Category: care

Global Scream! Polish Protest Art in Berlin

Published date September 25, 2022 Categories borders / care / feminism / movement / protest / Uncategorized

During the communist era in Poland, art was part of the socialist party’s propaganda and free art was censored. However, artists created politically engaged art, openly provoking or hiding ‘politically incorrect’ content between the lines. The political role of art is very much needed again today. As an artist, I have always addressed political, social and religious themes in my work. Since I have become involved in activism, I am practically still doing the same thing – engaged art, only that it is shown on the street, seen by crowds and not by a narrow circle of people interested in art. As an artist, I see this as a challenge to myself and my work, to seek a definition of art.

Transfers: Öffentliches Erforschen der Stadt mit den Münchner Kammerspielen

Published date June 22, 2022 Categories care / city / infrastructure / public research / public space

What is the City? Was macht unsere Stadt aus? Wer bestimmt die kommenden Entwicklungen? Welche Handlungsspielräume bleiben uns? Diese Fragen untersuchen die Münchner Kammerspiele gemeinsam mit Künstler*innen und Akteur*innen des kulturellen und gesellschaften Lebens im Rahmen mehrer Forschungsresidenzen. Gisela Mackenroth hat die hieraus entstandene Performance “Mimetic Bodies in Public Space” aus soziologischer Perspektive kommentiert. Mit Bezügen auf philosophische, künstlerische und ethnographische Ausrichtungen der Stadtforschung arbeitet sie heraus, wie die Performance zu konkreten Formen öffentlichen und kollektiven Forschens in der Stadt anregt. Der Text ist hier online verfügbar.

Video documentation of the discussion: Feminist cross-movement alliances

Published date June 2, 2022 Categories borders / care / city / feminism / housing / infrastructure / migration / organizing / protest

During the discussion on May 24, 2022 we were gathering different local and translocal experiences with cross-movement alliances driven by queer-feminist initiatives.First, the activists from Bulgaria, Spain, Switzerland and France were bringing in reports on queer-feminist interventions in social struggles within their local contexts. We were talking about queer-feminist protest against neoliberal reforms of social services, as well as queer-feminist initiatives for social housing and opposition against nationalist, right wing politics. Second, we were getting to know the transnational feminist network “Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational” (EAST). We were learning more about EAST’s queer-feminist approach to connect social struggles of migrants, care workers, women and LGBTQI-communities on a transnational level.

Earthcare Fieldcast: Episode 3

Published date December 6, 2021 Categories care / climate & ecology / food justice

This episode features conversations with the Austrian Sezonieri and Swiss Widerstand am Tellerrand campaigns for the rights of seasonal agricultural workers. How to organize with the migrant workers who do life-sustaining labors on temporary regimes? How can unions be pushed to take this seriously?

Earthcare Fieldcast: Episode 2

Published date October 5, 2021 Categories care / climate & ecology / feminism / food justice

In this episode we speak to Attila Szocs of Ecoruralis, a 14,000 member-strong peasant farmer organization in Romania that is part of La Via Campesina Europe. The first part of this episode explores the work of Ecoruralis at the community level: their seed house, peasant-to-peasant knowledge exchanges, local production and distribution networks, Ecoruralis’ approach to agroecology and organization, and the horizon for strengthening rural feminism.

Documentation: Imaginaries of Transformation

Published date August 30, 2021 Categories care / climate & ecology / feminism / food justice

This time-travel session takes us from desirable futures back to our complicated past, asking: How do we imagine transformation? Centering on a performative interview with Amaranta Herrero and Dimitris Papadopoulos, set in 2050, this session engages the playful and transdisciplinary method of the Future Archive project. Animating and complicating questions of what is desirable, this session encourages to go beyond strictly utopian and dystopian visions of the future, based on their own implicatedness in worlds and struggles.

Documentation: Learning and Struggling in Pandemic times

Published date August 26, 2021 Categories care / city / climate & ecology / feminism / movement / organizing / protest

The pandemic, like other unfolding and coming ecological crises, profoundly reshapes the terrain upon which social movements operate and emerge. We held a workshop in order to discuss different terrains of struggle over housing, reproductive rights, and ecology. Here we are allocating recordings of the talks and of the discussion on May 21st as well as further reflections on the workshop on May 22nd.

Care and unconditional solidarity in the struggle for the right to housing.

Published date July 28, 2021 Categories care / city / feminism / housing / organizing

Commentary on the Workshop “Learning and Struggling in Pandemic Times. Available in German and French.

Die Erfahrungen von Organizing im Wohnumfeld und die Erfahrung der Pandemie (die uns auf unser Wohnumfeld zurückgeworfen hat) können Grundlage dafür sein, ein Bewusstsein für informell geleistete Care-Arbeit zu schaffen und neue solidarische Formen von Care-Arbeit zu leben und zu erkämpfen…

Gleanings: The Kaleidoscope of Catastrophe

Published date May 4, 2021 Categories care / climate & ecology / food justice / infrastructure

Recently, I announced my intention to write a long essay about Malm to a circle of degrowth communists. One, a researcher and activist of US pipeline struggles, was exasperated at Malm’s apparently contradictory embrace of a strategy of pushing the capitalist state to do the right thing in Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency (2020) and his stringent support of sabotage in How to Blow up a Pipeline (2021).

Gleanings: Building Power

Published date March 10, 2021 Categories care / climate & ecology / movement

Syriza took power through elections—not so much on the basis of a movement that could embolden or depose it. Now it is back to fighting power for many Greeks. But beyond the taking and fighting of power, there is the question of building power.