mother earth

How to make use of the experience of maternity, parenthood and their community character? This autumn, Dizajn BWA Wrocław presents a collective exhibition entitled mother earth, which builds on the experience and practice of mothers caring for their children. The invited artists include Dominika Łabądź, Joanna Rajkowska and Kolektyw Antynataliści. 

Joanna Synowiec, the exhibition’s curator, sees the mother-child dependence in reference to a broader spectrum of relationships. She aims to ennoble the routine activities of caregiving and asks questions:

How to use the experience of maternity, parenthood and their community character? How can individual and collective maternity practices become central rather than peripheral to human activity? What would change if we acknowledged, universally and irrevocably, in space and relationships, that feeding, nursing, care and support for dependants is as important as rationality, justice and independence?

Joanna Synowiec 

Mother and Earth have been accepted as the parts of nature which patriarchy and capitalism have been exploiting for centuries. Mother has earthly powers, exhaustible, limited by her materiality and range of possibilities. Unlimited expansion is not only impossible, but also unethical, both in the context of the human body and nature. How can we use this connection with earth today in order to oppose the expansion and acknowledge what is corporeal and material, to lend it value and new meanings in the nature-culture system? 

The invited artists present works which often refer to their individual experience, but also collective practices and ways of communicating with children. They tackle such difficult subjects as fear, fatigue and decline, but also seek new commonality and new self in the presence of children. But above all else, they address the issues of care and relationship building, without which such initial communities would be difficult to establish.