conference
tickets
plenaries
parallel sessions
schedule
contact
tickets
plenaries
parallel sessions
schedule
contact
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.
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
James’s talk will focus on the concept of care aesthetics and its claim that the practice of care can be understood as embodied, sensory and craft like – that is for its aesthetics. His current research moves away from considering the arts in care settings, to attend to the aesthetic experience created within health care contexts through the work of health and social care practitioners. James will present on the origins of his interest in care aesthetics and then examine its application to work in different care contexts, largely focusing on older people care. He will draw on existing empirical work focusing on care for people in secure dementia wards and in male grooming in care homes, particularly examining practices, movements, and micro moments of care through a care aesthetic lens. The talk will draw on material developed through the CARE project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and outline the future plans for the Care Lab based at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
James Thompson is Professor of Applied Theatre at the University of Manchester. He was the co-founder of the TiPP Centre and founder of In Place of War and now runs a research project on Care Aesthetics and co-directs the Care Lab, at the Whitworth Art Gallery. He has run theatre projects internationally and has written widely on applied theatre and socially engaged arts. His new book Care Aesthetics: For Careful Art and Artful Care was published in 2022.
Many metaphors associate vulnerability, old age (Jean Améry), and suffering (Simone Weil) with gravity. In contrast, bodily ease seems to go hand in hand with grace (Henri Bergson, S. Weil), lightness, and everything that opposes the experience of gravity. I'll take this lexical and conceptual postulate in reverse, based on a specific dance practice: contact improvisation. In dealing with gravity, this somatic practice participates in embodied anchoring and in rooting (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, S. Weil, Jan Patocka). In so doing, this focus on the experience of gravity, falling, and supporting/carrying contributes precisely to an ontological lightening: in the movement made possible by the experience of gravity as well as the relationship between the performing bodies, the ego cogitans dissolves its totalizing claim in the experience of a body that is both limited and moved precisely in its performed boundaries. In other words, the limitation of the body, the experience of play with gravity instead of passive submission to heaviness, far from any moral degradation, reveals the primacy of the ethical over the ontological, in a sense akin to that of Emmanuel Levinas’s assumptions concerning the gaze of the other. In this context, I will argue that, far from the supposed vocation of care being to alleviate from the weight of gravity, a caring relationship can only be based on the experience of a kind of play together with gravity, a “humiliation”, in its very etymological sense — the Latin humus means “the earth”, “the ground” — which elevates us to a truly human ethic: an embodied care (Maurice Hamington).
Christine Leroy is a French philosopher (PhD, agrégée). She is associated with Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her phenomenological approach to the lived body is based on her experience of dance and performance. In the past, she mainly studied kinesthetic empathy and its ethical stakes, in terms of care. A professor of philosophy in classe préparatoire and a researcher based in Paris, she published three monographs: La Phénoménologie (Ellipses Publishers), Phénoménologie de la danse: De la chair à l'éthique (Hermann) and The Body (Atlande). She co-edited the collective book Pesanteur et Portance: Une éthique de la gravité with C. Palermo and published many articles, all about the experience of embodiment.
https://christineleroyplume.wordpress.com/
As a new, emerging field, care aesthetics is much indebted to the immense landscape of care ethics. Historically, care aesthetics emanated from specific care ethical insights, such as care as an embodied practice and relationality as a basic characteristic of caring practices. But does this mean that care aesthetics is part of care ethics? The choice for aesthetics and repair as the central topics for this care ethics conference indeed seems to imply such a relation.
Nevertheless, a closer engagement with both approaches shows some fundamental and possibly unbridgeable differences, on several levels. Differences that might suggest the need for a sharper divide between them and indicate a more autonomous positioning of care aesthetics than has been acknowledged until now. This conference is the perfect venue for a further exploration and critical discussion of the relation between care ethics and care aesthetics. The following scholars will participate in the discussion: James Thompson, Maurice Hamington, Vivienne Bozalek, Louis van den Hengel, and Andries Hiskes. Tom Maassen will offer a critical introduction to the relation between care ethics and care aesthetics. The discussion will be moderated by Tineke Abma.
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
30-31 January 2025 (Zoom links to be published later)
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, James Thompson, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus en Marielle Schuurman