The idea of the crisis of care highlights the diffuse strain and persistent inequalities that pervade the work of care—even as the perpetuation of the dominant system of production structurally relies on care’s unbroken performance. Cultural work and art institutions are hardly immune to the symptoms of care crisis. This open forum assembles artists, activists, curators, and researchers to navigate care gaps in curatorial practice in particular and the cultural sector in general. The primary goal, however, is to share vocabularies, experiences, and frameworks to aid in centring an ethos of care in efforts to transform conditions and relations in the cultural sector. Care Crisis, Care Connective: An Open Forum on Cultural Work unfolds through a sequence of workshops and performances.

10am–12pm
Curator Helena Reckitt and participants in the Curating and Caring workshops will present new propositions for curating with care.

12–1pm
Performance by Raju Rage

Raju Rage’s contribution will take the form of a remote audio performance on care and the cultural sector. Building on their earlier self-care performances in institutional spaces, which draw attention to the lack of care provided within such settings, the audio format is chosen as a way to avoid the exhausting demands that performance can place on the artist. Exploring how bodies are dis/connected, Raju Rage will centre on what healing and care might look like in the spaces we carve for ourselves and each other.

1–2pm
Scores composed by Lisa Busby and performed by the Element Choir based on protocols, policies, and proposals for cultural care.

2–4pm
Precarious Workers Brigade
Introduced by Nicole Cohen of Cultural Workers Organize

Kay Dickinson and Janna Graham will speak about Precarious Workers Brigade’s recent book, Training for Exploitation, which provides a pedagogical framework to assist students and artists in deconstructing dominant narratives around work, employability, and careers. They will conduct a workshop using tools from the book to critically examine the relationship between education, contemporary crises of work, artistic labour, and student debt. The workshop will address topics such as precarity, employment rights, cooperation, and solidarity, as well as show examples of alternative educational and organizing practices.

Workshop supported in part through the SSHRC-funded research project Cultural Workers Organize.

4–6pm
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn and Boo Watson
Hosted by Amber Berson

The Wages Due Song was written in 1974 by Canadian Boo Watson, a member of the Toronto-based Wages Due Lesbians collective. The song calls for women’s unwaged labour to be addressed as a workers’ struggle. The collective had ties to the international feminist movement Wages for Housework, which formed feminist groups to raise awareness of how housework and childcare are the basis of all social reproduction and industrial work. The groups were not only discussion clubs or thought experiments, but advanced real demands, with protest songs to go with them. “If women were paid for all they do, there’d be a lot of wages due,” sang the women campaigners in the 1970s. Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn and Boo Watson will lead a consciousness-raising workshop and write a song collectively with the participants to reflect today’s struggles.

Workshop presented in preparation for The Let Down Reflex, curated by Amber Berson and Juliana Driever for Take Care, Circuit 2: Care Work, October 16–November 4, 2017 at the Blackwood Gallery.