This image shows a person standing playing drums against a checkerboard background
Film still. Sop and Vanda Playford.

Sop – You are already here: A series of events investigating the changing state of being chronically ill

You Are Already Here is a series of collaborative works by Sop, between artists who identify as chronically ill, or who work closely with people who are chronically ill.

Sop collaborates with Vanda Playford, a GP, artist and student of psychoanalysis who has trained and worked with Shamanic practitioners. They will create a film which investigates the “Why?” of Sop’s Inflammatory Arthritis diagnosis through the mediums of drumming, interview and shamanic journeying to query more deeply about illness, its relation to life events, and the shifting and changing stories we tell ourselves about our illnesses.

Also using drumming, as well as voice, writing and movement, Rita Munus will host a series of workshops for chronically ill people to discover commonalities and amplify words and sounds that need to be heard. These workshops hope to interrogate and expose shared conditions: the difficulties of understanding our bodies in relation to capacity, capitalism and institutions, and the shame, guilt and hidden sides of having a long-term illness. The debates around these difficult matters will bring issues into the open, meeting urgent private and public discourse, which is too often left unarticulated.


11 September 2019
7 September 2019