Kinship Care Community

2013-Ongoing

Kinship Care Community is an ongoing project that imagines speculative relationships between humans and endangered species. Developed through performances, installations, photographs, videos, and participatory actions, the project explores how care might extend beyond conventional ideas of family, reproduction, and belonging. First developed in New York, the project brought together participants of different genders, ages, races, and abilities who imagined carrying Northern long-eared bats (*Myotis septentrionalis*), a species critically endangered due to habitat destruction and climate change. Through parafictional scenarios involving artificial wombs and interspecies pregnancy, participants became temporary surrogate carriers for the species, imagining new forms of responsibility and connection.

Across its different iterations, Kinship Care Community uses speculative gestures to refect on extinction, ecological loss, and the fragile relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Rather than treating care as a fixed role or identity, the project approaches it as something practiced, shared, and continually renegotiated.

Drawing from speculative fiction, ecology, and kinship studies, the project asks what it might mean to care for lives we are not expected to carry, and how acts of attention, proximity, and collective imagination might reshape our relationship to the living world.