Manuela Zechner
How do we imagine and project the future of the networks that sustain our everyday life and practices (political, cultural, etc.)? In the context of growing precarity and decomposition of social rights and welfare, how do we deal with the insecurity that our future embodies? Within creative and caring collective processes and social movements, what capacities do we have to imagine sustainable ways of collaborating, co-inhabiting, supporting eachother? What can the perspective of care bring to social movements and theories previously focussed around the image of fast-chaning networks, relations of opportunism, flexibility, precarity, of creativity and spontaneity?
These are some of the questions that underpin my current research in the framework of my writings on collective processes between creativity and care (I do this via a Phd at the Business and Drama Departments at Queen Mary University London, and publish bits of it in non-academic contexts on a regular basis, see below).
To engage these questions beyond (as well as within) a doctoral project embedded in and inevitably limited by the grave-like neoliberal university - to build and make accessible research materials beyond a thesis that no one will ever read - I am undertaking a series of conversations with people working collectively across caring and creative politics. This research is focused around Spain and the UK, where I myself am moving.
Audio-video materials created in this context show with pink framing on the future archive startpage. They can also be found in this list.
With time there will be thematically specific edits of materials, around topics such as networks, politics, care, institutions, etc.
Relating to this/coming out of this strand are parallel processes using the future archive method, some of which are linked to below.
UN FUTURO DE CUIDADO
a beautiful video that the Noticiero Intercultural made concerning the future of care, imagining a strike of care workers.
Nanopolitics group
London-based group that experiments with methods from performance, dance, theatre, somatics, therapy and the street, in an attempt to think politics from and with the body. There's no representational web page but an online working space.
>> see also: interview with Nelly
Precarias a la Deriva
Old website of a Madrid-based collective that worked around feminised labour, precarity and care (now disbanded).
Interview with the ex-group, reflecting on 'what they were wrong ten years ago' on turbulence.org.
>>see also: interviews with Fatimatta, Marisa
Schizoanalysis Collective Barcelona
I did a care networks mapping workshop with this group in 2010, in Barcelona. They're not online right now, but there's soon to be a text they based on a workshop they facilitated in the encampment at Sol in May 2010 (translation and link will follow).
>> see also: interview with Nizaia
Micropoliticas workshops
Workshops around micropolitics in 2011, Spain. I facilitated some theatre and theory based sessions around care networks, notes for them are here.
David Vercauteren also shared his work around the micropolitiques des groupes.
>> see also: interview with Pantxo
Micropolitics group London
Research group that works around micropolitics of research, cultural and collective practice.
http://micropolitics.wordpress.com/
Caring for the network, creatively
Manuela Zechner
in: Trans-Local Acts, ed. Doina Petrescu, Constantin Petcou, Nishat Awan
pdf online at www.publicworksgroup.net/2011/02/10/tla-press.pdf
Subjectivity and Collectivity: problems of relation
Manuela Zechner
another rejigged text touching upon care and creativity
Informal-formal labour diagram based around care and creative work, made in the context of my Phd chapter 1