Contemporary thinking about care, which began in the articulation of gender’s effects on labor, politics, and ethics, has extended to ecological terrain – large-scale human and nonhuman processes, including economies, ecologies, and planetary systems – as well as media practice – in the multi-faceted relationship between creators and subjects and the work and its audiences. The much-quoted, early definition of care comes from Berenice Fischer and Joan Tronto (1993) who describes care as a species activity that includes "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (19). This includes our bodies, our sentient selves, and our environments, all of which can be interwoven in an intricate life-sustaining web contingent on attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. Although grounded in this relational ontology of care-webs, María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) pointedly departs from this characterization, shifting from the realm of the domestic to planetary scale systems. Bellacasa connects theories of care with posthumanist technoscience, naturecultures, and epistemology in thinking with care as a “critically disruptive doing” and a vital requisite of collective thinking in interdependent worlds that compels a thick vision of caring (12). Consequently, care, and its accompanying ontological relationality, labour practices, and knowledge politics is disruptive as well as transformative, concurrently necessitating and animating both theory and praxis.

The historical relationship between critique and care elucidates the conspicuous tension in the academy between theory and praxis that is subject to multiple and divergent contemporary re-imaginings. From bell hooks’ “theory as liberatory practice” (1991) to Bruno Latour’s “matters of concern” (2004), Bellacasa’s “matters of care” (2017), the Care Collective’s “care manifesto” (2020), and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s (2013) “undercommons” and “study,” praxis as care work, and vice versa, figures prominently. This manifests, particularly, through an emphasis on the outwardness of intellectual work, as it moves beyond and outside of academia, the self-reflexive, situated and collective pursuit of justice and critique, with attention to dynamic processes and historicizing, the differentiated materiality of knowing, and the commitment to the everydayness of both critique and care in their profound mundanity and consistency. Prior to these iterations, care ethics, radical love, and its healing potential when directed to the self, had long been theorized in Black feminist thought. Attending to these lineages, Sara Ahmed (2014) references Audre Lorde’s (1988) assertion that self-care is not about one’s own happiness but about finding a way to exist in a world where certain bodies were never meant to survive and thus whose very existence become forms of radical praxis. In the beloved oft-quoted line, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Lorde compares her experience of battling cancer to her experience of battling against anti-black racism (181). This profound analogy demonstrates how racism is an attack on the body, on a deep and metabolic level, against the cells and immune system, where a world against you, turns your body against you. In seeking to remediate these attacks, redirecting care away from its “proper objects” to bodies deemed unworthy of care, self-care creates communities that “reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other” (Ahmed 2017, 240). It is an act of protest, a “technique of governance,” and a “turning away from injustice” (239). Inseparable to these perceptions are public and communal constituents – the assembly and interdependence of fragile communities, reconfiguring self-care beyond the individual and the threshold of indulgence.

Undoubtedly, the discursive explosion of care has seeped into creative practice and aesthetic discussions, generating insights about how care ethics are embodied and material while prompting us to rethink dominant approaches in contemporary art. If care is a triad of labour, ethics, and affect, the relationship to art is palpable, as a mode of work (artwork) that, in the context of sound, listening, social practice, and activist art, involves thinking about social, political, and cultural conditions through the engagement with material forms – bodies, artefacts, substances – and their ephemeral counterparts and practices – affect, sound, listening, and performance. In their careful engagement with the world and the singular ways in which this engagement is enacted and presented, artists and their artworks can entangle audiences in relations of care.  As I will argue through the example of Boyce’s work , the spatial, temporal, and material design of an artwork, as well as its conceptual strategies and speculations, can reconfigure our relationship to the world and the way we engage with materialities, histories, voices, modes of listening, and space. Yet, an art object’s function and ability to be transformative – for the people it involves as medium and the audience that experience its presentation – is not a given. Rather, the potential to be transformative– to generate a more caring approach and engagement with the world– hinges on its capacity to evoke complexity, multiplicity, and relationality.

Carol Gilligan (2011) describes an ethics of care as a “different voice” joined with self-relation and emotion:

 “an ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully (in their own right and on their own terms) and heard with respect. An ethics of care directs our attention to the need for responsiveness in relationships (paying attention, listening, responding) and to the costs of losing connection with oneself or with others.”

Gilligan calls for an approach that is charged by relationality, agency, personal experiences, and the capacity to challenge power structures. Moreover,as Gilligan notes through sonic metaphors, this expansion can be undertaken specifically through the act of listening and the medium of sound. It is not coincidental that Gilligan draws on sound, listening, and voice in theorizing an ethics of care. Rather, it reflects Gilligan’s understanding that sound is relational and embodied, recognition of listening as a form of healing, meditation, and attentiveness, and an engagement with politics of voice as inextricably connected to the idea of subjectivity in the public and political sphere.

Sound scholars Julian Henriques (2011), Marie Thompson (2017), Annie Goh (2017), and Pedro J.S. Vieira de Oliveira (2020) discuss the politics of interconnection, reflexivity, and situatedness in sound and listening, embedded with potential to produce (alternative) knowledges and disrupt subject-object relations that are inherent and implied in these processes. Albeit in different ways, they argue that the experience of encountering sounds cannot be divorced from its political, social, and material conditions. Vieira de Oliveira (2020) explain

“the materiality of sound, or the relationship that emerges from these encounters, is not abstracted from the space in which it takes places, or in other words, sound is living and lived phenomenon. Hence the subject of listening which encounters and is affected by vibration, can only become so within a given space, a given context, a given set of political, economic, cultural, social, material, spiritual, and ontological conditions” (76).

Goh, Thompson, and Oliveira think sound as embodied situated practice, which underscores an orientation towards both sound and source, placing emphasis on the stories and narratives from which sounds  sprout and sustain, ensuring that the webs of connection and historical relations are counted, and making explicit the listening body. Oliveira thinks with Edouard Glissant’s (1997) work on Relation to develop an approach towards sound art that should (and must) engage listeners in a process of Relation with the sonic object, enabling the emergence of otherwise aesthetic experiences, while at the same time weaving aural imaginaries that correlate to the sites and spaces of these sonic encounters. By attending to sonic events and phenomena at their sources, in whatever form or way this can be reached, as well as their recontextualization as phonographic object or performance, the multiplicity of meanings across aesthetics, affect, geographies, and space yields different materialities while never neglecting their political tensions and context. Oliveira’s argument thus posits sound art as a privileged form of articulation that is attuned to political and social matter, suggesting that it is through the liminal spaces within these encounters that its materiality and relational qualities are brought to the fore. ​​In what follows, I hope to demonstrate how Sonia Boyce’s work is a form of sonic articulation that does not divorce sound from context and meaning and in turn is attuned to the aesthetic, political, and social matter of sonic events. By focusing on Boyce’s use of excess, polyphony, chorus, bearing witness, and liminality, I aim to prove how these strategies might advance new critical perspectives and cultural entanglements of sonic resistance and care in contemporary artwork.