Carolina Caycedo: Care Report

February 19 - April 4, 2021

Carolina Caycedo is the 2020-21 Wanlass Artist-in-Residence. Caycedo’s practice is centered on vital issues of environmental justice, power relations, and organized resistance. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities.

The exhibition Care Report offers a visual lineage of feminist-led environmental movements across the globe despite patriarchal and extractivist structures. Womxn's practices of sustenance and making kin are central to the organizing principles in the defense of our natural commons: water, land, air, forests, and minerals. Providing care for others, nurturing both the human and the non-human, is at the core of womxn’s accumulated and embodied knowledge. It translates to domestic gestures such as growing food, healing with herbs, cleaning, cooking, and weaving; a knowledge and labor that has been historically gendered, stigmatized, and strategically underpaid. This care also takes place in the public sphere with womxn across generations spearheading human rights and environmental movements globally—as grassroots organizers, activists in the front lines of direct action, and thinkers and makers in academic and institutional settings. Both domestic and public labor of care are politically charged; they root us to a place and connect us with others. They are the essential keys for our climb out of the climate collapse facing our planetary household.

Care Report celebrates the expansive and often invisible power of physical, political, and domestic labor performed by womxn. The exhibition is comprised of a large scale collage of historical and recent documentation of global feminist-led environmental movements in conversation with Caycedo’s hand-labored sculpture Milk, a series of banners bearing political and spiritual statements, and the temporary mural In Yarrow We Trust portraying the powerful, healing yarrow plant.

In the midst of a global pandemic, social unrest, and a planet undergoing the devastating effects of climate change and land extraction, Care Report is an invitation to stand in solidarity with the activist movements of womxn across the globe, to engage in the programs and collective actions connected to the exhibit and to imagine a collective future free of extractivist ecological destruction, dispossession, and violence against both human and non-human life.

Sound Design: Paul Chavez
Light Design: Kari Swanson
Exhibition Installation: Chris Wawrinofsky

View more photos of the exhibition.

The Wanlass Artist in Residence Program is made possible by generous support from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.