Dresda Emma Mendez de la Brena – Granada, Spain (6 photos)

Care is currently a widely contested, multifaceted and unstable term with varying connotations including burden, necessity as well as (inter)dependence and emotional and affective fulfillment. All these engagements with care make specific contributions to the understanding and meanings of care, revealing how caring implicates different relationalities, issues, and practices in different settings. Particularly, scholars who take up issues of care investigate these fundamental issues including dependency, informal and formal care, caregiving work, and ‘ethics of care’ in the context of human care relationships. Care, in this context, is normally positioned as something only humans do. However, diverse disability scholars from feminist posthuman disabilities studies and Science and Technology Studies stand out for bringing to the fore the affective entanglements between humans and nonhumans as constitutive of various forms of care production. However, how nonhuman arrangements of care enact novel forms of relief, comfort, intimacy and even life-support to disabled individuals has seldom been explored as a topic. This photographic project is part of an art research-creation made by 15 women with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue that contributes to the meaningfulness of care in disabled worlds, by asking: What does “caring‟ mean when we go about thinking and living interdependently with beings other than human, in “more than human” worlds? How do things matter to the life of chronically ill and disabled individuals? What kind of care arrangements do they enter into and make with the thing-world so they can live as well as possible?