Grounded in acts of care and empathy, this free workshop will ask participants to consider how we speak and feel about the body in states of debility through a series of partnered communication exercises.

Organized by curator and Sick Time with Canaries member Taraneh Fazeli, “Calling in Sick” is co-presented by WOUND and Refuge in the Means, a residency project in the form of a care center by the Canaries collective at Recess Art during the months of September and October. Participants in "Calling in Sick" will be invited to move through a consideration of the temporal shape of care in exercises, actions, and discussions that will prompt participants to consider the language we tend to use around illness in various contexts (personal, professional, and all the spaces in between). Asked to recollect experiences of "calling in sick" (and how you may have felt care in that moment), workshop participants will address how we do or do not feel comfortable addressing the social reproduction of our lives in work and "public" contexts.

Drawing from dialogic exercises structured to explore social group identity, artworks such as Dennis Oppenheim’s Two Way Transfer Drawing and Jesse Cohen’s I is Another, as well as excerpts from illness memoirs and open letters to various communities, “Calling in Sick” will address what has become chronic through haptic encounters that invite intimacy. By doing do so, we will work towards building a new language around bodily impairment that does not see illness as the private property of one individual but a collective concern, and find ways to support each other as existence under capitalism becomes impossible.

This workshop is free, but reservations are required.