RADICAL CARE

2018

‘Radical Care,’ as I define it, is the urgent need to be present with one another—paying attention, listening, and nurturing our connections. It emphasizes human relationships and asks what we could do differently. In response to the crises of our time, we must reassess where we place value and explore how to create a new economy of care that doesn’t solely privilege certain bodies.

To me, Radical Care means extending the care we typically reserve for our intimate circles to strangers, caregivers, and those in need of care. It involves creating a brave space that welcomes diverse perspectives, fostering reflection on roles, gestures, and anecdotes to deepen our understanding of what it means to care.

In a Radical Care community space, participants are invited to celebrate their differences and engage in meaningful conversations, broadening our collective understanding of how to coexist with care. This space honors lived experiences, personal rituals, traditions, and stories, offering room for feelings to surface and be expressed through storytelling.

This project has continued to grow and change with every iteration. In it’s first version, it existed to serve a transitional community at the Ground Floor Art Centre in Chinatown, where I posed the question, “What do we owe to each other?” and spent three days as a host, offering soup and clay to slow down time, facilitate conversations, and listen to other's narratives.

The soup, a collaborative effort with Annie Canto and Molly Marineau, was a simple invitation to slow down and contemplate care. On day one, we served a lentil soup, followed by potato-leek and turnip soup on day two, and pumpkin soup on day three. Each bowl came with an ingredient list for guests to recreate the experience at home.

Language also played a key role in the space. Growing up in an English-medium school in India, I’ve reflected on how language unites and divides us. The space allowed participants to share their unique writing styles and express themselves in their own language, creating both secret bonds and connections between people who spoke the same language.

 

2022

In creating a space for Radical Care at Alternatives Gallery, I hoped to create an opportunity for dialogue, exchange and reflection with care at its core. Over 5 days, between November 28 - December 3rd, the gallery evolved with every new person that entered it and stories about care filled the room from top to bottom. Upon walking into the space, visitors were enveloped in the colour brown, which to me represents warmth, being ‘of colour’, and the ground on which we stand. The clay was arranged in the form of a wall of ‘Care Packages’, that visitors dismantled by being vulnerable alongside one another. Read more about this project on the ArtRise website and in this interview I did for Burnaby Now & Vancouver is Awesome.