S/CARE PACKAGES: Crises of Care of Self, Community, World

S/CARE PACKAGES: Crises of Care of Self, Community, World explores the pharmacology of care itself, its potentialities of cure and curse, remedy and poison—its “s/care” structure. The figures roaming the film act, respond, and engage with history and ontology, memories and speculations that capture us with concerns and anxieties over how best to care for ourselves, our societies, and our environment. Interweaving activism, art, philosophy, science, history, myth, memoir, and fiction, S/CARE PACKAGES stages images, words, music, and movements that provoke critical attention and creative response-abilities. Is it fitting or ironic that the worldview we call humanism may wipe out humans and destroy the world as we know it? Do the terms “Anthropocene” and “Capitalocene” give us too much credit or not enough? Have we turned on nature or has nature turned on us? Does care package something scary? And children play with something dark? While the world seems saturated with toxicities of viral pandemic, viral media, and veral nationalisms, we believe in the necessity—and chance—of affirming a positive, curative pharmacology that invents new modes of individuation, collaboration, and world-making. Care is precisely the attention we give to the pharmaka of self, community, and world.

S/CARE PACKAGES: Crises of Care of Self, Community, World
A film by Jon McKenzie and Ana Vujanović
Featuring Bernard Stiegler and Daniel Ross

Jon McKenzie is Professor of Practice and Director of StudioLab, a critical design and media lab at Cornell University that connects researchers, designers, and organisations working in human rights, public health, and social and environmental justice. StudioLab teams collaborate on strategic storytelling through transmedia knowledge, using performance design thinking as a human-centered, iterative process of stakeholder alignment and shared dreaming. Jon is the author of Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement: A StudioLab Manifesto (2019) and Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001), and he holds degrees in Fine Arts, English, and Performance Studies and has also worked as a writer and UX designer in NYC. He is founder and former director of DesignLab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and co-founder of the performance group McKenzie Stojnić. In addition to workshops and consulting, Jon produces experimental videos, lecture performances, and other media. His work and that of StudioLab can be found at labster8.net.

Ohad Ben Shimon (1978) is an artist, researcher and educator with a background in cognitive sciences, psychology, cultural analysis, international business education and art. He is currently PhD candidate at the Research Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, Senior Lecturer of Critical Thinking/ Researcher of Change Management at The Hague University of Applied Sciences and guest resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. His current PhD research focuses on the role of embodiment in knowledge-based organisations and is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) Doctoral Grant for Educators. https://linktr.ee/ohadbenshimon