Ultrasanity.
On madness, sanitation, anti-psychiatry, and resistance
 

This publication unfolds as a collection of words, works, and images that informed, incited, and embodied SAVVY Contemporary’s project ULTRASANITY. ON MADNESS, SANITATION, ANTIPSYCHIATRY, AND RESISTANCE – an exhibition and research project on the elasticity of sanity. 

It doesn’t materialise simply as a catalogue of the exhibition but as a book retracing the trajectory of a research, as an occasion to extend SAVVY’s curatorial proposition into a further choral perspective. With it we aim to deepen some of the reflections that moved and agitated us through two years of researches, conversations, programming, and practicing of Ultrasanity. The cogitations and the confrontations, the movements and the sounds, the trials and the tribulations, that accompanied us through the project and its 4 chapters and iterations are here collected to resonate one to each other, and to open new trajectories and paths. 

SAVVY Books aims at promoting epistemological diversity, resonating with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s claim that “Another Knowledge is Possible.” By acknowledging the limits and faults of academic disciplines and advocating for processes of unlearning, our effort is thus to create a platform which encourages extra-disciplinary knowledges – and promotes the thinking and writing of authors, artists, philosophers, scientists, and activists whose practices challenge Western epistemologies: looking towards epistemic systems from Africa and the African diaspora, Asia-Pacific, the Middle-East and Latin America. 

The series brings together SAVVY Contemporary and Archive Books in a collaboration based on the shared interest in a multiplicity of knowledges beyond the Western canon and a commitment to foster critical discussions and forge new collaborations and coalitions. We like to think of the books in this series as “borderlands,” to use an expression by Chicana poet and feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, by which we mean spaces where “a new story to explain the world and our participation in it” can be elaborated and told; spaces where epistemological disobedience (Walter Mignolo) and divergent thinking can be practiced.