A practical reflection on how artistic practice and childcare could reorganise each other.
Image credits: Steinunn Thorsteinsdottir
Dancing While Writing While Changing a Diaper
From 7 - 10 November 2024 Dansehallerne in collaboration with Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen and EDN hosted the EDN Carte Blanche Artist Exchange: Dancing While Writing While Changing A Diaper: A practical reflection on how artistic practice and childcare could reorganise each other.
This Carte Blanche Artist Exchange was a 4-day collective residency open to 20 national and international artists, choreographers and other dance professionals which aimed to encourage collective reflection and action when performing (im)possibilities in the simultaneity of artistic practice and childcare.
Taking childcare responsibilities is easily referred to as an obvious and gendered impediment to artistic practice. How can institutions adapt to make this less so? How can childcare and artistic labour adapt? Who has access to artistic practice and childcare in the first place?
Bringing artistic practice and childcare into cohabitation, we proposed to gather around these questions: How can artistic practice inspire doing childcare differently and how can childcare reorganise artistic labour?
Our intention was to co-create a space where professionals and children could engage, think and move poly-rhythmically together. This artist exchange involved score writing, dancing, talking and cooking together.
Key Takeaways
Invitation
We, Andrea and Adriano, find it helpful to disentangle childcare needs from family and parenting idea(l)s. This is why we use the terms childcare and child carers instead of family and parents in this proposal. Feel free to replace these terms. We are looking forward to having a conversation about them in Copenhagen!
We acknowledge that questioning childcare in a European context has historically been centered around straight, cis, able-bodied, white, middle-class demographic. And encourage applications by those who don´t fit into this narrow group.
Podcast conversation
Tune in for a conversation with the hosting choreographers Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen, with Hanne Svejstrup, activity manager at Dansehallerne, hosted by EDN's artistic project manager, Christoph Bovermann.
Programme
Viky Mendez Alves
Descendant of Kariña. Viky is an activist and community organizer focusing on health and anarchist solidarity care structures. She is very curious about possible strategies to recover the autopoietic vital impulse and primary symbiosis. She moves through spaces where mutual support allows direct action on related ideas and struggles, being a member of a feminist and anarchist collective has allowed her to live and experience practices of collective liberation while exploring the unknown of collective desire.
She is currently participating in a series of Mind Kut-ups open labs to play with different ways of deconstructing narrative based on chaotic intuition; A Café for social medicine, The Hologram community of practice, an Offline anarchist publishing and actions for the abolition of the patriarchal family, to undo adult supremacy.
Cosmo M Soltani
(he/they) is a storyteller, a community healer and a Baba/parent of 2 magical little humans. As a trans Iranian, displaced person of war, he centres healing and co-creating with their queer/trans BIPIOC communities, in every aspect of his life. Whether it’s through their storytelling (writing/filmmaking), acupuncture practice, and or parenting/building meaningful relationships with loved ones, he is always exploring ways to heal the past, shape care in the present and envision new futures with healing and liberation at its core.
Storm Møller Madsen
(they/them) is a performance studies scholar, curator, and dramaturg. They are currently doing a PhD at The Department of Arts & Cultural Studies, Section for Theater & Performance Studies at The University of Copenhagen. Their research explores body-based performance art by transgender artists. As a curator and dramaturg, they specialize in issues related to representation, gender, and critical feminist/queer strategies for artistic production. They co-parent two children with their life partner Cosmo.
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt
(she/her) works with performance, curation and aesthetic theory, and her work is framed and shaped by a.o. two children, a life partner, an artists’ duo. Cecilie, together with Swiss choreographer and curator Lucie Tuma, is the duo Chuck Morris. She is employed as associate professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on production conditions and infrastructures in the arts, and she has written about - amongst others - structural precarity, artists’ collectives, separatist organization of gendered and racialized artists and cultural workers, and diversity work in cultural policy in the Nordic region.
Krõõt Juurak and Alex Bailey
The artists Krõõt Juurak (they/them) and Alex Bailey (any) – co-parents of Albert – deal with issues of gender policy in raising a child in CODOMESTICATION. In this project, they invited their child to act as a co-director and collaborator in designing and performing the show, which they toured from 2018 until 2023 under the strict conditions that it would always be more fun for all to work than not to work. In co-operation with Renata Piotrowska-Auffret this project will be offered to be practiced and performed by other families in various geographical locations.
Renata Piotrowska-Auffret
Polish choreographer and curator. In her work, she is interested in female body politics, the notion of care and parenthood.
In her artistic practice, Piotrowska-Auffret contemplates the contemporary world by deriving inspiration from intimate experiences embedded in a given social context. She is interested in the perversity of relations between historical and contemporary body politics, between public and private, and between text and movement.
In her curatorial practice, Piotrowska-Auffret has been interested in the issue of reproduction and care policies in culture and art. She initiated an international network of six dance, theatre and performing arts institutions, for which the topic of broadly understood motherhood and parenthood as well as care policies in the area of culture and art is important: Lavanderia a Vapore from Italy, Lokomotiva from Macedonia, City of Women from Slovenia, Stanica – Center for Contemporary Dance from Serbia, BIRCA – residential center from Denmark, Ochota Cultural Center from Poland.
Lately she curated or is curating Mothers dance! International Research Forum “Parental figures in choreography”, discussion “Dancing & Parenting” at Tanzmesse, “(M)others on tour” in the frame of the Perform Europe project.
Emma Kim Hagdahl
a human, a craftsperson and a mother of two. She lives in an old farmhouse in the countryside and works with food, pottery and carpentry. With a past life as a dancer and choreographer deep into collective work thinking moving practices she occasionally joins these realms for service, pleasure and connection. Here as a chef.
Andrea Zavala Folache and Adriano Wilfert Jensen
are choreographers and they co-parent three year old Penélope Cleo. Together they question how capitalist, sexist and colonial norms of economy, sexuality and gender arise as soon as a child enters the stage. In the process, they exercise different plots for international collaboration through dance.
Andrea Zavala Folache
has a transdisciplinary approach to dance informed by her/their training in visual arts, painting, and choreography. She/they believes that experimenting with these disciplines un-hierarchically and ‘through each other’ can sustain relations and knowledge that move both within and beyond assumptions. Apart from engaging in long-term collaborative creations and experiments, such as Domestic Anarchism, Lands of Concert and Performing Arts Forum, Andy has a pedagogical practice teaching at SNDO (School for New Dance Development) in Amsterdam and co-directing ISAC (Institute Supérieur des Arts et des Choréographies) in Brussels.
Adriano Wilfert Jensen
uses dance and choreography to analyse and produce conditions for relations. Currently they are interested in empathy beyond identification. And after some years of touring internationally way too fast, she is working with Andrea on developing a methodology for international collaboration in dance that is more artistically, environmentally and relationally sustainable–And which can provide a good enough environment for his toddler. Recent engagements include: feelings and mixed feelings, dance performances, Galerie, an immaterial gallery and publisher for immaterial artworks, Performing arts forum, co-coordination of a self-organised residency. Dog Days Discourse, a peer-to-peer publication on dance Kitchen 3, a risograph print workshop without an owner.
How to participate with EDN travel support?
Registrations for EDN travel support were open until 8 September 2024.
How to participate without EDN travel support?
You could register to join the Exchange without requesting EDN travel support. In this case, you needed to book and cover travel and accommodation individually.
Registrations without EDN travel support were open until 6 October 2024.
Contact
For any questions regarding the registrations, you can reach out to EDN artistic project manager Christoph Bovermann at christoph@ednetwork.eu
About the Project
This exchange is brought to you by EDN—European Dance Development Network—as part of the knowledge-sharing activities of its EU-funded project 101053456 EDNext.