Armour of Care (2026)

Armour of Care is an artistic installation exploring strategies of perceiving and dealing with unpaid care work. Reacting to current reactionist portrayals of care, both online and offline, it takes the process of garment making as a guideline on ways we in which we could interact with care and domesticity as individuals. The project abstracts visual clues associated with the household, such as handstitching techniques, the apron and the Butterick Walkaway dress, (a pattern that gained a lot of popularity in 1950s America) into new objects. Leaning onto current online phenomena of romanticizing conservative family structures through the tradwife trend, the usage and abstraction of the Butterick B4790 aims to unravel this idealization. These objects produced suggest acknowledging the social relevance of care work, as well as the demystification of care as a „labour of love“, done only by specific bodies. Furthermore, the experience of social reproduction as something communal, instead of an activity done in isolation by a single person, can extend our definition of care as well.

Through studies of texts by Helen Hester, as well as Silvia Federici, along with interviews conducted with Austrian feminists, the project suggests how to cope with the hardships of unpaid care work. Focusing specifically on Hesters Term „domestic realism“, which leans onto Mark Fishers „capitalistic realism“, the work proposes realistic ways of interacting with care instead of utopian strategies. With an ongoing wave of conservative ideologies flooding through the web, politics and the personal, acknowledging harmful rhetorics and proposing new ways of caring

Armour of Care has been funded by the Queerfem Fördertopf of ÖH and was part of the Needlebound Issue Vol. 3 - Thread Geographies. It has been presented at the Vienna Design Week 2026 during the talk „Design Revolution Now!“, hosted by the Institute of Design Research.