13.10.2026
Tuesday

11 AM
INTRODUCTION
Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP
Kaira M. Cabañas, Curator-at-Large of Modern and Contemporary Art, MASP

 

11:10 AM — 1 PM
Round table

ANNA KIFFER
Antonin Artaud After Mexico
Many myths have circulated about Antonin Artaud’s 1936 trip to Mexico. However, the facts indicate a tumultuous return to Europe, his arrest in Ireland in 1937, his deportation to France, and his “disappearance”—during two years—in the Ville-Évrard Asylum. While these events tell the story of his “madness,” a retrospective analysis also reveals how his work—shaped by this experience (Mexico and psychiatric institutions)—would go on to build several platforms for contemporary art (experiments with the body and artists’ notebooks, among others). Nevertheless, they are also a sign—and this will be the focus of my talk—of a radical shift in the Western episteme and its impact on what might be regarded as a new imaginary of the body and writing.

 RACHEL SILVERI
“Points to My Own Tune”: Sonja Sekula’s Abstractions
This talk addresses how Surrealism and its study have approached the question of madness, offering a critique rooted in a position informed by feminism, queer theory, and mad studies. My contribution focuses on Sonja Sekula (1918–1963), a Swiss artist whose multi-decade career produced a rich array of abstract practices across media. An out lesbian who participated in Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist circles, Sekula lived variously in and out of psychiatric clinics throughout New York and Switzerland. The existing literature on Sekula has established her biography, narrated the stylistic development of her work, placed her practice in dialogue with the art of her friends, and elaborated readings which foreground her medical diagnosis of schizophrenia. Eschewing a bio-medical model which emphasizes illness and pathology, this talk instead analyzes the innovations of Sekula’s linework, which offers a new type of abstract automatism—one productively open to feminist, queer, and mad worldbuilding.
  
MOLLY SUPERFINE
Romare Bearden and Architectures of Care
 Romare Bearden’s monumental Cityscape (1976) has been conspicuously understudied in late-career scholarship on the artist, overshadowed by formally similar works like The Block (1971). This omission stems from its forced invisibility: following its 1974 proposal to and approval by the NYC Health and Hospitals Commission, the finished 27-foot mural debuted at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx in 1976, only to be evicted in under a week after a city councilman branded it “obscene.” The work was subsequently relegated to storage until its 1983 installation at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. I reframe Cityscape through the lens of institutional architecture, analyzing how it functions within its location in Bellevue’s chapel corridor. I explore the communal resonance of this curious landing spot, especially given the work’s early contestation on the grounds of blasphemous imagery. I argue instead that the mural extends an ethics of care within the same medical institution where Bearden was once admitted as a psychiatric patient in the 1950s.
Mediated by: Yudi Rafael, Assistant Curator, MASP

1 PM — 2:30 PM
Break

 2:30 PM — 3:30 PM
Round table
 
 
LULA WANDERLEY and REGINA PEIXOTO
Variations
The conversation between Lula and Regina will unfold in three parts. First, they will discuss Regina’s arrival at Espaço Aberto ao Tempo [Space Open to Time] and her moments of painful introversion and inability to communicate. They will also address her encounters with Lula during those times and the messages they exchanged on scraps of paper (the only means of communication available). They will explore how the poetics of these encounters gradually transferred to those writings, which gained a life of their own and transformed into poetry. In the second part, they will discuss how Regina’s poetry addresses deeper, subjective themes without neglecting the description of a poetically mundane daily life. This lends a lightness to her poetry that has captivated several poets and literary critics. Finally, they will reflect on poetry as a mediator—no longer of an encounter with oneself, but with the world, i.e., with everyone who wishes to read it.

Mediated by: Glaucea Helena de Britto, Assistant Curator, MASP

3:30 PM — 4:30 PM
Lecture

 

MATT BODET
Hallucination™ 
AI “hallucinations” are increasingly framed as productive failures: unexpected outputs that generate new images, language, aesthetics, and profit. Hallucination has become a site of experimentation, investment, and fascination; yet within the human mind continue to be pathologized, surveilled, and treated as conditions requiring correction. I argue that this is not a new phenomenon but an extension of a history in which madness has functioned as a resource for cultural production while mad people themselves remain excluded, institutionalized, or dismissed. From modernist appropriations of mad aesthetics to AI systems, madness continues to be mined for artistic and economic value while mad voices are denied their authority. This talk examines these contradictions through the lens of mad aesthetics and cultural history while confronting the political and economic structures that separate profitable forms of instability from lived mad experience, questioning who is permitted to deviate, generate, and speak without being reduced to error.

Mediated by: Kaira M. Cabañas, Curator-at-Large of Modern and Contemporary Art, MASP

14.10.2026
Wednesday

11 AM — 11:30 AM
Lecture

SUSAN BURCH
Re-storying Confinement: The Canton Asylum in South Dakota
Between 1902 and 1934, the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians—a federal psychiatric facility in South Dakota built to confine American Indians—incarcerated hundreds of people from dozens of Native nations. But detention at the Indian Asylum, as families experienced it, was not the beginning or end of the story. Drawing on a handmade map, a quilt, and other visual-material sources,  this talk  centers Indigenous kinship and memory to re-story Canton's history. These objects—created and shared by people Canton's violent intervention impacted—reveal what settler ableist institutionalization was designed to suppress.

Mediated by: Bruna Fernanda, Curatorial Assistant, MASP

11:30 AM — 12:30 PM
Round table

JEAN KAHLFA
Frantz Fanon’s Memorable Mistake: Social Therapy and Culture in Blida-Joinville, Algeria
In 1952-53, Frantz Fanon trained with Francesc Tosquelles, a Catalan anarchist psychiatrist who pioneered social therapy and transformed mental health care in asylums. In 1954, during the Algerian war of independence, Fanon became a psychiatrist at the segregated Blida-Joinville hospital, built in 1933 on colonial psychiatrist Antoine Porot’s plans. Despite introducing radical reforms, Fanon’s approach initially failed to treat the “Indigenous” population. This led him to reevaluate his approach, focusing on the cultural dimensions of mental illness and inventing ethnopsychiatry. This paper explains this complex history, essential for understanding Fanon’s thought and practice.

 

ABDESLAM ZIOU ZIOU
Labyrinthine Thinking: Anti-Psychiatry and Popular Therapies in Morocco 
This paper examines the notion of “labyrinthine thinking” developed by Moroccan psychiatrist Abdellah Ziou Ziou during his work at Pavilion 36 of Berrechid Psychiatric Hospital in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Influenced by institutional psychotherapy and anti-psychiatry, Ziou Ziou sought to rethink psychiatric practice through the concrete therapeutic trajectories of patients in Morocco, many of whom had first engaged with forms of popular care before entering the hospital. Rather than opposing psychiatric and popular practices, “labyrinthine thinking” emerged as a way of developing listening within a specific social and territorial context. It proposed a flexible and non-linear approach to psychic suffering, attentive to the patient’s language, environment, and modes of expression. By moving between different therapeutic worlds, this practice attempted to open psychiatry to other forms of knowledge and to create the conditions for a more situated and reciprocal encounter with patients. 

Mediated by: André Mesquita, Curator, MASP

12:30 PM — 2 PM
Break

2 PM — 3:30 PM
Round table

BENJAMIN BREEN
Entanglements in the Psychedelic History Archive
This talk surveys the emerging, global visual cultures of psychedelia from the 1850s to the 1960s, drawing in part on archival films, images, and audio recordings collected as part of the Psychedelic History Archive (psychedelicarchive.com). By recovering these materials, we can begin to see how radically different the early visual culture of psychedelia was from the familiar poster art and album covers that came to define it in the popular imagination. The talk asks what these overlooked images, films, and recordings reveal about the global entanglement of science, indigenous knowledge, and artistic experimentation that shaped psychedelic history.

 

BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE
From Sacred Plants to Psychedelic Science: Indigenous Roots and Colonial Silences
This talk examines how Indigenous knowledge contributed to the formation of the modern psychedelic movement, while also being largely marginalized or reduced to symbolic references within Western science and culture. In various Indigenous cosmologies, visionary experiences and “shamanic flights” are not regarded as individual experiences but rather as ontological shifts involving profound risks: becoming lost between worlds, turning into an animal or ancestor, or failing to return to the ordinary state of existence. Such concepts can be compared—albeit in an asymmetrical manner—to Western notions regarding the risks associated with psychoactive substance use, such as “going mad” or “dying.” Drawing on debates concerning coloniality and epistemology, the talk stresses relational perspectives on healing, interdependence, and belonging, wherein health emerges from networks of relationships among humans, non-humans, and territories. Finally, the centrality of the Global South in the production of this knowledge is discussed.

 

NICHOLAS POWER
Psychedelic Revolution Replaces the Psychedelic Renaissance
It is time to throw away the psychedelic renaissance. The Far-Right advances in the West from the U.S. to Russia to Argentina. Chinese Communist state surveillance is sold across Asia. Islamic mafia states like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran choke the people's freedom. Where do psychedelics fit into this global maelstrom? If the psychedelic movement can shift gears to open publicly funded treatment centers focused on civil servants, the working-poor, and college students, then we can set a cycle of healing that fuels solidarity for a broad coalition. Such a movement must be guided by revolutionary pedagogy from the book Black Psychedelic Revolution, which brings in concepts from Hegel and Marx, racial identity theory, and radical poetry. The core concept is the Return-to-the-Body.

Mediated by: Guilherme Giufrida, Assistant Curator, MASP

ABDESLAM ZIOU ZIOU

Abdeslam Ziou Ziou is an independent researcher and curator whose work explores collective dynamics in art history and psychiatry in postcolonial Morocco. His research focuses on the formation and dissolution of collective practices, informal circulations of knowledge, and the relationship between archives, narration, and curatorial practice. He works on institutional psychotherapy, anti-psychiatry movements in the Maghreb, and alternative forms of care and transmission. He has participated in projects and exhibitions including Untie to Tie – Movement.Bewegung at ifa-Galerie Berlin, the School of Casablanca project, and Toucher l’insensé at the Palais de Tokyo. He has received fellowships from CAORC/Mellon, UNESCO, and Akademie Schloss Solitude.

 

ANNA KIFFER

Anna Kiffere is a writer and researcher. Since 2005, she has been a professor in the Graduate Program in Literature, Culture, and Contemporaneity at PUC-Rio. A specialist of Antonin Artaud’s work, Kiffer has published books and papers and translated Artaud’s texts in Brazil. Since 2018, she has been researching and publishing papers on Édouard Glissant’s work. She coordinates the Coleção Glissant [Glissant Collection] at the publishing house Bazar do Tempo. Kiffer was a guest curator for the 34th São Paulo Biennial, for which she designed the show Corte/Relação: Antonin Artaud e Édouard Glissant. Her latest novel, No muro da nossa casa (2024), was a finalist for Best Novel at the 2025 São Paulo Literature Prize.

 

BEATRIZ CAIUBY LABATE

Labate is a Brazilian anthropologist, educator, author, speaker, and activist based in San Francisco, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and works in the fields of psychoactive substances, drug policies, shamanism, rituals, religion, and social justice. Labate is the Executive Director of the Instituto Chacruna de Plantas Psicodélicas Medicinais [Chacruna Institute for Medicinal Psychedelic Plants]. She serves as Senior Advisor for Culture and Strategy at the Associação Multidisciplinar de Estudos Psicodélicos [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – MAPS] and as a Visiting Professor at the Center for Graduate Theological Studies in Berkeley. A co-founder of the Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre Psicoativos [Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Psychoactives – NEIP] in Brazil, Labate also edits its website. She is the author, co-author, and co-editor of 29 books, three special editions, and numerous papers in academic journals and online publications.

 

BENJAMIN BREEN

Benjamin Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz and the author of two books: The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (2019) and Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (2024).

 

JEAN KAHLFA

Trinity Professor of French Studies at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He has widely published on the history of philosophy, anthropology and aesthetics. He produced the first scholarly edition of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness (Routledge, 2006. New, augmented edition, October 2026). He has co-edited, with Robert JC Young, Frantz Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom (French edition La Découverte 2015, 2018; English edition Bloomsbury 2017, 2020), which contains all of Fanon’s psychiatric works, which he has introduced and commented. Recently, he has published a volume on the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam’s collaboration with poets: Wifredo LAM – Livres d’artiste/ Artist’s Books (Jean-Michel Place Éditeur, 2025).

 

LULA WANDERLEY

Visual artist, therapist, and researcher. He chose not to get attached to art galleries and museums, instead developing work in the fields of graphic arts and experimental poetry. He also experimented with literature, film/video, and theater. He has lived in Rio de Janeiro since 1976, where he met Nise da Silveira, who suggested he become a therapist and challenged him to use only his sensitivity as a working tool. This led him to replace the academic view of clinical practice with a poetic one. This path brought him into contact with Lygia Clark (1920–1988), with whom he became friends and collaborators in her research on art/body/psyche. Together with friends, he founded Espaço Aberto ao Tempo [Space Open to Time], an institution that seeks to bring clinical practice into the realm of art, and where he met Regina Célia.

 

MATT BODET

Artist, writer, and founder of the Center for Mad Culture in Chicago. His work explores madness as a cultural identity through visual art, poetics, and programming. His research focuses on mad aesthetics, psychiatric history, language disruption, and cultural refusal. Bodett has presented internationally at conferences, museums, and universities, and is the host of the podcast Mad Tea. He is currently completing his forthcoming book A Sublime Refusal, which examines the extraction of mad aesthetics, the political regulation of thought and language, and madness as a site of resistance against systems of rational, capitalist, and psychiatric control.

 

MOLLY SUPERFINE

Molly Superfine, Ph.D., is an art historian and postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She is a scholar of modern and contemporary arts of the Americas, with particular expertise in arts of the African Diaspora, feminist practices, and haptic theory.

 

NICHOLAS POWER

Poet, Associate Professor of Literature, novelist, and reporter. His book, Black Psychedelic Revolution was published by North Atlantic Books in 2025. His writing has appeared in Truth-Out, The Indypendent, The Village Voice, Business Insider, The Root and Double-Blind.

 

RACHEL SILVERI

Assistant Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Florida. She is the author of The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026). Her writing has appeared in the journal Art History, numerous edited volumes, as well as various exhibition catalogues published by The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, the Barnes Foundation, the Bard Graduate Center, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among other major venues.

 

REGINA PEIXOTO

Regina Célia is the daughter of Maria and Rodovalho, and the sister of Rita and Rosângela—as well as others who have passed away. Although born in Rio de Janeiro, she feels as if she were from Bahia through both her parents. Her journey of self-discovery and finding her own path led her to study Social Work at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Literature at Faculdade Estácio de Sá, and a post-secondary IT course at Fundação de Apoio à Escola Técnica (FAETEC)—the journey itself was the ultimate reward. She has worked in labor unions and in informal settings, but the role she enjoyed most was serving as an IT instructor at the Nise da Silveira IT School. She has also been a member of Encantarte Editora since its inception and is part of the Ponto de Cultura Loucura Suburbana [Suburban Madness Culture Point]. For Regina, writing began as a need for communication and later evolved into a means of expression.

 

SUSAN BURCH

A Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College (Vermont), Susan Burch researches and teaches intersectional histories of deaf, disability, Mad, race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and gender and sexuality in the United States and Russia. Her scholarship includes The Encyclopedia of American Disability History (editor-in-chief, 2009) and Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (with Hannah Joyner, 2007). Her most recent book, Committed: Remembering Native Kinship in and beyond Institutions (2021), centers on peoples’ lived experiences inside and outside the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric institution created specifically to detain American Indians.