New publication: Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care

Social Practices


Date05/17/2024
Time19:00
LocationKiosk Rotterdam
Researchers
  • Carla Arcos
  • Carmen José
  • Judith Leijdekkers
  • Julia Wilhelm
  • Kari Robertson
  • Michelle Teran
  • Pablo Lerma
  • Renée Turner 
  • Seecum Cheung
  • Skye Maule-O’Brien
  • Vivian Sky Rehberg 
  • Yusser al Obaidi
  • Affiliated research project
  • Promiscuous Care Study Group and Wor(l)ding: A Harvested Glossary for Social Justice in Arts Education and Beyond

  • PRODUCED by the Promiscuous Care Study Group
    Title launch on 17th May, 2024 at kiosk, rotterdam

    How do we care for each other in our living, learning and working lives? The manual Promiscuous Infrastructures Practicing Care calls for an ethics of care and attentiveness to one another, re-imagines the making and the use of infrastructures, and situates care within a genealogy of artistic and social practice.

    Promiscuous Infrastructures brings together more than twenty contributors—art and social practitioners, researchers, and educators—including the twelve core members of the Promiscuous Care Study Group, who have been researching and writing about caring infrastructures and promiscuous care for several years. This project takes seriously the urgent need to imagine diverse infrastructures of care at every scale of planetary existence. The resulting interdisciplinary publication comprises essays, visual schematics and scores, personal letters, recipes, and conversations, which emerge from the work of the study group, situated around the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

    In society at large, the adjective “promiscuous” is commonly understood as a derogatory term, but it originally referred to people or things that “mingled confusedly or indiscriminately.”

    The promiscuity the title explores is defined by a clear and collective refusal of efficiency, and favors generosity, care, love, and attention. Together, the group and their interlocutors situate their own collective care practice within a genealogy of artistic and general social practice. Adopting the UK-based Care Collective’s understanding of promiscuous, which aims toward multiplying and experimenting with caring practices beyond the shriveled forms that prevail today, Promiscuous Infrastructures addresses the following themes: institutional change, communal responsibility and accountability practices, mental health and collective care, hospitality and hosting, soil, counter-histories, intergenerational learning, joy and collective grief, and the poetics of imagining otherwise. These themes nurture a practice of multiplying and experimenting in diverse and expansive ways.

    In this publication being promiscuous means taking agency within and beyond the shared context of structurally dispassionate cultural and educational institutions that require innovation, expediency, and measurable results above all.

    Praise for Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care

    Promiscuous Infrastructures is an impressive and significant intervention into that key political struggle that has come to define our age – the struggle for care.” – The Care Collective, authors of The Care Manifesto.

    “Feeling alienated because you work in an uncaring art school, university, or cultural institution? Then Promiscuous Infrastructures is for you!” – Dr. Marquard Smith, founder and Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Visual Culture.

    “Insisting that infrastructure does not only act on bodies, but that bodies act with and through infrastructure, this collection’s lively thinking provides new words and new pedagogies for radically re-imagining the making and the use of infrastructures.” –  Elke Krasny, author of Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care


    Title Info

    Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care (2024), First Edition. Published by: Journal for Aesthetics & Protest, Leipzig and WdKA Research Center, Rotterdam.

    Edited by Michelle Teran, Marc Herbst, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Renée Turner and The Promiscuous Care Study Group.

    288 pages with 82 color pages. Exposed spine binding. Language: English.

    For sale @ https://joaap.org/press.htm

    Contributors: Carla Arcos, Jacquill Basdew, Selma Bellal, Seecum Cheung, Cooking Something Up, Yoeri Guépin, Marc Herbst, Czar Kristoff P., Pablo Lerma, Judith Leijdekkers, Carmen José, Edwin Mingard, Skye Maule-O’Brien, Lola Olufemi, Laurence Rassel, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Reading Room Rotterdam, Kari Robertson, Yusser al Obaidi, Michelle Teran, Renée Turner, and Julia Wilhelm.

    Book Design by Yusser al Obaidi and Julia Wilhelm.
    Poster and Map Illustrations by Carla Arcos.

    RESEARCH AREAS >

    New Publication: Wor(l)ding: A Harvested Glossary for Social Justice in Arts Education and Beyond 

    Announcing the launch of a new publication by the Social Practices Research Group and Office for Inclusivity (O4I). Launch on 23rd October, 2024 @ Research Station. Willem de Kooning Academy, Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam.

    10/23/2024 // 10:00


    Social Practices: Promiscuous Infrastructures and Utterances – Events Update 2024

    An update on public events around the publications Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care and Utterances: Composing a Care-Informed Research Practice in the Cracks.

    10/04/2024 // 09:30


    New publication: Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care

    The title “Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care” is published by the Promiscuous Care Study Group. Title launch on 17th May, 2024 at kiosk, rotterdam

    05/17/2024 // 19:00


    New publication: Utterances: Composing a Care-Informed Research Practice in the Cracks 

    Announcing the launch of two books at Kiosk Rotterdam on Friday, May 17th, 2024, 19.00. Plus: dedicated workshop on Sunday 19th, at Kiosk.

    05/17/2024 // 19:00