Izabela Kowalczyk’s book concerns artistic practices of care that stand in solidarity with Others and listen attentively to their stories. These are relational practices that offer insights into our connections with humans, more-than-humans, and the planet as a whole.

The artistic works discussed express care in the face of ongoing violence, articulate a cry of despair in response to the current war in Ukraine, and pose questions about the climate catastrophe and about what a post-human world might be like. The author raises questions of the partnership-based treatment of animals invited to co-create art, as well as the relationships between birds, migrants, and queer people. The book includes hydrofeminist narratives about exploited rivers as well as analyses of works by e.g. Alevtina Kakhidze, Lia Dostlieva, Izabella Gustowska, Marek Wodzisławski, Piotr C. Kowalski, Sonia Rammer, Tatiana Czekalska and Leszek Golec, Gabrielle Goliath, Marjetica Potrč, and Carolina Caycedo.

The research perspective presented draws on post-humanist feminist thought, combining, among other things, ecofeminist, postcolonial, and queer theories, new feminist materialism, and Indigenous knowledge. The author proposes a way of thinking about art that involves “thinking with care”, and the book’s underlying aim is to encourage readers to care for our shared world by thinking together with art and together with Others.

A book excerpt:

Care, which I have adopted as a method, is the concept that binds together all the artistic strategies and actions discussed [in the book]. In the context of the material examined in the book, it can be understood very broadly. It may take the form of an act of protection, attentiveness, remembrance, and empathy, directed both towards individual human and non-human beings and towards entire ecosystems. In the case of the artistic activities cited, it is also care for psychological well-being and for relationships with those who are close to us, human and non-human alike. Care is affirmative, as Rosi Braidotti argues, while at the same time expressing resistance to destruction and injustice by restoring agency and dignity to human and more-than-human beings. It concerns both the building of interhuman and interspecies relationships and the future. Artistic practices of care offer positive solutions; they demonstrate new and better ways of coexisting with the world and of being together with Others, thereby offering hope for the future.