#11 The Economics of Care
Dear friends and colleagues, dear faraway nearby,
2020 has been a ride, and with everything in the world going on, I have been tenderly thinking about the many facets of care. As our mundane lives have been shaped through measurements we needed to take in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we all learned how precious our social life and relationships are. We are asked as a society to prioritize care and that seems to clash with the neoliberal version of the independent self. In the following I'm connecting a few dots and leave some open for you:
Care is a Currency
Under neoliberalism care gets usually sold under the label of self-care or attached to the concept of attention. Attention sucks the emotional side of care out of the equation and emphasizes that the root of this created attention economy is to control feelings. The attention economy deals with the premise that human attention is a scarce commodity. Content--I hate that term as it neutralizes the presentation of information into one vague category as if texts, image or audio would not require that we are more concrete or critical about the source--is in a constant battle for eyeballs in order to find ways to feed statistics, be scalable and monetize the received attention. To put it in a nutshell, we live in an era of overflowing amounts of information in contrast to the capability of humans to process this information in the velocity the market demands.
Neoliberalism likes to tell the inspirational stories of self-made men and women, and yet, that picture always leaves out that there were many people who cared along the way. We emphasize attention (and fame) so much in our current success narrative that we forget to ask the core question: what do these people do with our attention and ultimately what do they care about???
COVID-19 has shown us in a bitter way that care has a very emotional side and that care work needs much more acknowledgement: we've all seen the images of tired hospital workers caring for an impossible amount of very sick patients, people with children are under pressure to juggle home office with homeschooling, we all had to adjust and give up certain personal liberties in order to support the most vulnerable in our society. We might have finally realized that care can't be about profits but has to be about solidarity. Care is the connective tissue of our society. We ultimately live in a relational system. Care is an investment in one another and many of us finally realized that our personal support network, our community, is our biggest asset when we have to face the unknown.
My friend Gretta Louw shared this heartfelt post by artist Miguel Gutierrez who wrote about the current situation in the art world. And I do feel that many art institutions think that money talk is something we should only have in the art market but it's so important to talk about payment and models for the current time. This is how institutions can show how much they care:
Self-care vs. Community care
After the horrible New Zealand terror attack in 2019, Nakita Valerio wrote, "Shouting 'self-care' at people who actually need community care is how we fail people." Nakita Velerio’s original Facebook update hit a nerve and resonated with many:
“It’s not as if this feeling was new, nor was the concept itself. Women of colour in particular have been calling for a shift to community care for years, and yet the onslaught of the self-care industry continues. In the anger of the moment, this was the first time I had put the words together in exactly that way—and perhaps more important to me than the post’s reach were the comments and messages that rolled in along with it. Person after person from all across the world and all social positions validated and affirmed what I too was feeling: None of our problems can be solved by a pedicure.
Self-care is about the individual caring for their own basic physical needs, whereas community care is focused on the collective: taking care of people together, for everything from basic physical needs to psychological and even spiritual ones. Community care is a recognition of the undeniable cooperative and social nature of human beings and involves a commitment to reduce harm simply through being together.
Nakita Valerio: This Viral Facebook Post Urges People to Rethink Self-Care, Flare, April 16, 2019 https://www.flare.com/identity/self-care-new-zealand-muslim-attack/
Her statement is still valid right now. COVID-19 showed that certain communities in our society are vulnerable and need protection, emphasized that we need to think about the values that hold us together as a society. Community care is the base of how we build better worlds together.
Care, Indifference & Hate
What is the opposite of care? Many would argue hate, but I would argue it's indifference. 2020 has been a mad year where we've witnessed how people got enraged for the most bizarre reasons, usually stating that their personal freedom got cut and that they're not willing to pay the prize or that they don't see their personal benefits. It's hard to make them understand that we can't reward care for others, it's always an investment in wellbeing, in the future, in life. Care is the antidote to isolation.
Hate has a pervasive power to connect people: they find community in rage, they find fierce determination in the concept of the enemy/ the other that they have to fight. It's a way to exercise power and demonstrate dominance. These groups care about hate as a means to control the narrative. The whole purpose is destruction and to create distortion. It's a spiral...
Humans are social beings, we crave for connection and we fear loneliness. Care is an emotional response connected to something bigger: it's about the relationships that are important to us, where we feel we belong, where we find beauty and awe. Care is about the tender and vulnerable part of humanity, the part that we've left too long out of the success narrative.
Ask yourself a few question:
Who are you supporting with your investments? And are these companies truly reflective of the values you hold?
What independent creators can you support through buying their works, supporting them on patreon or tipping them?
Are you investing in what/ who helps you? Don't take these things/ people for granted if they are build on new economic models, if they support you there needs to be an exchange, this is how we nourish interconnectedness, this is how we ensure a sustainable future.
What do you truly care about? Is your attention and money reflecting that?
Sharing the love: A few independent creators and causes I care about and that are part of my support network:
Nicole Manganelli is a printmaker & graphic designer living in Portland, Maine (US). She is the founder of radical emprints that has a long history of working with movement artists & activist printmakers. I'm in love with her Anti-Capitalist Love Notes. She has currently set up a Solidarity Art Fund, with the most beautiful motto: We need bread, but we need roses, too.
If you've been around here for a while you might know that I adore the writing and teaching of Adrienne Maree Brown. She has a wonderful podcast with her sister Autumn Brown, "How to survive the end of the world podcast" (Yes, very timely but the podcast started long before Covid-19). You can support the podcast here> or you can support Adrienne directly here>
Educator and museum worker Paula Santos set up with her collaborators at Museum Workers Speak a fund for US based museum workers who have been laid off, furloughed, or had hours cut during the pandemic. You can find more about the relief fund here> and directly donate here>
If you can, join a union or support the causes of a union right now. As you might know, I'm based in Switzerland, a pretty neoliberal country which became even more evident during COVID.19. We never faced a real lockdown like Spain, Italy or parts of the US but many museums and cultural producers had to cancel their events since March. There has been barely any response from the government and many did not receive any financial help. I am really grateful for the work of unions and their mobilization power and negotiation force as that lead during the later part of this year for some of us to be able to access relief funds for cultural workers. I'm particularly grateful to the Swiss union Syndicom and the organization Suisse Culture.
What are some of the independent causes and creators (artists, writers, curators etc.) you care about and that can be supported in their current initiatives. I'm happily putting together a list for the next letter and share them with the community here.
Reading
On Despair and the Imagination
Megan Markle, the duchess of Sussex, wrote in the New York Times about her losing her second child, the polarization of our society and loneliness. And how the the path to healing perhaps begins with three simple words: Are you OK?
What Really Makes Us Resilient?
How work became an inescapable hellhole. Yes, not the most positive title, but this is an excellent piece by Anne Helen Petersen about navigating technology during a pandemic: "What these technologies do best is remind us of what we’re not doing: who’s hanging out without us, who’s working more than us, what news we’re not reading. They refuse to allow our consciousness off the hook, in order to do the essential, protective, regenerative work of sublimating and repressing."
Here Are the Lessons Top Museum Leaders Learned in 2020, From Adopting New Revenue Streams to Listening to the Quietest Voices
Podcasts
One of the best episodes I've listened to this month has been on Ruts and Routines hosted by Madeleine Dore. She interviewed senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne and author of “Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save The World,Tyson Yunkaporta on routine as the death of relation to people and place, the involuntary ruts we experience, and how ambition can be directed towards leaving tools for generations to come. Listen to the remarkable conversation here>
Another episode I loved on the same podcast, was with Self-taught astronomer and author of Is The Moon Upside Down? Greg Quicke. In the conversation he shares the everyday lessons we can find amongst the stars—from finding our flow, to worrying less about what other might people think. He also talks briefly about the great conjunction on Dec. 21, don't miss this event. I just booked a guided tour at our astronomical observatory.
What are you caring about right now? Drop me a line by replying to this letter or get in touch directly via anabelroro@gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter or Instagram.
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In solidarity <3
Yours,
Anabel