#piratecare

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Post-work & care labour | Danilo Correale + Maddalena Fragnito - Productive Leisure

Proteo was live.

✨Post-work & care labour ✨| Danilo Correale + Maddalena Fragnito

Dialogo con l'artista Danilo Correale e l'artista e attivista Maddalena Fragnito per provare a tracciare elementi ricorrenti di cura ribelle capaci di mettere in discussione strumenti e politiche della "cura dominante".

Productive Leisure 28-29-30 Gennaio 2022 Borgo San Paolo, Torino | online a cura di Proteo

Perché lavoriamo? Cosa significa lavorare oggi? Quand’è che non lavoriamo? Abbiamo lavorato abbastanza per riposarci? Vogliamo prenderci cura di noi? Partendo da queste domande, lɘ artistɘ e teoricɘ coinvoltɘ, tramite diversi media contribuiscono a costruire un immaginario di possibilità individuali e collettive in cui la presa di coscienza delle logiche lavorative attuali costituisce il primo passo verso una rinnovata consapevolezza della cura del sé. Productive Leisure è il progetto conclusivo di Campo 21 @campo_fsrr il corso di studi e pratiche curatoriali promosso dalla Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo con il sostegno di Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT @fondartecrt

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Medicina e Potere Maccaccaro’s series digitised

Thanks to the support of Memory of the World and the Pirate Care collective, the series Medicina e Potere, published by #Feltrinelli and curated by Giulio #Maccacaro, is now available online. It comprises thirty-two volumes, published between 1972 and 1983 by Italian and international authors. These books sparked transformative debates in Italy that remain crucial today.

I collected these volumes during the pandemic, tracking them down at market stalls and through online sellers, driven by the urgency to put them back into circulation and reactivate a critical debate on healthcare, health systems, and different models of care. The collection offers a precious—albeit partial—cross-section of the discussions that developed around these issues in the 1970s, tracing a profound movement of thought and practice that led to crucial transformations in institutional design and eco-social landscapes. It is a trajectory that deserves to be revisited and updated, rather than continually starting from scratch.

Enjoy! http://medicinapotere.memoryoftheworld.org/

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Healthcare as Disobedience Pirate Care Seminar and exhibition

Amid the ongoing pandemic healthcare crisis, this seminar brings together practitioners, scholars and activists to share different stories documenting the importance of collective action, finding workarounds and transgressing received notions when it comes to organising or reorganising healthcare in a perspective of social justice. Speakers will introduce examples from partisan hospitals during WWII and their impact on Yugoslav post-war healthcare, Italian deinstitutionalisation and patient rights movement in the 1970s, and solidarity clinics amid the Greek Debt crisis in the late 2000s.

SHEDULE:

Mon, Nov 10th, 18hrs (online only)* Valeria Graziano: Healthcare as disobedience: Introductions* Pantxo Ramas: The Legacies of Basaglian Deinstitutionalisation of Mental Healthcare* Chistos Giovanopoulos: Solidarity Clinics in Greece as Infrastructures of Commoning

Thu, Nov 11th, 18hrs (online and in gallery with prior registration)* Sanja Horvatinčić: ”Our Hospital is in the Forest”: Radical Healthcare as Resistance* Maddalena Fragnito: Medicina Democratica: Giulio Maccacaro and Italian Movements for Patient Rights

To visit the exhibition or attend the second day of the seminar in-person, please register by emailing: [email protected]. The number of in-person attendees is limited and masks are obligatory.

ON EXHIBITION:

The seminar takes place within the exhibition "Pirate Care ­— A Survey of Practices", open until December 1st, at Galerija Nova in Zagreb. It is convened by the Pirate Care collective and organised by Multimedia Institute and What, How and for Whom/WHW. Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, scholars and practitioners who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. It was initiated in 2018 by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak (https://pirate.care).

ABSTRACTS AND BIOS:

* The Legacies of Basaglian Deinstitutionalisation of Mental Healthcare 

Pantxo Ramas>>Starting from the materials of the Documentation Centre Oltre il Giardino, which collects the history of the radical deinstitutionalisation of mental healthcare in Trieste, against the asylums and for a community approach to suffering and emancipation, the talk will show how arts, institutional practices, as well as social movements interconnect for affirming the right to health and care as common practices for emancipation.<<Pantxo Ramas: After working in universities and contemporary art institutions at a European level, he is now in charge of the documentation and research centre Oltre Il Giardino for the social cooperative La Collina, Trieste. He is also a member of Conferenza Permanente per la Salute Mentale nel Mondo Franco Basaglia (Confbasaglia).

* Solidarity Clinics in Greece as infrastructures of commoning 

Christos Giovanopoulos>>The social solidarity clinics (and pharmacies) constitute one of the most successful paradigms of the movement of grassroots solidarity developed in Greece since 2011. Those people’s initiatives emerged in the context of the economic and political crisis as a way to both defend the notion of public healthcare and to fight against the regime of Troika supervision imposed on Greece. Based on self-organisation and horizontalism they have outlined processes with transformative qualities, towards more decentralized and socialized modes of primary health-care and of the medical practice itself. As health-care communities, they constitute a paradigm of expanding the notion and practice of democracy and participation in healthcare as “common” (matter).<<Christos Giovanopoulos is a Infra-demos project researcher, based in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a grassroots solidarity activist.

* ”Our Hospital is in the Forest”: Radical Healthcare as Resistance 

Sanja Horvatinčić>>During the Second World War, in the most severe circumstances of the Partisan guerrilla warfare, a vast network of movable and stationary hospital units operated on the whole Yugoslav territory, run mainly by women and persecuted minorities, such as Serbian civilians or Jewish nurses and doctors, and aiding for resistance fighters and impoverished rural population. The strong legacy of the wartime experience was foundational for the postwar establishment of free and accessible healthcare system in socialist Yugoslavia. Sanja Horvatinčić is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb. She is the coordinator of the international heritage project “Heritage from Below | Drežnica: Traces and Memories 1941 – 1945."<<

* Medicina Democratica: Giulio Maccacaro and Italian Movements for Patients’ Rights 

Maddalena Fragnito>>Giulio Maccacaro was a doctor and founder of Medicina Democratica. The ethical tension and scientific rigour with which he carried out crucial struggles of those years between working conditions and public health, brought a solid relationship with Feltrinelli publishing house. Medicine and Power was a series of books edited by Giulio A. Maccacaro for Feltrinelli between 1972 and 1977. During the exhibition, Maddalena Fragnito, with the support of the Pirate Care crew, will digitalise some extracts of Medicine and Power, making them available for the general public.<<Maddalena Fragnito is an artist and activist. She cofounded MACAO (2012), an autonomous cultural centre in Milan and SopraSotto (2013), a self-managed kindergarten by parents. Exhibition and seminar are organised with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia and the City of Zagreb. Sanja Horvatinčić’s talk, and the guided tours of the exhibition given by Pirate Care collective, are part of the WHW’s discursive program "History of Art and Society: Solidarity in the Time of Crisis".

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Behind the Mask online workshop: Pirate Care: Politicising Care, Piracy and Biopolitics

Part of the conference BEHIND THE MASK: Whistleblowing During the Pandemic (18-20 March 2021)

With: Valeria Graziano, Maddalena Fragnito, Ana Vilenica

In this workshop we are starting from the collective work on the Pirate Care Syllabus to present and delve deeper with participants into a variety of disobedient practices of care in light of their political and technological character. We will, specificially, focus on piracy, division of care labour, and civil biodisobedience.

Valeria Graziano - When care needs piracy In this short presentation and collective discussion that will follow, Valeria will focus on the case for disobedience in struggles against imperial property regimes. Reclaiming the idea of piracy when thinking of care foregrounds the need for radical collective action to challenge contemporary global systems of property and power.

Maddalena Fragnito - Care is a battleground Talk of care is currently everywhere. However, carelessness continues to reign. The paradoxes, ambiguities and hierarchies of care, as well as historical conflict between different care models, have become more explicit during the pandemic. On the one hand, capitalist care for profits of financial capital; on the other hand, necessary forms of refusal growing through the redistribution of care provisions and the commoning of care tasks among people. Can a conflictual collective care practice redesign democratic processes and public institutions?

Ana Vilenica will go into the care crises in housing and how the pandemic augmented issues we have been struggling with for decades. Her main focus will be on the politicisation of care in housing and tenants' struggles and the use of illegal/pirate gestures such as anti-eviction direct action, rent strike and militant aid. In connection to this, she will tackle the criminalisation of solidarity on a systemic level that has nested in legislation and getting tougher as an answer to growing housing and tenants movements.

Pirate Care network

Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, practitioners and scholars who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. Convened in 2018 by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, the project wishes to map and connect collective practices that are emerging in response to the neoliberal "crisis of care" — a convergence of processes that include austerity, welfare cuts, rollback of reproductive rights and criminalisation of migration. In response to that denial of care, imposed by the states and the markets, practices we have called pirate care are organising to help migrants survive at sea and on land, provide pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offer health support where institutions fail, self-organise childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone, liberate knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, and politicise that disobedience to contest the institutional status quo.

Our aim is to foster collective learning processes from the situated knowledges of these practices and together with the practitioners of pirate care we have been working on a collaboratively-written Pirate Care Syllabus and in the early period of the pandemic on a set of notes documenting organising of care titled "Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care".

Workshop leaders

Valeria Graziano is a critical theorist and educator, currently based at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Her research focuses on cultural practices that foster the refusal of work, the creative redistribution of social reproduction and the politicization of pleasure. Over the years, she has been involved in several initiatives of militant research across the cultural sector and social movements. She is one of the convenors of Pirate Care. Her latest publication is 'Rivoluzioni domestiche contro domesticazioni tecnologiche' (*La natura dell'economia*, Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2020).

Maddalena Fragnito (https://www.maddalenafragnito.com) is a cultural activist exploring the intersections between art, transfeminisms and technologies by focusing on practices of commoning care. At present she is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. She cofounded  MACAO (2012), an autonomous cultural centre in Milan and SopraSotto (2013), a kindergarten self-managed by parents. She is part of research group/projects Rebelling with Care (2019), Pirate Care (2019) and Biofriction (2020).

Ana Vilenica is an urban and cultural researcher and housing activist with research interest in cultural and political action against dominant housing regimes and other urban regeneration schemes, housing of the migrants, issues related to social reproduction, care and housing, culture-led urban regeneration, developer-led art and radical housing art. Her recent work focuses on housing struggles in the UK and in the post-Yugoslav space. She is the Editor of the Radical Housing Journal and the Editor for Central and East Europe at Interface-journal for and about social movements. She (co)edited books: On the ruins of the creative city (kuda.org, 2012), Becoming a mother in neoliberal capitalism (2013, uz)bu))na)))), Fragments for the study of art organisation in Yugoslavia (kuda.org, 2020) and The art of housing struggles (forthcoming).

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Pirate Care: Conference

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK invites you to its second annual conference, which will explore the phenomenon of 'Pirate Care'. The term Pirate Care condenses two processes that are particularly visible at present. On the one hand, basic care provisions that were previously considered cornerstones of social life are now being pushed towards illegality, as a consequence of geopolitical reordering and the marketisation of social services. At the same time new, technologically-enabled care networks are emerging in opposition to this drive toward illegality.The conference will feature projects providing various forms of pirate care ranging from refugee assistence, healthcare, reproductive care, childcare, access to public transport, access to knowledge, a number of reflections from and on such practices, and a film programme.

Projects:

Docs Not Cops + #PatientsNotPassports | The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective | Memory of the World | Planka | Power Makes Us Sick | Sea-Watch | SottoSopra pirate kindergarten | WeMake Milan + Opencare.cc | Conflict, Memory, Displacement project.

Participants:

Agustina Andreoletti (Academy of Media Arts Cologne) | Mijke van der Drift (Goldsmiths / Royal Academy of Art, The Hague) | Taraneh Fazeli (curatorial fellow, Red Bull Art Detroit, Canaries collective) | Kirsten Forkert (BCU) + Janna Graham (Goldsmiths) + Victoria Mponda (Conflict, Memory, Displacement project) | Maddalena Fragnito (SottoSopra) | Chris Grodotzki + Jelka Kretzschmar (Sea-Watch) | Toufic Haddad (Kenyon Institute) | Erik Kamenjašević (University of Haague) | Andrea Liu | Power Makes Us Sick | Gilbert B. Rodman (University of Minnesota) | Zoe Romano (WeMake Milan / Opencare.cc) + Serena Cangiano (SUPSI) | Deborah Streahle (Yale) | Nick Titus (Four Thieves Vinegar Collective) | Kim Trogal (UCA) | Ana Vilenica | Kandis Williams (Cassandra Press) | John Willbanks (Sage Bionetworks).Films by Kelly Gallagher (Syracuse University)

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Post-Inertia summer school

The Pirate Care research group was invited to run the Care & Affect module at the post-inertia summer school during the firsts three weeks of July 2020.

Here participants’ final projects

Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, scholars and practitioners who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. Pirate Care researches, gathers & nourishes those care initiatives which are taking risks by operating in the narrow grey zones left open between different knowledges, institutions and laws, inviting all to participate in a exploration of the mutual implications of care and technology that dare questioning the ideology of private property, work and metrics. In this course we'll be building on from the project Pirate Care. Pirate Care is mapping and connecting the collective practices that are emerging in response to the neoliberal "crisis of care". Throughout our lives we depend on the support of our kin, friends, strangers and institutions to sustain ourselves - and to sustain the world in which we and the future generations have to live. That interdependence of humans and non-human nature in the socio-ecological reproduction defines the relations of care, and that effort to sustain them defines the labour of care. Yet, over the last decades of financialized global capitalism, the convergence of processes that include the rollout of workfare, rollback of reproductive rights, austerity measures and criminalisation of migration have denied many from receiving that vital support. In response to these processes making lives disposable, the practices of pirate care are organising to help migrants survive at sea and on land, provide pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offer health support where institutions fail, self-organise childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone and liberate knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, whenever these stand in the way of safety and solidarity, and politicise that disobedience to contest the status quo. Throughout our six meetings we propose to use fictional narratives such as fairy tales and stories to develop alternative worlds fictions. Using methodologies from our Pirate Care Syllabus, we will detect in the in-world arrangements in these narratives the instances of invisible caring-labour and solidarity. We will entwine the process of development of these speculative fictions with sessions from PirateCare Syllabus. The first session will focus on questions of the formation of the refugee subjectivity under the circumstances of pandemic. The second session will focus on institutional arrangements for commoning care.

Post-Inertia summer school:

Covid19 seems to have interrupted the ‘long-now’ inertia, opening a portal to potential worlds-to-come. Its consequences changed a series of productive, relational and economical inertia. By doing so, the social understanding of the future has glitched, and now we’re trying to rebuild it embroiled in uncertainty. Post-Inertia is a summer school / collective experiment aimed at critical inquiry and exploring the role of speculative design in the current moment of social re-stabilization. The school will have two simultaneous levels, a general one focused on speculative thinking and practices, and a more particular one, where this knowledge will be applied in smaller groups, to the particular areas Technological Democratisation, Ecological Transition, (bio)Practices and Care & Affect.

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Flatten the curve, grow the care: What are we learning from Covid-19

An invitation to join the collective note-taking

This is a collective note-taking effort to document and learn from the organising of solidarity in response to the urgency of care precipitated by the pandemic of Coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2). The first round of notes, thoughts, protocols and propositions, or sessions as we categorise them here in the syllabus, reflects, largely, the experience of organising amidst outbreak and lockdown in Italy. 

In keeping with the spirit of this syllabus, we focus on those practices that foreground care, labour, technology and disobedience. They are meant to offer both practical guidance and inspiration to organising and living with the outbreak elsewhere. But are also meant to help articulate demands to shift our societies from capitalism, productivism, patriarchy and racism to societies centred on collectivising the shared task of regenerating the interdependent well-being of humans and nature.

Unlike the remaining topics in this Pirate Care Syllabus, this one is closely following developments that are unfolding. It is thus partial and provisional to the Italian, Croatian and British contexts from which we write. However, we encourage others to contribute to building a larger body of notes documenting solidarity in the time of quarantine. Please get in touch with us and propose practices you would like to document, you can reach us through the following channels:

[email protected]

Facebook page

Facebook group

Instagram

Telegram Channel

#piratecare:matrix.org

Read Coronanotes here. 

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Pirate Care, a syllabus

We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.

Pirate Care is a research process - primarily based in the transnational European space - that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which in new and interesting ways are trying to intervene in one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.

These practices are experimenting with self-organisation, alternative approaches to social reproduction and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges. Often they act disobediently in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations and executive orders that ciriminalise the duty of care by imposing exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race or territory. They are not shying risk of persecution in providing unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against and condemned to the status of disposable populations.

The Pirate Care Syllabus we present here for the first time is a tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices. We encourage everyone to freely use this syllabus to learn and organise processes of learning and to freely adapt, rewrite and expand it to reflect their own experience and serve their own pedagogies.

The topic “Commoning care” I have worked on for the syllabus, emerged from a set of creative methods and collective “rituals” used to escape the capitalist hegemony that were experimented with in a context of collectivizing childcare and explore different pedagogies. “Commoning care” here is also broadly intended as a statement, to say that the only work that has to be done immediately is the one which aims to undo capitalism altogether. The first 4 sessions of this topic are therefore focused on the questions of life/work balance and unpaid labour, while the last two are related to the experience of creating a pirate kindergarten in Milan.

https://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/commoningcare/