Weaving Interdependence: Archiving Communal Wellness with Healing Justice London
Rehearsing Community Health Justice, Rehearsing Freedoms Festival, 08/11/23, Ahmad El Mad.
Aim: To support Walworth residents to share opinions and hopes for community health, guided by key research questions set by Healing Justice London, then archive this in collaborative quilt world-building for Pembroke House’s community space Walworth Living Room.
Audience: All ages and abilities, groups between 3 – 25+ participants.
Commissioner and partners: Walworth Living Room and Healing Justice London for the Social Model of Health Project. Fellow community artist, Jacob V. Joyce conducted their own research, ‘Collective Remedies’, to produce a mural.
Funders: City Bridge Trust
Artistic solution: I contributed to the research question structure and designed an accessible six-part workshop, supporting participants to share their experiences and healing wisdom, and contribute unique artistic responses in quilt-making.
Project date: July 2023 – January 2024
Research and Archival Art Programme
Research questions and introduction – I contributed to the research question structure and prepared for participant responses. In the ‘A Healthy Exchange’ programme launch, fellow community artist, Jacob V Joyce and I introduced ourselves to Walworth and held our first research workshops.
Supported wellbeing and empowered individual expression – as a person and artist living with a chronic mental health disability, I coached participants to feel confident about their creativity and share their responses. By grounding participants in mindful art-making, I naturally supported them to share their experiences for research and encouraged participants to contribute unique artistic responses.
Illuminating community capacity – through conversation, writing and artistic enquiry, we collectively built on and enhanced each other's ideas, shared healing wisdom and strategies to support individual and community health. In a research update, we reflected on our community workshops, held space for healing and grief and had a community meal.
Weaving Interdependence quilt: Building on the ideas from the workshops, I enhanced abstract representations of health and wellbeing by arranging and stitching these together to make a powerful collective response that archives shared wisdom.
Impact & Testimonials
Love
.
Wisdom
.
Liberation
.
Love . Wisdom . Liberation .
The quilt articulates what health, wellbeing, joy and thriving feels like for Walworth. It’s a dazzling portal of imagination and commitment to health and a reminder to take steps to wellbeing.
“The workshops expanded the understanding of health and wellbeing by acknowledging that even if you are ill you can still thrive, create, contribute, feel valued by taking part in the creation of something.
Kawooya reflected that this was linked to being able to express freely and openly in
accessible and liberating ways, for example feeling free to make without an agenda or respond to questions knowing there is no right answer. The act of doing this communally was also an example of
how anxiety can be allayed and people can support and take care of each other, sharing ideas and preferences, practising choice and agency.”
