Caring-with: On Potentialities and Challenges of Relational Approaches
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 10:10am
- 11:10am
(60 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
The lab based activity aims at collectively exploring potentialities and challenges of relationality through a series of experiential 'exercises' (Cologni 2025), to allow for co-creation. This practical dialogic work has been more recently understood in terms of embodied care, in relation to percipience and contamination (Cologni 2024), and rooted in the reciprocal nature of 'caring-with' (Cologni 2020, Tronto 2013). Such approach is at the core of the ongoing conversation with Mother Art Collective, pioneer Los Angeles based artists within the ongoing Getty Research Institute funded research project 'Towards a Feminist Care Aesthetics' (2023/), which is grounded in archival study, intergenerational dialogue, and sustained artistic exchange.
During the experimental exercises I aim at instigating reflections on the nature of care within art practice research - as central and not peripheral - through exchanges including conversations, movement based activity, and tangible traces in terms of maintenance, mothering, emotional labour, as well as public and ecological responsibility (Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2027) , and planetary commitment.
References.
'From The Home To The Planet. A Dialogue Between Elena Cologni And Mother Art Collective' (2025) MLAC Museum, Sapienza Università di Roma, in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathias Botanical Garden (exhibition)
Cologni, E. (2025) (Un)Monuments of the Everyday: The Body of/at Work. In City, Public Space, and Body. The Embodied Experience of Urban Life. Routledge
Cologni, E. (2024) Percipience, Embodiment, Contamination(s). Practicing a Feminist Care Aesthetics. International Journal of Education and the Arts 25(1. Art for the Sake of Care: Learning from Artistic Practice and Inquiry)
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2027) Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds.
During the experimental exercises I aim at instigating reflections on the nature of care within art practice research - as central and not peripheral - through exchanges including conversations, movement based activity, and tangible traces in terms of maintenance, mothering, emotional labour, as well as public and ecological responsibility (Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2027) , and planetary commitment.
References.
'From The Home To The Planet. A Dialogue Between Elena Cologni And Mother Art Collective' (2025) MLAC Museum, Sapienza Università di Roma, in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathias Botanical Garden (exhibition)
Cologni, E. (2025) (Un)Monuments of the Everyday: The Body of/at Work. In City, Public Space, and Body. The Embodied Experience of Urban Life. Routledge
Cologni, E. (2024) Percipience, Embodiment, Contamination(s). Practicing a Feminist Care Aesthetics. International Journal of Education and the Arts 25(1. Art for the Sake of Care: Learning from Artistic Practice and Inquiry)
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2027) Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds.
Biography
Elena is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Practice at Cambridge School of art (Anglia Ruskin University) where she is Research Excellence Framework29 Convenor. She develops dialogic sculptural and situated artistic strategies for observing, recording and stimulating an awareness of experiences of the everyday. Within this context she creates instruments to facilitate the sharing of insights, the location of situated knowledges and arising of new questions from within our relations with one another, place and the environment. This is done through an interdisciplinary approach where artistic research intersects with environmental psychology, care ethics, philosophy, and gender studies, resulting in dialogic sculptures,
