#4 Caring – Contributions on the Blog
Letters to Joan
Correspondence by Sascia Bailer, Edna Bonhomme, Johanna Bruckner, Teresa Dillon, João Florêncio, Johanna Hedva, Elke Krasny, Gilly Karjevsky, Patricia Reed, Yayra Sumah and Rosario Talevi with Joan Tronto
On the New Alphabet School blog, this correspondence bring 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. These letters then span approaches that vary from the genealogical, to the political, to the planetary, if those distinctions even matter anymore. These letters and their recipient make up a constellation of care, offered here for you to find patterns or images that might emerge out of them.
Versions of Our Ideal Sanitised Tomorrow: #Caring Re-loaded
Videos by Mwape J. Mumbi (to be released at the end of June)
Against the background of the global pandemic caused by Covid-19, human life and its interrelationships have been called into question. While the whole world is looking for solutions. But the bias between the “haves and have-nots” is repeated in the narrative between the global North, which is searching for the solution to this crisis with the help of conventional medicine, and the global South, which is accused of being in danger of spreading the virus through “quackery”. How does the insistence on the use of e.g. a locally proven traditional medicine in Madagascar to fight Covid-19 differ from the waiting and hoping for a vaccine approved by the WHO and commercially available worldwide? What is meant by care in Madagascar and what does it amount to? In his video on the New Alphabet School blog, Mwape J. Mumbi shows a selection of filmed and self-recorded responses from people from Korea, Britain, Zambia and Kenya who share their experiences and ideas of care by teasing and testing conventional norms and thought of a world before and beyond Covid-19. To be released at the end of June.