Cuidado Circular

Tumbleweed – Valentina Monari and Rebecca Sforzani 

2021 – ongoing
participative actions and performances

Cuidado Circular is an ongoing project that focuses on the concept of care. It was born in 2021 during the online art residency Incorporare organized by Artemisia Collective in the frame of Black Brazil Art Bienal, in which a group of 10 women artists met twice a week during one month to share practices and ideas.

In this context, as participants, we decided to work on a common need with the help of the group: in the frenzy of everyday life we would like to exercise our right to reclaim our time: doing nothing, stopping overthinking. We met for individual interviews asking each woman a way to reconnect and take care of herself.

After collecting the personal practices of this group of women (meditation, walks in the nature, drawing, food…) we spent a week in an isolated place to try these actions and familiarize ourselves with them. We took time and space to create a ritual that is a tribute to “liberated” time: from work, from production, from relationships, from external judgment and from self-judgment, from housework, from social obligations.

After the reappropriation of these gestures, we started the second phase of the project, involving a larger community in a circular process: each participant experience a ritual created from the actions collected by the previous group and proposes, at the end of the action, a personal way of self-care as a gift to the next group.

With each group we walk together for approximately 3 hours experiencing the practices suggested by the previous one. Each stop begins by reading a sentence which will lead us into a symbolic action. 

Cuidado Circular is an evolving and ever-changing project, it involves a group of women or people who identify with the female gender. This choice stems from the desire to generate sorority practices through the language of art.

The path is defined in relation to the place where the action is carried out, enhancing the uniqueness of each context. It mostly took place in areas characterized by the presence of nature to enhance moments of collective meditation and the active contemplation of a landscape, but we are also interested in the re-discovery of the city.

Until now the performance was held at Monte Sole, Bologna, during Radici Festival (June 2022), at the Alas de Lunas festival in the Galapagos Islands (December 2022), in the cities of Cuenca and Tena, Ecuador, (December 2022) and Barcelona, Tudanzas Festival (May 2023)

We are now looking for new groups to take part in the participative action. We believe that it will be very enriching working with different groups creating an interchange inside (and outside) the hosting community.