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| Pirate Care: Practices |
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We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for providing safe pregnancy terminations to those who live in countries where abortion is illegal. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.
The exhibition Pirate Care is a survey of the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of “care” and “piracy”, which are trying to intervene in new and interesting ways in one of the most important challenges of our time: the “crisis of care” in its many interconnected dimensions.
We live in a time in which care, as a political and collective capacity of societies to attend to the most fundamental needs of humans and their living environments, is becoming more difficult or criminalised. Against this state of affairs, a number of autonomous, bottom-up initiatives share a willingness to openly disobey laws, regulations and dominant social norms whenever these stand in the way of solidarity and life. Crucially, they politicise their disobedience to contest the status quo. That disobedience and that politicisation are what defines these practices as ‘pirate care’.
The exhibition presents a survey of both contemporary and historical cases. It builds on the online Pirate Care Syllabus (https://syllabus.pirate.care), created with the aim of supporting collective learning from these initiatives. The Syllabus comes integrated with a library of all references mentioned in its sessions. It lives on the experimental publishing platform Sandpoints, initially developed for this project and designed to support processes of publishing collaborative writing.
Pirate Care was first exhibited in the context of Rijeka European Capital of Culture 2020, produced by Drugo More. While in Rijeka we presented the disobedient initiatives documented in the Syllabus, here in Zagreb we are sharing a broader range of pirate care practices that we came across during our four-year study.
Inevitably, there is no claim to comprehensiveness to our survey. Since our process of investigation is grounded in networks of activism in which we are also implicated, this is reflected in the geographical partiality and situatedness of the practices we were able to research.