Public Labors: Ecologies of Care meet Cinquantenaire in the framework of Outdoor Lab program.

Context

Our dream is to reimagine the Cinquantenaire and transform it into an ambitious and inclusive cultural pole. By re-enchanting creation within its ancestral museums, renovating them in an exemplary manner and turning them into places of polylogue and exchange, we aim to reactivate the site as a teeming agora open to a world city where the heart of Europe beats. We see it becoming a living campus of arts and sciences, where the collective memory of the city's inhabitants in their immense diversity is invented.

Who are we?

A new non-profit organization Horizon 50/200 under the coordination of Thomas Dermine, the State Secretary for Economic Relance, Strategic Investment and Science Policy, led by Paul Dujardin. We are a diverse team of 10 professionals tasked with launching an interdisciplinary and intersectoral program of co-creation and co-learning facilitating the process of coming together of all the shareholders and communities willing to participate in this work of reimagining and transforming of the emblematic site of Cinquantenaire.?

Public Labors: Ecologies of Care meet Cinquantenaire

Elke Krasny and Daria Bocharnikova invite the group Ecologies of Care for 2 days of encounters and slow learning at Cinquantenaire. On the occasion of International Labor day, we would like to meditate together on a series of questions: How does the park remember those who planted the trees? How does the park remember those who cut the grass? How does the park remember those who paved the walk ways? How does the park remember those who laid the water pipes and installed the electricity? How is labor being remembered in public spaces and celebrated by diverse institutions and communities? How is labor honored in the ecologies of public space, in particular public and open green spaces?

Labor is needed everywhere, yet labor is strangely absent from public memory. The relationship between public labor and public memory is fragile. Public labor is so very naturalized that it is silenced and made invisible. Furthermore, the ways in which natural environments and infrastructures depend on the labors of care, maintenance and repair are made to be forgotten. We use the occasion of May first celebrated as International Labor Day, to make the natural and infrastructural environment of the park speak of the labors needed to maintain their continued existence. We will walk, meditate, talk and read texts out loud to imagine the immensity of public labor that has kept the 300.000 square meters of the park, a former military exercise ground, alive since 1880.

Program

April 30 arrival of the participants

May 1 – Public encounters

10.00 – Welcome and a walk by Daria Bocharnikova and Elke Krasny at Pavillion of Human Passions

11. 00 - Vi?t V? ??o Qi Gong and Kung Fu workshop by Joulia Strauss

12.00 – Lunch break

12.30 Reading of the excerpts It Rains Differently co-written by Du?ica Dra?i?, Tanja ?ljivar and Mirjana Dragosavljevi? and conversation with Du?ica Dra?i?

14.00 Poetic collective law draft writing: Environmental Personhood for the Cinquantenaire under the guidance of Joulia Strauss

17.00 Si et No: performance for/with Cinquantenaire – a conversation by Raffaella Crispino and Gabi Scardi.

19.00 - dinner

May 2

10.00 – 16.00 - Slow study day at Cinquantenaire?

Ecologies of Care

Ecologies of Care is a group of curators, cultural workers, artists, and researchers, convened by Ur?ka Jurman and Elke Krasny. Starting from the meanings of curare, to care and to cure, which are the etymological root of the word curating, we center interdependencies in care as ethico-political and corpo- material relations. Acknowledging that care is always implicated in the given, defined by the aftermath of patriarchal oppression and colonial violence as well as by present-day compulsory neoliberalism and untrammelled capital accumulation, ecologies of care work on the conflicts around care and for the freedom and joys to care. Bringing together practices of maintenance and repair, multispecies ethics, social reproduction theory, critical heritage studies, feminist infrastructural critique, hydrofeminist engagements as well as the rights of humans and of nature, ecologies of care aspire to new public imaginaries of care.?

Visit out website : https://cinquantenaire.brussels/en/

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