Feminist Duration Reading Group: My name is Lubbert Das: A Fractured Chorus With frank r jagoe

The Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) is a collective reading group that explores under-represented feminist texts, movements and struggles from outside the Anglo-American canon. Through a shared practice of reading aloud together, one paragraph at a time, the group cultivates forms of collective thinking, intimacy and conversation across art, politics and feminist history.

My Name is Lubbert Das is a text and performance by artist and writer frank r jagoe, included in their recent book Significant Others. Across a series of interconnected fictions, Significant Others explores madness, language and the more-than-human, imagining forms of relation that resist rationality and human exceptionalism. My Name is Lubbert Das follows 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. 

In this session, participants will join frank r jagoe in moving through the CCA galleries, creating a fractured chorus of incoherence and forms of speech historically pathologised as madness. 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.

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.

This event is part of Flare-Up Live happening at Goldsmiths CCA on Saturday 1st August across its galleries. For more information and tickets to the main event, please visit this link.