Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating

Elke Krasny, Sophie Lingg, Lena Fritsch, Birgit Bosold and Vera Hofmann (eds.): Radicalizing Care. Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating, Sternberg Press/Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2022

What happens when feminist and queer care ethics are put into curating practice? What happens when the notion of care based on the politics of relatedness, interdependence, reciprocity, and response-ability informs the practices of curating? Delivered through critical theoretical essays, practice-informed case studies, and manifestos, the essays in this book offer insights from diverse contexts and geographies. These texts examine a year-long program at the Schwules Museum Berlin focused on the perspectives of women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, and trans people at the Schwules Museum; the formation of the Queer Trans Intersex People of Colour Narratives Collective in Brighton; Métis Kitchen Table Talks, organized around indigenous knowledge practices in Canada; complex navigations of motherhood and censorship in China; the rethinking of institutions together with First Nations artists in Melbourne; the reanimation of collectivity in immigrant and diasporic contexts in welfare state spaces in Vienna and Stockholm; struggles against Japanese vagina censorship; and an imagined museum of care for Rojava. Strategies include cripping and decolonizing as well as emergent forms of digital caring labor, including curating, hacking, and organizing online drag parties for pandemic times. With contributions by Edna Bonhomme, Birgit Bosold, Imayna Caceres, Pêdra Costa, COVEN BERLIN, Nika Dubrovsky, Lena Fritsch, Vanessa Gravenor, Julia Hartmann, Hitomi Hasegawa, Vera Hofmann, Hana Janečková, k\are (Agnieszka Habraschka and Mia von Matt), Gilly Karjevsky, Elke Krasny, Chantal Küng, Sophie Lingg, Claudia Lomoschitz, Cathy Mattes, Elizaveta Mhaili, Jelena Micić, Carlota Mir, Fabio Otti, Ven Paldano, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Nina Prader, Lesia Prokopenko, Patricia J. Reis, Elif Sarican, Rosario Talevi, Amelia Wallin, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, Stefanie Wuschitz.

Architecture, Care, and the Future, Arkitekturdagen Malmö, September 1, 2022

Elke Krasny’s lecture thinks about dimensions of care in architecture, opening complex and difficult questions of power, ethics, and futurity. What can we learn from revisiting past solutions to building justice and care for public housing or public health?

Announcement

Critical Care, Agenda Earth, Copenhagen, June 7, 2022

Care is critical to survivable and living with a deeply wounded planet. Architecture is implicated in, responsible for, responsible to, and entangled with producing conditions for continued livability and planetary inhabitability. Critical Care contributed to a public debate hosted by Dreyers Fond in Copenhagen. EARTH #3, the Dreyer Foundation concluded the series of events that put space, frameworks and the rights of the planet up for debate. The debate was curated by Marianne Krogh. 

Recording

Living with a Wounded Planet, Visualizing Care Conference, Duke University, May 13, 2022

The lecture Living with a Wounded Planet contributed to the transnational conference Visualizing Care Imaginaries & Infrastructures. Organized in the context of the Revaluing Care Net at Duke University, the conference focused on the labor of caring — for human and non-human worlds — which is often invisible, underpaid, unrecognized. The conference placed the emphasis on imaginaries to underline the utopian dimension of redesigning care, the importance of infrastructures sheds light on concrete practices and assemblages that are built through these alternative designs. 

https://www.valuingcare.net/visualizingcareconference

Monumentaler Aktivismus. In Sorge um die Zukunft von Erinnerung, Goethe-Universitaet Frankfurt am Main, May 4, 2022

Monumente repräsentieren, wie Gesellschaften Erinnerungen im öffentlichen Raum präsent machen. Der Vortrag ist mit Fragestellungen befasst, die für eine kritische Untersuchung von erinnerungspolitischen und erinnerungsethischen Dimensionen von Monumenten von Relevanz sind. Es ist wesentlich, nicht nur die ästhetischen Mittel, die stadträumlichen Zusammenhänge und die historischen Kontexte und Implikationen zu erforschen und zu verstehen, sondern immer auch in den Blick zu nehmen, woran die öffentliche Denkmalskultur eines Stadtraums nicht erinnert. Das bedeutet, aus den vorhandenen Denkmälern Rückschlüsse darauf zu ziehen, woran Gesellschaften (sich) nicht erinnern, was Gesellschaften vergessen machen wollen, was öffentlich unsichtbar gemacht wird. Öffentliche Verunsichtbarung ist eine wesentliche Dimension der Analyse bestehender Denkmäler. Ebenso ist es wesentlich, für Dimensionen der Zukunft von Erinnerung, darüber nachzudenken, was es bedeutet, dass Monumente immer dann eine Steigerung von Sichtbarkeit oder Auseinandersetzung mit ihrer Bedeutsamkeit erfahren, wie etwa durch globale Zirkulation in internationalen Medien und digitalen Plattformen, wenn Aktivist:innen sich politisch gegen bestehende Monumente organisieren, bestehende Denkmäler angreifen oder für die Errichtung von neuen kämpfen. Nicht zuletzt gilt es aus erinnerungspolitischer und erinnerungsethischer Sicht, sich in Theorie wie Aktivismus damit auseinanderzusetzen, wie Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege das Weiterleben von bestehenden Monumenten sichern, auch wenn aus politischen wie ethischen Gründen deren Entfernung vehement gefordert wird. Der Vortrag setzt sich mit Dimensionen der Restitution von öffentlichem Raum auseinander, mit Fragen nach demokratischen Perspektiven auf Monumente und mit der sorgeethischen Forderung, die den Schutz von Denkmälern und die Sorge für Denkmäler zu zentralen Auseinandersetzungen in kritischer Forschung und aktivistischer Debatte zu machen.

Radicalising Care: Elke Krasny and Maddalena Fragnito in conversation moderated by Emmanuele Braga, Zoe Romano, Milano, April 6, 2022

Radicalising Care: https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/category/school-of-mutation/raising-care/

Scales of Care: Affective Ecologies and Reproductive Urbanism, Montevideo Architecture Public School Online Seminar, April 6, 2022

Scales of Care: Affective Ecologies and Reproductive Urbanism
Starting from the observation of care fatigue and environmental exhaustion, take back care focuses on socio-ecological justice. Exhaustion and fatigue come to bear most on those who are always already considered key caregivers and essential workers. Be it the labor of guardians of the land, who restore conditions for animals and plants, be it the labor of kinship practices for family as well as community needs, such necessary care is taken for granted.
Those who provide such life-making care outside fee-paid or salaried regimes, are suffering from care exhaustion and care fatigue. Looked at through a historico-environmental lens, the environment has not fared much better and been understood to relentlessly provide what humans need for free. Environmental fatigue and ecological exhaustion result from this exploitative approach to the environment. The woman-nature nexus that has been at the core of racial capitalism and the patriarchal ideology of modernity, will be re-examined to stress the interdependence of humans and nature in care. Nature and bodies thus appear as interlinked sites of feminist struggles and everyday anti-capitalist, degrowth practices for eco-social justice. Capitalism’s answer to care needs, be they social or environmental, is always through the market. Care is being turned into a service, social services or eco-services. This leads to the relentless exploitation of resources and reproduction, as analyzed by Marxist feminism and transnational decolonial feminism. Foregrounding the economic relevance of care to anti-capitalist strategies as well as the political dimension of everyday feminisms, the workshop builds on Audre Lorde’s observation that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation´, and that is an act of political warfare.” Everyday care feminism focuses on the reproductive crisis that leads to human and environmental injustice and seeks to work for degrowth on an everyday level. The workshops use the iceberg framework developed by Gibson-Graham in their book Take Back the Economy to work out how anti-capitalist strategies connect caring labor, self-
care practices, spacial and environmental concerns. 

Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, Ghent University, March 28, 2022

How can, and will, architects and architecture respond to present-day conditions under neoliberal capitalism based on the resource-extraction and labor-exploitation?  How does response-able architecture build care? 

Recording

Unseen Realities, Panel at the Claiming Spaces Conference, Architecture Centre Vienna, March 26, 2022

The panel Unseen Realities focuses on invisible work and authorship in the everyday life of architectural produc-tion – whose realities, whose histories? We critically question the structures and mechanisms that contribute to manifesting today‘s hegemonic realities in architectural practice and explore how different forms of cooperation can arise.

Panelists: → Roberta Burghardt (she/her), Architect, Co-founder of the architects collective coopdisco, Berlin (DE) → Marisa Cortright (she/her), Independent Writer, Editor, Researcher, Zagreb (HRV) → Elke Krasny (she/her), Cultural Theorist, Curator, Urban Researcher, Vienna (AT) → Zaida Muxí Martínez (she/her), Architect, Teacher, Researcher, Barcelona (ESP)Concept & Moderation
Lauren Janko (she/her), Julia Nuler (she/her), Leon Scheuf-ler (he/him), Julia Wannenmacher (she/her), Elisabeth Weiler (she/her), Veronika Wladyga (she/her), C*S Collecti-ve Vienna (AT)

https://www.claimingspaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CSKonf_Programm2022_WEB-2.pdf

Feminist Night Scapes, Online, March 8, 2022

Feminist Night Scapes is a series of feminist walks curated, hosted, and performed by Elke Krasny, Sophie Ling, and Claudia Lomoschitz Feminist Night Scapes practices to take back the night together. Feminist Night Scapes is a feminist gathering, a space and time to honor conviviality and joy and to commemorate patriarchal urban violence and infrastructural neglect. Feminist Night Scapes is a walking symposium, a collective research process and a public manifestation. Feminist Night Scapes is feminist and queer feminist consciousness raising in action and gives rise to emancipatory urban imaginaries and urban futures. 

In feminist cities, WLINTA* (women, lesbians, inter, non-binary, trans, agender) groups roam the night. They enjoy places, share space, sing revolutionary songs, perform scores, stroll through the streets, and support each other.

March 8, International Women’s Day, invites us to imagine and demand non-sexist and peaceful cities. What would such feminist cities feel like? What kinds of infrastructures will they provide for their human and non-human inhabitants? What kinds of care-full environments will they offer? How have feminists used urban infrastructures for carving out different lives? How are boulevards and squares turned into infrastructures useful to marches, assemblies, and protests? How can we remember and honor those who built and fought for different infrastructures, access, justice, and caring cities.

Manifestos, reflections, pamphlets, songs, and scores will compose the virtual collective nightwalk with contributions from Justine Bell in Copenhagen, Maddalena Fragnito and Zoe Romano in Milano, Angela Dimitrakaki in Edinburgh , Sylvia Sadzinski (Berlin), Lucy Delap in Cambridge, Nina Prader in Berlin, Lara Perry in Brighton, Héléne Frichot (Melbourne), Małgorzata Markiewicz (Krakow), Elke Krasny & Sophie Lingg & Claudia Lomoschitz (Vienna), Mara Sánchez Llorens & Sálvora Feliz Ricoy (Madrid), Matilde Igual Capdevila (Valencia), Natalia Avlona ( Copenhagen ), Tara McDowell (Melbourne), Mascha Fehse & Licia Soldavini (Berlin), Zaida Muxi (Barcelona), Kirsten Lloyd (Edinburgh), Marvi Mazhar in Karachi and others.

https://www.akbild.ac.at/de/institute/kunstlerisches-lehramt/veranstaltungen/aktuelles/2022/feminist-night-scapes