‘We’re not having a conversation about the rights of artists. We’re having a conversation about human rights’.
Kate Adams (Project Art Works) in conversation with C. Mir, 7/11/22.
‘Often, we find that people with complex support needs don’t have involvement in the arts. Or, if they do, it can be quite mechanical, and it becomes about what they can’t do, rather than what they can do. What is missing is people’s spirit.’
Kate Adams (Project Art Works) in conversation with C. Mir, 7/11/22.
‘Infrastructures of care and control can enable and hamper people’s world-making, but they work in unpredictable ways, and they don’t always do one thing or the other. The whole point of the Cosmologies of Care drawings is to illustrate that each person’s relationship with systems of care/control can be totally different and what barriers and freedoms that might exist for one person might not be the same for another. There is not one definition (or solution) for ‘refugee’ and neither is there for ‘disabled/autistic/neurodivergent person’.
Martin Swan (Project Art Works) essay notes to A. K. P.
‘We confront the idea that care refers to an unpolluted, ideal, wholesome or pleasant political system. To quote María Puig de la Bellacasa: to care and to be cared for can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. Navigating this tension within care is vital to both of our communities. We are interested in understanding how so-called social systems of care also exercise discipline, marginalisation and control within already marginalised groups. Following an ethics of care that comes from expanded feminist knowledge, our approach to care has to do with ‘appropriating a toxic terrain and making it capable of nurturing again’, as Bellacasa points out. In this sense, positive feelings come from reciprocal relationships, joy, creative work, access to social life, and therefore have to do with the possibility of acting. What are the creative processes that we can use to face a violent system? We want to creatively intervene in the rigid system, connecting our bodies to our ability to act.
Carlota Mir, Notes on Navigating Systems of Care and Control, (n/p).
‘The notion of care in Trampoline House has to do with participation and reciprocity, which is the opposite of what government care looks like in the West. I get as much care from people in the house as I care for people in the house, and I think that’s where the notion of contract comes in. In spaces like Trampoline, a new social contract is needed to restore a sense of democracy. People enter the house based on a contract of shared ownership – ‘it’s my house, it’s your house, it’s our house’. The contract is based on the idea that the house has got your back but you also have to do your bit and help out. In this way, this contract gives a specific shape to the notion of care and participation. This is very important because restoring the ability to contribute and provide care is very difficult if you have spent eight years in a camp where nobody is expecting anything of you and where all you can do is sleep and wait’.
Tone Olaf Nielsen (Trampoline House), in Carlota Mir and Sara Alberani, ‘On Participation and Decolonising Solidarity: Trampoline House as Embodied Border’, in Alberani et al. (eds), Propositions on Translocal Solidarity (Berlin: Archive Books/Stockholm: Konstfack) [forthcoming].
I. Slow Death and the Sovereign: the phrase ‘slow death’ refers to the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism