Care/Car
Bright and brash the car cover is a trojan horse to spark a conversation about the car within the feminist city. The car cover serves as a slide deck with the audience walking around the car and being drawn to different motifs and concepts during the presentation. Through the use of fabric, texture and physical space, a different type of encounter is stimulated, and creative engagement enabled.
Advertising presents the car as the setting of adventure and novelty, whereas for most it is about the mundane and the inconvenient, a place of emotional labour particularly for those with care responsibilities. Within a capitalist system, car parking spaces are seen as a sign of prestige and privilege as opposed to being based on practicality and personhood. Meanwhile, urban planners seek to imagine a post-car utopia, as urban environments change in response to the climate crisis. This artistic intervention aims to reconsider the role of the car as a site of care, hence troubling masculine fantasies of a post-car world which continue to overlook nurture and care. It takes the form of a 15 min performance lecture with a felt car cover as prop delivered in a carpark.
Car covers are used to preserve rare and vintage cars but what of the everyday car? This presentation draws on existing research on the uses of cars for care and emotional labour. These include: grieving; relationship-building; and conversation. For instance, it is established that direct engagement with teenagers is often facilitated by the physical layout of the car, with its physical containment and parallel seating that allows for participants to be both distant (avoiding eye contact) and simultaneously intimate. What happens when we reduce this caring space to no more than a vehicle for transport?
Images are from Care/Car - Performance Lecture - Feminist and Queer Spatialities: Care, Connection and Change conference in August @ UCD.