Together with Elena Cologni and various artist-researchers, in our recent special issue, Art for the Sake of Care, we looked into how artistic practice contributes to care. Even before this issue, a diverse array of artists had already been featured in an increasing number of art exhibitions focused on care. The enthusiastic response to this conference on Care, Aesthetics, and Repair underscores the growing momentum in this field. Our exploration revealed a need to bridge the perceived divide between art and care, moving beyond comparisons and seeking a renewed approach to inhabit the world as a living landscape, free from such distinctions. Once again, I am inspired by François Jullien, who, in his Living Off Landscape: Or, the Unthought-of in Reason, proposed that “landscape is where land breaks with the limits of the sensible, flares out, and ‘emanates’ as an aura beyond its tangible form” (2018, p. 55), but without losing its texture, its anatomy of mountains and waters.
From this perspective, landscape addresses not the seeing or the knowing of what is seen, but the living and experiencing of it. This view takes us “to the limits of the perceptible” (Jullien, 2004, p. 25). The landscape becomes like a bow “which plays on my soul” (Jullien, 2020, p. 68). What happens if we move from observing, looking at, and studying care practices, to living them? Engaging with their qualities as a connoisseur, re-connecting with what makes care practices livable, such as their vitality? We may then be transported into a journey filled with subtle, intangible qualities, yet deeply entwined with the tangible spaces and materials where care is enacted. We discover that the physical, ethical, and spiritual qualities of care are not separate planes, but intricately intertwined. We discover that ethics would then integrate processual qualities such as vitality, potentiality and naturalness, but also raise new questions on hidden or disguised forms of control. To demonstrate this, my contribution will “aesthetically live” care, weaving narratives of care with visual, poetic, and analytic encounters through various mediums.
References
Jullien, F. (2020). From being to living: A Euro-Chinese lexicon of thought. SAGE.
Jullien, F. (2018). Living off landscape: Or, the unthought-of in reason. Rowman & Littlefield.
Jullien, F. (2004). In praise of blandness: Proceeding from Chinese thought and aesthetics. Zone Books.
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
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