Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros thématiques22Artelogie MondesMotherpumping: women-artists-moth...

Artelogie Mondes

Motherpumping: women-artists-mothers-scholars-etc. discussing the art system from Brazilian viewpoints

Michelle Farias Sommer

Résumés

In light of the debate concerning women-artists and women-artist-mothers-etc. in the art system, and the introduction of “motherhood” as a topic in academia, this essay aims to contribute to research on conditions for artistic and theoretical practices and forms of legitimation vis-à-vis this particular segment. The association between feminisms-art-motherhood-academia locates viewpoints in Brazil, under the sway both of a precarization of reproductive rights and the absence of structural resources either from the state or from private sources. Taking this context into consideration, the essay is geared towards the question: from the force of creation – taken here in its more literal meaning – to the addressing of artistic-theoretical practices by female art (re)producers, what does the word “mother”, in association with women-artists and women-artists-scholars-etc., evoke nowadays? 

contemporary art, feminisms, motherhood, academia.

Haut de page

Entrées d’index

Haut de page

Notes de la rédaction

The present essay is a revised and expanded version of the essay ‘Mãelhação: mulheres-artistas-mães-etc.’ published in Arte e Ensaios magazine – v. 29, n. 44 (2022), as part of the power, women and feminisms in the arts Dossier, organized by Talita Trizolli. See: https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/ae/issue/view/2416/showToc

Texte intégral

1The essay is structured around four axes. The first “art, experience and subjectivation in the light, and shadow, of motherhood”, circumscribes both the term women as affiliated to intersectional counter-colonial feminist approaches and the institution of motherhoods opposed to compulsory motherhoods and their instrumentalization by the patriarchy, in order to discuss the double implication of woman-mother as an impulse for the generation of difference in processes of subjectivation. The second axis discusses the establishment of the alleged dichotomy that exists between women-artists and/(or?) women-artist-mothers, debating, on the one hand, adult-centered orthodoxies in modes of creating art that exclude the mother-child pairing and, on the other, the pyramid-like structure that upholds the art system and its network of subalternities. The third, “women-artists-mothers-scholars-etc.”, taking into account the impact of children on women’s scholarly careers, bound as they are by neoliberal quantitative forms of scholarly output evaluation grounded on models of oppression of colonial authority over powers and knowledges, asks what type of knowledge is being currently acknowledged as such, and what forms of knowledge are not. The fourth and final axis, “mapping at-homeness: narrating”, both debates the possibilities of composing situated counter-epistemologies as strategies for confronting cognitive empires historically built on instances of scholarly dominance and presents artistic-scholarly output recently conceived, taking the Brazilian context as a starting point.

Art, experience and subjectivation in light of (and in the shadow of) motherhood

  • 1 DEWEY (2010).

2If, in an aesthetic experience, the end is experienced as the consummation of a process1, then aesthetic experience, when affiliated to – or, better still – contrasted with the plural (not subject to a totality) experience of motherhood, is the literality of the possibility of the construction of an end to other beginnings. In the plural experience of motherhood, divided into the before and after of a process of endless consummation (in terms of ending and finality), there may also lie the authentic experience of consummating oneself.

  • 2 In the present essay, the term "women" is based on criteria of gender self-identification and does (...)
  • 3 JAY (2005).

3Once upon a time there was a woman2 who became becoming – ceaseless gerund – a mother. A hyphen adjoins the woman, now woman-mother, both unifying and separating a selfsame (same?) being. Ambivalence takes on a foundational role in motherhood. If one can’t quite pinpoint what experience is – any experience, in light of its individual nature – then circumscribing it might still be possible3. The same goes for the experience of motherhood. Therefore, I strive to contextualize the plurality of meanings in operation alongside and emerging out of the transformations-revolutions of this becoming becoming woman-mother.

  • 4 Alongside India and the USA, Brazil figures as one of the three countries who were most deeply affe (...)
  • 5 In the broadest of terms, counter-colonial and intersectional feminist theories and practices origi (...)
  • 6 At the Department of Visual Languages at the Post-Graduate Program in Visual Arts at the Rio de Jan (...)
  • 7 Situated knowledges is a term associate to Donna Haraway theories. See: https://www.jstor.org/stabl (...)

4This essay was written based on my experience as a mother, which begins with my daughter’s birth, on September 2019, and whose post-natal period coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic – which reached Brazil at the beginning of March 2020 and was severely aggravated by negationist politics during the right-wing government that devastated the country from 2019–20224. It is motherhood that connects me indelibly to theories and practices of a counter-colonial and intersectional variety5, and it is to them I owe the impetus to propose this text, begun late 2022 and threaded out of a context of postdoctoral academic circumstances (2017–2022)6, which has prompted me to give full attention to situated knowledges7 produced by women-artist-mothers-etc.

  • 8 Luiza Baldan’s “The image at the end” and Cecília Cavalieri “Milky way: a cosmopoetic speculation”, (...)
  • 9 With Luiza Baldan, Cecília Cavalieri, Mayra Martins Redin and myself as mediator. Integrating modul (...)
  • 10 Flores, Lívia; Sommer, Michelle Farias. Cadernos Desilha 3. Rio de Janeiro: PPGAV EBA UFRJ / Editor (...)
  • 11 These discontinuous narrative fragments include a wealth of formats: diary entries, letters, annota (...)

5On March 2020, no sooner had I returned from maternity-leave than I took part in two doctoral panels on women-artist-mothers-etc. as examining professor8, and the queries during said meetings eventually led to the proposal for the “Landscape-motherhood” seminar9. In 2021, I acted as co-editor of “Un-Island Notebooks 3 / Exercises in landscape”10, a book which includes not only texts by artists who had taken part in the seminar, but also an essay of mine – “Facing dilettante writing: how do you write it?” – where I collated unrelated fragments of narratives which stand in friction against narrative models canonized and pacified by a certain romantic-idealized-patriarchal-class-oriented-capitalist mode of writing that we, women, are led to desire as the only possible form of production of knowledge, and on this occasion, I strengthen my dialogue with contemporary Latin-American female writers who occupy themselves with themes of motherhood and the arts (and beyond)11.

6Given this brief contextualization as to my perspective on the subjects addressed in the essay, I remark that, here, “motherhoods” are to be understood in their plural form and in light of feminist, counter-colonial, intersectional perspectives contrary to the “institution of motherhood”, compulsory maternity and its instrumentalization in the hands of the patriarchy; motherhoods that, grounded in the right to choose, are themselves critically and actively attentive to practices that build resources for the exercise of motherhood and mothering as something intrinsically conditioned by the environs in which it takes place.

7“Sexual education to make informed decisions, access to contraception to prevent abortions, legal abortions to prevent deaths” is the motto for the international fight for the legalization of abortion. Let us record here that, concerning heteropatriarchal violences regarding reproductive rights as a whole, Brazil is heading the opposite direction when it comes to recent victories for the right to abortion in latin-american countries where, currently, six countries have legalized or decriminalized the termination of pregnancies 12. Out of the thirteen countries that comprise Latin America, six countries have legalized or decriminalized pregnancy termination: Argentine, Chile, Colombia, Guiana, French Guiana, Uruguay and recently México too. Six other countries make allowances for the procedure, but only in cases when pregnancy might cause the death of the woman or is the result of rape; Brazil is in this group. Suriname is the only south-american country that prohibits abortion under any circumstance. Here, induced abortion is a crime, with prescribed penalties of 1 to 3 years’ incarceration for the woman, and four years for the doctor or any other individual found to have aborted a fetus. Instead of a right, access to safe abortion, in Brazil, is a class and racial privilege.

  • 13 I herewith thankfully acknowledge Cecilia Cavalieri's contribution during the composition process o (...)

8The changing contours of subjectivity – meaning, our current snapshot of (some) self-acknowledgement – are radically altered in the birth of motherhood. With the birth of motherhood, new/other processes of subjectivation are also born, deriving from a gain in the play of relations that establishes itself between an I-other; an I-is-the-other in the composition of the mother-baby dyad13.

9 In the familiar strangeness of the new com-position, there is a certain homeless feeling, without the “at-homeness” produced by the feeling of self-recognition. Has home become wider? Has it dissolved? From enchantment to apocalypse (and vice-versa), how does one recompose or compose a new identity amid fusions, diffusions, mixtures, fluxes in this now, alongside an I-other?

“A river is no less a river only because it converges with another river, quite the contrary, it becomes itself as well as other rivers, it gains strength. When we enter into convergence, we don’t stop being ourselves, we become ourselves and other people – we surplus. Convergence is a force that creates surplus, that heightens, that widens”. (Santos, 2023: p. 15)

10With the birth of motherhood, circumstantially and more or less momentarily, the micropolitical imperative becomes categorical in the governing of forces that stir reality, dissolving its forms and engendering new ones, mingling desire and subjectivity into everything that is concentrated in the realm of private life. The debate surrounding the lack of fundamental resources for the practice of motherhood and mothering is an extensive one, a deficiency that makes itself immediately visible after birth. Concerning the economy of care, amid so many topics that exceed the scope of the present essay, we find issues such as the remuneration of reproductive work, the extension of maternity leave – currently set at 120 days, according to the Consolidation of Labor Laws, while the World Health Organization prescribes a minimum of 180 days of exclusive breastfeeding, a fact that renders evident the disparity of temporalities for exclusive dedication to the newborn, the presence and/or absence of support networks (either spontaneous or salaried, considering all issues pertaining to each situation), the outsourcing of caregiving during first childhood etc.

  • 14 ROLNIK (1998).

11However, if subjectivity today is characterized by an omnipresent and excessive availability to external demands14, how then is one to relate once more, in another (perhaps new) form, to micropolitics in this post-partum? Under the governance of a caregiving economy, the imperative of adult maternal life is, amid a host of others, principally one: to reinvent oneself.

12In the great swath of maternity – both literally, when we think of the revolting obstetrical violences imposed upon subaltern bodies – and metaphorically, so plural and diverse in the sense of this break with a prior world as we knew it – a hiatus is introduced in, and for, the woman-mother composition. And it is in this hiatus, out of the (de)construction of the creative maternal force (contrary to romanticizing and in the fragile wholeness of its inherent fragmentation), that lies the potency of the revolutionary creative act of the production of difference in the processes of subjectivation. From the force of creation – taken here in its more literal denotation – to the addressing of artistic-theoretical creation by female art producers, what does the word “artists”, in association with women-mothers and women-mother-scholars-etc., generate nowadays?

Women-artists and/(or?) women-artist-mothers-etc.

13

“There are good artists who have children. They’re called men”, said English artist Tracey Emin in a 2014 interview, adding: “motherhood would compromise my work15.

14 “I believe having children is the reason why women don’t triumph as much as men in the artworld. There are many talented women. Why do men reach positions of such importance? Love, family, children; a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all that”, states Serbian artist Marina Abramovic in a 2016 interview. And she adds: “having children would be disastrous for my work”, “I am totally free not having a husband and children”, “I am the artwork”.16

15 In the international context, in the welcome public debate surrounding relations between art and motherhood, one is liable to come across, amid many reactions of women-artist-mothers to Emin’s and Abramovic’s controversial statements, justifications and arguments which are manifest attempts at taking down the artists’ arguments. “Can children stop a female artist from succeeding?”, asks the news-story that carries american artist Hein Kho’s answer to Abramovic’s interview17. “You can be both a mother and a successful artist”, asserts online platform Artsy, where several women-artist-mothers-etc. in the artworld pose with their children18. “All women have a right to choose whether to have children, or not to have them. And, like their male colleagues, women artists who opt to have children need not feel they must sacrifice their careers in order to become mothers”, the piece concludes19. Are women-artist-mothers-etc. the ones who sacrifice their careers, or is it a type of specifically patriarchal career in the art-system that is aborted when they become mothers?

16In 2018, Jori Finkel, an American journalist, shot a documentary entitled “Artist and Mother”, which investigates why the contemporary artworld, which takes pride in being a space for absolute freedom of expression, seems more than reluctant to embrace artworks relating to motherhood20. And it states: motherhood is one of the last great taboos in the art market, in the world of contemporary art, and “when I say it is one the last great taboos, I don’t mean to say it is literally indescribable, but that it is undervalued to the point where we don’t talk about it enough”. “Where is motherhood in the textbooks? Where is motherhood in museum exhibits? Sometimes, it finds its way into teaching departments (…)”. And she asks: “How would a history of motherhood in art look?”21. With this context in mind, I ask: how would an Art History that takes place alongside motherhood look?

17In 2019, The New York Times made public the story of American curator Nikki Columbus, who accused MoMA PS1 of reneging on a job offer for the position of Associate Curator for Performing Arts when the institution became aware that she had recently given birth22. Nikki, who filed a lawsuit for gender discrimination and pregnancy discrimination in the Human Rights Commission in the city of New York, publicized the settlement she reached with the institution: apart from the financial compensation she received on moral grounds, the museum committed itself to renewing policies destined to protect women-artists, parents and other caregivers who apply for jobs or work in the institution. “We are pleased with the settlement and happy to leave this matter behind”, the note published by the museum states. Let’s leave the matter behind.

18In 2022, Documenta 15 – under the artistic direction of the Indonesian art-activism collective named “ruangrupa”23, in an edition that, for the first time, is written by non-white, non-european curators, places children in the center of artistic proposals both as collaborators and public 24. As they entered the Fridericianum, Documenta’s historical headquarters, visitors were greeted by RURUKIDS25, a community space geared towards children of all ages. In this same space, “artist, teacher and mother”, as Graziela Kunsch 26appointed herself, the only Brazilian artist to take part in the exhibition, proposes the Public Daycare Center, a functional daycare service based on studies on child education conducted by Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pinker (1902–1984)27. In both projects, the exhibition spaces are integrated, unlike the traditional separation that takes place with spaces dedicated to children in most western art museums. Regarding Documenta 15, in the context of Brazilian art criticism, a news-story was published in Folha Ilustrada where Kunsch’s project, whose authorship goes unmentioned, is jokingly referred to as a “daycare center” in the context of an analysis of an “event that saw it fit to set up a daycare facility in Fridericianum’s highest-profile area (…)” where “collective well-being was, in fact, in the babies’ order of the day”.28.

19What does the incorporation of children in contemporary art exhibits indicate about the patriarchal art-system?

  • 29 It is urgent, for example, to map artistic residencies that veto the presence of children - and con (...)

20 Treating children both as audience and active participants in exhibits – as opposed to the regimen of training imposed by contemporary art, with its aseptic events ruled by the empire of “don’t”s (“don’t touch”, “don’t sit”, “don’t talk so loud”, “don’t run”, “attention!”) – evokes the right to inhabit public art events with manifest, undomesticated presences (as children’s bodies are, or should be). Everyone’s right to cities, a premise of urban dwelling, extends to everyone’s right to enjoy exhibitions. When and where children are admitted and included, mothers also socialize (when free from moral harassment that questions both their presences). The opposite is a constant to be verified in the art-system: spaces that exclude children also exclude mothers (in this overlap as artist, when artist, and as public).29 The action taken towards children and how they are seen is no less important than the action taken towards adults and how they are seen. Children, when brought to the forefront of exhibit experiences, make visible the adult-centered orthodoxies in “ways of making art”, pointing towards other forms of production and circulation which are founded on and inscribed in life; in lives not circumscribed by the regulations of museums and rigid art-system institutionalism.

21Despite the fact that discussions surrounding women-artists and/(or?) women-artist-mothers-etc. bring to the foreground the pressing need to publicly make feasible and deepen the debate on relations between women, art and motherhood today, the addressing of this issue seems to, mistakenly and recurrently, concern the opposition between one (maternal) condition versus another (non-maternal) condition, as, in the social construction of motherhood as a compulsory social institution attributed to the performativity of the female gender, women are the target. In this debate, one crucial matter remains buried: how do relations of productivity/visibility/validation occur?

22Is “having children the reason why women don’t triumph as much as men in the art-world”, as Marina Abramovic would have it? While before or, better still, in keeping with the debate on art and motherhood, it is necessary to ask: how does this archaic, perpetuated and cultivated patriarchal structuring of the art systems, in their set of production, circulation, consummation and validation of artistic practices, operate?

23In the strongly regulated and hyper-institutionalized chain of automatisms of the 21st century, feminist activism – if one is to include maternal feminisms, feminisms that adhere to the struggles of mothers – is a dissonant voice vis-à-vis the male power that governs the state of the world and, consequently, the state of the art-world. We must complexify “ways of making art” subordinated to rules both tacit and explicit imposed for the benefit of a “certain manner” of patriarchal artistic and scholarly production. Also, in the production of the self as an artist (“I am the work of art”), in a sickened global-neoliberal world based of self-promotion and hyper-exposal, in the demand for unbounded availability for production-circulation-consumption in the art systems (“totally free”) and, often, in recent and even more precarious conditions of labor (in the increasing uberization of the world), female art producers have engaged in artistic-scholarly practices that are dissident and questioning of the patriarchal establishment and are revolutionary potencies that force structural changes in the art systems.

  • 30 FETTER (2018); BULHÕES (1995).

24If arts system may be understood as the network of actors that form the set of individuals and institutions in charge of the production, circulation and consumption of objects and events defined by themselves as artistic, and also of the establishment of values and criteria for a society in a given period of time30artists can – and must – clash with and make visible the interconnected pyramid-type hierarchy which structures said system and its network of subalternities, where women are historically placed at the base that supports the top.

Women-artist-mother-scholars-etc.

  • 31 I take the opportunity to state here that the debate on artistic practices that focuses on the indi (...)

25Women-artist-mothers-etc. whose motherings may present themselves in themes more or less explicit in their artistic output, but to whom it would prove impossible not to acknowledge the implications of their condition as mother in their ways of conceptualizing worlds – are the main theme of this section. When the addressing of artistic creation crosses paths with academic production31, what is the “state of the art” of the conditions for production and scholarly output produced by the woman-mother-artist-scholar-etc.?

26“(2) When an artist is an artist full-time, we will refer to him as ‘artist-artist’; when the artist questions the nature and the function of his role as an artist, we will write ‘artist-etc.’ (so we will be able to imagine several categories: artist-curator, writer-artist, artist-activist, producer-artist, artist-articulator, artist-scholar, artist-therapist, artist-professor, artist-chemist etc.)” (Basbaum, 2005)

  • 32 The adjective "neoliberal" is employed here due to the fact that the contemporary method of evaluat (...)

27Before we come to problematize this question, an addendum to the recording of the emergence of institutional organizations in Brazil derived from initiatives created by women-mothers in academia in the face of a patriarchal, white, European, hostile, competitive and production-oriented context for production that is often based on precarious, hegemonic quantitative evaluations which reflect the dysfunctionalities of neoliberal forms of evaluation and impose a sole way of “Academic practice”32.

28Amid said initiatives is Parent in Science Brasil, whose mission it is to promote nation-wide discussion on motherhood within the realm of science so as to fill a void in data and knowledge regarding one fundamental matter: the impact of children in women’s academic careers33.

  • 34 Open Letter regarding the nomination of members to CNPQ's advisory boards in Parent in Science Bras (...)

“Despite the fact women represent 57 % of grad students and 53 % post-graduate students in Brazil, as academic careers progress, the amount of women dwindles drastically, a phenomenon known as the scissor effect, or vertical segregation. Many factors may contribute to the gender gap witnessed in science, but motherhood certainly plays an important role”.34

29In May 2018, Parent in Science Brasil held the “First Brazilian Symposium on Motherhood and Science”, which discussed the challenges of being a mother in Brazilian Academia, debating solutions for minimizing gender disparities35. Presenting international public-policy initiatives of support to motherhood in academic careers36 one of the demands resulting from the group’s mobilizing efforts made it possible for women and men to include, if they chose so, the date of birth or adoption of their children in the Curriculum Lattes database37. If, owing to data input, quantification becomes more possible, institutionally politicizing its effects into inclusive affirmative action remains a present-day struggle.

30Another initiative worthy of mention, now in the Rio de Janeiro context, is the Grupo de Trabalho Mães Cientistas (Scientist Mothers’ Workgroup) at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), created by professors during the Covid 19 pandemic38. A letter is forwarded to the rectory suggesting procedures and adaptations in UERJ’s internal stances that could mitigate the effects of such historical inequality and its impacts on the lives of scientist mothers39. At the same institution, in October 2021, a day-care facility was introduced for women students with children up to 7 years old 40. In March 2022, the inclusion of maternity-leave during the trial period of professors and administrative technicians is formally announced41.

31Some recently conducted research estimates that 59% of women-scholars have defined the impact of motherhood on their academic career as quite negative and 22% have defined it as negative 42. In the scissor effect of vertical segregation that takes place with motherhood in association with academia, it is urgent to publicly debate the development of policies and actions geared towards securing resources and conditions for permanence and research continuity for women-scholars. The demands also include the reformatting of grant concession and financing from development agencies, different evaluation criteria for productivity, real recognition of maternity-leave as a pause in one’s career, as well as support and assistance for mothers in participation in academic events43. For a mother to take part in an academic event – in a broad sense, including classes – one must always ask: by whom, how and for how much is the child being assisted?

32It is also essential to go beyond practical matters. We must actively call into question the white, class-based, patriarchal model of academic production we are instructed to desire as the sole form of producing legitimate thought. What are the other forms of academic production possible for the sorely needed composition of cartographies of changes of processes of subjectivation connected to writing and its theorization which happens alongside life, alongside lives?

  • 44 ROLNIK (2018).

33If art denounces the distribution of places in the current cartography, and renders conflict visible, it can also identify points of asphyxiation in the vital process, and set a creative force to burst open new worlds44. What do we, artistically and theoretically, create as we literally create?

Taking off from locale, mapping out “at-homeness”, narrating

“In 2009, the interview necessary for the selection process for my Phd program ended up lasting twice as long as the other candidate. I spent more than 50 minutes arguing my strategies for ensuring that my baby would be breastfed, although not yet born at that time (...)”.

“Actually I think I position myself as a researcher and artist, or artist and researcher. Throughout my academic life, master’s and doctorate, I was always heavily criticized for my type of text, which was more essay-like”.

  • 45 BARROS (2016, p. 10).
  • 46 Special “Art and Motherhoods” Dossier, of Desvio Magazine, EBA / UFRJ’s graduate program magazine, (...)

34Both of the statements above are by woman-artist-mother-scholar-etc. Roberta Barros. The first one is the first paragraph of the book “Elogio ao toque: ou como falar de arte feminina à brasileira (In praise of touching: or how to speak about woman’s art the Brazilian way” (2016), an outbranching of her self-titled Phd thesis (PPGAV/EBA/UFRJ), for which she was the recipient of the Gilbert Velho award for best thesis that year45. The second statement is part of an interview called “Maternal feminism, contemporary art and obstetrical violence”, conducted in 2019 in the context of the Special “Art and Motherhoods” Dossier of Desvio, the graduate program magazine of EBA/UFRJ46. Taken together, both remarks interrogate ways of producing academic thought. But who is allowed to question what in the struggle to maintain the academic establishment and the coloniality of knowledge?

  • 47 SOMMER (2021, p. 137)

“In the opening up of space that takes place alongside radical (dis)ruptures onto states of mothering lies the (re)invention of other devices for reading and writing”47. If maternity incorporates adversities (meaning contretemps, obstacles, difficulties) as a modus operandi for the creation of subjects, it also inaugurates the empire of fragmented time. Why shouldn’t we then embrace, along with the burgeoning new ways of life, the new ways of writing that arise from it? “In firming and affirming life, one writes how one lives”. (Sommer, 2021: p. 137)

“An (un)way of writing that is (apparently) disintegrated and that organizes (organizes?) that which already emerges as disorganized, first comes a word, then another one, and only then does meaning arrive (does it arrive?), and afterwards, some syntax. Ambivalent maternity, ambivalent writing: prolix and elliptical, succinct and expressive, detail-oriented and spotty. Some verbs seem to forget the subject of male-female (re)producion. When one doesn’t read or write – at least not out of the absolute, totalizing logic of reading and writing’s universality – other possible writings emerge also from words, languages, and many other com-positions” (Sommer, 2021: p. 155)

35In the specific, sensitive state of the verb “to mother”, in the vulnerability vis-à-vis an Other, in the vulnerability as regards oneself, there is – latently, manifestly or in a lurking manner – a desire to listen, a desire to narrate. And narrating is what allows experience to take place. In attempting to endow with meaning that which is being lived and is not an exclusively individual creation (although it is also that), how then, in the process of mothering – taking the private sphere, the domestic realm, as a starting point – can one touch life with art and art through life?

  • 48 BASBAUM (2013).

36The presence of the artist in Academia produces a new form of artist’s writing. The “artist-researcher”, as classified by Ricardo Basbaum48, has their artwork transformed into research and is led by science-based standards within product-based and technocratic parameters in which “art knowledge” cannot find a place, thus creating a divide between art knowledge (truth produced in artworks) and knowledge on art (art history discourse).

37For women-artist-mothers-etc., the “motherhood” ingredient is added to this “art knowledge” which (does not) find a place (possibly a double misalliance). In the discourse that inscribes itself as integral to the work, in the inducing mutations of a contemporary art condition, if poetics produce ways of life, ways of life also produce poetics as fundamental, integral action in the production of difference. And this production of difference is also to be found in the scholarly production of knowledge.

38 “Imposter syndrome: why do women feel they’re frauds, and how does this engage with the ‘self-confident’ idiots?”, asks Ligia Moreiras, from the “A scientist mother” platform49. When, taking the matter of gender as a starting point, we analyze imposter syndrome as a social, emotional and psychic phenomenon that makes women consider themselves as less efficient, incapable or suspicious of their abilities; as something learned and reinforced also by that which we learn as models; it is not hard to arrive, via analogy, at the structure of the academic system of scientific knowledge validation, based as it is on “a certain way of doing” that is white, masculine and heterosexual.

39 In order to avoid self-sabotaging behaviors of the “not sufficiently good artistic-theoretical production” type in works brought to effect by women-artist-mother-scholars-etc. and to contribute to the deconstruction of the idea of one sole narrative voice that is white, male and universal and to situate enunciative voices coming from feminist narrative perspectives for the composition of other ways of performing academic research, we thus rekindle historical inquiries prompted by feminist studies as drives for the (self)validation of other (also scholarly) forms of creation.

40

  • 50 Nochlin (1971). “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, originally published in American mag (...)

41 Who formulates the questions is art historiography?50

  • 51 Nochlin (1974). “How can feminism in the arts implement cultural change?”. Here, Nochlin, in the su (...)

42Who has permission to create?51

  • 52 hooks (1995). “Women artists. The creative process”. bell hooks considers time to be fundamental fo (...)

43As far as conditions for creating go, what is the time allotted to females vs. the time allotted to males?52

  • 53 Holanda (2020). “Feminist thought today: decolonial perspectives”. These questions are put forth by (...)

44How do we erect feminisms without taking into consideration original epistemologies? Without assimilating the grammars of struggle and the liberating insurrections that go with our histories? How can we reconsider the sources and concepts of western feminisms?53

  • 54 Richard (2008).
  • 55 Ibid.

45If Academia, on the one hand, can be a phallocratic trap “which binds the power-of-reason to reason as power”, as pointed out by Nelly Richard 54, it can also, on the other hand, act as that which orients consciousness, as pertains to the discursive character of the real-social, to the reversal of a white, literate, colonial model and towards the incorporation of orality’s potency55. In this context, renouncing theory would amount to preventing ourselves from understanding, systematizing and transforming, as this incorporation is an instrument of formation and intellectual struggle for women.

46In works that tell stories, when discourse becomes artistic practice as well, visualities implicate one another with narrative perspectives that give rise to new theoretical associations. For the expansion of the comprehension of what we take visual language to be – heretofore exclusively image-based – it is necessary to assimilate critical-theoretical tools hailing from disciplines linked to other realms of knowledge; to let it clash, to let it fictionalize. In this context, “narrative-women” gesture toward the poetic/political visualities/visibilities that construct other ways of narrating, also from an academic perspective.

  • 56 I choose, in this essay, to circumscribe, in the geographic swath of Rio de Janeiro, theoretical st (...)

47 Fourth wave feminism also prompts the spawning of works related to the theme of motherhood in the art-system – even if only in an embryonic way, in the composition of current, zeitgeist-centered themes which govern contemporary art – and, possibly, more recently and in more consequent fashion, the production of academic works whose subject matter presents itself more or less explicitly through theorization. Circumscribing the emergence of this issue from my own immediate academic universe (herewith restricted, for the purpose of this research, to an incomplete Rio de Janeiro swath)56, I make note of Luiza Baldan, Cecilia Cavalieri, Mariana Guimarães and Mariana Pimentel’s theoretical output.

48Luiza Baldan publishes “Corpo Sororo”, a choir-text that was born of recorded conversations with nineteen women-artist-mothers and is an integral part of her doctor’s thesis, “The image at the end” (2020)57. As a sort of collage puts itself together, individual names are suppressed in order to emphasize the multiplicity of subjectivities discussing themes inherent to motherhood – gestation, abortion, birth, death, puerperium, depression, caregiving, support networks, feminisms, intellectuality, breastfeeding, body, sex, babies and a host of other topics.58.

  • 59 CAVALIERI (2021).

49Cecilia Cavalieri crosspollinates counterphilosophical and speculative practices (as well as other drippings) in “Milk poetics, sky politics”, in her doctor’s thesis (still ongoing), which consists of a cosmogonic stroll that starts with a dream and ends in another. Between these two points, Cecilia presents an essay thought-in-conjunction with mammals in order to discuss micro and macrocosmic matters of gender, nutrition and caregiving. The text is a lactose constellation relating art, nature, economy/ecology, motherhood and animality.59

Image 02 - Cecília Cavalieiri. Poetics of milk, Politics of sky, 2021. Artist’s collection.https://cargocollective.com/​ceciliacavalieri/​trabalhos-works/​Poeticas-do-leite-politicas-do-ceu-Poetics-of-milk-Politics-of-sky

50Mariana Pimentel helms an ongoing research titled “How to become a housebound scholar?”60. Attempting to reconcile intellectual and reproductive work, she asks:

“What to do? I decide, thus, to take on this body – crooked, strange, alien, that is the housebound scholar, and to make of it a counter-pedagogical device by means of which I experience another oikonomia of scholarly-theoretical production, other forms of student-professor, professor-research, researcher-object relations within the institution itself. Forcing it to feminize itself from within, denaturalizing this male body which we are led to desire and perform as the only possibility for academic practice”.61

  • 62 GUIMARÃES (2021).
  • 63 GUIMARÃES (2021, p. 197).
  • 64 Ibid.

51Mariana Guimarães, in her thesis “The thread as invention of other possibles: house, garden, women and work”, investigates “(…) between theory and art made in connection and from connections between textile language, domestic space and the conditions for sustaining desire and invention of the artist, woman, mother, researcher and professor subjectivity62. And in the act of creating in creation 63, she points: “Creating is immense, between continuity and rupture. Immensity”64.

Image 03 - Mariana Guimarães. Hysterical Historic, 2019. Series embroidery Temple Time, composite by nine embroideries with silk threads on covers cotton. Artist’s collection. http://www.marianaguimaraes.art.br , accessed July 2024.

Image 03 - Mariana Guimarães. Hysterical Historic, 2019. Series embroidery Temple Time, composite by nine embroideries with silk threads on covers cotton. Artist’s collection. http://www.marianaguimaraes.art.br , accessed July 2024.

Image 04 - Mariana Guimarães. Scar, 2012. Embroidery on sock newborn. Artist’s collection. http://www.marianaguimaraes.art.br , accessed July 2024.

52Here, as we discuss women-artist-mother-scholars-etc, in this specific swath of motherhood, we still cannot escape cisgenderism and the manifest absence of representation for other sexual-affective orientations, as well as class and ethnicity, in a group that configures itself basically as white and socially privileged. If the theme of motherhood pervades academia, it simultaneously evidences the glaring absences that make up the lack of conditions for creation in the unequal distribution of time and conditions for production also among women. Who is missing here? Which women-artist-mothers does this (imposed) Academia engage in dialogue nowadays?

53In the MOTHERPUMPING of women-artist-mother-scholars-etc. in the art system I see, even if asymmetrically and more or less enunciated in discursivities, claims for visibility vis-à-vis reproductive work, the inclusion of artistic-theoretical practices of female art (re)producers in the patriarchal art-system and the legitimation of other ways of making art and theory which emerge out of life, out of lives. If women do uphold the top of the pyramid which structures this system’s network of subalternities with all its hyphens, they are also the ones who hold the power to make it crumble on behalf of a radical academic epistemological revision and the creation of other art systems.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

BALDAN, Luiza. A imagem no fim. Rio de Janeiro: 2020. Thesis (Doctorate – Post-graduate Program in Visual Arts. Area: Visual Language) – Fine Arts School at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

BALDAN, Luiza. Corpo Sororo. In: Flores, Lívia; Sommer, Michelle Farias. Cadernos Desilha 3. Rio de Janeiro: PPGAV EBA UFRJ / Editora Circuito, 2021. P. 162-179. https://www.luizabaldan.com/proj/corpo-sororo/ . Accessed October 2022.

BASBAUM, Ricardo. Amo os artistas-etc. Featured in Políticas Institucionais, Práticas Curatoriais, Rodrigo Moura (Org.), Belo Horizonte, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, 2005.

BASBAUM, Ricardo. Manual do artista-etc. Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2013.

BENJAMIN, Walter. O narrador: considerações sobre a obra de Nikolai Leskov. In: Magia, Técnica, Arte e Política: ensaio sobre literatura e história da cultura. 7. ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994, p.197-221.

BULHÕES, Maria Amélia. Lacunas como ponto de partida. In: Artes plásticas no Rio Grande do Sul: pesquisas recentes. Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 1995.

CAVALIERI, Cecilia. Poéticas do leite, políticas do céu. In: Flores, Lívia; Sommer, Michelle Farias. Cadernos Desilha 3. Rio de Janeiro: PPGAV EBA UFRJ / Editora Circuito, 2021. P. 180-206. http://editoracircuito.com.br/website/desilha-3-michelle-sommer-e-livia-flores-org/ . Accessed October 2022.

DEWEY, John. Arte como Experiência. São Paulo: Editora Martins Fontes, 2010.

FETTER, B. W. Das reconfigurações contemporâneas do(s) sistema(s) da arte. MODOS: Revista de História da Arte, Campinas, SP, v. 2, n. 3, p. 102–119, 2018. DOI: 10.24978/mod.v2i3.1077. Available at: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/mod/article/view/8663230 . Accessed October 2022.

GUIMARÃES, Mariana. O fio como invenção de outros possíveis: a casa, o jardim, a mulher e a obra. Rio de Janeiro: 2021. Tese (Doutorado – Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais), Escola de Belas Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

JAY, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European variations on a universal theme. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005.

HOLLANDA, Heloísa Buarque de. Introdução. In: HOLLANDA, Heloísa Buarque de (org.). Pensamento Feminista Hoje: Perspectivas Decoloniais. Rio de Janeiro: Bazar do Tempo, 2020. p. 11-34.

hooks, bell. Artistas mulheres: o processo criativo [1995]. In PEDROSA, Adriano; CARNEIRO, Amanda; MESQUITA, André (orgs.). Histórias das mulheres, histórias feministas: Vol. 2. Antologia. São Paulo: MASP, 2019, pp. 236-243.

NOCHLIN, Linda. Por que não houve grandes artistas mulheres? Translated by Juliana Vacaro. São Paulo: Edições Aurora, 2016. Availabel at: https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.edicoesaurora.com/6-por-que-nao-houve-grandes-mulheres-artistas-linda-nochlin/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1665173357491966&usg=AOvVaw1aEGuvL6ct9C5oZFw_YPJU . Accessed October 2022.

NOCHLIN, Linda. Como o feminismo nas artes pode implementar a mudança cultural. In: CARNEIRO, A; MESQUITA, A; PEDROSA, A. História das Mulheres, Histórias Feministas: Antologia. São Paulo: MASP, 2019, p. 72-80.

O'REILLY, Andrea. Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Paperback, Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2016.

PIMENTEL, Mariana. O trabalho doméstico como trabalho de arte. Revista Tetéia, vol. 2, year 2, 2019. Available at: https://teteia.org/post/617937207529013248/o-trabalho-dom%C3%A9stico-como-trabalho-de-arte . Accessed October 2022.

RICHARD, Nelly. Experiência e representação: o feminino, o latino-americano. In: Intervenções críticas: arte, cultura, gênero e política. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002, p. 142-55.

ROLNIK, Suely. Subjetividade Antropofágica. São Paulo: XXIV Bienal de São Paulo. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998, p. 128-136.

ROLNIK, Suely. Geopolítica da cafetinagem, 2006. Available at: https://transversal.at/transversal/1106/rolnik/pt . Accessed October 2022.

SANTOS, Antônio Bispo dos. A terra dá, a terra quer. São Paulo: Ubu Editora / Piseagrama, 2023.

SOMMER, Michelle Farias. Diante da escrita diletante*: como é que escreve?. In: Flores, Lívia; Sommer, Michelle Farias. Cadernos Desilha 3. Rio de Janeiro: PPGAV EBA UFRJ / Editora Circuito, 2021. P. 137-161. http://editoracircuito.com.br/website/desilha-3-michelle-sommer-e-livia-flores-org/ . Accessed October 2022.

Haut de page

Notes

1 DEWEY (2010).

2 In the present essay, the term "women" is based on criteria of gender self-identification and does not endorse any classification based on any sort of biological essentialism. In this context, in light of current gender studies, intersectional counter-colonial feminist approaches are structuring elements of this perspective.

3 JAY (2005).

4 Alongside India and the USA, Brazil figures as one of the three countries who were most deeply affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, both in terms of casualties as well as confirmed cases: https://infoms.saude.gov.br/extensions/covid-19_html/covid-19_html.html

5 In the broadest of terms, counter-colonial and intersectional feminist theories and practices originate from Latim-American experience and intellectual output, with its reflections on coloniality, gender coloniality, slavery and its effects, which are introduced in Latin-American countries as a way of dominating and controlling labor and bodies.

6 At the Department of Visual Languages at the Post-Graduate Program in Visual Arts at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (PPGAV-UFRJ), with a CAPES / PNPD research fellowship.

7 Situated knowledges is a term associate to Donna Haraway theories. See: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066

8 Luiza Baldan’s “The image at the end” and Cecília Cavalieri “Milky way: a cosmopoetic speculation”, both at PPGAV-UFRJ. In the first thesis, the breach-hiatus that demarcates a before and after to the birth of her daughter, experienced during her Phd studies, brings about a reassessment of artistic practices. In the second thesis, we find an interdisciplinary investigation around the notion of milk as language and how processes that streak through the ecology/economy of bodies of milk nourish contemporary lives and are written mainly as footnotes. Both share a preoccupation with gestating-lactating-metamorphosed bodies thought as world-making devices (as well as other textual productions).

9 With Luiza Baldan, Cecília Cavalieri, Mayra Martins Redin and myself as mediator. Integrating module of the “Exercises in landscape” seminar, carried out by research group Unisland – Atotality (PPGAV-UFRJ) and organized by Lívia Flores, André Leal, Diambe da Silva and myself, aided by CAPES and FAPERJ. See: https://atotalidade.wixsite.com/desilha/c%C3%B3pia-mapa-para-cruzar-2019 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKmKy1-qX2o

10 Flores, Lívia; Sommer, Michelle Farias. Cadernos Desilha 3. Rio de Janeiro: PPGAV EBA UFRJ / Editora Circuito, 2021. 232 pp. ‘Diante da escrita diletante*: como é que se escreve?’ p. 137-161. PPGAV EBA UFRJ / Editora Circuito, p. 137-161. See:

http://editoracircuito.com.br/website/desilha-3-michelle-sommer-e-livia-flores-org/

11 These discontinuous narrative fragments include a wealth of formats: diary entries, letters, annotations, email drafts, whatsapp writing, audio transcripts and other transcripts and a-d(i)verse printed matter. This conversation with Latin-American female writers and artists is sparked by texts authored by: Glória Anzáldua, Conceição Evaristo, Clarice Lispector, Cristina Ribas, Pilar Quintana, Luiza Baldan, Cecília Cavalieri, Mayra Martins Redin, Ariana Harwicz, Aleta Valente and Natália Quinderé.

12 Source: Center for Reproductive Rights. In: https://reproductiverights.org/maps/worlds-abortion-laws/ , Accessed October 2022.

13 I herewith thankfully acknowledge Cecilia Cavalieri's contribution during the composition process of the present text, and her precious addition to the phrase, which I share here: "this I-other is also process-based. just thinking to myself, here: this other isn’t born as other as all that. neither is this "becoming other" of the baby a given. it isn't at the drop of a hat that the baby ceases being an "organ" and becomes a subject. there's that word I'm fond of... myriad. there's a myriad I-others that precede both the I and the other. I-o / I-ot / I-oth / I-othe / I-other / -other / other".

14 ROLNIK (1998).

15 See: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/tracey-emin-there-are-good-artists-that-have-children-they-are-called-men-9771053.html , accessed October 2022.

16 See: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/mit-70-muss-man-den-bullshit-reduzieren-4892326.html and https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/26/marina-abramovic-abortions-children-disaster-work , accessed October 2022.

17 See: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2016/09/06/cultura/1473174739_691531.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CAcho%20que%20%5Bter%20filhos%5D,%C3%89%20importante , accessed October 2022.

18 See: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-motherhood-won-t-hinder-your-career-as-an-artist , accessed October 2022.

19 Ibid.

20 See: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2018/05/11/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-mother , accessed October 2022.

21 See: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/transcript-74-on-the-ground-in-l-a , accessed October 2022.

22 See: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/design/moma-ps1-settles-with-curator-who-said-giving-birth-cost-her-job-offer.html , accessed October 2022.

23 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsFPschEAhY , accessed October 2022.

24 See: https://documenta-fifteen.de/ , accessed October 2022.

25 See: ​​https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/rurukids/ , accessed October 2022.

26 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0kjC9RSjtE , accessed October 2022.

27 See: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/lumbung-members-artists/graziela-kunsch/ , accessed October 2022.

28 See: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/2022/06/documenta-de-kassel-tem-boate-fetichista-e-creche-para-mostrar-extremos-do-mundo.shtml , accessed October 2022.

29 It is urgent, for example, to map artistic residencies that veto the presence of children - and consequently - render the presence of women-artist-mothers inviable. For instance, the general regulation of FAAP artistic residency, one of the most important in Brazil, is clear: "Due to the venue's limitations, children and animals will not be accepted into the residency". See: https://central.faap.br/residenciaartistica/pdf/Regulamento-2019-10-05-2019.pdf , available July 2023.

30 FETTER (2018); BULHÕES (1995).

31 I take the opportunity to state here that the debate on artistic practices that focuses on the individual production of female art (re)producers is part of a broader research on "Narrative women” and is still ongoing. In the present essay, I opt not to delve too deeply into works, articles, dissertations or thesis related to motherhood (or tangential to it) outside my immediate academic surroundings, in order to concentrate on a more comprehensive questioning (continuum) of conditions for artistic and scholarly production by women-artists (also scholar-mothers, etc).

32 The adjective "neoliberal" is employed here due to the fact that the contemporary method of evaluation, which started to be implemented during the 1990s, and championed a quantitative slant, originates from one facet of neoliberal ideology, namely, entrepreneurship, understood here as the precept that government entities, including universities and public research institutions, must espouse forms of administration suitable to private-owned companies. On this debate, see:https://outraspalavras.net/mercadovsdemocracia/avaliacao-produtivista-quando-a-academia-imita-a-empresa/ , accessed October 2022.

33 See: https://www.parentinscience.com/sobre-o-parent-in-science , accessed October 2022. In 2021, the Brazilian movement won the Nature Research Awards for Inspiring Women in Science. The initiative aims to reward, celebrate and support the conquests of women scientists, as well as all people who work to encourage girls and young women to engage with and persevere in science. It’s the first time a Brazilian project wins the awards. See: https://www.nature.com/immersive/inspiringwomeninscience/index.html , accessed October 2022.

34 Open Letter regarding the nomination of members to CNPQ's advisory boards in Parent in Science Brasil, dated april 21st 2021, at: https://www.parentinscience.com/_files/ugd/0b341b_a20f5420b33b43a898e8c2faee889e23.pdf , accessed October 2022.

35 See: https://www.parentinscience.com/c%C3%B3pia-iii-simp%C3%B3sio-2021 , accessed October 2022.

36 Among them, Australia’s Maternity Funding, a government benefit for Academic career resumption during and after maternity leave.

37 Currículo Lattes has been a curricular registry for Brazilian students and researchers since 1999. Data and academic achievement records are carried out at Lattes Platform, a virtual environment created by the National Counsel for Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq) in order to compile and facilitate access to curriculums.

38 Despite being created by teachers, the group intends to hoard the demands of all mothers in the academic community, and reflect on how the dimensions of gender and caregiving pervade de academic work of women in a general sense. See: https://www.humanasrede.com/post/grupo-de-trabalho-m%C3%A3es-cientistas-da-uerj , accessed October 2022.

39 See: https://asduerj.org/v7/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/CARTA-PARA-REITORIA-FINAL.pdf , accessed October 2022.

40 The implementation of a daycare-benefit is geared to stricto sensu grad and post-grad students who have pre-school age children. See: https://www.uerj.br/noticia/reitoria-institui-auxilio-creche-para-estudantes-com-filhos-ate-7-anos-e-auxilio-transporte-durante-a-pandemia/ , accessed October 2022.

41 Probational internship spans a civil servant’s first three years of activity in Brazil. See:

: https://www.uerj.br/noticia/uerj-inclui-tempo-de-licenca-maternidade-na-contagem-do-estagio-probatorio-de-docentes-e-tecnicas/ accessed October 2022.

42 See: https://www.parentinscience.com/c%C3%B3pia-iii-simp%C3%B3sio-2021 , accessed October 2022.

43 Instigating discussions can be found in documents on the Parent in Science Brasil platform, and also in the Special “Art and Motherhoods” Dossier, of Desvio Magazine, EBA / UFRJ’s graduate program magazine, 6th edition, July 2019. See: https://revistadesvio.com/2019/09/01/sexta-edicao-da-revista-desvio/ , accessed October 2022.

44 ROLNIK (2018).

45 BARROS (2016, p. 10).

46 Special “Art and Motherhoods” Dossier, of Desvio Magazine, EBA / UFRJ’s graduate program magazine, 6th edition, July 2019. See: https://revistadesvio.com/2019/09/01/sexta-edicao-da-revista-desvio/ , accessed October 2022.

47 SOMMER (2021, p. 137)

48 BASBAUM (2013).

49 See: https://cientistaqueviroumae.com.br/sindrome-da-impostora/ , accessed October 2022.

50 Nochlin (1971). “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, originally published in American magazine ArtNews, in 1971. Attempting to answer that question, Nochlin interrogates art history methodologies as well as the construction of their narratives, pointing to the difference in “grandeur” between genders, as she problematizes who formulates the questions in art historiography.

51 Nochlin (1974). “How can feminism in the arts implement cultural change?”. Here, Nochlin, in the subjectivity of the very practice of art historians, questions who is allowed to create, and introduces the role of biography as crucial for reading the social context of artistic creation.

52 hooks (1995). “Women artists. The creative process”. bell hooks considers time to be fundamental for the comprehension of conditions for creation in the unequal distribution of time between women and men.

53 Holanda (2020). “Feminist thought today: decolonial perspectives”. These questions are put forth by Holanda in the introduction to this book, which features a set of voices of Brazilian and Latin-American scholars theorizing in light of the decolonial turn and counter-colonial feminist theories.

54 Richard (2008).

55 Ibid.

56 I choose, in this essay, to circumscribe, in the geographic swath of Rio de Janeiro, theoretical studies with which I have had, in my years as a postdoctoral researcher (2017-2022), direct dialogue in academic contexts.

57 BALDAN (2020).

58 BALDAN (2021). See: https://soundcloud.com/luizabaldan/corpo-sororo , viewed in July 2024.

59 CAVALIERI (2021).

60 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neRbtDie3T0 , viewed in October 2022.

61 See: https://teteia.org/post/617937207529013248/o-trabalho-dom%C3%A9stico-como-trabalho-de-arte , Accessed October 2022.

62 GUIMARÃES (2021).

63 GUIMARÃES (2021, p. 197).

64 Ibid.

Haut de page

Table des illustrations

URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15501/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 358k
Titre Image 01 - Cecília Cavalieiri. Poetics of milk, Politics of sky, 2021. Artist’s collection.https://cargocollective.com/​ceciliacavalieri/​trabalhos-works/​Poeticas-do-leite-politicas-do-ceu-Poetics-of-milk-Politics-of-sky
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15501/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 2,0M
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15501/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 72k
Titre Image 03 - Mariana Guimarães. Hysterical Historic, 2019. Series embroidery Temple Time, composite by nine embroideries with silk threads on covers cotton. Artist’s collection. http://www.marianaguimaraes.art.br , accessed July 2024.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/docannexe/image/15501/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 124k
Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Michelle Farias Sommer, « Motherpumping: women-artists-mothers-scholars-etc. discussing the art system from Brazilian viewpoints »Artelogie [En ligne], 22 | 2024, mis en ligne le 07 décembre 2024, consulté le 14 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/artelogie/15501 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12wva

Haut de page

Auteur

Michelle Farias Sommer

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ. Farias Sommer is a researcher and a writer and works as a professor, curator and visual arts critic. Currently she is an assistant professor of Art Theory at Rio de Janeiro State University. She is a postdoctoral student in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro with the research 'Contemporary narrative-women: visual arts and literature in intersection in artistic practices in Brazil' (with a National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) research fellowship / 2023-2024).

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search