Matters of Care

At the fourth London Design Biennale, the Care Pavilion will unfold through a series of new commissions focusing on matters of care: thinking through care in its many forms—of humans and nonhumans—while addressing its intricacies. It is a living collection of incentives to re-imagine the politics and ethics of care by interdisciplinary designers, architects, thinkers, activists, scholars, healers and cultural practitioners from the Global South and Global North.

These newly commissioned programmes will be open to the public from June 1–25, and comprise rituals, talks, panels, confabulations, performances and screenings from an international line-up of participants including: Bihter Almaç, Priyanka Bista, The Bonita Chola, Malé Luján Escalante, Carl Golembeski, Lizzie Harrison, Farzana Khan, Luke Moffat, Jamie Perera, Marco Perry, Ruth Potts, Aslıhan Şenel, Love SSega, Felipe Viveros, Keir Williams and many more.

Sympoeisis by Felipe Viveros and The Bonita Chola consists of a sound installation composed by Love Ssega, The Bonita Chola, Marco Perry, Carl Golembeski & Felipe Viveros, and a series of collective-care initiatives, which explores care through many ways of knowing and being. From the myths and ceremonies that over millennia have allowed people and the more than human world to speak, to care as an act of renewal and resistance. Sympoiesis is a space for wild ideas, deep listening— a place to “make-with” others. Ancestors in the Making: Care through Indigenous Lenses is a participatory performance led by The Bonita Chola and Felipe Viveros, which explores, documents and interacts with the living alternatives to the climate crisis already existing across the world. Initiated by Dr. Malé Luján Escalante, Dr. Luke Moffat and Lizzie Harrison, Dancing with the Trouble is a ritual to make time to be in our bodies, to dance with the troubles of the Anthropocene. Co-created live at the Pavilion with visitors exploring the values of care through embodied movement, the ritual embraces the magical, illogical and emergent.

Dr. Keir Williams’ The Oracle of All Beings is an interactive installation that integrates technology, ecology, and empathy. By encouraging visitors to reconsider their relationship with the environment and its inhabitants and reflecting on the balance between communication and action, it contributes to the collective reimagination of care and promotes the importance of acting for a healthier, more sustainable world. Matters of Care: Practices of Embodied Liberation—Farzana Khan, co-founder of Healing Justice London, sound artist Jamie Perera, and artist and academic Ruth Potts draw on somatics, new materialism and sound to explore new ways of being with one another—providing multi-sensory glimpses of collective liberatory abolitionist futures that show that other ways are possible.

Fluctuating Bodies of Care by Aslıhan Şenel and Bihter Almaç re-imagines hammam as a feminine care space and offers architectural gestures that urge intimacies between subjects and objects of design through a wet and hot undoing of architecture, which includes stories around spatial practices of feminine care, liquefaction of architecture, and sticky and slippery contacts between materials and bodies. Priyanka Bista’s Entangled Stories of the Anthropocene brings light to the complex, conflicted, and intertwined relationships shared between both marginalized human and nonhuman stakeholders coexisting in Koshi Tappu, Nepal. From mugger crocodiles, rock pythons, elephants to poachers, weavers, farmers, and fisherfolks, this series will give platform to the many voices and stories with the hopes to rewrite and recreate new collaborative multispecies stories.

Curated by Naiyi Wang with Academic Advisor Dr. Jana Scholze and Exhibition Manager Siwei Li, and organised with the special support of Beying Tech Inc., the Care Pavilion at London Design Biennale offers fertile ground for carefully considering “Care” through multiple dimensions and perspectives. It plays a special role by making many forms of care visible, serving as a practice of collective caring and curing that is accessible to everyone.

Care Pavilion
London Design Biennale 2023

Director: Song Tao
Academic advisor: Dr Jana Scholze
Curator: Naiyi Wang

Exhibition manager: Siwei Li
Communications manager: Shuyun Cao

Exhibition design: Zhou You, Founder of Update Studio / Juntian Dai, Founder of ZaoRuì Design
Visual design: Ye Qian, Founder of Y(17) Studio

Special support: Beying Tech Inc.
Ecological collaborator: MOOVI

Media inquiries: mail@wangnaiyi.com