My name is Lubbert Das: A Fractured Chorus with frank r jagoe

Join us in making a fractured chorus with artist and writer frank r jagoe, as part of Flare-Up: Live, an all-day event drawing on the themes of the CCA’s current group exhibition, Flare-Up. Artists and the CCA's Resident groups will contribute diverse explorations of embodiment – crip, sick, disabled, mad, trans, racialised and medicalised – through fiction, comedy, and history, in search of transcendence, collectivity, solidarity and interdependence.

My Name is Lubbert Das by frank r jagoe is a text from their recent book Significant Others, which explores madness, language and the more-than-human, across a series of interconnected fictions, imagining forms of relation that resist rationality and human exceptionalism. This non-linear, narrative performance text tells the myth of a stone passed from person to person across generations, living inside each of them from birth until death, outlasting them all. Drawing on the figure of Lubbert Das from late medieval art and literature – most notably Hieronymus Bosch's The Stone of Folly (1494) – the stone becomes the shard of flint lodged in the Fool's brain: a metaphor for madness not as something to be removed, but lived with. In doing so, the work reflects on the ways queerness and neurodivergence have been constructed as pathological states in need of cure. As in Bosch's painting, the performance leaves unresolved whether the stone truly exists or is a fiction invented by a succession of quack doctors.

In this session, participants will join frank r jagoe in moving through the CCA galleries, creating a fractured chorus of incoherence through forms of speech historically pathologised as madness. The project interrogates the relationship between surgery and performance, charlatanism and medicine, and trope and reality. jagoe’s exploration of these themes questions the authority of medical professionals, particularly in the context of psychiatric care, where patients are often disempowered and their voices are silenced. The idea that the doctor is the true fool – highlighted by Bosch’s depiction of the doctor wearing a funnel hat – serves as a powerful metaphor for the failures of psychiatric institutions.

You can book a free place for the performance here.

frank r jagoe is an artist and writer whose work reclaims madness and monstrosity as ways of challenging the exclusionary category of the human. Working across writing, performance and installation, they explore communication beyond rationality and language, foregrounding relationships with more-than-human beings and forms of knowledge that resist Western hierarchies of reason. Their book, Significant Others, won the 2024 Prototype Prize and was published by Prototype in 2025.

jagoe’s research has long centred on medieval writings about stones, particularly their role in medicine. The medieval belief in the animism of stones – imbuing them with healing properties – fascinates Jagoe, who draws parallels between these ancient beliefs and contemporary discussions of madness. In Bosch’s painting, a doctor pretends to extract a stone from the head of a fool, performing a false operation that symbolises medical trickery. This allegory is particularly resonant for jagoe, a psychiatric survivor who is drawn to the narrative’s critique of medical abuse through the “fiction of a fiction.”

Flare-Up: Live participating artists and collectives include: Alchemy, A Particular Reality & Yasmin Huleileh, Avril Corroon, Feminist Duration Reading Group & frank r jagoe, Iarlaith Ní Fheorais, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Resonance Poetry, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, and Tissue & Oísin Roberts.

Please book a separate free ticket for the full day in the CCA event page: https://goldsmithscca.art/event/flare-up-live/

ACCESS

Goldsmiths CCA has step-free, no-step access to the venue. More detailed accessibility information is available via the CCA website.  We are keen to support visitors with any specific requirements regarding their attendance. If you would like to request assistance or discuss access, contact the CCA office; goldsmithscca [@] gold.ac.uk or FDRG feministduration [@] gmail.com

IMAGE: Hieronymus Bosch, ‘Cutting the Stone,’ also called ‘The Extraction of the Stoen of Madness or The Cure of Folly, c. 1494