Care Ecologies set off one year into the COVID-19 pandemic (spring 2021), a time when the entanglement of health, social and ecological issues became painfully tangible. Lockdown and isolation were reminders that life is relational and that all beings are part of various ‘webs of care’. Understanding the research group as a concrete at-hand example of an ecology, we ask: How to be aware of one’s place in such an ecology? Which beings take care of which other beings? And what forms of care matter in a specific relationship? How to research with care? How to be, or become, a caring ecology? And how to attend to care frictions within these processes?
In the Care Ecologies research group, artists and researchers examine care and care-related topics, such as health injustice, loss and grief, and feminist finance, from various disciplinary positions e.g., medical humanities, architecture, culture and media studies, visual and performing arts. By taking the time to slow research down, and to create conditions for sharing practices, the group uses various on- and offline frameworks, which vary between research presentations, field trips, and practice sessions.
In addition to sharing the group members’ individual research practices centering care as a subject (see project series below), the group employs research and art practices to reflect on the complex meanings of care and how it may also shape the group’s collective exchanges, collaborations and entanglements. A shared interest of the core group members revolves around the affective practice of care itself, explored in co-authored and curated articles, workshops, and conference presentations.
Public Events & Participation
Care Ecologies events are announced through the ARIAS Calendar, the newsletter, and social media channels, and are open to anyone who is interested in participating. Read more about past events by using the filter CE and search bar on sub themes on our main page. Artists and researchers who want to engage in further exchange are welcome to join both the group and our shared research activities.
Care Ecologies group is hosted by Nienke Scholts. Current members are: Ania Molenda, Haitian Ma, Marloeke van der Vlught, Natalia Sanchez Querubin, Nienke Scholts, and ro heinrich. In our ecology, but currently taking care of other matters: Alexa Mardon, Clarinde Wesselink, Gabriela Milyanova, Hira Nabi, Inte Gloerich & Pia the dog, Maaike Muntinga, MOHA collective, Rita Sousa Mendez, Valentina Curandi, and others.
Carving out time to learn about various temporalities of care, Giving Time is a series of research presentations, workshops, and conversations that unpack feminist approaches to care that value slowness and community.
It does this by engaging with topics such as touch and intimacy, grammars of separability, inter-species care, and slowness, through collaboration with various artistic research practices and overlooked conversation partners such as trees, verbs, and soft tools.
Giving Time is also a reflection of working conditions that advocate for a slower form of research that takes the time to ‘be’ and re-imagine together: What modes of relating can be found in the “other side of time”? How does a verb-based language affect life? How do we speak about and care for feminist labour? What can we gain from slowness as a guiding rhythm and value for artistic research?
Past events include:
Hard Work / Soft Work - Harriet Rose Morley
Slow Research - Carolyn F. Strauss
How to Love a Tree? - Hira Nabi
Traveling Through Words and Tongues - ro heinrich
The Language of Climate Care
The Language of Climate Care is a gradual and collective research process, led by Ania Molenda, to rethink and create ways of responding to the climate emergency and its relationship to spatial, artistic, and design practices. The process focuses on being in uncertainty together and tooling up for reshaping the current dominant relationships between language and practice through cycles of gathering, archiving, and relating. It is an invitation to ask what needs to be learned and unlearned to create a caring relational practice.
Moments of gathering are based in practices of radical listening, as a way to open space for conversation, and simultaneously as a process of learning and unlearning how language shapes our modes of being (in relation). A key component in the workshops is an archive of objects, words, and phrases, as a resource for creatively speculating on languages and practices of climate care.
The gatherings are moments of care-fully performing the archive and creating documentation for an emerging language.
Can we archive the sense of care that emerges in its activation and if so, how?
For partnerships or collaborations on this research, we invite you to reach out to Ania Molenda
Ania MolendaPast events include:
The Language of Climate Care I
The Language of Climate Care II
Haunting the Digital is a series of workshops, exercises and publications led by Natalia Sanchez Quérubín where networked media come together with issues of suffering, grieving, and care, often in ways that challenge and expand how we experience death and loss. The workshops give an opportunity to explore and rehearse these issues with other people and through guided exercises that speculate on the future of technology and the grieving process. This is explored through themes such as ownership, policy and governance, consciousness of technology, and digital memory.
Losing someone generates a materiality of absence, be that letters, photographs, and a person’s belongings, and now as of late, also objects such as digital photos on phones and clouds, WhatsApp messages, voice messages, social media accounts, and e-mails.
These objects (and data) evoke comfort and connection as well as a sense of haunting. Digital things exist between the material and immaterial, always present in mobile devices while vulnerable to deletion. Losing the last WhatsApp messages sent by loved ones because of an update, misplacing a phone with precious photos and videos, visiting the social media accounts of people no longer here, and texting with the dead, are all contemporary grief-related experiences.
How do we imagine the future of grief, remembering, and technology?
Who owns a digital afterlife? How is it managed and governed?
What might these speculations offer to us about our current ideas of care and AI?
For partnerships or collaborations on this research, we invite you to reach out to Natalia Sánchez-Querubín
Natalia Sánchez-QuerubínPast events include:
Haunting the Digital I - Living and Grieving in a Connected World
Haunting the Digital II - Grief-Bots: Errors, Ghosts, and the More-Than-Human
Haunting the Digital III - Governing Digital Immortality
Following our Care Ecologies (CE) group members’ desire to bring awareness to the relationality between our different approaches to care, as unpacked in separate project series between 2021-2024, in 2025-2026 we are focusing the attention towards deepening our collective research. Sharpening our previous shared inquiry, we propose to apply a critical perspective onto practising care in, and as, an ecology, by looking at care frictions.
Across various contexts we observe challenges in attending to differences in care. The intent of being care-full can inhibit addressing emerging frictions. In facilitating collaboration, care is found not only in relational language, radical compassion, and attending to the shared space and participants. Care is also situated and practised in being with difference, with honouring physical and mental capacities and with discerning when “good intentions” are flawed by blindspots and are a cause of harm. Building sensitivity in attending to these complex, multilayered aspects, attests to the realities and labour of practising care in relation. The need to generate knowledge and practices for locating contradicting forces in facilitating care, led us to this research project The Ugly Sides of Care.
With The Ugly Sides of Care we aim to attend to the (mis)conceptions and blindspots of care in facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations in research, arts, and design. We take “ecology” as an evocative metaphor for thinking about practices and experiences of care in relation. Paraphrasing artist Francesco Salvini (2019), ecologies offer us a frame for understanding how materials, experiences, and people interact with each other, often in messy and “troubling” ways. To better understand what kind of spaces, conditions, and modes of relating would be necessary for unpacking care frictions, we will exchange with external facilitators to explore the limitations and blindspots in their approaches.
In 2025, the initial research phase engages in-depth exchange with facilitators, working in diverse contexts, to locate blindspots in practising care. Gathered insights are shared and sharpened in dialogue with peers and potential partners at a mini-symposium, planned for fall ‘25. In the final project phase, we extend our coalition and co-design to develop a series of propositions - tools, scenographic strategies, performative rituals - that activate continuous attention for the conditions and tensions of care throughout collaborative processes.
Nienke Scholts, ro heinrich, Marloeke van der Vlught, Ania Molenda, Natalia Sanchez Querubin and Haitian Ma are currently working on this project with a starting grant from Stimuleringsfonds for the Creative Industries.
Follow our Calendar and Newsletter for updates and events around this project. We are open to collaborations and partnerships generally as well as for next phases of this research, please get in touch with any interest or questions:
Nienke Scholts
