Public Health as Collaborative Perfomance | Lecture by Jody Wood

The public talk, Public Health as Collaborative Performance, is based on Social Pharmacy, a mobile, artistic installation facilitating community exchange of health remedies for mental, emotional, and physical well-being. The project accumulates a living library of people who comprise specific locales, offering a non-hierarchical collection of health resources from traditional and family knowledge that can be accessed in public space. 

Each remedy acts as a script for performing another person’s private health regimen. Consequently, the work proposes public health as a collaborative performance scripted and enacted by strangers living in proximity of one another. Using performance to move an individualistic behaviour of self-care into a relational gesture of community care, the project transforms personal health regiments into exchangeable objects and recipes. 

In building public dialogue about health and collective vulnerability, the project calls for a more responsive state. The project began in 2021 and has travelled throughout Sweden in Simpnäs, Skövde, and Norrtälje supported by Skövde Art Museum and in New Jersey and New York City supported by coLAB Arts, Whitebox Gallery, and Open Source Gallery.