Presented as part of “Constantina Zavitsanos: THIS COULD BE US,” a project of the R&D Season: SPECULATION.

Constantina Zavitsanos’s residency “THIS COULD BE US” includes a series of research-driven programs organized around speculative concepts of planning, contingency, and care. Not only is care one of the primary sources of surplus value within capitalism, as feminists have argued, it is also critical to social organization.

“Vanitas, a rehearsal,” organized with Park McArthur, explores questions of debt and dependency in order to think more complexly about decay, cyclical relay, “premature aging,” persistent immaturity, and other issues of development. In this and other iterations of Zavitsanos’s work, the sociality of what it is to “live labor” will be considered. “Still Life, a workshop” on March 26 is a companion program with McArthur in the form of a small group workshop.

McArthur and Zavitsanos will share a correspondence of scores, sounds, and simple actions with an audience. This is an open, in-progress rehearsal; a discussion with the audience will follow. This session is a precursor to public programming as part of Arika’s Episode 7: We Can’t Live Without Our Lives at the Tramway in Glasgow, April 15–19, 2015.

Constantina Zavitsanos
Constantina Zavitsanos is an artist who works with sculpture, performance, text, and sound. Her work deals with issues of debt and dependency, and investigates how intimate economies and fugitive relations might transform processes of distribution and exchange. Zavitsanos attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and has exhibited works at Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; Hessel Museum of Art, CSS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and MoMa P.S.1, Long Island City. She will participate in Arika Episode 7 in Glasgow, Scotland, this spring. Her essay and performance scores, “Other Forms of Conviviality,” written with Park McArthur, were published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Zavitsanos lives in New York and teaches at the New School.

Park McArthur
Park McArthur is an artist living and working in New York. Her most recent exhibitions took place at Essex Street, New York; Yale Union, Portland, OR; and Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Her writing, which focuses on dependency, autonomy, and care, has been published in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory with Constantina Zavitsanos and the _Happy HypocriteWomen & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Her first book-length project, Beverly Buchanan, 1978–1981—coedited with Jennifer Burris and published by Athénée Press—considers the work of Beverly Buchanan and comes out in March 2015. She is a 2015 Wynn Newhouse Award recipient.