formatus -> formare -> to format: the way something is arranged or set out.

We define modes of encounter, gatherings and assemblies through their spaces and the social protocols they employ. A room full of desks facing the front where one person is standing to give an hour long lecture is widely recognised as the format "class".

When unpacking formats - such as the class, the dinner, the salon, the walk -  we shift the attention from the what to the how. How we do things, how we shape our bonds, how we give form to our worlds. This requires that we carefully revise roles, conditions of work, representation as well as re-programme material and immaterial spaces of our practices.

But what makes a format a format of care?

A convening of feminist practitioners will explore this question in a practical and non-practical series of small engagements. This working two-day session asks how formats can be transformed into formats of care - looking at how feminist care ethics advance a politics of intersectional transversality and promote social, material, and ecological justice.

These formats have been constituted as spaces of resistance to dominant order in the past, and still hold that political potential for us today. But when practicing these formats within various cultural spheres, we stand the danger of opting out or losing the historical vantage point coming from radical feminist and queer practices. By caring for the genealogy of these formats, and by injecting them with the contemporary practice of care, we seek to reclaim and reconstitute the emancipated space they can provide.

Formats of Care is convened by Elke Gaugele, Gilly Karjevsky, Elke Krasny and Rosario Talevi together with Teresa Dillon, Lena Giovanazzi, Jia Gu, Patricia Kaersenhout, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Adela Lovric, Barbara Mahlknecht, Jana Patz, Jenny Richardson, Meike Schalk, Fiona Shipwright, Francoise Verges.

May 17th 2019, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Karl-Schweighofer Gasse 3, 1070 Vienna

12.30Guess who is coming for dinner, too? 

Patricia Kaersenhout

17:00 Decolonial Feminism

Francoise Verges

June 15th 2019, Berlin University of the Arts, Hardenbergstr. 33, 10623 Berlin

15:00 Public Summary: Collective Findings

Teresa Dillon, Elke Gaugele, Lena Giovanazzi, Jia Gu, Gilly Karjevsky, Elke Krasny,  Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga,  Adela Lovric, Fiona Shipwright, Rosario Talevi.

Formats of Care is a cooperation between Berlin University of the Arts, Space Production Studio; Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Department of Art and Education and Department of Fashion & Styles;  IKL Doctoral Studies in Philosophy; Floating University e.V. It is supported by DiVAversity of Arts, an initiative of the UdK Women's Representative Office.