PAST EVENT: This was part of the 2024 programme
On Wednesday 21 – Saturday 24th August, the Community Wellbeing Collective (CWC) hosted a public event in the Westside Plaza Shopping Centre in Wester Hailes as part of the Public Faculty No.15 ‘What community wellbeing means to you?’, facilitated with social practice artist and CWC initiator, and current board member Jeanne van Heeswijk.
Public Faculty is, as Jeanne van Heeswijk describes, her practice to train in deep listening. It consists in spending four hours for four days in a location to engage in conversation with anyone who would like to speak about the struggles, urgencies and desires that are present for them. As the global world continues to stretch beyond crisis, the local remains a site of struggle, where inequality and oppression is manifest, faced and felt deeply. In this context, Public Faculty No.15 will ask: ‘What does community wellbeing mean to you?’
This ended on 24th August with a public event, bringing together reflections that emerged from shared conversations, and thinking about what we can collectively learn about community, wellbeing, collective action and public belonging. Accompanied by a collective meal, this event ran between 12—4pm in the car park of the Westside plaza Shopping Centre undercover opposite the new home of the Community Wellbeing Space. Everyone is welcome. Free event.
Event Schedule:
12—1pm Free Community Lunch and Gathering
1—1.30pm Tour of The Community Wellbeing Space in creation
1.30—3pm Public Conversation – What Does Community Wellbeing Mean to You?
3–4pm Open Mic and participatory audio jam sharing conversations of Public Faculty No. 15
About the Community Wellbeing Collective:
The Community Wellbeing Collective (CWC) is a growing group of people from, and connected to, Wester Hailes – practising collective wellbeing, mutual care, responsibility, vulnerability, and solidarity. The CWC runs a Community Wellbeing Space by and for the people which is a space for respite from an unjust world in which to hold public imagination and create action towards a more just world. They build belonging and community, and create access to wellbeing as a radical act. You will meet them in a moment of reimagining as they recently needed to leave the space they had been occupying for the last two years, and are carving out community ownership within private property, transforming a new space into a purpose built community wellbeing space and social sculpture.
About Jeanne van Heeswijk:
Jeanne van Heeswijk creates long-term community embedded projects, combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organising and exchange in order to work with communities to take control of their futures. Public Faculty forms part of a series of events which the artist has organised around the world. These engage in collective learning through a process of knowledge exchange and deep listening within the context of a particular place, working with communities to re-think, re-define and re-enter public space through collective cultural action.