Residency: Lactating Bodies

Lactating bodies tackles an intimate but also highly political and urgent topic, namely, practices of breastfeeding and lactation. This residency will be devoted to the elaboration of the new participatory performance imagining a ritual...

Residency: Lactating Bodies

Katya Ev in collaboration with Azad Asifovich, Ciel Grommen & Maximiliaan Royakkers, Tobias Van Royen (TWIIID), Melanie Weil, Sarah Michel, at KANAL Centre Pompidou, Brussels

Sharing moment: Friday 14/04/2023. 14-18h: visits. From 18h: drinks
Please RSVP: vassilieva.katia@gmail.com

Katya Ev is looking for participants (remunerated). Find out more

Lactating bodies tackles an intimate but also highly political and urgent topic, namely, practices of breastfeeding and lactation.

How to create conditions in which lactating people will determine for themselves the conditions in which they will appear?

In 2021-2022 Katya Ev conducted an artistic research supported by a grant of the Flemish Community, on lactation practices in relation to the social, economic and gender realities and through the prism of 'body labour'. In 2022, Ev introduced her research around lactation within the collective project Emptor which articulates various questions concerning (co)property. This residency will be devoted to the elaboration of the new participatory performance imagining a ritual that enacts what Judith Butler calls "the right to appear" of lactating bodies within the public sphere. It challenges the notion that lactation should be confined to the private sphere and reframing it as a form of embodied labor.

How to deconstruct old patriarchal patterns and create new narratives and representations of female bodies within (occidental) histories of art and art institutions?

This is an artistic project with a political and feminist scope. It highlights breastfeeding and milk pumping being generally invisibilized (if not impossible) gestures in the public sphere and in professional contexts, and frames them as a form of body labour.

The invitation to lactating persons comes from an intention to elaborate the artistic project together with those first concerned so that they determine for themselves the conditions, scenarios and modalities according to which they will appear (in opposition to religious visual representations of a to female body giving breast emanating from cisgender male gaze).

How can the first concerned - lactating mothers/people - appear in the public sphere through artistic performative strategies? And transform their bodily presence from a vulnerable position to one of agency?

Read more on the artist's website

Location: KANAL - K1 Havenlaan 1 Av. du Port 1000 Brussels