Skövde Art Museum

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.