Art for the sake of care
Publication launch
Last Friday saw the official launch, in Cambridge, England, of ‘Art for the Sake of Care’, a special issue of the International Journal of Education and the Arts, which was co-edited by Merel Visse, my guest on the most recent episode of the Careful Thinking podcast.
In the words of the editorial introduction, the special issue ‘showcases more than 30 authors with contributions rooted in artistic practice, offering fresh perspectives on care’. As Merel and her co-editor, Elena Cologni, go on to explain:
In this special issue we show that the making of art, that caring and creating, are what makes life liveable. We show what more caring, careful and care-based art practices and research may look like. This issue demonstrates that art experiences are not exclusive to a select group or merely products of culture. Rather, art practice is deeply intertwined with our relational nature, just like care.
The diversity of the contributors, and of the contributions, is one of the special issue’s strengths. As Merel explained on the podcast, one of the aims was to ‘capture the richness of what’s going on in the field...our approach is to be as inclusive as possible’, adding that ‘inclusivity, interconnectedness, cross-disciplinary collaborations, all those are part of this special issue’.
Besides Merel herself, the issue also features work by two other podcast guests. Christine Leroy, who was my guest in Episode 7, contributed an article on ‘Performance and bodily anchoring of care: dance’s power to care’, and James Thompson, whom I interviewed for Episode 11, co-wrote a paper on ‘Care aesthetics and “being in the moment” through improvised music-making and male grooming in dementia care’.
The launch event took place at Anglia Ruskin University, where Elena Cologni (who, like Merel, is a scholar and educator, as well as a practising artist) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Practice. The event was part of the Cambridge Festival and is linked with the virtual exhibition, ‘Practicing Care through Art: a new Care Aesthetics’, which is available on-demand throughout the festival and can be viewed here. The launch was also live-streamed, and the recording can be viewed here.
Elena Cologni introduces the event
Elena opened the event, introducing the authors featured in the special issue who would be speaking about their contributions. Most of the presenters were joining the event online and the first to appear was Merel, speaking from the United States, who gave an overview of the special issue, suggesting that it acts as ‘a reminder that creativity and compassion and scholarship can all go together’ and that ‘together we can be a powerful force for change’. Merel drew attention to ‘four dynamic approaches to art and care’ to be found in the issue. One approach highlights the ‘embodied and sensory entanglements that we experience in every day in care settings’, while a second set of articles focuses on ‘artistic practices that are more about belonging and participation’. A third group ‘highlight meaningful resonance’, exploring ways of influencing institutions and policies, and ‘revealing how we can creative collecting compassion’, with a fourth approach being focused on ‘transformative art practices’ and ‘artistic practices as a vehicle for societal transformation.’
Merel Visse James ThompsonThe second speaker, joining from Manchester, was James Thompson, who explained the somewhat unusual title of his co-written contribution to the special issue, highlighting the ways in which it reflected the different professional backgrounds of the four co-authors. James is a theatre practitioner and researcher, and the author of the ground-breaking book Care Aesthetics: For Artful Care and Careful Art, while his co-authors are academics whose work focuses, variously, on mental health and social care in the context of people living with dementia.
Next to speak was Gabi Scardi, who teaches Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, Italy, and who also collaborates with museums and artistic institutions, curating solo shows and group exhibitions. Gabi’s article in the special issue has the title ‘Curating as caring at the heart of society’, arguing ‘that when art is considered to be relevant as a shared resource, then curating can be perceived as a meaningful way of taking care of the present in its perpetual transformation; a stimulus to, and a support in engaging with the questions of the era’. Her talk expanded on this theme, exploring the connections between curating and caring, which made me think of Merel’s description, in our recent conversation on the podcast, of her parents’ work caring for old buildings, and how preservation of places and artefacts can be a form of care.
Gabi Scardi’s talk also prompted some interesting comments from the audience in the room, with one participant pointing out that, in Brazilian Portuguese, the word for curator and healer is the same, which brought to mind my exploration, in a recent post, of the meanings and connotations of words for ‘care’ in different languages. This remark then prompted a comment from another audience member, Emily Bradfield, who is a researcher based at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Emily is currently working with museum colleagues on a ‘Stories of care’ project, looking at how they care for their collection from a conservation perspective, but making connections with care for ourselves and care for each other. Apparently they will be running some workshops on this theme in the museum and in the community in the coming months.
Gabi Scardi Micol RoubiniGabi Scardi’s article in the special issue uses as a case study a specific artistic project with which she was recently involved: the artist Micol Roubini’s film, La Montagna Magica (The Magic Mountain), which is concerned with a post-industrial area in northern Italy, ‘a geographical area that is going through a time of fragility, and that is imbued with a complex history’. Scardi writes that ‘it is a project that lends itself to the discussion of care, because it is an effort to rehabilitate a situation that is complex and marginalised, and needs a renewed attention in order to be deeply understood. Micol Roubini, whose best-known work La Strada per la Montagna (The Way to the Mountains) is an account of her quest for her family’s roots in Ukraine, explored these connections in the next presentation of the evening.
Anna Macdonald, a dance artist and scholar based at Central St Martin’s College of Arts and Design, was the only speaker present in the room for the launch. Anna’s article in the special issue explores ‘the relationship between performance and care within socially engaged dance’, offering ‘a practice-led exploration of the movement of care with specific reference to a screendance (dance and film) called Reasonable Adjustments, which was made with people living with chronic pain’. In her presentation, Anna spoke about her work in movement research, including a fascinating-sounding project on the choreography of consent, at the intersection of dance and law.
Anna Macdonald Ryan WoodringThe final speaker of the evening, Ryan Woodring, is based, like Merel, at Drew University in New Jersey. He introduced a film of his autoethnographic project ‘in which I 3D-modeled the speculative contours of an invisible affliction each day that I felt its presence, to explore how core principles in arts education such as defamiliarisation, appropriation, and glitch can be used to synthesise alternative archives that renegotiate agency with amorphous chronic illnesses and provide new frameworks for care.’
Films by Merel, Micol, Anna and Ryan form part of the ‘virtual exhibition’, which also includes other video art made by, or in some way connected with, authors included in the special issue, and a screening of the composite video was shown as part of the launch event. Merel Visse’s powerful The Hidden Kernel of Care, is the opening film. Describing it on her website, Merel writes that ‘this single-channel video interrogates the harm produced by aesthetic deprivation and injury, a suffering both aesthetic and moral, taking a near-silent toll’, exploring ‘how white sheets, the performative nature of time, and utterance create landscapes of care, revealing the aesthetic and moral dimensions of that care.’ In my last post, I included a still from the video, but I recommend watching the whole thing, with the sound on, for the full experience.
The header image is Ryan Woodring’s installation ‘View Today and Possibly Tomorrow’ (2022): 30 3D printed candles in glass display case. Size variable. International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago. Photograph by Dan Miller.