Welcome, shoppers, to The Mad Maps Project, an interactive digital performance archive that maps the use of psychiatric language in unexpected places.

To create The Mad Maps Project, contributing artists each received and crafted a response to a grocery item containing a term such as “mad,” “crazy,” “manic,” or “insane” in its product name.

Collectively, their work explores how we come to understand our relationship to mental health, mental illness, and mental disability through our everyday encounters, and how we might imagine those relationships otherwise.

Please feel free to use this website in whatever way is most accessible for you. You may want to focus only on this performance, or have the television on in the background. You may choose to eat or drink, care for yourself or others, leave and come back, sit, or move around, and so on. However you decide to engage, you are most welcome.

Please note that this project explores themes related to food, mental health, and/or mental distress. In order to assist you in navigating the project, additional content notes have been provided under the title of each piece, where applicable.

To begin your journey, select Shop Our Aisles from the menu below.
Or, to learn more about our project and access bonus content, select Explore Our Stockroom.