Collective Welfare

<p><em>Take Care</em>’s fifth circuit, <em>Collective Welfare</em>, glimpses typically sequestered and private spaces of care. The projects in this circuit juxtapose three sites of the institutional mediation of care: hospital, prison, hospice. These sites offer a reminder that the welfare state, in all its ambivalence, is a decisive front in the crisis of care. Reframing practices of individualized care as fundamentally social matters, this circuit works across video, photography, social media, and temporary architecture to bear witness to care’s pace, failure, and stratifications. <em>Collective Welfare</em> circulates images of the entanglement of the chronically ill body and the biomedical industrial complex; materially fabricates the incompatibility of care and incarceration, and shifts perspective on mass incarceration as symptom, and strategy, of care crisis; and screens moving images of dying, generated from an intimate hospice setting, trialling new ways of taking care with death aesthetically. <em>Collective Welfare</em> reveals the persistence of alternative habits of care and relations of interdependency, from the hospice tradition to prison abolition to communities of independent study. Closing <em>Take Care</em>, this circuit also revisits a hypothesis with which this exhibition series opened: that <em>care</em> is a vital conceptual device for a process of political recomposition that would deepen linkages across contexts and conflicts in the spheres of social reproduction and ecology.</p>