I came to Vienna in May 2024 to research art practices that have to do with palliative care, elderly care and care work. Simultaneously and ironically, I have been annoyed by the fact that care has become a buzzword in the art world, because my experience with modes of operation in the arts has been highly competitive and precarious, exhausting and exploitative rather than one of care. The reason why I had decided to delve into it anyway was my own personal experience with care labour at the end of my mother’s life. Experiencing the sheer radicality of care work and its direct link to human rights motivated me to want to explore its subversive, anti-capitalist potential. 

Care work represents physical and emotional commitment to what artist Johanna Hedva refers to in her essay Sick Woman Theory as all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, disabled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible. 

Care work is a devotion to sooth suffering and protect human rights and personal freedoms with empathy, love, solidarity, compassion or friendship – values that counteract the totalizing logics of financial capital accumulation, optimalisation of lifestyles towards productivity and maximum efficiency. In both, palliative care and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, human rights of those marginalized by the society are at stake. Human rights of those who have been constantly reminded that, to this society, their care, even their survival, does not matter.

The experience of working with the Indonesian collective ruangrupa taught me how to see art more as diverse practices rooted in life rather than a discipline or a profession. Therefore, I am interested in the modes of art’s operation, the relational aspects of artistic activity, in the how of art practices and how artists function within their locales. Staying in close contact with the real life of people is something that informs how I think about art. In Vienna I was lucky enough to meet Zuzana, a Slovakian care worker with more than 30 years of experience with whom we regularly met to walk our dogs, share food and hang out whilst getting to know each other more personally. Likewise, I am grateful for having met artists who have been actively protesting the genocide during my time in Vienna. Studio visits led to time spent together in informal situations from which more profound friendships were starting to sprout. I am grateful for having met people who are not afraid to stand up against injustice, take a position and organise collectively regardless of possible consequences such as cancelled exhibitions or, in case of Palestinian artist Nour Shantout, termination of her PhD and employment at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This case is not an isolated one and the Statement of Solidarity with Nour Shantout put together by the concerned art community presents an entire archive of the repressions Austrian universities have carried out in the last years inflicting atmosphere of fear and self-censorship. Those, who resist are the ones that in the words of Adrian Piper are “too expensive to buy” and that’s why they’re so valuable for democratic societies. 
Although I value making friends over professional connections, my time in Vienna was precious and has led to further collaborations with those with whom affinities in terms of human values were palpable.