The art collective Larre, promoters of the project Te( n ) cuidado, were invited to participate in the conference The Future of Culture is Common. A Conference on Commoning Cultural Activism, Aesthetics, Organization and Policy, on the 1st, 2nd & 3rd of June 2022, in the University of Antwerp (Belgium).
In response to this invitation, Larre proposed and conducted a space-workshop that invited the participants to reflect, discuss and co-create tools and mechanisms with which to implement care as an organizing principle in participants’ own context, community, collectives, cultural practices and/or cultural organizations.
The Valuing Value workshop proposes as a framework for reflection and criticism the issues worked on in the CIRCLUSION Catalyst around the idea of care, with the motivation of valuing a space from which to point out the complexities, difficulties and fuss that care in itself entails, specially when we use care as a value and practice to guide political and organisational changes in our everyday lives and in cultural practices and organizations.
To do so, the participants were introduced to the 12 tools shared and proposed during the seminar (Un)screwing care and the CIRCLUSION meeting:
1. Exchange system that evolves through, and is based on, care.
2. Organisation models that challenge the production-reproduction divide, suggesting the possibility of unifying both concepts.
3. Care as a form of hosting and be hosted.
4. Redistributing resources by balancing privileges.
5. Value systems and values that incorporate care.
6. Multiple and multi-species care.
7. A tool for promoting access of what is ‘residual’ and ‘marginal’.
8. Support mechanism.
9. Act of resistance (individual and collective).
10. Intersectional device.
11. Building community method.
12. Healing device.
Each participant could choose which topic they wanted to work on, and based on this choice, a series of work groups were created, to which the following question was confronted:
How can we collectively define a tool that would help us to approach and practice care in our artistic organizations and practices?
To answer this question, Larre put into practice a mediation dynamic that seeks to collect own experiences and share different points of view, problems and reflections to generate something common. In this case, new care-driven tools with which to operate in our contexts and communities. How we collectively overcome shared obstacles/difficulties, became our tools!
To close the workshop, we created a fanzine that brought together the tools proposed.
