Online program
#Caring: Workshops & Performance
To care is to recognize all bonds, between both humans and non-humans; between humans and their systems, their infrastructures and institutions, and to attend to their fragility. Ethics of care challenge us to construct social relations and systems based on situational and contextual morality, beyond abstract or universal notions of justice, to allow us to turn to processes of care, re-pair, maintenance and healing. More information...
Sunday, Jun 14
The third, and last day of the program invites participants to join artist-led workshops, performances and meditative rituals of care. These acts of care challenge normative concepts, regulations and myths around motherhood, autonomy and infrastructures from diverse perspectives.
11am–1pm online, with registration
Workshop #4: Who Depends on Whom? Deconstructing Ableist Perspectives of Autonomy and Dependence
With Júlia Souza Ayerbe
Dis*abled people have always designed mechanisms and structures to support and respect their own special needs and bodies to face ableism. At the present moment, the global population is trying to understand and develop new forms of life due to the limitations imposed by Covid-19, and much can be learned from the functional diverse community and disability studies. In the workshop participants are invited to interrogate their experiences and perspectives about “autonomy” and “dependence”. Together, they will investigate how invisible are the entangles of caring and the chains of production that sustain the ableist system, unmasking the neoliberal illusion of the “independent man” that stigmatizes vulnerable bodies as dependent, unproductive and worthless.
3–3.30pm Live stream on hkw.de
Public program: Love and Labor. Intimacy and Isolation. Care and Survival. A performance between mothers and children in a state of lockdown.
Online screening of a performance by Maternal Fantasies
Who cares for whom and what are the consequences? The feminist art collective Maternal Fantasies lets viewers peak into their homes, where artistic production exists alongside domestic tasks and childcare. Household items become toys. Kitchens become backdrops. Care work and parenting have historically been marked by gender-based inequalities, yet the current conditions of social distancing have acutely magnified these injustices. Against this backdrop, the performance seeks to understand “mothering” not as a physical and fixed category or identity, but instead as dedicated time, attention, nurturance, protection and an interrupted state of mind.
The performance was specifically developed for Fantastic Futures, the Advancement Award Exhibition at M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung.
4–6pm online, with registration
Workshop #5: Cleansing the Pipes
With Teresa Dillon
Tubes, lines, pipes, connectors of fibre, submarine communications chains and forked paths, colonial plumbing circumnavigating the globe. Infrastructures support us to exchange and communicate. What stories do they hold? Casting telecom-spells, the workshop participants activate their collective imaginaries, traveling through the superhighways of the digital. Teresa Dillon will guide this mediation and visioning, which will be followed by a group conversation on the histories of the Internet, its environmental and colonial footprint and what it takes to keep it going. Why should we care about the environmental costs of the Internet? How is this balanced by its multiple uses, particularly in supporting expressions of care during times of hyper regulation, isolation and physical distancing?