panel 28
Artistic Practices of Care: On Everyday Aesthetics
Caring Hips: Practices of Care within Artistic Research
Natalie Schiller
With my presentation, I seek to take you, the participants, on a journey with me into the realm of practices of care activated by my current artistic research project homemade hips. With homemade hips, I have creatively and critically entangled notions of hips and domesticity through my choreographic practice. In more detail, my professional experiences with hip-accentuated dance styles (belly dance and Latin dance) and domestic everyday routines, such as caring for my family, pets, and domestic environment, have shaped my artistic practice. Performative and participatory elements, as well as a philosophical discourse, will guide my presentation, where practices of care in relation to my artistic research can be re-experienced, re-performed, and re-disturbed.
Additionally, my lecture will explore the role and significance of bodies in caring assemblages, where I will ask playfully and analytically if aspects of care might be located and stimulated within a body (part) and if (and when) elements of care might be situated in hips. Furthermore, I will inquire, “Who might I become in the created assemblages of caring through daily ordinary actions, such as scrubbing, dusting, mopping, blasting, blowing, sucking, and cutting? Who am I becoming in the created assemblages, when I feel like I have disappeared, in the name of caring, due to being a housekeeper/owner and mother?” These questions were inspired by my performance moment Senses of Selves (2022), where I lay down with my cleaning tools on a red blanket. My contribution aims to cartograph ruptures and ripples in practices and ethics of care and celebrate notions of care in the light of difference, multiplicity, and complexity.
My artistic research conceptually resonates with thinkers and movers like Amelia DeFalco (2023), Donna Haraway (2016), Erin Manning (2016; 2020), Joan C. Tronto (1993), Karen Barad (2007; 2014), María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), Merel Visse et al. (2019), Rebecca Mayo (2018), and Rosi Braidotti (2019).
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168-187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity.
DeFalco, A. (2023). Curious kin in fictions of posthuman care. Oxford University Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Mayo, R. (2018). Labours of care: Art practice and urban ecological restoration [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. The Australian National University.
Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.
Manning, E. (2020). For a pragmatics of the useless. Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge.
Visse, M., Hansen, F. & Leget, C. (2019). The unsayable in arts-based research: On the praxis of life itself. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919842458/
My name is Natalie Schiller. I am a PhD researcher at the University of Auckland (Dance Studies, New Zealand), where my areas of expertise lie within artistic research, performance arts, performance philosophy, posthuman theories, feminist art, and feminist theories. My projects seek to investigate how artistic research supports critical, creative, and affirmative approaches of becoming and being in this turbulent world. My artistic research projects have been published via two journal articles (RIACT: Journal of Artistic Research, Creation and Technology, 1(1), 51-75, 2020; and Dance Research Aotearoa, 5(1), 47-58, 2017) and through conference presentations (Experiments in Motion: An Entanglement of Dancing Hips and Domesticity, International Conference on Artistic Research, Portugal, 2020; And Then Domesticity Stole my Hips! An Artistic Research Journey of Con-fusing Notions of Hips and Domesticity, Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies – ADSA, New Zealand, 2022; Diffracting Practices of Care through Artistic Research, International Conference Performing Care and Carelessness, Performance of the Real Research Theme, New Zealand, 2024). I am a member of Posthumanism in/as Artistic Practices (international reading and writing group) and an associate editor with The Internation Journal of Education and the Arts.
Caring Art Practices and Everyday Feminist Aesthetics of “Indian Women Artists”
Kanchana Mahadevan
Feminists have ushered in the aesthetics of every day by foregrounding women’s embodied work. Art, in this view, is a social practice, rather than the creation and contemplation of isolated beautiful objects. Drawing upon the every day, it expands the space for art through the milieu of interactions grounded in dependencies and vulnerabilities. Everyday activities, following Yuriko Saito, have aesthetic bearing both in form and content in concrete embodied contexts, rather than abstract thought. For instance, in the way one speaks or what one speaks and the gestures adopted in doing so. Such an aesthetic of social interaction and practice lends itself to moral evaluation. As Saito notes, it also nurtures the moral virtues of being open, cooperative, and empathetic through everyday activities associated with care ethics.
One can discern such an everyday aesthetics of care in a section of contemporary Indian visual artists termed by Deeptha Achar as “Indian women artists.” Their work is rooted in craft and the struggles of feminine experiences, while at the same time gesturing towards political movements such as feminism. Moreover, as the art practices of Nilima Sheikh, Navjot Altaf, and Sheba Chhachhi reveal, they underscore care and healing. However, the relationship between aesthetics, ethics, and politics needs to be addressed in such an implication of care in everyday aesthetics. This paper addresses this relationship by interpreting the art practices of Sheikh, Altaf, and Chhachhi and discussing the following questions: Does questioning canonical art blur the divide between ethics and aesthetics? Is an aesthetics of every day uniquely oriented towards an ethics of care? Further, does the sensibility of care and amelioration in everyday aesthetics develop through explicitly political awareness, such as the feminist movement? Or is it spontaneously present in the very idea of the every day as imbued with politics?
Kanchana Mahadevan is formerly Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Mumbai, which she had formerly headed thrice (April 2005- April 2008, May 2014- May 2017, and July 2020-April 2023). She teaches and writes in the areas of feminist philosophy, decolonization, critical theory, and political thought. Some of the research positions she has held include: Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science & Centre for Ethics and Global Politics LUISS University, Rome (2016); Senior Fellow “Justitia Amplificata” at Goethe University Frankfurt, Freie Universität Berlin and Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg (2018); Visiting Research Scholar on Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science, LUISS University, Rome (2019); Senior Fellow, Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway (2019); and LFUI Guest Professor (supported by Förderkreis 1669) at the Leopold Franzens University of Innsbruck (2023).
Her authored book Between Femininity and Feminism: Colonial and Postcolonial Perspectives on Care (Indian Council of Philosophical Research in collaboration with DK Printworld New Delhi, 2014) examines the relevance of Western feminist philosophy in the Indian context. She has co-edited two books on Gandhi, namely, Gandhi Then and Now: Autobiographies and Conversations and Inheriting Gandhi: Influences and Activisms (both published by Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2022). She has also coedited a volume of philosophical and psychological essays on the pandemic titled The COVID Spectrum: Theoretical and Experiential Perspectives (Speaking Tiger Publications, New Delhi, 2021). Her recent work attempts to situate the care theoretical perspective in the Indian context, with special reference to nursing policies and practices. She is also working on the significance of gender in debates on the post-secular at present and the care dimension of contemporary Indian art practices.
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