Intersections of Care

Intersections of Care is a research project in the arts by Florence Cheval and Loraine Furter.

Intersections of Care aims at researching and experimenting with display, understood as material or immaterial dispositifs connecting different elements in space in order to create a discourse or a narrative within an exhibition. We intend to work on those devices that are usually quite overlooked but which nevertheless make the link between space, artefacts and humans. Display stands for an interstice, an interface, through which issues of crucial importance in terms of seeing, knowing, but also of power relationships, unfolds - since it contributes to model, to give shape and meaning to the singular elements it connects.

The exhibition space as a public space (re)produces a certain vision, a certain reading, a certain perspective on artefacts in particular and the world in general. It is urgent for us to reflect on ways to reconfigure this exhibition space, including its actors; to reshape it, to bring it towards other modes of existence, to experiment around these modes to open up to non-binary, intersectional perspectives.

Our project focusses on building up a series of links between a number of singular projects in a genealogy of forms, while at the same time tackling the following questions: What visibility is given to what, to whom? Who is speaking, what are the conditions of speech? Who is seen, who is heard? Who is watching, who is listening? More specifically: how to design a display that integrates, deploys and activates issues of inclusivity, intersectionality and non-binarity, as a means to propose another reading of the artworks and of the exhibition, but also potentially as an alternative way to take position in the world?

It is about experimenting with display as a specific construction of a perspective in the (public) space of the exhibition, but also as a relational device towards certain hybridizations, other ways to produce knowledge and possibilities.

We engage into display as part and parcel of the following practices and formats: the publication (publishing), the exhibition (curating), and the institution (instituting) while placing them in a dialogue that will contribute to open up each of them and to construct new types of relationships.

The research Intersections of Care is supported by A/R art & research, the FRArt/FNRS Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique.

This page is typeset in Andada by Carolina Giovagnoli, Asul by Mariela Monsalve, Cambay by Pooja Saxena and CirrusCumulus by Clara Sambot — from the collection of open source fonts designed by womxn www.design-research.be/by-womxn/, and Carrie de Vocal Type Co.

The colors are ghostwhite, blueviolet, seagreen, hotpink and lavenderblush!

SHARED MOMENTS

Launch of the research, December 11 2019, La Bellone

Participation in the SHARE seminar, January 31st 2020, ArBA, Brussels

Open School section of the Risquons-Tout exhibition at Wiels, September 12, 2020 to January 10, 2021.

SITUATING THE RESEARCH GUESTS

Zakaria Almoutlak is a Syrian sculptor based in Brussels since 2016. He worked with his father in an atelier in Homs sculpting in the Palmyrene tradition until the civil war broke out. Almoutlak was deeply involved in the revolution. In early 2017, he received refugee status in Belgium. Almoutlak is a volunteer for several organizations that work with refugees, and a board member of the Brussels-based non-profit organization Refugees Are Not Alone (RANA). He is a key collaborator of artists Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne on their project Atlas Unlimited, a series of exhibitions in Brussels, Antwerp, Chicago and New York.

Sofia Caesar (BR) is a Brazilian artist based in Brussels. She is currently a doctoral student and teacher at LUCA School of Arts. Her practice uses different media such as installation, performance, sculpture and video to evoke states of ambivalence - action and passivity, pause and movement, work and rest - and question the dominant standards of productivity and work.

Laurie Charles (BE) is a Belgian video artist who interweaves folklore, history and fiction in her work. She is a guest professor for the editorial practice course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Belgium.

Sirah Foighel Brutmann is an audio-visual artist. She has been working through installation, moving image and performance in collaboration with Eitan Efrat for 15 years, and is a founding member of Messidor, an artist-run organisation for production and exchange. She is an active member of Engagement arts, a peer to peer platform that fights sexism in the arts, and she works from Level Five, an artist run cooperative studio in Brussels.

Sarah Magnan is a graphic designer and an activist whose practice mixes collaborative work and hybrid publishing with an intersectional scope. She questions our relationship with tools and the political aspect of graphic design. She is part of the collective Open Source Publishing and is one of the founding members of the magazine Médor. In 2015, she cofounded the cyber feminist collective Just for The Record, which addresses the intersections between gender and the way history is written.

Greg Nijs (BE) is a researcher at Urban Species (a program hosted by the Faculties of Architecture and Social Sciences and Philosophy of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and at LUCA School of Arts). He is interested in the relationship between human and non-human, participation, experience, affect and cognition. He links these elements in his research on urban spaces, “other” practices of knowledge production and technology. He is also curator and co-director of c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels, and visiting professor at the Printing Department of ENSAV La Cambre, Brussels.

… to be completed!