“The main goal of the Museum of Care is to produce and maintain social relationships…There are no guards.” The late David Graeber’s legacy continues
“Floating Heads” by Sophie Cave at Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow (link)
We are fascinated by the legacy of the late David Graeber. David was the radical anthropologist who was a guiding light of the Occupy movement; his posthumous book The Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) is an inspiration - particularly for those who want to prioritise socially-oriented creativity and innovation as core to the human record.
So we’re delighted to see this outcrop of the David Graeber Institute, set up to develop his work posthumously, titled The Museum of Care. Their basic definition:
“Revolution happens when there is a transformation of common sense.” David Graeber
The Museum of Care is a museum with many rooms around the globe. Like in any museum, some of these rooms are more permanent than others. New rooms are opened, existing rooms are occupied and change their function, and some rooms are abandoned and closed.
There are rooms made for reading. There are rooms made for dancing. There are rooms for doing carpentry, for growing vegetables, for doing science. Some rooms are “whatever rooms.”
Anyone can open a room in the Museum. All you have to do is propose what kind of room you want to open. Anyone can occupy a room in the Museum and run their own project in it. If you want to join someone else’s room, write to the curator and see if you can join them.
You do not need to be an artist to spend time in the Museum. To stay in the Museum does not cost money. The Museum is open to everyone whose practice augments our collective freedom by nurturing relations of care—care for people and animals, for materials and the environment.
The rooms in the Museum of Care are curated by their occupants. These rooms are constantly curated anew; there is no permanent collection, there are no permanent inhabitants. The Museum of Care stimulates the development of replicable collective practices that can cross over into different rooms as well as to the world outside. The Museum of Care does not end at its walls.
The main goal of the Museum of Care is to produce and maintain social relationships. Relationships may or may not include objects, but we are not involved in the cataloguing and archiving of artworks. There are no guards in the Museum of Care.
The Museum of Care is also a set of tools. We call it a tool box of Care.
Like Alexander Bogdanov’s Proletkult, the Museum of Care wants to rethink what it is to be a museum or an artist, and to produce spaces for freedom and care rather than monuments. In the Museum of Care, art is not the pinnacle of the symbolic or the production of works that can’t be touched, but a practice of building better worlds. Every person deserves the same care and attention that we currently direct towards monuments and masterpieces – and should for all eternity.
More here. In terms of our experiments in CANs and cosmolocalism, we are interested in containers for care and mutual support - which is what the invitation here, to set up a “museum of care” where you are, looks like. There’s further clarification on the site as to what a MoC is, and isn’t:
What The Museum of Care IS
An idea
An art project
A collection of spaces to meet
A place to hide
A place that you can make your own by copying everything and taking it with you
A place to argue, and to be friends
A mailing list, a collection of links, a reading group or movie club.
Mostly it is the people themselves. Actually, there is nothing in it except the people.
What The Museum of Care IS NOT
A collection of goods and treasures that may be stolen and sold
A fundraising machine
A cemetery
A job centre
A political party
A lobbyist group
It is anti-anti
Anti-neoliberals fundamentally, and specifically: against property as a right to prohibit people from doing what they want to do
Anti-representative democracy fundamentally, and specifically: representing other people’s interests in the absence of those being represented
Anti-authoritarian fundamentally, and specifically: long meetings of people who are in the business of making decisions for other people
Anti-wall, anti-barriers, anti-borders fundamentally, and specifically: instructions for those who don’t want to follow them
It is pro-pro
Pro freedom fundamentally, and specifically: everyone has the right to leave and to do whatever they want to do
Pro laughter and silliness fundamentally, and specifically: for those who come to us to procrastinate, to idle, to be silent and to watch
Pro privacy fundamentally, and specifically: for everyone’s right to be themselves, to not share what they don’t want to, and to not been forced to do what they don’t want to do
Pro risk fundamentally, and specifically: for everyone’s right to strive for the impossible, for the unexpected
Pro scandal fundamentally, and specifically: for the right to quarrel, to argue and reach for truth
More here. And there’s further elucidation from this 2020 essay:
… Empty offices not used to house bureaucrats or secret police will be turned into state museums: conservative, elitist institutions whose general ambiance balances somewhere between that of a cemetery and that of a bank.
We would like to insist on the possibility – perhaps not the likelihood, but at least the possibility – of sanity.
Imagine that the experience of lockdown and economic collapse actually allows us to see the world as it really is and we acknowledge that what’s referred to as “an economy” is simply the way we collectively keep each other alive, provision each other with the things we need and generally take care of one another. Say we also reject the notion of social control.
Prisons, after all, provide food, shelter and even basic medical care. Still, they are not “caring” institutions. What they provide is not care because real care is directed not just at supplying material needs, not even just to allow others to grow and thrive, but also, to maintain or enhance their freedom.
Imagine we jettison the idea of production and consumption being the sole purpose of economic life and substitute care and freedom. What would we do with the buildings then?
In a world built around care and solidarity, much of this vast and absurd office space would indeed be blown up, but others could be turned into free city universities, social centers and hotels for those in need of shelter.
We could call them ‘Museums of Care’ — precisely because they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations.