About a year ago, 19 of us came together under the loose name of the ‘Care & Intimacy working group’. We had a rough proposal to spend the 12 months of the residency convening in smaller sub-groups, and we thought we might do some or all of these: mapping out the ‘care landscape’ in the local arts scene, organising practice sessions, and engaging with other individuals and organisations in the arts to advocate for broader and deeper adoption of care practices.
Fast forward to now (March 2022), and the working group has since grown and expanded in ways that probably none of us expected. For instance, we’re about to wrap up our first phase of development for the Library of Care project, a public access digital resource around care in artmaking. Apart from doing our own public dialogue about the Library of Care, we also shared a version of it for Dance Nucleus’ SCOPE platform. We’ve also arrived at a clearer articulation of what it is that we care about and want to work on, and have since rebranded the working group as ‘CITRUS practices’, or ‘Care, Intimacy, TRaUma-informed & Safer practices in the arts’.
Amidst these more visible external changes, the working group has also been quietly developing our own vocabulary and shorthands for how we want to communicate, work and play together in more caring ways. We hope that this article gives you a better sense of these practices, as well as how various people within the working group are feeling right now!
P.S. We’ve been using Google Jamboard instead of Google Documents for some minute-taking and reflective prompts, and so we decided to also use Jamboard for this article (:
