About
Body Remedy is a (forming) ecology concerned with the centrality of process in shaping generative conditions for artistic practice and creative development. Our aim is to enable a livable multi-artform ecology through the essential dissemination of resources to women and gender variant practitioners who are Black and People of Colour (BPOC). These resources thread multi-artform practices, taking the form of artist residencies, experimental workshops and time-expanded artist fellowships. With the body as the central mediator in everything we do, our organising and critical frameworks follow the lineage of Black feminist study and African philosophies, through which we honour the interconnectedness of our realities.
We begin at the level of the body, in itself a site of knowledge, and one that requires rigour in holistic methodologies that do not separate the labour and creation of the body from its care.
The body is the medium and conduit that runs through everything we do, since everything begins and ends at the level of the body, and our futures depend on how our bodies can relate to one another.
It is through embodiment and somatic awareness that we become attuned to our desires, our refusals and our autonomy. Therefore we understand the body as fundamental material for our sovereignty and agency.
The Body as Central
Of Remedy
By remedy, we mean addressing the severance of connection to our bodies through practices that centre a material relationship and a process of activity at the base of the body. We understand remedy and care as a force of action, intention and collective resourcing. And so we are deliberate in moving away from languages of 'recovery' and 'repair' to refuse the pervasive framing of Black and Brown people as broken.
What we attend to purposefully is the systemically maintained disconnection from our bodies, and from each other. We remained grounded by the understanding that the individual body and the collective body are pathways to one another.
Ecology
Our focus is to form an ecology of circulated resources and collaborations within Scotland's creative sector. We are motivated to disseminate creative practices, knowledge(s), networks and opportunities, understanding that this reciprocal model of ecology shapes our entire model of governance. This moves through and across our core team, programme producers, advisory cohort and research cohort to our community of event participants.
This web of interconnectedness is rooted deeply in African philosophy, tradition and cosmology which evolves into a diasporic knowledge that sees no alternative but to embed collaboration, and a shared network of resources, skills and knowledges, into how we organise.
It takes form through team roles that shift and change, long-term relationships, a constellation of partnerships — including long-standing collaborations with Cove Park, David Dale Gallery & Studios and Glasgow International — an artist advisory cohort, and a research cohort of curators, researchers and artists commissioned to research through their own methods, feeding into our deeper organisational thinking and planning.
History
Founded in 2019, Body Remedy was initiated as an extension of founder Mele Broomes' work researching the experiences of Black creatives working in Scotland's creative industries and freelance sector. The report Perspectives — written by Żżo Charlery, commissioned by Broomes with the Freelance Taskforce — highlighted the critical need for a facilitated space to reconcile our creative work and physical wellbeing, as a way to mitigate the external and internalised impact of systemic oppression. Within a context of extenuating precarity, racialisation and limited access to holistic forms of support, it is increasingly crucial to develop tools and strategies for our endurance and perseverance. Body Remedy sits as a meeting place for our collective need and possibility. Our ethos is rooted in knowing that our artistic, physical, psychological, spiritual, creative and collective realities are interrelated — and that developing our knowledge of physical care and body-based support can sustain the many channels and spheres of our experience.
Our organisational work and thinking has been shaped by critical practitioners and organisations including Erotics of Liberation, RAW Material Company, Camille Sapara Barton, and the lineages of Black feminist study and Black materialism.