Sound Playground
The Care Council
Athens
2022 - present
Mouries Collective
The Care Council is an experimental project that seeks to develop care practices and relationships that embrace radical re-interpretations of kinship.
At its core, it asks: How and what type of care practices can help us become kin in healthy, sustainable and liberatory ways? It will attempt to collectively weave broader questions around how capitalism shapes the ways we relate with one another and with more-than-human beings, with situated experiences and personal stories reflecting about how “permanent-crisis” as a contemporary condition of (socio-economic and ecological) breakdown, loss, dispossession and fear affects our capacities to trust, share, engage, care, wish and desire, which modes of care we practice and experience in our everyday lives and how those could be expanded or intensified.
The project is conceived of as a methodology to accompany a more-than-artist collective as they take their first steps in shaping a common practice at a time marked by great uncertainty and instability. It wishes to provide them with tools that can help them sustain and reproduce themselves collectively and individually while (creatively yet care-fully) exploring affective modes of relating as the basis of their shared practice.
The project comprises a series of gatherings structured in three parts, namely 1) Bodywork, 2) Care-full Sharing and 3) Food (for Thought). Each gathering revolves around a specific topic and includes body/movement practices, writing, drawing or mapping exercises, and readings or screenings over a potluck.
So far, we have worked on: TRUST, CARE, SEXUALITIES, VULNERABILITIES, WISHES, DISCOMFORTS, PARTY, JOY, GRATEFULNESS, FAMILY, PLEASURE, VOICE and INTUITIONS.
OBJECTIVES
Short-term
- Practice/(re)learn to trust, ask for support, articulate/unpack our emotions, stories, needs and wishes, and show vulnerability
- Learn to ask good, supporting, transformative questions
- Experiment with (verbal and somatic) communicative skills and practices
- Intensify our connections and mutual affections
- Provide distributive, networked care
- Co-produce meaningful knowledge based on the articulation of personal experiences and embodied knowledge(s) with collectively worked-through theories and cultural products
- Co-imagine alternative care and kinship systems
- Articulate a tentative, situated and open definition of a care politics
Mid-term
- Consolidate an affective, attentive, accountable, care and support net that feels strong
- Establish new care/kinship habits in our everyday lives
- Develop modes of intentional kinship
- Compose our commonly produced knowledge(s) and speculative ruminations in material formats
- Spread/circulate these knowledge(s)
Long-term
- (Fully) de-habituate ourselves from capitalist modes of relation
- Co-create the more-than-human webs of care we need to mourn, repair the eco-social systems we live with, liberate ourselves and thrive