Mira Thompson
Who Cares? – On Receiving Care
Who cares?presents a collection of drawings, by ATD Teacher-Researcher singer and performer Mira Thompson exploring the perspective of being on the receiving end of caregiving practices. She conveys intimate acts and encounters of personal care into sequential, comic-style narratives. She illustrates the conflicting feelings and complexities that come with needing care in her daily life, while countering simplistic thinking when it comes to giving and receiving care.
The scenes are portrayed from Thompson’s point of view both from how she sees it as well as how it might look from the outside. The drawings balance between cheeky and earnest, showing how both portrayals are ways of coping with the realities of a given moment. The viewer is brought to a seemingly ordinary situation of being assisted with brushing her hair in a public space, when someone comments ‘you are really a queen, aren’t you?!’ Other drawings give a glimpse into intimate moments of receiving care where there’s peaceful silence.
Thompson started making the drawings out of a desire to articulate these relational, affective encounters of being on the receiving of care that are hard to describe in words, or the grief that’s experienced from witnessing overt or internalized ableism. Asking for help is always considered difficult, but when this help is necessary and considered one-sided, it’s different. Having to relate to people who are providing care means navigating power relations – is it possible to ask for the care that’s desired or is that seen as asking too much? Can I truly express myself or does that mean a risk or loss of needed care?
Mira Thompson (Amsterdam, 1993) is a singer, songwriter and performer. Informed by the tradition of vocal jazz, she is drawn to narrative song and strong poetic and visual elements within music. During her time at HKU Utrecht Conservatory, she developed a fascination for the different ways in which the voice can function as an embodied instrument. Whether written, spoken or sung, Mira wields language to evoke deep and buried feelings with an earnest yet witty approach. In 2019 she released her first EP Festina Lente. Since 2008 she has performed nationally at Mozaïek Theater, Frascati, Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, among others, and has toured in Germany and France.
Within her own artistic practice or that of others, cross-disciplinary collaboration is at the heart of Mira’s work. She writes on subjects of disability, language and activism to contemplate a more accessible world, and has published, both print and digital, in Metropolis M, Parool, Change Now, International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, and One World.
Invested in embodied learning and disability justice, Mira brings into question notions of accessibility and its universality through lectures, workshops and consultancy to organizations, tutors, and students. In addition to providing private singing lessons, she teaches and researches for Amsterdam University of the Arts: Amsterdam School for Theatre and Dance, and DAS Graduate School. Mira is a member of Feminists Against Ableism. She also does access work including voice narration, image descriptions, live captions and transcription.
Who cares? presents a collection of drawings, by ATD Teacher-Researcher singer and performer Mira Thompson exploring the perspective of being on the receiving end of caregiving practices. She conveys intimate acts and encounters of personal care into sequential, comic-style narratives. She illustrates the conflicting feelings and complexities that come with needing care in her daily life, while countering simplistic thinking when it comes to giving and receiving care.
Mira is a member of the Embodied Knowledge research group in the ATD lectorate and together with Carly Everaert initiated the project Interdependence: On disability justice and the (performing) arts. Mira's drawings will also be exhibited as part of the forthcoming conference Arts Beyond Ableism on November 25 @CvA - co-organised by the ATD Lectorate and Lectorate Kunst Educatie.
