Photography and Care as acts of resistance
Photography and Care as acts of resistance
30th June 2025 10 am Cas-co Leuven
Jana Haeckel – moss collective – Hermione Wiltshire in conversation with Cristina Cusani & Dafne Salis
Followed by a research study day with
the Archival Sensation Cluster and the Care Research Group
Cristina Cusani and Dafne Salis are two Italian visual artists and photographers in residence at Cas-co. During their residency they will present a conference and study day on photography and care.
The talk explores the aesthetics of reparative practices in photography and artistic creation. It highlights the reparative value of curating archival collections, both within institutional settings and in artists’ works, with a focus on how such acts can challenge and subvert dominant narratives.
The invited panelists are Jana Heackel, lecturer at the Kask & Conservatorium School of Arts Gent and associate senior researcher at the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography Art and Visual Culture, the moss curatorial collective, in the person of Lucie Menard, head of education programmes at Le Fresnoy — Studio national des arts contemporains and Hermione Wiltshire artist and professor at the Royal College of Art. The artists Cristina Cusani and Dafne Salis will moderate the discussion and will present their work.
Jana Heackel will discuss artistic engagements with troubled image archives as a form of caring and collective world-building. By focusing on intuitive and sensuous knowledge production, the introduced artistic works offer reparative and at the same time playful counter-imagery, giving visibility to lived realities that are often left out, erased or forgotten in the legacies of hegemonic historiographies.
Lucie Menard from the moss collective will explore how artists materially transform photographic archives, reframing their surfaces as sites of healing, resistance and agency,
engaging artist, subject and viewer. Are images the wound inflicted, the scar that remains, or the new skin that emerges after molting?
Hermione Wiltshire with her presentation will describe how, in her art practice, she has grappled with Photography’s technical insistence on directing our gaze towards its object. She will demonstrate her own methods of facing off The Male Gaze in her early work by brandishing the glamour that only colour photography can provide. She will return to the rhetorical language of the photographic studio in Birth Scene made in collaboration with Clare Bottomley but, reorientate the birthing body to offer a midwives’ point of view. In the series, I Modi, she evades photography’s infernal appetite for the explicit. Terese in Ecstatic Childbirth, ultimately demonstrates that it is the politics of gender that organises what we culturally see and not the technology as is often assumed. And finally, in Actions for Knowledge Repair and Tabletop, she enacts repairs that yearn to mend the rifts between subject and object, sexuality and birth and lived experiences of our maternal lines with the injustices of misogynistic culture.
Cristina Cusani and Dafne Salis will present their workshop Stitching Memories that search the presence of power structures within each participant’s life through the exploration of private memory. As an act of mending, attendants intervene on their photograph through embroidery by adding elements, concealing parts or changing the layout of what is portrayed, as to metaphorically repair their past.
In the afternoon, the Archival Sensation Cluster from the Kask & Conservatorium School of Arts Gent and the Care Research Group from the Royal College of Art, are invited to present their latest works and discuss together themes of repair and care. One of the group will focus on reparative and mending practices, enquiring how knowledge is handled; the other will engage with the potential of a critical, collective engagement with archives as “reparative practices” building on the idea of “critical fabulations”.
The participants will be:
Sonia D’alto, Davide Degano, and Laura Palau Barreda from the Archival Sensation Cluster;
Sohaila Baluch, Orla Fahey and Minna Pollanen from the Care Research Group.
The event is part of the projects Lost in Motherhood by Cristina Cusani and Techniques and Methodologies for Caring and Ethical Photography by Dafne Salis, both supported by Strategia Fotografia 2024, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Practical Information:
Date: 30th of June 2025 H. 10-12 am
Location: Cas-co, Vaartstraat 94, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. https://cas-co.be