CONATUS: Change Among Changes

This session features Manifesto Brutal (manifestobrutal.org) in collaboration with the theatre company Nontantoprecisi (nontantoprecisi.net), a group founded within Italy’s last asylum-concentration camp. Together they explore CONATUS — life that lives, imagining anti-psychiatric living experiments and collective ways of responding to illness, oppression, and the suffocating conditions of the present. The conversation moves from 24-hour schizo-analysis, to transforming symptoms, imagining worlds, writing, studying, weaving, singing, and ranting — from the bed to the stage and back again. Guided by Johanna Hedva’s question in Theory of the Sick Woman — “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” — the group reflects on how to create encounters across bodies, decolonize themselves, and form alliances through shared struggle. Their project includes a developing periodical publication called CONATUS, already alive within their work and collective