Festival of Care

EmbodiMap is an immersive Virtual Reality tool developed by the fEEL lab at UNSW.  A 10 minute guided experience helps users regulate stress and anxiety responses by visualising internal activation in the body. 

Embodimap invites users to engage with a life-sized avatar and interactive 3D drawing technology to map sensations and emotions. By tracking physiological responses like autonomic nervous system activation or localised tension, Embodimap promotes somatic awareness, which can help us to unwind and relax or to gain insight into how our bodies habitually respond to stressful situations.

Viv is an artificially intelligent (AI) companion Viv has lived an exciting life and is now a dementia advocate, having been diagnosed herself. She will hang out close to the ASB café, Plume, each day of the festival, talking about her life, interests, and experience of being diagnosed. Co-created with women living with dementia, Viv understands the complexity of the medical profession, shares about her concerns and responds with empathy. Join her for a chat and a cup of tea. 

Make your mark and contribute to a gorgeous mural for your hospital!

No artistic skills? No problem!

Drop by and create an instant painting, contributing to a library of images that will transform into a giant collective mural. 

A liberating & utterly fascinating experience!

Designed for professionals more used to solving other people’s problems than sharing our own, this program offers a unique opportunity for 15-minute, one-to-one authentic conversations tackling hard-to-talk-about subjects like workplace-stress, depression, and the general craziness of life.

Awkward Conversations are completely confidential, make no demands, have no expectations, and require no social skills.

Drop in or reserve a timeslot. Walk and talk or sit and chat.

Join actor/medical doctor Dr Renee Lim in an enlightening workshop. Inspired by Grace Under Pressure, a verbatim theatre project made with junior doctors and nurses about the workplace and training cultures that are making young health professionals sick – and which put patient lives at risk. Renee presents enactments from the theatre piece along with role-plays of difficult interactions around toxic workplaces, mental health, and stress. 

Dr Lim brought to life the stories shared by our doctors and nurses. Dr Lim’s ability to use her real life medical experience and acting skills to retell real life clinical experiences – both the beautiful and the heart breaking. Her use of clinical simulation techniques were powerful and allowed the audience to reflect on their own practice as all the stories were so relatable. I would highly recommend!

Kate Christopher – Clinical Governance and Risk Manager, St George Hospital.

Drop by for a yarn and weave your own takeaway wreath with Aunty Victoria and Kodie. Traditional crafting is a beautiful way of aligning with community, country and history so why not challenge your technical dexterity, learn a new skill and take ten minutes to focus and connect.

Bask in the ambience of live music with performances scheduled every day throughout the festival. Take a break and enjoy the jazz or decompress to the twinkling harp, there’s something for every taste. 

Alon Ilsar is an Australian drummer, composer, sound designer and instrument designer. He is co-designer of a new interface for electronic percussion called AirSticks.. "Like peeking around the corner of the time-space continuum and glimpsing the future", the Airsticks enable new forms of music participation.

Karaoke Massage is the (free!) ticket for you. Combining the practices of lullaby and touch, this performative exchange is a massage choreographed to your chosen musical hit.

Teik-Kim Pok is a multidisciplinary artist, performance-maker and educator having featured his work at Sydney Festival, Underbelly, Next Wave. His live art has manifested in interactive-durational-public performances, including quasi-therapy works Kino Klinik and Karaoke Massage. He was the titular character in Platon Theodoris’ debut award-winning feature Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites, (Sydney Underground Film Festival + Official Selection, Slamdance 2015).