Infrastructures of Care: Park MacArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos

With their newest episode, which will be appearing at Glasgow’s Tramway between the 15th and 19th of April, Edinburgh-based programmers Arika ask: “Could the ways we attend to each other’s joys and pains help us to generate different futures together? Could we give humanness a different future by re-imagining what bodies and minds can be?” They talk of an exploration of care and empathy, and what it means to provide and receive that care in many different forms and ways. From the schizoscenic theatre of the Ueinzz Theatre Company, to Poethical Readings of your political questions provided by Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira de Silva, Arika are inviting their artists and their audiences alike to explore the way they approach the world, and to provide and receive care to and from one another. 

Park MacArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos are two of the artists participating in Arika’s seventh 'episode' (as they term the installments of their diverse arts festival series), providing workshops which look at correspondence as a way of working, and open up the infrastructure of care to participants. In addition, a screening of the video It’s Sorta Like a Big Hug, with live reading of texts and correspondence between the two will be shown as part of the episode. Coming from New York City, Park and Tina sit down over Skype with The Skinny to talk about their work, ahead of their trip to Glasgow later in the month.

On their work together, and the role of correspondence within the episode, Tina states: “We’re friends, we’re artists. We have a correspondence of shared thought and I would say that formally that would be around sculpture and text, and conceptually I would say that that’s around debt and dependancy. Park maybe wouldn’t always say debt, but I think she shares concepts of indebtedness, or what you might call support, whereas I would straight up say debt. I also say dependancy but maybe my form of dependancy is more in terms of class whereas Park’s is more in terms of disability.”

“My form of dependancy is definitely in terms of class,” Park responds, and Tina adds: “Mine is now also in terms of disability. So that overlap has spread and mirrored or even flipped for both of us. That’s where our shared work is posited.”

Arika came across Park and Tina’s work from an article the two co-wrote for the Women in Performance journal of feminist theory, published out of NYU. The article blurs together Park and Tina’s voices – “sometimes so much so that I don’t even know who wrote what,” Tina says. They explore the types of “intimacy and utility found in providing and receiving care,” Park explains, “precisely when it isn’t waged labour. Tina was providing me care but I wasn’t paying her, so what are the other forms of indebtedness that come out of that?” 

"Everybody needs care, at some point or at many points" - Tina Zavitsanos

These ideas speak directly to Arika’s exploration of alternative care, as well as the way both Arika and Park and Tina work. “In a social world of artists and academics, a lot of friendships overlap,” they explain of their mutual friends, and how Arika had previously been following Park’s work. “We were both drawn to the way they programme, which seems to be out of one episode begets the next episode. The questions that arise from one episode generates the next participants, or invitees or topics of discussion and so there’s a really nice generational lineage there.”

This form of programming echoes Care Collective, to some extent, which will inform and feature in the work Park and Tina present at Arika later this month. “[Care Collective] was a call to my friend group in NYC to have friends come over to collectivise the daily care that I need. The early call was a question of whether to give the work without compensation, or to have an hourly rate or to exchange something. If I can do editing for someone and they provide care for me. That was a one-to-one question with each participant,” explains Park.

The connection between Care Collective and Arika was obvious, as Tina explains. “It’s almost like the way Arika are structuring, based on ally-ship and these lateral structures as opposed to hierarchical ones. That’s also what’s happening in Care Collective. Many members of Care Collective are also members of other care collectives, myself included. This is not an anomaly situation. It’s a special situation, 'special' meaning I like it or give it favour or whatever.”

“But it’s not exceptional or unprecedented,” Park follows up.

As much as Care Collective may be an influencing factor over the workshops that Park and Tina will be running, Care Collective is also literally coming to Arika to continue to facilitate Park’s care. “Everybody needs care, at some point or at many points. But the care of Park’s Care Collective is nightly and daily. We are in one way bringing Care Collective there, but Arika is becoming its own kind of Care Collective, which I think in art worlds is a really important thing. It’s asking an infrastructural question, or even a structuring question, rather than a question of a product. It cites the space of planning, or what it is to be in study together, as the site of the work.” 

The understanding that Arika has for the individual and collective needs of its participants is clear, as Park highlights: “They’re bringing this Ueinzz group from Sao Paulo, and that’s a major, great, infrastructural question. I think about this a lot in an art context – curators and programmers will figure out how to transport an enormous structure from Shanghai to New York, which is a huge amount of care and a huge amount of resources, but for the artist in the social context, the way that that would work for the individual is really different. Not that art works have it better, but certainly a kind of planning process around getting artwork from one place to another and safely. The artist is expected to sort of dance or float around that somehow and just magically appear.That exists in the structures of ableist privileging of non-disabled people over disabled people; any forms of efficiency or financial finesse that allow you to drop in, drop out. So for them to fundamentally build it from a different perspective is so cool.”

“We’re excited to come,” concludes Park, also highlighting the accessibility of Arika’s programming, with some events free and BSL at all events. “I would be super excited for any disability community within Glasgow to come to Episode 7, and I really want to meet other Glasgow crips.”

“We want to know what’s going on there,” Tina adds. “We want to get to know you.”

“It’s always fun to come to a place you don’t know to do a workshop, where you’re the ones supposed to be teaching, but clearly we’re the ones being taught. I want to really underscore that we really want people who are disabled to participate or come to the programme if that’s possible.” 

“I’m really interested in meeting crip community there. I would like to be in study with them, I would like to know what they’re thinking, feeling. With anyone, whether they are currently disabled or not, who is thinking through those forms of indebtedness and how we can be with each other, focussing on the surplus that we already have.”

“We could be wrong too,” Park closes, showing that they are just as interested in the questions arising out of their work as Arika. Hopefully Episode 7 will begin to answer some of those questions.