Event Details
Date
Location
Description
A three days study group on more than human care in connection with ecology and mysticism, rewilding curatorial practices, indigenous ecocentrism, collectivity, care and repair in and beyond the arts.
In collaboration with DAI,
curated by Iliana Fokianaki for State of Concept, Laura Huertas Millan, Collective Rewilding, and Aliya Say
With the participation of: Ifor Duncan, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Patricia Domínguez Claro, Olga Grotova, HYDRA, Michele Occelli, Stefanos Levidis, jackie sumell.
What does it mean to care, and how does this shape our daily lives and our work as cultural practitioners? This year, State of Concept continues the inquiries of its research initiative, The Bureau of Care, which over the past two years has traced the political and ethical roots of care—especially its collective dimensions and the ways it has been enacted, disseminated, and defined. We find ourselves in a global care crisis. Economic “growth” has eroded social reproduction, resulting in “time poverty,” an ever-elusive work–life balance, the rise of flexible yet precarious labor, the feminization of care work, and widening class divides. Austerity measures further reintroduce precarity and weaken the welfare state, jeopardizing care infrastructure. As Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez reminds us, any inquiry into the crisis of social reproduction must also “grapple with critiques of capitalism.”
By forming a covent dedicated to examining care-based practices—and imagining what it means to practice care in our work—this study group will investigate both the presence and absence of care across all spheres of life, and how those dynamics shape cultural production. We will begin by scrutinizing the Eurocentric lineages of care, with the goal of recalibrating and rethinking them. In Western modernity—and especially under today’s neoliberal ethos—care has too often been reduced to self-improvement, charity, or duty. This individualistic model stands in stark contrast to the collective orientation of care found in Indigenous epistemologies and the feminist and activist traditions they inform.
In the wake of a global pandemic, we see even more clearly how care, as structured in capitalist, patriarchal, and racist societies, fails most living beings. As David Graeber observed, “Generations of political manipulation have finally turned that sense of solidarity into a scourge. Our caring has been weaponized against us.” This COOP will investigate how to disarm that weaponization and restore care as an inherently collective endeavor, even when it addresses the self. We will pay particular attention to the radical potential of care labor—to disobey power and expand collective freedom—by studying moments when care has been wielded as a political tool. Inspirations include the Zapatista movement in Mexico, the Black Panther Party’s writings, Audre Lorde’s assertion that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” and Sara Ahmed’s reflections on “Self-Care as Warfare.”
Finally, we will expand our understanding of care to include more-than-human relations, drawing on ecofeminist theories and practices and their realizations in community-based activism, civic engagement, and the discourses that sustain them.
Curated by iLiana Fokianaki, Laura Huertas Millán, and the collective “Collective Rewilding” (Sara Garzón, Ameli M. Klein, Sabina Oroshi), The Covent of The Care-full will address questions born from research on care’s politics and ethics, such as:
- What should we care for, and for whose benefit?
- What are our personal care lineages?
- How can we move beyond a neoliberal, individualistic model of self-care toward a genuinely collective practice?
- Which survival, resistance, and resilience strategies sustain collective care today?
- How does care operate (or fail to operate) within the capitalist realities of contemporary artistic practice?
Methodology
We will map care’s historiographies and its connections to capitalism’s evolution, particularly how neoliberalism, in a pandemic-ravaged world, has diminished, corroded, and sidelined our sense of care as a shared responsibility. Then, we will identify civic, social work, care-labor, and artistic endeavors that have offered counter-narratives or alternative structures to strengthen collective care—and consider how these models might inform our own practices now. Among the specific facets of care we will explore are:
Care for Time
Care for Knowledge
Care for Freedom/Care as Weapon
Care for Refusal
Inter-species care
Care and social reproduction: Feminised care and care labour
Care, Repair and Healing
Care for Alternative Storytelling
Care for Encountering and Listening
