Health, Drugs and Rock n Roll

Week 35: Notes

Drugs can heal or destroy, they can cause death or prevent it.

Dineo Seshee Bopape, a South African multimedia artist, talks about where the soil and the herbs for healing the womb, come from. Nicole, Carolina and Melissa are midwives, who work in the Standing Rock Camp among 15,000 people from all over the world. It was started by the Lakota tribe and joined by most other Indigenous Nations to fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline and its negative impact on the environment and threat to sacred indigenous sites. Babera Georgette, is a Madagascan female health activist as is Gita Kunwar Chhettri some 4000 air miles north-east, in Nepal. Both women, along with many grassroots health volunteers, have brought about a considerable improvement in their country’s medical care for women.

Mothers who use drugs talk about how their habit affects their children’s lives – 30,000 pregnant women in Europe were estimated to be using opioids in 2013. In 2018 Nan Goldin, a US-American photographer, began working to expose the deadly effects of OxyContin, a legal pain killer widely prescribed by doctors and hospitals that can lead to addiction and  overdose deaths. Nan Goldin herself was addicted having been given the drug for a painful wrist, After rehab, she started up the campaign Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (P.A.I.N.), with a group of artists, activists and addicts, aimed at the Sackler family’s involvement in Purdue Pharma, the manufacturers of OxyContin. Since the Sackler family was a major contributor to galleries and art museums, Nan Golding called for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and later the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate group of British art galleries to stop accepting funding by the Sackler Family. The British institutions complied. Heroin, an even deadlier opioid, was used by US-American singers Billie Holiday (1915–1959) and Janis Joplin, (1943–1970) who died from an overdose aged 27. They are joined by Ami Winehouse (1983–2011) the English singer and songwriterwho died from alcohol poisoning.

In June 2020 the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease in Eastern Congo was declared ended due to a vaccine called Ervebo. This positive outcome may continue in Francesca Fini’s beautiful performance Healing. She is an Italian interdisciplinary artist who answered her artist friend Salvatore Iaconesi’s search for a cure after being diagnosed with brain cancer. Together with the first film of the programme it gives us the chance to reflect on the (spiritual) healing power of art.