Art, soin et citoyenneté

Why is art penetrating into the care sector more and more? How do cultural institutions find themselves questioning vulnerability?

These days offer a chance to reflect more deeply, by addressing experiences and good practice: artists, carers, and the cared-for tell of the transformative effect of these alliances, within our lived experience of otherness, in spaces where difference is welcomed, and given attention. Maison Gertrude, the arts centre in a rest home, fits completely into this process, as it reconfigures relationships and perceptions within a living space.

Encounter
The Need to Care

How and why are more and more artistic practices turning towards this dimension of care (in their themes, in their methods, in the composition of their artistic teams)? What does this reveal about the societies in which these artists evolve? What are the lacks and damages caused by the drive to hyper-productivity, by urban rhythms, by contemporary systems of exploitation that continue to crush bodies, minds, imaginations, and the possibilities of collective action?

Without claiming to be community doctors, and even less experts able to design a plan for healing or crisis exit, several artists today feel this need to care. Not to mend the failures of a system by compensating for state deficiencies, but to care for presences, for experiences that elude expertise, and for the ever-diminishing conditions of encounters with those who do not resemble “me”: with diversity, with difference, with all those whom various fields (medical and police in particular) label as “deviant.”

For such experiences to exist, there must be spaces, durations, places that, as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty says, “give duration to experiences.” This is how he defines institutions. Whether alternative or official and public, whether defined as artistic venues or therapeutic spaces, such institutions exist and/or attempt to do so by increasingly changing their uses and modes of functioning, so that they align with the scale of differences and, above all, with the care they require.

It is around this duo of artists and institutions that the first moment of reflection will be composed: sensitive, situated, and presented in varied formats, to give substance to this triptych “Art, Care, Citizenship.”

Roundtable
Sharing the Sensible

In what ways can the “ill,” the “deviant,” the “different” make art in their practices and ways of life? It is not only about listening to people who, despite disabilities, engage in artistic practices. It is above all about perceiving how, through a fragile life that must be reorganized differently, away from the rhythms and materials that shape the accepted violence of our urban environments, the essential forms of desirable life and, quite simply, of livable life are recreated.

Art does not reside only in the artifices of black boxes or white cubes. It also exists in the other “sharing of the sensible” (J. Rancière) that emerges along diminished lives, reconfiguring what is indispensable for any experience or aesthetics: the contours and forms of space and time.