Community Care as a Creative Practice in Wester Hailes

People are still having lunch as I walk into the ex-bottle shop renovated by Community Wellbeing Collective (CWC) to host Watch This Space. Chats and laughter welcome me as people sit together sharing one of the free meals provided by CWC. Bobby and Josie – two members of the collective – approach me with big smiles. "Do you want a cup of tea?" is the first question they pose, proving how unique this space is from what traditionally constitutes the programme of Edinburgh Art Festival.

The programme developed by CWC for Watch This Space was born out of conversations with the local community of Wester Hailes. The locals expressed the need for wellbeing services with a key focus on community and togetherness to make up for the structural inequalities faced in this area of the city. Therefore, for Edinburgh Art Festival the CWC – a group of local creatives, activists, and care workers – created a programme to nourish creativity, wellbeing, and to organise public actions to challenge the structures of social injustice in the housing, care, and education systems. Most importantly, CWC established a space for and with the community where, in their own words, "in our softness we allow our struggles to meet and to become un-stuck together."

This is a space made by its people: their stories, their healing journeys, and their creativity. Josie underscores that the programme was created with the community rather than for them. CWC expresses truly the concept of care by offering a sustainable model of artistic social practice that platforms and celebrates the knowledge held by Wester Hailes people. People like Seona, who leads colour therapy sessions for the programme to give back to her community, as she personally benefitted from this wellbeing practice. The space empowers individuals by spotlighting their value and encouraging a system of mutual learning that disrupts power dynamics inherent in many traditional ‘outreach’ art programmes.

"We are working collectively from a place of love, moving forward towards possibilities rather than prescribed outcomes." Through this approach, CWC facilitates more complex, more honest, and less binary narratives about the people of Wester Hailes. Seona, who is a resident of the local area, challenges the representation of their community as a place only defined by its poverty and the things it lacks: "There is still creativity here!" they tell me.

The sense of community and softness are the most striking features of this project. Forgetting for a few hours about my hectic life during the festival season, I rest for the first time in weeks welcomed by the warmth of this creative space. In practising collective wellbeing, Watch This Space creates room for love and grief. It opens up a space to cry, to heal and to rest, to come together and re-write possible futures focused on care. ‘Your seams are so beautiful to be seen’, local poet Bee Asha Singh performs during an open mic on the day I visit. I look around me and I see people who are learning to show their seams and the many different pathways that have brought them there to celebrate them out loud in a space that makes them seen. "I’m shaking but that’s good ‘cause I’m just a man who wants to be seen and heard" performs Raymond during the afternoon’s open mic, beautifully encapsulating the spirit of Watch This Space.

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Community Wellbeing Collective's programme continues Thu-Sat throughout September

This piece was commissioned as part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Emerging Writers programme; scroll on to read more from writers in the programme