The art of connection: How collective spaces foster healing and growth

In a world where stress and isolation are common, community art spaces offer a sanctuary for creativity, self-expression, cultural diversity and healing - in both personal and collective ways. Through shared experiences and artistic collaboration, these spaces are transforming neighborhoods and lives. Amsterdam’s transformative nature is one that is represented by these spaces. This approach is one influenced by the significance of counterculture in the city of Amsterdam, especially regarding to the emotional significance of what happens in these spaces.

One of the main issues in today’s world is our inability to properly understand and communicate our emotions to ourselves and others. Isolation and individuality are common to many of our day-to-day practices and ways of thinking. With communities constructed in virtual spaces, we often forget about the people right in front of us, whose energy we share and construct through even the simplest interactions. This is relevant to the Dutch context, but also gets reinforced across the world due to the wide range of influences that define our realities. Many factors contribute to the way we view our lives today. Inequality and injustice are a core principle of many of the institutions and systems we live in, but what the power dynamics of the world cannot attack, is our capacity to feel.

Many of the emotional effects we collectively and independently struggle with is understanding and recognizing each other, as we’re blinded by the screens that swallow us whole. Regardless of cultural differences, there are ways we can communicate things to one another - but the modernised world we live in inhibits our ability to do this due to subconscious fears of being heard, recorded, and even seen. As our emotions are something that was never properly framed or taught in traditional education systems, it can be hard to reconstruct our lenses of the world around us. But our experiences and understanding of them can be redefined, reconfigured, and reconciled by being with others, and one of the best examples of this are collective spaces.

Collective art spaces provide a healing factor for people’s lived experiences of trauma, exclusion, creative attacks and cultural attacks. In Amsterdam, they are able to foster multiple types of growth for the people and communities involved, also influencing the cityscape and culture over time. Amsterdam is well known for these spaces, contributing to the city’s image worldwide, attracting attention to the importance of collective, free, and creative community developments. Through analyzing the importance of these spaces over time, and through various discussions I’ve had with people in different collectives around the city, I can say that the collective and personal impacts run deep.  The practice of ‘art therapy’ is defined as being as old as the practice of art itself. There is an embedded significance in humans using art for healing purposes and storytelling. In this instance, it holds a deep psychological and emotional impact for people, especially when linked to healing. Although art therapy practices are structured in institutional and bureaucratic ways, the essence and significance of creative practice remains the same. Human psychology is not obvious or clear in the ways we try to translate it, but through art, culture, conversation and experience, the one point we all have in common is emotion. As social animals we have a need for growth and engagement. Creative and free spaces offer a inspiration and community to those who reside and visit. Creativity, art and community are at the core of the healing principles that the world needs to indulge in today. With it so easily accessible, it can be hard at times for us to recognize our own creative abilities and imagination. This comes down to our falsely internalized ideas of commodifying human products. All humans are emotional, and because of that all humans are creative. Even though there are differences surrounding the approaches and definitions we use to explore to those two ideas, it is something inherent to our lives. Understanding it brings us closer to ourselves and, as a byproduct, closer to others as well. Healing first happens individually, but collectives are a part of this bigger organism. Collective healing in these spaces then happen in real, sustainable way, as people share collective experiences and sentiments. 

“Only others can understand the depth of emotion that comes with creation.” 
Martin Kaffarnik (GROND)

There are times when weneed to have harsher conversations and feel negative emotion to truly understand and be attentive to one another

Art alone does not create the identity of a collective space, the people do. That’s not to say that there aren’t challenges in co-constructing our realities through practice. Issues of cultural difference and personal preferences do come up and can complicate the construction and culture of a setting. However, nothing good comes without difficulty. There are times when we need to have harsher conversations and feel negative emotion to truly understand and be attentive to one another. Creative collectives understand this, that finding ways to collaborate is a community effort. Being part of such a space was described to me as, at times, providing healthy support systems and feelings of reliability that our digital realities are unable to replicate. The space as a place of healing contributed to the individual feeling genuine belonging through artistic practice and support from others. People feel that they don’t need to prove their humanness, they can demonstrate it without hiding it or focusing on it. Another interviewee also acknowledged that it is sometimes easier to take care of others than ourselves, and this is also what happens when someone engages with making art making. People learn to care for themselves through acknowledging and presenting their ideas, feelings and thoughts. They learn to be together in silence, consumption, creation, by their own will to do so. They are able to deeply engage in the complexities of communal life within the spaces they create. At the We Sell Reality collective, artists engage in a different way by taking back their autonomy through art and community. They push away from imposed labels and present the world with their own instead. Their stories are theirs to tell, if they want to. It was explained to me by a member of We Sell Reality’s team that in the past, members stories were used by other’s for profit.  The growth of this collective enabled people to tell their own. In this, they continuously contribute to their own emotional processing, and provide a sort of autonomous healing practice in a collective setting. Regardless of the conflicts that can happen, these spaces provide a safe haven and a sense of reliable comfort for residents, which should never be taken for granted, for as social animals, we will always seek community and comfort in those around us. That is in essence, a replication of love and support, allowing people to genuinely be themselves, in a world where we are consistently discouraged from doing so. Communities and spaces like these truly make Amsterdam a very special place.

Freedom and experience are not only defined by how we categorize ourselves, but through that we do with the time that we have.
Through the growth people experience with themselves and others in these settings, it is obvious that things are not always easily done. At GROND (a new art space and collective at the Nieuwe Bajesdorp), people build homes and community amongst nature, all in the same space. When visiting, I was able to see some of the challenges and rewards of creating a collective art and living space. From the ground up, the collective has been considering their connection to nature in their healing, and constructing their physical space and collective culture. Although the process is energy and time consuming, the growth of this collective perfectly represents the challenges and rewards of co-construction. As through creation, we create new realities and approaches to our lives. What I especially commend at GROND was the growth of community, creation, healing, children and the actual environment surrounding the space - a perfect encapsulation of the principles that are healing to the world today.  

Our individual and collective experiences exist in the emotions with which we understand them. Understanding each other and building on our cultures, art and communication doesn’t come with finding the right labels for ourselves - it comes with the intention to listen, feel and understand enough to work together, find balance, find our middle. Freedom and experience are not only defined by how we categorize ourselves, but through what we do with the time we have - only acknowledging further that our sense of healing and community comes with the method, construction and challenges people face in constructing these spaces, and not always the final product. A process which is much like art making in itself.