Mediation, care and other commonplaces
By Lorena Ruíz
There are words that open up worlds. In recent years, care has unfolded multiple realities that surround us and constitute us: interdependence, vulnerability, fragility, collective sustenance or mutual support networks.
There are worlds that open words. Care brings with it the vocabulary of the warm, the human, the good, the maternal, the desirable. However, various positions, particularly feminist ones, have questioned these idealised visions and have instead pointed to the complexity of care. Inequalities, conflicts and power dynamics have been discussed, placing the gender dimension at the centre of the debate and demands.
Words and worlds. Imaginaries and practices. The semiotic and the material intertwining in the everyday experience of care.
Words and worlds refer us in turn to other words and worlds, they are inevitably linked. Something similar has been happening recently in the cultural sphere with the link between care and mediation. These two words - and their respective worlds - are increasingly looking at each other, coming closer together. Cultural mediation understood as a form of care implies a situated practice in which openness, observation and listening are central. At the same time, mediation also shares with care its complexity, contradictions and conflicts, its sticky and slippery character. They are always uncertain processes, unfinished devices whose meaning and use require the involvement of the other.
Mediation not only connects people, ideas, worlds and lives (again, symbolically and materially), but its fundamental purpose is to sustain those connections, to articulate them in a lasting way as long as they are meaningful to those who inhabit them. Mediation triggers conversations, turns our gaze on what affects and troubles us. It is a radar that tries to detect the particularities, desires, needs and strengths of communities.
Philosopher and mediator Juan Gutiérrez says that mediation is the art of how to make a common ground. For a place to be common, therefore, work is necessary -someone has to take care of it. This work is, moreover, an art: something that is simmered, with care, with its own language, difficult to catch. It is a craft.
The projects developed in Concomitant are based on this link between mediation and care.mediators and principals shape the commission that the artists will subsequently develop. When we move away from mediation understood as “being between” (between two collectives, between two people, between two approaches) and approach mediation understood as the art of connection, then a place appears before us that could be common.
The concomitances have, of course, this resolute vocation to be commonplaces.. However, if listening is a fundamental element in this practice of situated mediation, are we listening to those we accompany? Are we asking those we care for how they want to be cared for? Are there spaces - and times - in which we can talk about it? If they do not exist, how can we create them?
The interlocution between mediators and clients is a central element in this respect, but perhaps we could think about broadening the possible repertoires of dialogue and listening: decentring the discursive, the intellectual, even the rational, as well as exploring forms of joint creation - artistic, cultural, material - that allow us to listen to each other and think collectively, but through doing.
The logic hacker offers us anchors for these mediation practices. First of all, working in a distributed way, opening up the processes, in such a way that mediators as an additional node in the network, decentralising connections. Secondly, tinkering and tinkering, recovering trial and error - anyone who has children or works with children knows that tinkering and experimentation are a fundamental part of care. This approach also inevitably requires a form of mediation rooted in accompaniment: walking alongside others, recognising and welcoming their times, waiting, sometimes stopping to make things happen - or to make them happen on their own terms -, distancing ourselves as far as possible from the fetishism of intervention and methodologies. A accompaniment, which means opening only what we can accept.. This is another form of care.
Asking those we care for how they want to be cared for is important. Asking the commissioners how they want the commission to be made to the artists is important. But we need to go one step further: what are we going to do with what they respond to us? Where are we going to put it? What are we going to connect it to? Can we take in everything we hear? What do we do with the edges of representation - the speaking on behalf of? Care is then not only listening, it is also, and above all, what we do - and what we don't do - with what we hear. It is taking charge of what we hear: sustaining it. It is also not being able to care, to safeguard the links by assuming our own limits and those of the context.
Mediation is a joint exploration of what we know, what we want and what we can do.. This requires a logic of care based on listening and honesty: talking about discomfort, acknowledging what could be done and what could not be done. And why. Then we will be able to imagine other common places, other tools to build them, other alliances to sustain them.
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Sources:
(1) Padilla, Margarita (2012). The Internet Fighting Kit. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
(2) Fernández-Savater, Amador (2012). 15-M and the crisis of consensual culture in Spain. Periférica Internacional. Journal for the analysis of culture and territory., 13, 63-71.
