practicing family

'reformulating responsibility as collective effort and form of care within family structures and beyond as social practice that doesn’t maintain status quo again and again but cares for continuous and sustainable (re)production of sociality and solidarity'

Is located around family as fundamental relation most of us share in context-specific and individual forms. Going beyond idealized notions of *perfect families* and the idea of one generative family – often a patriarchal and heteronormative institution, built to reproduce and maintain the status quo – leaving the atomic family of “western” contexts behind, individualized in privatized isolation, Practicing family wants to understand family as first place where we learn about the world and thus a collection of knowledges coming from histories, individual and collective experiences, cultural practices ... how can this knowledge become a more conscious part of living life in the present? How can it become something else than avoiding problematic parts of one’s history leading to passiveness, called “neutrality”? But activating for mutual accountability, a practice, conscious about historical heritage?

The project wants to look at family practice as transformative, ongoing process, as a counter practice against the nation state, through which logics of whiteness as lifestyle in which the ones who produce tons of waste are not the ones to take care of that waste (and that work is being outsourced along the separation lines of race, class and gender), are being legitimized and naturalized.

What is family?

(incomplete list)

A group of people A social norm Blood Chosen Belonging, love, care, safety, unconditionality, … Avoidance, pain, trauma, guilt, violence, … To be continued, promising a permanence A (legal) institution reproducing the status quo – patriarchal, heteronormative, atomic individualized, isolated in private households, “non-political” Community, collectivity, There is no generative family To be abolished? Knowledge, practice, basic relationship amongst individuals or people or bodies, social relation A counter practice against the nation-state_ an ongoing transformative process A space for each other, held by each other Openness, honesty, solidarity Kinship, sharing, critique, growing, questioning, exploring