Thursday 3rd February at 3:00 PM (UK time)

Join Zoom Meeting Here (link)

Meeting ID: 928 6517 1765
Passcode: 623517

Facebook Art & Care Series: https://fb.me/e/p6aJmjw3c

This talk will explore and discuss notions of the parasite and related ideas around para-sites and paragogies, theoretically and practically, with reference to recent ‘art-anthropology’ projects and artistic practices that I am developing under the umbrella term ‘feminist hospitalities’. Most recently this has involved engaging themes of motherhood, interdependence and care, shared bodies and material intimacies, through the aesthetic forms of layering, appropriation, polyphony and autobiography, as well as collaborative ‘socially engaged’, trans-national practices (between Japan and Europe). I will consider and question the generativeness of the expansive way of reading and employing the notion of parasite borrowed from the philosopher Michel Serres and how this might relate to para-sites and paragogies. Parasites, threatening and generative, trouble boundaries of self and other; they can also be interpreted as an intervention or a ‘noise’ in a system, which produces ‘a third’. I will reflect on how working with such ideas has opened up my ways of thinking and making work, in ways that attend to interruptions, corruptions and transformations, which can themselves be, precisely, forms of care.

Dr. Jen Clarke is a Lecturer at Gray’s School of Art, RGU, Aberdeen. She is a trained anthropologist and a practicing artist (and sometime curator). Her work broadly explores the relationships between research and practice across anthropology, art, and ecological theory/politics.

The event is part of the series Art & Care including examples of best practices impacting society, through the lens of creative research and care ethics. This is led by Dr. Elena Cologni, Artist and Senior Research Fellow, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, and Dr. Merel Visse, Director Medical and Health Humanities at Drew University (US) and Associate Professor at the University for Humanistic Studies in The Netherlands.