Antonia Rohwetter
she/herThe Promise of Care
Facing the Crises of Social Reproduction in the Performing Arts
Antonia Rohwetter works as a dramaturg, researcher, writer and curator in contemporary performing arts and dance. Rather than focusing on producing knowledge about the arts, she is engaging with artistic methodologies as practices which can in themselves generate forms of discursive, sensorial, critical, and embodied knowledge. With an interdisciplinary academic background spanning Philosophy, Cultural and Gender Studies and Applied Theatre Studies, Antonia’s work is committed to queer, feminist, and decolonial modes of materialist analysis. She lives in Berlin.
Project
In the past years, not a single art institution in Europe might have refrained from creating a programme on care and healing. When care advances to a political category, there seems to be a shared acknowledgment that the reproduction of life is in crisis. Care maintains and repairs – with these qualities, one might assume, it could rather be complicit in stabilizing existing systems than transforming them. It’s no coincidence that from past to present care work has been delegated to feminized and racialized bodies under exploitative conditions. Nevertheless, artistic invocations of care tend to position maintenance and interdependence as radical alternatives to a present, in which lives based on extraction, exhaustion, social isolation and inequality seem to become unmanageable. But can there be practices of care that also transform the conditions under which we care? With this question, this project turns to practices in the performing arts that imagine new forms of caring and relating.
