Publication launch and community dialogue on practicing care
Thursday, May 16, 2024, 6 - 8 PM.
Community conversation open to everyone. In person at articule. Free dinner provided.
How do we care for each other in our living, learning, and working lives?
We invite you to join us in launching the publication, Promiscuous Infrastructures Practicing Care, over a pupusa dinner and to participate in an open conversation about what practicing care means to you.
6 PM doors open – dinner is served
6:30 PM collective reading and discussion begins
The book Promiscuous Infrastructures Practicing Care calls for an ethics of care and attentiveness to one another, re-imagines the making and the use of infrastructures, and situates care within a genealogy of artistic and social practice.
Promiscuous Infrastructures brings together more than twenty contributors—art and social practitioners, researchers, and educators—including the twelve core members of the Promiscuous Care Study Group, who have been researching and writing about caring infrastructures and promiscuous care for several years. This project takes seriously the urgent need to imagine diverse infrastructures of care at every scale of planetary existence. The resulting interdisciplinary publication comprises essays, visual schematics and scores, personal letters, recipes, and conversations, which emerge from the work of the study group, situated around the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.
In this publication being promiscuous means taking agency within and beyond the shared context of structurally dispassionate cultural and educational institutions that require innovation, expediency, and measurable results above all. The promiscuity the title explores is defined by a clear and collective refusal of efficiency, and favors generosity, care, love, and attention.
The evening will be hosted by two members of the Promiscuous Care Study Group: Skye Maule-O’Brien and Yusser al Obaidi.
For any questions or requests concerning accessibility to the event or our gallery space, please contact James via email or by phone at 514-842-9686.
For general accessibility information, please visit our dedicated page. Please note that with the increase in COVID 19 and flu transmissions, masks must be worn for the duration of the events
Skye Maule-O’Brien is a creative researcher and educator working between Rotterdam, Montreal, and Barbados. Combining theory, narrative, visual methods and materials her collaborative practice employs intimacy and vulnerability as creative, critical, and transformative tools through a theory she developed called intimate pedagogy. She holds a BFA in Art History with a minor in Adult Education and a Master’s in Educational Studies from Concordia University (Montreal), and a PhD in Education from York University (Toronto). At Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam) is a research fellow in Social Practices, leads interdisciplinary programming, and supports decolonial shifts in research and curriculum.
Yusser al Obaidi (1998) is a decolonial feminist writer and designer who seeks to acknowledge and enable the radical potential of intimate relational spaces. She graduated in the RASL Dual Degree Bachelor programme, in graphic design at Willem de Kooning Academy and political philosophy at Erasmus University College. Her practice revolves around intimate forms of publishing and the mobilization of alternative knowledge circulation patterns for writing that sits close to the skin. Her central concern: how can we affirm other ways of being/knowing?