Curating with Care 9781032069913, 9781032069968, 9781003204923

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Curating with Care

This book presents over 20 authors’ refections on ‘curating care’ – and presents a call to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life and for more ‘caring curating’ that responds to the social, ecological and political analysis of curatorial caregiving. Social and ecological struggles for a diferent planetary culture based on care and respect for the dignity of life are refected in contemporary curatorial practices that explore human and non-human interdependence. The prevalence of themes of care in curating is a response to a dual crisis: the crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics and the professional crisis of curating under the pressures of the increasingly commercialized cultural landscape. Foregrounding that all beings depend on each other for life and survival, this book collects theoretical essays, methodological challenges and case studies from curators working in diferent global geographies to explore the range of ways in which curatorial labour is rendered as care. Practising curators, activists and theorists situate curatorial labour in the context of today’s general care crisis. This volume answers to the call to more fully understand how their transformative work allows for imagining the future of bodily, social and environmental care and the ethics of interdependency diferently. Elke Krasny is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses care, ecological and social justice, memory work and emancipatory cultural practice at the present historical conjuncture marked by ecocidal and genocidal pasts. Her exhibition Hands-On Urbanism: The Right to Green on urban gardening and farming as subsistence practices was included in the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibition Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated with Angelika Fitz at the Architecture Centre Vienna in 2019, introduces a perspective of planetary care ethics through architectural practice. Krasny co-edited Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023).

Lara Perry works in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. Trained frst as a historian, Lara’s career has involved her in work with artists, curators, photographers, educators, computer scientists, philosophers, archivists, activists and art historians. Much of her research has focused on evolving feminist museology, starting with her doctoral thesis on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery (London) published as History’s Beauties: Women, History and the National Portrait Gallery 1856–1900 in 2006. Lara has published a number of essays and edited volumes concerning art history’s and curating’s relationship to gender and feminism, most recently, an edited volume with Elke Krasny Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023).

Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions

Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions is a new series focusing on museums, collecting, and exhibitions from an art historical perspective. Proposals for monographs and edited collections on this topic are welcomed. Curatorial Challenges Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating Edited by Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Anne Gregersen

Contemporary Curating, Artistic Reference and Public Reception Reconsidering Inclusion, Transparency and Mediation in Exhibition Making Practice Stéphanie Bertrand

Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire Museums of Design, Industry and the Applied Arts Matthew Rampley, Markian Prokopovych, and Nóra Veszprémi

Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera ‘Like a Giant Screen’ Rafaele Bedarida

The Venice Biennale and the AsiaPacifc in the Global Art World Stephen Naylor A History of Aboriginal Art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales Vanessa Russ

Displaying Art in the Early Modern Period Exhibiting Practices and Exhibition Spaces Edited by Pamela Bianchi Curating with Care Edited by Elke Krasny and Lara Perry

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Art-Museums-and-Exhibitions/book-series/RRAM

Curating with Care

Edited by Elke Krasny and Lara Perry

Cover credit: Johanna Braun, Spelling it like it is (Documentation), 2018, by kind permission of the artist. First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Elke Krasny and Lara Perry; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Elke Krasny and Lara Perry to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-06991-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-06996-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20492-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003204923 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction

x xi xix 1

ELKE KRASNY AND LARA PERRY

PART I

Caring Curating 1 Curatorial Labour and Decolonial Feminism

11 13

FRANÇOISE VERGÈS

2 Get Bodied: Inverting the Witch to Summon a New Commons

19

BRUXAS BRUXAS ARTS COLLECTIVE

3 Care Beyond Curation: A Conversation with Lauren Craig

31

INTERVIEW BY RACHA BARAKA

4 Transcultural Care and the Cultural Sector in the United Kingdom

42

PAULINE DE SOUZA

5 Caring for ‘Range-ful’ Identities in the Work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

56

HELEN KAPLINSKY

6 Decolonial and Heritage Practices in the Context of Current Global Challenges: Quilombola Museology and Digital Technologies in Brazilian Community Museums MIRELLA MARIA

71

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Contents

7 Caring Curating and Social Media

83

SOPHIE LINGG

8 A Laboratory of Care – Active Micropolitics, Joyfulness, and Afectivity

94

BERIT FISCHER

9 Avtonomi Akadimia: Curating Becomes Curing

107

JOULIA STRAUSS

10 Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission: Learning From Greenham Common

117

ALEXANDRA KOKOLI

11 Caring for Mourning, Working With Loss: Curating, Listening and Attending to the Sacred in Peruvian Highlands and Forests

131

ELIANA OTTA INTERVIEWED BY ELKE KRASNY

12 Care, Thought, Being: Curating With a Wounded Planet

141

ELKE KRASNY

PART II

Curating Care

151

13 Curating Forms of Care in Art and Activism: A Roundtable on Life Support

153

CAROLINE GAUSDEN, KIRSTEN LLOYD, NAT RAHA AND CATHERINE SPENCER

14 From Coping to Curious: Unlearning and Reimagining Curatorial Habits of Care

169

HELENA RECKITT

15 Care for Caregivers: Curating Against the Care Crisis

183

SASCIA BAILER

16 Cultivating Care Ethics and the Minor Gesture in Curatorial JACQUELINE MILLNER AND ZSUZSANNA (ZSUZSI) SOBOSLAY

197

Contents 17 ‘Do What You do Best and Outsource the Rest’ – Curatorial Lessons within Cultures of Outsourcing

ix 209

JENNY RICHARDS

18 The Platform of Care: Collective Curatorial Modes of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions Platform

224

KATJA KOBOLT, PETJA GRAFENAUER AND BRIGITA MILOŠ

19 Curating Queer Nursing: The Performance Installation Partus Gyno Bitch Tits

237

CLAUDIA LOMOSCHITZ

20 Curating a Collective Body: A Non-Idealized Concept of Care

246

MAGDALENA KALLENBERGER (MATERNAL FANTASIES COLLECTIVE)

21 Spellbound: Witchcraft Activism as Caring Curatorial Practice

259

JOHANNA BRAUN

22 Curating Aliveness: Engaging With Ecologies

269

ZAHRA KHAN

23 La escuela del buen vivir/The School of Good Life: Counteracting the Imperial Mode of Living

280

HANSEL SATO

Index

293

Figures

2.1 Bruxas Bruxas member and drag artist José Queervo joins the Valley Hags in hosting the closing reception of Get Bodied at the Edwin E. Zoller Gallery 5.1 Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, 2020 9.1 Room to Bloom Athens: Ecofeminism, Summer 2021 10.1 Mud-stained copy of The New Radiator: Souvenir issue on Greenham Common, March 21, 1982 11.1 Jhover Melendez, leader of the community Nuevo Amanecer Hawai and Víctor Pío, son of the assassinated leader Mauro Pío, showing the sacred hole where the Santani bird nests 13.1 Olivia Plender, Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power, 2021 15.1 Over 100 people joined the frst Social Muscle Club in Schleswig-Holstein 16.1 Illumine Collective (Majella Thomas and Malcolm Angelucci), O had I known that thus it happens, 2019, performance still, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne 17.1 Campaign to end outsourcing, 2019 18.1 Borut Kranjc, Borut Pahor with the team at the hair salon ND Design Hair and a young hairdresser, Dejan Nikolić, September 13, 2012, Ljubljana, Slovenia, photograph, Politics series, 2014 19.1 Partus gyno bitch tits, Videowork, 7:13 min, Video Still 3:53 min, Claudia Lomoschitz 2021 20.1 Travelling Drawing, 2020 21.1 Johanna Braun, Spelling it like it is (documentation), 2018 22.1 Omer Wasim, Spectral Remains, 2020–2022, Jasmine, soil and wood 23.1 The artistic intervention A Wiener Halal, the mobile Halal Sausage Stand took place within the framework of the festival SOHO in Ottakring in 2016

23 60 114 124

137 161 189

201 211

225 239 253 259 273 288

Contributors

Sascia Bailer  is a feminist researcher, writer and curator working at the intersection of care, contemporary art and social transformation. In her practice-based curatorial PhD at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading, she explores the activist potential of curating as a form of care. She has worked internationally within the arts including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019–2020, she was the artistic director at the M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung; today, she works as an interdependent curator and educator. She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design and a BA from Zeppelin University. Racha Baraka is a Franco-Algerian freelance journalist and writer pursuing an MA in Culture Industry at Goldsmiths University. She promotes, shares and writes about a shape-shifting culture in English and French, while striving to platform a plethora of voices and stories that are often underrepresented or marginalized in mainstream media. With a background in cultural studies, she is working on an upcoming digital exhibition with a group of multidisciplinary artists exploring the metaphor of the margins in relation to space and identity. Johanna Braun is an artist-researcher and current lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History. She has internationally performed, exhibited, published and given lectures on various aspects of witchcraft activism at institutions such as the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2022); VBKÖ, Vienna (2022); Sauerland-Museum, Arnsberg (2022); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); the Zurich University of the Arts (2018); UCLA (2018); Rrriot Festival Vienna (2018); Zitadelle Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2020–2021) and Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna (2018). She has published her research on the subject in  FemWiss Journal  (2018), McFarland (2021), FWK Journal (2022), among others.

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Bruxas Bruxas is a transnational artist collective invested in good vibrations for restoring the planet’s frst-order metabolic performance in search of alternative futures founded in alterity, plurality and radical–mycorrhizal care. Our assemblage of critical thinkers and makers facilitates multi-modal, immersive productions that are heavily informed by critical art, drag culture, ritual, slam poetry, hip-hop and folk art. Our loving transgressions blend together principles of ecosocialism, artivism and socially engaged art to bring to light issues that pertain not only to economic production but to social reproduction and environmental justice as well. These ingredients sustain our coalitional work and motivate us to create and perform caringly, yet critically, while maintaining a common mission: making art for a community by a community. Artists Alvaro Jordan, Ciara Newton, Kristina Bivona, Kiki Cooper and Xalli Zúñiga are the founding members of our socially conscious collective, where we come together to create immersive artworks that grapple with the contradictions of political life within broader structures of domination. We celebrate the entangled power of sensibility, allyship and liberatory pedagogies for nurturing our ever-growing forest of unhinged poetic subalternities. Lauren Craig is a London-based cultural futurist. Her practice as an artist, curator, full-spectrum doula and celebrant is untethered, sprawling and liberatory. Moving between performance, installation, experimental art writing, exhibition making, moving image, research and photography, her approach is a meditation on celebration, commemoration and tribute. Through archival research, reactivation and socialisation, she centres on lived experience whilst striking through and reframing past and present dominant narratives. Craig is a former member of the social history and curatorial collective Rita Keegan Archive Project. She has founded and directed six creative organizations with a background in ethical, social and environmental entrepreneurship and reproductive justice. She is the creator of the conceptual modality S:E:P:A:L:S: and a founding member of a same-titled group that explores care and safety within curating. She conducts curatorial research with the Maud Sulter estate led by Art360 project, Artists’ Legacies in the Museum. Berit Fischer (PhD)  is a curator, artist, writer and editor who has worked internationally since 1999. She holds a PhD from the Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, UK. In 2016, she founded the Radical Empathy Lab, an ongoing nomadic experimental socio-ecological laboratory for experiential and holistic knowledge production. She has lectured and given workshops worldwide at Haus der Kulteren der Welt and Making Futures School  in Berlin; Bergen University; ZhdK; FU Berlin; Winchester School of Art/Southampton University; Nottingham Trent University; Soma, Mexico City. Notable curatorial projects took place at Floating University and nGbK, Berlin; Akademie Schloss Solitude; tranzit.sk; Casino Luxembourg

Contributors

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Forum d’Art Contemporain; Brooklyn Waterfront Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition  and  Dumbo Arts Festival, New York; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; BankART, Yokohama. Caroline Gausden is a development worker for programming, curating and engagement at Glasgow Women’s Library. She has a practice-based curatorial PhD in feminist manifestos and social art practice from Gray’s school of Art, Aberdeen. Her research focus is on the convergence between radical, intersectional conceptions of hospitality, the archive and political art practices. Her PhD drew from feminist theoretical writing and activism alongside contemporary iterations of socially engaged art, including Glasgow Women’s Library, which is considered as a 30-year-old social sculpture and living form for social change. Petja Grafenauer (PhD) is a curator and assistant professor in the Department of Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. She is currently working on two research projects, ‘Models and Praxes of Global Cultural Exchange and Non-Aligned Movement. Research in the Spatio-Temporal Cultural Dynamics’ and ‘Protests, Art Praxes and Culture of Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Context’. Magdalena Kallenberger is a visual artist, researcher and writer working across flm, photography and installation. She studied in Berlin and Rotterdam and holds an MFA (Meisterschüler) in Media Art from the Berlin University of the Arts. Kallenberger has received several awards, grants and residencies including a doctoral fellowship from the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, and is currently a PhD candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar. Her writings have appeared in publications with MIT Press, k-Verlag, demeter press and gender(ed) thoughts. Most recently, she has co-edited ‘ReAssembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices’ by MATERNAL FANTASIES. She is an initiator, co-founder and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES. Helen Kaplinsky (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Helsinki and London. Her most recent exhibition is GENDERS, Science Gallery London (2020). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Curating at Liverpool John Moores University, Exhibition Research Lab (UK) and is part of Beyond Matter, a research collaboration across several European galleries. Her research spans cyberfeminist legacies, post-digital identity and ownership. In 2015, she co-founded Res., workspace/gallery (London) and co-edited its 2018 publication Alembic. Helen Kaplinsky’s collections research has included fellowships with the Contemporary Art Society, the Arts Council Collection and initiating an alternative collection model #temporarycustodians with Islington Mill studios.

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Contributors

Zahra Khan is a curator of contemporary South Asian art. She is the creative director of Foundation Art Divvy, through which she led and curated the inaugural ofcial Pavilion of Pakistan at the Venice Biennale 2019, Manora Field Notes. Foundation Art Divvy provides a platform at an institutional level to arts from Pakistan. It holds an annual large-scale institutional exhibition, the annual Divvy Film Festival, celebrating independent Pakistani cinema, and Art Divvy Conversations, building an archive of interviews with South Asian artists and flmmakers. Zahra is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She received a master’s degree in the History of Art and Archaeology from SOAS, London. Katja Kobolt (PhD) is a researcher, curator and art educator. Kobolt has initiated and realized research, publication, art and cultural projects in collaboration with feminist and postmigrant groups and institutions and taught at Berlin University of the Arts and Humboldt University as well as at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. Currently, she holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions research fellow position at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the ZRC SAZU Ljubljana. Dr Alexandra Kokoli is an art historian who researches practices informed by and committed to intersectional feminism. She works as a senior lecturer in Visual Culture at Middlesex University London, where she currently leads BA Fine Art and as Research Associate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. Her research into the aesthetics of feminist anti-nuclear activism at Greenham Common has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust. Elke Krasny is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator and author. Krasny’s scholarship addresses care, ecological and social justice, memory work and emancipatory cultural practice at the present historical conjuncture marked by ecocidal and genocidal pasts. Her exhibition HandsOn Urbanism: The Right to Green on urban gardening and farming as subsistence practices was included in the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. The exhibition Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated by Angelika Fitz at the Architecture Centre Vienna in 2019, introduces a perspective of planetary care ethics through architectural practice. Krasny co-edited Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023). Sophie Lingg experiments and researches on digitality, digital mass media (memes, Instagram, maps) and their use for curating, art and education. She initiated collaborative exhibition projects on the topic of commons, develops and realizes experimental workshops and participates in collaborative artistic and activist projects. Sophie studied art education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she has been teaching since 2019 and writing

Contributors

xv

her dissertation on artistic and artistic-activist work on social media. In 2020, together with her colleague Helena Schmidt, she was responsible for the nineteenth edition of the SFKP magazine, titled It’s About Time, with a focus on digital space, art and education. Kirsten Lloyd is a senior lecturer in curatorial theory and practice at The University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on late twentieth- and twentyfrst-century art and mediation, including lens-based practice, participatory work and realism. She is a research fellow with the ‘Feminism, Art, Maintenance’ (2019–2022) project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, and the academic lead for the University’s Contemporary Art Research Collection. Claudia Lomoschitz works as a visual artist, performer and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where she researches her PhD on cultural implications of lactation and Queer Nursing, supervised by Professor Elke Krasny. She completed her MA  Performance Studies  at the University of Hamburg and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Royal Danish Academy of Copenhagen. Her artistic works have been shown at Kunstraum Niederösterreich (PARTUS Gyno Bitch Tits, 2021), Tanzquartier Vienna (G.E.L., 2021), brut Vienna (Soft Skills, 2020) and Kampnagel Hamburg (Induzierte Laktation, 2017) and other venues. Currently, she works on care infrastructures within the video project ‘Health Investment’, examining the former women’s health hospital Semmelweis Clinic in Vienna, raising questions regarding women’s health commodifcation. Mirella Maria is a visual artist, researcher and teacher. She has a degree in visual arts and a master’s degree in art education from Universidade Júlio de Mesquita Filho – UNESP. She has worked as an art educator, trainer and consultant in spaces such as Afro Brazil Museum, Moreira Salles Institute, Modern Art Museum–MAM SP, SESC, Adelina Institute, Assis Chateaubriand Museum – MASP SP, Public Educational Sector – PMSP and the Sparks School (South Africa). As a visual artist, she participated in the XII Bienal do Mercosul. Currently, she is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin– Madison and an educational–cultural consultant. Her research is focused on counter-hegemonic artistic production, aligning it with epistemologies of the Global South, ethno-racial/gender issues and postcolonial studies. Dr Jacqueline Millner completed studies in law, political science and visual arts, before specializing in the history and theory of contemporary art as a writer and academic. She  is an associate professor of visual arts in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University. She has published widely on contemporary Australian and international art. Her books include Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes (Routledge, co-edited with Catriona Moore, 2018), Contemporary Art and Feminism

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Contributors

(Routledge, co-authored with Catriona Moore, 2021) and Care Ethics and Art (Routledge, co-edited with Gretchen Coombs, 2022). She has curated many multi-venue exhibitions and public programmes, including Curating Feminism (2014), Future Feminist Archive (2015), Femfix (2016). She has received research grants and residencies including from the Australian Research Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts NSW and Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris. Brigita Miloš (PhD) is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka. She is working in the feld of gender studies and literature, body studies and feminist theory. She is the coordinator of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Rijeka. Eliana Otta was born in Lima, Peru. She is an artist with a master’s degree in cultural studies and a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with the project ‘Lost and Shared: A  Laboratory for Collective Mourning Towards Afective and Transformative Politics’. Her work enquires about precarious labour and nature in neoliberal, extractivist economies and also gender inequality, intersecting feminism, poetry and politics. She creates experiences where curiosity, vulnerability and joy can be shared, exploring art’s possibilities to strengthen and regenerate communities. She expands this concerns through collective projects that involve curatorial and editorial work, the creation of spaces for conversation and experimentation. She co-founded the artists-run space Bisagra in Lima and the collective Oi Mouries in Athens and is currently focused on their project ‘The Care Council’. She coordinated the curatorial team at Lugar de la Memoria, Lima. Lara Perry works in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. Trained frst as a historian, Lara’s career has involved her in work with artists, curators, photographers, educators, computer scientists, philosophers, archivists, activists and art historians. Much of her research has focused on evolving feminist museology, starting with her doctoral thesis on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery (London) published as History’s Beauties: Women, History and the National Portrait Gallery 1856–1900 in 2006. Lara has published a number of essays and edited volumes concerning art history’s and curating’s relationship to gender and feminism, most recently, an edited volume with Elke Krasny Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2023). Dr  Nat Raha is a poet and activist–scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work focuses on transfeminism, queer studies, care, racial capitalism and decoloniality, across poetry, print cultures, art, politics and hi(r) story. She holds a PhD in queer Marxism from the University of Sussex.

Contributors

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Helena Reckitt is Reader in Curating in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has held curatorial and programming posts at The Power Plant, Toronto; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia and the ICA, London and was a commissioning editor in flm and performance studies at Routledge, London. Since 2015, she has coordinated the Feminist Duration Reading Group, a monthly gathering dedicated to underrepresented feminisms. She is exploring approaches from life writing in her critical and curatorial texts, having received an MA in creative and life writing from Goldsmiths in 2021. Jenny Richards’ research focuses on the politics of work, health and the body, and is developed through collaborative and collective practices. She is a doctoral candidate on the KTD programme at Konstfack and KTH. Her project ‘Against the Outsourced Body’ examines the efect and resistance to the expansion of individualized and outsourced care work. She was previously co-director of Konsthall C, Stockholm where together with Anna Ahlstrand and Jens Strandberg they developed Home Works, an exhibition programme exploring the politics of domestic work and the home. Manual Labours, initiated in 2012 is an ongoing collaborative research project with Sophie Hope investigating physical relationship to work: www.manuallabours.co.uk. Hansel Sato was born in Trujillo, Peru. He came to Vienna in 1998 with the UNESCO-Aschberg programme for artists and cultural workers and has been living and working there ever since. He studied painting and graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Prof. Franz Graf. Before that he was an assistant at the Universidad Católica de Lima. He has represented his country at several biennales and international events. His artistic work includes fgurative painting, comic, drawing and art in public space dealing with postcolonial theory. He works in various collectives in Vienna and Peru and is the co-head of the Vienna art festival SOHO in Ottakring. Since 2015, he has been a senior lecturer at the Institute for Education in the Arts, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Dr Zsuzsanna (Zsuzsi) Soboslay  is an artist educator at the National Gallery of Australia. She completed studies in literature, semiotics and music at Sydney University before moving into performance and museum practices. She has lectured in over 14 tertiary institutions and worked in professional, community and museum projects with artists of all disciplines, youth, children and adults of all abilities. She has received Australia Council support to undergo specialist trainings in the UK with refugee groups, elders and people of profound and complex needs. Her long-term projects include working with the Canberra South Sudanese community, members of the Forgotten and Stolen Generations and creating the immersive Anthems and Angels on

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Contributors

the theme of exile. She has published on writing; theatre and performance; music; dance; visual arts; ecology; ethics and inclusive processes in over 100 publications. Pauline de Souza is a senior lecturer in the Fine Arts Department in the Visual Arts Cluster at the University of East London and is the director of Diversity Art Forum. Catherine Spencer is a senior lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St  Andrews. Her essays have appeared in  Art History,  Art Journal,  ARTMargins,  Tate Papers,  Parallax, British Art Studies,  Oxford Art Journal and Women: A Cultural Review. Joulia Strauss is an artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. Born as Mari, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures, she lives and works in Athens and Berlin. ‘Joulia Strauss’ stands for a chord of artistic media, resonating a deep bond with philosophy, technology and the ongoing revolution for the world beyond Empire. Her works have been shown at the Pergamon Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, at Tate Modern, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and documenta14, among others. She is currently training to earn her third stripe in Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu and fnalizing her flm Transindigenous Assembly. Françoise Vergès (PhD in Political Theory, Berkeley) is a decolonial antiracist feminist and an independent curator who convenes workshops with artists and activists that lead to a public performance.

Acknowledgements

An edited collection of essays such as this volume is self-evidently the work of many hands, in this case more than 20 authors and the extended network of collaborators, artists and organizations with whom they have worked. As editors, we ofer our warmest thanks to the contributors who worked on their texts through the frst two intense years of the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020. They produced texts that are both timely and potent for a world that at least speaks of learning from the crisis. The essays have been gathered from a wide network of colleagues who have been committed to the exploration and investigation of the interconnected practices of feminism, curating and care over many years. Ideas for this edited volume frst emerged in conversation with Dorothee Richter and Helena Reckitt following a number of symposia on feminism and curating that have taken place in Vienna and in Zurich since 2016. These exchanges yielded several publications, among them the 2016 OnCurating journal dedicated to Curating in Feminist Thought, edited by Elke Krasny, Lara Perry and Dorothee Richter and the 2021 OnCurating journal dedicated to Instituting Feminism, edited by Helena Reckitt and Dorothee Richter, as well as two books published by Routledge, Curating as Feminist Organizing and this book, Curating with Care. To our editors at Routledge – Heidi Lowther, Emmie Shand, Matthew Gibbons and Heeranshi Sharma – we ofer our thanks for their confdent endorsement of the importance of our subject. The editors of this collection also enjoy the support of more local communities whose contributions to the completion of this manuscript we would like to acknowledge. For Elke, this is the invaluable fellowship of the students and staf at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and, in particular, her PhD seminar, which includes candidates from a transnational community of inspired researchers in feminisms, urban studies and related art and museum practices. For Lara, this is the refuge from the workplace provided by not only an informal circle of wise feminist writers and readers but also colleagues at the University of Brighton who are unceasingly supportive. She would particularly like to thank her Dean, Professor Stephen Maddison, for enabling her research and colleagues at the Centre for Design History

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for museum/curatorial studies general enthusiasm and for funding the transcription of the discussion with Françoise Vergès. We would also like to thank our own and each other’s families for their unbounded love and also bemused patience with our labour. Finally, we record our thanks to each other for the generous feminist intellectual friendship and solidarity that has been rewarded by this book.

Introduction Elke Krasny and Lara Perry

The word ‘care’ is becoming as present in the vocabulary of contemporary art and culture as has the word ‘curating’. While some may suspect this upward trend in use refects mere fashionability, we demonstrate in this book that its prevalence in contemporary curatorial practice should be understood as a response to a dual crisis: the persistent crisis of social and ecological care that characterizes global politics and the more recent professional crisis of curating. The convergence of these two developments has resulted in both a call for ‘curating care’ – an invitation to give curatorial attention to the primacy of care for all life – and a call for more ‘caring curating’ – a change in the practices of curating to foreground caregiving as framed through social and political analysis. The structural crisis of care, and in particular its gendered and racialized dimensions, can be traced through a long line of critical feminist scholarship and labour activism, for example in the works of Margaret Prescod, Black Women for Wages for Housework, Silvia Federici, Selma James, Nancy Fraser, Madeleine Bunting, Françoise Vergès, and David Graeber. Today, in the twenty-frst century, political struggles and large-scale movements, including Black Lives Matter, Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less), Idle no More, Fridays for Future, and, most recently, anti-war protests against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oppose death-making and violence as the opposite of care. These movements can be seen to converge in demands for a diferent culture based on care, and respect, for the dignity of life, the rights of humans, and the rights of nature (the right of nature and the idea of environmental personhood). That all beings depend on each other for life and survival is most clearly expressed in the Law of Mother Earth – “Mother Earth is a living dynamic system made up of the undivided community of all living beings, who are all interconnected, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny” (‘The Mother Earth Law’) one can see how lineages of indigenous cosmologies and ontologies, ecofeminist traditions and Western traditions of feminist care ethics converge in the shared notion of the primacy of interdependency. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has moved the crisis of care from a concern of activist struggle and bottom-up politics to

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the central stage of global politics. At the very beginning of the pandemic, care was declared a critical infrastructure that was involved in answering both the most urgent need for care and the forceful obligation to give care. With 15  million people having died from COVID-19 and care workers comprehensively exhausted – physically, economically, and emotionally in the face of ever-increasing demands to persevere – the very vulnerability of care and the interdependency in care have become obvious (Dowling 2021; Hakim et al. 2020). One route by which this new understanding of care and the crisis of care has been circulated is through curated exhibitions, public programmes, and discursive and educational events. The cultural production of curators, including curation at diferent scales ranging from the big museum to the self-managed art space, from the global biennale to the local cultural community centre, is always an expression, and a refection, of urgent contemporary concerns. On the other hand, the ‘crisis of curating’ has been linked by critical curators and cultural critics to the stellar career of the ‘curator as author’ and the celebrated idea of the global ‘star curator’ as well as to curationism as perfected and glossy selectionism, taste-making, and the overall commodifcation and commercialization of culture for consumption and culture as spectacle (Heinrich and Pollak 1996; Balzer 2014). This ‘crisis of curating’ is critically diagnosed through the alignments of contemporary celebrity culture and the demands for ever-more, ever-faster, and ever-bigger exhibitions and even monumental single artworks. This compulsion to curatorial production and performance leads to the exhaustion and depletion of all those along the curatorial production chain, which, of course, entangles humans, infrastructures, technologies, and the environment. This contemporary ‘crisis in curating’ results from accelerated overproduction causing exhaustion of minds and bodies and depletion of resources, at the same time that it fails to replenish, regenerate, or practically support all those who might beneft most from such provision of care. Those who are located among the “caring classes”, in the coinage of the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, have little or no time or resources to actually access the oferings of institutions of art and culture (Graeber 2019). There is an increasing realization that institutions of art and culture make use of their symbolic power and their material infrastructures to endow the interests of big capital and individual wealth with a healthier glow or to engage in forms of fashionable ethics that resonate with the marketing of identity politics, soft authoritarianism, and illiberal democracy. This way of operating has been called out as ‘oil washing’, ‘green washing’, ‘white washing’, ‘pink washing’, or ‘purple washing’ and has led to new forms of what we suggest could be thought of as caring activism, for example the actions by the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, Sackler PAIN, or Liberate Tate. Most recently, there has been the diagnosis of ‘care washing’, which sees care being promoted by museums as a symbolic value and through

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representational politics rather than by making concrete measures against racism and misogyny and for social and ecological justice. Care washing is so called because it does not efect change. It is a surface efect that can be incorporated into marketing and ‘public relations’ rather than investing time and resources into building actual relations with the public, which requires engagement with the conficts and contradictions inherent in care. A frst step could be to think deeply about how the access to cultural institutions and what they ofer is being made possible or being made impossible: how can those who have care obligations actually participate in this emergent culture around care? Who takes over their care obligations while they come to exhibitions, programmes, or assemblies in museums or cultural venues? How do the cleaners and guards of museums have access to economically just and dignifying work conditions and how can they access the cultural benefts of the institutions where they work? How can parents who are still nursing their little ones fnd a hospitable space in their cultural institutions? How can the frail or the elderly fnd zones of comfort to rest or be physically and mentally supported? Do neurodiverse visitors have adequate access to the presentation? How can the disabled and sick be welcomed? The recently diagnosed ‘crisis of curating’ is underpinned by new perspectives on the historical legacies of the profession’s roots in the history of imperialism and colonialism. Curating frst took shape as a profession within the modern museum institution originated with and from imperialism, nationalism, and colonialism and was designed to function with the hierarchies that regulated the formation of the nation state, exclusionary citizenship, and cultural values rooted in misogynist patriarchy and racist supremacy (Dimitrakaki and Perry 2013; Bayer et al. 2017; Krasny 2017; Reilly 2018; Hicks 2020; Krasny and Perry 2020; Ndikung 2021; Krasny et  al. 2022). In the feld of museum studies and curatorial practices, the call to care has emerged most visibly in the demand to reverse the order of the conventional understanding of the curator’s duty of care. The role of the curator is traditionally understood to ‘care for’ the objects held in museum collections and shown in exhibitions that themselves were designed to educate visitors in the hierarchies of the global order under colonialism. This ‘duty to care’, which is enshrined in actual laws and state structures, positions museums as institutions and infrastructures in the service of the protection of objects of art and culture. The imperative to care for – to conserve and materially protect – such collections produces a crisis in curating in two related ways: some cultural objects were collected through colonial violence, theft, and dispossession, while other objects have never been considered of value to be collected at all. Class bias and gender bias excluded the culture of the working classes, the culture produced by women, and the culture produced by all those who could be named today as the caring classes, from museum collections and from the value system established and upheld by museums.

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What does museum care as protection mean if objects are held against the will of those who want them returned to their communities of origin (see e.g. Sarr and Savoy 2018; Hicks 2020)? What do museum values stand for if they disavowed the need to care to begin with? One way in which museums and galleries have in recent years responded to this crisis in curating has been to insist on the curator’s obligation to people frst and objects second. Both priorities for curatorial practice draw on long legacies of established practice that have already been identifed in the scholarship on museums and exhibitions, and their competing nature is refected in debates that are advanced through scholarly publications on the one hand (see e.g. Cuno 2008) and in professional guidelines on the other (e.g. the protracted negotiation over the place of social justice in the defnition of the museum promoted by the International Council of Museums, Adams 2021). Such diferences and conficts are extremely characteristic of situations in which issues of care are concerned. While public or individual objectives of care and caregiving are often associated with the common good, beneft, service, and generosity, the arrangements for providing care in everyday life are on the contrary often shot through with confict, confrontation, and dissatisfaction. The compromises required of those who ofer care are rarely easy to make. Today, many critical curators, scholars of museums, as well as critics and theorists of curatorial practices, including many of the contributors to this volume, insistently invoke the Latin word curare, which is the etymological root of curating, to stress that their practice is rooted in an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, decolonial, ecological, feminist, or queer agendas and to express that their curatorial work resists the limitations of the inequalities that are entrenched within cultural organizations. Why does the invocation of the historical semantics, via etymology, provide a basis through which to claim curating as a form of care? The Latin word curare, broadly speaking, means to treat, to cure, to look after, to edit, or to organize – it was used even for example to describe the management of the animals which would be sacrifced in religious ceremonies. The word curator frst appeared in the English language in the fourteenth century, when it assumed the meaning of superintendent of minors or lunatics. Centuries later, during the long historical process of the formation of modern institutions, the curator came to mean a person, who was an overseer of a place of exhibition including museums, libraries, or zoos (Fowle 2007, 10). The diferent uses of the word expose the entanglements of care and control and the implications of the power of exposure or display that are accorded the curator. Insisting that curating can be practised as care calls for a present and future transformation of the established forms of curatorial practice that are increasingly identifed with the entwined histories of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy and for new forms of restitution, repatriation, and reparative working in the aftermath of modern museum violence. Care is invoked to resist the historic violence of curatorial power that imposed sexist and racist structures through the imperial and colonial

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collecting practices from which modern museum cultures originated but also exclusion of the so-called marginal positions from the museum episteme. The call to care is invoked against exploitative labour conditions in the cultural sector even as they refect the conditions of workers more broadly; for example the structural precarization and emotional exploitation of workers including artists, curators, art handlers, educators, critics, writers, researchers, retail and restaurant workers, scholars, security guards, and cleaners. The invocation of care is often presented as an act of resistance and a potent form of treatment for the crisis of curating. The urgency of changing practices to honour the body and mind also invites new refections on the care of the audience, and the visitor’s individual bodily, intellectual, and emotional needs. Care speaks insistently of the potential to use infrastructures and institutions diferently; to produce emancipatory social and ecological imaginaries through arts and culture and to decolonize minds and bodies and their support systems. The turn to care in the work of many critical curators acknowledges that care has been structurally invisibilized, marginalized, feminized, racialized, withheld, denied, or outsourced. Care has been exploited by state powers to regulate, subjugate, or oppress bodies, creatures, and territories by controlling the conditions of bio-social and eco-material reproduction. What is more, care, be it domestic labour, healthcare, childcare, or elder care, is implicated in political and economic systems that structure societies, and care discrepancies produce highly stratifed and unjust conditions. Unwillingly, care is implicated in the imposition of extreme violence and exploitation since its withdrawal leads to death. Care has been central to conficts and deep divisions within feminism, resulting from the histories of domination and exploitation connected to the mistress–slave or the mistress–maid constellation, and today these conficts continue in new forms of massive exploitation and extraction of caring labour in the provision of services such as cleaning, childcare, and garment production. The potential of struggles around care to unify those who have been assigned female at birth can be neither assumed nor achieved without conficts, as divisions of caring labour not only have to do with gender but also with race, caste, or class. Attempts to formulate the required changes to curatorial practice have been articulated in many recent articles, texts, roundtables, and symposia. Projects and initiatives are numerous, we can name only a few here to draw the attention to this turn to care in curatorial practice: ‘Caring for Confict’ at district Berlin 2017–2019; the transnational ‘Pirate Care Project’ convened by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak, running since 2019; the research-based exhibitions Care and Repair and Critical Care curated by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny for the Architekturzentrum Wien; Care Force initiated in 2019 by artist Marisa Morán Jahn together with the ‘National Domestic Workers Alliance in the United States of America’, ‘Intersections of Care’, a research project in the arts by

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Florence Cheval and Loraine Furter, initiated in 2019; ‘Rituals of Care’, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal and Noémie Solomon for the Berliner Festwochen in 2020; ‘Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care’, self-initiated and curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina in Paris since 2020; the ‘Care Council’, co-initiated by Eliana Otta, one of the contributors to this book, in Athens; the ‘Bureau of Care’ initiated by iLiana Fokianaki, State of Concept Athens, running in the years 2020– 2021; ‘to Mind is to Care at V2 Lab For the Unstable Media in Rotterdam’ in 2020–2021; the Ecologies of Care’ group initiated by Urska Jurman and Elke Krasny in 2021; the Environments of Care Group initiated by Elke Krasny and Lindsay Harkema; People Make Museums: Museums and Care Programme at the Holbourne Museum in Bath, UK in 2022; Take Care group exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson, France, 2019; Care and Citizenship Programme at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on Sea, England in 2021. Highlighting global interdependencies and the necessity for mutual as well as self-care, the writers of this volume speak from practices that address the local conditions of care and carelessness for which calls to social, economic, or environmental injustice demand redress. Each of the chapters elaborates the details of an individual project, as intended and in many cases executed, that ofers a diferent perspective on how care can be enacted in and through curatorial practice. The projects or processes represented have largely taken place since around 2017, so they can be considered to represent a relatively compressed period of curatorial practice; while the contributions represent activities that take place in diferent geographies, we have presented them as more powerfully related through the objects of care that they address in their locally specifc and situated contexts in diferent parts of Australia, Europe, the Americas, and South Asia. The structure of the book follows from the work of the contributors, who analyse or refect on the conditions, potentialities, and limitations of working ‘with care’ as practising curators, drawing on examples of their commitment to curating ‘with care’ and the challenges this presents but also the hope this generates. The two parts of the book – ‘Caring Curating’ and ‘Curating Care’ – explore diferent approaches to curatorial care. What does it mean to be doing something ‘with care’? It can mean a specifc way of doing something, a manner of flling the way one is doing whatever one is doing ‘with care’, that is with very close attention and consideration. It can also mean to be doing something in particular relation to care, to be choosing care as the subject matter, as the question, as the theme, as the matter of concern. Broadly speaking, curating ‘with care’ therefore, can refer to the aspiration or the desire to bring more ‘care’, as an ethico-political way of doing, into curatorial practice with the aim to do justice to the primacy of interdependency and interrelatedness while maintaining awareness of the norming and standardizing impact of institutions and infrastructures through

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which the curatorial work is produced and received. Such ‘caring curating’ insists on the dignity of life and is respectful of the rights of humans and the rights of nature while never forgetting the confictual, and conficted, nature of care. Curating with care can also mean that curators choose to work on care as their subject matter. ‘Curating care’ therefore refers to exhibitions, programmes, or activities which are dedicated to the subject matter of care, broadly understood, or even to the collective rehearsal or imagining of new practices of care. We make this distinction here, not to say that one group of curators can be understood as ‘caring curators’, that is working in a caring manner, while another group of curators can be understood to be dedicating their work to only the subject matter of ‘care’. Rather, we introduce this distinction to frame the analysis. One can therefore use ‘curating with care’ not only to describe a way of working but also as a theoretical perspective with which to analyse curatorial practices to understand how ‘caring’ was enacted; how working in caring ways was enabled or hindered by specifc institutional and infrastructural frameworks including budget, time, and resources or the structural discrimination, sexism, racism, and systemic injustices endemic in the continued legacies and present-day formations of patriarchy and supremacy. One can analyse how curatorial work made care the subject and in which traditions of understanding care that curatorial work can be placed. We may think of to give some examples: indigenous cosmologies; Western philosophies; economic and political understandings of social reproduction and care ethics; and histories of birth, nursing, domestic work, healthcare, hygiene, agriculture, and mourning. We are introducing the distinction between ‘caring curating’ and ‘curating care’ to invite more nuanced and more complex ways of practising and analysing curating. This distinction makes clear that caring curating is needed regardless of what any chosen topic may be, not just when the chosen topic is care. The distinction moreover invites critical thought on how exhibitions or programmes that choose care as their subject matter are actually able to commit to practising caring curating. Care is always met by limitations, is pushing against existing conditions, as it seeks to promote more just ways of existence. Here, etymology, can, again, provide us with historical semantics as a useful tool to think and practise curating with care. This time, it is not a Latin root but Old English that informs an understanding of what curating with care entails. “The word care derives from the Old English cearu suggesting sorrow, anxiety, grief” (Ahmed 2017, 169). Working with care, curating with care, is also always working with the sorrows and anxieties that each single and specifc situation of care entails in the continuum of care needed to sustain life. Care is always material. Care is always relational. Questions of care, demands for care, and care needs cannot be answered in the abstract but must be answered through the relations in which care is embedded and which are enabled, supported, performed, or even established through care.

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Curating with care asks political questions that have to be answered, not in the abstract, but concretely, in institutions, infrastructures, and beyond, in all the relations to which the making of a curatorial work, be it an exhibition or a workshop, a symposium or a gathering, is connected. Ethicopolitical questions of care can never be answered in the abstract; they must be answered bodily, environmentally, materially, spiritually. They must be answered at all scales. Every decision taken in a curatorial process is always a decision that relates to dimensions of care and has implications on how well care can be given and received. If curators think and act ‘with care’, it not only changes their work but also makes their work more complicated. Curating then becomes attentive to the primacy of interdependency, interrelatedness, and interconnectedness as beings are both vulnerable to and responsible to each other. Relations of care are marked by ontologies of precarity and shot through with systemic structural precarization. Curating with care opens up the joys, obligations, and pains of care, to its anxieties, sorrows, worries, troubles, conficts, and compromises. From a care ethics perspective the most challenging political question raised by curating with care is how to move from ‘caring about’ something to actually ‘caring for’ it. This is why, exactly like the work of care in everyday life which is never done, ‘curating with’ care can never be fnished, can never be complete. Curating with care is neither the next ‘new’ project nor a matrix of quantifcation to perform better than others. Curating with care involves and foregrounds the importance of the much-needed but often forgotten activities, which demand more – more time, more attention, and more resources – to treat all relations ethically and care-fully. This caring curating may not yield immediately visible results, or products, as they are required by the art world and the world at large. Yet the continued and persistent lack of care activities does have results that need to be made visible as part of what curating with care does. The lack of care in cultural work continues to harm and wound beings and environments. The exposure of this lack is the beginning of any struggle against these conditions and the start of forming new imaginaries and ontologies of care through a curated connection between care and culture. Curating with care, understood in the broadest sense possible, asks of curators and theorists to confront themselves with what their work ‘cares about’ and how they ‘care for’ what they ‘care about’. An ethics of care as praxis and theory of curating therefore thinks, feels, analyses, and works with the complexities and contradictions that economically, emotionally, epistemologically, materially, and technologically present themselves when aiming to align ‘caring about’ with ‘caring for’. Curating with care as an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist praxis and politics not only examines what curators’ work cares about, and what their work cares for, but can also contribute to new caring imaginaries and new caring ontologies that help us to learn how to care for care.

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Bibliography Adams, Geraldine Kendall. 2021. “Ideological Rift Persists as ICOM Restarts Museum Defnition Consultation”. Museums Journal, March 2. www.museumsassociation.org/ museums-journal/news/2021/03/ideological-rift-persists-as-icom-restartsmuseum-defnition-consultation/#. Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Balzer, David. 2014. Curationism. How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. London: Pluto Press. Bayer, Natalie, Belinda Kazeem-Kamínskí, and Nora Sternfeld. 2017. Kuratieren als antirassistische Praxis. Berlin: De Gruyter. Brouwer, Joe, and Sjoerd van Tuinen. 2019. To Mind Is to Care. Rotterdam: V2 Publishing. Climate Change Laws of the World, London School of Economics. “The Mother Earth Law and Integral Development to Live Well, Law No 300”. www.climate-laws.org/ geographies/bolivia/laws/the-mother-earth-law-and-integral-development-to-livewell-law-no-300. Last accessed July 1, 2022. Cuno, James. 2008. Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Ancient Heritage. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dimitrakaki, Angela, and Lara Perry. Eds. 2013. Politics in Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Dowling, Emma. 2021. The Care Crisis. What Caused It and How Can We End It? London: Verso. Fowle, Kate. 2007. “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today”. In Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating. Edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris, 10–19. New York: Apexart. Graeber, David. 2019. “From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes”. 36th Chaos Communication Congress, December 27. Open Transcripts. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/managerial-feudalism-revolt-caring-classes/. Last accessed July 7, 2022. Hakim, Jamie, Andreas Chatzidakis, Jo Littler, and Catherine Rottenberg. 2020. The Care Manifesto. London: Verso. Heinrich, Nathalie, and Michael Pollak. 1996. “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a Singular Position”. In Thinking about Exhibitions. Edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, 237–238. London and New York: Routledge. Hicks, Dan. 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press. Krasny, Elke. 2017. “Citizenship and the Museum: On Feminist Acts”. In Feminism and Museums: Intervention, Disruption, and Change. Edited by Jenna Ashton, 74–99. Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc. Krasny, Elke, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, and Vera Hofmann. 2022. Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press. Krasny, Elke, and Lara Perry. 2020. “Unsettling Gender, Sexuality and Race: ‘Crossing’ the Collecting, Classifying and Spectacularising Mechanism of the Museum”. Museum International 72(285–286): 130–139.

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Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. 2021. The Delusions of Care. Berlin: Archive Books. Reilly, Maura. 2018. Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain. Vers une nouvelle éthique relationnelle (The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics). Paris: Philip Rey and Editions du Seuil.

Part I

Caring Curating

1

Curatorial Labour and Decolonial Feminism Françoise Vergès

In my practice, I  tried to bring together curatorial labour and decolonial feminism. I have the constant desire to invent and put into practice a diferent pedagogy for the decolonization of the self and of the collective. These are the aims I am seeking. I hope that the practice I put together will reinforce among artists the desire for doing collaborative and collective work rather than just individual work. It is about ofering spaces where to learn in a new way, to unlearn to learn anew and to create. How do we practise decolonizing, not just say the word, but doing it? How do I distinguish decolonization practice from other kinds of critical practice? This is for me the question of decolonization as we speak. I will say that the work we have to do turns around two things: transmission and imagination. In art schools, transmission means completing the curriculum, fnding the women who have been forgotten, the Blacks, indigenous, Asian, queer, Latinx, who have been marginalized or erased not only to transform but also to reinvent the curriculum, which also means reinventing the way to teach and the way we learn. What Saidiya Hartman writes – “non-fction fction” – reminds me of how we worked with absences, bits and fragments for a museum in La Réunion (which never saw the day). We argued that we did not need to see everything, to show everything. I even suggested a “museum without objects,” working with the lack and the absence which did not mean inexistent. We had to put our imagination to work. In 2017, the fourth edition of L’Atelier, that I curated in Paris, had for theme Dystopia, Utopia, Heterotopia. It was about “revolutionary utopian thinking.” What will be its space? In Europe, the city has been the space in which the narrative of the revolution unfolds, and its representation is urban, the barricades, taking over buildings, putting down sites of power and so on. I said, “Why not the forest?” The forest is the site of witches, maroons, spirits and guerillas; yet it is not very present in European revolutionary utopian narratives. So we went to a real forest – not a park, a real forest – two hours from Paris. We were a very diverse group, of diferent ages and genders, artists and activists of colour. Before entering the forest, we asked its spirits to welcome us and ofered them food and libations. Walking together, carrying food and other things, gave our bodies a presence

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that sitting does not. Walking has its own dynamic; you walk, you talk to someone, then to someone else, or you are silent. The way the conversation is going on or the dynamic that is created are not formatted. There is serendipity, unexpected things. Walking does that. After three hours of walking, we sat under a magnifcent oak on beautiful clothes we had brought, and we ate. After lunch, I asked the group to be silent for 30 minutes and not less, not the formatted minute of silence. I saw that our bodies were changing positions. We had been sitting, eating, drinking (we had brought rum in honour of the spirits), and then, during the 30 minutes of silence, I saw that we started to lean on each other, closing our eyes. We started to hear the birds and the trees. We could listen, hear, feel the forest. As our bodies changed, our ways of listening changed as well, this was a way to unlearn. It did change the tone of the conversation. We spoke in a calmer way. Being in the forest together gave us strength, and it was upon that strength that we read and performed the manifesto the following day at La Colonie . . . Utopia meant utopian thinking, not building a utopia, not a city on the hill, but exercising our imagination. And not to be afraid of “crazy” dreams. To be open to new horizons, to sing what will be, what we wanted to realize. The workshops I convene are always based on a “low economy,” that is we tried to buy the less we can. If we need textiles, glasses, whatever, we can fnd them at home. We brought what we needed for the public performance to La Colonie (La Colonie was a space close to Gare du Nord in Paris opened by artist Kader Attia, which closed in March 2020 because of the pandemic). My workshops, which last two days, always end with a public performance.

Practising Freedom During colonial slavery which lasted centuries, there was not a day when you did not have enslaved women and men saying, “We will be free, one day we will be free.” Imagining freedom in a world where enslavement of Blacks had been naturalized, supported by the Church, the state, the culture, the society, the law, was imagination in practice. The possibility that there was a world in which slavery was not natural, a world of freedom and that imagination would contribute to act to build that world is such a lesson in courage, fortitude and relentless struggle. It is such a strong lesson! Workshops are also occasions to collectively practise decolonial feminism. For instance, how to listen to and examine everything we say. I mean, I say this but what do I mean? If I push further and further, what will I fnd? For instance, if I spontaneously criticize linearity and binarism because the dominant narrative rests on these two elements, have I  exhausted these notions? Why do I accept that binarism and linearity have the property of the West, which has defnitely defned them? Should I  not wonder if linearity is sometimes useful? And binarism? Thinking in binary terms is not exclusively Western. Though we make connections between diferent living

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forms, between day and night, the moon and the sun, water and land, we can also oppose them. There are a lot of tales that play on these oppositions. They do not rest on the rigid distinction of Western dominant ideology but on a fexible understanding of opposites. There is a distinction, but it is fexible. The earth is a turtle, night and day mix, the trees speak. I am not being clear, I want to say that they are moments when binary thinking is necessary, when conficting interests cannot be reconciled, fghting for freedom when forces want to maintain unfreedom, there is no mixing ground. It is not easy to free ourselves from the patriarchal colonial view of the world. We must be imaginative and examine each step of the process. Surviving in a world with the incredible brutality of capitalism, patriarchy and racism require many tools.

A Very Low Economy To return to the workshop I curate, I advocate the lowest economy. That is my method. What I seek in these workshops is to answer, “Are we able to do a collective performance that requires not that much?” If we are not, it’s okay, but we shall try. It is a practice of repair. It rejects the patriarchal/ colonial/racist discourse of lack – women are lacking this; colonized are lacking that; Blacks, Arabs, Asians, queer . . . are all lacking this or that. The only complete person is the white heterosexual bourgeois man. Refusing the discourse of lack contributes to the practice of repair. I realize that I have more than I thought, I thought I did not have much because I bought into the ideology of lack (if I had this, I could do that). To be sure, racial capitalism fabricates situations of total material deprivation; what I am talking about is that wealth is not what capitalism says it is. I am not the frst one to say this! I may ask at the beginning of a workshop, “Okay, all of us here, what, what are the languages we speak? What can we do with our hands? What do we need to build this?” If we put together every language each of us speaks, our memories and knowledge, we realize how much we have. We need to be conscious of what we have, of our own wealth and worth. We must reject the bourgeois conception of wealth and poverty. Poverty as a fabrication, capitalism and racism keeps people in poverty and makes them think that they are poor with no creativity or imagination. Social poverty in that ideology is synonymous with poverty of imagination. We don’t start from poverty as a natural state. When we did our performance for the workshop “Water/War/Peace” at Khiasma in 2018, I started with that fact: giving water was being criminalized in France. Giving water to a migrant could make you in the eyes of the state, an accomplice to smugglers. Giving water is a basic gesture of the human relation. Without water, human beings do not survive very long. We may not eat for three days, but if we don’t drink for three days, we will die. Then there are the wars around water that will intensify in the near

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future and pollution, contamination and privatization which are a kind of war. Peace has become a mere interlude between wars. Around that topic, I suggested three groups: the Cassandra who warns us but to whom nobody listens; the keepers of water, migrants, refugees, indigenous, nomads, people fabricated as vulnerable, but the protectors and keepers of water, that fragile thing; and the Amazons who prepare for war and are learning to use weapons. We were again a group of artists, activists and scholars of colour. On Friday evening, everyone had to choose a group. The next day, we went to Père Lachaise Cemetery to pay homage to the Communards who had been shot there by the reactionary French army in 1871. Then we walked to Cité internationale des arts and worked in groups. The performance was on Sunday evening at Khiasma, the space created by Olivier Marboeuf in Les Lilas, near Paris. What was extraordinary was that the three groups worked beautifully together without repetition. The fuidity proved that it was possible to create a public performance as long as we shared a method and the principles of collective creation. It was a very beautiful performance, a very beautiful performance. The public was totally amazed that we had realized this in just two days. We sought to use things we had: a group needed shoes, everyone brought shoes; another needed fruits and fowers, we picked them in our homes. Nothing should cost much. Nothing. We must work with what we have and discover by doing so that we have much more than we think.

Refuges and Sanctuaries Refuge is a historical form of resistance. We could think of the Underground Railway, of safe houses during anti-colonial wars, and of current spaces created for refugees and migrants. I  see refuges as a place to rest, to rest peacefully, to trust that you will not be terrorized and haunted. I read testimonies of refugees who can never sleep peacefully because they are afraid of police and militia, because they are sleeping in cold forests, in the cold or the heat. Finding refuge ofers a right to rest, the right to put your head on a clean pillow and sleep deeply. We know that forbidding people to sleep is torture, a torture that can lead you to madness. Of course, we can demand the creation of refuges to the state for the woman who, in the middle of the night, has to fnd a place because she is threatened by a companion. But this state-led refuge remains under its laws and norms. I am thinking of refuge as building autonomy. Refuge is often created to escape a threat. But it can also be a place to learn, where to fnd new strength, more autonomy. Sanctuary is more diffcult to defne. I see it as a space that will last longer than a refuge. Refuges and sanctuaries must be defended even with arms. The notion of threat helps understanding what kind of space is needed: what is the nature of the threat? Refuge can be a place where women, men and girls will sit and rest, talk to each other, have a chat, drink some tea, cook food, read. It is not

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strictly utilitarian; it is a place to breath. Away from the hostile environment that the racist, sexist, capitalist society is building every day. When I  say, “hostile environment,” I  don’t mean only police violence but the interdiction to circulate freely in the city if you are Black, Arab, sex worker, queer, trans, refugee, migrant, poor. Then there are curfews and interdictions. No need to write there is curfew for these groups. With the pandemic, we had ofcial, state-enforced curfew, but we always had curfew. The city is structurally bourgeois, racist and sexist; it is a hostile environment for many.

Reparations I have been working on the question of reparation, as a political demand and as pedagogy. How do we think repair in a world where devastation brought by racism, capitalism and imperialism accelerates every day? Destruction goes so fast that you feel you have barely the time to start repairing. How do we understand the irreparable? I  look at the entangled temporalities of decolonial repair. We are still repairing the past, and it is slowly being repaired. We are repairing the present. And we are already repairing the future which we see being destroyed in the present and that we need to repair because otherwise there would be no future for the next generations. What is repairing within these entangled temporalities? This was a question we discussed during the School La Colonie nomade – April–July 2021 – that I convened as part of Kader Attia’s show “Fragments of Repair” and a series of talks organized by BAK in Utrecht. In his work, Kader Attia’s argument that repairing is not erasing the scar was our starting point. We asked ourselves what do we know to repair with our hands? But also, how the absence, the lack is not necessarily producing trauma? There is an incompleteness in life that consumer capitalism refuses because we should fll our lives with goods. Mourning for what has been irredeemably lost as a result of racial capitalism is not welcomed, mourning must be an afair that comforts national narrative. Mourning is not just about melancholia. Understanding what life is about is also about mourning, unless life is conceived as without loss. A life without loss (again not the kind of loss imposed by racial capitalism) is science fction. To learn how to mourn is also an intergenerational gesture. Intergenerational thinking and practice are very important for me. In his conversations with me (published as Resolutely Black, 2020), Aimé Césaire told me he was wary of fnancial for slavery, he feared that the West would then say, “ok, done! let’s close the chapter.” To him, slavery was irreparable which meant keeping the story alive. But we must conceive politics of reparation as multiple and diverse. The West must repair, and the people must decide how they want reparations to be done, there is not a single answer. Forging fake papers, helping people with papers, opening

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autonomous schools, asking for land, working against the isolation that neoliberalism, racism and patriarchy impose, all these are forms of repair. Reparations is daily and it is an action. There is not one policy of reparation for once and for all. Solidarity, love, the politics of revolutionary love are our weapons. Repair will be the end of capitalism, patriarchy and of racism and privilege. To me that would be the world repaired. This text is based on a conversation between  Françoise  Vergès  and Elke Krasny, recorded on June 18, 2021.

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Get Bodied Inverting the Witch to Summon a New Commons Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective

Formation Bonding Through Solidarity How do we theorize a notion of “shelter” through resistance? To describe decentralized caretaking is to invoke a poetics of coping – resistance unfolds as the challenge of endurance in the face of disempowerment, precarity, and alterity. Aspiring towards ecopolitical respite via comradeship invokes moments of symbiosis repurposed as composting matter for the cultivation of the utopian, liberatory mindscapes that we craft in the cauldron of our curatorial and political praxis. Sympoiesis stands for the symbiotic process of self-generation and fair distribution in collectivity. In other words: “making-with” (Haraway 2016; Tsing 2017). Haraway’s reconceptualization of sympoiesis merges ecological–evolutionary–developmental biology and reorients it to promote art/science activisms committed to sustaining resilience within a damaged earth. Patriarchal embattlement breeds rapport forged in agonistic verticality. But to what end? Bruxas Bruxas, an artistic collective defned by activistic femme friendship, knows this paradigm all too well. Like the Soviet night witches of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, the collective’s infuence hovers over enchanted territories of surveillance and under the institutional gaze of phallogocentrism. Our approach to warfare manifests in the artful fertilizing of the ontological soils upon which we often (unknowingly) tread. We are planting the seeds of resistance. Bruxas work hard to build systems of support for the waves of life that are to come once the Capitalocene is fnally overcome. From the detritus of man-made, market-manufactured hubris – the reduction of lifeforms to exchangeable assets – Bruxas channels their creative prowess for the collective nurturing of an “erotic whole self” (Castillo 1994), where intuition guides the way towards fnding truth in facing the wounds inficted by domination. We know that, if cared for with critical openness and bravery, our wounds can act as stepping stones for the creation of an

DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-4

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economy of gifting grounded in reciprocity. A  new commons is thus envisioned as afective cartography nourished by the political practice of radical care. Radical care, in the sense that is practised by Bruxas, refers to as an afect-based, critical survival strategy in response to the inequitable dynamics that pervade our contemporary setting (Hobart and Kneese 2020). We see connection as the ultimate remedy to alienation. Our cohort performs radical social organizing based on principles of recognition and redistribution (Fraser 1995). We need both to efectively build systems of support in the face of rapid ecological collapse. Bruxas approaches caretaking as a form of curanderismo, which entails re-embedding the individualized self back in the webbed tapestries of the para-rational, other-than-human systems that sustain life. In 2017, the members of this collective realized that the power of their critically infected sisterhood bloomed from the depths of patriarchal, white supremacist institutional toxicity. Friendships blossomed in Penn State’s graduate sculpture studio spaces, where to-be members sought mutual support against the backdrop of an oppressive academic environment. Soon after, group dinners were hosted every Sunday at the communal home of three members. These gatherings became a space for sharing – food, personal stories of hurt and trauma, familial engagement – all interactive afronts to the siloing efects of art and academia. From the Undercommons (Harney and Moten 2013) to the surface of our afective fesh. The act of hosting, of caring became a ritualization of survival. The artist collective Bruxas Bruxas formed around this convergent and organic support system. These dinners still occur today, and Bruxas Bruxas has extended their communal activities to the public through a variety of informal and formal art and performance activities. As a collective of multidimensional creatrixes, Bruxas Bruxas leverages social empowerment from the cultural vindication of the witch archetype. Paying homage to our ferce foremothers – feminists who joined together to perform witch-embracing activism in the 1960s and 1970s1 – Bruxas are once again organizing to battle the perduring violence inherent to identity categories, which are colonial genres of domination. We invoke the spectre of the commons by methodically tearing up the spell of our current, male-centred, colonial regime of perception. The collective values the creative memory of the multifarious forms of wealth that once were shared among many. Our purpose as artists surviving-in-precarious-alterity is to uncage/unearth the playful wilderness that is metaphorized as folk culture; a vital substance that underpins our current sociopolitical paradigm, which was originally cast in the fres of domination. The word “bruxa” denotes “witch” in both Galician2 and Portuguese and has the same pronunciation as the Spanish word “bruja.” The deliberate use of the “x” is a slight wink at the transformational character these terms can have. Bruxas Bruxas seeks to actively undo the hauntological incantation of coloniality by raising consciousness around the historical debasement of the witch. We embody the “x” in Bruxa. We denounce the patriarchal stigmatization of women sages; understanding this process as symptomatic

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to the sexual division of labour that found its basis in the domination of women and nature. The domestication, control, and destruction of lands, peoples, and fertile life are seeded in the systems of measurement, communication, and globalization. Bruxas resist primitive accumulation through communion and reciprocity in nurturing. It is no random fact that witches once performed an indispensable role in managing the social and economic relations of the paradigms that preceded capitalism. Silvia Federici corroborates, [T]he witch hunts served to deprive women of their medical practices, forced them to submit to the patriarchal control of the nuclear family, and destroyed a holistic concept of nature that until the Renaissance set limits on the exploitation of the female body. (Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women 2018, 29) The commons refer to the spaces of communal land that was shared by peasants for pastures, cropland and access to forests and peat. The commons encompassed the material and existing (or even imagined) forms of sustenance that humans shared as members of a community. The enclosure of the commons led to the precarization of the proletariat. A class of destitute (exploitable) people emerged as a result of being forced to leave their former lands to sell their labour power to operate industrial machines. This historical process enabled the development/establishment of a capitalist class system. Witches were once a positive and integral infuence in precapitalist worlds. However, as activist–scholar Vandana Shiva explains, by stripping away the knowledge, creativity, and productive capacities of these women along with the denial of nature’s inherent creativity (the power to create), the world entered a state of manufactured precarity, which sought to dispossess the witch by rendering it both dangerous and expendable. The material disintegration of the communal territories of peasants, upon which the colonial/ modern world was built, incentivized the inferiorization of women and nonmen with the identity categories of class, race, and gender.

Ethos Currently, Bruxas Bruxas operates as a transnational artist collective. The group has made it its mission to channel vitality into a project of alternative futurity, an attempt to bring about the social and cultural conditions necessary for change. Drawing from the powerful legacies of previous feminist “político” covens immersed in anti-capitalist resistance, our clarion call echoes the Manifesto that W.I.T.C.H., the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell (2020), stated, There is no “joining” WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch. You make your own rules. You are

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Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective free and beautiful . . . You are a Witch by saying aloud, “I am a Witch” three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.

Bruxas are grounded in overcoming patriarchal, heterosexist, capitalist, and colonial systems of domination/oppression. The collective originally formed in Happy Valley, (State College), Pennsylvania. However, Bruxas are currently active in Mexico, Ghana, France, Thailand, and Chile. The sustenance we seek to provide one another is meant to operate via transnational and horizontal matriarchal care. As knowledge pollinators, Bruxas are aware of the urgent need for activating spaces where visual and political literacy can be developed communally. Bruxas live precariously in the Capitalocene, yet our solidarity to one another is our lifeblood. Together, members are able to focus on social and subversive actions – a collective aggression that has been tapped and gleaned from our individual practices. Here, as Bruxas, artists are able to challenge the unbearable passivity that is produced within colonial spaces. The collective’s every action resists the depletion of our power as Bruxas fearlessly critique aesthetic reifcation proper to institutions such as schools, museums, and art gallery systems.

Theoretical Underpinnings Bruxas cast spells through critical forms of inversion. Our formation centres the Debordian concept of the Spectacle as an inversion of life (Debord 1995) and thus, we are aware of the inverting illusion of ideology, which we question unrelentingly. As in the case of Bahktin’s theory of carnival, we view dance, drag, punk, drawing, and cooking as natural forms of lived, familial communication.3 However, we are aware of the active co-optation/commodifcation of these Deleuzian “minor-culture” celebrations, turning them into glittering arms of the state. Thus, it is essential to practise rigorous reinscription by those of us seeking to protect our mycorrhizal collectivity from epistemic colonization. This inversion of our “natural” selves diverged from salient notions of carnival theory, wherein a negentropic public staging of spectacles is permitted to “rupture” an otherwise “moral” social order under the condition that its rupture underscores that order’s hegemony. Instead, Bruxas Bruxas activity, fortifed by the wildness of folk knowledge and the world-building fuidity of pessimistic futurism, complicates the banking model of extractive pedagogy through a durational, uninterrupted joy divorced from normative indoctrination. What we foresee in our way of existence requires a purge in terms of social catharsis, opportunities for radical clairvoyance, and rabid acts of love. A feminist reconceptualization of Bakhtin posits that the carnivalistic warping of all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationality can lead to a new mode of kinship between individuals. Concretely, Bruxas opt to turn the stage inwards and challenge the passive contemplatory mode of

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spectatorship. This entails resisting the hypnotic authority of the male gaze. As critical creators, we acknowledge our limitations; we do not presume the possibility of enacting revolutionary change with a single art show. Our eforts are gradual. Also, we are aware of the fact that a careless handling of carnival can reinscribe the very social frameworks it seeks to denounce. The purpose of Get Bodied was to activate a space where people could momentarily experience ceaseless exuberance and hybrid excess, not only as spectators, but also as spect-actors. We meant for those present bodies to engage in an overly-aestheticized praxis of liberation. Even though we were not aware of it then, the transgression of the formal tenets of the gallery worked as an anti-colonial operation, efected through a contemporary display of syncretic pageantry. Our “inversions” enact colonial antidote through what Legacy Russell (2020) terms “the glitch,” a virtual “erratum,” the inherently liminal but deeply necessary correction to forced institutional consent. As such, rather than attempt to pacify the audience with a numbing spectacle, we sought instead to radicalize them. Bruxas conspired over dinner and drinks, conjuring, literally, a form of artistic reifcation that Denise da Silva (2015) would term “life worked on, through, and by a certain intention,” (para 2) against binary, against solution, too messy for taxonomical oversight. From bread and circus to euphoric bacchanal: that is how Bruxas Bruxas gave birth.

Figure 2.1 Bruxas  Bruxas  member and drag artist José Queervo joins the Valley Hags in hosting the closing reception of Get Bodied at the Edwin E. Zoller Gallery. Source: Photo by Helen Maser, Bruxas Bruxas, 2017.

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Embodiment Ceremonial Curation In September 2017, Bruxas Bruxas hosted its third formal public event at the Edwin W. Zoller Gallery. Our initial public activations occurred in tandem with other local events where we tested our ability to collaborate and perform within a formal setting. The underlying motivation for the show involved materializing a common ground for idea-making as well as building on the growing relationships with poets, performers, musicians, and dancers in our area. The Body as Framework The framework of Get Bodied was ultimately conceived as a collaborative exhibition featuring four artists and over two dozen performers. The core artists converged to create a visual constellation that grappled aesthetically as well as politically with race, oppression, supremacy, and community. Central to the exhibition was an investigation of culturally embedded power structures and visual matter. The artists, through individually curated collections of media and performance, worked towards an evolving installation rather than a static display of objects. Each day, an artist entered the space to conduct workshops, perform, and engage. As the exhibition progressed, concurrent collections of new material were projected or installed in the space. All visitors became a part of the fnal performance through the documentation of their engagement. The Commons as Landscape The week-long convergence of Get Bodied began with fnding a cohesive theme to which we all could contribute. As a gesture of connectivity amongst ourselves and any potential viewers, we settled on the internet platform YouTube to present personally curated playlists. Drawing from DIY cultural ethos, we were all able to share a slice of our interior selves. Each artist collected ten music videos and compiled them into a playlist. These video collections were then projected on a 24-hour loop in the gallery. Each video ran simultaneously, and every day of the week a diferent artist’s playlist would be audible.

The Show Visual Display The main gallery. The gallery space was enclosed by an atmospheric screening of music videos selected by each artist hosting the space. Each of the four walls

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displayed a looping selection of clips from mainstream culture as well as from counterculture. The central area was left open so that each artist–host could stage diferent activities that extended their practice to include visitor participation. Thus, intervalled excerpts of music genres such as cumbia, trap and twerk, Chilean folk, and underground punk resonated across the sensorium of the space, enhancing the efect with larger-than-life projections of the corresponding videos that accompanied each song. The central space, surrounded by a mellifuous cacophony of visual signifers, was intended to entice viewers into the gallery from the outside hallway connecting the school with the exhibition area.

Participatory Performance Daily. In communal resonance with our regular collaborations, Bruxas devised an experimental mise-en-scène curated from the standpoint of participation and action. The work was not meant to be contemplated passively. Rather, the experiment was meant to allow us to unfold, in a daring and concrete manner, our futuristic visions for a new way to experience meaning-making in transgression of any given aesthetic predispositions. Our daily invitation read: Each day an artist will enter the space to conduct workshops, perform, and engage. As the exhibition progresses, a concurrent collection of new material will occur and be projected or installed in the space. On Mondays, Xalli Zuniga curated “Political Portraits”, held from 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. “Political Portraits” was a project that facilitated dialogical encounters in art between people of diferent cultural and political backgrounds. Participants were encouraged to come together to (literally) draw out their cultural experiences within otherness/alterity. The point of crafting a makerly community was to collectively fnd potential ways to navigate structural afnity in our ways of surviving precarity under domination through dialogic drawing. Dialogic drawing became an act of meta-weaving mythical narratives through which the ephemeral community attained states of sympoiesis/making-with. This kind of art drew from the well of creative liberation to conduct an experimental project for a diferent kind of politics predicated on the dissenting power of creation in collectivity. On Tuesdays, Ciara Newton hosted “Twerk Tuesdays,” a project that stemmed from the artist’s framing of the body as a site of contestation against white-supremacist imaging. Staging “twerk” as an illustrious

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Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective performance of blackness, the gallery space was made to accommodate a discourse of visual advocacy from the vantage point of “vulgar” expression. The artist screened a fused display of highbrow and lowbrow dance stylings in an efort to create a welcoming environment for twerkers to disrupt cultural, racial, and economic labels placed on our bodies. The speakers blasted Beyonce’s “Get Me Bodied,” among other familiar tunes, which served as inspiration for the title of the show. Members of the surrounding community were invited to merge with the performing artists to practise dance moves rooted in diasporic and Afro-Caribbean cultures. This deterritorialization of the gallery space through collective dance learning was meant to challenge normative patterns of social engagement, which became a critique of the colonial social screenplays that determine the movement of bodies in our categorical landscapes. “Twerk Tuesday,” states Ciara, “developed from a personal desire to own my racial identity in an outward, celebratory gesture.” Twerk Tuesday was built and sustained by a supportive community interested in dance, allyship, and challenging social hierarchies. Life-long connections were made as independent and collective sessions transpired, allowing the shift from space making by an individual to space keeping by the collective. On Wednesdays, Alvaro Jordan presented “A Shared Gaze.” Jordan created a deliberate visual dilemma for spectators. By presenting a spliced spectacle, the dual screen forced observers to choose which side of the screen to focus on. They were presented with two options: pleasant entertainment or discomforting footage taken from reality. The viewers’ gaze, like that of a camera, was placed in the middle of this duality, highlighting the – often moral and – false choices behind spectatorship in capitalism, in both production and consumption of media. The artist inverted the easy-to-hide nature of looking by making it a matter of public discussion to provide a space for dialogue among spectators as a means to address the surreptitious power of the media. On Thursdays, Kristina Bivona performed “A  recollection of harm: Sinking-swimming-painting-skating”, a daily gallery engagement of active paintings with an open audience. The doors were opened to the gallery as music played. Bivona wore roller skates and taped brushes to sticks. She played loud international and queer punk like Big Joanie and Los Crudos and painted with ink wash on a 50-feet scroll. She invited others into this process of painting where folks moved with broad, awkward, bodily strokes, mimicking the collective awkwardness of a punk rock mosh pit. The participatory acts were a counterbalance to the institutional space where all students were invested in an act of recording. Here, instead, participants made marks as a community that would disappear. The Back Gallery. The main space of the gallery then transitioned to a partially independent back room where each artist presented artwork. This traditional

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rendition of a gallery space hosted works that grappled with our individual relationships to racism, class, and sex. Ciara Newton. Ciara Newton presented an installation of tiki torches titled “White People.” The content of the work refected the use of torches as props for racial intimidation by white supremacists, as was shown in recent times.4 Each torch was painted gold and bedazzled with jewels. These adornments were a reclamation of power by Newton, who was responding to the constant infux of violence onto Black bodies and the non-negotiable fortitude required to survive the ongoing violence. On the back of the wall the artist wrote, “We Are,” as a means to call out the blatant hypocrisy behind the ofcial PSU stadium chant. Xalli Zuniga. Xalli Zuniga presented “Tzompantli,” a mass collection of discarded takeaway food bags from popular Mexican-style fast-food restaurants from the US. This collected throwaway food ensemble was pulled from a series of actions where the artist picked the trash of restaurants around State College. Strung and suspended from foor to ceiling against a 17 ft × 22 ft wall, these bags emulated the famous Aztec walls of skulls (“Tzompantli”) that projected belligerent excess meant to inspire a fearsome worship of authority. The corrugation of tarnished fesh – as violated territory – is enclosed in the image of the sullied brown bag; a homage to the deadly fight of border refugees. The skull rack ofered an accessible commentary on the necropolitical implications of the Global North’s mass consumption of avocado, or “green gold,” fuelling cartel violence. The stench of the detritus posing as art begs the question of what is throwaway in the world? Who is a throwaway? Why? Kristina Bivona. Kristina Bivona pulled from her experience of housing insecurity and whiteness in the US southern states as a child. She created and hung four oversized panels (11 ft × 7 ft) of cotton rag paper each treated with a diferent white material. Titled That’s Mighty White of You, each piece contended with the multigenerational abuses of her white family through the medical, domestic, educational, and labour industry. The works wove together school documents, white linens, house paint, and cotton pulp to imagine how modernist aesthetics of whiteness capitalize on depersonalization which abetts neocolonialism. Alvaro Jordán. Alvaro Jordán presented a virtual reality video piece titled “Shared Gaze,” an immersive VR experience. The purpose of this piece was to visually isolate participants from the physical gallery while simultaneously projecting their gaze, literally, onto the opposing wall. The 360-degree video projection, as visualized from the VR headset, was divided in two contrasting sequences; both

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Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective occupying 180 degrees of the video and playing in parallel to each other. The display created a two-sided view on the moving image as spectacle; composed of clips taken from popular VR clips from platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. On the left, the projection showed a collection of news and documentary scenes from the experience of life in oppression, including military, eco-systemic, and political (as expressed in multifarious crises happening all over the world, provoking mass protests). On the right, spectators could witness multiple VR clips showcasing diferent forms of popular VR entertainment: roller-coaster rides, frst-person video game experiences, women in bathing suits or even underwear posing for the camera/viewer, and so on. Cognizant of the power that viralized media currently holds over politics (with the ability to even manipulate presidential elections), the artist stressed the need for audiences to have an exposure to multiple and diverse forms of gazing to resist the media’s erasure of diference. Closing Reception. Following the spirit of inversion, Bruxas Bruxas decided that, rather than having an opening reception, we would opt to gather a crowd to have a closing reception for Get Bodied, featuring a night of live performances. Our invitation to the public read: Please join us in this merged media intervention to participate in performances, exercises, and workshops for an ongoing assemblage of elastic otherness. Celebrating the eforts and energies of Get Bodied, a closing ceremony is to be held on the 29th of September. The closing evening afair comprised a selection of performances ranging from drag (“Valley Hags”), spoken word (“W.O.R.D.S.”), roller derby (*add name), and a hip-hop duet from Philadelphia (“Black and Nappy”).

We collaborated with other communities of creators such as the university club Writers Organized to Represent Diverse Stories (W.O.R.D.S.), the drag ensemble Valley Hags, as well as the hip-hop duo Black n’ Nappy. We simply prioritized our real life, the people we admire in creativity, and the resonance we felt in our intersections with hip-hop, drag, and spoken word poetry. In an environment dominated by sports, heteronormativity, and assimilation, drag and spoken word shows provide the State College community with a refuge for transgressive, authentic performance. Sympoiesis is an artform that lives, breathes, and changes in real time. So is drag, spoken word, roller derby, and hip hop. Aligned with the ethos of Get Bodied, the confagration of disruptive spectacles is meant to question and challenge existing colonialist structures built around the staged reifcation of identity.

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Refection By leveraging our divergent positionalities, we transformed the gallery into a space of convergence, presenting a series of dynamic activities curated by each of us on a diferent day of the week. We maintained a conventional gallery space at the back of the gallery where we displayed installations made by Ciara, Kristina, and Xalli. The show was up for two consecutive weeks, which gave us enough time to expand as we wished with regard to audience interaction prior to the fnal closing event. José Queervo,5 a founding member of the Valley Hags, recalls: This opportunity was a turning point for many of us in Drag. We were able to try something new, look a diferent way, use a new medium, and perform for a diferent audience. We were able to incorporate video projections into the performances using our bodies as ephemeral canvas. Makeup, illusion, and projection were melded together on our bodies. There was no elevated stage, no delineation between where the performer and the audience should be. As is often customary in Drag performances, we waded through the crowd, interacting, reacting, collecting tips, and implicating each audience member in the performance. As with twerk culture, drag artists were able to push their craft freely and in diferent directions as a result of being invited to bring drag into the fne art space. With Get Bodied, performers were enthralled by the possibility of inverting the master’s gaze in an efort to difract and expand consciousness through forms of celebratory congregation. Get Bodied gave people the opportunity to dwell in a space of aesthetic liberation in momentary suspension of coloniality. As Bruxas, we drew upon the materials that they had at our disposal: bodies in movement and the relational space where they incessantly forge forms of sisterhood-in-resistance. Bruxas Bruxas has expanded its transnational coven, thanks to which our numbers have grown. Currently, Bruxas Bruxas members include Sophia Capaldi, Alvaro Jordán, Alana Iturralde, Katy Barlow, Xalli Zúñiga, Rabiyatu Jalloh, Kristina Davis, Bryssa Koppie, Megan Wanttie, Torey Akers, Kiki Cooper, Ciara Newton, Helen Maser, Hillel O’Leary, Christina Dietz, Joe McMahon, Daniel Ulacia, Colin Miller, Katie Pack, Paolo Marino, Laurel Charleston, Christen Sperry Garcia, Taylor Foster, Michiko Murakami, and Alejandra Sieck.

Notes 1 Including W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell), Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Cell 16, and The Combahee River Collective, to name a few examples. 2 Some kinds of witches are also known as “meigas” in the cultural imaginary of Galicia.

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3 Bakhtin’s carnival ofers the possibility of engendering forms of inverted transubstantiation as political travesty, with a strong focus on the body (1984, 379). He writes: “Carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions” (Bakhtin 1984, 10). 4 It was at this time that white supremacists in Charlottesville, (NC) carried tiki torches to a night protest where a statue of Robert E. Lee was being removed. 5 Jose Queervo, the drag persona of Joe McMahon, is a 4,709-year old witch from the Astral Plane sent here to save the world from itself. McMahon formed a small coven to represent the local drag community, which ultimately became “Jose Queervo and The Valley Hags.”

Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 [1965]. Rabelais and His World. Trans. H. Iwolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Castillo, Ana. 1994. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1968. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C.L. Markmann. New York: Grove Press. Federici, Silvia. 2018. Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. Oakland: PM Press. Ferreira da Silva, D. 2015. “Reading Art as Confrontation”. E-fux (65). www. e-fux.com/journal/65/336390/reading-art-as-confrontation/. Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age”. New Left Review (212): 68. Halberstam, Jack. 2013. “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons”. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Edited by S. Harney and F. Moten, 2–14. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. “The University and the Undercommons.” In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Edited by S. Harney and F. Moten, 25–43. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions. Hobart, Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Kneese, Tamara. 2020. “Radical Care”. Social Text 38(1): 1–16. Rancière, Jacques, and S. Corcoran. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum. Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London and New York: Verso. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2017. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. W.I.T.C.H. 2020 [1968]. “W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto”. In Burn It Down!: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. Edited by Breanne Fahs, 991–993. London and New York: Verso.

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Care Beyond Curation A Conversation with Lauren Craig Interview by Racha Baraka

RACHA BARAKA (RB): How would you defne the role of a curator? LAUREN CRAIG (LC): I would call myself a cultural futurist and the

role of curator comes as part of that whole. My practice is about creating futures through conscious sensing of the present with other artists. It’s based on bringing forward archival knowledge research that is both embodied and immaterial as well as material. I can’t solely call myself a curator, but my role as curator sits within all of that. If I had to defne that role, I would say that it is a list of things: a doula . . . celebrant, translator, advocate, activist. To curate is to infuence to a certain extent – I don’t mean in Instagram or social media terms – I mean to bring forward some original thinking or knowledge; by original, I mean something from your lived experience; in other words, how life has touched you and to involve others in diferent ways of thinking. It’s about being a change maker, a fre starter, a carer, a mother . . . It’s about being an example, a peacemaker, a keeper, a place maker and pacemaker, an art appreciator, systems-thinker, a systems architect. I would defne my role as a curator as accidental but an accident that had to happen – it wasn’t something that I  set out to do. My place within my family shaped things – I’m the archivist, the organiser, the memory maker and the caretaker when it comes to the creative manifestations we make. That’s quite natural as I’m the middle child (I have seven siblings). I  didn’t go to art school or study art history, and it wasn’t until much later in my career that I  went through curatorial training. Instead, I studied business, marketing, and advertising in 2000 and thought I  would work as an art director. It was completely the wrong direction for me! The art was the only right bit. However, I did want to reclaim some of the strategies used in art direction and business

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Racha Baraka interviews Lauren Craig practice and subvert those commercial practices to build alternative futures and worlds using a business counterculture. I wanted to explore more ethical and entrepreneurial enterprises and quickly understood that I  needed to know the language of business because that was the language of the world. Administrative and entrepreneurial work was something that I’d started doing from quite a young age. Patronage or fnancial support from family was not an option for me. A lot of what being a cultural futurist is about is responsibility – this should be more widespread in curatorial roles too. Through my training as a celebrant, I  have learned a lot about sensing, response and ownership of the response. When co-designing ceremonies, care has to be embedded. You have to think about the response, efect and risks that the choices you make will cause. This has to be done carefully. My role in cocreating a funeral is the same as an exhibition retrospective, as a mother’s blessing, or a pre-conception conversation. Being a curator means taking responsibility for working alongside others to create containers for mark-making – the vessels or containers that mark occasions and memorable moments in life. Events of celebration or commemoration go hand in hand for me as a curator, which is why the archival and the contemporary are shown without traditional temporal or art historical classifcation. I coined the term ‘Condensed Curation’ to talk about these elements within the exhibitions I co-curate. The elements that I care for are the preconceived in our present futures, those that are present now, our ancestors and those in the seven generations to come. The dominant constructs and constraints of time and space are condensed under the weight of this knowledge, which is both ancient and of the future. There is a renewal of this breakdown, like in compost, a ‘collapsenomics’ and new opportunity out of the weakness that governs us. I studied MA Enterprise and Management for Creative Arts, London College of Communication, 2005. I  participated in Curating Conversations (2015)  an alternative curatorial development programme specializing in lens-based visual arts, founded and directed by Karen Alexander in partnership with organisations such as the Royal College of Art, Iniva, Spike Island and Autograph, which focused on giving nontraditionally trained curators an opportunity to learn. We met a number of people who told their stories as witnesses, about commissioning of work or sharing their photographic journeys. Many things stuck with me, but mostly the stories of Courtney J. Martin (at the time Deputy Director and Chief Curator of Dia Art Foundation), art historian and director Gaëtane Verna and artist Grace Ndiritu. Seven years later, the cohort is still communing. Prior to that, I established and directed the organisation Field (2009), which is probably the best example I have of traditional curation. At the same time it isn’t since most curators do not have to build an organisation or gallery from scratch to curate a show. I did all of this to have a

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place to support other artists and show their and my work. Field sought to work within urban environments, connecting art and nature. As a social enterprise, with both cultural and environmental joint aims, it was fnancially sustainable, receiving donations from my other organisation Thinking Flowers? I curated the exhibitions and designed and led the international residency programme as well as the public programme. The space also housed ethical business incubators for various fashion designers and ethical start-ups, and I  ofered holistic business mentoring. A  therapy space enabled access to afordable complementary therapies and others were able to rent the space at afordable prices for meditation and dance. The space was let as a community retail space in which local people sold products. Field was a concept that was very much about existing with and without a physical space – temporary; meanwhile, spaces are part of the experience and survival of artists and creative people as well as part of a destructive and extractivist chain of urban regeneration. Sadly, I had to pre-see and accept the death and obsoletion of the space. This is what a cultural futurist does – projects the future, trends trajectories and casts accordingly. Field had to be able to exist as some form of force feld or equal playing feld, where diferent ideas, concepts and people could act as co-producers and members without destructive hierarchies. The artist Paul Jones curated the exhibition Heterotopia Disjucture where alongside other artists we explored this theme. I like to see it as a protective space. These elements of composting, death and renewal are modes within my S:E:P:A:L:S: conceptual modality, and recently I have enjoyed reactivating these conversations with artist Jack Tan. I’m still in contact with, and collaborate with, a lot of the artists I  worked with during Field’s physical space. What stays with me, in regard to Field, is that I co-designed a legal structure with a barefoot lawyer alongside an amazing legal architect (who has now sadly passed away). They had designed cooperative and ethical business structures such as the Community Interest Company – I have not seen the world of constitution move forward much since. So, as a co-curator, I  feel you’re a world builder, you’re a container builder, and it’s your responsibility to infuence the space and the places that you go into. This is equal to not changing and accepting some of the conditions of the space that you’re in, and this can be attributed especially to the natural world. Could you take us back to the genesis of SEPALS and explain the intentions behind it? It took a really long time for S:E:P:A:L:S: to evolve – there are a lot of parts of it that have been with me for as long as I can remember. It takes time to give language to these experiences. Mainly, it has been consolidated over the last 20 years and through working in diferent kinds of way. I began sharing it as a whole in late 2019.

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Racha Baraka interviews Lauren Craig I’m currently working with S:E:P:A:L:S: as a conceptual modality that conjures up some form of ‘ethical culture memory’ by creating spaces or containers for vessels for ‘protective knowledge production’. It also goes beyond that, moving production into some form of regeneration – a free energetic/regenerative/abundant kind of creativity – and to protect the knowledge within that. This kind of systems thinking, of modality building of infrastructures, is about building worlds or experiences where creativity can exist freely, moving without constraint across felds that are usually classifed. S:E:P:A:L:S: is a germination space: a dark space where things can be developed. It’s a protective space where knowledge and free energy can be accumulated and shared. This space can also be defensive – defensive of intellectual property, creating healthy environments for people to be able to share without feeling extracted and depleted. For me, S:E:P:A:L:S: is like a system with diferent modes. Each letter of S:E:P:A:L:S: is modular – you can move each letter and stack it up like a totem or make diferent formations like a cube or triangle. It’s movable and adaptable for whichever situation is needed or whichever communities need it. A lot of S:E:P:A:L:S: was consolidated through my training as a doula (an emotional, spiritual and physical birth worker supporting people prior to preconception, during birth, and postnatally). I learnt a lot from Professor Joan Anim-Addo about mothering or doula-ing of the mind through her writing and introductions to Sylvia Wynter and the infnities of relational possibilities of Édouard Glissant through Denise Ferreira da Silva. The most recent element of S:E:P:A:L:S: has come from my relationship with the internet and social media. I  haven’t engaged in social media (depending on the platform) for around ten years despite being an early adopter. I increasingly found it a space where I didn’t feel protected or safe. I am excluded from certain types of knowledge without it, but it’s been a much healthier period of my life. I’m super curious about the internet as a space for healthy collaboration and as a possible safe space and I’m interested in exploring what that can mean. The S:E:P:A:L:S: group started out of a situation of collapse. The group was instigated at a British Art Network conference in 2020, which broke down due to the feeling of a group of people, including myself and instigated by Janine Francois, related to the lack of presence of Black women and other people of colour. This led me to contact the British Art Network where I met Pauline de Souza who wanted to help. There was a call out for people to consult and make recommendations. I wanted to take a restorative approach to how we could start to mend things and begin to create new systems when things go wrong. Sometimes, when things collapse, it is fne to allow them to, but these weaknesses within systems can also be where we make opportunities. This is how S:E:P:A:L:S: came into being.

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Racha Baraka, Lisa Kennedy, Salma Noor and Helen Starr were part of the founding group. We invited Jack Tan soon after who is part of the working group. I also brought in Georgina Obaya Evans (artist, yoga teacher and art psychotherapist) to hold space in terms of composting – a space where we can start to rebuild. We all take care of diferent things and lead diferent parts. We have a lot of blocks in communication because of specialist knowledge and language. Things take longer, but in that untangling of wire or ‘weeding’ we learn so much from each other. What is the meaning behind its name? S:E:P:A:L:S: comes from the outer petals of a bud – the visible petals are often green or a diferent shade to the inner petals and are made from a stronger material. They are resistant, waxier or denser. They exist to protect the sexual reproductive organs of the plant, providing safety and a sterile dark space for the generation/evolution/reproductive elements to happen. I perceive these outer petals to be like shields, defensive as well as protective. Whilst the bud is forming it is under almost impenetrable layers. It’s not perfect of course, some insects, bacteria have evolved to infltrate, extract energy and sometimes kill the plant. In this space, I like to imagine that there is a mystery – we don’t actually know what happens behind the closed sepals. This creative process takes an awful lot of energy and I feel we all need support in these practices. There is a point within a fower’s life where there’s a possibility for something beyond the plant – a kind of regenerative energy, free creativity and life force that exists. Among many other things, I’m a descendant of a Jamaican Maroon woman from the east area of the island in the hills. Communing with nature was essential to the survival of these people. Maroons are runaway, fugitives, free by their creative desire to survive and thrive but were previously enslaved African people. We were able to commune with the plant life in the Blue Mountains as a way to defend and protect ourselves against murder, rape and future re-enslavement by the British Army. In accomplishing that, we signed a treaty for our freedom, but there were stipulations (such as not being able to help any other enslaved Africans to become free). I hold onto this notion through the stories of my mother about her time there growing up, through my relationship with the island itself, through its herbs, fruits and trees and through dreams and meditative states. Again, going back to ‘communing as nature’ as opposed to ‘other to’, it is a defensive mechanism in itself as well as a creative accelerator. S:E:P:A:L:S: means to have acceptance of and understanding that everything goes back to the earth. There is a facing of death in the living process of the concept, just like contractions and expanses of breathing. In this place where S:E:P:A:L:S: exists we are able to operate outside the universal confnes of time and space. Through the permeable feedback

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loops, knowledge can be shared and seep away to the compost, where nothing is wasted but is renewed. I can break down what S:E:P:A:L:S: means, taking you through each letter, although I won’t be able to tell you how every mode works here, as it morphs depending on why it is needed. I  can say that throughout the whole conceptual modality there are permeable feedback loops that knowledge can travel through and to any part of the modality. Back and forth, these cords can also open/close like solid valves, but the feedback loops are mainly permeable and not solid, so that knowledge can be porous – cross-pollination can happen between diferent areas of knowledge production and all diferent systems. So, you can use it to think about what needs to be changed frst, or it can be about what needs to be burned down as land clearing can also spark germination for seeds that have been planted many years ago. It can also encourage the regeneration of certain ideas – what needs to go, what is already dead or draining the energy; what constitution, legal bind, clause or value chain is constraining the continued growth. This element of allowing things to go, is really important within the S:E:P:A:L:S: modality – accepting and facing death, loss, letting go and grief or the appropriate ritual or process for you. S:/ =Sustainability + Socialisation E:/ = Experience/Engagement/Experimental P:/ = Practice/Presencing/Past: Presencing: Projection A:/ =Action: Attentunement: Activism: Archive: Activation: Ancestors L:/ = Learning/Leadership/Legacy/Law S:/ = Sensitivity/Seclusion/Socialisation Compost/ = Medicine: Equilibrium/Dissolution Permeable Feedback Loop/ = circulate knowledge between all modes and modules RB:

LC:

With S:E:P:A:L:S: and within your own practice too, it seems that collective healing and communal care goes hand in hand with the Anthropocene. Can you explain how you fnd healing in nature? Truthfully, I don’t remember a time when I haven’t felt at one with the earth and with nature. I’m thinking about making perfume with petals in the sun as a kid or feeling a sense of grief when in strong and direct community and communication with nature. I  remember being very young, really enjoying making ladybird houses or watching the river or feeling the vibration of the claws of badgers on concrete; of thinking that maybe I or the earth will die young or more simply that this beauty is not forever. That feeling has been with me since childhood – a not really understanding of what the grief is for. A lot of my memories are of picking fowers and putting them into glass bottles, of river walks in ancient parks and woodlands, of urbanised environments – these are the ones I remember. I remember a strong feeling of grief, of overwhelming

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connectedness during the 1987 hurricane in the UK (Storm Dudley); of feeling completely calm within the chaos of the wind but also an element of loss. I remember the horizontal trees when we were fnally able to walk to school. I  had a similar feeling at Niagara Falls, of feeling completely overwhelmed with the fact that a waterfall can be turned into an alternative form of energy. During those periods, you’re just completely misted and covered with condensation – my tears an element of grief that at that moment, everything is water. I started to take these feelings more seriously around the time I had a block working with photography. Shortly after, I established Thinking Flowers? (2003). Thinking Flowers? was a creative campaigning company that had social, political and environmental activism at its heart alongside the power of creating oferings using fresh fowers. I  called this practice ‘foral installation’, a term that spoke within art and business language about something that didn’t really exist. We had sculptures that used fowers, but we didn’t have it as an art form itself. Bringing the form into a sculptural and socially embedded environmental practice felt like the right space for me to be in. I say socially embedded, but that was equal to its environmental and cultural existence as both a concept and an organisation. I  made physical installations for a number of large corporations and corporate accountants and reinvested the money into local green waste projects including my shared allotment. I created the term ‘foral donation’ to describe the double calendar I ran which was (1) commercial and (2) social. I  would donate fowers from massive events that would have been thrown away or taken home and redirect them to my social calendar made up of other social enterprises, charities and local unauthorised or unincorporated organisations and associations close to me in Brixton. They would be upcycled and donated to the local communities and then collected and composted on a shared allotment. Looking at this kind of life cycle, which again starts at the end/the obsolete, you are thinking about where these waste products could be before you start. This was happening around the founding conversations and beginning of thoughts around the circular economy and how to bring a cyclical way of thinking into a way of being for several product life cycles. There were a lot of journeys with Thinking Flowers? (2003–2016). Flowers are obviously being used in the UK and across Europe as indicators of conspicuous consumption, but their beauty isn’t everything. I felt a sense of grief work (of course, some of my clients were grieving for diferent reasons) and it led me to research where fowers came from. For several years I campaigned to change the global supply chain of cut fowers and worked with establishing ethical farms and accreditations for ethical fowers globally. These practices are now commonplace in supermarkets but didn’t exist at that point; they existed for bananas and cofee but not for diamonds or fowers. My processes were championed by the Eden Project and since 2009 have infuenced how the

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Racha Baraka interviews Lauren Craig Royal Horticultural Society and Chelsea Flower Show donate plants. I learnt more about aromatherapy and travelled to learn about the use of herbs and aromatherapy in birth work in Brazil especially, learning about the role of fowers within spiritual practices of those of African descent within Brazil and the Caribbean. I lived there for some time, a pivotal time where I started to learn about being a doula. We’re talking about collective healing and communal care, but I learnt about other areas of love and compassion in Brazil. Flowers are a part of that – they are given to celebrate birth and death and everything in between. The artist Limpo said to me that in his work ‘fowers are the stability of the emotions’ and I carry this as a universal law. The language of fowers present emotions in a way that celebrate creativity, but I also equally celebrate the demise and the obsoletion of life. In that letting go of life, you can bring life through you, fully, whole. After working as a doula for quite some time (full spectrum including preconception, death and abortion), I  was asked to start holding communal celebrations of healing and care and celebratory and commemoratory gatherings so trained as a celebrant. Around 2015, I did some studies and I kind of ducked out. I was burnt out and it was a time for me to just burn everything down to the ground. I had to really let go of a kind of saviour complex of wanting to cure every social ill and save the earth. Thinking that I could do this as one person or as part of a number of groups and collectives had taken over my whole life. I had to fnd a tangible, manageable, small but beautiful way to be able to hold that balance between life and death, between returning to the earth, between the ashes and the soil and fnd a way to settle into that role. This knowledge of grief – of being able to see both sides of creativity, to see creativity in both commemorating and celebrating – was something that I needed to hold onto, and I needed to understand. How can I honour the requests of others and my needs myself? I also began to understand myself more as a vessel that things can happen within, like Petal Tank – it didn’t have to always be me externalising things and doing and acting and being. I had work to do. Inner work, the difcult stuf, taking care of the inner landscape gardening. The ‘weeding’ as Jack Tan calls it in the S:E:P:A:L:S: group. It was at this point I stepped back from a lot of the collective work that I was doing, and I became a mother, a carer, a steward and a ferocious protector of my child. Through becoming pregnant I started to think about germination, dark spaces, protective spaces, defensive spaces – what are the conditions for creativity to thrive safely and healthily? It led me back to many conversations that I had around 2008, when I became an Ethical Pioneer for one of the Schumacher Colleges. We learnt various things like deep ecology, systems thinking and Gaia theory with an incredible host of teachers. The cohort itself were all kinds of little planets in their knowledge. It was a transformational experience for me, and at one point,

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I  got really angry at the education system and irritated that I  hadn’t found that way of learning before – learning as part of nature, with ease and comfort with the interconnectedness of geography, quantum physics and listening. At that point, I realised that I didn’t fnd learning diffcult at all. I went back to the conversations that I’d had with Professor Wangari Maathai and friends such as the late Polly Higgins, where we talked about earth jurisprudence – being a steward and a guardian of the planet as a way of living a whole sense of understanding of the earth. Around that time, Polly was developing theories of ecocide and going to present this as a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights. I was having conversations with teachers like Satish Kumar and Vandana Shiva, who talked about earth sovereignty, about humans and of seeds, and how understanding the soil and earth is something that we can use as an analogy for living. The notion of composting (starting from the waste) was something that has come about and re-emerged in my life as a way of looking at knowledge. Some of that speaks to notions of the ‘Anthropocene’, but I fear that there’s an over intellectualisation and extraction of the spirit and energy of the earth through this concept. Sometimes, when there’s so much talking it’s difcult to listen, and it’s difcult to hear what your body says, what the earth says. It is hard to be calm when you are fearful, in panic and crisis, in an emergency state. These concepts have brought about a new invitation within Europe for people to connect to the earth; the climate change crisis has brought a sense of togetherness, a collective need for something, and an opportunity to move away from a more individualistic way of being. But I do fear for the earth’s voice and the people who are closest to it. These conversations are almost becoming a distraction, and the people who are having to battle the most with the efects of climate change are silenced within the debate. This distracts us from feeling and witnessing and actually being close to what’s happening. I can only hope that in the element of the New Earth that I perceive to be part of the Anthropocene and conceptual notion of, that there is space for the ancient and the unknown – the knowledge of the global majority from our ancestry and culture that is actually new to Western thought systems. The most important is that this can fnd a meeting point, whether resonant or discordant, and that the meeting itself is reciprocal and regenerative rather than building a transactional system. How would you like to see S:E:P:A:L:S: evolve? The answer to this has to do with the natural evolution or death of S:E:P:A:L:S: itself and where it wants to go as an autonomous creative modality. I’m not the leader of the group – it’s a group of leaders leading and learning together on a project with diferent skills and competencies. It’s a massive learning curve in so many ways. As a group born out during COVID-19 times it may or may not survive. It may have already done or be doing what it was set up to do. With the world beginning to

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Racha Baraka interviews Lauren Craig open up again in various degrees, life’s demands have changed. Part of what we started and set out to do might have to die as it may not be able to continue to live in this new environment. There’s a publication that we’re working on and the possibility of a digital garden (which was central to my excitement about the project) which may or may not happen now due to the stamina of the people in the group. There are already new gardens, new parts of the concept that are popping up and germinating through various types of concepts as well as commissions. There are various research projects that I’m working on where the conceptual modality is central or at least a small part of it. This way of working is woven throughout a lot of the things that I’m currently working on. I’m always drawing shields and new seedpod shapes – something that I’ve doodled for the longest time. There are old seeds I grounded a long time ago that are starting to germinate and there’s more energy around certain conversations. I’m really excited by a lot of the work that I’ve seen exploring this notion of late because, going back, it has been present in my previous projects Petal Tank, Thinking Flowers?, and Field. I have a curiosity about the internet and digital spaces, and I’m curious to see what S:E:P:A:L:S: could do there. It will all happen quite slowly, and that’s pretty much all I can say about the evolution of S:E:P:A:L:S: for now. How do you implement care within your own practice? The way that care manifests in my practice is quite unspoken and quiet. I  guess it’s like the permeable feedback loops within the conceptual modality. In some ways, I think that’s care – remaining connected but open, with boundaries but somewhat fexible in the ability to allow things to fow through in and out (whether that’s hurt or pleasure, negative or positive emotions if we want to put it like that). Care is nonhierarchical and is quite fat across the diferent parts of my practice and modes of operating. There isn’t really a hierarchy placed as to what part is more important, and that’s linking respect quite closely with care as well as for diferent knowledge bases. Care manifests in my practice as material and immaterial concepts . . . universal planetary respect for animal/plant/person/fungi. . .. It’s somewhere between vulnerability and boundaries, it’s through breakdowns and breakthroughs, nourishment of the mind, nourishment of matter, :>through the replanting and repotting, :< through growing, reaping, sewing, through silence/sound/payment, donations, withholding,

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gathering spaces and people, with being other/being together, with embodying listening and vocalising. I think care manifests as part of being with the living and the dead, with the ancestors and the preconceived and with movement and stillness. I think it’s about something that I call ‘invocate/exvocate’ – you think about being an advocate, but sometimes you can advocate internally for someone or something or as part of nature. You can advocate internally and emotionally with your inner landscapes as well as your external modes of expression. Sometimes you can silently invocate, which is different to invoking. But when you make something, or a container for someone or yourself to make something else, it is something other than art and curation.

Bibliography Jones, Paul. 2022. Heterotopia-Disjuncture. http://heterotopia.site/ Last Accessed February 1, 2023.

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Transcultural Care and the Cultural Sector in the United Kingdom Pauline de Souza

Well-being and its relationship with the UK’s public cultural sector became paramount during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was increasingly apparent with the various lockdowns, the loss of jobs, the reduction of cultural engagement and the global impact of Black Lives Matter that the health of the nation was under duress as stress increased, and race, intersectionality and class discrimination were revealed to the population. In the public cultural sector, the word care was used to consider how well-being could be implemented to deal with stress and discrimination. The idea of care as a practice has been subsumed into social welfare for a long period. The neglect of social welfare needs in the UK and the incorporation of other public institutions to provide ways to fll in the gaps in social welfare and prevent demands for social welfare have led to a crisis of care, where thinking as well as discussing care have entered other discourses especially between the cultural and health sectors since the 1990s. The neglect of care provision extended into racial, disability, and class discrimination. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused us to discuss care more and become aware of carelessness, but it highlights previous discussions about the need of care in the UK. Dr Madeleine Leininger’s “Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality”, published in 2006, foreshadowed the ideas of culture and care that circulated in the UK. Articles about her theory were published in the 1970s and 1990s, before her completed work was published in 2006. Madeleine Leininger’s background was in nursing and her theory of culture care diversity, derived from the feld of anthropology, was developed to fnd new ways of medically caring for people from diverse backgrounds. In the 1950s, she was conscious that medical treatment of people from diverse cultural backgrounds was inadequate because comprehension of diferent cultures was limited. She realised this problem grew as more people from diferent cultures entered the American medical system. Her “Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality” circulated globally. The theory was understood to use cultural factor as infuencers of health and well-being. Over the decades, her work has evolved as transcultural as medical systems in diferent nations have incorporated cultural awareness into their systems. Leininger’s theory has been applied in the medical system in the UK since the 1990s.

DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-6

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I would argue that it has also been incorporated into research, discussions and practices of care, culture and well-being in the cultural sector. Leininger’s “Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality” analyses the diferent cultures and subcultures of ethnically diverse people. She believed, after collecting knowledge that is culturally specifc, that it would be possible for people from diferent cultures to determine what kind of care they require. Cultural Care Diversity examines the diferences in communication, meaning, cultural values and symbols of care between groups that facilitate or assist human care expressions. Culture Care is one aspect of the theory where a subjective/objective approach is used by other care-receiving cultures to learn and transmit lifestyles as well as beliefs that would facilitate their well-being. To engage with Culture Care, Leininger discussed how Culturally Congruent Care allows the medical system to sensitively gain knowledge and make decisions on how to provide care for people from different cultures taking into account cultural values, lifestyles and beliefs of a group. Cultural competency was intrinsic to Culturally Congruent Care. Cultural Care Universality looks at similar care meanings, values or symbols seen in cultures that are facilitative to aid people (Leininger 1991). Her values of Cultural Care Universality assert that “multiple social structure factors, ethnohistory, environmental context, language, and generic and professional care are critical infuencers of cultural care patterns to predict health, well-being, illness, healing, and the ways people face disabilities” (McFarland 1999, 7). Leininger’s ideas, published between the 1970s and 1990s, frst appeared in the UK in health publications and government policies. In 1998, Irene Papadopoulos, Mary Tilki and Gina Taylor published in the UK their book Transcultural Care: A Guide for Health Care Professionals. The book discussed the equity of care of other cultures and ultimately care for all. Care is comprehended by cultural knowledge, cultural awareness, sensitivity and competence. In 2003, Irene Papadopoulos made public some sections of the book in a short self-published article as “The Papadopoulos, Tilki and Taylor Model for the Development of Cultural Competence in Nursing” that was republished in 2016, where their model was further developed by incorporating a cultural generic and culture-specifc approach. In this article she stated, “cultural knowledge . . . [is] . . . meaningful contact with people from diferent ethnic groups that can enhance knowledge around their health beliefs and behaviours as well as raise understanding around the problems they face” (Papadopoulos 2016, 3). In the conclusion she states, “culturally competent care is becoming a 21st century imperative for those responsible for providing health care services in multi-cultural societies. Being treated in a culturally competent manner is a reasonable expectation of all of us in the new millennium” (4). Transcultural Care: A  Guide for Health Care Professionals was republished in 2006, with the additional elements relating to more in-depth understanding of cultural knowledge and a boarder approach to understanding

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what culture could be. Later, in 2010 and 2011, during the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, the Department of Health and Social Care published the white paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS. In this paper “putting the public frst” where government would “put patients at the heart of the NHS, through an information revolution and greater choice and control” (1) focused on understanding individual needs for everyone. It states under item 4 a) “Shared decision-making will become the norm: no decision about me without me” and in 4 e) “The system will focus on personalised care that refects individuals’ health and care needs” (1). An earlier Labour government report published in 1998 by Sir Donald Acheson, the Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health commissioned by Labour MP Tessa Jowell while Minister for Public Health recommended that health workers need to be trained in cultural competency. Discussions about the importance of health and its impact on the UK population continued in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries. Earlier discussions focused on transcultural care, but later they were expanded to include universal care linked to Leininger’s Cultural Care Universality and its values. The values in the UK government reports were multi-social structures, environmental context and systems of generic care alongside professional care, sometimes with diversity and/or ethnic cultural understanding. The term well-being was combined with the word care, and mental health was partnered with well-being. These additions are present in the Labour Government’s joint ministerial document Health, Work and Well-Being-Caring for Our Future (2005) by David Blunkett, Secretary of State for Works and Pensions, and Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Health. This report states, Our strategy for the health and well-being of working age people is a crucial part of delivering the Government’s commitment to improving the health and well-being of the working age population. This is a central element of our wider welfare reform agenda and is set out in the Government’s White Paper Choosing Health: Making Healthier Choices Easier . . . placing real responsibility not just in the hands of government, but with employers, individuals, the healthcare profession and all our stakeholders. (4) The report set out to initiate a national debate on health and well-being. In March 2005, Dr John Reid MP, Secretary of State for Health, represented his published report Independence, Well-Being and Choice: Our Vision for the Future of Social Care for Adults in England. Chapter 5 in the report, “The Role of the Wider Community”, began to look at a more holistic approach linked to care, health and well-being by highlighting the importance of leisure services to well-being. The report stated along with education, health and libraries, the leisure facilities are universal services ofered to members of the community and everyone, including those with mental health issues,

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disabled and older people, should have access to these universal services because “They can provide a valuable contribution to the wider well-being agenda” and “are obvious examples of services that contribute to the wellbeing and prevent agenda by fostering independence and inclusion” (39). However, the same report in Chapter 7, “The Strategic and Leadership Role of Local Government” mentions the importance of cultural sensitivity by “promoting social inclusion and well-being to deliver a proactive approach to meeting the care needs of adults in culturally sensitive ways” (44), making connections to cultural competency in the earlier report “Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health” by Sir Donald Acheson, to the cultural generic approach in “The Papadopoulos, Tilki and Taylor Model for the Development of Cultural Competence in Nursing” and Leininger’s “Culturally Congruent Care” which was widely used by those in the medical system to sensitively collect information. This intermingling of care, culture, well-being and the necessary involvement of the leisure services is more apparent in a 2005 report New Directions in Social Policy: Developing the Evidence Base for Museums, Libraries and Archives in England published by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which was sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport during this period. The report clearly states that museums do not have an understanding of the Labour Government’s holistic approach to health and mental health. It describes the government concept going “beyond direct physical health, to mean a ‘complete state of physical, mental and social well-being’. Despite this, there is no body of literature which specifcally examines the efectiveness of museums, libraries and archives activities in health/mental health in England” (10). Yet, the report does acknowledge that the arts and museums are involved in debates about health, consider social and cultural issues that infuence health but fail to make connections with mental health, The arts and museums, libraries and archives sectors are part of a wider debate about the nature and causes of health: beyond examining how material circumstances afect health (e.g. the link between income, employment status and mental health), some commentators argue that there are additional social and cultural factors which infuence health. Arts and health interventions thus consists of two main elements: (i) improving healthcare delivery via arts-based approaches, aimed at direct improvements in physical health (ii) arts-based activities that aim to improve individual/community health by addressing the social determinants of health. (10–11) It was the Burns Owens Partnership, an international consultancy for culture and the creative industries, that researched and wrote the report. They were commissioned by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in 2003 to do a broad review of past and current research on social policy. The

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fnal document looked at six areas, but I am looking at only four of those areas – social inclusion, cultural diversity, community cohesion and health, particularly mental health. It covers the period between 1997 and 2005. Cultural diversity is important to the report to reveal how it was interpreted and related to health/mental health, Against this background, the literature suggests that the sector often focuses on social inclusion, though many museums, galleries and libraries have interpreted this to be synonymous with cultural inclusion, by seeking simply to widen access (which is not the same as tackling social exclusion). Though cultural diversity is widely understood to refer to diversity based on race and ethnicity, across the MLA sector it is also interpreted more broadly, to include factors such as faith and disability. (25) It is evident that the report does acknowledge race and ethnicity as a cultural factor for health, that cultural diversity is a universal component to health but providing access to culture is the main focus to improve health. This directly echoes Leininger’s linking of care and ethnic culture including a universal care of which ethnicity/diversity is a part. Before this report the Arts Council England commissioned Dr  Rosalia Lelchuk Staricof’s “Arts in Health Medical Review” in 2004, as a response to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s Policy Action Team 10, a working group focusing on arts, sports and leisure and ethnic minority exclusion. In July  1999, the Policy Action Team 10 were looking at participation in the arts and health while relating it to neighbourhood regeneration. Arts Council England acknowledged they had to create a national art and health strategy with cultural diversity as a priority: “Arts Council’s Corporate Plan 2003–06 includes a commitment to developing strategies on ‘arts and health’ to underpin its strategic priority to ‘place cultural diversity at the heart of our work” (Staricof 2004, 11). Further on in the report, Staricof under the mental health section, paraphrasing JA Burr states, “Burr et  al. (1998) argue that the introduction of arts and humanities into the training and educational of medical and nursing staf is essential for their understanding of the cultural, social and ethnic and economic factors infuencing patients behaviour” (27). This reveals more evidence of how cultural diversity, arts, and health were becoming part of a national arts strategy that would have an impact on arts funding for public institutions. The Policy Action Team 10 in July 1999 could not ignore the Nufeld Trust 1998 “Windsor I Conference: Declaration of Arts, Health and Well-Being” that took place in London, equally Arts Council England would be aware of this document. A review of this conference was prepared for the Nufeld Trust publication “Arts, Health and Well-Being from the Windsor Conference I to a Nufeld Forum for the Medical Humanities: A Report for the Period of April  1998–June  2001 Including Proceedings of the Windsor Conference

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II in September 1999 (2002)” written by Dr Robin Philip. The “Windsor Conference I” looked at current activities between arts, health and efective practice in the UK and the US, where Foundations were laid there to promote the arts into the pivotal role across the spectrum of Britain’s health care and public health systems, to complement the scientifc and technological models of diagnosis and treatment that have driven medical policies and practice for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Owen Wyn 2013, 8) As the holistic approach to art, health, well-being and cultural diversity continued the Arts Council England and Department of Health jointly published A Prospectus for Arts and Health in 2007. The foreword was written by the Labour Government’s Andy Burnham MP, Minister of State for Delivery and Quality, Department of Health, and David Lammy, MP, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport. They wrote, Hundreds of research projects, organisations and individuals are showing that the arts are an integral part of the nature and quality of the services we provide. They reveal the efectiveness and value of arts and health initiatives, and the benefts they bring to patients, service users and their carers, and to communities and healthcare workers in every sector . . . We believe this prospectus will be of interest and value to everyone working to improve wellbeing, health and the patient experience, and we commend it to you. (Arts Council England 2007, 4) Later in the report it states that organisations “serve a range of people including those with disabilities, mental health problems, terminal illness and long-term health conditions, older people, carers, refugees, and people from a wide variety of ethnic origins” (13) and it continues promoting the Arts Council England strategy for supporting the arts and healthcare outlining its four priorities: • • • •

Healthy communities, which include objectives in mental health and for older people. Healthcare built environment, which includes working with primary care LIFT (Local Improvement Finance Trust) and hospital PFI (Private Financial Investment) developments. Workforce development, which includes artists working in health and the healthcare workforce. Campaigning and resource development for the roles of the arts in health.

(14)

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Examining these various documents from diferent health organisations, from the Labour Government and the Coalition Government, a number of questions arise. Why does the Labour and Coalition Government focus on the health and well-being of the UK population? What are the assumptions of the UK’s culturally diverse population relating to health and the arts within the cultural sector? First, the UK is a member of the World Health Organisation and has been since 1948. In 1998, the World Health Organisation had published their Health 21: An Introduction to the Health for All Policy Framework programme. In this publication the Regional Director for Europe stated, [E]njoyment of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being. Health is a precondition for well-being and the quality of life. It is a benchmark for measuring progress towards reduction of poverty, the promotion of social cohesion and the elimination of discrimination. Good health is fundamental to economic growth. Intersectoral investment for health not only unlocks new resources for health but also for wider benefts, contributing in the long term to overall economic and social development. Investment in outcome-oriented health care improves health and identifes resources that can be released to meet the growing demands on the health sector. (World Health Organisation 1998, 4) Second, it is clear that health of the population has an economic impact on the nation, but the Labour Government in 1997 inherited a country where it was acknowledged that the previous Conservative Government policies created inequality, despite the fact that the government tried to play down any inequalities. John Major, when he was prime minister, in his 1997 Indian and Pakistan independence anniversary speech, stated “Policy must be colour blind-it must just tackle disadvantage, faced by British citizens, whatever their background might be” and Tony Blair as prime minister from 1997 had to address the country’s inequalities by bringing in the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, making it possible for government departments including public institutions to be sued for racial discrimination, a statutory duty has been laid upon the NHS and other UK public service agencies to “have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination” and to ensure that every new action or policy considers the implications for racial equality. (Szczepura 2005) Third, understanding of mental health and ethnic minorities discrimination within the health service resulted in the Labour Government’s Department of Health launching their fve-year plan Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Care action plan in 2005. Black and ethnic minority groups were

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the main target, but its coverage expanded to include other groups: “[it] does not only refer to skin colour, but to people of all groups who may experience discrimination and disadvantage, such as those of Irish origin, Mediterranean origin and East European migrants” (Bignall et  al. 2019, 11). By reducing discrimination it was important to collect cultural information to enable “cultural capability of mental health services” (Wilson 2010, 5) by engaging communities with the support of community development workers. This complexity of care, well-being, health and the cultural sector is still rooted in what Sylvia Wynter calls Western monohumanism, a model of being human based on knowledge and economic systems that aspire to universalise the human experience: “All the people of the world, whatever their religions/cultures, are drawn into the homogenizing global structures that are based on the model-of-a-natural-organism world systemic order. This is the enacting of a uniquely secular liberal monohumanist conception of the human” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 21) that defnes who/what we are, and in which the biological human “is subordinated to a teleological economic script that governs our global well-being/ill-being” (10). This produces racialised categories, as those in power are able to make decisions including selection of who should have what and who should be denied, who should be included and who should be excluded. During her lifetime, Leininger’s Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality was criticised for its perspective on ethnic communities without considering the powerful structures that create racism and how they have an impact on the health of ethnic communities. Her theory was seen to replicate ethnic stereotypes. In 1999, Irene Papadopoulos and Kate Gerrish published their article “Transcultural Competence: The Challenge for Nurse Education” where they comment on her limitations: “Leininger’s approach adopts a culturalist perspective whereby the focus is on nurses developing expertise in caring for specifc ethnic groups, neglecting a consideration of racism and the structural factors that impact upon the health experiences of minority ethnic communities.” Acknowledging these additional factors, they state, “. . . it is however important to emphasise the diferences between the authors’ use of the term transcultural nursing and Leininger’s” (Papadopoulos and Gerrish 1999, 1454). Leininger’s “Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality” is criticised for reinforcing cultural stereotypes. Understanding her ideas about transcultural care is complex because it focuses on the unity of an ethnic community and not individual people. Her use of anthropology as a method for her theories helps to create stereotypes of ethnic communities. People using Leininger’s theories have focused on ethnic communities and thinking about individuals who exist within these communities. However, there is still the problem of creating ethnic stereotypes who can be excluded in diferent ways. However, the importance of social inclusion for the individual or and communities cannot be ignored. Social inclusion conceptualises

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identity within a social capital framework where social networks, communities and civic engagement are linked to sense of belonging and civic identity. In 2007, the report “Mental Health, Social Inclusion and Arts: Developing the Evidence Base” by Jenny Seeker, Sue Hacking, Helen Spandler, Lyn Kent and Jo Shenton looked at the 2004 research completed by the Labour Government’s Social Exclusion Department responsible for reducing social exclusion for people with mental health problems. It found that a large number of respondents agreed that “access to recreational activities, including participation in the arts, as essential to promote social inclusion”, (Hacking et al. 2007, 14) and Staricof’s “Arts in Health: A Review of the Medical Literature” stated the Arts Council England “identifed fve ways in which work on the arts and social exclusion would be taken forward: advocacy, examining the role of regularly-funded organisations, research and evaluation, multi-agency working and targeting resources” (Staricof 2004, 11). In 2013, during the Conservative and Liberal Democratic Coalition Government, the Royal Society for Public Health published their Arts, Health, Wellbeing Beyond the Millennium: How Far Have We Come and Where Do We Want To Go? The report was based on the fndings and discussions of the working group after looking at previous documents. It found that social capital was signifcant to social inclusion along with cultural capital when developing well-being strategies. In 2006, the Arts Council England’s report Power of Art Visual Arts: Evidence of Impact, Regeneration, Health, Education and Learning noted, “In the wider community, the arts contribute to health and well-being, to enhancing social relationships, social cohesion and a sense of purpose and engagement, and to building social capital-a major determinant of health” (46). The report focused on a number of case studies where commissioned artists worked with medical staf in hospital environments, such as the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts. The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts programme ran between 1990 and 2004, during which time it brought contemporary art and multicultural live performances into the hospital’s daily routine and assessed the responses of patients, staf and visitors to these art forms in a healthcare setting. This project was funded by the Charitable Funds Research Committee and the King’s Fund Committee that supported research in arts and healthcare. The lead researcher was Dr Rosalia Staricof. The King’s Fund had published its own report “King’s Fund: Enhancing the Healing Environment Programme” in 2003, where its focus was ensuring that hospital environments were conducive for all people. Its aspirations included improving privacy and dignity, reducing aggressive behaviour and good design that provided “evidence of the therapeutic impact”, fnally demonstrating “how small-scale projects can act as catalysts for major change”. These points were highlighted in the Arts Council 2007 report (Arts Council England 2007, 19). The King’s Fund had received substantial funding from the Department of Health between 2000 and 2003. The Royal Society for Public Health’s report is important because it discussed

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the Coalition Government’s new national executive agency, Public Health England, within the Department of Health. In 2013, with the Department of Health, it produced the “Public Health Outcomes Framework 2013–2016: Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Improving Outcomes and Supporting Transparency” where wider factors afecting well-being, health inequalities would be improved to create social contentedness. However, due to limited funding for the Arts Council England arts and health national strategy, it was only in 2016 under the Conservative Government did it award the organisation Hospital Rooms funding from Grants to the Arts. St. George’s Mental Health NHS trust with other medical specialists were involved with the project at The Phoenix Unit where patients with schizophrenia resided. Aiming for an installation with aesthetic impact, Niamh White, co-director of Hospital Rooms stated, Our desire is for art to have a direct and practical social impact. The participating artists have the potential to create art installations that rival presentations in our top London museums whilst at the same time being completely safe and secure for this environment, and Doctor Emma Whicher, Medical Director stated, “I am really excited by Hospital Rooms project. It is hugely benefcial to our patients and staf and means that museum quality artwork is available to our patients, which greatly contributes to their recovery and care” (Arts Council England 2016). This is diferent to how museum collections had been used within care/medical environments to promote well-being. They did not bring art objects from museum collections into the hospital environment. Instead, the hospital as a creative care environment incorporated the social capital and inclusion model. In 2013, while the Coalition Government were focusing on health and sports connected to well-being because of the 2012 Olympic Games, the Arts Council England funded the “Heritage in Hospitals” project to look at the efective therapeutic impact of objects on patients and healthcare users. This was followed by a 2014 report Mind, Body, Spirit: How Museums Impact Health and Wellbeing written by Jocelyn Dodd and Ceri Jones, based on the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries at Leicester University and discussed the fndings of the “Heritage in Hospitals” project. The report states It sets out to show how museums are well placed to respond to changes in public health, using their collections to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals, to counter health inequalities within communities, and contribute positively to the goals of public health bodies. (Dodd and Jones 2014, 3) In the same year, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (2014) commissioned the report Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of

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Culture and Sport. In this report, fnance and its connection to culture, wellbeing and care under the Coalition Government dominate. They wanted to estimate monetary values for well-being impacts “So that we can determine whether or not an intervention creates a net beneft, we would ideally like to express benefts in monetary units thus allowing direct comparison with cost” (7). The Coalition Government were concerned with public investment in the arts and simultaneously were pondering how arts could be available for everyone. Therefore, it was essential sport participation, cultural engagement could produce social outcomes relating to health and civic participation, provided it was connected to the government policies. During the Coalition Government, Arts Council England in 2013 published their Great Art and Culture for Everyone: 10  Year Strategic Framework 2010–2020. This report states, “despite fnancial restrictions, the continuing importance of arts and cultural organisation’s role within local communities in helping them build social capital and build resilience” (32). The word resilience is automatically connected to well-being and care. In 2017, Helena Reckitt, a curator and art critic who teaches Curating in the Art Department, Goldsmiths University, was involved in the event Labour of Curation at the Blackwood Gallery in Toronto, Canada, where she curated the exhibition Habits of Care. This exhibition looked at societal care crises and their diferential efects while simultaneously reasserting care as a collective practice of resilience amid structural forces of neglect. [It seeks not to] seal of institutional context in which Take Care is hosted. Labour of Curation refects on art’s implication in, rather than detached observation of, the crisis of care. A gallery is not a sanctuary but a site where distinct ‘dilemmas of care’ manifest, and are continually negotiated. (Reckitt 2017, 4) The crisis of care has been a concern in the UK before 2017, which is evident in the documents already discussed. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, social capital and cultural inclusion are used to fnd ways to support social welfare and community identity. The presence of COVID-19 compelled institutions to remember the importance of social capital and cultural inclusion, especially when institutions made mistakes dealing with the pandemic. Due to the impact of COVID-19, the UK’s public cultural institutions had to apply for cultural recovery funds from the Conservative Government. Only institutions that were “culturally signifcant” and had sound fnances could receive money (House of Commons 2021, 6). It meant that staf had to be made redundant, and people of colour at the South Bank Centre, Tate institutions and at the Barbican Centre felt targeted while redundancies were imposed. These developments coincided with the presence of Black Lives Matter in the UK, where the American civil rights organisation stood for solidarity

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against global racism. Equally, people with disabilities, working-class people, refugees, asylum seekers and LGBTQ+ felt targeted by Conversative Government policies. Amongst all these tensions and coping with COVID19, the Care Collective published “The Care Manifesto” in 2020 to reveal global carelessness, the impact of neoliberalism that neglects social welfare, community to focus on individual resilience and well-being. The “Manifesto” sees care as “a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and fourishing of life . . . embracing our interdependencies” (The Care Collective 2020, 4–5). Well-being and health became conditions attached to the health of the planet. In April 2020, the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport published the report “Evidence Summary for Policy: The Role of Arts in Improving Health & Wellbeing” still focusing on social outcomes and mental health prevention. This report was in response to the World Health Organisation’s 2019 report “What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Wellbeing”. In July 2020, during the frst UK COVID-19 lockdown, Autograph – the Association of Black Photographers – hosted a series of online exhibitions under the theme Care | Contagion | Community – Self  & Other curated by Renee Mussai, Mark Sealy and Bindi Vora. These exhibitions happened during a year “when contested monuments fell, racial and social justice movements were reignited, cultural and other institutions may have fnally woken up to perpetual cycles of structural racism and systemic exclusions” (Mussi and Sealey 2020, 11) where local, global communities became part of the ecological and cultural climate. Then, in September 2020, the Tate British Art Network Career Curators Group organised Curating, Community and Care that aimed to “explore the increasing urgent matter of how we care for ourselves, our colleagues, our collaborators and our audiences through our work in the arts, within and beyond institutions” www.tate. org.uk/whats-on/online-event/curating-care-and-community that focused on dismantling colonial, ableist tropes, new ways of engaging marginalised groups and curating as a form of repair. This was followed by TATE British Art Network Emerging Curators Group S:E:P:A:L:S: An Intersectional Approach to Care and Safety jointly hosted by Diversity Art Forum and ML. This event set out to redress some of the gaps that were missing from the TATE British Art Network Career Curators Group. The event looked at indigenous ways of approaching curating within a care framework and at the limitations on institutional care, art and health collaborations within hospital environments. These initiatives, Lauren Craig’s S:E:P:A:L:S: theory of indigenous knowledge and ethical cultural memory, connecting it to art practice and curating, Janine Francois’s discussions about the importance of rest as a cultural act against institutional notions of labour and production of time, are some examples that are still connected to transcultural care values framed by social structures but have added ecological values. Leininger’s Universal

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Care is connected to a global understanding of care for everyone, local and global discussions of communities, togetherness in these initiatives are essential to a universal understanding of care that incorporates the consideration of the planet. However, for Wynter categories of race, class and gender continue to reinforce Western power structure systems. Instead, the human should become a hybrid by rewriting descriptions of ourselves as a species connected to the world. In 2022, discussions about well-being, care and culture continue. In June–September Somerset House are hosting Externally Yours: Care, Repair & Healing exhibition and S:E:P:A:L:S group continues to work on their ideas before their publication is available.

Bibliography Arts Council England. 2006. Power of Art Visual Arts: Evidence of Impact, Regeneration, Health, Education and Learning. London: Arts Council England. Arts Council England. 2007. A Prospectus for Arts and Health. London: Arts Council England and Department of Health. Arts Council England. 2013. Great Art and Culture for Everyone: 10 Year Strategic Framework 2010–2020. London: Arts Council England. Arts Council England. 2016. “Hospital Rooms: Helping Mental Health with Art”. www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/hospital-rooms-helping-mental-health-art. Last accessed June 30, 2016. Bignall, Tracey, Samir Jeraj, Emily Helsby, and Jameer Butt. 2019. Racial Disparities in Mental Health: Literature and Evidence Review. London: VCSE Health and Wellbeing Alliance and Race Equity Foundation. Blunkett, David, and Patricia Hewitt. 2005. Health, Work and Well-Being-Caring for Our Future. A Strategy for the Health and Well-being of Working Age People. London: Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and the Health and Safety Executive. The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto. London and New York: Verso. Department of Culture, Media and Sport. 2014. Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport. London: Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Department of Health and Social Care. 2010. Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS. London: Department of Health and Social Care. Dodd, J., and C. Jones. 2014. Mind, Body, Spirit: How Museums Impact Health and Wellbeing. Leicester: Research Centre for Museums and Galleries. Hacking, S., M. Kent, J. Secker, J. Shenton, and H. Spandler. 2007. Mental Health, Social Inclusion and Arts: Developing the Evidence Base. London: National Social Inclusion Programme. House of Commons. 2021. Covid-19: Culture Recovery Fund, Eighth Report of Session 2021–22. London: House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts. Leininger, Madeleine M. 1991. “The Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality”. In Culture Care Diversity and Universality: A Worldwide Nursing Theory. Edited by M.M. Leininger and Marilyn McFarland, 5–68. Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett Learning. Major, John. 1997. “Mr Major’s Speech on Anniversary of Indian and Pakistan Independence”, January  18. https://johnmajorarchive.org.uk/1997/01/18/mr-majorsspeech-on-anniversary-of-indian-and-pakistan-independence-18-january-1997/. Last accessed June 6, 2022.

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McFarland, Marilyn R. 1999. The Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning. Mussi, Renee, and Mark Sealey. Eds. 2020. Care | Contagion | Community: Self & Other. London: Autograph. Oakley, Kate, and Richard Naylor. 2005. New Directions in Social Policy: Developing the Evidence Base for Museums, Libraries and Archives in England. London: Libraries and Archives Council. Owen Wyn, J. 2013. Arts, Health and Wellbeing Beyond the Millennium: How Far Have We Come and Where Do We Want to Go? London: Royal Society for Public Health. Papadopoulos, Irena. 2016. “The Papadopoulos, Tilki and Taylor Model for Development of Cultural Competence in Nursing”. In Transcultural Health and Social Care: Development of Culturally Competent Practitioners. Edited by Irena Papadopolous, 7–24. London: Churchill Livingstone Elsevier. Papadopoulos, Irena, and K. Gerrish. 1999. “Transcultural Competence: The Challenge for Nurse Education”. British Journal of Nursing 8(21): 1453–1470. Papadopoulos, Irena, Mary Tilki, and Gina Taylor. 1998. Transcultural Care: A Guide for Health Care Professionals. Lancaster: Quay Publishing. Reckitt, Helena. 2017. “Habits of Care”. In Labours of Curation. Edited by Letters and Handshakes, 4–11. Toronto: Blackwood Gallery. Reid, J. 2005. Independence, Well-Being and Choice: Our Vision for the Future of Social Care for Adults in England. London: Department of Health and Social Care. Staricof, R. 2004. Arts in Health: A Review of the Medical Literature. London: Arts Council England. Szczepura, A. 2005. “Access to Health Care for Ethnic Minority Populations”. Postgraduate Medical Journal 81: 141–147. Wilson, Melba et al. 2010. Race Equality Action Plan: A Five Year Review. London: National Mental Health Development Unit. World Health Organisation. 1998. Health 21: An Introduction to the Health for All Policy Framework. Copenhagen: World Health Organisation. Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. 2015. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Diferent Future: Conversations”. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human As Praxis. Edited by K. McKittrick, 9–89. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Caring for ‘Range-ful’ Identities in the Work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Helen Kaplinsky

Introduction Each path of the story includes a ceremony: to bury a dead name; to resurrect a trans* ancestor; or undertake self-care at the ‘trans relaxation spa’. Having selected the last option, you are teleported to the safety of ‘Hormone Tower’ run by ‘Our Body Our Choice Inc’. There, you gain access to everlasting pots of hormones. The diferent story branches that make up the installation and browserbased artwork “WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT” (henceforth referred to as “WE ARE HERE”) (Brathwaite-Shirley 2020)1 are a combination of biography and speculative fction. Initiated and directed by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, the desirous, future-orientated mythologies are made up from the testimonies of multiple Black trans* collaborators. Together they form a collective archive where lived experiences are documented through animated gamifed storytelling. The focus of the work circles around the terms of access to these narratives. Defnitive choices and points of implosion mark the forking narrative and develop tension, interrupt the audience’s interactive encounter and encourage refection upon chosen and given modes of identifcation. The operations of click-through in-app and online ‘terms and conditions’ are appropriated and refgured by the artist to create a critical framework for negotiating care for the archive of stories. This chapter unfurls how the artist’s confrontational approach towards audience access can be understood as an act of care and draws parallels between exploitative online infrastructures and the institutions of the art world. The scope of agency Brathwaite-Shirley claims for their act of care complicates any strict distinction between the realms of imagination and embodied material realities. The production of the work is contingent across an interdependent network that involves funders, institutions, online platforms, communities of practice, diasporic and gender-based communities of identifcation. Audiences are challenged to situate themselves within artwork’s narrative and question how certain bodies do or do not ‘ft’ into predetermined standards of identity-based segmentation. In turn, this work

DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-7

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can inform how curators might challenge institutional neoliberal notions of subjectivity, practised through audience segmentation. The world that Brathwaite-Shirley collectively builds is host to a cast of characters that move through a range of states and sometimes appear as non-human fgures. While some are fantastical, with exaggerated features such as elongated fngers and mountains of green hair, others disperse into a translucent cloud of foating pixels. The exaltation of multiple self-defned identities and modes of invisibility claims a space beyond extractive logics of categorisation practised by art institutions. Replete with an urgency to care for Black trans* people, the work of Brathwaite-Shirley is positioned within a history of oppression and contemporary struggles as a space of deliverance for imagining and creating caring infrastructures. The erasure of Black trans* life – a systematic normalisation of violence and victim blaming – is occurring on multiple levels globally and is understood as a conjunction of continuing colonial forces and a recent rise of right-wing anti-“gender ideology” movements.2 Whilst the artwork disseminates frst-person accounts to counteract the erasure of Black trans* lives from cultural memory, the power of visibility is multivalent. Drawing attention to the artists’ working context, namely – surveillance and identitybased segmentation – it is possible to view the narrative devices of ‘WE ARE HERE’ including a ‘terms of service’ text upon entrance and ‘forking paths’ based on identity, as gestures that draw attention to discriminatory forces; where and on what terms one is permitted to move and access – either as a participant or as an observer. First, I will describe identity-based segmentation, where institutional diversity policies perform a bureaucratic extraction of quantitative value from the so-called marginal actors. Second, I situate the work within a history of colonial violence where certain bodies are subject to forced legibility. The artistic strategy against these processes involves an insistence upon “rangeful” (Russell 2020) “multiple” (Star 1990; Stone 1995) identities and modes of anonymity and concealment (Moten 2003; Browne 2015; McKittrick 2021). ‘WE ARE HERE’ was commissioned for the exhibition ‘GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary’ at Science Gallery London (henceforth referred to as ‘SGL’ 2020). I was the curator-producer of the project, working in a freelance capacity.3 Whilst the commissioning of WE ARE HERE sought to directly amplify the voices of collaborators from within the archive on their own terms, this text does something diferent. I’m a white, cis, woman. The experiences of being Black and trans* discussed in the artwork are not mine. My refective reading of both the production and the audience experience of the work hovers, that is to say hesitantly but nonetheless continually drawn, to how Brathwaite-Shirley’s storytelling methodologies and questioning of data extraction online intersects with the curatorial vocation of framing audience journey and the institutional, often marketing-led, drive to discern the identities of actors in the network of cultural production.

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Welcome to the pro-Black pro-Trans* Archive The stories of Black trans* people are channelled through partially nonhuman avatars who act as saviours, occupying possible worlds devoted to their needs. Rifng on queer and horror indie video game aesthetics, these characters and scenes are rendered in digital animations hand-drawn by Brathwaite-Shirley, with haunting soundtracks of digitally recalibrated multiple voices. The artist also performs with her animations as a backdrop, delivering liturgical part spoken-word and part melodic scores. These are incantations for care, to “dig” (Brathwaite-Shirley 2020) for and honour Black trans* ancestors, who whilst they were excessively monitored during their lifetimes have since been misremembered or not remembered at all. Inspired by ‘choose-your-own adventure’ narratives of the 1980s, ‘WE ARE HERE’ forms part of a series of born-digital narratives by BrathwaiteShirley – including VR, browser games, frst-person shooter arcade games and ASCII illustrations – that variously experiment with plot devices and aesthetics across a history of gaming and internet culture. The structure of the work and its contents were produced with a group of Black trans* collaborators in a series of workshops.4 These constituted a collective endeavour of worlding – visioning and negotiating the governance of infrastructures that have high regard for Black trans* life. Collaborators shared autobiographical stories to inform the speculative scenarios we see in the work. Extending out from the design of content, from the avatars to scenarios, voices that make up the soundtrack, the workshops also steered the terms of access and framing for gallery audiences. Ownership over the terms of content contributed also included optional anonymity in the crediting of the work.5 Upon entering the installation version of WE ARE HERE, the visitor is greeted with a wall text that reads: WELCOME TO THE PRO BLACK PRO TRANS ARCHIVE THIS INTERACTIVE ARCHIVE WAS MADE TO STORE AND CENTRE BLACK TRANS PEOPLE TO PRESERVE OUR EXPERIENCES OUR THOUGHTS OUR FEELINGS OUR LIVES TO REMEMBER US EVEN WHEN WE ARE AT RISK OF BEING ERASED YOUR OWN IDENTITY WILL DETERMINE HOW YOU CAN INTERACT WITH THE ARCHIVE AS WELL AS WHAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS

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BE HONEST WITH THE ARCHIVE TO USE THE ARCHIVE TAKE A SEAT IN THE CHAIR IN THE CENTRE OF THE ROOM. USE THE BUTTONS 1,2,3 TO NAVIGATE THE CHOICES WHEN THEY ARE PRESENTED. IN ENTERING THIS SPACE YOU ARE AGREEING TO CENTRE THE BLACK TRANS EXPERIENCE THIS IS A PRO BLACK PRO TRANS SPACE THIS IS NOT YOUR SPACE THIS IS OUR SPACE YOU MAY FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE IF YOU DO NOT SUPPORT BLACK TRANS PEOPLE THEN YOU ARE NOT WELCOME IN THIS ROOM TW: NO TRAUMA HAS BEEN RECREATED IN THIS ARCHIVE BUT THERE ARE MENTIONS OF BURIAL, LOST HISTORY, DEADNAMES, HORMONES AND MISGENDERING THIS WORK CONTAINS SOME FLASHING LIGHTS. (Brathwaite-Shirley 2020) This text, and others like it, which the artist employs in several of their works, is analogous in style to a EULA (End User License Agreement) that pops up after you install software or download an app. Whilst these oftenencountered but little read terms and conditions request permission to track and extract data, the artist’s ameliorative set of terms borrows style but not content. The artist doesn’t want to sell your data. A corrective to past and ongoing inequalities, they quite clearly centre the group the artist identifes with – Black trans* people. With these users in mind, the contract reverses the inclination of a usual EULA and enacts a series of roadblocks in the audience’s journey to prevent what the artist identifes at one point in the narrative as possible ‘trans-tourism’. Following agreement to these boundaries, the room behind opens to reveal a projected arcade game title ‘WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT’. In the centre of the dark screening room, a stage-like pew extends an invitation for participation, a choice of fashing buttons and lurid neon piping that follows the contours of a black leather ‘gamer’ seat. Priority is given to Black trans* visitors with everyone else ofered a diferential role of observation on adjacent benches.6

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Figure 5.1 Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley,  WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF THOSE THAT ARE NOT, 2020. Installation view: GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary, January–February 2020. Source: Courtesy of Science Gallery London, King’s College London.

After pressing a button to begin, the audience are presented with another contract: TERMS AND CONDITIONS: YOU MUST AGREE TO CENTRE BLACK TRANS PEOPLE AND USE YOUR PRIVILEGES TO HELP THEM. THIS IS NOT A  PLACE WHERE WE MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER! YOUR ACTIONS WILL TELL US IF YOU STAND IN SUPPORT OF OUR EXISTENCE. Press 1 to agree, press 2 to decline. If you have picked the Black trans* path, then you don’t get the conditions, the archive implicitly trusts you, it is for you. On each wall fanking the projection are banners of fantastical, nonhuman fgures with a certain self-aware digitally rendered, pixelated fare. Texts overlaid on the images include statements that advocate for a multiplicity of Black trans* experience including: THERE IS POWER IN NOT PASSING. A distorted, synthesised high voice warbles in and out of legibility: “Please don’t let me go” .  .  . “my gaze is permanent” “don’t stand” . . . “Everything you do is vital” . . . “and I feel scared” . . . “in this moment” “and know that someone is watching you”.

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She invokes spiritual traditions with repeated mantras that appeal to a heightened awareness of the present moment. The ancestors of the past are summoned, and they petition audiences, holding their actions in the present accountable for a shared future. Distortion, arising from the use of AutoTune, perforates the legibility of her words. The audio processor, when set to a dizzying level, manipulates her voice to creepy ends, resulting in a depersonalised, mechanical enunciation. This efect not only partially masks the message delivered by the voice, but it also serves to hide the identity of the speaker. After pressing a button to begin, “LOADING . . . SOLIDARITY” there is the ofer of several forking paths. “WHAT DO YOU IDENTIFY AS? 1) I IDENTIFY AS BLACK AND TRANS 2) I IDENTIFY AS TRANS 3) I IDENTIFY AS CIS”. The story continues “YOU HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR HIDING OUR ANCESTORS”. This is my journey, the cis path. I’m told I  have been hiding ancestors and asked to use my privileges to help Black trans* people; however, this should not stand to bolster my ego. I  pass through ‘SECURITY AGAINST TRANS TOURISM’ and extractive tracking cookies are deleted. I  have been responsible for burying people underneath this earth. “Who deserves to live on top of the earth and who has been buried?” I’m assigned the job of digging for Black trans* ancestral history. I need to start loving and caring for Black trans* individuals. ‘SUPPORT US, SUPPORT US, WITH ACTIONS NOT WORDS’. I’m introduced to a forgotten Black trans* ancestor. I must fnd their dead name and bury it on their behalf. My second mission: to join the security team and help a Black trans* femme character remain safe while travelling. Ofered a series of paths, I select “CIS CITY” (Ibid.). I’m told to watch out for cis allies, they can be’ undercover consumers’ (I estimate this involves extracting images of trans* allyship for my own value). I enter a dark tunnel where options close in, I can’t protect the character from an abrupt ambush of being misgendered and the ‘game’ ends. The scenarios encountered, which risk causing feelings of dread, are situated in the path of cis audiences to promote empathy; however, to avoid recreating trauma and allay possible triggering, they are reported in text form rather than illustrated.

Segmentation of Desire Companies pop up countless times a day to ask, kindly, if I  mind while they use my browsing data (and permissibly share it with a third party). Personalised ads and other content are sent and received via my IP address. They may want to store and/or access information on my device, such as cookies. Sometimes, my data is applied by market researchers to generate audience insights and product development. The narrative branches of WE ARE HERE formulate a satire of these mechanisms, with clear parallels to be made between modes of online data collection and extraction of value that takes place in the culture industry.

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Following an amendment to the Race Relations Act in the UK in 2000, Arts Council England (ACE) required museums and galleries to have a diversity policy in place as a condition of funding (cited by Honorato 2020, 409). Honorato concludes that existing critiques and reports on diversity both inside and outside institutions (Khan 1976; Hylton 2007; Fisher 2011; Dewdney et al. 2013) “rely in diferent ways upon an essentialist view of representation” (Honorato 2020, 410) and therefore ingrain Western colonial modes of categorisation from above. Institutions use market segmentation to track and deliver data on their audiences both for internal audit and to report to external bodies such as funders. Segmentation situates each one of us into a series of discrete categories based upon identifed characteristics. Market, or Audience segmentation as it is known in the cultural sector, cleaves out boundaries in a population, enacting Foucauldian biopower on individual bodies and communities at a macro scale. Recently, ACE have been working with The Audience Agency to segment the population into ten subgroups. The model mobilises data on existing preferences, claiming past behaviour is indicative of current desire and thereby reinforcing inequalities of experience (Arts Council England n.d.). According to curator and researcher Carolina Rito, the performance indicators that require institutions to deliver projected diversity outcomes result in what she calls a “fallacy of segmented desires” (Rito 2020, 53). Each subject within the network, from audience to artist, is always splitting and rearranging desires and needs in excess of the singular bracket that the market chooses to make visible. A recent report by MeWe360, “black-led not for proft that champions Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic entrepreneurs in the arts and creative industries” (MeWe360 n.d.) funded by ACE, gathered qualitative feedback about the experiences of BAME art workers during the pandemic. Whilst in parallel with the Black Lives Matter movement, there was a wave of opportunities “designed to increase diversity” (Osborne and Doeser 2020, 1), the report provides critiques of institutional short-sightedness, including the need to overhaul White corporate structures that oversee the schemes. One artist interviewee commented, “I think people don’t really understand the optics of kind of going, if you’re Black and Brown go through this door. And if you’re not an ethnic minority, you can go through the front door” (Osborne and Doeser 2020, 19). However, ring-fenced opportunities are instigated by artists as well as institutions – as in the case of BrathwaiteShirley’s workshops, for POC trans* people – and this artist-led activity is also subject to extractive and uncaring mechanisms. While institutional specifcation can be characterised as surveilling, quantifying and fnancialising diversity – a category of diference, what strategies do artists have at their disposal to impart care, or simply “think diferently about diference”? (Braidotti 1994, 78). At a microscopic scale, segmentation is a term applied to the process of cell division. This division within an organism, an iterative becoming “other” which is necessary for life, brings

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to mind Braidotti’s emphasis on “Zoe” (life) as “vital and self-organising” matter (2018, 292). Her monistic understanding of Zoe – an entanglement with cross-species subjects and non-human forms of intelligence such as computation – places promise in speculation. Particularly, artistic modes of speculation, which can according to Braidotti express “prophetic desires” (2013, 192) – an insistence that the future be imagined to be enacted in the present. Da Silva’s “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics” (2014) is inspired by narrative forms that are not familiar as existing tropes of representation. She describes the characters penned by science fction author Octavia Butler as myriad modes of speculation that are also palpable in the avatars of WE ARE HERE. Da Silva’s theory asks what a world without universal reason and its given segmentations might look like, exemplifed by worlds imagined by Black feminist artists that defy the laws of space–time; bodies shape-shift, time-travel, and experience extreme empathy, with no distinction between the so-called real “and empathised” feelings (2014, 93). There is an urgent tone to underwriting the accounts of the unobservable and fantastical infrastructures of care that challenge given ‘truths’. The speculative storylines shared in WE ARE HERE are afrmative of the desires of trans* audiences and bypass moral disciplining, such as those imposed through medical paths to transition – a prerequisite for which is the truth of a gender dysphoria diagnosis.

Rangeful, Glitching Identities Brathwaite-Shirley’s avatars glitch given modes of institutional segmentation because they are profoundly multiple in their identities beyond given categories, both aesthetically and fguratively. The self-identifed categories that make up the forking path narrative of WE ARE HERE can be read as a critical refection on bureaucratic segmentation descriptors – inherited from Enlightenment ontology, point towards a refguring of existing infrastructures of recognition. However, ultimately, the artist’s approach to representation, through speculative avatars, stands to dismantle the use of categories encouraged by government policy and instead renders identity wild, unstable, fuzzy and unrecognisable to given tick boxes. Figuration is often slight, a clash of bright colours and shimmering surfaces, bodies melt into an ethereal background of pulsating pixelated animation. One of the avatars, ‘Cryingforyourgender’ has no facial features. Are they hiding a face or does lamenting gender render them featureless? By working with speculative modes of characterisation, Brathwaite-Shirley invites audiences to challenge fxed forms of recognition. Her psychedelic prisms for multiple membership that expands subjectivity beyond the given category of ‘human’ can be traced in notions of hybridity and mythological representations of monstrosity found in contemporary video games – some have several heads and others body parts that resemble sea creatures, insects and reptiles that are chimerical combinations. Often, only the odd hint of human-like

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subjectivity survives – a failing hand, a grimace. Non-human automatons also feature fat, cut-out human-shaped armies of robot-like fgures that chant ‘PRO BLACK’ and the soundtrack includes a robotic voice. Does the intonation partially conceal words or is it an esoteric language? These dazzling fgures encompass everything in their existence by means of being allied to no single defnition. They are always shifting, occupying and seen from many perspectives simultaneously. A motto repeated in WE ARE HERE states “THERE IS POWER IN NOT PASSING”. With this phrase, the aspiration to transition and be recognised as belonging to one binary gender category or another is rejected. Discussions of multiplicity and identity were important threads in the work of feminist science and technology theorists back in the 1990s. Feminist sociologist Susan Leigh Star described how for most people, lived experiences involve many seemingly contradictory roles – a patchwork of identity markers – some of which must be suppressed in order for an individual to be recognised and function within technocratic systems. She implored “we gain access to these (suppressed, multiple) selves” by “refusing to discard any of our selves in an ontological sense – refusing to ‘pass’ or become pure” (1990, 82). Undisciplined subjecthood is pathology under a neoliberal regime, with attendant terms such as multiple selves and split-personality (1990, 82). In 1995, transgender media theorist and artist Allucquere Rosanne ‘Sandy’ Stone repurposed the term MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder), removing the D and severing ties with the stigma of medical, institutional, categories. Writing at a time when virtual play environments such as MUDS (multiple user domains) were a novel medium, considered “a context for constructions and reconstructions of identity” (Turkle 1994, cited by Stone 1995, 34), Stone framed MP as a condition both arising from emerging network culture and also present in cultures with longer histories, such as the indigenous Mashpee. The nascent years of the consumer internet have been characterised as promoting naive optimism regarding identity, with cyberfeminists including Sadie Plant claiming virtual space would usher in a new world of fuid identity and exceptional sovereignty, granted to white women (1996 cited by Wilk 2013). In the age of text-based internet A/S/L identity,7 as the famous cartoon and later internet meme jokes “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (Steiner 1993). Post-Internet theorists including Gene Mchugh (2016/2009–2010) and Marisa Olson (Regine and Olson 2008) argued, now more than ten years ago, that as online space matured, with the ascent of social media and trusted fnancial transaction, online identities should be understood as inseparable and entangled with every aspect of the AFK (Away From Keyboard) world and its attendant inequalities.8 Russell, who speaks as a queer POC who spent signifcant amounts of time socialising in chat rooms as a teenager (2020, 3), makes a diferent case. In Glitch Feminism “a new manifesto for cyberfeminism” she argues against the predominantly white Post-Internet theory and proposes that the mobilisation

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of speculative, glitching identities by artists on social media are not naive but a form of collective care by means of “strategic occupation” (25): Imbuing digital material with fantasy today is not a retro act of mythologising; it continues as a survival mechanism. Using the Internet to play, perform, explore still has potential. Giving ourselves this space to experiment perhaps brings us closer to a projection of a “sustainable future”. (Russell 2020, 23) An aspect of glitch – range – is particularly pertinent to the work of Brathwaite-Shirley as it describes feminist artists’ approaches to world-building identities online: “Embracing the plausibility of range – that is, fantasizing, playing, experimenting by donning diferent ‘skins’ – becomes an act of empowerment, self-discovery and even self-care” (2020, 108). Range can be understood as a feminist extension of Stuart Hall’s unfxing of cultural identity “as a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation” (1997, 222). Part of the wider proposition of glitch, range is an aesthetics of movement, a slipping and sliding, a range-ful identity that takes up space in multiple directions (108). Through what Russell describes as “uselessness as a strategic tool” (69) and a “refusal to perform” (30) the range-ful identities parsed by automated and institutional fows – such as browser or gallery audience data collection – become “rendered unreadable” (68). The bodies formed through glitch cannot, in their insistent multiplicity, be smoothly categorised by the contemporary tools of Enlightenment categorisation in the age of “platform capitalism” –namely algorithms or surveillance capitalism (Srnicek 2017, 65). In this interaction of identity with automated processes, Russell understands range as an “act of self-care” (108). Care manifests as an obstruction, a statement to counteract extractive business models.

Creativity in Concealment Notions of creativity in concealment described in Black studies are fertile grounds for reading the aesthetics of Brathwaite-Shirley where images and sounds move in and out of legibility, often intentionally distorted to protect the identity of those speaking, watching or listening. As well as using digital distortion efects, Brathwaite-Shirley’s scores combine improvisation and the abstract skitting intonations of jazz with a kind of low-f R&B. While Black music culture – jazz and improvisation – is discussed by Fred Moten as the very nexus of Black identity and resistance to objectifcation (2003), Katherine McKittrick has recently extended the discussion of these methods, arguing that they celebrate the creativity of secrets, lying, recoding and fraud fundamental to Black survival through storytelling (2021, 8).9

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For Brathwaite-Shirley, concealment is sometimes extended to omission. The trigger warning (TW) of WE ARE HERE which reassures visitors that “no trauma has been recreated” delivers the pinnacle of the narrative in a matter-of-fact text form, rather than illustration. The break in representation serves as an axis to critique the popular consumption of images of Black and trans* bodies as primary sites of trauma and pain. Responsibility to decolonise imaginations often falls solely onto the shoulders of Black cultural producers. This translates as an obligation to create artistic products from trauma, images of pain, understood through a narrative of resilient life and survival against all odds. Rather than showing, BrathwaiteShirley implies the existence of trauma in her withdrawal of direct imagery. Employing self-censorship, she interrupts the extractive exhibitionary mode and instead chooses to imbue our imagination with speculative images of desire that ask for responses with actions rather than a consuming gaze. In the expanding feld of Black surveillance studies, Simone Browne’s “Dark Matter” (2015) is a foundational articulation that violence imparted upon people of colour is materialised as an insistence on making certain bodies visible. Browne narrates the politics of visibility citing the North American lantern laws of the eighteenth century, in which people of colour were made to carry lamps when unaccompanied by a white person. The lamps are termed a “supervisory device” (Ibid., 149) and encode “Black luminosity” (Ibid., 150) as a necro-political technology that continues to serve white supremacy. Following Browne’s work, Ruha Benjamin’s concept of the ‘New Jim Code’ goes on to argue that contemporary forms of digital capture, particularly those employed in the North American carceral system such as crime prediction algorithms, represent the current face of technopositivism and the role of digital culture in society at large (2019, 1). Beauchamp describes how trans* people are subjected to heightened tracking, perpetuated by both the public and the security state, on an everyday basis. It is these processes of security and surveillance that produce the category of ‘transgender itself’. Allegations of gender deviance, deception and noncompliance are used to justify surveillance as means to uncover a so-called true identity (Beauchamp 2018, 132). In the work of Brathwaite-Shirley, identity is not authorised or surveilled from above. The audience have the opportunity to self-identify – either Black and trans*, trans*, or cis. If these options seem few and unambiguous, they are demonstrative of how singular truth is embedded in everyday classifcation. Harsh divisions reproduce myriad inequalities, cutting into diferent fows of experience and deeming some truths acceptable over others. To be seen is distinct from forced legibility and its attendant possibilities for extraction. Brathwaite-Shirley’s means of narration speaks to a tradition of feminist, Black praxis where to be seen is to be recognised and understood by a community who share self-defned aspects of identity. Audre Lorde’s “Zaimi” (1982) which was coined by the author as its own genre – “a biomythography”: a hybrid of biography, mythology and history (Daniell

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1982) – emerged at a time when there was a growing demand for Black women and gender non-conforming people to see one another creating and be seen through writing that foregrounded subjective, situated voice. Whilst the melding of biography and fction has become a key strategy for many artists today, including Brathwaite-Shirley, the work of Lorde, as part of a larger movement of queer writing of colour where “genre boundaries no longer hold” (De Lauretis 1991, ix),10 can be understood as a precursor to this more recent movement in contemporary art.

Conclusion As cultural workers we should be alert to the extractive operations of identity-based segmentation, too often shaped by the fnancial priorities of institutions and instead follow the strategies of artists who act to unfx categorisation through speculative storytelling and methods of becoming undetectable. Brathwaite-Shirley is one of many artists responding to a violent, bureaucratic context of visibility and her interventions, which interrupt audiences smooth access to the narrative fow, can be understood as care protocols. Emerging from a post-digital generation and working with a keen awareness to avoid starry-eyed techno-solutionism, these protocols are not fnite responses but instead make space for expansive, practicable desires. WE ARE HERE asks for trust and takes on immense responsibility, promising to safeguard, perhaps the contents of an archive or the audiences themselves from co-option. While stories act to compose the imaginations of audiences, the works are not limited by the realm of the symbolic. Infrastructural modes of care, such as the terms and conditions of contract, put in place space–time boundaries and enable self-defned communities to speak on their own terms.

Notes 1 The installation version was frst commissioned for Science Gallery London exhibition Genders: Shaping and Breaking the Binary (Kaplinsky et al. 2020)January 13, 2020–March 16, 2020 (originally scheduled to stay open until June 28, 2020, it closed early due to COVID-19) and is accessible online at blacktransarchive.com. 2 The relation between right-wing populism and transphobia is particularly prominent in Hungary and Brazil, where trans* people are sufering governmentsanctioned discrimination and violence (Luz et al. 2021; Parti et al. 2021). Whilst gender studies in the academy is being dismantled in these countries, in the UK, transphobic campaigners who defne themselves as ‘gender-critical’ feminists are fourishing in academies through gender studies departments. In addition to binary notions of sexual diference, this anti-trans faction of gender studies is increasingly understood as aligned with far-right policies such as anti-immigration (Tudor 2021). 3 I started work on the project in July 2018 and in November 2019 took parental leave and producer Jessie Krish covered my role for the last two months of production.

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4 The collaborators included members of ‘transcend’ a support group local to SGL for ‘gender questioning young people’ convened by charity Metro  and artists from Brathwaite-Shirley’s community of practice: Marikiscrycrycry, Pacheanne, Bernice Mulenga, Ornella Ospino-Blkmoodyboi, Shay P-W, Zamy, CamusDoughen, Elijah Che, Travis Alabanza, Raks, Arthur Kibet, Vik, A  Marlowe and Christopher. Tobi Adbajo, Ebun Sodipo and Jacob V. Joybe were workshop engineers alongside Brathwaite-Shirely. 5 Due to need for a safe space for POC non-binary and trans* people to share in, no gallery staf members were present during the workshops. The convening of visions, a means of archiving Black trans* imagination was undertaken according to the artist’s stipulations, further amended by the wider group. 6 Benches alongside the ‘gamer player’ seat invite the audience to watch, hence one can view the path of someone with a diferent identity from yourself. 7 A/S/L refers to age/sex/location, a typical shorthand for getting to know chatroom users in the 1990s. 8 Rejecting dualistic language that divides experiences as either IRL (in real life) or online, Russell prefers AFK (away from keyboard) as it acknowledges even when someone steps away from the screen, they continue to be present online. 9 McKittrick quotes ‘The Grey Album’ by poet Kevin Young 2012 as exemplary. 10 De Lauretis, editor of Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities (1991), lists Lorde among indigenous and Black feminist writers, activists, artists and theorists crossing genres (1991, ix). Whilst the contributors are writing from a lesbian or queer perspective, their views and the omission of trans* authors whilst problematic is not indicative of anti-trans sentiment. The writings of contributors have since been taken up by trans* activists (The Audre Lorde Project n.d.).

Bibliography Arts Council England, n.d. “Culture-based Segmentation.” www.artscouncil.org.uk/ participating-and-attending/culture-based-segmentation. Last accessed August 16, 2021. Beauchamp, Toby. 2018. Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Durham: Duke University Press. Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Medford: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 1994. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Diference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge; Malden: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2018. “On Afrmative Ethics”. In Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy. Edited by Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn, 288–308. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brathwaite-Shirley, Danielle. 2020. “We Are Here Because of Those That Are Not”. Interactive Animated Film. https://blacktransarchive.com/. Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. Daniell, Rosemary. 1982. “The Poet Who Found Her Own Way”. The New York Times, December 19. www.nytimes.com/1982/12/19/books/the-poet-who-foundher-own-way.html. Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics”. The Black Scholar 44(2): 81–97.

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Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2016. “On Diference without Separability.” In Incerteza Viva: 32nd Bienal de São Paulo: 7 Sept–11 Dec 2016. Edited by Jochen Volz and Gabi Ngcobo, 57–65. São Paulo: Fundaçao Bienal de São Paulo. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1991. Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dewdney, Andrew, David Dibosa, and Victoria Walsh. 2013. Post-Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum. London: Routledge. Fisher, Jean. 2011. “Cultural Diversity and Institutional Policy”. In Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity. Edited by Richard Appignanesi, 61–68. London: Third Text. Hall, Stuart. 1997. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”. In Undoing Place?, 12. London and New York: Routledge. Honorato, Cayo. 2020. “The Predicament of Representation in the Politics of Diversity: A Discussion Through Tate Encounters”. Museum and Society 18(4): 409–424. Hylton, Richard. 2007. The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector – A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976–2006. Bath: Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts. Kaplinsky, Helen et al. 2020. GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary. Group Exhibition. London: Science Gallery London. https://london.sciencegallery.com/ genders. Khan, Naseem. 1976. The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Community Relations Commission. Lorde, Audre. 1982. Zami, a New Spelling of My Name (Crossing Press Feminist Series). Trumansburg: Crossing Press. Luz, Paula M. et al. 2021. “Association of Discrimination, Violence, and Resilience with Depressive Symptoms among Transgender Women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Analysis”. Transgender Health 7(1): 101–106. McHugh, Gene. 2016/2009–2010. “Net Art Anthology: Post Internet”. Net Art Anthology: Post Internet (blog). https://anthology.rhizome.org/post-internet. McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries). Durham: Duke University Press. MeWe360. n.d. “MeWe360”. https://mewe360.com/. Last accessed April 1, 2022. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Osborne, Kevin, and James Doeser. 2020. “Covid-19 and the Experience of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Creative Entrepreneurs”. MeWe360. http://mewe360. com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Covid-19-the-Experience-of-BAME-CreativeEntrepreneurs.pdf. Parti, Katalin et al. 2023. “Beyond Obstacles: Toward Justice for Victims of Sexual Violence in Hungary. A Literature Review”. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 24(1): 203–217. Plant, Sadie. 1996. “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations”. In Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Edited by R. Shields. London: SAGE. Regine, and Marisa Olson. 2008. “Interview with Marisa Olson”. We Make Money Not Art (blog), March  28. https://we-make-money-not-art.com/how_does_one_ become_marisa/.

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Rito, Carolina. 2020. “What Is the Curatorial Doing?”. In Institution as Praxis: New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research. Edited by Carolina Rito and Bill Balaskas, 44–60. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London; New York: Verso. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Theory Redux. Cambridge; Malden: Polity Press. Star, Susan Leigh. 1990. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions”. The Sociological Review 38(1_suppl): 26–56. Steiner, Peter. 1993. “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”. The New Yorker 69(20): 61. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. 1995. “Identity in Oshkosh”. In Posthuman Bodies. Edited by Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Tudor, Alyosxa. 2021. “Decolonizing Trans/Gender Studies?” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 8(2): 238–256. Turkle, Sherry. 1994. “Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in the MUDs”. Mind, Culture, and Activity 1(3): 158–167. Wilk, Elvia. 2013. “Where Looks Don’t Matter and Only the Best Writers Get Laid Feminism and Other Unfulflled Promises of the Text-Based Internet”. Cluster Mag. www.elviapw.com/WLDM-ew-041913-2.pdf. Young, Kevin. 2012. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

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Decolonial and Heritage Practices in the Context of Current Global Challenges Quilombola Museology and Digital Technologies in Brazilian Community Museums Mirella Maria

In recent years, the Latin American political scenario has been marked by a series of changes in the content of state policies in their diferent contexts. The political conceptions of both the progressive and the conservative ways are in debate which further promotes a long process of political crisis. The Brazilian territory has struggled with the steady decline in public investments in art and culture, intensifying since 2018, with the rise of conservative political positions and cultural heritage devaluation of vulnerable communities. The current presidential cultural political strategies (2018–2022) have gone through processes of rupture and continuity in their programmes and institutions generating fnancial instabilities in the cultural axis of the country (Calabre 2009; Cury 2002). In the politics of the progressive years of 2000–2008, culture was amplifed as the everyday life of the Brazilian population, from the fne arts to popular production; however, in the 2020s, the perception and attention to culture have been restricted and censored, denounced in speeches and its funding severely reduced. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in more reduction and invisibility for the area of culture in Brazil, since the producers of knowledge were not allowed to circulate due to the high rates of contamination and death in the country; the state further reduced funding and incentives to promote alternatives for maintenance and survival of the cultural producers. Cultural spaces that were valued in the policies of the previous progressive governments now sufer drastically with cuts and lack of recognition in the current federal structure. The cultural institutions derived from the struggles of progressive social movements have felt in a specifc way the constant clashes of government policies and the constraints imposed during the pandemic. With less funding, little government recognition and appreciation, and learning to deal with a hybrid/remote system of performance, these institutions have in fact exercised their role as artivism spaces, drawing on a joint artistic and

DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-8

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activist perspective to tackle the cultural heritage devaluation. A neologism coined by Chicanos artists from East Los Angeles and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, México, artivism spaces generally are conducted by marginalized people, who have been facing an old colonial system that reduces and inferiorizes their knowledge and technologies (Seyal 2020). To oppose these efects, artivism: is adopted to demonstrate a more radical approach and value-loaded attitude to engage in social-spatial issues through arts projects. Artivism is also an intentional attempt to bring about the community and environmental concerns and collaborate with the participant subjects to precipitate the transformation of certain social meaning. (Kang 2006, 153) These colonized populations are subject to diference markers such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and more, which serve to marginalize their spaces in national and civic structures of art and culture. Thus, the challenge is to strengthen diferent situated pieces of knowledge (Haraway 1988) to reframe colonial rule, which has been debated academically and empirically through decolonial insights. The colonial rupture in Brazilian culture is best understood from a critical interdisciplinary approach that has resulted in the concept of decolonization, which calls for the profound revision of political colonization and coloniality that underlie oppressive practices (Quijano 1997; Lugones 2010; Collins and Bilge 2020). This implies a critical observation of colonial structures that have survived until the present in Brazil. Strategies of rethinking (hooks 1994) political–educational practices are fundamental to strengthen situated knowledge and critically reframe the ruling colonial conditions. From the 1990s, the decolonial turn (Quijano 1997) was a practical approach undertaken in cultural places such as museums, which brought decolonial thinking into their museological practices. The movement for change in museums might be seen as a mobilization to engage in a critical way to rewrite histories, memories, and visualities that have been devalued (Maldonado-Torres 2014). Traditional museums have constantly negotiated and learned about their practices and positionality to overcome a stereotypical and colonial discourse. The socio-museology theory (Santos 2003) has been used as a practice in several traditional museums rethinking social experience especially after the war of 1939–1945, when countries around the world were engaged in political, cultural, economic, and educational reforms. In this process, these museums open a dialogue with other and diverse collections and the people, histories, and communities represented (or not) in the museums. By contrast, other ways of organizing cultural heritage have already been carried out in organizations such as community museums, which are spaces of articulation built by marginalized populations. The description of researchers Teresa Morales Cuauhtémoc

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Camarena, Silva Arze, and Jennifer Shepard of the characteristics of a community museum describes a broadening of its concept: The museum was created in response to the needs felt by the population. Often the need to afrm the possession of its heritage arises when a community feels the risk of losing it. In the course of the museum’s development, it has been found that it responds to many concerns. The appreciation of the past leads to a refection on the present. Why has the community changed and what is it looking for in the future? In the museum, the community confrms that it has the right to analyze such questions for itself. It confrms its ownership of its heritage and its decision of what to do with it. It responds to the right of all its inhabitants to know themselves, to be educated, and to recreation. (Morales and Camarena 2004, 1) Community museums have already presented practical alternatives of knowledge production and heritage assets in curating, exhibiting, and collecting. The signifcant belonging construction in the discourse and visuality brings the audience an active representative of the museum (Desvallées 1992). Community museums work through a collective process that belongs to a community that creates and organizes in its direction (Morales and Camarena 2004), aiming to break the crystallized colonial idea of the museum institution as a repository of hegemonic memory. Beyond the struggle, the act takes the form of preserving the richly counter-hegemonic memory with few structural resources and almost no governmental support. Moreover, it is essential to consider the challenging period of physical closure of cultural spaces due to a pandemic, which may set a precedent for a process of epistemicide (Carneiro 2005) of the knowledge produced in the museums in question. In this context, community museums are addressed as empirical knowledge producers according to socio-museology theory (Santos 2003) that value and diversify heritage assets, such as collections, curation, and exhibitions, including the audience as an active participant and producer of the museum’s legacy (Desvallées 1992). In particular, the female leadership in Brazilian museums and their communities have been rethinking the dynamics and the impact that the pandemic has caused on the institutions. Historically, marginalized Brazilian women – African, Black and indigenous – have always played a decisive role in the (re)organization of their communities under the colonial structure seen by slavery, dictatorship, inequality, sexism, and racism (Nascimento 1982). The quilombo, an Afro-Brazilian organization where women still have a crucial presence organizing political and cultural articulation between the quilombola community and the federal state, is an example. Women’s leadership remains in the contemporary context, valuing their ancestral cultural heritage in artistic institutions. To preserve marginalized knowledge,

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digital resources have been implemented in museum communication as a creative tool and an ally to (re)articulate and (re)disseminate decolonial knowledge. The use of technology is irreversible in culture. Cybermuseum studies have already recognized the vast virtual knowledge (Lévy 2013) and the deconstruction of oppressive social hierarchies that ignore the domain of self-knowledge and self-determination produced by communities in virtual environments (Gonzalez et al. 2013). This activity gains signifcance because media and information literacy (Balčytienė 2020) can contribute substantially to critical strategies, methodologies, evaluations, and interpretations that foreground community museums’ cultural heritage in online and ofine platforms. It is important to emphasize that even if marginalized communities experience social barriers that prevent the full quality and access to information and technology, the contact and literacy with the media in general provokes them to recreate strategies for disseminating museological knowledge and criticize the standard structure aligned to a hegemonic and historically favoured public. The presence of poor and/or Black women leaders from marginalized communities ruptures the pattern already produced in the digital media, developing decolonial practices, which can be also denominated as artivism (Costa and Coelho 2018) and establishing diverse roots to disseminate diverse cultural heritage views through art and activism.

Community Museums in Practice: Iaiá Procópia and Muquifu Brazilian cultural institutions led by women, like the Iaiá Procópia Museum, exemplify decolonial and digital practices and keep the knowledge produced by Afro-descendants alive. Procópia dos Santos Rosa is a pioneer and descendant of the Kalunga group – one of the Bantu African culture people – who allowed her private house to become a museological site for the community museum foundation. Her home, now the Iaiá Procópia Museum, was constituted in 2019 as a cultural, political, and identity house-territory. The people have formed self-sufcient communities named quilombos and have been living for more than 200 years isolated in remote regions, currently located in the Brazilian state of Goiás. Quilombo is the name for a struggle settlement and also a term for the subjective knowledge of the Black enslaved people (Moura 1987; Nascimento 1982). The political and historical role of the quilombos in Brazil brings us the importance of the struggle and resistance of Black African and African-descendant peoples who strategically articulated these territories, transforming them into political spaces, with their own economy and subsistence. In all the spaces in Brazil, where slavery was stratifed, the quilombos were one of the ways of confronting the colonial system, at least until the middle of the twentieth century. It is important to note that in the stories involving the narrative of the quilombos throughout Brazil, the male fgure predominated, bringing

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all the stereotypes linked to hardness, bravery, virility, and even violence as a form of resistance. In recent decades, there has been a transformation in the narratives resulting from the inclusion presence and voice of quilombola women presenting their stories and experiences, without an intermediation or invisibilization of their bodies and memories. During the 1990s, the Federal Constitution extended legal rights to the territories inhabited by their ancestors to the quilombola descendants. This contributed to the insertion of the feminine presence and its cultural practices, which researcher Marilea Almeida identifes as a territory of afection, understood as: a feld of political action that is expressed by the maintenance, creation, or redefnition of potential spaces for those who live in the quilombola territories. Territories of afections are not defned by the quilombola legal identity, but by the relationship that is established with the place and with those who live there. This is a political attitude that favors the use of knowledge as a way to expand spaces of subjectivation, constituted by means of the shifting of meanings that these women carry out in relation to the efects of exclusions of race, class, or gender that afect their bodies and the territories of their communities. (Almeida 2016, 218) To be a resident of a quilombo, to be a quilombola, is to be diverse and to understand that these territories and their histories are always changing. The Iaiá Procópia Museum can be understood in relation to this increasing acknowledgement of women’s role in this heritage, as it is a space created by women that foregrounds the material and immaterial heritage of their knowledge and their ancestors. In this way, it is important to understand that the conservation of the knowledge of the quilombola women of Goiás was organized with the understanding that Dona Iaiá’s house is also part of this narrative. The house museum organizes exhibitions based on transdisciplinary and refexive curation, placing its structure, material and immaterial knowledge of Iaiá Procópia and the community ancestry as active and empowering valorization agents of the quilombola community. The collection consists of objects from the Kalunga population such as weavings, ceramics, agricultural tools, photographs, audiovisual materials of Afro-Brazilian artistic manifestations, and homemade objects donated for displaying their daily life. The digital practices used for registering activities unmask the unequal structural access to technology and its tools, which are used to virtually and materially reach the local audience and those in other areas (Sabharwal 2015). A symbolic event to represent the museum’s use of technology is the construction of live-streaming interactions via social networks like Facebook to publicize the Iaiá Procópia Museum’s face-to-face and online work. These events, promoted in a partnership organized by the Aldir Blanc Law (a

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federal law passed in 2020 to allow for emergency measures to the cultural sector), provided revenue for the museum and technological apparatus for online streaming of conversations. In the discussions, Ms Iaiá Procópia and her granddaughter Bia Kalunga shared, in a didactic and afectionate way, the prayers performed inside the quilombola territory and an understanding of their place in the daily life of the people who live in this space. The video highlights how the chant is constructed, how Ms Iaiá learns and visualizes the prayers, and how the community welcomes and disseminates the quilombo and the museum’s collection through online recordings. The museological place thus is animated by the mobilization of women who – on a daily basis – foster the memory and history of this space and reafrm this strength through the prayers. At one of the online meetings held in July  2021, on their Facebook platform, Iaiá Procópia and Bia Kalunga emphasized the importance of ancestral practices such as prayers that are spoken and sung, recognizing orality as a tool for the continuation of knowledge. In this way, the housemuseum of Dona Iaiá, which already materializes its orality with records and objects of the practices of her community, now in the online context translates knowledge with live records of what is found in the daily life of the place. Moreover, the form of recovery of Afro-Brazilian knowledge through online resources is reinvented by using the social network to bring quilombola content that is little socialized within the traditional perspective of museology. With this description and understanding of what a museum, collection, and curatorship is for Dona Iaiá and Bia Kalunga, it is possible to see that this production of knowledge subverts the site of social networks and manifests a territory of afections (Almeida 2016) that feeds on art and activist practices. It is important to point out that even with the use of mobile phones with low connection in the quilombola territory, due to the wide social inequality in the country and the access to the internet in Brazil, the Iaiá Procópia museum manages to produce as digital content the oral technologies of the Afro matrix, a knowledge still marginalized due to structural racism in the country. The whole restructuring of the domain of media and information literacy to disseminate Afro-diasporic cultural manifestations in digital platforms (Guerreiro 2020) translates the academic and empirical study of quilombola museology (Neves 2019), a Brazilian perspective of art history valuing Afro-descendants’ methods of collecting, exhibiting, and preserving knowledge in the feld and online. In dialogue with a sociomuseological perspective, quilombola museology provides a structural analysis of the relationship between museum studies and the knowledge of Afro-descendants. Through this museum concept, the community critically re-elaborates the virtual environment to exhibit, curate, collect, and disseminate its knowledge from a decolonial perspective. In the same way, the Muquifu Museum has recognized the word quilombo as an analytic category to evoke territorial and cultural perspectives on the

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outskirts of Belo Horizonte, the southeast region of Brazil. The Muquifu Museum was created by 14 local women activists who are developing an independent perspective on museum practice. The Muquifu Museum of Quilombos and Peripheral Urban Areas (2012) bears in its name the words quilombo and muquifu as that refer to Afro-diasporic perspectives and give reference to the Afro-descendant population who resisted during the colonial period and were expelled from the large urban centres to live in peripheral communities with a poor quality of life and civic infrastructure. These spaces, called agglomerates or sometimes slums, are also ignored by a government which fails to provide proper economic, cultural, and geographical access to its residents. Subjected to structural, political, social, and cultural exclusion, the populations located in these marginalized communities reorganize themselves by creating spaces for art and culture that represent their realities aesthetically and that also carry out exchanges with other cultural models of seeing and thinking with art. In these exchanges, peripheral cultural movements are strengthened and promoted by the communities themselves and that occupy religious, abandoned, or recreated spaces in the region. In the case of the Muquifu Museum, the space occupied was made available by the Santos Pretos Catholic Church.1 The Muquifu Museum organizes objects that are meaningful to the marginalized people from the communities and slums in which it is situated to safeguard the memories of Afro-descendant populations. Muquifu is an urban quilombo, predominantly formed by Afro-descendant women, that focuses on the local memory preservation of vulnerable residents of the Morro do Papagaio and Santa Lucia community.2 This quilombo has constructed a self-sufcient museum with visual, ethnographic, and historical narratives of the locals that go beyond the community borders. The collection consists of oral and physical materials, such as tapes and photographs of Afro-Brazilian religious rituals from the African Bantu and homemade traditional objects which are donated by the residents. The term quilombo is used by the museum to signify that it is a space of culture and art that is in the process of reworking its existence, thinking of other ways to expose and connect with the public: [B]eyond curatorial processes, public interest and technical capacity, the symbolic dimension reveals that the museum is a mirror of several categories of social representation, understood as a process capable of assuming diferent forms and presenting itself in diferent ways, according to the value systems prioritized in each society. The museum can be recognized as a process, because it admits subversions and dismantlers, especially when we deal with its use by the community that shelters it. (Scheiner 2003, 41)3 Scheiner’s description of the museum allows us to appreciate the museum’s close and singular regard for the people who organized objects to occupy

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this space, as well as the way of exhibiting, curating, and thinking about art in this place. The museum, which is so well-articulated in the face-toface context, is also seeking to translate and activate digital technology to also respect the way in which Afro-Brazilian knowledge is presented, without invisibilities occurring in the online space. The virtual environment is already present in its practices, and the community is re-appropriating social media to produce critical knowledge about the synchronous and asynchronous activities of the borders (Guerreiro 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the institution carried out dozens of online activities, collaborating efectively with social movements, cultural spaces, artists, and producers to keep the museum’s collection alive. An example of these actions was the activity “Digital Museum: places in transformation”, which is a joint activity with diverse museums in Brazil, organized with the partnership of IBRAM – Brazilian Institute of Museums.4 The Muquifu Museum organized an online presentation to introduce the digital curatorship of TV Muquifu – a channel to present the museum’s collection. One of the stories broadcasted on Muquifu TV was about the crown of Dona Marta, one of the oldest community leaders of the region and queen of the Afro-Brazilian cultural practice called Congado.5 The crown is one of the most important symbols of representation of the Brazilian Congado celebration, a political and cultural manifestation that has its roots in the Congo royal dynasty in the country. The online episode used part of the physical environment of the museum and a presenter, who narrated the story of Dona Marta and the crown, highlighting it in the visual record. The beauty of the video is to observe how Dona Marta is exalted in her community and how all the knowledge built by African and Afro-Brazilian ancestors is perpetuated for generations, as for example with the Congado celebration, both in the territory where the Muquifu Museum is located and in several cities in Brazil. The territory of afections again manifests itself, exalting Black women as producers of knowledge. The broadcast became viral news in Brazil due to its empathetic and respectful perspective to narrate a nationally known Afro-Brazilian manifestation. The Muquifu Museum, as well as the Iaiá Procópia Museum, also had a contribution from the federal government, with funds allocated to foster activities and materials both before and during the pandemic. The use of these resources becomes evident to the audience when we observe the detailed audiovisual information and graphics created by the components of the Muquifu Museum. Furthermore, the youth of the community had actively participated in the proposition and construction of online activities promoted in the Museum, which enabled an interaction between older and younger people. This artivist initiative became a tool for the articulation and dissemination of quilombola museology and evidenced the territory of afections proposed by the Museum which started from the women who created the spaces to

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organize profound and ancestral knowledge and reached audiences who can recognize themselves in the narratives exposed there.

Black Experiences in First Place The daily social exclusion of peripheral territories, encompassing the past and present epistemic violence and current pandemic situation, virtually strengthened the quilombola museology in the community museums due to women’s conscious and critical use of museums’ partnership with their community. Besides disseminating and reifying peripheral knowledge placed at the centre, the activist strategies boost the construction of a critical online community museum accessible and decolonial for everyone – the social technology (Its Brasil 2004) appropriated by local and global audiences. Narrating the experiences of quilombola women . . . is part of a political choice, whose motivation is to simultaneously make visible and sexist devices that put their bodies, knowledge, and territories at constant risk, as well as the at constant risk, as well as the assemblages that, at the intersection between ethics and politics the conventional ways of doing politics, produce political and subjective becoming. This is not to idealize them, nor to suggest that there is only one political model to be followed. Their experiences are not exemplary in a moral sense, but they may be inspiring in times when neoliberal rationality, with sophisticated power devices, tends to limit our capacity to create collective projects. (Almeida 2016, 222) The political choice of having in contemporary art artistic productions of Black communities which have as references Black women narrating their experiences in museum collections created by their communities is the materialization of territories of afections throughout Brazil. Contemporary art history is highly engaged with self-refective discourses on its Eurocentric tradition by applying postcolonial methodologies to address the colonial origin of collections and museums and include art and cultural productions placed at the margins of the hegemonic Western centres. From this point, the Iaiá Procópia and Muquifu museums contributed to the decolonization of art history by intertwining the visualities of vulnerable peripheral communities in the digital medium. In doing so, it crosses borders that crystallize a single point of view to narrate memories through the eyes of these communities. At the same time, the museums reveal how women leaders in community museums cross colonial boundaries and develop methods to represent their situated knowledge by new technologies underpinning the quilombola as a new and emancipatory cultural concept: the quilombola museology.

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Notes 1 Brazil has in its history a proximity with religions of Christian origin. Thinking about the colonization process in the country from the Black perspective, the African and Afro-Brazilian people kept their practices related to the African continent, presenting a religiosity that brought Christian references with Bantu and Yoruba bases. From this point we can identify, for example, the presence of churches, Black saints, and Afro diasporic experiences in Brazilian roots. 2 The families and residents in these territories are of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous descent, from marginalized regions of the country. 3 Translation by the author. 4 IBRAM – the Brazilian Institute of Museums – is an organization linked to the Ministry of Tourism, the managing body of the National Museum Policy. IBRAM’s mission is to promote the valorization of museums and the museum feld, to ensure the right to memories, respect to diversity, and the universality of access to museal assets. 5 Congado is an Afro-Brazilian cultural practice from which the central theme of the festival is the coronation of the king and the queen of the Congo, representatives of the enslaved peoples who came to Brazil.

Bibliography Almeida, Marileia. 2016. “Território de Afetos: O cuidado nas práticas femininas quilombolas no Rio de Janeiro”. Transversos Publishing 8: 218–234. Assunção, Paula, Mário Chagas, and Judite Primo. 2013. To Understand New Museology in the XXI Century (Sociomuseology) (2nd ed.). Lisbon: Universidade Lusofona. Bachmann-Medick, Doris, Jens Kugele, and Ansgar Nünning. 2020. Futures of the Study of Culture (Concepts for the Study of Culture, 8) (Concepts for the Study of Culture (CSC)) (1st ed.). Berlin: De Gruyter. Balčytienė, Aukse. 2020. “Ulla Carlsson (Ed.) (2019). Understanding Media and Information Literacy (MIL) in the Digital Age: A Question of Democracy. Gothenburg: Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG), University of Gothenburg, 266 pp., ISBN: 978–91-88212-89-4”. Central European Journal of Communication 13(2): 293–295. Behar, Ruth. 1993. Translated Woman. Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston: Beacon Press. Bondía, José Luis. 2002. “Notas sobre a experiência e o saber de experiência”. Revista Brasileira de Educação 19: 20–28. Calabre, Lia. 2009. Políticas culturais no Brasil: dos anos 1930 ao século XXI. Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV. Carneiro, Aparecida Sueli. 2005. “A Construção do Otro como não-ser como fundamento do ser”. [Doctoral Thesis]. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo. Carvalho, Rosane Maria Rocha. 2005. “As transformações da relação museu e público: a infuência das tecnologias da informação e comunicação no desenvolvimento de um público virtual”. [Doctoral Thesis]. Rio de Janeiro: ECO/ UFRJ-IBICT. Collins, P.H., and Sirma Bilge. 2020. Intersectionality (Key Concepts) (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Costa, Maria Alice, and Naiara Coelho. 2018. “A(r)tivismo Feminista – Interseçoes Entre Arte, Política e Feminismo”. Confuencias: Revista de Sociologia e Politica 20(2): 25–49. Cury, Cynthia E. 2002. “Políticas culturais no Brasil: subsídios para a construção da brasilidade”. [Doctoral Thesis]. Sao Paulo: Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Desvallées, André. 1992. Vagues: An Anthology of New Museology. Savigny-leTemple, Museology Collection. Macon et Savingy-le-Temple: Éditions W MNES. Frohne, Ursula, and Christian Katti. 2000. “Introduction”. Art Journal 59(4): 8. Gonzalez, Montserrat Acosta et al. 2013. “Virtual Worlds. Opportunities and Challenges in the 21st Century”. Procedia Computer Science 25: 330–337. Guerreiro, Dalia. 2020. “Museologia e as tecnologias digitais”. Museologia & Interdisciplinaridade 9: 81–102. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Encarnación. 2006. “Translating Positionality: On Post-colonial Conjunctures and Transversal Understanding”. EIPCP – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. https://transversal.at/transversal/0606/gutierrezrodriguez/en. Last accessed December 5, 2022. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Harvest in Translation). London; New York: Routledge. Kang, Jay Min. 2006. “Identity Politics and Community Artivism: A Strategic Arts Project of Cultural Landscape Conservation at Treasure Hill, Taipei”. In Reconstructing Communities: Design Participation in the Face of Change. Washington: Washington University. Lévy, Pierre. 2013. Cibercultura. São Paulo: Editora 34. Lugones, Maria. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”. Hypatia 25(4): 742–759. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2014. “Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World”. Journal of Religious Ethics 42(4): 691–711. Morales, L., and Teresa Cuauhtémoc Camarena. 2004. O conceito de museu comunitário: história vivida ou memória para transformar a história? México: Centro INAH Oaxaca. Moura, Clovis. 1987. Quilombos Resistencia ao escravismo. São Paulo: Atica. Nascimento, Beatriz. 1982. “Kilombo e memória comunitária: um estudo de caso”. Revista Estudos Afro Asiáticos 6–7: 259–265. Neves, Vanusa Nogueira. 2019. “Histórias ressignifcadas entre Glorinha Fulustreka e Mulheres do Riachão”. [M.A. Thesis]. Goiania: Faculdade de Ciências SociaisPrograma de Pós graduação Interdisciplinar em Performances Culturais-UFG. Quijano, Aníbal. 1997. “Colonialidad de poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina”. Anuario Mariategui (9): 113–122. Raposo, Paulo. 2015. “ ‘Artivismo’: articulando dissidências, criando insurgências”. Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia 4(2): 3–12. https://doi.org/10.4000/ cadernosaa.909. Sabharwal, Arjun. 2015. Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities: Preserving and Promoting Archival and Special Collections (1st ed.). Hull: Chandos Publishing. Santos, Miriam Sepulveda. 2003. “Por uma sociologia dos Museus”. Cadernos do Ceom. Chapecó 41(27): 47–70. Scheiner, Tereza. 2003. “Comunicação, Educação, Exposição: novos saberes, novos sentidos”. Semiosfera 4–5.

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Seyal, Mira. 2020. “Human Rights and Art Activism: The US-Mexico Border”. [MA Thesis]. New York: Columbia University. Siqueira, Julia Maria. 2020. “Corazonar uma Museologia onde caibam muitas museologias: a interculturalização do campo como projeto decolonial”. In Introdução à Sociomuseologia. Edited by J. Primo and M. Moutinho, 113–152. Lisboa: Edições Universitárias Lusófonas. Vásquez, Rolando. 2019. El museo, la decolonialidad y el fn de la contemporaneidad. Otros Logos: Revista de Estudios Críticos. Vazquez, Rolando, and Miriam Barrera Contreras. 2016. “Aesthesis decolonial y los tiempos relacionales Entrevista a Rolando Vázquez”. CALLE 14: Revista de Investigación En El Campo Del Arte 11(18): 76–93.

7

Caring Curating and Social Media Sophie Lingg

Social media is still a relatively new infrastructure for showing, circulating, sharing and, in a new sense, producing art. Working with social media platforms raises new potentialities, challenges and concerns. The so-called independent artists, often precarious workers, and the so-called independent curators, also often precarious workers, who work with social media experience new freedoms and access to new audiences but also new forms of censorship and digital as well as emotional exhaustion. Sometimes, they are met with new forms of harassment and even concerted online attacks known as ‘shitstorms’ with little or no resources to defend themselves. Furthermore, exploitation, including self-exploitation, is constantly on the horizon. In pandemic times, with digital platforms the only communication and exhibition tools for not only museums and art institutions but particularly for the so-called independent artists, these often invisibilised conditions became exacerbated. As discussions about critical infrastructure and care work gained currency because of the pandemic, social media became a space where artists and curators, but also many others, shared quotes from the 1970s feminist writings on questions of social reproduction and care work. These critical quotes were circulating in newsfeeds alongside current newspaper articles and were commented in groups and public threads (Kisner 2021). This chapter is interested in what caring curating on social media means, in particular for independent curators who are interested in working with and ofering support to independent artists and precarious art workers. I will examine these themes in a text by Laurel Ptak from 2014 and its contextualisation with feminist discussion of work in the 1970s and bell hooks’s critique thereof (hooks 1984), as well as a contemporary artistic position by Dutch-based Romanian conceptual artist Alina Lupu, whose practice discusses work, precariousness and working conditions in contemporary economy. The conditions of sharing, showing, performing, looking and receiving on social media are a still relatively new, yet indispensable feld of consideration in which to move as curators, organisers, educators and artists. In 2014, Toronto-based writer and educator David Balzer published the book Curationism, in which he describes the eponymous phenomenon as a dominant

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practice not only within the arts but beyond that as a dominant cultural practice in all spheres. (Balzer 2014, 121) Social media platforms play a central role in this development, because individuals seeking to be individual by sharing their individuality with others use these same media (Balzer 2014, 7). Consequently, everybody knows how to choose, collect and compose – or curate (Balzer 2014, 132), thus the how in how to curate may well take other considerations into account. Social media exposure, I  argue is also a site of the gatekeeping that is applied in physical spaces and results in artists having varied access to successful use of social media. Within the felds of the arts, be it artistic production, curating, education, theory, art criticism or the sphere of galleries, of fairs and of collectors, working on social media is an important part of many artists’ regular tasks. Via social media profles people socialise and get to know new art, do research, share their portfolios, perform, and of course promote projects. Also, social media today is already partly fulflling its role as a space where artists who are silenced or made invisible by the mainstream art market, its galleries, critics and dealers exhibit and sell their work, as New York-based artist writer and activist Gregory Sholette puts it in his 2011 publication Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Sholette 2011, 3). As long as the art system is characterised by a “circulation” of only a few artists of “broad recognition” (Dimitrakaki and Shaked 2021, 13), especially Instagram to some extent provides a way to escape the “critical and economic structures of the art world by moving instead in-between it’s meshes” (Sholette 2011, 4). But what about the content, the artworks and performances that are banned from the platforms? How and to what extent can caring curatorial practices be applied to a commercial, capitalist and discriminating media corporation like Meta (formerly known as Facebook Inc.)? It is on Facebook and Instagram, in particular, that algorithms, as well as followers and users curate within a specifc framework that I would like to characterise in the following section.

The Predefned Structure(s) of Artistic Work on Social Media Although the distinction of IRL, In-Real-Life, and AFK, Away-FromKeyboard, has been challenged – US curator and writer Legacy Russell in her 2020 manifesto Glitch Feminism, for example suggests the glitch to “overcome the diferentiation between digital or online and non-digital or non-online experiences” (Russell 2020, 31) – it might be useful to think about diferences between analogue artistic work and artistic work in the digital realm. In the digital sphere of commercialised social media, three very important parameters of presenting and producing art stand out: frst, the terms of use of the platform; second, the strictly standardised predefned visual space and third, the unknown and unpredictable audience. Creating, presenting as well as curating art on social media with regard to these

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structural specifcs are in need of discourses and the establishment of care similar to feminist care in alleged AFK curating (Lingg 2022). In what follows, I will provide short evaluations of these three factors, in the course of which the need for care structures will become evident. Terms of Use Uploading (artistic) work on social media comes with specifc visual and aesthetic decisions based on the platform’s restrictions that are noticeable especially for queer and feminist artists. Complying with the platform’s terms of use might be very challenging for artists, who work with their naked body as their tool. For posting “explicit” images of bodies, may it be nipples, read as women’s, genitals, birth, injuries, wounds – whether aestheticised or not – users can have their content quickly removed and their accounts constrained or – temporarily or permanently – closed. Common (sometimes unsuccessful) strategies to avoid this include covering or blurring nipples or genitals, changing camera angles or avoiding revealing movements. These struggles are not limited to artistic work on social media but also afect other areas of waged work, such as sex work, where alternatives to Instagram are emerging that could also be interesting for artists.1 Furthermore, the platform’s nudity policy is not the only issue that has come to public attention in connection with the Meta corporation, as the extensive leaks from a former Facebook product manager in October 2021 have shown: not only have higher-profle accounts more rights in relation to the content they publish, the company is perfectly aware of the harmful beauty and body standards promoted as well as of illegal business, human trafcking and religiously motivated hatred on its platform.2 Space In contrast to AFK exhibition spaces, the space of commercialised social media platforms like Instagram is always and without alternatives, highly normalised and standardised. Modes of use are strictly predetermined, with hardly any room for adjustments, individualisation or hacks. The presentation formats are strictly limited, but due to a lack of audience in alternative digital spaces, the big platforms are hard to bypass. Additionally, although it is possible to delete posted content or manage its visibility, social media’s mode of presentation difers from the display of an AFK exhibition: not only does the poster grant the platform extensive rights over the content,3 the exhibition space’s functional architecture allows others to share, screenshot and potentially re-contextualise your posted text, images or videos. Thus the space, by its very structure, not only regulates the posted content but also assigns a special role to all its visitors aka users – it creates a group of people who may interact with others’ posted content. Therefore, an artist’s audience on social media is considerably diferent from an audience in

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the AFK sphere, not by chance but as a direct consequence of the space’s constitution. Audience Following this observation, a key aspect accompanying the use of social media for artistic practices is that a project is not completed at the moment when it is displayed or exhibited. It potentially remains in continuous development since people are in many cases able to comment and share the posted works, with a fast reaction and response time and equally rapid publication time span – possibly also with an anonymous username. The (alleged) anonymity combined with the possibility of high-speed public speech while sitting in front of one’s screen often leads to violent language and hate speech, cybermobbing and threats of violence as well as the transfer of content via screenshots or linked videos to other internet forums, where it can be discussed, disassembled and insulted. In contrast to the maintenance in an AFK space, where of course audiences also react, discuss and share their opinion and where – besides the space – the work is to be maintained in a more direct way, the artist’s work “continues” in a more invisible way in the social media space. Monitoring and moderating comments can be intense, especially when works, the artists and/or their social media profle already have developed a reputation for controversy. Releasing works can become a demanding care process, sometimes even requiring dealing with written abuse or “shitstorms”. Similar to infuencers, artists – often those whose artworks tend to go against the terms of use – are to a certain degree urged to work with social media to meet the art world’s interests of visibility, traceability and publicity. Not only when people get harassed, discriminated against or face violence or censorship, but also when artists lack the opportunity to present and promote their work due to restrictive terms and guidelines or when their work is targeted by conservatives, right-wing radicals and trolls, immediate and comprehensive support is necessary. It is thus essential to be concerned about the social media space and its conditions for artists and to engage with questions regarding the space, especially as feminists working in art and culture and in theory. I will now try to give the main points made by two texts that have addressed some of these issues – one Silvia Federici’s “Wages against Housework”, a movement-defning manifesto on unwaged work published in 1975 and the other “Wages for Facebook” by Laurel Ptak (2014), a more contemporary manifesto on working conditions on highly commercialised social media that draws upon the former.

Wages, Facebook, Housework In 2014, the New York City-based curator and writer Laurel Ptak published the “Wages for Facebook” manifesto. On wagesforfacebook.com there is

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not only no reference to the author, but also the text has no designated title, the URL takes on this function. The text is written in all caps, the words roll like flm credits, in a regular reading speed, the text moves as if slowly scrolled down automatically, it is neither possible to pause it nor to go back or forth. With its movement, the text on the website visualises the act of reading, and it performs the proclamation. When it comes to its end, it stands still and after about half a minute jumps back to the beginning and starts rolling again. The text was published and is accessible on the website wagesforfacebook.com and draws most explicitly on the 1975 feminist manifesto “Wages against Housework” by Silvia Federici that sought to present a political analysis of women’s work within a hegemonic, heteronormative patriarchal society. “Wages for Facebook” aims to connect the 1975 manifesto’s arguments on waged and unwaged work very directly to questions of work and working conditions regarding social media giants – here Facebook. wagesforfacebook.com starts of with the following paragraph: THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK. WITH EVERY LIKE, CHAT, TAG OR POKE OUR SUBJECTIVITY TURNS THEM A PROFIT. THEY CALL IT SHARING. WE CALL IT STEALING. WE’VE BEEN BOUND BY THEIR TERMS OF SERVICE FAR TOO LONG – IT’S TIME FOR OUR TERMS. These lines adapt the text Federici’s “Wages against Housework” manifesto (Federici 1975, 5), slightly modifed and adapted to digital work, to working on social media. The text refers to Facebook, but it can be transferred to many diferent practices in the digital sphere where users regularly and often on a daily basis use search engines, websites and social networks and with their actions, their search queries, comments, likes and shares they feed the algorithms that control the display of content, resulting in more personalised advertising and thus securing the platform’s advertising revenues. Both in “Wages for Facebook” and Federici’s “Wages Against Housework” the question may be raised about the addressed we – who are this we when both Federici and Ptak write about our terms? To understand this notion of our terms, next I will give a brief insight into the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. Based on the we formulated there and the justifed criticism of it, I will attempt to capture the essence of the we formulated by Ptak for the area of unpaid digital work. The 1970s Wages for Housework movement was an international women’s movement that shed light on the private and economic living conditions of women worldwide, calling on the capitalist organisation of work, including traditional family structure. The movement’s aim was to dismantle the hegemonic heteronormative power structures and living conditions in the nuclear family as well as to refuse them as a whole (Toupin 2018, 46), by means of going beyond the one-dimensional demand for money for work and instead discussing the problem of wages itself: that wages serve as an

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unconditional means of power (Toupin 2018, 211). One of the movement’s unifying forces was that both women in paid work and women in unpaid domestic and care work are afected by the patriarchal system and its divisions of roles in domestic, care and reproductive work (Toupin 2018, 211). Wages for Housework created solidarity within the diferent women’s movements and civil protest movements like students, anti-war, civil rights and anti-colonial movements that all together called attention to capitalism as a structurally sexist and racist system that is based on unpaid work, which is psychologised and thus given legitimacy (Toupin 2018, 241). Between the 1970s and Toupin’s historical review of the movement many years later, feminist eforts have evolved, rethinking earlier movements, emphasising questions of race and class and formulating a critique of liberal feminism that seeks not only equal rights but also professional development within an inherently broken and exploitative capitalist system (Arruzza et al. 2019). This system is defned with greater accuracy by bell hooks, who calls it imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (hooks 1984, 51). In her 1984 essay “Re-Thinking the Nature of Work”, bell hooks criticises much of the feminist movement’s treatment of work because of its exclusions of the working class and profound class biases, since the work imagined and the careers implied are well paid (hooks 1984, 95). Moreover, hooks argues that paid service work is just as exploitative as unpaid housework simply because of the low wages and poor working conditions, along with social marginalisation (hooks 1984, 102). In addition to service work in the job, further unpaid housework is added to everyday life. bell hooks thus exposes a key argument of Wages for Housework as classist, an argument that could be called the demand for the freedom not to take a job: in “Wages Against Housework”, Federici states that at the very moment wages for housework are being paid, the work is no longer “housework” in its patriarchal, capitalist reading but received as something else. Consequently, people get the agency to refuse, to limit the working hours and to defne the task range (Federici 1975, 5). bell hooks, on the contrary, emphasises that – instead of its mere rejection – a shift in the value of housework may be appropriate, as it is directly rewarding, for oneself and one’s immediate environment, as it allows for taking responsibility both for oneself and for the immediate environment. She points out that housework has to be learned – not only by women. If the understanding of housework were changed, if it were taught as valuable, instead of demeaning and degrading, the understanding of all other work would also be diferent (hooks 1984, 103). This would be a highly desirable outcome, since many jobs performed by women belong to the low-wage sector and jobs with low wages are socially automatically equated with “personal failure, lack of success, inferiority” (hooks 1984, 104). Moreover, those with no income who rely on the welfare state fnd themselves in a system that is designed to make the benefciaries undergo a “process of demoralisation in order to receive aid” (hooks 1984, 105).

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In her manifesto, Ptak reworks Federici’s (1975, 5) words exactly: “IN FACT, TO DEMAND WAGES FOR FACEBOOK DOES NOT MEAN TO SAY THAT IF WE ARE PAID WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO IT. IT MEANS PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE” (Ptak 2014). So one could say, if the demand for wages cannot be met within the systematic patriarchal, capitalist structures in which both “housework” and “Facebook” activity are embedded, it is therefore necessarily a demand that entails the collapse of these hierarchies. Yet accordingly, Ptak’s reformulation seems to be problematic as well, considering how essential it has become (not only) for many artists to be on – and thus work with (entailing a working for, too) – social media, and how hard to succeed without it. Especially for artists who – for various reasons – are to diferent degrees excluded from the commercial art market, social media seems indispensable (Sholette 2011, 3). Federici herself states an issue that can be linked to social media as well: “the problem, then, becomes how to bring this struggle out of the kitchen and bedroom and into the streets” (Federici 1975, 4). The connection, exchange and collective action that took place within the Wages for Housework movement can be surmised whenever hashtags on social media “trend” and social topics and activism gain visibility. Usually, this visibility drops again within a short time, and the hype is over. Concerning the work of artists, this means their work on social media seems to be, as I  described before, much less cared for due to its invisibility – an invisibility that, so one could claim, it shares with (AFK) care and housework. In relation to curating in physical spaces, it might be worth adding to the idea that exhibiting on social media is usually ongoing. Postings remain and potentially evolve even after the project is long fnished. Evolution in the form of commenting, sharing, disseminating tends to occur more immediately than it would if one had to enter an archive, get a catalogue and publish (where, anyway?) a statement based on this research. As the availability for response and interaction must be given at all times, having not enough capacities for care is already inherent to the platform. In an email interview, I  introduced Amsterdam-based Romanian artist Alina Lupu (as @theofceofalinalupu), whose artistic work on and beyond social media deals with work and living conditions, on precariousness in the arts, as well as in other felds of the job market, to Laurel Ptak’s “Wages for Facebook”. I  asked Lupu questions regarding the problematic (working) space of social media and the intertwining of artistic and online work. In her responses, Lupu mentions government-funded fnancial aid for artists during the frst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic as the basis for her freedom not to produce – a sort of basic income previously unthinkable. Applying this observation to social media and thereby linking it to “Wages for Facebook”, one could ask: what would the freedom not to produce, described by Alina Lupu, mean for one’s activities on social media platforms? How much would an artist share on the platforms if they did not have to represent their work to gain visibility, respectively fnd opportunities for paid work outside of social media?

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Alina Lupu connects Ptak’s “Wages for Facebook” and its demand to compensate the work done by users with Facebook’s relatively new dating feature and its slogan “Find Love Through What You Like”. Launched shortly before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook seemed to expect further proft from entering the matchmaking business; in an attempt to amplify their general incentive of social connection and “friendship” that Ptak hints at in her last sentence, again altering Federici’s words: “WE WANT TO CALL WORK WHAT IS WORK SO THAT EVENTUALLY WE MIGHT REDISCOVER WHAT FRIENDSHIP IS”. Alina Lupu refers to a specifc paragraph of Seasonal Associate (Greißler 2018) by German novelist Heike Geißler to underline the extent to which romantic relationships have entered the corporate landscape. In Geissler’s novel, set at an Amazon fulflment centre, romantic relationships at the workplace are described as benefcial for a company “because then they’ll work more blithely and create automatic attachment to the respective company” and therefore “additional power source for the employees, from which the company profts” (Greißler 2018, 148). The dilemma is brought full circle: “They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work” (Federici 1975, 5) and, again: “We want to call work what is work so that eventually we might rediscover what is love” (Federici 1975, 6). It is in fact no exaggeration to identify Facebook’s dating ofer as one more incentive strategy to work for them without pay. Analogously, artists’ work and curating are also “rewarded” by likes and heart emojis, although in their case more interaction with their content can mean more visibility. In our email conversation, Alina poses the following question: “have we managed to make resistance from within the system equally as appealing as the system has made itself for us?” – referring to both social media and the art system. She shared with me Instagram accounts of art educational, critical, grassroots movements in the Netherlands which are used to expose how the platforms are used, against us and by us.4 In relation to curating, the need to manage the discourse on social media is an additional demand on time resources, in relation to often very precarious working conditions and limited free time. To provide the necessary curatorial care for artistic work, while not further intensifying these conditions, new forms of collaboration with colleagues and artists could be established. By means of such structures, the necessary work could be shared, for example in the case of a “shitstorm” that needs to be dealt with or – albeit rarely – argument-based discussions that take place on social media platforms, so that it is no longer an individual’s (usually the author of the post) work alone, parallel to regular life in being mostly unpaid.

Conclusion As I  have tried to show, working with art on social media, compared to making art in the AFK sphere is marked by (at least) three important

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complexities: frst, a social media platform’s terms of use that are not necessarily suitable for works of art; second, the strictly standardised predefned space with its many limitations; and third, the unknown audience and their potentially unpredictable actions of re-contextualisation and hate speech. With Laurel Ptak’s work “Wages for Facebook” and its links to Federici’s manifesto “Wages Against Housework” – and bell hooks’s critique thereof – as well as with Alina Lupu’s thoughts on social media’s incentive mechanics, I have tried to show ways of how to think about the struggles of artists working with and on social media across generations, beyond the respective media diferences. By applying bell hooks’s proposal to ascribe new value to care work to the realm of social media, strategies to cope with these struggles could be developed based on the premise of a collective efort to support each other instead of merely rejecting artists’ or curators’ work on social media and thereby leaving it to the individual. After this step of acknowledging the issues and the important work which takes place to deal with them, the difculties could be approached from various curatorial perspectives. First, curators might take the reality of invisible work on social media (against account bans, hate speech etc.) into consideration when they use social media as a handy tool to discover new artists or curate an AFK show. Artists, too, might address their social media work from a curatorial angle: confronted with the question of how to manage their online portfolio, they could for example conclude that while Instagram seems to be a most convenient way to show, promote and interact, it could make sense to not have their whole body of work available there at all times. By taking shared work ofine strategically, the need to invest time in managing social media could be partially contained. Additionally, following, getting inspired by, and interacting with the work of other projects could also be understood as a form of curating that deserves more/better care: in a system where to like, to share or to save in one’s collection benefts the person behind the content, these actions should be performed carefully. This thought may be applied not only to curators and artists but to all other users as well: an inclusive, broad understanding of curating – such as the one introduced by Balzer – may help to establish structures of care for artists and their multi-layered work on social media.

Notes 1 The social media platform lips.social is considered an alternative to commercial social media, like the Meta corporation, built for and by female and non-binary as well as LGBTQIA+ users with the aim to create a safe space online to fnd ways of expression beyond biased censorship or harassment. https://lips.social/login; https://femtechinsider.com/crowdfunding-lips-wefunder/ 2 Coverage over the leaked information spread worldwide and was published as “the facebook fles” by The Wall Street Journal amongst others in October  2021. www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-fles-11631713039 Following on from this in December  2021, a lawsuit was fled in California, by a group

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of Rohingya refugees against Meta for their involvement in the spread of hate speech, disinformation and in conclusion the ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide in Myanmar. www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-suefacebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence 3 In Instagram’s community guidelines, it says: [Y]ou hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems. See: www.facebook.com/help/instagram/termsofuse [last visited July 11, 2021, 18:20] 4

Find here the list of accounts and initiatives mentioned by Alina Lupu: art. goss (www.instagram.com/art.goss/); not.a.playground (www.instagram.com/ not.a.playground/); cultural.workers.unite (www.instagram.com/cultural.workers. unite/); no.more.later (www.instagram.com/no.more.later/); tuituionfeerefund.nl (www.instagram.com/tuitionrefundmovementnl/). She also names the Dutch initiative ‘Call Out Dutch Art Institutions’ that collects student statements on sexual, racist, discriminatory incidents. (https://futuress.org/magazine/calling-out-dutchart-institutions/) [all last visited: July 14, 2021; 14:15]

Bibliography Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. New York: Verso. Balzer, David. 2014. Curationism. How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. Toronto: Coach House Books. Dimitrakaki, Angela, and Nizan Shaked. 2021. “Feminism, Instituting, and the Politics of Recognition in Global Capitalism.” OnCurating (52): 11–21. www. on-curating.org/issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-global-capitalism.html#.Yrg9Qy-21pQ. Federici, Silvia. 1975. Wages against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Press Ltd. Greißler, Heike. 2018. Seasonal Associate. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press. Horwitz, Jef. n.d. “The Facebook Files.” www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebookfles-11631713039. Last accessed April 30, 2022. Kisner, Jordan. 2021. “The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew: Silvia Federici Has Been Warning for Decades of What Happens When We Undervalue Domestic Labor.” New York Times, February  17. www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/magazine/waged-housework.html. Last accessed July 15, 2021. Lingg, Sophie. 2022. “Caring Curatorial Practice in Digital Times.” In Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. Edited by Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold, and Vera Hofmann, 48–57. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Lupu, Alina. “About.” https://theofceofalinalupu.com/about/. Last accessed April 30, 2022. Milmo, Dan. 2021. “Rohingya Sue Facebook for £150bn Over Myanmar Genocide”. www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmargenocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence. Last accessed April 30, 2022.

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Noble, Safya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press. Ptak, Laurel. 2014. “Wages for Facebook.” http://wagesforfacebook.com. Last accessed April 30, 2022. Russell, Legacy. 2020. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. New York: Verso. Sholette, Gregory. 2011. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. New York: Pluto Press. Toupin, Louise. 2018. Wages for Housework: A History of an International Feminist Movement, 1972–77. London: Pluto Press and UBC Press.

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A Laboratory of Care – Active Micropolitics, Joyfulness, and Afectivity Berit Fischer

Etymologically, the word care stems from the Old English noun caru, the verb carian (of  Germanic  origin), which is related to Old High German: chara (grief, lament), charon (grieve). Dictionaries defne the notion of care in relation to protective guardianship and the provision of what is needed for health and well-being, along with the notions of attentiveness and consideration. What might be contemporaneous urgencies, “laments”, that need guardianship and addressing in cultural production?; in curating with care? Especially during the imperatives of the current COVID-19 pandemic, established understandings of coexistence, inter-relationality, response-ability, and care have been put to a fundamental test. It has brutally unmasked the decades and centuries of humans’ greedy destructive exploitation of their natural planetary habitat and their ruthless apathy and disrespect for fellow human and living beings. Questions of solidarity, mutual aid, and respect for and of how we want to live together – as humans and within our ecological habitat – are of urgency more than ever. Today’s time is marked by planetary and social precarity, governed by power-seeking, exploitative neoliberal, cognitive, and technocratic capitalism that manipulatively operates on the deep micropolitical and psychological levels of our desires. A nourishing ground for hyper-individualism, separationism, and for a being in the world that is strongly marked by exteriority, self-representation (e.g. on social media), and manipulation by bespoke algorithmic codes of (dis-)information. Over-absorption of digital media has been recognised to alienate subjects from their own social and expressive eforts, leading to divisive relationships, alienation of the individual self, apathy, anxiety, and depression – a trademark of late capitalism. Deeply ingrained binary thinking and the many existing polarisations, a detached individualism and reactive micropolitics (elaborated later) disengage from aesthesia (Greek aisthētikos: relating to perception by the senses). It disengages from the sensing capacity of what Brazilian curator, psychoanalyst, and writer Suely Rolnik calls “the knowing body” (Rolnik 2015), from the powers of creation and the capacity for joyfulness and afectivity. Today’s utterly mediated and often distanced perception and engagement with the world craves embodied sensorial experiences and holistic ways of

DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-10

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critical consciousness raising. Spectator, observer, bystander, and the outsider view is what today’s society is abundantly saturated with. The conventional notion of the “spectator” needs to be problematised in curatorial practice if one understands the curatorial as agency and as caretaker for regenerating and safeguarding a micropolitical relational sensitivity, joyfulness, and afectivity. A  form of cultural production and alternative ways of curatorial making are needed, ones that do not involve their public as a disembodied observer or consumer of curatorial ideas and concerns that might be merely displayed and represented but rather those in which spectatorship is dissolved and members of the public become an active embodied, self-empowered, and experiencing participant. A  curatorial practice that experiments to fnd alternative ways of making, for fusing engagement with immersion; making its public inhabit, inhere, and mobilise the ideas and concerns at stake, instead of “ex-hibiting”, presenting, and re-presenting them. Curatorial methodologies of a regenerative care are needed, that reinvent and nourish the emergence of new subjectivities, and in particular of “inter-subjectivities” and the intrinsically dependent entanglement with all organic life. The situation demands a curatorial care, responsibility, and nursing, not only for a re-presentation of theories and ideas but rather for their mobilisation and for the activation of an active micropolitics within the curatorial audiences. How can the curatorial create conditions and spaces for its public to become one of the fundamental subjects of the curatorial care in the traditional tri-partition of artist/curator/audience; so that the curatorial public might transform into activated and empowered participants instead of passive spectators? This chapter ofers a proposal in which curatorial practice moves away from its history of an object- and visual-centred ontology, away from a dichotomy of the visual and the non-visual, towards what I coin as “afective transformative curation” or “experiential curation” (Fischer 2020). This is an ethico-political curatorial care that seeks an afective and embodied mobilisation of a curatorial knowledge formation and its theoretical and philosophical speculations. It is also a holistic and post-representational approach that works towards “in-habiting” ideas and concepts rather than “ex-hibiting” or re-presenting them (Fischer 2020).

Post-Representation Sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist Stuart Hall points out in his elaborations on visual representation that re-presentation implies that something is presented which is already there and that which is represented stands in for something and produces meaning. Hall refers to it as a potential distorted gap of meaning between the “true event” and how that is presented (Hall 1997). Acknowledging that even practical methodologies are usually instructed and activated by the means of language-based representation, it is this potential distorting gap of meaning in re-presentation that

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afective transformative curation strives to short-circuit: towards the nonre-presented, towards creating a holistic and intimate experience of what Hall calls the “true event”, the unmediated experience itself. The aspiration is to create and curate a gap of non- or post-representation that can a pause from the creation of purely cognitive meaning, that can pause and take a breath from representation, and that allows the curatorial participants to be in the present moment and to experience the self and the delicate resonances and interdependencies one is entangled with. It is ofered here as a curatorial approach that allows a pause for the awareness of and for being in presence. A re-learning of being in the knowing body, the collective body, of undoing one’s own representation; allowing a sphere for one’s own unmediated “true event” and for a curiosity and connectivity . . . to the elusive unnameable that escapes language and representation. (Fischer 2020)

Radical Empathy Lab We propose a non-separationist and holistic curatorial care and knowledge formation that strives towards connectivity within the ecology of the living world. A  curatorial care that counters hegemonic and systemic structures, the separationist neoliberal ideal of hyper-individualism and binary competitive knowledge production that celebrates detached individualism – which becomes a mere nourishing ground for manipulation and subjugation. A curating with care for the activation of its participants that nourishes afectivity, joyfulness, and forms of being together that promote inter-relationality. As Montgomery and bergman (2017) write: Friendship, kinship, and communalization have also been at the heart of working across the hierarchical divides of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonization, ableism, ecocide, and other systems that have taught us to enact violence on each other and internalize oppressive ways of relating. To make kin across these divisions is a precarious and radical act. (96) How can critical thought be experienced beyond curatorial forms of display, re-presentation, and beyond the consumption of, in particular, the visual? These are some of the questions that I engage with in my scholarly work and that I seek to mobilise in the workshops I give as a curator who works at the intersection of artistic and critical spatial practice. They prompted me to initiate an ongoing nomadic social and ecological research lab in 2016, the Radical Empathy Lab.1 Similar to Hall’s take on “re-presentation”, its afective and potentially transformative experiments seek to create a gap,

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ofering a momentary state of critical awareness and a state of being-inpresence. The Radical Empathy Lab takes a post-representational emphasis on aesthesia, the experiential, and focuses on creating critical consciousness on a micropolitical level to con(-)fgure momentary social felds of afective and empathic encounters of diferences. This micropolitical sphere is the ally in the search for escaping Hall’s gap of mediation in re-presentation, as it works within the individual participant’s level of desire and outside the realm of the representable. The Radical Empathy Lab does not call for viewing audiences but rather invites partakers into an unmediated embodied experience that is intertwined with cognitive critical philosophical refections.

Micropolitics The notion of micropolitics dates back to the 1960s and 1970s; for one thing in political and organisational schemes and otherwise in philosophy and the humanities like in French Post-Structuralism. Prominent is for example the work of Gilles Deleuze with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). They are key texts regarding micropolitics of desire, socioeconomic “complexes”, and that claim that through its forces and relations, desire produces social production and reality. The concept of micropolitics implies a critique of the conventional understanding of power within social spaces and sociopolitical confgurations in which subjectivisation is produced within contemporary capitalism. Micropolitics is understood to be strongly interrelated with macropolitics, as having an essential somatic and afective dimension to political action. Its dimension does not ft to conventional standards of political action but is nevertheless important to public life as it is the necessary driving force that activates social, ecological, and political engagements and transformations. More contemporary theory emphasises the socially transformative potential of micropolitical practices and activities that work on an afective, intersubjective, and collectivist level and that take place in the realm of the intimate, personal, and every day. The comprehension of the relationality between micro- and macropolitics has remained relevant until today. And the idea of the molecular has continued to be of interest not least in non-representational styles of working, with a methodological orientation towards pre-individual afects. Cultural theorist, philosopher, and artist Erin Manning for example elaborates What is usually constituted as the real thing – Politics with a capital P – is far less rigorously inventive, precisely because it operates in the sphere of representation where pre-composed bodies are already circulating.

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Berit Fischer The micropolitical is that which subverts this tendency in the political to present itself as already fully formed.

She refers to philosopher and social theorist Brian Massumi: “The micropolitical, he says, never registers consciously. In this sense, it is akin to microperception, which registers only in its efects”. She moreover emphasises the notion of praxis that is imminent in the concept of micropolitics, as “activating the afective potential of the interval between feeling and doing” (Manning 2009). The Radical Empathy Lab invites varied practices that work on a micropolitical level of microperception. An example of such practices is Deep Listening, which was developed by experimental composer, performer, and humanitarian Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016). It is an embodied practice that strengthens the awareness of place and presence through listening. Deep Listening inspires sonic perception, both outward and inward, and supports experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, joyfulness, personal, and the growth of community.2 Or the art form and social method of Social Presencing Theatre (SPT) which sharpens self-enquiry and systemic views on social change. It was developed by choreographer, performer, and educator Arawana Hayashi and scholar Otto Scharmer. It is not theatre in the conventional sense. Instead, it ofers a blank stage for simple body postures and movements to dissolve limiting concepts, to access intuition, and to make visible both current realities and the deeper – often invisible – points for creating profound change and future possibilities. SPT evokes the unspoken. It activates and brings together the knowing-body, the use of unconscious embodied knowledge with group intelligence and creative expression.3 So does the method of the integrative and holistic dancing process and system of Biodanza, the “dance of life”. Developed by Chilean psychologist and artist Rolando Toro in the 1970s, it works as a practice for poetic human encounter and communication, for self-empowerment and self-transformation, to develop one’s vitality, afectivity, creativity, and courage to express oneself. Such processual holistic practices are activating methods that work without mediation on a micro scale within the individual curatorial participant. By emphasising the processual and dissolving the viewer in this way, it ofers apertures for alternative relations and for changes in perspectives (e.g. also in the traditional notion of the laboratory).

Touching on the Notion of Laboratory The Radical Empathy Lab certainly is indebted to the legacies of cultural production of the 1960s and 1970s, participatory art or that of “relational aesthetics”, defned by Nicolas Bourriaud in his eponymous book from 1998. The lab sits within such tradition in ways that meaning is elaborated collectively rather than by a sole individual and in that it is moved by

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human relations and their social contextual circumstances. The lab difers from these other examples in that it does not refer to an aesthetic or relational object but rather the experience itself to create the space of relations and inter-subjective relations. The Radical Empathy Lab extends the traditional Cartesian notion of the laboratory that dates to the Western philosophical movement of Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which centred around reason as the primary source for authority and legitimacy. René Descartes’s argument that reason, and not experience, as the key to knowledge formation is one of the – if not the main – fundaments of modern thinking and the Western cultural history. With it, a worldview of the earth as an organic interconnected living entity got traded into a mechanistic cosmology that devaluates the planetary entity as a resource. Historically, this has not only justifed gendered exploitation, mastering and domination of humans and nature by “the man of science” as for example feminist environmental historians like Carolyn Merchant expand (Merchant 1980). It also laid the ground for human-centred and binary thinking (e.g. human/non-human) and for patriarchal and hegemonic power structures; it is the foundation for today’s age of the Capitalocene. In the historical convention, laboratories have been considered as places of experimentation for the natural sciences that are based on metrics and quantifcation. The Radical Empathy Lab, however, challenges, juxtaposes, and redefnes this naturalistic Cartesian worldview. It seeks to create conditions and spaces to experience, rehearse, and (re-)claim a more cosmo-logical worldview of a holistic, interrelated, and codependent multispecies ecology that presses the urgencies of intellectual, ethical, and political issues of our times. Etymologically, the term “laboratory” derives from medieval Latin laboratorium, and laborare,  to labour, as “a place for labour and for work, a workshop for practice and testing, for experimentation, for working something out” (Cocker et al. 2017, 32). The Radical Empathy Lab focuses less on the notion of the “workshop”, on the physicality of a space in which something gets worked on, but rather pursues the creation of spheres, situations and sets of conditions for non-binary and nonlinear experiences, associations, and experimentation. It provides an aesthetic frame and a processual temporality for the experience of ideas, for afective encounter, experimentation, examination, and refection. (Fischer 2020) The lab wishes to open alternative ways for experiential, relational, and embodied thinking and knowledge formation. “Labouring” through assembled transdisciplinary practices and epistemologies, it seeks to create situations for process and encouragement of

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This way the format of the laboratory can – on a philosophical level – challenge more directly its Cartesian history than for example the museum, whose task traditionally is to preserve tangible and intangible evidence on particular subjects and to make it accessible to visitors. The Radical Empathy Lab emphasises the processual and experiential rather than the display or ex-hibiting and hence a relational curatorial knowledge formation. The term laboratory is proposed here in the long-standing lineage of for example Bauhaus’s holistic and interdisciplinary rationale, which favours a methodological pluralism, intellectual–conceptual processes, and discursive creative practices (Fischer 2020). The Radical Empathy Lab  moves through time and place as afective encounters that explore how to holistically activate an alternative knowledge production that embraces  relational – versus informational – learning and the “knowing body”. It experiments with transdisciplinary holistic advances in which the cognitive intertwines with the non-semiotic to engage its participants towards experiencing their situated contexts in new ways.

Knowing Body The Radical Empathy Lab understands the curatorial as agency and as care that takes the experiential aspects of for example a feminist consciousnessraising to heart. It ofers an afective, transformative, discursive, and activating form of curatorial care that strives to break the ties with forms of subjectivation of hegemonic power structures and that holistically – in a mind and body activating way – nurtures agency and critical consciousness for the human and planetary interdependence. The body, the corporeality of the human multidimensional synergetic cross-species being with its sentient qualities, is an essential starting point for actuating a critical practice. The Radical Empathy Lab exercises a curatorial care for mobilising aesthesia, for “in-corpo-rating” an experiential, non-mediated, and embodied shifting of critical thinking towards new directions that might resist dominant and institutionalised narratives.  A micropolitical approach that understands the micro level and the body as “the central metaphor of the political and social order” (Blackman 2008, 17) and as a site of practice, of becoming, and of potentiality. Thinking has to do with the knowing body. If you disassociate from the knowing body, thinking becomes a reactive action, an action to deny what is asking for change, [it] invents a kind of illusion of truth that explains everything. It is our responsibility to make this shift! It is dangerous to deny the knowing body (i.e., in academy), thinking must

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come from the knowing body which is creating the politics of thought. Explaining, refecting, re-feeling. (Rolnik 2015) This “knowing body” is the starting point for micropolitics to take place and to resonate on the macropolitical plane.

Active Micropolitics The concept of active micropolitics is drawn from Brazilian psychoanalyst, writer, art, and cultural critic Suely Rolnik, who wrote together with Félix Guattari Molecular Revolution in Brazil/Micropolitica: Cartografas do desejo (Guattari and Rolnik 2007). Her contemporary approach to micropolitics adds a psychoanalytical perspective in a body of work that she defnes as the colonial-capitalistic unconscious, which represses the body of the modernist subject in the production of thought. She elaborates that there are two levels of experience that occur simultaneously in the “knowing body” which can cause a sense of experienced disequilibrium. One level of experience is “the familiar”, which fts our set of codes of understanding and perceiving the world. The second level of experience is one of “strangeness”. Rolnik argues that this afect of strangeness (or the uncanny) exists as an extra-personal experience – outside of the subject. It produces afects in the body and results from our condition as living cultural beings. Rolnik explains further that, paradoxically, both experiences, the familiar and the uncanny, happen simultaneously. This creates tension and imbalance that leads to a state of destabilisation and estrangement; it “poses a question mark to subjectivity” and creates a desire to regain equilibrium (Rolnik 2015). This moment of desire is when micropolitical distinctions take place and diferent politics of desire can latch on. Here, Rolnik distinguishes between active and re-active micropolitics. Re-active micropolitics she considers as “an anthro-phallo-ego-logocentric perspective” that is disconnected from the knowing-body and that she describes as “individual/homogenetic/identarian/universal-capitalist”. She elaborates: [C]onsuming in order to project and make sense of the destabilisation, I avoid the question mark. I fnd something to create the equilibrium, for example [through] consumption. [The] consequence [is]: the actions of desire have reproduced mere redundancy [of] the colonial-capitalistic unconscious. (Rolnik 2015) However, active micropolitics, she considers as “an anthropophagic perspective” (relational/heterogenic/singularising), that in contrast to re-active

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micropolitics is not avoiding, but in fact guided by that question mark and it produces diference: [A] new state of things could shift towards new ways of deciphering what is going on, facing the strangeness in the knowing-body, giving words, gestures, new strategies of resistance. (Rolnik 2015) In Rolnik’s rationale, re-active micropolitics and disassociating from the knowing-body implies the risk that the system produces an illusion with the same references that one already has and therefore simply reproduces the colonial capitalist unconsciousness and its politics of desire; thereby re-active micropolitics defends the dominion of sameness. On the other hand, active micropolitics, one that is consciously aware and in tune with the knowing body, constitutes the only way for change and for creating diference; a chance to gain new subjectivity, new confgurations of the unconscious and its relation to the world for breaking from the dominant references. Active micropolitics is refusal, resistance, and liberation of the colonial capitalistic unconscious that disassociates the modern subject from its knowing body. Transcending historical and geographical situatedness, the question and urgency of micropolitics persists and assists as a timeless inspirational guide of radical thought and optimism for self-empowerment and emancipation from oppressive systems that abuse vital forces of the biosphere and from dominant segregating politics in the production of subjectivity. A laboratory of care like the Radical Empathy Lab might create the conditions (spatial, temporal, discursive, interpersonal) and nurturing grounds for micropolitical forces of creativity to unfold, to be tuned into, to be rehearsed, and to fourish. Curating with, and in care, might ofer a safe space in which trust can be developed; micro-perception be rehearsed; one’s driving force of joyfulness can unfold; and in which afectivity, response-ability, and agency might be practised as an embodied critical micropolitical awareness. Practising an active micropolitics, through the sensual experience of the self and the holistic exercises that have an emotional afectivity, a critical consciousness for the ethical and political implications and for care can be developed. A reciprocal care that is nurtured from the intimacy of interaction, collectivity, and an embodied experiential awareness for the entanglements of social and ecological bodies. Curating with care for the actuation of the micropolitical, the restoration of the fexibility and creativity on the afective levels of desire of its participants, might become the nourishing ground and support relational dynamics on the macropolitical, the molar level of the social and ecological entanglements; it thus carries the emancipatory potential to counter-hegemonic and commodifying capitalist power structures. The Radical Empathy Lab’s curatorial ethic pursues a regenerative reactivation of aesthesis and of an active micropolitics as potential antidotes

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to hegemonic and capitalist manipulations and to the subjugation of social and ecological subjects. Linking Rolnik’s understanding of an active micropolitics and activating it in post-representational curation, the Radical Empathy Lab motivates a curatorial guardianship for the formation of afective social processes in the production of subjectivity, for processes of decolonisation and de-subjectivisation of the (social) body and its relationality to the Other. The notion of decolonisation is advanced here phenomenologically, to delink from hegemonic and capitalistic misappropriations in the process of subjectivisation, from divisive relationships, detached individualism, and re-active micropolitics, which disengages from the knowing body, from the powers of creation, and from the ability for joyfulness and afectivity.

Afectivity and Joyfulness as Curatorial Thinking Tools Joy is the growth of shared power to do, feel, and think more. (bergman and Montgomery 2019)

Together with the idea of micropolitics, the concept of afect is ofered here as a curatorial thinking tool to activate new sets of relations and links, assemblages that might allow for new imaginaries and new forms of creativity. Authors Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg emphasise the corporeal quality of afect, of it being relational and temporal; “a passage”, that focuses on the “intensities that pass body to body”. They explain it as follows: Afect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, afect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1) Their comprehension of afect as a “relational passage” recalls the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s elaborations on afect, which are here approached through political philosopher and literary theorist Michael Hardt’s reading of Spinoza’s philosophical treatise Ethics (written 1664/1665, frst published posthumously in 1677). Michael Hardt highlights the relationality between body and mind and argues that reason and the “action of the mind” are in correspondence with the “actions of the body”, what he calls corporeal reason (Hardt 2007, x) – the body and the mind dualism has of course – long before the so-called afective turn – been challenged in the humanities and sciences by feminist

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and queer standpoints. Hardt contends that afect poses the “passions of both body and mind” together in a continuum rather than the often-assumed dualism between it. In his argumentation he refers to Spinoza’s ethical and political thinking “to transform passions to actions” and to replace encounters that are based on external causes with encounters that are “determined by internal causes, which are necessarily joyful”. And yet we need to remember that Spinoza’s preference for internal causes does not lead to an isolation of any sort since every increase of the power to act and think corresponds to an increased power to be affected – the increased autonomy of the subject, in other words, always corresponds to its increased receptivity. (Hardt 2007, x) Hardt values Spinoza’s approach of being in fux with one’s passions, joyfulness, and exploration of still unknown powers as a new “ontology of the human that is constantly open and renewed” (Hardt 2007, x). It is to be emphasised that the Spinozist notion of “joy” is to be understood here as a radical and afrmative criticality that needs to be carefully differentiated from the everyday parlance notion of “joy”, from neoliberal imperatives towards engineered and coerced positivity and happiness; a notion that has been appropriated and connotated with the idea of consumption by for example advanced capitalism’s “happiness industry” (Davies 2015). Moreover, Hardt underlines Spinoza’s fundamental principle that all is interrelated, that true individual sovereignty is not quite existent; sovereign decision-making is rather minimal, as we are afected by the world outside of us. In Spinozian thought the body is not a closed-of entity but is composed by relation, thought as multiplicities, and dispersed landscapes (Hardt 2015, 216–217). Furthermore, the body embraces an equality between the power to act and to be afected, and an understanding that the one afected the most and, in most ways, is the most powerful and most alive. One’s powers, capacities, and passions can be increased or decreased by causality, which can have either a saddening or a joyful and empowering afect. Coming back to curation and synergising these philosophical speculations: the Radical Empathy Lab creates afective temporary micro-communities, unmediated and holistic conditions for a causality that does have a joyful and empowering afect. As a laboratory of care, for the guardianship of a micropolitical activation of afectivity and joyfulness, the lab opens possibilities for a change of perspective, to build towards collective re-imagination, regeneration, and reinvention of the established status quo and towards a mobilisation and agency against reactionary politics. bergman and Montgomery state for their contribution to one of the iterations of the Radical Empathy Lab:

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We think this increase in capacity [of joyfulness] is at the core of meaningful social and political change today: we are interested in what makes it possible to immediately transform social relations in an embodied and collective way. This might feel scary, painful, and exhilarating, but it will always be more than just the emotions one feels about it: joy is the growth of shared power to do, feel, and think more. (bergman and Montgomery 2019) Afectivity and joyfulness are ofered as proposals for new ways of an ethico-political, holistic post-representational, and transformative curation. Curating for and with care is curating as an agent that activates joyfulness as a political tool of resistance and for mobilising theoretical thought in an experiential way that sensitises aesthesis, instead of breaking reality up into discrete pieces that can be consumed. In the context of curating with care, this means that micropolitical projects not only care for the micropolitical level of its protagonists and the ideas at stake, but they moreover hold the potential to evolve into the molar, the macropolitical sphere, and thus recap the afective transformative potential of the curatorial as an incubator or ignition for social transformation. In other words, actuating active micropolitics, afectivity, and joyfulness – following and acting upon one’s passions and imaginaries, that which makes one thrive – does not only assist to fght reactionary anaesthesia, the loss of our sensing ability. It suggests that, from within the curatorial care for the micropolitical, a potential strategy for refusal, resistance, and resilience against dominant separating structures – that detach from the sensing and knowing bodies, from oneself and one’s interconnectedness with others – on the macropolitical plane is pertained. A care-full ethico-political curating encourages afective transformative encounters and ofers a holistic and relational knowledge formation that amplifes joyfulness and empowers its curatorial public towards an empathic interconnectedness with the living world.

Notes 1 For further information, please visit www.beritfscher.org. 2 See, for example, www.deeplistening.rpi.edu. 3 See, for example, https://arawanahayashi.com.

Bibliography bergman, carla, and Nick Montgomery. Unpublished manuscript, last modifed April 2019. Word document. Blackman, Lisa. 2008. The Body: The Key Concepts. Oxford; New York: Berg. Cocker, Emma, Nikolaus Gansterer, and Mariella Greil. Eds. 2017. Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations of the Line. Published in the series “Edition Angewandte”. Berlin; Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

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Davies, William. 2015. The Happiness Industry. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1972. L’anti-Oedipe: Captialisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Milles Plateaux: Captialisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Fischer, Berit. 2020. “How Can the Curatorial Create Spaces and Conditions for Activating a Micropolitical and Holistic Making of Social Empathy; an Approach on Post-Representational Curation”. [PhD Dissertation]. Southampton: University of Southampton/Winchester School of Art. Guattari, Félix, and Suely Rolnik. 2007. Molecular Revolution in Brazil. Translated from Portuguese by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes. Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London; Thousand Oaks: Sage in Association with the Open University. Hardt, Michael. 2007. “What Afects Are Good for.” In The Afective Turn, Theorizing the Social. Edited by Patricia Ticineto and Jean Halley, ix–1. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hardt, Michael. 2015. “The Power to Be Afected.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28(3): 215–222. Manning, Erin. 2009. “From Noun to Verb: The Micropolitics of ‘Making Collective’.” Interview by Nasrin Himada. INFLeXions No. 3 – Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. www.infexions.org/n3_hamidamanninghtml.html. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientifc Revolution. New York: Harper & Row. Montgomery, Nick, and carla bergman. 2017. Joyful Militancy. Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. Chico; Oakland; Edinburgh; Baltimore: AK Press. Rolnik, Suely. 2015. “Thinking from the Knowing-Body. A Micropolitics to Resist the Colonial-Capitalist Unconscious.” Paper presented at conference: Turning (to) Archive. Institutional Histories, Educational Regimes, Artistic Practices and Politics of Remembrance, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Afect Theory Reader. Edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, 1–25. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Avtonomi Akadimia Curating Becomes Curing Joulia Strauss

Avtonomi Akadimia is a self-organised grassroots university as a durational artwork. This university takes place in the garden in Athens where Plato taught: the Akadimia Platonos. Originally, this academy was a military gymnasium, and Plato was invited to join it to broaden the horizons of the male warriors. Training the youth into a condition of serving the militarised state is the oldest, most continuous European dispositif. This is what Avtonomi Akadimia rewrites: our dispositif is gentle, kind, and lush. The Akadimia Platonos is the etymological root of the academy as an institution of education. The concepts of discipline and indeed that of disciplines as such, stem from it, as does the militarised state, binary oppositions, the invention of a narrow and nationalist Europe, and the separation of culture from nature. The culture of this garden is the root of the Anthropocene. Plato’s Politeia, translated to English as The Republic, has preconditioned the empire at war with nature where we still live. Avtonomi Akadimia writes a new Politeia without Plato. It overwrites the existing Politeia, as a siren would the Odyssey; it celebrates the garden’s very existence as  a public space, as a commons,  throughout millennia – thanks to the communities that have been living with this garden and protecting it down the generations. As part of Avtonomi Akadimia, artists, curators, scientists, art historians, political philosophers, and environmental activists from all over the world weave a single epistemology. Together, we enact a university in times of climate chance. We hybridise Western political philosophy and media theory with indigenous forms of knowledge. We invent new goddesses and gods. We protect the environmental commons by establishing environmental personhood. In the Akadimia gardens, in Athenian public space, we stage artist talks, lectures, unauthorised exhibitions, gatherings, ceremonies, and spontaneous activities as part of exhibitions and festivals and itinerantly. Avtonomi Akadimia is a continuous living organism as a work of art. With it, art returns to the polis, establishing itself as a compass for our society. It can do so only as an activist project in public space, operating without authorisation. This is the only way to defend its vibrant pulsation from being captured by old logics, logics of pacifcation, of zombifcation. The Akadimia Platonos is the point of infection from where what was

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discredited as pre-scientifc wisdom has modulated into the tamed cybernetics of the state. We share non-capitalist time; we can be and are many things; we are a self-evolving socio-cybernetic sculpture, a latent flm set, and a political model of interconnectedness and diversity which is so urgent in our reLOVEution! Avtonomi Akadimia takes place in a parallel world, outside the spatio-temporal coordinates of reality, outside the monetary system. It lives on a surplus of political burning. While writing this chapter, I came to realise that the practice of creating and holding space for deep encounters of various artistic and philosophical discourses, beyond the regulated paths of cultural exchange, for intertwining contradicting forms of knowledge, and for unfolding political imagination through collective experiences, is at once an artistic–activist practice and a curatorial practice of care. By collectivising the artistic process, the ontological diference between artist and curator is displaced. Notions both of curatorial and of artistic practice transform in connection with all the other changes underway in our transition from the extractivist to the permacultural. Akadimia Platonos is a space for treating traumas caused by the systemic reduction of diversity to polarities, by the exclusion of art from the polis, by the failures of politics. Across the planet, the decolonial world has created its urban eco-environment, crucial in this age of pandemics, transforming art-as-business curatorial practice into art-as-curative collectivising practice. Instead of ‘development’, curators here orchestrate the defence of the social commons and free access to education in techniques of survival and spiritual practices ofering narratives of belonging to what is left of our environment. We know that we don’t know. During Akadimia’s seven years of life, the garden has become our memory palace, as invented by the poet Simonides of Keos. Currently, the garden is being transformed into a jungle as part of the activist struggle to have its environmental personhood legally enshrined. Rewriting Politeia is caring and working for environmental personhood and the rights of nature. Rewriting Politeia is a way to set in relief how our new cosmology is emerging. It is the basis for our sociality, our mutual care, and our pandemicchallenged psychological health. This text is a political manifesto. It is about a memory palace, a garden in the process of becoming-jungle, and an invitation to Athens to join our struggles.

Avtonomi Akadimia: Itinerant Education Despite our divagations through Europe’s cultural landscape – through its biennales or other cultural institutions – Avtonomi Akadimia doesn’t aspire to become part of any permanent museum collection. Avtonomi Akadimia is political art and visits institutions as a guest only. It doesn’t criticise the existing regime – it refers to an entirely diferent world. In 2015, Avtonomi Akadimia took part in the legendary ‘OMONOIA’, the Athens Biennale 5 to 6. This was a moment in which multiple artistic-activist

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movements from peripheral Europe were united: yes, we are exposed to the same colonial aggression (Tanks = Banks), but together we are strong! Then, Avtonomi Akadimia, with the participation of Greek, Japanese, Polish, Brazilian, and German faculty members, travelled to the Kyiv Biennale. The programme was held in the ‘UFO’, a spaceship cinema of Soviet Modernism, a monument of world architecture endangered by privatisation. The Kyiv Biennale, like the Athenian one, is a continuation of social struggles, in this case, of the Maidan protests. documenta 14 also hosted Akadimia’s conference as an artwork: The School of Everything, which discussed not the problems with education but political emergencies through the prism of the documenta 14’s central theme: learning. The conference took place in the sculptural environment of MoLotus, a hybrid of a Molotov cocktail and a lotus fower, its leaves carrying projections of the participants. This is a totem of Avtonomi Akadimia – this sculpture, which was initially mine, was collectivised over many unforgettable days: a host of documenta 14 visitors stayed at our conference and refused to return to the format of an exhibition. The School of Everything took place with the help of Paul B. Preciado. In Athens, Avtonomi Akadimia participated in the Parliament of Bodies, in Kassel, the feminist artist Mathilde ter Heijne ofered us space at the Kunsthochschule (School of Art Kassel). Akadimia has co-organised workshops in refugee camps around Athens, in collaboration with AthenSYN. Workshops provided us with the pretext to access the camps, which are ruled with weaponised ethnic groups. Indeed, it is not clear whether the strict entrance system is designed to protect the camps from potentially harmful strangers or to protect the general public from fnding out what is happening inside the camps. Child prostitution, synthetic drug business, and other economies are fourishing in the camps. On the pretext of teaching migrants to produce artworks, we were able to create a common space in the shelters out of the shipping containers, enabling gatherings with the migrants and inviting them to tell us what they had to say. We converted the results into artworks and put on some well-received exhibitions. Yet these art products were just by-products of an activist artistic process. The truth of this process will stay with those who were there. We sat for hours and hours in these containers, unable to stop crying. We heard about people’s experiences in staging the Syrian revolution. We subverted the prevailing border politics for some moments of oneness. We learned more from the ‘migrants’ than they did from us. We continue to learn. We continue to self-educate. We always return to the garden in Athens, to continue overwriting Politeia.

First Axiom of Athenian Ecofeminism: Too Big to Fail Fails! Avtonomi Akadimia always returns to its ground. Once, beings from a ‘different world’ came to this ‘ground’ to ‘visit’ us. The ‘biggest shadow bank on Earth’, BlackRock Inc, arrived with the plan to transform the garden

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into a block of concrete and abuse its symbolic capital. Instead of all the wondrous initiatives of the post-capitalist world, a shopping mall was to be erected here: Academy Gardens, 55,000 square metres of shopping with a predicted build cost of 350  million Euros. We fought back. Avtonomi Akadimia and the many other groups connected to the garden, and that make up our polycephalic society, initiated actions, meetings, conferences, and loud processions. The collectives around the garden published a petition on the domain www.academygardens.org. Thanks to the powerful collective efort, the petition was widely distributed among the large worldwide scientifc, philosophical, and artistic community. While our bodies were part of the activist operation on the ground, the online petition caught fre, as philologists, writers, DJs, curators, historians, all of whom are so important for us, ofered their support and their signatures.  There were weekly TV talks by young politicians from out of the movements while newspapers regularly exposed BlackRock’s confict of interest . . . 2018 was an intense summer. It brought the following ecofeminist lesson to light: too big to fail, fails – BlackRock was sent packing. The syllabus of the BlackRock Protest Semester involved a practice of reunion between physis and techné, of art with Gaia. The entire garden and knowledge ofered by Avtonomi Akadimia are commons. If capitalism, as Sylvia Federici (who has visited the site) says, began with a war on women, then we are the witches who can stop the re-colonisation that is underway. The Akadimia is a relatively new initiative, while the garden has lived as a commons throughout its entire existence, experiencing neither the witchhunt nor the rupture of modernity. BlackRock has tried to attack the garden and our lives: but the existentialist–anticapitalist approach of the Akadimia holds on to the garden, refusing the consumption of lives. It continues to host permaculture workshops, celebrations of rainbow families, festivals of alternative economies, and solstice and equinox rituals, in which we wildly jump over a massive fre as our ancestors did.

From Garden to Jungle Threatened by the spectre of the shopping mall, we began to honour the garden even more. We protect it like indigenous communities protect their living environments. In many respects, Akadimia practices rituals, which include my own artistic practice rooted in my cultural origin. My ‘DeanthropoceneDrawings’ portray the Akadimia’s Professors as animals. Following my shamanic visions, I draw them as spirit animals – not as what they look like but as how they are. This defnes the ethos of their contribution. Our seminars are held under the open sky: in the sun, under the beautiful cypresses and silver-leaved olive trees. The indigenous concept of a place consists in our relation to it. Environment equals knowledge. This is the pedagogy of the place. Knowledge stands in proximity to our environment. Art, in a reinvented role, modulates this proximity. The distance between people, their

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relation to their living spaces, is respected as sacred. The rural traditions of festivals, carnivals, and panegyric in southern Europe, and the shamanic ceremonies in the Andean communities, can be thought of as ancestral commons. They provide a space and a context for people to congregate and partake in a communal experience, which they help co-create and in which they also become participants – says Prof. Nikos Anastasopoulos, who is a big friend of pigeons (Anastasopoulos 2020, 99). In collaboration with Yorgos Theodorakis, founder of the Permaculture School, we sent out an invitation to the 27 Athenian initiatives to present their projects. The event took place the day before the frst hard COVID-19 lockdown (November 01, 2020). In Greek, the gender of the word ‘garden’ (ο κήπος) is masculine, so Akadimia Platonos, updating itself, has now become a jungle (η ζούγκλα), which, in Greek, is feminine. This invitation was the frst step toward claiming environmental personhood for the garden, understood as a jungle, in the feminine: The Akadimia Platonos Jungle* invites all humanoids to assemble and enjoy her sublime grounds, to praise her cypresses and her olive trees. She kindly asks climate activists, artists, philosophers and lawyers to join together. The Jungle is launching a call for integrative protection of commons, biodiversity and cultural heritage, for the relevant European legislation to seek inspiration in animist cosmologies, for the education system to transform through indigenous forms of knowledge, and for the separation between culture and nature to be overcome. #LegalRights4AkadimiaPlatonosJungle Akadimia Platonos Jungle seeks to set a European precedent and have environmental personhood recognised in Europe. Ecuador pioneered legal rights for nature in 2008 (Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador 2008). The right of the Vilcabambas river to exist and sustain itself has prohibited highway construction. In 2010, the idea of ecological personhood was implemented in Bolivia’s ‘Law of the Rights of Mother Earth’ (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra). This law suggests that Mother Earth is a collective subject of public interest: “Mother Earth is the dynamic living system made up of the indivisible community of all living systems – living, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny” (Wikipedia 2021). In 2014, the Te Urewera National Park in New Zealand was granted the legal status of an inalienable person that belongs to itself. With this precedence, the Whanganui river emancipated itself as a person in 2017. Even the metaphysical aspects of rivers have been ofcially recognised. In Colombia, the constitutional court has decided to protect the rights of the

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Atrato, to ensure the cultural protection of the basin’s indigenous population and a suspension of mining operations. The chain of legislative equivalences reached India, in 2017: recognising the critical rivers of the Ganges and the Yamuna as persons has provided for their energetic and physical purifcation. These rivers are known as healing baths and for receiving the ashes of the cremated. The rivers were being trashed, polluted by 1.5 billion litres of unprocessed wastewater and 500 million litres of industrial garbage a day, before the law stopped this violence. In Australia, Uluru, situated in the southern part of the Northern Territory, is sacred to the aboriginals of Pitjantjatjara. For us, the Akadimia Platonos Jungle is an Uluru. The spirits we worship live here: Sappho, Aristoxenos of Tarent, Philolaos, Diogenes, Friedrich Kittler, Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, Lynn Margulis, and our direct ancestor, Plato’s only female student, Diotima. In this Jungle, we exalt our sociopolitical ancestors who have fought for the freedom of knowledge over the entire duration of the Empire: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for relating the utopia of a society with a pedagogical concept; Robert Owen, for the gender-neutral community; the ‘nihilist’ Vera Figner, for founding schools in the villages of enslaved Russia; the Hamburger Torschule, for planlessness; and so on. We sacrifce rapéh to Maestra Olivia, who was shot in the Peruvian Amazonas. We admire the pedagogue Janusz Korczak, who, out of solidarity, perished with the orphans in his care in the gas chamber. It is to him that we owe the invention of children’s rights. Similarly, for the rights of nature, we are and will be indebted to those indigenous activists who are dying in the front line, defending what remains of the environment. Respecting and protecting rivers and mountains as persons is not an esoteric concept. Indigenous leaders, who are currently ascending to positions of power, are fghting for the commons, for the rights of nature, and have sponsored environmental and social movements. We love the jungle. We desire the growing hybridisation of urban environments with such jungles. We don’t need smart green cities. Our ancestors communicate with us through the trees and the light of the intact ecosystem. We don’t need the G5 to hear them better. Here, there is no ‘development’ lobby. We gladly remain underdeveloped. We live well together, with the jungle. In indigenous Bolivia, suma qamaña means ‘to live well together’, with nature, sustainably. It is the opposite of an involution, of neijuan, ‘rolling inwards’, as a solitary life under the computer table is described in China. The Japanese expression shizen kyosei shakai refers to a ‘society in a symbiosis’; Quechua peoples, from the Peruvian Andes, similarly say: sumak kawsay. In Mari, my language, to live the ‘good life’ means to ‘live like the gods’, yumo gai lij. We want the good life for the jungle. We are one with the jungle, and therefore we extend our human rights to her. The decolonial environmental turn of governance is a chance for a planetary politics. Our future depends on overcoming the confict between growthoriented criminality and indigenously inspired legislation for the protection of commons.

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Art’s Footprint: Caring About Emissions, Caring for Transformation During the semester Knowing Ourselves,1 Akadimia hosted a talk by Thomas Oberender, one of the frst authors to write about the inner decolonisation of Germany. His solidarity with us, Athenians, is documented in the publication Occupy History (2019). As a result of our mutual interest in Bruno Latour’s book Down to Earth, Oberender invited Avtonomi Akadimia to an exhibition in Berlin titled Down to Earth, held in 2020 at the MartinGropius-Bau.2 This rare exhibition set out to address art’s footprint: it was ‘unplugged’ (no electricity) and for the frst time in the museum’s history, the windows were open. No fights, only trains. Ironically, we could not invite those whose contributions might be most relevant, most precious, to participate in Down to Earth: zero emissions means no fights, even for people with so much to share, who may have never fown in their lives. These people could surely teach us their decolonial techniques of survival from a screen, but . . . unplugged means unplugged. Faced with this major contradiction in attempting to alter curatorial practices due to Gaia’s rage, the solution involved transforming curatorial practice into an artistic-shamanic one. We engaged in the real experience of a new kind of exhibition-making, one infuenced by a non-identitarian indigeneity. Through techné, then, I was able to provide an artistic way around the systemic limitations of this new exhibition concept. This curatorial practice ofered transformation – the best way to honour indigenous activists who have lost and are losing their lives on the front lines, in the Amazonas, Siberia, Australia, and many other places, and to show care for the public damaged by the virus in one way or another.

To Araucaria/Room to Bloom The Summer Semester 2021 was dedicated to a tree, an Araucaria. It welcomed us to hold a series of seminars and workshops in the inner yard of an empty villa situated just behind the Panteion University in Athens. The tree invited us to assemble together for a semester under its branches, in the open air. Avtonomi Akadimia continued to fourish, extending to an additional, ‘pandemic’ venue to allow Room to Bloom,3 which is the name of the ongoing educational initiative conceived by Studio Rizoma, Palermo, AthenSYN, The National Museums of World Culture, Gothenburg, and Avtonomi Akadimia, all of which are united by European Alternatives, a trans-European organisation advocating politics and culture beyond the nation state. One hundred young feminist artists were invited to attend a series of feminist workshops: in Athens, in Palermo, and online. For the Athenian edition of Room to Bloom, I proposed an Ecofeminism syllabus (Figure 9.1). The Akadimia’s seven years of existence has nourished the ground with teachings

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Figure 9.1 Room to Bloom Athens: Ecofeminism, Summer 2021. Source: Photograph courtesy of the author.

about the earth and by practising the deconstruction of dualisms inherited from the previous waves: the Akadimia Platonos Jungle is the only topos in which Karen Warren’s ‘theory-in-process’ appears as a tautology – theoria is a process. θεωρίᾱ in ancient Greek refers to a festive procession. Room to Bloom teachers ofered workshops, something unexpected for a programme that originally aspired to support the careers of young feminist artists in the masculine art world. Marina Naprushkina, an artist who took an active part in the Belarusian revolution and founder of the biggest women migrant support community in Berlin the ‘Neue Nachbarschaft/Moabit’, invited participants to search for a new political language that doesn’t reproduce the language of power, violence, and hierarchy – patriarchal forms of politics. The participants created a 15-metre-long collective painting dedicated to this search. By coincidence, a rally against a new attempt at gentrifying the Jungle was underway at the Akadimia Platonos, starting precisely as a huge painting was being completed. Celebrating the magic of the Jungle, we contributed a spontaneous solidarity action with the organisers of the protest. Each morning in the Villa Araucaria, a Sanskrit expert, Mayoori Sangameshwar Hanagodimath (aka MUKTA Mayoori), taught us Sanskrit, a study of many lifetimes. We have learned three primordial sounds common to all languages and their energetic experience. We have learned to use sound to release trauma, shame, and guilt. This healing science helps us to harness and express divinity and distribute it in the world.

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With the founding member of El Juego community (mountains of central Colombia), Aleksandra Rhodius, we engaged in healing techniques developed by the group. These techniques use conficts that emerge in the community’s daily lives to learn about the origins of individual and collective conficts. El Juego members are constantly learning and unlearning how to live with nature. They develop and practise healing techniques, which they call Doors. Doors combine ancestral knowledge with a range of psychotherapeutic methods. One example of this practice is the ‘Encounter’, which is an active meditation between two people where, through dialogue and eye contact, unconscious projections become visible. It allows you to express repressed emotions, fnd answers to unsatisfed needs, and recognise oneself in the other. Another is ‘A Constellation of Silence’, which is a group dynamic that consists in projecting a system in confict onto a defned space. The participants work on the instances most relevant to the confict and, through spontaneous gestures and rituals, arrive at a greater order. This practice also includes ‘Instrumental Breathing’, which works through over-oxygenating the brain and giving it a musical accompaniment, enabling a trance state  where repressed emotions and movements are expressed, and visions can arise. It allows the release of chronic pain and tensions rooted in the body. Throughout time and endless experiments with creolising knowledge, Avtonomi Akadimia itself has become a new practice of grounding, of knowing ourselves. During these seven years, the ruins of Plato’s school have slowly become what they are: ruins of the occidental world, ruins of capitalism. The programme of the Avtonomi Akadimia embodies an indigenised educational system. Avtonomi Akadimia – Academy for Transformation. What was once said at the end of the world, in the precarious Athenian district of Kolonos, where our Jungle is situated, has been suddenly heard in the centre of the European power: we are transforming the educational system of Europe.

Conclusion: Cure and Care Become One Indigenous communities inspire bioethical laws and the criminalisation of ecocide. As an example of such inspiration, I will conclude with a draft of the collectively developed law for the universal protection of Mother Earth, titled Paragraph 0. 1. The dignity of Mother Earth is inviolable. 2. She has the right of free development of her ecological personhood. 3. To respect and protect Mother Earth and her ecological personhood is the duty of all public and civil authorities. 4. She belongs to herself. The totality of her ecosystems and resources are part of the commons. 5. The populace of Germany professes the above inviolable and inalienable rights of Mother Earth as the basis of every interspecies community, and of peace and justice in the world.

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Notes 1 ‘Knowing Ourselves’, Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnṓthi seautón), is a collectivised update of ‘Know Thyself’, a well-known inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. 2 Programme for the Berliner Festpiele exhibition Down to Earth can be located at www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/berliner-festspiele/programm/bfs-gesamtprogramm/ programmdetail_309206.html. Last accessed June 6, 2022. 3 More information about the Room to Project can be located at www.roomtobloom. eu. Last accessed June 6, 2022.

Bibliography Anastasopoulos, Nicholas. 2020. “Cultural Life Reconfgured: From the Ancestral to the Digital Commons and Beyond”. In Cultural Heritage in the Realm of the Commons: Conversations on the Case of Greece. Edited by S. Lekakis, 97–108. London: Ubiquity Press. Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador. 2008. “Chapter  7: Rights of Nature”. https://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html. Last accessed January 31, 2011. Oberender, Thomas. 2019. Occupy History. Athens: Krytyka Polityczna. Also published in German as Empowerment Ost (Stuttgart: Tropen Verlag, 2020). www. thomas-oberender.de/937_english/968_text/1370_2019/1372_occupy_history_ workshop_avtonomi_akadimia_athens_19_7_19. Warren, Karen J. 1990. “The Power and the Promíse of Ecological Feminism”. Environmental Ethics 12(2): 125–144. Wikipedia. 2021. “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth”. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Law_of_the_Rights_of_Mother_Earth. Last accessed December 27, 2021.

10 Care, Aftercare, and the Work of Transmission Learning From Greenham Common1 Alexandra Kokoli Greenham Common, an Archival Assemblage in the Making The women’s peace camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000) was a site of sustained protest against nuclear weapons and the fallacy of Cold War deterrence, dispersed across the many gates of the USAF military base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, and extending beyond it, through the “Take Greenham Home” campaign and the global networks that Greenham women established and maintained. In addition to its welldocumented impact on public consciousness and continuous exposure in the British and international media (Liddington 1989; Roseneil 1995; Pettitt 2006), the peace camp soon emerged as a vibrant collective studio and exhibition site for art and activist practices, boldly blurring the lines between them. The protesters at Greenham Common revisited the direct-action strategies of the sufragettes and knowingly mobilised women’s crafts with all their ambiguous and ambivalent connotations, as a form of anti-militarist and anti-masculinist resistance in their much-photographed interventions on the perimeter fence of the airbase. In both its day-to-day running and its visual activist strategies, caregiving emerged as an essential and pervasive feature of the peace camp, distinguishing it from other forms of anti-nuclear and anti-war protest. While caregiving was practised in the camp and between the camp and its supporters nationally and internationally, it was also reclaimed within and mobilised beyond the familiar frameworks of social reproduction, in the consciousness-raising performances and posters of Sister Seven, as well as in Margaret Harrison’s recreations of the periphery fence of the Greenham Common airbase. Acts of knowledge-sharing and solidarity-building took the form of visual, material, and performative practices, which prompted me to nominate Greenham Common as the defnitive “mistress-piece” of the British feminist 1980s (Kokoli 2021), in response to a call for papers by Brenda Schmahmann. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, a formative feminist intervention in the discipline of art history, introduced its central thesis in the brilliant irony of its title: “there is not a female equivalent to the reverential ‘Old

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Master’ ” (Parker and Pollock 1981, 114). Rather than asserting that there have indeed been great women artists, authors Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock set out to examine how and why women’s signifcant contributions to the history of art have been consistently misrepresented, devalued, or ignored. The discipline and institutions of art history have been instrumental in the ideological operations responsible for such failings: “This is not simply to accuse art historians themselves of bias or prejudice”, Parker and Pollock explain, “but concerns the signifcance of the typical forms of art history, the survey history of art’s evolution independent of social forces, the catalogue raisonné and the monograph on a single artist’s work” (xviii). The research tools and established dissemination routes of the discipline implicitly “privilege the named creative individual and certain forms of art over all other expressions of creativity”. The call for papers of the conference Mistress-Pieces, in 2018,2 rifed on the irony of the book’s title, both acknowledging the continuing currency of Parker and Pollock’s critique of art history and inviting a corrective that teetered on the edge of entertaining the monographic art historical obsession that Parker and Pollock sought to dismantle. I  chose to approach the call for papers as a provocation to keep such difcult questions in focus, rather than an invitation to collaborate in the collective construction of a feminist canon, and responded to it with another provocation. Instead of a particular work of art, I proposed a cluster of practices with permeable and ultimately indefnable boundaries, practices most of which do not occupy the category of art in a comfortable or obvious way but are rather suspended between art and visual activism. With curating displacing art history as the framework of the present investigation, Greenham Common is no longer approached as a “mistress-piece” but an archival assemblage in the making. Greenham Common is considered from two separate points of view, both infected by a concern with care, curating, and transmission. First, I approach Greenham as a curatorial conundrum: how can Greenham be re-collected and re-circulated, through exhibition or other means, after the closure of the camp? How can historicisation and the desire for reactivation be reconciled in the transformation of Greenham Common into feminist heritage? Second, I refect on the resources thanks to which I have learned about and then began to research Greenham: the academic texts, published testimonials, and particularly the archival sprawl of ephemera, correspondence, images, and even fence fragments, as well as interpersonal exchanges brought about through the vicissitudes of data collection. The care invested in the making and maintenance of the Greenham archives demands reciprocation in the form of transmission through scholarly, activist, and further curatorial work. In what follows, an exposition of my research fndings and scholarly analysis weaves through a personal refection on the experience of researching a vibrant and expansive piece of queer feminist (art) history that both demands memorialisation – or something like it – and resists completion. Pivoting on an expanded understanding of assemblage, I argue that art practice ofers a model for dealing

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with feminist heritage which relies on care while tolerating risk and suggests that the two are in fact interconnected. A note on circumstances: when I  began writing this chapter in December 2020, England, where I live and work, I was placed under restrictions to help control the spread of COVID-19, including remote working where possible and measures to limit face-to-face social interactions and congregations of large groups. Access to physical archives had been severely limited or suspended during much of the time of the writing, although most of the archival research under discussion thankfully took place before the implementation of COVID-19 measures. Although the full impact of these changes falls outside the scope of this chapter, it is relevant to note that the commitment to transmissibility of the more politicised archives continues in new, virtual but no less real, ways. Finally, living through diferent degrees of lockdown measures has given those of us with the privilege of free movement in public space a real taste of what it feels like to be deprived of it, even temporarily. The intensifed signifcance of borders and boundaries at the peace camp, between the peace camp and the military base against which it protested, which was already underlined in the transformation of the perimeter fence into a gallery and challenged through its breaches, becomes uncannily animated at the now common sight of locked and guarded gates. Greenham resonates, beyond what is planned, intentional, or expected.

All Over the Place: Archival Sprawl and Virtual Museums From the beginning, it was the omnipresence of Greenham Common that I found most intimidating. Rarely did I present any of my research to audiences that did not include at least a few self-identifed Greenham women, male day-time visitors, or supporters. Nearly all were helpful in their suggestions and supportive. They also had questions about the motivations of my research: What is my connection to Greenham’s history? How did I fnd out about it? Ultimately (if not as directly), why did I care? My interest in Greenham did not stem from direct experience but feminist scholarly interest. Marina Warner’s acknowledgement of the eloquence and efectiveness of DIY actions of artistic activism were formative to my understanding of British feminism, paved the way for my transition from the felds of comparative literature and critical theory to art history, and helped keep the line between art and its close neighbours fne and permeable thereafter. Warner noted that the webs that protestors wove and/or deployed in blockades made trouble beyond their visual dimension: they choreographed the bodies of law enforcement ofcers from ordinary and Ministry of Defence police to perform the “fddly task” of detangling yarn, for which they were unprepared and to which they were ill-suited. Guy Brett (1986, 131–154) also focuses on the strategically fragile tensions of yarn and thread, each knot a happy confuence of symbolic power and materialist expediency, situating them in an unfolding web of social art practices that mobilised the

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physical and spiritual potential of fabric fbres, like those of David Medalla and Lygia Clark. Documentation of such actions at the peace camp homes in on not only the webs themselves but also their unmaking, knowingly foregrounding their dual – activist and artistic – dimensions, the feminist assimilation of destruction as artistic medium alongside the performance of iconographies of witchcraft. The origins of my research into Greenham lie in the conjunction of the aftermath of writing a book about the unhomeliness of art informed by and committed to feminism (Kokoli 2016) and a conference call for papers for new approaches to domesticity in feminist art history and curating. Jo Applin and Francesca Berry invited contributors to reconsider the entanglements between art, feminism, and domesticity, in light of the resurgence of old-fashioned domestic idealisation in popular culture, the labour of reuse motivated by ecology and austerity, and the intersectional complications of patriarchal domesticity as supplement to capitalist economy and a stock feminist concern.3 Not only was Greenham “a radically queer feminist intervention in the politics of home and family” (Roseneil 2012, 8), but it also involved a collective reclamation of the militarised commons and an eco-feminist exploration of what it means to live on this earth.4 With the fortieth anniversary of the peace camp’s foundation in September 2021, its heritage appears widely and readily acknowledged while questions of curating and audience engagement continue to demand practical responses.5 No, I never visited the peace camp in its 19-year span. No, my mother wasn’t a Greenham woman. Yes, I “just” read about it. And then, once I sensed that this would be the next big project, I began compiling a list of the archives I should visit and made it to only a few, including the Feminist Archive South, now in the special collections of the University of Bristol; the Peace Museum, Bradford, which holds on loan many of the iconic banners of Thalia Campbell and a lesser-known series of quilted and embroidered panels by Daphne Morgan (1916–2003); the Women’s Library, London School of Economics; Gwyn Kirk’s papers at the MayDay Rooms, London; at Bishopsgate Institute in Spitalfelds, a centre for culture, adult learning, and archival collections focusing on people’s history, the collection of the Format Photographers Agency, a militant women-only collective that documented the peace camp in feminist solidarity and activist participation; the Imperial War Museum, which holds the archive of R.A.G.E., Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment, bequeathed by its founder George Anthony Meyer. DM Withers (2016, 848) argues that collecting and curating the archives of women’s movements is rarely a purely academic pursuit, since such “memory resources” cannot be classifed as “historical evidence alone” but “examples of feminist cultural heritage”. Some hope of reactivation, if not concrete plans for it, similarly shadows the uses of such archives by researchers like myself, even though my relationship to the peace camp at Greenham Common is highly mediated and almost entirely academic.

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In this context, the defnition of ‘academic’ as scholarly is haunted by the other meaning of the word in modern English: purely theoretical, with no impact, and unrelated to real life. The archives from which I beneftted have a variety of motivations and institutional remits; not all share an interest in or a desire for feminist transmission and working across them suggests counternarratives that cannot be easily assimilated in the dissemination of the research. The multiple archival registers and the volume of archival content together encourage the researcher to be intensely and possibly idiosyncratically selective in their treatment of the material. Greenham Common’s archival sprawl mirrors the diversity of its visual, material, and performative cultures as well as the span of its aspirations, deceptively packaged as the single issue of nuclear disarmament. Such radical selectivity could be viewed as a form of curating, the outcomes of which are dynamically accommodated in a virtual feminist museum. Mobilising Aby Warburg’s Nachleben (afterlife/survival by metamorphosis), Griselda Pollock proposes the virtual feminist museum as a curatorial project in progress that untethers artefacts, images, and practices from their historical contexts and sets them in motion, tracing their travels, re-occurrences, and transformations across time and space. For Pollock (2007), virtuality is not opposed to actuality but vibrates with the possibility of realisation. A virtual museum is simultaneously less than and more than a real museum. When the Control Tower of the former USAF base reopened as a community and heritage space in 2018, I among others hoped that it would gradually become a museum of the peace camp. Despite hosting a series of events and exhibitions focusing on the peace camp, it soon became clear that the organisation adopted a “balanced” approach between the site’s military history and its feminist anti-nuclear legacies. In his essay “Non-Museums” on the infections of the curatorial in the partition-scarred Indian subcontinent, Adnan Madani (2013) explains “the absence or inadequacy of museums in Pakistan” (201) with an arresting phrase that could be applied to the not-yet-museum of Greenham Common: India and Pakistan “erase themselves and their lived history to justify their continued existence, to deny the absurdity of their being and the possibility of extinction through irrelevance rather than nuclear war” (202). I am in no position to evaluate Madani’s assessment of Pakistani museums, and his analysis doesn’t apply to the peace camp in any obvious way, but it does identify some of the advantages of museological absence: having no Greenham Museum motivates and validates acts of self-curating and powers continuous archival assembly and sharing of Greenham’s sprawling archives like no (single) museum could. A provocation to feminist art historical thinking still shaped by the idea that the identifcation and preservation of feminist heritage maps out the realm of the possible, non-museums mark not a vacuum but a space where other kinds of practice emerge; in the case of Greenham, as I argue later, this space is flled with careful research, both scholarly and archival, and also with research-led feminist art practice.

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Care-fully Curated Archives: A Neighbouring and a Stain Reading Jacques Derrida’s celebrated Archive Fever reveals little about the labour or conventions of archival research. This realisation, obvious to a seasoned historian like herself, was the starting point for Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, a playfully corrective response to Derrida’s intervention from an empirical perspective. Taking “archive fever” literally, in a move of “calculated naivety”, Steedman (2002, 10) begins her book with a discussion of the burden of archival research on historians, a burden that is intellectual, mental, and physical. Archives make for an inevitable but often disappointing resource, at once overwhelmingly voluminous but often thin on useful discoveries: sites of “everyday disappointments”, archives are in reality “far less portentous, difcult and meaningful than Derrida’s archive would seem to promise” (Steedman 2002, 9). Academic archive users are compelled to tame their fndings into ordered, meaningful, and knowledgeably extrapolated narratives – “[y]our craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater” – yet the arduous process of their research furnishes each of them with the potential to “produce counter narratives, of diferent kinds of discomfort” (18). Historically, “archive fever” has been not merely a fgure of speech but a serious health condition: crumbling leather, paper, and bindings, combined with detritus shed by previous handlers, produce a noxious dust – “the dust of others and of other times” (17) – responsible for transmitting anthrax infections and in some cases causing meningitis – a proper archive fever (29). Rather than operating on the outskirts of Derridean hauntology, in Steedman’s writing archives are revealed as dangerously abject and presenting many risks, not least to personal well-being. And although they can no longer be blamed for such ailments, the historian convincingly argues from experience that “the immediate ambition” that would always motivate her and her colleagues was “to leave” (29). While Steedman’s archives mostly consisted of municipal and governmental records, mine were considerably less dull. All the same, her vivid description of the pains and pleasures of archival research rings true, although my malaise stemmed from the worry that my work would remain merely “academic” rather than fail at being academic. Steedman’s Dust prompted me to pay attention to the materiality of the records I examined and to be always thinking about the counter-narratives I could produce given the chance. At Feminist Archive South, which I had also visited before it was accessioned by Bristol University, I was struck by the freezing temperature of the reading room and tempted to wrap myself in a colourful knitted shawl I found there with a spider web motif, a temptation which I thankfully resisted. By the time I visited the Imperial War Museum research rooms, I was better prepared; going through the papers of George Anthony Meyer of R.A.G.E. I came to the realisation that what Greenham women and Greenham supporters (contemporary and retrospective, including myself) regarded as a campaign to harass, defame, and intimidate, including attempts to have the

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water supply to the camp cut and Greenham women struck of the electoral register, was Meyer’s life’s work, which he (and his personal assistant Mrs Jenni Wilson, and also many others, paid or unpaid, who supported his work) archived with meticulous care (1982–1988). The exercise of care, a labour on top of any job description, informs the work of any archivist, amateur or professional, but becomes more meaningful and resonant in the case of archives of activism, progressive or reactionary. This is why instances of apparent carelessness or chance, like the two instructive examples I discuss in the following, require investigation or (re)consideration. A STAIN: Gwyn Kirk’s papers at the MayDay Rooms (n.d.), an “archive, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories”, were a must-see not only because of their location but also because Kirk is responsible, alongside Alice Cook, for a unique book that had already proved illuminating in my Greenham research. Greenham Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas and Actions from the Women’s Peace Movement (Cook and Kirk 1983) is a slim, collectively authored, and sparsely illustrated volume (albeit including now iconic photographs of Greenham actions such as woven spider webs), whose subtitle turns out to be a factual description rather than rhetoric: it includes actual nightmares about nuclear war by numerous women who explain their motivations for joining the peace camp, as well as stories and observations about activism from people on the ground. Dream narratives, thoughts, strategies, and tactics bleed into one another in ways that question their hierarchies or even their distinction. Although all texts are attributed to their authors, they are not typographically separated from one another, making it difcult for the reader to fnd what’s written by whom, and to question, in the process, whether individual authorship really matters. Here, form is truly inextricable from content. With this in mind, I shouldn’t have been taken aback by the discovery of a muddied copy of The New Radiator: Souvenir Issue on Greenham Common, March 21, 1982. Published by CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) South, the cover of this special issue is dominated by the female symbol fanked by a tepee and a hut, in both of which the home fres are kept burning. On the female symbol is the inscription “Welcome to Greenham Common”, partly covered by the drawing of a very young woman who is literally barefoot and pregnant. Published after the frst winter of the peace camp, the issue is stained by the experience of winter spent largely outdoors but also marked by the ambivalent relationship between Greenham and the CND, at times supportive but also marred by misunderstandings, stereotyping, underestimation, and exclusion.6 I suspect that were it not muddied, this magazine wouldn’t have been kept. A NEIGHBOURING: Among newspaper clippings, posters, correspondence devoted to the peace camp, and a catalogue of The Guardian exhibition Greenham Common 25 Years on (2006), the Greenham Common papers of Jayne and Juliet Nelson (1979–1997), at the Women’s Library, London

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Figure 10.1 Mud-stained copy of The New Radiator: Souvenir issue on Greenham Common, March 21, 1982. Gwyn Kirk’s personal papers on the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Movement (6 boxes), MayDay Rooms, London. Source: Photograph by Alexandra Kokoli.

School of Economics, include a copy of As We Grow Older: A  Study of the Housing and Support Needs of Older Lesbians and Gay Men (Hubbard and Rossington 1995), commissioned by Polari Housing Association with research monies from the Housing Associations Charitable Trust.

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A pioneering document in LGBTQ+ housing, the assumption of urban living in As We Grow Older is reinforced by photographs of concrete highrises and clashes with the rural (if far from pastoral) setting of the peace camp and the airbase that motivated its founding. Older women were a very visible and well-documented presence at Greenham, forming an important constituency whose support mattered in and around the camp. Caroline Goldie’s documentary about Nell Logan Greenham Granny (1986) forges important links between the twentieth-century labour movements, communism, unionism, and anti-fascism with Greenham’s anti-militarist feminisms but does not foreground the queer politics of the camp. The presence of As We Grow Older in the Nelson Greenham papers explains the persistence of the peace camp for years after the base closed down and the American forces departed: after and beyond nuclear weapons, it was the normative confnes of the nuclear family that were being dismantled. A lab for queer domesticities, the peace camp did not merely question and undo the atomisation of bourgeois nuclearity but contributed to the development of alternatives that would exceed its own lifetime.

Assemblage Against Memorialisation: A Quilt for Greenham In a whimsical passage from “Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis”, Sigmund Freud disputes the assumed function of monuments, which he describes as fulflling two seemingly incompatible functions: while they commemorate past events and persons, they also rely on being ignored. As “mnemic symbols” (Freud 1957 [1910], 16), they work not as memory devices but screens, keeping memory at bay whilst they claim to mark it. Responding with anything but disinterest would seem odd, even pathological: “what should we think of a Londoner who paused to-day in deep melancholy before the memorial of Queen Eleanor’s funeral instead of going about his business in the hurry that modern working conditions demand?”7 Although most museums and exhibitions aspire to a greater degree of sophistication than public statues of historical fgures (an increasing number of whom are no longer considered to be deserving of the honour), Freud pinpoints a contradiction at the heart of visual display for the purposes of collective remembering. Public visibility does not make shared heritage. Counterintuitively, the message of monuments is remember to forget. In the case of feminist activist heritage, Freud’s observations cast doubt on the additive logic that advocates for intersectionally feminist monuments to public fgures who have been marginalised due to their gender or ethnicity. The preservation and promotion of such heritage requires diferent aesthetic approaches that are mutable, resistant to conservation models that assume and pursue fxity, and ultimately more labour-intensive than the commissioning of statues because they demand ongoing care. Also counterintuitively, the feminist curating of feminist heritage needs to take care while also accepting a greater degree of risk.

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In her book on the discursive, material, embodied and afective workings of feminist activist heritage, Red Chidgey lists 12 capacities of the assemblage model that makes it well-suited to “the restlessness of movement memory” (2018, 55) in general and feminist memory in particular. These capacities tend to the DIY mutability and technological infections of “assemblage memory” as it applies and crucially contributes to feminist afterlives, but do not include the art historical defnition of assemblage, a largely antiaesthetic approach to making by fxing sourced or found materials together, showing attunement to their material properties combined with a critical awareness of their place in capitalist economy (as trash, treasure, and anything in-between), and often exploiting their incongruity while relying on low-skill techniques and low-resource processes. Dan Adler (2019) revisits assemblage in contemporary sculpture in reference to algorithmic marketing and actor-network theory to ofer an updated iteration of assemblage as critique of consumer capitalism in the post-digital world: the “tainted goods” of assemblage hybridity make curatorial trouble as they blur the distinction between making, collecting, and curating, sabotage display cultures, and “unwork the network” of objects, audiences, and institutions. The restless non-conformity of assemblage makes it a suitable if unpredictable methodology for feminist curating; or, however broadly “methodology” is defned, it may be more accurate to cast assemblage as a challenging companion to feminist curating, one that simultaneously gives it licence to remain unresolved and disorderly, and weakens the curatorial impulse to collect and order, or the historical one to narrate. And since assemblage stems from art practices in and after modernism rather than curating, it is unsurprising that examples of assemblage-as-curating come from art practice. In her book Becoming Feminist: Narratives and Memories, sociologist Carly Guest (2016) traces a range of routes to feminist activism for young women in the 2010s. Greenham Common is singled out as a source of activist inspiration, particularly through its sound archive of songs, already identifed as a particularly distinctive and eloquent feature of life and activism at the peace camp in journalistic (Fairhall 2006) and sociological (Roseneil 1995) accounts as well as in art practice, such as Alanna O’Kelly’s Chant Down Greenham (1984) and Tina Keane’s flm In Our Hands, Greenham (1984). Greenham sounds and their assemblage-inspired remixes from assorted interviews with Greenham women, songs, and noises from the camp form the soundtrack to Keane’s flm, in which two kinds of footage from the peace camp and from what could be a nature documentary ficker and merge into one another through the moving silhouettes of two hands. Made while the peace camp was at its peak and actively recruiting protestors and supporters, In Our Hands, Greenham casts the camp as a – literally – vibrant lab for resistance. Nearly 35 years later, Laura Phillips deploys her own archival research into Greenham’s activist legacies in collaborative performances of musical improvisation: she makes flms with photograms

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and 16-mm footage developed with readily available, “domestic” and ecofriendly chemicals such as cofee and soda crystals. In the photographic documentation of Performance With Halftone, a pair of hands “plays” the fence like a harp in an inaudible performance or rather a performance that is seen but lined with a diferent soundtrack from live musicians, produced independently but responsively.8 Responsive resonance is at work in the Greenham Common Quilt (2021) by Eleanor Louise West,9 a practice-based exploration of the queer histories of the peace camp, which outlived the removal of cruise missiles and the closure of the USAF base by nearly a decade. Crediting three archives as her sources of inspiration and support, the Feminist Library, the Rebel Dykes history project, and the oral and written histories of Greenham Women Everywhere, West assembles examples of lesbophobic rhetoric used to discredit the camp, quotes by Greenham women, song fragments, and images encountered in and remembered from the archives in a pink and chartreuse pieced and quilted blanket. West’s quilt was included in the archival and artistic exhibition Rebel Dykes (2021), curated by Atalanta Kernick and Kat Hudson. Ideally, this work is viewed by getting up very close to it, an awkward position in a gallery but natural to the artist while she was making it. She explains that its ideal “viewing” would also involve touching, even using the quilt as a blanket, allowing the viewer/ user to know it as she did while she was making it.10 West’s embroidery is confdent but simple enough to make someone as uncrafty as me to think that they too could render line drawings in stitch, while her transfers are suspended between evoking familiar outlines of groups of women who sat together in blockades or cooking or in leisure. I recognise some lyrics from the song “Now I’m a Happy Dyke”, also used in Nina Wakeford’s iterative performance “An Apprenticeship in Queer I  Believe It Was” (2016 ongoing). I home in on a cartoon of a stout exasperated woman kicking a missile, which I associate with the short-lived but widely infuential peace camp at Comiso, Sicily.11 Like all the various witches that surround it, the cartoon has a rich history in and beyond Greenham, mobilising the spider’s web of connections and associations beyond allegory. West assembles the most resonant of words and images, often repeated, remembered, and reproduced. They are of Greenham but not only of Greenham: the common-er the better. West’s quilt is tactile, inviting, and generously crediting its own sources and inspirations, pieced together with proudly obvious seams, accommodating of odd encounters through assemblage methods and aesthetics, responsive to resonance and vibrating with its own, indebted to archives but also fouting their expectations. When West told me that she would ideally like people to touch her quilt, I predictably expressed the concern that handling might shorten her artwork’s lifespan. That may well be a conservator’s worry, inculcated into art historians through training, but it wasn’t shared by the artist, who stitches obsolescence into her quilts by deliberately mixing cotton and synthetic materials. They are made to break down eventually, not through carelessness but through care-full consideration: if they

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succeed in their act of transmission, the work of remembering and celebrating will be picked up and continued by others, in some other, possibly also perishable, media. The Greenham Commons I’ve encountered in contemporary art practice campaign, among other things, for a feminist curating of feminist heritage that is full of risk and care and fully contingent on whether others care too.

Notes 1 This research has been supported by a research fellowship (2020) from the Leverhulme Trust (www.leverhulme.ac.uk/research-fellowships-2020). The author wishes to thank the Leverhulme Trust, Middlesex University, editors Elke Krasny and Lara Perry for their insightful feedback and support, the archives consulted and navigated with expert assistance from their archivists, and Laura Phillips and Eleanor Louise West for their work and time. 2 Mistress-Pieces, organised by Professor Brenda Schmahmann, University of Johannesburg, November  8–10, 2018. https://arthist.net/archive/17082/ lang=en_US 3 “House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities”, University of Birmingham, July 3–4, 2015. https://arthist.net/archive/9096/view=pdf 4 Such an exploration was at once philosophical, practical, and political. Those opposing the peace camp, including local far-right group R.A.G.E. (Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment), sought to have Greenham women struck of the electoral register by claiming that the peace camp did not constitute a valid residential address. Sculptor Aggie Jakubska was among 21 women who transferred their vote to the peace camp when they joined. In preparation for a hearing at Newbury District Council, Jakubska looked up the word “home” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Nowhere, in all the defnitions, did it mention anything about there being a structure where “home” is concerned; it was much to do with feelings and associations with a particular place. The home consisted of people rather than a house, and what you feel towards those people. (Harford and Hopkins 1984, 112) 5 Important publications addressing the heritage of Greenham Common on the fortieth anniversary of its establishment include Rebecca Kerrow and Rebecca Mordan (2021) and Charlotte Dew (2021), as well as the exhibition Peace Camp by Jemima Brown, installed at the West Berkshire Museum at the Greenham Common Control Tower and across the town of Newbury. 6 Mud is also the title of the autobiographical novel by Nicky Edwards (1986), where a lesbian feminist activist leaves the peace camp in frustration at the limitations of non-violent direct action and sets out to research a play about World War I. Mud refects on activist ambivalence, rifts and alliances in feminist politics, women’s friendship across diferent backgrounds and generations, and the symmetries and asymmetries between reluctant soldiers and antimilitarist feminists. 7 See also Walsh and Kokoli (2022). 8 Laura Phillips, Performance With Halftone, sound-responsive video projection, 2017. Photograph by Elieen [sic.] Long. www.lauraphillips86.co.uk/Performance_ with_Halftone.html Phillips shared with me contextual information about this

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work and her approach to practice as a form of engagement with feminist heritage in a personal email, October 9, 2020. 9 Eleanor Louise West, Greenham Common Quilt, 2021. Various textiles, vintage duvet, batting, transfer dyes, embroidery, enamelled chain, 135  cm × 200  cm. Photographic documentation available at: www.instagram.com/p/ CbrnlsXM5Om/ 10 West credits the three archives that informed the making of her quilt in the exhibition leafet of the Rebel Dykes Art and Archive Show, Space Station 65, London, June 25– September 17, 2021. The parallel between her making of the quilt and future interactions with it being ideally close and tactile was drawn by her in a conversation we had at the exhibition on July 29, 2021, during which she told me about the planned obsolescence of her work. The rest of the interpretation is mine. 11 Poster for an international demonstration against the US base in Comiso, Sicily, designed by Opland, 1982. International Institute of Social History, IISG BG E9/598, https://hdl.handle.net/10622/N30051001196028?locatt=view:level3

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Kokoli, Alexandra. 2016. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Kokoli, Alexandra. 2017. “Pre-emptive Mourning against the Bomb: Exploded Domesticities in Art Informed by Feminism and Anti-Nuclear Activism”. Oxford Art Journal 40(1): 153–168. Kokoli, Alexandra. 2021. “The Aesthetic Labour of Protest, Now and Then: The Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common (1981–2000)”. In Iconic Works of Art by Feminists and Gender Activists: Mistress-Pieces. Edited by Brenda Schmahmann, 22–37. London: Routledge. Liddington, Jill. 1989. The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism & Anti-Militarism in Britain Since 1820. London: Virago. MacDonald, Sharon et al. Eds. 1987. Images of Women in Peace and War. London: Macmillan. Madani, Adnan. 2013. “Non-Museums”. In The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating. Edited by Jean-Paul Martinon, 197–206. London: Bloomsbury Academic. MayDay Rooms. n.d. “Home Page”. https://maydayrooms.org/. Last accessed June 6, 2022. Meyer, George Anthony. 1982–1988. “Private Papers”. Imperial War Museum Collections, Documents 16487. www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030021673 Nelson, Jayne, and Juliet. 1979–1997. “Papers”. The Women’s Library, London School of Economics, 7JAN. https://archives.lse.ac.uk/Record.aspx?src=CalmView. Catalog&id=7JAN. Parker, Rozsika, and Griselda Pollock. 1981. Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pettitt, Ann. 2006. Walking to Greenham: How the Peace-camp Began and the Cold War Ended. South Glamorgan: Honno. Pollock, Griselda. 2007. Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Time, Space and the Archive. London and New York: Routledge. Roseneil, Sasha. 1995. Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham. Buckingham: Open University Press. Roseneil, Sasha. 2000. Common Women, Uncommon Practices: The Queer Feminisms of Greenham. London: Continuum. Roseneil, Sasha. 2012. “Queering Home and Family in the 1980s: The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp”. Talk delivered at Queer Homes, Queer Families: A History and Policy Debate, British Library, December 17. www.researchgate. net/publication/294582997_Queering_home_and_family_in_the_1980s_the_ Greenham_Common_Women’s_Peace_Camp. Smith, Julie Dawn. 2004. “Playing Like a Girl: The Queer Laughter of the Feminist Improvising Group”. In The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 224–243. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. 2002. Dust. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walsh, Maria, and Alexandra Kokoli. 2022. “Trauma and Repair in the Museum: An Introduction”. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 27: 4–19. https://doi. org/10.1057/s41282-022-00290-43 Withers, DM. 2016. “Theorising the Women’s Liberation Movement as Cultural Heritage”. Women’s History Review 25(5): 847–862.

11 Caring for Mourning, Working With Loss Curating, Listening and Attending to the Sacred in Peruvian Highlands and Forests Eliana Otta Interviewed by Elke Krasny Can you please share how you began to work on curating as mourning in the context of Peru? ELIANA: In 2013, I  was invited to a conversation organized by Denise Ledgard, the director of Lugar de la Memoria (Space of Memory), a national institution in Peru, which, at the time, was in the process of preparing an exhibition on the internal confict in Peru which characterized the years 1980–2000. There were the insurgent organizations, the Shining Path and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru, there was a deep economic crisis, and there was Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship. The museum focused on the armed groups that defed the power of the state and on how the state replied without a clear strategy. There were human rights violations by the armed forces. The state’s victory was ensured through the police’s intelligence services. This new institution, Lugar de la Memoria, emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Peru, which had presented a public report in 2003. That report was accompanied by a large exhibition of archival material produced by journalists. It was a seminal moment because until that point, most people did not want to talk about what happened, since the country was slowly gaining stability. The media and most people considered that we needed to focus on the future and on progress after Fujimori’s neoliberal reforms, which brought foreign investments, especially for the mining sector. There was a widespread discourse against “opening old wounds”. That frst exhibition, Yuyanapaq (which in Quechua means “to remember”) presented visual proof of the atrocities that happened generally outside of big urban centres, in the highlands or the rainforest. Because of deep colonial inheritances which included centralization, in the capital these stories would not get enough attention, and most people denied the horrifc violence happening in the countryside until bombs, electricity cuts and kidnappings took over Lima. In 2003, authorities from the German government saw the exhibition and ofered to donate money to create an institution to host it permanently. But the exhibition and the ELKE:

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narratives around the period were very contested by diferent state sectors because most of the cases that implied human rights violations by the state were, and are still, unpunished. Most authorities did not want the museum to exist because they feared that it would attract attention to cases that for many years escaped media coverage and public discussion. In 2011, under the newly elected president Ollanta Humala, a multisectoral commission with representatives from the Congress, the Church, civil society and the main federation of business and industry was formed. Denise Ledgard was appointed as director. She organized a participatory process to decide the content and orientations of the permanent exhibition. In 2013, I was invited to a meeting with workers from the cultural sector, to give our opinions about the exhibition. After that meeting, Denise invited me to create a public programme for the space. We avoided the term museum but rather called it space for memory. It was a site for encounters, dialogues and experiences that people could propose through their local organizations, especially the ones afected by violence. First, I organized a public programme, and then Denise invited me to coordinate the curatorial team in charge of the permanent exhibition. The team was composed of curator Jorge Villacorta, historian Ponciano del Pino, literature critic Víctor Vich and feminist artist Natalia Iguíñiz. We worked with a very small budget. Ponciano and I were in charge of interviewing people who had directly experienced violence or loss. We wanted to show a variety of cases with regard to the places of origin of the people afected, including people who belonged to the armed forces or who were closer to the insurgent organizations. We even showed a case of somebody who had lost his parents because they were members of the Shining Path, which at the time was still very controversial since the members of these organizations were banned from the public sphere. ELKE: How did the interviews address dimensions of human loss? ELIANA: These interviews were mostly held with people who had lost family members or friends or who had experienced violence. A woman could have lost her husband and her son and also been raped by soldiers. There were multiple violent experiences happening and we had to fnd a way to show the most diverse combinations within the traumatic events people lived, especially Andean peasant women. It was a long process because frst Ponciano and I  researched the cases and then we would propose them to the curatorial team. Sometimes, we went to fnd the people outside of Lima, in the most afected area in the highlands, Ayacucho, and the rainforest, Satipo. We also brought people to a studio in Lima to make the videos. ELKE: What does it mean to curate with care when conducting interviews about loss and violence for an exhibition? Could you say something about the videos?

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We wanted to show that these traumatic events were a moment within a larger chain of events happening in the life of people. We wanted to show that there was a before and there was an after for the survivors. We wanted to show how violence altered their lives and their communities but also their quest for justice and reparation. We wanted to show their agency and not fx them in the position of victims. That was very important, to transmit that sense of a complex and multilayered life, not reduced to one or two dramatic events. This approach of the curatorial team had to do with the fact that we focused on listening rather than on the human rights approach of reconciliation. Reconciliation is a concept for confict resolution coming out of the human rights discourse, in relation to anti-racism and indigenous rights in the contexts of post-war and settler colonialism. It has been used during processes of transitional justice in places like Rwanda, South Africa, Canada, Colombia. In Peru, the discourse of reconciliation helped to avoid prejudices against the Commission of Truth, since its adversaries always described it as an institution aiming to divide the country. Therefore, the message was always about the need to unite Peruvian population. Ten years after that strategy chosen by the Commission of Truth, we focused on the importance of listening, considering that before evoking the word reconciliation, all of us Peruvians needed to learn how to listen to each other; to learn to respect somebody else’s stories and accounts of a very disputed period. The labour of care for us consisted in creating proper conditions for the experience of listening. To explore and propose spatial, environmental conditions to foster careful, attentive listening practices that could be experienced collectively. ELKE: Listening to each other at a societal level is crucial. Does your curatorial work care about a society learning how to at least listen to each other, even if people do not agree with each other? ELIANA: Exactly. When we were about to inaugurate the exhibition after two years of work, we launched, through social media, clips of the testimonies using the message “Hoy nos escuchamos” (“Today we listen to each other”). This was the message to the public. It was very symbolic for us, to accomplish fostering a kind of listening that had not previously taken place, a kind of listening that was not given any space, particularly in public institutions. In a context permeated by suspicion and prejudices, we approached listening in a way that creates trust, which “means opening oneself – one’s inner world – to the voices and the experiences of others. And by doing so, taking the risk of being changed by coming to know them” (Gilligan and Eddy 2021, 142). The frst curatorial text in the exhibition informs visitors that there is no consensus around the number of deaths and disappearances from the period. We quoted various sources ofering diferent numbers, to make clear that the Lugar de la Memoria did not have the role of conveying ELIANA:

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an ofcial, closed version of the story. After that frst statement, there is a section titled “One Person, Every Person”, with monitors coming down from the ceiling. The monitors have a size that portrays the interviewed person in 1:1 scale, as if someone stands in front of you looking into your eyes while they tell their stories. The bodies ft the screen until their knees and the visitors’ legs correspond with them. When you enter the space and you see people in the installation, they are also completing the other person’s body while listening to the testimonies. ELKE: Why did you decide to show the bodies and faces of the people you interviewed in the videos? ELIANA: That was important because it allowed us to counteract stereotypes as to who could or could not have been a victim. We cared about the marks of violence in their bodies, how the bodies reacted to the experience of narrating traumatic events and how each person decided to show him- or herself while giving testimony. For example there is a soldier who lost a leg, standing on crutches. Missing half of the leg, he talks about how he learned to make prostheses for wounded bodies, and he now dedicates himself to that. And his was a very diferent body from that of a white, tall man, a diplomat who lost his father, who was a politician killed during a terrorist attack in Lima. It was very important to show how people mobilized to fght for justice all those decades. These people were mainly mothers who had lost their sons or husbands. They were from the lowest economic class, from peasant areas in the Andes. Before this exhibition, they had been portrayed to just be waiting for justice to happen. We showed the emblematic fgure of Mama Angelica, who was around 80 years old at that time. We showed her standing and talking to you, also looking to your eyes but for the frst time, in her case, depicted in an active posture. We also chose the pictures included in the exhibition, situations in which these women were more active than how they were traditionally portrayed, that sometimes seemed as if the images would demand compassion or even charity. We wanted to recognize and make visible their capacity as organizers and fghters, so we showed their bodies at demonstrations, carrying the symbol of their organization accompanied by their chanting voices. ELKE: There is so much care in the details. Can you say some more about what it means to curate a space for memory, a space for listening to loss? ELIANA: Looking at it retrospectively, I fnd our methodology, based in oral storytelling from specifc, territorialized, local experiences, attuned with how Gloria Anzaldúa describes the relationship between listening, storytelling and healing: Storytelling and reading and listening to stories is not only how we make sense of ourselves, our lives, and our place in the world, and how

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we make the Self. Storytelling is healing when it expands the autohistorias (self-narratives) of the tellers and the listeners, when it broadens the person that we are. (Anzaldúa 2015, 177) Simultaneously, I learnt to translate myself in these diferent universes because we were always talking with a diverse group of people, including sectors of society that saw each other, and saw us too, as enemies. I had to explain our ideas to the authorities from the armed forces, who knew that they had a lot to lose if those stories became public. I went to the meetings with the top representatives of state institutions, having to always be available for these diferent situations, always ready to explain the content and defend it when needed. All the time being conscious of the need to do these tasks being loyal to the trust given to us by the people who had shared with us their testimonies and accepted to show their bodies and faces. We also asked for the possessions of killed or disappeared people because we were interested in the afect carried by the objects itself, as an afective evidence beyond photography, which was until then the main way of addressing this period. We were interested in other senses beyond sight, in the haptic power of, for example a fag made by hand by women searching for their relatives, who embroidered the moments of their disappearances in pieces of fabric later stitched together. They donated the fag because it was meaningful for them to be part of an institution belonging to a public apparatus which had previously dismissed their losses and their grief. We ofered ourselves as listeners of stories and caretakers of things with huge emotional and symbolic value, which, we knew, could otherwise easily have been silenced, forgotten or destroyed. I was the one between the institution and the outside world, the bridge, many, many times responding to very difcult and tense situations. But the reward was huge. This kept me going, convinced and inspired. ELKE: How did your curatorial work on loss and mourning continue after your work with the Lugar de la Memoria? ELIANA: During my last period at the museum I  was always saying that when I fnish that job, I will go and live at the top of a mountain, somewhere without Wi-Fi, without a telephone. When the work fnished, I started applying for residencies and artistic opportunities outside of Peru to have a moment for myself, to have some distance from the overdose of Peruvian reality. That was how I ended up moving to Europe, to do research in Greece, trying to translate the question about mourning human losses into other types of losses and later on to expand the idea of loss beyond an anthropocentric view. The experience at the museum for me made clear that in Peru, but usually in general, there is a lack of public, social spaces

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for mourning. The question of which lives are grievable and which not is fundamental (Butler 2004, 33). For the research in Greece, I wanted to work collectively on how to mourn a political project, an idea of future, an element of what we call nature or a particular relationship with time. But the pandemic made me reframe this interest, because it brought back to the fore human loss in a massive way, as well as the issue of mourning on a planetary level. But amidst those simultaneous and global processes of loss, also within a generalized, bigger consciousness about global warming, I started to be more concerned about the killing of the indigenous leaders in Peru. There, and generally in Latin America, that situation has worsened in the last decade, especially since the pandemic increased the sensation of chaos and lack of governance in many places, a situation exploited by drug trafckers, land trafckers and corrupt authorities who proft from the land and resources of the rainforest. I was very moved by the experience of living in Europe, coming from Peru, by noticing how environmental struggles here still reproduce an idea of an apocalypse coming from the future. This view for me is blind to the progressive ends of many worlds during centuries of colonialism, to the ongoing processes of destruction and lives being lost right now when defending what is left of what is called nature. This is very evident in the Amazon, which has been lately called the “lungs of the world” by ecological activists. According to Jair Bolsonaro and other presidents from the countries administrating the Amazon, those communities are obstacles for progress and wellness. Hence, I think there is much to do from the outside, to respond to the loss of the people who have been for thousands of years taking care of that place and the complex entanglements that constitute it. Such reciprocal relationships, still guided by an ethical framework organizing the universe of most Amazonian communities, constitute what the ItalianPeruvian anthropologist Italo Varese describes as cosmocentrism, an alternative to anthropocentrism (Varese 2013, 34). ELKE: Can you explain your work on the Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning? ELIANA: The Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning is an ofering, an open invitation to those who would like to create together what this concept and practice could be: to decentralize mourning from the experience of human loss and to blur the limits between what we consider life and death, not to see them as fxed categories that can be put in modern, dichotomic relations of opposition. But to try to understand them as part of a regenerative cycle, closer to indigenous communities when they relate to what we call nature in environments in which, by example, a dead tree can be an infnite source of life for fungi and other beings.

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Figure 11.1 Jhover Melendez, leader of the community Nuevo Amanecer Hawai and Víctor Pío, son of the assassinated leader Mauro Pío, showing the sacred hole where the Santani bird nests. Source: Photograph by Eliana Otta.

Thus, I am trying to think how those fuid relationships between life, death and regeneration can inform a contemporary idea of mourning, which responds to the ongoing processes of loss produced by capitalism. In that sense, I follow the work of Thom Van Dooren and Gene Ray, who write about extinction and eco-genocide, and the work of Athena Athanasiou, who views loss as revolutionary force. For me, it is important to connect theoretical references to other sources of knowledge and to create bridges between diferent realities, especially connecting to Global South thinkers and practitioners. My understanding of what mourning should be nowadays implies imagining and exploring practices to reconnect us with life as a cosmological force. This view is informed by an Amazonian practice called Yana Allpa (Quechua for black soil), which was devised thousands of years ago by communities there, to guarantee soil regeneration. Through archaeological fndings it has been proved that the Amazonian rainforest increased its fertility thanks to merging agricultural knowledge and spirituality. The traditional stereotype of a “virgin” rainforest obscures how its inhabitants, carefully interacting with its life cycles, made it more fruitful through the years (Tindall et al. 2019, 237). The technique of Yana Allpa consists of burning organic debris under conditions of reduced oxygen, creating a carbonized biomass that regenerates the soil. The Amazon is a sedimented accumulation of soil regenerated through

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millennia by a mix of organic matter, dead humans and their handmade creations: ceramics (Tindall et al. 2019, 178). The Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning is inspired by Yana Allpa and other indigenous knowledges. It is a work in progress. A website is being made, it will show the videos I made in four communities in Peru, where the leaders were recently killed. The idea is to combine the experience of remembering and mourning with struggles for justice and to learn what the leaders tried to protect. The communities wish to gain visibility regarding their precarious, threatened life conditions but also regarding their projects and ideas for their futures. That is also why they agreed in sharing stories, to appear in the videos and to welcome me and my partner, Nuno Cassola, into their daily life. They have been experiencing centuries of annihilation, through viruses, the war in Peru, the violent exploitation of their home, frst with the rubber fever, then mining and now drug trafcking. They are very interested in showing it to others, to reach more audiences, since their losses are hardly reported by the Peruvian press. They are very aware of the threats surrounding them and they want allies. Their stories are outraged accounts of the killings and the state’s complicity with the dangers they face, but they are also joyful, full of love and care for their relatives. In their stories, they name a stone as a relative, point out the trees they use to treat diseases or explain their relationship with the animals around them. At the very core of the project is the need to show that there is no such a thing as an individual loss. These losses are always collective. ELKE: Listening is central to your work. It is a profound ethical question, how people listen to each other, not just to other humans but to the planet in a certain way. ELIANA: Probably, my mixed origins have fostered my listening habits, my openness and curiosity. From my father’s side, my grandfather was Japanese and my grandmother an indigenous Quechua speaker. From my mother’s side, my grandparents are mainly from the Peruvian coast, some with Spanish origins. Some had a peasant origin. Others were highly educated people from the city. I think this variety created a deep understanding of the possibility of coexistence between things that seem opposed and that in countries of colonial heritage are highly uneven because of the cruel hierarchies organizing social life. ELKE: Can you say some more about the idea of the sanctuary and how it relates to curating with care? ELIANA: I chose the sanctuary because of the kind of care it demands. Sanctuaries demand from us a humbleness, they invite us to relate with silence and with what is beyond words, to listen so carefully as to be able to hear the voices of those who are gone and of beings that are normally not supposed to talk to us. The spiritual dimension of the sanctuary tries to ofer alternatives to explore and expand deep intuitions and needs beyond logic, rational engagement with the world. Especially

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because when discussing life, loss and death but also politics; adding spirituality and afect to our convictions expands the horizons beyond what we can imagine otherwise. The current planetary crisis is not only a political, ecological, economical one but also a spiritual crisis. Nigerian philosopher and activist Bayo Akomolafe states that spirituality is not a private matter reduced to the search for meaning in our lives or some sort of redemption but a fundamental public question connecting us to the more than human while defying what is considered sense and nonsense (Akomolafe 2019). Most non-Western epistemologies and most indigenous communities are based on comprehending that the human was never alone but was always a being among multiple others demanding equal, ethical kinships. Within indigenous cosmogonies, there is no fear to speak about what in other languages is described as sacred. There is even less fear to do this in animistic ways, which is a constitutive characteristic of peoples perceiving the world as a universe where all is sentient, alive and having will as humans do. But in this case anyway, we are mediated by Spanish, which is not their language. So, I do not know how they would talk about that in their own languages, I can’t access that. ELKE: I wanted to add something about meaning and language. People working with curating as a form of care refer to curare, the Latin root of the word, which means care. In Spanish, cuidado means care and caution and, more recently, people have started to use cuidados in plural. ELIANA: Cuidados, cares, in plural was not so present in a quotidian vocabulary until recently. It was used during the Spanish crisis as feminists demanded the collectivization of care work. In Peru, it became more familiar during the last decade as a word connected to gendered practices that reclaim being acknowledged and recognized in the public sphere, ideally, with its consequent material efects. This was produced by the transnational dialogues and struggles fostered through feminist movements, but before that, people would not use it in plural. In Latin America, collectives and organizations now use cuidados in their discursive, political manifestations, but I think that they are putting into words and theory the surviving, solidarity practices which characterize everyday normality in precarious contexts. Because without collectivizing basic tasks it would be extremely difcult to exist, grow, enjoy and learn. Otherwise, it turns out almost impossible to fourish, to make art and to defend cultural habits threatened and repressed by deeply sedimented capitalist and colonialist structures. Structural violence and precariousness demand constant collaboration to survive, but likewise, the collectivization of caring, celebrating and mourning practices is the inheritance of the pre-colonial traditions shaping the territory nowadays called Peru. Such resistance skills and habits are what I mentioned before as learned through cohabiting with others, adapting ourselves, cooperating to solve daily problems and

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Eliana Otta Interviewed by Elke Krasny making our lives better together. Most of us grew up surrounded by care work not described as such. By example, having the recurrent, tangible example of women organizing themselves to provide free food for people in need, who would not consider themselves feminists. Until now feminism is a contested word there, especially among indigenous activists who claim their right to think themselves otherwise, not within that framework. But that is another discussion.

Bibliography Akomolafe, Bayo. 2019. “Making Sanctuary: Hope, Companionship, Race and Emergence in the Anthropocene”. March  15. www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/ making-sanctuary-hope-companionship-race-and-emergence-in-the-anthropocene. Last accessed June 2, 2022. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2015. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro. Rewriting Identity. Spirituality, Reality. London and Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso. Gilligan, Carol, and Jessica Eddy. 2021. “The Listening Guide: Replacing Judgment with Curiosity”. Qualitative Psychology 8(2): 141–151. Tindall, Robert, Fréderique Apfel-Marglin, and David Shearer. 2019 [2017]. Yana Allpa. El Biocarbón, Una Solución Ancestral Amazónica a la Crisis Climática. Lima: Apus Graph Ediciones. Varese, Stefano. 2013. “La Ética Cosmocéntrica de los Pueblos Indígenas de la Amazonía: Elementos para una Crítica de la Civilización”. In Selva Vida: De la Destrucción de la Amazonía al Paradigma de la Regeneración. Edited by Stefano Varese, Frédérique Apfel-Marglin, and Róger Rumrrill. Copenhagen: IWGIAUNAM-Casa de las Américas. Varese, Stefano. 2020. “Ethical Cosmologies in Amazonia”. Mester 49(1). http:// dx.doi.org/10.5070/M3491051392

12 Care, Thought, Being Curating With a Wounded Planet Elke Krasny

Dear readers (if I may), This chapter invites you to a humble exercise of curatorial consciousnessraising. Such an exercise draws on the feminist activist traditions which were developed to uncover the realities of women’s condition under patriarchy. Just as feminist consciousness raising difcult and painful questions to analyze collectively systemic patriarchal discrimination, injustice, and violence, exercising curatorial consciousness raising is seen as a cultural technique helpful for understanding together the realities of the man-made condition of the planet and the need to unite in struggle for care feminism rooted in planetary ethics. Placing René Descartes’s cogito, the Western epitome of celebrating individual consciousness as the reason for being, in relation to the communality of care as the basis for being able to be – that is to continue to exist – makes use of the traditional curatorial method of constellation. An important term in the thought traditions of the Frankfurt School, used by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno or Walter Benjamin, constellation has long been understood by practicing curators as one of the central, historically established, methods of working with objects, organizing and installing them spatially, so processes of meaning-making can take place. When I frst started working with exhibitions in 1989, I learned that constellation and contextualization are key curatorial methods. Understanding thought and care as a constellation in relation to the context of the man-made condition of the planet, known as the geological epoch of the Anthropocene, uses these two curatorial methods in this chapter for curatorial consciousness, inviting readers to move beyond the textual when using the invitations, prompts, or even provocations which are provided in what follows. When reading this chapter, it is my hope that, you, dear readers, may fnd and develop ways of working with it beyond the space and time of reading. Hopefully, you will be inspired to work on creating some curatorial constellations and contextualization. Hopefully, you will come up with your own exercises to use for colloquial and everyday conversations, for exchanges in classrooms or curatorial studies programs. Hopefully, the refections shared here as curatorial consciousness raising may contribute to working for

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curating with a wounded planet, which will require the hard work of overcoming generalized extractivism based on carbon ontologies and imaginaries of growth and expansion. Practicing curatorial consciousness-raising can, of course, usefully be employed to raise awareness of systemic museum efects. The profession of curating, in historical terms, is part of the museum, which through practicing curating with a wounded planet practiced as consciousness raising, has to be understood as a structure, which is implicated in and part of wounding the planet, in material terms, but, even more important, in terms of meaning-making. Cultures of global patriarchy and economies of the Self have historically been articulated through museums. Curating with a wounded planet as curatorial consciousness raising can be understood as a critical mode of studying museums, understanding how they were historically central to giving meaning and value to forms of culture and knowledge implicated in discrimination, subjugation, genocide, and ecocide. Studying museums accurately, as curatorial consciousness raising, means to study them in the most detailed and careful manner and to share such studying with audience. One can think of curatorial consciousnessraising as collective practice in museums, working together with visitors to uncover collectively the systemic efects of museums and exhibitions. This chapter adopts a wider understanding of curating beyond the walls of the museum and seeks to employ the curatorial techniques of constellation and contextualization to engage in curatorial consciousness-raising connected to many diferent sites, which are the planet’s wounds. Using these cultural techniques is seen as relevant to connect to the planet’s wound by raising awareness of lived lives and eco-social, biomaterial realities, which unfold in the wounds. There needs to be awareness of how manners of living make existing wounds worse or chronic or how manners of living can become wound treatment and healing. Anchoring curatorial consciousness-raising in the man-made condition of lived lives will require to leave behind the safeguarded position of the curator as author to move toward the curator as carer. Historically, the author and not the carer has been equated with the thinker. The carer was not held to be a thinker. Developing a cultural practice which moves caring and thinking closer together, that is care as thought and thought as care, is precisely what curatorial consciousness-raising can contribute to working for care feminism and planetary ethics. Western practices of feminism, even though historically very often communal and collective in their origins (as, e.g. feminist consciousness-raising), have often efectively resulted in the production of the feminist Self aligned with contemporary hyper-individualism, compulsory neoliberal competitiveness, lean-in careerism, and spectacular consumerism. Care feminism is proposed for all those kinds of feminist practices and theories, which, building on care as consciousness, center interdependency, interrelatedness, reciprocity, mutuality, and communality as they seek to decenter thinking of the human as the sole recipient or even the sole agent of care. Care feminism moves and operates at all scales, from the “molecular”

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to the “planetary”, seeking to understand what matters to consciousness and what does not, what counts as consciousness and what does not (Roy 2018; Morgan 1984; Spivak 2012 [1996]). Care feminism, as proposed here, joins thought and care to move for understanding and practicing care in common for living with a wounded planet. Planetary ethics think of the planet not as external. On the most basic and most fundamental level, one may think here of breathing, drinking, feeding, eating, or moving about as planetary activities that, understood through care feminism, are historical, locational, and wounded by withholding care. They are deeply wounded by extracting and exhausting care and care violence produced through “un-caring as a means of care” (Ndikung 2021). Modern thought and the idea of Man has externalized the planet and the wounding world it has built on and in the planet through infrastructures useful to its extraction. This has led to today’s biosocial and eco-material realities, in which the planet is seen as separate from Man. Planetary ethics are concerned with how to relate ethically, and caringly, to these relations as they decenter the human as sole creator of care while at the same insisting on dignifying conditions of existence for all human beings. Planetary ethics is based on the understanding that caring for the continuity of relations is the interconnectedness through which existence is enabled. Such understanding is neither given nor static. It has to be imagined, thought, learned, and continuously practiced as not to continue wounding the planet and taking better care of the existing wounds.

Thought, Care, and Being “We care, therefore we are”.’ “I think, therefore I am”. As these two sentences each give their reason for being, they can be understood as expressions of very diferent epistemologies. An epistemology of care starts from the primacy of interdependency in life-making needs, while an epistemology of thought starts from the primacy of individual consciousness. Placing these two sentences next to each other is a curatorial invitation to you, dear readers, for understanding René Descartes’s formulation of the cogito, foundational to the Enlightenment idea of the being of Man as individual consciousness, in relation to a planetary ethics and the essentiality of care for sustaining life together in the current moment of climate catastrophe, pandemic, mass death, species loss, and extinction. How do we privilege the relation between care and thought as the foundation of being? Creating constellations and providing context are two key curatorial methods considered relevant to generating knowledge and enabling experience through exhibitions as well as many other curatorial formats including symposia, assemblies, structured gatherings, conversations, or walks. Contextualization can provide information considered relevant to the elements, or objects, in a constellation and to the ideas they stand for. Taken together, constellation and context are generating processes of meaning-making, most broadly understood.

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The opening of this section employs the curatorial method of creating a constellation which invites readers to engage with their own responses to the statement “we care, therefore we are” followed by the famous philosophical principle of “I  know, therefore I  am”. Dear readers, I  will take some time for fnding out how you feel about these two sentences. What do these two sentences mean to you, personally, socially, politically, ecologically? What do these two sentences make you think of? How do you feel about them? Do you fnd yourselves in agreement with these two sentences or in disagreement? Perhaps, paradoxically, like myself, you fnd yourself oscillating between being both in agreement and in disagreement, or to be more precise about my own feelings, torn about what it means to fnd oneself in agreement with both of these sentences while understanding that they do not speak easily to the same understandings of how, in very general terms, human beings relate to the world around them and to their own consciousness. If you have the time, and energy, to pause your reading for a while, I would like to most cordially invite you to get a piece of paper and a pen, or even to use the margin of the page to write down your refections on these two sentences coming together and how you feel about your feelings when you read them. Take as long as you like to engage in writing or simply refection rather than in reading. If you wish to not write down your thoughts and feelings, it would still be nice, if you cared to take some more time to explore your own understanding, and your response, to these two sentences. When I wrote these two sentences down, what puzzled me most was that I had never seen them written down together, even though one may have assumed that a long time ago someone may have thought of we care, therefore we are as a response to I think, therefore I am. I allow myself to imagine that it may have been someone living in the seventeenth century, a contemporary of René Descartes, perhaps, who, reading this sentence, maybe on an island considered remote in relation to the place in Europe where the Discourse had frst been printed and published, was struck by the declaration of individualism and thought to herself that, in fact, we are, because we care. Maybe there was someone else in the eighteenth century, who, working as a servant, found her way to books in her master’s library and coming across the proclamation of “I think, therefore I am” thought out loud to herself, in the middle of the night, “we care, therefore we are”. We may never know. Many sentences, thought in response to other sentences, may never have found their way into print. Many sentences, written as response to something someone has read, may never fnd their readers. Thinking curatorially one ponders how to create constellations between unspoken, unwritten, and unheard-of sentences, which, as one feels, must have been out there waiting to fnd each other in new constellations. Constellations matter. They encourage thinking of other constellations. Marked by in-betweenness of the elements that are being constellated to each other, constellations make room for thought, feeling, imagination, and dreams. As a curatorial method, when employed with consideration

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and care, constellations are ways for opening the in-between as a space for forming new relations to meanings, including the resignifcation or even the refusal or abolishing of meaning. Treading lightly on the in-between spaces in a constellation, making room for porosity and permeability, but also the tensions, contradictions, and conficts between the elements in a constellation, is a curatorial approach that can make it possible that a constellation allows to see otherwise, read diferently, or listen anew. German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin has written beautifully of constellations, stating “that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”. Human imagination can see stars as constellations, with the space between them connected through imaginary lines so they become visible to the human eye as Cancer or Pegasus or other creatures inhabiting the sky at night. What now does this mean to the constellation of care, thought, and being? Which new lines, or fgures, can be drawn so the constellation is imagined through a shape and becomes recognizable? What could one see as the shape the constellation of care, thought, and being assumes? Where do the lines start? Where do they meet? What do they connect? I leave it to you, dear reader, to imagine your shape for the constellation of care, thought, and being. If you happen to be someone who actually likes to draw, then I very kindly invite you to draw your lines between care, thought, and being and to allow for a shape to take shape. Curators employing the method of creating constellations often also employ the method of contextualization in the case of exhibitions to make better understood how their chosen objects relate to ideas. Filling the space between objects and ideas with what is conventionally referred to as information, curators may use captions or wall texts to provide information that correlates or, sometimes, calls into question and interrogates the conditions through which specifc objects have come to be understood as bearers of specifc ideas. Conventionally, and very generally speaking, museums provide information on material makings as well as historical, social, or political dimensions. Rarely have museums in the past provided any information on ecological, geological, or climatological dimensions of objects in relation to the ideas transported through them. I  will turn to this observation in more detail in the concluding section of this chapter. Now, I address you again, dear reader. I kindly invite you to think of some objects you would choose in relation to the two sentences “we care, therefore we are” and “I think, therefore I am”, which form this chapter’s curatorial constellation. What would make for a good object, or good objects, to show that beings exist because of care? What would make for a good object, or good objects, to show that thinking is held to constitute individual human consciousness? You could assemble a number of diferent objects, thinking of the kinds of context you would like to provide together with them. You may want to start by looking at objects you have at home. You may want to start by thinking of images of artworks. Or you may want to begin any which way feels best for you. If at all possible, I would encourage you to

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make time for actually assembling the objects you have chosen. Maybe you can put them on a table or on a windowsill. Maybe you can print out the images of artworks and group them. It would be wonderful if you had the time and the patience to think of possible contexts you would wish to provide alongside with your objects. Which information would you provide? Which stories would you like to tell, so the specifc objects you have chosen become an articulation of the constellation of care, thought, and being? When looking at your objects now, how do you feel about them? What might they tell others if you were to share your curatorial constellation with friends or neighbors or colleagues? How would you provide the context to them through which you want them to view the constellation of care, thought, and being, as it is expressed through the objects you have brought into constellation with each other?

The Man-Made Condition of the Wounded Planet “I think, therefore I am” is a key thought in Western Enlightenment philosophy, which gave rise to the formation of a historically specifc political and economic fgure. This fgure rested on the idea of the autonomous individual, independent from the earth and free from duties of care. Following the diagnosis of feminist anthropologist Anna Tsing, we come to understand this fgure as “Enlightenment Man” (2016, 3) or simply “Man” in the analysis of philosopher and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter (2003, 260). This fgure produced gendered, racialized, sexualized, and resource realities which were harmful, violent, and uncaring to the earth and all the earth’s beings, in particular those beings which did not embody and live in accord with the fgure of Enlightenment Man. I use the sentence “I think, therefore I am” as representative for many sentences or treatises, as pars pro toto for a mode of thinking, that led to understanding bodily being as inferior to and weaker than thought. Western thought came to be viewed as supreme, privileging those who think of themselves as being independently able to shape being, subjugate life, and engage in “terraforming” the earth (Ghosh 2021, 53). Thought, understood as individual consciousness, defnes being or more precisely, the way of being embodied by the fgure of modern Enlightenment Man. Care, even though there is no life and survival without it, was not the starting point for Enlightenment philosophy and thus remained absent from how being in relation to consciousness was conceptualized. As Enlightenment Man became Self-ish, the world created on planet Earth became uncaring. Separating consciousness from care was central to the political, social, and ecological formation of historical realities in which a Self that did not care, and did not have to care, began to conceive of all those from whom care for life and survival was withheld as “brutes” and of all those, who have “milk-producing mammae” as “mammals” (Bacon quoted in Ghosh 2021, 187; Linnaeus quoted in Schiebinger 1993, 382). Racism and sexism moved beings considered brutes and beings considered mammals closer to

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nature. At the same time, nature was held to not have consciousness and therefore to not be alive or feel, as consciousness was reserved for, and mastered by, the Enlightened Self, who claims being through thinking. In historical, material, and ecological terms, Self-ish thought led to the supremacist formations of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, harmful extractivism, and violent heteropatriarchy, as described in environmental historian and philosopher Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980). Thought over being, or “dead nature”, circumscribed the boundaries of being and imprinted the planet with Man-made activities, which were justifed precisely by the philosophy of mind over matter. This has to be understood to be operating on the level of a political ideology. Today, there is a critical language available for understanding the planetary consequences of Self-ish thought and the uncaring world it produced. This language includes ways of thinking critically through concepts such as “necropolitics”, “necroeconomics”, and “geontopower” based on distinguishing “Life and Nonlife” in the words of anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, who works with perspectives informed by indigenous modes of being in Australia and queer modes of being in the US. Critical scholarship is examining how Self-ish thought has turned care into violence through historical forms of colonial institutionalization, fascist concepts of eugenics, and neoliberal welfare instrumentalization in which states police bodies through borders and through privileging neoliberal, client-oriented patient choice over actual care (see e.g. Hunter 2021; Cassata 2011; Weindling 1993; Mol 2008). The many ways in which care has historically been colonized by politics and economies, which were supported by the Enlightenment supremacy of thought, have brought the planet to its current condition on the brink of careless destruction and ruination of inhabitability and liveability. In 2000, the new term “Anthropocene” was proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer to capture the Man-made imprint on the planet as geological change and to suggest that this change had taken on proportions that warranted naming, and introducing, a new geological epoch. Enlightenment Man unleashed Man as geological force. In 2016, the interdisciplinary Anthropocene Working Group, established in 2009 by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, part of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, voted that the Anthropocene is, in fact, a new geological epoch. Today, beings live in the aftermath of an intellectual environment that has ultimately produced a Man-made environment that has to be understood as “a global stratigraphic signature” (Kolbert 2014, 109). The consequences of Enlightenment Man’s consciousness are felt through the reactions of the planet Earth with greenhouse gases leading to global warming and earthly beings confronted with rising sea levels, wildfres, ocean acidifcation, unbreathable air, and the rise of pandemics, to name just a few of the efects of globalized economies and politics of uncaringness.

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Human beings today are tasked with responding politically and ethically to the Anthropocene situation, with developing a sense of planetary ethics. Human beings are confronted with the situation that Man-made economic, social, and material systems and infrastructural technologies based on extractivist resource imaginaries and exploitative labor imaginaries justifed by the premises of thought over being, mind over matter, are leading to disastrous ruination: ultimately putting at risk all beings on earth. Man has to be understood as geological force which has become the cause of planetary catastrophe, mass extinction, and ecocide. Today, one has to critically rewrite the paradigmatic sentence on Man’s individual consciousness as follows: “Man” thinks, therefore being is at risk. Separating care from thought is not only violent in and of itself, but it breeds historically specifc violence in regimes and management of care. Separating care and thought, with thinking celebrated as consciousness, and care understood in economic and social terms as a burden and dirty work have led to the historical situation that “caring has been associated with lowly people” (Tronto 2015, 12). Violence against care and regimes of care as violence have emerged as critical understandings of how the aftermath of Enlightenment consciousness has impacted on being. Care ethics, understood as political theory in the context of Western feminist thought traditions, is still quite centered on the relations between human beings but now moves in directions that include life relations most broadly understood through opening to multispecies thought as well as indigenous ontologies and cosmologies (Tronto 2015; Engster and Hamington 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Kimmerer 2013; Simard 2021). Marxist feminist analysis of the extraction, exploitation and, at the same time, permanent devaluation of caring labor on a massive scale has recently been invigorated by critical scholarship on social reproduction theory including work on Black women’s reproduction, central to racial extractivism and supremacy, as well as on care under pandemic conditions (Battacharya 2017; Dowling et al. 2021). Today, there is a need to move from care ethics, through which care is understood as “everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible”, to a planetary ethics understood as everything we do for living with a wounded planet.

Working for Curating With a Wounded Planet The historical fgure of the “independent” curator blown up into the mythical proportions of heroic auteurship and neoliberal celebrity culture can easily be traced back to the fgure of Enlightenment Man. Therefore, curatorial consciousness raising is much needed for uncovering the profession’s historical de-formations and their impact on current practices, which may, in fact, actually continue to be harmful to and wound the planet, even if the imaginaries they propose for the Anthropocene condition are critical or

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even healing. Critical feminist curators have spoken tirelessly of the etymological legacy of the word curating, which, derived from the Latin curare, means both caring and curing. Today, among the most important tasks for curating with a wounded planet – that is caring and curing with a wounded planet – is to develop new ways of curating, understood in material, economic, and ecological terms that do not add to and prevent the deepening of existing planetary wounds. At the same time, curatorial consciousnessraising for living with a wounded planet – that is extending curating to have meaning for the real life – will, as is my deep hope, help build awareness for care feminism and planetary ethics by working on overcoming the harmful and wounding separations of being, thought, and care: we think, therefore we care; we care, therefore we think; we think as we care and we care as we think, therefore we are.

Bibliography Battacharya, Tithi. Ed. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Cassata, Francesco. 2011. Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy. Budapest: Central European University Press. Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter (41): 17–18. Dowling, Emma Ayse Dursn, Syntia Hasenöhrl, Verena Kettner, and Birgit Sauer. Eds. 2021. “Caring in Times of a Global Pandemic”. Historical Social Research 46(4). Engster, Daniel, and Maurice Hamington. Eds. 2015. Care Ethics and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2021. The Nutmeg’s Curse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hunter, Shona. 2021. “Decolonizing White Care: Relational Reckoning with the Violence of Coloniality in Welfare.” Ethics and Social Welfare 15(4): 44–362. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientifc Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Mass Extinction. An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientifc Revolution. New York: Harper & Row. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care. Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Morgan, Robin. 1984. “Introduction. Planetary Feminism: The Politics of the Twenty-First Century.” In Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology. Edited by Robin Morgan, 1–37. Garden City: Anchor Press. Ndikung, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng. 2021. The Delusions of Care. Berlin: Archive Books. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roy, Deboleena. 2018. Molecular Feminisms. Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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Schiebinger, Londa. 1993. “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” The American Historical Review 98(2): 382–411. Simard, Suzanne. 2021. Finding the Mother Tree. Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Vintage Books. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2012. “Imperative to Re-Imagine the Planet.” In An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 335–350. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tronto, Joan. 2015. Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tsing, Anna. 2016. “Earth Stalked by Man.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 34(1): 2–16. Weindling, Paul. 1993. Health, Race, and German Politics Between National Unifcation and Nazism, 1870–1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man.” New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.

Part II

Curating Care

13 Curating Forms of Care in Art and Activism A Roundtable on Life Support Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha and Catherine Spencer This roundtable captures the four-person curatorial team’s refections on our exhibition project Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) in summer 2021. As the project’s implications continue to unfold, this represents an opportunity to consider the key issues it sought to address and questions raised through the development process. Although sharing an enduring commitment to feminist struggle, we are each grounded within diferent positions and perspectives. Our discussion traces these points of connection and distinction while negotiating two strands of feminist theorisation central to this volume: the ethics of care and social reproduction perspectives. Life Support was spurred by our respective analyses of the politics of care within the art feld and an evolving collaborative relationship with GWL, the UK’s only accredited museum dedicated to women’s history. The project took GWL’s histories, collections, and communities as a starting point to explore how art and activist production from the 1970s to the present have challenged existing systems of care while imagining vital alternatives. Having emerged in 1991 as a result of grassroots activism, GWL now occupies Bridgeton’s vacated public library, one of the seven ‘Carnegie’ libraries donated to the city at the turn of the twentieth century using wealth accumulated in great part through the (classed and racialised) labour of iron and steel workers in the US. A feminist resource, which critically refects upon its own structures of governance and history, Life Support sought actively to participate in these processes during GWL’s thirtieth anniversary year. In early 2020, shortly after initial archival research and site visits, the ground shifted with the rapid onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our focus on social reproduction’s processes and infrastructures assumed new levels of urgency as formally hidden and undervalued labour was revealed to be essential to the maintenance of life, while the skewed and violently unequal political responses to the crisis unfolded along ableist, racist, gendered and classed lines. As our research and curatorial work advanced – or, in some respects, ground to a halt – our guiding questions demanded fresh consideration: what are the support structures needed to maintain life? Who is

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included and excluded from them? How have individuals and communities organised to gain access to these systems and to change them? The resulting exhibition looked across private life and public infrastructures, with artworks and archival materials integrated throughout GWL’s building. In the library and events space on the ground foor, works by Kate Davis, Greer Lankton, Veronica Ryan and Alberta Whittle examined questions of care, containment, holding, memory and salvage in distinct but interconnected ways. In the main library, visitors could sit and listen to Manual Labours’ Global Stafroom Podcast exploring questions of care in the workplace and read the associated Manual. Upstairs, we worked in partnership with Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants’ union, to present an iteration of Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here . . . (1989–ongoing), displaying archival materials relating to her original project on housing struggles and gentrifcation, alongside new and loaned contributions addressing the Scottish context. Next door, Olivia Plender’s reimagined and refurbished community room drew on her research into feminist healthcare activism and pedagogy. Other contributions exceeded the exhibition’s spatial and temporal parameters, including Manual Labours’ workshops with GWL’s team; a residency by the Glasgow-based charity Ubuntu Women Shelter led by and for migrant womxn, which provides short-term emergency accommodation needs for womxn (including non-binary, cis and trans women); and ongoing collaborations with Living Rent, and the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA). Across four themes – institutions, care practices, archives and infrastructures – our conversation considers what it means to try and curate as feminists in relation to considerations of capacity, institutional and structural inequalities and the pandemic’s ongoing ramifcations.

Institutions Given our ambition for Life Support to highlight and enhance, rather than extract and drain, GWL’s existing resources, I think it’s a good idea to begin with the context. Debates on feminist curating query the extent to which approaches end up maintaining, or even fortifying, existing institutional models. Collaborating with GWL cast these questions in a diferent light; over three decades, it has worked to imagine and enact alternative structures which respond to feminist and LGBTQ+ critiques. Our project therefore entered into alignment with an already-existing infrastructure of support for life-making rather than simply thematising these concerns. GWL’s primary position as a library (rather than a contemporary art gallery) carries with it a particular approach to civic space, contrasting the confnes of the white cube and opening up new ways of working with people and organisations.

KIRSTEN LLOYD:

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So the question of what kind of art world we sought to reproduce, and for whom, remained crucial. Caroline, where do GWL’s diferences lie in your view, particularly regarding the institution’s capacity to amplify the political resonance of creative initiatives instead of diminishing or disciplining them? CAROLINE GAUSDEN: The symbolism of the library as one of the last surviving commons, within a relentless process of privatisation that we have been witnessing for some time, is really important. GWL is built on donated books, archival materials and objects. Not only are these materials shared amongst our communities, but the vision of what is important to know is collectively held through that process. In this way, the Carnegie paradigm of ‘bestowing’ culture upon people is countered. GWL’s structure is multifaceted, moving between the categories of museum, library, archive, arts and learning space. It works on diferent registers for the diferent people who encounter it, with its mission – to celebrate the lives, creativity and achievements of women – providing coherence. I  understand this openness – which is slippery in relation to categories, yet clearly defned in terms of values and mission – as a form of social art practice; an embedded part of GWL’s history as a space initiated and still run by artists. At the core of social and political praxis is a desire to fnd ways for people to participate in something or collaborate. To host in this way there needs to be enough structure for people to feel comfortable and know where they are but also space for movement and empowerment (Gausden and Smith 2015). What this means is that GWL has a very diferent audience, though ‘audience’ is not even the word we would use for most people accessing the building; rather, there are many terms in play, including ‘readers’, ‘volunteers’, ‘library members’ and ‘learners’. Some people arrive looking for art, but many others are here for diferent reasons: help with reading and writing (we have an adult literacy and numeracy programme), to share missing histories, to print a document, to use skill sets undervalued by a production system that overlooks older women, to test feminist organisational modes in practice, to organise or to write and publish perspectives that have been ignored elsewhere. Established in the frst ten years of GWL when it was a grassroots organisation, this commitment to a heterogeneous, collaboratively produced core programme was maintained with the frst paid positions, which funded projects like Lips (Lesbians in peer support) and Syma Ahmed’s amazing work recording and championing South Asian community histories and creativity (Morrison et  al. 2011). Today, GWL continues to ofer a space where political art practices can meet with many diferent perspectives. I think the Life Support curatorial team understood this context quite intuitively and were able to amplify it through the partnerships with activist organisations, seeding some really lovely encounters along the

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way. The local branch of Living Rent used If You Lived Here . . . to host their monthly meetings and to ofer support sessions for women trying to navigate difcult (to say the least) social housing systems. When the branch rep, Jack Hanington and I showed one member, Ama, up to the space, we stopped in front of Joey Simons and Keira McLean’s incredible timeline depicting the history of women’s housing activism in Glasgow. Looking over at Jack, Ama said: “now I’m part of this too!”. The timeline made it easy for her to imagine herself as part of this critical activity. Equally, it felt important for Living Rent organisers – most of whom are women – to see themselves as part of a continuum of feminist activists. NAT RAHA: One of Life Support’s strengths has been to think and work refexively with regard to the reproduction of institutions. One approach was using the show to bring into dialogue alternative visions of organising and the aesthetic practices that co-constitute them, from Joey and Keira’s timeline, to juxtaposing archive materials with a video capturing GWL’s early work. These materials were given a prominence that also called into question the outputs typically produced by, or expected from, institutional and academic contexts (that are not focused on socially engaged practices). Generally speaking, decentring power from institutional contexts, along with resources – money, time and space – and developing and maintaining dialogues with groups, artists and others from outside of these contexts are central to challenging institutional hegemony. In working with and facilitating spaces and dialogues with Ubuntu Women Shelter and Living Rent, we encouraged knowledge and practices that tend to get separated out of, or sidelined from institutional contexts (Whittle and Ubuntu Women Shelter and Life Support 2021). This has opened up conversations that root these practices and knowledges into structural contexts – for instance, I think of Adebusola Ramsay’s important intervention into the Housing is a Feminist Issue event, situating housing and health inequalities in Glasgow as an aspect of racial capitalism (Whittle et  al. 2021). Such dialogues encourage all parties to be refective of their positioning or relation to their own context. A decolonial framework would emphasise that the knowledge pertaining from indigenous, racialised or marginalised perspectives cannot be understood within institutional contexts without situating these knowledges in marginalised groups (Simpson 2017). CG: Nat, what happens when an organisation run by marginalised people becomes an institution? When will Ubuntu Women Shelter be an institution, and will that be a bad thing? I’m mindful of a conversation between Adele Patrick (GWL’s co-founder) and feminist leaders who have infuenced her, including Nandita Gandhi (Patrick 2021). Adele asserted that GWL’s status as an institution is important, but the question your thinking raises for me is whether marginalised groups can claim money, time and space without becoming hegemonic. I  think

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remaining fexible would be a key priority; is there such a thing as feminist instituting that is in process? NR: When any organisation either run by and for a minoritised group of people, or representative of a minority group, pursues power and resources from dominant contexts as an interface of that minority, there’s a risk of sidelining aspects of the needs of that wider grouping of people. To become an institution is a risk for any autonomous organisation – creating conditions where funding (and the interests of funders) become a stake. This is a common problem in the analysis and critique of the NGO industrial complex. Sometimes, institutions do need to back down, too, which may be a practice of fexibility and may be about divesting power downwards to people who may be hesitating at the entrance of the building. CATHERINE SPENCER: We were conscious that the exhibition was taking place in GWL’s thirtieth anniversary year, providing an opportunity to celebrate a manifestation of feminist duration. However, this also raised questions about the relationship between GWL’s fabric and the histories and ideas that we hoped to address through the exhibition. As you’ve articulated Nat and Caroline, we were working with an organisation which has shifted from being a grassroots entity to one which now constitutes an institution of sorts. Both in general and specifcally with our project, GWL is supported through a variety of sources and partners spanning public funds, private foundations, and academic institutions, which operate as businesses in the neoliberal education marketplace. The funding for our project from the Arts and Humanities Research Council was administered through the University of St Andrews, and this raises questions about how to develop a feminist project from within deeply hierarchical and elitist structures, with extractive, commodifying, transactional and instrumentalist approaches to knowledge ‘production’, demanding self-refexivity regarding the power dynamics of resource (re)distribution. KL: Yes, it’s really important not to overstate our – or, more generally, the art institution’s – ability to somehow operate in a space apart (the persistence of this assumption in the contemporary art feld continues to surprise me). Even taking into account GWL’s important diferences, we still had to navigate deep contradictions. When structuring and delivering Life Support, we were keen to prioritise both care and the politics of care; as a bare minimum, this meant ensuring that everyone was paid for their time and that accessibility was centred. But any attempt to focus on the material needs and well-being of people inevitably runs into difculties. The Marxist theorist Martha Giménez’s work is useful here. She shows how, under capitalism, the process and labour of life-making are subordinate to the formal production economy; the relationship between production and reproduction is fundamentally contradictory, and we feel this in our everyday lives (Giménez 2019).

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Caroline Gausden et al. With Life Support, the most obvious and keenly felt instantiation of this contradiction was the delivery model which was necessarily tied to the logic of the project due to funding structures. The feminist critiques we posed as curators, together with those of the artists and GWL itself, were always staged within the realities of the capitalist economy. Angela Dimitrakaki and Nizan Shaked have articulated how, regardless of political intentions, we are locked into these material conditions (Dimitrakaki and Shaked 2021).

Practices of Care As discussed, being self-refexive about institutions was essential to Life Support in terms of operation as much as content, and we sought to braid these two aspects together, particularly when foregrounding artistic and curatorial approaches that use care as a strategy. Approaching the exhibition as a form of praxis meant, for example foregrounding how Greer Lankton’s careful staging of her dolls in photographs conveys such love and solicitude for her creations, tangibly manifesting documentation itself as a mode of care while considering where to display more visceral pieces such as Red Womb (1981), which shows a doll in a state of bodily fragmentation, to ensure that people who use the GWL building regularly could engage with the work in their own time and space. NR: The presentation of works by Greer was deeply informed by considering how to show the work of an artist historically neglected, but with a current of interest in her practice and archive, in a manner that tended to her practice without fetishising either the subjects or the content of the work, nor Greer’s positioning as a trans artist who died young in the 1990s. The challenges of researching and curating largely virtually during the pandemic, and the limits on transporting works from overseas, infuenced our decision to present Greer’s photographic works, rather than showing her sculptural works. Greer’s photographs focus on her life-size dolls captured in everyday scenes, faunting high glamour in works including Peggy Moftt (1986) and Candy at Einsteins (1989), and at times with vulnerability literally exposed in Red Womb and Sissy’s Bedroom (1985). The works were presented throughout the exhibition, producing resonances between Lankton’s elaborately detailed domestic intimacies and the politics of health, care, grief and housing that were emphasised at diferent points in the space. Fabricated as a double-sided fag, Peggy Moftt, depicting a fgure of Peggy Moftt in a white on black crochet butterfy-winged dress on a red background, few from a fagpole above the entrance to the library. In juxtaposition to the intimate interiors, here one stepped-out, or stepped-in, with CS:

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Peggy, as both her outft and the boldness of the fag – in Caroline’s words – emphasised ‘entering the room’. CG: Yes, entering the room, but also adorning neoclassical architecture associated with a certain kind of colonialism, I felt the fag also signalled an occupation. I’m so glad we could show that range of Greer’s work; the joy and vulnerability really expressed the ethos at GWL. Her fgures have an aesthetic I’ve seen before here; unapologetically glamorous and shouting out for recognition beyond places assigned to them by others on the edges of respectability. CS: We decided to position Red Womb within an area under a mezzanine housing GWL’s archive reading space. Ordinarily, this gallery is demarcated through a frieze of slatted wooden ‘fns’, which allow light in and enable audiences to see the works on display. However, we decided to construct a temporary wall around this area to create an atmosphere of containment. This began as a practical consideration because the delicate fabric and photographic works we showed by Veronica Ryan (Particles, 2017, and Lamentations in the Garden, 2000) need very low light levels, but it also echoed the container motifs that are such an important part of Ryan’s artistic vocabulary. Particles features forms which allude to seed pods and casings, alongside plaster casts of the fimsy plastic and foam trays used to transport fruit. This led us to conceive of the under-mezzanine gallery as a holding zone, where the viewing experience could be slowed down. This became a space where works like Lamentations in the Garden, which deals with themes including suicide and obliteration, and relates to what Dorothy Price has compellingly identifed as an afect of “binding trauma” in Ryan’s work, could be navigated in a quieter and more intimate setting (Price 2021a, 2021b). However, it raised other problems and challenges, in that the low light levels were not very accessible and made it difcult to see the works, especially for partially-sighted viewers. The show therefore had to constantly navigate diferent understandings of curatorial care. The light levels were loan requirements from the Arts Council Collection and the Hepworth Wakefeld, who understand their duty of care to the works as one of preservation, but this can result in ableist barriers which contrast the kinds of embodied care viewers might need (on the links between preservationist modes of care and cultural imperialism see Azoulay 2019). It wasn’t possible for us to reconcile these contradicting paradigms of curatorial care in Life Support and, looking back, this feels like an especially unresolved element. NR: While, as a team, our approach was undertaken with a central ethos of care, it’s worth commenting on how feminist practices infected curating during the strict Scottish lockdowns for the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic of course is a feminist issue, from the immediate crisis of care it engendered, to the long-term impacts of the virus, to the working practices we undertook to complete the exhibition. For an extended

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Caroline Gausden et al. period of the project (seven months), Caroline was the sole team member onsite at GWL, facilitating our virtual engagement with the building. Practices of care do not easily translate to a virtual form. Our work with artists during this time was almost exclusively conducted online. The prominence of digitally reproduced material in the show itself was not simply because these were the forms that worked in this context but because the care necessitated by the pandemic – to ensure artists, curators, library staf and exhibition visitors were protected – changed the exhibition and our programming. It’s true that our practices of care changed dramatically, removing the soft edges to interactions that convey important dimensions when we host in person. We communicate diferent things about ourselves when we eat together or even just share warm drinks and space in informal ways. This understanding was central to GWL’s approach to hosting pre-pandemic. The micro-practices that help signal care and support group dynamics are a key concern for Olivia Plender, whose contribution to Life Support functioned partly to reframe and acknowledge these non-spectacular interventions as part of a feminist pedagogy. Her commission reimagined and domesticated our community room, a key space for many groups to meet and support each other, through the introduction of softer lighting, carpets, and bean bags, alongside a ‘Lavender Menace’ wall and ceiling colour. This laid the foundations for the next stage of her collaboration with us which will focus on the development of a workbook. As Nat says, much of this work simply doesn’t translate into virtual contexts, meaning that we’ve had to slow things down and work beyond conventional exhibition timescales. Slowing the pace has been in keeping with Olivia’s focus on health inequality, which is derived from her own lived experience of coping with a chronic health condition and noticing that chronic illnesses often experienced by women (with intersecting factors like poor housing and overwhelming care burdens all playing a part) are not taken seriously by the mainstream medical establishment. Her creative response has been informed by Crip theory and critical disabilities studies, particularly around queering time to get away from capitalist demands for relentless productivity (Kafer 2013; Plender 2021). In my view, the juxtaposition of the two installations upstairs was particularly powerful. Olivia’s transformation ofered a space for rest and organising. This more relaxed atmosphere contrasted sharply with Martha’s intense presentation in the adjacent room packed with reproduced archival documents, photographs, prints, banners, audio and video. What connected the two was their adoption of a feminist perspective which focused on the infrastructures of social reproduction – healthcare and housing respectively – rather than socially reproductive ‘care’ labour such as cooking and cleaning. The 1989 staging of If You Lived Here .  .  . was ahead of its time in this respect, but though the

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Figure 13.1 Olivia Plender, Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem is Power, 2021. Life Support installation detail. Source: Artwork reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo by Alan Dimmick.

NR:

feminist angle was certainly present back then, it wasn’t overt. At GWL, we wanted to renew If You Lived Here . . . for a very diferent (though no less fraught) set of crises induced by neoliberal urbanism but also to foreground the impact of gentrifcation and regeneration on women, together with their role in housing struggles locally and internationally. I see both these projects as part of a social reproduction turn in artistic, curatorial and institutional practice. Alongside the valorisation of care, there is a marked tendency across the contemporary art feld to contribute to the provision of essential human needs such as food, healthcare, housing and education (Lloyd 2021). Crucially, Martha and Olivia engage critically with these infrastructures and conceptualisations of care more broadly. Both connect economic relations to everyday lived experience while providing space and resources to support struggle on the terrains of social reproduction. They begin to help us answer a question posed by Living Rent during our conversations; namely, how can we bring care and solidarity into organising strategies? From a curatorial perspective, they encourage us to think seriously about how exhibitions and art interventions can begin to contribute to the present, to the actually existing temporality of feminist struggle. The distinction between social reproduction and an ethics of care is by no means clear cut. If social reproduction is understood as the activities and work involved in the direct maintenance of life (or of an

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Caroline Gausden et al. institutional form), from feeding bodies to cleaning public space, then might care be understood as an ethical approach to a life, practice or relation? (Vergès 2021). There’s the question of the social value of people or bodies – of racialised, feminised, disabled, poor, migrant, trans and/or queer people in particular, including the labour we undertake and the work we produce – within the racial and gendered division of labour under racial capitalism in its current form as neoliberalism (see Raha 2017, 2021). This includes the forms of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “organised abandonment” between state responses to the pandemic, climate crisis and incarceration in prisons and detention centres (Gilmore 2007). While these subjects were addressed from a present and herstorical/hirstorical perspective through the show, works specifcally addressed what kinds of practices of care, which are themselves culturally and hirstorically situated, might ground or sustain or shield each other or even aid one to fourish.1 Alberta Whittle’s flm trilogy Creating Dangerously (we-I insist!) presents the importance of practices that nourish core afective elements, such as radical softness, alongside political strategies and protest that work to address and challenge anti-Blackness on UK/global levels. The flms synthesise the ethics of care-as-nourishment as central to political struggle and aesthetic production. An ethical approach to care can bare and tend to the gaps and grief that emerge within these political contexts, as profoundly considered in Ryan’s Lamentations in the Garden.

Archives CS:

We’ve touched briefy on the role of archives in Life Support, but it would be great to return to this given it was such an important part of our thinking. While conscious of the violence and exclusions that have historically shaped archival mechanisms, and not wanting to reduce active struggles to archival traces, we sought to use archival collections as a way of making connections with longer histories of struggle (Spencer 2018). Life Support engaged this material in diferent ways, from Olivia’s research for her installation, to our inclusion of materials from GWL collections in If You Lived Here . . . and in displays relating to feminist and LGBTQ+ organising that encompassed housing, healthcare, and resistance to state violence, like the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common. While foregrounding GWL’s archives, we also conducted research at the Bishopsgate Institute in London, and the Franki Rafes Photography Collection at the University of St  Andrews. Life Support provided an opportunity to trace links between collections; we worked with researchers Rachel Boyd and Weitian Liu to curate a selection of photographs by Rafes (Boyd and Liu 2021 and Liu 2021) and

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included items from related collections such as the Harpies & Quines and Scottish Women’s Aid archives at GWL. Rather than shipping Martha’s crates of archival materials from the US, we used the budget to cover the labour of scanning the items and then reprinted them here in Scotland. This solution worked for the studio at a time when the archive is in high demand as housing struggles proliferate and meant that we could refect the DIY feel of the original iteration. Martha emphasised the value of collaging diferent contexts and responses through the display to allow a more complex set of perspectives to emerge. So photographs documenting actions staged by young mothers as part of the Focus E15 campaign in London (2013–present) sat alongside leafets addressing the impact of the Poll Tax on women in the 1980s and materials about Take Root, a women’s self-build collective which two of GWL’s founders were involved with in the 1990s. Importantly, the archival materials were presented on a level with loaned artworks. In my view, this is a great example of a critical realist approach in action. As Olivia was unable to travel, I supported her research in the GWL archives. In our search for materials relating to feminist activism around healthcare provision, we foregrounded moments where women have recorded experiences of health inequality as they struggled with unrecognised and misdiagnosed conditions, identifed blind spots in healthcare systems and imagined alternatives. In a moment when we couldn’t physically come together, Olivia guided me through a process of gathering voices from the archive, including testimonies of experience of racism and sexism in healthcare systems, zines ofering much needed perspectives on life with chronic health conditions, deconstructed histories of health systems, dancing women in menopause support groups and countless adverts for support groups for sharing and collectively carrying the weight of these inequalities. We displayed these archival materials alongside Olivia’s research into the changing form of the iconic publication  Our Bodies, Ourselves,  initially created by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in the 1970s (editions from 1971, 1978, 1984, 1994 and 2014, and including Trans Bodies, Trans Selves  from 2014 and 2022). Olivia created some incredible drawings based on this publication’s history which became the core visual element to her intervention. For her, the book’s ability to morph into new forms as it met new contexts, together with the archival materials we unearthed, was a testimony to feminism’s ability to create fexible structures open to new voices. In selecting materials for display downstairs, I wanted to present a brief insight into lesbian, gay and wider LGBTQ organising in the UK from the 1980s, directly responding to government hostility and harassment. This is a period where some self-organised feminist and lesbian and gay organisations were gaining fnancial support from the Greater London

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Caroline Gausden et al. Council. It has only recently become subject to herstorical attention, eclipsed by the history of Section  28 of the 1988 Local Government Act, introduced by Thatcher’s government to outlaw any discussion of LGBTQ lives and relationships (labelled as “pretended family relationships”) by public authorities including schools. Here, the law functions as a tool attempting to suppress the reproduction of queer and trans lives while conditions of duress produce additional care labour for marginalised communities (Raha 2021). The display featured materials from GWL’s Lesbian Archive and from the Bishopsgate Institute, including items from 1984 to 1986 produced by the Lesbian and Policing Project (LESPOP) – a group which monitored police treatment of lesbians and informed lesbians about their rights within a changing legal landscape. LESPOP’s materials incorporated bold text and graphic design for posters and fiers produced on brightly coloured paper or using fuorescent colours – this was information that needed to be seen. An A3-size antiraids poster, produced in multiple languages, explained what to do if the police came to raid a women’s community space or home. Designed for such spaces by Kris Black, a Black woman active in LESPOP, it depicts a mixed-race lesbian family (complete with children and cats) as they are questioned by the police. Another item was a bust card, a pocked-sized A6 fyer advising lesbians on their rights if questioned by the police or if facing arrest. These materials have an astonishing contemporary resonance and speak to the ongoing work of resistance by marginalised communities to maintain our lives and voices within the UK – similar items circulate today among communities resisting state violence.

Infrastructure of the Project KL:

Given our focus on the constellation of social processes and infrastructures that comprise social reproduction, it seems important to examine the ‘hidden abodes’ within the Life Support project. What infrastructures did we have to navigate and to what extent were we successful in bringing a feminist politics to bear? Perhaps, attending to the question of time is a good place to start. Taking time to build relationships – with each other, the artists, partners and participants – and allowing them space to evolve has been a core part of our ethos. However, this is not to say that longer-term activities are necessarily more radical. Dave Beech ofers a useful corrective which could also be applied to concepts including ‘care’ and ‘collaboration’, venturing that endurance and duration are not solutions to art’s social contradictions. Rather, in some circumstances, they could signal a “failure to seriously engage with the contradictions of a space” (Beech 2011, 322). In addition to the contradictions that arose in relation to Life Support already discussed, we could add

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the approach to time which attends to engagement with political struggle and building solidarity against the desire to protect and properly recompense labour time, in line with the feminist curatorial approach advanced by both GWL and the Life Support team. I  wonder if we could say a bit more about this? CG: It’s important to draw in the extractive and exploitative temporalities of the art feld more generally. This is something that GWL actively tries to counter; but staging an initiative of this scale and complexity inevitably led to difculties. I think the question I’m asking myself now is how can we avoid imbalance in workloads so that we’re not modelling an EDI approach where care is outward facing but team members are overworked and exhausted in the process? Can we all adjust our pace so there is an equality of working patterns? It’s something that the Life Support project sought to model and the Manual Labours workshops with GWL staf addressed directly, developing new conceptualisations of rest spaces at work. I think Alberta’s trilogy makes a brilliant argument for self-care in activist practices, which is front-line work often performed by bodies that are most oppressed within systems, but what does it mean for feminist curatorial work? CS: This goes back to our previous discussion of care; the curator Helena Reckitt has emphasised the signifcant risk of art institutions invoking care in a depoliticised way and deploying it as a theme rather than an ethos, practice, or ethics. Reckitt is concerned that the “preoccupation” with curatorial care is “being used not to challenge but to perpetuate the status quo”, partly due to the fact that curators “rarely seem to acknowledge the low-status and infrastructural activities that sustain production across the creative ecology, let alone make eforts to extend care to those working in adjacent felds” (Reckitt 2020, 196). We tried to at least be aware of the infrastructural activities needed to sustain care within our own ecology, but this was unsurprisingly often complex. Working together can take time and proximity, particularly to create the kinds of relationships where expectations are not foreclosed, and there is freedom and trust to experiment and develop new ideas. Equally, we were trying to protect time and capacity while working to funder and institutional timelines. These have to be constantly pushed at to make space for bodies that might be tired or might not be able to work or experiencing a number of diferent pressures simultaneously. NR: One hidden abode that Life Support has facilitated is the Ubuntu Women Shelter residency within the community room at GWL, which ran in autumn 2021. This collaboration was nourished by Alberta Whittle’s ideas and practices regarding creating space and time for play and to explore what freedom can look like for Black and Brown womxn and non-binary people today in Glasgow. This ethos is infected in the dialogues within Alberta’s flm business as usual: hostile environment (a remix) (2021), and the playfulness encouraged by her marbled urethane,

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teach-yourself-to-dance foor sculpture stormy weather skylarking (2021). Ubuntu led on planning fve weeks of creativity, resource, reprieve and bodywork to make space for exploring freedom, given the stress, grief and oppression that the people in their group face. Life Support resourced Ubuntu with practical materials for making art, adorning and tending to oneself, for bodywork and creative documentation – making purchases from a shopping list composed by Ubuntu staf. However, creating such a space necessitates privacy – expressions of freedom are for those within the room and defnitely not for public consumption. The residency raised questions of how Ubuntu could make themselves feel at home within GWL, when making home in the UK can already be a trial for migrant women. Neoliberal management attitudes would demand, quite literally, to see results (impact!) in such circumstances, so to fabricate such an infrastructure through Life Support to counter that tendency has been something I’m personally grateful for, given what I’ve learned while working on facilitating the residency. Yes! I’m glad you mentioned stormy weather skylarking as part of this interplay between diferent aspects of Alberta’s contribution. I feel that as well as evoking play, Alberta was asking us to think about how demarcating territory and enforcing structure works, particularly in relation to colonial histories. But also, for me that work asks us what escapes these processes. The freedom that I think Nat is describing is hard-won but so important if we are to retain hope in our activist practices alongside the much-needed critical awareness of infrastructural violence that Kirsten rightly centres.

Note 1 “Hirstorical” describes an understanding of history centred through the experiences of trans and gender-nonconforming lives, where an ‘r’ denotes a movement towards a gender-expansive hirstory (Raha and Baars 2021).

Bibliography Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. 2019. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso. Beech, Dave. 2011. “The Ideology of Duration in the Dematerialised Monument: Art, Sites, Publics and Time.” In Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art. Edited by Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty, 313–326. Amsterdam: Valiz. Boyd, Rachel, and Weitian Liu. 2021. “Photographs by Franki Rafes in Life Support.” https://lifesupport.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2021/10/11/photographs-by-franki-rafesin-life-support/. Last accessed December 7, 2021. Dimitrakaki, Angela, and Nizan Shaked. 2021. “Feminism, Instituting, and the Politics of Recognition in Global Capitalism.” On Curating 52. www.on-curating.org/

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issue-52-reader/feminism-instituting-and-the-politics-of-recognition-in-globalcapitalism.html#.YbH51PHP3lx. Gausden, Caroline, and Helen Smith. 2015. “Conversational Mapping: Revaluing the Social Aspects of Art.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures 12. https://doi. org/10.20415/hyp/012.cm03 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giménez, Martha E. 2019. Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays. Leiden: Brill. Glasgow Housing Struggles Archive website. https://glasgowtenantsarchive.com/. Last accessed December 7, 2021. Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Liu, Weitian. 2021. “Franki Rafes: Photography as a Social Practice.” Photomonitor, March. https://photomonitor.co.uk/essay/franki-rafes-photography-as-a-socialpractice/. Living Rent website. www.livingrent.org/. Last accessed December 7, 2021. Lloyd, Kirsten. 2021. “Art, Life and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Curating Social Practice.” The Journal of Curatorial Studies 10(2): 150–176. https://doi. org/10.1386/jcs_00041_1. Manual Labours. 2020. “The Global Stafroom Podcast.” https://manuallabours. co.uk/todo/the-global-stafroom/. Last accessed December 10, 2021. Morrison, Sue, Syma Ahmed, and Shamaaila Nooranne. 2011. She Settles in the Shields: Untold Stories of Migrant Women in Pollokshields. Glasgow: Glasgow Women’s Library. Patrick, Adele. 2021. “Digging Deep: Leadership, Learning, and Endurance. A Conversation between Nandita Gandhi, Althea Greenan, Merete Ipsen, and Adele Patrick.” On Curating 52. www.on-curating.org/issue-52-reader/digging-deepleadership-learning-and-endurance.html#.YbH2i_HP3lx. Plender, Olivia. 2021. “Conversation with Olivia Plender.” In Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism. Edited by Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha, and Catherine Spencer, 29–31. Glasgow: Glasgow Women’s Library. Price, Dorothy. 2021a. “Binding Trauma.” Art History 44(1): 8–14. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-8365.12572 Price, Dorothy. 2021b. “Fragile Propositions.” In Veronica Ryan: Along a Spectrum, 24–32. Bristol: Spike Island. Raha, Nat. 2017. “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116(3): 632–646. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3961754. Raha, Nat. 2021. “A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction.” In Transgender Marxism. Edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, 85–112. London: Pluto Press. Raha, Nat, and Grietje Baars. 2021. “The Place of the Transfagbidyke is in the Revolution.” Third Text 35(1): 176–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.20 20.1864950. Reckitt, Helena. 2020. “Taking (Back) Care.” In On Care. Edited by Rebecca Jagoe and Sharon Kivland, 196–202. London: Ma Bibliothèque. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spencer, Catherine. 2018. “The Pedagogies of Performative Afterlife.” Parallax 24(1): 19–44. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13534645.2017.1415262.

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Ubuntu Women Shelter. www.ubuntu-glasgow.org.uk/. Last accessed December  7, 2021. Vergès, Françoise. 2021. A Decolonial Feminism. Trans. Ashley Bohrer. London: Pluto Press. Whittle, Alberta, Adebusola Ramsay, and Graham Campbell. 2021. “Lessons Learned: Weather Warnings. Glasgow Sculpture Studios.” https://soundcloud. com/glasgowsculpturestudios/lessons-learned-weather-warnings. Last accessed December 12, 2021. Whittle, Alberta, Ubuntu Women Shelter and Life Support. 2021. “In Conversation.” In Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism. Edited by Caroline Gausden, Kirsten Lloyd, Nat Raha and Catherine Spencer, 17–23. Glasgow: Glasgow Women’s Library.

14 From Coping to Curious Unlearning and Reimagining Curatorial Habits of Care Helena Reckitt

For the roundtable conversation “Taking Care: Feminist Curatorial Pasts, Presents and Futures,” (Lloyd et  al. 2016) four feminist curators and art historians, based in Scotland, England, and Sweden, shared their insights into recent curatorial projects and scholarship informed by feminism and centred on social practice and care. Of their wide-ranging discussion of feminism’s recent, and overdue, centrality to curatorial practice and thought, it was their refections on the feminised traits of the curator that particularly compelled me. Kirsten Lloyd analysed the curator’s rise as an economic symptom, equated with the fexibility and amenability expected of neoliberal workers. Jenny Richards, meanwhile, rifng on Lloyd’s account of the collapse of subjectivity and productivity, evoked the fgure of “the coping curator,” who downplays systemic problems and suppresses her own emotions. “That woman who looks great, perfect lipstick, never needs to sleep and as Arlie Hochschild says [in her 1983 book The Managed Heart] ‘ofering only the clean house (gallery) and welcoming smile’ ” (Lloyd et al. 2016, 118). Richards’s characterisation of professionalism as performance resonated with my own experience holding curatorial and programming roles and the strain I had often felt to present an image of unfappable poise. During the 20 years in which I worked in non-proft art institutions in the UK and North America, from 1990 to 2010, the contemporary art feld expanded hugely. The proliferation of temporary exhibitions, biennales, art fairs, and private foundations stimulated a growth in cultural tourism and an accompanying boom in art-oriented higher education. Meanwhile, work conditions in the sector became increasingly insecure. No longer expecting to follow a stable career trajectory, most arts workers internalised the idea that they were independent agents, ‘free’ to develop projects on a succession of part-time and short-term contracts, for which they often travelled or relocated. To compensate for austerity cuts carried out in many Western countries, public arts organisations became reliant on private funds, while the under- and unremunerated labour of employees and volunteers in efect helped to subsidise those institutions’ fnancial operations. From exceeding their contracted hours, to devoting their private lives courting infuential funders and patrons, and producing projects on “just in time” schedules,

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cultural workers performed the precarity associated with networked capitalism (Reckitt 2016). In my case, the pressure I felt to be hyperactive and visible, developing multiple programmes in a small team and under tight deadlines, left me little time or energy for relationships or activities outside work. From keeping up with the art world’s itinerant calendar, usually on my own time and out of my own pocket, to socialising with well-connected patrons, and attending local art events, it often felt as if my whole life was on institutional loan. My knowledge of contemporary art, my relationships with artists, gallerists, and collectors, all were treated as commodities, to which board members and high-level members of the galley were ofered access. To some artists, I seemed to also represent a useful resource, someone to befriend if they were to be recommended for exhibitions and awards and included in the itineraries for studio visits of visiting critics and curators. An emerging local artist whose work I had featured in a group show once called me at the gallery to ask when I planned to visit his new exhibition. A week later, when I had still not found the time to go, he left me a voice mail: he had checked with gallery staf, and they confrmed that I had still not attended. All these experiences made me feel like a commodity to be instrumentalised. Friendships were transactional and feeting, to be dropped once someone else occupied my role. As well as maintaining a constant level of activity, while suppressing my own needs for non-professional relationships and responsibilities, as well as relaxation and rest, I felt obliged to maintain a public image that refected the gallery’s vanguard brand. As my director explained, urging me to set up meetings with infuential artists and curators during the Venice Biennale opening, regardless of whether or not we planned to work with them, “It’s all about the optics.” My consciousness of the need to convey an image of polished professionalism and subtle glamour preceded my working at the gallery. Having fractured my elbow in a cycling accident days before my job interview, I removed the cast and dosed up on painkillers before leaving home. Once I joined the institutional staf, at the same time as my personal life and afects were being instrumentalised, I started to be criticised by management for being “overly emotional” on the job. In a classic instance of the political implications of disciplining the self, analysed by Michel Foucault (1988), it seemed that the only feelings I was entitled to display were those that could be put to institutional use. The result was that I  experienced a form of emotional compartmentalisation and splitting, similar to the tendency Richards observes in herself and other curators to “push the messy, difcult, and desirable work into the background, in order to leave a cleansed version of that role in the public” (Lloyd et al. 2016). Yet, although meeting the required levels of presenteeism, productivity, and visibility took a physical and emotional toll, I  hesitated to voice my concerns. ‘Good jobs’ in the arts were scarce to fnd in that city. Having

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relocated with my partner, who had secured a tenure-track academic job, I had spent a year job-hunting before being hired. Wondering what to do if I failed to fnd work in my feld only reinforced how deeply intertwined my identity was with my professional persona. In a manner to which female cultural workers are especially prone, as Angela McRobbie argues, I  had internalised the idea that I carried out “passionate work,” more a vocation than a job (McRobbie 2015). Indeed, working to the point of burn out was almost a badge of honour amongst myself and other gallery colleagues. As the director of a small US art centre where I had previously worked liked to claim, “we punch way above our weight.” Overwork was also often matched by underpay, a legacy of arts jobs historically being the domain of the wealthy, extensions of their love for and ownership of valuable objects, more a privilege than a profession. Low pay and unstable terms also corresponded with the pattern described by Cristina Morini (2007) as the feminisation of labour, whereby the infux of the female workforce from the late 1960s into the arts, education, and care and customer service led to a defation of those felds, in terms of both wages and prestige. Ironically, the lowered status of female-dominated sectors was partly an outcome of women’s demands for the fexibility needed to balance waged work with unpaid domestic and caring labour, demands that the capitalist system exploited. Even had I made my discomfort public, I feared doing so would damage my reputation, brand me as a whiner, lacking the resilience to perform under pressure, thus jeopardising my future employment prospects. Close to exhaustion, battling insomnia, I nonetheless continued to project the persona of the coping curator.

Selfe Care and Feminised Labour Isabelle Graw diagnoses my inhibition to voice dissent as a symptom of ‘semiocapitalism’: the commodifcation of subjective expression and afects. Cultural workers feel compelled to maintain good relations with people they might one day collaborate with or work for, creating a culture in which cooperation takes precedence over agonism and critique. Contacts are currency as “contact capital” is accumulated. “The more contacts we collect, the better for our personal value” (2008, 76). Lane Relyea makes a similar point in Your Everyday Art World (2013). Discussing the networked activities of arts scenes, invested in patterns of mutual validation, branding, and prestige by association, he characterises how they operate within relational economies of geographically and socially dispersed ‘weak ties.’ By contrast, “strong ties,” such as those often found in impoverished communities, are geographically and socially bounded, driven by bonds of mutual dependence and support (Relyea 2013, 54). “Selfe care” is the term coined by Lauren Fournier (2018) to defne the promotion of a personal or professional persona.1 In the ceaseless search for the dopamine pull of likes and engagement in today’s attention economy,

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arts workers’ cultivation of a public persona refects the broader emergence of social media celebrities and infuencers. Selfe care, often taking precedence over genuine forms of self and collective nurturing, can encompass the promotion of a glamorous, networked, and sought-after image, along the lines I felt compelled to present as an institutional curator. It can also include the sharing of images of individuals holding books of fashionable criticism, an auto-theoretical trait detected by Fournier in the feeds of certain post-internet artists (and a tendency to which I too have been prone). In contrast to this now-familiar trend, Fournier shows how selfe care can also trade in the sharing of painful, taboo, and shame-inducing emotions. As an example she cites Melissa Broder’s blog and subsequent book So Sad Today (2016), documenting the author’s exhausting search for attention and afrmation resulting from her profound anxiety and depression. While it is important to diferentiate between problematic practices of oversharing and the soft brag and the potential activist and community-building tactics of amplifying stigmatised issues and traumatic experiences, as Fournier takes pains to do, both tendencies nonetheless refect the impetus to perform under the gaze of virtual others. Curatorial scholar Nanne Buurman characterises curators’ propensity to over-identify with institutions they work for as “Stockholm syndrome” (Buurman 2021, 22). Remarking on women’s dominance in the curatorial feld, she notes: [C]omplementary to stereotypical associations of artistry with masculinity, structural analogies can be discerned between traditional scripts of femininity and widespread curatorial codes of conduct: beyond the shared etymology of care work and curating in the Latin curare (to care), the practices of curators and care workers are generally associated with an emphasis on modesty, restraint, and a negation of productivity or creativity of authorship. Moreover, their subject positions have in common an emancipatory trajectory from invisible agents/stagehands behind the scenes of (representational) economies to the role of protagonists that take center stage. (2021, 21) Recalling curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s characterisation of the white cube as a “space of emancipation,” Buurman wonders if her dOCUMENTA (13) constitutes “a neoliberal smooth space in which the benevolent curatorial smile conveys the impression of freedom from domination through the use of barely noticeable soft power?” (2021, 30).

Disidentifcation and Care of the Self Once I stopped working as an institutional curator and started to derive my living as a university lecturer, I used the self-critical space of academia to

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interrogate my former professional habitus. I began to see that, by romanticising my work and believing that the prestige of artists and intellectuals I worked with rubbed of on me, I had contributed to maintaining exploitative and unsustainable work conditions.2 With art historian Danielle Child and Jenny Richards (whose description of the ‘coping curator’ so resonated with me) I wrote the article “Labours of Love” (2017), in which we pooled our experiences of the many ways we had prioritised professional obligations and relationships above those without instrumental value. We looked to the roots of these behaviours in our social conditioning, as daughters of neoliberal parents, employees in service industries, and precarious workers. I  continued analysing art world habits of care (and lack therein) through leading various workshops with cultural and education workers in Toronto (Blackwood Gallery, 2017), Shefeld (SITE Gallery, 2018), London (Studio Voltaire, 2018), Helsinki (in-waves, 2018), and Paris (Ferme du Buisson, 2019), as well as with MFA Curating students at Goldsmiths. Working alone and with others to identify the systemic nature of exploitative work conditions gave me some distance on my previous work behaviour. The efort to denaturalise internalised norms has resonance with the, albeit far more systematic and long-term, feminist practice of consciousness raising. Such self-refexivity also fnds parallels with Foucault’s writing on the care of the self (Foucault et al. 1987), a process of retreat that involves refecting on the nuances and textures of everyday life. In contrast to the solipsism of selfe care, care of the self is ultimately a collective act, as insights an individual gains into their own condition are amplifed when shared with others through teaching, mentorship, and other ethical forms of relation.3 Foucault’s concern with quotidian experience, personal refection, and narrative also connects to literary scholar Jane Gallop’s exploration of anecdote and feminist storytelling. Erupting into scenes of academia, anecdote has the efect of refguring inherited modes of scholarly authority and vocality, leaving us a little unsure as to when and where we have become too personal, and when and where it is precisely this grounding in the personal that is making our political scholarship, our theory, possible, as Natalie Loveless observes (2019, 65–66).

Unlearning Habits of Care Within the cultural feld, high status typically accrues to activities linked to artworks and artists (especially if they are critically or commercially validated), while low status adheres to tasks involving ‘uninitiated’ groups, such as children and non-art world audiences, and with the work of maintaining mundane and ephemeral objects. This conceptual split between prestigious and menial labour and value has little to do with material diferences and

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everything to do with symbolic associations. Identifying the nineteenthcentury-origins of the division between ‘spiritual’ care and nurturance associated with white bourgeois women, and ‘menial’ dirty work associated with racialised women, Mara Marin shows how this distinction continues “to justify the contradictory tendencies to sentimentalize care while materially undervaluing it” (Woodly et al. 2021). Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who memorably declared “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.),” (1969) dramatised the hierarchies of museological care in her 1974 gallery intervention Transfer (The Maintenance of the Art Object). Her performance included exchanging the specialised materials with which the conservator preserved an Egyptian mummy with the rags used by the janitor to mop the museum foor. Over the past 15 years, care and maintenance have become the focus for various curatorial research projects. One example whose conceptual complexity and political urgency makes me return to it regularly is the Grand Domestic Revolution (GDR), which started at CASCO in Utrecht in 2009, taking diferent forms and orientations when it opened at non-proft arts organisations in London, Derry/Londonderry, Ljubljana, Stockholm, and Malmo. Exploring conditions and possibilities of hosting, living, and working together, this multi-part programme focused on the labour of social reproduction, of building and sustaining life. Especially pertinent to my focus on denaturalising hierarchies of value and care are the ‘Unlearning’ exercises developed by artist Annette Krauss with the CASCO team. Recognising that their individual and collective investments in being constantly ‘busy’ contributed to a culture of hyper production and stress, the exercises ranged from moving around the gallery furniture to hosting weekly reading sessions and carrying out group cleaning and maintenance labour, all eforts to make visible, share, and redistribute previously neglected aspects of art institutional housework. Similarly invested in practices of institutional analysis, Bergen-based curator Eva Rowson highlights the undervalued cultural labour typically carried out by members of feminised, racialised, and classed groups. Growing out of her project “How Do We Keep It Going?” Rowson (2018) seeks to reject working practices that undermine participants’ well-being, instead valuing intimacy and experimentation: If we imagine our programmes becoming less about always being visible and more about protecting space for ourselves and others to test things, take risks, learn, fail, and relearn as we go along, then we need to shift institutions and funders away from the need to have clear outcomes in order to prove what they’re doing is “productive.” At the Kunsthall in Bergen, Rowson developed a programme informed by the question ‘Who’s Doing the Washing Up?’ All employees were invited to programming meetings, including those not usually involved in core

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curatorial decisions such as “ticket sellers, poster hangers, operations teams, cleaners” (Rowson 2020). As a consequence, exhibition credits subsequently acknowledged the labour of maintenance staf alongside the curatorial and administrative team. That Rowson acknowledges questioning whether the art centre’s cleaner would feel ‘shame’ in being publicly acknowledged for his work suggests how deeply entrenched these prejudices against such labour continues to be. The process also stimulated awareness about how certain goals of inclusivity, such as 50/50 gender balance in music line-ups, had been reached, while other glaring oversights, like the dysfunctional nongendered, accessible toilet, were ignored. Emerging from a 2018 intervention led by artist Jordi Ferreiro, access to the previously unavailable toilet was eventually enabled.

Giving It Time The art institutional devaluation and disavowal of caring and maintenance activities contrast starkly with the way in which ‘high profle’ curators and institutional leaders are fetishized and celebrated, their ‘charismatic’ traits accruing the glamour and mythic status of hyper-individualised artists. The expectation for curators and directors to perform visionary capabilities is built into the application and interview process, which is premised on the idea that candidates know what is needed, before they have even been ofered the job. Even if the opportunity to speak with a staf member in advance of an interview is now often ofered,4 the need to provide long-term programming and fundraising plans assumes an unrealistic and problematically ‘god-like’ level of foresight. The arrogant, top-down approach taken by many organisational leaders therefore follows this expectation. So it was notable that when Cecilia Widenheim took over directorship of Stockholm’s Tensta Konsthall in 2019, she resisted the oedipal narrative of succession and overthrow, instead acknowledging the work of her predecessor, Maria Lind, and her wish to develop, rather than archive and deem obsolete, her achievements (Antaya 2018). Also refusing to glorify institutional work, when discussing their co-directorship of another Swedish art institution, Konsthall C, Richards and her co-director emphasise their mundane and relational roles: “janitor/chef/cleaner/therapist/friend/organiser/builder/teacher/administrator/artist” (Lloyd et al. 2016, 118). Similarly, of the various positions she has held, including curator, institutional director, and head of an art school, Brussels-based Laurence Rassel refuses to merge the personal with the professional. “I never use ‘I am a director,’ ” she explains, “It is not an identity, I act as or I am occupying the position of etc.”5 Unwilling to privilege an organisation’s outward-facing aspects above its overall health, Rassel builds on tenets of institutional psychology that “if you wanted to take care of a person, you have to take care of the institution, that if the institution is sick, the people who are patients there will be as sick as the institution is.” Psychiatric patients joined staf members to

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participate in their own care and healing. “Everything counts,” from the design and care of the garden, to who does the cooking and cleaning, and how, a collaborative approach that values all members’ agency and creativity (Sollfrank 2019). Such refusals of mastery and arrogance fnd echoes in contemporary calls to reduce the pace of expansion and production and devote the same care to art organisations’ internal workings as to their public-facing outputs. Responding to curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez‘s invitation to ‘slow down’ and take a more holistic approach to the deployment of art institutional resources and capacities, Alba Colomo and Lucy Lopez, co-founders of La Sala, an emerging intersectional feminist space in Nottingham, envisage an organisation that is nurturing rather than extractive, built around the table and in relation to the food grown in their adjacent allotment. Their inaugural series “Fermenting Institutions, Thinking Beans” shed light on lengthy, organic processes that are generative, sensitive to locality, and responsive to conditions of burn out, both planetary and personal (La Sala 2019). La Sala builds on Isabelle Stengers’s concept of “slow science,” cited by PetrešinBachelez, where paying attention entails more-than-human entanglements, and the transformative power of participants thinking together resembles “the slow knowledge of a gardener” rather than “the fast one of so-called rational industrial agriculture” (Petrešin-Bachelez 2017). A commitment to working across time, rather than according to the shortterm schedules endemic to gallery programming, is also a hallmark of Alex Martinis Roe’s artistic research, for which she creates long-term support structures. Martinis Roe emphasises the importance of working through, rather than suppressing, diference and friction when it emerges in group situations, to stimulate the kind of feminist dynamics that can engender safe space. Rather than saying “I’m not going to say this, I’m not going to say that,” and go silent because you’re worried you might say the wrong thing, I think it would be better to just be committed to the group and the project. Thinking instead, I’m not going to leave when it gets diffcult. Or I’m not going to abandon somebody if I have made a mistake and hurt them, rather than constantly trying to prevent yourself from making mistakes. (Martinis Roe and Reckitt 2021, 109) Rethinking whose knowledge and experience are valued, and for that recognition to make a diference to who is given institutional agency and power, is another cornerstone of the various social justice-oriented initiatives that I  consider. At the Wellcome Collection in London, the need to think beyond conventional professional knowledge led the curatorial team for Being Human, a permanent display inspired by the Social Model of Disability, to hold long-term consultations with advisers and specialists, from

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disabled individuals and members of disability organisations to academics and research scientists. Exhibition staf took on board the insights that emerged from these discussions to challenge implicit distinctions between supposed ‘able-bodied’ museum professionals and ‘disabled’ outsiders. Vitrines in the exhibition displayed ‘prosthetics’ donated by Wellcome employees, which included spectacles, a hearing aid, and a prosthetic knee and breast, accompanied by written accounts of owners’ mixed emotions about them. Having learnt how disabled museum visitors often felt marginalised or excluded, staf devised a gallery foor plan which accommodated visitors viewing work from a wheelchair or standing, featuring plenty of seating, and a prominent entrance for wheelchair users to avoid them entering “by the back door” (Barlow 2020).

From Coping to Curiosity These examples point to the need for cultural workers to adopt more openended approaches to devising projects in which they see themselves as part of a relational network rather than as fgures of authority and control. When approaching curatorial research as a starting point for questions and experiments, rather than demonstrations of competence and knowledge, ignorance can be treated as a spur to learn rather than a source of frustration or shame. “We aren’t here to learn what we already know,” the title of an article by Kyla Wazana Tompkins, derived from methodologies she developed teaching intersectional feminisms, proposes just such a curious and questioning stance (Tompkins 2016). Curiosity is also central to Loveless’s defnition of research creation, in which “You can’t be curious about something you already know, but you need to know something about it in order to be curious” (2019, 48). In the curatorial and research projects I have developed since I stopped working as a full-time institutional curator, I  have started to devise more dynamic, reciprocal, and unstable relationship with my collaborators, using them as opportunities to think and experiment with others, from artists, thinkers, and activists to audience members and fellow organisers. For the 2014 exhibition Getting Rid of Ourselves, at OCADU Gallery in Toronto, for instance, I  invited the participating artists to suggest ways in which I could refect the exhibition’s exploration of instrumentalised subjectivity on a curatorial level rather than simply presenting their work as illustrations of my theme. Responses included one collective contributing to the exhibition design, one artist proposing a workshop on DIY artist survival techniques, and a collaborative duo wanting to invest the entire project budget on the stock market. By performing the conditions of its existence, the exhibition exceeded conventional representational curatorial strategies to test its own functions, according to scholar Emma Brasó (2021). This embrace of uncertainty also informs my approach to the Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG), a monthly meeting exploring

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under-represented feminisms, which I have coordinated since 2015. Sessions are proposed and led by various members of the Working Group and Support Group, as well as former participants and friends. Fostering divergent views and approaches results in a programme that is far more polyvocal, in theme and aesthetic approach, than it would be had I kept a tight grip of the curatorial reins. The FDRG’s longevity also results from its open-ended character, as sessions are shaped according to the interests and curiosities of a shifting group. Eforts to make sessions accessible, without ‘dumbing down’ content, include adopting a format of reading out loud together, one person and one paragraph at a time. Remarking on the intimacy of a session she attended, a newcomer recently remarked that she had long searched for a reading group like this that takes as much care with the quality of the exchange as it does with what is read.

Becoming and Caring Diferently Changing ingrained institutional behaviours of the kind I  have described in the cultural sector is a complex process. It can’t be carried out singlehandedly, especially given the instability of many cultural workers’ livelihoods and their fnancial and emotional dependence on institutions and must occur within the context of a broader commitment to organisational change. It is especially challenging to change systemic habits in sectors like the arts that are enmeshed in ideologies of vocation and love and which encourage romanticisation and over-identifcation. Transforming what Katie Barclay calls an institution’s “feeling rules” requires a deeply held commitment by its members to think about their emotional selves in new ways and to “become something diferent” (2021, 2). Just such a commitment can be seen in some of the examples of curatorial and institutional work I  have given. The Grand Domestic Revolution took place when CASCO was moving to a new building and redefning its mission as working for the commons. Being Human  was developed in the run-up to the Wellcome Collection’s initiative to centre transformational and institutional justice, which included forging a plan on anti-Blackness and racism and committing £1 million to a three-year access, inclusion, and diversity strategy. The process also entailed interrogating the Wellcome’s extractavist colonial origins and commissioning a study of the potential carbon footprint for an exhibition on magic, which identifed visitor travel to the exhibition as its most environmentally damaging dimension. Learning from the Collection’s long-term engagement with issues of access and disability, for a series of artist commissions developed during the COVID19 pandemic, curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz implemented ‘crip time.’ Three artists, Sop, the vacuum cleaner, and Khairani Barokka, were invited to respond to the UK government’s campaign ‘Stay at Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives,’ and its disproportionate impact on certain communities and individuals. To enable fexibility, commissions were ofered without any

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fxed plans for public visibility. The three works eventually entered the institution’s COVID-19 collection, and Sop’s piece featured in the 2021 exhibition Rooted Beings.6 Akin to how I have described my eforts to distance myself from naturalised forms of cultural subjectivity and labour, Barclay explores how some contemporary academics are involved in a process of ‘cooling of’ from the vocational self that academia calls for and the power systems it reproduces. She argues that such a cooling, accompanied by “learning to sit in discomfort,” can be an important step in eforts to build more ethical institutions (Barclay 2021, 53). Signs of ‘cooling’ are also visible in the today’s cultural sector. Arts workers are more regularly voicing their discomfort with perpetuating a system in which notions of care are often spoken, but care rarely extends beyond a limited, privileged few. In tactics that echo Foucault’s writing on care of the self, over the past couple of years UK-based arts workers have used social media alongside more conventional publishing formats to amplify their experiences of toxic workplace conventions, from bullying to racism, tokenism, precarity, and ableism.7 These more-frequently voiced grievances are also accompanied by current initiatives in the UK cultural sector that attempt to centre and value care: from the London arts organisation Furtherfeld’s residency for carers, to the Scottish arts agency Arika’s childcare and phone data fund, and the founding of Mother House studios in South London, which welcomes artists’ children and includes childcare provision. The growing institutional adoption of live captioning and written image descriptions refects another attempt to respond to participants’ diferent access needs. Most of the work involved in devising new protocols of care, and pressuring institutions to adopt them in ways that go beyond tokenistic or one-of gestures, is carried out by artists and poorly paid cultural workers. Having experienced a defcit of institutional care frst hand, they recognise the need to work together and care for one another. Artist and writer Johanna Hedva is one such fgure. As part of their eforts to build intimacy, care, and relationality with organisations with whom they work, Hedva has made public the disability access rider they send before accepting institutional invitations (Hedva 2019). The rider details her needs, from travel, diet, and accommodation, to seating and rest, gender-neutral toilets and inclusive documentation and mediation. Written to avoid the labour of repeatedly articulating their needs as someone with long-term chronic illness, the rider represents a concerted efort to get institutions to shape their programmes in response to people’s individual needs and not force them to adhere to rigid formats. Hedva’s document ends with the hope that protocols adopted to support their participation will become part of the institution’s commitment to care better in the future. Jamila Prowse, an arts worker and writer inspired by Hedva, who has written about her own encounters with toxic work environments, describes the need for an “intrinsically fexible, human centred approach” that is “less

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focused on a specifc outcome, and more focused on the time and investment you put into thinking, collaborating, creating, facilitating discussion and nurturing relationships.” Such a change in orientation holds the potential to foster working environments “where our mind is free to roam, to imagine alternative potentialities” (Prowse 2020). The problems I  encountered working for non-proft arts organisations, especially in my last curatorial post, are hardly exceptional. I draw on these experiences not to incite sympathy or surprise but to underline their all-too familiar and systemic nature. I also want to attempt to hold myself accountable, to understand why I  did so little to improve my situation, and why I chose to quit instead of battling it out. I want, moreover, to gain insight into why I  failed to build solidarity with my co-workers, in the absence of a trades union or other collective bargaining platform. Perhaps, bonds between colleagues discouraged them from letting others down, for failing the institution whose mission they so valued. Perhaps, they had internalised the idea that they were disposable and easily replaced should they speak out. I also don’t want to exaggerate the difculties I faced. In many ways I was lucky. I lived with my partner, who had a full-time academic post. In the knowledge that I had my family’s support, I resigned from my gallery position without having another job lined up. Refusing to sit through a meeting at which my boss began reading from a long list detailing my shortcomings gave me perverse satisfaction. The list began with my failure to make him look good in public and in the presence of visiting luminaries; after all “it’s all about the optics.” That someone with my privileges – white, middle class, university-educated, cis-gendered, able-bodied – experienced such profound discomfort, such conviction that I  was not up to the job, only highlights the stress experienced by members of marginalised groups who do not meet the norms to which I conformed, who are so often made to feel inadequate and out of place. One of the pleasures of teaching, singled out by Barclay as providing sources of meaning and passion that ofer some compensation for academics whose ardour for university culture has cooled (2021, 38), is contributing to the development of emerging practitioners. It can be especially rewarding to support students who are not prepared to accept the art world’s status quo but who commit to doing things otherwise. It is the eforts of arts practitioners to develop more equitable, joyful, caring, and curious ways of working that encourage me to “keep it going,” in Rowson’s phrase. Refusing to surrender all their vitality to institutions that would suck the very life out of them, they try to make worlds in which they might truly want to live.

Notes 1 Thanks to Erica Scourti for introducing me to Fournier’s notion of selfe care. 2 See my earlier refections on the dangers of burnout and exhaustion for cultural workers in conditions of precarity and emotional splitting in (Reckitt 2016).

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3 See Liz Kinnamon (2016) on the political importance of care of the self, the dangers of self-neglect, and overestimation of collectivity and togetherness in producing joy. 4 Thanks to Persilia Caton, who has interviewed for curatorial jobs more recently than I have, for this insight, and for her careful and insightful reading of an early version of this text. 5 Laurence Rassel, email to the author, March 15, 2021. 6 Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, email to the author, June 6, 2022. 7 See, for example, recent accounts at weareparable.com, 2020, www.weareparable. com/hypocrisy-fake-solidarity-and-glass-ceilings-my-perspective-working-at-thewilliam-morris-gallery/?preview=true&fbclid=IwAR0ivcAAd5EoCpOSwrR-Cd0 F5gZxVzT-aSzhSiMRdxnJ2DfadKwISTTqB34; Arts Professional, June 24, 2020, www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/we-need-collectivity-againststructural-and-institutional-racism-cultural-sector?fbclid=IwAR0lwrTL1mRmG2 F83673mENmA7AiNhRzCeGHBRFfEme-MUyrtHuui187QJ4; https://heystacks. com/doc/337/this-work-isnt-for-us–by-jemma-desai;”Disability Arts, Online, April  2020; and The White Pube’s regular pointed art world critiques, https:// thewhitepube.co.uk/

Bibliography Antaya, Christine. 2018. “Cecilia Widenheim New Director of Tensta Konsthall”. Nordic Art Review, October 30. https://kunstkritikk.com/cecilia-widenheim-newdirector-of-tensta-konsthall/. Last accessed December 8, 2022. Barclay, Kate. 2021. Academic Emotions: Feeling the Institution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barlow, Clare. 2020. “Whose Body? Disability in the Museum”. In Health. Edited by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, 167–173. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery. Brasó, Emma. 2021. “Exhibiting Parafctional Artists: Curatorial Approaches to Fiction and Authorship.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 10(1): 50–71. Broder, Melissa. 2016. So Sad Today: Personal Essays. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Buurman, Nanne. 2021. “From Prison Guard to Healer: Curatorial Subjectivities in the Context of Gendered Economies”. On Curating 52: 21–34. Child, Danielle, Helena Reckitt, and Jenny Richards. 2017. “Labours of Love.” Third Text 31(1): 147–168. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel, Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, Alfredo Gomez-Müller, and J.D. Gauthier. 1987. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 12: 112. Fournier, Lauren. 2018. “Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfe Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 33(3): 643–662. Graw, Isabelle. 2008. ‘Response to Luc Boltanski’. In Under Pressure: Pictures, Subjects, and the New Spirit of Capitalism. Edited by D. Birnbaum, 75–80. London: Sternberg Press. Hedva, Johanna. 2019. “Hedva’s Disability Access Rider”. August  22. https:// sickwomantheory.tumblr.com/post/187188672521/hedvas-disability-access-rider.

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Kinnamon, Liz. 2016. “Attention Under Repair: Asceticism from Self-care to Care of the Self.” Women  & Performance: A  Journal of Feminist Theory 26(2–3): 184–196. La Sala. 2019. “A Working Code of Practice for La Sala”. www.lasala.uk/codeofpractice. Last accessed May 30, 2022. Lloyd, Kirsten, Catherine Spencer, Victoria Horne, and Jenny Richards. 2016. “Taking Care: Feminist Curatorial Pasts, Presents and Futures”. On Curating 29: 116–128. Loveless, Natalie. 2019. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. Martinis Roe, Alexis, and Helena Reckitt. 2021. “Relationality in Feminist Collective Practice.” On Curating 52: 103–119. McRobbie, Angela. 2015. Be Creative: Making a Living in the Ne Culture Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morini, Cristina. 2007. “The Feminization of Labour in Cognitive Capitalism.” Feminist Review 87: 40–59. Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša. 2017. “For Slow Institutions”. e-fux Journal 85. www. e-fux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/. Prowse, Jamila. 2020. “The Quiet Revolution of the Self-Isolated”. Art Work Magazine. https://jamilaprowse.com/portfolio/the-quiet-revolution-of-the-self-isolatedart-work-magazine-2020. Last accessed May 30, 2022. Reckitt, Helena. 2016. “Support Acts: Curating, Caring, and Social Reproduction”. Journal of Curatorial Studies 5(1): 6–30. Relyea, Lane. 2013. Your Everyday Art World. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rowson, Eva. 2018. “How Do We Keep It Going? Independent Curator + Producer Eva Rowson on How to Sustain Space for Each Other on Our Own Terms.” AQNB, January  16. www.aqnb.com/2018/01/16/how-do-we-keep-it-going-independentcurator-producer-eva-rowson-on-how-to-sustain-space-for-each-other-on-our-ownterms/. Last accessed May 30, 2022. Rowson, Eva. 2020. “I heart Women.” https://iheartwomen.co.uk/evarowson/. Last accessed May 30, 2022. Sollfrank, Cornelia. 2019. “Commoning the Institution – or How to Create an Alternative (Art School), When “There Is No Alternative.” On Curating (43). www. on-curating.org/issue-43-reader/commoning-the-institution-or-how-to-createan-alternative-art-school-when-there-is-no-alternative.html#.YpUqYWDMIbY. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. 2016. “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know”. LA Review of Books, September  13. https://avidly.lareviewofbooks. org/2016/09/13/we-arent-here-to-learn-what-we-know-we-already-know/. Last accessed December 8, 2022. Ukeles, Mierle Laderman. 1969. “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, Proposal for an exhibition ‘Care’ ”. https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf. Last accessed May 30, 2022. Woodly, Deva et al. 2021. “The Politics of Care.” Contemporary Political Theory 20(4): 890–925. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00515-8.

15 Care for Caregivers Curating Against the Care Crisis Sascia Bailer

Economy of the Invisible Hands Historically defned as “one of the most exploitative, fexible and invisible forms of labour performed by women” (Akbulut 2017), care-work until today is upheld by deep-seated unequal and contradictory structures, which the COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully clear. Due to the closing of schools and childcare centres as part of the lockdown measures – while parents were expected to continue their waged labour – societies worldwide experienced a central contradiction within the capitalist system, which has been voiced by Marxist feminists since the 1970s: without social reproduction, no workforce; without workforce, no commodities; without commodities, no accumulation of capital. Prominent fgures of the discourse such as the feminist scholars and activists Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser have argued that housework and social reproduction lay the groundwork for capitalist value creation, although usually they are, paradoxically, unpaid: Unwaged social reproductive activity is necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value, and the functioning of capitalism as such. None of those things could exist in the absence of housework, child-raising, schooling, and afective care, and a host of other activities that serve to reproduce new generations of workers. . . . Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in capitalist society. (Fraser 2017, 23) The ofcial economy therefore depends on social reproduction whose value it disavows (Fraser 2017, 23). In this light, Adam Smith’s suggested “invisible hand of the market” rather appears to be billions of “invisibilised women’s hands” (Praetorius and Grünenfelder 2020, 4), whose labour would have produced 10.9 trillion US dollars in value if their work had been paid with minimum wages, according to fgures released by Oxfam for the year 2018 (Wezerek and Ghodsee 2020). That is more than the total earnings of the world’s largest corporations, according to the Fortune Global 500

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list, to which Walmart, Apple, and Amazon belong (Wezerek and Ghodsee 2020). This labour, however, does not appear in any GDP calculation worldwide even though no economy is sustainable without it. Despite the pandemic’s seeming heightened recognition and valorizing of care-work (e.g. through the much-contested nightly clapping for careworkers), this labour remains systemically devalued as an economic principle: “where there is no productivity diferential, employment will not be perceived as worthwhile unless wages are higher than the average paid to carers” (Himmelweit 2005, 16). At the same time, care is morally charged, easily romanticized, and associated with joy and devotion, “confating care with afection and nurture” (Murphy 2015, 732). This confictual feld of care-work is therefore marked by various forces that systemically devalue it, keep it invisible as a gendered and racialized background activity, within an economy that capitalizes on “free-rides” of social reproduction and natural resources (Fraser 2017, 23). In short, “neoliberalism is uncaring by design” (The Care Collective 2020, Introduction), particularly leaving caregivers utterly uncared for. Emma Dowling therefore advocates for feminist approaches to confront the neoliberal contradictions around the prevailing care crisis by strengthening democratic processes that centre politics and ethics of care: Care cannot be considered in isolation from the broader social, cultural and economic organisation of society, but must be part of a more radical transformation linking care and democracy through which people can regain a sense of control over their lives and livelihoods in ways that are both socially and ecologically just. (Dowling 2018, 339) Against this background, this chapter asks in which ways a feminist curatorial practice – with its dedication to social transformation, rooted within ethics of care – can form part of these democratizing processes that hold the potential to shift the discourses and practices around care-work. After providing an overview of the contested coupling of curating and care, I present an example of my own curatorial practice as Artistic Director (2019–2020) of M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, in which I  addressed questions of care through participatory curatorial formats.

Contested Terrain: Curatorial Care Curatorial practice – due to the etymological origin of the verb to curate (Latin root curare = to take care, to look after) – is continuously tied to the politics of care and thus invited to redefne its democratic agency between artistic production and social urgencies. However, the associated meanings between curating and care remain a contested terrain, having undergone considerable shifts in the past. In the beginning of the twentieth century,

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the gendered connotations of curating were in alignment with the feminized and romanticized codes of conduct for care-work, with a shared sense of “modesty, restraint, and the negation of authorship,” as Nanne Buurman argues (2016, 146). The author compares curatorial care for artworks and collections to housekeeping, which historically has been predominantly performed by women in a self-negating manner. Both function as backstage agencies that had few public merits but adhered to a separation of spheres, in which the authority and autonomy of artists and men was secured by the invisible care labours performed by curators and women respectively. (Buurman 2016, 146) However, over the course of the twentieth century, this understanding of a curator-as-carer shifted towards the curator-as-author (Krasny 2017, 3). The birth of the curator as an independent exhibition-maker – in analogy with the traditional conception of (male) solo artist as genius – marked the trend of a “masculinization of curating” (Buurman 2016, 146; Richter 2013). In this light, one cannot neglect the hierarchical and discriminatory connotation that is implicated in curating’s etymological root. Kate Fowle notes that, in the English language curator refers to guardian or overseer, implying that “a curator is someone who presides over something – suggesting an inherent relationship between care and control” (Fowle 2007, 10). In the case of Harald Szeemann during documenta 5, his “view focused entirely on himself as author, and he considered the exhibition to be an image of one single worldview” as Dorothee Richter concludes in her analysis of his self-understanding and self-positioning as a curator vis- à-vis the invited artists (Richter 2013, 46). In such instances, the supposedly cared for, the artworks and artists, run the risk of losing their voice to the curatoras-author. The ambiguous association between curating with care therefore oscillates between the promise of protection, support and afection, and the risk of losing voice and/or agency of the artists and artefacts taken care of. While the beginnings of curating appeared to be disinterested from politics and social movements, curatorial practice is inevitably part of “(critically addressing) the politics of how art and culture are produced, shown, mediated, analyzed, and made public” (Krasny 2015, 54). Elke Krasny not only regards questions of politics and social change as part of feminist thought but also considers “curating and curatorial thought as always already profoundly entangled with political and social questions” (Krasny 2015, 54). The recollection of the etymological root of curating as care has sparked an upsurge in curatorial initiatives that emphasize care as a radical act of feminist and anti-racist practices. Despite its contested notions, the ambiguities of the association between curating and care contain an activist potential to challenge the modus operandi of society and the ways in which artistic and curatorial practices operate, produce visibility, and articulate

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counter-protocols of relationality. I  argue that this unveiling, this making transparent of the contradictions of the curatorial feld, is what defnes curating’s sociopolitical dimension. Hence, curators are asked not only to critically refect upon their practice in the context of feminist and decolonizing theories but also to regard their work as already deeply implicated in transformative sociopolitical processes. From this standpoint, feminist curating aims at carving out alternatives “to traditional (patriarchal) models of authorship, production and community,” and thereby actively uncovers and challenges deeply entrenched societal patterns (Richter 2019, 184). Maura Reilly’s proposition for a curatorial activism also seeks to establish a “curatorial corrective” as a way to combat the “moral emergency in the art world” (Reilly 2017). She demands a heightened representation of marginalized social groups; thereby addressing ongoing discrimination in gallery representation, auction-price diferentials, and inclusion in collections and exhibitions (Reilly 2017). Building on the trajectory of curatorial activism, Elke Krasny proposes the concept of caring activism, an interweaving of curating with feminist care theory, to render frequently invisible codependencies legible – thereby ofering resistance to the concept of the curator as independent author (Krasny 2017, 3). This approach explicitly intends to counter the suppression of curating’s relationship to care, to counter the insinuation that “care as invisibilized and feminized labour does not yield aesthetic and intellectually relevant production” (Krasny 2017, 3). Within the arts – an already highly precarious feld of labour – these feminized notions of care are amplifed and form the basis of devaluation and mechanisms of exclusions for curators, artists, and cultural producers who aim to both care and create. Marcia Breuer, visual artist and photographer based in Hamburg, Germany, in her manifesto “Mehr Mütter für die Kunst” [More Mothers in the Arts] describes the ways in which caring responsibilities within the arts are a central career-hindering factor for mothers: If a working woman has children, this usually has relevant consequences for her further professional life in general and for her further professional career in particular, despite all protestations and according to all studies. If a woman artist has children, this leads her into a situation that makes the continuation of her artistic career almost completely impossible. (Breuer 2019)1 A study by the Berlin-based artist union BBK [Berufsverband Bildender Künstler*innen Berlin e.V.] highlighted that in the second largest artist city after New York, women artists earn 28% less than their male colleagues (BBK Berlin 2018). The gendered gap is therefore 7% wider than in the overall economy. The lack of income is moreover closely tied to a lack of representation in solo and group shows in museums and galleries. Many artist positions, art historical research and discourse suggest that

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motherhood – not so much fatherhood – in the arts is still one of the last taboos (Buhr 2019). In an art world in which women have historically served as (nude) muses, as de-sexualized Madonna fgures, as objects of art making, rather than as agents of autonomous artistic practices, women artists today are still confronted with the binary choice of “art or children” (Nochlin 1971; Judah 2020). It comes as no surprise that the art world is thus facing a void of mothers as recognized artistic agents, and consequently, children are commonly not depicted within contemporary artistic works – let alone integrated into the process of art making. As art critic Elke Buhr states in the art magazine monopol, “Sex, death, politics: art can show everything today. But children? They are not a theme. Especially for their mothers, they are considered killers of an artist’s career” (Buhr 2019, 43). In light of the capitalist contradictions around care and its alarming manifestations within the art world, it seemed imperative to create a curatorial programme that would not only address these conditions but also actively counter them through a caring curatorial activism.

Care for Caregivers: Curatorial Platform for Care at M.1 Hohenlockstedt As part of the artist workshop series Care for Caregivers, I  invited the Israeli-American artist and activist Shira Richter to direct the workshop Care Counts: On Value and Visibility of Caregiving. The two-day workshop formed part of an 18-month participatory curatorial programming at M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in rural Northern Germany, where I served as Artistic Director in 2019–2020. For this particular workshop, the invitation card showed the photographic work Push (2005) by Shira Richter, where the hand of one of her twins almost forcefully grabs the fesh of her overstretched postpartum belly. The card asked in bold lettering, “what is the value of my work if it is invisible and unpaid?” The workshop thus urged the participants right from the beginning to engage with the question of what their daily, often invisible, unpaid, mental, or physical care-work looks like and what an appropriate recognition for this labour could or should be. While incorporating her photographic and flmic artistic works, Shira Richter and the participants questioned societal models that produce invisibilities of (motherly) care-work while promoting competitive modes of thought instead of cooperation and solidarity. In collaborative exercises, the participants were encouraged to explore strategies of solidarity in everyday life – how cooperation not competition could be implemented and lived as a form of collective care. Shira Richter’s workshop was one amongst six artist-led workshops at M.1 that brought together local caregivers and invited them to dedicate themselves to questions of mutual trust, role expectations in motherhood, collective self-care, and strategies against isolation, which had already been

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an urgent matter even before the COVID-19 pandemic’s social distancing became the new norm.2 The curatorial, participatory programme originated from the question, “who cares for the ones who care for others?” and thus centred the lived realities of caregivers, in which structural inequalities manifest themselves in gaps of gendered, economic, and political participation. Located in Hohenlockstedt within rural Northern Germany, the curatorial formats set the local as the point of departure for arts-based democratic processes. This situated approach is in alignment with Meghan Johnston’s understanding of slow curating as a process, which “includes a meaningful and deep understanding of one’s immediate context, working with local experts to learn the cultural politics, the poetics of place, and to investigate issues conscious and unconscious that afect everyday lives” (Johnston 2014, 26). It was therefore important to me that the programme would speak to the people – above all to those who were performing care-work in a wide variety of forms – and that their themes be heard; that the questions not be far removed from their day-to-day lives, fnding instead their origin therein. To let the programme emerge from the community rather than imposing it from the outside, I moved to Hohenlockstedt for four months – with my then-three-year-old son and with my almost 80-year-old grandfather as support – to investigate: “what does care mean in Hohenlockstedt, who looks after whom and in what form?” As a newcomer to Hohenlockstedt, I  learnt through multiple conversations that this place – unlike the other surrounding villages – doesn’t have a town hall and is in need of meeting spaces, where the community would be able to come together informally. It was therefore important to me to explore the possible depths of curating as a relational practice that attempts to create non-hierarchical spaces for encounter in Hohenlockstedt and to strengthen and expand local support networks. Through almost two years’ collaboration with artists, activists, and residents from Hohenlockstedt and its surroundings, a participatory programme took shape, striving for collective care, solidarity, and community building on local and regional levels and beyond. Even if the conception and organization of the events were designed institutionally, the programme lived from togetherness: exchange, assembly, and participation were central from the beginning; hence, without the participants’ constant attendance, without their contributions in action and thought, the programme would have missed its mark. The opening event, in spring 2019, fully embraced these curatorial ethics of care towards the community, as over 100 people had come together in moderated roundtables to form temporary collectives of exchange. The frst Social Muscle Club had come to Hohenlockstedt: Jill Emerson, artist and co-founder of this initiative, introduced the event as a playful invitation to train one’s “social muscles” by practising giving and taking. Participants wrote their wishes, as well as what they were able and willing to give, on slips of paper – thereby ofering and accepting a range of gestures and objects. A micro-social network was created which transcended the spaces

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Figure 15.1 Over 100 people joined the frst Social Muscle Club in Schleswig-Holstein. Source: photo credit: Bettina Winkler-Marxen.

of the art institution as participants made arrangements for the near future – to take walks together, to mow someone else’s lawn or practice Spanish together. Some months after the Social Muscle Club, I  was delighted to encounter two older women again, who had been at the same roundtable. They explained to me that they had become friends at the Social Muscle Club and now took walks together regularly. To my pleasure, this invitation to strengthen small actions of solidarity in everyday life on a local level had fostered new caring encounters. The workshop Everyday Strategies Against Isolation (July 2019) – as part of the series Care for Caregivers – also focused on the question of how participants, based on their everyday lives, could strengthen and expand their own care networks. The artist and researcher Manuela Zechner facilitated a mapping exercise, which aimed at more closely analysing and then drawing one’s own interpersonal relationships according to diferent categories (bodily care, fnancial support, emotional connection, etc.). Through the multilayered quality of the exercise, the 20 participants, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to mid-eighties, became conscious of what kinds of support already existed and where there were still gaps. What united the workshops of the series was their dedication not only to honest dialogue and artistic experimentation but also to raising and responding to questions that resonated with everyday caregivers. However,

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to question was not only an artistic method applied throughout the various formats but had also emerged as a key curatorial strategy for community engagement. The invitation cards for the workshops did not focus on promoting the arrival of an international artist to the rural community, but each showed a central question around the theme of the workshop: the workshop on trust by the Paris-based dancer and performance artist Myriam Lefkowitz asked, “what are the conditions for mutual trust?”; the workshop on collective self-care by the intercultural art collective Grand Beauty on Tour asked, “what kind of relationship do I  maintain with myself?”; and the visual artist Julieta Aranda asked in her workshop on time, “what kind of future is dormant within in us?”. Hence each one of the invitation cards gave space for a critical question(ing) – thereby establishing a connection between the content of the workshop and the lived experience of caregivers who encountered the leafets across the public sphere of the region. Over the course of the series, I  came to understand this approach as a curatorial method that enabled a tender linkage between more abstract academic discourses on the one hand and locally situated care-practices on the other. With such relational curatorial formats I had aimed at establishing a participatory platform at M.1 to foster visibility and alliances for and between caregivers in the region through artistic and socially engaged methods. I sought to particularly create a curatorial counter-model to the dominant forms of cultural production, asking myself in which ways I could use my position of power to promote questions of care not only at the level of the visible (i.e. in exhibitions, flm screenings) but also in terms of the structural framework (which oftentimes is invisibilized itself). How could I focus on care as a theme for participatory engagement and artistic and discursive production and representation while also fostering support structures that would enable artists and participants with caring responsibility to join the public programming?

Caring Infrastructures: Towards Care as Method Like care-work, support structures – or what we have been referring to as “caring infrastructures”3 – tend to be invisibilized and underacknowledged. This notion resonates in Doina Petrescu’s understanding of support as that which is behind, below, and underneath, hidden. . . . It is the invisible that makes possible, the visible, the absent which allows things to be present, the transient which make things lasting, the impossible that carry on the condition of possibility. (Condorelli and Wade 2009, 13) In a curatorial efort to centre both care-work and the invisible infrastructures that support not only cultural organizations but also social life itself,

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the programme regarded the creation of such “caring infrastructures” as a central element. Over the course of the programme, this increased the urgency to go beyond questions of visibility and to shift focus towards creating and altering existing social and physical (infra)structures through the lens of care. In this regard, I join Nora Sternfeld’s proposition of postrepresentational curating, in which curating is not so much concerned with “the mere representation of social relations, but which lays the ground for intervening in them – an intellectual practice that understands itself as involved, dissensual, and situated in solidarity with existing social movements” (Palladini and Sternfeld 2014, 1–2). For the workshop series Care for Caregivers, this meant countering the lack of representation of women and mother artists within the arts and building “caring infrastructures” to enable their contribution. I  had thus invited only women artists, some of whom had previously worked explicitly on care, others more implicitly. In the preparatory conversations for the workshops, it became apparent that each of the artists was performing carework alongside their artistic practice. Some were single-parenting; some were pregnant at the moment when our conversations began and arrived to facilitate the workshop with an infant. In the context of our collaboration, their caring responsibilities were not seen as a lack of fexibility but rather as a matter of expertise, as a matter of credibility to address the politics of care through their artmaking as a form of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988). Children and possible partners of artist facilitators and of participants were explicitly welcome to the events, and free on-site childcare was provided as a key conceptual element of the curatorial programming. A former gallery space was turned into a permanent children’s room, not only dedicating budget and curatorial attention to the needs of families but also altering the physical space towards their inclusion. Free shared meals furthermore formed an integral element, where informal togetherness was enhanced while bodies were nourished through freshly made food. These curatorial choices come with the recognition that the art world becomes sustainable only if the ones working and participating in it can reproduce their livelihoods and can be provided with a support system that includes “childcare, parental leave and provisions for people with disabilities, to fair pay and employment practices” (Reckitt 2016, 25). This frames curatorial care as a way to extend love and care beyond the high-status objects, artists and patrons generally considered worthy of curatorial custodianship and, instead, devote attention to nurturing the reproductive labour that sustains the living processes of cultural production. (Reckitt 2016, 25) The curatorial decision to feature women artists, some of whom are also mothers, did not only heighten the visibility of their artistic practices but

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also demanded the creation of physical, social, and fnancial gestures of care that could account for their needs. My intention of constructing caring infrastructures through a relational curatorial programming was rooted in the belief that the reorganization of everyday life forms the basis for the “creation of nonexploitative social relations” and serves as the central terrain for social transformation and for the creation of new forms of solidarity (Federici 2012, 125). While existing societal patterns, habits, and norms appear rigid at frst glance, they act as the invisibilized yet dynamic and relational infrastructures that order our shared realities (Berlant 2006; Star 1999) and thus carry the potential of social transformation. These relational webs between the involved artists, participants, and the wider community create a social space that makes architectural boundaries fade into the background while foregrounding human relations and interactions (Möntmann 2002). These social spaces function as partial publics which are dynamic, heterogeneous, and temporary, turning the museum walls into “porous membranes,” thereby squeezing out artistic actions into the local political and cultural space (Möntmann 2002, 10). From this position, curating can be perceived as “radical relational practice” (Krasny 2017, 120) wherever the practice expands from the site of a museum, rippling out into the urban – and I may add, rural – to engage with a variety of sociopolitical urgencies. Thus, taking care seriously as an explicit curatorial position means not only to provide visibility for marginalized subjects but also to use curatorial practice and thought as a vehicle, as an organizational method to actively (re)construct relationships, visibilities, and caring infrastructures with the sincere dedication to the sociopolitical transformation. In tandem with this aim to explore care as an organizing principle in Hohenlockstedt, my colleague Claudia Dorfmüller, the inclusion activist Antje Hachenberg, and I developed a series of storytelling cafes at M.1 as a democratic, locally rooted platform for exchange and solidarity alliances. The storytelling sessions were co-moderated by local activists, aligning with existing social initiatives and making accessible the tools and knowledges that these practices had already allocated for the specifc region. The Berlinbased artist duo Polyphrenic Creatures had guided the dialogical process, intervening with artistic inserts, and ultimately creating a sound collage that hints to the multiplicity of vulnerabilities, needs, and capacities inherent to the community. After the conversation series had to shift online during the pandemic and my position as artistic director had ofcially come to an end, the group had not been able to get together in real life anymore. One year later, we had therefore asked the participants to come together for a forum to collectively evaluate and refect the process. The strong necessity to come together prevailed, but the participants showed hesitation to continue the process in a self-organized manner. On the next day, one participant reached out, sharing that she was willing to organize the next meeting of the storytelling cafe – however to this day, a self-organized continuation

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has not taken place, as few participants confrmed their attendance for the proposed meeting. This highlights the fragility and the multiple complexities of sustaining such relational processes after projects have come to their ofcial ending. Ultimately, all of these curatorial processes were ephemeral; they were neither material nor tangible but rather characterized by the experiential, not the visible. The question arose: what remains of an encounter, of a conversation, of a social space? Personal memories, emotions, and perhaps some notes? How can these feeting moments of the curatorial project be captured – and how can the experiential also be made accessible to people who were not there? A group of students from Studio Experimentelles Design at the HFBK Hamburg (Prof. Jesko Fezer’s class)4 had taken on these questions while accompanying the curatorial programme at M.1 for over a year.5 As a result they developed the Archive of Encounters, which brought together artistic interpretations and documentary elements for each event in the form of a wooden case. The eight archival cases are meant to be mobile and participatory: through cooperation with the community library in Hohenlockstedt, the cases can be borrowed and taken home like other media. The archive invites users to investigate the traces, engaging at their own pace with the themes, impressions, and experiences and developing their own encounters with the cases’ contents – thus enabling a continued engagement with the curatorial programme after it had come to a formal closing.

Conclusion Against the background of the contradictions between the capitalist framework and care-work, curatorial practice is bound to address its etymological root in care and the gendered and discriminatory connotations that arise from it. Through the framing of curating as a sociopolitical practice with a dedication to ethics of care – as proposed by Elke Krasny’s approach of caring activism or Maura Reilly’s curatorial activism – it can contribute to shifting the power and representational matrix within the arts. The curatorial programme on care at M.1 (Bailer 2019) discussed earlier aimed to produce such common grounds for encounter, for artistic–visual explorations, and to establish caring infrastructures that may continue to develop independently from the formalities of institutions, be it friendships, memories of belonging, small groups, new knowledges about existing local networks, food recipes, or contacts between engaged actors who might not have met otherwise. Relational curatorial formats such as the storytelling cafes, the workshop series Care for Caregivers, the exchange event Social Muscle Club, and the interactive Archive of Encounters countered the hostile societal and economic mechanisms that continue to marginalize care-work today. The formats rather fostered tender linkages between the scales of the personal, the local, the everyday, and political democratic

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transformative processes – and facilitated the construction of new caring infrastructures (Bailer 2020, 35). The chapter makes a case for assuming curatorial responsibility for the overall structures and context of one’s work environment; it urges curators to make full use of their agency to not only address matters of care on a representational level but also to actively alter afective, social, fnancial, and physical infrastructures in alignment with ethics of care. This understanding may serve as a road map for cultural practitioners to integrate care as a method into their feld of work, contributing to the curatorial activist idea of challenging discriminatory art historical canons and representations, to highlighting questions of care as central to society and the overall economy while building the foundations of caring infrastructures across the cultural sphere.

Notes 1 This leads me to understand motherhood not as a biological but as a political and symbolic category in which social, fnancial, and economic conficts unfold, amplifed within the arts. With this position, I follow the writers Rumaan Alam, Kim Brooks, Jessica Friedmann, Sheila Heti, and Meaghan O’Connell in their conversation “What it Means to Write About Motherhood, Part One” (2018). 2 The workshop series included further artistic contributions by Julieta Aranda (artist, Berlin/New York), Grand Beauty on Tour (Frauke Frech, Hengameh Sadeghi – intercultural collective, Leipzig), Myriam Lefkowitz (performance artist, Paris), Liz Rech and Annika Scharm (performance artists, Hamburg), and Manuela Zechner (artist/researcher, Vienna). 3 I want to give credit to Rosario Talevi and Gilly Karjevsky with whom I have co-curated the New Alphabet School edition on Caring at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020. In this process, we collectively exchanged ideas and advanced our thinking around the concept of caring infrastructures, which I present in this chapter. 4 The Archive of Encounters was conceptualized, designed, and produced by Veronica Andres, Pablo Lapettina, Laura Mahnke, and Skadi Sturm. 5 “Archive of Encounters”, M.1, https://www.m1-hohenlockstedt.de/en/20192020/art/archive-of-encounters/. Last accessed December 10, 2022.

Bibliography Akbulut, Bengi. 2017. “Carework as Commons: Towards a Feminist Degrowth Agenda.” Degrowth.info. www.degrowth.info/blog/carework-as-commons-towards-a-feministdegrowth-agenda. Last accessed March 22, 2022. Alam, Rumaan, Kim Brooks, Jessica Friedmann, Sheila Heti, and Meaghan O’Connell. 2018. “What It Means to Write about Motherhood, Part One.” LitHub. https://lithub.com/what-it-means-to-write-about-motherhood-part-one/. Last accessed March 22, 2022. Bailer, Sascia. 2019. “Artistic Direction 2019–20: CARE at M.1 Arthur BoskampStiftung”. www.m1-hohenlockstedt.de/en/2019-2020/. Last accessed March  22, 2022.

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Bailer, Sascia. 2020. Curating, Care, and Corona. Hohenlockstedt: Verlag der Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung. BBK Berlin. 2018. “Gender Pay Gap/Gender Show Gap in der Bildenden Kunst.” 3. Fördersummit des BBK Berlin. Berlin: IFSE Studio Berlin III. Berlant, Lauren. 2006. “Cruel Optimism.” Diferences 17: 20–36. Breuer, Marcia. 2019. “Mehr Mütter Für Die Kunst”. http://mehrmütterfürdiekunst. net/index.php?s=start#unterzeichnen. Last accessed March 22, 2022. Buhr, Elke. 2019. “Das Letzte Tabu: Kind und Kunst.” Monopol. Magazin für Kunst und Leben. https://www.monopol-magazin.de/ Buurman, Nanne. 2016. “Angels in the White Cube? Rhetorics of Curatorial Innocence at Documenta (13).” OnCurating Journal 29: 146–160. Condorelli, Céline, and Gavin Wade. 2009. Support Structures. London: Sternberg Press. Dowling, Emma. 2018. “Confronting Capital’s Care Fix: Care Through the Lens of Democracy”. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion 37: 332–346. Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Brooklyn: PM Press. Fowle, Kate. 2007. “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today.” In Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating. Edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris, 10–19. New York: Apexart. Fraser, Nancy. 2017. “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism.” In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, 21–36. London: Pluto Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14: 575–599. Himmelweit, Susan. 2005. “Can We Aford (Not) to Care: Prospects and Policy.” New Working Paper Series (London School of Economics, Gender Institute) 15: 1–45. Johnston, Megan. 2014. “Slow Curating: Re-Thinking and Extending Socially Engaged Art in the Context of Northern Ireland.” OnCurating Journal 24: 23–33. Judah, Hettie. 2020. “Motherhood Is Taboo in the Art World – It’s as If We’ve Sold Out: Female Artists on the Impact of Having Kids.” The Guardian. www. theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/dec/02/motherhood-taboo-art-world-soldout-bourgeoisie. Last accessed March 22, 2022. Krasny, Elke. 2015. “Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method.” Curating Degree Zero Archive: Curatorial Research 51–69. Krasny, Elke. 2017. “Caring Activism. Assembly, Collection, and the Museum.” Collecting in Time of GFZH Leipzig. https://collecting-in-time.gfzk.de/en. Last accessed March 22, 2022. Möntmann, Nina. 2002. Kunst Als Sozialer Raum: Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green. Köln: Walther König. Murphy, Michelle. 2015. “Unsettling Care: Troubling Transnational Itineraries of Care in Feminist Health Practices.” Social Studies of Science 45: 717–737. Nochlin, Linda. 1971. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness. Edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Mora. New York: Basic Books.

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Palladini, Giulia, and Nora Sternfeld. 2014. Taking Time Together. A Posthumous Refection on a Collaborative Project, and Polyprgasmic Disobedience. A Dialogue Between Giulia Palladini and Nora Sternfeld. Helsinki: CuMMA PAPERS #6. Praetorius, Ina, and Regula Grünenfelder. 2020. Wirtschaft ist Care. Zurich: Frauen*synode. Reckitt, Helena. 2016. “Support Acts: Curating, Caring and Social Reproduction.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5: 6–30. Reilly, Maura. 2017. “What Is Curatorial Activism?” ARTnews. www.artnews.com/ art-news/news/what-is-curatorial-activism-9271/. Last accessed March 22, 2022. Richter, Dorothee. 2013. “Artists and Curators as Authors – Competitors, Collaborators, or Team-Workers?” OnCurating Journal 19: 43–57. Richter, Dorothee. 2019. “Feministische Perspektiven Des Kuratorischen/Auf Das Kuratieren.” In Zeichen/momente. Vergegenwärtigungen in Kunst Und Kulturanalyse. Edited by Sigrid Adorf and Kathrin Heinz, 183–202. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 377–391. The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto. London: Verso Books (apple e-book edition). Wezerek, Gus, and Kristen R. Ghodsee. 2020. “Women’s Unpaid Labor Is Worth $10,900,000,000,000.” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2020/03/04/opinion/women-unpaid-labor.html. Last accessed March  22, 2022.

16 Cultivating Care Ethics and the Minor Gesture in Curatorial Jacqueline Millner and Zsuzsanna (Zsuzsi) Soboslay1 Introduction “It is easier to identify major shifts than to catalogue the nuanced rhythms of the minor .  .  . [It] invents its own value, a value as ephemeral as it is mobile”, writes Erin Manning (Manning 2016, 1–2). What might happen if those ever-present but often overlooked pulsations were more universally aforded due care? What if we were able to accord equal value, including aesthetic value, to the complex, coexistent, and generative forces that accompany and make possible what we register as ‘new’ and ‘major’ phenomena? This chapter considers these questions in relation to research and curatorial practices in contemporary arts and theory. With the falling away of the noise of so much major gesture during COVID-19, with the cancellation of grants, gigs, gatherings, and hence the point-scores such events accrue, we have perhaps been gifted a capacity to think diferently: in the minor key. The major, built-in received values, knows only one way to go, along received pathways. The minor adapts, adjusts, responds, and shifts. And we realise that, maybe, it is the grand gestures that have always been the more fragile. What we register and applaud as ‘the major gesture’ is in part a product of neoliberal exigencies that preclude the cultivation of alternative modes of exploring, curating, and academic research: before we even begin, we are already time-, money-, and space-bound, pressured to measure and evaluate, categorise and compare, specialise, and above all compete. These purportedly objective ‘metrics’ are routinely applied to determine what is of value and what meets the threshold for ‘success’, replicating the norm – the major – while overlooking the underlying minor gestures. Yet, the global crises we currently face demand that we upturn the norm, that we wrest back time, space, and exchange from their neoliberal colonisation. Instead of trusting the existing measures of value, we are called to wait for what latencies may emerge when we listen rather than speak, when we pause and hover rather than follow the imperative to ‘produce’. In this way, the ‘the minor gesture’ connects with the feminist ethics of care, tapping into “the recalcitrance of the temporality of care to productionist rhythms” (Puig de

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la Bellacasa 2017, 171). Feminist care ethics understand the world in a state of ever-changing relationship, where no part is isolated and autonomous, and where small and intimate acts are connected to a broader politics (Gilligan 1982; Tronto 2015). Care ethics, in other words, are attentive to and valorise the minor gesture as potentially transformative. In this chapter we explore how those common activities in the academy and the arts world, such as curating, symposia, and skills workshops, can be done diferently with an eye to the minor gesture and care ethics. We focus on two recent case studies, projects that we as collaborative, arts-based practitioners created to explore what insights they might yield into care as an ethico-political material doing, as well as afective and emotional relations. A feminist curatorial experiment, The Care Symposium (held in Melbourne, 2019), brought together dozens of artists and interdisciplinary researchers exploring care. Through extended time, inclusivity, fexibility, and free amenity, the ravages of the academic and art institution – fear of rejection, imperative to compete, constant call to account – could be temporarily alleviated, and alliances, both personal and collective, forged to cultivate resilience and create the ground for ongoing research. The ReStorying Project (Canberra and environs, 2020–2021) is a longer-term, modular, free-access process providing respite for artists (of any medium) afected by the disruptions of COVID-19. The project ofered an alternative space to what have become ‘normal’ operations across arts industries that usually validate by outcomes and value the ‘grand gesture’ above the many thousand, unremunerated, steps that comprise our artmaking ‘along the way’. Together, by engaging with curatorial methods and artist skills development, these two case studies ofer practical alternatives to ‘major’, outcome-driven artistic production. Both embody an ethics of care that embrace ‘the minor gesture’, attempting to remain open to unlimited experiential variations that suggest other forms of being, knowing, and doing, and privileging experiential complexity above the fnishing line. As researchers/practitioners embedded in these case studies, here we intersperse theory, thick description, and refections on being called to care in lived encounters that have confounded us, caused discomfort, or  frayed the edges of our attempts to select, group, interpret, and curate meaning. The writing lens adjusts from panorama to close-up, continually crossreferencing between personal and political, cognitive and sensory, attuned to how the smallest of actions (and the smallest of thoughts which generate them) can make a diference.

Care Ethics and the Minor Mode: Positioning the Care Symposium and ReStorying Both The Care Symposium and ReStorying respond to embodied suspicions that conventions in major museum and gallery exhibitions, performance events, as well as traditional conference structures, often leave participants, contributors, and aspects of their perceptions and experience, ignored,

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invisible, or overridden. Conferences, for example, can leave participants physically or mentally exhausted by the efort to front up and compete and even ashamed and anxious when they realise they are tuning out or wishing they were somewhere else. In academic settings, and to a large extent still in contemporary art museums despite decades of museum outreach, there prevails a strong sense of gatekeeping that pressures participants to demonstrate credentials to feel legitimate and at home. But what might happen if instead participants are invited to do nothing, and in that clearing, to let perception hone itself? What if an event imagined the audience’s bodily needs, created enough space and time to negotiate the elements that are present, and ofered the conditions that might allow audiences to slowly, bodily, map the complex ideas, intelligences, lives, and energies that had intersected there?2 The Care Symposium as a conference, and ReStorying as a modular, long-term workshop, sought to experiment with how such forms might redress the kinds of abuses to which academic and arts work are habitually blind. Both sought to explore how we might change how value is ascribed to artistic and/ or academic work, and to rethink assumptions about what is ‘quality’ and worthy of attention in the contexts of academia and contemporary arts. In this, we saw the conjunction of valuing the minor and caring for participants. Both The Care Symposium and ReStorying sought to remain indeterminate in ways that resonate with Erin Manning’s articulation of the ‘problematising’ minor gesture. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, Manning writes that “the major is a structural tendency that organises itself according to predetermined defnitions of value”, while the minor problematises the major’s normative standards (Manning: 1–2). The major afrms existing parameters for what registers and counts, whereas the minor is present in those subtle shifts that create the conditions for change, that often remain unseen in the shadow of the major, dismissed as “unrigorous, fimsy” yet in their ephemerality and fux creating opportunities for new values to emerge (Manning: 1–2). Manning’s evocation of the minor gesture in terms of neurodiversity, that challenges what is understood as ‘functioning’, is of particular relevance to both projects: such an approach recasts the need for care (i.e. for ‘assistance’ ‘accommodation’, ‘attentiveness’, ‘attunement’, and ‘facilitation’) not in terms of lack but as a foundational and shared experience, and a potential site of positive and productive change. Feminist philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa evokes the minor mode as a powerful avenue for change in her valorisation of the overlooked, “the mundane doings of maintenance and repair”, arguing for the ethico-political dimensions of investigating neglected things, practices, and experiences, as in much feminist enquiry (Puig de la Bellacasa: 170). This concept initially sounds mechanistic, calling us to bring spanners to our tasks to ‘make things go’, but it is her more subtle insights about the subordination of the multiple temporal rhythms of care to the linear temporalities of productivism, the highjacking of time by “prevalent conceptions of innovation” that resonate particularly strongly in the events we discuss here. Puig de la Bellacasa

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posits that in capitalist societies we associate the future with ‘progress’, that our practices are orientated towards anxiety-inducing expectation. Consequently, we are acculturated to a temporal focus on “productive outcomes” that “in the world of promissory capitalism involves taking risks and acting fast” (Puig de la Bellacasa: 174). One way to disrupt things might be to engage with the temporal rhythms of “experiences that are obscured or marginalised as ‘unproductive’ ” (Puig de la Bellacasa: 177). The care ethics embedded in Care Symposium and ReStorying valorise the minor: those experiences that thrive in the cracks, in the moss, in the carpet; in the dust, in air vents, and between trafc lanes; in the too-hard, the not-on-the-payroll, the unkempt, the sleepless hours, the thoughts that evolve over months. Care ethics give a language to mothering, to aged parent care, to pick-ups and drop-ofs, to refugees escaping multifarious oppressions, to the vagaries of mental illness, to the impossibility of a friend getting respite care for her severely disabled child. They ask that we acknowledge the stuf that keeps our universe together: the mess and the waiting and the cups of tea; the weeks in lock down, watching fres or waiting for ash to cool down; the waiting to start, to feel something, to initiate, to separate, to come together again. It invites us to value the minor gestures that make up our lives, the things people – artists, and others – have enacted, without praise, over many years.

The Care Symposium The Care Symposium, held over four days in November 2019 in Melbourne, emerged from a year-long nurturing of the Care Network, a dispersed group of artists and interdisciplinary researchers from around Australia, interested to connect through feminist care practices, particularly in response to the pervasive harm and perverted values perpetrated by neoliberalism in all aspects of their personal and professional lives. The network was formed in part through roundtables held in 2019, in various cities and regional centres, that invited participants through open calls to come together to share their ideas and practices, with a view to cultivating solidarity (well aware of the potential pitfalls of essentialism and identity). Many of those presenting their work at the symposium were members of the network, responding again to an open call for a range of modes of engagement, including artworks, talks, workshops, performances, panels, and walks, informed by a range of disciplines and perspectives that critically dialogue with care ethics – including animal and environmental ethics, alternative economic models, prison abolition, death literacy, progressive pedagogies, deep listening, mental health, disability, parenting, and social practice approaches such as craftivism. The Care Symposium sought to embody ‘unproductive’ time in the minor mode. The programme was informed by care for participants: all sessions were free, and there was time for slow activities, free vegan food, and plenty of space for social interaction, with childcare available to parents with young children. Our space, ofered in kind by the student union gallery of a

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large metropolitan university, had a long history of feminist programming although currently dedicated primarily to undergraduate student shows, hence while centrally located and accessible, sits adjacent to mainstream academic and contemporary art events.3 The gallery was surrounded by a series of small meeting rooms which could be adapted to various sizes and activities, creating a sense of openness, informality, and ease of movement. Habituated conference hierarchies were questioned with the inclusion of all proposals; events were scheduled sequentially so there would be minimal confict between presenters; and there was openness to accommodate a wide range of modes of sharing and creating knowledge and connection, from dance performances, to weaving workshops, to tea circles. The symposium included an exhibition of works by artists in the Care Network who had been meeting throughout the year in roundtables to share caring practices; again, all proposals were accepted and installed, with attentiveness and respect for their particular needs. This integration of care themes and care in organising and hosting was fundamental to the ethics of the event while the interdisciplinary nature of the presentations and discussion helped to embody the interrelatedness of all things, be they social and political issues, living and non-living beings. Nonetheless, the complex multivalence of care was ever-present in those moments that, as we noted earlier, at times brought us undone, as we sketch here.4

Figure 16.1 Illumine Collective (Majella Thomas and Malcolm Angelucci), O had I  known that thus it happens, 2019, performance still, George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne. Source: photo by Brent Edward.

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The Illimine Collective, in their endurance performance, O had I known that thus it happens (2019) in many ways embodied the extended time and the cultivation of attentiveness/responsiveness that takes one outside the bodily discipline of neoliberal ‘autonomy’ and ‘productiveness’. The artists performed an act of reciprocal ‘tattooing’: dressed in clinical white and sitting opposite each other, they slowly, carefully, and quietly took turns to make marks on each other’s inner arms using a tattooing gun, with the ‘unproductive’ twist that it was inkless. As a prelude, the performers read the poem by Boris Pasternak referenced in the work’s title, a lament of broken hearts and ageing bodies: “O had I known that thus it happens, when frst I started, that at will, Your lines with blood in them destroy you, Roll up into your throat and kill”. Majella Thomas explained that the poem perfectly captured the experience of her and Malcolm Angelucci’s 15-year relationship, that care does not exist without harm, “a notion that sent a palpable wave of consternation through the audience” (Bews 2021). The performers admitted that this was the frst time they had performed this in public and invited the audience to come and go as they pleased: a token of the minor gesture that released the audience from the usual contract of ‘undivided attention’ and invited them to reconfgure the performance: [T]he movement in the room as people come and go; the duration of attention for each audience member; the changing density of bodies in the room; the density of witnesses; all were as much a part of the performance as the tattooing itself. This created a sense of looseness that underlined the trust the performers and audience has developed in the context of the symposium, the performance occurring on the fourth day. (Bews 2021) After a time, the performance began to settle into a rhythm as the performers took turns with their tools, exchanging whispers as they held each other’s arms for the task. And then, unexpectedly, Malcolm stood up, looking dazed, before lurching sideways and collapsing. This unplanned exposure of vulnerability compelled a series of decisions and actions that tested the ethics of a symposium centred on care. A hierarchy of care immediately asserted itself, with Malcolm’s well-being the immediate priority, we as organisers rushing to his side before the moment opened out to others with frst-aid experience and close personal relations. Only once Malcolm had assured us of his safety and the colour had returned to his face did the welfare of the others in the room become a focus. I had come to know the two members of the Illumine Collective in the days prior to their performance when they attended several other sessions and lunchtime chats during the symposium. During those conversations they described their extensive preparations, assured me that even though

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it was a debut before an audience, they had practised the mutual tattooing process many times in their studio and had well-established safety protocols. They struck me as thoughtful, fully professional artists and scholars, generous, open, and funny. No doubt these impressions came into play when Malcolm, Majella, and I debriefed on his fainting a short while after he had recovered. The frst matter, of course, was Malcolm’s and Majella’s well-being and their need to process and contextualise what had occurred. The second matter was whether the performance should be re-staged or cancelled, a decision the performers called on me to make.5 They assured me they were both well and expressed their desire to continue. Malcolm explained that his fainting was not a reaction to his own physical pain but rather to his realisation that he was responsible for acutely harming his partner. I became bodily conscious of all the ambivalences of care: how best to care for performers, audience, family, myself, and the event itself? And to whom falls response-ability? As Sam Bews captured the moment, Malcolm’s discombobulation was held within the structure and intent of the performance; held too by the audience who were creating the space for the experiment/performance to take place. The performance was held in the wider embrace of the symposium; by our attention to what they were risking; by our decision to risk ourselves “standing” with them . . . It seemed to me absolutely the right decision to allow them to continue to perform, to trust the artists . . . We were caring for the intimacy, vulnerability, risk they wanted to reveal to us through the work; to make conscious within and to the world. (Bews 2021) “Anywhere else, they would have pulled the plug on this!” Malcolm exclaimed, smiling with gratitude and relief before the performers resumed their work, refecting on the profoundly diferent values holding the event overall. We might remember that the etymology of the verb “to care” is rooted in the verb “to cure” and from that in the verb “to grieve”:6 “good care” may result from due processing of the “failures” (the minor again) we grieve.

ReStorying In the arts, so many of our outputs are required to be grand gestures: the ‘extraordinary’ painting or great play, the epoch-defning composition, the grand jeté. What is buried in these demands is the thousands of hours in-training: the 10,000 practice hours to gain profciency as a dancer or a musician; the hours of fermenting and fomenting in cultural development processes.7 Some of these hours accrue dollar values, others are more directly documented by and in the body itself: in the muscle memory of the musician; in the timbre of trust (manifest as a kind of muscle relaxation

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perhaps) when working with/in the communities we love. To be(come) profcient, we need to know our instruments like the back of our own hand, like the river knows the rise of its mountain and plains. This is attunement, both self-focused and selfess, a kind of mastery that in some proportion also gives over to mystery (or at least, to the non-verbal). By contrast, the neoliberal project colonises sensations, emotions, and uncertainties for its own requirements, hijacking time and processes towards productivity. We lose both expansiveness and intimacies. Yet even as we annotate the hours that consolidate an artist’s skill base and muscle-memory, here is a deeper question: from where does our brilliance, our inspiration, come? What, in fact, do we inspire? I remember the creative tension when a baby is about to roll over for the frst time. It is something she will do, it is supposedly programmed in her cells, but what enables her to fulfl the action through all her failed attempts? Emerging from her latent capability, her motions “not yet fully this or that”, requires a “co-composition” (Manning: 2, quoting AN Whitehead). Even in the womb, it is not only the genius of her personal DNA that causes her embryo to grow but also optimal conditions inviting her to move into a next phase: that is her growth, her coming-forth, is a collaborative act.8 What due care do we give for the delicate collaborative acts within ourselves and others?9

Collaborative Listening I have worked on several projects with elite percussionists, helping them develop methodologies to handle passages of extreme virtuosity via movement and other re-imaginative processes that subvert entrapment within traditional techniques. Their technique takes years to train; my training takes years to be able to help them shift in that moment: so many smaller gestures along the way. We ask, ‘if this phrase were a shape moving through space, how do we gesture it?’ I have seen their bodies become lithe snakes, undulate like watercourses, scarper like squirrels, or become mountains. They retain these qualities when they return to their instruments; although now physically more contained, the embodiment exercises afect and improve their sound and agility and, as if carried by the generating forces they have discovered, alleviate strain. This may be the reverse of our baby’s action: the inner pathway to the outer action has been re-composed, as they have been invited and given permission to emerge by the collaborative process. As a methodology, the work is a calling-to that if applied more broadly could create “vital new modes of encounter and new forms of life-living” (Manning: 8). ReStorying is, in part, a project prompted by grief (giving respite to artists afected by COVID-19) towards fnding our own cure(s) by supporting and sustaining the thousand steps, minor gestures, and hours of practice – as with our baby’s attempts to roll – that help constitute our sensing and our

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mattering. (Barad 2012, 3). The minor and the major gesture are always, already, coexistent, codependent, and contiguous, as are catastrophe and joy, failure and recovery, disease and good health, now and always. The project is an open-ended exploration of alternative rhythms, subliminal awareness, and speculative processes to reconfgure where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. It pays reverence to space, land, sea, and air and our relations to each, exploring touching/being touched, listening/being heard. It sets out to enhance reciprocal relations that support and engender creativity, and allows for the radical indeterminacies and potentialities of sensation and connection (Barad 2012) intrinsic to creative processes. There is no intention to provide solutions; rather, the invitation is to sit in an inbetween space and encourage a letting-go and reordering. It ofers a chance to reconfgure habits, by working with the non-dominant hand (fguratively and metaphorically), mapping timelines and Medicine Wheels, creating nourishing winds and good will, and giving us a break from outcomes. The modules – titled Refect, Reframe, Replenish, Re-wire, Riding the Unknown, and Recombine/Release10 – pay homage to the multivalency of creativity itself and the nexus between care and the time creativity takes to cure. Modules were initially ofered once per month: an online library now renders them accessible in perpetuity, in whichever order one chooses, and on-call. In each workshop, we have the opportunity to work across several modalities, including drawing, sound, movement, playful storytelling via cocompositional processes, and deep listening. In addition, exercises focused on cognitive re-patterning and/or ‘problem-solving’ are called on as appropriate. The exercises include an embodied acknowledgement of country; blind profle drawing; marking textures of key life moments; and creating an openness around marked events. Whole body gestures loop space–time back and forth; yogic exercises acknowledge the spaciousness of the inner body and ofer cradling to the inner organs. In Module 2, exercises include rhythmic, gestural, visual, and vocal exchange (call-and-response type) processes and explore inter- and intra-cellular communication. Module 3 uses ‘object theatre’ and ancient traditions of mask, puppetry, and performance, while the last three modules are aimed at entraining fexibility, ‘riding the unknown’, and reconfguring practices for the future. The organisation that produced Restorying insisted that all six modules be pre-mapped. Initially, I baulked at this: as a responsive improviser, I feared it as a clamp, a shutdown. But in their delivery, we have discovered how solid they are whilst retaining so much room to move. As James Thompson observes – in describing the resilience, rather than weakness, of such processes – care can create a powerful and sustainable aesthetic of its own making.11 By way of sidestepping the punishing expectations of ‘advancement’ – especially at the expense of one’s own resources and stamina – the modules sustain a playful, cross-disciplinary disruptiveness. How else can we gesture, sketch, paint, make sound, or move? Evaluation sheets demonstrate that many participants reconfgured their own professional prisms: dramaturgs

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start painting murals; playwrights turn to writing songs; painters re-vision their life narratives. The exercises resemble a game of exquisite corpse that recombines elements, parts, in relation to new wholes. The project was set up in a minor key, under funding from a ‘major key’ investor, although the funding is minimal, and does not cover our costs. The funding application itself required statistical ‘evidence of need’. As per usual, the requirement to undertake such strenuous (and out-of-discipline) research is a prohibitive demand on independents who do this work for no recompense. The project is being delivered under the auspice of a professional theatre company, which needs to allocate personnel, resources, and space, amongst and between schedules answering to their primary, commercial demands. These demands have contributed to an eight-month delay of initiating the project, before space and time have become sufciently available to follow-through with the programme. As the project rolls forth, it must be accompanied by ongoing evaluation and documentation, which has already proved difcult for participants ‘not yet ready’ to give feedback or too vulnerable to share their contribution. We are in medias res – along the way, without known destination, embodying those “creative tensions” between care as politics, afective engagement, and “maintenance” that Puig de la Bellacasa describes (Puig de la Bellacasa: 5).

Conclusion ReStorying and The Care Symposium create opportunities for more openended, exploratory, dishabituated engagements in the areas of academic and artistic research practices, including conference presentation and attendance and skills workshop participation. Both projects recast the need for care – for ‘assistance’ ‘accommodation’, ‘attentiveness’, ‘attunement’, and ‘facilitation’ – not in terms of lack but as a foundational and shared experience and a potential site of change. Participants’ engagement in diferent ways with the fuidity and emotional, technical or intellectual risks in both events challenged us, as researcher-practitioners, to trust our understandings of, and care for, the multivalency of creativity itself and for the complex, polyvalent embodiment of our co-creators. The Care Symposium created compassionate space around the “vulnerability and risk” buried within intimacy (Bews 2021) that the Illimine Collective wished to share through their work; allowing vulnerability to be sustained is a bellwether of our tolerance for change and illumination in and beyond such contexts (Butler et al. 2016). Participants of ReStorying re-experience their practices as almost boundless resources which can be refreshed by tools from outside of their professional repertoires. Both projects allow the rivers of our respective disciplines to be fed by the tributaries of other arts and embodiment techniques that inform part of the ofteninvisible ecosystems of the estuaries that might transform our practices.

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Both case studies model how we might fnd ways to value care as it becomes evident in the form, and in the planning, curation, and execution, of our artistic research and skills development practices. Both projects attempt to follow the ‘minor’ impulses, textures, and imperatives in the gestures of our practices, from which untold riches may unfold.

Notes 1 When the frst person is used in this chapter, it refers to Jacqueline Millner when writing about The Care Symposium in the frst case study section and to Zsuzsanna Soboslay when writing about the Restorying Project in the second. Otherwise, we use ‘we’. 2 This was the topic of an unpublished conference roundtable Jacqueline Millner contributed to in 2019: Art Association of Australia and NZ national conference, panel convened by Dr Maura Reilly, Auckland, New Zealand. 3 We are grateful for the kind support of The George Paton Gallery run by the Student Union of the University of Melbourne. 4 Details of the symposium are available on the Care Project Network website: www.careprojectnetwork.com/copy-of-melbourne-2019 5 Note that Malcom and Majella granted their permission to the author to write about the performance and this incident, including giving permissions to use the images of the performance. 6 ‘To care’, verb, from Middle English caren, carien, from Old English carian (“to sorrow, grieve, be troubled, be anxious, to care for, heed”), from ProtoGermanic *karōną (“to care”). 7 The archaic form of the verb ‘to foment’ is ‘to bathe (a part of the body) with warm or medicated lotions’, hence, to soothe; etymologically, the word’s current meaning ‘to instigate or stir up, to provoke, or agitate’ carries the echo of its opposite meaning: www.etymonline.com/search?q=foment; accessed on August 8, 2021. 8 This is the discovery of embryologist Erich Blechschmidt: Erich Blechschmidt 2004/1955, The Ontogenetic Basis Of Human Anatomy: A  BiodynamicApproach To Development From Conception To Birth, Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books. 9 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa includes more-than-human others (Puig de la Bellacasa, 177). 10 The full library is accessible via this link: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8703501 with a full project description available at: www.thestreet.org.au/artists/ re-storying. 11 This concept is discussed extensively in two of Thompson’s works, Hedonism Is a Bunker. Performance Afects, 1–11 (2009) https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9780230242425_1; and Towards an Aesthetics of Care. Research in Drama Education, 20(4), 430–441 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2015.10 68109

Bibliography Barad, Karen. 2012. “On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I  am”. Diferences 23(3): 206–223. Cited in Rosie McLellan. 2017. “Your Waste of Time: Art-Based Geographical Practices and the Environment”. University of Bristol

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Society and Space MSc blog, August 14, 2017. https://societyandspace.blogs.bristol. ac.uk/?s=ROSIE+MCLELLAN. Last accessed August 10, 2021. Bews, Sam. 2021. Email correspondence with the author. Blechschmidt, Erich. 2004/1955. The Ontogenetic Basis of Human Anatomy: A Biodynamic Approach to Development from Conception to Birth. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Diferent Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, J. 2009. “Introduction: Hedonism Is a Bunker”. Performance Afects 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230242425_1. Thompson, J. 2015. “Towards an Aesthetics of Care”. Research in Drama Education 20(4): 430–441. Tronto, J. 2015. ‘Democratic Caring and Global Care Responsibilities’. In Ethics of Care: Critical Advances in International Perspective. Edited by Marion Barnes, Tula Brannelly, Lizzie Ward, and Nicky Ward, 21–30. Bristol: Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/doi:10.2307/j.ctt1t89d95.6.

Blog Soboslay, Zsuzsanna. 2015. June 9. https://zsuzsacsardasinlondon.blogspot.com/2015/ 07/post-3-stray-thoughts-from-ambient-jam.html.

17 ‘Do What You do Best and Outsource the Rest’ – Curatorial Lessons within Cultures of Outsourcing Jenny Richards Outsourcing as a labour practice prevents workers’ access to structures of support and care, including sick and holiday pay, regulated wages and pensions. Many engaged in outsourced work have been pulled from their own social reproductive networks; forced to migrate to European countries for exhaustive, poorly paid and unreliable work or to urban centres far away from family and friends. A word born in the 1980s, rooted in the work of business management consultant Peter F. Drucker (1989) exemplifed in his slogan ‘Do what you do best and outsource the rest’ – the term ‘outsourcing’ has served to mystify the privatisation and subordination of care and maintenance work.1 The art feld is not exempt from the problem of outsourcing. It is exemplifed in the production of work in geographies where labour costs are lower, the outsourcing of cleaning and catering services in art spaces, and temporary contracts aimed often at those working in educational programmes or community engagement as the White Pube have discussed (Muhammad 2020). Or as Lina Džuverović and Irene Revell describe in the context of curatorial work, the outsourcing and/or neglect of personal care work to provide visible care on the job – curatorial care – a reality that means the gates of the curatorial profession are often opened only for the privileged “with enough class and enough whiteness” or those younger with less care needs (Džuverović and Revell 2019). The persistent deprioritising and devaluing of care work furthered by outsourcing has been analysed by Nancy Fraser as part of the current rendering of social reproduction: Globalizing and neoliberal this new regime is promoting state and corporate disinvestment from social welfare while recruiting women into the paid workforce. Thus it is externalizing care work onto families and communities while diminishing their capacity to perform it. The result is a new dualised organisation of social reproduction, commodifed for those who can pay for it and privatised for those who cannot. (Fraser 2017, 32)

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Fraser is joined by many feminist voices, including Premila Nadasen, in arguing how the crisis in our capacity to care for ourselves is a new turn in the narrative of social reproduction and care work. For Nadasen, social reproduction “has become a source of proft-making for the private sector, government agencies, nonprofts and individuals, in contrast to Marxistfeminist analyses that see social reproduction as a precondition for capitalist proft”. Nadasen goes on to explain that the often-forced outsourcing of social reproductive work by families in their own crisis furthers only capitalist accumulation and class division (2021). In 2020, during the UK COVID-19 lockdown, Sophie Hope and I – who collaborate on the practice-based research body Manual Labours2 – developed a series of live podcast discussions with activists, care workers, academics and cultural workers. Titled The Global Stafroom (2020–ongoing), conversations explored how people take care of themselves and others during working hours – with an expanded sense of work as unpaid, underpaid and paid. The stafroom as an object of study ofered us a space of entanglement; a site of collective care and sociality and a site that reproduces the same exclusions and violences that exist within the workplace (Manual Labours 2021). During the 20 weeks of broadcasting many diferent conversations raised the common issue of pressure to outsource personal and familial care needs, alongside the practice in work of outsourcing those resources necessary to perform social reproduction and care during working hours. We heard how the management of spaces once allocated for a staf break or place to eat lunch and meet colleagues has been outsourced to other companies to generate income. In the case of a university, the management of the stafroom is outsourced to an external catering company to create a commercial bar for staf to pay the privilege to have a break, while within hospitality, the stafroom moves online (Manual Labours 2020). Henry Chango Lopez, General Secretary of IWGB (Independent Workers of Great Britain), who joined us in week three, discussed their long-term Outsourced Workers Campaign3 to bring workers back ‘in-house’. Their struggle is based on the right to have the same working conditions as colleagues who work within the same workplace. Fragmenting the workforce through difering contracts aids the isolation of workers and depletes potential for collegial solidarity. Additionally, spatial isolation produced through outsourced labour often means workers don’t have a regular workplace where it is possible to get to know others. These traits compound the reduction of worker agency, making it increasingly difcult to have access to spaces of collectivity and self-determination that can provide resources to confront the conditions of outsourcing. In the case of the struggle at Goldsmiths and the University’s CCA gallery, a joint staf and student campaign calls for bringing outsourced workers within cleaning and security services back ‘in-house’, confronting what Henry Chango Lopez describes as being treated “as second-class employees”.4 He explains, at the heart of outsourcing is the outsourcing of

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Figure 17.1 Campaign to end outsourcing, 2019. Source: Photo courtesy of IWGB Union.

responsibility to take care of workers and their conditions of work. Perhaps, it is this logic of outsourcing that can be seen more readily in much cultural production that is happy to outsource the responsibility of its production and thus defect the need to address the conditions of its creation. The pressure of overproduction, consistently reproduced in the cultural feld as Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez has discussed (2017), is inseparable from extractive labour practices – the vast amount of voluntary labour, unpaid internships, zero-hour contracts – that squeeze as much as possible out of invariably underfunded budgets. The realm of the curatorial is also marked and shaped by the logics and disciplines of outsourcing. With institutional jobs few and far between, many work freelance or on fxed-term contracts, only invited in to develop a one-of project or exhibition. Work carried out by invited curators, often encouraged to be self-defned as “independent”,5 can be incorporated into the institution’s programming and public face with limited possibility of the same concerns in the exhibition halls seeping into the operations of the institution. We might recognise similar instances in the current wealth of care-focused exhibition and event projects, “the art feld’s social reproduction turn” as Kirsten Lloyd defnes it, which often take little time to address the structural conditions and logics under which the institution promoting this work operates (2021, 171). This chimes with Tithi Bhattacharya’s

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examination of social reproduction and its defnitions, in which she reminds us that Marx’s most common use of social reproduction refers to the “reproduction of the capitalist system as a whole” (2017, 6). A focus on care and social reproduction should not be read as a challenge to capitalist logic. Helena Reckitt elaborates how a “preoccupation with curatorial care was being used not to challenge but to perpetuate the status quo”, placing pressure on the “feminised role of curators . . . as sources of infnite care” (2020, 196). Work developed under these conditions can often be decorated with the language of feminism, in which social reproduction is a moral good, which as Marina Vishmidt warns, conveniently detaches emphasis on social reproduction’s role in the reproduction of capital, a tendency that can also assist in the re-inscription of essentialised gendered roles (2017, 3–9). Conversations in The Global Stafroom shared these tensions and refections expanding the operations and micropolitics of outsourcing beyond the contractual. Thinking back, I hear the voices of Henry Chango Lopez and Maddalena Fragnito that underline the role outsourcing plays in the further privatization of social reproduction, making care infrastructure accessible to only the wealthy few.6 So how might we challenge the logic and practice of outsourcing within the cultural feld? The question holds an implicit invitation to go beyond the public-facing façade, beyond the exhibition programme’s “thematics and the superfcial valorization of care” (Lloyd 2021, 171) to address the exploitative working conditions that the feld is dependent on. Perhaps, this could also be a way to push back against the logics of outsourcing that continue to devalue and marginalise the time and space to care for ourselves and each other? And by highlighting that the art feld is inscribed by such dynamics, might we better sharpen our artistic and curatorial tools for both inhabiting and working against the dynamics of outsourcing that permeate the cultural feld and well-established in other felds of work?

Outsourcing and Feminism Feminist practice and struggle both within and beyond the cultural feld is a body of knowledge critical to an exploration into the entwinement of outsourcing and social reproduction. When we speak about social reproduction,7 it is the work that enables us to survive from one day to the next, it is our life support system: the cooking, cleaning and caring. The undervaluing and lack of payment of social reproductive work has a long history, connected to colonialism and its ongoing continuities, which structure the carrying out of this work by classed, gendered and racialised bodies. Feminisms of the 1970s developed a Marxist materialist analysis of social reproduction and care work, demanding the valorisation of this foundational labour that all other work rests upon. They cracked open the false dichotomy between public and private, testifying that the home is indeed a space of work and the division between public and private, as Silvia Federici describes, refects

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the division of labour and the hierarchies and exclusion that are built upon it (2021, 173). Today, capital has evolved to expand this sphere of work and redefne the division of labour. It might be argued that the feminist cries from the Wages for Housework movement8 have been met by the market; ensuring that those who can aford it can outsource their social reproduction to often underpaid workers who can care for older generations or your kids or give you a bit of friendship over online platforms. Despite a rich plethora of Black feminist and anti-racist feminist struggle in the 1970s,9 European feminism of the period is often historicised with a lack of attention to intersectional practices and perspectives, dominated by the experiences and challenges of middle-class white women. The state and capital worked to dampen radical liberatory desires of the 1970s feminism, in which the movement’s strategy to enter work as a tool for gaining equality could be used to recentre the logic of capitalist waged work and whiteness. As many Black feminists in particular have argued, the narrative of women entering the workforce shores up the false assumption that women were previously excluded from work, something referring largely to the situation of white middle-class women. Women of colour, women enslaved by colonial violence, and working-class women have been intensively incorporated into the workforce, often unpaid and subjected to its violent exploitation (Kollontai 1977, 252). The narrative of the expansion of outsourcing is then also the narrative of the racialisation of social reproduction and care work. By examining the history and impact and efects of outsourcing social reproduction and care work, might it help us shed new light on the techniques of exploitation, that have, as Françoise Vergès describes, expanded both racial capitalist10 domination and civilisational feminisms11 (Vergès 2021, 82)? And how can we ensure this informs not only our methods and work within the cultural feld but a wider commitment to what Lola Olufemi outlines as, feminism as a “political project about what could be” (2020, 1)? IWGB’s struggle against contractual outsourcing is fought by demanding workers be brought back ‘in house’ while the wider logics of outsourcing can be confronted through a revalorising of social reproduction and the building of infrastructure and resources to centre our interdependencies and care needs. Here, Social Reproduction Theory’s critical perspective can help sharpen how we understand and develop these forms of resistance. It reminds us of social reproduction’s role in the reproduction of the very racial capitalist structures that we are aiming to destroy. Infrastructure for social reproduction can also mean as Larne Abse Gogarty asserts, the building of prisons or the increasing of border control, both key areas of outsourced labour and privatisation (2017, 122). In addition, social reproduction’s vast amounts of caring labour should not be valued as Premila Nadasen asserts, by “reifying the emotional component of the labour, which obscures the fact that care workers are frst and foremost workers” (2021). Valuing care labour for its moral good, as we have seen in the pandemic’s claps for carers,

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does not pay the bills and ensures the continuation of the inadequate remuneration of this essential work. However, by following lessons from Silvia Federici’s work, we can start to understand social reproduction’s double character, one that “reproduces us and valorizes us not only in view of our integration into the labour market but also against it” (2012, 2). It is this potential of generative refusal, inherent within the work of care, Silvia Federici argues, that can simultaneously develop relations, infrastructures and practices that function diferently to the reproduction of the current structures of domination. Gargi Bhattacharyya’s examination of racial capitalism also draws attention to this potential, clarifying, “this may be some way from the demand to be ‘revolutionary’ but it is an indication of the other ways of being that exist at the edge of or alongside capitalist formations” (2018, 55). They are voices in concert with centuries of feminist struggle that has been insisting on this potential of social reproduction, that we might further elaborate when we listen to the invisibilised knowledge and skills within the work of care, that draws attention to both our diferent bodily needs and desires and that of the environment we inhabit. These voices help us to imagine what a world might look like if we centred our interdependencies and the work of care necessary for us all to fourish. In a climate where many cultural workers are refusing for their labour to be implemented in the maintenance of the status quo (Reckitt 2021), the language of outsourcing has been used to uncover the normalised practice of exploitation within the art feld (see: V Joyce 2021). I have been learning from their work alongside a number of artistic and curatorial practices that dig behind the optical workings of art to resist the logics of outsourcing seen through the devaluing of care and social reproductive work and the production of outsourced cultural labour as complicit with what Sara Ahmed describes as “performance culture” (2012, 85). Learning that resisting outsourcing is not only to pay attention to social reproduction but also to institute structural change, which can increase and expand collective access to spaces and resources that allow us to reproduce ourselves and others diferently. I am indebted to these practices whose horizon ofers a possible response to what Premila Nadasen calls for when she speaks of a “care infrastructure”(2021) – social reproductive infrastructures helping us to learn how to take care of ourselves and each other, in opposition to those proposed by capital. Other Artists I meet Lisa Tan in her studio. It is a calm and beautifully appointed space located in a residential building in the West of Stockholm. She welcomes me in with tea and dried fruit, perfect for this late afternoon meeting as my energy depletes. Sat on her couch we start a discussion on her work Other Artists (2019), which was made before the COVID-19 pandemic for the Oslo Biennial. The work saw the renovation of a series of public accessible

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toilets in a city-owned building containing subsidised artist studios. As Lisa Tan describes visiting the studios and a trip to the bathroom, her body recoils. While invited to work with the central staircase that ascends four foors, she explored the single-occupant toilets that are situated on each level. The efect of visiting these cold and neglected facilities served as a persistent call to refocus her attention to the often invisibilised, overlooked daily activities and spaces involved in art practice and exhibition making. Lisa Tan hands me the accompanying takeaway postcard to the artwork which is available near each renovated bathroom which includes a quote from the artist Tom Burr, We hear ourselves across time and on the other sides of walls, working, not working, listening, painting, speaking, not speaking. . . . There is a politics to placement, and alignment, and company. And there is a genealogy created out of manifestos, practices and love poems, out of close encounters in our immediate surroundings, and out of a transhistorical crush.12 Aware of a growing number of practices working at the level of infrastructure has led me to dwell on the work Other Artists by Lisa Tan. From our conversations, I learn of the depth of emotional and administrative labour behind the production of Other Artists. Unlike the often-feeting biennial artwork that was proposed in the invitation, Lisa Tan redistributed economic resources and time into producing a permanent artwork that could be used by the community of artists in the studios and a wider public visiting the building. Concerned by the logic of outsourcing described earlier, which accelerates and perpetuates the privatisation and devaluing of our interdependent care needs, I am drawn to the process and positioning of Other Artists that funnels private money – through budget accrued from the 1% private developer contribution to culture – into a public restroom. Lisa Tan speaks of the work as a conceptual piece, while Josh Shaddock, commissioned by Lisa Tan to write about the piece because of their long-term dialogue as artist friends, calls it, “a quiet gesture that shifts focus from the work, away from the studio space of Myntgata 2 . . . The restroom – warm, clean, efcient, and soothing – allows one to stop, refect, breathe” (Shaddock 2019). There is a politics to this refocus, through which the usually limited lifespan of project funding is directed toward nourishing a permanent space that remains beyond the exhibition for the community of artists working there. With the additional words by Josh Shaddock in mind, the work alerts us to both the sites of reproduction and care work that are overlooked within cultural production and the neglect of bodily needs and rest in the working day of an artist or curator. A neglect that is often built on what Lina Džuverović and Irene Revell (2019) locate in the notion of stamina, necessary to cope with the normalised hyperproduction of the cultural feld, which foregrounds the ableist foundations that the fgure of the curator or artist is built on.

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It was possible for me to write this chapter only because of the vast collective work of others, their knowledge, practice, care work, a funded PhD position – I could go on. Lisa Tan foregrounds the collective work in the title Other Artists, and that the forgettable feeting moment of passing another artist in the corridor on the way to the bathroom, is just as invaluable to artistic life and production as the site of exhibition. Such are the interdependencies that outsourcing seeks to invisibilise in order for the individualised artist to appear. When speaking about the piece, Lisa Tan describes the pleasure in thinking of the work as an invitation for more public rest. Her use of the American word ‘restrooms’ when we discuss the work underscores the work as a space for ‘public rest’, encouraging us to both carry out our care needs and collectively support each other’s need for rest. Refecting on the implicit politics in this gesture, I am reminded of another artist, Johanna Hedva, and their words on how our need of “care demands that we live as though we are all interconnected – which we are – it invalidates the myth of the individual’s autonomy” (2020). While I talk of Other Artists at a level of use and infrastructure, Lisa Tan reminds me that she consulted only the cleaning staf of the space in the development process of this work. Unlike the common tropes of a socially engaged approach that might invite the participation of artists inhabiting the building to contribute to the process, Lisa Tan gets on with the artwork and all the labour the work of refurbishment entails. Her method wields critique of assumptions tied up in a socially engaged practice that can often “demand artists focused on their own work .  .  . spend their labour time contributing to a process they do not have interest in nor capacity for”. Her resistance to normative processes of socially engaged art taps into longstanding critiques of this methodology, which often fail to consider who and what is profting from the labour of others. Claire Bishop’s critique also points out that not only is the work often predicated on wageless labour to supplement the retracted welfare state but is also a form of cultural participation with the aim of producing malleable and controllable subjects (2012). As Lisa Tan describes, there is a labour demanded when asking another to articulate what care they might desire or need. “Care can also be not to consult”, to be able to see what infrastructure could be built on and doing that work.13 Here, labour isn’t outsourced onto invisibilised participants to visibilise the commissioned artist’s politics; instead, she turns a liberal understanding of participation on its head, delivering something to be used by the community, asking nothing in return. Al Madhafah – The Living Room I frst meet Sandi Hilal at The Women’s Centre in Stockholm.14 It is a chatter-flled domestic building in Stockholm’s Northern suburbs. Upon entering, you pass a kitchen with scents of cofee brewing and fresh bread – fka – to be shared during Sandi Hilal’s presentation that morning. Greetings

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in Swedish, Arabic and Turkish are hollered to those entering as we push shoes from our feet and slide into communal slippers and pad down the hallway to a sitting room. Sandi Hilal begins to share their process of developing Al Madhafah – The Living Room (2016–ongoing) with curators Joanna Zawieja and Marti Manen, which interrogates who has the right to host through the establishment of a semi-public living room15 located in a refugee house in Boden, a town in the North of Sweden. Sandi Hilal talks of the emergence of this work through conversations with marginalised communities living in Boden and a desire to pull apart the oppressive power relations of the asylum system and public art production which reproduces the dichotomy of host and guest and the racialised division of agency and dependency. Sandi Hilal’s presentation concludes by asking, Who has the right to host, and who is told they need to behave like a perfect guest? How can we analyze the power of hosting as a means of becoming visible and demanding agency? How can we understand visibility as a precondition for political subjectivity? (2019) There is much to learn from Al Madhafah – The Living Room (AMTLR) and the process of developing concrete and social architecture that address operations of outsourcing seen in the removal of resources for social reproduction and care. At the same time, as border controls are outsourced to security companies, or in the current alarming case of the UK to the Rwandan state, the privatisation and retraction of the welfare state invites culture to step up as a neoliberal solution to underserviced and underresourced communities. This outsourcing of care to the cultural sector is often approached through short-term projects with time-contingent funding, where artists parachute into a community often marginalised by the violence of state infrastructure to ofer creative solutions (see: Kwon 2002, Muhammad 2020). Hence, can establishing a longer-term living room space that interrogates who has the right to host be part of a refusal to the exploitative and violent white supremacist logics that underpin both the Swedish Migration Agency and the much cultural production? It is pertinent that the art commissioner of AMTLR is The Swedish Public Art Agency – an arm of the state. Sandi Hilal describes frst visiting Boden with the group of state-employed curators and how they were hosted by two residents, Yasmeen Mahmoud and Ibrahim Muhammad Haj Abdulla: In that small living room, by hosting us, Yasmeen and Ibrahim simply switched familiar social roles: instead of being refugees hosted by the government, they played the role of host, hosting the Swedish government. Their living room gave them the opportunity to reject their role of obedient guest, complying with norms and rules, and exercise their right to be hosts. (Hilal 2019)

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In what way could this rejection and refusal against the predetermined depoliticised role as guest be supported further and ofered an infrastructure to enable its proliferation? Building on this encounter, AMTLR developed a concrete space to support forms of participation and political subjectivity in ways that can ofer an alternative to the binary of inclusion and exclusion found in Sweden. AMTLR draws on the common concept and practice of the public living room in Arab societies, a collective gathering space that functions through a particular host who often ofers up part of their private home to become a publicly used space, which as Sandi Hilal describes have been “fundamental to the organization of society” (2020). By setting up a space to practice other politics of hospitality and address care needs beyond the privatised family, AMTLR asks us to think not only about the outsourcing of welfare to the culture sector but also about the role of the cultural institution as a site which extends the violent binary of host (institution) and guest (visitor/ community) (Hilal 2020, 192). Cultural outsourcing can be responsible for undermining the self-realisation of community spaces of social reproduction and culture, which, as Jacob V Joyce has outlined, are instead brokered by art spaces which act as an arm of the state (2021). Hilal invites us to question the kinds of infrastructures cultural institutions develop, support and reproduce.16 Laura Briggs highlights the racialisation of social reproduction by addressing not only which bodies predominantly perform caring and maintenance labour for the beneft of white society but also whose social reproduction matters more than others – a logic seen alarmingly explicit within racist migration policies. She argues that the centrality of controlling the means of people’s reproduction is a technique of white supremacist power structures through which people are forced to assimilate to the constellations of social reproduction organised around the nuclear family and privatised care, which ensure the smooth running of racial capitalism (2017, 12).17 Creating public space for collective sociality – AMTLR ran on an open door policy – in the sharing of meals, cooking, in exercising the right to host – also works against eforts to control practices of social reproduction, working towards the self-subjectivation of a community, who can develop the space according to its own needs and desires. Sandi Hilal asks us to consider in what ways visibility is a precondition for political subjectivity. The historic privatisation of social reproduction and care upon the family (Weeks 2021), extended through logics of outsourcing, is a process that increasingly individualises care work encouraging it to happen in isolation, both spatially and in terms of temporality, during late night shifts or in the confnes of under-resourced homes. Historically, in a European context, the possibility of visibility is ordained to the public sphere (Arendt 1958, 22–78). The maintenance of the binary between private, the site of reproduction, and public, the site of production (Bhattacharya 2017), functions to maintain racial capitalist relations, ensuring that

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some work and bodies, those white and male, have access to the political, while others are forced into the realm of the private, the space of unwork, depoliticised and invisibilised. The Disability Justice movement has joined the struggle to refuse this oppression dichotomy and the false conception that denotes the private as a space of nonwork of invisibility and thus not a space of politics. Building on racial justice and feminist movements, they point out the white supremacist and patriarchal ideology that the public is built on, a space that has not only excluded women, people of colour and the working class but, as Johanna Hedva highlights, is often inaccessible to people with disabilities or illness (2022). Outsourcing’s role in maintaining oppressive binaries of public/visibilised and private/invisibilised form part of a technology of depoliticisation and as we learn from Sandi Hilal can be mapped onto the division of host and guest. The challenge, as Sandi Hilal describes, is “how to create a sense of ownership and right to participate as a host, not only in private spaces but also in public” (2020, 192). Dwelling in the “semi-public” (2020, 190) space and sociality built within AMTLR ofer tools of how to destabilise the dichotomy of such structures and the agency and exclusion they distribute. AMTLR can help us learn that infrastructures to redistribute the right to host open new possibilities for political agency. It might then be telling that since starting to write this chapter, The Swedish Migration Agency has closed AMTLR in Boden – taking back the space that was originally given over to its establishment. The community who built AMTLR now pass by its locked door and empty windows, an image that can serve to remind us of the control the state can exert over forms of collective agency and practice.

Lessons Against Outsourcing Common throughout these practices are the exploring and building of new infrastructural capacities for social reproductive work and relations to develop diferently. Learning from discussions in The Global Stafroom, it was possible to generate awareness of the operations of outsourcing beyond the contractual. Other Artists ofered a quiet reminder via the work of refurbishment to attend to and expand moments of daily sociality and public rest that are neglected yet vital to any artist’s practice. AMTLR insists that a space for collective sociality and care must be constructed to upend the sufocating Eurocentric binaries of guest and host, to function as a site for politicisation. Space for social reproduction and care has found itself co-opted, colonised and consumed in racial capitalist eforts to cement inequality and maximise exploitative techniques of production. What feels important to the practices explored in this chapter is that they intervene in and rework such spaces that are increasingly afected by the logics and mechanisms of outsourcing. Working beyond the performative, at the level of infrastructure, their critical

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lens is also turned inwards to the cultural feld, demanding a reconfguration of the oppressive forms of production marked by the practice of outsourcing. Their methods are ones we as cultural workers and curators can learn from if we want to refuse the harmful cycles of much cultural production. By drawing attention to the disappearance of the stafroom and the lunch break in the context of work, the neglected and inaccessible restroom in the public building or the inexistence of community-led gathering space constructed to redistribute the power of the host, I am learning how these projects work against outsourcing as a productive model, using cultural resources to create alternative politicised relations and physical and social infrastructure for us to reproduce ourselves diferently. We might see their strategy as expanding Henry Chango Lopez’s call to bring outsourced workers back ‘in house’, to reclaim what racial capitalism seeks to outsource and privatise, producing a form of publicness that challenges the division of labour and space that upholds the dichotomy of what work and bodies are valued and visible. Their diferent locations and methods can be thought together as an expanded public house, complete with restroom, stafroom and living room, that builds an infrastructure for nurturing afective relations between isolated individuals subject to the violence of outsourcing’s efects and depoliticising fallout.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those who have made writing this chapter possible, in particular, Henry Chango Lopez, Sandi Hilal, Sophie Hope, Lisa Tan and Joanna Zawieja for the insightful discussions, David Eckersley for their feedback and Lara Perry and Elke Krasny for the invitation and editorial guidance.

Notes 1 The practice of outsourcing, of pushing away our need for care, can also be understood as part of racial capitalist eforts to invisibilise our interdependencies and uphold the myth of the self-sufcient individual, a fgure as Françoise Vergès writes, is sustained and made visible through the enduring work of racialised, gendered and classed workers (2019). I use the term following Shahram Khosravi’s research on the politics of migration, presented in “Acts of Self Ruin Study Session 1” at Marabouparken Konsthall, September 27, 2017, pointing to the active roles that Eurocentric power structures are constantly enacting a process of invisibilisation on certain voices, bodies and work. For a discussion on the myth of independence, see: The Care Collective 2020. 2 For more information visit: www.manuallabours.co.uk 3 For more information on the IWGB’s work, see: www.iwgb.org.uk and their Outsourced Workers Campaign: https://iwgb.org.uk/post/5b5f446a12f0a/iwgbcampaign-wins-major-conce 4 Jenny Richards and Henry Chango Lopez, March 20, 2019.

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5 Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez amongst many others have begun to describe their practice as an ‘interdependent curator’ to point towards the problematic and incorrect assumptions inherited by the role of ‘independent curator’ that invisibilises the endemic collective and collaborative relations in the curatorial. For a discussion around this redefnition of the fgure of the curator, see: PetresinBachelez 2020. 6 To listen to the full conversation with Henry Chango Lopez, Maddalena Fragnito and others that are part of The Global Stafroom Podcast, visit: https:// manuallabours.co.uk/todo/the-global-stafroom 7 Social reproduction understood as, “that human labour at the heart of creating and reproducing society as a whole” (Bhattacharya 2017, 2). 8 The International Wages for Housework Campaign began in 1972 within feminist groups in Italy and spread internationally with organisations in the US, the UK, and Canada. As their name depicts, they fought for wages for unpaid housework. For more information on their political perspective on a wage for housework, see Federici 2012. 9 For a few examples of a huge body of signifcant groups in the UK in the 1970s, see: International Black Women for Wages for Housework, Manchester Black Women’s Coop, Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, Southhall Black Sisters, Brixton Black Women’s Group and Black Women Talk. For a discussion on Black feminist organising in the UK and critiques of British Feminism – “the ways in which a particular tradition, white Eurocentric and Western, has sought to establish itself as the only legitimate feminism”, see: Amos and Parmar 1984. 10 Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of racial capitalism: “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it” (2020). 11 Françoise Vergès defnes civilisational feminism as borrowing “the vocabulary and objectives of the colonial civilizing mission”, for their in-depth analysis, see: Vergès 2021. 12 To fnd the original quote, see: Burr 2016, 119. 13 All references to the conversation with Lisa Tan and any quotes made by Lisa Tan within this section are from a conversation between Jenny Richards and Lisa Tan. June 23, 2021. 14 For more information on The Women’s Centre, Tensta/Hjulsta/Kvinnocenter Tensta/Hjulsta, see: http://kvinnocentertensta-hjulsta.org/ 15 For a further discussion on Al Madhafah – The Living Room and its problematising of the opposition between public and private, see: Zawieja 2022. 16 For a compelling critique of structural racism in the arts and the tokenism institutions perform in their ‘question to diversify the institution’, see: UKartists 4 BLM, 2020. 17 For further reading around the role of the family as the model for social reproduction imposed by settler colonialism on indigenous communities, see: Tallbear 2017.

Bibliography Abse Gogarty, Larne. 2017. “ ‘Usefulness’ in Contemporary Art and Politics.” Third Text 31(1): 117–132. Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. London: Duke University Press. Amos, Valerie, and Pratibha Parmar. 1984. “Challenging Imperial Feminism.” Feminist Review (17): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395006.

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Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago. Bhattacharya, Tithi. Ed. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2018. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. Lanham: Rowan and Littlefeld. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artifcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books. Boys, Jos, and Efy Harle. 2020. “Episode 13: Architectures and Histories of the Stafroom with Jos Boys and Efy Harle”. May 4. In The Global Stafroom Podcast, produced by Manual Labours, podcast, 1:14:52. https://manuallabours. co.uk/podcast/episode-13-architectures-and-histories-of-the-stafroom/. Briggs, Laura. 2017. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown Island. 2018. Brown Island in the White Sea (A Handbook for a Collective Practice). Stockholm: Konstfack. Burr, Tom. 2016. “Now I Am Quietly Waiting for the Catastrophe of My Personality to Seem Beautiful Again, and Interesting, and Modern.” In Tom Burr/Anthology: Writings, 1991–2005. Edited by Florence Derieux, 118–119. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Drucker, Peter. 1989. “Sell the Mailroom”. The Wall Street Journal, July 25. https:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB113202230063197204 Džuverović, Lina, and Irene Revell. 2019. “Lots of Shiny Junk at the Art Dump: The Sick and Unwilling Curator.” Parse (9). https://parsejournal.com/article/ lots-of-shiny-junk-at-the-art-dump-the-sick-and-unwilling-curator/. Last accessed December 10, 2022. Federici, Silvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press. Federici, Silvia. 2021. “The Politics of Eating Together, or Eating Together in Politics.” In Homeworks-A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organising with Art and Domestic Work. Edited by Jenny Richards and Jens Strandberg, 165–176. Eindhoven: Onomatopee. Fraser, Nancy. 2017. “The Crisis of Care? On Social Reproduction Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism.” In Social Reproduction Theory-Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, 21–36. London: Pluto. Hedva, Johanna. 2020. “Get Well Soon.” Get Well Soon. https://getwellsoon.labr.io/. Hedva, Johanna. 2022. ‘Sick Woman Theory.” Topical Cream. www.topicalcream. org/features/sick-woman-theory/. Hilal, Sandi. 2019. “‫المضافة‬/The Living Room: The Right to Host: Sandi Hilal Notes.” Obieg, September 26. https://obieg.pl/en/146-the-living-room-the-right-to-host. Hilal, Sandi. 2020. “The Right to Host.” Efux Architecture. www.e-fux.com/ architecture/overgrowth/287384/the-right-to-host/. Joyce, Jacob V. (@JacobVJoyce). 2021. “Decolonising the Blah Blah.” Instagram Post, October 7. www.instagram.com/jacobvjoyce/?hl=en. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1977. Selected Writings. Trans. and Edited by Alix Holt. New York: W.W. Norton. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specifc Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Lewis, Sophie. 2019. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family. London: Verso Books. Lloyd, Kirsten. 2021. “Art, Life and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Curating Social Practice.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 10(2): 150–176. https://doi. org/10.1386/ jcs_00041_1.

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Manual Labours. 2020. “The Global Stafroom Podcast.” https://manuallabours. co.uk/todo/the-global-stafroom/. Manual Labours (Sophie Hope & Jenny Richards). 2021. “Stories from the Global Stafroom: Experiences of Caring and Uncaring Architectures at Work with Efy Harle and Jos Boys.” Architecture and Culture 9(2): 193–217. https://doi.org/10. 1080/20507828.2021.1920217. Muhammad, Zarina. 2020. “{The Community, the State and a Specifc Kind of Headache}.” The White Pube. www.thewhitepube.co.uk/communitystateheadache. Last accessed December 10, 2022. Nadasen, Premila. 2021. “How Capitalism Invented the Care Economy”. The Nation, July 16. www.thenation.com/article/society/care-workers-emotional-labor/. Olufemi, Lola. 2020. Feminism, Interrupted. London: Pluto Press Petresin-Bachelez, Natasa. 2017. “For Slow Institutions.” Efux (85). www.e-fux. com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institution. Petresin-Bachelez, Natasa. 2020. “Practices of Care: On Rehumanization and Curating.” What Could/Should Curating Do? Facebook. www.facebook.com/watch/ live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=223341892744498. Reckitt, Helena. 2020. “Take (Back) Care.” In On Care. Edited by Rebecca Jagoe and Sharon Kivland, 196–202. Hastings: MA Bibliotheque. Reckitt, Helena. 2021. “Productive Refusals.” In Old Land, New Waters. Edited by Edward Ball, 134–139. London: Freelands Foundation. Shaddock, Josh. 2019. “Take the Stairs.” https://lisatan.net/current-work.html. Last accessed December 10, 2022. Tallbear, Kim. 2017. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” In Making Kin Not Population. Edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway, 145–209. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso Books. UK Artists 4 BLM Arts collective including Jade Montserrat, Cecilia Wee, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Tae Ateh. 2020. “We Need Collectivity against Structural and Institutional Racism in the Cultural Sector”. Arts Professional, June  21. www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/we-need-collectivity-against-structural-andinstitutional-racism-cultural-sector. Vergès, Françoise. 2019. “Capitolocene, Race, Waste and Gender.” Efux Journal 100. www.e-fux.com/journal/100/269165/capitalocene-waste-race-and-gender/. Vergès, Françoise. 2021. A Decolonial Feminism. London: Pluto Press. Vishmidt, Marina. 2017. “The Two Reproductions in (Feminist) Art and Theory Since the 1970s.” Third Text 31(1): 50–66. Weeks, Kathi. 2021. “Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal.” Feminist Theory 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211015841 Wilson Gilmore, Ruth. 2020. “Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore an Antipode Foundation Film.” Directed by Kenton Card. www.youtube. com/watch?v=2CS627aKrJI. Zawieja, Joanna. 2022. “Stepping Over a Threshold.” In Public Memory, Public Art: Refections on Monuments and Memorial Art Today. Edited by Annika Enqvist, Rebecka Katz Thor, Karolina Modig, and Joanna Zawieja, 161–165. Stockholm: Public Art Agency Sweden and Art and Theory Publishing.

18 The Platform of Care Collective Curatorial Modes of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions Platform Katja Kobolt, Petja Grafenauer and Brigita Miloš Working collectively and individually, n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions group has since the year 2018 explored cosmetics and beauty work from the perspective of both the care provider and the recipient, as well as its industrial (chemical, beauty, flm, automotive, and social media industries), health and social (working conditions and constructions of subjectivities, especially along intersectionality), and its ecological entanglements. The members of the group have worked mostly on self-employed basis in non- or semiinstitutional, mostly migrant and/or queer precarious contexts in diferent central and southeast European cities (Berlin, Munich, Kassel, Ljubljana, Rijeka). By anchoring the collaborative research and production work in diferent frameworks, a decentralized and situated production base for the platform has been enabled. In the following pages, the researchers collectively turn to selected aspects of care all stemming from the platform’s work. Katja Kobolt, in her consideration of the platform’s collective curatorial methods, proposes a relational thinking about care by discussing the platform’s engagement with the precarity of feminized beauty and artistic work. Focusing on questions of the (platform’s) relation to work and what comes out of that work, she rethinks the process of diferentiation on which both identity politics and the extraction of surplus value are based and thus positions the work of the platform as an ethical practice in the realm of social reproduction labour. Brigita Miloš discusses the ethical aspects of the platform’s research into beauty work as performed in the project The 3rd Shift. She proposes thinking of care in relation to Adriana Cavarero’s concept of inclination or the dis/position of the subject pulled by “the attraction that is exerted by an object external to the person who makes it, drawing that person into conformity with a line of tension that at once inclines and raises the body” (Cavarero 2016, 92). Petja Grafenauer considers concern for the collective or rather the absence of concern and the absence of the collective respectively. Drawing on photographer Borut Krajnc’s artistic photo series (Figure  18.1) of the events which served as the 2012 election campaign of the current Slovenian president, Grafenauer discusses the mimicry of a politics of care. She asks what DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-21

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Figure 18.1 Borut Kranjc, Borut Pahor with the team at the hair salon ND Design Hair and a young hairdresser, Dejan Nikolić, September 13, 2012, Ljubljana, Slovenia, photograph, Politics series, 2014. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. The Politics (Politika) depicts the presidential candidate and future President of the Republic of Slovenia, Borut Pahor, in activities related to the theme “Together – Encouraging Each Other” during his election campaign in 2012. The series was frst published as a perpetual calendar/photo book.

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care is in real politics today: just a (speech) performance or a work of care for the collective?

Care in Collective Curatorial Modes of Production: The n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions Platform1 Katja Kobolt Art and beauty work are to be considered both as care and, more broadly, as social reproductive work: beauty work and beautifcation as a prerequisite for inclusion in wage labour and artistic work as the (re)production of shared understandings. Against the backdrop of the feminization of both beauty and artistic labour and the prevalence of precarity in both sectors, I propose a consideration of the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions engagement with precarity. In the case of the platform’s work, there is a spectrum of feminized subjects: the beauty work providers at one end and, at the other, the recipients (also artists), who are both in addition engaged with daily or regular procedures of self-grooming and also other beautifying body regimes or beauty work. In the following, I  consider the relationship of the two “opposite” ends of this spectrum, particularly between the platform’s members – artists, researchers, and curators engaged with immaterial work – and beauty workers, whose work is usually considered as material. What kind of relations between these two groups did the platform’s artistic and curatorial modes produce, and did they intervene into ossifed social diferences that arise from the diference between immaterial and material labour? Against this background, I propose that, in reconsidering the platform’s activities through the phenomenon of care and precarity, particular attention should be paid to the production of “diference” as a result of the platform’s collective curatorial modes. Within and with the platform, we have addressed care and the precariat in two ways. We have produced and researched works and also developed presentation formats for the visibility and consideration of the precarity of beauty work – from temporospatial and material conditions in the feminized and migrantized beauty sector (cf. Eckstein and Nguyen 2011 and Kang 2003) to the normativity of beauty work as a prerequisite for feminized subjects (also artists) to enter the so-called productive labour. On the other hand, the platform actively refected on its own precarious situatedness. Artistic work in the heteronomy of precarious and exploitative conditions has been discussed from diferent angles by various researchers. However, many authors consider the alienation of artistic work (and other immaterial labour such as research and creative work) from labour as the core of the ideological base on which the rearticulation of intersectional diferences, the mechanisms of exploitation, and thus the accumulation of surplus value rest.

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Jelena Vesić, in her text “Administration of Aesthetics or: On Underground Currents of Negotiating Artistic Jobs; Between Love and Money, Money and Love” (2016), attests “love” projected on the artist’s work, the function of divorcing artistic work from labour and thus from money: “while Mr. Money tends toward anonymity and invisibility, Miss Love remains in the spotlight and on stage, trying to disguise herself, frequently changing her masks and wardrobe”. Similarly, Bojana Kunst observes in her book Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism in regard to the artist’s work and life (because today life is work and work is life) a projection of “pleasure of capital .  .  . projected into the artist’s way of life” (Kunst 2015, 150). Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt state in “Make Whichever You Find Work” that in the times when art integrates diverse felds of social action and imagination (from political, educational, health, social and care work etc.), it remains socially efective only if separated from capitalist work and claim that “the enactment of micro-utopian experiments in spaces overdetermined by existing social relations dominated by abstract value comprises a measure of, not how close but, how far we are from the emergence of truly emancipatory practices” (Iles and Vishmidt 2011). Thus, the authors articulate the paradox that to some degree has been also inherent in the “micro-utopian” n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions platform. The platform has resisted material and institutional precarity by sharing the means of production. At each n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions edition, diferent individuals, initiatives, and institutions came together to share time, space, and money for joint work.2 In addition to assembling and sharing various means of production and creating a safer and sustainable production environment, an important method practised was continuous joint work on the same artistic positions over a longer period of time, to be presented as work in progress on various occasions. Thus, the resources which were always sparse anyway were thus “spent” not only to prolong the production time but also to improve and deepen the exchange and dialogue within the group and share the work respectively – something that is usually missing in the usual production process, where exclusivity and often overproduction are the telos of (over)work (Petrešin-Bachelez 2017). The curatorial structure for the presentations of the platform’s work was also designed to allow members to participate in various aspects of the research and production process, thus opening up the platform’s production towards collective authorship (and also enhancing the fees paid to members at individual occasions), entitling each member to initiate projects. The platform was not tied to any institution, all members joined or left it according to their resources and interests, and distributive works such as the publications were produced collectively and thus “owned” by all.3 As presentation formats were developed through a collective dialogue, this has also signifcantly expanded the methods of authorship. However, while on the one hand the platform’s “star-shaped” structure, which enabled decentralized and temporarily situated production situations

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within diferent institutional or non-institutional contexts, made the production possible in the frst place and the collective dimension did mitigate the precarious working conditions of the participating artists to a certain extent, on the other hand the “estrangement from labour continued apace” (Iles and Vishmidt 2011). This was partly addressed in some internal but also public problematizations of the platform. Despite the diferent articulations, what was most critically addressed was the platform’s discomfort with external and sometimes even internal expectations regarding the possible political organization of precarious beauty workers as assumed objectives of the platform’s work. In some cases, beauty workers participated in the platform’s research process and actions as teachers and interviewers, facilitators, or even co-authors. The platform organized a public fundraising campaign when one of the beauty workers faced eviction, being unable to work during the pandemic. Even if the members of the platform were not united in their ambitions – some of them aspired to the political organization of precarious beauty workers while others doubted its legitimacy and ability to do this – through its work, the platform rearticulated existing social diferences and remained embedded in capitalist production. Feminists, especially Marxists or materialist feminists, are obligated to understand not only how the construction of diference has been used to legitimize exploitation in social reproduction but also how crucial the specifc organization of social reproduction is to the functioning of capitalism or something-other-than-capitalism (Fraser 2016). Unpaid social reproduction activity is central to the functioning of capitalism – based on the accumulation of surplus value (Fraser 2016). Starting from the materialist thesis that “the logic of capitalist production and commodifcation subsumes all diference under the aegis of general equivalence (money)”, Slobodan Karamanić and Manuela Unverdorben (2019, 164) note that to extract surplus value, capitalism must pre-produce, re-articulate, and reinvent diference. Therefore, central for intersectional diferences are the questions of subject’s positionality in and towards social reproduction (activity) and of the abstract value of this activity. What was the platform’s relation to work and what has come out of that work? As a “micro-utopian experiment”, the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions intervened partially, mainly at the level of curators and artists, in existing social relations and abstract value. The abstract value persisted in favour of the immaterial workers – artists, curators, and researchers – as opposed to the “subjects” of their research – beauty work and beauty workers. Some of the aforementioned invitations to beauty workers to join the platform’s activities intervened to some degree in ossifed social diferences (in this case, between platform members and beauty workers). However, in the dilemma of “Who are we to organize the workers?” and “Who will organize the workers if not us?”, the platform had ended up mostly sticking to what is usually associated with research and artistic work about beauty work. Also, considering that especially feminized platform’s members as any other

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feminized subjects are more or less intensively engaged in everyday beauty work, to discuss the platform’s actions and modus operandi at the level of care as an inclination, as Brigita Miloš has in her contribution to this chapter, is therefore a far more accurate description than would be enabled by an analysis in terms of structural intervention/change into relations within social reproduction and abstract value.

Layers of Care: Inclinations in the Research/Artistic Project The 3rd Shift Brigita Miloš The appropriate relation to proclaimed standards of female beauty is a contested category in feminist writing. Diferences in the understanding of the processes of female beautifcation refect the theoretical shifts between the contemporary and the second feminist wave. The former condemnatory descriptions of the patriarchal patterns directing the work of (female) beauty (or beautifcation) are challenged by later arguments favouring the emancipatory potential of women’s self-determined (beautifying) choices. The (contemporary feminist) theory’s performative efect has been present in The 3rd Shift. Croatian artist Milijana Babić participated in the project, together with the members of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Rijeka, in one of the programmes of the event Rijeka – European Capital of Culture. The project proceeded in two phases, with 60 semi-structured interviews conducted in Rijeka’s beauty parlours in 2019, as the frst phase and a creative re-conceptualization of the collected material realized as an intervention (insert) in the Croatian women’s glossy magazine Gloria Glam (distributed in February  2020, print run 10,000) as the second phase. By examining the relations between the terms “body”, “work”, “beauty”, and “woman” in this project, the authors emphasized women’s beautifcation practices as (unpaid) work. Connecting the idea of work to that of free time, the “third shift” becomes the focal point for observing the two traditional shifts of women’s work, the paid and the unpaid (care work and housework), the public and the private, infuencing the entirety of labour aspects of women’s life. Women’s beautifcation practices are (traditionally) described as unnecessary and frivolous. Also, women have been taught to self-care to be beautiful (but not look like they tried too hard to achieve their beauty), sexy (but not slutty), pure (but not prudish), slender (but curvy in the right places), youthful (if they are adults), mature (if they are adolescents), fashionably dressed, controlled (in their posture, bearing, and appetites), healthy, ft, and able-bodied. (Chrisler and Johnston-Robledo 2018, 11)

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Therefore the phrase “self-care” strengthens the connection between the notion of care with the female gender by inscribing values of aestheticization and ornamentalism on women’s bodies or indicating the necessity for beautifcation to be manifested in women’s lives. Furthermore, the practices of beautifcation and modifcation of (female) embodied selves can include traumatic features: Women’s bodies are perceived by many as sex objects or as objects of beauty and are subject to constant evaluation and judgement. These judgements are considered normative and need not be hidden or kept private (e.g., street harassment, slut-bashing, the “fashion police”). Most girls and women are aware that they are constantly subject to evaluation, which makes it difcult for them to attain a comfortable embodiment. (Chrisler and Johnston-Robledo 2018, 9) It might seem redundant to elaborate on the feminist epistemological agenda aiming at re-positioning beautifcation from frivolous indulgence to the status of work. Still, as Deborah Rhode (2016, 709) notices, It has not helped feminists’ political agenda or public image to denounce widely accepted beauty practices and women who won’t get with the program. Greater tolerance is in order, along with the recognition that women are not all similarly situated in their capacity for resistance. The primary consideration of the The 3rd Shift project was to incline towards relation-conscious arrangements and conditions to ensure an “ecosystem” that would sustain the “diversity principle” and consequently lead to the “politicization of epistemology” (Scheman 1995, 183). As introduced in Adriana Cavarero’s writing (2016), the concept of inclination represents the dis/position of the subject pulled by “the attraction that is exerted by an object external to the person who makes it, drawing that person into conformity with a line of tension that at once inclines and raises the body” (Cavarero 2016, 92). The inclining subject renounces her “verticality” to assume a more unstable state, difering from the balanced verticality of the autonomous human subject position. At least three levels of inclination can be noted in the project The 3rd Shift. On the frst level, the methodology of conducting research in a familiar location supportive of all included part(ner)s was an important aspect of the frst phase. The in situ interviews were conducted during respondents’ engagement in beautifcation procedures, where they shared experiences and attitudes about their appearance-enhancement methods, acknowledging the extent of resources invested in their looks. Women’s beautifcation practices were performed, described, and refected upon in/during the respondents’ utterances, proving the respondents’ discourse was subject-constructive and inclined to the researchers’ needs.

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The second instance of inclination introduces a space for critical beauty discourse to occupy. If beauty is a “moral matter” (Widdows 2018, 2), it follows that the creative outcome of The 3rd Shift is performative and includes both the normative aspect of the contemporary concept of female beauty and the opening of a discursive space to parallel theoretical and ethical concepts. The project’s self-referential output – a fake glossy magazine – closes the creative circle by placing the newly conceptualized content in the discursive context of normative beauty (discourse) from which it most often emerges. Furthermore, “emancipated femininity” (Lazar 2011, 39), which appears as a sign of linking “the normative practice of beautifcation with an emancipated identity” (Lazar 2011, 37), denotes a specifc double passion for performative actions (and efects) of contemporary femininity. Namely, recognizing the inclination to engage or work with/in beautifcation practices is related to contemplating the ultimate purpose of that work, to achieve the efect of beauty. Even in post-backlash times, the emancipatory feminist policy reappears in beauty narratives, indicating the awareness of the hegemonic nature of the enthusiasm for beauty. Emancipated femininity, therefore, can not only be understood as an unconvincing promise of the liberal–feminist agenda. The strength of arguments from ideology, hegemony, consumerism and power overcomes the equation of emancipation with liberalism. On the other hand, the emancipatory identity policies of the last century and their theoretical grounding cannot withstand argumentative objections related to the generalization (colonization) of knowledge or insensitivity to intersectional issues. This theoretical stand-of coexists with the growing number of diverse forms of beautifcation practices by which women either afrm their social visibility or ensure social inclusion. Moreover, while it is true that some of the performative efects of the most widely understood desire to achieve beauty are destructive, it is also a fact that the accelerated feld of female beautifcation produces subversive performative efects. The project’s output, a fake glossy insert, represents the inclination towards politicizing (feminist) epistemology because “(t)hose who write about women’s issues need to recognize that not everyone has the luxury of being able to say ‘screw you’ to the cosmetics industry” (Rhode 2016, 709). Finally, the third layer of inclination is the production activities that followed the notorious collapse of the Rijeka – European Capital of Culture (RECC) project. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and imposed preventive measures coincided with the long-awaited culture festival in Rijeka. Due to the extreme contextual changes, the expected cultural feast became a period of shock and decommissioning on the cultural scene. In the resulting atmosphere of overt suspicion towards mainstream cultural agents’ capabilities to provide the necessary structural support, the project The 3rd Shift became a part of the feminist n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions platform, allowing the project team to participate in the platform’s collaborative research and publication.

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The concept of inclination in this particular context does not refect merely the tendency towards feminist networking (for such an idea is close to the corporative, “vertically”-postured bonding principle), and it does not simply indicate the sisterhood-shaped (horizontally postured) solidarity (for such an idea is a dangerous romanticized myth). Adriana Cavarero notes that “it is instructive that . . . the dimension of verticality is embodied in the fgure of the father, while the dimension of horizontality is embodied in the fgure of the brothers” (Cavarero 2016, 130–131). In both the cases, two “edge” spatial positions – verticality and horizontality – obscure what is the most exciting and challenging aspect of inclination. It calls for changing the conceptual register so that “(w)hen our questioning calls upon a relational rather than individualistic model, and hence too on an altruistic rather than selfsh subject, the inclination can become the module that composes the picture’s design – its leitmotif or prevailing posture” (Cavarero 2016, 128). Interrelatedness and interdependence inscribed in the concept of inclination make the term a signifer representing the core set of ethical and epistemological facets in the “ecosystem” of the project The 3rd Shift.

Aesthetics of Politics and Mimicry of Care for Post-Socialist Children. Two Artworks by the Photographer Borut Kranjc4 Petja Grafenauer Collaborating in the platform’s 2020 edition Corneous Stories: Cosmetics in Society and Time (Grafenauer and Kobolt 2020) brought up questions that went beyond the platform’s engagement and led to rethinking the subject(s) of care in a wider area. One of the questions that emerged in the context of the platform’s research and the 2014 photo series by Borut Kranjc led also to the question of what was the purpose of the Slovenian presidential campaign in 2012, in which the president-elect Borut Pahor purported to take care of citizens by performing care activities (such as garbage disposal, sewing, frefghting and hairdressing) instead of doing what he was supposed to do as a prospective president – act like a president? It was a failed media campaign that showed the emptiness beneath the shiny surface. Tim Dassler’s proposal on the relation between care ethics and care politics suggests the relationship that was being exploited: . . . due to its ability to draw on and activate universally shared human experiences, feelings, and emotions, as well as it being concerned with creating favourable conditions for reducing hurt and promoting human fourishing and enhancement . . . care truly seems to be a political undertaking at heart. (Dassler 2016, 66) The presidential campaign in question should, however, be considered as an imitation of caring. Many, including the photography by Borut Kranjc,

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recognized its mimicry of care, and it is exactly the ambivalence of the performance of care that makes the series interesting for the discussion within the n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions research. In the photo series Politics (2014), photojournalist and artist Borut Kranjc privately followed the president’s campaign from an angle of an artist. Kranjc’s artistic lens exposed the mimicry of care by the then-presidential candidate Borut Pahor, who could spend a day (and a photo session) performing acts of care our food, our garbage, our beauty, or our Lipizzaner horses; however, Kranjc’s photo series exposes that this was a populist act. The president was only pretending to care for the “common people”, to be “one of us”, and as such “we” know that the caring he imitated in the campaign was a pose that creates an important diference: it was precisely in the idea of being equal that the diference is re-articulated. Why was the president-to-be doing this, and why did he not present himself as the presidential fgure that people should look up to? Did he believe that people are incapable of taking basic care of themselves? Had he also submitted to the ideology of the European Union, in which the citizens of its post-socialist state-members, such as Slovenia, are only small children who have yet to learn democracy and capitalism? When the fnancial crisis melted the neoliberal capitalist democratic phantasm (Žižek 2003), in which the neoliberal capitalist democratic systems are full of “care” for every citizen, and which was presented to the new, mainly post-socialist Europeans in 2014 as a bedtime story, it could already be stated that: [E]ven if people [in the former Yugoslavia] are aware of the rights that they have lost, or rather, that they themselves have renounced, even if they are aware that the adult generations today live worse than their parent’s generation, they think that there is no alternative [to neoliberal capitalist democracies] . . . It’s about complete powerlessness, a kind of epochal apathy, a fatalism that has paralyzed not only critical thinking or the will to change, but also the sense of reality itself. It is about apathy and powerlessness that performatively structure reality itself, but these are themselves deeply unrealistic, and that is fundamentally ideological. (Buden 2014, 3) The (new European, post-socialist) society that has been treated by the old Europe, and also by its own leaders, as immature and still in need to be “cared for” could not respond well to the fnancial crisis, the environmental crisis, the migrant crisis, the democratic crisis, growing populism, and right-wing politics in its promised land and later to the pandemic and fnally war – to the crisis of social reproduction. Society, which has been lied to again and again in history, was lied to once more with the dream of a democratic prosperous Europe. The supposed care for people, performed by the president-to-be was just a campaign, a bluf, an image that Krajnc

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captured beautifully – with a drop of irony – in his artistically very wellcrafted photographs. A work of art is always an expression of the individual but strongly tied to time, space, society, capital, politics, poetics, and the conditions of life in which it is created. Most importantly, the work of art says even more about the viewers, the audience that at some point stands in front of it. If the artwork is of good quality, it speaks of the fact that we engage with ourselves and our environment through art. Art is caring even when it is critical or especially when it is. In these moments, it is about revealing the truth: criticizing what exists to improve it. In its social dimension, then, artistic activity is also an activity of social reproduction, care, and concern. However, can we counteract the complete political populism shown as mimicry of care, the emptiness that is evident in the president’s performance, in the works of Borut Krajnc? This is a not an easy task because it requires self-refection and the admission that this is a reality to which we have tacitly agreed, a reality in which it is not the rule of law but the law of the strongest that applies, a reality that we, I do not know on what basis, not only call democratic but proclaim as our historical model. (Buden 2014, 6) From today’s perspective in 2022, Kranjc’s Politics (2014) was fun and harmless. Kranjc captured a beautiful façade, produced an aesthetic perfection of advertising for the candidate for the presidency of the Republic, and his photographs were cynical, they pointed to the fracture. Politics is not the mimicry of caring (populism). President Pahor looked caring in the pictures, like a hero in a Netfix series, beautiful, attractive, on the edge of kitsch, perfectly captured in the lens by the photographer. And how could one not indulge in the aesthetically perfect image of a well-groomed male persona in duet with a horse, who even dares to pick up a pair of barber scissors and hairdryer or dispose of the citizens’ garbage? The politician, of course, went to the people only for a day, ostensibly and with the desire to score political points. When Kranjc got him in front of his lens, the images that merged into a series simultaneously exuded a formal aesthetic and walked a fne line between mockery and frst-rate photographic documentation of a political campaign of caring for people. Through a series of images, the artist managed to uncover a void, a shiny surface beneath which was an emptiness, a platitude. And Slovenia seemed to be cared for. A few years later (2020–2022), populist discourse looked very diferent. Instead of scintillating media campaigns, in Slovenia, the central communicational power of the government, with Prime Minister Janez Janša at the helm, has shifted from Instagram (used by President Borut Pahor) to Twitter and erupted into hate speech unimaginable in 2014. Slovenia was ruled by short statements by the Prime Minister on Twitter, often publicly ridiculing

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individual groups of citizens, especially migrants, self-employed, artists, and others like naughty children; hate speech was a constant element. Concern enacted through violence? This is the other side of care. It used to be only mimed, but today the violence is overt and has evolved from images to words and actions using water cannons and tear gas against protesters. At the time of Krajnc’s series Politics, things in Slovenia were not so clear politically as they are in 2022. But it was precisely the way this political campaign exploited the idea of caring that led to what we have today, and we do not know what to call it: fascism comes from a diferent time and space. Buden explains, I am increasingly sceptical about the use of the term fascism. It seems to be too optimistic. It is based on the naive belief that the enemy we face is the old, already defeated enemy. And what if it is a phenomenon that, precisely because it is new and still unseen, could be much more dangerous than what we still call fascism? (Jameson 1994, xii)

Notes 1 The research for this chapter was supported by the research project “Picturing Modernist Future”, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkłodowskaCurie grant agreement No. 101024090. 2 n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions editions: seminar and fnal exhibition at the Berlin Universität der Künste, 2018; an exhibition, art educational programme, and a publication (n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions 2019) in the framework of the no stop non stop (balkanet e.V. and Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich, 2018); Caring for Confict cultural educational programme (District Berlin, 2019); Corneous Stories seminar, publication, exhibition and art educational programmes at the 26th City of Women Festival in Ljubljana. 3 Both platform’s open access publications – n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions. a collaborative publication on nailwork, art and migration (n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions 2019) and Corneous Stories: Cosmetics in Society and Time (Grafenauer and Kobolt 2020) – to be retrieved at: www.district-berlin.com/en/ publications/8164-2/ and www.cityofwomen.org/zbornik_rozevinazgodovine. pdf. 4 The chapter is made as a part of the ARRS project J6–3144: Protests, art practices and culture of memory in the post-Yugoslav context.

Bibliography Buden, Boris. 2014. Cona prehoda. Ljubljana: Krt Publishing House. Cavarero, Adriana. 2016. Inclination: A Critique of Rectitude. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chrisler, Joan C., and Ingrid Johnston-Robledo. 2018. Woman’s Embodied Self: Feminist Perspectives on Identity and Image (Psychology of Women). Washington: American Psychological Association.

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Dassler, Tim. 2016. “From Care Ethics to Care Politics. Toward a Political Notion of Care”. [M.A. Thesis]. Tromso: Arctic University of Norway. Eckstein, Susan, and Minh T.N. Nguyen. 2011. “The Making and Transnationalization of an Ethnic Niche: Vietnamese Manicurists”. International Migration Review 45(3): 639–674. Fraser, Nancy. 2016. “Contradictions of Capital and Care”. New Left Review 100: 99–117. Grafenauer, Petja, and Katja Kobolt. Ed. 2020. Corneous Stories: Cosmetics in Society and Time. Ljubljana: Academy of Fine Arts and Design in the University of Ljubljana. www.cityofwomen.org/zbornik_rozevinazgodovine.pdf. Iles, Anthony, and Marina Vishmidt. 2011. “Make Whichever You Find Work”. Variant 41: 54–59. Jameson, Frederic. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Kang, Millian. 2003. “The Managed Hand: The Commercialization of Bodies and Emotions in Korean Immigrant-Owned Nail Salons”. Gender  & Society 17(6): 820–839. Karamanić, Slobodan, and Manuela Unverdorben. 2019 [2006]. “Balkan High, Balkan Low: Pop-Music Production Between Hybridity and Class Struggle”. In Eastern European Popular Music. Edited by E. Mazierska and Z. Győri, 155–177. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Hants: Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing. Lazar, Michelle M. 2011. “The Right to Be Beautiful: Postfeminist Identity and Consumer Beauty Advertising”. In New Femininities – Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Edited by R. Gill and C. Scharf, 37–51. London: Palgrave Macmillan. n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions. Eds. 2019. n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions. a collaborative publication on nailwork, art and migration. Munich; Berlin: Balkanet. e.V. and District Berlin. www.district-berlin.com/en/publications/8164-2/. Last accessed December 16, 2021. Petrešin-Bachelez, Nataša. 2017. “For Slow Institutions”. e-fux Journal 85. www. e-fux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/. Last accessed December 16, 2021. Rhode, D.L. 2016. “Appearance as a Feminist Issue”. SMU Law Review 69: 697. https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol69/iss4/2. Last accessed December 14, 2021. Scheman, N. 1995. “Feminist Epistemology”. Metaphilosophy 26(3): 177–190. Vesić, J. 2016. “Administration of Aesthetics or: On Underground Currents of Negotiating Artistic Jobs; between Love and Money, Money and Love”. Schloss Post. https://schloss-post.com/administration-aesthetics-underground-currentsnegotiating-artistic-jobs-love-money-money-love/. Last accessed January  17, 2022. Widdows, Heather. 2018. Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Idea. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. Kuga fantazem (2nd reprint). Ljubljana: Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo.

19 Curating Queer Nursing The Performance Installation Partus Gyno Bitch Tits Claudia Lomoschitz

Partus Gyno Bitch Tits is the title of a performance installation I presented at Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna in May 2021. Partus (Latin) means birth, Gyno (Greek) is short for gynaecomastia to describe swelling of the breast tissue in medical terms but also in bodybuilding. Bitch tits comes as well from the context of bodybuilding and is used as self-designation to speak of male gynaecomastia and male lactation. This chapter refects my research and the queer curatorial strategies I used to approach curating nursing with care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). My research into diferent approaches to chestfeeding (Wolfe-Roubatis and Spatz 2015, 36); biologism; biohacking; molecular feminism; induced lactation and male lactation informed the work, which seeks to open up new phantasies of reproduction work. These include gender-equitable concepts of reproductive labour and non-binary, collective and multigenerational phantasies of post-maternal practices (Stephens 2011) like queer nursing (Burisch 2020).  Political scientist and care ethics scholar Joan Tronto understands care as a practice of maintaining and repairing the world, a practice widely neglected in a gendered neoliberal economy that glorifes paid work over relationships involving care labour (Tronto 2005, 258). Researcher Junko Yamashita claims that “welfare states have not taken their responsibility of providing structures that enable care work fully into account” (Yamashita 2016, 434) and understands it as a feminist quest to challenge gender-neutral neoliberal policies, which disregard human dependency and vulnerability and therefore reinvigorates gender diferences. Social reproduction care work is highly entangled with economic inequality and is linked to colonial and patriarchal cruelty and ethical dimensions. The exciting text Relational, and Strange on queer breastfeeding by feminist scholar Fiona Giles contests the common argument that the sexualized bare chest is the cause of the prohibition of nursing practices in public spaces because it challenges the taboo of relating motherhood and sexuality (Giles 2004, 306). By this contested logic nursing, as gender-divided unpaid reproductive labour, is problematic in the public sphere and therefore, inevitably individualized and privatized (Fannin and Perrier 2016, 385). To counter these conditions, it is necessary to develop care infrastructures for nursing in public space as well, which

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means to make space to nurse, pump or heat formula, to fairly recognize the costs of nursing labour, to ofer access to lactation consultants and make sure that nursers feel supported. Nursing (whether chestfeeding or formula feeding) is part of the physically demanding reproductive labour that is performed – mostly – outside of waged labour. Research on the economies of cruelty around chestfeeding, from wet nurse slavery to discrimination against nursing in public space, was the starting point of the exhibition’s quest to work on countering what are cruel cultural and social imaginaries of practices that are deemed as queer nursing. Through looking at various nursing practices like induced lactation, milk-sharing networks, adoptive parenting and cross-species nursing, my research resulted in an accumulation of an archive of images from religious depictions to mythological stories and videos of fetish representation that depict diverse nursing practices. Close encounters with experiences of chestfeeding friends, whose bodies transformed into nursing bodies that were subject to claims of constant accessibility, prompted my work on this topic. The enormous societal pressure on mothers to chestfeed, fostered by medical staf, media, friends and relatives, and the simultaneous devaluation and invisibilization of nursing as reproductive labour infuenced my curatorial approach. The efort associated with nursing is idealized, mystifed or stigmatized, and the biological function of lactation is used to justify gender inequalities. To convey that nursing does not relate to gender is to dismantle heteronormative and cis-normative assumptions regarding lactation. Approaching nursing with care requires addressing these conventions of nursing through the notion of intervulnerabilities (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 82).

Queering Perceptions of Nursing Curatorial questions regarding Partus gyno bitch tits started with research into counter-hegemonic practices of induced lactation and male lactation. Practical information on how to induce lactation is widely available online. The practice is known in communities around adoptive parenting, surrogacy, wet nursing, queer parenting and milk-sharing networks. Learning that all bodies, including male-assigned bodies, have a primary set of mammary glands and can release chestmilk, unleashed for me a new phantasy of gender equal reproduction. Even though male lactation has been known since ancient times, studies are rare.  Legal studies scholar Mathilde Cohen sees this gap as a refection of the traditional gender roles which so permeate research agendas’ fundamental analytic categories that male lactation is considered unworthy of serious scientifc inquiry, even if only to be refuted. To be sure, male lactation remains an oddity. (Cohen 2017, 147)

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Figure 19.1 Partus gyno bitch tits, Videowork, 7:13 min, Video Still 3:53 min, Claudia Lomoschitz 2021. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Cohen develops the analysis that speaking of male lactation involves thinking about the gender identity of the parent; the nutritional substance which is provided and the activity with the child that brings the parent and nutrition together. “Male breastfeeding undoes the presumption that parenting is binary, with men as fathers and women as mothers” (Cohen 2017, 149). The curatorial considerations behind centring the work on male lactation aimed at expanding nursing as a practice that can be performed by all genders.

Performing and Filming Queer Nursing In preparation for the exhibition, I worked with the eight performers who had agreed to become part of the exhibition, in their private homes, where the video shooting took place. The participating performers were Jorgo Loucas, Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir, Peter Rothkappel, Birgit Stimmer, Martin Bous and myself, who represent a range of ages, genders and diferent backgrounds. Each performer brought previous experience such as acting, dancing, DJing or sound work to the work process. Their interest in participating in the performance was based on both curiosity around queer nursing practices and personal implications and struggles with reproductive labour. Furthermore, there was also an interest in working in such a diverse group on these sensitive topics. The videos can be understood as a one-on-one research process exploring, and performing, practices of queer nursing and learning about experiences of and emotions around chestfeeding. As I treated the camera like a separate entity which I installed in the

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room, I could be present with the performers in front of the camera to share intervulnerabilities regarding our bodies and emotions. This challenges a division between those who flm and those who are being flmed. I fostered the blurring of roles by actively engaging with the performers in front of the camera and using the camera as an attentive actor on its own. In these close encounters spontaneous actions derived ranging from using a breast pump, to caressing one another, to physical lactation, to imaginations of queer nursing. One video depicts Jorgo Loucas and myself hugging each other topless enjoying the sunlight on a windowsill while talking about gender equality, induced lactation and nursing phantasies, refecting on the relationality of biological bodies. In another scene, Jorgo Loucas uses a breast pump while talking about its physically draining efects. The close up shows how the breast pump moves his hairy nipple up and down. The word nature appears as a tattoo on his chest. The videos include extensive imagery of bare skin which are intended to invoke recollections of feeling and touching. María Puig de la Bellacasa highlights touch as a sensory mode which counteracts dominant ways of knowledge production (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 97). Haptic engagement is akin to thinking with care as a (knowledge) politics of inhabiting the potentials of neglected perception, of speculative commitments that are about relating with, and partaking in, worlds struggling to make their other visions not so much visible but possible. (118) Puig states further that embodiment, relationality and engagement are crucial to feminist epistemology and knowledge politics (96). Her observations were important to how I approached the video work. The eight videos show scenes that challenge moralizing narratives and obsolete gender norms and ponder upon the active role of bodies shaping discourse by unfolding agency and self-determination regarding the biological body. “Feminism needs to form intimate and unruly alliances with biological data to continue to make trouble” (Wilson 1998, 35). To address naturalized concepts of gendered bodies can be seen as an important tool to foster queer feminist questions. To focus on the biology within bodily systems is a step towards acknowledging social systems surrounding us. Another video frame shows Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir squeezing her nipple to squirt streams of milk, which then drip down a copper plate while the subtitle captures a conversation on milk as a medical substance and exploitative claims towards female bodies. All the videos address disparities of nursing and make the physical act of lactation visible while creating visions of induced lactation and male lactation. The power to visually disrupt normative images and to transform them towards collective care practices was a central queer curatorial strategy. To construct the exhibition from within lived queer encounters and lived practices opened up the political potential

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of generating pluralistic images that engaged critically with representation and diversifed patriarchal images of care.

Building an Archive of Queer Nursing Phantasies My curatorial research, which led me to study legal and medical scholarship on lactation and to staging the video encounters, also included a deep engagement with a visual history of queer nursing practices. From this research, I chose 50 art historical examples, which were presented as paper prints in the exhibition. This genealogy included social media images, art historical references, mythological depictions and medical illustrations. The presented images displayed a critical, multidimensional, non-linear collection regarding the history of nursing ranging from motifs of violence like in the case of St. Agatha, to strange nursing relations between Cimon and Pero, to images depicting interspecies feeding like Romulus and Remus nursed by a wolf or people of the Indian community Bishnoi chestfeeding orphan animals. Depictions of the Christian motive of Maria Lactans were hanging next to images of male lactating bodybuilders and illustrations regarding the cruelty of wet nurse slavery. My research, and also my selection of images, focused on the psychological history of lactation and cultural implications across time, especially focusing on genealogies, relations and afects. My curatorial aim was to invite the viewer to imagine that a queer history of nursing is, in fact, possible. Following feminist theorist Elke Krasny, I used “dis/ordering, un/learning, inter/vening, and moving inter/disciplinarily” to create a queer visual genealogy of nursing (Krasny 2015, 55, 58). The images as arranged for exhibition crossed disciplines, questioned borders of canonical classifcation and made space for counter-hegemonic visions, as “queer curating must necessarily question and challenge the normative structures of the museum itself by addressing questions of the archive, collecting, and education as well as acknowledging and addressing a ‘queer’ audience” (Katz and Söll 2018, 2).

Curatorial Worries My preparatory curatorial research also sought to understand how male lactation comes about. How is it induced? A rise of prolactin level can be induced by touch leading to the release of oxytocin. What causes it to happen? The longer I researched, the more my curatorial worries grew. Male lactation can be caused by malnutrition or enormous psychological stress, which can lead to dysfunctions of hormonal glands and the liver. I learnt that  thousands of men who had been imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps lactated after liberation (Cohen 2017, 142). Therefore, approaching male lactation in the local context of Austrian fascist and genocidal history is contested and complex. These historical implications informed my

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curatorial approach towards queer nursing and male lactation, which I tried to address with utmost care. The exhibitionary installation did address that violent fascist history as part of the history of male lactation within an audio piece. Much curatorial consideration was given to thinking about a potentially very diverse audience with many diferent ideas of what nursing should be and how it should be seen and bringing into the exhibition space diferent personal experiences. Therefore, the aim was to create a gentle, non-confrontational, multi-sensorial environment in the exhibition space while still aligning the work with a political struggle for gender, and nursing, equity.

Installing With Care Purple light welcomed the visitors into the space, as they heard a soundscape by Nikkname&Jorke. Working with a very limited budget and reusing chipboard plinths, painted grey and white, in diferent sizes, the eight video projections were spread out across the entire exhibition space. Four stage-like platforms were installed to structure the space alongside large glass basins flled with a translucent, milk-like substance. The open-foor exhibition space of Kunstraum Niederösterreich has in it one smaller room, which provides a more intimate cabinet situation. Here, I installed the prints showing the visual archive of queer nursing imagery. An audio piece with distorted voice recording provided some explanation about the diferent images. The exhibition provided room for movement, space between the videos, yet also visual connectivities and relations echoing and resonating across the space. Installing with care made time and space for “leaving room for unanswered questions, gaps, and fssures” (Katz and Söll 2018, 2). While the display strategy aimed at a coherent multisensorial environment suggesting continuity and fow, the ethical and political aims were “a curatorial disruption” of hegemonic understandings of what nursing looks like and whose bodies are seen as nursing bodies (Miersch 2019, 206). Curatorial disruptions, which are a key methodology in queer curating, emphasize relational, performative and subjective knowledge production via the simultaneity of linguistic, visual and physical information to destabilize normative thinking (Miersch 2019, 207). While interested in destabilizing normative thinking, my curatorial disruptions took enormous care to share knowledge around queer nursing with visitors, who may never have thought about this, who personally had diferent experiences than the ones shown or who may feel uncomfortable because of what they were made to see.  “Queer exhibitions disrupt any notion of a singular, unifed, homogeneous audience, in favor of a plurality of audiences with a plurality of interests, experiences, and competencies” (Katz and Söll 2018, 2). To relate to this assumed plurality of the audience, I approached queer nursing with gentle insistence and care for making space for relating visually to a plurality of embodied nursing knowledges.

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Feeling With the Bodies Post-maternal thinker Mary Phillips argues for reafrming visceral sensations and emotions experienced through the body and demands more acceptance towards the body’s feshiness to embrace careful embodied relationships (Phillips 2016, 477). Within the durational live-performance, visitors could perceive careful embodied encounters between the participating performers – gestures of care composed the 30-minute-long performance, realized in alternation between the sculptural stage elements. The performers carried out the movements in slow temporality to evoke tableaux vivant-like iconographic scenarios that reworked the gender roles associated with diferent caring roles. For example Martin Bous stroked Birgit Stimmer’s hair while Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir cradled a laptop in her arms. Peter Rothkappel stood in a forward-bent pose, in reference to the posture in which Andrea Gunnlaugsdóttir had given birth to her child. Jorgo Lucas gently caressed his chest to stimulate lactation while Martin Bous’ placed his head on Jorgo Louca’s body. In addition, the performers also handled objects such as silver nipple shields, which are used for their antibacterial efect on sore nipples. Curating such interactions of embodied relationality put visions of careful encounters into lived reality for a fraction of time and sensitized visitors’ embodied perceptions and sympathies. To curate a performance around queer nursing also opens up care ethical concerns regarding relational and performative ethics as well as afective knowledge. How to take care of the performer’s bodies, needs, boundaries in regard to such delicate topics like nursing and how to work with privacy rights? Facilitating space for exchange and well-being is necessary to set ground to sharing intimate encounters, therefore curatorial practices need to enable atmospheres in which trust, openness, enthusiasm and mutual understanding can fourish. Providing careful infrastructures can mean to collectively decide upon breaks, to give space for exchange, to listen, to physically provide places of retreat and ofer supplies like food and drinks. As the group of performers was diverse, it was necessary to develop fexible rehearsal formats, where it was possible for example to bring infants, to not insist on performers staying throughout and to collectively negotiate rehearsal times. My dual role as curator and participating performer opened up the recognition of interdependency and intervulnerability, which worked against hierarchization and fostered equitable encounters. The close collaboration within the team and openness to sharing experiences shaped the performance-installation into a collective body of work. Highlighting collaborative and social aspects of art production is important to queer-feminist ethics, counteracting the individualizing myth of an artistic genius, I want to recognize the network of people involved in birthing Partus Gyno Bitch Tits. In addition to the performers and the sound designer named earlier, who dedicated emotional and physical energies, time and openness to the project, the production process was also supported by

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Lisa Jäger, who shared her curatorial and artistic expertise to develop the exhibition spatially; Mael Blau, who skilfully proved costumes and lighting design and Moritz Franz Zangls, whose witty eyes shaped the video documentation. The facilitators of Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Birgit Knoechl and Christoph Schirmer helped to install the exhibits with lots of patience and positive attitude. Katharina Brandl, the artistic director of Kunstraum Niederösterreich; Katrin Deutsch, the head of operations; Nina Kohlbauer and Marina Ninić, the marketing and exhibition managers responsible for communication supported the realization of the project with best means and great care. Laura Birschitzky, intern of Kunstraum Niederösterreich at that time, helped to change the milky substance in the large glass basins, which was necessary to prevent the material from degrading and becoming malodorous. This team of supportive queer feminist thinkers and practitioners involved in the artistic and curatorial process enabled collaborative social care infrastructures. Queer curating counteracts heteronormative structures and desires by challenging the museums as meaning-making entity from within (Katz and Söll 2018, 2).

Conclusion The queer curatorial work ethics led to the multidimensional exhibition Partus gyno bitch tits, opening up reproductive phantasies of collective care entangled with counter-hegemonic views on generational and gendered relations while addressing sociopolitical and historical aspects and eforts of reproductive work. Working curatorially with care and ethical responsibility at the levels of research, deployed references, visual disruptions and embodiment, counter-hegemonic imaginaries of collective care were enabled to emerge by reconfguring images and emphasizing embodied connectivity, relatedness, vulnerability and tenderness. The queer curatorial practices of Partus gyno bitch tits performatively brought phantasies of collective care to the fore and opened up spaces to refect on hegemonic dispositives regarding nursing. Critiquing conventional biologism and thinking about care labour under post-maternal preconditions is directed towards the political claim to facilitate care infrastructures and strengthen welfare systems to support care work and establish a basic income for reproductive labour. As maternal practices are embedded in the construction of gender, social policies need to also support male-assigned people to engage in care work (Yamashita 2016, 441). An important step towards gender-equal nursing is the collective engagement in performing care work, sharing responsibilities and making decisions on how to nurse (Rückert-John and Kröger 2015, 97). For a society to become more gender-equal regarding nursing, it is important to open up space for discussions, negotiation and communication around models of collectively shared reproductive labour. To foster the understanding that all genders take part in care work, including nursing, it is important to revalue care work and support social infrastructures, which enable collective care

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work and emphasize that nursing is not assigned to any one gender or any one person alone.

Bibliography Burisch, Liesel. 2020. Queer Nursing. Berlin: Gorilla Milk. Cohen, Matilde. 2017. “The Lactating Man.” In Making Milk. The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food. Edited by Mathilde Cohen and Yoriko Otomo, 141–160. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Fannin, Maria, and Maud Perrier. 2016. “Refguring the Postmaternal”. Australian Feminist Studies 31(90): 383–392. Giles, Fiona. 2004. “ ‘Relational, and Strange’: A Preliminary Foray into a Project to Queer Breastfeeding”. Australian Feminist Studies 19(45): 301–314. Katz, Jonathan, and Anne Söll. 2018. “Queer Exhibitions/Queer Curating”. On Curating 37. www.on-curating.org/issue-37-reader/editorial-queer-exhibitionsqueer-curating.html#.YoYGmy221QI. Krasny, Elke. 2015. “Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method”. On Curating 26. Miersch, Beatrice. 2019. “Evidenzen stören. Uberlegungen zu einem Queer Curating”. In Evidenzen des Expositorischen. Wie in Ausstellungen Wissen, Erkenntnis und ästhetische Bedeutung erzeugt wird. Edited by Klaus Krüger, Elke A. Werner, and Andreas Schalhorn, 203–232. Bielefeld: Transcript. Phillips, Mary. 2016. “Embodied Care and Planet Earth: Ecofeminism, Maternalism and Postmaternalism”. Australian Feminist Studies 31(90): 468–485. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Rückert-John, Jana, and Melanie Kröger. 2015. “Stillende‘Männer. Väterselbstbilder und Väterfremdbilder in Ubergang zur Elternschaft.” In Mutter, Vater, KindGeschlechterpraxen in der Elternschaft. Edited by Rhea Seehaus, Lotte Rose, and Marga Günther, 81–100. Berlin: Barbara Budruch. Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking. Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press. Tronto, Joan. 2005. “An Ethic of Care.” In Feminist Theory: A  Philosophical Anthology. Edited by Ann E. Cudd and Robin O. Andreasen, 251–263. Oxford; Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1998. Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition. New York: Routledge. Wolfe-Roubatis, Emily, and Diane L. Spatz. 2015. “Transgender Men and Lactation: What Nurses Need to Know.” MCN, The American Journal of Maternal/ Child Nursing 40: 32–38. Yamashita, Junko. 2016. “A Vision of Postmaternalism: Institutionalising Fathers’ Engagement with Care”. Australian Feminist Studies 31(90): 432–447.

20 Curating a Collective Body A Non-Idealized Concept of Care Magdalena Kallenberger (MATERNAL FANTASIES Collective) Curators are fond of and quick to refer their practices to the etymology of the term curating, which is from Latin curare as ‘to care’. But “how much can you actually care if an exhibition goes on for three months, is open a few days a week, and then you leave again?” (Skrabs et al. 2021, 24) asks Duygu Örs, curator at the Berlin Biennale and KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The project logic that governs most exhibition curating does not ft into a sustainable concept of care because it does not consider that care, like love, is a reciprocal process of giving and receiving. The radical art practice of MATERNAL FANTASIES, a feminist art collective based in Berlin, has strived to create reciprocal care. I will describe this process from my entangled position as (mother) artist and researcher, co-founder and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES. In the frst section, I will outline how the collective has established a radical art practice to resist persisting forms of structural discrimination by what we have come to call the ‘rotational work/care model’. In the second section, I will lay out how MATERNAL FANTASIES integrates their children into the artistic process. What started out as a practical necessity has opened up new potentialities for MATERNAL FANTASIES on how to build/curate a collective body based on a non-idealized version of care. In the third section, I will explain how MATERNAL FANTASIES collective practice is strongly rooted in the history of feminist organizing and draws deeply on the theoretical lineage and practice of “Maternal Thinking” (Ruddick 1980). In conclusion, I will demonstrate how MATERNAL FANTASIES has formed a porous, collective body, built on reciprocal relations and unequal terms, and highlight how our renegotiation of multiple complexities unfolds new potentialities for other (mothers) artists and cultural producers to maintain a selfcritical art/care practice which resists capitalist logics of linear production. This chapter is based on a conversational text, group emails, and interviews with the members of MATERNAL FANTASIES to represent the collective body through individual voices.

Persisting Forms of Structural Discrimination Research shows that while having children actually boosts men’s careers, each consecutive baby sets women further back in pay and status, regardless DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-23

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of class background or work industry. Overall women lose 63% of their potential incomes compared to men’s earnings due to childbirth (Feldhof 2021). Compared to the European average, Germany’s general gender pay gap of 18% (Statistische Bundesamt 2021) is one of the highest in Europe, both overall and in comparison with countries with similarly high female employment rates (Schmieder and Wrohlich 2021). Furthermore, 43% of all one-person households in Germany, of which 88% are female, face poverty (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2021). This situation is even worse in Berlin, where visual artists face a signifcantly high gender pay gap of 31% (BBK Berlin 2019). Additionally, there is a wide disparity in the opportunities available for both exhibiting artwork and being represented in collections, with women having disproportionately less access to those opportunities than men. The situation is aggravated further by the tendency to sell works created by female artists at subsidised prices. Further, women are underrepresented on committees and juries (Wöbken 2018). As a result of gender and motherhood/care work-based discrimination, the following broad pictures emerges. Among the ten leading male artists in the international art ranking, nine are fathers of a total of 32 children. Among the ten leading female artists, only three are mothers. They have one child each. Jef Koons, for example, is the father of eight children, Gerhard Richter of four. The most successful female artist Rosemarie Trockel has none (Horst and Ganter 2020).

Expanding the Root Towards a Situated Self MATERNAL FANTASIES was founded in 2018, as an international, interdisciplinary collective of female (mother) artists and cultural producers. It counts as its members Lena Chen, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Hanne Klaas, Maicyra Leão, Aino El Solh, Isabell Spengler, and me, Magdalena Kallenberger. In the early days of motherhood, all of us had experienced frst-hand a rupture to the fantasy that “women can now do it [all], even have it, or that they would have it if they just tried hard enough” (Ahmed 2017, 5). This was the initial impetus to gather and to deliberately join an intergenerational dialogue as artists, who are mothers, who are daughters. In that sense, we use the term ‘radical’ quite literally, drawing on Latin radicalis as ‘root’. On the one hand, we collaborate with each other and our children, while on the other hand we put a strong emphasis on drawing from the roots planted by our feminist ancestors. In the early group reading sessions, we discussed classic feminist writings from bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, Sarah Ruddick, Valerie Solanas, Patricia Hill Collins, Bracha Ettinger, Eva Kittay, and other intellectual ancestors. We viewed their words as “companion texts” (Ahmed 2017, 16) to the texts of contemporaries such as Iman Mersal, Lisa Baraitser, and adrienne maree brown. Thus, our collective research and practice functions as an intergenerational dialogue writing ourselves into the long tradition of “Maternal Thinking” (Ruddick 1980, 346) as Erfahrungswissen (hands-on experience and practical knowledge).

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The collective expands and connects this tradition with contemporary critical debates in the Anthropocene on how “we are inescapably entwined and entangled with others, even when we cannot track or directly perceive this entanglement” (Shotwell 2016, 8). Giving birth and becoming mothers ourselves had caused some kind of existential revelation and transformative moment for each of us. Suddenly, we were confronted with a new role, literally delivered into a state of being that diminished our previous selves as independent women within a society that held autonomy as a core value. Suddenly, we were responsible for a vulnerable dependent other, with its own demands and constant desires. We saw ourselves trapped in a new temporal structure based on the child’s rhythm and immediate needs of feeding, sleeping, and being cleaned that was at odds with the capitalist logic of linear time. Our new self was ambushed into relations “with a particular and peculiar other whose rate of change is devastatingly rapid, who is always by defnition ‘developing’, shifting, changing” (Baraitser 2009, 22), which forced us to change and to adapt constantly. Anthropologists have coined the term “matrescence” (Raphael 2011, 66) to describe the physical, psychological, and emotional changes that accompany the process of becoming a mother. Suddenly, the term ‘radical’ was not just a metaphor; we had produced a ‘root’ that had been growing in ourselves which, however, had almost no representation in the arts. We were surprised to fnd out that there was no space for our new selves in the art world. People solely identifed us as mothers who can no longer be serious artists. We were struggling individually with our inability to attend events and openings, which usually start in the evening and rarely ofer childcare. As Tracey Emin succinctly puts it, “There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men” (Alexander 2014).

Self-Organizing as Resistance and Radical Practice Isabell Spengler, founding member of MATERNAL FANTASIES, pointed out that the fact that most artist residency places are not laid out to accommodate artists with young children already says a lot about who our society views as artist and how the role or time span of motherhood is usually excluded from those allowed to speak and produce. (M1 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung 2020) MATERNAL FANTASIES set up Landpartie1 (2018) a three-day residency with no funding. Self-organizing this residency enabled us to generate a temporary infrastructure in which we could come together and produce work

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as a large group without a budget. In 2019, we received an advancement award by the M.1 Arthur Boskamp foundation, a small cultural institution based in the North of Germany. This early acknowledgement of our work motivated us to proceed with our collective research and artistic process. The award included a fee and the possibility of a second residency, an exhibition, and a publication.2

Establishing a Rotational Work/Care Model Founding member Mikala Hyldig Dal coined the term ‘art-life fusionism’ to describe the Landpartie. What started out as a light-hearted vision soon turned out to be the foundation for our working method. To practice ‘artlife fusionism’ meant for Dal “to not ignore the potency of motherhood for my theoretical and artistic work”. For her, our children became “the cast, brainstormers, co-directors, costume-makers, set designers, voice-overs, etc.”3 This approach allowed us to take our children along to our art making sessions instead of leaving them with babysitters, godparents, partners, or friends. Dal’s ‘Art-life-fusionism’ blurs the lines between collective artistic production, collective living, and everyday care work. It was in the work Landpartie that we were able to apply this new approach for the frst time as a methodology.4 During the day at our Landpartie sessions, we produced diferent artworks such as tableaux-like long takes and performative improvisations for the camera and recorded them in video. To include the children into the collective process, we appropriated children’s games to make our collective production attractive for them to join. For instance, we would stage a work from the art historical canon and use the popular kids game “freeze”. In this children’s game, everyone dances as the music plays. When the music stops, each player must freeze immediately and hold that position until the music begins again. The artistic process follows a simple set of rules: members take turns as director, cinematographer, and performer or fulfl in the meanwhile reproductive tasks like cooking, cleaning, or childcare. Each director is responsible for the realization of one image or scene.

Extending Reciprocal Relations: Rotational Hosting Alongside our immersive artistic residencies, we organize working sessions in the studio of one of our members. In these sessions, the collective acts as a social and aesthetic experimental environment. A team of two functions as host [German: Gastgeber] and receives the collective on Sunday afternoon. The German noun Gastgeber/in describes a host as someone who receives people as guests in his/her home, while the noun etymologically entails Geber, the one who gives. In the following section I will explain how our ‘rotational hosting’ expands the notion of care.

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For each session, the hosts provide performative exercises that we execute together with the children. Founding member Maicyra Leão specifes: The idea is to consider the exercise not as an ephemeral action, but rather as an action that has a fexible structure and can be multiplied. In this sense, the instructions become both a form of documentation and directions that allow for generative appropriation.5 After these performative exercises, we execute a creative writing session of 20 minutes to refect on its bodily experience. Reading these refections aloud for each other is always very inspiring to me. They palpably illustrate how these performative exercises unlock a diferent perception of relationality. To further delineate the practice, I will give a detailed description of one of these performative exercises. The Travelling Drawing (2020) (original title in German: Wanderzeichnung) was conceptualized by Mikala Hyldig Dal. Leão describes: The exercise deals with a subtle perception of a collective body. The participants, both adults and children, sit on the foor in each other’s laps forming a line. They ofer their back as a surface for a tactual [sic] drawing, carried out through the touch of the fnger. This “drawing” travels through all the participating bodies and emerges fnally as a painting on the canvas.6 In the creative writing session following the event I wrote: I am trying to analyze what I have received. It is impossible for me to multitask, to receive, comprehend and send of simultaneously. What is the adequate process of translation? To transfer the exact line on the canvas or to submit and express the emotions I receive through the brush and colour? I  feel like I’m being squeezed into a generational line. First time understanding how things could get transferred to the next generation and sensing what might be lost on the way. Sensing its process of transformation. Some things might not be understood, some things might be understood diferently, some things might be left out. A warm stream swapping from person to person to canvas. A mass of information to perceive on so many levels.7

Curating a Collective Body We understand our collective practice as a methodology for organizing resistance, identity, praxis, and coalition under contemporary late-capitalist cultural conditions and as an act of radical (self) care. Founding member Lena Chen pointed out that

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MATERNAL FANTASIES is not the only collective of artist-mothers. Indeed, we have been introduced to, spoken alongside, and been supported by similar initiatives from around the world. While our collective has a particular working style and dynamic, the existence of all these artist-mother communities suggests that our concerns are not isolated but rather, speak to a failure in the system to accommodate our positions as caregivers. Working collectively is a survival strategy in the competitive ecosystem of the arts; artist-mothers have learned to adapt to conditions of economic scarcity and institutional discrimination. (MATERNAL FANTASIES 2021) Founding member Aino El Solh has established a professional healing practice next to her art practice. From this experience, she observes how organisms afect each other. In ecology we are looking at systems, co-existence, interactions, mono- and polygamy. The scope of interest goes beyond the individual subject, and the references are constantly changing. An artist can choose implicit singularity but a parent cannot because parenting as such, is relational and multidimensional. Thus, a mother-artist/artist-mother is already structured to support another being. When we, the members of the MATERNAL FANTASIES, reached out to each other and formed a collective, our inner (support) structure allowed us to connect on many levels. Our children, our careers, our life experience and our survival strategies became the material of this larger support structure. (MATERNAL FANTASIES 2021) Leão further exemplifed how our struggles to combine creativity, work, community, and mothering as practices in a contemporary life propelled us toward becoming a collective body. In those initial moments of formation, we tried but could not articulate a statement about our collective aims. Intuitively, we all knew that together it could be possible – for practical, emotional, political or creative reasons – to continue working as professional artists, dedicated caregivers, and complex women (Silva 2021, 128)

Expanding the Collective Body Towards the Children In the beginning, it started out of a necessity to include the children into our collective process. Founding member Hanne Klaas: “The children’s artistic practice difers much from that of adults. They make other decisions, based on other assumptions and life experiences” (MATERNAL FANTASIES

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2021). Their involvement is constantly renegotiated because they are growing “ ‘developing’, shifting, changing” (Baraitser 2009, 22) and has a dynamic confguration. In the following, I would like to specify how this collaboration with the children opened up our practice. With and through the children we discovered new potentialities which expanded our collective practice and our idea of care towards a reciprocal relation of giving and receiving. Mikala Dal describes: At our very last meeting before traveling to our frst Landpartie residency we were all drawing together, us, the kids. We were sketching out ideas for papier-mâché artifacts to be used as strap-on props and body extensions – DIY theatrical tools – for our frst collective art project at beOnest in Brandenburg. To imagine, draft and build body extensions collectively using papier-mâché was a method serving to include the children: it’s easy to produce, cheap, fast, accessible. You can fail and test, trial and error. The kids’ design drafts and drawings were fgurative: my daughter created a birdlike-dinosaur (does she know birds are the last dinosaurs?), with extending elements to be attached to her bottom and her nose; Hanne’s boys created monsters, oversized paws of claws and green, a huge lizard foot to go with it; Rosemarie, Olga’s daughter, was becoming a mythological creature that, too, can fy (are angels remnants of dead birds?). The grownups’ extensions were abstract, mostly: a device that will ground you by making the bottom half of your body into one piece, melted into the pavement; one that will draw silence to your headspace by removing all upper orifces; one that connects your breast with your mouth so you may continuously feed yourself; one that makes of your uterus an expandable housing project with the capacity to accommodate inhabitants of all ages. (MATERNAL FANTASIES 2021) Klaas points out how the set up of a framework for a collective piece is complex when it has to include participants of all ages. Playful games have to be included into the making, simplifed tasks in which the children can take their turn, equivalent to adults. Adults have to step back from attempts at perfectionism. Building objects, the telling of fantastic stories, objects making sounds, all these playful and experimental realms lead to wonderful collective moments. (MATERNAL FANTASIES 2021) The presence of the children interrupted our concept of linear production and static, aesthetic perfection. However, we discovered that exactly these moments add a new layer of meaning when, for example, a child accidentally photobombs a carefully choreographed tableau vivant. The scene was

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Figure 20.1 Travelling Drawing, 2020. Documentation of performative exercise by MATERNAL FANTASIES. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

a restaging of Gauguin’s Circle of Life (1897–1898). The interference of the child brought us to address and challenge the Modernist thought of continuous progress and cyclical linearity illustrated in this painting. In that sense, unpredictability, interruptions, and failures became transformative moments in our practice. They produce “a small ‘blank’ experience that at once arrests and provides new points of departure” (Baraitser 2009, 11). Involving the children started from a basic necessity, but it gave us the opportunity to refect and taught us to embrace misconceptions, interruptions, and failure as a means to discover how this intergenerational process and production takes place.

Collaborating on Unequal Terms Isabell Spengler expressed in a working session that she fnds it hard to collaborate with non-parents because “as a parent I  have a diferent day rhythm. And how you can structure your day with a baby is very diferent from when the child is one or two years old”. Integrating our children renders visible that we don’t collaborate on equal terms. Not amongst us, not with the children. Hanne Klaas, mother of three, soon four children asserted: The kids become directors of playing out scenes. But still, they depend on us. They also follow us because they trust us. But this also

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Magdalena Kallenberger (MATERNAL FANTASIES collective) raises ethical questions. Do we really want to expose our kids on the worldwide web? Do we wanna show them in exhibitions? Do we want to present them to the outside world – if they can’t yet decide for themselves? Do they want to be seen in the way we present ourselves together? And there is always the question of how much do they really feel free to participate? How far do we convince them to join? How much do we ‘use’ them? How much are we open to receive and learn from them? (MATERNAL FANTASIES 2021)

We have accepted dwelling multiple complexities around the involvement of our children as our way of staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016, 1), with each other, raising and re-raising these questions. We understand these re-negotiations as our “task to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response” (Haraway 2016, 1). Often, we agree to disagree and decide case by case, project by project, exhibition by exhibition on how to collaborate, produce, and present our works. We are very well aware that we cannot foresee further controversies as well as all possible consequences our decisions could cause for our children in the future.

Maintaining the Collective Body But it’s not enough to shout “Vive the multiple!”; the multiple has to be done. (Henri Bergson, quoted in Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, 197)

Our living circumstances have changed since we began the process of becoming a collective in 2018: three more children were born, two are on their way, two were lost in the early stage of pregnancies. Amongst our members, one of us has lost a partner through bereavement, another two through separation. Some have found love in new relationships; some have stuck with old ones. One moved back to her native Finland, one spent the COVID-19 year in her native Iceland, another one is currently based in the US. We all live in evolving and sometimes changing family constellations, in partnerships, as single parents or in co-parenting constellations. We have diferent professions, capacities, and ambitions. Leão defnes MATERNAL FANTASIES as the body that connects us. “It is a secure space where we can bridge the divide between our children and our profession. But it is also a place for deep negotiations in which we constantly switch between the I and the we, in which the I inevitably contains the we and vice versa, but not always in equal proportions. There are crucial diferences that separate and attract us. Which part of me is silenced in this collective? In what sense does it expand my

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boundaries? What holds us together? How do we, artists and mothers, create change together? (Silva 2021, 125) In this sense our ‘multiple’ does not consist of identical objects; still we have built a collective body that is fexible to expand and adapt, fexible to interact. Our collective body oscillates between internal and external processes, not necessarily on equal terms, because of our diverging ambitions, capacities, skills, and professionalism.

Curating Reciprocal Relations on Unequal Terms In the last section, I would like to give an insight into the structures that we have built together to form a collective body able to act and interact. Before we start any project we meet together to collectively assess our individual interests, ambitions, and capacities to contribute to the project. We collectively defne a basic structure and fexible concept which is adaptable to diferent situations. Usually, a team of two leads a project or workshop while one person handles the communication with the institutional partner. This person reports back to the collective if needed and often also manages the fnances and the production. When we are invited to talks and presentations, we insist on coming as a team of two, which doubles the costs for travel, accommodation, and honorarium. We demand this to avoid that one voice represents the collective towards the public while internally rotating these speaking positions within the collective as much as possible. In this way, we make diferent perspectives of the collective body visible while learning from each other’s perspectives and skills. Of course, this is not always possible but nevertheless we try. Early on, we established the rule that from each paid project, workshop, or talk, a percentage of the artist fee feeds back into the collective budget. When we sell a photograph or receive a screening fee, we have an agreement that a certain ratio goes to the person who has produced or conceptualized the work while another ratio goes to the person who has made the acquisition or manages the communication with the collector or institution. The remaining ratio feeds back into the collective budget from which we fnance our collective artistic productions. When it comes to all these fnance issues, we try to be as transparent as possible and discuss, negotiate, and re-negotiate the adequate compensation based on a self-defned rate of individual time spent instead of considering a professional hierarchy. We try to rotate all tasks and duties as equally as possible while accepting that we don’t share equal capacities, interests, ambitions nor professional skills or privileges. This is a continuous challenge of thinking-with, dissentingwithin, and thinking-for to be able to stay with each other, but it also helps us to appreciate each other’s skills and eforts.

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Situating MATERNAL FANTASIES Practice Within the History of Feminist Organizing The members of MATERNAL FANTASIES are shaped by their diferent cultural roots and upbringing. In our practice, we refect on the conficted history of feminism while bringing out through our rotational practice of writing, editing, and performing the diferent colours of our ‘Erfahrungswissen’ or experiential knowledge. We insert polyvocality and an intersectional perspective rooted in praxis into the generational line of feminist thinking. We rewrite, adapt, reformulate, perform, and continue the generational line while also challenging the single-hero narrative (Solnit 2019). We understand our collective body intergenerationally as a reciprocal relationship on unequal terms and our children as a constant “developing, shifting, changing other” (Baraitser 2009, 22) like ourselves. Our grassroots rotation principle is utopian and radical at the same time, explained by member Isabel Spengler, “because it values an amateur implementation just as much as a professional implementation”. Our practice tackles class and privileges in a very practical sense from rotating speaking positions to distributing tasks and duties to compensating tasks based on a self-defned rate of individual time spent without considering a hierarchy of professional skills. Now, in 2021, our critique of motherhood(s), care work, and representation in the arts has become even more urgent and visible due the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has acutely magnifed existing social injustices. We are amidst the younger feminists in advanced industrial societies, described by noted scholars Christina Ewig and Myra Marx Ferre, who “do recognize that their foremothers made controversial, transformative demands that became the common sense of their lives and are aware that gender equality has not actually been realized” (Ewig and Ferree 2013, 422). We use feminist organizing strategies “shifting between autonomy and embeddedness” (Ewig and Ferree 2013, 425) and apply them to our collective body. We build on what has been accomplished but also stimulate and enhance important, contemporary debates through our collective art practice. In that sense, we reinforce our maternal foremothers’ claim that motherhood is not a private condition. Motherhood is political. I am specifcally grateful to Maicyra Leão contributing her expertise and advice on how to display the “collective body” in this chapter through the voices and perspectives of the individual members of MATERNAL FANTASIES. A big thank you goes out as well to Elke Krasny, Lara Perry, Lena Chen, and Xenia Fink for their support and critical feedback along the way.

Notes 1 Landpartie is an old-fashioned German word for a trip to the countryside. 2 This included the exhibition “Fantastic Futures” (2020) and the book Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices (2021).

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3 Email correspondence between Mikala H. Dal and MATERNAL FANTASIES. June 08, 2018. 4 Specifed by Maicyra Leão in a conversation with the author, November  25, 2021. 5 Google Docs fle in preparation of the publication between Maicyra Leão and the author. Date last modifed April 26, 2020. 6 Google Docs fle in preparation of the publication between Maicyra Leão and the author. Date last modifed April 26, 2020. 7 Google Docs fle with texts from the collective writing session after “Travelling Drawing Exercises”. Date last modifed September 29, 2019.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Alexander, Ella. 2014. “Emin: Good Artists That Have Children Are Called Men.” The Independent, October  3. www.independent.co.uk/news/people/tracey-eminthere-are-good-artists-that-have-children-they-are-called-men-9771053.html. Baraitser, Lisa. 2009. Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. London: Routledge. BBK Berlin. 2019. “Gender Pay/Gender Show Gap in der Bildenden Kunst.” BBK Berlin. https://www.bbk-berlin.de/kalender/3-foerdersummit-bildende-kunst. Last accessed December 10, 2022. Bertelsmann Stiftung. 2021. “Trotz Arbeit abgehängt: Armutsrisiko von Alleinerziehenden verharrt auf hohem Niveau.” Bertelsmann Stiftung, July  15. www. bertelsmann-stiftung.de/de/themen/aktuelle-meldungen/2021/juli/armutsrisikovon-alleinerziehenden-verharrt-auf-hohem-niveau. Ewig, Christina, and Myra M. Ferree. 2013. “Feminist Organizing: What’s Old, What’s New? History, Trends, and Issues.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, 411–435. Oxford: OUP. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199751457.013.0017. Feldhof, Charlotte H. 2021. “The Child Penalty: Implications of Parenthood on Labour Market Outcomes for Men and Women in Germany.” SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 1120. Berlin: Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW). www.diw.de/de/diw_01.c.812001.de/publikationen/ soeppapers/2021_1120/the_child_penalty__implications_of_parenthood_on_ labour_market_outcomes_for_men_and_women_in_germany.html. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Horst, Simone, and Kira Ganter. 2020. “Warum sind Kunstwerke von Frauen weniger wert?” funk, June 20, 2022. www.funk.net/channel/strgf-11384/warum-sindkunstwerke-von-frauen-weniger-wert-1695085. M1 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung. 2020. “FANTASTIC FUTURES – Filme zu Fürsorge und Kollektivität. Artist Talk mit Maternal Fantasies.” Vimeo, March 29, 2021. https://vimeo.com/530269334. MATERNAL FANTASIES. 2021. Unpublished manuscript last revised August 17. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2012. “ ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care.” The Sociological Review 60(2): 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x. Raphael, Dana. 2011. “Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, a ‘New/Old’ Rite de Passage.” In Being Female, 65–72. New York: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi. org/10.1515/9783110813128.65.

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Ruddick, Sarah. 1980. “Maternal Thinking.” Feminist Studies 6(2): 342–367. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177749. Schmieder, Julia, and Katharina Wrohlich. 2021. “Gender Pay Gap in a European Comparison: Positive Correlation Between the Female Labour Force Participation Rate and the Gender Pay Gap.” DIW Weekly Report 11(9): 65–70. Shotwell, Alexis. 2016. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Silva, Maicyra T. 2021. “Core and Margins: Porrous Tools of Feminist Collectivity.” In Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices, 124–134. Eindhoven: Onomatopee. Skrabs, Lena, Paloma Sanchez-Palencia, Stefan Klein, and Vanessa Brazeau. Eds. 2021. Taking Care of What You Are Doing. N.p.: Zeitraum Exit and Festival Wunder der Prärie. Solnit, Rebecca. 2019. “When the Hero Is the Problem.” Literary Hub, April  2. https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-when-the-hero-is-the-problem/. Statistische Bundesamt. 2021. “Gender Pay Gap 2020: Frauen verdienten 18% weniger als Männer.” Statistisches Bundesamt, March  9. www.destatis.de/DE/ Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/03/PD21_106_621.html. Wöbken, Hergen. 2018. “Studio Berlin III The Situation of Berlin’s Artists and the Gender Gap.” Institut für Strategieentwicklung (IFSE). https://ifse.de/Pdf/IFSE_ Studio-Berlin-III-EN.pdf. Last accessed May 8, 2022.

21 Spellbound Witchcraft Activism as Caring Curatorial Practice Johanna Braun

Figure 21.1 Johanna Braun, Spelling it like it is (documentation), 2018. Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

double, double, toil and trouble/fre burn, and cauldron bubble/ for caring practices sake/curare and a fllet of a fenny snake/join or organize a coven/to escape the heat of the oven/for a charm of powerful trouble/like a hell-broth boil and bubble In putting this bewitching chant ‘up front’ of this short chapter (an artistic spin on the famous lines in Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (1623)), I  try to cast a spell on you. In doing so, I  follow artists and performers

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who turn to witchcraft and magic to bring together care and performance practices through spell casting. These artistic spellcasters belong to a wider network of artists and activists who link practical magic and feminism to organize and unionize – creating ‘magical resistance’ within art institutional spaces and also beyond in (large-scale) public performances. They form covens, curate exhibitions and public art events, host reading groups, organize workshops, educational programs, and mass events, among many other forms of collaborative work to ‘heal’ and ‘take care of’ their communities and the world at large. As you might have noticed in recent years: witches seem to roam freely, and witchcraft fnds itself in many public discussions at the center of attention. A  quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on the topic. Interestingly, although one might assume that the belief in witchcraft is a topic belonging to history books on the early European modern period, there is a growing investment in the term and associated practice that reveal the century-spanning legacy of witchcraft within a global context. While witchcraft is still used today in many parts of the world as medical and religious aid, it also experiences a surge in Western thought. The past years have seen an intensifcation of the interest in all kinds of aspects of witchcraft and magic, notably in the context of health care debates and the ‘healing’ of unjust social and political actions. If there is a call for injustice, witches are not far, and witchcraft is summoned to address the inequitable circumstances. The witch in this regard is celebrated as an icon of care and healing practices, and the healing powers of witchcraft are evoked in a wide range of ailments, extending from the individual body to the body politic, and even the ailing body of the earth globe. Spells are created and rituals performed to heal (human-caused) social, economic, and environmental injustices. Witchcraft has become synonymous with care and self-care practices; entire book titles are published on this intersection (such as Murphy-Hiscock 2018; Stewart 2020; Wigington 2020; Patterson 2020, to name only a few). Lisa Marie Basile has foreseen this trend in her article “Witchcraft’s New Branding – As Self-Care for Dark Times” (2017). Pressing issues of our time are at the center of spell work and public (performative) gatherings (in the real world and digital spaces) that address diferent forms of sexism enacted through state violence and unjust medical, legal, colonial, and capitalist legacies in broader terms. This magical resistance calls in communal action against sexism, transphobia, sexual abuse, femicide, anti-black racism, and climate injustice. Within this feld of inquiry queer feminist practitioners are at the forefront of diverse transnational social justice movements, broadly summarized under the umbrella term ‘witchcraft activism’. This chapter traces some of the countless artistic and curatorial practices within the prism of witchcraft activism and how they evidently stem from and share their beginning in collective and collaborative practices that are linked to feminist and queer feminist movements in our global present.

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Amid this context, this chapter is meant as an exploration of relations on witchcraft’s performance repertoire as a form of activist care work. Spells are in this context an efective remedy to care for allies, to unite and join forces beyond the limitations of place and time. (Spell) books, also called grimoires, are key resources in the practice of witchcraft and the transmission of century-long traditions in community care work. Thus, I propose, to locate witchcraft’s specifc (re)emergence within a broader cultural context that seeks to work against what can be understood as parallel forms of social exclusion. But this recurrent engagement with the fgure of the witch does not arise out of historical vacuum. A build-up of spirited engagement with all-things witchcraft can be followed for quite some time, and especially continuously since the second half of the twentieth century, and even more so during the second decade of the twenty-frst century. The arts – as it is often in such cases – seem conspicuously engaged with and involved in these public discussions. Countless exhibitions were curated, performances and conferences held, festivals organized, journals established, and articles and essays written. Several articles and media reports have already covered this phenomenon in the so-called art world (Scott 2016; Yates Garcia 2016; Bunting-Branch 2017; Judah 2018; Jefreys 2018; Bennett 2019; Niesel 2021, among many others). Interestingly, the artistic works summoning the healing powers of witchcraft are presented in art institutions of all ranges; from museums, public collections, commercial galleries, alternative and artist-run exhibition spaces, and also beyond these spatial borders of exhibition spaces streaming into the digital realm and mass events in the public domain. Thus, it becomes evident that while the witch is often portrayed as curating meticulously the ingredients in potions, tinctures, rituals, or spells, witchcraft seems to enchant artistic and also art curatorial practices alike. Here, queer feminist curatorial practices summon witchcraft activism to address the pressing issues of our time. Tellingly, witchcraft ties in with two diametrical ideas of curare, the term that is oft-quoted within curatorial scholarship as the foundation of the practice: on the one hand, the term is discussed in its relation to the Latin etymological origin, which means to heal, or ‘to take care of” and on the other hand, as in the common name for various plant extract alkaloid arrow poisons. While the term curare is often summoned to describe the root of our understanding of the (art) curator, the second understanding unfolds the century-spanning medical knowledge of indigenous peoples in Central and South America and the history of colonized healing practices into Western medicine. This second understanding of the term is curare as treatment, something which becomes active by a direct wound contamination; inficted by injection, such as a poison dart or an arrow. In this sense, the term curare illustrates fttingly the oppositional qualities ascribed to witchcraft within an

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understanding of medical practice, spanning from healing powers to the poisonous potential of it. While public discussions describe the witch on a wide spectrum of attributions, the healing power, and therefore the ‘good intentions’, of witchcraft predominates in artistic and curatorial involvements – although at the same time media coverage on these events render them often as malicious and ill-intentioned. Nevertheless, independently from the institutional ponderousness of the exhibition space, the witch predominantly emerges as the (super)natural healer, who not only heals bodily ailments but social, societal, economic, and political ones as well. Recent curatorial projects include, but are by no means limited to, Tarantallegra (Hester, New York 2016); Neo-Pagan-Bitch-Witch! (Evelyn Yard, London 2016); the art-directed magazine Sabat that ‘fuses witchcraft and feminism’ (established in 2016); the performance-symposium Witchy Methodologies (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 2017); Jesse Jones’s solo presentation Tremble, Tremble (Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017); Magic Circle (Kunstraum Niederösterreich, Vienna 2018); Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 2019); We Are the Witches You Couldn’t Burn: Women and Witchcraft Through the Ages (Langson Library, UC Irvine 2019); Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites (curated by Legion Projects and supported by Arts Council England, which toured through the UK and Australia in 2019); Coven: Witchcraft for Love Politics (Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research, Athina starting in January 2020); disturbance: witch (Citadel Spandau, Berlin 2020–2021); The Witch Institute symposium (Queen’s University in Katarokwi/Kingston, Ontario, Canada 2021); among many others. All of these exhibitions and curatorial projects were curated around the theme of witchcraft and contemporary art practices, often by artists and interestingly predominantly circle around themes of healing and activism as a form of ‘taking care of’ specifc vulnerable communities, humankind in more general terms and our planet at large. Such artistic and curatorial projects are clearly understood in the realm of activist work; unveiling the cureative and cure-atorial powers of witchcraft. What is particularly interesting is that the terms curating and curing/healing are not only vaguely addressed but built the core mission statements of many of these artistic explorations. The artist Jenna Lee Forde, for example, writes in her “curated” (here the term curate is chosen by the artist, therefore rendering her work as curatorial instead of editorial) online zine WITCHES HEAL: A Queer and Feminist Zine About Witches, Healing and Self-Care (2020): As WITCHES WHO HEAL we gather a pathway to healing through change and renewal. .  .  . We are interested in breaking down gender binary, smashing the patriarchy, dismantling white supremacy, and cripping ableism in order to bring power to WITCHES WHO HEAL. The artists Vassilia Kaga and Caterina Stamou have curated an event series titled Coven: Witchcraft for Love Politics (initiated in January 2020), and

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their mission statement very much underlines the various entanglements of witchcraft, activism, exhibition making, and curating as cure-ative practice. Their curatorial mission statement summarizes that their project came together: through discussions about how to come close, exchange healing and supportive practices and make space for each other in new ways of conviviality within an art exhibition context. We decided to turn Coven into a journey from the online to the ofine world and create a community of care beyond the limits of physical space. In August 2021, The Witch Institute organized an online symposium, creating a ‘collaborative meeting space for those who are interested in responding to contemporary imaginings of the witch in popular and visual culture’. The seven days of events included 18 roundtables, 14 workshops, and several screenings, talks, and performances. Part of the program was also the Spellbound project, which was originally commissioned by the Toronto Animated Image Society as a short flm program in 2019, and which grew for The Witch Institute as Spellbound (expanded); with an accompanying workshop and rafed multimedia Collective Spell Package, curated by Geneviève Wallen. Spellbound  revisits themes revolving around healing-based rituals found in spiritual practices outside of Christian dogmatism. Spellbound reclaims oppressed spiritual knowledge and ties these (artistic) practices to caregiving work, ancestral reconnections, and community building (The Witch Institute 2021). What becomes evident in these few examples is that witches are not alone, but they are highly organized, they unionize and band together as a form of critical thinking and activist engagement. Witchcraft seems to provide a productive vehicle to connect feminist politics and curating practices from the individual to the communal. The communal aspect is what makes witchcraft so specifcally compelling to queer feminist practices in the present. Witchcraft has been historically imagined as communal practice, composed of a group of practitioners who gather together for ritual in secret organizations or communities. The idea that witches not only practice powerful magic for communities but that they comprise their very own parallel (secret) society was already widespread in the twelfth century. The collective performance of witchcraft is what makes them frightening and compelling. It is no surprise that at a time when women*’s1 rights and human rights more broadly are under increasing pressure in some areas of Western society, that the fgure of the witch is used as a queer-feminist symbol of (healing) power, both rhetorically and in ‘actual’ practices of witchcraft rituals. Witchcraft is in those instances often understood as a means for fghting against social, economic, and environmental injustices and of allying with marginalized and oppressed subjects. Artistic practices have not been left untouched by this phenomenon as witchcraft and magic have been increasingly mobilized in contemporary feminist (performance) art and activism,

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as explored in articles by Izabella Scott (2016) or Amanda Yates Garcia (2016). Several books were recently published that focus on this intersection of the so-called magical resistance, or ‘witchcraft activism’ (mostly in the United States), such as Witchcraft Activism: A Toolkit for Magical Resistance (2019), written by the ‘witch-activist’ David Salisbury, which includes spells for social justice, civil rights, the environment, and practical tips on everything from joining activist groups to conjuring spells for self-protection and Michael M. Hughes, the originator of the #bindtrump spell, Magic for the Resistance: Rituals and Spells for Change (2018), or author, activist, and practicing witch Sarah Lyons’ Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism (2019). As a result of these activities, and many more, the witch has become an important motif for feminist, environmentalist, and postcolonial reinterpretations, with Silvia Federici as the touchstone thinker. Federici recently published Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (2018); but Caliban and the Witch (2004) remains the seminal text. The current revival and celebration of the witch can be regarded partly as a continuation of ‘witchcraft activism’ groups that were active in the second half of the twentieth century. The feminist protest group W.I.T.C.H, which was founded on Hallowe’en in 1968, by members of the New York Radical Women group, is probably the most well-known example. W.I.T.C.H plays on pop cultural tropes of the wicked witch with pointy black hats and capes and advocates for women’s rights, Black liberation and anti-war through performative political action, and the current phenomenon directly references and continues those practices. The resurrection of W.I.T.C.H. by the protest group Chicago Coven in 2015, for example, draws on the aesthetic and attitude of their predecessors. This contemporary iteration has led ritual public processions for abortion rights, hexed property profteers, and cast protective spells against gentrifcation and rent increases in Chicago. The artist Anna Bunting-Branch, who curated the event ‘Witchy Methodologies’ at ICA London in 2017, summarizes: W.I.T.C.H. was not a single, homogenous organization but a collective vision that was enacted diferently by activists within diferent contexts and communities. W.I.T.C.H encouraged women to identify shared experiences, acknowledge their collective repression and speak out against oppressive forces. In this way, W.I.T.C.H. emphasized the empowerment of women through collective action. (Bunting-Branch 2017) It is interesting that although the causes for such public action have changed since the original iteration of W.I.T.C.H, the focus on collectivity and transformation that was already at the center of the original W.I.T.C.H. group is also echoed “in activist practices such as WHEREISANAMENDIETA, Sisters Uncut or Liberate Tate” (Bunting-Branch 2017).

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W.I.T.C.H was not an isolated incident but embedded in a wider discussion of how witchcraft provides a magical bond between feminist protest forms and performative action. Silvia Bovenschen has already covered the dominant discussions surrounding the witch as a feminist icon of the 1970s in the US in her text “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature” (1978). In it, Bovenschen explores the growing interest in the witch as a fgure of protest within and in the reception of feminist movements in the 1970s. These discussions are very much embedded into a wider emergence of revisionist feminist histories in the 1970s, such as the often-quoted Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s writings. It was then in the early 1980s when Miriam Simons, under the pen name Starhawk, linked in her many bestselling books, such as Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (1982), a link between witchcraft practices, feminism, and direct political action. Starhawk organized annually a Hallowe’en ritual known as the Spiral Dance in San Francisco, where artists, musicians, and dancers collaborated on a large-scale event in 1999, and around 1,500 people participated. With the tendency of right-wing politics in the 1980s, and the election of Ronald Reagan and the religious right, Starhawk expanded her activism to include African Americans, Black Americans, indigenous peoples, Intersectional feminism, and the LGBTQ+ community and commit her actions to environmental activism. This commitment to social justice issues has stayed with diferent witchcraft movements in recent years, and ‘witches’ have become increasingly visible at protest sites following the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016; from daily ‘hexes’ outside Trump tower, to internationally organized largescale spell castings, such as the much-covered #bindtrump spell initiated by Michael M. Hughes, to organizing under the hashtag #witchesforblm casting spells of protection for Black Lives Matter protesters and ‘hex’ against police brutality, especially following the international protests in 2020. A  new W.I.T.C.H group was also established in Portland in 2016, called W.I.T.C.H PDX (confer: witchpdx.com or @witchpdx on Instagram), which refected a much more inclusive social justice practice, embracing antiracism, antifascism, antipatriarchy, indigenous rights, gender self-determination, women’s liberation, trans liberation, anti-rape culture, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protection, immigrant rights, among many other pressing issues of our times, promising a continuous evolution of witchcraft activism. Most of the examples considered in this chapter draw on these predecessors and the current manifestations that interpret and contextualize witchcraft practitioners as empowered and empowering fgures that question, challenge, and threaten power structures. However, within that framework, this representation of the witch unfortunately still undergoes production and distribution within the capitalist mechanism that continues to promote

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a “whitewashed” Westernized history of the witch (Federici 2004). Building on Silvia Federici (2018), this chapter stands in solidarity with recent attention paid to interpersonal and institutional violence against BIPOC, queer and white women* that has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations. Importantly, as witchcraft has been used to address important questions of the particularities of specifc time periods and locales, its focus and intentions, and therefore the core questions addressed have continuously changed. Such questions addressed in current witchcraft practices within an art (curatorial) context include, but are not limited to the following: How can witchcraft facilitate a queer feminist, decolonial, and antiracist activism? How can witchcraft operate within traditional art spaces and expand such spaces in unique ways to bring communities together and discuss important issues of our time, especially when it comes to questions of curing, healing, and “taking care of”? Who has the freedom to care, to be cared for, or to protest unjust health care practices? Where are the critical lines drawn between the symbolic and aesthetic uses of witchcraft and magic in contemporary art practices and the actual care work of (indigenous) healers and self-identifed witches? How can we aid a productive dialogue in revitalizing the witch without reinscribing into a white, Eurocentric, colonial, and heteronormative narrative of witchcraft and care work? These current manifestations of witchcraft in a contemporary (art) context stem from various artistic practices that used concepts and aesthetics of witchcraft and magic to raise important questions around care and healing practices and health care politics that are entangled in such discussions. They refuse categorization that draws sharp distinctions between theory and practice or art and activism, just as the many radical practices before them. In this regard, this chapter comprises only a snapshot in time, entangled in a continuous exchange of an extended network of artists, curators, thinkers, and activists, who utilize witchcraft to call for communal political action and put spells, as a caring practice, in favor of a more just world. In this sense, as I care for you, and we care for each other, let’s say it together: double, double, toil and let us stay with the trouble.

Note 1 The form women* is used to indicate the most inclusive possible use of the term.

Bibliography Basile, Lisa Marie. 2017. “Witchcraft’s New Branding – As Self-Care For Dark Times”. Refnery29, February  24. www.refnery29.com/en-us/2017/02/142584/ modern-witchcraft-self-care-holistic-approach. Last accessed September 1, 2021. Bennett, Jessica. 2019. “When Did Everybody Become a Witch?” The New York Times, October  24. www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/books/peak-witch.html. Last accessed September 1, 2021.

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Bovenschen, Silvia. 1978. “The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of Appropriation of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature.” New German Critique 15: 83–119. Braun, Johanna. 2018. “Witchcraft Hysteria. Die Heimsuchung der Salemer Gerichtsverfahren in aktuellen öfentlichen Debatten in den Vereinigten Staaten”. FemWiss Journal – Swiss Association of Feminist Studies 16–25. Braun, Johanna. 2021. “From Witchcraft Activism to Witch Hunt Sentiments: The Changing Political Landscape in American Horror Story”. In The New Witches: Critical Essays on 21st Century Television Portrayals. Edited by Aaron K.H. Ho, 28–40. Jeferson: McFarland. Bunting-Branch, Anna. 2017. “Welcome into the Coven of Heretics!: The Construction of a Witchy Collectivity”. ICA Online. https://archive.ica.art/bulletin/ welcome-coven-heretics. Last accessed September 1, 2021. Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Federici, Silvia. 2018. Witches, Witch-hunting, and Women. Oakland: PM Press. Forde, Jenna Lee. 2020. Witches Heal. Toronto: Colour Code Printing. Hughes, Michael M. 2018. Magic for the Resistance. Rituals and Spells for Change. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications. Jefreys, Tom. 2018. “The Return of the Witch in Contemporary Culture”. Frieze, November  26. www.frieze.com/article/return-witch-contemporary-culture. Last accessed September 1, 2021. Jones, Amelia, and Andrew Stephenson. Eds. 1999. Performing the Body/Performing the Text. London: Routledge. Judah, Hettie. 2018. “How Witchcraft Continues to Cast Its Spell on Artists’s Magical Thinking”. Frieze, September 3. www.frieze.com/article/how-witchcraftcontinues-cast-its-spell-artistss-magical-thinking. Last accessed September 1, 2021. Kaga, Vassilia, and Caterina Stamou. 2021. “COVEN: Witchcraft for Love Politics”. https://feministresearch.org/coven/. Lyons, Sarah. 2019. Revolutionary Witchcraft. Philadelphia: Running Press. Murphy-Hiscock, Arin. 2018. The Witch’s Book of Self-Care: Magical Ways to Pamper, Soothe, and Care for Your Body and Spirit. Avon, MA: Adams Media. Niesel, Jef. 2021. “New Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick Exhibit Demonstrates How Art Can Heal”. March 9. www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/ archives/2021/03/09/new-buckland-museum-of-witchcraft-and-magick-exhibitdemonstrates-how-art-can-heal. Patterson, Rachel. 2020. Curative Magic: A Witch’s Guide to Self Discovery, Care & Healing. Woodbury: Llewellyn. Salisbury, David. 2019. Witchcraft Activism. A  Toolkit for Magical Resistance. Newburyport, MA: Red Wheel/Weiser. Scott, Izabella. 2016. “Why Witchcraft Is Making a Comeback in Art.” Artsy, September 6. www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-witchcraft-is-making-a-comeback-in-art. Shakespeare, William. 1623. “The Tragedy of Macbeth”. In Shakespeare, William, Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (The First Folio. The New York Public Library). London: Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount. Starhawk. 1982. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press. Stewart, Tenae. 2020. The Modern Witch’s Guide to Magickal Self-Care: 36 Sustainable Rituals for Nourishing Your Mind, Body, and Intuition. New York: Skyhorse.

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Wigington, Patti. 2020. Witchcraft for Healing: Radical Self-Care for Your Mind, Body, and Spirit. Emeryville: Rockridge Press. The Witch Institute. 2021. “Spellbound”. https://witchinstitute.com/events/screenings/spellbound-expanded/. Last accessed December 12, 2022. Yates Garcia, Amanda. 2016. “The Rise of the L.A. Art Witch.” CARLA, November 30. contemporaryartreview.la/the-rise-of-the-l-a-art-witch

22 Curating Aliveness Engaging With Ecologies Zahra Khan

Aliveness refers to a state of life and awareness, consciousness and vitality. An active state of being present, which is accepted as being a state of the living world of humans and animals, is aliveness. It is generally accepted that the same is true for plants and ecologies that are living; they are in a state of aliveness, growing, breathing, transforming and have consciousness. They, like the land from which they grow, bear witness. A state of aliveness in plants and ecologies is also referenced by Animism, a term coined by the Victorian-era anthropologist EB Tylor in his book Primitive Culture, 1871, to describe a philosophical belief that he associated with “primitive cultures”. Tylor and his explorations of animism have since been criticized; researchers have taken the concept further and have since coined the term “new animism”. For the purposes of this chapter, I will separate the term from Taylor’s colonial-era reading of it. The belief that a spirit rests within everything natural and that the natural world is interconnected is shared by many cultures and faiths, including those native to South Asia, like the Buddhist, Hindu and Suf Islamic customs. Many of these traditions even believe that land and water are alive and absorb the memories and legacies of what has passed. With drastic climate change, such philosophy and thinking are becoming increasingly relevant. Artists in Pakistan have loudly (and subtly) used their work to protest, support or critique current and historic practices. Focusing upon the natural world, artists have turned to land, earth and other organic materials as their subject matter. Artists also explore environments from the standpoint of sociopolitical ecologies. Their work on deteriorating ecosystems is clever, tender and thoughtful. Building narratives, they study the vast impact of land and nature from diferent angles, including that of aliveness and survival. As a curator, I fnd this to be a crucial genre of art making to investigate and to champion. And when dealing with living subject matter, be it artwork or research, it is imperative to do so with care, ethically and respectfully, avoiding sensationalism and also drawing the viewer into the larger thematic concerns of the work. The journey of forming and creating the work, which is an important part of many of the works discussed in the following paragraphs, is sometimes difcult to discern, but it is the

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responsibility of the curator to translate and communicate this to the viewer. I have absorbed this philosophy into my own curatorial practice and also within an ongoing conversation series with artists across South Asia to build a substantial archive of material. This chapter investigates ideas of aliveness while it explores the work of artists who examine plant consciousness, conversations between trees, river gods, blind dolphins and the lament of caught fsh. It considers the practices of selected artists in Pakistan, creating within a postcolonial, geopolitical space and within philosophies of aliveness and awareness. It looks at their work on swiftly depleting ecosystems and what it means for larger consciousness. It follows artists who are delving into stretches of land and topography to study social and political behaviors and those utilizing organic materials including wood, land and rocks in their work and their experiences excavating within environments. Those who are interested in living ecologies and the politics of water. Artists who create fctionalized narratives and delve into the larger cultural mythologies that have been absorbed by the land and awareness of these regions. Ultimately, through their various projects and research, the artists in this chapter are studying belonging, belonging through aliveness, belonging through creating connections and synergies with the earth, by laying down roots and growing, by creating a shared language of communication or understanding with the natural world around us. Steeped in legend, absorbed by rocks, wafting in the air, is the legacy of consciousness, the reverberating efects of past migrations and sociopolitical movements, shared belief systems and ideas of identity. What is it to belong to the earth and why is there a need for belonging?

The Artist as the Archaeologist Artists working amidst natural habitats, particularly those following research-based practices, take careful time to traverse their surroundings. Recognizing the layers of history and living memory embedded within spaces and within rocks and landscapes, they engage in active observation, like that of an archaeologist or a historian, piecing together parts of a narrative, slowly and deliberately. In a way they create ritualistic patterns of excavation and homage, reimbuing life into the remains they discover. Walking within a space and allowing themselves to absorb the complexities of their surroundings and in turn leaving their mark upon the terrain. Sohail Zuberi is an example of an artist working with exploratory methods within natural habitats. His Karachi-based practice is diverse and multilayered, considering urban environments and changing ecologies. A long-term, ongoing project, Archaeologies of Tomorrow (2010–the present), culminated in a solo exhibition titled Archaeologies of Tomorrow, 2018, curated by Zarmeene Shah at Koel Gallery in Karachi, Pakistan. Another exhibition is planned for September  2022. Zuberi’s

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practice presents art created from debris, objects and remains (including religious objects, clothes, marine bones) that have washed up on a beach in Karachi. Many objects are the relics of capsized boats that the sea spews back to the land (Gayer 2018). Zuberi’s weekly collecting ritual includes walking his dogs on a stretch of beach every Sunday, much like Baudelaire’s faneur, and picking up wood, rope, glass and natural fber. He incorporates these found materials into his art, at times creating assemblages, but primarily displaying the objects as relics or museum objects, imbued with memory and a new life. Zuberi has created a routine of beach visits, collecting specimens, recording, preserving and recycling or upcycling and fnally displaying. His work pays respectful homage to the multitude of remains he collects, to the might of the sea and what it decides to return to the land each week and is evidence of man’s increasingly irreversible impact upon the earth and upon each other (Art Divvy 2020; Shah 2018). Similar to Zuberi’s practice, an ongoing engagement with Manora Island, of the coast of Karachi, forms an integral branch of Naiza Khan’s larger practice. This relationship with Manora island was the focus of her solo presentation Manora Field Notes, 2019 at the inaugural Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019, which I had curated. Khan has spent more than a decade visiting the island and immersing herself within the fabric of the island, like Zuberi, walking on the beach, journaling, connecting with locals and the community, creating site-specifc interventions, collecting objects she fnds there and building an archive of images, videos, sculptures, drawings, paintings and memories. The locals on Manora Island become participants in Khan’s work while also being its initial audience. Manora Island has a deep and rich history; it can be viewed as a microcosm of Pakistan, frst referenced in Western literature by Alexander the Great’s general, part of the old Silk Route, home to the sites of diferent religions, the shrine of Yousuf Shah Ghazi and the site of legends, as well as a continued colonial legacy, buildings like the old British-built lighthouse or the weather observatory, which was the subject of the installation Hundreds of Birds Killed, 2019, frst exhibited at the Venice Biennale. She has built strong connections with the island as it unfolds itself to her. Alongside tracking the changing ecology of the island, she has been following the migration of locals from the island to Karachi mainland, as well as considering its trade routes, during an era of deepening alliances with China, and changing international movements, as demonstrated in Sticky Rice and Other Stories, 2019 (Khan 2019). Khan’s practice has also considered the myths that surround the larger region, such as the myth of “Morriro and the Whale”, as written about by the Sindhi Poet, Shah Abdullah Bhittai, where the fsherman Morriro was swallowed whole by a giant whale (that had previously caught and killed his brothers) and then managed to kill the creature and escape (Elliott 2015). This legend continues to be sung about by the fsherman around Karachi’s seas (Gayer 2018). It was this historical, political and

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social unpacking and deliberate and thoughtful analysis of a tract of land which I, as a curator, found most fascinating.

Conversations With Trees While the artists discussed so far delve into stretches of land, rocks, debris and organic remains for their art, walking as part of their practice, others have been looking at living organisms as their focus, turning to plants, trees, mammals and water bodies in their work. Living ecologies that create ideas of aliveness. When asked why, the artists I spoke with believed it was a natural progression, “it made sense”, an intuitive reaction to the world around them and perhaps the next logical step in achieving true immersion, and feeling at one, or a part of the surrounding topographies. Recent studies have concluded that trees, particularly Hub trees, build systems around themselves of communication and community. They have a distinct language and a shared method of growth – microcosms within ecologies (Simard 2018). Tapping into these overarching ideas of animal and plant consciousness and using them as a means of marrying technology and nature, Mehreen Murtaza’s larger practice draws from science fction, spirituality and philosophy. Her site-specifc installation, How Will You Conduct Yourself in the Company of Trees (2015) brings together aspects of fctional and nonfction narratives. It uses sound, electromagnetic waves and living plants to explore synergies and conversations. The installation was exhibited within an enclosed gallery space when it was shown at Manchester Art Gallery in 2017. Taking elements from a Zen Garden, the project was more carefully pruned and curated to remain within the art space’s regulations. The installation was reminiscent of a Zen garden, with manicured plants, a ramp, a gazebo and a pond, specimens in cases for viewers to see. It became a quiet meditative space with a tea drinking ceremony and a collaboration with a local musician. Audiences felt transported. When this site-specifc work was installed in Lahore for the Lahore Biennale 01 in 2018, the project was more attuned to what Murtaza wanted to present. The installation was exhibited around a massive Banyan tree in the famed Lawrence Gardens. Fittingly, the project was wilder with reverberating sound and majestic trees. The wires and systems which convert electromagnetic energies to sound, giving the tree a voice, were hung on the branches in this organic space, where nature grows and lives peacefully. The audience was invited to interact with the installation and their intervention would transform the sound of the piece, highlighting the impact of interactions between people and fora. The conversation of each installation has been vastly diferent, primarily because of its display, but audiences in both locations were active participants in the artwork. It is important to notice and critique whether our own behavior changes when trees are given a voice and therefore able to participate in the conversation.1 Also engaging in conversations with trees is Hira Nabi in a new fourchannel flm project titled How To Love A  Tree (in development). Nabi spent time in the Galiyat hill stations, a few hours outside of Islamabad to

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Nathiagali. Surrounded by “aliveness” in these wild forests, Nabi began noticing dead or dying trees. She immersed within wilder sections of forests where the majority of trees were Blue Pines, the trees are very much local to the landscape. Nabi decided to make an ofering to nature and honor four chosen trees. Nabi worked with four musicians, whose instruments (fute, guitar, Sarangi and Rubab) are each made of wood, and the two traditional eastern techniques (Sarangi and Rubab) are endangered. The project is based upon the idea of endangerment and care, both for the musical arts and for the sustenance of the tree: it involved ofering a gift without the expectation of return and without the need to change or beautify. With Nabi flming, each musician selected a tree and played to that individual, creating a synergy and a conversation between the tree and the musician and the instrument made of wood. In the remote hill stations, surrounded by no one, during a stormy day, the tree was the audience for this performance, as the musician played for its beneft and its care. Nabi sees herself as a facilitator in this scenario and hopes audience members will meditate and refect upon their own relationship to the natural world.2 The trees in this project are indigenous to the locale, and by selecting the Galiyat, which had originally been popularized by the British colonial powers, Nabi invokes ideas of representation, displacement, migration and belonging, themes which Khan, Wasim and Bhutto have also followed through their work.

Figure 22.1 Omer Wasim, Spectral Remains, 2020–2022, Jasmine, soil and wood. Commissioned for Language is Migrant, Colomboscope 2022; supported by EUNIC and Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka. Source: Image courtesy of the artist.

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Like Mehreen Murtaza’s Manchester gallery display, Omer Wasim’s practice engages with natural matter. His work explores the concept of nature or land bearing witness. He too has been incorporating living plants in his practice, which transform installations and the meaning of the work. In the recent iteration of Colomboscope in Sri Lanka, Language is Migrant, 2022, Wasim presented his project Spectral Remains, 2020–2022 at Rio Cinema Complex. During a month-long residency in Sri Lanka in 2021, Wasim learned about fowering and botanical plants and their healing properties. The site-specifc installation, which was carefully cared for during the exhibition, included periwinkle and jasmine plants, which the production team had cared for and reared for months prior to the display. The process of selecting, raising and caring for the plants became an enormous part of the artistic process and of the larger installation. Wasim selected two kinds of plants that have a particular meaning of repair, memory and healing. Visitors to the exhibition were aware of the properties of the plants and understood the poignant reasons behind their inclusion (Ginwala and Rajendran 2022; Art Divvy 2022). Wasim’s work was also a refection upon displacement and migration, the trauma of which almost every South Asian family has a historic or current association with and with the overarching question of belonging. The artist’s own family migrated from Bangladesh to Pakistan, during the separation of East and West Pakistan. At the end of the exhibition the plants were distributed to trusted people to take them home who continued to care for them. This idea of exchange or adoption is not uncommon, but it gives an important thoughtful conclusion – aliveness beyond the show and a safe fnal home for the plants, continuing to honor and care for them. Once an iconic plush cinema, Rio Cinema was burned down during Black July in 1983, which is often earmarked as the beginning of the 26-years-long armed confict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan state. The rundown cinema complex, which continues to play flms, is now being reused as an arts space, particularly by Colomboscope (Azeez 2022). It is also a poignant reminder of the persistence of nature; sometimes, it overtakes these buildings and creeps in, unwanted or unseen, highlighting its own strength and belonging. Aliveness within the building enlivens, transforming it into a space of healing (Ginwala and Rajendran 2022).

Aliveness in Historic Structures The space and location of an exhibition or a display is of paramount importance in my personal curatorial journey and when I view an artwork. I fnd myself drawn toward historic buildings and the stories hidden within them, absorbed by the bricks and the cement. Old buildings meld into the larger environment – becoming attuned with the city, absorbing narratives within their walls, they are witnesses to lived lives and become proof of belonging to that time and place.

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Like the earth under our feet which has absorbed and housed countless secrets, lives, species, the life of a building is multifold. Buildings evolve with the times, remaining relevant and versatile while continuing to hold onto their glorious past and the secrets and stories they have witnessed. I have curated two exhibitions as collateral exhibitions to the Lahore Biennale in 2018 and 2020. Both have been situated within historic buildings, which have played a central role in the exhibition, both in the concept and in the experience of the viewers as they moved through the show. One, “I, too, am a part of this history”, 2018, was at a Haveli, in Lahore’s center city, the Fakir Khana Museum, a private family run museum, with a provenance from Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s trusted generals. The other, “Sagar Theatre on Queen’s Road”, was the oldest theater house in Lahore, originally known as Sagar Theatre and subsequently converted into a flm theater – the Plaza Cinema. The artists I  invited for the exhibitions responded to the building and its transforming function as well as the curatorial brief of the show. They created immersive site-specifc installations, which gave visitors to the exhibitions the opportunity to explore these historic locations through the art installations and via the eyes of the artists. The artists recognized the importance of these buildings within the ecology of a dynamic urban environment and incorporated that awareness into the show. Horrifed by the felling of trees in Lahore to allow for road expansions, Faizan Naveed exhibited It Was A Tree Of Life, 2022, at The Factory: Project 1.0 an exhibition held at a shoe factory in Lahore. Naveed hung a tree by its roots, upside-down, from the ceiling of a chemical storage facility within the shoe factory. Over the course of the exhibition, the tree slowly shed its leaves. When asked why, Naveed explained that the vast expanse of the space inspired him to hang a tree upside down, as a reminder of constant degradation to nature, against the felling of trees. Naveed wanted to bring in organic matter to disrupt this industrial structure producing man-made products. Like the work of other artists in this chapter, this was a protest against unceasing urban development. Over the course of the exhibition, the hanging tree slowly dried up and died – it had been forcibly removed from its habitat and sources of sustenance. Attuned to the diferent layers that come together within the work, like Wasim, Naveed was acutely aware of the life of the living organism before the art exhibition. The tree that he found for the artwork was initially slated to be chopped, and like Wasim, he prepared to replant it and heal it after the run of the exhibition; sadly his endeavor was in vain – the tree would not be revived, highlighting the ethical concerns of exhibiting living ecologies.3

The Crisis for Water The desperate need for ecological awareness and change is visible at all levels. Water is another realm that artists are diving into, particularly since

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Pakistan is facing a water crisis. Water has been the subject of international agreements and decrees, rivers that run through nations embroiled in confict or seas are not free and open, they too have international limitations placed upon them (Salman 2021). Climate change and geopolitical decisions have deeply exacerbated this issue. Fazal Rizvi’s art practice invokes memory and his project, Rooms Afoat, 2018, questions water ownership, migration and entrapment. In his multi-layered immersive work, a sound piece is played on a boat journey in the Arabian Sea. The experiential-based work is reminiscent of the experiences of fsherfolk upon vast seas that are governed by ruthless international laws. Fishermen are picked up for accidentally trespassing illegally into international waters. Poor impoverished fsherfolk become pawns in the chess game between nation states. Rizvi fctionalizes a scenario and imagines a trapped fsherman, captive within a jail cell for having trespassed into enemy territory. Sound is important, the sound of breath and of poetic, spoken monologues, one of the fctional men discussing the prison that he is in. The other fctional monologue is that of a fsh, its lament to being captured. Fish are often piled upon each other under boat decks, the source of income for these poor fshermen, but kept in cramped circumstances. Like these fsherfolk, the fsh too were free to swim before they were captured. Multiple sensory elements come together in this work – the smell and sights of the sea, movement of the boat, sound of the work – making it an experiential work, not documented by the artist and difcult to fully comprehend without having experienced it.4 Also working with the politics of land, water and displacement in the realm of activism are Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani, the artist duo. Their work deals with communities within local ecologies and pursues projects pertaining to land and water degradation. Rajani and Malkani have engaged with communities, who are most immediately afected by disruptive and dangerous land practices. They research, document and call out illegal land practices, particularly on the development of Bahria Town, a massive housing scheme in diferent cities of Pakistan, criticizing the irresponsible degradation of natural landscapes for the construction of large developments, which often forcibly remove indigenous local communities. Mismanaged and reckless construction as well as climate change have created enormous water problems in Karachi and its larger outskirts, ironically a city created out of a community of fshing villages. See-sawing between devastating foods which wreck through localities, or extreme water scarcity, worsening immediate and future living conditions. Taking their practice even further, Rajani and Malkani founded Karachi LaJamia, an anti-institution, in 2015, and ofer immersive, research-based courses such as Humare Siyal Rishte (Our Watery Relations), 2021, and The Gadap Sessions, 2016, to directly engage with local communities and Karachi’s ecologies. The Gadap Sessions culminated in the 2018 publication Exhausted Geographies II (Rajani and Malkani 2020, 2022).

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Pak Khawateen Painting Club (Pure Pakistani Women’s Painting Club), a collective project of women artists, led by Saba Khan, is exploring the politics of water and its associated power dynamics along the River Indus. The group visited the six dams in the North of Pakistan, some of which were built in the Cold War era, the Diamir-Bhasha Dam is still under construction and has been touted as a critically important project to deal with the country’s water problem. It has since become associated with national patriotism and pride, despite mounting criticism by experts, who believe the dam will cause an ecological disaster (Abbas and Hussain 2021; “ GilgitBaltistan” 2020). The artists of The Pak Khawateen Painting Club have adopted the uniform, literally and subversively, of “a benign, bourgeoisie group of patriotic conformists,” (Khan 2022) as they access these primarily male-dominated centres celebrating man’s power over the mighty River Indus. Conducting critical research into the legacy of these industrial behemoths generating hydraulic power for the nation, the group uncovers the difculties faced by local indigenous communities, which were often forced to relocate, with livelihoods destroyed, as well as local folktales and mythologies embedded in the surrounds of the River Indus. The project was displayed as a large-scale installation at the Lahore Biennale 02, where audio pieces, photographs, drawings, paintings, specimens were displayed within Cold-War era-esque machines, created as likenesses to the control panel rooms within these dams. The group will next be moving on to explore the colonial-era barrages in the South.5 Zulfkar Ali Bhutto is equally concerned about the growing water crisis. His current project, Bulhan Nameh: Dolphin Diaries, 2022, began as an interest in architecture and the historic stretch of river. Bhutto’s work was focused upon re-mystifyng the Indus River, the life force of the region and exploring the myths and legends around it, such as the Indus River God, Sindhu Mata and Khwaja Khizr, the Zinda Pir (the Living Saint) and the Bulhan (blind river dolphin of the Indus), surrounding a stretch of the river in Sukkur. The myths and legends are embedded in the fabric of the land and believed by the locals, irrespective of their faith. This stretch of river is between the colonial-era Sukkur Barrage and an island shrine dedicated to Khwaja Khizr. Further engagement, particularly weeks spent surveying and counting the Bulhan, transformed the project. The artist became part of a larger happening – a decades-long movement to count the dolphins and ensure their safety. Locals pursue this activity, this month-long journey along the Indus counting the dolphins, along with a process of education has changed attitudes toward the dolphins. Tribes that made a living killing them are now helping to preserve them. But it is barrages and canals and other methods to control the water movement, which are playing a role in jeopardizing the survival of the dolphins, local marine life and communities of fsherfolk, therefore forcibly changing the livelihood of locals from farming to other occupations. These attempts to control and possess water have created a burgeoning crisis, which is becoming only worse.6

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Bearing Witness The artist’s journey of discovery is initially as a humble spectator bearing witness, watching and noting what is already in motion whilst researching existing material and eventually creating an artistic output. Zulfkar Ali Bhutto’s hand-embroidered and embellished image of the River God Sindhu Mata riding a Manghopir (a type of crocodile indigenous to Sindh); or a boat journey spent listening to the poetic narration of a man and a fsh trapped against their will like in Fazal Rizvi’s work; or being surrounded by installations of lovingly grown living plants, like Omer Wasim; or a series of immersive courses like Shajana Rajani and Zahra Malkani; or a dialogue with trees as Mehreen Murtaza did. The ethics of working with living ecologies and entities is always something to carefully consider. In many of these works, the journey of research and creation is an important segment of the fnished artwork, and it is the duty of the curator to ensure viewers are able to sense and comprehend the broader journey of the work. Ultimately, these artists are from the earth, and they connect with the secrets it holds within and seek to learn from the multiple generations of lives and events it has seen and absorbed and from the legends and myths that continue to pervade the land. They engage with living ecologies and produce works of aliveness that seek deep-rooted connections to counter widespread destructive practices. They look to discover and preserve the teachings of Mother Earth. Honoring old traditions, building dialogues and connections among ourselves and our fellow inhabitants on this earth, putting down roots and preparing for growth. Artists have understood it is time to move past the inexhaustible need for resources, political control and geographical possession and to learn the lessons the earth in its abundant wisdom and experience has to ofer.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

Audio interview with Mehreen Murtaza, April 17, 2022. Audio interview with Hira Nabi, April 25, 2022. Audio interview with Faizan Naveed, May 29, 2022. Audio interview with Fazal Rizvi, April 21, 2022. Audio interview with Saba Khan, June 17, 2022. Audio interview with Zulfkar Ali Bhutto, May 2, 2022.

Bibliography Abbas, Hassan, and Asghar Hussain. 2021. “Opinion: The Diamer-Bhasha Dam Is Neither Green Nor Cheap.” Dawn News, November  10. www.dawn.com/ news/1657198. Animism. Science Direct. www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/animism. Last accessed June 20, 2022. Art Divvy. 2020. “Art Divvy Conversation Series: Sohail Zuberi. Insta-Live Recorded Conversation with the Artist”. Instagram, November 26, 2020. www.instagram. com/tv/CIEA17oHK3M/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link.

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Art Divvy. 2022. “Art Divvy Conversation Series: Omer Wasim, Insta-Live Recorded Conversation with the Artist”. Instagram, April 1, 2022. www.instagram.com/tv/ Cbzsx5uJcvg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link. Azeez, Abdul Halik. “Rio Cinema Is Colombo’s Iconic Movie Theatre at Slave Island”. Discover Asia. https://i-discoverasia.com/slave-island/. Last accessed May 31, 2022. Bhutto, Zulfkar Ali. “Bulhan Nameh”. Website: Zulfkar Ali Bhutto Art. www. zulfkaralibhuttoart.org/bulhan-nameh. Last accessed June 1, 2022. Elliott, David. 2015. “In the Guts of the Whale: Image and Revelation in the Work of Naiza Khan”. In Naiza Khan: Undoing Ongoing. London: Rossi  & Rossi. www.naizakhan.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2015-Undoing-Ongoing.pdf. Gayer, Laurent. 2018. “Of Disposable People and Discarded Things”. Catalogue Essay for Koel Gallery: Karachi. Karachi: Koel Gallery, Karachi, 40–46. “Gilgit-Baltistan: Construction of Diamer Dam to have Devastating Impact on Climate”. 2020. Unrepresented Nations and People’s Organization (UNPO), July 14. https://unpo.org/article/21981. Ginwala, Natasha, and Anushka Rajendran. 2022. “Omer Wasim.” In Language Is Migrant, 100–101. Colombo: Fold Media Collective. https://south-south.art/wpcontent/uploads/2022/02/Language-Is-Migrant-Catalog.pdf. “How Trees Secretly Talk to Each Other in the Forest”. Decoder. www.youtube. com/watch?v=7kHZ0a_6TxY. Last accessed May 31, 2022. Khan, Saba. 2022. “Pak Khawateen Painting Club: Indus Water Machines”. Saba Khan. https://sabakhan.com/section/491211-Pak-Khawateen-Painting-Club.html. Last accessed June 20, 2022. Khan, Zahra. 2019. “Manora Field Notes”. In Manora Field Notes Italy, 15–20. Milan: Foundation Art Divvy & Mousse Publishing. “Mehreen Murtaza”. Manchester Art Gallery. https://manchesterartgallery.org/ exhibitions-and-events/exhibition/mehreen-murtaza/. Last accessed May  31, 2022. Rajani, Shahana, and Zahra Malkani. 2020. “Histories of Disintegration”. Anthropocene Curriculum. www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contributors/shahana-rajaniand-zahra-malkani. Last accessed May 31, 2022. Rajani, Shahana, and Zahra Malkani. 2022. “Notes Toward a Karachi Ecopedagogy”. Anthropocene Curriculum. www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/ contributors/shahana-rajani-and-zahra-malkani. Last accessed May 31, 2022. Salman, Aneel. 2021. “Pakistan’s Looming Water Crisis” East Asia Forum, November 21. www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/11/13/pakistans-looming-water-crisis/. Shah, Zarmeene. 2018. “Archaeologies of Tomorrow: On the Work of Sohail Zuberi” Catalogue Essay for Koel Gallery: Karachi, Karachi, 4–8. Simard, Suzanne. 2018. “Mycorrhizal Networks Facilitate Tree Communication, Learning and Memory”. In Memory and Learning in Plants, Edited by F. Baluska, M. Gagliano, and G. Witzany, 191–213. Cham: Springer International.

23 La escuela del buen vivir/The School of Good Life Counteracting the Imperial Mode of Living Hansel Sato Fredric Jameson once wrote that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Paraphrasing Jameson’s sentence, we could also say that is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of our mode of living in the Global North. Trapped in an endless consumerism, we no longer seem able to imagine a future that might be radically diferent from the present, even after having experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. My question now is, are artists, educators and other cultural producers able to reimagine counter-narratives that help us to create environmental and social awareness and to reshape our modes of living? Let me frst mention some facts: according to a recent study, the pandemic has increased the use of one’s own car, SUV-cars and car purchase intentions (Rokke 2022). Many people just want back to “normal” despite the ecological crisis or increasing global economic inequality. Some “technoptimists” hope that technology will solve climate change, but more just accept the coming collapse and have already resigned. In an opinion essay for the New Yorker titled “What If We Stopped Pretending?” the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote that our damage to the climate is sure to pass a “point of no return”, that climate apocalypse is coming anyway, and we need to admit that we can’t prevent it anymore. He writes: If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope. (Franzen 2019) On the other hand, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in February  2022, has exposed once again the weakness of a development model hooked on fossil fuels, the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions. But is there no alternative? Is predatory capitalism still the only game in town? Francis Fukuyama has talked about the end of history and the triumph of the narrative of the free market. It was basically a correct diagnosis, and we can

DOI:10.4324/9781003204923-26

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see the consequences: increasing socioeconomic inequality worldwide and politicians still trying to ignore the environmental destructive process of neoliberal capitalism. This last stage of capitalism has actually managed to present itself as a quasi-natural order to which there is no alternative. What is to be done? From my perspective as art curator, educator and Global South-migrant living for more than 20 years in Central Europe, this chapter is an attempt to refect on the transformative and emancipatory potential of artistic and pedagogical practices in Vienna that are inspired by the Andean concept of sumak kawsay (translated as “good life” in English, “buen vivir” in Spanish or “suma qamaña” in Aymara). In the frst section of this chapter, I will explain the concept of sumak kawsay and highlight its potential as an alternative to Western consumerism and to what Ulrich Brand and Markuss Wissen have called the “imperial mode of living” (Brand and Wissen 2018, 16). Using their theory I’ll describe artistic and pedagogical practices in Vienna that aim to transform society through the activation of collaborative actions on its environment.

Sumak kawsay Sumak kawsay is a central principal in the ancestral worldview of the indigenous peoples of the Andean region. The concept was widely difused on an international level when it was transformed into a political principle to reshape the state and in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 2000s, during the administrations of Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. Sumak kawsay was used as an alternative development model since the adoption of plurinational constitutions in Ecuadorian Constitution in 2008, and in the Bolivian one in 2009. Both constitutions have granted legal rights to nature, recognize the multi-ethnic nature of the Andean countries and enhance the position of their indigenous peoples. Although several interpretations of this concept can be found, there is a set of characteristics including the following: living in fullness; knowing how to live in harmony with the cycles of the earth and the cosmos; understanding that everything is in fragile balance; and that there is an interconnection among all elements in a whole. Sumak kawsay means knowing how to exist and coexist, that there is no life that is not in relation to all life forms and inanimate matter since humanity itself is nature. As everything is in balance, it is not possible to live well if someone else sufers and lives badly or if nature is deteriorated or destroyed to satisfy human needs. It is about a reciprocal relationship between the three elemental cosmic regions that are equally primordial: hanan pacha is the upper realm, the world above that includes the sun, the sky, the moon, the stars, the planets and constellations and is the home of the gods; kay pacha is the perceptible space inhabited by people, animals and plants and ucu pacha is the inner world, the place from where people originated, the space below which is the realm of the dead and

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of everything that is under the surface of the land or water. There is a variety of connections between this diferent worlds, to give an example: caves, springs and any opening in the earth’s surface are considered as communication channels between the ucu pacha and the kay pacha (Pease 2011, 134). What diferentiates sumak kawsay from Western modern notion of “good living” is the importance of the relationship with natural word. While buen vivir considers human beings to be an integral part of the fabric of nature, European modernity creates a degree of distance through the instrumental rationalism of philosophers like John Locke or Rene Descartes, who conceived of nature as a means to achieve human goals, an external entity to be measured, tamed and exploited. In this sense, European modernity has an anthropocentric approach which stands in clear opposition to the biocentric turn posed by buen vivir. Moreover, buen vivir clashes with the Western conception of endless progress because Pachamama (the deity “World Mother” in Aymara and Quechua cultures) has a limit which prevents boundless development and growth at the cost of others: animals, plants, human beings. Through living sumak kawsay, indigenous communities are able to preserve their unique culture and identity and care for an environment that they know will provide for generations to come. Sumak kawsay reject manipulative and instrumental rationalities and linear understanding of progress. I would like to pause here to mention that sumak kawsay has been an inspiration for me, in my role as art practitioner, curator and co-head of an art and cultural association based in Vienna. The question arises whether sumak kawsay can operate as “antidote” to brutal neoliberal consumerism, at least partially, and if it is possible to translate this alternative model in the Austrian context using artistic and pedagogical means. How to make use of the potential interplay of indigenous knowledge, socially engaged art and activism? I will address this question in the second section of this chapter. Continuing the explanation of buen vivir, according to Eduardo Gudynas, this concept is more than the Western idea of living well, as in all its versions defend the integrity and continuity of Society–Nature, and they include a redefnition of communities that are inhabited by both humans and nonhumans; and signifcantly, none of these proposed alternatives endorse the anxiety for progress of both orthodox and heterodox economists, or the widely shared idea that there are universal models that should or must be followed. (Veltemeyer and Záyago 2021, 206) For Gudynas, with the buen vivir, the subject of well-being is not about the individual but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation. Individual rights to own, to sell, to have, to accumulate are promoted by capitalism. But this alternative model from South America subjugates the rights of the individual to those of collective

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and nature. According to sumak kawsay, humans are never owners of the earth and its resources, they are only passengers. This contradicts the idea of unlimited exploitation of natural resources which has a long history in Latin America. Colonialism with its hegemonic narrative and the patriarchal and racist ideologies inherent to it did not accept alternative ways of living and propagated an alienation from nature and the violent destruction of ancient socioeconomic systems and the environmental balance. This universalizing and still hegemonic narrative fnds its continuation in extractivism, the process of extracting natural resources from the earth to sell on the world market. Mineral and oil exploitation brings actually few economic benefts to the most people in the Global South but leaves huge ecological damage to indigenous communities and produces irreparable scars on our fragile planet. A remarkable fact is that in spite of the growing evidence of its limited contribution to genuine national development, extractivism continues in good health in South America. Exportation of commodities such as oil and coal is increasing its pace, and governments insist on framing it as the motor of economic growth. It is even more surprising that this is continuing in progressive and leftist governments. The problem has to do with the foundation of modern capitalism whose goal is not to take care of nature or to be responsible towards living beings but just to generate profts, as Gudynas argues. Even the more environmentally friendly concept of the “green economy” is guided by capitalism’s growth imperative and commodifcation of nature. The “green economy” suggests that countries need only make their economies “green” to solve ecological problems. The problem with green economics is that it is basically conceived as an “investment plan” and can thus be considered a form of green modernisation. Reducing the levels of consumption is not a priority. On the other hand, it is unlikely that such a green economy can be realised, at least not anytime soon. The necessary rapid increase in efciency is still far beyond human technical capabilities. Finally, Gudynas considering buen vivir as a framework for moving beyond modernity as well, beyond a mode of living that is not ecologically sustainable and normalizes social inequality; in other words, moving beyond the “imperial mode of living”.

Imperial Mode of Living Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have proposed the concept of the “imperial mode of living”. It addresses the fact that capitalism implies asymmetrical development as well as a rapid increase of Western modes of production and living, all over the world. Since the Industrial Revolution and especially since the war of 1939–1945, the logic of liberal markets shapes everyday life that are unconsciously reproduced. Everyday practices, individual and societal orientations, identities created by specifc consumerist habits, all of them depend largely on the unlimited appropriation of resources, the cheap labour from elsewhere and the imperative of eternal economic growth.

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Patterns of imperial consumption have been inherited and are part of the everyday life of the upper and middle classes of the Global North and increasingly in many countries of the Global South. These everyday practices that reproduce unequal social relations along the lines of class, gender and race are supported by state institutions and thus normalized in a way that its imperial character remains hidden because the conditions of commodity production are rendered invisible. To take just one example: Western mainstream media neglects to inform the fact that a majority of the two million child labourers in the cocoa industry in West African farms are doing the type of dangerous work – swinging machetes, carrying heavy loads, spraying pesticides – that international authorities consider the “worst forms of child labor”, according to the US Labor Department. Other fact that remains invisible for most Western consumers is the structural violence against environmental defenders. A recent report from Global Witness revealed that in 2020, at least 331 of them were killed globally, most of them in Latin America. The majority of those deaths were among people who worked in the defence of land and environment rights and the rights of the indigenous peoples (Whoriskey and Siegel 2019). Brand writes that: The imperial mode of living is made possible by the fact that companies and employees in the production process, the public sector, or people as everyday consumers can access cheap resources and cheap labour “elsewhere” – including within the societies of the Global North – and this access is often accompanied by sufering, exploitation, humiliation, and ecological destruction. For some, this creates agency and material prosperity, as well as a (politically fought for and desired) functioning public infrastructure and services. For others, it means a gradual destruction of their livelihoods and an intensifcation of their dependency on others. (Brand 2020) On the other hand, these authors argue that in the Global North, the ecological crisis is primarily perceived as an environmental problem and not as a comprehensive societal crisis product of our imperial mode of life. The dominant narrative is still telling us that the catastrophe is caused by the fact that “humankind” or “human civilization” is ignoring its “natural limits” (Brand and Wissen 2018, 19). But what is the “human civilization”? A discourse that universalizes the responsibility for the ecological crisis hides that its deep roots are to be found in the history of colonial exploitation and environmental depredation perpetrated by Western imperialism in alliance with capitalism.

From the Imperial Mode of Living Towards a Good Life for All If you were in charge of an art space placed in a historical community building in Vienna and you would like to render visible the “imperial mode of

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living” and at the same time, propose new models of human–nature relations through artistic and pedagogical means, what would you do? This question was the starting point which initiated La escuela del buen vivir/The school of good life. The project was started in March 2022 in the municipal housing project Sandleitenhof and is organized and carried out by the Viennese culture association SOHO in Ottakring, which I co-direct. La escuela del buen vivir is not a school in the traditional sense of the word but a community-based art initiative that works at the interface between art and education. The school is an open space for free and critical learning through making, with the means of art. We have invited local and international artists, educators, collectives, activists and other cultural producers to develop several community-based projects and workshops to refect on the emancipatory potential of the notion of buen vivir. Before I start describing the conceptual basis of La escuela del buen vivir, it is important to mention, that it is not our intention to romanticize sumak kawsay or indigenous life. We just think that some central ideas of buen vivir have the potential to grow into an emancipatory paradigm in Europe. After all, we are just searching for alternatives to repair disrupted social bonds and to survive as human species in an endangered world. The school aims to change the way we think about the relation between humans and nature and questions the dominant logic of Western consumerism, which is accelerating ecological degradation and global social inequality. La escuela del buen vivir puts an emphasis on the fact that socio-ecological transformation has to address the imperial mode of living at every level. Our long-term goal is to politicise everyday life through critical thinking, to interfere with hegemonic narratives and to render visible colonial forms of power. Simply put, it is about developing critical consciousness and imagine possible modes of actions through artistic practices related to already described basic principles of buen vivir, such as reciprocity or relationality. In general, we want to establish a public discussion about what it means to live together and learn to trust again in our ability to shape the future beyond mistrust and discomfort. We aim to promote alliances across people with diferent backgrounds and lifestyles through open debate and collaboration. The goal is to become aware of our privileges and responsibilities towards people and nature and to start acting to transform society – beginning with changing our imperial mode of living. How can we oppose the imperial mode of living and the structures that underpin and consolidate it? What is meant by good living? Good for whom? And what can we do as responsible citizens living in the Global North?

Inspirations Our project fnds inspiration in pedagogical programmes undertaken by contemporary artists and educators in recent decades, especially in Latin America, where art and alternative pedagogy shared a project in empowering marginalized groups to resist the abuse of power. In this region of the

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Global South, there are innumerable projects related to the education of indigenous people such as the Universidad de la Tierra of the Zapatistas in Mexico, as well as those focused on the relation between art and politics like the Catedra de Arte de Conducta in Havana created by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. At the same time, there are several traditions and theories of popular education and critical pedagogy that inform our practice, but we lean on decolonizing, migrant-positioned and gender-critical approaches. These perspectives consider knowledge as an instrument for social transformation in immigration societies, encourages an open discussion about the hidden structures of patriarchy and neocolonialism, aims to overcome knowledge hierarchies and fade the line between teacher and student as everyone learns alongside each other. These approaches include theoretical and practical work of Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Maria do Mar Castro Varela, bell hooks, Paul Mecheril, Carmen Mörsch, Elke Krasny, Luis Camnitzer, Donna Haraway, Ulrich Brand, Markuss Wissen, I.L.A. collective or maiz (an independent organization by and for migrant women) and trafo.k. Like these artists, educators, collectives and theoreticians, the escuela del buen vivir considers knowledge as a praxis.

Where? La escuela del buen vivir takes place in SOHO STUDIOS, the new art spaces of art association SOHO in Ottakring. Our galleries are located in the municipal housing Sandleitenhof with an exhibition and event room (590 m²) and a shared room in the former cinema (80 m2). The public space in Sandleitenhof is another possible “stage” to perform our programme. Sandleitenhof is located on the northwestern edge of Ottakring and was erected in fve construction phases between 1924 and 1929. With 1,587 apartments and over 4,000 residents (originally 5,000), it is the largest community building from the period of “Red Vienna”, which was characterized by signifcant investment in public housing.1 Modern facilities were associated with the conception of the Sandleitenhof: 58 workshops; 75 shops, including a cofee house, a post ofce and a pharmacy; a public library; a 600-person cinema and theatre hall; an outdoor swimming pool; as well as one of the frst Montessori kindergartens in Vienna. There are far fewer small shops in operation today than in the 1930s, and they just continue to disappear while big shopping centres are fourishing in the immediate vicinity. On the other hand, the generous open spaces and gardens in this community building are usually empty of people. It is rare to see children or young people playing on the streets or in the courtyards because many recreational activities in public space have been prohibited. It is a bizarre situation: you have a beautiful Baroque and Jugendstil architecture, a model community building for democratic socialism, for the working class, but nowadays you don’t see people using its well-designed public space. You have the “hardware”, but the “software” is missing.

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For Whom? With Whom? The School of Good Life is open to everyone interested, but we set a focus on Sandleitenhof residents. What is their educational, socioeconomic and cultural background? According to the Austrian magazine Profle, only a small percent of Gemeindebau (the German word for municipal housing) residents have a high school diploma and their unemployment rate is usually twice as high as the average in Vienna. In general, around 60% have a background of migration (Neuhold 2018). With the opening of the Viennese community housing for immigrant families in 2006, solidarity among the Austrian residents diminished and right-wing tendencies in their voting behaviour increased. At the same time, the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) has not missed an opportunity to campaign against migrants. “No more Muslims in community buildings” is one of its demands. The discriminatory discourse of right-wing conservatives and right-wing extremists in Austria can also be better understood through the concept of the “imperial mode of living”. This right-wing parties take advantage of the growing social and economic insecurity, exploits the fear of those who feel their lifestyle threatened and promise ethnic Austrians to defend their imperial mode of living by excluding ethnic minorities and focusing primarily on migration issues. Many participants and visitors of la escuela del buen vivir are people with an open-minded approach to the topic of migration or environmental issues. Our main audience is made up of artists and other cultural producers, and we work as well with community leaders and residents with migrant background; however, we want to attract another kind of public, for example, opponents of immigration. Our aim is to bring people with very diferent backgrounds together and refect with them root causes of massive global migration, economic inequality and environmental degradation. The rightwing party voters I could talked with use to complain about the “lazy and noisy foreigners” that allegedly will never integrate into “Austrian culture” or share our “Western values”. To approach them is a real challenge. Many of these neighbours vote for conservative or right-wing populist parties that aim to implement a neoliberal agenda based on an (alleged) meritocracy and reduction in government spending although themselves earn a precarious living, are unemployed or have to rely on government welfare benefts. Is it worth having a conversation with them about the Global North’s imperial modes of living and production? Or that full- or long-term employment is impossible under such a system, even in a rich European country, as Richard Sennett points out? (Sennett 1998). Can we discuss these topics so people will listen? How should we communicate with them? There are some good examples that show that communication is possible: for example during our last biennial art festival we carried out a project dealing with the topic of migration, employment and food that actually reached hundreds of Austrian neighbours from Sandleiten and made it possible – at least for some of them – to have a “frst contact” with refugees and to even talk with

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Figure 23.1 The artistic intervention A Wiener Halal, the mobile Halal Sausage Stand took place within the framework of the festival SOHO in Ottakring in 2016. It unites the diversity of food traditions of Vienna and deals with the denied right to work for asylum seekers in Austria. Source: Photo by Mehmet Emir.

them. The project’s name was “A Wiener Halal – the mobile Halal Sausage Stand”. Refugees designed a sausage stand and took over the sale of the sausages for additional income. The project was developed in cooperation with Zuzana Ernst, Georg Sampl, Brunnenpassage and the Františeks Praktikanten association. Part of the programme comprised outdoor discussions, halal and vegan sausage tastings, and the halal rap song from the singer EsRap. Austria’s sausage tradition was integrated with its long history of immigration. The goal behind our eforts was to enhance mutual understanding and make the diversity of Vienna visible. As an artistic intervention, it also referred to the right to work that is denied for the newly arrived. “A Wiener Halal” gave us hope that escuela del buen vivir can reach many Sandleiten neighbours and help to dismantle prejudices against people with diferent ethnical or cultural backgrounds. The most important aspect is the open debate. We are convinced that there is value in a healthy exchange of ideas even with those with whom we passionately disagree. Participants should be prompted to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship or moral sanction, provided that these opinions are not harmful, discriminatory or threatening to others. Respect and the recognition of the Otherness of another are a priority.

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How? The invited artist, art educators and other cultural producers are developing collective projects engaged in social and civic refection inspired by strategies and methods borrowed from critical, decolonial and feminist pedagogies. These pedagogies consider knowledge to be socially and historically constructed and seek to identify and displace rigid or obsolete social norms. They take into account personal experience and biographical background of participants in the learning process. They respect each other’s point of view and help to develop skills and knowledge that are not just restricted to a classroom. They encourage and support social and political activism, but its emphasis is less on the act of protest – which is, of course, very important – than on becoming a network for the participation of others. These pedagogies seek to create more democratic spaces by sharing responsibility for developing the structure and content of the lessons in collaboration and dialogue with the teacher and other students. They support the practical use of theory while promoting the importance of structural change within the institutional hierarchy in Western academia. The escuela doesn’t have permanent classrooms, a regular curriculum or a specifc visitor profle. There are open debates, a reading room, interdisciplinary workshops, communal tea making, interventions and performances in open space, walks, dialogical art guides, community gardening and so on. Artists and educators are already collaborating with local groups and (cultural) institutions, community workers, youth centres, kindergartens, schools, local politicians, neighbourhood residents and a pensioners’ club. Additionally, the project managers have invited other experts like historians or sociologists to provide the participants with information that could be useful for their current artistic projects. The production of a dynamic and dialogical experience for participants is running in parallel with the production of artistic forms. The artistic results have diferent complexity levels according to the context, theme and participants’ know-how. The material or immaterial outputs and the documentation of their elaboration process are shown regularly in SOHO Studios, in public space and on our website. To extend the activities of escuela del buen vivir, we prompt project managers and participants to act beyond the borders of Sandleitenhof. It could be a farm, a butchery, a fabric, a grocery store, the immigration and register ofce of Vienna . . . In fact, we have already realized a sustainability workshop and participative performances in a grocery store. It happened in the big supermarket Interspar during our last biennial festival. Under the guidance of the white-robed artist duo honey & bunny, people sorted goods, removing products from their usual locations and placing them on new shelves. The organizing system was based on the idea of sustainability: articles were arranged according to the water consumed, transport routes taken and fairness in their production process. Visitor participation was spontaneous, but the artist duo worked as well with school groups who

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scheduled visits to the project. The action resulted in the creation of a new “sustainability shelf” in the supermarket. Finally, escuela del buen vivir will also include research networks cooperating with several cultural institutions and other actors (museums, universities, schools, self-organized collectives, activists, etc.) at national and international level. The frst international conference and workshop on the topic buen vivir has already taken place. In October 2021, we invited Peruvian cultural producers to talk about the projects they have developed for Pallay Pampa, an exhibition that took place between September and December 2021, in the ifa-Gallery Berlin. The show was curated by Lizet Díaz Machuca. A roundtable was part of the programme as well. The exhibition was promoted by ifa-Gallery and the Berlinartweek in this way: Pallay Pampa is a Quechua expression which describes the diferent areas of weave on Andean textiles: Pallay symbolises what is said, while Pampa symbolises the unsaid. This also connotes freedom . . . The exhibition brings together artists and interdisciplinary researchers from Peru to refect critically on the cultural contributions by Andean communities in the current context, given the many consequences of globalization and colonization. The commissioned works encompass aspects such as community cooperation, teaching and nature. One part of the show focuses on traditional Andean textile technology. We likewise learn about the work of a shaman who lives in the city; the multidimensionality of Andean thought and poetry; potato growing and the right to eat; or water harvesting as a sustainable co-creation between ecosystem and individual. (Berlinartweek, n.d.)

Indigenous Knowledge In a roundtable discussion that took place at SOHO Studios we talked about Pallay Pampa with the curator Díaz Machuca and her project partner, the artist Emilio Santisteban. Their aim was to show how indigenous knowledge has to be addressed not simply through economic, instrumental and rational approaches but through the aesthetic, emancipatory and imaginative acts that defne many contemporary art practices. As Lizet and Emilio point out, indigenous knowledge is nothing else other than creating bonds as part of a social dynamic that modifes afective, economical and social structures. Thus, knowledge is not something that individuals own or have; it’s rather the connective tissue that binds a community. Moreover, to be part of a community means to take care of the others including animals, plants, soil, water . . . In traditional Andean economy, for example, “breeding and nurturing” replace the concept of “producing” (Van Kessel and Salas 2002, 64).

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On the other hand, for indigenous people, the creation of aesthetic forms of expression is always the result of a collective process embedded in tradition. This idea clashes with the modern Western model of individual “genius” or “creator”, a kind of a miniature God – usually a male – that has to be original and reinvent the art world again and again. In contemporary art schools in Lima and Vienna, this individualistic art paradigm is still learned and reproduced. In this sense the project aims to reshape how students work, train, trade, collaborate, think of themselves and about the relationship between art, tradition and craft.

Conclusion The frst step towards change is awareness. The escuela del buen vivir aims to raise consciousness about the environmental crisis and global social inequality, both result of our imperial mode of living. This artistic and educational project proposes alternative models of human–nature coexistence based on collaborative work and traditional knowledge in a local context. We are aware that only together we can overcome global ecological crisis, but frst we have to clarify what we mean when we say “we”; it means to think about the millions of other humans beings who have been rendered invisible because of their nation, race, gender, class or any other category of discrimination. And to think that animals, plants air, water and earth are also part of this “we”. All this implies that we have to be aware of our privileges as Global North citizens, as human beings and rethink the colonial dominant narrative we have internalized. What stories have we been told? Which sources do we have access to? What perspectives do we not know? And how do we deal with our own (learned) ignorance? Gayatri Spivak has written of “unlearning one’s privileges as one’s loss” (Landry and Maclean 1996, 4). The way to achieve this is by working together through one’s beliefs, biases and preconceptions and understanding how they arose and became naturalized. Finally, the concept of buen vivir is not a naive dogma of salvation; we are aware of the specifc context in which it could be applied; however, it encourages us to question the uncontested dogmas of modernization in a more radical manner and to imagine a better future.

Note 1 It is remarkable that even to this day around 60% of Vienna inhabitants live in co-ops, government-owned or -subsidised housing built around the nucleus of the 1920s system.

Bibliography Berlinartweek. n.d. “Pallay Pampa. Andine Kreuzungen.” https://berlinartweek.de/ event/pallay-pampa. Last accessed January 9, 2021.

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Brand, Ulrich. 2020. “Global Solidarity as a Practical Critique of the Imperial Mode of Living.” Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, February 17. www.rosalux.de/en/news/ id/41635/global-solidarity-as-a-practical-critique-of-the-imperial-mode-of-living. Brand, Ulrich, and Markus Wissen. 2018. The Limits to Capitalist Nature: Theorizing and Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living. London; New York: Rowman & Littlefeld. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Franzen, Jonathan. 2019. “What If We Stopped Pretending.” The New Yorker, September 8. www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stoppedpretending. I.L.A. Ed. 2019. At the Expense of Others? How the Imperial Mode of Living Prevents a Good Life for All. Munich: Oekom. Landry, Donna, and Gerald M. MacLean. Eds. 1996. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge. Neuhold, Clemens. 2018. “Wer wohnt eigentlich im Gemeindebau.” Profl, December 12, 2018. www.profl.at/oesterreich/wien-wer-wohnt-eigentlich-im-gemeindebau/ 400878086. Pease, Franklin. 2011. The Incas. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontifcia Universidad Católica del Perú. Rokke, Nils. 2022. “SUV Sales Record Highlights Climate Challenge Ahead.” Forbes, February 14. www.forbes.com/sites/nilsrokke/2022/02/14/suv-sales-recordhighlights-climate-challenge-ahead/? Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. London; New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Van Kessel, Juan, and Porfrio Enriquez Salas. 2002. Señas y señaleros de la santa tierra: agronomía andina. Quito/Iquique: Abya-Yala/IECTA. Veltemeyer, Henry, and Edgard Záyago Lau. Eds. 2021. Buen Vivir and the Challenges to Capitalism in Latin America. London; New York: Routledge. Whoriskey, Peter, and Rachel Siegel. 2019. “Cocoa’s Child Laborers.” Washington Post, June  5, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/ hershey-nestle-mars-chocolate-child-labor-west-africa/. Last accessed December  10, 2022.

Index

ableism 153, 179 abortion 38 Abse Gogarty, Larne 213 Academy Gardens 110 ACE see Arts Council England Acheson, Donald 44–5 active micropolitics 94–106; concept of 101–3; see also laboratory of care activism 1–2, 19–21, 108–9, 117, 126, 153–68, 185–6, 193, 263; forms of care in 153–68 Adler, Dan 126 ‘Administration of Aesthetics’ 227 Adorno, Theodor 141 aesthesia 94, 97, 100 aesthetics of politics 232–5 afective turn 103–4 afectivity 94–106; as curatorial thinking tool 103–5; see also laboratory of care AFK spaces see away-from-keyboard spaces aftercare 117–30; see also work of transmission agonistic verticality 19 Ahmed, Sara 214 Ahmed, Syma 155 Akadimia Platonos 107–8 Akadimia Platonos Jungle 111, 114 Akomolafe, Bayo 139 Al-Madhafah 216–19 Aldir Blanc Law 75–6 Alexander, Karen 32 aliveness 269–79; see also curating aliveness Almeida, Marilea 75 alterity 19–20 Amazon 90, 184 Amazons 16

‘An Apprenticeship in Queer’ 127 Anastasopoulos, Nikos 111 ancestral commons 111 Angelucci, Malcolm 202–3 Anim-Addo, Joan 34 Animism 269 annihilation 138 anonymity 57, 86, 227 Anthropocene 39, 107, 141, 147–8, 248 anti-capitalism 4, 8 anti-memorialisation 125–8 anti-militarism 117 Anti-Oedipus 97 anti-racism 8, 213 anti-sexism 8 anti-war movements 88 Anzaldúa, Gloria 134 apathy 94 Applin, Jo 120 Aranda, Julieta 190 Araucaria dedication 113–15 Archaeologies of Tomorrow 20 archival assemblage 117–19 archival sprawl 119–21 Archive of Encounters 193 Archive Fever 122 archive of queer nursing fantasies 241 archives of Life Support initiative 162–4 aromatherapy 38 art – beauty 226–7 art-life fusionism 249 artist as archaeologist 270–2 Artist at Work 227 artivism 71–2, 74, 119 Arts Council England 46–7, 50–2, 62 ‘Arts Council’s Strategic Plan’ 46 art’s footprint 113

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‘Arts in Health Medical Review’ 46, 50 Arts, Health, Wellbeing Beyond the Millennium 50 Arze, Silva 73 As We Grow Older 124–5 assemblage against memorialisation 125–8 Athanasiou, Athena 137 Athenian ecofeminism 109–10 Athens Biennale 108–9 attending to the sacred 131–40 attention economy 171–2 Attia, Kader 14, 17 attunement 204, 206 Audience Agency 62 audience on social media 86 Autograph 53 autonomy 16, 18, 39, 198, 202 Avtonomi Akadimia 107–16; Araucaria 113–15; art’s footprint 113; Athenian ecofeminism 109–10; cure and care become one 115–16; from garden to jungle 110–12; itinerant education 108–9 away-from-keyboard spaces 64, 83–93; and social media compared 84–91 Babić, Milijana 229 back gallery (Bruxas) 26–8 Bakhtin, Mikhail 22–3 Balzer, David 83–4, 91 BAME artists 62 Barad, Karen 204–5 Baraitser, Lisa 247 Baraka, Rachel 34 Barbican Centre 52 Barclay, Kate 178–9 Barokka, Khairani 178 BBK see Berufsverbund Bildender Künstler bearing witness 278 Beauchamp, Toby 66 beautifcation 224–36 becoming diferent 178–80 Becoming Feminist 126 Beech, David 164 Being Human 176–8 Benjamin, Ruha 66 Benjamin, Walter 141, 145 bergman, carla 96, 103–5 Berry, Francesca 120 Berufsverbund Bildender Künstler 186–7

Bews, Sam 203 Beyoncé 26 Bhattacharya, Tithi 211–12 Bhattacharyya, Gargi 214 Bhutto, Zulfkar Ali 277–8 Big Joanie 26 binarism 14–15 binary parenting 239 binary thinking 94, 96 Biodanza 98 biomaterial realities 142 biomythology 66–7 Birschitzky, Laura 244 Bishnoi people 241 Bishop, Claire 216 Bivona, Kristina 26–7, 29 Black experiences 79 Black, Kris 164 Black Lives Matter 1, 42, 52–3, 265 Black n’ Nappy 28 Black Rock Inc. 109–10 Black surveillance studies 66 Black trans* archive 56–70 blackness 25–6 Blair, Tony 48 Blau, Mael 244 Blunkett, David 44 body as framework 24 Bolsonaro, Jair 136 bonding through solidarity 19–21 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 163 Bourriaud, Nicolas 98–9 Bous, Martin 239, 243 Bovenschen, Silvia 265 Boyd, Rachel 162 Braidotti, Rosi 63 Brathwaite-Shirley, Danielle 56–70 Brand, Ulrich 281, 283–4, 286 Brandl, Katharina 244 Brasó, Emma 177 Brett, Guy 119 Breuer, Marcia 186 Briggs, Laura 218 Broder, Melissa 172 Browne, Simon 66 Bruguera, Tania 286 Bruxas Bruxas Arts Collective 19–30 Buden, Boris 235 Buhr, Elke 187 Bulhan Nameh 277 Bunting-Branch, Anna 264 ‘Bureau of Care’ 6

Index Burnham, Andy 47 Burns Owens Partnership 45 Burr, J.A. 46 Business as Usual 165 Butler, Olivia 63 Buurman, Nanne 172, 185 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 123 Campbell, Thalia 120 Candy at Einsteins 158 Capitalocene 19, 22, 99 Caramena, Teresa Cuauhtémoc 72–3 care beyond curation 31–41 care for caregivers 183–96; care as model 190–3; curatorial care 184–7; economy of invisible hands 183–4; M.1 Hohenlockstedt 187–90; sociopolitical practice 193–4 Care Collective 53 care crisis 183–96; see also care for caregivers care ethics 148, 198–200 care feminism 142–3 Care For Caregivers 187–90 Care Force 5 ‘Care Manifesto’ 53 care as model 190–3 Care and Repair 5 Care Symposium 198–203 ‘care washing’ 2–3 care-fully curated archives 122–5 Care/Contagion/Community – Self & Other 53 CareNetwork 200–1 caring activism 2–3 ‘caring classes’ 2 ‘Caring for Confict’ 5 caring curating 11–150; Avtonomi Akadimia 107–16; care beyond curation 31–41; care, thought, being 141–50; caring for mourning 131–40; caring for ‘range-ful’ identities 56–70; curatorial labour 13–18; decolonial/heritage practices 71–82; ‘Get Bodied’ 19–30; laboratory of care 94–106; and social media 83–93; transcultural care 42–55; work of transmission 117–30 caring diferently 178–80 caring infrastructures 190–3 caring for ‘range-ful’ identities 56–70 caring for’range-ful’ identities; creativity in concealment 65–7;

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extractive operations of segmentation 67; including ceremony 56–7; proBlack, pro-trans archive 58–61; rangeful, glitching identities 63–5; segmentation of desire 61–3 carnival 22, 111 Cartesian worldview 99–100 cassandra 16 Cassola, Nuno 138 Cavarero, Adriana 224, 230, 232 ceremonial curation 24 ceremonies 56–7 Césaire, Aimé 17 changing awareness 291 Chango Lopez, Henry 210, 212, 220 Chant Down Greenham 126 Charitable Funds Research Committee 50 Chelsea Flower Show 38 Chelsea and Westminster Hospital 50 Chen, Lena 247, 250, 256 chestfeeding 237–8, 241; see also male lactation Cheval, Florence 6 Chidgey, Red 126 Child, Danielle 173 child prostitution 109 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 172 Cimon and Pero 241 ‘CIS CITY’ 61 civil rights movements 88 Clark, Lygia 120 class bias 3 climate apocalypse 280 closing reception (Bruxas) 28 CND see Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament cogito 141, 143, 149; see also thought and being Cohen, Mathilde 238–9 Cold War 117, 277 collaborating on unequal terms 253–4 collaborative listening 204–6 collective curation 226–9 Colomo, Alba 176 colonial/capitalistic unconscious 101 colonialism 4–5 colour-blind policy 48 Commission of Truth 133 commodifcation 22 commons as landscape 24 Communards 16 community museums in practice 73–9

296

Index

composting 34–6, 39 ‘condensed curation’ 32 Congado celebration 78 ‘Constellation of Science’ 115 constellations 144–5 containment 154 ‘Contemporary Witch, The’ 265 contested terrain 184–7 contextualisation 143 conversations with trees 272–4 Cook, Alice 123 cooling of 179 coping 19 coping to curiosity 169–82; caring diferently 178–80; developing relational networks 177–8; disidentifcation 172–3; giving it time 175–7; selfe care 171–2; unlearning habits of care 173–5 Corneous Stories 232 corporeal reason 103–4 corporeality 100, 103 Correa, Rafael 281 counter-hegemonic memory 73 counteracting imperialism 280–92; changing awareness 291; for/with whom? 287–8; how? 289–90; imperial mode of living 283–4; indigenous knowledge 290–1; inspirations 285–6; living good life 284–5; sumak kawsay 281–3; where is school for good life? 286 Coven 262–3 COVID-19 pandemic 1–2, 14, 17, 39–40, 42, 52–3, 71–3, 78, 89–90, 94, 111, 116, 119, 153, 178–9, 183–4, 188, 197–8, 204–6, 210, 213–15, 231, 254–6, 280 Craig, Lauren 31–41, 53 Creating Dangerously 162 creativity in concealment 65–7 criminalisation of ecocide 115–16 crip time 178 crisis of curating 2–3 crisis for water 275–7 Critical Care 5 critical forms of inversion 22 cross-pollination 36 Cruzen, Paul J. 147 ‘Cryingforyourgender’ 63 cuidados 139 cultivating care ethics 197–208; aesthetic value 197–8; care ethics

198–200; Care Symposium 200–3; collaborative listening 204–6; disinhabituated engagement 206–7; ReStorying 203–4 cultural care diversity 42–55 cultural diversity 46 cultural feminism 32 cultural sector (UK) 43–55; see also transcultural care culturally congruent care 43–5 cultures of outsourcing 209–23 curanderismo 20 ‘Curat’ 246–58; see also non-idealised concept of care curating against the care crisis 183–96; see also care for caregivers curating aliveness 269–79; aliveness in historic structures 274–5; artist as archaeologist 270–2; bearing witness 278; conversations with trees 272–4; crisis for water 275–7 curating becomes curing 107–16; see also Avtonomi Akadimia curating care 151–292; care for caregivers 183–96; cultivating care ethics 197–208; cultures of outsourcing 209–23; ‘Curat’ 246–58; curating aliveness 269–79; curating queer nursing 237–45; forms of care in art/activism 153–68; from coping to curious 169–82; La escuela del buen viver 280–92; platform of care 224–36; Spellbound 259–68 ‘Curating, Care, Community’ 34 curating a collective body 250–1 Curating Conversations 32 curating wounded planet 148–9 Curationism 83–4 curatorial care 184–7 curatorial consciousness raising 141–50 curatorial disruption 200, 242 curatorial labour 13–18; see also decolonial feminism curatorial modes of production 226–9 curatorial thinking tools 103–5 curatorial worries on queer nursing 241–2 cyberfeminism 64–5 da Silva, Denise Ferreira 23, 34, 63 daily performance (Bruxas) 25–6 ‘Dark Matter’ 66 Dark Matter 84

Index Dassler, Tim 232 Davis, Kate 154 de Souza, Pauline 34 Death of Nature 147 debasement 20–1 Debord, Guy 22 decolonial feminism 13–18; low economy 15–16; practising freedom 14–15; refuges/sanctuaries 16–17; reparations 17–18 decolonial turn 72 decolonial/heritage practices 71–82; Black experiences 79; community museums in practice 74–9 decolonising imagination 66 Deep Listening 98 defning ‘care’ 1–10 del Pino, Ponciano 132 Deleuze, Gilles 22, 97, 199 Delivering Race Equality in Mental Health Care 48–9 democratic phantasm 233 demoralisation 88 Department of Culture, Media and Sport 51–2 Department of Health and Social Care (UK) 44, 47, 50–1 depression 94 Derrida, Jacques 122 Descartes, René 98, 141, 143–4, 282 destruction 17 Deutsch, Katrin 244 Dia Art Foundation 32 Díaz Machuca, Lizet 290 digital technologies (Brazil) 71–82; see also decolonial/heritage practices Dimitrakaki, Angela 158 disability 42–3, 47, 52–3, 179 Disability Justice Movement 219 Discourse 144 discrimination 7, 42 disempowerment 19 disidentifcation 172–3 disinformation 94 disinhabituated engagement 206–7 disruption 200, 242 dissenting-within 255 distortion 61, 95 diversity 62 DIY cultural ethos 24 dOCUMENTA (13) 172 Dodd, Jocelyn 51 doing nothing 199

297

Dona Marta 78 Doors 115 Dorfmüller, Claudia 192 dos Santos Rosa, Procópia 74–9 Dowling, Emma 184 Down to Earth 113 dream narratives 123 Dreaming the Dark 265 Drucker, Peter F. 209 drug trafcking 138 dualism 114 duality 26 due care 204 Dust 122 duty of care 3 dysphoria 63 Dystopia, Utopia, Heterotopia 13 Džuverovíc, Lina 209, 215 ecocide 39, 148 ecofeminism 110, 113–14, 116 ecogenicide 137 economy of invisible hands 183–4 ecopolitical respite 19 Eden Project 37 Edwin W. Zoller Gallery 24 Ehrenreich, Barbara 265 El Juego community 115 El Solh, Aino 247, 251 emancipation 79, 172, 231 embodied reality 56, 99, 198 embodiment of Bruxas 24; body as framework 24; ceremonial curation 24; commons as landscape 24 Emerson, Jill 188 Emin, Tracey 248 emissions 113 emojis 90 empathic interconnectedness 105 engaging with ecologies 269–79; see also curating aliveness English, Deirdre 265 ‘Enhancing the Healing Environment Programme’ 50 Enlightenment 63, 99, 143, 146–7 Enlightenment Man 146–8 Environments of Care Group 6 epistemicide 73 equilibrium 101 equinox rituals 110 Equity and Excellence 44 ‘erotic whole self’ 19–20 ethical cultural memory 33–4

298

Index

Ethics 103–4 ethos of Bruxas 21–2 Ettinger, Bracha 247 Everyday Strangers Against Isolation 189 evolution of la escuela 289–90 Ewig, Christina 256 ex-hibiting 95 expanding collective body 251–3 expectations 175–7 experiental curation 95 experimental show (Bruxas) 24–8; participatory performance 25–8; visual display 24–5 exploitation 88, 94, 138, 173, 226 extending reciprocal relations 249–50 exteriority 94 Externally Yours 54 extra-personal experience 101 extractive operations of segmentation 67 extractivism 283 exvocation 41 Facebook 75–6, 84–90 fallacy of segmented desires 62 fantasies of queer nursing 241 fascism 235, 241–2 FDRG see Feminist Duration Reading Group Federici, Silvia 21, 86–91, 110, 183, 212–14, 264, 266 feeling with bodies 242–4 feminised labour 171–2 feminism 19–22, 212–14 Feminist Archive South 120, 122 Feminist Duration Reading Group 177–8 feminist organising 256 Ferre, Myra Marx 256 Ferreiro, Jordi 175 Field 32–3, 40 Figner, Vera 112 fguration 63 flming queer nursing 239–41 ‘Find Love Through What You Like’ 90 Fink, Xenia 256 Fitz, Angelika 5 ‘Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ 125 foral donation 37 Fokianaki, iLiana 6 Forde, Jenna Lee 262 formation of Bruxas 19–21; bonding through solidarity 19–21

forms of care in art 153–68; archives 162–4; infrastructure of Life Support initiative 164–6; institutions 154–8; practices of care 158–62 Fortune Global 500 183–4 Foucault, Michel 170, 173, 179 Fournier, Lauren 171–2 Fowle, Kate 185 ‘Fragments of Repair’ 17 Fragnito, Maddelena 212 Francois, Janine 34, 53–4 Franzen, Jonathan 280 Fraser, Nancy 183, 209–10 Freire, Paulo 286 Freud, Sigmund 125 Fukuyama, Francis 280–1 Furter, Loraine 6 Gadap Sessions 276 Gaia theory 38, 110, 113 Gallop, Jane 173 Gandhi, Nandita 156 garden to jungle 110–12 Gausden, Caroline 155–7, 159–60, 163, 165–6 Geiβler, Heike 90 gender bias 3 gender ideology 57 gendered relations 244–5 ‘GENDERS: Shaping and Breaking the Binary’ 57 Gerrish, Kate 49 ‘Get Bodied’ 19–30; see also inverting the witch Getting Rid of Ourselves 177 GHSA see Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive Giles, Fiona 237 Giménez, Martha 157 giving water 15–16 Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive 154 Glasgow Women’s Library 153–8, 163–6 Glissant, Édouard 34 ‘glitch’ 23 Glitch Feminism 64–5, 84 glitching identities 63–5; see also ‘range-ful’ identities global racism 52–3 Global Stafroom, The 210, 212, 219 Global Witness 284 globalisation 21 Gloria Glam 229

Index Goldie, Caroline 125 Goldsmiths University 52 Graeber, David 1–2 Grafenauer, Petja 224–5, 232–5 Grand Domestic Revolution 174, 178 grand gesture 198 grand jeté 203 Graw, Isabelle 171 Graziano, Valeria 5 green economy 283 green washing 2 Greenham Common 117–30, 162; see also work of transmission Greenham Common Quilt 127 Greenham Granny 125 Greenham Quilt 125–8 Greenham Women Everywhere 127, 1213 Gregg, Melissa 103 grimoires 261 Guardian 123–4 Guattari, Félix 97, 101, 199 Gudynas, Eduardo 282–3 Guest, Carly 126 Gunnlaugsdóttir, Andrea 239–40, 243 GWL see Glasgow Women’s Library habits of care 173–5 Habits of Care 52 habituated hierarchies 201 Hachenberg, Antje 192 Hacking, Sue 50 Haj Abdulla, Ibrahim Muhammad 217 Hall, Stuart 65, 95–7 Hanington, Jack 156 happiness industry 104 Haraway, Donna 286 Hardt, Michael 103–4 Harkema, Lindsay 6 Harpers & Queen 163 Harrison, Margaret 117 Hartman, Saidiya 13 hate speech 91 Hayashi, Arawana 98 Health 21 48 Health, Work and Well-being Caring 44 Hedva, Johanna 179, 219 Heliotrope 33 ‘Heritage in Hospitals’ 51 heteronormative power structures 87–8 Hewitt, Patricia 44 hierarchy of care 202 Higgins, Polly 39

299

Hilal, Sandi 216–19 Hill Collins, Patricia 237 historic structures and aliveness 274–5 Hochschild, Arlie 169 holistic mentoring 33 Honorato, Cayo 62 hooks, bell 83, 88, 91, 247, 286 Hope, Sophie 210 Hospital Rooms 15 hostile environments 16–17 housework on social media 86–90 Housing Association Charitable Trust 124 ‘How Do We Keep Going?’ 174 How to Love a Tree 272–3 How You Will Conduct Yourself 272 Hudson, Kat 127 Hughes, Michael M. 264–5 Humala, Ollanta 132 human trafcking 85 Humare Siyal Rishte 276 Hundreds of Birds Killed 271 Hyldig Dal, Mikala 247, 249–50, 252 hyper-individualism 94, 96, 142 Iaía Procópia Museum 74–9 IBRAM (Brazilian Institute of Museums)78 identity politics 2 identity-based segmentation 56–7, 62 If You Lived Here . . . 154, 156, 160–2 Iguíñiz, Natalia 132 Illimine Collective 202, 206 imagination 13 imitation of caring 232–4 imperial mode of living 281, 283–5 Imperial War Museum 120, 122 imperialism 4–5, 280–92 in media res 206 In Our Hands, Greenham 126 in-corpo-rating 100 in-habiting 95 inclination 229–32 inclinations in research 229–32 including ceremony 56–7 inclusion of Black experiences 79 Independence, Well-being and Choice 44–5 Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health 44–5 Independent Workers of Great Britain 210, 213 indigenous knowledge 138, 290–1

300

Index

individualism 144 information literacy 74 infrastructure of Life Support initiative 164–6 inspirations 285–6 Instagram 84, 90 institutions of care 154–8 inter-relationality 94 interdependence 53 intersectional feminisms 177–8 ‘Intersections of Care’ 5–6 intervulnerability 238 intuition 19–20 inversion 22–3 inverting the witch 19–30; embodiment 24; ethos 21–2; formation 19–21; refection 29; the show 24–8; theoretical underpinnings 22–3 invisible hands 183–4 invocation 41 involution 112 It Was a Tree of Life 275 itinerant education 108–9 IWGB see Independent Workers of Great Britain Jäger, Lisa 244 Jahn Morán, Marisa 5 Jameson, Fredric 280 Janša, Janez 234 Johnston, Meghan 188 Jones, Paul 33 Jonse, Ceri 51 Jordán, Alvaro 26–7 Jowell, Tessa 44 Joyce, Jacob V. 218 joyfulness 94–106; as curatorial thinking tool 103–5; see also laboratory of care Jurman, Urska 6 Kaga, Vassilia 262 Kallenberger, Magdalena 247 Kalunga, Bia 76 Kalunga people 74–9 Karamanić, Slobodan 228 Keane, Tina 126 keepers of water 16 Kennedy, Lisa 34 Kent, Lyn 50 Kernick, Atalanta 127 Khan, Naiza 271 Khan, Saba 277

King’s Fund 50 Kirk, Gwyn 120, 123 Kittay, Eva 247 Klaas, Hanne 247, 251–4 Knoechl, Birgit 244 knowing body 94, 100–1 Knowing Ourselves 113 Kobolt, Katya 224, 226–9 Kohlbauer, Nina 244 Koons, Jef 247 Korczak, Janusz 112 Kranjc, Borut 224–5, 232–5 Krasny, Elke 5–6, 13–18, 185–6, 193, 241, 256, 286 Krauss, Annette 174 Kumar, Satish 39 Kunst, Bojana 227 Kyiv Biennale 109 La Colonie 14, 17 La escuela del buen vivir 280–92; changing awareness 291; good life for all 284–5; how it came about 289–90; imperial mode of living 283–4; indigenous knowledge 290–1; inspirations 285–6; sumak kawsay 281–3; where it is 286; who it is for 287–8 laboratory of care 94–106; active micropolitics 101–3; curatorial thinking tools 103–5; knowing body 100–1; micropolitics 97–8; notion of laboratory 98–100; postrepresentation 95–6; radical empathy lab 96–7 ‘Labours of Love’ 173 Laderman Ukeles, Mierle 174 Lamentations in the Garden 162 Lammy, David 47 Lankton, Greer 154, 158 L’Atelier 13 latent capability 204 Latour, Bruno 113 ‘Lavender Menace’ 160 layers of care 229–32 lean-in careerism 142 Leão, Maicyra 247, 250–1, 256 Ledgard, Denise 131–2 Lefkowitz, Myriam 190 legacy of feminism 21 Leininger, Madeleine 42–5, 49, 53–4 leisure services 44–5 Lesbian Archive (GWL) 164

Index Lesbians in peer support 155 LESPOP 164 lessons against outsourcing 219–20 LGBTQ+ 52–3, 125, 154, 162–3, 265 liberation 23 Life Support round table 153–68 LIFT see Local Improvement Finance Trust Limpo 38 Lind, Maria 175 linearity 14–15 LIPS see Lesbians in peer support listening 131–40 Liu, Weitan 162 living good life 284–5 Living Rent 154, 156, 161 Lloyd, Kirsten 154–5, 157–8, 160–1, 163–5, 169, 211 Local Improvement Finance Trust 47 location of la escuela 286 Locke, John 282 Logan, Nell 125 Lopez, Lucy 176 Lorde, Audre 66–7 Los Crudos 26 Loucas, Jorge 239–40, 243 Loveless, Natalie 173, 177 low economy 15–16 Lugar de la Memoria 131–40 Lupu, Alina 83, 89–91 Lyons, Sarah 264 M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung 184, 187, 249 M.1 Hohenlockstedt 187–90 Maathai, Wangari 39 Mchugh, Gene 64 McKittrick, Katherine 65 McLean, Keira 156 McRobbie, Angela, 171 Madani, Adnan 121 Mahmoud, Yasmeen 217 Maidan protests 109 main gallery (Bruxas) 24–5 maintaining collective body 254–5 major gesture 197, 205 Major, John 48 ‘Make Whatever You Find Work’ 227 making an archival assemblage 117–19 ‘making-with’ 19 male lactation 237–45 Malkani, Zahra 276, 278 man-made hubris 19–20

301

man-made wounded planet 146–8 Managed Heart, The 169 Manifesto of W.I.T.C.H. 21–2 Manning, Erin 97–8, 197, 199 Manora Field Notes 271 Manual Labourers’ podcast 154, 165, 210 Marboeuf, Olivier 16 marginalisation 13, 72–4, 88, 180, 212, 217, 285 Maria Lactans 241 Marin, Mara 174 Mars, Marcell 5 Martin, Courtney J. 32 Martinis Roe, Alex 176 Marxist feminism 148, 183, 210, 212, 228 masculinisation 185 Massumi, Brian 98 matchmaking 90 MATERNAL FANTASIES Collective 246–58; see also non-idealised concept of care maternal thinking 246–7 MayDay Rooms 123 mechanistic cosmology 99 Medak, Tomislav 5 Medalla, David 120 memorialisation 118 ‘Mental Health, Social Inclusion and Arts’ 50 Merchant, Carolyn 99, 147 Mershal, Iman 247 Meta see Facebook metrics 197 MeWe360 62 Meyer, George Anthony 120, 122–3 Ni Una Menos 1 micropolitics 97–8 Miloš, Brigita 224, 229–32 mimicry of care 232–5 Mind, Body, Spirit 51 minor gesture in curatorial 197–208 minor mode 198–200 Mistress-Pieces conference 118 mnemic symbols 125 ‘Model for Development of Cultural Competence in Nursing’ 43, 45 molecular feminism 237 Molecular Revolution in Brazil 101 MoLotus 109 monistic understanding 63 monitoring 86

302

Index

monohumanism 49 Montgomery, Nick 96, 103–5 Morales, Evo 281 Morales, L. 72–3 Morgan, Daphne 120 Morini, Cristina 171 Moten, Fred 65 Mother Earth Law 1, 111, 115–16, 278 mothering language 200 mourning 17, 131–40 MPD see multiple personality disorder MUKTA Mayoori 114 multiple personality disorder 64 multivalence of care 201 Muquifu Museum 74–9 Murtaza, Mehreen 272, 274, 278 muscle memory 204 Museums, Libraries and Archives Council 45 Mussai, Renee 53 mutability 126 mutual trust 190 ‘My Deanthropocene-Drawings’ 110 n*a*i*l*s hacks*facts*fctions* platform 224–36; see also platform of care Nabi, Hira 272–3 Nachleben 121 Nadasen, Premila 210, 213 Naprushkina, Marina 114 Naveed, Faizan 275 Ndiritu, Grace 32 necropolitics 147 neighbouring and stain 122–5 Nelson, Jayne 124–5 Nelson, Juliet 124–5 neoliberalism 18, 53, 57, 64, 94, 142, 161–2, 166, 172–3, 184, 197, 202–4 neurodiversity 199 New Directions in Social Policy 45 New Earth 39 New Jim Code 66 New Radiator, The 123 New Yorker 280 Newton, Ciara 25–7, 29 Nikkname&Jorke 242 Ninić, Marina 244 non-idealised concept of care 246–58; collaborating on unequal terms 253–4; curating a collective body 250–1; history of feminist organising 256; maintaining collective body

254–5; reciprocal relations 249–50; reciprocal relations–unequal terms 255; rotational work model 249; self-organisation 248–9; situated self 247–8; structural discrimination 246–7; towards children 251–3 ‘Non-Museums’ 121 Noor, Salma 34 notion of laboratory 98–100 notions of shelter 19 ‘Now I’m a Happy Dyke’ 126 nuance rhythms of the minor 197–8 Nufeld Trust 46 nurturance 174 O Had I Known that Thus it Happens 202 Obaya Evans, Georgina 35 Oberender, Thomas 113 Occupy History 113 Odyssey 107 O’Kelly, Alanna 126 Old Mistresses 117–18 Oliveros, Pauline 98 Olivia, Maestra 112 Olson, Marisa 64 Olufemi, Lola 213 OMONOIA 108–9 oppression 24, 57, 74 optics 180 organised abandonment 162 Other 62–3, 103, 288 Other Artists 214–19; Lisa Tan 214–16; Sandi Hilal 216–19 Otta, Eliana 131–40 Our Bodies, Ourselves 163 outsourcing 209–23; and feminism 212–14; lessons against 219–20; Other Artists 214–19 oversight 185 Owen, Robert 112 Oxfam 183 pacifcation 107 Pahor, Borut 232–4 Pallay Pampa 290 Papadopoulous, Irene 43, 45, 49 Parker, Rozsika 118 Parliament of Bodies 109 pars pro toto 146 participatory performance (Bruxas) 25–8; back gallery 26–8; closing reception 28; daily 25–6

Index Partus Gyno Bitch Tits 237–45; see also queer nursing Pasternak, Boris 202 patriarchy 7, 15, 17–18, 88–9, 142 Patrick, Adele 156 Peace Museum, Bradford 120 Peggy Moft 158 People Make Museums 6 Performance With Halftone 137 performing queer nursing 239–41 peripheral territories 77–9 Permaculture School 111 Perry, Lara 256 Peru 131–40 pessimistic futurism 22 Petal Tank 38, 40 Petrešin-Bachelez, Natăsa 6, 176, 211 PFI see Private Financial Investment Philip, Robin 47 Phillips, Laura 126–7 Phillips, Mary 243 pink washing 2 Pirate Care Project 5 planetary ethics 143 Plant, Sadie 64 platform capitalism 65 platform of care 224–36; curatorial modes of production 226–9; layers of care 229–32; mimicry of care 232–5 Plato 107, 115 Plender, Olivia 154, 160 POC trans* people 62 Polari Housing Association 124 Policy Team Action 10 46 polis 107 Politeia 107–9 ‘Political Portraits’ 25 Politics 234–5 Pollock, Griselda 118, 121 Polyphrenic Creatures 192 positioning Care Symposium 198–200 post-representation 95–6 post-representational curation 105 post-socialist children 232–5 post-structuralism 97 Post-Internet theory 64–5 potentiality 100–1 Povinelli, Elizabeth 147 power to create 21 Power of Visual Arts 50 practices of care 158–62 practising freedom 14–15 pre-conception conversation 32

303

precariousness 83, 89 precarity 19 Preciado, Paul B. 109 predefned structure of artistic work 84–6; audience 86; space 85–6; terms of use 85 Primitive Culture 269 Private Financial Investment 47 pro-Black, pro-trans archive 58–61; see also Black trans* archive productive outcomes 200 prophetic desires 63 Prospectus for Arts and Health 47 protest 117–19 Prowse, Jamila 179–80 Ptak, Laurel 83, 86–7, 89–91 Public Health England 51 ‘Public Health Outcomes Framework’ 51 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria 199–200, 240 punk 22, 25–6 Push 187 Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport 51–2 queer nursing 237–45; archive of queer nursing phantasies 241; feeling with bodies 243–4; generational/gendered relations 244–5; installing with care 242; performing and flming 239–41; queering perceptions of nursing 238–9 queer punk 26 queering perceptions of nursing 238–9 Queervo, José 29 quilombola museology 71–82; see also decolonial/heritage practices Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 48, 62 racial capitalism 218–19 racism 7, 15–18, 52–3, 73, 88, 146–7 radical care 20 radical clairvoyance 22–3 radical empathy lab 96–104 Rafes, Frankie 162 R.A.G.E. see Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment Raha, Nat 156–66 Rajani, Shahana 276, 278 Ramsay, Adebusola 156 ‘range-ful’ identities 56–70; see also caring for ‘range-ful’ identities

304

Index

rape 132 Rassel, Laurence 175 Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment 120, 122 Ray, Gene 137 re-active micropolitics 94–106 re-appropriation of social media 78 re-contextualisation 90 re-presentation 96–7 ‘Re-Thinking the Nature of Work’ 88 reactionary anaesthesia 105 reason for being 143–6 Rebel Dykes 127 Rebel Dykes 127 reciprocal relations 255 reciprocity 19–21 Reckitt, Helena 52, 165, 212 recoding 65 ‘Recollection of Harm, A’ 26 reconciliation 133 Red Womb 158 refection on convergence 29 refuges 16–17 regeneration 33–5 Reid, John 44 reifcation of identity 28 Reilly, Maura 186, 193 reimagining curatorial care habits 169–82; see also coping to curiosity reinventing teaching 13 relational aesthetics 98–100, 188 relational passage 103–5 Relational and Strange 237 Relyea, Lane 171 remote working 119 reparations 17–18 repurposing MPD 64 resignifcation 145 resilience 52 resistance 16–17, 19, 74–9, 126, 139, 248–9 Resolutely Black 17 resonance 127, 189–90 ReStorying 198–9, 203–4 rethinking strategies 72 Revell, Irene 209, 215 Rhode, Deborah 230 Rhodius, Aleksandra 115 RHS see Royal Horticultural Society Rich, Adrienne 247 Richards, Jenny 169–70, 173, 175 Richter, Dorothee 185 Richter, Gerhard 247

Richter, Shira 187 Rijeka 229, 231 Rito, Caroline 62 ‘Rituals of Care’ 6 Rizvi, Fazal 276, 278 Rodriguez Muñoz, Bárbara 178 Rolnik, Suely 94, 101–3 Romulus and Remus 241 Room to Bloom initiative 113–15 Rooms Afoat 276 Rooted Beings 179 Rosenthal, Stephanie 6 Rosler, Martha 154 rotational hosting 249–50 rotational work model 249 Rothkappel, Peter 239, 243 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 112 Rowson, Eva 174–5, 180 Royal Horticultural Society 37–8 Royal Society for Public Health 50–1 Ruddick, Sarah 247 Russell, Legacy 23, 64–5, 84 Ryan, Veronica 154, 162 S:E:P:A:L:S: conceptual modality 33–6, 38–40, 53–4 St. Agatha 241 sanctuaries 16–17 Sanskrit 114–15 Santisteban, Emilio 290 Scharmer, Otto 98 Scheiner, Tereza 77–8 Schirmer, Christoph 244 schizophrenia 51 Schmahmann, Brenda 117 School of Everything 109 School of Good Life, The see La escuela del buen vivir Science Gallery London 57 Scott, Izabella 264 Sealy, Mark 53 Seasonal Associates 90 Seeker, Jenny 50 segmentation of desire 61–3 Seigworth, Gregory J. 103 self-care 6, 56, 65, 172–3, 187, 229–30 self-censorship 66 self-decolonisation 13–14 self-defnition 56–7, 67 self-determination 74, 265 self-empowerment 95 self-enquiry 98 self-exploration 83

Index self-identity 66 self-knowledge 74 self-negation 185 self-organisation 192, 248–9 self-representation 94 self-transformation 98 selfe care 171–2 semiocapitalism 171 Sennett, Richard 287 separationism 94 sex work 85 sexism 7, 16–17, 73, 88, 146–7 SGL see Science Gallery London Shaddock, Josh 215 Shah, Zarmeene 270 Shaked, Nizan 158 shamanic ceremonies 111, 113 shape shifting 63 ‘Shared Gaze, A’ 26–8 shared heritage 125 Shenton, Jo 50 Shepard, Jennifer 73 Shining Path 131–2 ‘shitstorms’ 83, 86, 90 Shiva, Vandana 21, 39 Sholette, Gregory 84 Simonides of Keos 108 Simons, Joey 156 Simons, Miriam 265 Sissy’s Bedroom 158 Sister Seven 117 situated knowledge 191 situated self 247–8 slavery 14–15, 17 slow curating 188 Smith, Adam 183 So Sad Today 172 social capital 52 social exclusion 50 Social Exclusion Department 50 social inclusion 49–50 social media and caring curating 83–93; standardisation 90–1; structure of artistic work 84–6; wages, Facebook, housework 86–90 Social Muscle Club 188–9, 193 Social Presence Theatre 98 social reproduction theory 213, 219, 228, 237 social reproductive work 212, 237 social welfare 42 socioeconomic complexes 97 sociopolitical practice 193–4

305

Solanas, Valerie 237 solidarity 18–21, 52–3, 61, 94, 112, 114, 117, 188, 200 Solomon, Noémie 6 solstice rituals 110 Somerset House 54 sonic perception 98 Sorokina, Eliana 6 sovereignty 39 space of emancipation 172 space on social media 85–6 Spandler, Helen 50 Spectacle 22 spectatorship 23, 26, 94–5 Spectral Remains 274 Spellbound (exhibition) 262 Spellbound (project) 263–8 Spencer, Catherine 158–9, 162–3, 165, 167 Spengler, Isabell 247–8, 253, 256 Spinoza, Baruch 103–4 spiritual care 174 Spivak, Gayatri, 286, 291 split personality 64 SPT see Social Presence Theatre Stamou, Caterina 262 Star, Susan Leigh 64 Staricof, Rosalia 46, 50 Starr, Helen 34 Stay Home . . . campaign 178–9 ‘staying with trouble’ 254 Steedman, Carolyn 122 Stenger, Isabelle 176 Sternfeld, Nora 191 Sticky Rice and Other Stories 271 stigmatisation 20–1 Stimmer, Birgit 239, 243 Stockholm Syndrome 172 Stoermer, Eugene F. 147 Stone, Allucquere Rosanne 64 stormy weather skylarking 166 strangeness 101 stratisgraphic signature 147 stress 42 structural discrimination 246–7 Studio Experimentelles Design 193 subjectivity 57, 64, 101, 103, 224 sufragette movement 117 suma qamaña 112 sumak kawsay 281–3 summoning a new commons 19–30; see also inverting the witch supremacy 7, 24–6, 88

306

Index

sustainability 112, 290 Swedish Migration Agency 217, 219 symbiosis 19 Szeeman, Harald 185 tainted goods 126 Take Greenham Home 117 Take Root 163 ‘Taking Care: Feminist Curatorial Pasts . . .’ 169–82 Tan, Jack 34–5, 38 Tan, Lisa 214–16 Tanks = Banks 109 Tarantallegra 363 tattooing 202 Taylor, Gina 43, 45 Te Urewera National Park (NZ) 111 techno-positivism 66–7 ter Heijne, Mathilde 109 terminal illness 47 ‘terms and conditions’ 56–60 terms of social media use 85 terraforming 146 Thatcher, Margaret 164 That’s Mighty White of You 27 Theodorakis, Yorgos 111 ‘Theory of Culture Care Diversity and Universality’ 42–3, 49, 53–4 theory-in-process 114 Thinking Flowers? 33, 37, 40 3rd Shift 225, 229–32 Thomas, Majella 202–3 Thompson, James 205 thought and being 141–50; curating wounded planet 148–9; man-made wounded planet 146–8; thought, care, being 143–6 Thousand Plateaus, A 97 Tilki, Mary 43, 45 Toro, Rolanda 98 Toupin, Louise 88 ‘Towards a Black Feminist Poethics’ 63 Trans Bodies, Trans Selves 163 transcultural care 43–55 Transcultural Care 43–4 ‘Transcultural Competence’ 49 Transfer (Maintenance of the Art Object 174 transformation 113 transition 63 transmission 13 transphobia 260 trauma 66, 114

Travelling Drawing 250 Trockel, Rosemarie 247 Tronto, Joan 237 ‘true event’ 95–6 Tsing, Anna 146 ‘Twerk Tuesdays’ 25–6 Twitter 234–5 Tylor, E.B. 269 ‘Tzompantli’ 27 Ubuntu Women Shelter 154, 156, 165, 166 Uluru 112 Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights 39 unlearning curatorial care habits 169–82; see also coping to curiosity ‘unlearning’ exercises 174 unproductive time 200 Unverdorben, Manuela 228 upcycling 37 utopia 112 Valley Hags 28–9 van Dooren, Thom 137 Varese, Italo 136 Venice Biennale 170, 271 Vergès, Françoise 1, 13–18, 213 Verna, Gaëtane 32 Vesić, Jelena 227 Vich, Victor 132 Villacorta, Jorge 132 virtual erratum 23 virtual museums 119–21 Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning 136–8 Vishmidt, Marina 212, 227 visibility 89, 125 visual display 24–5; main gallery 24–5 Vora, Bindi 53 vulnerability 79 ‘Wages against Housework’ 86–7, 91 ‘Wages for Facebook’ manifesto 86–7, 89–91 ‘Wages for Housework’ 87–8, 213 wages on social media 86–90 wagesforfacebook.com 86–7 Wakeford, Nina 127 walking 13–14 Wallen, Geneviève 263 Walmart 184 Warburg, Amy 121

Index Warner, Marina 119 Warren, Karen 114 Wassim, Omer 274, 278 water crisis 275–7 Wazana Tompkins, Kyla 177 ‘WE ARE HERE’ 56–64, 66–7 We Are the Witches You Could Not Burn 262 West, Eleanor Louise 127 wet nurse slavery 238 ‘What If We Stopped Pretending?’ 280 ‘What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts’ 53 Whicher, Emma 51 White, Niamh 51 ‘White People’ 27 White Pube 209 Whittle, Alberta 154, 162, 165–6 WHO see World Health Organisation who la escuela is for 287–8 Widenheim, Cecilia 175 ‘Wiener Halal’ 288 Wilson Gilmore, Ruth 162 Wilson, Jenni 123 ‘Windsor Conference I’ 47 Wissen, Markuss 281, 283, 286 W.I.T.C.H. see Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell Witch Institute 262–3 witchcraft activism 110, 259–68 WITCHES HEAL 262

307

Withers, Deborah 120 women sages 20–1; see also inverting the witch Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell 21–2, 264–5 Women’s Library 120, 127 work of transmission 117–30; archival assemblage 117–19; care-fully created archives 122–5; Greenham Quilt 125–8; virtual museums 119–21 working with loss 131–40 World Health Organisation 48, 53 wounded planet 141–50; see also thought and being Writers Organized to Represent Diverse Stories 28 Wynter, Sylvia 34, 49, 54, 146 Yamashita, Junko 237 Yana Allpa 137–8 Yates Garcia, Amanda 264 Your Everyday Art World 171 YouTube 24, 28 ‘Zaimi’ 66 Zangls, Moritz Franz 244 Zapatistas 72 Zechner, Manuela 189 zombifcation 107 Zuberi, Sohail 270–1 Zuniga, Xalli 25, 27, 29