Arts in Health
experimental arts processes mediating health-care worlds
Providing creative tools to heal the social fabric as it relates to medicine. This work engages patients, medical practitioners, and their environments in exploring the experience of illness through creative practice: art residencies, workshops and critical pedagogies.
Learning with Disability groups who care for justice and mutual aid and Feminist Science, these artistic dispositives – creative processes including experimental movement, material and somatic practices – center patient’s experiences to unveil harmful clinic/cultural discourses, propose alternative doctor-patient relations, shift medical narratives, examine normative structures of care, and offer respite to patients, their environments, and medical practitioners alike.
image from the residency “Sounding Resistances” (Mexico 2016)
oncogrrrls, 2011-2021
performance project on making cancer otherwise.
oncogrrrls (always in lower case) is a performance activist project that aims to move cancer beyond the individualization of the experience and into collective inquiry of the structural pains of cancer. Through co-creation and somatic research, oncogrrrls asks: what would happen if we treat cancer as a creative research? how do we make something about “it” and how do we make it together? A long investigation on arts mediation for cancer worldings that asks: how do we make cancer political through art making? Which questions can move cancer beyond individualization of the experience and foreground connections?
onco-poiesis
Explores the possibilities that emerge when we treat ‘cancer’ as creative inquiry.
As an extension of oncogrrrls, this project aims to open the lessons learned from working with cancer patients to art mediators, medical practitioners, health activists, and culture makers to gather the transformative potential of illness into crafting interconnected worlds and intersectional just relations (slowing down, resting, staying in not-knowing, arousing).
onco-poiesis is supported by a CREA grant from the Barcelona Culture Institute.
image from a video by Sweet Labor Art Collective
Vital Signs
Collaboratively devising practices to measure vital signs beyond bio-medical discourses.
What would happen if we think of vitality in terms of webs of relation instead of individual life-spans? How can art improvisation, exploration and play shift conversations about what counts as a livable life in medical settings? Which kind of conversations are possible when doctors, patients and culture makers play together? What would a joy-o-meter measure?
This project was born in the creative residency improvisation as practice of care with Sweet Labour Art Collective, and has evolved in collaboration with art students, nurses and care practitioners.
A still from the residency Trans*Plant, my disease is an artistic creation (2019) by Quimera Rosa at UC Davis
Cosensing HealthCare
Engaging healthcare teams in sensing together through creative art practices
Co-sensing is a tool for dramaturgy, and a concept for researching how to be together across differences. As an improvisation score—That is, a set of instructions to engage in an action, co-sensing is an invitation to stay present, slow down, and engage the senses- instead of the habitual rational logics— in clinical settings.
Thinking with Quimera Rosa’s residency Trans*Plant, my disease is an artistic creation, this concept manifested as an approach for rehearsing ecologies of exposure in arts and medical science. The invitation is to suspend any ‘knowing’ and tune into the sensory fields we share as a possibility for deeper listening, from where new forms of togethering can emerge.
Between 2019 and 2024 I workshoped cosensing with multiple communities, with grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Art Festivals (Emmetroppe) and at Stanford University. In 2024, I piloted this approach in healthcare education through the Basler Chair of Excellence, at ETSU. I continue working to develop methodologies for engaging togethering through not knowing in clinical settings