How to not make it worse?
How to balancing collective liberation whilst being therapeutic?
What is trauma informed karaoke anyway, and why is it an access requirement?
How to laugh at it all going wrong?
How to hold the saddest thing you heard today?
What happens when wonky young people take over the means of production?

In the middle of a young peoples mental health pandemic it’s ok ask ‘so what good could art do here?” After about 8 years of working with children and young people around the aesthetics and politics of mental health it would be pure lush to share some of these approaches, tools, mistakes and processes I’ve developed or learnt. Whilst also collective learning and making something appropriate to your lives and context.

The Balmy Disaster Class is a process/residency for early-career social practice artists, mental health activists and young people navigating mental health challenges to imagine new ways of being, making and caring together.

Part laboratory, part temporary community, we’ll try to be together for conversations that don’t usually happen, voices that aren’t often heard, and forms of expression that don’t fit neatly into boxes. It will be messy, funny, mental, hopeful, sad and… contradictory. There will be snacks.