care as a community good

This project is inspired by the transformative power of intimate gatherings. Most of my transformation has happened in intimate group settings where my care is prioritized.

The Seattle-area resource Big Door Brigade defines mutual aid as “when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!”

The state sees communal care as an ideological threat. This is why mutual aid movements are routinely targeted and undermined by the US government. Mutual aid projects are a manifestation of power that contradicts the state’s primary narrative about what it is, who we are, and whose purpose it ultimately serves.

The idea that disasters autogenerate panicked, aimlessly violent hordes of people who must be controlled with an iron fist is an authoritarian fever dream. While the powerful would have us believe that frightened people are always selfish and hypervigilant, cooperation and collaborative care are common human responses to disaster.

Awareness’ is an unambitious political end-goal for a few reasons. Firstly: awareness of what? The information circulated in ‘awareness’ narratives often uncritically props up neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism supports the privatisation of major businesses, cuts to state welfare, and an emphasis on ‘individual responsibility

I think attention’s prioritization of the optical is already waning in favor of alternative modes of being-in-common, reflected in the rise of a discourse of ‘care’ in contemporary art and performance—I’m thinking of all the collective, experiential, sensorial, even spiritual practices that I’m seeing today. In New York, I see exhibitions and perfo