Book Launch | Care in Conflict: Artistic Reflections on Broken Worlds/Words

Thursday 26 June, 2025
Starting time: 19:30 | Free admission
Benaki Museum Café, 138 Pireos & Andronikou, 118 54 Athens

It is with great pleasure that we announce the publication of the new edited volume Care in Conflict: Artistic Reflections on Broken Worlds/Words and invite you to its public launch. The book, edited by the Center of New Media and Feminist Public Practices (CNMFPP), includes essays by Gigi Argyropoulou, Ethel Baraona and Lisa Maillard, Elke Krasny and Svetlana Milevska, while the postface hosts a text by bell hooks in translation.

The public presentation of the volume, which is co-organized with The G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, celebrates the completion of the Care Ecologies research project. The event features the curator Fabiola Fiocco, with a talk in response to the book, and E Skourti with a performative lecture. The presentation will be moderated by Iris Lykourioti, on behalf of the CNMFPP, opening the discussion to the audience.

The discussion will be conducted in English without simultaneous interpretation.

MORE INFO:
Care Ecologies is an interdisciplinary project that highlights different aspects of care, through initiatives that place care at the centre of social, cultural and environmental discourse. As the research project links different and diverse geographies, economies and cultural contexts, the publication takes as its starting point the multiple languages spoken by the project partners and focuses on the intersections and cracks of this “multilingualism” concerning not only language itself, but also the very concept of care.

The authors, Gigi Argyropoulou, Ethel Baraona and Lisa Maillard, Elke Krasny and Svetlana Milevska, were invited to write new texts attempting to revisit the concept of care and its discontents. In their texts, they reflect upon understandings of the fundamental role of care, in relation to contradictions of social cohesion and social emancipation, while issues such as the Global South, feminism, situated knowledge and affect also emerge. As a postface, bell hooks' text “Language: teaching new worlds/teaching new words” - translated into Greek - is an invitation for critical reflection and action, opening up possibilities for redefining the collective future through language and care.

This collective project underlines the importance of our interventions and work as part of a critical pedagogy that invests not in the accumulation of knowledge, but in the empowerment of our consciences for a more just and safe world. A project that seems absolutely urgent in our current circumstances.
The publication was produced in the framework of a consortium of organisations from South-Eastern Europe, the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept, Idensitat, WHW/What, how & for whom and the CNMFPP, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

SPEAKERS BIOS:
>> Fabiola Fiocco is a curator, facilitator and MSCA doctoral fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art. She holds an MA in Museology from the Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam, an MA in Art History from Roma Tre University in Rome, and a BA in Arts Management from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. Her work focuses on the intersection of art and activism, the representation of (post-)work in contemporary art, infrastructural critique, and the influence of feminist epistemologies on art histories and theories. She has collaborated with independent art spaces, museums and foundations – including Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), L’Internationale, and UNIDEE Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella) – and academic institutions. She has been involved in various research clusters and has presented her research at international conferences. Her writings have been published in academic journals and magazines, such as ARCH+, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, roots&routes and Field Journal.

>> E Scourti is an artist and writer, based in Athens and London. They have exhibited internationally, including at High Line New York, Serendicity Festival, Hong Kong, Ochto Athens, Wellcome Collection, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, Somerset House, ICA London and Athens Biennale. Their solo show Profiles of You, at EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens was in 2023.Their writing has been published in On Care (Ma Biblioteque, 2020), Spells (Spiral House 2018, 2025) and Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017) amongst others. Solo publications include The Outage (2014, Banner Repeater) No to Self (Veer, 2023) and As the non-world falls away (TEXTZ, 2024). They are co-lead on the AUTO project, part of the Feminist Duration Reading Group residency at CCA Goldsmiths. They are undertaking a PhD at Goldsmiths and are Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Central St Martins.