Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

A week-long research residency program, a collective learning and caring experience, a call for creative people whose work is based on research, experimentation, and collaborations. Recently inaugurated (October 2022), it took place in Crete, and brought together nine cultural practitioners from different fields (curators, artist-performers, writers, historians, place makers, researchers, cultural managers) as well as 6 speakers-workshop leaders (university professors, researchers, architects, performers, writers), all of whom have studied, in different and various ways, the topic of care. Starting with the “Care Manifesto” by the Care Collective, over the course of eight days, during workshops, presentations, and debates, we discussed community-led co-creative projects, case studies and empirical studies on the social organization of care in Greece within broader interdisciplinary approaches, the crisis of social care and healthcare in Greece and abroad, the gradual shrinking of the welfare state, the refugee crisis, the pandemic, and the environmental crisis, as well as the secondary traumas of carers, the lack of (their) care, and ‘care washing’.

The MuseIT project aims to co-design and develop an inclusive multisensory platform with interactive technologies for people with disabilities to have enriched engagement with cultural assets and experiences. The technologies we will develop are namely: a toolkit of multi-sensory technologies including Virtual Reality for cultural immersive experiences and a remote musical co-creation platform. With these technologies, we want to widen access to cultural experiences and cultural heritage for people with disabilities. Beyond the development of technologies, the MuseIT partners will develop methodologies for transfer, capacity-building and awareness-raising, addressed to cultural organisations, policymakers and civil society, with the aim of supporting the change of narratives on disability.

This project was implemented by Društvo Asocaicija in Slovenia. Local partners: Ravnikar Gallery Space, Radio Študent, Lokal Patriot, Zavod Sploh, City of Women, Nomad Dance Academy, Forum Ljubljana, Glej Theatre, Emanat. Supported by: Ministry of Public Administration.
The purpose of the project has been to alleviate symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, physical pain, and conflicts in the workplace.
The project aimed to strengthen the health and well-being of workers, reducing absenteeism, the need for medicalization, increasing motivation, well-being, mental health, confidence, understanding of self and others, and capacity for self-reflection.
One of the goals of the project was to create guidelines for decision-makers on how to broaden the scope of such cooperation and further develop the field, with the ultimate goal of better understanding the potential of connecting art and business through a specific correlation to well-being in the workplace.
Objectives
- promote the inclusion of art in businesses and companies in order to improve the well-being of employees in their working age, early adulthood and midlife
- reduce stress, anxiety, depression symptoms, physical pain, and improve conflict resolution, while increasing motivation, well-being, mental health, confidence, understanding of self and others, and developing a capacity for self-reflection among employees
- test three models of including art in companies to increase the well-being of employees and gather data that will answer questions such as whether companies find such inclusion of art beneficial
- collect evidence on the potential of art to contribute to the well-being of employees based on proposed experimental models of including art into businesses
- create guidelines for further studies and decision makers on how to broaden the scope of cooperation between art and business, and further develop the field
- strengthen the sustainability of an independent certificate system for including arts into businesses
The pilot project involved 23 employees from three different companies who took part in a three-part program of diverse cultural activities, including art installations and interventions in the workplace, contemporary dance workshops, and creative collaborative residencies.
The project was involving complex preparation, including a detailed design of the intervention and evaluation protocol, consultation on the project design with public health experts, artists, psychologists, HR department heads, and employees, as well as conversations and cooperation meetings with local stakeholders such as representatives of general physicians, private and public health institutions, manager associations, labor unions, and cultural organizations.

It is a project that has become a regular programme. It has been conducted since 2016 when it started as a dedicated project for improving accessibility of 23 regional cultural institutions in Malopolska, Poland. By inviting non-governmental organisations, it has developed a model of improving accessibility of any public space, including culture sector. However, it moved its focus from the needs of people with disabilities and highlighted that we shall be open to diverse and various needs of people visiting our institutions. Moreover, it emphasized that accessibility will not be successful if we won't let others create those cultural spaces together with us. It provides then not only practical solutions, but inspires cultural, social and educational policies, both at political, but also at strategic level.

This project focuses on digital health promotion, understood as those messages and initiatives that encourage the adoption of healthy lifestyles (physical activity, diet, psychological well-being, etc.) through digital technologies (websites, apps, social networks, or self-monitoring devices). The main hypothesis is that these digital technologies play a fundamental pedagogical role in how young people learn about and understand their bodies, health, fitness and well-being. Specifically, they promote normative gendered body ideals and norms, neoliberal notions of the self and discourses of health consumption, which generate risks and inequalities. In addition, it is worrying that these public or informal pedagogies often come into tension with the health-related learnings provided by formal education.
The final goal of this project responds to the urgent need to understand and address how school education could help young people to successfully navigate through this complex landscape of digital health promotion. To this end, the purpose of this project will be to co-develop with young people innovative and critical pedagogical ideas about digital health technologies in schools, informed by a deep understanding of the meanings, contexts and social factors that shape Spanish young peoples relation with digital health promotion.
The project has three objectives:
1) To co-research with young people of diverse social profiles about the role of digital technologies for healthy lifestyles on their lives, exploring the impact over their health, health behaviours and identities as well as the affects, relations and learnings that emerge;
2) To co-create with young people critical digital health pedagogies aimed at challenging normative meanings and affects on health, health behaviours and identities;
3) To design an educational proposal aimed at the critical digital health education of young people.
The research design will be participatory, multi-method, iterative and multi-site, with the development of fieldwork in two Autonomous Communities, selected by their different socio-demographic characteristics: Madrid (urban) and Galicia (rural). It will consist of the following Research Stages:
1) Survey of a representative sample of young people to map their uses of these technologies;
2) Digital diaries, as participatory visual methods to delve into the meanings and impact of these technologies;
3) Co-creation workshops through participatory creative methodologies for the development of critical digital health pedagogies.
Additionally, a transversal stage of Participatory Action Research will be developed with young people who will collaborate closely with the research team. This project involves the design of an audiovisual educational proposal aimed at critical education on digital health promotion. The project plans to have an impact on young people and educational agents, as well as policy makers in the areas of Education and Health Promotion.

The pilot program "Tenemos cita con el Arte", made by art educators from the Complutense University with people affected with Alzheimer and other dementias and their caregivers. In this program the organisers have developed a series of visits to the Prado Museum and the National Museum Art Center Reina Sofía as well as workshops of artistic creation related to these visits. The aim of this project is to create some protocols of visits and workshops that can work as reference to artists, educators and other professionals.

A graphic recording is an image used to represent and/or analyse phenomena or events. They are produced from the representation of subjectivities, meetings, and interactions of collective action, aiming to reflect on contextualised flows and synergies. Through the Madrid Salud (2021) project Art and Health, graphic recordings have been developed after three online meetings: 1) the “Broken Hugs” project, 2) the World Mental Health Day meeting, and 3) the “Building Compassionate Communities” meeting. Graphic recordings in this context can reinforce a sense of community and make bonds between participants visible, especially since the pandemic forced the transfer of most meetings from in-person to online mode.
This project aims to expand on the key concepts presented in previous studies on this subject, analysing how these visual strategies expand their potential for a post-COVID art mediation, and identifying broadened characteristics in our remotely created productions that expand the graphic recordings possibilities in an artistic mediation and community health context.

A project about art and health developed from the temporary exposition of Cai Guo-Qiang at the National Museum of Prado (2017). The program consisted of a development of a visit to the National Museum of Prado, and also artistic creation workshops at the Municipal Communitarian Health Center. The objective was to improve the health and generate psychosocial wellbeing with a group of women enabling their participation and implication in the cultural life of the city of Madrid. 15 users with an average age of 57 years participated in the development of the interventions. They belonged to two Municipal Communitarian Health Centers: Usera and Villa de Vallecas.

Within the “Madrid, a Healthy City” (Madrid Salud) strategy, the “ReiaManí Universe” is developed, an artistic mediation initiative that was born thanks to the Art and Health scholarship together with the Socio-educational and Pre-employment Support Program for Adolescents (ASPA). Artistic-educational workshops are carried out with young people at a social disadvantage, with difficulties managing their emotions and establishing relationships with equals. These creative workshops promote skills for cohesion and social support as protective factors against unwanted loneliness and psychological suffering. Their main objective is to build an emotionally safe environment through art-health relationships and their own imaginative and self-finding processes. These workshops have been based on the creation of playful and artistic materials for the participants, thus working on aspects of community health and well-being through comics, stickers, action figures, and board games. The methodology is proposed from an action-research perspective, with flexible planning to adapt to collective needs, concluding that the collective construction of the “ReiaManí Universe” has fostered group coexistence and the development of social, emotional, and creative skills.

This project was implemented by Cluj Cultural Centre in Cluj-Napoca, Romania in partnership with the World Health Organisation and University College London.
The goal of this pilot project was to explore to what extent Music and Motherhood, a clinically effective group singing intervention for new mums in the UK, had to be adapted to meet local needs, thus investigating the feasibility of implementation and its impact on the mental health and well-being of participants in Romania and Denmark.
Group singing for maternal mental health aims to help alleviate depression symptoms, supporting participants in transforming negative emotions and negative self-perception, to experience positive emotions, support cathartic release, gather peer support, and reinforce mother-infant bonding. Mothers attend these sessions together with their babies and get to share experiences and receive support from the group, sing, and engage in simple music-making activities under the facilitation of a music lead.
In Cluj-Napoca, the research project involved two groups. Two singing groups were organised, one for Romanian-speaking mothers and another one for Hungarian-speaking mothers. In total,15 new Romanian and Hungarian-speaking mothers experiencing postpartum depression symptoms participated in a 10-week group singing intervention facilitated by professional singing leaders.
The pilot involved a complex preparation, including a detailed design of the intervention and evaluation protocol; an ethical validation of the research protocol by the Babeș-Bolyai University and the WHO IRB/ethics committees; a process of consultation on the project design with public health experts, artists, psychologists and mothers who have previously experienced PPD; and conversations and cooperation meetings with a number of local stakeholders such as representatives of general physicians, private and public health institutions, psychology and mental health associations, cultural organisations, media, parents’ groups, and other interested parts.
With the aim to test the impact on different contexts, the intervention was piloted also in Denmark and Italy, by local organisations. The results show in all cases positive benefits for the beneficiaries.