Picture by Tawfiq Sediqi, © Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care, AWARE Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions
Building on a common interest in feminist and translocal approaches, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, invites the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care for a one-year residency starting in June 2024. During this period, the Initiative will propose several events exploring the theme of “Care as Methodology.”
Over the course of this year, the Initiative will strengthen their ecosystem of curators, artists, therapists and researchers based in the Greater Paris region and creative practitioners who are in exile or seeking asylum in France. Together, they will experiment with strategies of institutional sustainability based on collective organizing and feminist practices rooted in anti-racist, eco-critical and social struggles. Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care relates to its practices as methodologies of care in face of capitalist, colonial and patriarchal violence that they seek to rethink through concrete gestures: public discussions and performances, collective kitchens and meals, diverse ancestral divination techniques, alliance-building and solidarity. Being rooted in the Greater Paris region and its contemporary art field, the Initiative aims to practice and reflect collectively on a “theory of care” which would reconfigure the value system inherent to this very field.
The Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care, started in 2020 in the Greater Paris region, is a diverse group of practitioners of arts, crafts, philosophies, healing and therapy coming from vastly spread geographies. Neither a classical collective nor a rigid structure, the Initiative is researching and reinventing modes of sustainable institutionalism. Based on friendships as well as professional bonds, it functions as an ecosystem and fosters interdependence and solidarity beyond identity. The focus on care is enacted as a flow of activities that nurture individuals and sustain social, environmental and political bonds, focusing as much on processes and methods as on outcomes. Through fluid artistic and curatorial ventures, the Initiative embraces the languages, energies, histories, landscapes, bodies, and materials that reflect a non-extractive and sensitive relationship to the human and non-human alike.
