ERNESTYNA ORLOWSKA

I've Been Feeling It Too

Performance, 35'

2020

Lokal Int, Biel

 

Concept, Performance: Ernestyna Orlowska

 

This performance deals with the mother figure stereotypes in a subversive and anarchistic way. In January 2019 I became a mother. To be pregnant, to give

birth and to be the mother of an infant is like experiencing a force of nature (similar to an earthquake) and is in discrepancy with the image that capitalist and medialized society produces.

Suddenly I found myself in conservative models of relationships, my identity as an artist was weak, my academic world view imploded. But the problem is not the child. The problem lies in the attempt to bring the actual care work for a child together with the ideas, requirements and constraints of a modern adult life that is custom fit for independent men. Meanwhile one feels like an animal, because the main source of nourishment for this new creature is one’s own breast, which until now has only served as a sexual symbol.

At the center of the performance is a fictional character who is the PR spokesperson for the force of nature (or force of natureculture) of motherhood. Her mission

is to transform space in the same way a force of nature, namely a shift of the weather situation, can transform spaces. This can be done on a subtle atmospheric level, but also on a visual level. But her secret mission is to make motherhood even more artificial than it already is, to make it’s artificiality visible. It sings every audience member’s name to welcome it (like they do in the nursery), squeezes colored milk

out of the breast and forms a cup out of it, let’s audience members drink from it, pulls out children’s song texts from the wet wipe box and performs them.

This performance is inspired by anti-dualistic discourses. These argue against an apriori existence of nature. Nature is produced in the process of its exploration. Nature and culture are inseparably intertwined. According to Donna Haraway, such an attitude implies that all human beings are monsters, because the apparatuses (=discursive processes) that make people into human beings have to keep on working in order to maintain this border or even to shift it.

The objects in the space were created in the process of materializing the investigation of these motherhood-monsterhood constructs. There is an oversized pacifier from unburned clay attached to a necklace that says Sorry Not Sorry. Actually sucking it would dissolve the unburned clay. Clay would be sucked in by a human, and the first human, according to biblical creation myths, was also created by clay.

There is a post-apocalyptic pram with tokens inside, a full length dress made from stuffy checked children shirts that usually middle aged adult men would wear and a baby body shaped handbag made from cow skin, with crocodile pattern.