The Mosaic Rooms has commissioned RESOLVE Collective for the 2023 Family Artist and Outdoor Play commission.

RESOLVE Collective will design with and for young people in our local area. The purpose of this project is to animate childrens’ understanding of solidarity through play with a fun, interactive and evolving play structure that will be erected in The Mosaic Rooms’ Garden.

In continuing our collaboration with Earl’s Court Youth Club we will organise a series of creative workshops which will shape the outdoor play commission. The new, co-produced work will manifest in a semi-permanent installation that uses experimental and radical play to explore concepts and practices of solidarity for a variety of communities and social causes in the UK and internationally. A launch event and three public family workshops will further activate the commission in The Mosaic Rooms’ Garden. Throughout summer 2023, the installation will grow and evolve, changing through play. Our audiences will create and change the Tools for Solidarity installation through their interactions, helping each other to understand what tools and exchanges are needed in our community, to organise, empathise, and practice solidarity with various causes.

Other partners in the project will contribute to devising self-led play guides for the Tools installation through public sessions. These ‘lesson plans’ invite partners and participants to reflect on ‘solidarity’ and what this means for them. These reflections will center children’s creative language, and will be reinterpreted spatially, activating the garden as a site of making and learning.

In May 2023, RESOLVE Collective will deliver schools workshops at the Education Unit at A. M. Qattan Foundation in Palestine. These sessions will create a legacy of learning which will be continued by the schools and presented later in 2023. The visit will also inform their commission at The Mosaic Rooms by connecting to international Tools for Solidarity.

You can join in the following workshops with RESOLVE Collective:

Saturday 24th June – Launch Event – Family Fair Day
Saturday 8th July – Tools for Solidarity x Mohammad Saleh

RESOLVE Collective is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across Europe, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment. They have developed projects, exhibitions and residencies including at Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin; London Design Festival in Brixton; They currently have a solo exhibition at Barbican’s Curve Gallery and have presented shows at Serpentine Gallery, Wellcome Collection, CCA Brighton, De La Warr Pavilion, Peckham Platform, S1 Art Space; V&A East.

PRESS RELEASE – RESOLVE Collective: Tools for Solidarity

Supported by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s Arts Grants Scheme

PHOTO CREDIT: Photos courtesy of RESOLVE Collective, and Tom Arran.

Children and families are always welcome at The Mosaic Rooms. You can visit anytime to play and explore with creative materials and sensory play activities.

We have curated a range of materials to suit children of all ages, including bright, stimulating, and thought-provoking objects, as well as plenty of materials for drawing and colouring.

By using simple prompts and fun, open-ended materials in the Play Area, we invite children to creatively engage with ideas and themes from our current exhibition.

If you have any questions or would like to find out more about our Play Area, please email learning@archive.mosaicrooms.org.

What Grows Wild

The Mosaic Rooms are sharing space with adult groups from The Dalgarno Trust, in partnership with Community Herbalist Rasheeqa Ahmad. The adults taking part in the project are from St. Antonio’s Ladies’ Group, the Volunteering in Partnership (VIP) Group, and the Healthworks Group at The Dalgarno Trust. The initial sessions took place at The Mosaic Rooms, and at Chelsea Physic Garden. during summer 2022.

Using local herbs and plants as a starting point, the groups have been exploring ideas of shared knowledge, health related herbalism, and ways of taking that knowledge home.

In Autumn, the groups will meet again to reflect on the change of season, and celebrate a zine produced from the summer workshops.

About Rasheeqa Ahmad

Rasheeqa (Hedge Herbs) is a herbalist in her community in Walthamstow in north London. She has been practicing since 2012, offering treatment with herbal medicine and teaching about its many aspects, alongside a wider mix of work whose aim is connecting us as communities with the potential of this knowledge and craft as a way to develop healthier living systems and relationships. She has contributed writing to artist publications around these themes and has presented talks around the histories and politics of plant medicine and healthcare.

Rasheeqa is inspired by her early involvement with the Radical Herbalism Gathering in exploring how to make plant medicine accessible and restore balance to its practice in the contexts of systemic inequalities and oppressions that are part of our shared histories. She comes from a family lineage of herbal medicine practitioners in Unani Tibb, who continue to practice this in northern India.

She is an instigator of the Community Apothecary in her locality, a project that brings community members together around a patchwork of medicinal herb gardens where we can learn about growing, wildcrafting and making medicines together, which are then available to the community. The vision is to co-create thriving mutually supportive healthcare systems, sharing knowledge, peer support and the model so that we can create landscapes of healing everywhere.

About The Dalgarno Trust and Chelsea Physic Garden

The Dalgarno Trust
Improving lives in north Kensington

The Dalgarno Trust community centre is a safe space for their local community to meet, build friendships and form a strong and supportive social network. It bring individuals of all ages from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds together so that they can fulfil their potential and break the cycle of poverty, ill-health and deprivation.

Dalgarno Trust are delighted to be working with the Mosaic Rooms in this gardening project to improve health and well being with the local community.

Chelsea Physic Garden

Sitting on the Thames Embankment, and sheltered by high walls, Chelsea Physic Garden is one of the oldest and most respected botanic gardens in Europe. It is the oldest in London, and only surpassed in age, in England, by Oxford Botanic Garden. You can find out more about Chelsea Physic Garden here.