How a letter transformed a cultural mediation process
This is what the Quasars mediation process has been like so far.
For about a year now, we have been working on the most invisible and probably thankless part of the Quasars concomitance. This concomitance has not been like others in which there is a clearly defined number of people interested in a very specific topic. Here, what we had was healthcare personnel interested in improving the emotional care of cancer patients. And when we say «health personnel», we refer to many different profiles: oncologists, nurses, radiotherapy technicians, and even non-health personnel who are interested in improving the emotional care of oncology patients. And even non-health staff who are in contact with patients, such as volunteers or cleaners.
As terrible as the disease of cancer is, one of the most beautiful things is to see that everyone, without exception, wants to help. It is easy to work in mediation when solidarity is in the air. However, the unsociable schedules of the health staff and the difficulty to understand the materiality of an artistic mediation process at the beginning have hindered the consolidation of a stable working group, what we at Concomitentes call «the comitentes».
Group building and project exploration
This group was finalised in June 2024. From then on, a period of research began in which we tried to narrow down what we specifically wanted. Emotional care of cancer patients« is a very broad concept: there are many types of cancer, different stages within the disease and a great diversity in the way they deal with their emotional complexity.
This is my second project in a healthcare environment, and I still maintain the same humility with which I enter these spaces. Here it is not enough to champion culture as an indispensable gesture to defend its value, as can happen in other contexts. Once the project is finished, we will be able to assess how useful culture is in a healthcare environment such as this. But at the outset it can only serve the needs of those who are ill.
Mediation: a compendium of practices mixing rigour and intuition
Mediation is a compendium of practices that come from other disciplines. It has a part of facilitation, a part of institutional representation, a part of narrative generation and communication, a part of conflict resolution, a part of artistic curatorship and, of course, it has a part of research. My academic training and my experience bring me closer to a documentary maker than to a doctoral student. I don't want to make a Manichean distinction (I know there are documentary filmmakers who are also doctors!), but my approach is to observe, note and try to understand how emotional care unfolds from an intuitive place, trying to reveal which stories are worth telling and why.
One of the best things that mediation does is to break the myth of the «romantic auteur», this idea of the artist as someone immune to social contexts who suddenly says «Eureka» and has a great idea out of nowhere. However, neither is it a question of hiding the fact that there are certain processes in which something does click. These are moments when someone realises something, fixes an intuition and turns it into the idea on which an entire project can later be built.
An unexpected finding: letters from patients
In this exercise of intuitive research, observation and documentation, that is what happened on one of the days. Tatiana and Lucre, two of the visitors, showed me the cubicles where the patients who are about to receive radiotherapy change. They are very small spaces, one metre by one metre. When I entered, I saw them full of letters, and the feeling was very powerful. Even though I was not an oncology patient, I put myself in the shoes of someone who is about to receive a radiotherapy session and I understood that these letters, addressed to the health staff in gratitude for their work, were in fact, at the heart of the matter, sheltering other patients.
I asked about them, and they explained that for reasons of data protection, privacy and, in some cases, cleanliness, they are periodically removed. It was then that they brought out some filing cabinets where letters from the last 25 years were stored. I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that we are talking about the history of healthcare in Seville. Not because it is something unique (in all hospitals, public or private, there are people who express gratitude for the treatment they have received), but because of the fact that they have been preserved here and because of the amount of knowledge they contain.
Some letters are poetic, others managerial, thanking everything from the hospital director to the orderlies. Some are religious, others secular but spiritual. Some make you laugh, others make you shudder. I spent hours reading them, often in tears. There was one constant in all of them: deep gratitude to the health workers. You can tell it is not instrumental or corporate, but a genuine expression of gratitude. In one such letter, a patient referred to the health staff as her «quasars», quoting from a book by Punset:
«For my quasars... I send you a short reflection on quasars... a celestial body that has a stellar appearance and, in the telescope, appears as a faint star. However, observed with the radio telescope, they show an energetic emission comparable to that of an entire galaxy. Quasars are the most luminous objects known in the Universe and their energy is equivalent to that of a trillion suns. You are a quasar on Earth and, like it, you emit this intense light in a selfless and altruistic manner.
Art for learning to live with cancer in other ways
What these letters also reveal, beyond gratitude, is the misunderstanding and fear that often accompanies the disease. It changes not only the body and energy of patients, but also their social relationships. Unfortunately, many people do not know how to accompany them. Taboo and stigma create invisible walls.
That is why, together with the group of principals, we have decided to carry out two artistic interventions: a series of illustrations that de-dramatise the disease from a humorous point of view. (a transcendental, reflective and tender humour) and a sound map of testimonies to serve as a space for mutual support among patients.. There is still the most important thing to do. The journey is complex and long. But we will always be able to say that the path was made clear by a letter.
