What if someone you trust could facilitate care within a given project, relational dynamic, or process? What if we could have a sounding board for our doubts, and things that excite us within the creative process, or a pair of extra eyes on a workshop skeleton, or sharp listening methods?

What it is: Artistic caretaking is an organisational set of tools and practices to witness artistic or any work, or processes, and relational dynamics in collaborations, and the undercurrents of a process that requires specific needs or care; it is a framework that centres care as an aspect of developing work -  care within our work is no longer an afterthought but rather, an important aspect of the work itself that can assure sustainable work practices in conversation with our health and wellbeing and those of the people around us. 

Context: It arises from a melange of contexts such as community organising, reproductive labor, caretaking, dramaturgy and artistic protocol design,  and facilitation of safer spaces within an expansiveness of relational modes of reciprocity. It was born from a need to foster more accessibility and support within a certain creative process between artists, caretakers, workers, etc., informed by politics of care, disability justice, solidarity based anticapitalist relational modes, and capacity building. The practice lives within experiments in emotional support, professional feedback, and mutual witnessing of each other, within a space of fluid negotiation of different conditions on how to look at creative, professional,  or social processes and their relational dynamics . 

Fazle Shairmahomed and I have been developing different protocols that fit into this work together through our close collaboration with Lim collective  and Ariel Feminisms throughout the last years.

How it came to be: as artists, creatives, organisers and cultural workers, we don’t have specific types of support compared to other industries and there isn’t a culture of unionizing our fields. So, our work conditions are always filled with a lot of precarity and we end up doing a lot of unpaid labour. Especially freelancing, we are often not protected in terms of workers rights. Those of us who experience different forms of structural oppression from racism to misogyny, to ableism and violent forms of sanism, xenophobia, islamophobia to mention a few, struggle in different ways economically, having poor access to proper mental and physical health and well being. There is often a type of isolation that is really crippling under neoliberalist individualism. Plus creating under Palestinian genocide and systems of extractivism and colonial pillaging in Congo, war and famine  in Sudan and a global settling of fascism  in general, collectively, we are under collapse. 

Artistic caretaking becomes a mode or a model framework for instigating a lens of support and solidarity towards the work we do having in consideration the conditions we have to navigate in our bodies, everyday life, within structures that are often neglecting, and dismissive. It makes us ask ourselves: what conditions do I need to make my work more sustainable? What needs does the work have right now, at a specific place, context? What surrounds those needs?

The following sections presents a few areas I look at when providing artistic caretaking for a process, project, group /collective  dynamic, or a conversation exchange:

body doubling

being able to sit / stand / dance / move / laugh/ etc with someone for a particular set in time and space: an artistic caretaker potentially functions as a kind of body double with specific negotiations of how, when, where, for how long, and in what capacity.

having a witness of support to engage with one’s ideas, work, and downloads, engaging in a dynamic of not being alone with the process.

What types of attention is needed here?

Creating a simple structure of how one is choosing to be a witness is useful so the caretaker can adjust to what is needed. This might change in the middle of the process, but it is important to communicate it from the beginning. Some useful questions:

• Do I need feedback and what kind?

• Detailed oriented, or structural (towards the process or project)?

• What is the focus of this feedback?

• Would my artistic caretaker think with me, or, just witness, or, listen to me?

• Do I need other references, material, or input? What kind?

(re)viewing , (re)visiting, and analyzing materials

We depart from the idea that the material already exists yet, there might be an issue of the material not being accessible (in whatever form this means). The process is already in motion, there is already a spark, an image, a sound, a word, or a bunch of disconnected pieces, or archives that need further thinking and witnessing with another.

Where do you struggle, or can anticipate struggle?

As a key central question within the feedback structure, it is important to also pay attention to areas of struggle in the process, conversation, project, or relational dynamic. It requires a specific type of attention that might not be so easy to draw in the same ways that it is difficult sometimes to assess our needs. The role of the artistic caretaker is to help one figure out how does one struggle which could be mapped out by looking at different areas, or issues that need to be addressed .

This is also a question that can be turned towards the artist / worker / people themselves, such as in what capacity does one struggle at /with the issue? Does it have general systemic aspects: is it socioeconomic, or politically and structurally driven: of racial, economic/material, classist, ableist, patriarchal /gendered, heteronormative, or, religious nature?

Crafting care riders

A care rider is an important addition to a technical rider that points towards needs related to work conditions (physical, social infrastructure, security, cultural etc.), access needs, and the communication of boundaries and requests based on bids for care. As a document it can be fluid and constantly negotiated with those you choose to share this with: from collaborators, to partners, to institutions you work with, or even for your self(-elves) only.

A care rider guideline becomes a learning space to name and voice difficult aspects of care one didn’t/don’t have access to in a professional context or, in a specific relational dynamic, or process. For an example of a care rider click in the link

Other general points of attention I focus on when providing artistic caretaking

• Dramaturgy support - focused mainly on references, inspiration, and initial catalysis 

• Workshopping ideas and protocols for the processes / project / relational dynamic

• Identifying the politics of the work /process and its resonance

• Supporting group, or constellation mediation through developing guidelines together

• Identifying productivity boundaries and guidelines for care work 

• Identifying general needs of the artist(s) / workers / relational dynamic / project 

• Staying with the question: What needs to shift in the process?

• Identifying the futurity of the work and further dreaming 

If this sounds like a need in your life, contact me at salllamtoro@bodyhacker.love for booking consultations or inquires. I charge for this work according to the scope of the work that is presented to me starting at the rate of 1400 DKK / 187€ (prep, consultation + follow-up). Expect that I’ll ask a lot of questions to design some protocols.