| Date | 09/18/2023 |
| Time | |
| Location | WdKA, TENT |
| Researchers | |
| Affiliated research project |
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Promiscuous Infrastructures
A public seminar series on caring infrastructures and pedagogies of care
The seminar series Promiscuous Infrastructures will gather a host of interdisciplinary and multifaceted conversations devoted to care infrastructure and pedagogies of care. Bringing together art and social practitioners, researchers, and educators, Promiscuous Infrastructures explores the relations between the individual, social and institutional bodies and infrastructures. According to the London-based “Care Collective,” “Promiscuous care means caring more and in ways that remain experimental and extensive by current standards. […] To encourage promiscuous care means building institutions that are both capacious and agile enough to recognise and resource wider forms of care at the level of kinship.”[1] This seminar series aims to destabilize assumptions around infrastructure and care. It asks: If we are to care in promiscuous, expanded and plural ways, what systems can we use, require, or co-create to support these? Invited practitioners offer insights and conversations around soil politics, mental health and collective care, intergenerational community, and the poetics of imagining otherwise.
This seminar series has been programmed by the Promiscuous Care Study Group with external partners Reading Room Rotterdam and TENT. Interviews, conversations and photo documentation from the seminar series will be included within the forthcoming book Promiscuous Infrastructures Reader (Publishers: Research Centre WdKA together with Kiosk and Journal for Aesthetics & Protest).
Hosted by the Social Practices research program at WdKA Research Center, the Promiscuous Care Study Group gathers under the aegis of study using individual and collective care practices as sites of inquiry. The study group cultivates research around care in the institution, communal responsibility and accountability practices, intimate pedagogies, slow reading practices, hospitality and hosting, soil and contamination, counter-histories, and collective grief. This research connects to the Social Practices study program at Willem de Kooning Academy and thematics exploring the body, the social body and the possibility of living differently.
Reading Room Rotterdam is a nomadic roaming library traveling throughout the city in a cargo bike. The library functions as a gathering agent for communities to entangle with one another and for knowledge to be disseminated. Through public events and the library service, the RRR offers an exchange of mediums of knowledge, be it through shared dinners, workshops, gardens, or text.
[1] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, (London: Verso, 2020), 41.
fall program:
Yoeri Guépin
The Smallest Gesture
Film screening of The Smallest Gesture followed by discussion
Monday 18th September 2023 12.30 – 13.30
Auditorium Willem de Kooning Academy (WH.00.116)
Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam
Free to attend and open to anyone
Lola Olufemi
The Meal is Language and this is a Dinner Party
Conversation for the delusional, for the imaginative, the ones in this world but not of this world.
Wednesday 20th September 2023 18.00 – 20.00
TENT in collaboration with Reading Room Rotterdam
Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam
Limited availability. Register here.
Edwin Mingard
Praxis: Ethics of co-production
A screening of a selection of Edwin Mingard’s collaboratively made film works, followed by discussion
Thursday 5th October 2023, 12.00 – 13.00
Auditorium Willem de Kooning Academy (WH.00.116)
Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam
Free to attend and open to anyone
A workshop led Edwin Mingard follows the screening
14.30 – 17.00
Research Station Willem de Kooning Academy (WH.00.316)
For students of Willem de Kooning Academy
Laurence Rassel and Selma Bellal
Decompartmentalize to prevent isolation, or how conflict can serve to recreate ties
A conversation devoted to care infrastructure and the potential for systemic change within art and design education, research, and administration.
Friday 13th October 2023 12.30 – 13.30
Willem de Kooning Academy (WH.03.155)
Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam.
Free to attend and open to anyone
Jim van Geel, Jacquill Basdew & Czar Kristoff
It Doesn’t Stop at Images
A generational conversation on queerness, joy and visibility
Thursday 2nd November 2023 14.30-16.30
Research Station Willem de Kooning Academy (WH.00.316)
Wijnhaven 61, 3011 WJ Rotterdam.
Free to attend and open to anyone
