Thinking and practicing Community Care

Curated by Danielle Bowler, Keval Harie & Amie Soudien

Over the past three years, the Lesser Violence Reading Group has been a place for discussion, debate and reflection around the multiple ways in which artists and creative communities navigate everyday realities of raced, gendered and sexualised violence. Conversations in small group sessions have extended from the daily impact of heteronormative patriarchy on black, brown, queer and women’s bodies, to the deep, historical legacies of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and the sexual-racial codes they have inscribed. Pumla Dineo Gqola’s articulation of rape culture remains a critical framework for the group, in both locating and refusing a paradigm of permissible anti-black/feminine violence.

The Lesser Violence Reading Group draws from a community of artists, performers, writers, curators, arts organisers and activists. Guest presenters are invited to share multi-modal ‘readings’, and to encourage dialogue around key questions of representation and violence, as they intersect with localised and transnational experiences of race, gender and sexuality. In seeking more liveable feminist, queer and intersectional alternatives, presenters and participants reflect on the possibilities presented through forms of creative practice, in making space for transformative, even healing encounters.

Organised and curated by Danielle Bowler, Keval Harie and Amie Soudien, the thematic focus of this year’s group looks at notions of connectivity, community and family, in relation to a praxis of care. In a context of normalised raced, gendered and sexualised violence, this is about thinking through and enacting alternatives. The global pandemic has radically altered the terms by which individuals and communities engage with home life, work and loved ones, shifting the ways in which we meet, gather and interact. These changes have also demonstrated the power of social networks and chosen communities, both online and offline. For many people, home does not necessarily mean sanctuary, and the notion of family can be a fraught even dangerous one. Consequently, modes of self-care and their relation to community are revealed as both critical and deeply political practices.

Speaking about self-care as a collective practice, Angela Davis recalls:

Personally, I started practicing yoga and meditation when I was in jail but it was more of an individual practice. Later I had to recognize the importance of the collective character of that work on the self.

This collective understanding of care is further extended in her recent interview with Lesser Violence co-curator Danielle Bowler:

Well, what I found really interesting about the notion of self-care that has emerged among young activists over the last period…since the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the US, is that it does not conceptualise the self in an individualistic way. So, the self is the self only in relation to others, so it is a communal self.

Building on this idea of communal care, this year’s sessions will delve deeper into thinking about ourselves in community, considering how we connect, what prevents us from connecting, and what we can do to develop better support systems for those around us, and for ourselves. We are thinking about the values and politics of care, about curation as community building, as well as the challenges and possibilities of creating spaces of safety and care online. These are considerations we understand as crucial to thinking about, responding to, and also refusing the pervasive reality of raced, gendered and sexualised violence that is the crisis norm of patriarchy and rape culture.

Akani Shimange, Dee Marco, Kathleen Ebersohn, and Maneo Mohale join Danielle Bowler and Keval Harie as our 2020 facilitators. We are honoured to welcome these remarkable individuals, all of whom we recognise as deeply invested in multiple ways of honouring, building and shaping creative forms of community.

In the past, Lesser Violence sessions have been accompanied by a meal, and hosted by individuals and organisations connected to our community. This year’s iteration will look quite different, but we hope to share the same commitment to considered conversation, and a welcoming, non-hierarchical environment in which all voices are valued. The group’s presenters will continue to provide ‘readings’ for their respective sessions. These multimedia playlists will include videos, images, sound and text – with links to stream and download made available on the VIAD website. In the week following each playlist’s release, there will be an opportunity for participants to engage in a closed online chat room, hosted by the facilitator in question. Registration is required to gain access, and this will be administered via EventBrite. Please note that in keeping with the group’s intention to create enabling and caring discursive spaces, the online chat room will be limited to 25 people or fewer.

Why 'Lesser Violence'?

The idea for the reading group emerged from a panel discussion entitled Lesser Violence - with, through, around, against, hosted by GALA and VIAD on the 31st of August 2017 and facilitated by VIAD curator and researcher Amie Soudien. With contributions from artists Donna Kukama, Gabrielle Goliath, Nondumiso Msimanga and Senzeni Marasela, the aim of the discussion was to bring together a community of artists, writers, curators and activists with a shared interest in gender rights, and to initiate dialogue around artistic (and especially performative) strategies for working with, through, around and against the enactment and perpetuation of gendered and sexualised violence. Now in its second iteration, the Lesser Violence Reading Group was envisioned as one way of furthering the close conversations, interactions and collaborations initiated by this engagement.

In naming the panel discussion reading group, our reference to ‘lesser violence’ recalls Jacques Derrida’s conception of an ethics hinged not on the prescriptive certainty of an ‘ought’ or ‘should’, but on the “ordeal of undecidability” and the possibility of a “lesser violence”. Accounted for here is a terrain of risk in which decisions are made, and must be accounted for, without the guarantee of them being ‘right’ or ‘good’ but at best as constituting a lesser form of violence. The opportunity presented in this reading group is to explore this complex ethical space in relation to performative practices seeking to engage with, and make ‘shareable’, incommensurate experiences of violence and trauma.

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For a sensitive reflection on this ethical conception, and its relation to representations of trauma in post-apartheid South Africa, see Ruth Lipschitz’s ‘Archival aftershock. On spectral justice, non-criminal death and infinite responsibility’ (2017), in Critical Addresses. The Archive-in-Practice. Johannesburg: The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre.139-149

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For more information on the Lesser Violence Reading Group, contact visualidentitiesfada@gmail.com.