MANIFESTO FOR AN ACCUMULATION OF CARE
The bedroom is a monument is an altar: this is our counter-architecture.
WE MOURN AND WE BUILD IN THE SAME GESTURE.
We grieve the conditions that make our interdependence necessary while constructing monuments to the care that sustains us. Our wooden spiral domesticates Vladimir Tatlin‘s neverbuilt Monument to the Third International: his revolutionary architecture reimagined as bedroom furniture, as mourning altar, as monument to interdependence.
We know the romance of queer chosen family seduces us even as it obscures a harder truth: when the state withdraws, our care relationships buckle under weights they were never equipped to carry. Sophie Lewis names this precisely—by abandoning care to the family, the state compromises the very relationships it exploits. Love persists alongside exhaustion, tenderness alongside resentment. Not because we lack devotion, but because no relationship can replace public infrastructure.
If the love comes through more clearly than the difficulty in our work, this too is part of the problem: how much easier it is to display care than to admit its costs.
We monumentalise this labour precisely because it has been relegated to privacy. Not to glorify our survival, but to make visible the infrastructure that sustains life at the margins. The bedroom becomes monument, the home becomes altar—not because these spaces are sacred, but because they are where we conspire to stay alive.
The care we document is exhausting. It carries the weight of being each other‘s main safety net. We monumentalise it anyway. Not despite these complications, but through them.
WE PUBLICISE THE PRIVATE.
Bedroom furniture occupies gallery space as fact, not metaphor. As Kathi Weeks wrote, care has been privatised by the state, confined to households, erased from public record. We drag it into view. Most of us spend a lot of time in bed. These spaces where we sustain each other aren‘t separate from politics: they are the ground from which our politics emerge.
WE MAKE ART.
When marginalised artists depict daily life, critics often see documentation, not aesthetic choice. We reject this framework. Every element here is composed: the duvet selected, the altar arranged, the burlap wrapped with intention. We‘re not just archiving our lives; we‘re constructing form from the materials of survival.
The boundaries they police—high/low, art/life, form/document—dissolve in our hands. This work is simultaneously archive and aesthetic practice, memory and construction, documentary and speculation.
WE MONUMENTALISE WHAT CAPITALISM DISCARDS.
The DIY solutions, the informal networks, the rhythms that refuse productivity metrics. Our materials are deliberately imperfect. Flaws are our method. We monumentalise the makeshift because the makeshift has sustained us.
WE ACCUMULATE DIFFERENTLY.
We reclaim accumulation from capital‘s logic of extraction. Where they demand efficiency, we create density. Where they streamline, we layer. Our installation overflows—textiles, sounds, medical supplies, ten years of correspondence—because interdependent life resists minimalism. This isn‘t hoarding; it‘s how we build shared abundance against imposed scarcity.
WE REJECT YOUR ARCHIVES.
We write our own histories. The objects here are replicas from our lives; some captions document, others speculate. The correspondence is verbatim but hand-copied—we each rewrote our own letters alongside each other‘s, blurring the boundaries of authorship through collective transcription. Like Tatlin‘s monument, which exists most powerfully as an unrealised vision, any speculative aspects of the work articulate truths that conventional documentation cannot capture.
WE TAKE WHAT WE CAN.
We understand the difference between care as institutional rhetoric and care as material redistribution. The gallery offers us space; we use it tactically. This isn‘t revolutionary—we know political action requires more than occupying white cubes. It‘s one strategy among many.
THIS IS WHAT WE PRACTICE:
• Accumulation as shared abundance, not private wealth
• Care as foundation, not afterthought
• Interdependence as strategy, not symptom
• Survival as a collective practice, not individual achievement
WE ARE ALREADY BUILDING.
While the state debates our right to exist, we create the structures that sustain us. While they pathologize our needs, we meet them—imperfectly, but persistently. The networks hold. The correspondence continues. The altar accumulates. This installation is testimony.
***
There are parts of the house that are dimly lit. Others that have remained bright for as long as it has existed. The house wants to provide shelter for others and so makes sure to stock the correct supplies: bedding, a large dining table, a fully equipped kitchen, a playpen for children, a place for discussion, several nooks and crannies in which to gather. The house tries not to betray secrets: regardless of who they belong to. And so, it has buried some under the floor-boards, lodged others behind the sofa, painted a few into door frames and walls. It has many rooms and perhaps more importantly, many windows for looking outward. The house tries to keep its door open whenever possible, regulating temperature in order to invite others in. The interior is plush, designed for plurality and comfort. The house prides itself on being multifunctional but it is often haunted by what it has forgotten. In one room, an older woman waits patiently, looking out of the window smiling. In another, a group of friends laugh – quietly goading one another, gently pushing on each other’s sore spots. Upstairs in the nursery, a baby is being born, three doors to the left, a little girl can’t remember if she is allowed to leave her room. The house wants all of these disparate figures to meet but their different locations in time prevent this. Whenever the old woman hears the baby crying and leaves her room to find him, the sound drifts further and further along the corridor, she gives up from exhaustion before she can reach him. When the little girl gets the courage to leave the room, the old woman’s footsteps scare her back into the corner, she decides to keep playing for five more minutes. The baby can’t see past his own fingers, but the house takes care of him, makes sure he is fed and clothed and bathed, that he is stimulated, that he eats well. He has yet to be held by a human being. At any given time, the occupants of his sprawling house look outside – or at least upwards, beyond themselves. The house knows that they will find each other eventually, that they are connected by forces too powerful to name. Each person in the house only has to believe this for it to be true.
***
Dear Christie, Christine and Vera,
I can barely remember how we found ourselves here, where we got the audacity to provide ourselves with a framework for thinking out loud and working together. I’m so glad that we freed ourselves from the notion that the public development of artistic practice is gauche, that we humbled ourselves enough to think that we had something to learn through creating work and melding our practices. I know it has softened my own approach to writing, now I trust myself more that every piece of writing needn’t be the best, there is no competition. Since we started working and making together, many things have happened: we’ve lost two members, and that still stings, we’ve written and collaborated and fought, and dropped the ball and picked it up again, seen each other through relationship breakdowns, heartache, decisions we regretted, but our various projects have given us some way of understanding these processes as part of a creative whole. We have begun to understand and give voice to the true source of value: the work that we do for each other – in describing it, taking photos and videos, treating it as if it were a serious endeavour under capitalism, rather than merely a coincidence of friendship, we’ve revealed a structure and a strategy (at least in part) for thinking against the increasingly alienative tenants of the world. Vera, the piece on friendship by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie that you introduced to me reminded me that friendship is also a way to glimpse freedom because it involves relational invention. It’s true that I see us change and invent ourselves anew for each other almost monthly, we follow each other through fads and phases and obsessions. That relational invention feels like a promise: you can be nimble, changeable, fickle, I won’t hold you to it. It almost feels like the promise of accumulation: give me more, every version of yourself, I’ll gather it all and keep it safe for you.
Thinking through and with you about working, not working, and leeching of institutional resources these last five years has reminded me how much of my life is lost to forms of wage labour which are driven by precarity. Watching our manifesto video reminds me of how we have been encouraged to forget the thousands that were sacrificed to the ongoing global pandemic – what was for many of us, an opening, a chance to build the infrastructure we have now ran alongside death. So much of the world runs alongside death. The ability to really think, to sit deeply and ponder an idea or concept, to read and understand it fully, even to fully participate in the fruition of this project has been so difficult for me as of late. When I think of an “Accumulation of Care” I think of the plural routes that we sustain each other’s autonomy, the ways we labour to produce good will, humour, pleasure, what we lend to each other in times of need – money, a home, what we make for each other: a dress, a table cloth, and the way we meet basic needs without asking, “have you eaten?” “Come over for dinner?” Here are all of the most valuable things in my life and it is never cliche to admit this in a world that continues to be ravaged from the profit motive.
Christine, I was complaining to you about a person in one of my workshops, who in response to Huey P Newton’s assertion that culture alone will not liberate us, responded, from inside the imperial core that is actively annihilating the people of Palestine, that his ‘activism’ didn’t save him either. When I was ranting to you about it, I could see the ways you made space for me to call this interaction what it was: despicable, a dereliction of duty, all without judgement. I think I settled on this phrase, “Does she know what it means to dedicate your life to the liberation of black people, to be assassinated by the state because you pose such a threat to its governing order?” and you laughed and I remembered that you’ve known me for a decade and you understand exactly why that response disturbed me so much. I rarely stop to think about the work that has gone into the production of a relationship that feels so natural, as if it has always existed. In those moments, I think I understand what Marx’s mean about where value is located, I think of another quote by Sarah Marie Hall that I used in the same workshop. “One of the main ways in which components of social reproduction interconnect is as forms of labour. Thus, labour is a central concept but is often eclipsed by discussions of care. These are of course interrelated – care is labour, care is labouring.”
I could keep writing forever about these instances but I want to leave a space for someone else to pick up where I have left off.
Lola x
***
Dear Lola, Christie, Christine,
I arguably have the worst memory of us all, but I want to stay for a while with the question that you started with, Lola - how did we get here? I know we all indulge in fabricating different versions of our collective’s origin myth, but here I will abstain from a narrative account. What I can offer, though, is my thoughts on the why - why we came together, why labouring for each other doesn’t feel like work, and why all of this matters; or, to think through the terms in Lola’s letter, why all of this is so valuable.
One of my favourite homosexuals once said:
“As far back as I remember, to want guys [garcons] was to want relations with guys. That has always been important for me, not necessarily in the form of a couple but as a matter of existence: how is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences? What is it to be “naked” among men, outside of institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie? It’s a desire, an uneasiness, a desire-in-uneasiness that exists among a lot of people.”
His casual disinterest for lesbianism notwithstanding, our friend is right: queerness begins with friendship. To be a dyke, at least for me, is only very partially about my own romantic entanglements, and has much more to do with the fact that I feel qualified to give my unsolicited opinion about everyone else’s. My queerness, or my desire for queerness would have remained inchoate, had I not met you. We initiated each other into what we now could call a mode of life, a commitment to companionship, something we continuously reinvent and negotiate.
We had all known Estrangement before we met each other, some of us more familiar with her than others. As the years go by, I can better recognise her as the entremetteuse, her unyielding hand silently guiding us towards one another. The ungenerous will call our encounter the consolation prize, but I know that, in the end, we are the luckiest. We got a chance at co-creation, at crafting the preferential option for mutuality.
Amongst us, there has been uneasiness and then some. Touch isn’t always natural. We have all, in some way or another, participated in mediated conversations as a last-resort measure to salvage our relations from what in the moment felt like inextricable conflict between us or with others. We have repeatedly failed one another, and I know we often hurt alone. The doubts over the limits of empathy haven’t dissipated - there are certain pains we don’t trust each other with, yet. We have moulded conflict into the site of intimacy, yes, but not without definite strain. So how is it, then, that our friendships feel the most natural, like they have always existed? Why do we keep coming back if being in relation can be so hard?
Although we resent having our work be reduced to insipid reclamations of laziness, we can’t deny that we really hate work. Working is often associated, for me, with a state of dissociated stasis, or something that requires endless grumbling to render bearable (Lola, I’m thinking of your irritation with the man in the workshop). And yet, the work of friendship, which became the work of our collective through our decision to elevate relation to the status of the work of art, feels different. It is a type of labour of mutual reproduction that isn’t tied to feminine abjection, conditional belonging or the profit motive. Labouring for one another isn’t necessarily easier; the crucial difference is that I want to do it.
Why do we need the words ‘labour’ and ‘work’ to refer to areas of human activity, when we already have ‘effort’, ‘application’, ‘dedication’, ‘survival’, ‘reproduction’, ‘care’, ‘creation’, ‘art’? If I had more time or energy I’d go down an etymological rabbit hole, as I suspect that at some point we’d end up talking about the Latin or Greek word for torture and how it leads us to the current semantic tools at our disposal. The point being, ‘labour’ and ‘work’ serve to designate that which is done under conditions of alienation. Our relationships are flawed, we make art because we need money; in other words, we work. The great promise of our collective, however, is that we work to reduce that space separating us from our selves and each other. Together we ask ourselves: what does it mean to live an unalienated life? I know that, for some moments, we go beyond the rehearsal of non-estrangement and delight in the pleasures of the communal.
The work of creating this installation began long before we even knew about the existence of this gallery. Do you remember? It was in the years of death (the ongoing global pandemic, yes), and two of us got very sick. I became consumed by the fear of your loss, of the end of our lives as we knew it. Death, as I waited for her, taught me not only how to live with ghosts, but to fight for them. Did you know I was almost named Clara after our comrade Zetkin? Nothing we’re attempting here is particularly original. The person who named me and the person who I was almost named after both struggled in their own way for a cause not too different to ours. History is what hurts, and I’ve inherited a peculiar blend of conviction and ambivalence. Here, then, is the value of having a bestie: it is a strategy for building political determination, for re-enchanting the project of collectivity.
I’ll end with these lines by the EZLN:
“Facing the mountain we speak with our dead so that they will reveal to us in their word the path down which our veiled faces should turn. The drums rang out and in the voice of the earth our pain spoke and our history spoke. “For everyone, everything,” say our dead. Until it is so, there will be nothing for us.”
With love,
Vera
***
A Note on Value and Accumulation:
The importance of defining our terms moves us away from the ‘International Art English’ (as identified by Alix Rule and David Levine) that is commonly found in the press releases of exhibitions. For us, this note is also an invitation for us to think about if we mean what we say we mean. When we argue for a different kind of accumulation against the for-profit drivers of the present, an accumulation of caring and care practices, is such a thing actually possible?
What do we know? We start from a Marxist position that holds that all external objects have both use-values and exchange values, and that capital’s transformation of objects, the product of human labour, into commodities for exchange obscures not only the labour that produces them but assigns to them a new value derived from exploitative processes of production. The truest source of value is labour: which reproduces the worker, the world and the objects which become commodities. Value is one way to think through a number of consequences of the capitalist mode of production, namely how the production of commodities and their ‘exchange values’ are merely definite quantities of congealed labour time. Our critique of the wage relation begins from an understanding that we do not strive for the cessation of labour in its entirety but rather the cessation of exploitative labour – we want to labour for each other, to produce external objects which fulfil our human needs without the requirement to buy and sell these objects.
We are inclined to believe that such a thing is possible because we note the ways that, through our friendship, we sustain each other emotionally, politically and materially against the for-profit motive. Our work, ‘An Accumulation of Care’ scales up our belief. If capital’s circulation maintains a death grip on the world’s resources, can our inscrutable labour hijack the notion of accumulation and misdirect it towards abundance? Can we labour again in a different way and is this one part of a multi-pronged strategy necessary to meet the urgent demands of the present? Against maldistribution, how is the claiming of so called ‘unproductive labour,’ useful in the creation of environments of freedom and communalism? We have created a monument to this kind of slow labour: we have amassed our things, in order to give form to the caring labour that helps us fend off our own alienation.
In Capital Volume One, Marx writes, ‘the less the productivity of labour, the greater the labourtime necessary to produce an article, and the greater its value.’ In a world where technological advancement, worker’s skill and the social organisation of processes of production are at an alltime high, objects which require increased labour time are of greater value because they bypass capitalist’s mode of production’s greatest imperative: efficiency. The laborious, labour-intensive processes of being with one another through modes of social relation which cannot be quantified. They do not neatly produce an object for sale and are therefore invaluable. It is because friendship requires greater labour-time that it is both beautiful and necessary. We recognise how we labour for one another outside of the rules of commodity exchange: the time spent thinking, writing, talking, wandering the earth, organising our lives around one another provides another model for locating value. Sophie Lewis writes that to love someone is to struggle for their autonomy and immersion in care as much as such a thing is possible in a world choked by capital – here “care” is positioned as an infrastructural set of ethical relations that refuses the stratification of labour and processes of exploitation inherent to capitalism’s operation.
When Marx argues that the accumulation of capital is the excessive attainment of wealth in the form of commodities, we hear this argument and know with our bodies that this process relies on the fundamental disregard for human life. The profit motive does not care how and on whose backs the wealth is created – it does not care about the cages, financial institutions, weapons manufacturers and fossil fuel companies through which it flows – this disregard results in an environment in which death is not even regarded as an unfortunate consequence of wealth creation but instead a necessary and just one. ‘An Accumulation of Care’ proposes as with revolutionary historical processes across history, as with the world historical axis that shifts through resistance in Palestine, in Sudan and in Kashmir, that the drive for accumulation can be transformed, that we can reject wealth in the form of commodities in favour of resource distribution, council planning, collective ownership, love, friendship, comradeship; kinship, anti-colonial struggle and the generation of social forms and ethics which sustain life rather than extinguish it. We have created a monument that understands, like Diane Di Prima, that we must behave as if we can have what we ask for and therefore we must ask for everything.
***
They’ve made the garden very beautiful and sometimes, the simplest words to describe a thing are enough. When they first moved in, it had the sad look of neglected greenery, speckled with bits of glass. Patches of grass had hardened from lack of watering. The landlord plastered over the problem and when they pull up the fake grass cover, they discover the extent of the damage. This is when it starts. They envisage what is not yet there but will be there when they have enough time and the conditions are ripe for optimal growth. Believe it or not, they’ve made the soil beautiful with water, trips to the garden centre, with jackets, boots and seeds in the rain and a careful plan for what they will grow and every possible way the flowers could bloom. They’ve made it beautiful with time and patience and periods where they had to abandon their plans for the garden because more pressing issues demanded attention. The garden is a rescue mission.
//
This text written by Bare Minimum Collective is accompanying their installation An Accumulation of Care in the exhibition Accumulation – On Collecting, Growth and Excess at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich.
