How can we understand the intersection between artistic research, an important and growing field of contemporary artistic practice, and care, a term that has become crucial for many artists as they endeavor to reckon with widespread crises and catastrophes—from wars, to the pandemic, to climate change, and beyond?
To address this question, one must consider the current discussion about the concept of care, particularly within the domain of care ethics. This emerging field investigates the disturbed relationship between human beings and the world, a dynamic that appears to be a direct consequence of humanity being forced to confront certain psychological, political, and planetary limits. Such collisions manifest as a breakdown of democracy—wherein politics are no longer responsive to citizens—and eventual environmental collapse, caused by the widespread treatment of earth as an exploitable resource. These urgencies have prompted political scientist Joan Tronto to stress the importance of asking what should be done to “maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible.”1
Tronto proposes using care as a tool to repair the connections between “world,” “existence,” and “life.” Her definition of the concept goes against the prevailing understanding of care in neoliberal capitalism—namely self-care, which reductively appropriates a more radical ethics to focus instead on personal lifestyle and “wellness” rather than on mutual enrichment. From Tronto’s perspective, care is not something an inherently isolated and selfish individual needs to be compelled to do through self-interest or duty. On the contrary, it comes naturally to humans because we are all involved in and dependent on the ecology of what she calls a “life-sustaining web.”2 Within collective enactments, care encompasses strategies of survival, resilience, and resistance, and becomes a critical practice and concept.
It is precisely Tronto’s communal understanding of care that resonates with the field of artistic research, which is a relatively new, post-disciplinary form of inquiry characterized by an intertwining of creative practice, critical epistemologies, and engaged strategies of making things public.3 This methodological combination of theory and practice enables artistic research to rehearse planetary issues such as ecological crises and social injustices in ways altogether different than established, disciplinary means of knowledge production.4 It is uniquely poised to catalyze a “23 skidoo” from established norms, and to imagine, initiate, and negotiate other paradigms for living together. The projects featured below emphasize that developing a topical ethics of care and imagining potential “ways out” are high on the agenda of artistic research.5
• Gustafsson&Haapoja, a creative collaboration formed by the author Laura Gustafsson and the artist Terike Haapoja, exemplifies this mode of inquiry. For their research project Manual for Earthly Living—which yielded the three-hour video work Becoming (2020), commissioned by the Helsinki Art Museum in 2020—the artistic duo carried out and filmed thirty-seven interviews with artists, writers, activists, caregivers, and thinkers whose life and work assume non-anthropocentric perspectives.6 They asked each of their subjects: Is it possible to live as a human being in a world endangered by the old way of being human? Can we propose a different approach to nature-culture ethics as manifested in everyday practices? How can art contribute to forms of subjecthood and citizenship that are no longer determined by anthropocentric frameworks? Many of Gustafsson&Haapoja’s interviewees suggested that humankind can build a future world where care forms the basis of coexistence and communality—a world based on an “alterbiopolitics” in which the dominant perspective of Homo economicus is replaced by that of Homo ecologicus, an approach that instead focuses on collective empowerment, sustainable existence, and more-than-human community.
• The Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s research-based practice offers another excellent example of a post-human approach by emphasizing how climate change’s rapid acceleration forces us to fundamentally rethink humans’ relationship to the earth. In her video essay Subatlantic (2015), Biemann juxtaposes the scope of human history with the sciences of geology and climatology, showing that the imaginary globe constructed by humanities discourses fails to resonate with earth’s mighty planetary grammar.7 Working from an awareness of geological time, we might be able to develop a mode of contemporary art that reveals earth’s reality as an unstable living environment. Art carries the potential to connect us to infinite, untamable forces that animate extra-historical dimensions beyond modernist constructions of linear time and progress. “Perhaps from there,” says Biemann’s scientist narrator, “we can envision a less divided future that can harbor a posthuman way of being in the world.”8
• The filmmaker duo Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan assume a similar post-anthropocentric perspective in their film Stones Have Laws (2018).9 The work portrays how the Western model of abstract, progressive time has played an important role in processes of colonization and exploitation, as well as in the loss of self-determination for a wide range of cultures and creatures. Stones Have Laws attends to the current situation of the Maroon community in the interior of Suriname. Through their oral traditions and rituals, the Maroon people are shown to possess profound respect and awe for the intrinsic rhythms of nature. The filmmakers register the stark contrasts between the Maroon understanding of ecological time and the more growth-oriented, measurable time enforced by capitalist chronopolitics, which commodifies nature and considers it an object rather than an animate force. Van Brummelen and de Haan’s research project also centers recent protest movements in Latin America that trouble the colonial discourse of progress and the speed of productionist interventions.10 These movements also strive for different, decolonial ways of organizing knowledge, time, and ontology that demand another ecology of care.
Artist Ruthia Jenrbekova rehearsing her online performance for the Politics of Aesthetics working group’s presentation at the EARN conference “The Postresearch Condition,” 2021. Photo: Maria Vilkovisky.
• The Politics of Aesthetics working group—a collective formed by Berhanu Ashagrie, Anette Baldauf, Azadeh Fatehrad, Renate Lorenz, and the PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna—also articulates this chronopolitical predicament of “Western” time’s supremacy. Against the systematic violence of Western extractivism and constricted knowledge production, the group advocates for Baradian intra-action and enacting Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity.11 In Glissant’s model, practicing opacity entails guarding oneself against the consuming, assimilationist gaze of colonization and hegemony at large, under which transparency so often leads to othering, victimization, and the conversion of pain into spectacle. The Politics of Aesthetics group argues that it is the role of the aesthetic realm to enable more authentic and just encounters with alterity. In the aesthetic realm, we can accept that the other is opaque to us while still allowing ourselves to approach their density, thickness, or fluidity. Here lies the proposition of a politics of aesthetics: the pursuit of adjacency—a mode that encourages familiarity and nearness, in opposition to the dominant tendency to treat others as “strangers”—should prevail in the discourse of artistic research.12 In turn, artistic research focuses on more topical modes of care, such as dismantling rigid classifications, cultivating attentiveness, and refining our ways of nurturing others.
• The Western episteme rests upon the hegemony of the visual regime; observation gained from sight is widely privileged over other forms of knowledge. Therefore, drawing attention to other, excluded forms of sensory experience is a crucial method of resistance. The artist Marloeke van der Vlugt’s research explores strategies that activate the sense of touch within aesthetic processes. For example, Thresholds of Touch (2023), a performative experiment that she cocreated with Carey Jewitt and Falk Hübner, explores the reciprocity of physical touching with others, environments, and objects.13 The project resulted in a video essay that uses embodied artistic strategies to engage carefully with and reflect affectively on the participants’ experience of a sensitizing experiment. Van der Vlugt’s artistic research proposes an onto-epistemic turn, foregrounding touch as a neglected and transformative way of knowing that contrasts with the prominence of vision, which typically produces more distanced knowledge. Touch could be the sensorial universe that intensifies involvement and proximity in more-than-human worlds.
The transcendental affinity between care ethics and artistic research is particularly well articulated in interdisciplinary scholar Maria Puíg de la Bellacasa’s 2017 book Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Puíg de la Bellacasa describes care as a dynamic, triangular relationship of labor, affect, and politics. Care, she insists, should never be reduced to only one of its three dimensions: labor (an exclusive focus on the practical), the affective (an exclusive focus on engagement), and the ethico-political (an exclusive focus on involvement). Only when all three are actively present can care manifest itself as a truly speculative and versatile domain that is open-ended and allows room for possible reconfigurations.
Puíg de la Bellacasa’s characterization of care as a tripartite system of dynamic mutual coherence shows clear similarities with the practice of artistic research, a mode of inquiry that can also be described as a triangular relationship irreducible to any one of its three conceptual spaces: creative practice (experimentality, art-making, sensory potential); artistic thinking (open-ended, speculative, associative, nonlinear); and dissemination strategies (curatorial formats, topical modes of political imaginaries, performative perspectives, transformational spaces for encounters).14
Whatever conceptual space one starts from, an artistic research practice should always amount to a creative proposition for thought in action and a mode of inquiry that can never be reduced to a single method. Thus, artistic research cannot be exactly equated with creative innovation, which emphasizes economic utility; nor should it be limited to the academic constraints of disciplinary knowledge production. It is also altogether different from political activism, which primarily focuses on strategies of dissemination. Artistic research—as modeled by Puíg de la Bellacasa’s modus operandi of care—must operate under conditions that ensure a continuous intersection between the three distinct conceptual spaces of creative practice, artistic thinking, and dissemination strategies. Scrutinizing the similarities between artistic research and care—such as their radical potential to envision alternative agencies and modes of cohabitation and to produce performative explorations of possible “ways out”—could lead to a mutual enrichment of their concepts and ecologies. Their conjoined capabilities could teach us to think more profoundly about many matters of concern and, ultimately, to enact better futures.
Joan Tronto, Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics (Cornell, 2015), 3.
Tronto, Who Cares?, 8.
The development of artistic research was stimulated by the 1999 Bologna Declaration, which enabled European art institutions to offer PhDs in fine art. In 2002, Documenta 11 paid particular attention to this discourse, and Documenta 13 in 2012 was entirely dedicated to artistic research →.
The publication “After the Research Turn,” ed. Henk Slager, special issue, MaHKUscript: Journal of Fine Art Research 4, no. 1 (2020) outlines a “research decade” in which artistic research had to relate to academic routines and institutional stereotypes that seriously impeded creativity and artistic thinking. The editorial introduction I wrote for the volume asked an urgent question: How can we prevent methodological processes of disciplining and normalization from subsuming the transformational potential—often described as “processes without a protocol”—of an as-yet-productive field? →.
The 2021 edition of Steirischer Herbst, “The Way Out,” curated by Ekaterina Degot, Christoph Platz, Dominik Müller, Mirela Baciak, and David Riff, also searched for ways out of intractable problems that have become more urgent than ever before →.
See Terike Haapoja’s presentation “How to Become Human” in the context of “After the Research Turn” →. See also Haapoja’s presentation “Vulnerability, Animality, Community” at “The Postresearch Condition,” the 2021 European Artistic Research Network (EARN) conference, held at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht →.
Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic (2015) →.
Stones Have Laws was first presented at “Inter-Nation,” the 2018 EARN conference held at GradCAM, Dublin →. The project was further contextualized in van Brummelen’s PhD thesis, “Drifting Studio Practice” (Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2021) →. In 2022, the film was part of the second iteration of “Re-Imagining Futures,” entitled “Any Speculation Whatever,” at the 14th Havana Biennial, “Futuro Y Contemporaneidad” (Future and Contemporaneity).
These perspectives are presented in Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive,” lecture, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, April 4, 2015; Allan deSouza and Allyson Purpura, “Undisciplined Knowledge,” in African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work, ed. Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee (Indiana University Press, 2013); and Rolando Vázquez, Vistas of Modernity (Jap Sam Books, 2020).
Karen Barad’s neologism “intra-action” refers to the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. In contrast to the usual “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), 33; Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000).
