Amartey Golding & Gaylene Gould

Bring Us To Feel
Events with Gaylene Gould
25 – 27 November 2021

The exhibition Bring Me To Heal is accompanied by a public programme organised by Gaylene Gould of The Space To Come. Bring Us To Feel are restorative events, which will help us experience and explore our feelings, emotional responses and understanding of generational trauma in Britain and the possibility of collective rituals of healing.

Feeling Tour
Thursday 25 November, 6-8pm
You are invited to commune with each other through your own embodied feelings, sensations and cultural memories aroused by Golding’s film that tells an epic fable of trauma and healing. After watching the film, you will be invited to reflect on the ways we might each embody the characters. Inspired by phenomenology and mindfulness practices, this experience offers a glimpse of the emotional ancestral legacies that lie within each of us.

Bring Me to Heal Reasoning
Saturday 27 November, 5-6pm
In a special live interdisciplinary conversation, or “reasoning” as referred to in Rastafari culture, the artist Amartey Golding, University of Brighton's professor in Historical Cultural Studies Graham Dawson and the psychoanalytic psychotherapist Maya Lasker-Wallfisch will explore the under-examined area of the emotional legacy and inherited trauma of white Britain and how we might begin to heal as a nation. The audience and the artist will have a chance to more deeply explore the themes that underpin this exhibition.

Well Fed: Fish n Chips and Compassion
Saturday 27 November 6.30-8pm
What do we think the role compassion plays in healing generational trauma for white Britain? You will have a chance to discuss this with others over a playful Fish and Chips conversation dinner in the Attenborough Centre Cafe. The dinner guests will be invited to debate, reflect and imagine your own responses helped along by a special conversation menu and bags of salty fish and chips. What do white Britons need healing from and should space be made for it? What’s the relationship between forgiveness, justice and compassion? What might a collective healing ritual in culturally diverse Britain look like? How entangled are our own personal cultural identities? Well Fed is a touring project for people to practise the art of listening, sharing and exploring the potential of conversation as a tool for personal and collective transformation.

Bring Us to Feel has been designed by Gaylene Gould of The Space To Come and produced by Zaynab Bunsie.

About the Speakers
Maya Lasker-Wallfisch is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, author and educator, with a particular interest in transgenerational trauma. She works between London and Berlin. Maya’s interest in trauma and the issues arising from trans-generational trauma have their origins in her experience of being a second generation Holocaust survivor. Maya has an interest in working with people whose lives have been impacted by the Holocaust and other displacement trauma. In her memoirs named Letter to Breslau, Maya offers a unique exploration of the impact of the Holocaust on three generations of her family. She is committed to the facilitation of dialogues between second generation descendants of perpetrators and 'survivors and is currently writing her second book to be published in 2022.

Professor Graham Dawson is the University of Brighton's professor in Historical Cultural Studies, with seminal publications on the cultural memory of war and conflict. He is Director of the university's Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing on cultural studies, history, literature, cultural geography and psychoanalysis. It investigates the inter-relations between memory, narrative, lived experience and identity, with a particular interest in the personal memories and subjectivities produced in oral histories/life stories and the cultural and political ramifications of their relation to public and national representations of the past and the future. Dawson's main focus is on the politics of memory and ‘post-conflict’ culture in the Irish peace process, and legacies of the Northern Irish Troubles in Ireland and Britain. His current interests lie in the cultural politics and temporal dynamics of ‘dealing with the past’ within conflict transformation, involving questions of memory and silence; subjectivity, identity and emotion; representation and acknowledgement; imaginative geography and historical justice.