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Re-Imagining Care through Artistic, Creative-Led Practice Research: A Multifaceted Panel
chair: Merel Visse
This panel brings together four PhD artist-researchers who utilize creative and practice-led approaches to explore the multifaceted nature of care. Through presentations and interactivity, they invite you to experience and reflect on the ethics of care within their artistic, design, and scholarly practices. By intersecting themes of artistic practice, care, and ethics, this panel offers a unique perspective on the role of creative research in shaping more humane and meaningful care practices.
The Tunnel as Urban Care-scape
Marloeke van der Vlugt
In this presentation, I introduce my artistic research method Touching by describing how passing through a pedestrian tunnel for months in a row, afforded me to execute a series of performative and caring gestures over time. I explain, using diverse audiovisual media, how the tunnel developed into an expanded scenographic research site – as its direct, pertinent impact on my daily rhythm activated me to become still, in a state of reception, evoking an awareness of my sensory material engagement with materialities – (non)human entities, objects, and environment – and activated via diverse aesthetic encounters an ethical stance in the world. Simultaneously, the tunnel slowly transformed into a “carescape” – an explorative site of caring activities evoking questions of response-ability and recognizing the time-space dimensions of care.
Within my current artistic PhD research, I call this phase of exploration contact, which I understand as the conscious, reciprocal experience of me touching and being touched. This physical connection persuades me to dispose (part of) my agency and become in relation: an experience oscillating between touching and being in contact that becomes an interval in time and space, an aspect of interaction that is de-hierarchizing us in the material world – through physical connection aimed at reciprocal awareness.
As an artist-researcher, I aim to develop Touching as an (artistic) creation method that stimulates an audience, participant, maker, or student to expose oneself to the other and the unknown, affording a state of being present that influences how you interact with, respond to, and take care of bodies, objects, and spaces. When the awareness and contemplation of Touching becomes an active decision or negotiation process, it gets politicized as it opens questions of response-ability and supports an ethical stance. Next to the aesthetic lens, I analyse the tunnel as a “carescape” exploring the place of care in our direct urban surroundings, underlining the importance of space and time to the social organization and experience of informal care exchanges.
Countering the Dominance of Economic Impact Thinking in Economic Art Education: Exploring Existential Art Experiences as Care
Esther Willemse
In the Dutch cultural and art sector and related sectors such as art education and research, the dominant focus on economic impact of art is receiving increasing criticism. Economic impact thinking often overlooks the intrinsic value of art experiences, including their existential value, which are difficult to quantify in monetary terms. To balance this, funding agencies and other policy research bodies are increasingly turning to qualitative methods to evaluate art’s impact on recipients, focusing on reflexive and mental aspects of recipients when assessing the quality of art projects. It is striking that these studies still take place within the positivist-economic discourse of impact thinking with a hyper focus on (measuring) effects. Inevitable existential qualities and unsayable, hard to verbalize dimensions of lived art experiences are ignored. In my PhD research, I explore, with students of art and economic education, lived art experiences on an existential level to counter dominant approaches to impact, and introduce care for experiences in impact thinking discourse. Grounded in lived art experiences, I will develop curriculum innovations, such as walking methods and Wonder Labs Ultimately, to enrich economic impact thinking in economic arts education.
This session will be an interactive space for participants to reflect on their lived art experiences. Together, we will explore the implications for developing a more caring approach to impact thinking. After a very short introduction about the PhD project, I invite the participants to stand two by two opposite each other, near the chairs to get in touch with each other. I ask them to take the clipboard with a pencil and draw the person standing in front of them; in one line, without looking at the paper or lifting the pencil. They then write the person’s first name on the drawing and sit on the chairs with their eyes closed. By firstly silently remembering a strong art experience, participants exchange details and thoughts on the lived art experiences and, secondly, deepen the conversation to an existential level and explore questions like: What is it like to be with art? And how is that meaningful to care? To conclude the mini session, I ask participants to write down the things said during the conversation on the drawing and to hang it on the wire in the room so we can highlight some of the drawing and things said.
Re-visioning Responsibility: Integrating an Ethics of Care in Design Practices
Simona Kicurovska
This contribution explores the integration of care ethics into design practices using Margaret Urban Walker’s expressive-collaborative model of responsibility. It merges an aesthetic encounter, immersing participants in the foundational concepts of my practice-led creative research, with reflective analysis of past co-creative events analyzed through Walker’s framework. My approach highlights the interplay between experiential learning and reflective practice, emphasizing how design can function as a medium for ethical discourse and care.
Contribution Outline:
1. Aesthetic Encounter (±10 minutes): Participants will engage in a sensory-based and co-creative task designed to prompt thinking and acting through the lens of care and responsibility. This encounter serves to prepare participants to not only reflect on but also through (personal) experience, providing a practical insight into how care ethics informs design practices.
2. Reflective Analysis (±5 minutes): A detailed analysis of previous co-creative events, applying Walker’s expressive-collaborative framework, will be presented. This will feature specific examples of design decisions and interactions, illustrating the practical implications and transformative potential of integrating care ethics into design practices. Outcomes are assessed through participant feedback and reflective essay(s) that evaluate the depth of ethical engagement and the practical application of care principles in design contexts.
3. Discussion (5 minutes): An open discussion to reflect on the aesthetic encounter and its implications for personal understandings and practices of design and/or care ethics.
This contribution demonstrates how aesthetic and ethical considerations are intertwined in design practices. By engaging with Walker’s model of responsibility, it explores how design can be a form of care that actively contributes to societal repair. The session underscores the role of aesthetic encounters in understanding and applying ethical concepts, proposing a model for how designers can use these insights to enhance and repair communal environments.
The methods used in my learning environments, such as scored aesthetic encounters and co-creative activities, lift participants slightly above the everyday, providing aesthetic care. By discussing outcomes like participant-created manifestos and scores, this contribution highlights how artistic practices contribute to personal and communal repair, reshaping educational environments and societal norms. It will demonstrate how Walker’s model is enacted in design practices where responsibility is not just about answering for actions but involves creating a dialogue through which communal values and ethics are expressed and negotiated. This reflects an ongoing ethical negotiation, essential for contemporary design education and the development of ethically engaged designers.
Drawing towards New Moral Ecologies in Co-creative Practices between Artists, Patients, and Caregivers.
Marielle Schuurman
In response to multiple systemic crises, artists increasingly stretch the boundaries of their traditional habitats to contribute to a more just and caring society. They move to places in society where they can make a difference: for example, in social support services and healthcare institutions. My study uses a care ethical perspective to examine CARE-labs: Co-creative Artistic Research Ecology labs, within the SPRONG network Creating Cultures of Care. CARE-labs are collaborative spaces where artists, patients, healthcare professionals, and others co-create new care concepts and practices.
However, integrating artistic and care perspectives presents challenges. For example, CARE-labs emphasize people and materials’ relationality and interdependence, whereas institutional care-contexts prioritize protocols and professional distance. Questions – and conflicts – arise about the role and responsibility of participants, about who cares for whom and what, about ownership, agency, temporality, and reciprocity. What is good care, when artists and patients shape their own co-creation practice, overruling medical and institutional protocols? These are deeply moral questions, explored in CARE-labs as “moral ecologies.” With this, I refer to people establishing new relations with vulnerability, their bodies, materialities, institutional forces, and with one another, shifting focus from individual behaviors to dynamic networks of people, materials, and environments engaging in co-creative relations.
In my contribution to this panel, in line with Thinking Through Drawing research, I will invite participants in a drawing space, where I conduct a 20-minute drawing session around the concept of “moral ecologies,” inspired by the first case study work in CARE-labs. This session also includes a small exhibition of these drawings.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman