'AcrossRCA - The Safe Space' is an online platform to grant visitors accessibility to our mission : Destroying the barriers of empathy and self-care. Pain actively limits through promoting the act of making as a tool integrated to your everyday schedule to manage emotion and stress.
As a collective, we ran workshops to begin introducing ways of utilising everyday material to the public and encourage creating a community to join our journey, developing on the works and having others build on our works.
We hosted an Installation workshop utilising the Art therapy format by experimenting with workshop structures. We found ways to create a safe space physically through the transformation of the space, and metaphorically through developing a community – resulting in making an installation workshop as participants can help terraform their space while being guided by Artists who can teach them certain techniques.
As a group, we wanted the project to be a way to encourage making and community because we want to use Art to help regulate emotions and defeat isolation. Increasing empathy in the Arts is important to our project, allowing making to be accessible to those not confident in making to still feel included.
To keep the dialogue open beyond the workshops and allow people to participate that are not able to join the workshops in person, as a group we decided to make a website to document our work. This also provides a platform for the public to upload their ideas/artwork in order to continue building a community that encourages communication by sharing their works as well as collaborating / expanding on posted works which can lead to a series of works being created.
