‘Health communism means all care for all people. [...] While it is often expressed [...] that everyone should receive the care that they need [...] the determination of this need has become inculcated by capitalist logics and [...] as a determination of an individual’s debt/eugenic burden. [...] Countries with broad socialised medicine and social welfare programmes routinely still maintain their surplus populations with overt antagonism’.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (London: Verso, 2022), pp. xiv-xvii
The concept of ‘the chain’ [at Trampoline House] comes from the fact that we [refugees and asylum seekers] just keep circling in a loop, and everything just keeps repeating itself, you know, also […] in terms of like sustaining people's bodies but at the same time the system strips people out from their humanity and from their individuality, because when you are a rejected asylum seeker in Denmark you just have no access or no right to to basically anything. You can just sleep and eat and breathe, and that’s all of your rights.
Muhannad Al-Ulaby, ‘Navigating Systems of Care and Control: A Conversation between Trampoline House and Project Art Works’.
‘We look to the English Poor Laws as the root of our contemporary distinction between workers - the productive and deserving members of the body politic’ and the surplus - unproductive, undeserving - and how the policing of this distinction has developed as one of the central imbrications of health and capital [...]. [In this sense,] the asylum system is a paradigmatic example of the intersection of health, capital, and the carceral logics that must be understood in order to resist health capitalism’.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism (London: Verso, 2022), pp. xiv-xvii
‘We avoid using the term ‘disabilities’ wherever possible, as the term dates from paternalistic framing of bodily and intellectual difference as broken or wrong, i.e. eugenics/medical/charity model of disability. Instead, we normally prefer to say people who are neurodivergent and have complex support needs.’
Martin Swan (Project Art Works), essay notes to A. K. P.
‘We are interested in exploring the ways in which failing health - both physical and mental, are by-products of failing public health and migration policies, which inflict trauma to the body, and how these are disproportionately felt due to race, class, gender, or ability. We are interested in exploring how sickness/disability emerge as a result of the asylum process and the system itself. But we want to do it from a place of consciousness-raising and collective empowerment where, rather than focusing on an individual's story, it is their through lived experience that people situate themselves vis à vis the systems in place’.
Carlota Mir, ‘Notes on Navigating Systems of Care and Control’ (n.p.)