Archives, Care, and Feminist Infrastructures

Archives, Care, and Feminist Infrastructures

A conversation with feminist researcher Tania Rispoli

moderated by Agáta Marzec

This session reflects on artistic practices that use archival images as more than aesthetic objects, attending to the histories, subjects, exclusions, and material conditions implicated within them. By making ethical questions arising from archival content, context, and materiality part of creative work, these practices may be seen as developing an aesthetics of care.

Yet what is at stake in naming such work as care? The term often remains tied to human relations and damage-oriented interventions. Given the societal devaluation of care, this framing may inadvertently assign artists responsibility for cleaning up oppressive histories. Ecologically oriented projects further complicate human-centred understandings of care by engaging with more-than-human contexts and the techno-ecological conditions of photography. These hesitations ask for an expanded framework capable of recognising the complex, structural ways such projects enact care, beyond claiming to be caring or illustrating issues that need intervention.

This session invites feminist researcher Tania Rispoli to unpack the relationship between archives and care through her concept of feminist infrastructures. Her work reframes care from a purely restorative ideal to its material and organisational conditions, holding together the tension between regenerative practices of sustaining relations and the conflictual work of questioning the inequalities that structure them.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

TANIA RISPOLI

Tania Rispoli is currently non-tenure track faculty in Italian and the co-director of the international and interdisciplinary network Revaluing Care in the Global Economy.  Her manuscript, The Politics of Care: Feminist Infrastructures of Love and Labor, develops her doctoral research on the politics of care across posthumanism and Marxist feminism. Working across feminist political theory, literature, and film studies, she examines care through processes of embodiment and disembodiment, regeneration and conflict, love and labor. Her scholarship has appeared in Feminist Studies, Philosophy and Public Issues, Studi sulla Questione Criminale, and Annali d’Italianistica. She has also translated into Italian works by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson.

AGÁTA MARZEC

Agáta Marzec is an interdisciplinary researcher working across ecology, photography, and media. Her practice connects environmental science, artistic research, and pedagogy to explore how environments, knowledge, and situated relations shape one another. She co-develops the Towards Atmospheric Care project and is an associate lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she teaches On the Commons and Ecology in the Expanded Field.

Image credit: Black-and-white photographic print, undated; rephotographed by Agáta Marzec, 2026