IMPORTANT EVENT UPDATE

Thank you everyone for supporting Friday’s planned event ‘Imagine New Landscapes for Madness’

Due to illness we must regrettably postpone this Friday’s event.

While we make plans to reschedule our event for the Spring – to which you will all be invited – we sincerely apologise for any disappointment.

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Is it possible to go mad in a safer and positive way? 

Join us for an evening of conversation between writer and current Delfina Foundation UK Associate Micha Frazer-Carroll and artist and activist the vacuum cleaner (James Leadbitter). 

This talk is part of the public programme of the third thematic season of science_technology_society at Delfina Foundation, which explores how emergent technologies complicate our understanding of mental well-being. The season examines the potential of art, science, and technology to reimagine mental health support, justice, and pride.

In Micha’s recent book Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health (2023), she explores how the current mental health crisis is connected to capitalism, racism and other social issues, offering an anti-capitalist, disability justice-informed perspective on the politics of mental health.

the vacuum cleaner’s long-term project, Madlove: A Designer Asylum, blends research, design, architecture, and exhibitions to reimagine mental health support and the environments in which this support takes place. 

In their conversation, Micha and James will explore, through the lens of lived experience, the power of imagination and the potential for art and digital technologies to help us reimagine new landscapes of mental healthcare. 

This event is organised in partnership with DASH. DASH is a UK-based, Disabled-led visual arts charity dedicated to creating opportunities for Disabled artists to develop their creative practice. DASH’s vision is a society where Disability Art is core and equally valued in the arts sector. The team works with artists, audiences, communities, and organisations to challenge inequality and implement change.

Outline of the evening

Doors will open for the event at 18:15pm. There will be a free bar with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The talk will take place in Delfina Foundation’s dining room with chairs for all attendees. The chairs are wooden and have a back to them but no armrests. The talk will begin at approximately 18:30 and will last one hour. From 19:30 to 20:00 audience members will have time to ask questions to the speakers. The event will end at 20:00. There will be a recording of the event that will be available on the Delfina Foundation website for viewing. 

Content warning

Please note that this event may include a discussion about mental distress, suicide, self-harm and psychiatric violence. Attendees are welcome to move in and out of the space as they need.

About the speakers 

the vacuum cleaner is the name of a UK-based artist and activist who makes candid, provocative and playful work.

His work combines mad pride and disability justice organising, direct action and deep ecology, but always with lightness and silliness. Over the last 12 years, he has focused on the design of mad spaces, organising and crip aesthetics. Often working with large groups, including young people, health professionals and different communities, his art and activism aim to challenge and change how mental health is understood, treated and experienced.

With roots in activism and radical art, the vacuum cleaner has created one-man interventions and large-scale actions as well as performance, installation and film.  His work has been shown in galleries, theatres, hospitals and schools and has appeared on streets, within social movements and in public spaces internationally.

Micha Frazer-Carroll is an author with a background in journalism. Her non-fiction work takes on themes of anti-capitalism, mental health, disability, and culture and considers how storytelling can further movements for social justice. Last year, Micha published Mad World, a book on the politics of mental health, with Pluto Press.

During her residency at Delfina, she is working on a new creative writing project that will look at themes of madness, futurity, and technology. The work will engage with the sci-fi genre and feature an unreliable narrator experiencing dissociation and a non-linear experience of time.

Micha has been nominated for the Anthony Burgess Prize for cultural criticism, the Comment Awards’ Fresh New Voice of the Year and the Bread and Roses Award for radical publishing. She published Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health in 2023 and has written for Wasafiri, Vogue, Dazed and a number of other publications. She currently edits for Skin Deep, a magazine on the intersection of racial justice, arts and culture, and has written culture columns at both the Guardian and the Independent. This year, Micha is working on a text to accompany ‘The New Subject – Mutating Rights and Conditions of Living Bodies’—an exhibition taking place with the KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin.