Holding Space: Grief, Loss and the Value of the Arts: An immersive, community-anchored and arts-based workshop on the role of the arts in fostering knowledge and dialogue on grief and loss in Black and minoritised communities

The focus of this report is racially minoritised population groups in Wales and on finding ways to map their conceptualisations of death and dying, experiences of End-of-life care pathways, and loss and bereavement. Given the Wales health and social care strategic ecosystem (outlined below), the approach must be co-designed, multi-agency, and poly-vocal. This report will provide a summary of one event that sought to explore loss and grief with a small number of people, the majority of whom came from racially minoritised backgrounds. The event aimed to provide an engagement and learning opportunity and also to test engagement models that could prove to be mutually beneficial and non-extractive. The event detailed below allowed for cross-sector dialogue and multi-stakeholder engagement as an important first step in the building of an inclusive and community-anchored research programme. Visual arts – film documentary and a photography pop exhibition - were positioned as creative artefacts (art ‘of and for itself’) and creative prompts and proxies to engender connection, dialogue and engagement.