ABSTRACT
In the ongoing aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, staff in healthcare facilities continue to experience high levels of workplace stress and low levels of well-being. The Festival of Care (2023), produced by an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the University of New South Wales in partnership with the South Eastern Sydney Local Health District (SESLHD), explored the potential for arts-based care practices to enhance staff wellbeing in three Sydney hospitals. The Festival employed a range of artist-led actions and ambient interventions framed around understandings of care aesthetics as modalities of expression that assist life-sustaining social practices to improve the quality of interhuman relations. This chapter utilises ethnographic fieldwork to record the tensions, ruptures and messy tendrils evoked by the Festival’s interactions with clinical time and space. Marking the Festival as a durational presence that changed experiences of space, the flows of bodies, rhythms and modes of attention, this chapter draws theories of the minor gesture, as that which inhabits the fringes of perception and thought, into conversation with theories of, and approaches to, temporal observation. In doing so, it identifies four temporal gestures that evoke the tentative and yet potentialising conditions for subtle and resistive forms of care work to be enacted and imagined.
