What is the sound of care and solidarity?

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’. From this investigation into the discontents of care, the participants began to assemble a vocabulary of care words.

What at first seems simple to define – ‘cooking’, ‘parenting’, ‘friendship’, ‘sharing’ soon reaches beyond into much larger narratives and desires to care across borders and across cultures. Community building, solidarity work, support work all point to a larger and much richer picture of how care functions, in many instances, autonomously from state or government control and wishes. Very soon we reached deeper and more pointed words of care – ‘status’, ‘barriers’, ‘aid’, ‘resilience’.

Join us at the Reading Assembly, where we will present a live Listening Session using the sound objects assembled by participants from Reading Refugee Support Group and from the sound archives of Ultra-red. The session will be informed by the question: What is the sound of care and solidarity?

A Listening Session is a small investigative method that centres the activity in collective listening. We listen together and then we ask the question: What did you hear? It is from the answers to this question that we begin to deepen our joint understanding of our own care practices and desires for something better in this world. We will use this public session to add further words to our vocabulary of care.