Week 132 – January 24 to January 31

Michelle Deignan

Let us play

Single channel HD video, 1 min, 2023

Liza Dimbleby

Dettie Flynn

To Observe

One of the very first gestures of Care : to give one’s attention to something, to a thought, or to someone.

On the morning of 31 December, I took the children to the ridge line to observe the snow-covered summit of Mont Blanc, which can be seen in the distance on a bright blue clear day.

On the way, we found a beetle.

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For this new year of 2023, besides wishing you all joy, I would like to ask my Crown Sisters to help me to collect gestures of care. Sisters of mine, what would be the gesture of care that you would describe for me, for inclusion in one of the Museum Of Care‘s contributing collections?

Kasia Ozga

I was making paper for a wall drawing for a show in Upstate New York and the steam from the boiler and the hum of the beater began to slowly melt the snow and ice on the outside of the greenhouse that I was working in.

Catherine Radosa

Photography/digital collage made during the long-term film project Campagne de Paris, paysage triangulaire (2017-2023) on the Triangle of Gonesse (Paris region) – agricultural land in the process of artificialization (satellite view source – Géoportail.gouv.fr).

Katja Stuke

Ruth Maclennan

Yesterday I walked from Covent Garden to Whitechapel through the City of London. Not as quiet as I’d expected on a Sunday, but there seem to be a lot of tourists in London at the moment and it was sunny and bright. This tree with its concrete casing stopped me in my tracks: rings the only sign it had lived, trapped inside a small fortress. My eye was then drawn upwards, up the blue metallic cylinders of Lloyds of London, ‘the World’s insurance marketplace’, as it boasts on its website.

The building was designed by Richard Rogers and opened in 1986. Five years later Lloyds nearly went under, but was saved, although many of its so-called ‘names’ (often small investors who unwittingly invested with unlimited liability) did lose everything.  Insurance could be one of the ways to stop the madness of funding  fossil fuel extraction. Meanwhile the ice caps are melting and the physical world literally imploding, as permafrost becomes former-frost and ice sheets slide faster and faster into the ocean.  These shiny towers lean into each other – instead of trees – high up above me, reflecting themselves and the sky, completely out of touch. Of course that is the point. Anything could be going on in front of a screen, inside a steel and glass tube – I’m in front of a screen myself as I write this, looking at the picture of the steel and glass tubes. You could be insider-dealing or investing in windmills, selling mortgages or weapons, or all of those things. The little street across from here is called Saint Mary Axe, named after a medieval church that was destroyed in the 16^th century. I’m glad the name has stuck although no one quite knows what it means. Whose axe? What was it used for? A name is a stubborn thing, that can keep on conjuring – haunting, stirring – even when no one remembers where it came from or who first used it.

Anne Brunswic

Guêpier 1

Je me fourre encore et toujours dans des guêpiers dont je sors confuse et furieuse contre moi-même. Cela m’a inspiré le recueil de nouvelles « Qu’est-ce que tu fais là ? » paru en 2001. La question est toujours d’actualité.  Bon sang, mais qu’est-ce que je fais là ?

Un taxi me cueille à la gare de Marseille. Il me dépose une demi-heure plus tard au pied d’un hôtel de luxe en bord de mer. Je pénètre dans l’espace épuré d’un magazine de décoration. Le volume de la chambre est démesuré, le lit de deux mètres de large inquiétant, ma pauvre petite valise noire me fait l’effet d’un cafard dans le couloir l’entrée. Je pressens que j’aurai du mal à trouver le sommeil. La baie vitrée donne sur une crique aux parois ocre rouge qui plonge dans des flots bleu indigo. De la Méditerranée souffle un vent printanier. Le ciel est d’un bleu irréprochable, transparent comme il n’est jamais à Paris.

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Manuela Morgaine

Valeria Troubina