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Care Beyond Repair?
Ecological Damage and Aesthetic Reparative Practices: Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility, and Response-ability
Vivienne Bozalek & Michalinos Zembylas
This presentation considers how ecological damage is entangled with responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability, and thinks about what aesthetic practices might be useful in working towards reparation. The first part of the presentation considers the contribution that the notion of responsibility in care and feminist new materialist ethics has made towards critiquing taken-for-granted notions of the Anthropocene and sustainability discourses and rhetoric prevalent in current ecological debates. The second part of the presentation examines how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply entwined and how privileged irresponsibility is important for understanding this entanglement. The third part of the presentation considers a number of response-able (responsive) arts-based research-creation practices (Manning, 2016) that may be made to dismantle the mechanistic worldview inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. This part of the presentation provides examples of three such experimental practices in higher education that are ways of coupling colonial ecological damages with reparation. These examples of arts-based practices are from projects in Cape Town, South Africa, and pertain to the histories of apartheid and colonialism and its effects on the land and Indigenous peoples. The final part of the presentation thinks-with relational ontologies of Black and Indigenous worldviews such as critical animism and considers how they intersect with care and feminist posthumanist ethics to develop alternative practices in academia.
Vivienne Bozalek is an Emerita Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. Her most recent co-authored book with Michalinos Zembylas is Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability: Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage (Palgrave, 2023) and recent co-edited books include Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives, with Bob Pease (Routledge, 2021), Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities with Tamara Shefer and Nike Romano (Routledge, 2024).
Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia, and Research Faculty at Lebanese American University. He holds a Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Chair for 2023-2026. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in education, particularly in relation to social justice, decolonization, and politics. His latest books are: Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability: Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage (co-authored with Vivienne Bozalek), and Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education (co-edited with Petra Mikulan).
”If We Do Not Seek to Fix What Has Been broken, Then What?“: On the Possibility of Care in the Arts, if Repair is Impossible
Rahel Kesselring
Against the discursive background of damaged “Anthropocene” environments (cf. Haraway, Shotwell, Tsing), this contribution aims to examine practices of care in contemporary art. I am particularly interested in examining site-specific artistic practices that take place within ecosystems and that through their procedures of care attempt to trigger repair, reconciliation, mourning, and redemption.
”If we do not seek to fix what has been broken, then what?“, queer theorist Jack Halberstam asks. What if the repair of damaged ecosystems is no longer possible? What other impacts do procedures of care have? Demanding for an ethics of decay, philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa calls for a radical rethinking of our material ontology, leading to a culture of shared and assisted breakdown as procedures of care – ”let there be breakdown,” she requests. For Eve Tuck and C. Ree on the other hand, healing and reconciliation can never occur, only mercy.
In my contribution, I plan to firstly analyze ”Manheim calling” by Silke Schatz. The art projects documents traces of botanical rewilding in a coal mining area in Western Germany. Schatz’ archives the existing landscape before it will be razed to the ground to make way for the mining site. In the context of my presentation, I will interpret the artist’s documentary and archival work as procedure of care that cannot bring healing, but a form of appeasement and mourning. Secondly, the artistic work of Lara Almarcegui examines wastelands as peripheral areas that are forced out by urban development. Her ”Guides to Wastelands” – detailed examinations of the entanglements of those peripheral areas – are, I will argue, procedures of care and memorial to these disappearing zones. Methodically, against the background of feminist and queer theory, I will analyze these artistic practices based on my field work on-site as well as through interviews with the artists.
Rahel Kesselring is a cultural researcher and artist. Currently, she is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural History and Theory and part of the cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity”, both at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her doctoral project investigates concepts and site-specific implementations of “repair,” “regeneration,” and “renaturation” within forest ecosystems in works of contemporary art at the interface between plant studies, art, and cultural theory. Rahel has a background in performance studies and scenography. Most recently she worked as a research associate and lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts. As a scenographer, she works in the field of performance and site-specific art in various collaborations across Europe. https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/members/8689/rahel-kesselring and https://www.rahelkesselring.org/
Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused: The Practice of Illness
Yen Noh
Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused is a lecture performance that concerns illness as a practice. By refusing illness as an individuated concept of survival, it engages illness as a possibility for participating in artistic and social aesthetic pedagogy. In doing so, Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused explores the body that suffers as potential turning into a conduit for an “other,” “larger” bodies. In other words, the sensitivity of being ill – that is the radical unsettlement of self – is no longer a threat, instead becomes a breach to break away from the seemingly solid boundaries of what we call “body.”
The performance is critically informed by the two artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Ana Mendieta. The scene of alchemy they enacted and performed – the mystical meeting of blood, water, ink, fire, soil – is grounded in their dispossessed body and moves to a temporal revelation of possibilities for a change. Their “mystical realism” seeks the ways in which the processes of body and psyche marked by dispossession and displacement are uncongealed and transposed into a social commentary. Cha’s and Mendieta’s poetics of non/relation posits their body as a vessel – from which a “swarm of singularities” can emerge, while the urgency for freedom and difference remains.
Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused explores illness in this light. While a diseuse(d), diseased, and disused body represents histories of violence, it carries out continual processes of transmutation and therefore opens up to bearing extraordinary social relations of humans and more-than-humans, and potentially lead to the emergence of non-self and many-other-selves as “whole.” In this regard, illness is inherently social. Being ill is a temporal, spatial, and linguistic, as well as cultural, social, and political orchestration of escape. What does this escape look like? Diseuse(d), Diseased, Disused begins with this question.
Yen Noh is an artist, writer, and educator whose practice engages with artistic and social aesthetic pedagogy. Her research has so far been on varied modes of linguistic and paralinguistic performativity as a way to challenge the cyclical violence of racialized and gendered identity and its (re)presentation. Throughout, she is concerned with possibilities of language that embody the “poethics” of the unspeakable beyond linguistic norms and without reclaiming subjectivity. Noh currently explores illness as a pedagogical method and practice as part of the process of her own recovery. By drawing on a relationship between language, disability, and intimacy, she is interested in possibilities for a radical unsettlement of the self, through which extraordinary social relations can be opened up.
Noh participated in the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice 2021-2022 and will be a fellow of THIRD Cycle Research Group 2024-2026 at the Academy of Theatre of Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts. Her recent performances, exhibitions, trainings, and contributions, both collaboratively and individually, include: The Hauntologists, BAK, Utrecht, 2022; Troubling Archive, BAK, 2022; Nothing Is – Everything Just Has Been or Will Be, Korean Cultural Center UK, London; We Owe Each Other Everything, Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, 2020; Representation, Kunstlicht, vol. 41, 2020; Considering Monoculture, deBuren, Brussels, 2020; and The Im/possible Avant-garde: Can We Talk About MAVO?, Bulegoa z/b, Bilbao, 2019. Noh lives and works in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
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