Museum of Care
The Museum of Care (MoC) is a collective participatory project conceived by artist Nika Dubrovsky and anthropologist David Graeber. Its mission is to create a shared space for experimental projects where academics, artists, the working class, pensioners, children, and migrants can participate. The Museum hosts a variety of public lectures, reading groups, art projects, and debates about politics, art, history, and anthropology. The initiative received its current shape after Graeber’s death in September 2020 and the Carnival4David, organized in memory of Graeber by his family and friends.[1][2]
The MoC operates at the intersection of contemporary art, experimental social activism, and academic practices.[3] It proclaims values of solidarity, care, participation, and reciprocity. MoC is an open-source project explicitly inviting people around the world to use this framework to create and develop their own projects on the basis of mutual help and respect.[4]
Concept
The concept of the Museum of Care was originally conceived by the artist Dubrovsky and her partner, the anthropologist Graeber, in their article “The Museum of Care: Imagining the World after the Pandemic”, published in Arts of the Working Class in April 2020.[5] In their article, Dubrovsky and Graeber imagine a post-pandemic future, where vast surfaces of office spaces and conservative institutions are turned into “free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter.”[5]
“We could call them ‘Museums of Care' -- precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations.”[5]
The concept evolved while Graeber and Dubrovsky collaborated with a group of women in Rojava who used the COVID-19 pandemic as a moment to reimagine relations between arts, material production, mutual help, and aesthetics. In the talk "From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes" presented in December 2019 at the 36th Chaos Communication Congress, Graeber referred to the MoC as a space where creative attempts "to completely reimagine economics, the relation of freedom, aesthetics, and value" take place.[6] The concept was further theorized in a series of publications about the artistic project in Rojava.[7][3][8]
"One reason art has remained a competitive game, despite all its past revolutions, has been that it is conceived as a form of production. What if it were conceived as a form of care? What if we conceived of all forms of value in such terms –- to see the transformation of art to be part of a more general process of replacing patriarchal society with a society of caregivers, in a world tilting towards total disaster?"[3]
History
After Graeber's sudden death in Venice, the family decided — in line with his anarchist political standing — to turn the funerals into the Carnival4David,[9] or the “Intergalactic Memorial Carnival," organized as a distributed and interactive event with online streaming from different countries. The goal of that format was to make the Carnival as inclusive as possible and allow Graeber's friends from all over the world to participate. The Carnival took place on Sunday 11 October 2020[10][11] and brought together more than 220 events in places across the world from Australia to Europe, ranging from forests to prisons.[12][13][14] Some of the events were broadcast within the framework of the festival Steirischer Herbst 2020,[15] where Graeber and Dubrovsky would have participated together.[16][17] Ekaterina Degot and David Riff from the Steirischer Herbst curatorial team organized the twelve-hour video stream that started in New Zealand, followed by Japan throughout the world and ended up in the Portobello Road in London, where Graeber lived with his wife.[18]
Many participants of the event expressed their interest in maintaining the community that emerged during the Carnival and decided to pursue the collaboration in the form of the MoC, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Molly Crabapple, Ekaterina Degot, Frédéric Vandenberghe,Jay Jordan, Lowkey, Steve Keen, Anton Newcombe, Jacques Servin, Astra Taylor, and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping.[citation needed]
The MoC has continued since 2019, assembling reading groups, hosting public lectures, and projects in collaboration with Adrian Bowyer, Silvia Federici, Keith Hart, Michael Hudson, Carne Ross, Maxime Rovère, and Steven Shaviro.
References
- ↑ Cain, Sian (2020-09-03). "David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2022-06-28. Retrieved 2022-07-04. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "Café Sabot für David Graeber, Stressfaktor" [Café Sabot for David Graeber]. radar.squat.net. 2020-10-11. Archived from the original on 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Sarican, Elif; Dubrovsky, Nika; Mhaili, Elizaveta (2022). "On a Museum of Care (in Rojava)" (PDF). In Krasny, Elke; Lingg, Sophie; Fritsch, Lena; Bosold, Birgit; Hofmann, Vera. Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating. MIT Press, distributed for Sternberg Press. pp. 272–283. ISBN 9783956795909. Search this book on
- ↑ "Tools of Museum of Care". Museum of Care. 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2022-07-04. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Dubrovsky, Nika; Graeber, David (April 2020). "The Museum of Care: Imagining the world after the pandemic". Arts of the Working Class (11): 45.
- ↑ Graeber, David (2019-12-27). "From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes". Open Transcripts. Chaos Communication Congress. Retrieved 2022-08-11. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Mitrofanova, Alla; Sevinaz, Evdike; Dubrovsky, Nika (April 2020). "Art as Care". Krapiva (2020–04) – via academia.edu.
- ↑ "A Tribute to David Graeber: Museum of Care in Rojava with Debbie Bookchin & Nika Dubrovsky by SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) Region Radio". Anchor by Spotify. 2021-01-25. Retrieved 2022-08-11. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "carnival4david". Museum of Care. 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "In Memoriam || David Graeber's intergalactic night || The Night of Toothful Hearts". Free Home University. 2020-10-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ Perring, Rebecca (2020-10-18). "Express". Jeremy Corbyn HUMILIATION: Former Labour leader flouts COVID rules at ‘memorial carnival’. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- ↑ Glanc, Tomáš (2020-10-05). "(en) Czech, AFED: Intergalactic memorial carnival for David Graeber". A-Infos. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- ↑ "Intergalactic memorial carnival to pay tribute to David Graeber". ANFNews. 2020-10-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- ↑ "Carnaval Intergaláctico por David Graeber en la Argentina". Comunizar. 2020-10-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- ↑ "steirischerherbst'22. About". steirischerherbst. 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "E-flux. Announcements". E-flux. 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- ↑ "Transformation 21". Konferenzimforum. 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2022-08-11.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
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External links
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