Rupert’s 2020 Public Programmes: Perspectives on Care and Interdependence

Rupert’s 2020 public programmes are exploring care and interdependence and how they intersect with cultural, socio-political and artistic practices. Throughout the year, discussions will be grounded in disability studies and activism to think through and critically question what care and interdependence can mean.

The programmes bring together local and international speakers from diverse backgrounds, including law, activism, academia and the arts. They will also involve a number of our residents and locally-based artists presenting their work in relation to the programmes’ ideas. 

Rupert’s public programmes have turned to exploring care and interdependence in response to an ideology of individualism and competition. This ideology has emerged increasingly under a social-economic system characterised by neoliberalism. The consequences of this include creating or entrenching division and systematically devaluing care, both as a form of labour and as an ethical principle.  It is also an ideology that fails to recognise the basic premise of interdependence, which concerns how we are all, in varying degrees, mutually dependent on and responsible to each other and our environment.

The programmes aim to critically examine why this ideology of individualism and competition has become so powerful while also exploring alternatives to it. Drawing on a range of perspectives, the programmes consider what interdependence can mean for practices of care, relations of power and forms of solidarity, not just in the arts but in society more generally.  

Rupert’s programmes are partly supported by Lithuanian Culture Council and Vilnius city municipality.