Manteno Project (2018-2019)
Manteno Project is a site specific research and performance project. Located in the town of Manteno, Illinois, this project served as a conceptual, archaeological investigation into the history of Manteno’s former state psychiatric hospital. The hospital’s cottage-system has since been transformed into a thriving neighborhood with a few shops, but two miles east remains the isolated cemetery that holds hundreds, if not thousands, of graves belonging to Manteno’s patients.
As I continued to visit Manteno over the course of a year, attempting to compile an archive of what remained of headstones sinking into the earth, I struggled to locate archival material of the patients. Archives of chronicling Mad experiences and identities have long been misguided, destroyed, or continue to be controlled by the State, as is the case of many library archives that forbid visitors unrelated to former patients from accessing them. The Manteno community library refused my requests, and by the end of the project, I was left with an unfinished archive and a 3-hour long performance of me documenting each grave with a video camera in an attempt to memorialize those rendered invisible.
Graves
10 min. excerpt of 3 hr. long performance on-site
This footage, shot in infrared, combs over grave markers belonging to people who were institutionalized at Manteno. Many graves are sunken into the earth, leaving behind a shadow. I spend a brief moment acknowledging each of the hundreds of graves.
Still image of the Graves performance
Tomb
21 min.
A meditative cleansing of the remaining structure of a tomb in the center of the cemetery.