ABSTRACT
At the heart of this chapter are two art projects which articulate at-home-ness in myth stories: ‘Earth Stories’ and ‘Sleeping Giants’ – digital videos that emerged out of a two-year long workshop series with a group of mental health system survivors in Wales, in the United Kingdom. As a resident of a small Welsh village, and a fellow disabled person, I collaborated with people using the village’s mental health self-help center, and we created communal poetry, dance, performance, traditional music, and video. In the following, I use ‘we’ when I speak about our practices and intents, and I use it advisedly – there is of course a tension between our art work and my academic writing about it, claiming a communal voice that cannot be anything but my own single one. But given both our experiences together and the theme of this chapter, I have chosen to stay with the precariously positioned ‘we:’ the (im) possibility of community in the cauldron of essentialized identities and notions of ‘the nation.’
