The Gravity of Care
The Gravity of Care, detail
The Gravity of Care
The Gravity of Care, detail
The Gravity of Care
The Gravity of Care is conceived as a delegated performance—an intimate exchange between the artist and members of the United Nations Human Rights Treaty Bodies. Cibic invited these advocates to donate their tears, which she then photographed under a microscope. From these images, she constructed a speculative planetary surface, cast as a slowly rotating bronze globe. Its surface appears to depict islands, continents, and waterways—each formation derived directly from the microscopic topographies of tear fluid.
These emotional residues, rendered as terrain, offer a counter-cartography: a world shaped not by conquest or extraction, but by grief, resilience, and endurance. Cast in bronze—a material historically bound to monuments, war memorials, and patriarchal permanence—the globe intentionally subverts the authority of its own medium. Rather than glorifying domination, it commemorates a form of human rights work increasingly marginalised in the contemporary political condition.
The globe’s rotation introduces a meditative, almost hypnotic rhythm—a quiet rebuttal to the static and declarative stance of traditional bronze sculpture. In this motion, the work resists closure, suggesting a living, shifting world imagined through the lens of care.
By inverting the extractivist gaze—turning it toward the microscopic, the emotional, the overlooked—the sculpture functions as an illusionist device. It invites viewers to reconsider planetary imaginaries not as fixed constructs of power, but as fluid sites of intimacy, interdependence, and restitution. The Gravity of Care envisions a world reordered through acts of maintenance, justice, and collective emotional labour—a terrain where tears become the ground from which alternative futures emerge.