Resources for artistic practices

In a competitive existence we hide our weak spots. When something comes too close, threatens to touch us, we had better shield our vulnerability. However, this means there is less and less room for exchange. Evaluation madness and the constant urge to innovate push people back further and further into a virtual shell. Anyway, we are all just messing about, says Marlies De Munck. She therefore pleads for openness and compassion. Because all this sheltering keeps you from touching. And from being touched. Pascal Gielen warmly advocates an aesthetic skill: the ability to experience, through all our senses, a ramshackle and fragile reality and still see it as a coherent whole. Art, theatre, dance, or music can touch us deeply and unexpectedly, show us new connections, and change rigid opinions. That is the power of art and culture: to reconcile us with life, which can be turbulent, disjointed, and fragile.

Care work is at once omnipresent and invisible. It encompasses all forms of socially necessary – or reproductive – labor: raising children, cooking, cleaning, shopping, looking after the elderly and the ill, and many other tasks. It is what allows for and sustains productive labor (including architectural labor) in the first place.

How does solidarity emerge? When are political alliances formed beyond differences, and why do certain struggles seem to garner more solidarity than others? What constitutes solidarity work, and what contradictions, interests and strategies shape it? In their new volume, Hierarchies of Solidarity, சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா (Sinthujan Varatharajah) and مشترى هلال (Moshtari Hilal) jointly reflect on a practice that, as an act against oppression, manifests itself in both seemingly small, everyday gestures and global political contexts.

Creatives, practitioners, designers, and artistic researchers are engaging in a participatory practice of collectively investigating what practising solidarity in fashion entails. This book recognises the urgency of practising more care for other humans, animals, organisms, and species, as well as the other (living) matter related to fashion, clothing, and textiles.

Learn more about the critical strategies, affirmative approaches, and embodied practices.

‘Radio Ballads: Songs for Change’ revisits the spirit of the revolutionary BBC series (1957–64) that amplified the voices of workers and underrepresented communities through song and storytelling. Over sixty years later, Serpentine Civic Projects commissioned four new Radio Ballads (2019–23) by artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim, and Ilona Sagar, working with carers, social workers, and residents in Barking and Dagenham. This publication weaves their complex stories of care, grief, and resilience through eight collaborative songs, exploring how creative collaboration can foster interdependence, healing, and collective action. It asks: what collective songs are needed for today’s crises?

Rest Is Resistance is a book by Tricia Hersey, that encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.

In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us.

small white monkeys is a fragmented essay, including poems and images, on self-expression, self-help and shame. Beginning with the image of the small white monkeys, the text examines the author’s relationship with shame through a series of short studies on, amongst other things, cats, hair as a metonym for the self in poetry and fiction, and perceptions of sexual violence.

Studies on Squats is an evocative exploration of embodied resistance and political movement that uses the multifaceted posture of the “Asian Squat” as a lens through which broader concepts of migration, illness, and resilience are examined. In Studies on Squats, the body—in its most vulnerable and potent states—becomes a speculative site for reclaiming agency by crafting new forms of protest that draw from ancestral strength, humor and eroticism.

Utterances: Composing a Care-Informed Research Practice in the Cracks is a humble offering towards an alternative artistic research practice that is guided by an ethics of care.

Utterances proposes the ‘check in’ as an invitation, as well as a structure, dialogue, and reality that begins with the lived experience of the body, combined with the visceral experiences of sharing intimate spaces together. This approach opens space for collecting impressions, allowing for tensions and gaps, speaking and being silent, presence and non-presence, note taking and taking note, all as an ongoing process of caring coalition building.

This intimate publication’s collective research encompasses a way of working, the rhythms and the breaks of a certain kind of intimacy, and an ethos of being in ‘right relation’. With respect to this research being in right relation, seemingly separate lines of inquiry become interwoven, generate emergent interrelationships, bring together collective imagination, pursue unpredictable pathways, and honour the marginalia of research by centring the side notes and whispers.