thehealingweb.org
~digital caring infrastructure woven by intergenerational knowledge~
ABOUT THE PROJECT ⋆ ★
“How do I provide myself with the best physical and psychic nourishment to repair past, and minimize future damage to my body?” asked Audre Lorde following treatment for breast cancer in The Cancer Journals. She found the answer to her healing was community and re-envisioning her body on her own terms.
Inspired by Lorde and various other thinkers considering health, healing networks and solidarity infrastructures, The Healing Web is an ongoing research project about the technology’s entanglement with communication, connection and healing. In a way, this project is like building a web, weaving together bits of information taken in from everywhere. Further construction of this network will (hopefully) look like community collaboration, expanding the healing web as an archive and safe, digital space to process transitions and feel grief, rage, guilt, and strength.
THIS PROJECT ASKS:
- What are your needs and the needs of others?
- What is care work?
- How does technology aid in receiving or providing care?
- Do you have the information you need?
- How do we heal our networks?
ABOUT THE S3RV3R *ೃ༄
This project is being hosted with Yunohost on a droplet from Digital Ocean. Anyone will be able to visit at t
Building this project on a self-hosted server puts caring praxis into practice by allowing data bodies to be reclaimed. Self-hosting establishes digital autonomy much like care systems are intended to protect bodily autonomy and personal health information. We exist physically and digitally and both spaces are overridden by surveillanced capitalist infrastructure that lack compassion. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Donna Haraway states, “Communications technologies and biotechnologies are crucial tools [for] recrafting our bodies"(Haraway). Radical healing networks connect communities without comprising the right to privacy or the right to repair our bodies with compassion.
Our personal experiences of our bodies interconnect us in the same ways technologies do. Haraway describes the immune system not only as an information system, but a biopolitical map with enforced borders. Community health can heal through network of care. As the Care Collective puts it: “Both positive and negative emotions inevitability entwine with both our care practices and our very capacities to care. It is because of the complexity and profound challenges of care, as capacity and practice, that we must provide and ensure the necessary social infrastructure that enables us to care for others, both proximate and distant.”
ABOUT THE PROCESS *ೃ༄
I read a lot to try and find this project’s direction, guided by this course’s readings and my own library and research. I also wrote quite a bit in a journal that also housed my class notes, as physically writing a thought helps me cement it in my head. At the time of writing this, I do not think I am utilizing my server to its full potential as an active tool for action, but I am still piecing together its digital skeleton. I ultimately hope my tiny piece of solidarity infrastructure will become a radical communal space for comfort and healing.
~*~ Inspirations ~*~
Get Well Soon (2020) by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain – https://getwellsoon.labr.io/
“Get Well Soon is a massive e-card comprised of over 200,000 unique messages of well wishes. The messages are sourced from the popular crowd funding site gofundme.com, a self-described ‘leader in online medical fundraising’, which, due to lack of affordable healthcare in the United States is widely relied upon for funding vital medical procedures. The piece is accompanied by a short essay from Johanna Hedva.”
Doctor Hotspot (2011) – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/doctor-hotspot/
“Dr. Jeffrey Brenner is a local physician who some believe might have the model to solve one of America's most intractable problems: lowering the cost of health care. While analyzing medical billing data in Camden, N.J., he mapped out "hot spots" of the impoverished city's high-cost patients. By targeting unique care -- including home visits and social workers -- at the city's most costly patients, he developed a program that he argues has both lowered health care costs and provided better care in Camden.”
~*~ Works Cited ~*~
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
The Care Collective. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. Verso Books, 2020
~*~ Essential Listening ~*~
Projeto Memoria Brasileira: Vivia Garoto - Garoto
Bird Songs of Eastern North America
ABOUT ME ツ
I am a Paraguayan-American artist, community organizer and caregiver based in New York. I am a part of Mil Mundos, a collective run bilingual bookstore and adjacent nonprofit working to support autonomous communities in Bushwick, Brooklyn.