Invitation to planning meeting for Visual Assembly of Hospital Workers

Originally posted on V-A.city on June 29, 2020. [view original post]

The Visual Assembly is a new experiment in democratic collaborative imagining and creating – a public art project to offer one of possible vision on how our healthcare system could develop.

Meeting open to all but especially health workers and service users, those employed and served by private health as well as the NHS, to reimagine the health care spaces they work in, live in, heal in. We welcome all workers, from cleaners, porters, café staff, cooks, to nurses, doctors and managers as well as patients and interested artists/activists.

We hope you can join us for the next session which will be on Saturday 4th July over Zoom as part of Our NHS Deserves Better: NHS Anniversary weekend hosted by Keep Our NHS Public

We had good participation meeting in the first planning session: Thanks to the following for attending and contributing:

• Alia Butt –NHS worker and founding member of NHS Staff Voices (KONP)
• Dr Alia Haider– Friends of Doctors, Pakistan
• Drew McFadyen – videographer, the Great NHS Heist
• Fabian Tompsett – formerly of Tower Hamlets African Caribbean
• Hagir Ahmed – NHS Volunteer R¬esponder and health activist
• Mental Health Organisation
• James Stopfoth – Artist and health worker
• Paul Engers – holistic mental health care thru art and therapy
• Nika Dubrovsky, David Graeber and Tae Ateh – organisers of the Visual Assembly

The initial discussion covered many things but some key points:

1.      Location of the visual assembly collaborative art-work: we discussed making the graphic outside a prominent large London hospital. While it would be great to Apply to a hospital to make an art installation we realise that this is  a long process and we don’t have the time to do that. We decided to try a guerrilla art action and have a back up team and location in case we are moved on.

2.      The tension between distributed health care and centralised huge hospitals. We looked at some different models eg previous models used in this country such as Cottage Hospitals and the colonial hospitals set up in Sierra Leone at the time of the abolition of slavery. Decentralisation and residential care: local areas have a hospital facility, town or village – rather than huge centralised complexes

3.      We also touched on avant-garde art methods such as Lettrist metagraphy/ hypergraphy/ psychogeography, Situationist physiography and the Constructivists Isotypes (International System Of Typographic Education) that inform this project. We discussed the specific icons, signs, symbols, letters and stencils we can use.

This next session will have the following specific outcomes:

1. To decide on method of facilitation – majority vote, consensus etc

• To form two support groups to directly implement the visual assembly. For each location we need: an artist, a video operator, a scriber, an assistant (better two).

• The question of local V global: Should we open our Visual Assembly with two 10 minute presentations by people from different countries? Who /where?

We invited a few friends to open up with brief (5-10 minutes) presentations.
Among them