Approach

Care work, or what it means within the organisation of the social body, is currently at the centre of an infinite number of debates on how to structure the public body’s responsibility for these practices that make it possible for human-animal life to continue thanks to the silenced and invisible work of millions of bodies (84% of which are women).

Beyond these demands, What Care Sustains?, proposes to delve into what in turn sustains the whole of the extensive and diverse amalgam that integrates what we call Care work. What sustains such practices, repetitions and actions supported over time? What are the bodies that take up Care, what are they in turn sustaining by assuming such practices? Does it have a much deeper value at a psycho-structural level than we imagine?

From three debates carried out over the course of a trimester (September to November), we intend to explore everything that in turn sustains such practices - extensive and diverse - that make up what we call Care work, based on three territories of enquiry: (1) Psycho-structural and material-corporal riches or potencies, (2) Vivility or corpo-conditions for a possible life and (3) Wounds or all the psychic accumulation that the bodies that care carry.

Three debates open to the public mixed with formats of performative dynamics that involve the public, with theoretical reflection and non-theoretical from situated activism or body-embodied learning (from bodies that politicise what crosses them without theoretical pretensions), so that thought and action can gradually build up triggering possibilities in all of us.

Here are the territories of each debate:

Debate 1: Psycho-structural and material-corporal riches or potencies

• Date: Saturday 11 September 2021
• Duration (with breaks): 10 am to 2 pm followed by a collective lunch at the end of each debat.

To investigate the various wealth and powers that are generated by caregivers' bodies. What are these riches and powers? What is psycho-structural wealth? Is the body the place of logistical-material power? Where do they accumulate and who accumulates these riches, which are essential for the continuity of life? From these riches, what is built?

Debate 2: Vivility or corpo-conditions for a possible life

• Date: Saturday 23 October 2021
• Duration (with breaks): 10 am to 2 pm followed by a collective lunch at the end of each debat.

To delve into what are the conditions to achieve a ‘livability’ of Care work, livable conditions both for the bodies that care and for the bodies that need to be cared for. What do livable conditions consist of? How are such conditions generated for a possible life? What would be desirable for a livability of care? Universal basic income? Care income based on typologies from diverse practices? Non-phallocentric architecture based on the needs of the bodies that care and of the bodies that need to be cared for? Without these livable conditions, which bodies are conducive to livability?

Debate 3: Wounded or all the psychic accumulation carried by bodies that care for

• Date: Saturday 13 November 2021
• Duration (with breaks): 10 am to 2 pm followed by a collective lunch at the end of each debat.

To delve into all the psychic burdens of devaluation, poverty and oppression that run through the bodies that care and all the psychic sediment of pain linked to the extensive and diverse practices that confirm care. To investigate the processes of medicalisation and pathologiszation by the pater-white-extractivist system as a response to its incapacity (as systemic denial) to recognise and restore its naturalised abuse, for centuries, over the bodies that assume care. We will enter into the aftermath of extractivism on our bodies by opening up the questions: What are such wounds? What burdens do we carry in our bodies? What do we do with such psychic burdens? Can the score be reset after the socio-historical accumulation of abuse on the bodies that care? How do we do this?

To close this debate, the performer Zarys Falcón will facilitate a closing ritual with the audience and guests for the healing of all the accumulated oppression and psychic pain that we, the bodies that care and our ancestors carry, from practices of cimarronaje to connect with the telluric networks that heal our bodies and the bodies that preceded us. Catharsis from non-white-Eurocentric feminism to name and heal the psychic wound of care.