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Ecologies of Care: Collaborative Practices in Human and More-Than-Human Environments
Learning and Practicing Care with Plants
Brussels Health Gardens, Heide Maria Baden, Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri & Lisa Sattell
Climate and ecological emergencies followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent wars revealed many limits and fragilities of modernity to our society. As a result, a deep curiosity unfolds asking to explore one’s own ecologies and identities of care. Now, a surge for repairing and healing relationships has captivated western societies, who increasingly search for local places and plant companions to experience our co-existence with what has been termed “nature.”
Confronted by our own senses of emergency, despair, emotional struggles, inner conflicts, helplessness, worthlessness, trauma, and search for integrity, our working group has been exploring and building various communities of convivial practices of being in relationships with each other, plants, time, seasonality, and landscapes. Based on nondualism and unconditional confidence, such communities include Brussels Health Gardens, Common Dreams School, International Forest Therapy Days, Writing(with)Plants, We Will Dance with Mountains, a school called HOME, ClimateExistence, Warm Data, and others. Working for various years in small islands connected with academic spaces, we are now finding ourselves connecting through common exercises of weaving interspecies connectivity, ecosystem awareness, and the more-than-human perspective into practice.
What these practices have in common are a slowing down and engaging in learning with plants, people, and healing spaces through experimental transdisciplinary care research, artistic, and therapeutic nature-based health practices (e.g. forest bathing, gardening, foraging, herbalism, urban agriculture, storytelling, mindful photography, art of caring/living/hosting, grieving with people, plants, and places). Expanding our existences and models of socialisation to the more-than-human world, we open pathways for interbeing and lead each other to recognizing ourselves as diverse creatures expressing vitality among other life forms and communities. Engaging in local and global practices allows us to weave together soil as fabric for zooming-in and zooming-out of our subjective experiences and to perceive plants as intimate companions or biological/geological hyperobjects (Morton, 2014). One key realisation was acknowledging vegetal time and our kinship with nonhuman beings, especially plants and us humans as a subset of their ecologies.
References
Morton, T, 2014. “Pandora’s Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought,” in Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, eds. Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Brussels Health Gardens (BHG) is a collective of caring citizen researchers and their kin, with links to Brussels, interested in exploring human-nature relationships. By acknowledging BHG as author, we want to stress the importance of caring and learning in collaboration with others – humans and nonhumans. The first activities of BHG were organised early 2019.
Dr. Heide Maria Baden (Broby, Denmark) recently completed her dissertation entitled Demographic Ageing in Plants, and has worked in plant systematics, floristics, and biodiversity conservation with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh for two decades. With her Master of Arts in Physical Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA she began her lifelong study of plant-atmosphere interactions. HMB is an ambassador for the vital role of the biosphere in the state of creating atmospheric balance and a livable climate for all beings.
Lisa Sattell (Menomonee Land, USA) is an experienced K-12 and adult educator, workshop facilitator, healer, and community organizer, currently serving as meditation and self-awareness leadership facilitator for advanced systems living, eco-literacy, eco-design, and healing-centered education. Interests focus on the creative process and its major role as catalyst for systems awareness and transformation in the collective field. A consultant and researcher, Lisa facilitates think tanks for organizational development and compassionate leadership in for profit and nonprofit sectors using intergenerational qualitative research and ethnography.
Dr. Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri (presenting author, Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, University of Mons, Belgium) is a pharmacist, transdisciplinary researcher, kin gardener, and co-creator in urban communities focusing on nature-based health practices for resilience and personal exploration in possible becoming. In her work, she is focusing on relational lived experiences shared between humans and plants.
Watching Guardians: Considering Practices of Producing Human Knowledge about Care
Lauren Wagner & Sanne Schoonbrood
Following the provocations of thinkers like Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret, we are curious about the intersection between academically generated knowledge and artistically generated understandings of care for more-than-human environments in how it is exercised by “guardians” and “stewards” - those who are charged with protecting and preserving, as well as with avoiding future crisis and disaster, and whose labor, if effective, should go unnoticed (Denis & Pontille, 2022). This is a tricky problem because the activity of care – in particular “guardianship” which may involve little active intervention – is not always temporally discrete, but happens over potentially extended time frames and can be difficult to sensorially observe. Moreover, the various ways of “voicing” the interests of multispecies actors through inevitably human channels of communication are difficult to attune with reliable accuracy. Given that care is becoming a central conceptual framework for understanding human-environment relations and even the materiality of lifeworlds, finding a methodological place to stand to observe care deserves attention.
Combining two ongoing projects on guardianship of housing and of a river, this paper explores what methods we can exercise to observe “care” in the more-than-human living environment. While multi-sensory forms of observation are abundant in contemporary ethnographic research, the “data” they can produce may provide alternative knowledges that do not have clear trajectory into academic knowledge production. Likewise, artistic interventions can provoke alternative understandings and perspectives, but without providing a conclusive foundation for the next intervention. When thinking about care as fundamentally relational and embodied practice, over time and space, we wonder how these forms of knowledge can build with each other.
References
Denis, J. & Pontille, D. (2022). Le soin des choses: Politiques de la maintenance. La Découverte.
Lauren Wagner is Associate Professor in Diasporic Mobilities at Maastricht University. Her research explores an intersection of migratory and touristic mobilities with housing through the sociomaterial practices of caring for houses built by migrants in their countries of origin. Within this project she collaborates with students and researchers of all variety, as well as artists working on housing and care.
Sanne Schoonbrood is a scholar in Anthropology and Development Studies. Her research interests are human-nature relationships and the creative inclusion of the other-than-human in academia. She explored non-anthropocentric perspectives on ecological care for her MA thesis in Globalisation and Development Studies at Maastricht University.
To Research (as) an Ecology of Care
Care Ecologies research group
The double bill “to research (as) an ecology of care” engages with the challenges and (im)possibilities of performing (as) an ecology of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in collaborative and interdisciplinary research. Our research group has explored care as a subject and a concern in its own functioning (Care Ecologies research group, 2022).
We suggest that using “ecology,” “care,” and “performance” as theoretical and methodological frameworks can support rethinking how to embed care within collaborative research practices. Often narratives about collaborative research emphasize linear progress and scripts about optimization and productivity. Lived experience is more chaotic, requiring the alignment of ideas across diverse temporalities (including time zones) and commitments. Drawing on Rolando Vázquez’s decolonial aesthesis – which is “the plurality of sensorial experiences and expressions” (Wevers, 2019) – we aim to shift the focus away from practices of perception and knowing to practices of being, listening, relating, and not-knowing. How can concepts like rhythm, place, and embodiment reshape our understanding of collaboration and the emergence of care within it?
In two workshops, we employ performance and creative writing to foster collective reflection on caring research practices within a multi-disciplinary group. The first involves a performative-reading (20 minutes) during the on-site gathering, where we explore the notion of performing collaboration* as an ecology of care. The second, a two-hour online workshop during the online portion of the conference, delves into the practice of researching together. Although each workshop stands alone, they complement each other in addressing collaborative research. Strategically incorporating both live and online elements reflects the multi-channel nature of collaborative research, involving tools like Zoom, Google Docs, and in-person interaction. This approach not only facilitates exchange across digital and physical spaces but also expands the ecology of care to local and international colleagues.
Part I: Collaboration – Performative Reading | On-site – 20 min.
The workshop begins with a performative reading where participants** equipped with printouts of text fragments, read aloud while navigating the room. Participants choose when to read, taking turns without a set order, building a natural rhythm through repetition. This exercise supports imagining an overhanging ecology, involving non-human and human agents in an attempt to sustain a web of care. As participants move, they embody various temporal layers that interact with and erase each other, influenced by the conference space’s visual, architectural, and acoustic qualities. This dynamic interaction with the physical site serves as a score, guiding their engagement and interpretation.
After the performative reading, attendees are invited to discuss the experience, using it as a lens to reflect on collaboration aspects. We emphasize that the objective is not to establish a “rhythm” for optimization, but to critically investigate research as a dynamic and evolving process. With this live performative reading we share and continue the threads of what we learned so far, as an ongoing rehearsal for an ecology of care.
Part II: Researching – Workshop | Online (CET) – 120 min.
The workshop invites participants to explore caring (artistic) research practices, addressing three strands: publishing, documentation, and facilitation. Participants are distributed into workgroups around the themes, where through guided experimental writing and sharing exercises, they unpack assumptions and care-full practices around research. In this context, we approach publishing through the kind of care needed when making research public. Documentation involves looking at how notetaking, audiovisual recording, and other related practices incorporate (non-)human bodies and entities and at creating living archives*** that continues conversations from previous gatherings. Facilitation centers on the organizational dynamic in collaborative research, namely, facilitating care-full exchange between people across disciplines. Building on personal experiences, we set out to develop a growing, propositional, and critical document of care practices on collaborative and sidling (Manning, 2020) ways of researching.
* We relate performing to the post-humanist understanding of performativity that points to the material aspects of meaning-making: how discursive practices and material phenomena are mutually implicated (Barad, 2003). This extends the idea of performance as a series of gestures related to embodied cognition, corporal literacy, and socio-political circumstances of the moment (Butler, 1988; Vlugt, 2015).
** “Thinking alongside with our collaborators [...] as a practice, as a rehearsal,” in the words of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar, and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, during storytelling Studio Encounters on Water #2, Perdu, Amsterdam, 23 April 2024.
*** Living archives resonate the conception of the anarchive as an “ethico-aesthetic adventure of living artfully,” where the politics of archiving gives care to the living matters and future potential of being together (Manning, 2020, p. 97).
References
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801-831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321
Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519-531.
Care Ecologies research group (Curandi, V., Gloerich, I., Molenda, A., Muntinga, M., Sanchez Querubin, N., Scholts, N. & Vlugt, M. van der) (2022). Towards becoming an ecology of care. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 27(6-7), 251-259. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2198879
Manning, E. (2020). What things do when they shape each other. In For a pragmatics of the useless (pp. 75-102). Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Vlugt, M. van der (2015). Performance as interface, interface as performance : An exploration of embodied interaction with technology in experimental performance. International Theatre & Film Books.
Wevers, R. (2019). Decolonial aesthesis and the museum: An interview with Rolando Vázquez Melken.Stedelijk Studies Journal, 8. https://doi.org/10.54533/StedStud.vol008.art06
Care Ecologies is a group of artists and scholars concerned with matters of care and with examining them from diverse disciplines such as the medical humanities, architecture, media studies, and choreography. The group discusses care-related topics and methodologies, reflecting also on how care is enacted in their personal research work and practice and how it shows up in their collaborations. Care Ecologies is part of ARIAS, a platform that facilitates encounters between researchers from artistic and scientific fields in Amsterdam. Group members who will participate in leading the workshop are: ro heinrich, Haitian Ma, Gabriela Milyanova, Natalia Sanchez Querubin, Nienke Scholts, Marloeke van der Vlugt.
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