Uncategorized

What happens when an international art collective is placed in a suburban school? International sound artist-activist collective Ultra-red worked closely working with a diverse group of youths from Maiden Erlegh School in the East Reading area, to explore the politics of care, questions of wellbeing and mental health, as well as issues of social citizenship… Continue reading iCare workshops

Compass Recovery College is a mental health and wellbeing organisation based in Reading, Berkshire, UK, commissioned by Reading Borough Council. They provide free courses and social groups for anyone in the area aged 18 or over who may be affected directly or indirectly by mental health or wellbeing challenges. Everyone is welcome and everyone is… Continue reading Compass Recovery College: CARE

MA Creative Enterprise students at the University of Reading explore their experiences of self-care throughout lockdown – documenting and discussing their self-care practices through different forms of artistic expression A short film by University of Reading MA Creative Enterprise students which investigates the concept of self-care within the context of Covid-19 and the restrictions placed… Continue reading Waiting for Flowers to Bloom: Life in Lockdown

Join us for Walking the Wing, an audio play about incarceration during the COVID 19 pandemic created with men serving prison sentences, prison staff, and people with lived experience of the criminal justice system. The audio play will be followed by a Q&A with the makers.  ‘And then I feel. Like there’s no air and… Continue reading Sounding Out: Listening Session

Stories and narratives of communities in Reading This is an online workshop about our experience of caring spaces in Reading. Architecture students have made an online collage of Reading city centre that captures some of their personal experiences of how space and people care for them in Reading, some of them positive and others negative.… Continue reading Architecture Cares

Premiered live at Reading Assembly 2021, Menstrual Care Charter is Performing Women’s Health’s inaugural event. The performance will be followed by an interdisciplinary Q&A with leading menstruation experts. Before the event, during the event and beyond the event, we ask Reading Assembly’s participants and audiences or anyone interested in the topic to contribute with their… Continue reading Menstrual Care Charter

A performance between mothers and children in a state of lockdown   (Video by Maternal Fantasies collective, 23 minutes, Germany, June 2020) Who cares for whom and what are the consequences? The feminist art collective Maternal Fantasies lets viewers peak into their homes, where artistic production exists alongside domestic tasks and childcare. Household items become… Continue reading Love and Labor. Intimacy and Isolation. Care and Survival.

Reading Refugee Support Group have been working with Ultra-red over a series of online sessions to look and expand on how we think about the work and practices of care we all undertake. Using sound recordings as objects to listen to and reflect upon, the participants began to broaden out how they conceived of ‘care’.… Continue reading What is the sound of care and solidarity?

A work in progress, exploring the power of random colouring, and doing nothing in particular, as an act of self-care.  This short collaborative project was inspired by the recent trend of Mindful colouring, but with a desire to move away from the intricate details of a colouring image often found in mindful colouring books and… Continue reading Collaborative colourings: How do you feel about Monday?

A video work exploring the concept of over-caring, and the word ‘care’ becoming something negative and a coping mechanism, explored in a humorous way, following a guide of to-do’s that are unachievable. Taking the word ‘care’ and turning it on it’s head, I wondered how and if, such an act could become negative, what happens… Continue reading Self-care over-care

A workshop exploring the relationship between cooking, comfort, and care ‘Cooking and Care’ is a project which aims to understand how cooking and providing food helps us care for ourselves and others. In our workshop, participants are encouraged to bake something (with suggestions from us) and engage in conversation; What does cooking mean to you?… Continue reading Cooking and Care

Produce artworks from your walks in nature around the themes of care and self-care.  This workshop is centred around the idea of ‘self-care’, using the practice of walking in nature as the initiator. The session is laid back and friendly, with no artistic experience needed. It is a way for us to explore different ways… Continue reading A Walk in Nature

Are you self-isolating or feeling disconnected because of the pandemic? Join our session making seed paper to create a plantable message and get reconnected. This session aims to provoke consideration of how we can adapt our approaches to showing care across the current climate, which critically involves the obstacle of distance. The activity, which will… Continue reading Defying the distance: Sustainable letters for loved ones

The booklet “Curating, Care, and Corona“ (2020) by Sascia Bailer is many things: a critical questioning, a doubting, a reflecting, sometimes also a plea. But above all it should also enable insight into Sascia Bailer’s curatorial programme 2019/20 on Care at M.1 Arthur Boskamp Foundation in Northern Germany, and invite readers to continue with their own related lines of thought. The text unites five fragments that engage with artistic works and curatorial formats from her programme, each in the context of societal discourses surrounding care, curating, digitality, alternative economies and the necessity of new social infrastructures. For Reading Assembly: CARE, the excerpt from the booklet “Curating with Care?“ is featured below. The full publication can be downloaded here. A printed version can be ordered at info@arthurboskamp-stiftung.de. The publication is part of the kuratieren-series of the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung.

Connecting, collaborating, and caring for each other during lockdown 2020-2021 The purpleSTARS, are a group of people with and without learning difficulties, who aim to make museum experiences more inclusive through sensory art and digital media. The Pandemic led to purpleSTARS experimenting with connecting, collaborating, and documenting lives online. In the first lockdown we connected… Continue reading purpleSTARS Pandemic Portraits