In Episode 71, Dominic Campbell talked about the community building power of Caribbean Carnival and working with cutting edge brain science at the Global Brain Health Institute. In this episode, Dominic Campbell explores questions like: What roles can artists can play at the intersection of science, healthcare, and policymaking? What conditions support radical collaborative thinking and design? And how can artists help scientists communicate with the real world, or as Dominic puts it “lab to table.”

BIO

Dominic Campbell is the originator and co-leader of Creative Aging International. As Ireland's Bealtaine Festival’s Director he steered the festivals growth and expansion over eight years. Formerly an Artistic Director of Ireland’s national celebration, St Patrick’s Festival, he transformed its three shows into ninety within four years growing production and managerial teams alongside the financial support required.

 Dominic went on to design and produce national celebrations marking the expansion of European Union in 2004 and Centenary celebrations for James Joyce. For “The Day Of Welcomes” marking EU expansion, he devised and produced 12 simultaneous festivals pairing EU expansion countries with Irish towns and cities engaging 2,500 artists from 32 countries.

He mentored festivals in Wales (Gwanwynn), Scotland (Luminate), and has developed projects with partners in Australia and The Netherlands. In 2012 he established the first global conference on Creativity In Older Age opened by Irish President Michael D Higgins. 

In 2016 he became an inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Equity and Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute a project between Trinity College Dublin and University College Southern California an ambitious worldwide program seeking social and public health solutions to reduce the scale and adverse impact of dementia.

Recognized by The Irish Times as one of the top ten key cultural influencers in Ireland he seeks strategic and business partners to develop Creative Aging International.

Notable Mentions

Change the Story Collection: Creative Aging: In the rapidly growing creative care field, the arts are increasingly seen as a powerful and effective prescription for reducing isolation, healing, trauma, promoting vital and essential social connections, mitigating, and delaying the symptoms of dementia, and also changing the way we all think about aging. The artists in this collection are working communities, healthcare facilities, and laboratories to advance new insights and ideas about creative aging alongside neuroscientists, public health professionals, architects, journalists, economists, psychologists, educators, and other artists

Global Brain Health Institute: The Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) is dedicated to protecting the world’s aging populations from threats to brain health. “We strive to improve brain health for populations across the world, reaching into local communities and across our global network. GBHI brings together a powerful mix of disciplines, professions, backgrounds, skills, perspectives, and approaches to develop new science-based solutions. “

The Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health: The Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health program at GBHI provides innovative training, networking, and support to emerging leaders focused on improving brain health and reducing the impact of dementia in their local communities and on a global scale. It is one of seven global Atlantic Fellows programs to advance fairer, healthier, and more inclusive societies.

Veronica Rojas: Veronica was a guest on Change the Story / Change the World in April of 2023. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. She has been a Visual Aid Grant recipient and has been nominated to The Eureka Fellowship Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. In 2011 Veronica got the Jerome Caja Terrible Beauty Award. Veronicas’ paintings have been reviewed in Artweek Magazine, Bay Area Express, Metro Active and the TV program Latin Eyes. Currently, Veronica is an Atlantic Fellow for Brain Health and Equity at the Global Brain Health Institute.

Barbara Steveni: was the co-founder and director of the Artist Placement Group (APG), which ran from the 1960s to the 1990s. The APG's goal was to refocus art outside galleries and museums. It instead installed artists in industrial and government organizations to both learn about and to have a voice in these worlds and then, where possible, organize exhibitions of work related to those experiences. Its work was a key precursor of the now widely-applied artist in residency concept.

Kunle Adewale is an artist by profession and a graduate of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife Nialegeria with specialization in painting and art history. He studied Civic Leadership from Tulane University, New Orleans and Arts in Medicine, from University of Florida. With over a decade experience as an artist and educationist, Kunle founded Tender Arts Nigeria in 2013, a social enterprise and non-profit making organization which positively impacts children, youth and adult population with focus on therapeutic arts, art education, talent development, community development and civic engagement.  

Augustin Ibanez Agustín is a psychologist, trained on electrophysiology at the Max Plank Institute for Brain Research. He received his PhD in psychology and neuroscience and performed a postdoc on neuroscience at University of Heidelberg. Now he is director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Center and dean of the behavioral sciences undergraduate program at Universidad San Andres (Argentina), full professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibanez (Chile), and co-director of the Dementia Research Latin American Consortium (ReDLat).

Creative Brain Week: Creative Brain Week 2023 – online and in person events which explored and celebrated how brain science and creativity collide to seed new ideas in social development, technology, entrepreneurship, wellbeing and physical, mental and brain health across the life cycle. This annual pioneering event illustrates innovation at the intersection of arts and brain science, including creative approaches to health.

Xerox PARC (Palo alto Research Center), PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California.[2][3][4] Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xerox, tasked with creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems.[1][5]

Liz Lerman: Change the Story Episode 63-& Episode 64 Wicked Bodies

Pillsbury House and Theater; Change the Story Episode 55

Rowena Richie's work draws from her eclectic background in modern dance, improvisation, music, drawing, and writing. Her production, Lost and Found in the Mission, presented a cross-section of humanity as defined by handwritten scraps of paper she and co-creator Susie Hara found on the streets of San Francisco’s Mission District, where Rowena has lived since 2001. Lost and Found won Best Ensemble Performance at the 2008 SF Fringe Festival. Rowena has worked with the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project for the past 15 years. In 2011, under the direction of Chong Shuch, Rowena was featured as Bride Love in Act 3 of Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge at the Magic Theater. 

Josh Kornbluth Josh tours with his autobiographical monologues, writes and acts in feature films, and writes and hosts the "Citizen Brain" online video series (citizenbrain.org).  

Joan Tronto: is professor of political science at the University of Minnesota,[2] and was previously professor of women's studies and political science at Hunter College and the Graduate School, City University of New York.[3]

Salutogenesis is the study of the origins of health and focuses on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis). More specifically, the "salutogenic model" was originally concerned with the relationship between health, stress, and coping through a study of Holocaust survivors. Despite going through the dramatic tragedy of the holocaust, some survivors were able to thrive later in life. The discovery that there must be powerful health causing factors led to the development of salutogenesis. The term was coined by Aaron Antonovsky[1] (1923-1994), a professor of medical sociology. The salutogenic question posed by Aaron Antonovsky is, "How can this person be helped to move toward greater health?"

Dominic Campbell 2

And we know that in terms of mental health, gender-based violence, physical and emotional difficulties. But we also know that in terms of what creative interventions can do. And we are now in a place where we connect both the creative interventions and the research with global communities where people are looking at the results of a hundred years of conflict or being conflicted because of the way that their story is visible, or not visible within the environment that they live. I'm also thinking about the tools. I love this idea. I'm very fond of this idea that the vehicle that got you this far might not be the vehicle that gets you to the next bit.

And so, part of my answering what next is to think about what I do and how I do things, how I might change them.

This is Change the Story. Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Part Five: Boiling the ocean.

[00:03:08] DC: Yeah, I was there as the first cohort, it's an interesting thing so firstly, GBHI and then the mothership, which is the Atlantic Institute. So, they were still trying to figure out what this thing was and to. My great benefit, I ended up there for two years. And what's the pedagogy for a pretty diverse set of disciplinarians coming to what is initially, a biomedical understanding about Alzheimer's and dementia. From that beginning, it's evolved slightly differently, on both sites.

So, America reflects American healthcare system, Ireland reflects Irish healthcare system, but they also reflect the culture of both sites and what became very quickly apparent, was I arrived, with a set of experiences, not as an empty vessel.

So, I felt it appropriate to bring those experiences into that environment and to look at the culture of healthcare, to look at what that meant for the people that worked in it, to look at what became a big focus on the social determinants of health. And gradually the program has evolved from a singular focus on Alzheimer dementia to something slightly broader. And it’s still evolving, which is fantastic. And then after about a year, maybe, maybe actually a bit quicker than that, it became apparent that the GBHI was one of several different fellowships that were part of the Atlantic Institute.

And each of those has a focus on equity in some form, depending on the context where the program is started. So, the South African one is focused on race equity. There is one focused on global issues run from London School of Economics. There's one in Melbourne focused on Aboriginal Torres Island Strait’s, framings of social equity.

So, they're very different depending on where they grow. And so, those seven runs independently, but they connect through the University of Oxford. And gradually, it’s become interesting to try and work with both.

So, with GBHI and the brain health side of things and health models and ways that artists work. And then with Atlantic on, complex systems, things like displacement, narrative change, all of that good stuff. Trying to boil the ocean, as my friend says.

[00:05:36] DC: yeah, it was a part of ambition, but I think art means different things, I think. And so there was a sense that, creativity was great for amplifying scientific messages. And then there was also a sense that maybe you needed to analyze the artists because of their brain conditions, which was quite entertaining.

[00:05:53] DC: There was a job to do in developing a shared framework for understanding. And so, I initially wrote a thing called the Five Pockets. These are what I suggest are the role for creativity and the arts within the GBHI universe. And then from that I developed an arts and brain curriculum, which I've taught for three years and embedded now in the curriculum and ways of thinking.

And, and now elements of that have gone off on their own lovely journey. And other people as they've come in and have contributed and added to that. But the ambition was always to have very different types of people, so journalists and lawyers and different kinds of intelligence. What I don't think they quite realized was, firstly, when you invite artist in, they look at the world in a way that changes the way that everybody else looks at the world, and they often exist in a place of divine disgruntlement.

[00:06:51] DC: Yeah. So, you know, they might be questioning things, but it's really it, it's from a place of glory, I suppose. How do we make this better and more interesting?

I mean, it's hard. it's difficult and some of it is impossible. But to me, that's one of the most interesting things that I've done in my work is get beyond the, the idea that, certain places are endowed with a special imprimatur. And, especially at the highest levels, opened them back up to the learning mode for their own culture, and their own structures. Which is to me is totally thrilling, to be around that.

[00:08:13] BC: Oh, yes, organization and imagination. One of the great. Imaginative interventions or inventions of the 21st century artists embedded and paid. As professional creative peers working in the heart of government and industry in Great Britain.

Barbara Steveni: Artist placement group came out of this notion when I got lost in the factories on the outer circular road. Most of the industries were shut down, but I went to collect some material and I found myself in these factories. And, um, I thought, why aren't we here?

And that was my eureka moment. You know, there's a whole different context for us here. You know, also for artists, you know, and as we were doing events and happenings at the time, I had this idea. That there was a new role for artists. What would we have to do if we were in these dirty contexts of, um, commerce industry and government as it later became?

Our intention was that there was a much more active role if we could negotiate the role, which would carry an artist approach to work in a different context, which would then impinge on what that work would be, and that was to negotiate an open brief that was, that the organizations would invite.

And so, I went back and looked at that work and what they were writing about and thinking about was, how you bring in an, the artist as every person and a sort of external intelligence. And they said, what's fundamental is that the artist has to be invited in. So, the organization wants to have that intelligence.

So, I was thinking about that and continued to think about that actually, with the fellowship. Also, I'd never been in a university, so that was an interesting thing to realize that the university has buildings, and each building is a particular department, and each department has a particular fixed noun and attached to it. And the interesting stuff is where there's a hyphen. So that was interesting. But, but beyond that was also I think when an institution or an organization is in formation, then it's rich with possibility. But what happens pretty soon is an institution settles into a pattern where it's primary focuses to sustain the institution. So, the first rule of the institution is to sustain itself.

And then the second thing that happens is it can only understand an organization that's a bit like itself. It literally doesn't have a way, you can only see what you can measure, that kind of way of thinking. So that is, and has been, and remains interesting. And there are some great people in the. GBHI and in the Atlantic (Fellowship) and they'll continue to attract extraordinary fellows. And the fellows are really the most interesting place.

BC: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:20] BC: And to me, and I apologize for the metaphor, each one of them is an infection agent with their story. And they're obviously all accomplished, so, the story is robust. So, they can't be ignored, in the way that, sometimes, power structures can do. And looking at their biographies, the thing I like is investing in change agents. The idea that these people already have agency, you're giving them some new horsepower and relationships, which probably are the most important and putting them back in the wild.

And all the training I've done has been based on that idea. That you take folks that are predisposed to working, organizing, navigating systems, understanding them, but at the end of the day, accountable to a community or an idea, and then giving them some, an extra boost, which is great.

I'm not as familiar as you are with the outcomes of all these folks. Do you feel pretty good about what's happened with the people that have gone back into their worlds?

So, it's universal, people of different states. So, the first challenge is, finding a language. So, when there was four of us, it was really interesting because it was quite intense because there were only four of us and we had to get on with it. And there would be me, there would be a, there was a neuropsychologist, clinical linguist, a practitioner in a hospital, and an epidemiologist, all words that I couldn't pronounce when we started.

[00:12:26] DC: And so, we had these lovely conversations, and they would say things, and I just wouldn't understand what they were saying at all. And I would say things, and as they said when they got to know me, “He would say things and it sounded to us like rainbows and unicorns.”

So, we had a completely fascinating misunderstanding for a long time. And I realized at one point that I needed to spend as much time trying to understand these people with multiple PhDs as I would spend trying to understand someone with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's that I was working with in a workshop.

I had to put in the effort, and I had to get out of my comfort zone to find out and better understand what it was that they did. And when I started to do that, then it became infinitely richer. The second thing that helped, and this emerged over a couple of years, is that GBHI is a values-based organization.

And so, it reverts back to values rather than to like any other kind of ambition. And it has a theory of change, a pole star direction of travel. But, in the middle bit there's a lot of leeway for moving around. And then I think the fact that it's on two sites means that there's enough grit to make a pearl.

So, there is, negotiation ongoing all the time. So, that makes it really fascinating. And occasionally I get very fed up with like people talking about potential, but then I remind myself that actually people are at different stages and they're at different stages of their own development, of their career, whatever that might be. And also, with their relationship to the program that they're going through.

And I started to do these once-a-month check-ins initially just for artists, because artists arriving into a biomedical environment can find it quite challenging. So, we just used to check in and chat and see how people were doing, and then we kept it going.

And now it's been going for about four years. So, what that means is there are people from all the cohorts and the cross-generational piece is phenomenally rich. So not only are people saying, “That thing happened to me, and “We felt that” but they're also starting to cluster in terms of interest, discipline, ambition, in all sorts of new and interesting ways.

And so, what I think is starting to happen is, GBHI-based projects popping up all over the place, but it took a while for them to seed. And to, if you wanna use organic language, to go through a whole sort of cycle before they could germinate.

And then in parallel, there are people that go fast. They just go really fast. So, because it's a values-based system, once you are part of the program, there's an initial degree of trust. Once people get to know you a little bit more and there's always an opportunity for that social event or online event, or then you develop a shared understanding. And then with some people you find that your horizons align, and your practice aligns really quickly, and you can do some really exciting things.

So, that's the work that I've done in West Africa with Kunle Adewale that happened really fast and continues to grow to phase, right? There's work that I'm doing with in Latin America with Augustin Ibanez on curriculum development, but on all sorts of other areas around artists. We have a project called Making a Way Out of No Way, which is about artists that reimagine the communities that they're born into.

BC: Here is Augustin Ibanez, a neuroscientist and Global Atlantic fellow describing one of these projects that's bringing music to communities in Latin America as a brain health change agent.

Agustin Ibanez: Music has this kind of exceptional blending. You know, music activates your language, areas of your brain, but also the memory, also the feelings. It's a kind of, um, synergic blending that happens in the brain. And this is that the music makes, makes the music integrate a huge blending of process in the brain. And because of that, it's so powerful. We're working with the WHO (World Health Organization), and we will work during two years to prepare a specific curriculum with different topics like violence in Colombia, uh, um, tango for Parkinson's Disease in Chile, and in Argentina improving the educational skills of, uh, street musicians, like, like Copa de Vida. And then after this two years period, if we show that we can, uh, grow and create collaboration with them, we can apply to the direct founding from the WHO.

DC: and then, yeah, creative Brain Week has become this platform for showcasing that work, amplifying it, inspiring people, and then, and encouraging people to connect and go on. So, it, I think there's different projects at different levels of gestation. and some things just take time, like policy text, policy time, and, lab-based research seems to take lab-based research time and artists just go, yeah, we'll do that tomorrow.

Part Six: Lab to Table

One of the things I keep thinking about is, I've been through a lot of institutional crises. Organizations, that are falling apart, which many people see as, the beginning of an end, but has given me the most fundamental, laboratory for understanding change, particularly when it comes to structures that are, enamored of themselves. In some cases, falling apart is it's the only way that they can allow, change to occur, or even not even allow it, it just occurs. And in, in places that really didn't understand what was happening.

I mean, it's the kind of thing where someone ends up with a physical condition and they've lost their balance and they're totally confused. And, obviously left to its own devices’ confusion can be very dangerous. But, in the right circumstance, it can be an incredible moment for learning. The confusion is based on the things that aren't working anyways. And the most interesting thing to me has been that often in those circumstances, nobody imagines that some good questions and good answers could come from the creative tribe. Now, that's not true at GBHI, where they have recognized that there's something there, in the creative process. That's exciting to me.

And they don't endure, which is interesting. They have a sort of finite life. But interestingly enough, the university in Trinity has been talking about this. And maybe there's definitely a piece in that in GBHI. I, there's an element of that and in the Bigger Atlantic Initiative, and partly it's simply cuz it brings people that wouldn't ordinarily get to hang out together. Together.

[00:19:31] DC: It’s really simple. What's the most radical thing you can do is, my friend Mary Turner said, tell someone your life story…

BC: Absolutely.

DC: …and then where does it go from there? But it's interesting, as well, for pedagogy. There are quite a lot of dancers now in the program who have come through the program.

BC: I’ve noticed.

DC: …incredibly eloquent people in all sorts of ways, and partly cause of the pandemic. They've not had the chance to hang out together. And so, it's…. they are hobbled, I think not having the opportunity to move and think. So, we see where that goes with. Interesting.

[00:20:00] DC: Yes, well. Yeah.

I was just thinking about, if they're not already familiar with Liz turning those dancers on particularly to, Liz's horizontal thinking and the critical response process. And now she's onto the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which is of course central to the dance world.

Here's what she has to say about it. This is where I'm heading with this new I, this newer idea. And it started when I did the project around physics.

Liz Lerman: It's the Heisenberg, which everybody talked to. Heisenberg Uncertainty, which I've defined as if you measure the shape, you lose the velocity. If you go after the velocity, you can't see the shape. And I think this is really interesting cuz. The i…. you really need both. You have to be able to do both. Most things can't.

In fact, most dancers can't. Most dancers are shaped dancers or momentum dancers. There're very few who can do both. But institutions are shape. And they wanna change their shape, and they can't. It's all interlocking shapes. So, you have to dissolve the molecules. You've gotta dissolve back into where you have momentum, which can be terrifying to an institution. It doesn't know if it's gonna know its shape again. But you have to --- like a curriculum, you have to let it go. I don't think the ingredients actually change that much. I mean, the stuff is all there, but… and then you let the new shape take its form that's going to be more ready for the time we're in. And you want a flexibility between shape and momentum.

But it is a kind of farm to table process so that you can take what people are discovering in the labs, or in the scanners, and then you can think about education, and you think about the pedagogy for education, which I think we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of that, and then you can think about intervention, and then you can think about evaluation, going back to, to inform the lab-based work. So, you end up with a virtuous process and there is no hierarchy of one thing over another.

And when we get to there, I think we'll be in a really sweet spot because the, the tendency is that the health science analyzes how good the singing project is. And that single direction I think it'll back thinking into a corner. Because then you're in a competitive environment where you're thinking about how good is the aspirin compared to the, that's… and you're missing it. You're not able to articulate, really what happens is, and this would know well.

But the pedagogy bit's fascinating. So, dancers talk about move, think, do. So, you move first, then you Yeah. And there is some really interest in neuroscience that would echo something like, haptic process, think with your hands that we literally construct. And so, when you start to think about, how do you teach whatever it is we're learning, then some interesting stuff starts to happen. And especially now that the AI tools are so effective that they're causing all sorts of panic and academic lands because, did I write this or did a, did an AI write this? And so, they're going back to doing an oral presentation when I think that opens up.

[00:22:21] DC: that's really fascinating for how knowledge is made and transmitted and stops the arts being this rarefied thing that happens in places with the red rope, which, you and I don't believe, but it's another reason for encouraging back into the everyday.

So, I think the main thing I like about working with the neuroscientists and GBHI in general is that it's not about creative practice being for a small group of people who are very lovely, but it roots it in everyday life. And that was where I was before I joined the GBHI and now the other strands of work are evolving.

[00:22:59] DC: It's also where my thinking is, I've always been about sense making as a way of understanding the world and making things with other people as a way to understand who and where we all are in the world, yeah.

And they have a community-based accountability mission to 30,000 people that live in two neighborhoods in Minneapolis, the epicenter of which is where George Floyd's murder occurred. And so, they've been involved in really nitty gritty questions of how to avoid further harm, how to mitigate trauma, how to, bridge difference, how to negotiate conflict, all those kinds of things.

And my little scraping the surface of neuroscience of brain science, I shared with them, about issues related to difference and fear, and flight or fight. And the most wonderful thing about it, and I think this is true with Liz's work as well, is that they would say things like, what took those neuroscientists so long to figure this out?

We've known this all along. And I mean, to me, that's why I feel like there's this natural alliance in this thing is that you have people who are experiencing or discovering or learning about some pretty profound things, in parallel universes who speak different languages.

And I think it really benefited them to understand some of the synapse responses that are going on when they're actually in the field doing their work. Which is pretty intense, and I think there's having that knowledge is a, not only powerful, but it can also make you so much more effective I think, in that kind of work.

So, when you're going to give a presentation in a speech, you can either decide to tell yourself that you are fearful or that you are excited. And if you tell yourself repeatedly that you're excited, it becomes so much easier to give a presentation. So little things like that are really helpful as are, ways of questioning why the brain is biased.

For example, there is an evolutionary theory that aligns with aversion. And we are most, we have greatest aversion from things that are wet and dribble and are contagious. It's all about contagious, about staying safe. And you can logic that out to realize that people find it hardest to work with people who have a disability, which makes them dribble, then they do with something that might make them noisy, right. So, if people are wet, then it's, you have to work at it.

So, it's, those little things are really useful. And, learning about collective behavior as well, I think is quite a fascinating thing. And it's an interesting thing to have that in your mind alongside frameworks for the development of Alzheimer's, or the many manifestations of Alzheimer's that are beginning to be unpicked through neuroscience research.

And that just gives you a greater suite of tools. So, you can learn to observe people to realize that they've got a particular kind of challenge in a particular part of their brain. And therefore, music might be better than language, or visual might be better than anything. Or as well as the flip side, which is people remember how you make them feel way more than they remember who you are. And that's true for anybody, but it's particularly true for someone who's cognitive memory aspects are failing.

So yeah, being able to sit with bits of knowledge from both is great. And, and to learn, not to reject it, but to be critical about it in a filtering sense. And the other thing that was interesting, I think is realizing that everybody starts from the perspective of curiosity and then they just pick up tools.

So, everybody's interested in how this works, and what happens with the way that people behave, and why do they do that, particularly when they wander into somewhere like university. But they develop different disciplines, and they… we tend to call these the arts and the sciences actually, I think that's getting a bit more blurry in a really interesting way. And it's a great place to hang out. So, it's really fascinating.

So, from my experience I know that these cross-sector cross-discipline mashups can be extraordinarily stimulating and provocative. I'm curious about whether it has changed the way you think about the work, both with your aims, and your approach.

When we last talked, pre pandemic, I was, busy trying to make festivals and events as a way of prototyping what a world with adults living longer, healthier, could be. And then getting people together who were over the age of 70 wasn't such a good idea. So, we've had to shelve that and rethink it. We also had to adapt all the ways that we were trying to survive and thrive. And one of the things that's come out of that is work with the Irish Hospice Foundation, which is a national agency for the idea of hospice and how it trains people.

It trains the medical services, and it basically has brought in Ireland the idea of, end of life and palliative care into a system that's primarily acute. And so, two years ago in the pandemic, they found an excuse to do a four-month project, which would help them think about what the role of arts and creativity was in the work that they do. And so, they brought me in. I did a four-month project, we did some nice things, and it, then it's taken off. So now it's a national program with 52 projects.

And occasionally, the neuroscience offers a language for understanding what might be going on in a room, or in people's relationships, or in a particular phase. And it's interesting for me how some of the artists that go through the program, they pick up what they pick up, and then when they get to the other side after a while, they merge back into what they were doing previously.

Josh Kornbluth, the monologues would be a good example. he's gone back to finish a piece he was writing before he did GBHI. But he's also still doing the Citizen Brain work where he uses his skills to explain or articulate or explore a particular aspect of neuroscience. Or Rowena Richie who works with For You Productions and makes dance work, and, it’s interesting in how you convene, I think how you assemble, how you bring groups of people together. And so, the GBHI experiences offering a suite of tools that they are adapting into their own toolkit rather than reducing what they do simply to, “Let me explain the Alzheimer's to you.”

[00:30:45] DC: Yeah. Their own agent. Yeah. so that's quite interesting. So, when we tried to articulate that, we developed this thing called the Five Pockets. So, we said:

• There is creativity that is about engaging individuals or groups.

• There is creativity as research practice.

• There is creativity as amplification.

• There is creativity as transformation of system, transformation of place.

• And then the other one is about individual agency, the journey of an individual with themselves.

And they were a useful framework for trying to share an understanding of people's practice, and to not think about this in a hierarchy, but to think about this in a different way.

They were starting from scratch. They had just finished the building -- This is purpose-built, and their first cohort was coming, some of them with kids. And it was just a wonderful way to say, “What are all the ways that an artist can interact with this emerging community?”

So, we came up with four areas:

• The artists as a teacher.

• The artist as a creative problem solver. You know, partner with the organization,

• The artist, as a collaborative community builder inside with the folks living there.

• And the artist as a cultural bridge builder outside, between the facility and the broader community.

And instead of just naming them, also telling a story for each one. And every single one of the roles, just like the ones that you've described here, made total sense to them right away. Once it was shared. It wasn't like, “How weird, why would that be something an artist would help you do?”

And it taught me a lot about, how the potential story can be expanded in ways that are really rich with really good partners who aren't just standing on the sideline. The residents and the administrators were part of the design team and ultimately part of the program.

And, so we, we help them hire artists, train artists. And then, basically had people think intentionally about: What are the priorities? what are the stages you're in with your organization? What's gonna take the most energy? Where can this resource help you meet a particular need? It was great. Everybody really, understood that this increased the potential for success in a pretty challenging environment.

So, Dominic, one of the things that I see in your work, and that we emphasized in that program, and in our training is recognizing, and pushing back on the tyranny of the prevailing narratives about, you know, having been incarcerated, having a disability, getting older as a story of inexorable decline. Could you talk about how that shows up in your work?

You can't necessarily outrun them.

[00:34:15] DC: But you can outthink them.

00:34:23] DC Yeah. it's the thing that you see with, older adults and young children when the older adults are just having their own fun. Yes,

Yeah, that stuff is great. I was looking for, something somebody said to me yesterday, which was about, accessibility. So, they're working on trying to come up with a format for, not physical accessibility, but neurodiverse accessibility.

So, you make spaces, you design spaces that are where you have a standard in the same way that you have, ramps and whatever you need for physical disability. Then they're trying to come up with some equivalent for, for neurodiversity, which is a really interesting way of thinking about the world and about design and about what we build.

[00:35:38] DC: There's Joan Tronto who's this really fantastic academic. And she talks about the foundation of the state. So, she went back and studied Greeks and she said, “When they founded, when they came up with the idea of the Republic, they had two spaces. They had the Senate, which is over there, and they had the domestic, which was over there. And all the big and important stuff went in the Senate where the blokes were and all the other stuff, which included care went into the domestic space”. And so, she said, “How do we build a republic which has care at the center of it? And how do you take it from the domestic into the other space and then mix up the gentrification of it?

And when I came across it, it stayed with me ever since. And I think about it a lot. How do you build a society around ideas of care? And we're pretty good at doing care to other people in some cases, but we use it as a weapon occasionally. We're not so good at receiving it. We're not so good at being the vulnerable person or the person that needs help. And maybe that's as important to think about as it is to create care as armor. So, how do we create opportunity for people to be vulnerable. And is that not a role of theater and performance and art and all that good stuff? And I kind of think it is.

So, the shows that I get interested in at the moment are all about… they're all about assemblage, they're all about, how do you bring people into a room so that they can sit with difference? And not simply about diversity. They're much more about equity in the true sense. yeah, so they're less confused by, what's that quote? “We asked for equity, and you gave us diversity, but diversity is not equity.”

[00:38:05] DC There's a great James Baldwin quote. He said, there's always a great James Baldwin quote. There's probably a great James Baldwin quote for everything. But there is one that stays to mind at the moment, which is he said, “It's easier to make people cry than it is to get 'em to change their mind.” And so, it came to mind when you were talking, because I'm not sure that what I tried to do at the moment is in any way about getting people to change their mind.

One of the reasons that I started to do so much work with older populations was because I fondly believed that when people got older, and near death, that some of the things that they were, bothered about and divided by in their earlier years would disappear. And that ain't true by and large. It's true when people get sick, they just don't really care. They're just sick. Yeah, but like, if you're old and wealthy, and old and poor, there is a massive divide between how you are, or are not, connected with those things that will hold you up and support you.

But I still think there's something in that, which I'd think about more now, is how do we identify the vulnerability in each other, but also how do we identify the abundance in everybody so that we're not competing for, the slices of a cake.

[00:39:23] DC: Cuz you just, you live in a small vacuum on a rock in space, so it's ultimately, it's gonna shoot yourself in the foot in a big way.

I'm now, I'm rediscovering both the history, and I guess you might even say, the alchemy of magic. I feel like I've been in the magic business my whole life, because of the imagination being at the center of pretty much everything I do.

So, I'm in the middle of writing a piece of music about magic, that is…, I mean, it's so amazing when you actually undertake a song which may have four verses, a bridge and you spend a couple of months reading try and get it right. it's a wonderful focusing agent. It's fantastic.

So now, in conjunction with the study, and the music making I wake up in the morning and I go for walks by the water. And, I've become, an observer, of shore bird life. And there are many more questions I have than I have answers for why in the world they're what doing they're doing. But my experience being that connected with the natural world is that the word “miracle” just jumps up. It’s always there.

So, the two force fields impinging on my brain these days are miracle and magic. I'm really interested in them, as ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of inquiring, so it's interesting.

So, about two years ago, II worked with a songwriter to work with a food bank in over two years. We made a song suite with the people from the food bank. And we took the glory that is the food bank, and then we went off. And we tend to work together, and then avoid each other for a while, and then we'll find our way back over a couple years.

He started a piece and then he had to have three stents in his heart. And,

[00:42:05] DC: The piece got finished eventually in a kind of roundabout way, and we borrowed St. Patrick's Cathedral, the big cathedral in Dublin, to perform it early in the morning. We snuck in with their permission and we filmed it. And we just wanted the resonator really. But you're in a church, in a cathedral and it was with people that we've known for a long time, and we're all looking a bit old and tired now, and it was a lovely piece of music that he'd written, inspired by, I dunno, classical madrigals, and prog rock, and the Velvet Underground just…

[00:42:33] DC: …a vocal piece. So, from that, we're now talking about every life deserves a cathedral.

[00:42:40] DC: But it's not about articulating a lot, it's just about writing the piece, and finding the place, and rethinking what those buildings allow us to do. We got very excited by the idea that an organ can't travel, it has to come with a cathedral.

But I say that to echo your point, that yeah, making work is a great process for sense making in the health work. I've started talking a lot about Saluto Genesis, which is this idea that you need to create the condition from which health can flourish. So the rest of medicine is based on pathogenesis, trying to figure out what's going wrong. The pathology,

[00:43:22] DC: Saluto genesis is about growth. It's about creating the conditions from which health can flourish. And it's such a great word for all the work that you do, or Liz does, or I do it's a nice one to have in your back pocket, I think.

[00:43:49] DC: Yeah, stay well.

Oh, and a reminder, please. Check out our collections of past episodes that have been organized by subject and arts discipline and other ways on our website. At www.artandcommunity.com under the podcast dropdown.

Change the Story / Change the World is a production that the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape blossom up regularly from the brilliant musical garden attended by Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. Until next time.

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And one last note: This episode has been 100% human.