MHAS is delighted to collaborate with We are Here Scotland’s Creative Balance initiative on two powerful workshops exploring collective healing and mental health.

Workshop One: “How to Gather Warmth?: Healing as a Collective, Embodied Practice” with Rositsa Mahdi 

Though solitude is fundamental to our capacity to process and rest, chronic isolation, especially during the dark and cold months in the northern hemisphere, robs us of our capacity for connection, sense of belonging and ability to resist oppressive systems. Taking place amid the textile poems and sound meditations of the exhibition “Letters of Healing” at Mental Health Arts Space Berlin, this workshop invites you to explore healing as a collective, embodied practice. It offers a space for collective rest through gentle, guided movement and somatic exercises. We’ll melt into slowness, listen deeply to the body, sense and soften together, practising presence and letting go of the pressure to perform. Rooted in the knowing that we don’t need to “heal first” to be worthy of belonging, and centring BIPOC and queer experiences, this workshop reimagines rest not as an individual retreat, but as a quiet rehearsal for connection, a practice of attunement through body, sound, and shared presence.

This is a hybrid event organised in collaboration with We Are Here Scotland’s Creative Balance initiative. It will be held in English in-person at MHAS Berlin and online on Zoom. Remote participants are warmly welcome to dial in from a comfortable location and attend in a low-threshold, relaxed event setting – i.e. with the option of keeping cameras off and closed captions with automatic translations available.

About the Facilitator:

Rositsa Mahdi is a Bulgarian-Nigerian artist based in Berlin, working with words and movement. With roots in anti-racist and queer-feminist spaces, interpreting, dance and performance, she studies the body as a political site and explores how developing an intimate relationship with it expands our capacity for connection and vision of (collective) liberation.

Creative Balance is a research project centring the wellbeing of racialised communities in Scotland’s creative industries. It is led by We Are Here Scotland, a space aimed at supporting and raising the voices of Black and Global Majority creatives and cultural professionals across Scotland.

We Are Here Scotland is a space aimed at supporting and raising the voices of Black and Global Majority creatives and cultural professionals across Scotland.