Ciclos de Arte y Salud Mental is an ongoing participatory programme developed by Valentina Gaia Lops that operates at the intersection of artistic practice, mental health and collective inquiry. Conceived as a sustained framework rather than a discrete project, the cycles bring together participants with diverse relationships to mental health — including lived experience, professional practice and social engagement — to explore how these realities are shaped, mediated and contested.

The programme unfolds through regular encounters structured around artistic processes, where drawing, writing, movement and conversation function as tools for reflection and shared production. Within this context, art is mobilised as a situated methodology that enables forms of knowledge to emerge through experience, relation and embodied practice.

Ciclos de Arte y Salud Mental is intrinsically connected to El Informe, a long-term artistic research project that investigates the dispositifs, languages and institutional structures that define mental health. The cycles operate as both a generative and reflexive space within this research, where collective sessions produce materials, testimonies and gestures that inform and expand the installation and its evolving archive.

Rather than aiming at fixed outcomes, the programme foregrounds process, continuity and the conditions that allow for collective thinking. Through its ongoing structure, it sustains a space where artistic practice becomes a means to engage critically with the social, political and institutional dimensions of mental health.