panel 9Maternal Aesthetics
Dutiful Daughters, Difficult Mothers, and Sanctioned Spheres: Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie and My Mother Laughs
Laura Haynes
In 2013, Chantal Akerman flew back from New York to Brussels to care for her mother, Natalia (Nelly), who was dying. Nelly was the only member of her Polish-born family to survive Auschwitz, having fled in exile to Belgium in 1938. Repairing geographical distance and staying with her mother in her apartment, the filmmaker records, on camera and in writing, a melodious ceremony of their days together. The semi-surreptitiously shot vignettes of her final film, No Home Movie (released in 2015), eliminate incident and story to cinematically render the repeated gestures and essence of quotidian days of daughterhood/motherhood during palliative care in the space of the domestic.
The grey Belgian autumn fills the apartment with the diffuse light and the balcony peers onto the neighbour’s garden below. Sequestered at the end of the hall in her mother’s home (“a refuge where I can write and smoke with the window open,” she notes), Akerman writes My Mother Laughs, first published in 2013. A book that resembles a “sneeze,” so says Eileen Myles in the preface to the 2019 edition, captures the (in)tolerant, fraught love and duty of a daughter. The sneeze is a syncope that interrupts. These diarised works frame her mother’s long quiet days of confinement within the walls of her apartment, hidden from the unseen and unseeing world in motion. A life destined to end.
In its close attention to the late work of Chantal Akerman (and others including Roland Barthes and Lynne Tillman), this paper will consider reparative caregiving and impossible, irrecoverable absence or territories. It will review the diarised form as mutually aesthetic and therapeutic and extend to consider the ethics of intimate documentary and the quotidian biographical. The paper will take a hybrid form, weaving comparative, critical, and theoretical analysis with narrative poetics to propose and enact a compelling relation of reparative aesthetics in visual culture and literature.
Dr Laura Haynes is a writer, editor, and academic based in Glasgow. She is co-director of MAP magazine and at The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary Master of Letters Art Writing postgraduate programme, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Her work is interdisciplinary and cross-form, often presented in multiple registers including academic or literary publication, exhibition and performance. Her writing both embodies and examines the intimate, cerebral, and emotional voice as a rhetorical form where criticality is charged by correlation to the everyday. Her work is underpinned by a feminist approach to understanding social relations between writers and artists, and she has frequently written on forms such as anecdote, conversation and gossip as powerful and political forms of “minor literature.”
Publishing internationally, and across various forms, her work is published in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes (Review of Modern Literature and Art, University of Montreal), Journal for Writing in Creative Practice (Intellect) and magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP. Alongside her position at GSA, Laura has played a pivotal role in advancing art writing and performative publishing practices in Scotland as an Editorial Director of MAP, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the discussion and support of artist-led publishing and production, established in 2005. In this role she regularly commissions new writing and editorial projects.
Research and artistic interests include: expanded forms of biographical writing, autotheory, critical memoir, cross-form and cross-genre writing, interdisciplinary writing, feminist theory, behavioural theory, reproductive labour, class, ethics and moral theory, somatic practices, matrescence, grief and loss.
MATERNAL FANTASIES: The Art of Care and the Care of Art
Magdalena Kallenberger
This presentation focuses on MATERNAL FANTASIES, a feminist art collective based in Berlin, and how it has established an “aesthetics of care” through its collective artistic production. With Thompson, “aesthetics of care” encompass not only small, imaginative interactions or grand exhibitions but also are always attuned to the interpersonal connections evident in the creation and presentation of artistic endeavors. Founded in 2018, MATERNAL FANTASIES’ collective art emerges from a maternal perspective through a relational process emphasizing intergenerational engagements between the members and their (growing and changing) children over time. Their collective artworks span film, photography, performance, installation, and text. They are all produced in and through a self-organized rotational care/work mode, which considers care/work part of the production process. A non-idealized concept of care is the basis of their non-hierarchical mode of production that pays attention to the reciprocal relations of giving and receiving on unequal terms – considering interpersonal relations, skills, resources, ambitions, capacities, and life choices of the members and their participating children. Through creative exercises, their rotational working mode facilitates re-learning collectivity and communal care, following Joan Tronto’s guidance in recognizing that care requires seeing the world from someone/something else’s perspective. On another level, their collective artistic practice integrates sensory, bodily, affective, and lived experiences carved out in performative exercises and collective automatic writing sessions as collective material in their artistic production. In this presentation, I will use my entangled position as an artistic researcher, initiator, co-founder, and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES to examine two artworks by the collective and point out how these “aesthetics of care” manifest in and through their collective artistic practice.
Magdalena Kallenberger is an artist, writer, and researcher. Her mediums span video, photography, performance, installation, and text, combining research into feminist histories and writing with autobiography, theory, and performative elements. Kallenberger’s research-based and often collaborative practice investigates themes around radical care and feminist practices tackling the in/visibility of care/work and motherhood(s) not just in the Arts.
Kallenberger graduated from the University of the Arts Berlin and is a PhD candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar, supported by a Friedrich-Ebert Foundation scholarship. Her practice-based PhD explores autotheory and collective art production as knowledge-building practices within the context of artistic research. Her thought-provoking creations, produced in solo and collective constellations, have been exhibited internationally, most recently at Múzeum Ludwig Budapest, Arnolfini Bristol, Galerie Arsenal Bialystok, Museum of Memory and Human Rights Santiago de Chile, HKW Berlin, and Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
Kallenberger’s articles and essays appeared in publications with Routledge (2023), MIT Press (2023), k-Verlag (2023), demeter press (2023) and gender(ed) thoughts (2024). She has co-edited “Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices” by MATERNAL FANTASIES, published with onomatopee in 2021, second edition in 2022. Magdalena Kallenberger is initiator, co-founder, and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES collective.
M/Othering and Care
Sonakshi Srivastava
In Susan Sontag’s essay, “Illness as Metaphor,” everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of well and in the kingdom of sick. This dwelling is treated with “care” in Pinto’s “Em and the Big Hoom,” where the narrator’s mother, Em suffers from bipolar disorder and in Avni Doshi’s “Burnt Sugar”, where a daughter reassesses her own life as she assumes caregiving duties for her mother. While both the novels share certain similarities – both talk about mothers, about madness and sickness – what particularly stands out are the contested negotiations and the everyday transactions that colour the child-mother relationship. The caregivers’ narratives (here the children become the caregivers) work as a testimony of how filial ties are sustained through acts of care during illness rather than an account of how illness alone necessitates care.
Fiona Robinson rethinks care ethics through a critical feminist lens to reveal the different forms of power that keep the values and activities of care hidden from “public” view. Reflecting on the tensions that abound in mother-daughter relations, this paper is an attempt to explore how the two novels posture “motherhood,” “labour,” and “care ethics” in the Indian scenario, and what it means to be an “ill mother” in a society where motherhood is pedestalized. Reading the two texts with and against each other sharpens the critique of the ethics of “care-giving” – is it a duty more than feeling? What can the novels teach us about care-giving and solidarity in the face of the uneven times that we inhabit? I will unpack these questions and more to understand how care-work is negotiated in literary texts and what it means for our entangled patriarchal existence.
Sonakshi Srivastava is a writing tutor at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India. She previously graduated from the University of Delhi where she read English Literature. Her MPhil dissertation is on the biopolitics of ability and debility in contemporary fiction. She is a resident researcher for ForeignObjekt. She is one of the recipients of South Asia Speaks mentorship programme, working on translating the Hindi novel Titli into English under the mentorship of Arunava Sinha. She is a contributing translator columnist at “The Bilingual Window.” She was also shortlisted for the 2020 Serendipity FoodLab Residency, and was a Tempus Public Foundation Fellow in 2021. Her works have previously appeared in or are appearing in Hakara, potluck zine, orangepeel mag, and Rhodora among others. She is widely passionate about discard studies, food literatures, astromancy, posthumanism, zines, and animal studies.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
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