CONSTRUCTING CARE 2024

GuestRoomMaribor May / June 2024

CONSTRUCTING CARE

Eszter Kállay, Daria Khrystych, Martyna Miller, Vitória Monteiro, Teri Szűcs

Constructing Care

From left to right: Vitoria Monteiro, Teri Szűcs, Daria Khrystych, Martyna Miller, Safi Kállay and Eszter Kállay / Photo: Janez Klenovšek

From left to right: Vitoria Monteiro, Teri Szűcs, Daria Khrystych, Martyna Miller, Safi Kállay and Eszter Kállay / Photo: Janez Klenovšek

Through the Constructing Care programme, we aim to explore current issues related to the notion of care and caregiving through art and critical theory. Caring is a difficult word to use, difficult to translate, but it is also a very broad concept that applies to everyone. During the residency we will look together at its layers of meaning, which include caring for the sick and the elderly, raising children, ensuring the well-being of ourselves and our communities, as well as taking responsibility for our natural environment. We also need to talk about and critically interrogate the institutions of care.

The aim of the residency is not to encourage the creation of new, individual works, but to think together and plan collaborations for the future. We will address issues of the global care crisis from a local perspective, with a particular focus on Maribor: from personal and interpersonal experiences of care, to the political dimensions of the care crisis, such as: the lack of adequate support from states, the link between care workers and migration, feminised care work, and the gendered aspects of invisible, unpaid care work. Residents are invited to try to open up a more sustained reflection on how creative interventions, arts-based research and community arts practices can impact on local communities and wider society.

VITÓRIA MONTEIRO originally comes from the theater and performance scene in Brazil. When she joined an academic research group on intermediality in 2013, it elevated her understanding of inter- and transmedial narratives to a new level. Since then, she not only engages with different artistic media, but through the years she developed her own practice: creating transmedial research-based projects that fill in the gaps of history with art. In 2023 Vitória finished her diploma studies with the Honours Award of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and has been awarded the START stipend from the Austrian State for the year of 2024.

TERI SZŰCS (Hungary–Slovenia, 1975) is a writer, critic, curator and independent researcher. She gained her PhD in 2009 at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Szűcs is a former assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University; former lecturer at Corvinus University. She was the consultant of a number of exhibitions, among others, the RomaMoMA-project of OFF-Biennale Budapest at Documenta 15. Szűcs was a co-curator of the Visual Art Section of RomArchive – Digital Archive of the Roma and of the exhibition Collectively Carried Out (Budapest History Museum – OFF-Biennale Budapest). Szűcs has published and edited books in the field of memory studies and literature. She is the author of The History of Forgetting – The Witness of the Holocaust in Literary Works and “My Memory Resturned to Me”. Over the past half-decade she has been involved in dementia home care. She has started writing her autobiographical series titled to collect and recount the experiences and adventures of cargiving. “My Memory Returned to Me” is a multilingual writing project that aims to describe the caring relationship as a joint endeavour to remember, to learn and to change. It involves diasporic positions and identites – also as a manifestation of how the caring relationship rearranges fixed positionalities. Szűcs has also started her theoretical inquiry into the multiple functions of art in the context of dementia care.

DARIA KHRYSTYCH was born and raised in Kyiv. She is an activist, independent researcher, socially engaged artist. Being highly fascinated by in-between relations, power dynamics, and bottom-up movements, she was wandering from Tallinn to Porto, from Berlin to Kyiv, meeting communities and exploring spaces, longing for alternative anti-capitalist, anti-racist, non-patriarchal, queer, decolonial initiatives and practices to reimagine alternative futures to ones, proposed by dominant discourses.

MARTYNA MILLER was born in Kętrzyn, Poland. She is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and anthropologist, studied in Warsaw and Sarajevo, received her doctorate in fine arts from the University of Fine Arts in Poznań (under Izabella Gustowska). Co-founder of the Polanki duos and the TYNA collective. Since 2018, she has been co-leading the DOMIE project in Poznań, an experimental endeavor at the intersection of art, architecture and social sciences. Her projects explore the relationship between memory and the body. Through memories and their reconstructions, she creates methods to work with the mediality of experience. She is interested in the relationship between nature and community in processes of healing, production and transformation. Her recent projects, such as Memory Carp, Intimacy of Waters and Sexinsitu, analyse individual and collective relationships with water and the ocean, entering the space of hydro-activism. She uses video, performance, sound and more. Her works are often in the form of series, collections, gestures, fragments of broader explorations. She is a scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2014), winner of the SIGMA Scholarship (2013-2015) and the TOKAS residency in Tokyo (2020).

ESZTER KÁLLAY (1994) is a poet, visual artist, translator and feminist activist. She graduated in the Master in Critical Studies program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2021. Her first book of poetry entitled Hand in the Air was published in October 2020 by Magvető Publishing House in Budapest. Her second book of poetry entitled Celandine will be published in November 2023, also by Magvető Publishing House. She translated Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo into Hungarian which was published in 2021. She is working at EMMA Association, a national women's organisation working for women's fundamental rights and social equality, with a particular focus on gender-based oppression, violence against women during childbearing and child-rearing, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) at individual, community and societal levels, with a particular focus on vulnerable groups of women.

https://pekarnamm.org/23348 https://pekarnamm.org/23146

CONSTRUCTING CARE ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMME

18. 5. / 6.00 pm / OBRAT/ Meet the Residents - presentation of the work of guest artists Eszter Kállay, Daria Khrystych, Martyna Miller, Vitória Monteiro and Teri Szűcs

20 May / 7.00 pm / Vetrinjski dvor / Reading Circle Bojana Kunst: The Life of Art: Crossing Lines of Concern / organised by associations Polagoma and Rizoma

22. 5. / 11.00 am / Pekarna Magdalenske mreže / Festival of Volunteering in Maribor - Round table on different aspects of care work / Majda Hrženjak, Peace Institute, researcher in the field of care work, Maša Hawlina and Anja Lazar, Institute for Housing and Space Studies, Nina Pleteršek and Marija Glavica, Home Help Centre, Drago Perger, Danica Vogrinec Home, Marjan Holc, TOTI DCA Day Activity Centre for the Elderly / The event is organized within the framework of the network "Volunteering in Maribor"

24. 5. / 5.00 pm / OBRAT / Interactive lecture by performer, actress and dancer Barbara Kukovec

31 5 / 5.00 pm/ KC Pekarna gathering point / InterestSafari / Simon Žlahtič

1.6. / 6.00 pm / OBRAT / Rosa's School of Workers' Rights - "Who cares about women artists?" / talk by Tee Hvala, moderated by Maja Pan

6. 6. / 7.00 pm / OBRAT / Danica Knežević: Rhythms of Care / exhibition opening / curator Teri Szűcs

11. 6. / 6.00 pm / OBRAT / Presentation of the work and research of curator, researcher and art critic Flòra Gadó

12 June / 11.00 am / Pekarna Magdalenske mreže/ Violence against the Elderly - lecture / Nataša Usar and Tea Šauperl

12. 6. / 6.00 pm/ OBRAT / CARE / conversation between artist Danica Knežević and curator Teri Szűcs

14. 6. / 6.00 pm/ Pekarna Magdalenske mreže / Final presentation of the process of the project Constructing Care

The resedency project Constructing Care is supported by Culture Moves Europe, a project funded by European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.