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Care for the Other-Than-Human: Earthly, Oceanic, and Cellular Engagements
Geopoetics and Care of the Earth in the Anthropocene
Brunella Casalini
From their inception, the ethics of care and theories of social reproduction have challenged the private/public divide and its underlying nature/culture dualism. Nature and culture, public and private, have functioned in modernity as “real abstractions” capable of structuring our belief systems and thus our common sense. The ethics of care has recently appealed to art and artistic activities as activities of care for the soul and body in order to achieve a different relationship with ourselves and objects, but since the 1970s – think of the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles – it has also been clear that the task of re-signifying care gives art a central role in its intrinsically political dimension. It takes an appeal not only to our cognitive but also to our emotional and sensory resources to transform care in our common sense into the activity that sustains all life on a daily basis, and to which we must therefore give centrality on a political level. Only art can provide images, narratives, words and deeds that are capable of profoundly influencing our imagination and leading us to a correct understanding of the role played by care practices, understood in a broad sense that includes not only the activities of caring for others, but also those of repair and maintenance, so essential in responding to the challenges posed by an epoch that has been defined as the Anthropocene and is constantly being redefined through a multiplicity of "-cenes" (from the Capitalocene to the Necrocene, Polemocene, Wasteocene, etc. – there are now at least 80/90 proposed alternatives). A fact that in itself demonstrates the importance we attach to the possibility of re-narrating, with different and new words and images, controversial objects that demand our attention, concern and care, or, in other words, that shows how the transformation of the existing order and its implicit aesthetic dimension requires a counter-cultural engagement that calls for art, in its multiple forms. The aim of this paper is to explore in particular the role that geopoetics plays today in contemporary theoretical reflection on and political resistance to the Anthropocene.
Brunella Casalini is Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Florence, Italy. Her recent publications include "The Nurturing Language of Care Ethics and Other Related Feminist Approaches: Opposing Contemporary Neoliberal Politics", in P. Urban and L. Ward (Eds.), Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State, Palgrave MacMillan, Cham 2020, pp. 117-136; "Care and Injustice", International Journal of Care and Caring, 4(1), 2020, pp. 59-73; "Carelessness and Ignorance: The Epistemic Vices of the Privileged Analysed through Their Waste", in J. Braga (Ed.), Ethics of Care: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives, Springer, Series Advancing Global Bioethics, Cham, 2025; and Waste Land: Dall'incuria dell'homo faber alla cura dell'homo reflectus [Waste Land: From the Carelessness of Homo Faber to the Care of Homo Reflectus], IF Press, forthcoming.
Care and Repair in/through/with Oceanic Engagements
Tamara Shefer
Diffractively weaving care, feminist new materialist. and posthumanist ethical sensibilities, and drawing on hydrofeminism (Neimanis, 2013, 2017a, 2017b), this presentation thinks in, with, and through oceanic engagements for reparative flourishing in current academic and global climates. Our swimming-photographing-writing-reading-thinking together emerged from our engagements with reconfiguring higher education in post-apartheid South Africa within the larger project of care, justice, and decolonial scholarship globally. Deeply aware of how normative practices in the neoliberal academy repeat colonial, patriarchal, and humanist logics, we work with imaginative, creative, embodied, relational, and affective practices to re-imagine scholarship. In our video presentation, we share narratives from our oceanic swimming-thinking-reading-writing together. Our writings and images speak of the poignant experiences of “taking a thought to water.” We share visceral and affecting encounters with underwater creatures and plants and the awe of a methodology of encounter (Probyn, 2016). We also confront the fluid temporalities and hauntings of apartheid and colonial violences that saturate the oceans; these place-space-time matterings trouble our privileged irresponsibility and implicatedness in current environmental damages and violences to many humans and other species. Our relational encounters in the ocean sharpen our response-ability for anthropocentric damages to the ocean and planet. Our shared vulnerabilities in the ocean, especially in isolated COVID-times, and our care-full watery attention to each other, oceanic creatures and environments, keeps us afloat in the sea and also in other spaces of precarity, like the toxic university. Our film thinks with the possibilities of such watery engagements for generating response-ability for our precious hydrocommons. We suggest that collective engagements which draw humans into an embodied engagement with oceans and ocean critters, with troubled histories, presents and futures, may open up alternative imaginaries of ways to live ethically, care-fully, reparatively and response-ably in current times, towards survival and flourishing for all.
References
Neimanis, A. (2012). Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water. In H. Gunkel, C.Nigianni & F. Söderbäck (Eds), Undutiful daughters: Mobilizing future concepts, bodies and subjectivities in feminist thought and practice (pp. 85-100). Palgrave Macmillan.
Neimanis, A. (2013). Feminist subjectivity, watered. Feminist Review, 103, 23-41.
Neimanis, A. (2017a). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic.
Neimanis. A. (2017b). Water and knowledge. In D. Christian & R. Wong (Eds.) Downstream: Reimagining Water (pp. 51-68). Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Probyn, E. (2016). Eating the ocean. Duke University Press.
Tamara Shefer is Senior Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. Her scholarship has foregrounded the study of gender and sexualities within postcolonial, decolonial, transnational feminist, and critical masculinities thinking, with particular emphasis on young people. She is currently engaged with re-conceptualising academic knowledge with emphasis on embodied, affective, feminist, decolonial pedagogies and research, including collaborations across art and activism and thinking with oceans and water. Her most recent books include: A Feminist Critique of Sexuality Education for Gender Justice in South African Contexts (co-authored with S. Ngabaza, 2023, CSA&G Pretoria University); Knowledge, Power and Young Sexualities: A Transnational Feminist Engagement (co-authoured with J. Hearn, 2022, Routledge); and the Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (co-edited with L. Gottzén & U. Mellström, 2020). She is also co-editor (with V. Bozalek & N. Romano) on the recently published volume Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities (Routledge, 2024).
What Does It Mean to Care for a Unicellular Micro-organism? Photography as Mutualistic Care
Risk Hazekamp & Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803
As an artist working with photography, I hold myself co-accountable to photography’s contribution in determining the stories we do perceive and the ones we fail to perceive (Azoulay, 2019). I investigate speculative photographic narratives to envision how “we” are related beyond what we understand to be our dominant relationship to the planet (Gumbs, 2020).
In March 2020, I became caretaker of two cultures of Synechocystis, a unicellular Cyanobacterium. Cyanobacteria have shaped the evolution of respiration on planet Earth. They were the first organisms to perform oxygenic photosynthesis (Povinelli, 2016). Little by little, Cyanobacteria made Earth inhabitable for humans.
Still, I had no idea how to care for these invisible green critters. After many mistakes, I understood that my perception of time in relation to care was far too coarse, that care is also not acting.
“From the perspective of human–nonhuman relations in technoscience and naturecultures, unproblematic visions of care (...) would not only be meaningless but could be fatal.” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017)
In deep collaboration with our ancient Cyanobacteria ancestors, I propose a new approach to photography, a change in attitude to make photography less anthropocentric. A type of photography where the photographer no longer is in control of the actual image, but rather creates the circumstances and conditions in which photosensitive images may evolve.
Supported by methodologies like “listening” and “unlearning,” my artistic practice takes place in the day to day: to read what is not written, to hear what is not told. To see what is invisible and to listen to the unspoken.Through embracing the praxis of mutualistic care (Karana, 2020) nearby a more-than-human “Other,” I try to“figure out pathways towards more joyful and ethical co-becoming with the planet body” (Lykke, 2022).
Risk Hazekamp (they/them) is an inter-dependent visual artist, researcher, and an art educator. After studies at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, they lived in Berlin for eleven years. In 2020 Hazekamp graduated at the “Advanced Master of Research in Art & Design in a Social-Political Context” at St Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp and attended the 2020 and 2021 editions of “María Lugones Decolonial Summer School” of Utrecht University and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Subsequently, they started as a researcher at the “Research Group for Biobased Art & Design” at St. Joost School of Art & Design/Avans in Breda+Den Bosch where, as of June 2023, in collaboration with the “Materials Experience Lab” at TU Delft and the “Professorship Art and Sustainability” of Minerva Art Academy/Hanze in Groningen, Hazekamp started their Professional Doctorate, titled: “Unlearning Photography – Listening to Cyanobacteria.”
Their work has revolved around the complex and constantly changing relationship between “body” and “image.” Through a combination of personal activism, decolonial praxis, and analogue (currently micro-organic) photography, visual intersectional processes are developed to change existing systems. In doing so, Risk takes on the position of a student as often as possible investigating Unlearning Photography, currently through their more-than-human relationality “nearby” Cyanobacteria.
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