The art of care

Abstract

Building on emerging work that considers urban life and designs through the lens of care, this article examines how a performative care practice might serve as an oppositional ethic and strategy in the late capitalist city. The analysis is based on the Guerrilla Grafters, an eco-arts collective that surreptitiously grafts fruit onto sterile city trees in San Francisco. Original data include interviews with participants and critics and a qualitative analysis of relevant media accounts. The article proposes that the Guerrilla Grafters are engaged in a performative care practice, a public facing set of actions that make visible and valuable the labor as well as ethics of attending to the interdependence of all life. This performative care practice is a discursive, relational and spatial strategy that seeks to interrupt relations of dominance and ideologies that cheapen certain life. Through a case study of performative care, this study provokes a more general examination of how care ethics and practices work in oppositional practices under dynamics of neoliberalism and ecological crisis in cities of the Global North.