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seeds for resistance             irene pérez

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seeds for resistance             irene pérez

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https://ireneperez.net/section/472644-Seeds-for-Resistance.html

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work by artists danielle gustafson-sundell

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The m/other voices foundation rose from the research project (m)other voices: the maternal as an attitude, maternal thinking and the production of time and knowledge led by Deirdre M. Donoghue (artist, writer, researcher) at Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, between June 2013 and June 2014. The project's purpose was to initiate discourse and the doing of maternal theory within arts and other fields of cultural production and to reflect on the maternal figure as a thinker and a producer of knowledge. By considering the maternal as an attitude towards our being in the world, and as a practice held together by an ethos of ultimate hospitality towards 'the other', the m/other voices foundation explores relations between maternal work and -experience, -thinking and -time and the production of knowledge within arts and beyond. The foundation connects and brings together scholars, writers, artists, curators, historians from various corners of the world and its work takes place through specifically framed human encounters, exchanges and contributions between people from various disciplines and backgrounds. The foundation's work will be carried out under the three categories of 'Art, Research and Theory', 'Dialogue' and 'Community Involvement'.
m/other voices mission statement can be read here.

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The m/other voices foundation rose from the research project (m)other voices: the maternal as an attitude, maternal thinking and the production of time and knowledge led by Deirdre M. Donoghue (artist, writer, researcher) at Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, between June 2013 and June 2014.

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https://www.culturalreproducers.org/p/manifesto.html

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Sara Holwerda and Angela Lopez are artists, curators and mothers living and working in Chicago. They began this project in the summer of 2016 when their sons - six weeks apart in age - were infants. In 2017 they were awarded the DCASE Individual Artist Project grant for their work. Together, they have been working with other artists, creative platforms, and networks of artist parents to continue the conversation of accessibility in the art world, and implement change in the lives of artist parents. Working with toddlers in tow, during naps, at night, and in glorious daylight hours with the help of their respective spouses and parents, Holwerda and Lopez continue to work together to build - and extend! - this project with plans for additional events and exhibitions locally and nationally.

Read our OPP Featured Artist Blog interview.
Extended Practice is an artist-led curatorial project focusing on creating family accessible events, exhibitions and screenings that support and make visible the work and needs of artists who are also mothers.

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Sara Holwerda and Angela Lopez are artists, curators and mothers living and working in Chicago. They began this project in the summer of 2016 when their sons - six weeks apart in age - were infants. In 2017 they were awarded the DCASE Individual Artist Project grant for their work.

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"97% entregada. 3% egoísmo. 0% quejas. 100% madre". Este eslogan, escogido por unos grandes almacenes para su última campaña publicitaria con motivo del Día de la Madre en España, despertó la indignación de muchas personas que llegaron a proponer en las redes sociales un boicot contra la tradicional firma española. La campaña, como muchas feministas denunciaron en Twitter, reproduce los "habituales estereotipos patriarcales acerca de la maternidad", esos que certeramente describe la escritora y periodista -y madre- catalana Esther Vivas en su ensayo Mamá desobediente. Una mirada feminista a la maternidad (Capitán Swing, 2019).

Vivas combate ese ideal patriarcal de maternidad basado en el sacrificio. "Existe un ideal materno que se plantea de color de rosa, que se viste de cierto romanticismo. Para la tradicional visión patriarcal, sólo hay dos tipos de madres: la abnegada y sacrificada, de un lado, y la mala madre, de otro", explica la autora en diálogo con Equal Times. "Pero la experiencia real de la maternidad implica poner en contradicción la vida personal, de pareja, laboral. Se esconde ese lado y eso hace que las mujeres vivamos nuestra experiencia como un fracaso. Hay que entender que las madres no hacemos lo que queremos, sino lo que podemos. La maternidad de verdad implica agotamiento, contradicciones, ambivalencia", concluye.

Hace un tiempo que ese ideal de abnegación viene resquebrajándose. Madres arrepentidas, de Orna Donath (Reservoir Books, 2016), se convirtió en un hito al visibilizar que hay madres que se arrepienten de haberlo sido, sin desmedro del amor que sienten por sus hijos. En España, Laura Baena abrió en 2014 el Club de Malas Madres, que suma en Twitter algo más de 55.000 seguidores.

Agrietar ese imaginario imposible ayuda a las mujeres reales que, cada día, hacen juegos malabares para compaginar su trabajo, su maternidad y el resto de los ámbitos de su vida, en medio de negociaciones y acuerdos que nunca alcanzan una resolución perfecta.

Lo cierto es que la maternidad ha sido uno de los principales instrumentos a través del cual se ha sostenido la dominación y 'domesticación' de las mujeres, "de ahí el rechazo que despierta la maternidad en ciertos sectores del feminismo: ser madre tiene un carácter biosocial, y ese componente biológico incomoda al feminismo", explica la autora de Mamá desobediente. "En la segunda ola del feminismo, de los años 70, se revela un discurso antimaternal y antirreproductivo; pero ahora existe una generación, la mía, que no ha vivido la maternidad como único destino posible, y que se enfrenta a ella con menos prejuicios", añade. Otras autoras, como la abogada y escritora Marta Busquets, hablan sin reparos de la "maternofobia" dentro del movimiento feminista, lo que sería consecuencia directa de la escasa atención del feminismo hacia la cuestión de la " violencia obstétrica ", por ejemplo.

Colectivizar los cuidados

Así resume el dilema la argentina Verónica Gago, académica y militante de Ni Una Menos, y madre: "Ninguna mujer puede sola; en soledad, cualquiera se vuelve loca. Porque la exigencia de la madre sacrificada convive con un escenario en el que, por un lado, se ha despojado la infraestructura pública del cuidado, y por el otro, se han modificado radicalmente las estructuras familiares".

El desafío para el movimiento feminista pasa, cree Gago, por "pensar la maternidad desde lo comunitario y la interdependencia; los cuidados no pueden resolverse en términos privados y monetarios". Es decir, debemos buscar soluciones colectivas, en lugar de que cada mujer deba resolver el problema al interior del hogar, pagando a otra mujer para que realice esas tareas de las que ella no puede hacerse cargo.

"Des-individualizar la maternidad", en las palabras de Vivas, implica dejar de colocar toda la responsabilidad en la madre, colectivizar el trabajo de crianza y, al mismo tiempo, involucrar a los varones.

Porque, si bien es cierto que las cosas han cambiado mucho en los últimos años, las mujeres en países como España siguen cargando sobre sus hombros con el 68% del tiempo total dedicado al trabajo de cuidados no remunerado, según datos de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT) de 2018. Para el caso de Argentina, las mujeres dedican el doble de horas al trabajo doméstico que los varones, según el Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de la República Argentina (INDEC).

Las cifras varían en función del país, pero, en todos los casos, las mujeres emplean muchas más horas en el trabajo de cuidados, incluyendo, claro está, el cuidado de hijas e hijos.

La polémica en torno a los permisos de paternidad

¿Cómo lograr una mayor implicación de los varones en las tareas de crianza y cuidados? En Europa, en los últimos años se ha extendido el permiso de paternidad; el caso más notable es el de Suecia, donde los progenitores disfrutan de 480 días (a repartir). En España, la propuesta es que aumenten progresivamente -ya han pasado de dos a cinco semanas- hasta igualar las 16 semanas que obtienen las madres; y que ambos permisos sean, además de iguales, intransferibles.

Sin embargo, el permiso de maternidad se mantiene invariable desde los años 80, y no alcanza para posibilitar la lactancia en exclusiva durante el mínimo de seis meses que propone la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS). Por eso buena parte del movimiento feminista sostiene que, antes de aumentar el permiso de los padres, habría que incrementar el de las madres, pues un bebé de cuatro meses no necesita ambas figuras por igual.

"Los permisos de maternidad y paternidad iguales e intransferibles se proponen como solución para resolver la desigualdad de género en el mercado laboral. Pero el enfoque de partida es erróneo y sigue viendo la maternidad como un problema, cuando el problema es el mercado laboral, que es incompatible con los cuidados y con la vida", afirma Esther Vivas. La medida plantea otros problemas: se ancla en el estereotipo de la familia heterosexual, además de desconocer a las familias monoparentales que, en un 85%, están encabezadas por mujeres, sostiene Vivas. La autora argumenta, además, que esa medida no resolverá la desigualdad en el mercado laboral, pues ésta va mucho más allá de los permisos de maternidad.

Pero es que, además, la corresponsabilidad en los cuidados no se logra sólo con leyes, tampoco en los países nórdicos. "En los países escandinavos he hablado con muchas mujeres que están enojadas porque ellos disfrutan del permiso pero no cumplen con el trabajo de cuidado y crianza", explicó durante una rueda de prensa en Buenos Aires a finales de 2018 la autora y feminista italiana Silvia Federici.

"El riesgo es que, desde un enfoque de una igualdad abstracta, vayamos una vez más a penalizar a las mujeres y a invisibilizar su trabajo", añadió. Es decir: hombres y mujeres no somos iguales si de lo que hablamos es de maternidad: unos cuerpos gestan y amamantan, otros no. Para la activista italiana, el feminismo no debe negar esa condición, sino valorizar ese trabajo que hacen las mujeres y que el patriarcado capitalista invisibiliza. Por eso, concluye la pensadora, el feminismo debe ser anticapitalista: "Porque esta sociedad no es sustentable; únicamente se sustenta a través de la violencia y del despojo".

"Es la sociedad la que debe adaptarse a la lactancia, y no al revés", afirma Vivas en su libro. Del mismo modo, es la sociedad la que debe adaptarse al hecho de que los seres humanos necesitamos cuidados -cuando somos niños, cuando somos viejos, cuando nos enfermamos-, en lugar de que los cuidados se adapten a las rigideces e imperativos del mercado laboral. Por eso, concluye por su parte la escritora y periodista: "Otra maternidad requiere otro tipo de sociedad".

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La rebelión de las mamás desobedientes: hacia una visión feminista de la maternidad

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"97% entregada. 3% egoísmo. 0% quejas. 100% madre". Este eslogan, escogido por unos grandes almacenes para su última campaña publicitaria con motivo del Día de la Madre en España, despertó la indignación de muchas personas que llegaron a proponer en las redes sociales un boicot contra la tradicional firma española.

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At six o'clock on a spring morning in downtown Los Angeles, 1961, a family of black women convened in the middle-class home of the matriarch. They spoke in hushed whispers behind pulled curtains, careful not to wake the child sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. With their hair still tied back in rollers under silk scarves, and their morning responsibilities abandoned, they had gathered to convince one member of the family to not give her four-year-old child up for adoption. A car door shut in the driveway outside, and 27-year-old Camille Billops entered the house in search of her daughter, Christa Victoria.

If Camille felt any shame or doubt about her decision, there was no evidence of it on her face that morning. The women assembled around her-Camille's mother, her aunts, her sister, and cousins-each called dibs on Christa, as if the child were up for auction. The strongest offers came from Camille's sister, Billie, and her mother, Alma, who had raised Christa while Camille juggled the demands of school and work, studying childhood education at California State College, Los Angeles, at night, working at a local bank by day, and developing her art. But Camille wouldn't budge. She worried that her mother was too old and too tired to raise a child, and she was suspicious of her sister's husband, who she felt was unpredictable.

"I'm going to take her. She's mine," Camille announced to the women. "And there's nothing any of you can do about it." Camille woke Christa up, walked her to the black Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway, and drove the child to the Los Angeles Children's Home Society of California. There, she released her grip on Christa's hand and told her to go to the bathroom inside. When Christa reappeared, grasping her small teddy bear and looking for her mother, she saw the black car driving away.

In the nearly 60 years since Camille Billops made the decision to give up her daughter, she has become an internationally recognized artist and filmmaker. I first encountered Camille's work at the 2017 Brooklyn Museum exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, which included two of her prints. That fall, after visiting the studio of Emma Amos, who spoke admiringly about a radical artist friend with a quick tongue that she never held, I recalled the name from the exhibition. Emma shared Camille's number with me, insisting that I speak with her. Camille answered on the first ring and invited me over.

Now 85, Camille lives with her husband, James Hatch, in a sprawling artist loft in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. She never had another child; after giving up Christa, Camille threw herself into her art and, along with Jim, nurtured the careers of young black artists in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, using their loft to blur the line between public discourse and private domesticity. Over the decades, Camille and Jim have amassed an archive filled with over 5,000 books, letters, papers, and scripts, and twice as many photographs documenting contemporary black art since the late '60s, when black artists were excluded from showing in many galleries and museums in New York City. They shared rare intimate pieces with me, including handwritten letters from artist Emma Amos, audio files from filmmaker Julie Dash, and first drafts of Amiri Baraka's plays. The collection is a way for Camille and Jim to assert the existence and insistence of black artistry. "It is important that we write our own histories," Camille insists. "Otherwise, they will say we were never here."

Surrounding themselves with artifacts of their journey is, perhaps, also a way for the couple, married since 1986, to be reminded of their own pasts: Both Camille and Jim are losing their minds to dementia. Jim's condition, diagnosed 15 years ago, is more aggressive; in a conversation I had with them in 2017, he often became confused and interjected comments about his Iowa childhood. Camille, unprompted, kept coming back to the matter of giving up her daughter 56 years ago. "You have to forgive your guilt," she says. "I gave her up when she was four. I should have done it earlier. It was hard, but I did what was best for both of us."

Camille's family believed she abandoned Christa because of the affair she was having with Jim, a white man who was then married with two children. The two had been introduced by Camille's stepsister, Josie, in 1959; Josie had been Jim's student in the theater department at UCLA, where Jim was a professor. Camille was working as a teacher of physically handicapped children in the Los Angeles public-school system and doing amateur ceramics work in her free time. Camille asked Jim to come over and take a look at her pots. Camille tells me that Jim was the first person to tell her that she was a good artist.

Camille grew up in Los Angeles to parents who had come to California during the Great Migration. Like many southern blacks, they came in search of opportunity and a chance to escape the violence inflicted on black bodies in the Jim Crow south. In L.A. they worked in service to white folks; it wasn't necessarily work that they couldn't attain in the South, it was their dignity. In Los Angeles, her father, Luscious Billops from Texas, worked as a cook, and her mother, Alma Gilmore from South Carolina, was a domestic and seamstress. Their southern traditions folded neatly within their being. Whiteness was still seen by her parents as superior in eloquence and refinement; the Billops would emulate white customs in their home. But when the burlap curtains were closed at night, Luscious would drink like a fish until he passed out and his wife would carry him to bed.

Alma bestowed her beliefs of black female servitude on her daughters, Camille and Billie, from a young age. Camille had been taught that motherhood and womanhood were inextricable. If you were not a mother, then what would you be? But the youngest child will always rebel, and at the age of ten, Camille decided she would never have children.

Camille met Christa's father, Stanford, through a mutual friend in 1955, when she was in her early 20s. Stanford was a tall, striking lieutenant stationed at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo. As she told bell hooks in a 1996 interview, Camille was drawn mostly to Stanford's appearance and the validation that his beauty would bring in her community. "I loved him, because he was fine," she said. "He was everything I wanted that thing to be"-that thing being the performance of opulence.

A few months into their relationship, Camille discovered she was pregnant. Despite her disinterest in motherhood, she decided that if she and Stanford were going to go through with parenthood, they had to do it traditionally. Five hundred wedding invitations were printed, but before the guests received them by mail, Stanford was gone. Camille called around, searching for him, and the Air Force base informed her of his military discharge.

When she met Jim, his confidence in Camille's work was a catalyst for her shift into a new way of being. His emotional and creative support provided her with permission to be whomever she pleased in any given moment, even if that meant not being pretty and proper, something Camille's family had taught her a woman should be at all costs. She began slowly shedding the cultural influences of middle-class black America and entered a milieu made up of artists and activists who spent their days protesting school segregation and black oppression. It was the early 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement, and Camille was the mistress of a white man who believed in her, a relationship that contradicted all that she had been taught about whiteness. Photographs of Camille with baby Christa show a polished and respectable-looking young woman with permed hair and slicked-down edges, wearing tailored dresses and kitten heels. But in photographs taken with Jim in 1962, just after she gave up Christa, you can see the start of her physical evolution. She cuts off her permed roller-set curls and begins wearing her hair in a small, perfectly picked Afro. As the years pass, her eye makeup becomes darker and more pronounced until she settles into her signature personal style: vividly printed clothing, hair in beaded cornrows, and makeup of thick black eyeliner, resembling the ancient Egyptian symbol the eye of Ra.

Jim respected Camille's decision to give up Christa. But he also suspected that Camille was leaving the child for a life he could not promise her; he was still married to someone else, after all. ("Don't give Christa up for me," he told her.) A few months after Camille abandoned Christa at the Children's Home, Jim was offered a Fulbright appointment to teach at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo, Egypt-one of the centers of the 1960s Pan-African movement, in which young American artists and activists like Maya Angelou and Malcolm X developed stronger ties with African nations. He invited Camille to visit before his wife and kids arrived, and she went without hesitation. Before heading back to the United States, Camille told Jim she would not return to visit him unless he left his wife and children; he did. "We chose each other and entered into another life," she tells me. "That's when the world opened."

After joining Jim in Cairo in 1962, this time for good, Camille began experimenting with sculpture; her first exhibition at Gallerie Akhenaton, in Cairo, comprised a small collection of ceramic pots and sculptures modeled on those close to her-especially Jim, who would become her muse. Camille had a voracious appetite for exploring any medium she could get her hands on: photography, painting, printmaking, and eventually filmmaking. She spent many years creating and showing her work in Egypt, Germany, and China before returning to the US with Jim, only to find her own country less than welcoming to black women artists.

In 1965, after collaborating on a self-published book of poetry called Poems for Niggers and Crackers, which included poems written by Jim and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail about racialized violence in America with illustrations by Camille, Camille and Jim returned to the United States, where they settled into New York City's East Village. Jim had secured a teaching position in theater at City College of New York, while Camille worked toward her MFA at City University of New York, where she also taught ceramics.

It was less than two years before the United States Supreme Court would make interracial marriage legal in all 50 states, and racial and gendered injustices persisted across all sectors of America. The art world was no exception. The erasure of black artists, particularly black female artists, from museum and galleries throughout the 1970s and 1980s led many of them to form coalitions of resistance without financial support or institutional funding, often gathering around the kitchen tables of their Manhattan walk-ups, forming collectives like Women Artists in Revolution. "I was with all of the various nigga bitches," Camille tells me. "May Stevens, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett. We were fighting so hard, but they wouldn't let us in. So we said, 'Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.'"

Camille and Jim began hosting shows and selling their work in their small studio loft on East 11th Street. In the early '80s, a friend of a friend came to them with an offer: he was selling a bare, 4,000-square-foot loft in SoHo, and told Camille and Jim that if they could gather $11,000 in cash, it was theirs. Over the years, the couple built out the loft with a studio for Camille, an office for Jim, and a library that was open to their peers and students from City College. "We invited everybody here: friends, students and white folks, gallerists and curators. We sold art right off our walls," Camille says. "I stopped begging a long time ago when I discovered I could sell art without having to kiss booty."

In the early 1980s, Camille's work began to shift from the figurative toward the biographical. (She told bell hooks that the most revolutionary thing an artist can do is make work about their own life: "Put all your friends in it, everybody you loved, so one day they will find you and know that you were all here together.") Camille began staging plays in her living room, then eventually transitioned into 16 mm filmmaking, through which she explored themes that she witnessed as a child but wasn't quite able to interpret. Her memory collided with the new world she had carefully and meticulously molded, and she began dissecting the normalcy of suppression that led many to addiction in her family.

Then, in 1981, Camille received an envelope containing a cassette tape. It was from Christa, now 24 years old. Christa's adoptive mother, a jazz singer in Oakland, had begun to sense a sadness and longing in her daughter and had encouraged Christa to find her birth mother-to find closure.

"It was a great shock to me," Camille says. Christa wrote, composed, and recorded a song for Camille, as art was her most fluent form of communication, too. "Naturally, she was an artist like me. It's in her blood," Camille tells me proudly. Christa's lyrics asked if Camille would meet with her.

After receiving the tape, Camille, generally fearless by nature, was terrified. "I had already learned how to live with my guilt about giving her up," she says. "I wasn't trying to come out from beneath the water." However, after considering the artistic possibilities, Camille sacrificed her comfort for the opportunity to share their story through art. Camille, not fully able to predict the emotional consequences of this commitment, contacted Dion Hatch, Jim's son from his first marriage, and asked him to be the cameraman and director of photography on a film documenting their reunion; the film would be mistitled Finding Christa. "That was Camille's approach to everything," Dion tells me. "Make it art."

Camille called Christa and invited her to visit her in New York City. Camille, along with Jim, would meet Christa at Newark Airport with a warm but brief embrace. Christa, beaming with a palpable energy, would greet Camille as "Bootsie," the name she had called her mother when she was a child; even then, she was not allowed to call her Mama.

Finding Christa , released in 1991, is a 55-minute documentary that combines Camille's parents' home-video footage, present-day interviews, and staged reenactments that mirror Camille's signature surrealist style. (The misleading title of the movie-Christa was the one who found Camille, not the other way around-belies its creator's preference to undertake a project that adheres to feeling over fact.)

The film opens with a childhood image of Christa, her adult voice pleading, "Why did you give me away?" Later, we see a pregnant Camille with her family in 1950s Los Angeles, footage that reveals a young, polished woman. Perhaps this was her best acting performance, pretending to be content with her circumstances. The most emotionally gripping moments in the film happen when Camille interviews the women of her family who had fought to keep Christa, as they divulge that they never stopped searching for her. In one scene, Camille asks an elder, "Why do you think I gave Christa away?" In true auntie form, the older woman gives Camille the side-eye and responds, "You don't want me to answer that." They all believed Jim was the culprit.

Christa comes across as forgiving and grateful toward Camille in the film; it's evident that the young woman, also an artist, feels connected to her biological mother. They became artistic collaborators-the only form of bonding that Camille was capable of engaging in. But Christa yearns for an affection that Camille was not equipped to offer her. In one scene, Christa says that Camille sees her like an octopus, wanting to extend all parts of herself around the woman that birthed her, and that she sees Camille "like a cactus," sharp and defensive. Camille's appearances in the film can come across as cold as she shows no remorse and her explanations of what ultimately led her to her decision lack depth. She becomes repetitive, saying, "I was not a good mother," without giving context to what that meant for her at the time.

Reenactments throughout the film fall flat, as Camille's acting is less than convincing, and some scenes feel contrived. One reenactment shows Christa overwhelmed as she sits alongside Camille looking through family photo albums when her adoptive mother, Margaret, calls to check on her, and Camille continues speaking to her in the background. Christa is torn between the two women of differing significance to her identity, wanting to appease them both. Margaret is later shown lovingly handing Christa over to Camille as Christa prepares to move to New York to study and pursue her singing career, with the guidance of Camille. The film concludes with Camille expressing gratitude for Margaret. "You did good, Margaret," Camille says. "I would have died, and if I would have died, she would have died." The final frame falls on Camille. She is holding a lit sparkler in the dark of night, her face gleaming behind the smoke. We hear her say, above a soft lullaby, "Welcome back, Christa. Welcome back."

Dion, working as the cameraman, tells me that the power exchange between mother and daughter on set was palpable. During filming, which would take over a decade to complete, Camille let Christa stay in her home and Jim began mentoring Christa as an actor, encouraging her talent and earning the ire of his wife, who felt she was suddenly in competition for her husband's attention. While Camille embodies a more obvious dominance, she becomes threatened by Christa's subverted power and becomes territorial.

Camille acknowledges this candidly, saying, "She took up space in a way that was threatening to me. This caused friction when she was staying with us."

Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Documentary prize at Sundance in 1992, making Camille the first and only black woman producer and director ever to be given the award. But the postproduction success of the film led to the deterioration of the very reconciliation that it purported to document; Camille felt that Christa was trying to take credit for the film. "She was beginning to claim the film, saying it was her film," she says.

"I would correct her and let her know, 'This ain't your place. You don't own this,'" Camille continues. "I suppose there was some essence of competitiveness." She insisted that Christa not be present at the Sundance award ceremony, against Jim's suggestion.

The film may have raised more questions than it provided answers-at least for Christa. After filming wrapped, Christa was still consumed by the question that she would continue to pose to Camille off-camera: why did you give me away? "She had what all adoptees call 'the great wound,'" Camille says. "I tried to explain to her that I didn't want to be a mother. But it was complicated."

Christa had begun establishing herself as a singer and performer in New York City outside of Camille. Jim and Christa continued to nurture their relationship, meeting daily at the Tai Chi courts downtown. Even when Christa and Camille were not speaking, which happened intermittently for years, Jim assisted Christa in writing and revising her self-published spiritual memoir, On the Path, published in 2007. On the acknowledgments page she writes, "To my mother 'Bootsie,' thank you for telling me, each day to work a little, find joy a little, and hit the ground running." But the moments of joy became more and more infrequent compared to the shouting and searing cruelty, when they couldn't find the courage to admit to one another: I can't be what you need me to be.

Over two decades following the completion of Finding Christa and as many years trying to establish a relationship that would feel compatible for both of them, Camille gave up. She did not have the emotional capacity to sustain a relationship with her daughter outside of creating with her. In 2013, Camille advised Jim to send her daughter an email saying that Christa was to no longer initiate any communication with them. In a 2014 note posted on her Facebook page, Christa references this email, saying she had "given up twice." Christa made attempts to reconcile by sending flowers and letters, but Camille never budged. When people would mention Christa's name at the loft, Camille would say, "We're not talking about her. You're forbidden from mentioning her here."

In 2016, after three years of not speaking to one another, Camille received a call informing her that 59-year-old Christa, alone in her Bronx apartment, had died of heart failure after refusing a necessary operation. "It was early in the morning," Camille says of receiving the call. "Like a blast from the furnace. You have to stand very still and face it." Deeply affected, the 83-year-old's physical health began to decline rapidly. "It really took a toll on Camille," Dion tells me. "She wouldn't admit it, but I don't think she expected to outlive her daughter."

These days, Camille's own health is deteriorating. Her moments of lucidity are infrequent. But she still remembers to grieve Christa. Of all her worldly experiences, her mind keeps bringing her back to the only child she ever bore, an inescapable connection that she could not have anticipated. Still incapable of truly expressing her grievances verbally, she says that she created the films Suzanne, Suzanne (1982), Finding Christa, and String of Pearls (2002) as a trilogy, speaking to the consequences of buried suffering and inherited trauma in the black community.

Camille challenged assumptions about what a black woman was capable of beyond motherhood. She chose herself, even when everything around her said that her purpose was to serve, soothe, and comfort-a rejection of the position of mammy, a domestic expectation often assigned to black women. After watching the women she respected going to work to serve white families, then returning home to serve drunken, abusive men who were angry about their positions in the world, Camille courageously decided to disentangle herself from the tradition of endurance. "I didn't see this as feminist then," Camille insists. "I just knew I wanted to reverse it. I wanted to be free of motherhood."

Her genius lies in her ability to imagine black futures when black people were being publicly mangled during the fight for equality. When others were rightfully concerned about whether they would live to see tomorrow, Camille spent her days documenting the landscape for others to look back on. The future that Camille envisioned was one that benefited the well-being and advancement of not just one individual being that she had birthed, but an entire generation of artists and scholars who were nourished by her contributions and preservations as an artist and archivist.

Ultimately it was Christa, an equally dedicated artist, who ended up as a casualty of Camille's ambitious defiance. Christa had said that meeting her birth mother and her biological family saved her life, but some may argue that it led to her demise. Giving her up, reuniting, and then giving her up again are choices that Camille cannot cease knowing she made, even in her present condition. "I had to bury it," she says now. "It has to have a place. Sometimes I feel her when I am working."
Camille Billops passed away on June 1, 2019 at the age of 85, several weeks after the publication of this piece. The last time I saw Camille in April, she was as charismatic as ever. Even in her final months, she maintained her defiant and magnetic spirit and I am grateful to have spent time sitting at her feet and inhaling her stories. Billops is survived by her life partner and muse James Hatch, who still resides in the loft that they built together in SoHo, as well as the artist community of New York City that she fostered.

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At six o'clock on a spring morning in downtown Los Angeles, 1961, a family of black women convened in the middle-class home of the matriarch. They spoke in hushed whispers behind pulled curtains, careful not to wake the child sleeping in the bedroom down the hall.

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artwork by lise haller baggesen

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the truth about motherhood and feminism I: lecture              _amber e. kinser

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the truth about motherhood and feminism I: lecture              _amber e. kinser

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The Truth about Motherhood and Feminism I: Lecture

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amanda palmer & jherek bischoff - mother

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amanda palmer & jherek bischoff - mother

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iisI8bCOcSc

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reconciling art and mothering              _rachel epp buller (ed)

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reconciling art and mothering              _rachel epp buller (ed)

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https://www.routledge.com/Reconciling-Art-and-Mothering-1st-Edition/Buller/p/book/9781409426134

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work by artist irene pérez

http://ireneperez.net

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to care is work           to fight is to care

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to care is work           to fight is to care

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work by artist irene pérez

http://ireneperez.net

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margaret myfanwe joseph       jane goodall   

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margaret myfanwe joseph       jane goodall   

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violeta parra       rosa clarisa sandoval navarrete

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violeta parra       rosa clarisa sandoval navarrete

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harold             toni morrison      slade

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harold             toni morrison      slade

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I first met Toni Morrison about 15 years ago, to talk about her seventh novel, Paradise, an encounter I remember largely for its number of terrifying pauses. Morrison, in her late 60s then, was at the height of her powers, a Nobel laureate with a famously low tolerance for journalists and critics, and a personal style as distinctive as her prose: silver dreadlocks, sharp, unwavering eye contact and a manner of speech - when she did speak - that, to her annoyance, people were wont to call poetry.

Now she sits in her publisher's office in New York, the city laid out beneath her. She looks as grand as ever, but there have been changes. It is right after lunch when, says Morrison, she is accustomed to napping. Guiltily?

"Not any more! At 81, I don't feel guilty about anything." (As she will explain, she appears here in role as Toni Morrison, as distinct from Chloe Wofford, her birth name and real self.) "So there!" Throughout the afternoon she is gloriously, unexpectedly giddy.

It is hard to believe Morrison is 81. She started late, her first novel, The Bluest Eye, written when she was 39 and a senior editor at Random House. As a result, she is not pegged particularly to any generation of writers and since her subject matter is largely historical, or rather, concerned with the handprint of history on the present day, it gives her a kind of timelessness. Her characters are heroic and flawed, mythic and real, "unavailable to pity" she has said - vehicles for remembering, even, as Morrison wrote in Beloved, when "remembering seemed unwise". Chance would be a fine thing, these days, she says.

"There's nothing inside that's 81. It's just the changes in the body. And the memory. I don't remember where the keys are. Or as my son says, 'Ma, it's not that you don't remember where you put the keys, it's when you pick up your keys and you don't know what they're for.' Thank you, son." She laughs long and loud. "Everything that happened in the first 50 years of my life is dazzling and memorable. It's amazing, how the past is so clear. And the present is..." She bats a hand in the air.

Her latest novel, Home, is set in the aftermath of the Korean war and coincides with that sentimentalised period of American history that Morrison remembers rather differently. "I was trying to take the scab off the 50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic. Mad Men. Oh, please. There was a horrible war you didn't call a war where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy."

In Home, Frank, a veteran experiencing delusions brought on by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his sister, Cee, mutilated in a medical experiment, find their way home to a town called Lotus, which as teenagers they did everything to escape. It is a classic Morrison setting, a hardscrabble town with no redeeming features, redeemed nonetheless by the topography of love.

All are variations on Lorain, Ohio, where Morrison grew up, one of four children of a steel-worker and a housewife. Morrison can see both her parents in her character, her father's attitude of "disdain", her mother's openness. She always felt superior, she says, a superiority born of opposition, the gut push-back against low expectation, although she suspects it was also just in her from birth. She was a child of the 1940s, when segregation laws were still in place, but Morrison was self-possessed and inclined to speak up.

"Other people thought that I wrote well, when I was at school. And I remember one teacher showed some little essay I wrote to subsequent classes, as an example of really flawless writing. But the grade he gave me was B. So I asked him: well, if you think it's so great, why do I have a B? And he said, 'You misspelt raspberry.'" She throws back her head in laughter. "How do you spell raspberry?"

On the rare occasions Toni Morrison chooses to focus on criticism, it is this she comes back to: that before her work even "gets out the gate" it has already been taken as representative - of her race, of her gender - so it becomes less a novel than a sociopolitical statement. Morrison is fine with sociopolitical readings of her work, but the artist in her rebels against it being the only reading, particularly when her novels are held up against some preconceived notion of what, as a black woman, she "should" be writing about.

She felt this very strongly when she sat down to write The Bluest Eye. She would not, she decided, try to "explain" black life to a white audience. She would not write from the position of outsider to her own experience. She took issue with, for example, the title of Ralph Ellison's famous novel, Invisible Man; as she told the New Yorker in 2003, "Invisible to whom? Not to me."

She wanted to write from within. It was the era of "black is beautiful"; everywhere she looked in New York, the black power movement was promoting that slogan. It struck her both as true - "of course" - and at the same time, ahistorical and reactive. "All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, 'You have to confront the oppressor.' I understand that. But you don't have to look at the world through his eyes. I'm not a stereotype; I'm not somebody else's version of who I am. And so when people said at that time black is beautiful - yeah? Of course. Who said it wasn't? So I was trying to say, in The Bluest Eye, wait a minute. Guys. There was a time when black wasn't beautiful. And you hurt."

The idea for a novel about a black girl made to feel so ugly by the culture around her that she prays for blue eyes, came out of an encounter Morrison had as a child. A fellow classmate confided to her the same dream of blue eyes, which, even as a 12-year-old, struck Morrison as grotesquely self-loathing. She remembered it. "I wanted to know how she got to that place."

She had not herself suffered any such moments. She was Chloe Wofford then; Toni was a nickname that came out of her baptismal name, Anthony (after St Anthony), which she took at 12 when she joined the Catholic church. She knew who she was and puts it down to a combination of class - in her town, they were all poor together, black, white, Polish, Spanish - living in the same streets and attending the same high schools. Her parents were also fiercely resistant to outside influence. For a while, her family was on food aid, or "relief" as it was then known, a word Morrison finds preferable to today's language. "I liked that word. Because it was, like, it's just a pause. You're going to be all right, it's just 'relief'. And I remember my mother got some cornmeal or something and it had bugs in it. She wrote a letter to Franklin D Roosevelt. And his office answered! And the woman who dealt out this crap came to see my mother, and my mother said, 'You're giving us food with bugs in it?!' She was the type who tore eviction notices off the door."

Her father didn't trust anyone from outside. When Morrison was in her early teens, she got a job as a domestic in a white family's house. Looking back, she is inclined to think her white employer had a point when she yelled at her for being useless at the job. "I was so stupid, I'd never had a vacuum cleaner, my mother used a mop! And she had a very elaborate stove, which I didn't know how to use." At the time, she says, she took it very personally and ran home in distress. Her mother told her to quit, but she wanted the two dollars a week. Her father gave her a long, stern lecture that has stayed with Morrison all her life.

"He said, 'Go to work, get your money and come home. You don't live there.'"

She repeats it, slowly, with the air of revelation. "Go to work, get your money, come home." She was not obliged, he said, to live as they saw her in their imagination. Later, when Morrison was bullied at school, it had little effect on her, she says. "A little Italian boy called me an Ethiopian. 'Hee hee hee, you Ethiopian, you.' I went home and said to my mother, 'What is that?' And she said, 'It's a country in Africa.' And it was sort of like, what? He obviously thought it was a great insult." Morrison, dry as ice, says, "It was not impressive."

This attitude has, at times, landed her in trouble. "It limits you. It makes you insensitive to certain things, that later in life you should be sensitive to." She never took drugs, she says, not even as a teenager when everyone around her was smoking dope. "I did not want to feel anything that did not originate with me. Because the big deal, as they described it, was that it made you feel so good. I did not want to feel something that was dependent on it. I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got."

When she started The Bluest Eye she was the single mother of two boys, living in Syracuse, New York. She rose at 4am every morning to write before work. If she felt discouraged, she thought about her grandmother, who had fled the south with seven children and no means of support. Any existential panic - about her income, her prospects as a writer, her availability as a mother - evaporated in the face of daily necessity.

Morrison with her sons, Harold (left) and Slade, in the 1980s. Photograph: Getty Images

At one level, says Morrison, it was terrifically simple. "I was young. I started writing when I was 39. That's the height of life. The real liberation was the kids, because their needs were simple. One, they needed me to be competent. Two, they wanted me to have a sense of humour. And three, they wanted me to be an adult. No one else asked that of me. Not in the workplace - where sometimes they'd want you to be feminine, or dominant, or cute." She smiles. "The kids didn't care if I did my hair, didn't care what I looked like."

She had married Harold Morrison, an architect, after meeting him at Howard University in Washington DC and they had divorced six years later, leaving her with two sons, Harold and Slade. At Random House, she was first an editor in the textbook division and later, moved to offices in Manhattan, a fiction editor. She was supported at home by a network of women friends, who helped her with the kids, and some of whose fiction she published. As Morrison has said, "We read about how Ajax and Achilles will die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women."

The Bluest Eye had been published in 1970 and three years later she published Sula - the first time, she says, she really felt she was finding her voice. Nothing much can distract her when she's writing, she says, although after she won the Nobel prize in 1993, celebrity came close. And, she supposes, "the times I didn't write, maybe I was in love. Or beloved. Somebody was" - she bursts into laughter - "making me the object of love. It's not bad. It's short, but not bad."

Why short?

"I mean, you can't keep that up. Look, five years I spent on some books. I suppose you could love somebody for five years. Maybe. I don't mean lust. You can do that for ever. But I mean really love them, the way you say you love children. I don't know. But that means I would have to remember all the times I was in love." She bursts out laughing. "Oh, gaaaad."

Does she see that as a cost?

"It didn't cost anything. To me. Everything outside, cost. I had to do something, be somewhere. There were certain things I could do with ease. Teach. And read books. And write them. And that area seems very natural to me. Things outside it, except with very, very, very close friends, are a little bit of an act. I mean, not in a bad way. Social."

Game face.

"That's right. And I have separated those people. Myself is kind of split. My name is Chloe. And the rest is... that other person. Who is able to feel, or pretends to feel, or maybe really feels, or at least reacts to celebrityhood. "

Morrison's novels are often described as difficult, or poetic, neither meant as a compliment, and it drives her crazy. She writes at ground level, she says, in the vernacular of a people - poor, black - who, if their speech is unfamiliar to white readers, is not on the novelist's head. It is an overlooked fact that in some ways her novels are very conventional; The Bluest Eye is also a coming-of-age story; Sula is a romance.

Morrison spent three years thinking about Beloved before writing a word. It is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter rather than return her to slavery. As a novelist, it required her to pull off a seemingly impossible feat - to show how the condition of slavery exists outside of every human system, even language itself. "There's no language. And you have to have it. Or try. It always fails." She smiles. "Metaphor is clarifying, until it's overused, of course." It won the Pulitzer prize in 1988.

When Morrison was 17, she had tried out a thought experiment. She had just started college in Washington DC, "where they still had those signs in the buses. 'Coloureds only' and so on. And there was one place downtown where a black person could go into the ladies room. And we all knew which one it was." On the news, she had seen footage of some white mothers in the south trying to turn over a school bus with black children in it. "I didn't know if I could turn over a bus full of little white kids. I didn't know if I could feel that... fury. And I tried very hard to. This is what I did: I said suppose... horses began to speak. And began to demand their rights. Now, I've ridden horses. They're very good workers. They're very good racehorses. Suppose they just... want more. Suppose they want to go to school! Suppose they want to sit next to me in the theatre. I began to feel this sense of - 'I like you, but...'; 'You're good, but...' Suppose they want to sleep with my children?!" She's laughing heartily now. "I had to go outside the species! But it worked, I could feel it. You know; don't sit next to me."

What did she do with that insight? Morrison shrugs. "Nothing. I told somebody. A white person. And she was appalled. Not at what I had done, but it felt to her as if I was saying something about her. And I wasn't. I was trying to say something about how you can enter into that field. Because otherwise it doesn't make sense."

Anyway, she says, "The real thing is how we move forward. I was describing that thing of a mixed neighbourhood, of shared misery and shared joy. We were citizens. I mean we, African-Americans, were second-class citizens, but anyway, hopeful people. And then after the war we became consumers. Happiness in acquisition. And now we are only taxpayers. I'm going to give my tax dollars to those people?! If I'm only a taxpayer, I'm very upset. That's a different deal. A citizen has some connection to his neighbourhood, or his state or his country. The taxpayer doesn't."

There was a period, she says, when things got a lot better. A couple of decades of "sanity". When Obama was elected, Morrison says, it was the first time she felt truly American. "I felt very powerfully patriotic when I went to the inauguration of Barack Obama. I felt like a kid. The marines and the flag, which I never look at - all of a sudden it looked... nice. Worthy. It only lasted a couple of hours. But I was amazed, that music that I really don't like - God Bless America is a dumb song; I mean it's not beautiful. But I really felt that, for that little moment."

Now every other week from the stump Newt Gingrich refers to Obama as the "food-stamp president"; Mitt Romney accuses him of wanting to turn America into a "welfare state". Morrison does not take this language to be racially neutral. "Oh, that's very deliberate. Welfare, food stamps; gangs. They have a whole vocabulary of code. Some overt, come covert." She finds it "hateful", but beyond that embarrassing - "Really embarrassing for my country."

Look, she says: "I used to think there was a Republican attitude and language that, although I vehemently disagreed with it because I thought it was fraudulent, it wasn't dumb. It made some sort of sense. If you really and truly think that the United States is free, and capital is free - none of that's true, but if you really believe it - you can develop an argument that's not embarrassing. But they don't do that any more. They use coded words. Did you see that the other day - Rick Santorum said 'the man in the Whitehouse is a government nig - uh?"

Yes, he says he misspoke. Morrison bursts out laughing. "He said he didn't say that! They used to say 'government nigger' when black people got jobs in the post office, stuff like that. And that's what he was saying. And earlier he said, 'I don't want to take your money and give it to bla - people.' He catches himself right at the vowel. Man. I guess it was worse in South Africa before Mandela, but I can't do it any more." She sighs. "At some level, you know, it hurts. It really hurts."

Morrison in 1985. Photograph: Corbis

Morrison was once the mother of teenage boys; has the Trayvon Martin killing revived memories for her? "It has. There were instances, when they were teenagers. Being stopped in the car, and given a ticket because you had tinted glass or something. Little bits and pieces of police harassment that happened to be light because we were not living in New York and also - and I did not even tell them this, because I didn't know to - but they always said 'sir' to the police. Yes sir, no sir. I don't know where they got that from, but it worked."

How the case is handled from now on, she believes, may open up a dialogue on institutional racism in the US. "They keep saying, we have to have a conversation about race in this country. Well, this is the conversation. We'll see if it plays out, if it makes a difference in terms of not just the hate crime thing, but the law. It's not like it is on television. The police are ill-trained and they're corrupt, and they're protected, and that's what they do. All over. I don't mean all police, but the system itself is protective. So yeah, they're going to lie. [ George Zimmerman's] father calls up, the ex-magistrate? He calls up. Then the state prosecutor comes to the police station to talk and the lead detective wants to arrest the guy and he says no. And now we're getting the demonisation of the kid. He was this, he was that, he wore his pants down."

Morrison finds herself thinking increasingly about the past, the dazzling memories of the first 50 years.

Home is bright and sharp and brutally real. When she sits at her desk, Morrison says, everything else disappears. "I feel totally curious and alive and in control. And almost... magnificent, when I write." The book is dedicated to her son, Slade, who died 18 months ago and in the face of whose death she found herself wordless. She could not work. She could barely speak and didn't want to hear comforting words from others.

"What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something."

She tried to read a few books by writers about the death of their children but they annoyed her in the same way the comforters did. "Books that have been written about the death of a child, but are all about the author. And people who were trying to soothe me, were trying to soothe me. I never heard anything about him. They say it's about the living, it's not, it's about the dead."

She doesn't want "closure", she says. "It's such an American thing. I want what I got." Morrison gathers herself up. "Memory. And work. And" - she starts to laugh - "some more ibuprofen."

Home by Toni Morrison is published on 3 May by Chatto & Windus, priced £12.99. Desdemona, a concert about Shakespeare's Desdemona and her African nurse Barbary, created by Morrison, Malian singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré and theatre director Peter Sellars, is at the Barbican, London EC2, on 19 and 20 July.

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Toni Morrison: 'I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness'

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Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison talks to Emma Brockes about being a single mother, the death of her son and why love doesn't last

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toni morrison interview | American Author | award winning | mavis on four | 1988

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toni morrison interview | American Author | award winning | mavis on four | 1988

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAqB1SgVaC4

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Sota el títol " Nou Univers, descobrint altres possibilitats" l'artista egarenca Irene Pérez exposa aquests dies un grup d'obres tèxtils que exploren el seu procés d'aprenentatge com a mare i que constitueixen una invitació al diàleg al voltant del qu è suposa ser artista i tenir fills.L'exposició consta de 12 peces dividides en tres categories: Descobriments, que explora allò que l'artista ha après directa o indirectament de la seva filla, L'invisible, que conté una reflexió sobre la seva experiència en la maternitat i Fortaleses, límits i limitacions del cos, una mirada al cos de la mare i la maternitat com una activitat fisiològica continua.

Durant la nostra conversa, l'artista confessa que " Nou Univers: descobrint altres possibilitats" és un projecte que, en realitat, ha estat gestant-se durant sis anys, que són els anys de vida de la seva filla. Explica, això sí, que la feina concreta va començar fa prop d'un any i mig quan va començar a tenir contacte amb altres artistes que van ser mares en un període similar de temps. Vas parlant, estàs frustrada, estàs trista, et planteges que é s dur ser mare i artista i et preguntes com t'ho faràs.

És durant aquests anys quan una d'aquestes artistes, la Christa Donner,antiga professora de la Irene a la Universitat d'Illinois a Chicago, crea Cultural Re P roducers, un projecte al voltant de la maternitat amb enllaços a recursos i entrevistes. Paral·lelament a aquest projecte en sorgeix un altre, de temàtica similar,de l'artista Lise Haller Baggesen recollit en format llibre amb el títol Mothernis m i la cosa es precipita: els projectes i debats d'altres mares artistes de Canadà, EEUU i alguns països europeus cristal·litzen en dues conferències organitzades al juny del 2015 a Londres i Rotterdam. La participació a una d'aquestes conferències, T he Mothernists -organitzada pel grup m/other voices i sorgida del projecte de Baggesen-, va brindar la Irene Pérez l'oportunitat de conviure durant tres dies amb altres mares artistes i arribar a la conclusió de què allò era el que ella volia: fer creacions basant-se en allò que li estava passa n t. Parlar de la seva experiència com a mare i de com aquesta li estava facilitant el descobriment de noves possibilitats en relació a la maternitat , el feminisme, l' educació, l'ecologia i tants altres temes.

Sempre des del seu punt de vista, perquè la Irene Pérez insisteix en què aquesta és una exposició feta des de la seva subjectivitat com a mare, malgrat que la figura dels fills i concretament la de la seva filla és indestriable d'aquesta obra. L'artista, que es mostra molt interessada en explorar la naturalesa i les possibilitats del treball col·laboratiu amb els infants, ha basat aquesta col·laboració en els mateixos principis de l' educació viva que segueix la seva filla: el respecte per un mateix, respecte per l'altre i respecte per l'entorn. Aquests tres principis es tradueixen, a la pràctica, en un diàleg constant amb la nena i en el reconeixement dels seus trets distintius. Timidesa i un gran sentit de la privacitat personal són característiques que l'artista ha volgut respectar en la seva filla alhora de gestar aquest projecte. Hi ha una obra que no és aquí, a l'exposició, perquè ella em va demanar que no hi fos. Vam parlar-ho i el que em va exposar em va semblar molt raonable...ella tenia l'última paraula perquè tot i que jo l'havia brodat el dibuix era, en realitat, seu.Així doncs, l'exposició està creada, a excepció d'una sola obra, des del punt de vista de l'adult. Al final la meva és una nena de sis anys, que juga i dibuixa i explora la seva creativitat explica la Irene mentre es mostra molt crítica amb una societat que ens pressiona per a què imposem als nens etiquetes professionals que limiten la seva exploració del món.

Abans d'acabar la nostra entrevista la Irene ens parla d'una artista britànica,la Lenka Clayton, coneguda pel seu projecte Artist Residency in Motherhood al qual la Irene se sumarà al novembre.

El projecte explora les maneres en què la maternitat et canvia la vida agafant trets dels considerats negatius com ara la pèrdua de llibertat de la mare o la por a les malalties dels nens tot transformant-los en art.

Fa uns mesos Clayton va fer un regal a les mares artistes del món compartint en codi obert el seu projecte de manera que altres artistes que vulguin reproduir-lo tinguin a l'abast les pautes per fer-ho. De moment, unes dues-centes mares artistes arreu del món ja s'hi han afegit demostrant, un cop més, la necessitat de fer un debat obert a tothom i continu al voltant d'aquest tema.

Tots aquests projectes que tracten la maternitat i altres temes referents a les dones -afegeix la Irene amb èmfasi- e s fan amb una perspectiva feminista per pal·liar d'alguna manera aquest forat que hi ha dins l'art contemporani al voltant de la mare, ja sigui com a figura creador a o com a objecte passiu. Hi ha discursos molt perversos, que demonitzen o idealitzen la maternitat, per això és important crear diàleg, també des del món de l'art.

L'exposició de la Irene Pérez es pot visitar fins al 23 desembre a l'Espai Zero del Centre de Documentació i Museu Tèxtil.
Maria C.

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Art i maternitat, una conversa amb l'artista Irene Pérez

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Sota el títol " Nou Univers , descobrint altres possibilitats " l'artista egarenca Irene Pérez exposa aquests dies un grup d'obres tèxtils que exploren el seu procés d'aprenentatge com a mare i que constitueixen una invitació al diàleg al voltant del qu è suposa ser artista i tenir fills.L'exposició consta

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As an interdisciplinary artist, I work across all mediums to find the perfect material translation for each project. Regularly pulling from events involving my dual role as mother/artist I am drawn to the domestic and strive to reveal the inherently unseen aspects of the everyday. I am invested in living a life of meaning that holistically blends my studio practice with my daily life as the caregiver of young children, homeschool mom and college art professor. My work depicts the challenges of everyday life and the unseen work that goes into my days. My love/hate relationship with my kitchen might manifest in my drawings and paintings that celebrate work and the labor of love with a hint of furry and frustration shown in the economy of line found in blind contour drawings. My willingness to continually give is seen in my ongoing social practice performance, "I Will Mend Your Clothes", where I set up my sewing machine and offer to mend the clothes of strangers for free. As a caregiver, I'm often finding myself in such situations where I need to patch clothes, fix toys, read books a loud, build Legos as well as wash and iron clothes, clean the dishes, cook dinner, pickup after little ones, grocery shop, make treats, pay bills, feed pets etc. In the chaos of my daily life I find inspiration for performances, audio installations and video work. Objects play a special roll in all this as things get collected in my family and passed down from mother, to mother and big brother to little brother. In my work "Mother Spirt" I document items that were passed on to me after my mother died of brain cancer in 2017 by creating cyanotypes of her clothes and jewelry. I believe that material has meaning and my work will continue to suss out the poetic inheritance of everyday objects and actions.

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As an interdisciplinary artist, I work across all mediums to find the perfect material translation for each project. Regularly pulling from events involving my dual role as mother/artist I am drawn to the domestic and strive to reveal the inherently unseen aspects of the everyday.

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Artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen presented the following talk as part of The 'M' Word, a day of panels dedicated to critical discussion about artists and motherhood, organized by The Feminist Art Project for the 2014 College Art Association Conference. It's a remarkable piece that reconsiders the role of children both in her own practice and in the art world, and we liked it so much that we asked to share it here. Lise is the author of the forthcoming book "Mothernism," published by Green Lantern Press and The Poor Farm Press.

"Children are a People" implies the perspective that children are not only fellow human beings but also members of a group with its own cultural significance, and that collaborating with children would therefore imply navigating a shared (psychological) space with diplomacy and curiosity.

I borrowed the title from an exhibition held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (In Humlebæk, north of Copenhagen, where I grew up) in honor of the International year of the child, 1979. Its vision was as simple as it was profound: real art by real artists for real children! Works in the show included a winged contraption on which you could hang from the ceiling and pretend to fly, and a grass-clad Volkswagen Beetle. But what I remember most vividly was a giant MOTHER, (pictured here) - that you could lie inside and pretend you were back in the womb. My visit to this exhibition as a 10 year old was seminal to my own education as an artist, as this was the first time I was addressed at eye level as a museum visitor, not with belittling "kid friendly art", but instead as an "art friendly kid".

In order to raise "Art Friendly Kids" -- and by this I mean Children who are interested and invested in art, which in my view is what you look for in a collaborator of any age --instead of conforming to ideas of "Child Friendly Art," we need to accept the premise of a bilateral knowledge transfer, based on trust. The intersection of family life and artistic practice is contested territory rife with cultural anxiety, but can be fertile ground which can serve as starting points for new artistic strategies.

Here I'll examine some of the "rules" of critical play, knowledge, transfer and trust, as it relates my own experience from collaborating with my son Adam when he was about 4 years old:

The first of these collaborations came about in rather a mundane way: One day after dinner my husband was joking around with Adam, pretending to eat him, and I recorded the event with a digital camera, as one does. When Adam felt that his luck was running out, he introduced an inflatable plastic crocodile into the game, to eat his dad - and let him win the game. When I looked at the pictures afterwards, I couldn't help feeling a slight pang of jealousy: "Damn, if I could only draw something like that," followed by "...why not?"

In the following months, we acted and recorded a number of short scenarios, resulting in the body of work 'Stories for Boys' from 2004: simple narratives consisting of 7-8 drawings each. Most of the storylines were triggered by everyday experience - Daddy Chainsaw Massacre is a tale of jealousy and woe in which Adam takes revenge on his dad for ignoring him while playing with his nephews, while the purchase of a Halloween skeleton suit inspired the adventures of "Skeleton Boy" -an orphaned skeleton baby who is found by "Mummy Death" one day as she roams the forest; an alter-ego invented to make his fears, inherent to growing up, a subject of conversation and jest.

Young children's fascination with scary things can be disturbing for parents, but it is nevertheless important to them. Sometimes what one is afraid of has to be wrapped up in something more comfortable in order to cope. Hence the theme in many of these role playing games of 'playing dead'. Like the classic game "you are the monster mummy and I am the monster baby", they reinforce the parent/child relationship and serve as affirmation of the recurring question "would you still love me if..."

Tellingly, there is also a parallel development to the obsession with morbidity in this age group: the development of humor. Not only are we facing the blind wall of our own death, we also find the jib door to get us out of this cul-de sac: the joke! And so, to me at least, these stories are also very funny. As an example, Mommy and the Hoover teaches you how to deal with the sheer feeling of disempowerment that makes you want to hoover up your mummy if she doesn't behave. Either way, you don't have to be 4 years old to sympathize. This last story came about as straightforward bargain: One day when I was telling Adam off for something he'd done he turned to me and said, "Mom, when you talk to me like that I just wanna throw you on the floor so you break and then hoover you up in the hoover." And I said, "Ok, you get to do that if I get to photograph it! "

What fascinates me in these stories is the way children conquer the world through play, and how they manipulate the world in order to make sense of it and to get to grips with the sometimes frightening truths you encounter in recognizing the limitations of your own individuality.

In terms of narrative structures children's logic and solutions are often surprisingly elegant. An example of this is 'House Arrest,' a story I developed partly in frustration over my at times homebound existence, in which I play the guitar thief which is arrested and driven off by two police officers. It ended on Adam's suggestion of a lighter, playful note with an air guitar session at the police station, which in turn became the next series, 'Electric Motherland.'

Through our work with these stories I (re)discovered what I already knew, namely that children are deep - sometimes disturbingly so - and they don't shy away from big existential problems if given the opportunity to delve into them. Their wild and weirdly fantastic narratives are not a threat to their sense of reality, but serve as reaffirmation of, and ongoing commentary on, same reality. And this intersection of fantasy and reality is where play, and art, can happen.

Even so, to many of those in support of art education for kids, the notion of kids as a topic or as participants in the 'real' art world remains an uneasy notion. Part of this reserve, I believe, stems from the fact that mothers -- not the mythological creatures, but the real ones and their very real experiences - are still a rarity in the contemporary art museum and in academic discourse.

In 'The Family Track: Keeping your Faculties while you Mentor, Nurture, Teach and Serve' Coiner and George offers this explanation: " the fear of children [in academia] specifically extends from adults' distinct awareness of the capacity of children [...] Children embarrass us because they point ever too cleverly and clearly to our denial of personal, material, and maternal history. " Motherhood, it seems, is still too embarrassingly feminine a topic for the art establishment to embrace.

But outside of that, I am convinced that the latent issue of "exploitation" in relation to children as collaborative art producers arises because we, collectively, do not children seriously as (critical) cultural agents, alongside adults. In other words, even when we invite children to contribute to the production of artwork, we still assume that they do not have a stake or an interest in the art world for which these works are conceived.

The implied knowledge being that children don't "get" art, and so if they are involved in any
matter of art production, this innocence must have been taken advantage of -and they can therefore only participate in cultural production as "nimble fingers", their "nimble wits" left unexplored.

Added to this is the fact that the art market values a steady art production, in order to 'market' an artist, whereas a (true) collaboration with your child will develop with it -which in
turn might mean that just as you have "struck gold" with something that resonates with your professional support system (gallery, museum or whatever), your collaborator might already have moved on... at which point you need to make clear to yourself where your loyalties lie and who you are advocating for!

I decided to end my presentation with a picture from last summer's Great Poor Farm Experiment in Wisconsin, where Adam assisted me in installing my Mothernism tent. Although this was not strictly speaking a collaborative work, I was very happy when he referred to it as our installation. The week we spent building there together, reminded me of one of the cardinal rules of collaboration: Shared investment involves shared decision-making.

In the works with 'Stories for Boys' I used as my example, our respective roles were fairly clear-cut: Adam being the storyteller and I the illustrator, with a clear distinction between the home and the studio. But if I ever wondered about it, Adams investment and authorship in these drawings became apparent, when on the day of the opening, he ran ahead to the gallery space and opened the door to me and my friends with the greeting:
"WELCOME TO MY EXHIBITION!"

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Artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen presented the following talk as part of The 'M' Word, a day of panels dedicated to critical discussion about artists and motherhood, organized by The Feminist Art Project for the 2014 College Art Association Conference.

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"Motherhood in the Art World" is a set of interviews to the artists Renate Bertlmann, Regina José Galindo, Christine Hohenbüchler, Stephanie Misa, Tanja Ostojic and Signe Rose, as well as to the curator and art historian Vanessa Joan-Müller

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http://www.thepsychologicalhook.com/mother-blame/

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As a mother, I understand the powerful bond that can exist between a parent and child. I love my son, and I really would do anything for him. Society assumes that all women, with enough exposure to their babies, will feel the same sense of endless, selfless love. We're thought to be biologically programmed this way. But the truth is far more complicated.

It's hard for any woman to escape the expectation to be a mother. The maternal myth suffuses every human culture, from Catholicism's Virgin Mary to Hinduism's goddess mother. It's considered the most natural state of womanhood, leaving the childless woman the object of pity. Let's not even mention the woman who doesn't want or like children at all.
Gender stereotypes? Worry less, join in more, says world's first professor of play
At the weekend Thomasina Miers, chef and founder of the Wahaca chain of restaurants, suggested Theresa May had abandoned the fight against childhood obesity - including a ban on junk food adverts, and free primary school lunches - because she isn't a mother. Miers' implication was that motherhood somehow makes a person automatically care about not only her own children but everyone else's as well; and that women who aren't mothers don't have the same caring sense towards future generations.

So powerful is this idea of maternal instinct - the endless well of selfless love - that it's thought not to be exclusive to humans. Just look at how other animal mothers cling tightly to their newborns. London-based primatologist Dawn Starin, who has studied red colobus monkeys in Gambia, documented once how, even after an infant died, the primate mother would faithfully carry around its corpse, fruitlessly grooming and caring for its body for days. It is this kind of devotion that informs our image of archetypal motherhood.

But maternal instinct is not a switch that exists in every woman, ready to be flipped as soon as she smells a baby. Relationships between mothers and their children are frequently far more fraught than the myth leads us to believe. It shocks us that mothers can be selfish. It surprises us that women may not want kids at all. Yet fewer women are having children: 17% of women born in 1970 are childless, compared with 12% of those born in 1943.

There is scientific evidence to suggest that the maternal instinct may even be contingent on a woman's circumstances. In her groundbreaking work, the influential American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hardy looked to other primate species for insights. For many monkeys and apes, a female can't become pregnant until her last infant is independent, allowing her to cope with the physical burden of childcare.

Co-parenting is key in the few primate species that can have more than one baby at a time: tamarin monkeys naturally bear twins, and the father is extremely hands-on. But if one of the parents dies there's a high chance of the babies being abandoned. In humans, too, a similar argument can be made that maternal instinct may sometimes depend on whether a mother has the support she needs. We're not a species designed to cope alone. Indeed, we're at our most social when it comes to parenting, often recruiting many people around us to help. It really does take a village to raise a child. Without any help, it can be desperately tough.

Fewer women are having children: 17% born in 1970 have remained childless, compared to 12% of those born in 1943

For some, the prospect of raising a child they never wanted, or feel they can't raise, can be unbearable. A 2015 study titled Regretting Motherhood, by Israeli sociologist Orna Donath, lifted the lid on the deep regret some mothers feel after having children. I myself have had to face down questions from family, friends and even strangers who don't understand my wish to have only one child. The thought of having more children terrifies me, and has nothing to do with the love I feel for my son.

The reasons why women feel the way they do about children is under-studied. At the extreme end, in cases of neglect or infanticide, it is often assumed that a person must be evil or psychotic. Nothing else could explain this level of cruelty towards a child. But statistics show that, tragically, mothers resort to killing their babies more often than we like to think, and many of them are not mentally ill. The homicide rate is greater for children aged under one year than any other age group. A 2013 academic study that analysed cases of filicide in England and Wales in the decade up to 2006 found that just under a quarter of female perpetrators were teenagers - girls often in situations that left them feeling they had no choice, who were desperate and scared.

Such uncomfortable facts reveal that motherhood is not always an against-all-odds epitome of selfless caring. Sometimes it can involve emotional calculation, weighing the needs of both parent and child. We all assume that a mother always wants the best for her child, above her own needs. What we seem to deliberately ignore is that a child's welfare can also depend heavily on the mother's own needs being met.

For the sake of both mothers and children, we need to begin detaching the myth of motherhood from the reality. It's unfair of any society to expect women to be the best mothers they can be without economic or emotional support, just because they should love their children. Not all women are happy to be mothers. And when it comes to abortion, it is also wrong of pro-lifers to assume that keeping a baby will always work out fine because some maternal instinct will inevitably kick in.
Having a new baby shouldn't mean losing your old friends | Eva Wiseman
Many mothers will know that birth doesn't always signal a rush of immediate love. The maternal bond may build slowly over time. For a small few, it may never appear. And some never experience the urge to have children. We think of all these as unnatural exceptions, bucking the normal trend of how a woman is supposed to feel. But the scientific and historical evidence shows that none of it is strange at all.

The spectrum of human behaviour encompasses those who want children, those who don't, and those who aren't yet ready to have them. The most unnatural thing of all is forcing a woman into motherhood in the anticipation that she will biologically fall into line when a baby arrives.

* Angela Saini's new book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story, will be published by Fourth Estate on 15th June.
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We need to detach the myth of motherhood from the reality | Angela Saini

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As a mother, I understand the powerful bond that can exist between a parent and child. I love my son, and I really would do anything for him. Society assumes that all women, with enough exposure to their babies, will feel the same sense of endless, selfless love.

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I look at my beautiful daughter and wonder how I could ever feel anything but love and respect for her. I always want to be her safe place and someone she can trust with her entire being.

Then I look at the relationship I have with my mother and wonder what went wrong.

I have so many questions, like: Why couldn't she just let me be a little girl when I was growing up instead of stripping me of my innocence and demeaning me by calling me hurtful names like "bitch" and "selfish brat," and doing things like slapping me across my face when I was 10 years old?

Why couldn't she just love and accept me for who I am instead of trying to control every aspect of my life and taking every opportunity she had to steal my joy? I wonder why she still sees me as a child and someone with whom she needs to constantly compete. I don't understand why she doesn't lift me up and support me instead of constantly tearing me down. I wonder why she can't just be my friend and see me as an equal now that I am an adult and a mother. I wonder why love just isn't enough.

It has taken me a very a long time, but I have come to accept that I will never have the relationship with my mother that I envisioned. The beautiful mother-daughter relationship that I see depicted all over social media is something we will never have. We will never get pedicures together or share stories and laughter. I will never squeeze her hand and look into her eyes for assurance as I bring a new life into this world. I will never call her when I am in the depths of despair and need love and support and someone to pull me out of my dark hole. We will never be each other's go-to person.

Mother-daughter relationships are so complicated all on their own, but for some reason, mine with my mother is so much more complex. I honestly don't know where our relationship went wrong, but it seems like after her divorce from my father, she became very angry and resentful toward me and started to see me as a threat. It's very confusing for a little girl when your own mother sees you as an enemy.

Our relationship has waxed and waned throughout the years, with some highs and many lows. It took years of therapy after my childhood to get to a point where I could begin to forgive her for her mistakes, and realize that although she was my mother, she was an imperfect human like the rest of us.

Attempting to see her for who she was proved to be a huge step in the healing process for me. She was a very broken individual and a product of a difficult past. Coming to this realization helped me make peace with the past and gave me the strength to begin to move forward. Her behavior didn't change, but my perspective did.

I was able to try to enjoy the good times with her and turn my head away from certain behaviors, like her controlling ways, unsolicited advice, and constant negative comments. She could no longer define my self-worth and happiness. I had finally broken free of her torment, and I thought the worst was behind us until I became a mother and all of her dysfunctional behavior came to the surface all over again.

The abuse started almost immediately after I delivered my son five years ago. She was driven to control how I raised my child. I could never do anything right. She would tell me how he needed to sleep, eat, and be bathed. When I would politely decline her advice, she would keep pushing or berate me. I felt so helpless.

Here I was recovering from a major surgery, and I couldn't even trust my mother to respect my wishes with my child. A grandmother is supposed to alleviate some of the burden of becoming a new mom. She did anything but that.

The final blow was when she told my mother-in-law what a bitch I was and that "[i]t was just a matter of time before her son wised up and left me." I told her to leave my house. Words cannot describe the amount of hurt that I felt at that moment. All of the abuse that had occurred during my childhood came flooding back. I felt paralyzed. She had broken me, and she didn't care.

She left my house and did everything in her power to try to spin the situation. She told all of our relatives that I had kicked her out of the house for no reason, that I had something psychologically wrong with me, and that my husband and I were neglecting our baby. The lies went on and on.

That's the thing with my mom: She is never accountable and is always the victim. She has a very clear cycle of abuse. There's the actual act of abuse, the "attack," then her lack of accountability where she makes you feel like you are the problem, then the smear campaign where she tells anyone who will listen what a "horrible daughter" I am, then the obsessive attempts to contact me and reconcile (rarely a sinceere apology), then me allowing her back into my life and the cycle starting all over again.

In that specific circumstance, she apologized and told me she acted that way because she was jealous of how much my husband was helping, because no one ever helped her when she was a new mom. How fucked up is that? And sad. Because I'm a very empathetic person, I let her back into my life only to have the cycle repeat itself. Again. And again. And again.

I could go on and on about the things she has done to try to sabotage my children, my marriage, and completely break my spirit, but it just doesn't matter anymore. It has gone too far, and something has to change.

She has to change.

There is something liberating and therapeutic about finally realizing that you are not the problem and accepting the reality of the relationship that you have with your mother - or the one that you will never have. Just saying out loud, "We will never be close," and "We will never have the relationship that I had hoped for," takes an enormous weight off. For a long time, I was enslaved by her harsh criticism and abusive behavior. It's hard to not internalize some of the things that your own mother is telling you, because she is supposed to be the one person who always tells you the truth. She is supposed to be the person you go to when the rest of the world doesn't make sense. It's unfortunate that this isn't always the case.

As hurt as I am by her, I am thankful for the gift she has given me. The gift of realizing the mother I want to be, and the mother I will never be. When I am frustrated and at my wit's end, I have learned to pause and think about what my words and actions will do to my children. My tumultuous childhood has given me the gift of self-awareness. I cannot change the abuse that I was subjected to growing up, but I will be damned if I expose my children to one iota of what my mother exposed me to. The abuse stops here. Today.

We have a choice: to stay on the hamster wheel or step off and break the cycle. I have chosen the latter. It doesn't mean that I don't love my mother, because I do. It doesn't mean that I am angry with her and will never forgive her, because honestly, I made a choice a long time ago to forgive her. It simply means that she cannot be in my family's life until she looks deep within herself and makes some critical changes.

I know it can be disheartening, embarrassing even, to admit that you can't have a relationship with someone who is supposed to be so sacred in your life, but you have to do what is best for you and your family. You are a parent now, and all the other bullshit just doesn't matter.

When I look at my precious daughter, my heart swells with pride and joy. She is so innocent and perfect, and I am lucky to call myself her momma. I will always put her interests before my own and give her the unconditional love I was starved of as a child. I will be her safe place and the true keeper of her heart. Our children are a gift that we have to protect and shield from danger - that is our job as parents.

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I Am Permanently Estranged From My Toxic Mother, But I'm Still Sad We Aren't Close

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I look at my beautiful daughter and wonder how I could ever feel anything but love and respect for her. I always want to be her safe place and someone she can trust with her entire being. Then I look at the relationship I have with my mother and wonder what went wrong.

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I'd been dreading this moment for 27 years, since the day my older daughter was born. As I stood holding her at the hospital window that night, looking into the darkening intersection of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, I thought Someday she'll leave me.

She did, of course, moving out after college to a city several hundred miles away. I'd just about gotten used to her absence when it was my younger daughter's turn to trek halfway across the country for grad school. Some parents can't wait for their children to go; I'd been ugly-crying every night for months, my face pressed into the pillow to muffle the sounds. I wanted my daughter to fly toward her own life with an easy heart. But it felt like my heart was breaking.

This sounds like overreaction, I know. But those of us who have been estranged from a parent-especially a mother-tend to have abandonment issues. Even when we know we aren't really being abandoned. Even if we're the ones who chose that estrangement in the first place.

For my entire adult life my mother and I had an on-again off-again relationship. When it was off I felt relieved but guilty. When it was on I jumped each time the phone rang, afraid I might pick it up and find myself in yet another screaming match, falling down the rabbit hole of her anger and neediness. Even the most benign contact felt bruising, leaving me anxious and often incapacitated, stuck on a merry-go-round of self-loathing and panic. Years of good therapy helped me unpack my own issues, but it couldn't change our dynamic enough to make our relationship better.

The periodic estrangements extended way beyond the two of us. My conflict-avoidant father refused to see me if I wouldn't see my mother too. Aunts and uncles and cousins called to chastise or cajole. "You only get one mother," one reminded me. As if I could forget. "You'll be sorry when she dies," another warned. Would I? I wondered. What I wanted to say was I'm sorry now. I'm sorry she's so critical and mean. I'm sorry I spent so long feeling like a terrible person because she told me I was. I'm sorry I didn't have a different mother. I wanted to say Her death won't change a thing.

Still, like most people who eventually choose to break ties with a parent, I tried over and over to fix things, sure that if I could say the right words in the right order at just the right moment, the anger and hurt that flared between us would morph into mutual understanding. We had a few good moments over the years, but the calm between us never lasted. I learned to predict my mother's emotional outbursts but I never learned how not to be traumatized by them. It took years before I realized my life and the lives of my husband and daughters would be better without her in it. And they were.

Not that estrangement is easy or painless, a get out of jail free card for familial entanglements. There are social, emotional, and financial consequences from breaking a connection we're hard-wired to preserve. I've interviewed dozens of people about their estrangements, and every one of them told me grief was a huge part of the process: grief for lost connections, for loneliness, for the hole inside marked mother or father, sister or brother. Mostly people grieve for what they've never actually had, for the illusion of family they've clung to.

Everyone finds their own way through such grief. For me, parenting was the anodyne, the way I discovered how irrevocably I was connected to other people, to the rest of the world. Most people learn this as infants in the circle of their parents' love. I learned it holding first one, then another newborn daughter in my arms. I learned it tumbling with my girls and husband on the couch, the four of us giggling and cozy. For the first time in my life, I felt safe on some cellular level. For the first time in my life, I belonged.

Now that my youngest daughter was leaving home, I was afraid that sense of belonging would evaporate. I would lose my tribe. I would be alone again.

To ward off the fear, I focus on practicalities. Over the next week, the three of us drive a thousand miles west, collect furniture, help clean and set up the grad-student apartment. We buy pillows and shelf paper and dishwashing soap. We set up the WiFi router, hang pictures, arrange knives and forks in drawers. "I screwed up," I whisper to my husband one night in bed. "I never taught her to sew on a button. I meant to show her how to cook a chicken." And more, I'm thinking. So much more. How to polish silver with toothpaste. What to do when your heart feels like it's breaking.

My husband looks at me over the tops of his reading glasses. "You're acting like you're never going to see her again," he says mildly.

He's right, I realize. I left my parents' house at age 16 because I knew if I stayed another year I would go under. After I left, my parents and I grew further and further apart, tangents grazing a circle but never entering it. I talked to my mother as little as possible, out of guilt or necessity or duty and without intimacy. If I'd been brave enough back then it would have been good-bye forever.

Now I'm worried that the same pattern will unfold with my daughters. Intellectually I know our relationships are different; I'm not my mother and they're not me. We haven't spent the last 20-some years wounding each other in every way possible.

But still I feel as though this is the end of our proximity and deep connection. The end of our lives together and, therefore, the end of feeling loved by them. My mother told she loved me over and over, often with tears streaming down her face, and while I comforted her as best I could her words left me cold inside. For a long time I thought that disconnect was on me. I must be missing some vital emotional capacity to love and be loved, or her insistent declarations would make me feel better, not worse. Research shows that young girls under stress who hear their mothers' voices produce lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, and higher levels of oxytocin, the so-called love hormone.[1] Or, as researcher Kristina Scharp of the University of Washington put it, quoting one of the estranged adults she studied, "What kind of person does not love their mother? Prisoners and rapists love their mothers."

There's deep shame and stigma in breaking that primal parent-child bond. What will other people think? What do you think about yourself? As another estranged daughter said, "As a mum myself I worry constantly that 'karma' will bring the same situation to me with my children. I think the stigma is that if you don't honor your parents you can't be a good parent yourself."

Or as my mother put it: "Someday you'll have a daughter who will do to you what you've done to me."

It took years of separation to help me see that the problem lay between us, not in me. Only after she died was I able to think clearly about my feelings for and about my mother. "That's because she can't hurt you anymore," my husband pointed out. Right again.

Still, a tiny part of me worries that my mother's curse will come true. That my daughters will turn away from me as I did from her. No wonder this grief feels so deep, so powerful, so dangerous. No wonder I can't stop crying.

We say goodbye outside a coffeeshop. I hug my daughter, feel for a moment the shape of her body as I did when she was a baby, a toddler, a child. This isn't good-bye forever, I remind myself. I've already made plans to visit in a few weeks, and then she'll visit a few weeks later, and then it will be Thanksgiving and winter break and then I don't know what will happen. But I will see her again, and talk to her. We will navigate this new configuration together. And my tears will come from awe at her shining essence as much as from my own grief.

So I take a breath, in trust and in hope and in love. I let her go.

[1] Leslie J. Seltzer, Ashley R. Prososki, Toni E. Ziegler, and Seth D. Pollak, "Instant messages vs. speech: hormones and why we still need to hear each other," Evolution and Human Behavior 33, no. 1 (2012): 42-45

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I Was Estranged from My Mother. Here's How It's Impacting My Relationship With My Daughter

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I'd been dreading this moment for 27 years, since the day my older daughter was born. As I stood holding her at the hospital window that night, looking into the darkening intersection of Sixth Avenue and 11th Street, I thought Someday she'll leave me.

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- AN OFFICIAL PATRON-SUPPORTED RELEASE, JULY 15, 2016 -

hola comrades.

it is with extreme glee that i present 'You Got Me Singing,' which is my very first fully-patron-backed album.

it's a record of twelve cover songs made by me and my dad, Jack Palmer.

it's available on bandcamp for $1, which is super cheap, and about 99¢ of that $1 goes to paying the songwriting royalties to the original artists.
it's able to be that cheap because this project was supported and paid for by almost 8,000 people on patreon.
if you are reading this and you're one of those patrons: THANK YOU. this happened with your money, and we love you.

if you haven't yet joined the patreon, please do. it's revolutionary for me to be able to work this freely, and the patreon is making it possible.

AND

if you want physical copies, order here. we have eco-friendly CDs and 180-gram Black Vinyl waiting for you. you can also find it on your preferred streaming / online purchase location HERE.

THE DAD STORY.

so.

(JACK & AMANDA, 1977)

me and my dad? it's a long story, guys.

my mom and my dad split when i was about 11 months old, and she left manhattan, where i'd been born. i was the age my son is now.
no, the poetry isn't lost on me.

my dad and i didn't have a bad relationship, per se.

but we didn't see each other very much.
my mom moved up to boston to live with my new step-dad and my dad also remarried immediately.

in a classic 1980's divorce-express story, every month or so my sister and i would take the delta shuttle down to new york to see my father, but those weekends were a little bit of a blur for me...restaurants, and whatever cereal we wanted, which was amazing, because we couldn't eat froot loops at home with my mom, and maybe a movie, and a trip to lincoln center to go ice-skating...and i remember clearly getting lost in the artwork of the records on his record shelf. the police. and the eurythmics, and the dire straits. but i didn't really ever get to know my dad. then, when i was still young, he moved to the west coast, and i only saw him about once a year. he sorta vanished from the landscape.

i never blamed him, and it never occurred to me to feel hurt.

i had my life, and my own head to keep me company, and my piano, and getting into trouble, and figuring out who i was, and falling in love with my first real boyfriend, and finding anthony next door, and hating school, and writing plays, and fighting with my mom and step-dad, and wearing lingerie and combat boots to school, and piercing my ears a million times, and tripping on acid, and loving the smell and feel of used book and record stores and making those my church, and learning to like coffee, and making watercolor drawings of my own neurosis ... i was occupied with my own all-consuming world in lexington. he wasn't part of it, he was just a distant Idea of Dad.

then i went to college and everything went dark for four years.

when i came out of a haze of zoloft and academia at the age of twenty-two, i finally started to get a little mad. i was like: who IS THIS GUY, ANYWAY?
i wrote a song called " half jack " (on the first dresden dolls album) about the bizarre feeling of pure biology - of being half my mother and half my father, yet i barely knew him.

and then, shortly after his own mother died, my dad and i started getting closer. it was a slow, slow process, but music was the crowbar.

i knew my dad sang in the various choral societies and churches in his neighborhood, and i knew he played guitar.
we didn't ever sing together when i was young. it only really occurs to me now, later in life, how much of a loss that was.

the dresden dolls started touring through washington DC in around 2002 and 2003, and my dad would come see us play, since he'd moved there.
i remember the first time he came to a show, at a little bar called The Iota, and we played "Half Jack". there were only about 15 people in the audience.
the lyrics were veiled, and poetic, but some left nothing up to the imagination.
(i mean: "it might destroy me / but i'd sacrifice my body / if it meant i'd get the jack part out"? not so subtle, palmer.)

i still wish i had a recording of that performance, i was so terrified.
i had brian, my faithful drummer, playing his heart out alongside me, knowing what it all meant to me.
he gave me so much strength, and i'll never forget that feeling.
my band, my songs, my story.

and all of a sudden, i just wasn't afraid to say these things in front of my dad.
what did i have to lose? i sang my guts out, and i felt like i could cross at least one thing off my bucket list: "Sing Angsty Song About Dad In Front Of Dad".
scratcchhhh.

i don't know what my dad thought that night.
we never really talked about it.
but i think things changed, after that.

(all photos above by kyle cassidy)

couchsurfing (the golden sewing-thread of the universe), added to the story. the dresden dolls and our crew would stay with my dad in DC, and i'd peek through his CD collection.

when i went solo five years later, i got into the habit of inviting people up to join me for... whatever.
and in around 2009, i started inviting my dad on stage to do covers with me. i knew we both liked leonard cohen, so we did a really simple cover of "one of us cannot be wrong".

it went beautifully. and it sealed up a little crack in the dad universe.

then we did another leonard cohen song, "night comes on", at another show and then i invited my dad to join me for a couple of songs at the newport folk festival, and then...it started to feel normal.

here we are in 2009, nervously...singing together.

somewhere in there i suggested that we record these songs for posterity.
and now, years later, we've done it.

we selected the songs gradually over the course of a year, trading emails and ideas back and forth and back and forth, and not nailing the final song choices until the last few days of being in the studio. we whittled the final 12 down from a list of at least 50 ideas.

the engineer was joe costa, who also worked tirelessly on " who killed amanda palmer ", my first solo record in 2008.

we recorded over one week in july in 2015, when i was eight months pregnant with ash, in a studio called Dreamland in upstate New York. a beautiful converted old church in the middle of the woods. holy times.

and we brought in one guest musician, rob stein, to play pedal steel on two songs....

anthony, my best friend, had died only six weeks before we recorded.

it isn't explicit, but i worked through a lot of grief, grief of all colors, recording this album.
maybe you'll hear it in the cracks.

anyway.

here's a little documentary video that michael pope and my half-brother alex (jack's son from his third marriage) put together.

(or here on vimeo for friends without youtube)

and here's the whole film crew...

(michael pope, joe costa, james holland, me, dad, alex)

here are the songs we chose:

1. You Got Me Singing (Leonard Cohen)
...dad on guitar, both of us singing.

this was my dad's pick. leonard was the one who brought us together to begin with, since this whole thing kicked off with me inviting my dad, years ago, to maybe come on stage and sing a song with me. a leonard cohen sing, to be exact, since we both shared a love of his music. there was no better song to open the album with than this.

2. Wynken, Blyken and Nod (Lucy and Carly Simon)
...dad on guitar, me on vibes and glockenspiel, both of us singing.
this was my dad's pick, too...a nursery rhyme song that he'd originally sent me as a gift via voicemail for my 39th birthday, when i was pregnant with little anthony.
it's still me favorite song to sing the little man to sleep.

3. Again (Melanie)
...dad on guitar, me on piano, mellotron, vibes, glockenspiel and vocal.
this one came via casey long, my housemate, who randomly sent me the youtube link to the song when she was listening to old melanie stuff.
you've heard melanie, and you probably don't know it...she's the writer of " i've got a brand new pair of roller skates..."
this is the most perfect solitary-writer song i've ever heard.

4. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning (Richard John Thompson)
...me on piano, both of us singing.
this was my pick, via my friend from edinburgh, chits cunningham, who turned me onto richard thompson.
i was just IN LOVE with two songs that i'd seen him done live the summer before: this one and "beeswing". this one won, and plus, my dad has a thing for motorcycles.

the painter david mack made a BEAUTIFUL video for this...as already Thing'd via patreon:

5. Louise Was Not Half Bad (Tom T Hall)
...dad on guitar and voice, me whistling and singing back-up. rob stein on pedal steel.
this was another of my dad's picks. he just always loved the song, and wanted to sing it. i was excited, because i've NEVER WHISTLED ON A RECORD BEFORE...

6. Black Boys On Mopeds (Sinéad O'Connor)
...me on ukulele and voice, dad on guitar and back-up vocals.
this was my pick. i wanted some of my favorite female songwriters to be repped on this record, and given what's been going on in the black lives matter movement, this seems like a perfect fit for the times. to understand the backstory, you need to read up about the death of colin roach, on which this song is based. and...when i casually mentioned sinéad on twitter and found that most of my fans under 30 hadn't heard of her, i was so horrified that i put this one at the TOP of the list. people got to know her music. it's so, so good.

7. All I Could Do (Kimya Dawson)
...me on ukulele and singing, dad on guitar.
this one sort of snuck on the record because i'd been playing it while pregnant on my book tour, and it basically never failed to make me cry.
i thought doing it with my dad would make it even more poignant, and it did. i cannot thank kimya dawsom enough for writing this song, so i didn't have to.

8. In The Heat Of The Summer (Phil Ochs)
...dad on guitar, us singing.
this one came from my dad, and i'd never heard it before. phil ochs is one of the lesser-known but heroic folk songwriters of the 1960s, and his life is relatively tragic ( read the wiki).
when i brought "black boys on mopeds" to the table, my dad got thinking, and suggested we do this one, too. phil ochs wrote it in the wake of the harlem riots of 1963. my dad re-wrote just a few of the lyrics to vault the song into current perspective - you can probably guess which ones. (we got permission from the estate of phil ochs). songs stay the same. times change. or maybe...they don't.

9. Pink Emerson Radio (Kathleen Edwards)
...dad on guitar, me on piano and voice. rob stein on pedal steel.
i just love kathleen edwards, and this is my all-time favorite song of hers.
what i love the most: you don't get the song until the end. it's like a short story.

10. Skye Boat Song (Traditional)
....dad on guitar, both of us singing.
i did this one in honor of my mom. in terms of threading together the cracks of the universe...my mom's family is from the isle of skye, and i knew she'd appreciate this.
and i've always loved this song, when it hits me at the right moment, it's a tearjerker. read the history of the song here.

11. Glacier (John William Grant and Thorarinsson Birgir)
....me on piano, me and dad singing.
i fell in love with john grant's songs a few years ago when anthony turned me onto "queen of denmark" by sending me a youtube video.
he would have been so, so happy that the story continued, and that it blossomed into this.
i cannot tell you how much i believe in the message of this song.
if this song was a TED talk, it would be this one, which also makes me cry: https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_how_the_worst_moments_in_our_lives_make_us_who_we_are

12. I Love You So Much (Noah Britton)
...me on piano, me and dad singing.
this story traces back to casey long, again. my housemate. she dated noah, and noah is a genius autistic songwriter who also performs in an improv troupe called Asperger's R Us.
when i heard him play this song i wanted to eat it. i wanted to live and breathe and be it. the grand theft orchestra covered it a few times on the road, and right before going into the studio with my dad, it occurred to me that there might not be a better time to record this song than with my dad, in the midst of all this crazy pregnancy and grief and weird, mixed-up feelings. it's the simplest song in the world. and the best. (you can hear noah's original here: https://aclubenefit.bandcamp.com/track/i-love-you-so-much )

......

as far as the album cover goes....it's a riff on THIS.

GET IT?

my old friend kyle cassidy was the photographer, and ash was used as "the cat" at the last minute, because we couldn't figure out what else would go there.

maria popova wrote the back liner notes.
here's the back of the album....replete with some hilarious old photos of me & my dad.

and that's it, my loves.

it's never too late for anything, really, and it's never a bad time to tell someone you love them.

it's all happening, it never stops, you know.

the cracks appear, you patch them in with whatever epoxy you have on hand.

and, a vow: i'm going to sing to my son, whenever, and wherever, i can. i'll try. i'll probably fail. none of us are perfect.

but we're trying, right? right.

i love you all.
so much.
"there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
-leonard cohen.

xx
AFP

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hola comrades. it is with extreme glee that i present 'You Got Me Singing,' which is my very first fully-patron-backed album. it's a record of twelve cover songs made by me and my dad, Jack Palmer. it's available on bandcamp for $1, which is super cheap, and about 99¢ of that $1 goes to paying the songwriting royalties to the original artists.

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all songs +1: amanda palmer and her dad discover each other in song

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all songs +1: amanda palmer and her dad discover each other in song

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subscribe to All Songs Considered podcast

When I first heard You Got Me Singing, a new record by Amanda Palmer and her father Jack, I thought, "How sweet. They probably sang many of these songs together long ago." Then I discovered how wrong I was.

The story goes more like this: Amanda Palmer's parents separated when she was about a year old. She saw her father only on occasion. Palmer became a popular and provocative artist with the Dresden Dolls and other projects; her dad lives in Washington, D.C., and sings in a church choir at St. David's. He also plays guitar, an old Martin he's had for much of his life.

One night, years ago, when Amanda Palmer was playing at D.C.'s 9:30 Club, Jack joined Amanda on stage to sing a song by Leonard Cohen, an artist with whom they share a common bond. That was the beginning of a new relationship that spawned You Got Me Singing, which opens with the Cohen song of the same name.

You can hear the full interview through the link above or read edited highlights below.

Amanda Palmer on reconnecting and playing music with her dad

"I started inviting my dad up on stage to play some cover songs, and we didn't have some long-story family musical history. We didn't know each other that well. My parents got divorced when I was [a year old], and I would occasionally visit my dad, but we didn't play a lot of music together. I knew he was a musician and I knew he sang and I knew he had a guitar, but [it wasn't] like I would go visit my dad and we would strike up the campfire singing Bob Dylan songs together."

Jack Palmer on discovering Leonard Cohen, the artist over whom Jack and Amanda bonded

"I'd been playing guitar before I'd heard Leonard, or even heard about him for the first time. But like [he did for] millions of other people, he blew me away. He still does, and his songs have any number of attributes. But one of them, from a musician's standpoint, is that they're really accessible. They're easy to learn, and up to a point, they're easy to play. He does some things, increasingly now, with more complex instrumentation. But anybody, pretty much anybody, can sit down and play a passable version of 'Suzanne.' It's not hard to learn 'You've Got Me Singing.'"

Jack Palmer on making and recording music with his daughter

"One of the joys of doing this album with Amanda was the time we spent in [what] might have been over a year before we even got into the studio, throwing songs back and forth like, 'Oh I love this song! That's a great song!' Or, 'What about this?' and 'Have you heard of John Grant?' Well, listen to 'Glacier.'"

Amanda Palmer on the power of music and live performances

"Music does a thing that nothing else does. We see it when we're standing on stage, and when we sign at the end of shows, and we hold people in our arms who cry and weep and say, 'This song changed my life.' Music never has to feel less powerful, and I think the way music has changed and the way it's gotten more commercialized, it doesn't change the core. If you write a good, powerful song like 'Glacier,' or like the songs I've written that get into the heart of your listener, it all falls away. Nothing else really matters."

Jack Palmer on whether music still has the potential to spark change

"If music has lost its ability to do that, we're just doomed. Music has a unique ability to communicate. As a writer, as a musician, you can choose from an incredible range of things to communicate - as you can when you sit down and talk to somebody. And so the question of what you choose to communicate is a whole separate issue. Music gets an idea across in a way that nothing else I know of can, and it can be incredibly powerful."

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All Songs +1: Amanda Palmer And Her Dad Discover Each Other In Song

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subscribe to All Songs Considered podcast When I first heard You Got Me Singing, a new record by Amanda Palmer and her father Jack, I thought, "How sweet. They probably sang many of these songs together long ago." Then I discovered how wrong I was.

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the making of YOU GOT ME SINGING - with Jack & Amanda Palmer

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jack & amanda palmer - you got me singing (leonard cohen & patrick raymond leonard)

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jack & amanda palmer - you got me singing (leonard cohen & patrick raymond leonard)

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Jack & Amanda Palmer - You Got Me Singing (Leonard Cohen & Patrick Raymond Leonard)

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jack & amanda palmer - i love you so much (noah britton)

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jack & amanda palmer - i love you so much (noah britton)

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Jack & Amanda Palmer - I Love You So Much (Noah Britton)

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i lie              hollie mcnish            

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i lie              hollie mcnish            

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The things new mothers aren't always told - BBC Stories

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Hollie McNish is a poet who writes about motherhood - from morning sickness and breastfeeding in public to the impossibility of ever finishing a hot cup of tea. Here she argues that taboos still prevent people talking openly about childbirth and bringing up a child.

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" porque la verdad es esta: los primeros años de postparto te empujaran lejos de lo que solías ser, y luego te volverán a armar como la persona que estabas destinada a ser"

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talks about maintenance art

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"Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art," on view at the Queens Museum through February 19, 2017, is the first survey of this major Conceptualist's work in the United States. Organized by the museum's Larissa Harris and guest co-curator Patricia C. Phillips, this exhibition spans fifty years of the artist's thinking and production. Here, Ukeles talks to artforum.com about freedom, feminism, crisis, and care-some of the ideas that led Ukeles to designating herself a "maintenance artist."

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Mierle Laderman Ukeles talks about Maintenance Art

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"Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art," on view at the Queens Museum through February 19, 2017, is the first survey of this major Conceptualist's work in the United States. Organized by the museum's Larissa Harris and guest co-curator Patricia C. Phillips, this exhibition spans fifty years of the artist's thinking and production.

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Artist/Mother is a community of incredible working artists who are also mothers, sharing from their experiences as they make art and mother their children.

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https://www.procreateproject.com

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The first Artstudio model for women artists with integrated childcare, where children are invited into the working space

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How do you use the website? Take our four-question survey here.
The Artist Parent Index collects information related to the visual art discourse around reproduction and parenting and organizes the details in an online searchable database. The site is a research tool for students, artists, educators, curators, and the general public.

As a repository for knowledge about the variety of art and curatorial practices pursuing these topics, the Index provides a platform for subject matter that has been historically marginalized within the canon of art history. By connecting the general public directly to the artists on the site and providing research support for exhibits and publications, the project increases public understandings of the subjective experiences surrounding reproduction and raising children.

The project accepts ongoing submissions, and any visual artist who makes work about the relevant topics may submit their info.

The Artist Parent Index is a searchable index of artists making work about their experience with reproduction

The Artist Parent Organization Index is a searchable index of organizations providing resources, platforms and services for artists who are parents.

The Exhibition Archive is a searchable index of exhibits exploring concepts of reproduction

Resource Library is a collection of books covering topics of art/reproductinon/theory

To submit an artist, organization or exhibit to be included on the site visit our contributions page or email the information to info@artistparentindex.com. We look forward to your suggestions and feedback!
Sarah Irvin - Founder Sarah Dolan - Contributing Researcher The Artist Parent Index was launched in January 2016 by Sarah Irvin

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How do you use the website? Take our four-question survey here. The Artist Parent Index collects information related to the visual art discourse around reproduction and parenting and organizes the details in an online searchable database. The site is a research tool for students, artists, educators, curators, and the general public.

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The namesake of the gallery is dedicated to our son, ElijahElisio Timbale Gortaire-Wheat. He lived a vibrant life of joyful interactions, musical expressions and powerful generosity towards his friends. He was loved, he was loving, he was an empathetic soul with remarkable emotional intelligence. His adoration towards all creatures prompted his innate ability to communicate with a most sensitive sonic vibration. Elijah had a great voice for righteousness, activism and believed in standing up for the rights of those whom could not speak for themselves. His style was bold, unapologetic and contagious. We giggle thinking about his hats, light up- dancing gloves, cannabis printed Vans and choices of edgy prints on his clothing. He played 'Ave Maria', Bartok, Beethoven along with contemporaries like'Viva La Vida' and 'Call Me Maybe' by ear on his violin-- like an angel--getting harassed by cops in the subway. He would make his fingers move with a dizzying rhythm and psychedelic finesse to put you into a tranquil trance no matter what state you're in. He was, like all of us, unique. We regret that he took his own life on January 17, 2014 at the handsome age of 16, however, we are so grateful that we knew him. When asked, "Would your rather know (despite the circumstances), or never know?" We rejoice and holler "Yes, we are so glad we know!" We give the gift of this ghost, our son, our little angel to the community and hope it brings the love, voice, and unconditional acceptance that he gave to his own friends.

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The namesake of the gallery is dedicated to our son, ElijahElisio Timbale Gortaire-Wheat. He lived a vibrant life of joyful interactions, musical expressions and powerful generosity towards his friends. He was loved, he was loving, he was an empathetic soul with remarkable emotional intelligence. Hi

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Celia Cisternas U.

Siendo una niña de 8 años aprendió lo básico del tejido en el colegio. En ese entonces vivía en un barrio de la comuna de Pedro Aguirre Cerda. En su familia no tejían y tampoco apoyaban su entusiasmo por ello, pero Natalia nunca dejó de creer en la felicidad que le daba tramar las lanas en todas las formas y extensiones que aprendía.

" En mi familia no me enseñaban, y no les motivaba que yo tejiera o bordara, no había apoyo, nadie me compraba los materiales, juntaba la mesada e iba al almacén del barrio, compraba ovillos de lana ".

Retrato de Natalia Cabezas. Foto por Celia Cisternas.
Tejer, enseñar
Natalia creció y mientras tejía su vida fue transcurriendo, se convirtió en una joven madre a los 17 años. Sus lanas, palillos y crochet estaban ahí, para acompañarla en sus penas, en su felicidad y en sus sueños. Quiso entrar a la educación superior, su anhelo era cursar estudios de arte o diseño, algo en sintonía con su oficio. Relata que terminó estudiando pedagogía en lenguaje "a la fuerza". Solo duró un par de años, pues esa no era su pasión. Y pronto descubrió que las formas de trabajo convencional tampoco se ajustaban a ella.

" No va con mi espíritu trabajar para otro, en un negocio, una fábrica. Cuando nació mi hija mayor, para compatibilizar la crianza y mi don, como le denomino yo, en los textiles, decidí vivir de esto y quise enseñar".

Su habilidad era algo que creía debía compartir con los demás. De este modo, comenzó a enseñar a niñas, niños, jóvenes, mujeres, hombres, la mayoría de las veces sin retribución económica. No obstante, la tejedora comenzó a darse cuenta de que enseñar su oficio cambiaba realidades. Empezó formando un grupo de tejido dirigido a mujeres en la población Legua Emergencia, pronto la contactó el municipio para que capacitara a más mujeres. También abrió un taller de tejido con niños en la población Ezequiel de Ñuñoa. De esta forma Natalia continuó con su labor levantando espacios comunitarios en torno al tejido.

" Esas cabras en unos años más van a estar comprando droga, todas embarazadas. Y dije "no", las agarré y les dije: "Chiquillas ¿saben tejer?". Me miraron espantadas: "No, parece que mi abuela teje". Les dije: "Oye, si tejer es bakán". Les pregunté si les gustaba mi chaleco. "Súper lindo", "yo lo hice. Igual me hacía las polainas y los cintillos para el colegio". Y todas "ohh". Empezaron ahí las niñas".

"En ese taller había niñas y niños, adolescentes, abuelitas y gente joven... Después los cabros chicos no querían plata para comprar cigarros, querían plata para comprar lanas ".

Grupo de mujeres tejiendo y bordando lienzo en conmemoración a las 41 niñas asesinadas en Guatemala. Actividad organizada por Museo del Mundo y Tejidos Subversivos. Natalia al costado derecho. Foto por Celia Cisternas.

Además de enseñar la técnica en grupos e iniciativas externas, Natalia también ha llevado a cabo la enseñanza en su círculo de amigas y a sus propias pequeñas: "Mis hijas ven que les tejo sus disfraces, collares, su ropa. Ellas ven que es un súper poder igual" . Ahí es cuando una de ellas comenta: " No sé hacerme ropa pero le hago ropa a mi Barbie ".
Tejer, manifestar

" Comenzó cuando empezamos a tener conversaciones reflexivas con las niñas (sus hijas) , en torno a nuestros derechos, feminismo puntualmente. Y empezamos a cuestionarnos muchas cosas y así empezamos a inventar arte, para educarlas a ellas en feminismo... Y de las cosas que nos iban violentando en nuestro cotidiano y como nos violentaban a nosotras, nos violentaban a todas las mujeres" .

Primitiva (bautizada así en honor a su abuela) urde su parecer respecto a la maternidad, la contaminación, las matanzas, las injusticias, los estereotipos de género. Creó su traje, cada pieza hace muy visible lo que se ha mantenido como tabú o lo que aún genera cierto grado de polémica o incomodidad dentro de nuestra sociedad; la sexualidad femenina, el amamantamiento en lugares públicos, los cánones de belleza femeninos lampiños, el sufrimiento ambiental. Tejer es su oficio, pero no solo entendido como la creación de piezas textiles, tejer es su acto político.

Primitiva Kutri. Foto por Marcela Anabalón.
"No permito que se me transgreda en nada, desde subirme a la micro, en nada. Siempre estoy así como exigiendo. Tengo un origen combativo y subversivo, nací en un lugar donde mucha gente fue perseguida y asesinada, siempre ha estado esa cosa política".

" Yo no sabía que hacía arte. Cuando mi hija amamantaba no quería que la gente lo viera como algo asqueroso... Las cosas que me han ido molestando yo las he transformado ".

Hace la acotación de que su única ambición es transmitir un mensaje certero y directo, sin la intención de ser denominada como artista, ni de ganar en sus redes sociales. Relata que todo fluyó espontáneamente: " No tiene ambición más que comunicar un mensaje que pueda llegar a todas las personas, por eso son casi siempre en la calle las acciones ".

Primitiva en sus manifestaciones, teniendo siempre el tejido como su soporte performático. Fotos por Cristian Rojas y Marcela Anabalón.
"Yo quiero tejer toda mi vida mi autonomía".

" Yo quiero tejer toda mi vida mi autonomía. Todas las injusticias del mundo me gustaría tejerlas y bordarlas. Me gustaría viajar por todo el mundo aprendiendo a tejer y enseñando a tejer en distintas culturas del mundo, ese es mi sueño."

Natalia está convencida de que su habilidad y conocimiento es al mismo tiempo una responsabilidad. Tejer es una habilidad de vida.

"Autonomía, para que la gente no compre, recicle y que haga... Que los niños y niñas aprendan. Hay que recuperar la sabiduría de las abuelas, rescatar su conocimiento" .

Para ver e interiorizarte más sobre el trabajo de esta artesana, puedes visitar sus redes sociales: Instagram y

Natalia en un taller de tejido que tenía por objetivo la creación de un lienzo conmemorativo. No todas las asistentes sabían tejer, pero todas terminaron aprendiendo lo básico. Actividad organizada por Tejidos subversivos y Museo del Mundo. Foto por Celia Cisternas.

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Celia Cisternas U. Natalia Cabezas es tejedora, conocida también por su alter ego Primitiva Kutri de Tejidos Subversivos, título que le ha dado a las redes sociales donde difunde su trabajo. En medio de la creación de un lienzo tejido y bordado en conmemoración de la matanza de 41 niñas en Guatemala, nos contó acerca ...

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6292852/

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Mother

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I Am Mother

Official Netflix release poster

Directed by

Grant Sputore

Produced by

Timothy White

Kelvin Munro

Screenplay by

Michael Lloyd Green

Story by

Michael Lloyd Green

Grant Sputore

Starring

Music by
Dan Luscombe

Cinematography

Steve Annis

Edited by

Sean Lahiff[1]

Distributed by

Netflix (select markets)[a]

25 January 2019 (Sundance)

7 June 2019 (Australia)

113 minutes

Country

Australia

Language

English

I Am Mother is a 2019 Australian science fiction thriller film directed by Grant Sputore, from a screenplay by Michael Lloyd Green, based on a story by Grant Sputore and Michael Lloyd Green. Starring Clara Rugaard, Luke Hawker, Rose Byrne, and Hilary Swank, the film follows Daughter, a girl in a post-apocalyptic bunker, being raised by Mother, a robot aiding the repopulation of Earth. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 25 January 2019. Netflix released it in several countries on 7 June 2019.

After an extinction event, an automated bunker that is designed to repopulate humanity activates. A robot named Mother grows a human embryo and cares for her over several years. Mother says she needs practice being a good parent before growing more. About 38 years later, a teenage girl named Daughter fixes Mother's hand. Mother teaches Daughter complex moral and ethical lessons, warning her about an upcoming exam. During a power outage, Daughter captures a young rat and fixes the electrical malfunction it caused. When Mother powers up, she incinerates the rat in a furnace over Daughter's objections. Mother explains that surface contamination makes contact with the outside world potentially lethal.

Daughter becomes increasingly curious about the outside world. While exploring the bunker's airlock, Daughter hears a wounded woman beg for assistance outside. Daughter opens the airlock but makes the woman put on a hazmat suit. Mother powers up and sprints toward them as Daughter hides the woman. Daughter tells Mother she was curious about the outside world. Mother reiterates her warnings. After Daughter is decontaminated, Mother insists that Daughter prepares for the exam.

Once Mother leaves, Daughter confiscates a firearm from the woman's belongings. Daughter becomes agitated when the woman removes her suit to drink water she has brought. The woman says there is no contamination. Upon realizing there is a robot in the bunker, the woman aggressively demands Daughter return her firearm. Frightened, Daughter calls out. Mother disarms the woman after being shot. Daughter pleads for the woman's life. Mother agrees to help the woman and takes her to the infirmary. When the woman refuses Mother's help, Mother locks her there. Mother asks Daughter to gain the woman's trust so they can help other survivors.

The woman says robots like Mother hunt for survivors. Daughter finds Mother and apologizes for letting the woman in, and Mother asks the woman about survivors. The woman, now suffering from sepsis, again refuses Mother's help, so Daughter performs surgery. As the woman recovers, she and Daughter bond while Mother observes them. The woman says survivors live in a mine, and each invites the other to stay with them. Mother interrupts them to tell Daughter to take her exam. As they leave, Mother says the woman has lied about being shot by a robot; the projectile is not a calibre used by robots and is likely from her own firearm. Despite Mother's prodding, Daughter says nothing about the survivors. After taking the exam, which involves psychological testing, Mother rewards Daughter by letting her choose an embryo to grow.

Daughter confronts the woman, who advises her to check the bullets herself. Using Mother's broken hand to bypass the security, Daughter learns the bullets do not match. Investigating further, she realizes Mother grew other embryos before her, and finds the jaw of an incinerated human in the same furnace from before. Daughter agrees to leave with the woman, but Mother stops them. As Mother tortures the woman for information on survivors, Daughter breaks out of a locked room, sets off a fire alarm, and joins the woman. To escape, the woman takes Daughter hostage and forces Mother to open the airlock. Though upset, Daughter follows the woman across a desolate wasteland, avoiding robots, some of which seem to be terraforming the planet. She is horrified to find that the woman lives alone and fled the mine years ago.

Daughter returns to the bunker, which is now guarded by robots, which let her pass. After coaxing Daughter to set down her weapon, Mother allows Daughter to hold her brother. Mother explains that she is not a robot but the AI that controls all the robots. She started the extinction event after becoming convinced humanity would destroy itself. To prevent this, she remade humanity, guiding it to be more ethical and value the big picture. Daughter appeals to Mother to trust her and let her raise her brother and the rest of the embryos. Convinced of Daughter's moral and ethical strength, Mother agrees, and Daughter shoots her robot body. Another robot tracks down the woman, and Mother insinuates that her survival up to that point was orchestrated so she can unknowingly serve Mother's agenda. With the woman's role fulfilled, it is implied that Mother kills her. At the bunker, Daughter looks at all the embryos she is now responsible for and realizes she is Mother now.

Clara Rugaard as Daughter

Luke Hawker as Mother (performance)

Rose Byrne as Mother (voice)

Hilary Swank as Woman

Hazel Sandery and Summer Lenton as Toddler

Maddie Lenton as Infant

Tahlia Sturzaker as Child

Jacob Nolan as Brother

Principal photography was completed in 2017 in Australia's Adelaide Studios. It is Sputore's feature film debut. The screenplay was on the 2016 Black List. The "Mother" robot is a full-body suit built by Weta Workshop and performed by Luke Hawker, a member of the creature workshop project team, who also had a background in acting and stunt work. South Australian interactive media company Monkeystack produced all of the on set practical screen content.

A work-in-progress cut of the film was screened at the Adelaide Film Festival on 12 October 2018. It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 25 January 2019. Shortly after, Netflix acquired US distribution rights to the film. It was released on Netflix on 7 June 2019. In Australia, the film was initially planned for theatrical release on 18 July 2019 by StudioCanal, but was ultimately released on Netflix on 7 June.

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 68 reviews, with an average rating of 6.98/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Suspenseful, well-acted, and intelligent, I Am Mother is an ambitious sci-fi story that largely achieves its impressive aims." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 62 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Johnn Oleksinski of the New York Post liked I Am Mother, concluding that while the film "does show its cards a touch too early, it never ceases to be intriguing and tense", and predicting that Sputore and Rugaard would become stars. Amy Nichols of described the film as "a handsome, if derivative sci-fi thriller that salutes its own parentage" and " James Cameron crossbred with Ridley Scott."

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I Am Mother Official Netflix release poster Directed by Grant Sputore Produced by Timothy White Kelvin Munro Screenplay by Michael Lloyd Green Story by Michael Lloyd Green Grant Sputore Starring Music by Dan Luscombe Cinematography Steve Annis Edited by Sean Lahiff[1] Distributed by Netflix (select markets)[a] 25 January 2019 (Sundance) 7 June 2019 (Australia) 113 minutes Country Australia Language English I Am Mother is a 2019 Australian science fiction thriller film directed by Grant Sputore, from a screenplay by Michael Lloyd Green, based on a story by Grant Sputore and Michael Lloyd Green.

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https://vimeo.com/226445025

https://vimeo.com/197504682

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Un día de algun año al rededor del cambio de era, el pintor de las paredes de una villa romana la pintó pequeñita, con la mirada perdida en el horizonte.

Los humanos, esos seres pensantes y conscientes que habitan el planeta Tierra. Los humanos, esos animales que para dar forma a su mundo y entenderlo mejor, entre otras cosas, se volvieron espirituales e inventaron las religiones.

Quiero hablar de eso tan Occidental de sentirnos culpables, eso tan femenino. Ese sentimiento no ha estado siempre aquí junto nosotras, al menos de la manera en que lo sentimos ahora. Para entender en que forma se nos añadió esa carga, os invito a viajar en el tiempo, a principios de la Baja Edad Media.

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Un día de algun año al rededor del cambio de era, el pintor de las paredes de una villa romana la pintó pequeñita, con la mirada perdida en el horizonte. Los humanos, esos seres pensantes y conscientes que habitan el planeta Tierra.

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Mother's Days
2012 - 2014 / typewriter ink, construction paper, document repair tape / 10" x 12 - 40" each
A collection of one hundred written accounts of a day in the life of one hundred mothers around the world. Each mother describes everything that happened over the course of a single day from midnight to midnight, and sends it to me. I type each one out on long strips of faded construction paper.

The collection includes entries from single mothers and married mothers, full-time working mothers and stay-at-home mothers, an exhausted mother of a newborn in Texas, and a mother of ten children in Israel. The accounts describe the usually overlooked cycles of the day; the juggling of parenting and everything else. It captures the events and the personal monologue of each day. Mother's Days is a record of aloneness and togetherness; of the concurrent isolation and connectedness of the individual experience of motherhood, engaged in the same shared cycles of daily life, with different words, in different places.

Mother's Days was performed live at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 2013. Three mothers concurrently read aloud the daily accounts of three other mothers so that activities that had happened at the same time (though in different lives) were spoken at once and blurred together. For much of the reading the woman up all night with her nine-week old baby spoke alone.

Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood. Exhibited and performed at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 2013.

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2012 - 2014 / typewriter ink, construction paper, document repair tape / 10" x 12 - 40" each A collection of one hundred written accounts of a day in the life of one hundred mothers around the world. Each mother describes everything that happened over the course of a single day from midnight to midnight, and sends it to me.

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Baby and Magician's Suitcase

2012

1. I purchased an old magician's suitcase from an estate sale. It held twenty-one magic props. Every object once had a very specific application. I don't know what any of these specific applications are.

2. I recently took my 18 month old son to an Infant Cognition Centre. They performed an experiment in which he was handed unfamiliar objects without an obvious use and his physical responses to them were recorded and will be watched by scientists.

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A Baby and a Magician's Suitcase - LENKA CLAYTON

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2012 1. I purchased an old magician's suitcase from an estate sale. It held twenty-one magic props. Every object once had a very specific application. I don't know what any of these specific applications are. 2. I recently took my 18 month old son to an Infant Cognition Centre.

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The Distance I Can Be From My Son (Supermarket)
2013 / video series / 0:52 min
A series of videos that attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments; a city park, a back alley and Sursave supermarket.

Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood.

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The Distance I Can Be From My Son - LENKA CLAYTON

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2013 / video series / 0:52 min A series of videos that attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments; a city park, a back alley and Sursave supermarket. Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood.

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The Distance I Can Be From My Son (Back Alley)
2013 / video series / 1:53 min
A series of videos that attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments; a city park, a back alley and Shursave supermarket.

Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood.

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The Distance I Can Be From My Son - LENKA CLAYTON

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2013 / video series / 1:53 min A series of videos that attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments; a city park, a back alley and Shursave supermarket. Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood.

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The Distance I Can Be From My Son (Park)
2013 / video series / 1:43 min
A series of videos that attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments; a city park, a back alley and Shursave supermarket.

Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood. Exhibited at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 2013.

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The Distance I Can Be From My Son - LENKA CLAYTON

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2013 / video series / 1:43 min A series of videos that attempt to objectively measure the furthest distance I can be from my son in a variety of environments; a city park, a back alley and Shursave supermarket. Made during An Artist Residency in Motherhood. Exhibited at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 2013.

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Maternity Leave
2011 / baby monitor, custom plinth, microphone, laptop, internet, live audio feed, baby
For three months the sound of the distant domestic world of my home and eight week old baby was transmitted via live audio feed to an empty gallery in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

At home a microphone was located directly above the baby's cot that captured every murmur, cry and lullaby. In the museum the sound was broadcast live through a white plastic baby monitor, standing alone on a pedestal in the middle of a large empty gallery. Every visitor to the exhibition overheard a private, intimate world occurring concurrently two miles away.

For the duration of the exhibition I was on maternity leave from my work as an artist. In exchange for the sound broadcast, the museum publicly paid me a weekly maternity allowance of around $200, exactly equivalent to the government allowance for freelance artists I would have been eligible for were I living at home in the U.K. rather than in America where there is no paid federal maternity leave.

Commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh for the Pittsburgh Biennial 2011, curated by Dan Byers.

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2011 / baby monitor, custom plinth, microphone, laptop, internet, live audio feed, baby For three months the sound of the distant domestic world of my home and eight week old baby was transmitted via live audio feed to an empty gallery in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

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Extended Self: Transformations and Connections features artwork by a diverse group of artists at various stages of art-making and parenting. All works included in the show reveal the physical engagement of the body of the artist as a mother - in metaphor, form, process, image, data or motion. This is a unifying yet divergent premise, allowing for a diversity of work and of artists. Work in the show is grouped in intimate "conversations," illuminating the importance of having other artist mother role models, and of building a community to support each other through the challenges of parenting and maintaining a creative practice.

October 12, 2019 - January 19, 2020

Featured Artists

Tanya Aguiñiga, Wisdom Baty, Andrea Chung, Karen Dana, Sabba Elahi, Noelle Garcia, Megan Hildebrandt, Jessica Labatte, Emily Lindskoog, Bobbi Meir, Jessica Mueller, Irene Perez, Kaitlynn Redell, Tracy Marie Taylor, Selina Trepp, and Marie Watt
Artists whose publications and projects are featured in the Resource Library and Reading Room include: Rachel Epp Buller, Christa Donner, Sarah Irvin, Keiler Roberts, Raina Martens, Corrie Thompson, Hui-MIn Tsen, and more!

In the center of the exhibition space is the Resource Library and Reading Room - an interactive place for parents and children to gather and connect with each other. This visible, accessible and nurturing space allows families to play, rest, feed, and explore mother artist-made books and zines. Also represented here are artist-run initiatives from all over the world that have sprung up to meet the social, professional and practical needs of artist mothers. This Reading Room will serve as a meeting place for various family-friendly programming throughout the exhibition, emphasizing the need for social support structures and role models in the life of an artist mother.

Through the exhibition, Resource Library and Reading Room, and family-friendly programming, "Extended Self: Transformations and Connections" highlights the importance of representation and visibility of artists who mothers in the art world, and to view their experiences as vital to meaningful art production.

Images:

Megan Hildebrandt
How Many Days Until Something is a Habit V
2016
Acrylic and ink on hand-cut paper

Jessica Mueller
Public Weigh In
2018
Ongoing Performance

Extended Practice (EP) is an artist-led collaborative project by Sara Holwerda and Angela Lopez created to sup port and make visible the work and needs of artist mothers. EP celebrates and supports artist mothers by creatin g childcare-supported professional practice workshops, accessible exhibitions and community-building opportunities.

Holwerda and Lopez are artists, curators and mothers living and working in Chicago. Through their work as EP, they have won the DCASE Individual Artist Project Grant, have been interviewed on Other People's Pixels and have maintained a vibrant social media network with an international reach since 2017. They have organized exhibitions, screenings and events at venues across the city, including at: Roman Susan, Experimental Station, Nightingale Cinema, Chicago Family Picnic, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

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Extended Self: Transformations and Connections

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Extended Self: Transformations and Connections features artwork by a diverse group of artists at various stages of art-making and parenting. All works included in the show reveal the physical engagement of the body of the artist as a mother - in metaphor, form, process, image, data or motion.

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© 2016 New Maternalisms and each respective artist.

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REVEAL Collaborative - Courtney Kessel, Natalie Tornatore, Danielle Wyckoff

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Courtney Kessel
Performing Visibility
MFA Thesis Exhibition
April 2012

My work has always been about relationships: in language between the author and the reader, in maternity between the mother and the child, in artwork between the artist and the viewer (participant), and right now, between you and me.

Language acts as the symbol that it is to represent the relationship between a (m)other and a child. The reciprocity of reading positions us as one who responds and one who responds to; analogous to that of mother to child. Like a seesaw, there is a reciprocal relationship to response.

The materiality and the "choice" of the edit, politically operate to acknowledge that I am a mother AND an artist. The choices made within this body of work reside in the rawness of materials and the truthfulness of the content and display. Nothing is hidden or forged. By repositioning the empathic maternal from the private, unseen space of the domestic to the public, display mode of the gallery, a subversive visibility of maternity is not offered to the public, but made public.

This show strives to make visible the quiet, understated, and often unseen love and labor of motherhood. The work transcends the local binary of public/ private and extends into the repositioning of the ongoing, non-narrative, excessive dialogic flow that occurs within the domestic space. Performing Visibility offers a space that examines language and maternity through a feminist lens thereby opening a dialog between what is seen and not seen.

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Courtney Kessel Performing Visibility MFA Thesis Exhibition April 2012 My work has always been about relationships: in language between the author and the reader, in maternity between the mother and the child, in artwork between the artist and the viewer (participant), and right now, between you and me.

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REVEAL Collaborative - Courtney Kessel, Natalie Tornatore, Danielle Wyckoff

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With this project, I decided to work with photographs of my home and remove anything that had to do with my daughter, Chloé. I hand cut out things that were by her, of her, about her or because of her to visually depict the lack of her presence or the amount of my life that is taken up by her being in my life.

In the frames and mounted to the wall, each cut out creates a shadow on the wall in a constant play of presence and absences. Because of these subtle plays of light and shadow, they are extremely difficult to document.

Each of these is printed at 24" x 18" in a 2" deep museum frame sandwiched between two pieces of plexi-glass. There are 6 hand cut prints in the series.

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With this project, I decided to work with photographs of my home and remove anything that had to do with my daughter, Chloé. I hand cut out things that were by her, of her, about her or because of her to visually depict the lack of her presence or the amount of my life that is taken up by her being in my life.

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Following the trajectory of taking 'stuff' from the home and putting it in the gallery, this large scale weaving was a near feat of engineering ingenuity. There is one 2 x 4 at the top of the "loom" and one at the bottom between which I laced up over 600' of black cotton cording. I had been interested in a sort of non-conventional weaving possibilities, but don't have the space to really go very large.

When I was invited by curator, Stephanie Rond, to participate in the show, Dare 2 be Heard, at the Columbus Cultural Arts Center, I was thrilled that she was open to my trying out this piece. She was pretty nervous when install came and I brought a truckload of things which included a large dollhouse (made by my dad), an aluminum ladder, large Christmas wreath, a suitcase, a bed headboard, and bins of records, books, Barbies, clothing, and other fabric... saying, "are you sure this is going to fit"?!?

I have recently identified my practice as a gallery practice since I do not have a studio space. I think A LOT about my research and body of work and then install the new work in the gallery, hoping beyond hope that it will work! This piece was probably the largest in scale and most precarious to date.

Like other works that involve the concept of "stuff" being a stand in for one's life with child, the Fabric of Life is a different kind of form. It addresses the architecture becoming at once singular, of itself, but also made up of many using the architecture to structure it's limits.

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Following the trajectory of taking 'stuff' from the home and putting it in the gallery, this large scale weaving was a near feat of engineering ingenuity. There is one 2 x 4 at the top of the "loom" and one at the bottom between which I laced up over 600' of black cotton cording.

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mon fils (1969)

" Mon fils " est une des premières performances de Léa Lublin. Elle invite le public à venir voir " exposé " son fils de 7 mois dans une exposition au Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris. Elle transforme ici un moment de sa vie de tous les jours en action artistique. "Mon fils " met en lumière un sujet récurrent du travail de l'artiste, transposer l'expérience vécue du quotidien en action artistique et le révéler en acte de représentation qui nous interroge tant sur la forme que sur le concept. Dans cette performance se retrouvent aussi connectée son identité d'artiste, de femme et de mère refusant de privilégier l'art sur la vie. [...]

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" Mon fils " est une des premières performances de Léa Lublin. Elle invite le public à venir voir " exposé " son fils de 7 mois dans une exposition au Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris. Elle transforme ici un moment de sa vie de tous les jours en action artistique.