On the occasion of the third anniversary of the Community Wellbeing Space opening in July 2022 as the main commission for Edinburgh Art Festival 2022, they are looking back to look forward, and welcome visitors to us together keeping it together: an interactive installation curated by Federica Cologna in collaboration with and as part of the Community Wellbeing Collective with the support of the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh.

There will be a free Community Meal on Saturday 9 August, 1—2pm

us together keeping it together is a shared space to assemble and explore the practice and learnings of the Community Wellbeing Collective (CWC), a durational social art collective of 30+ people living in or connected to Wester Hailes practising and creating space for collective wellbeing towards change.

The installation brings together resources, objects, toolkits, stories, exercises, ideas, chants, invitations, prompts, wishes and CWC archival material full of the lived and the felt in common. Visitors are welcome to step into the installation, engage with it, and join them for a series of interventions drawing from the material on display to grow conversations about radical collective care possibilities, and how to continue the fight for collective and individual struggles.

How does the CWC resist and carve out space for public imagination in the current state of crises, divisions and violence? Which kind of collective processes and action can be set in motion? us together keeping it together invites visitors to sit with these questions alongside the CWC, and hold together a space for listening, learning, and longing towards one another, discussing what moves us and how we move with it towards communal liveable futures.

Federica Cologna is a CWC member, artist and PhD researcher at the Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh working between socially engaged artistic practice and feminist theory across different forms, from scores, editorial projects, installations and creative/critical writing to workshops, interventions and performances. us together keeping it together derives from her experience as a CWC member and from her doctoral research project exploring art as collective action and the reimagination of civic engagement.