Angela Beallor

A DRAWING OUT: VISIBILIZING THE LABOR OF CARE, ENACTING MUTUAL AID

Abstract 

Focusing on her collaborative performance project, A Drawing Out :: Lactic Orchestration, first staged in 2018, Angela Beallor reflects upon the multiple layers of labor made visible in the inspiration for the piece: an early unattributed Soviet-era photograph depicting a group of twenty people pumping breastmilk together. This exploration develops a connection between material production and labor, represented in the photograph and enacted through performance, to contemporary mutual aid caretaking networks.

Angela Garbes, among others, has written a compelling intersectional call for valuing the essential labor of care work within the context of the current global pandemic. The term “essential labor” has become common parlance to describe labor that is often the site of caregiving without care given to the workers risking their lives during the crisis of Covid-19 (recall hospital workers dressed in garbage bags due to a lack of proper PPE). If labor is essential to the “critical infrastructure operations, " it should be valued, honored, and respected. In addition, the unpaid care work carried out in our homes, for dependent children, those living with illness, and our aged community members-- should also, as Garbes writes, be a part of this valued essential work.

This essay explores the proposals and policies for radical caretaking labor reform drafted by Soviet theorist and policymaker Aleksandra Kollontai during the Soviet 1920s. Situated between historical and political analysis, Beallor meditates on the potential of both depiction and enaction, in artistic production and collaborative performance, to help pre-figure mutual aid, collaboration, community organization, and caretaking in the current world—as we struggle to upend the current capitalist and patriarchal status quo(s).