Care is not comfort.
Care is a crack.
A refusal to turn pain into beauty,
or fatigue into productivity.
To care is to stay inside the wound –
to inhabit the distance between bodies,
without closing it too soon.
To care means to unlearn the reflex of repair.
We are not nurses of harmony.
We are researchers of fragility.
We are the seamstresses of the invisible fabric –
the one that holds the world together but never appears in the frame.
Our Care is not therapeutic.
It is political and negative.
It resists the optimism of progress,
the false language of success,
the moral comfort of “inclusion”.
Our Care is slow, uncertain, and collective.
It is made of breathing, silence, trembling,
and the shared exhaustion that binds us.
In the Sanatorium for Seamstresses,
we do not heal –
we reverse the direction of compassion.
The ones who were always “helped”
will now become the helpers.
The ones who were observed
will now observe.
We declare the right to fragile solidarity.
To tired tenderness.
To imperfect gestures.
We believe that only through Negative Care –
Care that does not fix,
does not absorb,
does not pacify –
can we begin to imagine another kind of world:
a world where the act of touching by ivy is already an act of resistance.
Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya