Paper short abstract:

Responsible worlding practices need to contribute to increasing the sheer amount of care and love in/on the planet: non-cynical love and care are our tools and energies, intensities and attentions, to resist cynicism and toxic irresponsibility.

Paper long abstract:

As architects, artists, designers and thinkers, as inhabitants and makers of the worlds we live in, we need responsible practices that make us aware of the things we care about and the ways in which such care matters: the impact it has in the mattering of the world. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa explains how “care joins together an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation”. Speaking of matters of care – beyond matters of concern and matters of fact –, can be useful in helping us understand material obligations and responsibilities, while remaining critical to moralism(s) and humanist explanations.

This contribution will approach responsibility and matters of care in spatial practices, exploring architectures of encounter, attention and care. Responsible worlding practices need to contribute to increasing the sheer amount of care and love in/on the planet: non-cynical love and care are our tools and energies, intensities and attentions, to resist cynicism and toxic irresponsibility. Combining dwelling and performative perspectives, I will address the interplays of matter/care, as nouns and verbs, understanding care as a doing, as a situated ethics and as a politics of architecture, to explore the fragile power of the anarchic share: an active listening, a generous gifting, an open encounter based on accepting we are not single beings, and carefully enduring the waiting of becoming-with others in/through an amphibian, constituting practice.