On the Recursivity of Care

In her writing and research, Marina Vishmidt assesses how art, labor, and value intertwine. In this talk at EMPAC, Vishmidt touches on works that use technology and tautology to indicate the unrepresentability of care & maintenance work–be it on the home, the body, or the self. 

Feminist art from the 1970s onwards, such as Margaret Raspé’s Frautomat films from the early 1970s or Fronza Woods’ 1981 Fannie’s Film (both screened as part of this program), exhibit the entropy of maintenance. These works suggest that the foundation of care work lies not only in concern for what is ongoing, but in a recognition of the tendency of maintenance to unravel over time.

Rather than becoming an object of representation, maintenance more often provides the conditions of representation. Its practices of social reproduction pursue a temporality of ever-sameness, a ‘re-’ of production without product. 

In this vein, Vishmidt’s EMPAC-commissioned talk explores a question of recursion, examining how replication of an initial form at different scales, and in different registers of interpretation, is modified by process. Repetitive processes of housework, as in the early films of Raspé, are changed by their documentation and exploded by the mode this documentation takes. Through recursion, repetition yields difference. 

Quote by Margaret Raspé, from an interview with Magazin Florida, published in Magazin FLORIDA #02, 2016.