panel 5
Per/forming Care: New Visions and Imaginings

Various artists

During this timeslot, conference participants are invited to explore a variety of live performances and other artistic contributions. These include interactive installations and performances, a video installation, a sculpture exhibition, photography, and other works that engage with the conference themes. Participants will also have the unique opportunity to meet the artists and engage in a conversation about their work and creative processes.

My Mother’s Material

Bax & Bax

My Mother’s Material is an art performance by mother and child. This intergenerational dialogue explores the sediments of care and material culture that are present in our maternal line, and our ambiguous and paradoxical relationships with those sediments. It is an attempt to portray the positive as well as the negative effects being gendered as female has on our health, capabilities, connections, our being-in-our-bodies and being-towards-our-bodies, on motherhood, childhood, and womanhood. The performance is a ritual in which mother and child connect through costumes, archival footage, and in sharing a cup of tea by way of the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu).

Performance and costumes: Atty Bax and Hanna Bax
Film and assistant: Cansu Koça
Music: Nils Juijn

Hanna Bax is a Master Student of Humanistic Studies at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands, with a background in philosophy – specifically philosophy of psychiatry, – phenomenology, Japanese aesthetics, and Zen Buddhism. They are also an official student of the Japanese tea ceremony or chanoyu at Urasenke Tankokai Belgium. Combining these studies and practices, and their love for illustration and dance, they intend to become a spiritual counsellor specialized in ritual, ceremony, and art as care.
Atty Bax, born in Vlissingen (1965), is a visual artist working on the edges of feminism, eroticism, and textiles. A totem is a natural or spiritual artefact, being or animal that holds a personal and symbolic meaning for an individual. Her sculptures are like totems to her. They are created through the shaping of her feelings and experiences, whether it happens consciously or unconsciously, with a great love for materials. She graduated in 1988 and started her career as a performance artist working internationally with theatrical rituals trying to unite body and mind. Nowadays, she makes sculptures and artefacts mostly with beads, celebrating the physical. Website: www.attybax.com Instagram: @atty.bax

The Loneliness of Illness

Truus Teunissen
While living with a chronic illness, the irregular, unpredictable, erratic, and loss-without-end periods affect me, the artist, the most. This also chafes and falters with my environment, which expects regularity and predictability. Yet, I try to adjust my self-image as a sick person – patient – by repeatedly accepting, with gentleness, compassion and mercy, that this is it. In this tolerating and enduring of illness and limitation, I keep trying, above all, to feel a whole person again instead of just a sick body part.

Making art allows me to create a bridge to my often ill body. In this way, I reconnect with my whole body and with other people by engaging in conversation.

So, could an artistic creation be seen as a form of caring and vice versa, I wonder. For me, this is the case. I see making an artistic creation and talking about it with the other person as a form of self-care and caring for the others. Examples are the works of art that are often present in hospitals. These can give people with an illness, who need to be there, a feeling of connection with the work of art, or with the artist, or with each other.

Description of this work of art, created in the spring of 2024:

The sculpture group shows battered bodies (driftwood) and the cold transparent rectangular and orderly cubes represent the medical white environment in a hospital. The sculpture group depicts people with an illness on their way to an appointment or a treatment. They walk/sit there among all other people but are alone with their worries, fear and sadness and cannot connect with the other human beings: the loneliness of the disease.

With this artwork, I explore the role of being battered and scarred by illness and the need to belong. The loneliness that illness often causes creates distance and sometimes gets in the way of connecting and feeling connected to yourself or to the other person. I created this work of art to tell about my own experiences of illness and about trying to connect with my body – art became a bridge to my body – to and with other people.

Truus Teunissen is guest researcher at the Department of Care Ethics, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands and at Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, Leiden, the Netherlands. She is also committee member in two research programmes at ZonMw, The Hague, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on Patient and Public Involvement (PPI), justice, care ethics, inclusivity, arts and health, and experiential knowledge. She works with autoethnographic, phenomenological, and arts-based research methods. In 2012, she issued a set of appraisal criteria from the patient’s perspective for health research and quality of care improvement activities. Since then, she is involved in the health research cycle decision making, both as researcher and as experiential expert. In her work, she focuses on arts and care and on ethical issues in care and research. She translates her lived experiences with chronic diseases – experiences such as vulnerability, strength, and belonging – into artistic expressions such as sculptures and paintings and uses these in projects, publications, and exhibitions.

253 ways to care
(2024, single channel video)
Merel Visse

In his essay Care Comes in the Wake of Retreat, critical theorist Michael Stone-Richards argues that the “West” is “in abandonment.” This abandonment manifests as a downfall of connection with others, a trend that drags much of the world along with it. Further bolstering this argument, Jan Patočka describes a “loss of ground” – a feeling of disconnection and alienation from both our built and natural environment, and from each other. This cycle of neglect takes a heavy toll. It leaves us feeling adrift, without inspiration, ultimately harming the very spaces we inhabit.

My single channel video is designed to inspire everyone who yearns to reconnect with the built and natural environment around them: ordinary persons, family members, professionals like developers, planners, architects, artists, designers, or builders – even public officials, local representatives, business owners, and neighbors. Growing up in a family of builders and architects ignited my fascination with the work of the late architect Christopher Alexander, particularly his seminal works, A Timeless Way of Building, A Vision of a Living World, and A Pattern Language. He presented 253 patterns that relate to how we aesthetically experience the built and natural environment. Think of his “patterns” as aesthetic qualities that might be considered in caring architecture, like a home, neighborhood, or city. For example, Pattern 187, the Marriage Bed. “It is crucial that the couple choose the right time to build the bed, and not buy one at the drop of a hat,” Alexander wrote. “It is unlikely the bed can have the right feeling until the couple has weathered some hard times together and there is some depth to their experience.”

This video explores the intersection of this architectural, aesthetic philosophy and care ethics through footage of ubiquitous space, my conceptual drawings and everyday experiences. We don't just inhabit spaces; by making and repairing them, from homes to entire cities, we engage in practices of creation and care – practices that ultimately define how we live.
References
Alexander, C. (2020). The nature of order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe, book three: A vision of a living world. The Center for Environmental Structure Publishing.
Alexander, C. (2018). A pattern language: Towns, buildings, construction. Oxford University Press.
Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. Oxford University Press.
Stone-Richards, M. (2017). Care comes in the wake of retreat. e-flux Architecture. Retrieved November 6, 2024, from https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/future-public/151953/care-comes-in-the-wake-of-retreat/

Merel Visse is an academic, artist, editor, and educator who, for three decades, successfully initiated various grant-funded, innovative, cross-disciplinary programs with civic and academic impact. She holds faculty positions at Drew University’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies (U.S.A.), where she chairs a Graduate Program, and at the University of Humanistic Studies. Merel serves on several editorial boards of Visual Art and Education journals, co-founded the Meaningful Artistic Research Program in The Netherlands, and the Art & Care Platform Series. Merel was an artist in residence at the NY School of Visual Arts and the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn. She is fortunate to call both the United States and the Netherlands home. www.merelvisse.com

Reclaiming Maternal Lineage: The “Parricida” Performance as an Act of Care and Resistance

“Parricida,” is a durational ritual set within a restroom space, challenging the patriarchal norm of familial name inheritance through intimate one-to-one engagements. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s metaphorical use of parricide in "Letter to My Father" to critique authoritarian structures, “Parricida” is an act of resistance against these norms, employing care as its core methodology. Participants, prompted by an attendant while they wash their hands, engage in dialogues reflecting on identity changes if their maternal name was inherited instead of their paternal. This scenario encourages participants to inscribe their first names along with both parents' family names on the restroom mirrors, symbolically reclaiming their maternal lineage.

Theoretically, the intervention draws on feminist care ethics, emphasizing performative and body-centric aspects of care as aesthetic and resistive practices. This re-naming act, documented through participant-photographed reflections and their subsequent sharing, serves as both a personal and communal reclamation, and a broader commentary on gender equality.

Empirically, the study employs qualitative analysis of the documented dialogues and visual data, illustrating how such interventions can significantly alter perceptions of identity and lineage. This not only foregrounds underrecognized maternal histories but also amplifies narratives that challenge patriarchal oppression, fostering a discourse on gender equality through creative acts of care.

The performative intervention will contribute to the dialogue on how artistic practices can be reimagined as acts of worldmaking and care, challenging and extending existing aesthetic theories. It aims to provide theoretical insights and practical outcomes, advocating for a reconsideration of the aesthetic and ethical value of care in the arts, crucial for advancing social justice.

Callisthenics: Stories of Support, Aversion, and Love
Paloma Bouhana, Henny Dörr & Philippine Hoegen

Abstract
A performance piece about being untrained, unprepared, and unwilling for care giving and receiving.

The piece deals with unmentionable aspects of informal care, through the lens of intergenerational personal experiences. Drawing from the heavy emotional and physical load of caring for parents, partners, or siblings, the narrative explores themes of conflicting needs and desires, paradoxes in care relationships, and the interplay between love and revulsion.

The performance brings together a constellation of three generations of artworkers who believe in, and practice, art as a place of mutual care, artistic exchange, and solidarity. Performance is the medium that connects us, both as method and as dissemination of our work and research.

The performance is rooted in lived experiences of informal care, collaborative explorations and research-through-doing.

The performers embody various roles shifting between them fluidly to speak of the multifaceted nature of care relationships. Through “showing doing”, they explore the physical and emotional weight of caregiving, the contrasts and the paradoxes of responsibilities.

Paloma Bouhana is an artist based in Brussels (BE). After a Master in Economics she graduated from the Design Academy of Eindhoven in 2018. Shifting her approach permitted her to orient her artistic research towards blind spots in mainstream economics like radical equality, feminist ethics of care, or the social relationship of value-labor. Her installations combine mediums like performance, video, scenography, and costume design. She has been working with artists like Rossella Biscotti, Laure Prouvost, Goda Palekaite. and Philippine Hoegen. In her last installation, supported by the Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie and entitled “A matrix is a plate of biscuits”, she questions through field research, mold-making, and songwriting, why the thinking that grows from physical labor has been relegated to a lower status. In September 2024, she started a six-month residency at Morpho, Antwerp, during which she will develop an economically abnormal work song.
Henny Dörr (MA), theatre scientist and dramaturg, works as a researcher and lecturer at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht. Their focus has also always been on creative and performative processes and practices that transgress the boundaries of disciplines.

Between 1990 and 2021, they developed a range of bachelor and master courses on theatre design, (interactive) performance design, and scenography. Until 2021, they headed the international MA Scenography program, which strongly focuses on expanding forms of scenography and contemporary ideas on spectatorship. As course director and tutor, they created an inclusive learning and research environment and challenged conventional views of knowledge transfer. The international context in which they work as a teacher leads to ongoing, in-depth critical reflection on their pedagogy, their biases, and their “constructive” naivety within an intercultural art and design context.

As researcher in the professorship Expanding Artistic Practices of HKU, Henny Dörr works in transdisciplinary teams that develop co-creative processes between art and (health) care. This artistic research practice is supported by detailed investigation into the impact on the agents and voices involved, the artistic methods and strategies that are put in operation, and the ethical dilemmas that come to the surface.
Philippine Hoegen is an artist based in Belgium and The Netherlands, working mainly with performance as an artistic medium and as a research strategy. Hoegen is currently a researcher and PD Candidate at the Professorship Expanding Artistic Practices, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, with the project Performing Working*, in which she looks at work through the lens of performance and performance through the lens of work. Who are we when we work, and who are we when we don’t, or can’t? She problematizes the championing of waged work above all other activities and its status as a condition for citizenship and social participation. She looks at the social exclusion that this causes for different people, exploring the value of hidden and unwaged work and the dynamics of the invisibilization of those doing it.

* Performing Working is a Professional Doctorate project conducted in HKU University of the Arts Utrecht as part of a new, practice-led professional education line that started in 2023 within Dutch Universities of Applied Sciences, equivalent to a PhD.

The Beauty and Power of the Uniform in Theatre and Medicine (artistic/performative contribution)
Nora Korfker & Lotte van den Berg

We are an actress and a medical student/care ethicist. Our contribution is a performance in which we draw a comparison between the medical world and the theatre. In the performance, we will show the beauty and power of the uniform in these two worlds. The audience will watch two characters, a doctor and an actress, both performing their own morning routine. They move into the same room, but do not see each other. A conversation is held between the doctor and the patient (actress), highlighting first the doctor's perspective and then the patient's perspective. In this, it becomes clear that the patient is subordinate to the doctor and feels unacknowledged. Later, the two characters meet again: the doctor goes to a performance of the actress. There the doctor is confronted with how the actress experienced the conversation and thus with her own behaviour. The doctor, during that performance, also feels unacknowledged by the actress. As a result, she thinks back on the conversation and comes to the conclusion that the patient must have felt the same way she feels now. The message of the performance is that power is enclosed with wearing a uniform. (Doctor: white coat; actress: costume). It is important to be aware of this, break through it and reciprocate with the other. After the performance there will be a small piece for the audience to read in which the care ethic background of this performance will be explained in more detail.

Nora Korfker, 24 years old, graduated in 2022 from the acting department at HKU Utrecht University of the Arts, the Netherlands. She is active in the Dutch theatre and movie scene in the Netherlands. She is not only an actor, she also makes theatre herself. Theatre is about telling stories and making people aware of subjects they may have never thought about. She loves to combine her strengths with Lotte on this subject.
Lotte van den Berg, 25 years old, graduated from the Master in Care Ethics and Policy at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and is currently completing the master of medicine at Erasmus University. She will complete her final elective internships in (acute) psychiatry and rehabilitation medicine. For the Master's in Care Ethics and Policy, she wrote her thesis on having a chronic illness in the physician world, partly from her own experiences as a chronically ill doctor-to-be. She recently published an article on physicians living with chronic illness in the physician world. Co-written with Dr. Alistair Niemeijer and Prof. Alice Schippers, the article was published in the Dutch Journal of Health Care and Ethics.

Per/forming & Becoming