Care Pavilion at London Design Biennale 2023

June 1–25, 2023

The London Design Biennale’s Care Pavilion will be located at Somerset House from June 1–25, 2023. Song Tao will be in charge of directing and Naiyi Wang will be in charge of curating the pavilion’s “CARE” theme.

Despite being all around us, care is in a severe crisis. Since the worldwide pandemic entered its “state of exception” in 2020, the word “CARE” has acquired a highly severe meaning. We can observe how concerns about “caring for,” “caring about,” and “caring with” manifest themselves in a variety of contexts. Although there has been “a discursive explosion of concern,” we have hardly put it into action. In order to respond to these perennial yet urgent issues of care, we must consider care in all of its complexities and consider it for both humans and nonhumans.

In order to re-imagine the politics and ethics of care, the Care Pavilion at the London Design Biennale will solicit responses from interdisciplinary designers, activists, scholars, healers, and cultural practitioners from all around the world. The Biennale will feature newly commissioned pieces, as well as a magazine, a documentary, and a number of meetings in conjunction with the exhibition. This comprises more than 50 participants’ comments on how caring is intertwined with their creative processes and how they care under unstable and risky circumstances.

The Care Pavilion manifests through the Care manifesto, Care publication, Care documentary, Collective-care initiatives and Care-full practices, where care—in all its complexities—will be re-imagined and re-collectivised through an intersectional perspective. The Care Pavilion is organized by its Director Song Tao and Curator Naiyi Wang, with Siwei Li (Exhibition Manager), Zhou You—Founder of Updated Studio (Exhibition Design) and Ye Qian—Founder of openAstudio (Visual Design). Our team aims to emphasize the necessity of curatorial support (infrastructure) to ensure that caring (whether for, about, or with) can really flourish. We deploy “curating”—from the Latin word curare, meaning “to care” and “to cure”—as a tool to radically expand and collectively reflect on the notion of care. The Care Pavilion plays a special role by making many forms of care visible, serving as a practice of collective caring and curing that is accessible to everyone.