Lectures

The social fabric of existence is woven by care. But how is care actually being cared for? And who cares for care, politically, socially, epistemically? How is care understood as knowledge? And how does knowing our relations to the world change if knowing starts from the relations of care? In the name of care, nation states have promoted the colonial supremacist project of patriarchy. In the name of freedom, so-called second wave feminism identified caring labors as burden hindering women’s creativity, intellectual productivity, and economic mobility. Tracing how modern ontologies of gender were linked to mammalian epistemologies and their political economy of care essentialism this lecture asks what it would take to free care from the patriarchal violence of domination and extraction. This lecture asks if we can learn to imagine care otherwise and looks at activism, art, and theory providing hope, resistance, and endurance to collectively imagine and practice the freedom to care.

https://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/program/gondoskodo-gyakorlatok-szimpozium-vigyazat-torekeny-handle-care-cimu-kiallitas-zaroesemenye

The 2023 Architecture Humanities Research Conference, AHRA, is dedicated to: Situated Ecologies of Care.
Elke Krasny’s keynote lecture “Living with a wounded planet. On building care” will address how historical acts of care violence and structural carelessness of capitalist-colonial-patriarchal regimes of modernity and their spatialization through architecture and the built environment have wounded the planet. Today, humans and all other living beings inhabit the air and the water and the earth and the infrastructures and the buildings and the technologies of a deeply wounded planet. At the same time, the lecture will address that architecture as a primary form of care has not only defined the spatialization of care and reproductive labors according to patriarchal-colonial-capitalist logics, but also has the potential to create and provide an emancipatory and transformative care praxis. Introducing the notion of scales of care, the lecture examines how scales of care can be understood through feminist epistemologies-as-embodied practices and thus become scales of concern, curiosity, cure, and worry that have to be brought into the reproductive, regenerative, and restorative capacities of architecture for everyday lived lives and for beginning to heal a deeply wounded planet, we are part of.

Information on the AHRA conference can be found here: https://ahra2023.org

Urban change throughout the 1980s and 1990s was marked by processes of deindustrialization. Cities, and entire regions, suffered a decline in productive industrial activity. As factories or plants closed down, a new type of architecture moved in with style. Urban regeneration was premised on the promise of the icon or the landmark. Ranging from corporate headquarters to museums, universities to football stadiums, opera houses to convention centres, markets to airports, architecture served the global economy by promoting iconic experiences. How is such experience produced, and, most importantly, how is it reproduced on the daily level? This lecture examines such iconic moves in architecture as they complexly interconnect urban regeneration and daily reproduction. Looking at the effective and affective dimensions of such iconic moves of architecture under neoliberal capitalism, we raise the questions what urban regeneration means and how it is maintained through reproduction. Focusing on the material dimension of architecture, the economy of production and the economy of reproduction are considered as equally relevant.

Iconic Moves: Regeneration + Reproduction
Elke Krasny

On the heels of their recent collaboration, Architecture for the Future (MIT, 2023), Yasmeen Lari and Elke Krasny will reflect on the many responsibilities of those working within the built environment, the need to recognize new and pluralistic forms of spatial practice, and how to address the interconnectedness of socio-ecological crisis at the planetary scale.

Announcement

The lecture on Critical Care. Architecture for a Broken Planet will contribute to the panel Arquitectura para la vida colectiva.ProgramRe-Imaginar el Futuro Feminista — Una discusión transdisciplinaria acerca del futuro de los cuidados y políticas del tiempo, violencias, derechos sexuales y reproductivos, y la feminización de la política. 

Program

https://bogota.gov.co/internacional/bogota-sera-la-sede-de-foro-mundial-de-ciudades-y-del-women-deliver

Der Maßstab diente der Vermessung des Raums auf dem Planeten Erde. Mittels des Maßstabs wurde der Raum beherrschbar, in unterschiedlichen Größenverhältnissen darstellbar. In ideengeschichtlicher und lebensweltlicher Hinsicht gilt der Maßstab als soziale Norm, als Richtlinie. Dieser Vortrag geht von Maßstäben der Sorge aus, um Architektur als planetarische Praxis zu befragen. Von welchen Maßstäben geht Architektur aus? Welche Maßstäbe der Sorge werden durch Architektur hervorgebracht und durchgesetzt? Mit welchen Maßstäben kann Architektur zu sorgetragender planetarischer Praxis werden

Announcement

The lecture Radicalizing Care. Maintenance as Resistance contributed to the Art and Care Study Day at the Cambridge Festival in 2022. My lecture focused on how maintenance can be understood as practicing resistance with-in and against extractive conditions of care under compulsory neoliberalism. Art and Care presents a growing international network aiming at collecting, sharing, and learning from best practices from the perspectives of creative research and care ethics, in physical and digital realms. More specifically these will be discussed in terms of impact in society through social responsibility, mutual support, and cooperation, as applied to the care for the environment, society, heritage and art. The exchange will aim at consolidating the new post-disciplinary context for Care Ethics and Creative Research.The event was led by Dr. Elena Cologni, Dr. Merel Visse and HR Mag Eveline Wandl-Vogt, https://www.eventbrite.com/e/art-care-study-day-resumed-cambridge-festival-2022-tickets-275429606367?keep_tld=1

Image: ‘Mother’s Tools’, Elena Cologni (2018, 1 of 4: wood, steel, custom-made fabric labels, artist’s mother’s embroidery kit, 20cmx20cm each);

What can a solidary and needs-oriented living and working together look like from the perspective of care? How do we fight for the Care Revolution? May 12 is International Nurses Day. The lecture Maintenance as Resistance – Resistance as Maintenance was a contribution to Congress of Care – Kongress der Sorge. Ein Vernetzungstag für Arbeitskämpfe und feministische Initiativen anlässlich des Tages der Pflege am 12.5. With the Congress of Care, HAU opens its doors to feminist initiatives, current labor struggles in the field of care, and activists from urban society. For one day, HAU2 will become a place for the exchange of experiences: In workshops, table discussions and panel discussions, spaces of possibility for broad queerfeminist networking and solidarity will be created. After two years of the Corona pandemic and the successful labor struggle of the Berlin hospital movement, it is clear that there is no way back to so-called “normality.” The congress is a workshop to work out and discuss together feminist alternatives to a society based on competition and oriented towards profits. Neighbors, colleagues and friends are invited to join activists, feminist theorists and strikers from the Berlin hospital movement in a thought process. 

https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/programm/pdetail/kongress-der-sorge

Reflections on Urban Curating, Decolonizing Urban Memory  contributed to Heritage Days 2022 in Brussels, to the outdoor lab and co-creation workshop in front of the Pavilion of Human Passions, built in the form of a Greek temple by Victor Horta in the Park du Cinquentenaire in Brussels. Starting from the name of this park, the so-called Jubelpark, is crucial to understand the ongoingness of coloniality through the unquestioned presence of colonial pasts at symbolic, material, and environmental levels as this presence of colonial pasts effects political, social, affective, and epistemic hauntings and violences. 

The outdoor lab was hosted by ASBL. Horizon 50 200, created under the initiative of Thomas Dermine, State Secretary for Science Policy, Recovery Program and Strategic Investments with the goal of the redevelopment of Parc du Cinquentenaire on the occasion of the bicentenary of Belgium in 20230. 

Vortrag bei einer Konferenz des DIFU Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik in Berlin: Kuratierte Innenstädte. Resssortübergreifende Zusammenarbeit in der kulturellen Stadtentwicklung

Inhaltlich ging es dem Deutschen Institut für Urbanistik um folgende Fragen: Wie können sich Kulturinstitutionen in die (Innen-)Städte hin öffnen – das städtische Leben im öffentlichen Raum einbeziehen und aufnehmen, bspw. mit  zivilgesellschaftlichen urbanen Initiativen zusammenarbeiten? Welche Formen der Zusammenarbeit werden für stadtgesellschaftliche Anliegen erprobt, welche die Künste mit umfassen? Wie können künstlerische und kuratorische Strategien dazu beitragen, (verödende) Innenstädte in neuer Weise zu beleben? Wie  könnten dafür Entscheidungen und Verantwortung zwischen den beteiligten Akteur*innen geteilt werden? Anliegen ist, den Teilnehmenden aus den kommunalen Verwaltungen (aus den Ressorts Stadtentwicklung und Stadtplanung, Kultur, Wirtschaftsförderung) einen Blick über den Tellerrand zu geben und sie anzuregen, die damit verbundenen Möglichkeiten für ihre Städte in den Blick zu nehmen.

https://difu.de/sites/default/files/media_files/2022-06-13_kuratierte_innenstaedte.programm_v06-04-2022.pdf