Promiscuous Infrastructures: Practicing Care

Promiscuous Infrastructures brings together more than twenty contributors—art and social practitioners, researchers, and educators—who have been researching and writing about caring infrastructures and promiscuous care for the past several years. This interdisciplinary publication comprises essays, visual schematics and scores, personal letters, recipes, and conversations, which emerge from the work of the Promiscuous Care Study Group, situated around the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Promiscuous Infrastructures calls for an ethics of care and attentiveness to one another within and beyond the shared context of a structurally dispassionate institution that requires innovation, expediency, and accountable results. The promiscuity it explores is defined by a collective refusal of efficiency, and favors generosity, care, love, and attention. Together, the group and their interlocutors address themes ranging from institutional change, communal responsibility and accountability practices, mental health and collective care, hospitality and hosting, soil, counter-histories, intergenerational learning, joy and collective grief and the poetics of imagining otherwise.