Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care

by Michelle Teran (Editor)

"Promiscuous Infrastructures brings together more than twenty contributors—art and social practitioners, researchers, and educators—who have been researching and writing about caring infrastructures and promiscuous care for the past several years. This interdisciplinary publication comprises essays, visual schematics and scores, personal letters, recipes, and conversations, which emerge from the work of the Promiscuous Care Study Group, situated around the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.

Promiscuous Infrastructures calls for an ethics of care and attentiveness to one another within and beyond the shared context of a structurally dispassionate institution that requires innovation, expediency, and accountable results. The promiscuity it explores is defined by a collective refusal of efficiency, and favors generosity, care, love, and attention. Together, the group and their interlocutors address themes ranging from institutional change, communal responsibility and accountability practices, mental health and collective care, hospitality and hosting, soil, counter-histories, intergenerational learning, joy and collective grief and the poetics of imagining otherwise."

With contributions from: Carla Arcos, Jacquill Basdew, Selma Bellal, Seecum Cheung, Cooking Something Up, Yoeri Guépin, Marc Herbst, Czar Kristoff P., Pablo Lerma, Judith Leijdekkers, Carmen José, Edwin Mingard, Skye Maule-O’Brien, Lola Olufemi, Laurence Rassel, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Reading Room Rotterdam, Kari Robertson, Yusser al Obaidi, Michelle Teran, Renée Turner, and Julia Wilhelm.

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[Holly Denson-Camp · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Some call that an escape from the misery of the day,
‘utopia’
becomes a retreat, or another map for the future
but I want the full story suspended in impossibility
dripping with conjured things,
information in media res
And in place of data there would only be stuff to
make more of that good stuff,
no maps—no coordinates, or roots, only a
pattern of intensity that responds to the skin on
our fingertips, a pattern that changes every 10 minutes.
I want facts to curdle. That's a spoiled substance
we could use.
I want knowledge you can sit a while in,
knowledge that won't expel you for pontificating
knowledge that knows there is no certitude
in a political economy that wants you dead or worked to
death or alive but not really here, or banished, or picking
off scraps, or preoccupied with the violence done
unto you—so hurt you find it hard to breathe whilst drowning
in a bed of your tears, so alienated you look at yourself
and say ‘who is that?’—or sectioned, or having a heart
attack, aged forty-six, or flesh blown to smithereens, or
living in the shadow of an assassinated martyr, or earning
your breakfast, lunch and dinner, or going hungry so your
kids eat, or rotting in a flat somewhere, or trapped by
something as arbitrary as a border. Sorry, if the fantastic
seems appealing. We're alive there."
- Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, p. 124

[Avery Marley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Promiscuous Infrastructures, Practicing Care is a groundbreaking exploration of care as both ethics and practice. The editors and contributors skillfully intertwine essays, schematics, personal reflections, and collaborative experiments to rethink infrastructures, social, educational, and artistic, through generosity, attention, and collective responsibility. Far from a mere manual, this volume models an expansive and interdisciplinary approach to caring practices, highlighting joy, grief, and intergenerational learning while challenging conventional efficiency, driven structures. A compelling, timely work for anyone invested in imagining more humane and attentive ways of living and working together.

[Linde Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing bundle of essays and experiences - loved reading this and felt inspired on so many levels and topics

[Gizem Kendik Önduygu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fasilitasyon önerileri ve teşekkürler kısmını etkili buldum.