Care Manifesto
Date:
4 Apr - 26 Jun 2023
Address:
cusp. 79 Fengshan Rd, Hangzhou, China, 310000
Artists:
Dayna Casey, Jiechen Zhang (张洁晨), Tealia Ellis Ritter, Tianqi Liu（刘天琦）
Introduction:
“Care Manifesto” attempts to discuss care for the environment and people, as well as care and support for others, as a collective practice. In a time when the pandemic is slowly coming to an end, we as a space are trying to emphasise that we can look at our space as if it were 'home', as a space for cultivating mutual care, trying to practice interdependence, building new care and links, care and healing in humans, non-humans and space. This exhibition attempts to extend from caring for plants and animals and the metaphors behind them to a discussion of intimacy and collective and individual trauma, from how we construct 'family' to the interior of the family, we try to make 'caring' more oriented, describing how we express and understand our relationship with others. We try to make 'caring' more oriented, describing how we can express and understand our links with others to help change the way we build a more 'caring' world.
As written in the book 'The Care Manifesto', The Care Manifesto sets out a vision of a truly caring world that seeks to re-imagine the role of care and attention in our daily lives as an organising principle in all aspects and scales of life. We are all interdependent and it is only by nurturing this interdependence that we can create a world in which each of us can not only survive but thrive. "It suggests expanding our understanding of kinship for more 'mixed care' and it calls for a more joyful world by transforming public spaces to create places of care.
At the same time care and attention has been historically devalued and, in the aftermath of the pandemic, greatly exposed the violence perpetrated by the neoliberal marketplace, which has made it impossible for most of us to provide and receive care and attention. Over the past decades, neoliberal capitalism has used this longer history of devaluation to also reshape and deepen it. The conception of the domestic space as a sphere of reproduction rather than production has made caring labour easier and increasingly exploitable by the market. With the industrial revolution, caring for and looking after oneself shifted towards individualism, and caring for others and providing care was made to appear alien. For too long we have been diminished in our ability to care for and care for people even in our most intimate spheres, while being strongly encouraged to limit our care and concern for strangers and distant people. Self-care became a sign of the cultural maturity of the imperialist class in the West, and caring for one's own well-being was framed as an individual obligation to society. The neoliberal approach to self-care, which is rooted in heteronormative, white and Western Enlightenment legacies and which exacerbates inequalities at the social level, is an economic order that focuses solely on profit, growth, international competitiveness and undermines all forms of care and concern.
We urgently need a politics that puts care front and centre, that expands the capacity, practice and imagination of caring. By care and concern, we do not just mean 'hands-on', or what people do when they directly care for the physical and emotional needs of others (although this dimension of care remains crucial and urgent),caring for one another is also a social competence and activity that involves everything that is necessary for life. Most importantly, putting care at the centre means acknowledging and accepting our interdependence, and Jade Begay emphasises that "now more than ever we need to decolonise from individualism and reconnect with a community approach to care." Through the exhibition we therefore wanted to highlight the significance of mutual care, where caring and caregiving are understood as an enduring social capacity and practice. "Mutual care is the basis of our individual and collective need to provide political, social, material and emotional conditions.
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Date:
4 Apr - 26 Jun 2023
Address:
cusp. 79 Fengshan Rd, Hangzhou, China, 310000
Artists:
Dayna Casey, Jiechen Zhang (张洁晨), Tealia Ellis Ritter, Tianqi Liu（刘天琦）
Introduction:
“Care Manifesto” attempts to discuss care for the environment and people, as well as care and support for others, as a collective practice. In a time when the pandemic is slowly coming to an end, we as a space are trying to emphasise that we can look at our space as if it were 'home', as a space for cultivating mutual care, trying to practice interdependence, building new care and links, care and healing in humans, non-humans and space. This exhibition attempts to extend from caring for plants and animals and the metaphors behind them to a discussion of intimacy and collective and individual trauma, from how we construct 'family' to the interior of the family, we try to make 'caring' more oriented, describing how we express and understand our relationship with others. We try to make 'caring' more oriented, describing how we can express and understand our links with others to help change the way we build a more 'caring' world.
As written in the book 'The Care Manifesto', The Care Manifesto sets out a vision of a truly caring world that seeks to re-imagine the role of care and attention in our daily lives as an organising principle in all aspects and scales of life. We are all interdependent and it is only by nurturing this interdependence that we can create a world in which each of us can not only survive but thrive. "It suggests expanding our understanding of kinship for more 'mixed care' and it calls for a more joyful world by transforming public spaces to create places of care.
At the same time care and attention has been historically devalued and, in the aftermath of the pandemic, greatly exposed the violence perpetrated by the neoliberal marketplace, which has made it impossible for most of us to provide and receive care and attention. Over the past decades, neoliberal capitalism has used this longer history of devaluation to also reshape and deepen it. The conception of the domestic space as a sphere of reproduction rather than production has made caring labour easier and increasingly exploitable by the market. With the industrial revolution, caring for and looking after oneself shifted towards individualism, and caring for others and providing care was made to appear alien. For too long we have been diminished in our ability to care for and care for people even in our most intimate spheres, while being strongly encouraged to limit our care and concern for strangers and distant people. Self-care became a sign of the cultural maturity of the imperialist class in the West, and caring for one's own well-being was framed as an individual obligation to society. The neoliberal approach to self-care, which is rooted in heteronormative, white and Western Enlightenment legacies and which exacerbates inequalities at the social level, is an economic order that focuses solely on profit, growth, international competitiveness and undermines all forms of care and concern.
We urgently need a politics that puts care front and centre, that expands the capacity, practice and imagination of caring. By care and concern, we do not just mean 'hands-on', or what people do when they directly care for the physical and emotional needs of others (although this dimension of care remains crucial and urgent),caring for one another is also a social competence and activity that involves everything that is necessary for life. Most importantly, putting care at the centre means acknowledging and accepting our interdependence, and Jade Begay emphasises that "now more than ever we need to decolonise from individualism and reconnect with a community approach to care." Through the exhibition we therefore wanted to highlight the significance of mutual care, where caring and caregiving are understood as an enduring social capacity and practice. "Mutual care is the basis of our individual and collective need to provide political, social, material and emotional conditions.
Fertile Imaginaries, a Vessel for 92% Water (images&texts) 2020
Dayna Casey
What to preserve, what to transform? The seeds, the rind, the juice: an unfolding, unended digestion of the political entangled narratives of the watermelon within fossil and racial capital. Initially a performative installation. The watermelon was used by climate denialists and key figures from the fossil fuel industry to frame climate change as an ideological conspiracy, instead of addressing its scientific reality. A warning against a trojan horse of communists disguising as environmentalists: green on the outside, red on the inside. A warning of a threat of change to maintain and preserve the now.
By acknowledging this necessary radical systemic change, the watermelon became a catalyst to broad associative thinkings in this project. Acknowledging the racial connotation of the watermelon in the U.S. context—although initially a Black empowerment symbol after which appropriated by the right—it became a framework and metaphor to help think through, to take the time to sit with, and digest these simplified right-wing political narratives and their histories. Ultimately expanding beyond them and thinking otherwise. The seven scattered texts are connected to and resulting from the seeds, the rind, the juice, all what has been left out from only the outer and inner of green on the outside, red on the inside. Expanding the imaginary and building upon this eco-communism. What can happen at a smaller, more complex and fluid scale? How to live with (non)fertility in toxic and destructive presents and futures? Touching upon ecology, reproduction, living with toxicity, Black revolutionary mothering, quantum plural futurity, fermentation, queering time, symbiotic cooperation and bodily coping strategies in heatwaves.
Exploring the political entangled narratives of the watermelon within fossil and racial capital. It was used to frame ecological destruction as an eco-communist conspiracy: green on the outside, red on the inside. A warning of a threat of change to preserve the now. 7 short texts that result from the seeds, the rind, the juice, to expand beyond the inner and outer, building upon eco-communism. What happens at a smaller, more complex and fluid scale? Touching upon ecology, reproduction, kinship, symbiosis, and feminist fermentation.
The small black seeds are seemingly scattered throughout the inner red. To the general consumer they are of great annoyance as this crunchy nuisance disrupts the everyday gesture of biting. I have carefully separated and removed these disrup- tions from their nutrient-laden placenta, arranging a refusal of the before. I shuffle them, again and again; demonstrating a plurality of what-comesnexts.
I have decided against putting these detached seeds into fertile soil, myself atleast. More bodies, more cooperation. It will reach further that way.
I am leaving it up to you to decide if you want to swallow it, as it is perfectly healthy and I encourage you to, or to carry it with you to sow in fertile soil. Sometime, some place. This would
contribute to the more longterm plan.
Please don't swallow or sow the painted seeds, I would not want toxins to enter your body or the earth. If you swallow it, I promise it will not grow in your belly as you were perhaps told as a child.
Dayna Casey (1988, AU/NL) is an artist, researcher, and graphic designer. She looks to material-symbolic objects and unpacks them to narrativise entangled political matter(s). Her ongoing research project Fertile Imaginaries has various chapters looking at matters of reproductive fertility, climate denial, and how cosmologies of financialised climate risk permeate the intimate realm. As a current resident at the Jan van Eyck post-academy, she is expanding its second chapter and materialising this into a sculptural installation. Casey is also active in feminist publishing and was initiator, co-editor and designer of the KABK Wxtch Craft zine with Erika Sprey, exploring wxtch craft as a queer feminist liberatory practice. She is collaborating with artist Eline Benjaminsen on the book ‘Collapsed Mythologies: A Geofinancial Atlas’, unravelling financial slang and its etymological histories, revealing the absurd (super)natural ‘fictions’ that shape our worldly ecology. She has an MA in Art Praxis and Critical Theory from the Dutch Art Institute, and is an artistic research tutor at the MA Critical Inquiry Lab in Eindhoven.
Wake Me Up 2020
Jiechen Zhang (张洁晨)
The quest for happiness and security appears to be a human instinct, and relies on a powerful belief-based system that is constantly propagated. In past, present and fantasy homes, we have been free, but more vulnerable. Home Sweet Home expresses the uncertainty of contradictions in a rickety little house, where there is no catharsis and no consequences.
Jiechen Zhang was born in Changchun and now lives and works in Shanghai. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2018 with a degree in Contemporary Art Practice. Jiechen is an interdisciplinary artist, working with painting, installation, moving image, and performance.
Jiechen’s practice revolves around the interplay of environment, human and language, and she uses exploratory narratives to express the interpenetration of different relationships. Her work often simulates a perpetual state of swaying by creating a particular moment of repetition, and she sees this state as the way things really are. These works, which appear in pairs, are in a state of perpetual similarity, waiting for the viewer's eye to trigger a back and forth correspondence between each other. She also explores the connection between different real life events and how similar details recreate memory.
The model family 2022
Tealia Ellis RitterTealia Ellis Ritter is an American artist. Her debut monograph, The Model Family, was released in February, 2022 by Loose Joints. Ellis Ritter's work contends with the intersecting roles of the photograph as personal document, familial marker of time and object with physical surface. Her interests lie in exploring in both a physical and emotional sense the act of looking and being looked at in return, coupled with the desire to understand the changing nature of intimacy over time. She is presently engaged in a long term project documenting family members in both a representational and abstract manner, with a focus on the physicality and vulnerability of the human body.
Ellis Ritter’s work has been exhibited internationally, most recently by Aperture, Taschen NYC, the Swab Art Fair, Barcelona and as part of Designing Women III: MOTHER. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The British Journal of Photography, AnOther Magazine, Wallpaper Magazine, i-D, Mouvement Magazine, France, Youthies Magazine, Public Editions, The Financial Times of London and Elephant Magazine.
You and I will fold the sheets, and we will match together to the ends. Then, there will be a bridge between you and me, and the wind will take shape. One corner puckers then droops, and that is the line you and I choose to approach each other. Touching, separating, approaching again, folding, folding, pulling, shaking, tapping, straightening, folding, tangled outlines. The sheets bear our rotation power and transmit flowing care with ongoing negotiation in a non-verbal way. At the moment, the space of the body wrapped in the fabric is speaking.
Beneath the fabric is the obscured daily labour and production of women. From Tianshan, from Kashgar. The fabric is also no longer something mute, but lively, soft, powerful, and politically entangled. Touch. I touch the cool, rustling fibres of cotton, hemp and other plants. I see every texture and groove. The dryness and moisture of their surface have significance and value. Abandoning the vertical stance of the dominant human. Sensing and concerning what nonhuman matter does. Our collective care and closeness will be born out of time spent together, of collaboration in daily labour, of shared suffering and flowing love ever since.
Tianqi Liu, graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2019, majoring in Performance, and now lives in Hangzhou.
Tianqi Liu's work is dominated by performance art, and her practice focuses on exploring a non-verbal way to consider the complexities of the flow of pain from daily life both in the present and passing time. While seeking for a covered and hidden internality, Tianqi’s works examine the power relations between intimacy and real society, and how the gendered, social, and political relations within them constitute the body.
Exhibition Credits:
Curated by Ruijing Ge, Bowei Yang, Xiner Xu, Weilian Zou
Graphic Design: 44
Special thanks: Guipiao Hua, ziqi, jiatu, danian, 19, drink Sponsors
