Shall We Sit Together? Settings of Care

Location: Mosaic Rooms, London
Collaborative Team: Mosaic Room’s Young Collective, Marwan Kaabour, Resolve Collective
Partners: Mosaic Rooms, New Citizens’ Gateway
Project Context
Starting in the Spring of 2023, Febrik collaborated with Mosaic Room’s Young Collective on a yearlong socially engaged art project which explored the political and social dimensions of sitting and working together. Using a variety of tools and references, the young people thought through their individual as well as collective interests and motivations, producing work that reflected their narrative as young asylum seekers and refugees in London. Themes of care and protection emerged as interpretations of solidarity.
The Mosaic Rooms Young Collective are a group of young people who engage with the work of local charity New Citizens’ Gateway, which promotes the wellbeing of young asylum seekers and refugees in London.

Project Brief
The project interrogated meanings of ‘sitting’ as a social and political practice and proposed settings of care with the body and elements from the studio space – such as chairs, walls and doors. The sessions asked questions about proximity, power dynamics, violence, fragility and support.
The project culminated in an exhibition that holds evidence of these accumulative experiments and begins to answer the ways in which we can sit together as we care for others and care for the values we hold dear:
Studio Set-Up – the naming of designated spaces for different types of sitting together with specific practices and intended relationships;
Gestures of Care – chairs and other domestic furniture were arranged to suggest forms of solidarity from building bridges to blocking doorways
Chair of Care – a construction of cut-up chairs that thought about the pain of others and who to offer a chair to
Settings of Care – a photographic reconstruction of scenes of care through which the group articulated how they would care for others using the body and chairs as a shield to giving advice in the shadows of safety.
These works built up an archive of collective knowledge of acts of care, a manifesto of gestures, settings and suggestions.
We invite you to add to this list: What are your acts of care?
United Kingdom +447879493527
Mohamad Hafeda:
mohamad@febrik.org
United Kingdom +447583411395