Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

A trained guide lead the participants, people suffering from cancer, through a journey of knowledge and discovery inside the museum. Patients, their families and caregivers share their experiences and emotions in front of masterpieces and, at the end, there is a laboratory where they can produce an artwork. Visits take place monthly, they are free and different every time as the guide sets customized and thematic itineraries. In this way, paintings become sliding doors on emotions and life. It is a way to reconnect to oneself and others.

This project is a unique example of ancient wisdom through modern tech. This eco-art exploration offers 27 images in ink, each image has a title in the Irish language, each title connects the audience deeply with nature. The title and it's meaning is explained on audio, accessed using a QR code. There is a one minute guided breath practice with each image connecting nature and inner nature. This is accesses using the same QR code. Audience members get to slow their breathing down, take a break from thinking and connect with nature.

Arts on Prescription (AoP) is a complementary intervention used to support people who are on sick leave due to stress, anxiety and depression and/or musculoskeletal pain.
Patients are identified and referred to AoP by professionals in primary health care and outpatient psychiatric care. AoR is performed beyond healthcare and coordinated by a person from the municipality. AoR was defined as participating in arts activities in closed groups, for 2.5 hours twice a week for ten weeks including i.e. song, crafts, drama and concert.

Social Pharmacy (2021-2022) is an ongoing project that imagines a post-pandemic future in which communities connect with one another and their material environment to ensure mutual survival. The project redefines public health as a collaborative performance and asks what healing recipes can be found in simple acts of generosity between members of society, and by utilizing the natural world around us. The project activates several touch-points of circular economy to generate participation and knowledge exchange within local communities. An iteration of Social Pharmacy begins with interviews on health and workshops in the local community. As the installation is activated, visitors are invited to take remedies from Social Pharmacy, and contribute their own written recipes in exchange.
Social Pharmacy is an artwork which centers process, community engagement, and non-hierarchical knowledge production. By sharing health knowledge generated by residents of local communities, the project especially values knowledge from the most vulnerable members of society such as elderly and people with disabilities and chronic illnesses because of their attention to the ebbs and flows of personal health. The project also aims for cross-cultural exchange of remedies, acknowledging that migratory flows may input new cultural knowledge into a region, but that knowledge may remain only within the family or social network unless there is a system in place for it to be shared and permeated into society. Physical health is also interconnected with emotional and mental health, material reality, and social interaction. The project as ‘public art’ uses concepts of performance to move an individualistic behavior of self-care into a relational gesture of community care, transforming personal health regiments into exchangeable objects and recipes.

Art Connects Mental Health: A Time to Breathe is a two-year European wide transnational partnership project that provides education, training and awareness-raising at national and European levels using creative processes to promote positive mental health and emotional well-being with youth. Six partner organisations come together to create a Europe-wide Creative Arts for Health and Well-being hub, a new online, interactive, learning resource centre that supports the role of the arts to promote physical and emotional positive mental health and well-being for all.
A challenging event like the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic can affect everyone’s mental health. Each of us is doing our best to look after ourselves however young people may need extra attention and support. Building synergies between the arts, youth education, and health and well-being, this project supports the role of the arts to promote positive mental health and emotional well-being, to overcome stress and anxiety and to build resilience across Europe, strengthening links across Europe in relation to the arts, education and positive mental health and well-being with and by young people.
A Time to Breathe is supported by Erasmus+. The partners are Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality, Dublin, Ireland (lead partner); Ente acli istruzione professionale piemonte, (ENTE) Torino, Italy; Euroreso, Naples, Italy; European Centre in Training for Employment, Rethymno, Greece; Fundacion Intras, Valladolid, Spain and Youth Peace Group Danube, Vukovar, Croatia.

The Embassy of the Netherlands in Italy and BAM! Cultural Strategies launched a Call for Projects aimed at public bodies, cultural institutions, associations that had developed cultural projects dedicated to the elderly in order to develop and share best practices between professionals from Italy and the Netherlands. More than 130 high-quality projects joined the call. As a result of the call, 12 entities were selected to participate in an online day of meetings on the topic.
The mapping was finally published online, for each of these projects a brief introduction is offered and is explained what could be observed by comparing the projects with each other. The objective of the research was to have a first overview that would allow the Embassy to understand the most appropriate direction to take in the coming years on the topic of creative aging and thus get to know Italian cultural realities with which to undertake possible collaborations.

Linking community archaeology and well-being in the Mediterranean (LOGGIA) is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship action. LOGGIA aims to understand to what extent community archaeology practices can contribute to community well-being in the Mediterranean context, by focusing on the inclusion of vulnerable groups through case study research.
Archaeology may positively impact individuals, communities and vulnerable groups. To that end, the EU-funded LOGGIA project adopts a unique approach to investigate how archaeology can promote community well-being in the Mediterranean by focusing on persons with disabilities through two case studies in Italy and Cyprus. The project integrates archaeology, well-being and disability studies to design a novel theoretical and evaluation framework linking community archaeology and well-being, and assesses the impact of archaeology programmes on community well-being. LOGGIA is assessing the extent to which the interaction with a digital environment contributes to the inclusion of persons with disabilities.

Il Cantiere Teatrale - Sotto il Segno del Cancro is a project in Social and Community Theater and Medical Humanities in Oncology, conducted from 2006 to 2009 by the European Popular Theater and the Master in Social and Community Theater | United with the support of the Oncology Network of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta and the Piedmont Region. The work first developed within the San Giovanni Antica Sede cancer hospital in Turin and then extended to various hospitals and health centers in the city of Turin. The project received the High Patronage of the Municipality of Turin and the Piedmont Region and the Italian Theater Organization, and was appreciated, among others, by Umberto Veronesi. Project questions and objectives: The experience of treatment and dying today is almost entirely delegated to the medical health approach. Hospitals are islands in the city. Can the theater enter it and become a vehicle for human and social participation? Does the condition of those who experience the disease as a patient or as a caregiver contain a look at life that affects each of us? Is it possible to re-establish an overall dramaturgy of dying?

In November 2022, GM NHS Integrated Care launched the Greater Manchester Creative Health Strategy, detailing how GM plans to become the first city region in the world to realise the power of creativity, culture and heritage in addressing inequities and improving the health and well-being of its residents.
The GM Creative Health strategy sets out the importance of creative health in supporting GM to become a Marmot city region and in delivering against the recommendations of the Independent Inequalities Commission by enhancing well-being and equity; focusing on people and communities; and emphasising preventative approaches. The strategy highlights the role of creative health in delivering against NHSE’s priorities, including Core20PLUS5 and in delivering against the 2022 Greater Manchester Strategy, helping GM to become a greener, fairer and more prosperous city region.
Mirroring the broader GM approach to health, the GM Creative Health Strategy adopts a population health approach across the life course, setting out how creative health can support childhood development, prepare children for school, help us into work, improve our working lives, protect us from illness and assist in managing our long-term conditions. And as we age, how creative, cultural and heritage activities can keep us healthy, socially connected and living well at home.
The strategy also highlights where creative approaches can contribute to specific clinical pathways, for example, the contribution singing can make to overcoming breathlessness and anxiety in people with Long Covid; how dance can help to reduce falls and emergency hospital admissions and how engagement with creative activity can tackle at least half of the known risk factors for dementia.
A three-year Creative Health delivery plan (2023-26) is currently under development.

Art Therapy made by volunteers from ATE is a therapeutic framework and the methodology which is mainly used on art therapy theory, group analytic psychotherapy, dynamic psychotherapies and contemporary art theory. As a general rule, Art Therapy is indicated for people who, due to their circumstances or the disease they suffer, find it difficult to verbally articulate their conflicts and emotions. The initiative "The body in art therapy" is a creative action as a modulator of emotional activation in adults with severe intellectual disability (DIS). The activities included in this initiative are: design an MIAT based on the body's potential as the main avenue of creative expression for adults with DIS; explore how the dynamics of creative action work in modulating emotional activation during creative processes; and analyse the mechanisms of action, dynamics of intervention and factors at play with the development and application of MIAT.