The Future of Care:
In Conversation with Camille Sapara Barton and Lou Drago

Camille Sapara Barton & Lou Dragon during FIBER 2024. Photo credits: Léa Shamaa.

During FIBER 2024, I had the privilege of interviewing Camille Sapara Barton and Lou Drago. Both artists attend to these violences that hide in the body and mind by urging for new and old conceptions of health and healing. Their artistic practices are directed at the creation of communal, shared experiences that respond to the current precarity of care. They gracefully demonstrate the potential of art making to re-shape imaginaries and to actualise alternative theories and conceptions of care in the present. 

Camille Sapara Barton is an artist, writer and somatic practitioner based in Amsterdam. They focus on addressing and subverting the Western misconception surrounding grief, and strive to create spaces for embodied ethics. Both efforts intentionally and inevitably, represent alternative and radical forms of care. According to Sapara Barton, grief work is crucial for enacting what they call liveable futures, “futures that are going to support the web of life, support as many beings as possible to thrive and to live in an abundant and nourishing way.”[4] In this context, they address our current aversion to grief as symptomatic of the industrialisation, the mechanisation of the human body. The detachment from grief that is demanded from the body and the individual by the power structures that control both results in the acute isolation of people who find themselves in mourning, consciously or unconsciously. 

Borrowing from the Dagara perspective on death, their new book Tending Grief observes this phenomenon with a focus on grief that falls outside of the definition that is given, allowed, of it in the West[5]. While we generally think of grief as the pain that accompanies the loss of an individual, and as something that itself affects discrete persons, Sapara Barton calls to attention forms of collective, trans-generational wounds that generate underrepresented, unaddressed emotional and physical violence. The turmoil caused by these wounds lingers in the mind and body of individuals and collectives in much the same ways as what the West defines as grief, but is rarely addressed as such. 

The very nature of our times seem to generate anxieties in both individuals and collectives. We often associate grief with the loss of a person or persons, yet we can also grieve “the death of our dreams, the death of our ecology. Grieving futures, grieving pasts that we’ve never known6.” Lou Drago is an artist and researcher based in Berlin. Their work investigates the connections between the healing potential of sound, queer feminisms, and meditative collective practices. They too identify grief as a plural and complex consequence of precarity maintained by capitalist structures. Like Sapara Barton, they believe that creating space to feel and recognise this grief is essential to creating new networks of care. In turn, these networks of care are necessary for producing social change, the kind that might re-imagine the value of human beings not according to labor or profit. The kind that might emphasise the intrinsic right of all to access vital necessities, which allows the value of personal aspiration and interpersonal connection to emerge from the contraption of precarity. 

Identifying and tending to this grief is decidedly a non-profitable form of care in as far as it does not maximize instantaneous physical productivity. And so it must operate outside of established distributions of care — either in private organizations, for a price, or in the remaining non-productive spaces. Sapara Barton and Drago rely on spaces dedicated to art, music, nightlife and their hybrids to enact this care as embodied artistic practice. In 2018, Sapara Barton debuted the SanQtuary at Shambala Festival in the UK, a venue dedicated to providing a safe(r) space for the queer attendees of the festival. The SanQtuary hosted DJ sets and performances as well as workshops and activities that focused on harm reduction, specifically in the context of queer nightlife. 

According to Sapara Barton, clubs in particular, as non-productive spaces, can become “a catch-all for many different ways of relating. (...) I think there are many people who consciously or unconsciously are using these spaces to grieve. To grieve and to move through discomfort, because there aren't any other containers really. (...) But if people aren't aware of it, it can create some challenging dynamics.” In order to address the often overwhelming combination of this grieving and the increased availability of substances in these spaces, their projects such as the SanQtuary but also Emergent Bass in Berlin, sought to foster the accessibility of resources for dealing with whatever people bring with them to the dance floor. Emergent Bass is an event series centred on dance and music that simultaneously aims to provide theoretical and material resources to its audience. They address the healing potential of sound and movement as well as the importance of the Afro-diasporic influence on House, Techno, and Bass music, the now-staples of Berlin’s underground club culture. Cultural erasure can be at the root of concealed grieving. Through education, intentional and collective movement Emergent Bass offers an entry point into that grief. 

Similarly, Drago uses sound to create spaces in which people can tune into concealed tension in the body. Together with their collaborator marum, they host live sonic seances under the name of infinity rug. In a variety of venues across Europe, from disused power stations to clubs, boats or galleries, they aim to center a collective experience extended over entire nights, with musical offerings punctuated by performances and readings, accompanied by sharing of food, textiles, and scents. Currently they are “exploring different bass frequencies and trying to explore where they are each felt in the body, which is very useful for dispersing, moving or shifting energy blockages — allowing energy to flow around the body differently.”[8] They want to experiment with the uses of techno and ambient tracks, to activate the whole body through dance to be able to receive the very subtle frequencies of ambient and drone music. According to Drago, “within the realms of psycho-somatic ailments, [...] sound can be an extremely powerful tool.”[9] 

Drago and marum have also premiered a non-verbal edition of infinity rug, Sound as Touch, in which attendees were invited to explore what emerges when refraining from communicating with the voice. For Drago, alleviating the pressure to speak during times of coming-together can be an alternative but extremely powerful way to relate to one another, to listen to the body of the individual and the body of the collective. Attending to grief through artistic practices rooted in care can be an alternative remedy to the current individualism and ableism of care structures. 

Ultimately, these works provide accessibility to resources in order to offer an agency, a literacy of care. Both artists rely on embodied ethics in their practices. According to Sapara Barton, “many practitioners will have ethical codes that they identify with, but there's often a big gap between what's written down and what's practised.”[10] For both Sapara Barton and Drago, the embodiment of their values and research in their respective artistic practice is crucial in regards to meaning making but also an end in itself. Their work exists through and at the service of actualising their hopes for socio-cultural change with regards to care. 

Drago’s radio show t r a n s i e n c e on Cashmere Radio offers an antidote for the anxieties and pressing questions created by the turbulence and uncertainty of the current times. Bi-monthly, they invite artists to create a musical landscape to soothe anxieties, address existential questions and imagine alternative realities with the possibilities of change and relief. Mixes curated by the host and guest merge to create a liminal space in order to externalise the unaddressed fears and grieving that “ends up getting stuck in the body.”[11] The medium is perhaps the most important part of the project—the radio dispatch. Anybody with access to an internet connection can benefit from this resource in real time or in retrospect. 

In 2022, Sapara Barton launched the GEN Grief Toolkit in collaboration with Global Environments Network. In this Toolkit, they compiled research into non-Western practices of tending grief: why they are necessary, how they can alleviate individual and collective pain, and a set of guidelines on how to practice these rituals, alone or in a group, with a related bibliography[12]. This toolkit is also accessible online for free as an interpersonal and educational tool. Resources of this nature are indispensable but often exploited for profit. Sapara Barton emphasized in a disclaimer to this toolkit as well as during our correspondence that proper citation of this toolkit and their work at large is an invaluable form of care “which is often absent in the art world.” Under the conditions of an extremely individualistic, monolithic art market, non-transactional interactions and collective practices are actively discouraged. In this context, resource sharing is also an act of care. So is engaging in creative processes that reject the supremacy of ownership and the author. Proper citation and crediting practices also fall under this effort: the creation and use of these resources aims to emphasise the shared authorship of social work but also the right to recognition of this work.