Synthesis
Book Week 2023:
Emerging From Overwhelm
Feeling Strong invited India Boxall, a Glasgow-based artist and writer, to facilitate a workshop with our young people that would reflect on Eco Anxiety from a youth perspective by creating a collaborative piece of written artwork. After our initial meeting, India developed the workshop titled Emerging From Overwhelm. The session aimed to encourage our young people to reflect on what greenspaces meant to them and what steps they could take to preserve them for future generations.
India described the session as:
“Being overwhelmed is something that we have in common. I would like to use this commonality as our strength, and a starting point to write together from. In the depths of feeling submerged, we can sit with, respond, and transcend our shared overwhelm to find new ways of thinking about climate. We will create an experimental, collaborative text using the hidden meanings of words - their etymologies - to find harmonies and frictions across time and space, context and geography, human and nonhuman. It is in this work we will calm our overwhelm and become good ancestors.”
Overall, the young people of our Art Night enjoyed this session, responding to the theme and writer facilitator well, by creating art that was both mournful and hopeful for the future. By creating a joint letter that would collage together the young people were able to individually respond to the workshop, creating something that is still a collaborative work of writing and art.