Islands of Safety
2024Islands of Safety was a 3 hour workshop I taught at the RCA for MA Sculpture students. I was invited by tutor Whiskey Chow.
Similarly to the workshop I taught in 2023 for MA students on Across RCA, this workshop continued themes looking at excercises and principles from the Vietnamese Mental Health Services.
We began students by doing a string connections game to warm up students to talking and sharing experiences of priviledge, each ball of string was passed onto another student who had listened to another student and felt a connection. We continued the game until the ball finished and resulted in a web of connections.
Secondly we watched a video clip from the BBC where they featured the Recipes of Life project ran by the Vietnamese Mental Health Services and the Social Kitchen. We watched as participants from that workshop shared testimonies escaping Vietnam by boat, and also sharing recipes and stories of resilience. I then shared pamphlets and information from the VMHS then demonstrated my own recipe my mum shared with me, Vietnamese Lemonade. Participants helped to create this and also took turns to cut and squeeze the lemon the Vietnamese way. We then drank together and it was very engaging for students who were shy.
We ended the workshop doing a body mapping excercise, connecting feelings emotions and the physical body through a somatic approach. Participants would lay on a yellow table cloth and map out their bodies, and through a series of mark making, annotations and colours, were able to identify each others feelings, present-ness in the room and ability to support one another.
A catalogue called FESTUS was created along with the other teaching groups and some notes are shown in the photos.
