The third, and last day of the program invites participants to join artist-led workshops, performances and meditative rituals of care. These acts of care challenge normative concepts, regulations and myths around motherhood, autonomy and infrastructures from diverse perspectives.

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11 am-1 pm online, with registration
Workshop #4: Who depends on who? Deconstructing ableist perspectives of autonomy and dependence
With Júlia Souza Ayerbe
In English

Dis*abled people have always designed mechanisms and structures to support and respect their own special needs and bodies to face ableism. At the present moment, the global population is trying to understand and develop new forms of life due to the limitations imposed by Covid-19, and much can be learned from the functional diverse community and disability studies. In the workshop participants are invited to interrogate their experiences and perspectives about “autonomy” and “dependence”. Together, they will investigate how invisible are the entangles of caring and the chains of production that sustain the ableist system, unmasking the neoliberal illusion of the “independent man” that stigmatizes vulnerable bodies as dependent, unproductive and worthless.

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3-3:30 pm Live stream on www.hkw.de/caring
Love and Labor. Intimacy and Isolation. Care and Survival.
A performance between mothers and children in a state of lockdown.
Online screening of a performance by Maternal Fantasies
In English

Who cares for whom and what are the consequences? The feminist art collective Maternal Fantasies lets viewers peak into their homes, where artistic production exists alongside domestic tasks and childcare. Household items become toys. Kitchens become backdrops. Care work and parenting have historically been marked by gender-based inequalities, yet the current conditions of social distancing have acutely magnified these injustices. Against this backdrop, the performance seeks to understand “mothering” not as a physical and fixed category or identity, but instead as dedicated time, attention, nurturance, protection and an interrupted state of mind.
The film can be viewed on New Alphabet School Blog
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6-8 pm online, with registration
Workshop #5: Cleansing the Pipes
With Teresa Dillon
In English

Tubes, lines, pipes, connectors of fibre, submarine communications chains and forked paths, colonial plumbing circumnavigating the globe. Infrastructures support us to exchange and communicate. What stories do they hold? Casting telecom-spells, the workshop participants activate their collective imaginaries, traveling through the superhighways of the digital. Teresa Dillon will guide this mediation and visioning, which will be followed by a group conversation on the histories of the Internet, its environmental and colonial footprint and what it takes to keep it going. Why should we care about the environmental costs of the Internet?How is this balanced by its multiple uses, particularly in supporting expressions of care during times of hyper regulation, isolation and physical distancing?

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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.