Curating as an Act of Care

“Care is a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” —Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto

The inaugural Guangzhou Design Triennial opens to the public from January 16 to May 31, 2024, with its theme The Warm-beings, which is curated by Shaoqiang Wang (Director of GDMoA), Vicky Richardson, Naiyi Wang, Degeng Li and anothermountainman (Stanley Wong).

As one of the thematic exhibitions, Matters of Care, curated by Naiyi Wang, invites 24 interdisciplinary designers and architects from around the globe to ruminate on notions of care, it seeks to explore care through many ways of knowing and being, at a time when a world where carelessness reigns. The thematic exhibition addresses a series of themes from “self-as-collective care” to “more-than-human care,” offering new perspectives that have extended to large-scale human and nonhuman processes, including economies, ecologies, and planetary systems. Building upon this expansive definition of care, Matters of Care brings together an interdisciplinary group of participants to reimagine the politics and ethics of care.

Matters of Care features two newly commissioned works that Triennial has handed to New York–based architecture studio MOS (Hilary Sample & Michael Meredith) and the Italian designer Aldo Cibic. MOS believes that architecture is a form of tending. After researching clinics and community gardens for more than a decade, they now present Greenhouse No. 1, Clinic No. 1, which combines a greenhouse with a clinic that has new possibilities as a public space that makes many forms of care visible. Aldo Cibic’s installation Rethinking Happiness in China reconsiders how to be able to live according to the time of nature. It is a manifesto for finding new paths that, starting from the wisdom of the past, can show us how to look at a future in which we understand how much nature can give us. He believes that the notion of care cannot be separated from the notion of harmony with Nature.

In addition to the commissioned works, the thematic exhibition comprises a selection of projects by interdisciplinary designers, architects, and researchers whose practices center on processes of care-taking, examples of ‘care-full’ practices from all over the world. Among them, the exhibition displays a series of site-specific installations, including those produced by Alissa + Nienke (Alissa van Asseldonk & Nienke Bongers), Lin Fanglu, Onearthstudio, and the adaptation of the work of Studio Ossidiana (Giovanni Bellotti & Alessandra Covini) and FormaFantasma (Andrea Trimarchi & Simone Farresin). The participants in this exhibition investigate care through an intersectional perspective on the precariousness of community, collectivity, vulnerability, solidarity, tenderness, maintenance and reparation.

“This thematic exhibition invites a deeper understanding of the intricacies of care,” says Naiyi Wang. “It offers fertile ground for carefully considering ‘care’ across multiple forms, dimensions and perspectives.”

As an ongoing research project, CARE is initiated by Naiyi Wang in 2020, with first launch at London Design Biennale (LDB 2023), and then Guangzhou Design Triennial (GDT 2024). By using these two platforms as a testing ground, it carries the potential to ensure that caring (whether for, about, or with) is imaginable and actionable. CARE manifests through Collective-care initiatives, ‘Care-full’ practices, as well as a Care Manifesto published by BAUHINIA, including a series of declarations of “I care by…” by 50 interdisciplinary designers, architects, thinkers, activists, scholars, healers and cultural practitioners from the Global South and Global North.

Participants (in alphabetical order)
A.A.Murakami (Azusa Murakami & Alexander Groves), Aldo Cibic, Alissa + Nienke (Alissa van Asseldonk & Nienke Bongers), Alvaro Catalan de Ocon, Chen Min, Colin Fournier, Eric Klarenbeek & Maartje Dros, FormaFantasma (Andrea Trimarchi & Simone Farresin), Lin Fanglu, MOS Architects (Hilary Sample & Michael Meredith), Neri Oxman, Onearthstudio, Shahar Livne, Studio Ossidiana (Giovanni Bellotti & Alessandra Covini), Terreform ONE (Mitchell Joachim & Vivian Kuan)

Matters of Care at Guangzhou Design Triennial 2024 is supported by Design Trust Feature Grant.