Taking back self-care! Challenging the invisibility of unpaid care work through feminist art

Abstract

Once again, the COVID-19 pandemic has tragically made visible on whose shoulders the functioning of our society rests. While precarious workers faced depletion and increased time-poverty, the privileged gained an extra portion of leisure time. Under the present conjectures, politics of time allocation have exacerbated. We are a Vienna-based feminist art collective, which during the pandemic experienced an urge to shift our work on unpaid care work towards the dimension of self-care. We stress on the feminist potential of practices of self-care, to subvert, as a collective action, neo-liberal notions of individualized ‘self-carishness’. In this article, we illustrate this shift with an array of selected artworks, which problematize the social relations around unpaid and underpaid labour in relating to historical sites. Hereby we search historically meaningful venues of feminist struggles to create a public sphere of discussion. Our artwork consists of a range of emancipatory practices from performance to fine arts, including pieces like public psychotherapy consultations, a video installation of the invisibility of the cleaning body, a performance of ‘the mother that is not present’. Besides exhibiting, the collective also engaged in editing an art book, featuring artist workshops on the legal dimension of care, labour union activism, feminist writing and other collective strategies of taking back self-care.