 We are in the field that an ambiguity is beautiful. The void is beautiful. Not understanding is a possibility. I'm trained as an anthropologist. Anthropology is really about understanding the everyday of people and how people live together. Curatorial work for me now consists of trying to bring people together and through that encounter create new knowledge. I am a researcher specialized in art and cultural anthropology. I'm an artist, so I guess my expertise is in social practice and using art as a sort of a catalyst to make small changes in the society. I have a PhD in American studies and a background during curatorial work and interview-based research. And I'm really interested in the stories that we tell about ourselves and how we can make change through those stories. I studied architecture and then after a few years of practice I studied urban sociology. And mostly I'm interested in how to hold space for people from diverse backgrounds to come together and make space for constructive conversation. Minescapes is a project that through the arts and cultural production tries to approach mental health differently. It tries to bring different people together to question what mental health is, how it is defined and by whom it is defined, how it is treated. It does so by bridging research, policy, advocacy, as well as civil society. I think mindscapes is to train us to be more intuitive, to understand the term mental health from an art or cultural perspective. So it's really not about finding solutions, more like finding possibilities. People who live on the margins in India don't have the luxury of time and space to even express themselves or talk about mental health as a thing that exists. A lot of the work in Bangalore really tried to look at how does one serve as these missing voices to hold space for these conversations on their terms. These could be people who are from low income communities, sex worker communities, children or people living with a mental illness. Here in New York, there was a real aim to support the communities that were most hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. And instead of just stopping at saying they need to be supported better, they asked what could be done to actually be more inclusive, create more joy, go toward what should be in the world. Guadalupe Maravilla in the Brooklyn Museum worked to create a space that was especially supportive of undocumented communities. In Berlin, what we did is realize different small research projects that were questioning, for example, how mental health and inequality relate. What music does to you and how it can sustain certain kind of emotions, how the past affects the present, what kind of role trauma plays with regards to mental health. I think Welcome was the glue that brought us together. It's been really wonderful actually to have the company of the other cultural leads just to be able to know what's happening in different parts of the world. Also to recognize how much there are similarities sometimes with respect to the language or the challenges in language when we talk about mental health, the limitations that we have when we speak with communities. It's useful to then be able to have this conversation across Japan, across Germany and across the US. I think sometimes virtual conversations are really tricky because language was sort of an obstacle because we're talking about sentiment and emotions. And I really wanted to be as articulate as possible, but sometimes language becomes the obstacle. Both working with Welcome and working with the Curatorial Research Fellows has also been a lot about translation from cultural work to political work to research work. But because within Welcome itself already, you find all these different people, it felt like we could actually quite quickly get into that discussion. It's been really useful to think about of reframe arts and culture as not just extraordinary things or performances that someone's doing at some point, but as everyday living. It's what our mothers have been doing, our grandmothers have been doing, cultures, songs that people sing on festivals, cultures, the food that people make. That forms a big part of how people's mental health sustains. Improving mental health does not just mean seeking therapy. The only thing I've been doing is learn. This idea of co-production where together with social scientists, with people working in the medical field, with people working in policy is crucial. You think about a common problem, but from different perspectives. And mental health is a really wonderful example to do that because if you talk about health and if you talk about mental health, you talk about society. What I have learned from this whole project is I understand what is lacking, what is missing from the context in Japan to develop the conversations about mental health and art and culture. I think if we would like to continue this kind of project, we really have to prepare the ground to grow this kind of conversation with professionals and non-professionals and general public. In New York, a lot of the communities that are most vulnerable and people who've been through the most are not supported. In my wildest dreams, those people would be provided with the most support. Making a more integrated approach and understanding of how if you fund housing, you're supporting mental health and well-being. If you make it easy for people to get access to a public pool, you're supporting mental health and well-being. And I hope that maybe some policy makers take this into account to support our most vulnerable communities. For this field to change and what I think mindscapes really try to do, particularly in Berlin because we were working from within the museum, is that these spaces actually become meaningful places in society that is truly trying to integrate as many people as possible, not only visiting the museum but actually making the museum, and thus also making the museum a space where meaningful conversations can take place about contemporary problems. Art is so much about imagination and without it, there is no creation. I want to sort of make sure I'm more engaged in what's really happening outside of my comfort zone and say, listen to what people have to say so that as an artist I can sort of grow. My big takeaway from mindscapes would be the idea of bringing yourself to work. And to say that we, when we show up as our full selves, we represent our educational, professional and cultural selves and we bring that to the table.