CHAORDIC is a radical new partnership, led by Portraits of Recovery, including Castlefield Gallery, Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth.
Through three art commissions, Chaordic aims to test and explore how deepened access to and participation in the arts can help re-frame addiction and recovery identities. Journeying as a creative act and conceptual premise will encourage notions of cultural citizenship as an emancipatory path to visibility and identity status for Recoverism and the Recoverist Community.
Recoverism is a new Northwest art and social movement that looks at recovering people and their communities as social assets with newly collective, responsible ways of living. Free from substance or self-harming and defeating behaviours.
Manchester is a Recoverist incubator, and the city is its base camp. It is rooted in the city’s long history as an international birthplace of significant social movements. Recoverism as an ideology can help society better look at itself as a whole and shift how we think, work, live and express ourselves.
Identifying the pain of living, Chaordic seeks to offer Recoverism as a mutually inclusive cultural philosophy and methodology that can be applied to all areas of society. This approach simultaneously reframes addiction as a health, social and cultural issue and not a moral failing.
Chaordic, as activism and art for social and cultural change, will introduce and embed Recoverism and Recoverist ideology within wider society and the mainstream arts and culture.
Where we are now……..
The UK Recovery community was officially recognised by the 2010 Governmental drug strategy, Reducing Demand, Restricting Supply, Building Recovery: Supporting People to Live a Drug-Free Life. Albeit this fact, the community remains hyper-marginalised and, on few agendas, or lips.
In the context of Chaordic, we present the recovery community as an emergent group. Why emergent? To be regarded as a marginalised community, one must be visible to some degree to be identified. The Recovery community has yet to achieve this status.
Recovery is often misunderstood. Recovery is not finite; it is a social process, a journey. It is cultural, contemporary and in the moment. Recovery is a defining force for those living it.
