One Pager: The Caring Cabinet

by | Apr 21, 2021 | ArtsCabinet (UK) team | 3 comments

Tags: OnePager

We have been working around the notion of care, mostly through discussing the two books Matters of Care and The Care Manifesto  thinking through weaving and bodily movement. We have been contemplating how to bring in our individual research and practices into our work as the Caring Cabinet. There are many common threads, areas and notions that we are delving further into as we have started working on the publication. 


Some aspects of care that we are exploring now are: 

  • Care unfolding through bodily movement
  • Practices of making and the responsibilities of material usage 
  • Ecological relationships between humans and the non-human world
  • Peer-led art education in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The four of us, working collectively since the beginning of the Encounters residency rather than having individual projects for it, have been having long conversations around what it means to care through Zoom, Teams, Jitsi and Whatsapp. We have never physically met, but we have been finding (or trying to find ways) to care for one another in the multiple crises that we are encountering and create a caring space online for ourselves. Perhaps this has been much more interesting and relatable for us than merely talking about care from a theoretical or academic point of view. We have been practising what we’re trying to explore and investigate intellectually. 

Our part as the Caring Cabinet in the publication aims to bring together these multiple contexts, interests and spheres (personal, theoretical and practical) together through various mediums and materials produced individually and collectively. 

*We aim to reconstruct the encounters from different angles – compared to the points of view of an anthropological filmmaker/arts producer – we will scrutinise our eclectic materials as fly on the wall (observer) fly in the soup (participant) and fly in the eye (I) (reflexive).

3 Comments

  1. Ioanna Mitsika

    The connection between care, body and movement is something that we understand well in the performing arts. When a good dance lesson is over the teacher’s sense of care prevails. When a good improvisation session is completed, again the feeling is that the facilitator and the rest of the group provided a safe and caring environment, so that the improvisers can move and express themselves freely.
    The body, our most intimate material, accepts and understands care just as it understands its opposite: exposure, indifference, abuse.
    The search for care through digital reality leaves a space for research on how communication codes are translated, how language and the sensation of things is transmitted without physical presence or physical contact. This element is very close to the topic that, among other things, the Greek team dealt with, in the context of the ‘encounters’ project, and more specifically in the project ‘commuINty’. How can care manifest itself on the body when only wired through a computer screen?
    The body as a basic means of performing arts, theater and dance, seeks care and communication and, especially during covid, when lessons and rehearsals are made entirely through the screen, the essence of care becomes a priority.
    Reading in your posts about your long conversations but also about the time and patience required by the process of weaving, another connection comes to mind. Both our ‘commuINty’ research and ‘The Caring Cabinet’ research run through the concept of time, as a connection and a necessary condition for things to happen.

  2. Å

    feedback to Arts Cabinet (UK) team

    “how to bring in our individual research and practices into . . “

    we ask ourselves: how to bring in our individual research and
    practices into a joint collective research study ?

    “to create a caring space online for ourselves”

    we ask ourselves: how to create a caring space online ?

    the act of weaving
    to be able to tell their histories
    an external force
    one must listen to the secrets
    trace the sounds
    let’s join together for a couple of minutes

    vertical thread:
    horizontal thread:

    the weaving

    the weaving !

    we ask ourselves: the volna?
    we ask ourselves: the rehearsal?

    / Raketa & Agder team

  3. Electra Karatza

    I assume it’s a conscious decision to write about multiple platforms and to name them. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
    With regards to care: do you think that some platforms are more “care-full”, “safe” or “friendly” than others, and if yes, to what does this relate? Does this relate, for example, to someone’s familiarity with one platform, the fact that is free to use, discreet, or a feature that is more accelerated in one versus another platform? I would love to know more about your findings and more details on how you do bodily experiments or exercises through each of those platforms you mention.

    I think my research about online film festivals could relate to your research as well. Drawing inspiration from you, I can add a question to my discussions with film festival professionals: how did they provide care for each other through their platforms of communication
    when working on building their online film festival edition? Similar questions do exist in my main outline but they were not as clearly related to care. They somehow look clearer to me now.

    P.S. Wouldn’t it be nice if every zoom meeting started as slow as physical meetings do?
    in the sense that usually in a physical meeting pre-covid people greeted each other, discussed a few random things, had a coffee etc. etc. This in-between time is more difficult to kill online, but it is also extremely necessary as it builds the foreground for better, more deep communication. How do we excuse the one that is late to a meeting, the one that for some reason is unable to participate in a Zoom one day? Isn’t understanding a form of care that is not present in many working environments after all? Are we able to find new ways to work with each other? Hasn’t the pandemic given us a new sense of understanding of someone’s inability to participate in something or inability to meet a deadline? so many opportunities to dream of fairer, more care-full futures!

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