The Anti-Manual of Care and Accountability

The Anti-Manual of Care and Accountability is an experimental book of incomplete reflections on art’s connection with curatorial practices, collectivity, care, and repair in the context of Indigenous, Black, feminist, and queer manifestations of ecocriticism. Through a collection of texts, artworks, and exhibitions organized by the international working group Collective Rewilding, The Anti-Manual engages with a wide range of theoretical and practical examples of more-than-human care. The book probes the questions: How can we engage with environmental ways of being and thinking, and with forms of care in the nonhuman world that lead to frameworks for multi-species care? How can we belong in a more-than-human community? How are communal practices capable of shaping and transforming our encounters with the nonhuman? 

Faced with the demand for an irrefutable paradigm shift to enable livable worlds, the book invites thinkers, curators, and artists to propose strategies to orient ourselves towards a materiality of care. Throughout the book, we include examination and documentation of projects like The Sound of Scape (Kunsthalle Bratislava, June 2023), the Latin American interdisciplinary group Liana Collective and their collaborative research program on plant-human relationships, Las Yerbas (July-October 2023), Eglė Budvytytė’s film Songs from the Compost (2019), Paulina Velázquez Solís’ mycelial media performance with live animation and sound Multifungi (March 2023), and Nocturnal Medicine’s gathering on climate grief, Ecological Tuning Session (March 2023). These projects, among others, deal with disparate realities that sit between art of the Anthropocene, Environmental Aesthetics, and decolonial refusal of environmental violence. Altogether, these projects are a testament to how we can transform our habitual way of being and existing, particularly within the context of art, as they each work to dissolve the limits between the subject and the environment, the division between object and subject, and hence between culture and nature. The case studies included here aim to establish a materiality of care that begins by offering new imaginaries and narratives for other ways of creating and inhabiting the multiple worlds that surround us. 

Following Indigenous, feminist and environmental thinkers, we entertain and hold together the discomfort, vulnerability, and limitations that come with weaving new experiences and territories, of feeling excluded and often insecure about the path forward. For example the Māori curator Puawai Cairns advocates for a more porous and permeable relationship between objects, communities, and institutions. Cairns argues that discomfort can and should be potentiated not with the goal of a simple liberal tolerance of diversity to feel good. Rather, it is a combative process that has as its horizon another way of being in this world, a collective coexistence. In other words, the ethos of care in curatorial practice should be understood as being inseparable from the process and practice of constant becoming and becoming undone, actualizing and vanishing, appearing and disappearing. 

Through the engagement of a materiality of care, as a collective we have experienced a number of productive tensions. These arise from initiatives that weave climate actions geared towards intersectional models and curatorial practices oriented to kinship relationalities that ultimately enable sites for the production of forms of co-learning from place, the construction of situated knowledge, and worldmaking. The potentiality of the tensions between action and practice materializes through the different chapters in this book, which attempt to help us enter into a situated and embodied consciousness, thinking about the interaction between ideas of community, politics, and ecology outside of the realm of abstraction.

Following artist and theorist Patricia Reed, thinking about care also means explicitly developing responsibility systems and practices. That is, we are responsible for the damage caused directly or indirectly to others. In addition to that, Indigenous historian and expert in museum studies Amy Lonetree reassures us that museums “must address the legacies of lingering historical pain.” To be sites of decolonization, Lonetree says, art institutions must honor Indigenous and Afro-indigenous knowledge, testimonies, and worldviews by privileging these voices and perspectives. Privileging these voices then means, among other things, instilling, cultivating, and sharing stories, but not stories of colonization as a genealogy that is recounted as a myth of origin and therefore of the end of the world. Rather, it refers to focusing on the stories of resilience, survival, and the power of mutuality in inter-species communities. 

We also draw on drawings, photographs, and other such multimedia contributions as complements to the case studies in order to investigate collections, curatorial practices, and art historical methodologies, as these lie at the center of the museum/institution as a site of accumulation and preservation and have implicitly linked curatorship and conservationist care. To expose this relationship, Serpentine Gallery Director of Curatorial Affairs and Public Practices, Yesomi Umolu, for instance, highlights fifteen points about the limitations of museum knowledge and care. Umolu proposes that paying attention to this implicit relationship between care and curation is to recognize the limits of our knowledge, and is a first step towards beginning to generate care-oriented relationships. This is not the care of collecting, which wants to expose or frame the other with "care," as an object of luxurious and exotic origin, but to care as a materiality of artistic work and practice that is responsible for the relationships that are to be built within and beyond a subject and object. Additional contributors to the volume: Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd, Chelsea M. Frazier, Natasha Myers, and Urbonas Studio among others.   

The Anti-Manual of Care and Accountability spawns from tentacular thinking, to use Donna Haraway’s term, giving space and voice to many authors, artists, and curators. Through the intersectional entanglements explored in the book, a rewilding of curatorial practices emerges as a relationship with the land, with other humans, non-humans, and ancestors, and with time or even history itself. Care as rewilding is manifested as a conscience rooted in mutuality, interdependence, and solidarity. It also names a daily and constant commitment of resistance, refusal, and sabotage of existing structures and relationships. Even, and finally, it names an economy of love that is determined by immeasurability, vulnerability, and discomfort.