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Towards an Ethics and Aesthetics of Repair

Care as a Form of Repair: Examining Aesthetics, Dramaturgy, and Justice in Grenfell: In the Words of the Survivors, A Verbatim Theatre Play by Gillian Slovo (2023)
Amanda Stuart Fisher

This paper examines Grenfell: In the Words of the Survivors, a verbatim theatre play by Gillian Slovo (2023), which draws on testimony from the survivors of the Grenfell fire and evidence presented at the government Grenfell inquiry. In this paper, I consider how the dramaturgy and mise-en-scène of the play reveal how aesthetics and performance can be employed to examine the intersections of care and justice, staging a potent form of repair.

The fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 killed 72 people and left many more injured, bereaved, and homeless. The formal inquiry found that “every death was avoidable” and in 2021, the government formally apologised for failures which had helped create an “environment in which such a tragedy was possible.” Addressing these failures through the testimony of survivors and their families, Slovo’s play examines how relationships of interdependence and an aesthetics of care sustained the community at Grenfell in years prior to the fire. Juxtaposing this with the neoliberal housing policies of a local council, which enacted a politics of gentrification on this community, the play exposes the privation of care experienced by residents before, during and after the fire.

Through her use of verbatim theatre, Slovo’s dramaturgy foregrounds and attends to the lived experience of the community. In so doing, I argue, the performance examines how attentiveness emerges in this dramaturgical context as an aesthetic and a form of resistance and repair. Through its staging, Grenfell: In the Words of the Survivors, I suggest, invites audiences to think afresh about questions of justice and care in relation to social housing. Through its exploration of the “woundedness” (Till, 2012) of the community at Grenfell and the slow violence (El-Ennay, 2019) they encountered, the play responds by enacting an aesthetics of care which serves to stage potent form of resistance and repair.

Amanda Stuart Fisher is a Reader in Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London. Her monograph Performing the Testimonial: Rethinking Verbatim Dramaturgies and her co-edited collection: Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance were published by Manchester University Press in 2020. Her research has also been published in various international journals, such as Performance Research, Studies in Theatre and Performance and TDR/The Drama Review.

Towards An Aesthetics of Repair: The Artistic Practices of Nalini Malani, Simone Leigh, and Cecilia Vicuña

Alycia Danckaarts

How does one repair the unrepairable? For the last decade, the notions of repair and care have increasingly surfaced in debates on decolonial theory and the broader humanities. The need for new tools to look towards a potentially better future seems quite evident. But how can we make this concept of repair more concrete and workable, especially when regarding ongoing, intangible, and irreversible ruptures such as colonialism and its afterlives? Is a cultural, or social or political, repair in that case even possible? And if so, how? This paper explores how the concept of repair can be further developed in relation to the decolonial through an exploration of different artists who are working around issues of cultural memory and trauma, (sexual) violence and oppression, (cultural) identity and resistance and sovereignty. The aim of this project is to contribute to an understanding of repair from a decolonial perspective.

By looking at three different artists and practices, this paper will explore through different materialities what an aesthetics of repair might constitute. The three artists chosen for this analysis – Nalini Malani, Cecilia Vicuña, and Simone Leigh – each take their own distinctive approach to a reparative practice and will therefore be combined in one exploration to aim at a more enhanced rethinking of repair. All three artistic practices trigger acts of imagination in the viewer that might open up new possibilities of seeing and thinking about a potential future. This paper will argue that their artworks do this respectively through invocations of “the fragmentary,” “the precarious” and “the opaque.” By emphasising loss, these artists all have at stake a recovery of cultural memory and a repairing of a morality. The proposed outcome of this paper is thus that an emphasis on these last aspects of repair will be more workable in decolonial contexts.

Alycia Danckaarts is a research master’s student at the University of Amsterdam from The Netherlands. After finishing her bachelor in Art History at UvA in 2020, she started the master Art and Performance Research Studies. Her research interests lie in contemporary art and its connections to the political, with a focus on the intersections of decolonial aesthetics and gender theory. After having spent a semester at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she focused on indigenous Australian art and culture, she has been delving into issues of cultural memory, decolonial theory, queer and gender studies, and sociology and ethics. At the moment, she is writing her master thesis on an aesthetics of repair, in which she focusses on the artistic practices of Nalini Malani, Simone Leigh, and Cecilia Vicuña.

Careful with Perfection: Repair, Tikkun Olam, and Care Ethics
Pieter Dronkers

Tronto’s and Fisher’s broad definition of care contains the notion of “repairing the world” (Tronto, 2013, p. 19). This concept resonates with the Jewish idea of tikkun olam. Especially in modern, progressive interpretations, tikkun olam aims, like care in the Tronto/Fisher definition, at the restoration of relationships and the reweaving of social connections that got lost. Today, this notion has become central to many Jewish initiatives and interventions that seek to contribute to more just societies through communal action (Rosenthal, 2005). Studying the similarities of care and tikkun olam enriches our understanding of what repair means, including how art-care practices can help to restore the communal (Bickel & Fisher, 2022). However, there is also an important distinction: while Tronto and Fisher’s explicitly define care as oriented towards a world “in which we can live as well as possible,” acknowledging the inherent imperfection of the world, the teleology of tikkun olam is often interpreted as completion, or perfecting the world.

Within Jewish history, the idea of tikkun olam has been foundational for calls to build model societies that represent the aesthetics of the world as it should be. In other religious and non-religious worldviews related ideals of repairing the world by striving towards perfection exist. Throughout history, such ideals have inspired attempts to perfectionist forms of community building that culminated in violence and disintegration, rather than in webs of care in which people can flourish. This prompts an inquiry into how the care ethical notion of “as well as possible” can function as a necessary limitation to practices of reparation. This paper seeks to explore how a care ethical examination of tikkun olam can enhance our understanding of repairing the world while also offering insights into preventing it from becoming overly zealous and detrimental to communal life.
ReferencesBickel, B. A. & Fisher, M. (2022). Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry, and Healing. Routledge.
Rosenthal, G. S. (2005). Tikkun ha‐Olam: The Metamorphosis of a Concept. The Journal of Religion, 85(2), 214-240. https://doi.org/10.1086/427314
Tronto, J. (2013). Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York University Press.

Pieter Dronkers is an Assistant Professor in Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies, The Netherlands. He teaches courses on moral deliberation, policy making, and care ethics, while his own research focuses on the politics of care and solidarity in international humanitarianism. His recent research projects focused on groups in vulnerable positions in the Netherlands during the COVID pandemic and the moral distress of Palestinian nurses in a hospital in East Jerusalem.

panel 4
An Ethico-Aesthetics of Care: Rethinking Care Theory

Care Ethics and the Problem of Beauty
Steven Steyl

Care Theory as a Process Moral Aesthetic
Maurice Hamington

The Fourfold Relation between Care and Aesthetics
Carlo Leget & Finn Thorbjørn Hansen

panel 5Caring Relationalities and the Arts of Attention

The Arts of Attention
Nathalie Zaccaï-Reyners

Aesthetic Education to Care? Reclaiming “Affective Virtuosity” on the Continuum of Care/Attention/Desire
Kelly Gawel

The Role of Expression in Caring Relationships
Anderson Harris

panel 6Ethics, Aesthetics, and Design in Dementia Care

Dignity, Care Ethics, and Design in Dementia Residential Care Environments
Jodi Sturge & Elleke Landeweer

Theatre, Ethics, and End-of-Life Care for People with Dementia
Janieke Bruin

Into the Wide Open? Nature-Based Aesthetics in Dementia Care
Ruud Hendriks & Ike Kamphof

Conceptualizing & Creating