A 12-Month Recovery Fund for Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi

Coordinated by Care Support Team

We are calling on Va-Bene’s friends, family, colleagues, collaborators, artists, curators, institutions, universities, former students and participants, queer and trans communities, cultural networks, chosen families, and everyone, near and far, who has known her personally, worked or practised with her, followed her work, or been touched, challenged, supported, or influenced by her advocacy, activism, performances, teaching, lectures, writing, and public practice to stand with her now.

We are seeking to raise €46,000 to support Va-Bene’s health, care, rehabilitation, essential living needs, and financial stability from now through the next twelve months of recovery.

We are deeply grateful to the friends, family, colleagues, institutions, communities, and individuals who have continued to hold space for Va-Bene since a medical emergency. Over these months, support has reached her through personal donations, gifts, smaller-circle fundraisers, private benefit efforts, practical care, and many other forms of solidarity. That support has carried her through an extraordinarily difficult period, and we do not take it for granted.

Much of this support, however, happened quietly and within limited networks.

As the recovery continues, the financial and practical demands have grown beyond what these private structures can sustainably carry alone. With greater clarity now around her continuing needs, we believe this is the right and necessary time to open the campaign more widely.

Many of you who know Va-Bene closely, or even from a distance, will already know something of the life she has built around care. For more than a decade, she has used her artistic practice, professional income, personal resources, home, time, and networks to create opportunities and structures for others. Through mentorship, residencies, artistic development, mobility support, community initiatives, teaching, advocacy, and the Va-Bene Scholarship & Mentorship Residency Abroad, she has supported artists, young people, queer and trans communities, students, mentees, collaborators, and many others locally and internationally.

One of the questions that has strongly shaped Va-Bene’s rituals, performances, activism, care initiatives, and community-building is:

Who Heals the Healers?

Today, that question has become deeply personal.

What Led Us Here

As many of you are already aware, Va-Bene has been recovering from a severe brain bleed and emergency brain surgery since December 2025, followed by further health complications.

She continues to live with significant neurological effects from the brain bleed and surgery.

Her condition continues to fluctuate. Memory, concentration, neurological tolerance, physical energy, mobility, communication, and her capacity for sustained activity can vary considerably. She continues to require medical follow-up, specialist examinations, rehabilitation, care, and significant periods of rest.

At the same time, the professional income that sustained Va-Bene’s life, responsibilities, and many of the initiatives she supported has been severely affected. Her income has historically come from performances, teaching, lectures, exhibitions, commissions, guest professorships, talks, workshops, and international artistic and institutional engagements. Her present medical condition has required her to limit her workload drastically and suspend, cancel, or postpone a number of opportunities.

These needs are immediate and continuing. Va-Bene currently needs support with rent and essential living expenses, food and household needs, medical consultations and home-doctor visits, specialist examinations and scans, rehabilitation and therapies, medication, transportation and mobility, emergency medical costs, essential day-to-day care expenses, and recovery-related financial obligations that have already accumulated during the months in which she has been sustained privately.

During periods when Va-Bene requires sustained day-to-day care, there are also basic living responsibilities connected to the person providing that support, particularly where caregiving affects that person’s own capacity to work independently.

The €46,000 recovery fund is intended to provide approximately twelve months of greater stability around these immediate and continuing needs, allowing Va-Bene to live, receive care, continue treatment and rehabilitation, meet essential responsibilities, settle recovery-related obligations, and protect the time her body and neurological condition need to heal.

Use of the Recovery Fund

For transparency and accountability, funds raised through this campaign will support Va-Bene’s health recovery, rehabilitation, care, housing, essential living needs, parental responsibilities, survival, and other immediate recovery-related costs.

They are not being raised for perfocraZe International Artist Residency, crazinisT artisT studiO, the Va-Bene Scholarship & Mentorship Residency Abroad, Radicalizing the Art Workshop, Love Feast, scholarships, mentorship programmes, residency participants, tuition, travel, or other initiatives and care structures Va-Bene has historically supported or funded through her own professional income and personal resources.

Anyone wishing to support a particular artist, mentee, student, programme, or organisation is welcome to support them directly and separately. Contributions to this campaign should not be made with the expectation that Va-Bene will redistribute them to others.

Va-Bene also continues to carry essential parental responsibilities for her two young children. These responsibilities remain part of the ordinary reality of her life during recovery.

Many of you who know Va-Bene may also know her long-standing motto: Love Wins.

It has guided much of her work, care, and community practice. During this recovery, those words have taken another form: Love Heals.

On Support and Other Ways to Help

Please do not make donations, institutional support, or fundraising initiatives conditional upon her participating in video interviews, recorded appeals, public appearances, or other engagements requiring significant neurological, physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual energy.

Va-Bene should not have to repeatedly narrate her illness or perform her recovery in order to receive support.

If you wish to support Va-Bene outside the GoFundMe through a direct contribution, institutional support, a small-circle fundraiser, benefit event, a film screening or exhibition of her existing body of work (e.g. photographic series or video works), or another support structure, please contact the Care Support Team through the organiser contact option on this GoFundMe page for the appropriate documentation, transfer information, and support protocol.

Donate and Share

We are asking everyone who has the capacity to help build this recovery fund.

If you can give €1, €10, €50, €500, or more, please give what you can. Every contribution matters, and larger contributions are equally welcome and deeply appreciated.

After making a donation, please continue sharing the campaign and encourage friends, colleagues, institutions, universities, artistic communities, queer and trans networks, and other trusted circles to contribute.

If you are unable to contribute financially, sharing the campaign is also deeply appreciated. At the same time, crowdfunding can only create the support it is meant to build when sharing is accompanied by giving wherever possible. If everyone shares while expecting someone else to donate, the campaign may travel widely without creating the financial support Va-Bene needs.

So, if you are able to give, please do. Give as little or as much as you can, continue sharing, and encourage others to participate.

This campaign is not an invitation to pity Va-Bene. It is an invitation to help create stability around someone whose life and work have, for many years, been deeply invested in creating care, opportunity, visibility, mobility, and support for others.

We are asking for twelve months in which Va-Bene can prioritise healing, rehabilitation, medical care, rest, and recovery without financial pressure continually determining what her body must do next.

Who Heals the Healers?

Today, we are asking the wider community to help answer that question.

Love Wins.

Love Heals.

With care, solidarity, and gratitude,

Va-Bene Care Support Team & Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [aka crazinisT artisT]