| Date | 08/29/2023 |
| Time | |
| Location | Zagreb, Croatia |
| Researchers | |
| Affiliated research project |
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The Promiscuous Care Study Group will be presenting at the 9th International DeGrowth conference, August 29th-September 2nd, 2023 in Zagreb. There, the group will contribute to the thematic stream, Artistic Ecologies and Eco-social practices.
Topics to be explored are:
What are the potentials of art in transforming the existing world? How can it spawn new degrowth subjectivities? How can the production and presentation of art be more responsible towards resources? How can art put forward new cultural practices committed to degrowth? How can art renew alliances between artistic ecologies, communities, institutional experiments and new forms of activism for social and environmental justice?
Full details of the Zagreb conference can be found here.
About the Promiscuous care group
The Promiscuous Care Study Group emerged from the need to build up learning communities where we might recognize the abundance of working together in difference. Comprising students, teachers, and researchers working within an academy of art and design, the group formed around shared sensibilities, practices, and approaches that reach through and beyond our institutional roles and individual practices as artists, designers, writers, and educators. In our individual and collective practices, we explore the relations between the individual, social and institutional bodies, and infrastructures. Together we ask: How can we reclaim the word ‘promiscuous’ as an opportunity to transgress and build support and care networks within uncaring systems? What infrastructures facilitate promiscuous forms of care?
The study group operates as an interruption of institutional pacing and alienation. The academy that hosts the group created the conditions that require it through its felt absence of caring infrastructure. It is a space for slowness, nourishment, grief, uncertainty, and attentiveness to bodies, relations, and needs. Shared thematics manifest in reproductive labours; of cooking, gardening, stitching, and weaving. Undervalued or under-represented histories and counter-histories are dug, dredged, reclaimed, and examined with care. The precarious, invisible, and peripheral are explored through witnessing bodies, intimate pedagogies, and testimonial forms. We host check-ins, practice workshops on building trust and safety, experiment with collective writing and transcribing, and read, watch, listen, and eat together. For the conference, we propose a session will include a presentation and discussion combined with pedagogical and artistic research experiments.
