The Complicating Care series offers a look at the way “care” is taken up in artistic practice and by artists’ communities, with an eye toward its relationship to intersecting oppressions, social and environmental justice, and impulses towards decolonization. The series offers reflections from a collection of international writers, artists, and activists who examine care from within their differing cultural and geopolitical contexts.
On a basic level, the term care as we use it here refers to looking-after and providing for needs, the mending, upkeep and maintenance of bodies, nervous systems, and the earth—it has been described variously as a set of practices, a strategy, and a process. Within the western-European context, the notion of care is complicated by its relationship to the capitalist, settler state, both in the case where care and its associated labour is undervalued or rendered invisible, and on the flip side when it is outsourced and monetized.
The Complicating Care series will draw from writers and artists who are thinking about care for the more-than-human; care and its relationship to labour; the pitfalls of commoditized self-care versus work that looks at rest and trauma; commemoration and grieving; alternative economies; and radical accessibility and its relationship to care. Further, the series will ask how vulnerability, intimacy, and reciprocity—with and between the human and nonhuman—complicate and enliven the work of care at this time of ongoing social and environmental rupture.
Banner Image: This stitched portrait is part of The Passage Memorial by selma banich and the Women to Women Collective in Zagreb, Croatia. Hand-dyed and hand-sewn, it depicts Cyrille’s memorial stitch for six-year-old Madina from Afghanistan. She died in 2017 in a train crash near Šid, on the Croatian-Serbian border, shortly after her family was pushed back from Croatia to Serbia.
Book Material
The solidarity and affection of independent publishing networks As a child, I remember desperately wanting a journal with a magnetic seal like my friends had at the time. Our family’s
Strange, Delightful, Impure Frolic
Re-imagining relationships between complicated species
Scarcity, memory, and the theory of nonmonogamy
In a cafe near Templehof park in Berlin in the spring, Anna Bowen catches up with scholar and writer Simon(e) van Saarloos about their new book, Take Em Down: Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting.
Is caring for everyone possible?
The new year has only increased the intensity of our global instability. What responsibility do we have to tend to the needs of those who make us feel unsafe?
Care and Historical Memory: An Exchange
Introduction content notes: residential schools From the perspective of psychoanalysis, curation, and care, X University* researcher and postdoctoral fellow Ricky Varghese and Toronto-based curator Vince Rozario discuss both the significance
Depression Cooking: taking care in isolation
After years of disordered eating, I learned to listen quietly to real markers of hunger and realized, quite startlingly, that I am always hungry.
Precarious Bodies, Precarious Institutions
After co-creating a radio project that privileged rest, gossip, and informal knowledge production, Elaine W. Ho writes about the interplay between institutional care and her own body from the vantage point of her hospital bed in Hong Kong.
When the Dead Open the Eyes of the Living
In Zagreb, Croatia, the Women to Women collective commemorates lives lost along the Balkan migrant trail through slow craft stitching as a gesture of care and protest.
MAID in Canada: a radical response to changes in medically assisted dying
New legislation in Canada is making it easier than ever to receive medical assistance in dying, but disability activists are sounding the alarm.
Decolonizing Natal Care in Trinidad & Tobago
Medically-managed birthing practices in Trinidad and Tobago are bound to the country’s colonial history. A contemporary resurgence of home births attended by midwives marks an important period in contemporary health care in the country.
