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Contemporary socio-economic systems are increasingly characterized by sensory overstimulation, accelerated productivity, and extractive organizational cultures that undermine individual and collective well-being. These conditions are particularly acute within care-related professions, a vulnerability intensified during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in chronic stress, burnout, and erosion of belonging. Prevailing responses remain largely reactive and individualized, often intervening only after breakdown has occurred and failing to address the relational, cultural, and ecological dimensions of care. This research investigates how embodied, art-based, and relational practices can function as preventive infrastructures of care at individual and community levels, and how small, intentional actions—understood as micropolitical interventions—can cultivate regulation, resilience, and harmony within the self, among communities, and in relation to the living Earth.

The project adopts a qualitative, practice-based, and multiscalar artistic research methodology structured through two interdependent branches. Way of Care focuses on the individual scale, examining sensory regulation, perception, symbolic meaning, and everyday rituals through embodied artistic practices. Care for the Caretakers addresses the collective scale, investigating relational dynamics, shared meaning-making, group rituals, and institutional cultures within care-labor communities. Research activities include facilitated embodied practices, collective sessions, and dialogical exchange. Knowledge emerges through iterative cycles of practice and reflection, analyzed through ethics of care, developmental psychology and biology, ecosophy, deep ecology, relational epistemologies, and micropolitical theory. Preliminary insights suggest that such practices support early self-regulation, strengthen relational coherence, and foster collective resilience prior to systemic or clinical breakdown, proposing art and culture as preventive, ecological infrastructures of care within contemporary care systems.