This launch is part of a two-day performance symposium arranged by performance artist Inga Gerner Nielsen with a knowledge production team consisting of choreographer, Ar Utke Acs, and publisher Nat Marcus.
In the Mirror of Care Work investigates skill-sets within Nordic interactive performance practices. The knowledge is shared by the use of a mirror; on one side, the work of interactive performers – on the other, the work of nurses. By inviting in perspectives of care workers and looking into the history of their profession, we engage discussions about the politics, mythologies and poetics of ours. Do we as performers – like the nurses were once said to – abide by the feeling of a calling? And does this involve a kind of spiritual care for our audience? What would it mean for the field of interactive performance if we, like nurses, started to be viewed as a profession of our own?
This two-day performance symposium invites professionals in the fields of performers and care workers to take part in the project’s methods of storytelling and performative interviews, reading sessions with texts from the project’s publication, and poetic score works for collective reflections.
The publication launch includes a reading of two texts from the publication by interactive performer Josefina Björk and teacher of the History of Nursing, Helle Kronborg Krogsgaard.
Curator of the Reading edge library, Izabella Borzecka, will host a conversation centered around how to make a publication into a shared container for readers and writers from two seemingly very different professions. What is the method of the mirror? How does it produce knowledge about working with one-to-one interactions? When does the mirror of care work collapse?
After the conversation, the evening will continue in one of the studios where you will be met by a performative presentation of the publication and guided into collective scores of thinking together.