‘Caring for Images, Looking at Care’ – Exploring Images of Care
How do we see, document, and respectfully represent acts of care that tend to be made invisible, despite their central role in the maintenance of healthy social relations, and indeed of society at large? This workshop proposes to explore the space of care, a space centrally related to human vulnerability and dependence, and to focus on the intersection of care in its broadest sense with “images, vision and visuality” (Pieta and Sokolovsky 2021). Inspired by the work of and framed around a conversation with Barbara Pieta and Paolo Favero, the two founders of the ‘Images of Care Collective’, this workshop is an invitation to think collectively about how multimodality — whether photographs, film, or other audiovisual media — can help us access, document, and understand acts of care that are often overlooked. How can multimodal approaches challenge existing representations of care and help us reimagine the ways we engage with vulnerability and power in care relations?
This targeted, hands-on workshop will engage with selected early-career researchers’ work on care and help them develop their projects. If you have a project (concluded or ongoing) that addresses (some of) the questions raised above, we would love to read more about it! To join us for the workshop, hand in your proposal through the application form. This is a great opportunity to share your thoughts and experiences and get constructive feedback from experts and peers.
Workshop Highlights
- Explore the realm of care by exchanging with the founders of the ‘Images of Care Collective’, Barbara Pieta, Martina Laganà and Paolo Favero, with peers and an interested public.
- Keynote lecture by Barbara Pieta, Paolo Favero and Martina Laganà
- Panel contributions by büro spatzig collective, Volha Verbilovich, Akemi Matsumura and Annebel Huijboom
- Open to all: Whether you’re working on film, multimedia, or cross-disciplinary projects, all creators are welcome.
Details
- Workshop Details:
- 09:30-10:45 Keynote
- 10:45-11:15 Coffee Break
- 11:15-12:45 Workshop Session I: Experiments in Care and Vision
- 12:45-14:30 Lunch
- 14:30-17:00 Workshop Session II: Conversations on Images of Care
- Location: Regard Bleu Ethnographic Film Festival, Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Pelikanstrasse 40, 8001 Zurich
- Cost: Free (donations welcomed to support our non-profit festival!)
- Language: English
- Limited space: the workshop is open to the public (no registration necessary), space is limited, first come first served
Workshop organized by Olivia Killias and Saada Elabed, in collaboration with Barbara Pieta, Martina Laganà and Paolo Favero.
About the Instructors
Barbara Pieta
Barbara Pieta is a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a co-founder of the Images of Care Collective. During fieldwork with older adults living with dementia in northeast Italy, she explored how in this context care and visuality mutually constitute each through a vast range of practices and across manifold distinct communities of “lookers”. She has since worked to foster a sustained and attentive dialogue between so far surprisingly mutually disengaged crowds: anthropologists of care and visual anthropologists. This commitment led her to serve as a co-editor of the AnthroVision Journal’s special issue on care and the coordinator of the inaugural edition of the EASA’s AVA Award (Ageing and Visual Anthropology Award). Through her publications, she has argued for the recognition of care as an intrinsic quality of different ways of looking (Pieta 2021 and 2024). She also co-founded Ethics Lab which unites ethnographers working with older adults and committed to transforming ways of “doing ethics” in ethnographic dementia research.
Martina Laganà
Martina Laganà has held a research scholarship in Applied Anthropology at Eastern Piedmont University since 2021. Her research primarily focuses on the development and implementation of care programs for older adults within assisted living facilities in Northern Italy. Specifically, her fieldwork investigates the role of material environments in shaping residents’ well-being and explores how arts and cultural initiatives can foster the deinstitutionalization of care settings. Her research interests extend to the application of participatory and arts-based methodologies to enhance both participant and audience engagement. She became a member of the “Images of Care Collective” to explore the connections between visuality and care in the context of institutional care.
Paolo Favero (Images of Care Collective)
Paolo SH Favero is an image-making visual anthropologist with an interest in the meaning of images in human life. Paolo’s decades-long insistence on the generativity and interactivity of imagistic practices underlined his previous work on (among others) x-ray imagery, shadows as well as visual culture of death in India and beyond. More recently, it has also led to his co-founding of the Images of Care Collective as well as his advocating for the “look” as a medium for studying the visual field (Favero and Lehmuskallio 2025) Professor in Visual Anthropology and Cultures at the University of Antwerp, and for many years co-convenor of the EASA’s Visual Anthropology Network, he is specialised on emerging technologies, visual and sensory ethnography, arts-based methods and existential anthropology. Paolo is also the author of four single-authored books: “ImageMaking-India” (Routledge, 2020), “The Present Image”(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), “Dentro e Oltre l’Immagine” (Meltemi 2017), “India Dreams” (Stockholm Univ. Press 2005).