Herbarium: Hybrids PlantsSsSsS

SPACE FOR REFLECTION / WORKSHOP

What is Care Work?

Who Cares?

Why Care?

This space is for anyone who want to be part of a discussion and reflection on CARE using story telling and art as a medium to deepen our conversation. There will be two main activities in the workshop: sharing OUR OWN STORIES of giving and receiving care and creating one’s own hybrid plant using femmage*

We can agree that to a varying degree everyone needs physical and emotional care. While it is true that some members of our society have more needs for direct care such as children, the elderly, the disabled and the people with certain medical conditions, any independent adult need emotional affirmation from the others and self care to be happy. The problem is that in our culture caring is devalued, underpaid, and invisible and more often than not this work falls on women, people of color, and immigrants. It is a vicious cycle.

HERBARIUM OF HYBRID PLANTS

Different plants need different environments to thrive. Such environmental factors include sunlight, shadow, moisture, differing air pressure, ground composition, and surrounding species that enter into relationships with the plant. We can create visual images of a person’s story of care by using plants as metaphor of our body in need of giving and receiving care. We don’t have to limit to an already existing plant to represent ourselves but we will broaden our imagination through the process of hybridization-assemblage of multiple species-which can be another metaphor of our culture.

FEMMAGE

‘Femmage’ is a term developed by Miraim Schapiro and Mellissa Meyer in Waste not, want not: an inquiry into what women saved and assembled’ which first appeared in the magazine Heresies: Women’s Traditional Arts: The Politics of Aesthetics in 1978.

Femmage: A word Invented by us to include all the above activities (collage, assemblage, découpage, photomontage) as they were practiced by women using traditional women’s technique to achieve their art—sewing, piecing, hooking, cutting, appliquéing, cooking and the like—activities also engaged in by men but assigned in history to women.