MAAT joins Manicómio to think about the role of museums in what concerns mental health illnesses, as well as in reducing stigma surrounding disease. Can museums be catalyst spaces for health? How can they contribute to the well-being and autonomy of people who suffer from mental health illnesses?

The “Roadmap for Mental Health” leads you to different spots at MAAT, using an interdisciplinary strategy that interweaves health with visual arts and museum architecture.

Manifesto

Human rights activism in mental health

This is a manifesto for mental health as a universal value and for the activation of human rights in mental health. This is a manifesto for well-being.
This is a manifesto that aims to establish a relationship between artistic creation, the institutionalised venues for their exhibition and mental health.
This is a manifesto of contamination between art and mental health.

I am space. I am the space that I feel.
I am what I live. I am the product of what I was given and what I have. I am what I created, what I dreamed, what I felt.
But there is not only past in me: there is (only) present and building the future.
I am the space I inhabit.
This museum is now my space of (well) being, my space of (taking) pleasure, space of questioning, of provocation, of healing.
I am us. We are us, the others, the same. We are everyone, everything!
At MAAT, with Manicómio, we want to rethink, redo, rebuild, transform. At MAAT there are no people thought of as sick: there are people in art.
The museum space welcomes life. Art is life, too. Art transforms.
Art is revolution - because it does not serve to appease, but to challenge. It is by facing this challenge that we can overcome the alienation of everyday life.
At MAAT, with Manicómio, we expand the concept of the museum as a place that we inhabit and think about together with the works that are exhibited there.
At MAAT, with Manicómio, we establish our home, we reach a new concept of belonging. We start with the circumscribed space of our mind and body and reach a space that has no limits.
There is unreason in the reason that oppresses us. At MAAT we break walls: the museum is a landscape (a garden, a forest, a river, a sea, a house, a city), where we walk, a horizon we seek.
MAAT is me, we are us. We are us, the others, the same. We are everyone, everything!
At MAAT, with Manicómio, mind and body are in dialogue with our surroundings. And we want to expand what surrounds us, we want to harmonise the ideal and the real, we want a space where everything is demanding, but where everything flows freely.
We want a museum that helps us to live better; a museum that evolves with us and we evolve with it.
A museum is built (deconstructed and reconstructed) and we are built with it. A museum is an open work: we preserve and continue to create our memory and that of the planet.
Together we are the museum.
The museum is no longer (only) a museum; it is humanity.
MAAT is me, we are us. We are us, the others, the same. We are everyone, everything!

Imagine a museum that cares about your mental health: a museum where walls are not barriers; a mediating museum that goes beyond what is established in its functions of memory and transmission of institutional and encyclopaedic culture.
Imagine a museum where you can be whatever you want: where, through the creativity on display, you can build and rebuild your own thoughts; a museum where you define your other future and ours too.
Imagine a museum where you can be and stay: a safe space.
Imagine a museum that makes the “healing” space evolve: where every corner and nook is a possibility of repositioning the body and mind without having to be classified as “normal” or “crazy”.
Imagine a museum that helps to heal without “normalising” those who inhabit it and resort to it.
Imagine MAAT in collaboration with Manicómio – that museum exists!

Manicómio is an artistic creation space, featuring a gallery and art studio with resident artists who have experienced or are experiencing mental health issues. Located in a coworking space in Lisbon since 2018, Manicómio offers freedom in artistic practice and freedom in the pursuit of individual purpose, intersecting art with mental health and human rights.