The Museum of Care is an international informal creative space where anyone can propose and realize a project. Some of MoC projects are supported by DGI, and some exist in their own right.
The Museum of Care is not one place. It understands itself as a network of places in which tools and ideas for sustaining and reproducing human life are gathered and shared. It is a place of abundance, not scarcity.
The network of solidarity formed during #Carnival4David is being transformed into the Museum of Care. For a few years now, we’ve been meeting online or offline to host reading groups, public art projects, conferences and educational programs and to think together about what a museum could be if it cared more about living people than rare objects. Out of these conversations grew an idea: an international system of solidarity through physical spaces, each housing the Survival Kit Collection alongside local collections that matter to the people who create and inhabit them.
We believe that museums should be build in buildings that are themselves repurposed. But we want to follow not the French Revolution, with its seizure of palaces and institutions already considered valuable, but the Paris Commune and its idea of communal luxury. Instead of repurposing places that the old world deemed precious, we want to transform what it currently considers waste: shipping containers, temporary structures, pipe shelters, and other forms we haven’t yet imagined — and we invite you to propose them. We see this as a network of care in which communities themselves sustain, tend, and own — not in the sense of excluding others, but in the sense of having the right to share with everyone — the values and the things that matter in their place.
Like Alexander Bogdanov’s Proletkult, the Museum of Care wants to rethink what it is to be a museum or an artist, and how to produce spaces for freedom and care. In the Museum of Care, art is not the pinnacle of the symbolic or the production of works that can’t be touched, but a practice of building better worlds. Every person deserves the same care and attention that we currently direct towards monuments and masterpieces – and should for all eternity.