OPEN HEART CLINIC WITH YAA ADDAE
Image of participants during one of the workshops
In October, we were excited to welcome the founder of Open heart Clinic, Yaa Addae (she/they), a writer, researcher, and participatory curator, whose practice is centred on social design as a writer and creative technologist, to facilitate a 2 part creative lab in response to the themes surrounding the ongoing speculative archive project.
The first part of the lab included a reading group called the ‘Open Heart Clinic: Care Futures Reading Group’, which took place on the evening of Wednesday 2 October 2024. The workshop including an reading list* to help participants explore the politics of technology and architecture through the lens of black feminist theory. This session aimed to ground participants in the theory that informs the next part of the lab: a workshop called the ‘Open Heart Clinic: Designing Loving Worlds,’.
The Open Heart Clinic workshop: Designing Loving Worlds, took place on Saturday 5 October 2024, and was guided by the question, 'what does it look like to return love to the systemically underloved?’
Participants were invited to first, consider how design upholds structural violence and armed with this knowledge, begin to carefully imagine new ways of being together towards personal and collective healing - leaning into how these themes intersect with the local Newham community, as well as their own, if coming from elsewhere.
Drawing on case studies of community care practices, Black feminist cultural references and personal experiences, the group collectively theorised around the politics of love and co-design blueprints for future care infrastructure. Participants were also introduced to introductory trends forecasting methods (for liberatory strategising) and speculative design principles.
From the workshops, audio was collected to share in the Speculative Archive, which will be available from this website from January 2025.
About the creative lab, a participant said:
“Yaa is a great thinker and it was useful to provide a space to congregate for discussion and readings.”
About the workshops , Yaa said:
“Because the first workshop was a reading group focused on care futures and the second centring how design can be used to create more loving worlds we were able to apply these thoughts and think more concretely about how the neighbourhood of Stratford has changed rapidly–delving into who is involved in those changes and why we think community infrastructure is necessary and what it could look like in various neighbourhoods, connecting the themes to both the locality of Newham and other parts of London.”
*Reading List
Pre-reading is not necessary, but if you’d like to get ahead, please find the reading list below.
Technologyðos - Amiri Baraka
On the issue of roles - Toni Cade Bambara
The mundane afrofuturist manifesto - Martine Syms
June Jordan: A Black Feminist Poetics of Architecture - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Yaa Addae
Yaa Addae (she/they) a writer, researcher, and participatory curator whose practice is concerned with architecture, both social and physical.
The speculative art archive is led by artist and programme facilitator, Sandra Falase, part of a year-long engagement programme at Alice Billing House, supported by the Creative Land Trust and Heritage Lottery Fund.