The Big Anxiety is a cultural festival exploring the big and hard-to-talk about issues associated with mental health and personal trauma with a vision to form connections for people with lived experiences of mental health by providing support that fosters understanding and creates awareness through creativity. An initiative of the University of New South Wales.
Spaces for conversation and listening, podcasts, art, poetry, performance, augmented reality, meditation, a two-day forum, and more will be activated across Naarm/Melbourne from 21 September to 15 October 2022.
The Big Anxiety Forum. Photograph: Markus Ravik. Courtesy The Big Anxiety
The Big Anxiety will deliver a range of creative and experimental experiences. Among them, the Children’s Sensorium, an interactive project introducing strategies for emotional resilience and wellbeing for young people that will tap their curiosity through light, colour, touch, sound, smell, and taste inspired by Kulin Country; Atatjura Kulinma, Think Mindfully is a series of guided meditations in Pitjantjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra Indigenous languages; the Nurses and Midwives Art Exchange exhibition brings focus to frontline nurses and midwives and their stories during the pandemic; and a film screening and Q&A titled Sincerely Survivor follows dancers exploring old asylums informed by arts-based research into the mental health system and the need for reform.
The Big Anxiety Forum. Photograph: Markus Ravik. Courtesy The Big Anxiety
Over two days, The Big Anxiety Forum will offer an immersive and experiential approach to mental health and trauma support and will draw on the knowledge of First Nations people to promote deep listening and collaboration using creativity, design, and innovative conversation formats to highlight experiences of trauma, grief, suicide, and self-harm. Hear from an exciting range of artists and creative thinkers.
