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Caring Infrastructures
Temporalities of Care in the Conservation of Contemporary Art
Renée van de Vall
In 2021, Maastricht's Bonnefantenmuseum started the restoration of Ferdi Tajiri’s (1927-1968) Hortisculptures, colourful organic forms with strong suggestions of female sexuality. Made from various kinds of fabrics, the Hortisculptures showed signs of wear and tear after decades of storage. Their restoration posed many challenges and took much longer than foreseen. “Restoring Ferdi” wasn’t a purely backstage affair. Many in-house and external professionals and students were involved and during the process there was a small exhibition showing the already restored works, photographs of the artist in her studio, a video documentary, and occasionally the two restorers at work.
“Restoring Ferdi” is a fine example of “conservation-as-care.” Rather than “conservation-as-protection,” focused on the material preservation of the authentic art object (Domínguez Rubio, 2020), “conservation-as-care” aims to support an artwork's flourishing in a context of inevitable change, both of the work itself and of the worlds it inhabits (van de Vall 2023a, 2023b). The project shows how a collaborative caring practice may complicate the dominant, productionist time-scapes of the museum by “making time” with an alternative ethos of attentiveness and responsiveness and a different “logic” (Laurenson, 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Mol, Moser & Pols, 2012; Tronto, 1993). A problem yet unresolved, however, both in conservation theory and practice, is how to respond carefully to the ultimate mortality of contemporary art objects while at the same time honouring their legacy. How to conceive an equivalent in the care for “dying” works of art for what in the context of nature and historic environment conservation has been called “adaptive release” (DeSilvey et al., 2021)? I will argue that the answer requires exploring, next to the “embedded” time-scapes of the museum, the interactions between “epoch time” and “embodied time” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) involved in the care for artworks in the long run.
References
DeSilvey, C., Fredheim, H., Fluck, H., Hails, R., Harrison, R., Samuel I. & Blundell, A. (2021). When loss is more: From managed decline to adaptive release. The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 12(3-4), 418-433. https://doi.org/10.1080/17567505.2021.1957263
Domínguez Rubio, F. (2020). Still life: Ecologies of the modern imagination at the art museum. The University of Chicago Press.
Laurenson, P. (2023). Making time. In R. van de Vall & V. van Saaze (Eds), Conservation of contemporary art: Bridging the gap between theory and practice (pp. 385-201). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42357-4_19
Mol, A., Moser, I. & Pols, J. (Eds) (2012). Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. Transcript.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethics of care. Routledge.
Vall, R. van de (2023a). Doing ethics in practice: SBMK platform meetings. In R. van de Vall & V. van Saaze (Eds), Conservation of contemporary art: Bridging the gap between theory and practice (pp. 33-55). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42357-4_3
Vall, R. van de (2023b). Caring for contemporary art: Reflections on ethics and aesthetics in precarious times. Valedictory Lecture Maastricht University. https://doi.org/10.26481/spe.20230119rv
Renée van de Vall is emeritus professor in Art & Media at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the phenomenology of spectatorship in contemporary art, on processes of globalization of contemporary art and media, and on conservation theory and ethics in the context of contemporary art. She was project leader of various research projects, most recently (2016-2019) of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network on New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA).
Care Aesthetics in Contemporary Art: Interdependence and Care in las mediocre Art Collectivet
Ana Ferriols & María Paula Santiago Martín de Madrid
This conference assesses the different forms that an aesthetics of care takes in the contemporary artistic panorama. Following the proposal made by James Thompson, a classification of four aesthetics sections mixing art and care is made. The sections are: ecology and care, care and kindness, care and feminism, and caring infrastructure. Each section is explained with a series of examples of representative exhibitions. This analysis sets the grounds for a discussion on the work of the art collective las mediocre (Valencia, Spain) formed by eight young women and one non-binary person. The collective’s work is explained from a caring infrastructure point of view. This work takes place in a precarious professional environment in which the means for production are mostly based on co-participation in a “people as infrastructure” context – emphasizing the importance of collaborative networks of exchange and cooperation between people lacking material means. The main questions addressed in the collective’s projects like “Más tibias que frescas” that took place in the independent art space Pols in 2022 are: How can we create a support structure in art creation that is able to challenge capitalistic ideas of individualism, authorship, competition, and excellence so deeply rooted in the art working context? And, more positively, how can we create with a greater focus on commoning, reproduction, and care towards each other and our bodies? In addressing these questions, the collective resorts to radical imagination and friendship to build new ways for working together in the art labour scenario. To conclude, I reflect on the results and difficulties encountered in putting these ideas into practice with other professional agents and working with institutions or independent art spaces.
Ana Ferriols (1997) graduated in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. She is currently developing her research at this university with a postdoctoral contract from the Spanish Ministry of Universities at the Art and Environment Research Center (2021-2025). She has been a visiting researcher at the European University Institute in Florence (2022) and at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2023) under the supervision of Benno Gammerl and Giulia Lamoni, respectively. She has published the article: “The city of care: Infrastructure for an art in common” (2023) in the journal Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, and the book Urban Commons and Artistic Production (2022) with Editorial Contrabando. Her work addresses the relationship between contemporary art and care theory, her thesis is titled Care Theory in 21st Century Art: Proposals for artistic creation and cultural management in southern Europe during the period 2000-2023. She participates in the R&D project “Ecological Humanities and Ecosocial Transitions: Ethical, Aesthetic, and Pedagogical Proposals for the Anthropocene.” Her research work is carried out in parallel with her participation in the artistic collective las mediocre. With las mediocre she has participated in exhibitions such as “Más tibias que frescas” (2022) in the independent space Pols, in Valencia, as well as in the artistic residency “El ponent la mou, el llevant la plou” (2022) from the Immunity/community program of Idensitat, as part of the European project “Who cares?” The collective's work is focused on relationships, collectivity and care as a central form of creation.
María Paula Santiago Martín de Madrid holds a PhD in Fine Arts, is a University Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Valencia, Spain, and currently director of the Art and Environment Research Center of the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Since 2006, she has participated in and been the Principal Investigator of numerous R&D projects subsidized by public calls of an institutional nature. She has published articles about urban themes, social environments, and their links with art in magazines such as Thémata. Revista de Filosofía; Archivo de Arte Valenciano; Bellas Artes. Revista de artes plásticas, estética, diseño e imagen; Fabrikart; Gama and Revista Estúdio. She is the author of the books: La convivencia plural, una aproximación a la ciudad (2020), Art site: Periferias expositivas (2016), Fuera de campo: Leer el espacio desde las artes (2014), In situ: Espacios urbanos contemporáneos (2011), Visiones del entorno: Paisaje, territorio y ciudad en las artes visuales (2009), Tabula rasa: Nuevos siglos, nuevos ensanches (2008), and Márgenes y centros: La ciudad contrapuesta (2007). Additionally, she has curated and participated in numerous national and international art exhibitions.
Caring for Public Things, Repairing Our Worlds: A Conversation Between Maintenance/Repair Studies and Feminist Care Ethics.
Sophie Bourgault
In an important article titled “Rethinking Repair,” science studies scholar Steven J. Jackson proposed a “standpoint epistemology of repair” that sought to place repair and repair workers at the forefront of technology and social science research. Jackson’s analysis began with the observation that there is a paradox at the heart of human existence: we live in an “always-almost-falling-apart world” (a world of collapse and breaking), and yet, we also live in a world of “constant fixing and reinvention” (a world of hope). Most significantly for our purposes, Jackson argued that what ties these two realities together was repair, which he defined as these “subtle acts of care” (2014, p. 222) carried out daily in order to maintain our world and to fit together its messy organizational, biological, technological and sociopolitical aspects.
Jackson also proposed an “ethics of mutual care and responsibility” (2014, p. 231) that very briefly gestured towards Carol Gilligan’s research. What our paper hopes to show is that much could be gained by having a more sustained conversation between care ethics and repair/maintenance studies – particularly around their respective views on fragility, temporality, attention, and aesthetics. The paper will draw partially on the writings of well-known care theorists, but also on that of maintenance scholars such as Jérôme Denis and David Pontille. While insufficiently attuned to gender dynamics, the latter’s Le soin des choses: Politiques de la maintenance (2022) offers care theorists rich insights concerning the complex art that constitutes cleaning and repair.
The paper makes a plea for the greater recognition of all those individuals whose discreet work is devoted to the maintenance of public things and infrastructures – both of which are, I argue, crucial for sustaining decent democratic politics. Drawing on feminist theorists like Bonnie Honig and Lauren Berlant as well as on critical geography scholarship, the paper also draws the contours of what I call “caring infrastructures.”
Sophie Bourgault is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Current research interests gravitate around the ethics of care; gender, temporality, and work; epistemologies of ignorance; and contemporary feminist theory. In addition to having published numerous book chapters and articles on feminist ethics and epistemic injustice, she has coedited several volumes on care, including Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege: Critical Care Ethics Perspectives (forthcoming 2024); Éthiques de l’hospitaliteě, du don et du care; In Yet a Different Voice; Care and Emotions [in Italian, Cura ed emozioni]; and Le care: Éthique féministe actuelle. She was guest coeditor for a special issue on gender, work, and justice (Politique et Sociétés) and guest coeditor for the International Journal of Care and Caring (with F. Robinson).
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
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