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Art Birth Education Featured Artists International MAMA Medical

MAMA: ISSUE 52 HBAC Performance Manifesto

HBAC Performance Manifesto – MAMA Artist Bio

SLQS is a Franco-Vietnamese artist living in East London. Her work is interdisciplinary and questions the politics of space and who is excluded from it. SLQS makes and holds space as a woman, a person of mixed heritage, a foreigner, a mother and an artist. She invites her audience to decolonise spatial orders from imperialist, sexist and racist structures. SLQS has presented work at Totally Thames, Spitalfields Music, Rich Mix, Procreate Project, the Live Art Development Agency, the Royal College of Art, the Brunel Museum, the Migration Museum and the Attenborough Art Centre. She is a board member of the Creative Think Tank for UK New Artists.

https://www.workbyslqs.com/                                 @workbyslqs (instagram)

About the work

The HBAC Performance Manifesto was written from my personal experience of being pregnant and not given access to a home birth or the birthing centre. Having previously had a caesarean, I was labelled ‘high risk’ and was not being heard.

On 4th and 5th November 2018, over 25 hours, I performed the act of giving birth at home with the support of two independent midwives. The birth was documented as an act of everyday life in the domestic space, with cameras set up in my kitchen, my bedroom and my living room. The Manifesto declares my views on birth as an every day performance and Home Birth After Cesarean (HBAC) as being a safe birth

option. It was published by the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS) in 2020.

Independent midwifery supports choices for women by providing evidence based information and continuity of care to women. Since 2020, due to their insurance product being annulled, their home birth practice is now prohibited, threatening an ancestral profession and restricting women’s birth rights. A group of independent midwives are taking action and fundraising to set up their own insurance product owned by women, with the long term goal to set up a hardship fund. You can support their campaign here: Childbirth Choices Matters.

HBAC PERFORMANCE MANIFESTO

To the medicalised institutions, their medical staff and the health governmental bodies

ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?

NO I am not high risk

NO I will not go to the labour ward

NO I will not be immobilised by continuous monitoring NO I will not labour under time pressure

NO I will not listen to you

NO I will not be given a trial of labour

I WILL LABOUR!

Giving birth is an ancestral ritual which has been performed at home by women for centuries. An act which has ensured the survival of the human species.

Women and daughters have witnessed the act of giving birth for millennia. Women can perform the art of giving birth and every performance will be unique.

Giving birth is a creative act.

The ultimate act of transformation.

A HBAC (Home Birth After Cesarean) is a political act attempting to shift the power from an obstetrically-led medical institution to a woman-centred care approach.

Labour is a durational performance: starting spontaneously with an unexpected duration.

A HABC gives time to the performance of labour. There is no failure to progress, only failure to wait! Patience and respect for the process is practiced.

A HBAC requires participants to support the performer throughout the act of birth. Midwives, partners, family members, friends will be chosen in advance by the performer to participate in the event.

A HBAC enables the performer to control her birth. She is informed and capable of making the right decisions for herself and her baby. She rejects the politics of fear and failure institutionalised by hospital birth.

A HBAC should be available to all women without resistance. All women are eligible for care and should be in control of their choices without judgement.

I AM STRONG

I AM CAPABLE

I TRUST MY BODY I TRUST MY BABY

The performance of HBAC is not a medicalised event. It is a holistic act celebrating life itself. HBAC is performed without the traditional medical props.

NO Forceps NO Ventouse NO CTG

NO Cannulas

NO Augmentation Drugs

NO Amniotomy

NO Epidural

The performance of HBAC challenges the current medical hierarchy of birth. Verticality is replaced by horizontality.

The performance of HBAC reframes birth as an event in a woman’s life in her domestic environment. There is no drama.

Giving birth is a woman’s right of passage into motherhood. A physical and mental journey leading to an act of transformation. Such a journey requires preparation and planning, knowing that unforeseen circumstances can change the course of actions.

A birth plan is a manifesto of personal preferences.

In the performance of HBAC, hospitals and obstetrics interventions are for emergencies only. Giving birth is an innate performance. A primal aptitude buried deep inside every woman.

The performance of HBAC redefines risk. Risk is not measured as a possible scar rupture but as avoiding another assisted birth and future mental trauma associated to this experience.

The performance of HBAC promotes independence. INDEPENDENCE in the choices the performer makes about her birth. INDEPENDENCE from hospital’s policies

INDEPENDENCE from unnecessary medical intervention.

The performance of HBAC respects the culture of birth and the art of midwifery. The performance of HBAC is an act of activism.

Written by Sarah Le Quang Sang, October 2018,

In Flat 55 Maitland House, Bishops Way, London, E2 9HT

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Art Featured Feminism gender International MAMA MOM Art Annex MoM Pop Up

M.A.M.A. Issue 48: Maternal as a Strategy

What you’re going to do now?

By Galit Criden

The term ‘maternal’ has been pulsing through the academic and contemporary art worlds.  Contemporary art institutions seek to cultivate it; scholars write about it, and artists who become mothers are confronted by the concept.

A confession: it took me a long time to connect to the term maternal. Even after having my baby girl, the term still felt obsolete. The second time around, as a student at Goldsmiths Uni, I started to read about maternal organizations demanding equality and providing agency to those who mother the other. It became really fascinating when I began reading about how scholars, drag, trans, and performance artists were trying to queer the maternal by liberating it by reframing language and traditional thinking about it. As they question the role of community in regard to care practices, open and share the act of mothering, rethink how the maternal can be at use in our society – I began to rethink my own values, production, and artistic process, how I could collaborate and think about mother work differently. 

In a webinar hosted by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney held in July 2020, they respond to contemporary political and social disarray. As they note: “Differentiating ourselves through practice is not to identify or disidentify but to continue with the practice, asking questions that are supposed to produce movement and not paralysis.” Inspired by their conversation, the term maternal strategies bubbles up in my thinking. Could the maternal construct a discourse of change? Can it be a strategy for others? And how we might use maternal strategies to reconstruct ourselves, our artistic spaces, words, and our movement to politically vision a different kind of future?

In a constant dialog with these ideas and questions, the different projects I choreograph allow people to go through a process of reflection-loss-re-imagination and yes sometimes it invites them to stay in boredom and uncertainty for a long long time. As the choreographer-the mama of these spatial performative attempts, I use maternal strategies to reorganize and to facilitate. I apply a maternal perspective (harmony, balance, sharing of space and resource), taking into consideration where the performance work is performed, the kind of cultural history it holds, the people who are performing, and the kind of knowledge they hold. By facilitating a space that fundamentally recognizes differences in its rhythm, physical actions, social expectation, where there is no leader but a group of people sharing what they know, a space with no hierarchy between objects, bodies, sound, and audience – Is to my opinion a new kind of territory-form-sphere-strategy where alternative knowledge can evolve and new thoughts about people’s body, movement & freedom of choice can be learned.

‘Observation Room Project’ is a practice of slowing down, drawing its strength from the tension between the human subject and its surroundings. it takes into consideration the vital entanglements of one body with other kinds of bodies therefore is relational and maternal in its perspective. Slowness and durational are the two main methodologies through which I created ‘Observation Room’. in reaction to a rapid society, slowness is a way to counter fixed ideas of production, creative processes, individualism, and many more. It enables “a listening”, perhaps even a “healing” space where the form is captured and new learning can happen.

In ‘Stardust’, I reflected on the working reality of artists & mother artists. By presenting this work at Christie’s [Auction House], Stardust showcased active mother artists as the work of art, while investigating the relationship between the viewer – the commodity of art – and the mother artist who produces it. In this performance, each mother artist was for sale. Next to her feet laid a description of who she is, what she does for a living. (Performing: Rosalind Noctor, Vicky Samuel, Alisa Oleva))

In ‘Standing Still’, the relation between space, duration, and movement is intensely magnified, and the viewer is given the chance to enter another realm of consciousness and awareness. This event took place at the Wellcome Collection Museum. For one hour the performers invited the public to take part in standing still together – reflecting on what happens to the mind and body in a moment of stillness (London).

Indeed, when maternal strategies are used and performed by artists they open space to respond to the patriarchal system by offering different voices, movements, and new images where an alternative reality can exist.

Although we cannot simply conserve the idea of maternal and maternal strategies only through observing a performance, a drag show, an image, or an exhibition, we can perhaps begin to accumulate, through the deconstruction of words, participation in liminal spaces, sharing of invisible maternal experiences, acting with intention, recognizing M-others, maternal actions that mean so much to this society.

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Art motherhood Opportunities

Support the Mother [LINK]

The Mother House (London), is the world’s first affordable artists studio model with integrated childcare, where children are welcome into the workspace.

A crowdfunding campaign for the Mother House studio, with the prime aim to open the first permanent space in London in 2019 and complete the Tool Kit for the National and international replication of the model for a wider social and cultural impact.

MH now has 200 backers (of which the Motherhood Foundation is one), and together with the support from the Mayor of London and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation MH has raised 68% of the funds. It’s all or nothing and it would be a real shame to lose what gathered so far and not being able to make this ‘dream of many’ a reality. 

The crowdfunding ends on the 16th of Dec so we hope you will have time to review the catalog before that. SUPPORT THE MOTHER HOUSE NOW LINK!

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Art

Desperate Artwives Takeover – London England

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW

Who: Depserate Artwives Collective – Mother Artists!

What: We envisage each artist performing a repetitive domestic action or interruption of their own interpretation for the duration whilst wearing something red for recognition. (Some of the actions will be – folding, cleaning the floor, calling the children, hanging the washing etc). Where: In and around the Tate Modern.

Please be ready to start at 1pm.

The action is to be flash mob style. We will be starting by being spread out (please choose your position and if you can, let us know where you will be – roughly).

We will gradually get together for a big finale at approx. 1:45. Final meeting point will be at the river entrance on Queen’s Walks in between the trees’ path. When: Sunday the 6th of August from 1pm to 1:45 approx.

How Long: Approx 45 minutes Aims:

• To make visible Women doing domestic actions, in front of the Tate Modern at a time when finally we see a woman taking over as director of the gallery.

• To draw attention to the lack of women artists hanging in the gallery and represented throughout the art world in general.

• To draw attention to an invisible and legitimate and often unheard voice, that of the motherartist and to give it value.

• To demonstrate against and give voice and recognition to the silent unpaid work done by the many millions of women around the world that is diminished, minimised and unacknowledged.

If you cannot make it in person and will join us via Social Media:

• ON THE DAY post a picture of yourself whilst performing a domestic action on YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE or TWITTER ACCOUNT

• Wear something red

• Make sure you hash tag the following #uniteddespitethedistance #motherartist #desperateartwives

Desperate Artwives