Caring as an Act of Resistance

What does care look like when it evolves out of a consciously critical lens, and through a cultural practice? To find out, Marc Garrrett, co-director of Furtherfield (UK), chairs a panel with cultural producers: Cassie Thornton, Elsa James, and Tomislav Medak, to discuss care as an act of resistance: against despair, uncertainty, and social fracturing.

This conference is taking place at a time of mass social upheaval around the world. What knowledges and strategies do we need to acknowledge, and build on, in order to navigate through a world fractured by racism: class division, the covid-19 virus, imposed Austerity, international debt, as global communications infrastructures illegally and systematically hack and overwhelm democracy, Fake news generating tiny groups of clandestine media strategists working in alliance with dodgy politicians, corrupt financiers, and right-wing media giants? On top of this, we are also dealing with the mass extinction of wildlife and destruction of life-supporting ecosystems.

What a mess we’re all in. However, this panel does not expect to answer all the problems and absolutes. It’s about accepting our imperfections and building on new and old, ‘lived’ choices, rather than conforming to the same hierarchies, behaviours and infrastructures which have caused the problems in the first place. The 21st Century needs better visions and more intuitive approaches of understanding each other, technology, creatures, and things. The so-called “strong men” have been the only ones with power to take decisive action and they have failed us. Now is the time to bring other voices in from the ground.

Speakers

Tomislav Medak is a PhD researcher at Coventry University’s Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He’s also a part of the theory and publishing team of Multimedia Institute/MAMA, an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World & Pirate Care initiatives, and a member of the performing arts collective BADco. His research interests are in technology, capitalist development and post-capitalist transition, with a particular focus on planetary ecological crisis, techno-science and intellectual property.

Marc Garrett is the co-founder & artistic director of Furtherfield & DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab. Furtherfield disrupts & democratises art and technology through exhibitions, labs & debate, for deep exploration, open tools & free thinking. http://www.furtherfield.org DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab is an arts, blockchain & web 3.0 technologies research hub for fairer, more dynamic & connected cultural ecologies & economies now. http://decal.is/ Recent publications: State Machines: Reflections & Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, & Art. Edited by Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, Inte Gloerich. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2019 http://bit.do/eQgg3 Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain. Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner. Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, currently living in Canada. Since before the 2008 financial collapse, Thornton has focused on researching and revealing the complex nature of debt through socially engaged art. She is the Artist-in-Pandemic at Furtherfield in London, working on a social cure for a cooperative species: The Hologram. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social center at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

Elsa James (born in 1968, London, England) is an artist and activist living in Essex since 1999. Her work intervenes in the overlapping discourses of race, gender, diaspora and belonging. Her black British identity ignites her interdisciplinary and research-based practice, located within the fields of contemporary performance, text and language-based art, socio-political and socially engaged art; occasionally dabbling with drawing and painting. Solo works employ aural and the archives to examine ideas surrounding regionality of race and black subjectivity. Recent projects Forgotten Black Essex (2018) and Black Girl Essex (2019) explores the historical, temporal and spatial dimensions of what it means to be black in Essex; England’s most misunderstood, and, homogeneously white county. Her social practice includes advocating for the inclusion of marginalised voices and communities in the arts sector; New Ways of Seeing, Making and Telling (2018), a visual provocation and live debate, challenged how the art sector can ‘genuinely’ address barriers to participation and involvement in the arts for Black, Asian and other minority communities. James has exhibited, screened and presented projects nationally including Autograph (ABP), London; Big Screen Southend at Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Firstsite Gallery, Colchester; Furtherfield, London; Metal Culture, Southend; Site Gallery, Sheffield and Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, London.