Practicing Care: Ethics, Labor and Representation is a survey of contemporary conversations on care in art, architecture, culture, and environments. In architecture, understanding ‘care’ as a form of discourse (as well as labor) has little reverberation, despite the fact that architecture has historically and theoretically articulated itself as an art derived from the necessity for shelter – in other words, as an act of care. Theories of care originated in the articulation of gender’s effects on labor, politics, and ethics, but contemporary thinking about care (or theorizing care) has extended to large-scale human and nonhuman processes, including economies, ecologies, and planetary systems. Building upon an expansive definition of care as spanning sites from the bodily and the domestic to interspecies and planetary scales, the course Practicing Care brings together interdisciplinary projects, texts, and conversations from art and architectural practitioners and thinkers whose work centers on processes of breakdown, repair, maintenance, and care-taking. We will examine how organizing and cultural work are also understood to be acts of "caring for,” and conceptualize together how to practice better. The course will pair critical and theoretical texts alongside contemporary art, architecture and critical spatial practices, through projects, institutions, and exhibitions, including African Mobilities by Mpho Matsipas, Dark Matter University, Art + Practice, Black School, Navel, Bryony Roberts’ research in care centers, Jorge Oteros Pailos preservation practice, Mierle Ukeles Laderman’s Maintenance Art, Rosario Talevi / raumlabor’s Climate Care. 

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