Behind the Mask online workshop:
Pirate Care: Politicising Care, Piracy and Biopolitics

Pirate Care - 27 March.jpg

Saturday, March 27 · 2021, 11:00 - 13:00 CET, online workshop
Cost: €8 / reduced €5 · Language: English · Tickets

Part of the conference BEHIND THE MASK: Whistleblowing During the Pandemic (18-20 March 2021)

Pirate Care: Politicising Care, Piracy and Biopolitics

With: Valeria Graziano, Maddalena Fragnito, Ana Vilenica

In this workshop we are starting from the collective work on the Pirate Care Syllabus to present and delve deeper with participants into a variety of disobedient practices of care in light of their political and technological character. We will, specificially, focus on piracy, division of care labour, and radical housing practices in times of corona.

Valeria Graziano - When care needs piracy
In this short presentation and collective discussion that will follow, Valeria will focus on the case for disobedience in struggles against imperial property regimes. Reclaiming the idea of piracy when thinking of care foregrounds the need for radical collective action to challenge contemporary global systems of property and power.

Maddalena Fragnito - Care is a battleground
Talk of care is currently everywhere. However, carelessness continues to reign. The paradoxes, ambiguities and hierarchies of care, as well as historical conflict between different care models, have become more explicit during the pandemic. On the one hand, capitalist care for profits of financial capital; on the other hand, necessary forms of refusal growing through the redistribution of care provisions and the commoning of care tasks among people. Can a conflictual collective care practice redesign democratic processes and public institutions?

Ana Vilenica will go into the care crises in housing and how the pandemic augmented issues we have been struggling with for decades. Her main focus will be on the politicisation of care in housing and tenants' struggles and the use of illegal/pirate gestures such as anti-eviction direct action, rent strike and militant aid. In connection to this, she will tackle the criminalisation of solidarity on a systemic level that has nested in legislation and getting tougher as an answer to growing housing and tenants movements.

Pirate Care network

Pirate Care is a transnational research project and a network of activists, practitioners and scholars who stand against the criminalization of solidarity & for a common care infrastructure. Convened in 2018 by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, the project wishes to map and connect collective practices that are emerging in response to the neoliberal "crisis of care" — a convergence of processes that include austerity, welfare cuts, rollback of reproductive rights and criminalisation of migration. In response to that denial of care, imposed by the states and the markets, practices we have called pirate care are organising to help migrants survive at sea and on land, provide pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offer health support where institutions fail, self-organise childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone, liberate knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, and politicise that disobedience to contest the institutional status quo.

Our aim is to foster collective learning processes from the situated knowledges of these practices and together with the practitioners of pirate care we have been working on a collaboratively-written Pirate Care Syllabus and in the early period of the pandemic on a set of notes documenting organising of care titled "Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care".

Workshop leaders

Valeria Graziano is a critical theorist and educator, currently based at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Her research focuses on cultural practices that foster the refusal of work, the creative redistribution of social reproduction and the politicization of pleasure. Over the years, she has been involved in several initiatives of militant research across the cultural sector and social movements. She is one of the convenors of Pirate Care. Her latest publication is 'Rivoluzioni domestiche contro domesticazioni tecnologiche' (*La natura dell'economia*, Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2020).

Maddalena Fragnito (https://www.maddalenafragnito.com) is a cultural activist exploring the intersections between art, transfeminisms and technologies by focusing on practices of commoning care. At present she is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. She cofounded MACAO (2012), an autonomous cultural centre in Milan and SopraSotto (2013), a kindergarten self-managed by parents. She is part of research group/projects Rebelling with Care (2019), Pirate Care (2019) and Biofriction (2020).

Ana Vilenica is an urban and cultural researcher and housing activist with research interest in cultural and political action against dominant housing regimes and other urban regeneration schemes, housing of the migrants, issues related to social reproduction, care and housing, culture-led urban regeneration, developer-led art and radical housing art. Her recent work focuses on housing struggles in the UK and in the post-Yugoslav space. She is the Editor of the Radical Housing Journal and the Editor for Central and East Europe at Interface-journal for and about social movements. She (co)edited books: On the ruins of the creative city (kuda.org, 2012), Becoming a mother in neoliberal capitalism (2013, uz)bu))na)))), Fragments for the study of art organisation in Yugoslavia (kuda.org, 2020) and The art of housing struggles (forthcoming).

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