Aesthetics of Solace, Politics of Care

“The world will look different if we move care from its current peripheral location to a place near the center of human life,” wrote Joan Tronto in Moral Boundaries (1993). Three decades later, this workshop takes Tronto’s claim as a point of departure and critical reassessment, asking how care—in its aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions, from antiquity to the present—has made the world look different. How have individual forms of solace, including those embedded in artistic production and reception, been mobilized toward political ends? When has care, in claiming new ethical potentials, sought to distance itself from earlier aesthetic norms? And when does care of oneself (re)emerge as a form of political dissidence?

Across two days, fourteen speakers approach care and solace as historically contingent and politically fraught. Resisting purely affirmational or presentist accounts, they draw attention to the structures that mediate care: systems of governance and surveillance, regimes of labor and institutionalization, and the shaping of identity along gendered and racialized lines. Together, the speakers offer alternative genealogies of care and solace—and consider their critical futures. 

Program

DAY 1  —  Thursday, JUNE 11

14:00–14:20  Welcome and Introduction, Hana Gründler and Alejandro Nodarse Jammal                     

Structuring and Mediating Care  
Chair: Mimi Cheng

14:20–14:40  Daphne Martin  
Aesthetics of Care at the Ancient Greek Tomb

14:40–15:00  Tatiana Carbonell 
Masses in Motion: The Promise of Governing Catastrophe in the Alpine Nineteenth Century

15:00–15:30  Response and Discussion

 

15:30–15:50  Break

 

Alternative Genealogies of Care  
Chair: Oliver Aas

15:50–16:10  Nanne Buurman
Ambivalences of Care: A Genealogy of Curatorial Morality and the Dark Side of the Cura

16:10–16:30  Hannah Chodura  
Progress(ion) in the Ruins? — On Negative Dimensions of Care

16:30–17:00  Response and Discussion

 

17:00–17:20  Break

 

Surveillance and Visibility  
Chair: Frida Sandström

17:20–17:40  Alexandre Diallo  
Solace Under Surveillance: Care as a Criterion of Recognition in Killing Eve

17:40–18:00  Paula Muhr  
Withdrawing Care, Seeking Solace: Functional Seizures and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Visibility

18:00–18:30  Response and Discussion

 

18:30–18:45  Break

 

18:45–20:30
Screening of Caterina Borelli’s Film The House He Built (76 min.)
Chair: Alejandro Nodarse Jammal

20:30–21:30  Dinner (for speakers only)

21:30–22:30  Structures of Care in Florence: Walking Discussion

 

DAY 2  —  Friday, JUNE 12

 

Labor, Institutions, Identities: I   
Chair: Katharine Stahlbuhk

9:00–9:20    Giovanni Vito Distefano  
Imagining Institutional Care for Madness: An Inquiry into Sixteenth-Century Italian Literature

9:20–9:40     Lorenzo Graf  
New Age Solace in the Name of (Psychiatric) Care: Dressing Our Wounds in Warm Clothes (1980) by Donna Henes at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center

9:40–10:10    Response and Discussion

 

10:10–10:30  Coffee Break

 

Labor, Institutions, Identities: II  
Chair: Eva Schreiner

10:30–10:50  Lexington Davis  
Homemaking in the Women's Prison: Groupe de Cinq’s La Roquette, prison de femmes (1974–75)

10:50–11:10  Serena Pacchiani
 'Il tempio, il loro tempio' ('A Temple, Their Temple'): Care, Artistic Patronage, and the Politics of Disabled Artists in Fascist Italy

11:10–11:40  Response and Discussion

 

11:40–12:40  Tea Time (for speakers only)

 

Consolatory Spaces and Futures  
Chair: Laura Valterio

12:40–13:10  Brief visit to the Museo degli Innocenti

Return to Palazzo Grifoni

13:15–13:45  Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Virginia Marano  
From Orphanage to Museum: An Account of Adaptive Reuse at the Museo degli Innocenti

13:45–14:05  Jade de Montserrat  
Every Single One of Them: Ours Is a Love Ethic

14:05–14:35  Response and Discussion

 

Closing Remarks