Presented as part of “Constantina Zavitsanos: THIS COULD BE US,” a project of the R&D Season: SPECULATION.

Constantina Zavitsanos’s residency “THIS COULD BE US” includes a series of research-driven programs organized around speculative concepts of planning, contingency, and care. Not only is care one of the primary sources of surplus value within capitalism, as feminists have argued, it is also critical to social organization.

“Still Life, a workshop,” organized with Park McArthur, introduces Zavitsanos’s residency by expanding ideas of debt and dependency in order to think more complexly about decay, cyclical relay, “premature aging,” persistent immaturity, and other issues of development. In this and other iterations of Zavitsanos’s work, the sociality of what it is to “live labor” will be considered. “Vanitas, a rehearsal” on March 29 is a companion program with McArthur.

In 2011, writer Mia Mingus described “access intimacy” in a post on her blog, Leaving Evidence, as “the kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level.” Access intimacy can be found anywhere and does not require a political understanding of disability. How can we take note of access intimacy as it exists? This small group workshop seeks to collaboratively compose strategies in collective care by constituting a space for those interested in finding new (and in recognizing already extant) commons.
The workshop is free but has a limited capacity of fifteen physically present participants and up to ten online participants.

Constantina Zavitsanos
Constantina Zavitsanos is an artist who works with sculpture, performance, text, and sound. Her work deals with issues of debt and dependency, and investigates how intimate economies and fugitive relations might transform processes of distribution and exchange. Zavitsanos attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and has exhibited works at Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; Hessel Museum of Art, CSS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and MoMa P.S.1, Long Island City. She will participate in Arika Episode 7 in Glasgow, Scotland, this spring. Her essay and performance scores, “Other Forms of Conviviality,” written with Park McArthur, were published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Zavitsanos lives in New York and teaches at the New School.

Park McArthur
Park McArthur is an artist living and working in New York. Her most recent exhibitions took place at Essex Street, New York; Yale Union, Portland, OR; and Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Her writing, which focuses on dependency, autonomy, and care, has been published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory with Constantina Zavitsanos and the _Happy HypocriteWomen & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Her first book-length project, Beverly Buchanan, 1978–1981—coedited with Jennifer Burris and published by Athénée Press—considers the work of Beverly Buchanan and comes out in March 2015. She is a 2015 Wynn Newhouse Award recipient.