Ecologies of Care


In the Care Ecologies research group, artists and scholars examine care from various disciplinary positions, e.g. medical humanities, architecture, culture and media studies, visual and performing arts, and through topics such as health injustice, loss and grief and feminist finance. 

 

The group employs research and art practices to reflect on the complex meanings of care and how care may also shape the group’s collective exchanges, collaborations and entanglements. Artistic and academic practices rely on labour and care practices, often overlooked. Burnout, caregiving, business demands and health issues are not secondary to the capacity of the researchers and artists. The group is a laboratory to reflect both on care as a subject and on care as a concern in functioning as a research group. Some of the ideas the group is currently exploring include the following:

 

– Developing care-full forms of sharing experiences. How can we create space for more continuous performativities of exchange not bound to one moment in time, but rather as webs of care that spread and branch out? 

 

– Exploring how artistic interventions may become sites to explore and experience care. How to remain attentive to labour and embodiment to avoid romanticising care? 

 

– Making speculative propositions for enriching our ways of being an ecology of care. It involves asking how social positionings may impact access and encounters with systems (including health, professional, and academic), both informal and institutional?

 

Care Ecologies set off during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when the entanglement of health, social and ecological issues became -even more- painfully visible. The initial gatherings were held online and offered a valuable context for this collective of people during difficult times of isolation. Since then, the group uses various on- and offline frameworks which vary between research presentations, field trips and practice sessions. A lesson from these encounters so far is that defining care is not, and nor should not it be a simple task. 

 

Current Care Ecologies members are: Ania Molenda, Inte Gloerich, Natalia Sanchez Querubin, Marloeke van der Vlugt, Maaike Mutinga, Yoshen Liu, Nienke Scholts, Mariana Fernandez

 

 

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