panel 3Time to Care: Aesthetic Interventions and Everyday Life
Notes Towards Creative and Caring Research Practices
Noa Roei, Mariska Zwartsenburg, Jeanette Pols, Maya Lane & Simone Stergioula
Classic evaluative methods, with their insistence on impact measurement and tendency to discipline research subjects, are not ideal for studying the aesthetic experience of caregivers in care practices under pressure. Answering to this predicament, we argue for the need to reconceptualize what research entails in settings of emergency care, and address the importance of artistic events as partners for formulating creative and caring research methodologies. To do so, we reflect on the trajectory of our research project at the Emergency Department of a hospital in one of NL’s big cities. In this project, we work together across disciplines (anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy, medicine, creative arts, curation) and institutional partnerships (hospitals, museums, universities) to explore: (a) how aesthetic interventions in the shape of artistic events and co-creations may mitigate some of the problems experienced by caregivers in the spaces where they care, and (b) how these events may be researched in ways that do not disturb care practices nor aggravate their problems. This premise originates in an understanding of aesthetic experiences as important determinants in the way daily institutional care is experienced by caregivers.
In our research, we created a series of artistic events, and experimented with more and less traditional evaluative methods, ranging from surveys and field notes to sensory mappings and confession booths. Our presentation will share our ongoing search for the kind of experiences that emerged through these events, and the insight gained in the processes of their organisation and introduction, in specific relation to the setting of emergency care. We unpack processes of working towards both art events and research experiments, to show how our work benefitted from a more dynamic understanding of the relation between creativity, research, and ethics of care, and the role that cross-institutional collaboration and artistic practices played in this trajectory.
Noa Roei is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Her current research focuses on art and visual culture in relation to institutional design and infrastructure, building on previous research in the fields of performance and visual arts, nationalism, conflict and war. Upcoming publications engage with care infrastructure and the need to rethink existing research methodologies in the Humanities.
Mariska Zwartsenburg is an Emergency Physician at OLVG and principal investigator in the OLVG research team. She has a background in medical journalism and (science) philosophy, and is actively involved in several pieces of research toward a more humane approach to medicine. She co-created the Pediatric Emergency Department, the Project Learning from Excellence that focuses on what goes well in healthcare, and coaches fellows in Emergency Medicine.
Jeannette Pols is Professor of Anthropology of Everyday Ethics in Healthcare. She works with the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, and with the department of Ethics, Law & Humanities of the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam of the same university. Her recent publications address the aesthetics of everyday care and the way artistic events enable specific social meanings to emerge. In 2023, she organized the festival Unexpected Subjects, a cross-over festival for Art, Science & Philosophy.
Maya Lane is a medical anthropologist based at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include queer ecologies, multispecies care, eating and cooking practices, employing queer, feminist, and crip theory throughout her work. She currently works on multispecies “toxicities” at the Meertens Institute and is part of ArtiC, an interdisciplinary working group exploring aesthetic interventions and care in an Amsterdam hospital.
Simone Stergioula is a researcher in critical theory and affective justice based in Amsterdam. They are currently part of the project Art in Care: Aesthetic Configurations, Impact, and Spaces of Care (ArtiC), where they develop creative-research methodologies to account for the complex entanglements between subjects and architecture in hospital spaces.
Pads on Stage! Re-telling Stories of Living with Incontinence through Puppet Theatre
Riku Laakkonen, Tuulia Lahtinen, Anna I. Rajala, Timo Uotinen & Tiina Vaittinen
Adult incontinence pad users and their daily lives are in many ways overlooked in society. This paper presents our reflections on a theatre performance that is based on autobiographical and anonymous “pad stories” written by research participants who either use adult incontinence pads themselves or by people who help others to use them (e.g., care professionals, carers, and personal assistants). The pad stories were re-told by incontinence pads, animated as puppets by the presenters of this paper, who do research around the topic of incontinence and/or incontinence pads in different fields. Because of the taboos and stigmas associated with the subject, our performance is deeply political, and in this way, it relates to a rich tradition of documentary theatre. Our performance protagonists, the puppets, alienate and, at the same time, protect the owners of the stories. Another performance tradition from which we borrow is the reading drama, where the performers read the text directly from the script, meaning that there is no attempt to memorise the lines. In this way, we aim to give attention to the stories themselves. Through the performance, our research team wanted to bring the hidden and silenced everyday stories to the stage. At the same time, we wanted to test alternative ways of sharing information and research results through art. When pads speak on stage about the silenced lives of human society, it may become possible to address the stigma of incontinence and the need for pads in a different way than the way it is told by human characters. This is what we set out to explore in our performance, together with the audience. At the heart of the presentation is, therefore, the question of how to transmit adult incontinence pad users’ experiences in an ethical, caring, and reparative manner. Communicating these experiences is also important for the development of incontinence care and for shaping the way we approach incontinence.
Artist-researcher Riku Laakkonen started his artistic doctoral studies at the Tampere University in August 2020. His research focuses on intra-actions between older adults with dementia and material objects, including adult incontinence pads. He is currently co-convener of TaPRA Applied and Social Theatre working group.
MSc. Tuulia Lahtinen (Tampere University) is working on her doctoral thesis on prevention and treatment of incontinence in Finnish maternity clinics. She has a background as a public health nurse and has worked with people with incontinence.
Dr. Anna I. Rajala (Tampere University and The University of the Arts Helsinki) is a critical theorist and social scientist currently working on her postdoctoral project on the politics of excrement. She is also working on how Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic experience might critically inform narrative medicine.
Dr. Timo Uotinen specialises in Shakespearian drama, critical theory, and early modern philosophy. He is currently working on the concept of incontinence and its historical connotations of immorality.
Dr. Tiina Vaittinen (Tampere University) is a care ethicist and political economist whose most recent work in the Pad Project has focused on developing holistically sustainable continence care. She dreams of a world where everyone’s care needs, including the most silenced ones, could be met within planetary boundaries.
The Time to Care
Poornima Sardana
In 2019, in between my chemotherapy cycles, I developed dental problems. The pain was inexplicable but so was the hurriedness of decisions to be taken. In their rush to resolve the issue, the dentist removed a fairly healthy tooth and the chemotherapy was resumed. I often think of that hasty decision, the strength applied by the dentist and her assistant to pull out a tooth that was not ready to decay. And it transports me to uprooting of great old trees for a highway, to exploitative mining, deforestation, to capitalism and its application of power. Above all, it makes me wonder about time. If time was not perceived to be less, was careful attention and deliberation possible? This “accelerated time” and resulting “volatility,” says Harvey, “makes it extremely difficult to engage in any long-term planning.” How does such experience of time affect care, whether for an individual or the planet, its ethics and its aesthetics? (Harvey, 1989, pp. 286-287).
As an antidote, I am often drawn to the art of Rafoogari (darning) in India, slow, deliberate movements of fingers, threads healing a piece of textile through “appropriate care action” (Saito, 2022, p. 22). I find solace in Hayao Miyazaki’s storytelling, the aesthetics of the animation revealing the sublime in everyday life, reciprocity in nature, consciousness, and a more caring pace of life unfolding. And I wonder if these acts of care through art, or caring within the art, are these windows into perceptions of time and ways of living that could inform our ways of understanding and “knowing”? Building on current literature on Care Aesthetics, I am eager to find resources in art that could shape an “epistemology of care” (Dalmiya, 2016, p. 2), and juxtapose it with personal experiences of illness, haste, and “bad care” (Tronto, 2013). Through this curation of lived and aesthetic experiences in care, I wish to enquire about time.
References
Dalmiya, V. (2016). Caring to know: Comparative care ethics, feminist epistemology, and the Mahābhārata. Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Blackwell.
Saito, Y. (2022). Aesthetics of care: Practice in everyday life. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. NYU Press.
Poornima Sardana is Founder of the Museums Of Hope and is currently engaged in designing her art toolkit for patients and caregivers, Seasons of the Mind, with the support of Hyundai’s Art for Hope Grant 2024. She has been a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar at NYU for her MA in Museum Studies, a Young India Fellow at the Ashoka University, and studied BDes from NIFT, New Delhi. She researches and works at the intersection of museums, well-being, and care, and contributed a chapter to the edited volume Flourishing in Museums. She co-founded the Museums Mazzedaar Collective to experiment with playfulness in museums.
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