Queer Care Caravan: Self Care Workshop

Join a free workshop exploring queer helplines, archives, and sound imagine futures of community care, facilitated by Conal McStravick.

Archivists Conal McStravick and Louise Neilson share cross-border histories of lesbian and gay support networks, drawing from switchboards, groups, and media collections. Together we explore how connections formed beyond visibility, and how listening to earlier practices can inspire new approaches to mutual support today within cultural, rural, and international contexts.

Lothian Health Services Archive contributors introduce materials tracing helplines and peer-led infrastructures that linked cities with smaller places during the 1970s and 1980s. Questions emerge around finding each other without visibility, and what those models offer now. Participants encounter ephemera, recordings, and a Stuart Marshall 1970s sound artwork repurposed as a speculative answering machine for future queer and trans health. A curated screening presents Michael Balser’s 1995 experimental television work for Toronto Living with AIDS, featuring voices from artists and activists connected to Diseased Pariah News. Food, shared fruits, and everyday care objects become tools for collective listening, sonic play, and imagining tomorrow across borders, generations, practices, solidarities, memories, pleasures, and responsibilities together, shaping responsive ethics for community wellbeing collectively.

About the Queer Care Caravan

This event is part of the Queer Care Caravan, an artist residency hosted by The Burr of Berwick exploring resilient LGBTQIA+ community-led care across a Film Library exhibition, workshops and screenings.

Inspired by the use of caravans as a therapeutic retreat, 3 artists from Scotland, the Netherlands and Canada spend time in Berwick-upon-Tweed sharing radical approaches to care taken by the resilient LGBTQIA+ community.

The project explores how care and knowledge are shared - past and present - to support LGBTQIA+ people’s rights and wellbeing. The Film Library features a curated selection of video works and ephemera exploring queer care, including materials from Edinburgh Action for Trans Health and AIDS activism. Free monthly events offer the opportunity to make friends and share films, walks, conversations and meals.

About the Burr of Berwick

With a focus on the power of storytelling, Berwick Film & Media Arts Fetsival hosts a year-round programme of film events, workshops and conversations. Named after the Northumbrian dialect, The Burr of Berwick invites responses to the histories, communities and stories of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Based at 22 Bridge Street, The Burr offers regular opportunities to meet up, share ideas and discuss our complex and changing world through film. The programme includes artist development workshops, exhibitions, public commissions and pop-up events.

Find out more at bfmaf.org.