March 2016 / Sharon Renee Stewart, USA / NL

ART, RESEARCH, THEORY: In the March column we are pleased to feature Sharon Stewart, who studied piano at the Utrecht School of the Arts, Faculty of Music, and later completed a Masters in Music Pedagogy at the Royal Conservatoire, The Hague. She has a private piano practice in Arnhem, has collaborated as sound artist with various dancers, and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Sonic Studies. Works with dancers have been performed at festivals and other venues in Arnhem, Amsterdam, Nijmegen and The Hague in the Netherlands. A composition of hers involving whale sounds was nominated for a national composition prize for female composers (MCN Compositieopdracht Prijs). She publishes poetry in a collaboration with Amanda Judd on shandastudd.com. Sharon became certified in Deep Listening, with Pauline Oliveros, IONE and Heloise Gold in 2011 and is currently a teacher, with Jennifer Wilsey and Ximena Alarcón, for the online international Deep Listening Certificate Program.

LISTENING TO THE MOTHER(BEING)

i suggest that the following be read while listening to the soundscape for LIGHT – DARK – LIGHT – HEAVY, a dance performance for one dancer, light and sound. 

Light–Dark–Light–Heavy is a cross-arts collaboration between
Ellen Kilsgaard (dance) 
Chris Crickmay (visual art)
Sharon Stewart (sound)
Performed by Ellen Kilsgaard

‘Light–Dark–Light–Heavy’ - a dance performance for one dancer, light and sound. Light–Dark–Light–Heavy is a cross-arts collaboration between Ellen Kilsgaard (dance) Chris Crickmay (visual art) Sharon Stewart (sound) Performed by Ellen Kilsgaard. This track is the sound design. Watch full performance on Vimeo: LIGHT-DARK-LIGHT-HEAVY a choreography for light, dance and sound Performance June 14th 2015 - CPH-Stage Copenhagen https://vimeo.com/139980033 In the beginning, stillness, darkness and quiet pervade. From this expanse of possibility, light, sound and movement emerge, weaving a journey in which you are invited to enter an imaginary space of association, memory and fantasy knitted together with the movement-body of the dancer. Is the dancer lighting the space or does the space light the dancer? Does the sound propel the movement, or does the movement generate the sounds? What fantasies arise within the quiet, darkness and stillness to merge with the living energy of the performance? Light–Dark–Light–Heavy is a small scale, intimate piece that uses modest means to achieve dramatic effects and emotionally charged moments. The work explores the visual and acoustic physicality of a given space and what this space might perceptually and imaginatively become. Movement, light and sound draw us (as audience) inward to intimate spaces of the body and then out into what seem to become crowded spaces with many presences, or again further out into large open expanses – to landscapes and places beyond. It is an abstract work, yet it evokes a multitude of associations, connecting us with the familiar everyday world we all share and to places beyond, to nameless presences and circumstances such as arise in our individual dreams. The title uses ‘lightness’ in two senses – ‘light’ as in the lightness of the body and light as in illumination. The title also refers to darkness/ shade/ shadow as positive qualities of their own (not just an absence of light) and heaviness or weight, implying the grounded physical presence and reality of a moving body in space. The light, which is carried by the dancer, amplifies even the smallest movement, creating a continuously transforming visual environment, which she inhabits. Through the reflections from skin, clothing and the architectural space, ‘sensory landscapes’ emerge and extend the moving body outwards, making it part of a single, continually transforming world with neither foreground nor background. Instead of being lit from the outside the piece is, as it were, lit from within. The dancer both creates and inhabits a place that emerges and shifts before us as we witness it. One might say we witness the internal life or the ‘coming alive’ of a person – a person who exists, not just alone in the imaginary and real space of performance, but also in the company of her audience, who travel with her, seeing what she sees, feeling what she feels. The experiencing body of the performer evokes a unique perceptual journey within each audience member. The sound is a mix of (sometimes highly modified) field recordings and physically modeled synthesized sound. It has been designed to trigger associations while remaining in an open dialogue with the visual and moving dimensions of the piece, balancing in an ambiguous relationship with the dancer’s motion, sometimes seeming to emerge from the very actions of the performer while, perhaps simultaneously, seeming to propel the performer into motion or stillness. At other times it might suggest a parallel world in which interaction is coincidental.

. how my heart crept in bed with me

this morning

in the black

in the cool

in the quiet

first, as always, the smell

rising from the heat

blood, down and flesh

then, touch, quivering and vital

tenacious to the pull

clenching and releasing

without divide

can one follow without fixing

hold without strangling

tracing fine bones and pulses

the narrowness of the ribs

feel the swell, the burst

without drowning

without drowning

eyes open, always mirroring

in dark pools

eyes shut

the moment has gone by

enough

like a butterfly, unsettled

it draws itself away.

october 2014
sharon stewart
published on shandastudd.com

...form...

perhaps this poem, written in response to a moment with my son, says it all. perhaps it says nothing.

it’s always about finding the right medium (isn’t it?): minimal words, a plethora of words, no words. how can you convey that which you would like to convey efficiently (or not) and effectively (or not)? 

this vast subject: my (art)work, my mother(being). i will use some poetic text and metaphor. i will romanticise things, because that is what inevitably happens when i use words. i will weave sound, listening, improvising, motherbeing. 

my medium/s are sound and words. my mediums are my body, the space around me and the variety of electronic and mechanical, synthesized and acoustic instruments that i control and that control me. 

but here you are as well! you, the reader. i feel you. your presence washes through my heart and into my belly as i write, and this sensation brings hot tears to my eyes. every act i do as an artist, as a human being, as a mother is filled (also) with a longing to bring us to ourselves, to open space for what you feel and hear, smell and taste, wish and sigh: your breath, your being. with this text, i communicate me, but i (also) want to communicate you. it’s complicated. maybe you don’t want this. maybe you don’t want this level of intimacy. maybe when you listen to music you don’t want the silences that reveal your stomach growling or the empty moments that drop into pain. maybe we cannot help but push each other away.

our mediums here are sound and words. our mediums are our bodies, the space around us and the variety of electronic and mechanical, synthesized and acoustic instruments that we control and that control us. 

i have written poetry for more than 30 years. i have written music for more than 20 years. i have been a mother for more than 13 years. you have done so much more.

...interpenetration...

this foreign body that i do not reject, thanks to some quirk of evolution, roots itself in every aspect of my life. i am stunned by the level of interpenetration, conflict and collaboration. we both want desperately to live, and this primal intent weaves its way into my eating, sleeping, shitting. every priority becomes a pact, a deal, a concession.

i have never experienced interdependency like this.

i open to the soft skin of my newborn that operates like nothingness. i can slip through with my energies and intents as if s/he is soft butter. but that slipping engulfs me in an undulating sea of warm silk. thought ceases. there is only sensing.

i hear the sound of breathing like i have never heard it before. tiny modulations of speed and intensity that convey meaning: i am hungry, i am excited, i am disturbed, i am famished, i am sleepy. meaning that triggers time-based action to the listening mother: food, attention, comfort, stimulation, bath, reduction of stimulation, sleeping rituals. there is no verbal entry to the communication of disturbance or excitement. you can respond verbally or with a physical action response. i respond with as much attention and awareness that i can muster. i try not to judge myself.

i hearfeel the vibration of the heartbeat as never before. tiny modulations of speed and intensity. i had never understood how delicate and responsive the heart is, fluttering like a threatened bird, lapping on the shore of the bodylake, unfailing in its expressiveness.

do you remember the feel of your father’s hand?

i understand how sound penetrates me and leaves its traces on my bodymemory. i listen through the imagined hearing of my newborn. i listen to the most vulnerable of sounds, and they rock me to the core with their intensity.

...impermanence...

where does song exist outside of the breath? what propels any rhythm but the moving body? the physicality of the vibrating world washes our bodymind, coming and going.

even with electronic music, we rely on the impulses of the governing hu/ma/n/chine and flow of data through electromagnetic impulses, control voltage through physical or digital channels, the vibrating impulse pumped and revealed through membranes.

sound is continually being born and dying, leaving it’s ephemeral or indelible traces in our sense memory, just as we are marked by the rapid slipping away of our baby, our toddler, our child, our teenager. each day holds a small ritual of mourning as they shed themselves, disappearing forever in this rapid flame of time. we cannot hold on, yet it holds us, inescapably molds us as it shreds us bare.

do you remember the sound of your mother’s voice?

even this compulsive documentation, this archiving of an endless flood of photos, films, sound files, only temporarily saves me from the confrontation with loss. each digital echo or shadow forms a consolation that buffers me, like gathering seeds for the winter of presence. i disappear and am revealed in this documentation. who am i in the consolidation of the artifacts of my children? where am i in this desperate need to re/member them?

 “how narrow we see the world"

...exhaustion...

no experience had prepared me for the deep exhaustion i would face trying to live my personal ambitions while mothering one, and then two, children. moments of collapsing on the sofa, mentally begging for mercy, bones aching, dizziness, a hazy wash of indifference and deep panic, dropping into a few minutes of coma-like sleep.

you receive absolutely no mercy from a growing child who wants to pull things apart, rearrange your furniture, smash their heads, eat, wail their dissatisfaction, eat more and then vehemently refuse to eat, pinch your body and pull strands of your hair.

internal voices moan (remember, sleep deprivation is a recognised form of torture): please go away, disappear, put yourself on pause while i recover. while at the same time i bury these thoughts under the earthy layers of touch, kisses, (fake) smiles and songs, a sort of gardening in which rotting things feed the most exquisite flowers.

recovery and genuine bliss and fake attentiveness walk hand-in-hand in our mutual stroll into the future. do we grow up together?

where are you sinking from tiredness? where does it pull on you?

perhaps there is music there as well.

...glitches and noise aesthetics...

 glitch is the unexpected result of a malfunction, when a machine receives corrupt data or when a machine is pushed beyond its signal-processing capacity; signal/s can no longer be processed in the way that the machine is designed to process them. glitch music adheres to an “aesthetic of failure”: malfunctioning or abused devices, distortion, skipping, hums, bugs, scratches, and fatal system errors.

noise arises when an instrument is stretched beyond its capacity to make a regular sound wave: too much pressure, too hard of a hit, too much air, excessive friction, leaking stops, cracked reeds and squeaking pedals. noise is that which is set in opposition to and measured against the desired signal. noise is the random error that makes your statistical model perform poorly. noise can be described in ratios and in sensory overloads that no numbers can properly represent.

forgotten tennis lessons, lost shoes, lost scarves, lost gloves, pure physical shouting, slamming doors, breaking windows, missed trains, bloodied noses, bloodied elbows, bloody cursing, screaming, crying, broken toys, lost games, small hurts and discomforts, vanishing keys, shit squirting out of diapers, puke gushing from mouths, fevers, collapses, blatant refusals, endless papers, junked devices, trash, streams of unwanted gifts, broken promises, broken friendships, flooding, nearly burning down and barely scraping by...

are you still breathing?

notice the ambient sounds around you. breathe into those sounds.

an almost reverent devotion to quiet seeps into the room.

transitory technical failure becomes “domesticated glitch” (Rosa Menkman's Sunshine in My Throat, glitches vs glitch art and Vernacular of File Formats) once it is appreciated, made controllable, and reproduced in an art context.

...improvisation...

score 1
pleasure
adagio cantabile

enter into an expanse of time
allow time to stretch into countless rubatos of perfected synchronisations
explore the pervasive sunshine of the presence of the other
punctuate this experience of presence with absolute bliss in layered fugue
add looks, touches, kisses, laughs and cuddles ad libitum

score 2
punctuality
molto agitato

you have exactly 30 minutes before your train leaves the station
you need 15 minutes to bike your child to their caretaker
you need 2 minutes to politely hand over child
you need 7 minutes to bike further and catch train
if you do not catch this train, your career will end or... something worse
choose two of the following:

·      child pukes on their clothing
·      child pukes on your clothing
·      you cannot find your keys
·      you cannot find your bike keys
·      you cannot find your train card
·      you cannot find your wallet
·      child refuses to put on their coat
·      child knocks your breakfast smoothie on the floor
·      you knock your breakfast smoothie on the floor

you have 6 minutes to get out of the door

score 3
stopping
larghissimo

find yourself

suspend...
revisit yourself
suspend
recline yourself
suspend
discover your favorite position
suspend
invite someone to join you
suspend
connect to your heartbeat
suspend
press your spine against another
suspend
close your eyes
suspend
breathe with your whole body
suspend
fall asleep with another

suspend...

...others...

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) Wesleyan University Press
Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together” in Vol. 6, No. 1, Women: Sex and Sexuality, Part 2 (1980), translated by Carolyn Burke
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (2007) Fordham University Press
Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005) Deep Listening Publications
Joshua (2002)
Aidan (2005)
David (1966)

February 2016 / Oda Projesi, TR

ART, RESEARCH, THEORY: In the February column we are pleased to feature Oda Projesi, an artist collective from Istanbul, founded by Özge Açıkkol, Güneş Savaş and Seçil Yersel, who turned their collaboration with each other into an art project in 2000. From January 2000 on Oda Projesi had an art space in Galata, İstanbul that functioned as an independent non-profit art space hosting projects, gatherings and acts up until March 16th, 2005, when they were evicted from their space due to the process of gentrification. Since then Oda Projesi has remained mobile. Although the collective isn’t based in Galata anymore, it still continues to raise questions about space and place through the creation of “relationship models”. They do this through the use of different mediums such as radio stations, books, postcards and newspapers, as well as by giving form to different meeting points in the city; always depending on and respecting the creativity of Istanbul and its citizens. Besides investigating relations between space, everyday life and survival tactics, Oda Projesi is interested in relations between artistic production and precariousness in various ways. For the m/other voices column, Oda Projesi’s Özge Açıkkol and Güneş Savaş posed questions to each other, which they then have attempted to answer. What follows is their conversation with each other. 

IF I ASK YOU A QUESTION AND THEN YOU ASK A QUESTION FROM ME

Galata, September 20th, 2003. Oda Projesi's courtyard during  «COURSE» a project by Naz Erayda in the 8th Istanbul Biennale 'Poetic Justice' and « ADA » project by Oda Projesi.

                                                              ÖZGE: 
How do you set up your mental space after becoming a mother? What kind of a space is it? Can you describe it?

                                                              GÜNES:
Actually my mental space is not one that I can easily describe; it changes all the time depending on many factors. To be a mother certainly triggers this process and stimulates it even more. I keep wondering on the tiny islands of my mind while thinking about motherly things that I need to do and planning the day. I would actually like all these distinct, tiny islands to get together and form one mainland. I am trying to find a place, a space into which I can spatially and mentally flow and accumulate.
I guess before being a mother I used to build up my daily life on the basis of spreading out into branches through which I used to flow and become productive. Now what I seek is to accumulate and settle down, to combine pieces and islands. That is basically how being a mother has affected me. When we began I thought I would not be able to describe my mental space at all, but I guess I’ve managed to do it to some extent.. My mental space is composed of islands but I would rather build up one single mainland. 
Since I have become a mother, I have been trying to change and wash all my previous habits away. This is like a revolution for me, and an excellent way to defeat repetition. What is it that I want? Not as my past self, but as the present ‘me’. Who is the present ‘me’ anyway? What are my present needs? What methods could I adopt to become productive in this presence, without needing to get out of home and away from my son? Is this possible? How can I manage to be solely on my own despite my mind when I get out of home to have coffee in a nearby place with my pencils and notebook; trying to learn how to draw, all over again, by looking at trees?

                                                                ÖZGE:
My mental space at the moment is my body.
I’m not very stabilised yet as an artist after the birth of my son. Rona is 3 and ¼ years old now, but I still have the memory of giving birth and giving milk until he was 2 years old. It feels like this mental space, which is my body, is still under re-construction and my mind is still blurry about what kind of a person I am, or am willing to be after ‘my own birth as a mother’. It is a new life and a very flexible life. It is a new life in which my son is re-educating me. Within this education, for now, I must accept that it is a kind of ‘double life’, my life and my son’s life. So my mental space is shared most of the time, as was my body when I was pregnant.
Eight months after Rona was born, the Gezi events, the people’s uprising against the destruction of the Gezi Park started in İstanbul. It was very intensive, because at once there was so much hope, but also several young people died in the protests. I convinced myself that it was just starting now; the buds of freedom... And with the baby I was holding I was very happy. Thinking that my son will live in better times.
Day-by-day Turkey is becoming more and more violent against trees, forests and against women. Since a long while now, the government is fighting in Kurdish towns killing its own people. It is a massacre and during the fights and curfews in southeastern towns, the mothers cannot even bury the dead bodies of their children and instead have to preserve them in their houses, in their fridges. It sounds unreal, doesn’t it? So everyday I am questioning: What it is to be a mother in such a geography? What does raising a child mean? And also what does it mean to produce art?
At the moment I was writing this text, a bombing happened in Ankara. No one is safe. My mental space is widely occupied with this issue these days. How to protect my child, my family, myself, my mind without isolating myself / isolating ourselves, or without making harm to other people? It is a big question. I am extending this question to ask myself: How can one take care of the other children in need too? How can I separate my child from other children? Is it fair? There are lots of refugee children in Istanbul where I live, and children under hard conditions, as in the war in the Kurdish region in Turkey. Then if we extend even more: Not only children, but their families too.. Does being a mother mean only being a mother to your own child? My answer is: “No!” 
Can we extend it? Could being a mother be a metaphor for supporting others under danger from violence? Could it be about supporting others in their revolution? Could it be a common resistance to the human violence?
Living in a country where usually most of the male population thinks that they have a right to a woman’s body, and having a government supporting this discourse is a big challenge in its own. Having mental space also helps to resist this fragmentation of brain, body, production.. It is not only a space where I produce, but a space where I can have a total and complete existence. Not only as a woman, or an artist, or a mother, but where I can keep ‘my entirety’, as also was mentioned by Sylvia Plath in her works.

"During the Gezi Park occupation and protests, the governor of Istanbul made an announcement especially to the “mothers” saying: “Please come and take your children from here, bring them home, otherwise we are not responsible of the results.” It was like a threat to the young people resisting in their tents in the park. Later on, the mothers came to the park to join the resistance and they made a big circle by holding each others’ hands. They did not take their children home, but they collaborated with them instead. This event was illustrated with this anonymous image, showing the abandoned Atatürk Cultural Center building, one of the symbols of the resistance."    
-Oda Projesi 

                                                                 ÖZGE:
What kind of a ‘layer’ does motherhood open up within the geography of violence and that we are face-to-face with today? In which direction does motherhood’s meaning change within this era of suppression and displacement?
 

                                                                GÜNES:
Despite my intense desire of settling down, I think I first need to face my concern about whether some day I will have to run away from where I live.
To raise a child, to supervise one more human’s start in this world is inherently a serious responsibility. In this part of the world, a parent not only experiences happiness and satisfaction, but at the same time inevitably feels the deep anxiety of the question “What have I done?” I don’t think I am capable of giving a definition of motherhood. When I think of the other mothers in my close vicinity, I realize that everyone experiences motherhood in a different way. As a matter of fact, I guess I cannot detach myself from my motherhood and look upon it objectively. The current situation in which we are living nowadays blurs my mind. The misfortune of refugee mothers, the tragedies of mothers in southeast Turkey and the fact that I am incapable of doing anything about this, all create an intense feeling of empathy and desperation inside me. Yet none of the things I have written so far is an answer to what you have asked, they just manifest the impacts of the ‘present’ on me, and as a matter of fact I am not capable of telling more.

                                                            GÜNES:
After the birth of Rona, what happened to your ways of producing, your production and the space where you produce? In what way did they change? Could you think of the production as an entirety, without fragmenting it into the daily life, housework, what you share with your son, your artistic- and intellectual production and what you do to earn money? Is it possible to create a common sense out of all these?

                                                            ÖZGE:
As an artist and a freelance editor/translator, I was already acting within precarious working conditions. I always worked from home, but a little before and after Rona’s birth I rejected even to have a working desk. I was using different places in the house, or I was going to a café to be able to work. I wanted to not feel guilty for the work I’m not able to do. I guess that’s why I did not want to have a desk. Later with my son growing I started to be more in need of ‘a room of my own’.
Then my husband, Burak, needed an office and moved his working space there and we were also lucky to have a room both for myself and for Oda Projesi. But until that time I was having different fantasies about finding a working place where you neither need to consume something all day long in order to be able to work like in a café, or sitting in a library where you have many restrictions. I was dreaming of a place with no precise function, a place where you can be more flexible and besides working, you can meditate, read something or sometimes do craftwork. Not an office, not a library, not home, not café.. I was thinking that this could also be my mental space.. A space that you can load up with ideas, artworks: different kinds of production. And that this flexibility could also allow for my child to be with me sometimes while I’m working. But I do need to also be alone because my publishing jobs don’t allow me to integrate my child into doing them. That work needs isolation most of the time.
With Oda Projesi, and especially with our last ANA project[1] in which we questioned the mother/artist relation, we experimented on how we can do both at the same time; mothering and producing. I still need to build up my own ‘entirety’ and then I think it will be possible for me to integrate my motherhood, my production, my jobs into each other. Sometimes I also don’t find this ideal very coherent with the reality. The reality is that I need my own time and space most of the time, and the work that I do is also about building this time and space through work.

                                                            GÜNES:
Is it possible to live and work without any kind of ‘program’ with kids?

                                                                  ÖZGE:
This really changes, but most of the time, I think we need to find a common ‘program’ in which both my child and me can be happy. We talk about two human beings, which means two willpowers… Sometimes I need programming and Rona too, but sometimes we are happier when we let it go, we drift by the time of the day.

                                                            GÜNES:
If you should have to leave your country together with your child and could only bring a few items with you, what would you take?

                                                            ÖZGE:
My list of items would be:
A smart phone: The last years in Turkey we have needed social media a lot because of reaching the true news has been very restricted. There has been no other way to be able to get the news. The smart phone becomes vital. Notebooks and pencils: The minimal material to be able to continue my artistic production, which helps me to survive..
A novel that I like to read the most: Especially fiction could help me to challenge my reality with imagination.
I would have the same things for my child (besides a little food and clothes of course) since he likes to draw and read. And if possible:
A camera (photo or video), to be able to record any tragedy to help with historiography.

                                                            ÖZGE:
When you look from your position as a woman and a mother, what kind of a path have you taken in your production? (both in the production of your everyday and artistic production) Could you think of an imagination of the future?

                                                           GÜNES:
Since my son was born I have been thinking about possibilities of integrating my artistic production more with daily life. I need to move away from my previous production model that I had before being a mother. Although Oda Projesi is still a great source, which backs me up and inspires me, it is very demanding as a model and requires devotion and sacrificing many other things. I would rather move forward based on this previous experience, not to return back to it. What I need is to adapt my ways of artistic production to my present resources, possibilities and requirements.
My concept of time has changed a lot. I have recently started drawing again. As we go often to parks with my son, I have started looking at trees, learning about them and drawing them. I have started to follow their seeds, sprouts and cones. A recent means of being productive for me is to work close with the soil in open fields and pursue what nature offers us. I now spend considerably less time with my son in museums or in the city than in fields, forests and parks. The fact that I am more passionate about trees is maybe not only because I now spend more time with my son in nature, but also closely related to Gezi Park manifestations. In this part of the world where I live, there is intense oppression not only against people but also against nature. I think that I have to learn the methods of recovering what we are losing in this respect and teach them to my son as well. What interests me more now is soil, seeds and trees.
I guess ‘art’ is a methodology for me, which facilitates my understanding and endurance of the reality in which I live. When I lean on an old and wise tree, or when I see, listen to and contemplate on an artistic work, or when I myself make one, I feel like I am not alone. I don’t believe it is actually possible to imagine the future. The mind makes a fiction but reality flows usually in a different direction. I guess I am truly Eastern in this regard. It is far more easier for me to differentiate between types of cedar trees by looking at their cones, or to differentiate the seed of a long pepper from that of a tomato, rather than to imagine the future and envisage different ways of artistic production.

Günes Savas                                                                                                                                                              

Günes Savas

[1] At ANA AIR (Astrid Noack’s Atelier residency, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2013) Oda Projesi worked on the issue of “motherhood” and everyday life production with their project ANA, claiming that there were strategies and tactics to be learned from each other. The first inspiration for the ANA project came from the very practical need of Oda Projesi –being artist mothers- to participate in this residency with their children. 

January 2016 / Elena Marcevska, MKD

ART, RESEARCH, THEORY: In the year's first column we are pleased to feature Dr. Elena Marcevska, a London based interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Following her doctoral study on screen and feminist performance practice, she continues to focus on the relationships between performance, maternal body and digital writing. She was a key organizer of the international conference 'Motherhood and Creative Practice'  (London South Bank University, June 2015) and writes about the intersection between maternal, creativity and activism.

BORDERS WITH/IN THE MOTHER

Joe Mulroy: Why do you think he’ll leave?

Frank Dixon: Because he slipped through and fell in a crack.

Nobody likes staying in a crack because they’re nothing.

Nobody likes to be stuck in a crack.

(Excerpt from The Terminal, 2004, 3”)

Crossing Borders / Crossing Generations

Borders have traditionally been seen as lines of division[1], as the final line of resistance between a mythical ‘us’ and an equally mythical ‘them’; either a method of containment or a final barrier leading to ultimate liberation and freedom. It was challenging to write this article while at the same time there is an immense refugee crises unfolding in Europe, but I thought it is particularly important to discuss intergenerational trauma, borders and maternal in this context of current events. These days I often evoke Michel de Certeau's aphorism: “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across..” [2] We need to take account of ‘local context’ and transnational narratives while travelling between two types of knowledge: the official abstract ‘maps’ and the personal embodied ‘stories’. When writing about her piece Ten Months, Susan Hiller contemplates on this complex territory and says: “My ‘self’ is a site for thoughts, feelings, sensations, not an impermeable, corporeal boundary. I AM NOT A CONTAINER… Identity is a collaboration. The self is multiple.”[3]

 Diary entry, Day 4.

 I do not have many close relatives who have emigrated or lived in different countries during their lifetime. My entire family has always been happy where it was, proud of their origins and struggling with the demanding cultural and political conditions of the Balkan region. However, that struggle was constantly emphasized with my grandmother’s story about her father, the only one who left the country to go to Chicago in the USA. At that time, the beginning of the 20th century, it was an arduous journey, and one you would undertake if you wanted to disappear. Apparently he came back and stayed in Macedonia, though the conditions of his return were always puzzling and nobody wanted to discuss them. In secret my grandmother told us that if the Balkan wars had not been so cruel and if he had been less stubborn, all of us would probably be in the USA.
When I received my scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I went to see my grandmother. Having suffered a couple of strokes one after the other, she was struggling with dementia. When the news of my scholarship was shared at the table with our family, her eyes opened wide and for a moment she seemed to be quite her old self. She almost yelled in joy “I knew it, I knew that it would be you!” 
She then took me by the hand and said that it was my job to fulfill the dreams of my great-grandfather. She showed me a box of old photographs and a passport – memories that had not been shared with anyone before. The box was now mine, I deserved it.
There were many reasons why Todor, my great-grandfather was a silent man and never talked about his life in the USA. He was extremely liberal with his daughters, who were educated to the highest level at a time when females were only allowed to attend the first two grades. He was fluent in Italian and English in a country that was on the wrong side of the Cold War wall (he passed the English on to my grandmother and mother in secret). And every day he silently questioned his decision to return. It was a painful gift, a Pandora’s box in a way, a gateway to someone’s life story: so well kept.
Even now it puzzles me that these mediated memories, an aged screen into a lost life, are such a strong burden for me. I am still struggling to understand why my grandmother thought that it was my job to fulfill his dreams and why until the day she died (just a couple of months after I left for the USA) the only things she remembered clearly were my name and my location. What was the process that linked all of us to this painful story of migration, borders and invisible liminality?

My artistic and scholarly research is part of my body, thus inevitably carrying its history. It is a very specific history, of a body that has been trapped in liminal spaces for a very long period (both in a geographical/historical sense, but also in a metaphorical and metonymical sense); a body that has been captured in “a world of multiple crises and continuous fragmentations.”[4] The link between my body, theory and the tools that I use has become the most significant element of my exploration of borders. I cannot possibly outline my arguments without offering snippets of my personal experience through reflective writing.

Borders and Mothers

Diary entry, Day 91.

Living between two worlds can be demanding. Like an illness, you can’t escape from it. It is so deep in your body. It covers every border that protects you from outside. You can articulate yourself on the screen, but deep inside you know, that the screen never articulates, it only imposes form.

 Delivery at gate. There are two gates. One in. One out. And me in between.

 A: “We miss you so much”. Her eyes get tearful. I can’t deliver the news.

B: “Maybe we will stay.”

A: “Stay where?”

B: “I am not quite sure….”

 I am thinking of my great grandfather.

 How do you deliver a loss?

My project ‘Valid until…’ (2009-2011) is an in-depth research on the theme of borders and motherhood. ‘Valid until…’ consists of a series of autobiographical writing, performative photographs and videos made during a period of 140 days. The period was symbolic, equal to one hundred and forty questions that I had to answer about myself, my children and my family in the visa application. This is a challenge that repeatedly occurs in my life. Coming from South East Europe (the ex-Yugoslavia region), my validity and legal status is constantly re-evaluated and subject to the scrutiny of the Western European authorities. The period of one hundred and forty days was a period of confirming the validity of my legal status in United Kingdom. 

'Valid until…', video and performance, 2009-2011, Elena Marchevska.

Borders can be built from outside, they can be physical and tangible, difficult to cross, but passable. I felt compelled as an artist to talk about the experience of motherhood as a highly political state, where the body is split and carries not only the child into this world, but also the cultural responsibility and intergenerational take on the borders that youngsters have to cross. As Tyler alludes, “theoretical and creative work on the maternal is central to the future of radical feminist politics thinking with, and from, the maternal generates alternatives to neoliberal discourses of reflexive individualism which have stultified political resistance to global capitalism“.

In my research and performative interventions I look at the relationship between the material realities of lived feminist motherhood and the stunning ways in which artist-mothers negotiate and translate their experiences with/on the border. Liss suggests that through feminist conceptions of interdependence, intersubjectivity, and the maternal self, the artist is capable of conceiving new social artistic projects that think (m)otherwise. [6] This relates to philosopher Sara Ruddick’s foundational ideas on the concept of maternal thinking, specifically as she wondered, “what maternal concepts might introduce into political and philosophical discussions?”[7]

I think it is particularly potent to think of Gloria Anzaludia here and her suggestion that borderlands are loaded with meaning. While borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’, a borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. Anzaludia’s borderland is in a constant state of transition. As described by Cixous, the borderland was for her marking the zone of not belonging as a child. She poetically depicts:

 "I went toward France, without having had the idea of arriving there. Once in France I was not there. I saw that I would never arrive in France. I had not thought about it. At the beginning I was disturbed, surprised, I had so wanted to leave that I must have vaguely thought that leaving would lead to arriving. In the first naïve period it is very strange and difficult to not arrive where one is. For a year I felt the ground tremble, the streets repel me, I was sick. Until the day I understood there is no harm, only difficulties, in living in the zone without belonging." (1998 :169).

In the current refugee crises, maternal is at the same time visible and invisible, so talked about, so public and so deeply incoherent. In general terms with 'maternal', I refer not only to the material and embodied experience of pregnancy, motherhood and lactation of migrant mothers captured by media, but also to identities and meanings of mothering, the ongoing emotional and relational work of being with children and others, the daily material practices of childrearing, the social locations and structural contexts within which these women mother. Indeed, to the whole range of embodied, social and cultural meanings, practices and structures associated with reproduction and parenting in crises. 

Irene Gedalof introduces the theoretical approach that pivots on the notion that migrant women’s reproductive work can be characterized as a kind of ‘juggling between two worlds’. For example, Ruba Salih’s work on Moroccan migrant women in Italy (2001, 2003) provides much fascinating detail of the complexities of home for migrant women and the material and emotional work that goes into maintaining transnational links and identities. Yet I feel that this theoretical framework does not go far enough in terms of practical application. While it allows us to recognize that migrant women are involved in complex and dynamic work when they mother, it still leaves us with a sense that this work occurs between two, relatively stable sites of belonging, the ‘here’ and the ‘there’.

While this certainly captures part of the processes of making home in which migrant mothers are engaged, it does not quite get at the messy, dynamic nature of the reproductive processes and practices involved (talking daily on Skype with the family ‘there’, shifting between languages, answering in the right language, crying, leaking, vomiting in a foreign space, in a foreign culture). The question is not only how migrant mothers are constrained by pre-existing structures in their agency, but also, how we understand both structures and agents of belonging as messy and dynamic entanglements of constraint and enablement, being and becoming, movement and inhabitance. Some of the work on migration by feminist geographers has expanded this insight by drawing on a more fluid and dynamic concept of ‘place’ [8] and the intricate relationships between body, place and identity.[9] The point of the matter is that we live in a world which is organised along multiple axes of mobility, circulation, flows of people and commodities. [10] Displacement is a central feature of the postmodern era. [11]

 Where is my home mummy?

The image above is a text (or rather a statement) my daughter wrote to me when she was 5 and a half. I told her that we won’t be able to go back to Macedonia over Easter, because I am too busy at work and her father can’t get days off. She appeared rather accepting of this announcement, but half an hour later, when I went to the kitchen I saw this statement written on our dinning table: “ Dear mum and dad, when I grow up, I will live in Macedoanuia”.

First it made me laugh and giggle, until the evening, when I started fretting and rethinking all my life decisions. The past is not as separate from the present. I am reminded of this when making decisions for my children everyday, on multiple occasions. The past is constantly broken down and reintegrated into the present. How to find a way to tell you, my daughters, why I am doing this? A string of letters about my joy and pain, ambivalent motherhood on the border.

In 'Valid until …' her voice and body encompassing mine; traversing the physical boundaries. Us in transitional spaces, us at home, us in a liminal limbo waiting for visas. Endless drawings of houses, endless questions of where we belong, endless memories of where we don’t belong. 

'Valid until…', video and performance, 2009-2011, Elena Marchevska.

And going back to the present moment, yet another immigrant crises unfold in Europe. It is an imperative in this media frenzy to use strategic first-person voices (my own, hers, my daughter’s, her daughter’s, my family’s, all the families that are on the borderline). My thinking on “voice” here bears an affinity with that of feminist law professor and writer Drucilla Cornell: “I use ‘voice’ in contrast to muteness that makes feminine ‘reality’ disappear because it cannot be articulated. Muteness not only implies silencing of women, it also indicates the ‘dumbness’ before what cannot be ‘heard’ or ‘read’ because it cannot be articulated”. [12] This links to Jane Bacon’s concept of “voice of her body” where she asks the crucial question of how a woman artist can be sure that the (artistic, academic, personal) ‘voice’ she has is being received in the way that is important for her. She further suggests that in order to answer this, the artist needs to attend a careful process of inner listening and allowing that provides the ground from which she can move to find her body/self. [13] In these moments of desperation and grief we just to have to find ways on how to empathetically be in the place of the other and inside one’s self, how to care for another and one’s self. The visual, conceptual and artistic exploration of borders and motherhood are necessary to renounce patriarchal, sexist, and racist attitudes that separate body from the mind, the intimate from the political, and human beings from each other.

'Valid until…', video and performance, 2009-2011, Elena Marchevska.

[1] (Bade 1987, Ong 1999, Corrin 1992, Rogoff 2000)

[2] (de Certeau in Conquergood, 2004:311)

[3] (1984:xiii)

[4] (Pena in Lacy 1995, p.103)

[5] (2008:5)

[6] (2009:xix)

[7] (Ruddick in Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan, 1994: 30)

[8]  (Massey, 1993) 

[9] (Dyck, 2006) 

[10]  (Cresswell,1997:368) 

[11] (Probyn in Braidotti, 2006:78) 

[12] (1991:3)

[13] (2010: 72). 

December 2015 / Martha Joy Rose, USA

ART, RESEARCH, THEORY: In the December column we are pleased to feature Martha Joy Rose, (USA), a New York-based performance artist, scholar, and the mother of four young adults ages 21-26. Having been named as “God Mother of Mom Rock” by the CNN, Joy has been making music since the early 1980’s in New York City. With the birth of her first child she created the Housewives On Prozac band, which has enjoyed international success and spawned a mother-made music movement. In 2002, seeking to identify the unique expressions of women who are mothers and to amplify their voices, Joy founded the Mamapalooza Festival, currently being administrated each May through the New York Parks Department. In 2009, she directed the film The Motherhood Movement: You Say You Want a Revolution, which promotes, showcases, and makes visible maternal discussion, disseminating information on the subject of Feminist/activist Mothers and the missions of International Maternal agencies. Working together with a team of academics and activists, Joy opened the first-ever Museum of Motherhood (M.O.M.) on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 2011. Currently she is teaching “Families and Social Change” at Manhattan College. Joy’s Master’s Degree in Mother Studies is a herstoric first, and she has written for Sage Press, Demeter Press, and assorted literary journals.

A M/OTHER MOVEMENT FOR THE MASSES

Standing at the podium, about to begin a lecture to the twenty students in front of me at Manhattan College, I pop on a power point and click through the images of women creating mother-made art. In this particular slide-show there are curated photos from the Procreate Project, Project Afterbirth, m/other voices, Ima Iyla'a: The Art of Motherhood, Mamapalooza, and Demeter Press, as well as striking text from the Mom Egg Review. The students seem interested. The images are provocative, often including everything from menstruation blood to musical instruments. I have known for a long time how important it is for women who are mothers to have an arts movement of their own. And yet, gaining traction has proved to be harder than I thought. For many reasons, social, political, and cultural, women still lag behind globally in the arts world. From filmmakers who reportedly comprise a mere 4.1% of the top grossing directors of major motion pictures,[1] to the Guerilla Girls-inspired rants calling out major contemporary museums for their lack of equal exhibition time, women in the arts still have a lot of catching up to do.[2] Motherhood complicates these inequities further for reasons that are difficult to identify, but let me try.

There are three major forces compounding mother’s visibility in the arts: identity, consensus, and physical dis/ability. Let us first look at identity. Before we can even begin to dive into the idea of a mother-inspired arts movement, we need to clarify what is a mother? You might feel like arguing with me that there is no need, but in fact there is a need. If one is going to create a mother-arts movement one has to know whom one is including, and what the point of your movement is. Are you going to call your arts event a celebration of motherhood? What about those who do not think it is an elation, but rather a great misery heaped on them when they were least prepared? Are you concerned about the procreative act itself? The carrying, and waiting for the development and birth of the future child? What are you going to do with the adoptive mothers who did not birth their babies but are finding their mother-identity through the act of caregiving? And what about the ones who lost their children along the way? Are you going to include parents; meaning the mother and the father? This is a lovely idea, but, if you include parents, what do you do to amplify the unique experience of one who cellularly divides? The one whose body goes through embodied changes? Then, what about the “single” mother, with no likely partner or spouse? What are you going to do with grandmothers, stepmothers, gay couples, and the surrogates? Unlike many other objects or identities, from the very beginning the notion of mother is fraught. She is not a simple creature. She might not even be a woman. Therefore, conceivably a mother might be a he. Likewise, politically speaking, a mother might be a religious, right-minded, anti-abortion, Phyllis Schlafly kind of character, or she might be a forthright, left-leaning feminist. She might be an advocate of something you hate, and therefore you are tempted to hate her, or she might be a killer, a thief, or an addict. She might be absent. Is she one whose story you want to include? Are you going to share your arts movement with her? Herein lies the crux of the number one problem of a m/other based movement. There are so many kinds. I have been masticating on this for the better part of 26 years trying to sort out its complications.

While writing my thesis for graduate school I struggled not only with a definition of mother, but also with a definition of what the academic study of mothers might include. My reasoning for this was twofold. In my experience as the creator of an arts festival, which has aimed to highlight the varying voices, art, comedy, music, theater, and literature of motherhood, I consistently wrestled with what to do with the women who were not mothers but were other-mothers, aunties, and nannies insisting they wanted their experiences to be included. I wrestled with what to do with the caregiving partners, fathers, grandparents, and children of these creative-types, mostly because thy also often inquired about being included. Sometimes mothers wanted to blend their families in their art making and even if they didn’t, non-mothers often wanted to feel they too could exercise their voice. This challenged my vision for mother-made art, if only in the sense that it constantly required me to question whom to include or not include? If the art is about family, what sets these mothers apart from the others they are connected to? What makes them unique, or special, or why should they have a festival, movement, arts-based collection all their own? We all know that historically women’s voices have been silent relatively and mothers even more so. That could be reason enough, but in the end, maybe not. Questions and complications remain. No one, including me, seems satisfied with exclusionary practices.

The second part of the dilemma is, if we could identify the specificities of what mother is, how do we gain consensus on whether she is worth studying or whether her art is specifically noteworthy and deserving of its own category? Considering that we have left the first question somewhat unanswered, then the second question of cooperation creates its own challenges. The status or category of mother is often fraught. She does not represent all good things despite the fact that we have expected her to be everything: creator, collaborator, connector, and caregiver, for free, forever, unconditionally? Mothers manifest their fair share of resentment, both for socially constructed reasons and for psychological ones. Feminist movements reluctantly embrace motherhood if at all, and even mothers themselves seem unsure whether they care more about activism, equal wages, or getting dinner on the table. There is not enough time in this essay to adequately address this, although many have tried including Adrienne Rich[3] and Phyllis Chesler[4] for example. Let us for the purposes of this article simply say that it is extremely difficult to get people to agree on a consensus regarding mothers, mother-art, and motherhood.

Finally, leaving the answers to the first two issues ambiguous, we can now move to the very real challenges most mothers face, which include ability, time, and perspective. As any mother of a young one will attest to, creating anything other than limited cleanliness, order, income, and edible food can be a full-time occupation. Mix in the ephemeral nature of art and challenges arise. How does one find the hours in the day (or night)? The space? Some regularity? Should one buy paints or food? Make music or buy shoes? Natalie Loveless claims in her curated exhibit titled New Maternalisms that “mama-artists [need] to find creative ways of integrating their practices as mothers, artists, curators, writers, and teachers. By taking seriously the need to create from local and embodied conditions, these practices bring visibility and value to the maternal in and as art.”[5] I agree with her. But, as I have articulated, distinct challenges remain.

Ultimately, the notion of exactly what makes a mother, be it birth, caregiving, egg donation, or identity can all be debated. However, we define what a mother is and what the art-movement looks like, it must include relational aspects. Words like m/other, m/otherness, or mother-ness attempt to describe this. Any idea of mother must include the concept of transformation, inclusion, and evolution. Both the personal and relational status of me + other = m/other proposes an examination of how m/otherness or mother-ness is the experience of being connected, or disconnected, to one who is part of you. Or, of being a person who, as part of another and also linked to another (genetically, through caregiving, or by association), might inform action in a world conceived as relational. This view differs from our current social system. Current systems have been motivated by alienation, and by violent, external, institutional, and hierarchical social constructions. Herein’ lies the call for change. As Rothman asserts in the Book of Life, “The world that I live in, and the world that I want for my children, is not a world of scattered isolated individuals, and not a world of walls. It is a world of communities, of social solidarity, of connectedness between individuals and between communities, a world in which people and communities grow from and into each other.” (p.233). She explains that motherhood is “otherhood.” Or, as I theorize here: a mother is one who who divides, yet through that division he/she is paradoxically increased. Therefore, the division is also a multiplication. A theory of mother-ness privileges the conversation of difference (or division) and insists on tolerant engagement (connection) as well as intense intellectual curiosity as a fundamental practice. Therefore, as we make art, explore motherhood, and find ways to move forward, let us lift each other up. Let us continue to explore our victories as we lament our losses. Let us speak not with one voice, but with many voices and most of all – let that be okay.

      M. Joy Rose and Zena Marpet with Housewives On Prozac Band (2006).

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/10/06/women-directors-hollywood/

[2] http://nmwa.org/advocate/get-facts

[3] Of Woman Born

[4] Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman

[5] Natalie Loveless, New Maternalisms, Fado Gallery 2012