What does care leave behind?

Not monuments. Not declarations. More often: a body held, a seed saved, a gesture repeated so many times it becomes invisible. Care operates below the threshold of the archivable, and yet these six artists insist on finding its traces, in textiles and toys, in mythology and protest, in the cosmological and the domestic.

care // archives opens with a question our open call posed plainly: what gets archived through care — and what doesn't? The works gathered here push that question further, asking who performs care, for whom, at what cost — and whether the archive itself can ever be neutral.

Rest as a Political Act

David Horgan's Rest as Resistance announces its terms immediately: painted in bold red letters across the bottom of the canvas, the title is a declaration. Inspired by Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance, the painting stages a woman reclining — reading, unhurried, a martini glass nearby — surrounded by a vocabulary of symbols that feel simultaneously personal and mythic. There is something deliberately unserious about the scene, and that is precisely the point. Rest, Horgan argues, is not the absence of care but one of its most radical expressions: caring for oneself against the grain of a culture that demands perpetual productivity.

The painting's visual language is loose, expressive, almost naïve — and this too reads as a refusal. Against the polished surfaces of aspirational imagery, Horgan offers something handmade, immediate, proudly unfinished. The work archives the permission to stop.

The Labor Encoded in Thread

Monica C. Locascio's Because you are part of their memory and you are going to disappear is perhaps the exhibition's most quietly devastating work. Crocheted from salvaged cotton yarn — ideally from the collections of deceased individuals — and set against antique fabric from a former partner's grandmother's attic, the piece presents a soft, organic form that reads simultaneously as lung, placenta, and lichen. It is beautiful in the way that living systems are beautiful: intricate, asymmetrical, persistently alive.

The work emerges from Locascio's research into epigenetics, endosymbiotic evolution, and reproductive labor, and was made during pregnancy and early motherhood. It asks what gets passed down — not just biologically, but through the accumulated weight of domestic expectation, the unspoken scripts of gender that are woven into the very fabric of care. The salvaged materials carry their own histories: someone held this cord, used this cloth, lived and died. Locascio transforms that residue into something that thinks about inheritance from the inside.

Care Beyond the Human

Alexandra Masmanidi's untitled photograph collapses the boundary between the maternal and the botanical with startling precision. A figure holds a newborn against bare skin; where a face should be, enormous white flowers bloom outward. A Caladium leaf wraps the body like a garment, or a second skin. The image is shot on film, in a garden, with the casual intimacy of someone who has been here before.

The facelessness is not absence; it is a kind of expansion. By replacing the human face with a flower, Masmanidi suggests that the act of holding a child is not exclusively human, that care belongs to a longer biological continuum. The figure becomes something between mother, plant, and ecosystem. What is being archived here is not a specific face, but a gesture: the curve of an arm around a small body, the offering of warmth.

Collective Care as Cosmology

Ana Tamayo's work operates at the intersection of feminist science fiction, decolonial ecology, and collective ritual. Part of her ongoing Constellation Queer project, the image places three figures around a luminous abundance of fruit against a starfield: an imagined community practicing food sovereignty, seed sovereignty, and mutual healing. Words scatter across the surface like annotations: autonomías alimentarias vivas, semillas vivas, chagra milpa, tierra fértil.

The work emerges from Tamayo's laboratory Pelvica Plantae — a space of dance ritual, medicinal plants, and collective performance photography activated across Colombia, France, and beyond. Care here is not private or individualised but communal and cosmological: a practice of survival that reaches back to ancestral knowledge and forward into queer utopian possibility. The archive Tamayo builds is not documentary but speculative — a record of a world that does not yet fully exist, tended into being through repetition and imagination.

Grief and Tenderness Across Species

Jeanne Jalandoni's The Call is a painting that holds grief like a body holds breath. A minotaur-like figure — Jalandoni's own invented mythology — sits cradling a rooster in its arms, with another chicken resting nearby. The setting is lush and twilit, the colors bruised and tender. The composition borrows from Fernando Amorsolo's 1933 sketch Reading a Letter, and carries the same quality of longing: someone waiting, someone already gone.

The roosters reference her mother's childhood stories of her lolo's farm in the Philippines — and the Ilocano ritual of sacrificing a rooster to guide a spirit into the afterlife. The painting holds these losses together: the personal grief of losing a loved one, the yearning for ancestral homeland, the psychological labor of navigating cultural hybridity. Care here is enacted across species and beyond death, in mourning rituals that are also acts of accompaniment. Jalandoni's use of handmade textiles alongside paint embodies this duality: two traditions merging into one material act of tending.

Memory as Toy, Archive as Play

Catatte Tapia's Pizarritas / Magic Slate is the collection's most formally precise intervention. Three painted images — fragments of domestic, childhood scenes — are mounted inside the frames of magic slates, those old erasable drawing toys designed to capture and immediately release. The slates are meant to forget. Tapia uses them to remember.

The tension is deliberate: a latent memory that is difficult to forget, she writes, housed inside a material that is designed not to hold. The magic slate becomes a figure for care's archival problem — the way so much of what is tended quietly, received privately, endured daily, slips through the systems designed to document it. By fixing her images inside these frames, Tapia stages an act of resistance: making the erasable permanent, insisting on the record.

What Care Archives

What these six works share is not a unified theory of care but a shared insistence on its complexity. Care appears here as resistance and exhaustion, as inherited labor and chosen kinship, as ritual mourning and political rest, as the slow crocheting of a placenta and the cosmic gathering of seeds. None of these works sentimentalises it. All of them take it seriously.

What gets archived through care? These artists suggest: the body's memory of being held. The thread of a practice passed down through generations. The permission to stop. The grief of accompaniment. The dream of a world organised around tending rather than extraction.

And what doesn't get archived? Perhaps that is where the work begins — in the gestures too small, too repetitive, too communal to register. These six artists are making the case that those gestures are the archive. That care, in all its quietness and all its tension, is exactly what is worth keeping.

Featured artists: David Horgan, Monica C. Locascio, Alexandra Masmanidi, Ana Tamayo, Jeanne Jalandoni, Catatte Tapia