Abstract
Social Pharmacy is a mobile, artistic installation facilitating community exchange of health remedies for mental, emotional, and physical well-being. The project accumulate a living library of people who comprise specific locales, offering a non-hierarchical collection of health resources from traditional and family knowledge that can be accessed in public space. Each remedy acts as a script or a score for performing another person’s private health regiment. Consequently, the work proposes public health as a collaborative performance scripted and enacted by strangers living in proximity of one another. Using performance to move an individualistic behavior of self-care into a relational gesture of community care, the project transforms personal health regiments into exchangeable objects and recipes. In building public dialog about health and collective vulnerability, the project calls for a more responsive state. The project began in 2021 and has traveled throughout Sweden in Simpnäs, Skövde, and Norrtälje supported by Skövde Art Museum and in New Jersey and New York City supported by coLAB Arts and Whitebox Gallery.
Presenters
Jody WoodAssistant Professor, Art and Social Practice MFA Program, Sam Houston State University, Texas, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
2023 Special Focus—-New Aesthetic Expressions: The Social Role of Art
KEYWORDS
Social Practice Art, Health, Collectivizing Action, Medicine, State Support, Vulnerability
