NOTICE: Registration for the workshop is closed; the maximum number of participants has been reached.
Ecologie di Sostentamento is a workshop that draws on Adelita Husni Bey’s research carried out during the pandemic, in the field of what is called ‘essential work’. The workshop addresses the issue of the ‘capture’ of care work in capitalist economies and focuses on a paradigmatic contradiction: how is it possible that workers defined as ‘necessary’ and crucial to the functioning of contemporary society (teachers, nurses, labourers, refuse collectors) are repeatedly devalued, underpaid, put at risk and abandoned? What de-capture mechanisms are possible? What urgent analysis tools are available to us? What examples of radical healthcare practices can we study together? What can the ecological origin of the pandemic tell us about the future of both necessary work and mass diseases? How can the concept of ecology and debility be used in a relational way to rigorously analyse alternatives to overexploitation in healthcare and other essential sectors?
Based in part on the writings of Angela Mitropoulos and the Marxist epidemiologist Rob Wallace, the workshop will present students with feminist and anti-racist alternatives to the neoliberalisation of healthcare, through radical actions such as the occupation of Lennox Hospital by the Puerto Rican liberation group Young Lords and the organisational model developed by ACT UP in the care and defence of HIV-positive people. The workshop will use political theatre techniques with the aim of addressing and developing some of the keywords and themes of the workshop, including readings, discussions, embodied pedagogy and screenings to analyse and seek answers to the question: what is the essential work to be developed to safeguard local and primary subsistence ecologies?
Adelita Husni-Bey (Milan, 1985) is an artist and pedagogy expert interested in topics ranging from anarcho-collectivism to theatre, from jurisprudence to urban development studies. She has organised workshops and exhibitions, drawing inspiration from non-competitive pedagogical models conveyed through contemporary art. The work carried out in various contexts in collaboration with activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, poets, actors, urban planners, physiotherapists, athletes, teachers and students consists of creating places for collective practice. She has taken part in Work it Out! Aalborg Museum, 2021, Trainings for the Not Yet, BAK, Utrecht, 2020, Being: New Photography, 2018, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2015; Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2014. She is a researcher at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics 2020-2022, where she developed These Conditions, 2022 at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York, a hybrid space that is an exhibition space, a film set and a pedagogical space. She represented Italy at the 2017 Venice Biennale with Roberto Cuoghi and Giorgio Andreotta Caló.
Cover image: Miniature by Pierart dou Tielt illustrating the Tractatus quartus bu Gilles li Muisit (Tournai, c. 1353). The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death. ms. 13076 – 13077 fol. 24v
For information, write to: Sara Basta s.basta@abaroma.it
Communications Office of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome
Coordination: Prof. Guglielmo Gigliotti g.gigliotti@abaroma.it
Collaboration: Chiara Picco, Martina Macchia, Marianna Pontillo comunicazione@abaroma.it