ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses care and its accompanying ethics offer a potential path to reconstruct a post-COVID-19 world: it considers how creative practitioners are currently imagining this values revolution. It also considers the institutional challenges of caring from the perspective of curating, neoliberal university practices, recent theorisations of social practice and performance. The book begins with positioning practices in the context of care ethics, in particular the condition of precarity and the response of attuning relationality through the First Nations concept of deep listening. It provides sex work, working from home, the university and the carceral system. The LAST collective’s process of deeply engaging with and valuing each other’s work improves the artists’ chances of surviving in what is a decidedly neoliberal cultural environment, and re-attunes them in their ongoing commitment to the mattering world.
