rADICAL cARE
Workshop / Clay Installation / Community Engaged Practice
‘Radical Care’ as I define it, is a need, an urge and a desperation for us to be present with one another - paying attention, listening, nurturing and growing our interpersonal connections. It places emphasis on human relationships to ask what we could we be doing differently? The crisis of our time, calls for a reassessment of where we place value and how we might create a new economy of care that doesn’t just privilege working bodies.
In a Radical Care community space, members are invited to celebrate their difference and engage in conversation in order to widen our understanding of how we can be in this world together with an intent of care. This space values lived experience, personal rituals, traditions and anecdotes. Aiming to provide a place for our feelings to occupy space and be made visible, through the form of storytelling which in turn is able to generate a new form of knowledge.
This project takes the form of an inclusionary space of belonging for a transitional community of difference, where I asked the question ‘What Do We Owe to Each Other?’ at the Ground Floor Art Centre, an artist run studio space in the heart of Chinatown. I inhabited this space for a period of three days, for six hours each day, playing the role of a host that would care for visitors; offering soup and clay with the intention of slowing down and being present in order to facilitate conversations and listen to each other’s narratives.
Serving soup
The soup was a collective effort of Annie Canto and Molly Marineau. Providing sustenance to others, especially on cold and rainy days was the best way I could think of to welcome guests into the space. This served as an invitation to slow down and spend some time, drinking soup while contemplating care. On day one we served a not-so-green lentil soup, day two a potato-leek and turnip soup and my personal favourite on day three, the pumpkin soup. Each soup was accompanied by an ingredient list for the visitor to recreate if they so wished.
lANGUAGE
We navigate this world with the use of a shared language, a tool for communication that on the surface unifies us as thinking and feeling bodies. Having studied in an English medium school for majority of my education in an Indian context, I find it crucial to contemplate the role of language as it is used, and the power or agency that it can either afford or absolve for those that employ it. The space provided an opportunity for participants to share a glimpse into varying writing styles, and for people to express themselves in their own language which produced at once a secret and a strong bond between people that spoke the same language.
Radical Care x Curiko 2022
Read more about this project on the ArtRise website and in this interview I did for Burnaby Now & Vancouver is Awesome.
This expressions of care were contributed by community members that visited the space between November 28 - December 3rd at Alternatives Gallery.