Alchemy of Madness: Leonora Carrington's 'Down Below' - Talk by dama

The Alchemy of Madness: Fairy Tale Archetypes, Feminine Transformation, and Surrealist Vision in Leonora Carrington's Down Below by dama

Leonora Carrington's Down Below (written 1943) occupies a singular place in the surrealist canon: it is a dreamscape composed in first-person, retrospectively narrated account of an actual psychotic break, forced institutionalization, and near-fatal "treatment" in a Santander asylum in 1940. This lecture argues that Carrington's genius lies in her refusal to separate clinical horror from enchantment and she narrates her breakdown using the grammar of fairy tale (transformation, animal familiars, magical numbers, quest and trial, the wicked captor, the wise helper) while never letting that grammar soften or mythologize the real violence of psychiatric abuse she suffered. Where the male surrealists treated madness, hysteria, and the "convulsive" female body as raw material for aesthetic revelation, Carrington writes from inside the convulsion, reclaiming the fairy tale's structures of transformation as tools of psychic survival and feminist self-authorship rather than male-authored objects of fascination. The lecture traces how Carrington's lifelong engagement with Celtic and Irish folklore, alchemical symbolism, and the fairy tale's logic of metamorphosis converges in Down Below to produce a text that is simultaneously a trauma narrative, a feminist critique of surrealism's treatment of women, and a work of visionary literature in its own right.

dama (aka Amanda Maciel Antunes) is a Brazilian artist and occult practitioner based in Los Angeles, raised in rural southeast Brazil. Working in direct lineage with the surrealist tradition she now studies and teaches, her autodidactic, transdisciplinary practice treats conjuring as method; using bibliomancy, automatism, and mediumship to bridge language and ritual through painting, performance, writing, sound, film, and assemblage. Durational by design, her projects often unfold over years, approaching the arcane as both research and revelation, in a practice of self-authored transformation that runs parallel to the very archetypes at the heart of this lecture. She is a librarian at the Philosophical Research Society, where she founded the Surrealist Study Group and her monthly class for children and families Mystic Makers. She is currently an artist cohort member at the Center for Deep Listening.

Suggested Supplementary Readings

• Carrington, Leonora. The Hearing Trumpet (1974)
• Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Thames & Hudson, 1985.
• Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994
• Aberth, Susan. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art. Lund Humphries, 2004.
• Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment (1976)

Tickets: $12 (in person event)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

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This September, PRS celebrates the many wonders of fairytales and folk stories through a series of illustrated presentations, film screenings, and workshops!