ICU

The Intensive Cancer University

This is not a support group, but it will be supportive. This is not therapy, but it will be therapeutic. This is not the Intensive Care Unit, it’s ICU.

The ICU is a project designed to give cancer patients an opportunity to think critically about how cancer is discussed, advertised, treated and otherwise considered in public. Although we are surrounded by large scale awareness campaigns and an endless barrage of cancer fundraisers, as patients we are often left to our own devices to think through what it all means: personally, politically, financially, socially, culturally, spiritually.

The Intensive Cancer University asks patients and those closest to them to engage in deeper, more critical conversations about ‘the big C’ and uses art (theatre, literature, film) as an impetus for conversation, for peer-to-peer knowledge transfer and for (eventually) raising the level of discourse around cancer nationwide.

The ICU was led by Complicité and Brian Lobel and ran throughout 2015.