Marking World Mental Health Day for Artangel

Image: Installation photograph by Hugo Glendinning. Still from The Directors: Lucy, Marcus Coates (2022). Courtesy of Artangel.⁠

Artangel · Freelance Marketing and Comms

Oct 2022 · Clerkenwell

  • Community engagement

  • Ability to deal with sensitive issues in the public eye

  • Social listening

  • Marketing strategy

The Directors is a collaboration between artist Marcus Coates and five individuals in recovery from different lived experiences of psychosis. Positioned behind the camera, each of them directs Coates in a filmed restaging of a particular episode from their lives.

The Directors initially ran for eight weeks in Pimlico, coinciding with World Mental Health Day (WMHD). We decided as a team to screen the films on YouTube and Vimeo for one week to mark WMHD, enabling anyone across the world to view Coates’ work. There were many questions over how to promote this activity sensitively. In dealing with real life episodes of psychosis, the upmost care had to be taken in sharing the project online, where it could be easily misconstrued.

Due to the subjects being discussed, I used social listening to monitor The Directors’ reception in Pimlico. I collected tweets and comments from audience members about the show (which all happened to be positive). In the run up to WMHD, I messaged each commenter to request if they could send voice notes to bring their feedback to life. The nature of the project elicited many moving responses and I decided this was the best way to promote the work in a sensitive manner. The commenters were all glad to create voice notes for The Directors, which I shared over social media across the week around WMHD. It created the biggest spike in website visitors during the show’s run time, sending lots of new audience members over to Artangel’s YouTube and Vimeo channels to watch the films.

You can listen to the feedback on Artangel’s Instagram Highlight for The Directors.

Since the screenings the demand for The Directors to be shown on a wider scale led to our team creating a website, What’s Going On? to share the films and their associated resources. I worked with the web designers, Marcus Coates and external volunteers, as well as bringing in the wider Artangel team to create the site’s content and copy. In spring 2024 the films were screened in New Zealand, Denmark and at multiple universities in the UK.