ZONES OF CARE. ARCHIVES, MUSEUMS, ENVIRONMENTS
The symposium borrows the notion of “zones of care” from medical and emergency contexts, where the term designates graduated levels of threat and urgency. Curated by Elke Krasny, Studio for Art and Education at the Department of Education in the Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with artist and researcher Jelena Micić.
Recast in relation to archives, museums, and environments, this framework offers a critical lens through which to apprehend how threats and urgencies are produced, inhabited, and contested from radically situated scholarly-activist perspectives, and how they are differently framed within geopolitical logics of influence and power. It foregrounds the uneven distribution of care and neglect, asking how vulnerability, preservation, and exposure are differentially allocated across cultural and ecological spaces, and to whose endurance such arrangements remain tethered. Hosted at the Museum of Yugoslavia, the symposium creates a platform for exchange between PhD researchers at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and scholars in heritage, museum and curatorial studies and the environmental humanities.
Program:
June 4th, 2026
15–17 h
- Jelena Micić
Approaching the Family Archive: Material Relations and Non-Alignment - Anna Mikaela Ekstrand
Subverting Entrapment: Curating Feminist Futures in BiG’s Dollhouse - Carlota Mir
Books, Like Bodies: Feminist Latency and the Infrastructures of Care
18–19:30 h
- Milena Jokanović
Taking Care of the Cut: All the Lives of Tito’s Sculpture - Elke Krasny and Lara Perry
Zones of Care: Unworlding the Museum and Rematriating Cultures
June 5th, 2026
11–13:30 h
- Andrija Filipović
Our Debauched Empire: Merlinka’s Terezin sin (2001) and Queer Postsocialist Environments - Carmen Lael Hines
The care complex – scenographies of reproductive labour - Sonja Steiner
Following the Pomegranate: Rachel Ruysch's Four Works, 1710-1717 - Nicola Jakob-Feiks
Learning with Snails, Plastic, and Entangled Worlds