Dear friends and colleagues,
I need your help to fund a theatre project that will explore how young people in Mombasa, Kenya experience the presence and absence of care in their lives.
In 2023, I collaborated with Jukwaa Arts Productions, a theatre company based in Mombasa, to create a play and short film about Covid vaccine rumours. Funded by King’s College London, our goal was to create a space for dialogue about Covid vaccines through participatory theatre – a space where diverse views could be shared, and where this highly polarizing issue could be explored. Over 400 Mombasans took part in the animated participatory performances, which you can read about here.
“No one cares about us – we know our lives are disposable.”
During the post-performance discussions, Mombasans frequently expressed their distrust of vaccines within a wider landscape of being fundamentally uncared for by people and institutions at all levels – including the state, medical professionals, Western governments and corporations. Audiences were acutely aware of how wealth, race, gender and religion shape who gets adequate care and who doesn’t.
How might we respond to these pervasive experiences of 'carelessness' and build more equitable access to care for all?
We are now building a 3-year project to explore this issue of care. Care is fundamental to being human – a source of joy and connection, it is also bound up with experiences of dependence, obligation and injustice. Care is difficult to talk about. Many of us are attuned to what care feels like, but may find it hard to describe in words.
Our upcoming project will create a methodology for mapping and building care through theatre-making.
Theatre-making workshops and performances will enable us to explore the visceral and ambivalent nature of care. Theatre allows diverse life experiences to be reflected on stage, and for contradictory and emotive issues to be addressed through humour, conflict and the drama of everyday life. As we found in our first joint production, this promotes engagement and creative problem-solving in ways that can be challenging to arrive at through conventional forms of research and dialogue.
In 2024, we will host a series of workshops with young adults in Mombasa (18-35-year-olds), using theatre- and arts-based activities to map the presence, absence and ambivalences of care in their lives. Through the workshops, we will brainstorm collective strategies for strengthening existing care networks, as well as produce practical recommendations for those mandated with providing care.
The project will investigate how care is experienced in a broad range of interpersonal and institutional contexts – amongst friends and family, as well as in health care settings, workplaces, government institutions and development initiatives. How do young adults currently experience care - and its absence - in these environments? What would need to change to build more caring futures?
Crowdfunding campaign
Our goal is to raise £10,000 to fund this phase of our collaboration, which will run from January to June 2024. These funds will enable us to run workshops with young adults in Mombasa, as well as produce a participatory theatre performance and short film exploring care.
The theatre performances and film screenings will be used to generate public debate on care in Mombasa and beyond, and form the basis of the arts-based toolkit that we plan to develop over the next 3 years.
The project will result in community-led recommendations for improving care across many spheres of life. We will use the artistic outputs to engage a broad range of stakeholders committed to providing more equitable access to care – including those who work on vaccines and wider health initiatives, policymakers, community activists and donors.
The need to address carelessness extends far beyond Mombasa. As the project develops, we plan to create an arts-based toolkit for researching and building care that can be taken up by communities elsewhere.
With grateful thanks for your support, we wish you all a caring new year!
Zoë Goodman, Caroline Ngorobi and the team at Jukwaa Arts Productions
A bit more about us:
Caroline Ngorobi is the Founder and Producer of Jukwaa Arts Productions, a creative greenhouse established in Mombasa in 2015, which voices social issues through performing and visual arts.
Jukwaa Arts supports the professional advancement of artists on the Kenyan coast, while provoking robust debate and progressive social change through community and boardroom theatre, street art installations and artists’ hangouts. Previous projects have addressed issues such as marine conservation, sexual harassment in the workplace, and the promotion of care for intangible cultural heritage. Jukwaa Arts have extensive experience collaborating with diverse institutional actors, including KEMRI (the Kenya Medical Research Institute) and the British Council.
Dr Zoë Goodman is an anthropologist and facilitator with 15 years of experience at top universities, non-profit organizations and the UN. She has been doing research in Mombasa for a decade. Passionate about engaging publics beyond the university, Zoë is increasingly involved in arts-based and embodied approaches to research and collective care. She is an experienced facilitator and recently piloted a series of workshops at King’s College London, designed to support the creation of care practices amongst students.
