Reclaiming self-care and enacting new practices of mutual aid are not separate tasks but reciprocally constituting responses to the crisis of care. Rather than abandon self-care to upmarket consumerism or dismiss it as a supplement to hyper-productivity, Take Care’s third circuit, Infrastructures and Aesthetics of Mutual Aid, retains a commitment to a resistant concept of self-care. It is a survival strategy of bodies, desires, and forms of community which forces of domination continually work to erase, deny, or marginalize.11Sara Ahmed, “Selfcare as Warfare,” feministkilljoys (August 25, 2014): https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare. In confronting systemic oppressions, exceeding the bounds of the individual, and centring marginalized collective ways of knowing, self-care blurs with mutual aid. “Mutual contest” (competition for limited and shared resources) coexists with a countervailing law of “mutual aid” (reciprocal exchange of resources and co-operative services for mutual benefit), which is vital to the “maintenance of life.”22Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1902), xiii. Redressing needs that a prevailing order fails to meet, mutual aid is anchored in affective bonds, manifest in practices of co-operation, formalized in institutions, sustained by beliefs and customs, and rooted in the recognition that mutual support is necessary to adapt to and survive adverse material conditions. If the crisis of care atomizes and strains caring capacities, the persistence of mutual aid not only fills care gaps but also affirms an excess of caring capacity and infrastructure-making, tangible and intangible, for an aesthetics of living, carefully, in common.33“This way of thinking infrastructure-making as the convergence scene of various value abstractions, material protocols for metabolizing resources, and socially distributed experience taps into David Harvey’s view that the disturbance capital makes in creating dominant class interest infrastructures can also foster countermovements in new infrastructures for life and sociality, despite and in response to the neglect and destructiveness of the state and capital toward the very contexts of life and lives that they’re exploiting.” Lauren Berlant, “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times,” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space vol. 34, no. 3 (2016): 403. Infrastructures and Aesthetics of Mutual Aid opens space for autonomous determinations of care, defiantly performs the precarization of labour and life, rehearses temporary communities of support, and hosts rituals of communication between artist and audience through which the gallery is refigured as a site of mutual aid.

—Letters & Handshakes