Artlink (Edinburgh & the Lothians) - Becoming Citizens
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Artlink (Edinburgh & the Lothians) was established in 1984. It supports a range of opportunities for individuals to get involved in the arts: as an audience member, through arts programmes in local communities and in hospitals. Artlink believes that taking part in the arts has an important role to play in realising personal and social change.
Artlink’s work is about making sure that individuals who experience disability or disadvantage can get involved and work with artists, arts organisations and arts venues – locally, nationally and internationally. It looks at imaginative ways in which it can support individuals to get to the arts, how they can work in partnership with artists and how it can make sure that the results are relevant, practical and of good quality.
Background
Becoming Citizens is a project initiated by Artlink’s hospital arts project Functionsuite. Running since November 2006 until January 2008, the aim of the project is for artist, Michelle Naismith, to develop a film work with people who have enduring mental health problems. The project is working with patients/ex-patients and their family/carers from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, St.John’s Hospital and Edinburgh and West Lothian communities. The project objectives are to:
- Reduce stigma, by raising awareness of the experiences of the individual and the experience of those around them, using the arts to gain a greater understanding of issues, which are, in fact, common to us all.
- Promote positive mental health and wellbeing, looking at what is and what could be available by imaginatively responding to the projected aspirations of those involved in the project.
- Create video artworks which address and draw attention to issues of isolation and work towards community involvement.
Michelle Naismith is a professional artist who has worked for Artlink’s Functionsuite Project for many years. Through her video work with Artlink she collates information gathered from patients and ex-patients, turning it into highly imaginative films which are both provocative and visually stimulating.
Michelle has been researching and developing the script for the Becoming Citizens project since November 2006. The completed video artwork will be promoted and presented within mental health and arts networks to raise awareness of issues of emotional wellbeing.
The working title for the video work is ‘The Daft Days’, the title of a poem by Robert Fergusson, a contemporary of Robert Burns, who died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam, now the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.
The Daft Days script combines the opinions of patients and ex-patients on life inside and outside of psychiatric care, combined with text by the artist and fragments of modified Hollywood scripts which have a psychiatric theme at their core. One of the existing scripts used is a short scene from the one of the first episodes of the American daytime soap opera, Melrose Place, involving a melodramatic take on a beautiful and successful doctor’s incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.
The film will make comparisons between auditioning for a role in a play for television and auditioning for life outside hospital in the community, making comment on what is ‘out there’ for people with enduring mental ill health. The project will invite people who have worked with Artlink in the past to take part in auditions for parts in the play. For example, an ex-participant and ex-patient of Bangour Village Hospital, now living in West Lothian, could audition for the role of a community psychiatric nurse, a patient or a psychiatrist. The ‘actors’ will comprise ex-patients from the Royal Edinburgh and Bangour Village, a French doctor and Artlink staff.
The auditions and the actual play will take place in the Royal Edinburgh Tribunal Suite, a space neither inside nor outside of the hospital.
The finished video will have scenes from the auditions cut together with scenes acted out from the television play, ‘The Daft Days’. The whole project will be shot on HD video to give the finished work a ‘television programme’ appearance, as TV plays a large role in the daily life of people isolated in hospitals and in the community.