Loss merges with voice This moment captures faltering, dissipating voice as I spoke about my Nightingale Theatre project, an ongoing response to the British government’s instantiation of ‘Nightingale’ triage sites for medical and legal service provision during the COVID-19 pandemic. Operating as pop-ups within hotels, town halls, libraries, arts centres and theatres, these sites included ‘Nightingale Hospitals’ and vaccination centres as well as ‘Nightingale Courts’, including at the Battersea Arts Centre (which hosted a vaccination clinic) and at Birmingham Repertory Theatre and The Lowry (which each hosted courts). Between theatre-as-hospital and theatre-as-court, responses from these theatres’ publics ranged from extreme relief to extreme betrayal; and though Nightingales have been largely disestablished, their short-lived manifestation illustrates how arts organisations are being compelled by the government to co-deliver health and justice provision in a variety of ongoing modes. Responding to this trend to implicate theatres in delivery of health and justice, in 2023 Zeddie Lawal (More Than a Moment: Action With & For Black Creatives), anthropologist of public health Megan Clinch (Queen Mary University of London) and I formed a Nightingale Theatre collective of theatre practitioners, health and justice professionals, and policymakers in London and Birmingham, to develop a plan around how we could embed abolitionist principles of healing, justice and radical imagination in this work. We term the Nightingale Collective’s work ‘postprophetic worldbuilding’ for health and justice. Our unique framing of postprophetic worldbuilding builds on the figuration of Nightingales via the Greek myth of Philomela, who metamorphosed into a nightingale after being raped and silenced through the removal of her tongue. In dramatic and poetic texts of the ancient Greeks through to present day, the nightingale signifies the philomel moment, ‘the postprophetic moment, when the theme of loss merges with voice – when, in fact, a ‘lost voice’ becomes the subject of moving force of poetic song’ (Hartman 1975). The tongue outside the mouth, in flight, telling of terror and loss at the hands of the state, summoning solidarity, takes on powerful symbolism for us in this context. We argue that postprophetic space-time is one that reaches beyond the pain and violence of carceral logics, even as it guards against these, by bringing fragments of carnal knowledge to institutional paradigms: as ‘kinetically marginal’ figures, nightingales ‘ope[n] out onto something beyond the self’ (Dickson 2019:2). Our Collective works with abolitionist medicine, an emerging movement inspired by the dismantling of the PIC, to identify cross-spatialisations of law and healthcare in arts settings. Abolitionist medicine is fundamentally propositional, committed to experimentation around how knowledge about and decisions for health might be distributed across community settings. As ‘loss merges with voice’, we investigate postprophetic worldbuilding as a way to explore how complex and co-opted mechanisms of ‘participation’ and ‘co-production’ might work and move within these contexts.