Curatorial Concept Note: Side Residency. Jaipur.
Care, Work and Precarity.
SIDE, Jaipur is hosting a six week international residency program inviting practitioners to investigate the politics of care in relation to precarity within a broader framework of how working and non-working lives are organized in the current economic climate. We understand precarity as the social and political conditions that render lives precarious. We seek to investigate Work (within the economic framework of Capitalism) as a frame that expels bodies, bodies that can no longer work (temporal or permanent), putting their survivability and sustainability in question. Simultaneously we seek to understand, comprehend and look at how care may then be a political tool in organizing ourselves and resisting these conditions that produce lives and deaths that don’t matter. Starting from the relationship between the care giver and the care receiver we will over the course of the six weeks work through how we understand it and explore the political possibilities that this space offers in terms of care and precarity.
The residency aims to set up relationships between the students, faculty, the Academy and local community organizing. Practitioners in collaboration with students, faculty at Pearl Academy as well as locally self-organized collectives/activists in Jaipur will initiate processes that will enable the building of alliances and the production of knowledge based on lived experiences through various methodologies that communities and practitioners bring to the process.
Practitioners could propose facilitating workshops, discussions, walks, film screenings, food and eating together, performances, militant research, listening together to name a few.
The residency’s outcomes will be decided by the practitioners, their collaborators and the processes that are set up. We will end with a public event that will offer audiences and collaborators a space to look at the processes that have informed the residency.
Some of the spaces this residency wishes to explore are:
- Gender, caste, race, class in the care economy
- Precarious bodies and Care taking/receiving
- Forming Collectivities, building Relations, organizing around care
- Care, Citizenship and Nation-State
- Immigration and the production of non-working bodies
- Environment
- Activism and Care
We would like to bring together artists (film, photography, installation, sound, filmmakers), writers (poetry, prose, spoken word), researchers, oral historians and other practitioners interested in the residency.
Rashmi Munikempanna 