m/other becomings 

Through durational collaborations between experimental cultural institutions, artists and thinkers, m/other becomings will cultivate intergenerational and multispecies methodologies, make space for the investigation of domestic resistance practices, and probe technologies of reproduction, resilience and recuperation. 

m/other becomings sees a collaboration between Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), The Association for Arts and Mental Health (DK), Kultivator (SE), Art Lab Gnesta (SE) and Bioart Society (FI). The project is generously supported by Bikuben Fonden, Nordic Culture Point, Nordic Culture Fund, AP Møller Foundation, IASPIS and Vestamagers Lokalpulje.

m/other becomings - curatorial statement

Mothering bodies are boundary creatures; they inhabit a liminal space between the mundane and the strange. Mothering bodies may manifest an ultimate gender conformity, but they are also portals into feral and messy morphologies, resisting the self-other divide so foundational to the epistemologies of Western modernity. As fierce, tired, vulnerable, heavy and porous carriers in perpetual interconnection, perpetual attachment, mothering bodies swell, stretch, envelope and leak in all directions, and challenge regimes based on linearity, progress and subjecthood by foregrounding everyday, repetitive and frankly unglamorous practices of sustaining life by confirming and continuing kinship.

Often, motherhood is enrolled in the sanctioning of Women as the biologically given frontworkers in regimes of care and reproduction. (White, heterosexual, able-bodied, affluent) Motherhood has been - and still very much is - weaponized in the often violent perpetuation of a political status quo, and utilized in the othering of marginalized bodies, practices and cultures.

However, mothering as action instead of essence, as the quotidian practices of cultivating, carrying and caring for kin - holds radical potential as it opens towards relations and recuperation beyond the nuclear family, beyond its gender politics and its state-sanctioned economies of labour, consumption and affect.

With this project, we want to take a closer look at the im/possibilities of mothering, not as essence, but as troubled practice and as a modest, utopian and oftentimes exhausted precursor of hope. We want to ask what it means - and may come to mean - to make, to mend, to make space for kin in spite of and against the social reproduction of sameness and compliance, and the (bio)politics of gendered and racialized violence. We want to explore reproductive futures and how life sciences give an opportunity to transform and challenge our ideas and possibilities of reproduction and the maternal.

How may we come to mother, to host and to make dwelling for each other in ways that cancel the brutal mechanisms of othering from within political and ecological landscapes enrolled in and wretched by ongoing necropolitics of coloniality and extractive capitalism? What happens when the technologies and politics of the maternal are unleashed from the affective and economic structures of heteronormative reproduction, from natality and even from species’ genealogies? m/other becomings will investigate junctions and leaky borderlands between motherhood and otherhood. Tentatively probing into the potentials of bringing forth an insurgent, but also non-innocent politics of care by investigating the strangeness of mothers as it pushes against conventional notions of body, self, family and belonging.

m/other becomings is generously supported by Bikuben Fonden, The Nordic Culture Fund, Nordic Culture Point, IASPIS, Vestamagers Lokaludvalg and A.P. Møller Fonden.

m/other becomings draws from an earlier curatorial conversation, which also included the Multispecies Salon and Art Laboratory Berlin initiated by Ida Bencke and Eben Kirksey.

Program overview:
m/other becomings will start in late spring 2021 with a program organised by the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology in Copenhagen in collaboration with the Center for Art and Mental Health and ARIEL - Feminisms in the Aesthetics. 

During the Summer 2021 Kultivator will host a workshop on the project topics. The findings of the workshop will be presented in an exhibition at Art Lab Gnesta during the autumn of 2021. 

m/other becomings will finish in Helsinki in the spring of 2022 with a concluding exhibition and symposia.