IMAGINE

How do you want to be cared for—and care for yourself—in the face of change, grief, and loss?

This personal question is at the heart of IMAGINE, a community arts-based initiative at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen.

Talking about death, loss, and grief can bring up strong feelings and memories. It can remind us how we have grieved, the support we’ve received, and how we’ve learned to live with and share these experiences, of how we have cared for ourselves and others.

In IMAGINE, we explore these topics in workshops with small groups that usually last half a day, including breaks. The workshops are led by Professor Wolfgang Schmid and Dr. Maren Metell from the Grieg Academy at University of Bergen. They combine creative activities with open conversations. Participants are invited to engage with different forms of arts materials—draw, make music, tell stories, or write poetry—and express their thoughts and feelings about care, both for themselves and for others.

Arts health-promoting and community-building capacities

A report from the World Health Organization in 2019 showed that the arts can help people deal with illness, injury, and emotional challenges. Art can bring people together, help express difficult emotions, and support healing and recovery. It can also help prevent illness and promote health throughout life.

Considering the value of death and life

In the 2022 Lancets Commission report on The Value of Death gathered a wide range of people from around the world—healthcare workers, scientists, philosophers, artists, and community leaders—looking at how death and dying are handled in Western societies. The report concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how much death and dying are managed by professionals, often separated from everyday community life and knowledge. This became particularly obvious during the pandemic but points to a deeper weakening of traditional, community-based knowledge and practices around dying, death and grief. While modern healthcare was indispensable during the pandemic, the report reminds that professional systems have pushed aside families and communities in end-of-life care. Social support networks have been replaced by specialists and protocols, making death and grief feel unfamiliar and harder to talk about. However, considering the value of death, prompts us to turn to life, rethink how we want to life.

‘Care as a commons’

IMAGINE takes up both, arts and communities’ power for people’s health, life and community. It applies arts-engagement as a practice and a method to co-create spaces for creativity, connection, learning and reflection. IMAGINEworkshops are open to everyone—across generations, genders, nationalities, backgrounds, and abilities. It encourages people to embody care beyond medical treatment and standardised routines carried out by professionals in specialized institutions. 

IMAGINE promotes ‘care as a commons’ referring to a form of commitment based on the presence of people; the active, direct, first-person participation of those who share common concerns, interests, and values. The word ‘commons’ is related to ‘community’, ‘communication’, and ‘commonwealth’. Thus, ‘care as commons’ expands the realm of care to something we all share, possess, are capable of, and can do! 

Commons are shared spaces, processes, and practices that we build and rebuild together. They challenge care systems that feel rigid, distant, or uncaring, and instead promote ideas that help us build understanding, solidarity across generations, and well-being. How we care, what we care or don’t care about shows what we value and what kind of world we want to live in together. IMAGINE aims to support inclusive and creative ways of practicing care—shaped by the cultures, values, and everyday lives of the people who take part. The workshop format is flexible and can be adapted to different groups, places, and situations. 

We have conducted workshops at the University of Bergen with groups of healthcare students from different disciplines; with a group of people with developmental disabilities; and with children and their families at the Bergen International Festival. At the festival, we hosted drop-in workshops in a small hut built especially for the event and placed in a pedestrian area in Bergen. Children could simply walk in and take part in drawing, storytelling, and music-making.

Works cited:

Fancourt, D., and Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence of the role of arts in improving health and well-being. A scoping review. Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report 67. World Health Organization. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK553773/ (external link)

Haiven, M. (2014). Crises of imagination, crises of power. Capitalism, creativity and the commons. Zed Books (UK, US, and Worldwide), Fernwood Publishing (Canada).

Halstead, J., and Schmid, W. (2024). Hearing Loss - Listening to End-of-Life Transitions, an Arts-Based Approach to Midlife Mourning. Age, Culture, Humanities, Vol 7 (2023). https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v7i.141921 (external link)

Sallnow, L., et al (2022) “Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life.” Lancetvol. 399, 2022, pp. 837-84. Doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02314-X.