The event was livestreamed via www.hkw.de/caring. The recording of the opening evening can be found in the media library of HKW.

The opening day explores, maps, complicates and challenges notions of caring, considered as both, a range of practices and an ethics of being together otherwise. The first day introduces the audience to the history of the concept of care but also to the contemporary discourse around caring and thereby sets the ground for the upcoming contributions of the following days.
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6 pm
Introduction
With Sascia Bailer, Gilly Karjesvky, Rosario Talevi, Olga von Schubert
In English

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6:15 pm
Opening Ritual: N E P O <
Audio by Polyphrenic Creatures
In English and German

In Hohenlockstedt, a small community in Schleswig-Holstein, neighbours have been coming together since the beginning of 2020 in the storytelling-café series Holo Miteinander at M.1 of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung. The central question is how do we want to live together? At the moment when vulnerability is admitted to everyone, a sense of social power of trust is created. The artist duo Polyphrenic Creatures accompanies these talks. In the performative gesture N E P O < they transform, in the way of a carpet of language, the respective subjective experience in a rhythmic reconnection to a collective narrative. N E P O < invites us to engage in new directions of reading in order to release internalized ways of thinking and acting from their rigidity and to learn from each other and to (re-)learn forms of interaction. With N E P O <, Polyphrenic Creatures create a performative gesture of opening through their bodies and voices - and thus initiate the program of #4 Caring with local-situated questions and communal knowledge production.

Notation clapping / technical support: Bastian Hagedorn, Vocal Recordings: Diana Tsantekidou.

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6:30 pm
On Caring
Conversation by Helena Reckitt and Elke Krasny
Followed by a Q&A, moderated by Sascia Bailer, Gilly Karjevsky, Rosario Talevi
90 minutes
In English

Caring has recently received increased attention in critical cultural discourses, allowing for new research projects, exhibitions, and publications to emerge. Yet, why now? Why does society seem to be more receptive than ever to a subject as old as humanity? This opening conversation between the two curators and authors Elke Krasny and Helena Reckitt traces the history of care and social reproduction from a feminist and critical cultural perspective and situates it in today ́s discourse on caring. By highlighting relevant practices on caring they will question, complicate, and reflect on caring as a radical practice towards social transformation. This conversation will be followed by a moderated Q&A session via live chat.

To the video recording of the conversation

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8 pm
Atmospheric Escape: Fabulating Care
Audio by Johanna Bruckner
In English

Gaseous substances of the Earth escape into space and form extracorporeal bodies. These structures come into being as their molecular particles mutually support, align with and ripple against each other and the electromagnetic field. Johanna Bruckner calls this state polymorphous care or desire. How can these non-human bodies and their poetics of care be imagined?, How can these crystallizations be aesthetically narrated, accessed and diffracted? How can they help us fabulate and perform possible future worlds, languages and practices of care beyond the tangible? The audio offers scores for the listener to approach these questions in aesthetic, sonic and collective ways.

To listen to the piece click here:
Johanna Bruckner · Atmospheric Escape

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On the blog of the New Alphabet School more artistic, activist and scholarly contributions can be found. The blog also hosts the interdisciplinary correspondance project Letters to Joan, which brings together views on the current state of care in times of pandemic from artists, writers and academics. The invitation to write these letters to Joan Tronto, a key proponent of different concepts and theories on care, provide a loose framework inside of which these practitioners could position in relation to from their own practice and identity, addressing their words to a person who is also a node, with the idea of informal correspondence.

With texts by Edna Bonhomme, Johanna Bruckner, Teresa Dillon, João Florêncio, Johanna Hedva, Elke Krasny, Patricia Reed, Yayra Sumah and Joan Tronto.