As we are moving into an age where technology, as it’s becoming more ubiquitous, it’s also smaller, more intertwined into our everyday life in a way that is, most of the time, unperceivable through our senses. As such, how can we end up caring for (and caring about) an almost invisible techno-eco-system that rapidly developed around us in a way that far exceeds the speed of biological evolution?
Yvonne Volkart theorizes the techno-eco-feminist and the becoming-together cross-species turn in the art of the last decade, through practices that use data and technical processes in a way that generates new forms of attention towards the environment. But how can we fully grasp the implications of the technosystem, and its potential for care towards the human and more-than-human world, while the recent rate of change didn’t allow humanity to create meaning for the collective experiences of the last decades.
Delving deeper into the meaning of care, the Latin verb curare had a double meaning – to care and to cure. Even more, by coincidence, curare is the common name for a drug belonging to the alkaloid family of organic compounds derived from plants, that was used for hunting and also for therapeutic purposes in Central and South America. The interdependencies of care, either ethico-political, material or ecological, point to a new way of thinking about technology, in a manner that develops new societal and environmental encounters among seemingly unrelated or isolated systems.
Places of Care recontextualizes the way we look at and connect to technology. The project builds a sense-breaking context, as each artwork imagines new ways of interacting with and relating to technological artifacts and the man-made ecosystems around them. Reversing the zooming out strategies that we employed to be able to navigate the over-technological world around us, the project is re-framing technology in an attempt to reset our relationship with it – by understanding its history, rethinking the way we create its identity, or the way we interact with it on an emotional level as well as the ecological implications, not only in relation to the natural environment, but also with the other human-made systems.
Places of Care creates a space of reflection on our newly formed realities, and where they are heading. While we usually tend to imagine how our world will look like in the future, the project raises critical questions about how we will interact with, and relate to, both the material and digital systems that we create and that we use.