panel 4
Embodied Ethics and Care Aesthetics: Feminist, Trans*, and Queer Interventions
Percipience, Embodiment, Contamination(s): Practicing a Feminist Care Aesthetics
Elena Cologni
I will offer a new reading of dialogic artistic research in terms of feminist care aesthetics. This includes the perceptual and phenomenological underpinnings of relational dynamics in my dialogic art, and in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of percipience, informing Maurice Hamington’s embodied care (2004), and Anya Daly’s affective reversibility (2018, 2019).
In particular, I consider the roots of the word practice/praxis coming from the Greek phronesis, which is a capacity to respond to the particularities of experience, and to evolving relationships with others, which for Aristotle enabled the human being to live well within the polis (Pakes, 2004). Phronesis is thus associated for Aristotle with the domain of praxis (social action) rather than poesis (making), but they coexist in dialogic art.
Art based on relationality is inherently a practice of care, as care is said to be “a basic aspect of human behaviour integral to our interrelationships” (Hamington, 2004). By drawing on the caring with dialogic art strategy (Cologni, 2020a, 2020b; Tronto, 1993), I discuss how it relates to Elena Pulcini’s notion of “contaminated subject” resulting from a feminist critique of the “sovereign subject” (2013, 2022). It is believed that adopting such art approach can turn daily “distractions, interruptions and fragmentations” (Mother Art Collective, 1973) into opportunities for dialogue and change through art that starting from the individual, can have transformational societal impact.
ReferencesCologni, E. (2020a). Art as a caring practice: New connections for social transformation (season 1, episode 9) [Audio podcast episode]. In Creativity Pioneers Podcast. The Moleskine Foundation. https://moleskinefoundation.org/initiative/the-moleskine-foundation-podcast/
Cologni, E. (2020b). Caring-with dialogic sculptures: A post-disciplinary investigation into forms of attachment. PsicoArt: Rivista di arte e psicologia, 10(10), 19–64. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2038-6184/11444
Daly, A. (2019). A phenomenological grounding for feminist ethics. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 50(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2018.1487195
Daly, A. (2018). Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic interworld: From primordial percipience to wild logos. Philosophy Today, 62(3), 847-867. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday20181024231
Hamington, M. (2004). Embodied care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and feminist ethics. University of Illinois Press.
Mother Art Collective. (1973). Artists' statement. Getty Library, Research Institute, 2017.M.60 (box 1, f.4).
Pakes, A. (2004). Art as action or art as object? The embodiment of knowledge in practice as research. Working Papers in Art and Design, 3.
Pulcini, E. (2013). Contaminazione e vulnerabilità: Il sé nell’età globale. In S. Caporale Bizzini & M. Richter Malabotta (Eds), Soggetti itineranti: Donne alla ricerca del sè (pp. 159-175). AlboVersorio.
Pulcini, E. (2022). Feminism and convivialism. In F. Adloff & A. Caillé (Eds), Convivial futures: Views from a post-growth tomorrow (pp. 39-48). Transcript Verlag.
Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
Dr. Elena Cologni is an artist and Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Critical Practice with the role of Research and Innovation Lead at the Cambridge School of Art (Anglia Ruskin University), where she also leads the WeCARE Unit, and is Course Director of the MA Art Health and Wellbeing. Cologni has organised with Merel Visse the Art & Care series since 2019. Trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan, and the University of Leeds, she obtained a PhD in Art and Philosophy, as well as her postdoc at the University of the Arts London (funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council). Pioneer of the Art Practice Research approach, she worked at, among others, University of Lincoln, the University of Cambridge (GB), and ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL). Cologni's artistic career has been supported by numerous institutions, including National Portrait Gallery (London), ICA (London), Tate Modern (London), CCA (Glasgow), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The Women's Art Collection (Cambridge), MKGallery (Milton Keynes), Museums Quartier (Vienna), Galleria Milano (Milan), neon and GAM (Bologna), GAMeC (Bergamo), Venice Biennale, Tournai Triennale (Belgium), and Foundation Bevilacqua LaMasa (Venice). Upcoming exhibitions at the Heong Gallery, Cambridge (UK) and the Museo Laboratorio Arte Contemporanea, Sapienza Università, Rome (Italy). Cologni has received numerous awards, the ongoing support from Arts Council England and the British Council (GB), and has also won the prestigious Getty Research Institute Grant (Los Angeles 2023). www.elenacologni.com
Embodied Aesthetics and the Ethics of Care: Trans* and Queer* Interventions
Kaimé Guerrero
In this new era, defined by a global crisis, the prevailing anthropocentric, Western-centric, racist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, capitalist paradigm has wrought devastating effects worldwide. This is especially pronounced in regions often referred to as the “Global South,” yet remains undeniable even in areas identified as the “Global North,” particularly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crisis, and ongoing conflicts. To address this, there's a call for the production of new and the recognition of marginalized onto-epistemologies, fostering responsible material-discursive practices of care, response-ability, and conviviality. These paradigms align with new materialisms and critical posthumanisms, extending beyond academic, cultural, and artistic practices, which challenge existing constructions of reality, emphasizing the rejection of dualistic frameworks and acknowledging the active role of materiality and more-than-human existences in boundary-drawing processes. I argue that the production of alternative material-discursive cartographies of care and coexistence takes place in subjugated, anticolonial, queer, anti-racist, and disabled aesthetic-political processes both beyond and within academic contexts. This contribution will focus on counter-hegemonic artistic interventions stemming from the embodied experiences of queer*, trans*, and inter*, BIPoC*, and dis/abled groups from the so-called Global South. These interventions, by recognizing the intersection of different forms of discrimination, give rise to “ethico-onto-epistem-ologies” (Barad, 2007) grounded in the recognition of an unavoidable interdependence, thereby allowing for the creation of novel forms of care, solidarity, resistance, and livable,more egalitarian worlds.
The aim of this proposal is to examine the methodology through which material-discursive practices are mobilized within artistic manifestations to create embodied "matterphorics" (Barad, 2021) of care. These practices not only expand the conception of care and ethics but also bring forth new forms of being, knowing, and becoming-with, intervening in hegemonic world configurations. Moreover, this proposal intends to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue, understood as diffractive patterns (Barad, 2007), between the matterphorics resulting from artistic processes and new-materialist, queer, trans*, decolonial approaches. This dialogue seeks to draw lines of connection aimed at political transformation.
My name is Kaimé Guerrero. I am a trans* non-binary writer and scholar, originally from Quito and now based in Berlin for the past nine years. My academic journey began with studies in Sociology and Political Science at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. I furthered my education by completing a Master's degree in Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies with a Gender Profile at the Freie Universität Berlin. Currently, I am a PhD candidate and researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre "Intervening Arts" (SFB1512) within the Department of Humanities at the University Duisburg-Essen. My research and artistic pursuits revolve around exploring the intersections between aesthetic-political and scientific processes, particularly in the context of generating alternative forms of world-making.
Pregnancy, Birth, and Parenting and the Evocative Art of Louise Bourgeois
In the artworks of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), the experiences of pregnancy, birth, and parenting are prominently expressed. Feminist philosophy – maternal theory and care ethics primarily – seeks to include these embodied experiences, but faces an uphill battle. The public perception of these experiences is at best that it is interesting on a personal level and perhaps also facing some societal and political challenges. The impact on the lives of people, in the moral and political sense, is largely underestimated. With this paper, I challenge this perception and valuation, for which I seek support in art. I contend that the presentation of artworks helps to evoke an affective response to the need for care of pregnant, birthing, and parenting embodied persons. This response, hopefully, supports the claim that these persons need more care than many societies at present offer. With this approach I follow the care ethical key insight that care is a response to a need and that unmet needs or harmful practices require repair.
Three works by Louise Bourgeois are presented while an argument is made for the reconceptualization of pregnancy, birth, and parenting respectively. This reconceptualization takes place on the level of ontology, ethics, and politics, in line with care ethics, hence concerning questions of the self, the good, and the ordering of our society. The central thesis is that Bourgeois’ provocative art helps to open up these questions, has an impact both on the affect and the understandings of these questions, and as such enables researchers to reimagine more adequate forms of care. By way of example, the idea of “ethical dialogue” is put central, and complemented by the ideas of “pre-dialogue” in pregnancy, “silencing” in birth, and “interruption” in parenting. As such, art and philosophy work together towards new understandings as the basis of better care.
Inge van Nistelrooij is Associate Professor of Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She has broad experience as a publicist, researcher, and educator in care ethics, for which she draws upon her interdisciplinary research into care practices and care philosophy. More recently, her research focuses upon ethical and existential questions concerning pregnancy, birth, and parenting, ranging from questions of (in)fertility, pregnancy loss, child-free living, to responsibility for future generations. Next to her academic work, she works as an ethics consultant and policy advisor in care, where she is often involved in facilitating ethical reflection in interdisciplinary teams and in participatory action research trajectories in which care professional and informal carers collaborate.
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