My name is Lubbert Das is an ongoing project which imagines queerness and autism as an intimate relationship with a shard of stone lodged in the subjects’ brain, inspired by the Bosch painting The Stone of Folly. This nonlinear, narrative performance tells a myth of a stone that is passed from subject to subject across generations, living inside them from birth to death, outlasting them all.

Moving from space to space in the back rooms of Chapter, the work will create a fractured chorus of incoherence and forms of speech considered signs of madness. In the Bosch painting, the stone of folly is a falsehood: in this project, it is ambiguous if the stone exists, or is a false narrative created by a series of quack doctors, mirroring the ambivalent relationship many autistic people feel to diagnosis as simultaneously a truth and a pathologising falsehood. The performance aims to challenge bioessentialism, psychiatry, and the Western scientific view that stones are inert, lifeless.

Rebecca Jagoe is a non-binary, disabled, autistic artist who works across text, performance and sculpture. Their work is a material memoir which examines how experiences of illness, madness, and gender are informed by specific Western, Christian narratives around the ‘human’, and human dominion over the earth. Posing critiques of violent resource extraction, Jagoe’s work reminds us that all matter is alive.

Their work has been shown at Site Gallery, Sheffield; g39, Cardiff; and Freelands Gallery, London (all 2023); The Drawing Room, London; Mostyn, Llandudno; Somerset House, London, EKKM Tallinn and Kim? Riga (all 2021), Wysing, Cambridge, and CCA Goldsmiths, London (all 2020). In 2023 they were the inaugural recipient of the Neuroqueering Grant. They were a Wales in Venice Fellow 2022-23, awarded by ACW and Artes Mundi, and a Freelands Fellow 2021-2 at g39. They are currently part of the disability cohort Creativity is Mistakes.

This is a durational performance, audiences are welcome to come and go at their discretion. The performance will take place at a number of sites, including the main foyer, the common room (first floor), and a stairwell beside common room. Please note, one part of this performance will happen on a stairwell inaccessible to wheelchair users, live audio of this section will be played in the lift found in the entrance of the building.

Content warnings: Reference to psychiatric and sexual abuse.

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