colonial mәdness: feminist-indigenous cosmologies

This artistic research project positions itself at the crossroads of different colonial realities and their psychic worlds, and offers to examine psychosis and other radical psychic states from a cosmological, rather than medical perspective, calling for worldmaking as a practice of epistemic co-existence through the means of editing, listening, overwriting, and historizing documentary material of various origin. As such, it aims to create a space where decolonial and feminist realities can confront the extraction from the ecosystems and cosmologies they voluntarily and involuntarily belong to. The right for madness thus becomes the river mouth for projections of unfit systems of knowledge-production.

From juxtaposing indigenous family archives with avant-garde colonial fantasies to the cinematic re-imagining of subjective delirium experiences and forms of healing, the project has spanned various strategies and layers of understanding documentary practices in relation to the globalitarian colonial regime. Aesthetically rooted in a Tatar feminist perspective, the research also seeks to connect the overlapping wounds, scars, holes, and other effects that coloniality continuously produces on bodies and psyches. In western and westernized contexts, the corporeal effects of these regimes are often approached through the umbrella term "mental health" and its derivatives, mediated by monolingual, monocultural state-run institutions or market-driven private enterprises, invariably individualized. The structural and aesthetic disposition of existing support structures conceals the reality of subjectivities that do not operate within the given logics, or epistemically violate it. Approaching this complex landscape on the plane of partial objects, understood psychoanalytically, in their relationship to the world, through the gaze and the voice in particular – who, how, for whom, and where one looks at/appeals to – becomes paramount, as these relations shape the borders of one's subjectivity, and so-called sanity.

I am exploring decolonial documentary practices as a tool that spans across mediums in an attempt to embody feminist and feminized perspectives; indigenous time; ruptured geographies; psychotic experiences in relation to institutional frameworks; translocal and transpsychic solidarity. Last but not least, this project aims to dignify and historicize states, conditions, as well as relationships to a territory that have been reduced to being sick, occult, delirious, uncurable, secondary or simply irrelevant. Layering cosmological understandings along with neoliberal readings of radical psychic states comprises an opaque effort to relate the a-topias, the nowheres of being, which are continuously produced by every gesture of colonial-patriarchal alienation. Aesthetically, I am looking into forms that could accommodate epistemic differences that are non-translatable but yet have the right to coexist.