Caritas Christi

Over several months in early 2022, I engaged in a series of fieldwork encounters alongside Dr Marg Ross and Dr Justin Dwyer during their clinical trial investigating psilocybin for end-of-life distress at St Vincent’s Hospital’s Caritas Christi campus. The purpose of these visits was to observe, interview, and document their space-making practices as they set up and packed down the treatment room. Through video recordings, written notes, sketches, and short sensory poems, I documented both my observations and my sensory experiences. Crucially, this fieldwork became the first active exploration of what would become my core methodological suite of attunement methods: resonance practices, deep listening, and active noticing.

My experience with this research broadly is that in every project, there is what you think you are doing and then there is what actually happens. My original intention was to focus on the material practices and objects deployed within the clinical room. However, over the course of my time at Caritas, my attention shifted toward the mutuality of the P-AT encounter. The sheer intensity of the experience in that room is carried by everyone present, just in different ways. The profound vulnerability of the participant demands an equally profound level of physical and emotional endurance from the therapist. The giving and receiving of care becomes a deeply entangled, shared weight, requiring constant physical adjustment between the bodies and materials in the space.

Dr Marg Ross described the non-verbal connection that gradually developed between her and Justin over the course of the trial:

"So, we do have this sort of dance, and it’s a lovely kind of way of knowing when one of us is in the foreground or the background. And sometimes both of us are in the foreground as well. We’ve certainly had times where a participant has reached out for both of us, called out our names, and held our hands. And we’re on either side, just holding their hands through this experience. In a really lovely way, it’s become more nonverbal" (Ross, 2022).

Marg’s use of the language of dance introduced a critical sense of dynamism to my understanding of the way care moves in clinical spaces - flowing through people, objects, and the spaces between and around them in multiple directions simultaneously.

Paying attention to the flows of care offers immense value when thinking spatially. First, it acts as an inherently egalitarian lens, demanding that spatial consideration is paid to all the bodies in the room. Second, it introduces a vital sense of movement into space-making practices. For spatial designers, it leaves us with an open, unresolved challenge: how do we create environments that actively hold the bodies engaged in caregiving and care-receiving, while simultaneously building enough looseness and flexibility into the room to allow those continuous, entangled flows of care to occur unhindered?

Tactical Alliances Care Loose Space

Attunement

2021

Library

Georges Perec, "Species of Spaces and Other Pieces"

In his essay The Bed, Georges Perec describes the bed as "the individual space par excellence, the elementary space of the body (the bed-monad)". He points out that it is one of the rare places where we adopt a horizontal posture, surrendering our upright orientation to the world.

This conceptualisation of the bed was profoundly helpful during my fieldwork at the Caritas Christi Hospice. In the psychedelic therapy room, the bed is a paradoxical object. It is a piece of domestic furniture sitting uncomfortably in a clinical space, operating as a "queer anchor" for a vulnerable body. By thinking with Perec, I was able to see the bed not just as a passive prop, but as an active, relational participant in the therapy. The bed holds the physical body as the mind wanders, becoming a shared interface that structures the ongoing, delicate choreography of care between the caregivers and the cared-for. It helped me realise that to understand the spatialities of psychedelic care, we have to look closely at what unfolds at the exact site of the mattress.

Anne Carson, "Autobiography of Red"

"Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room, pondering the cracks and fissures of his inner life" (Carson, 1998, p. 136).

Another book about beds. When I first read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, I was struck by how she treated the bed as more than furniture - as a kind of interior landscape or psychic terrain to which the protagonist, Geryon, retreats, where time collapses and emotional truth condenses. The bed, for Geryon, operates as a site of intimacy, vulnerability, transformation, and rupture: a threshold space, bridging his inside world and the world beyond.

Carson writes about the bed as a thing that bridges. On one side, it is a highly territorialised object, with a fixed place, normative uses, and clear temporal associations. On the other, it is a space of deterritorialisation: as the site of dreaming, the bed opens to nonlinear psychic geographies; as the site of illness, the bed undoes the body's habitual rhythms and deconstructs temporal experience; and as the site of desire and sexuality, it can resist normative functions and produce new assemblages of becoming.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, "Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds"

In Matters of Care, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa reframes care not as a sentimental virtue or a benign emotion, but as a "demanding, thick, impure complexity" that entangles hands-on physical labour, affective engagement, and ethico-political involvement. Care is an active, ongoing maintenance of interdependent worlds - something that must be continuously done to keep our environments liveable.

When applied to the clinical fieldwork at the Caritas Christi Hospice, Puig de la Bellacasa’s framework helps elevate the mundane, often invisible labour of the caregiving team. In this space, care is not abstract; it is physically and spatially enacted through minor, responsive adjustments - changing the incline of a hospital bed, softening the lighting, holding a hand, or giving a blanket. These acts are practical manifestations of care.