Dreaming Care into Being: Collective Meaning Making, Part IV
Reflections on Workshop 4: Cripping Care with Mae Eskenazi:
Crip care, love, and relationships in museums is groundbreaking—it is how we make our aliveness known to each other. Brilliance, creativity, and tenderness are words Mae Eskenazi used to describe their interactions with me and my work as it relates to my Dreaming Care into Being Experiential Learning Series hosted by Dia Art Foundation. The vulnerability, meaning-making, and world-building that happened in these workshops moved things in people’s lives that are still finding their way to be named. Mae’s offerings to American visual artist, Bob Flanagan, the painful exuberance of self dialogue in a journal film, and the ways in which cripping care will continue to mean multitudes as we both live and die is the work. In this workshop, I witnessed folks get to know themselves better as well as hold with grace the unfamiliar parts. The privilege of collaborating with a museum is that you get to materialize the experience of care in real-time. The workshop began with a poem by me, “Big Sigh”, to which I shed tears ruminating over the lines “If we feed and clothe each other, share meds, and walk each other toward survivable conditions, we are in love. I am on my way to being in love with you.” It feels like more than a poem. It feels like a demystified way to call in what we need void of dissonance of unattainable worlds.
—Kamra Sadia Hakim
Collective Meaning Making
Care Manual: Dreaming Care into Being is part pedagogical text and part archive of lived experience. Designed around a curated glossary, the publication pioneers a very clear theme: that we have the power to author our own ways of being. To bring the manual to life, we will be compiling a glossary specific to the experiences of those participating in the Dreaming Care into Being experiential learning series on-site. This week’s entry comes from a participant’s reflection after undergoing constellation work. To visit previous weeks’ entries, please visit blog posts from Week I, Week II, and Week III.
About Dreaming Care into Being
Facilitated by artist and Activation Residency founder Kamra Sadia Hakim, Dreaming Care into Being is an experiential learning series celebrating the release of Hakim’s book Care Manual: Dreaming Care into Being. The series comprises five workshops developed in collaboration with a series of guest artists, each exploring themes from the publication. This program is inspired by the framework of transformative justice: praxis ought to align with values, and what you believe is how you show up in the world. Dreaming Care into Being is designed to take participants on a somatic journey through the literary work.
The series is free and open to the public. Space is limited and reservations are required. Register for individual or multiple sessions here.
