Abstract
I am at my desk, layering photographs to create composite images. The photographs belong to a project which was made in 2018, before I became a mother. In it, I re-staged pictures of family members taken in Hong Kong in the 1950s - I adopted the poses of my then two-year-old mother and my grandmother in the original sites. In 1951, my grandmother would have been at the stage of matrescence I find myself in now, at the time of proposing this chapter in 2024. Originally designed to be viewed in pairs, today I am experimenting with layering the original and 2018 photographs over each other, so that three generations of a maternal line can share space together.
Through my office window, I see a nesting Great Tit taking the wool I tied to a tree branch. She is using it to create the final layer of her nest inside our garden bird box, which contains a hidden camera. My partner, toddler son Ivor and I have been avidly watching the progress of the Great Tit together. The layers of her careful construction - twigs, moss and now wool - blur together with the layers in the images I am making: my grandmother cradling my mother in a colonial city that was their temporary home, my body performing maternal gestures four years before the arrival of my son, alongside the body of the Great Tit crafting her nest in circular form, softening the hard edges of the bird box she has occupied.
How can scenographic making prepare us (whether bird or human) for the unfamiliar land of motherhood? What is learned through performing the matrescent gestures of other people or species?
This chapter is proposed as a speculative narrative, superimposing matrescent bird and human gesture and scenographic making. Drawing on the worlding practice of Vinciane Despret which proposes the life stories of birds as opening up new methods of imaginative crafting and Donna J. Haraway’s contention that new knowledge derived from the stories of living beings beyond the human nourishes ‘a muscle critical for caring about flourishing’, this narrative will superimpose a colonial mid-century childhood and matrescence against the activities of a soon-to-be bird mother, to consider how and where we ‘make our nests’ and offer our bodies in service of this task.
References
Despret, V. (2022) Living as a Bird. Cambridge UK and Medford US: Polity Press
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Through my office window, I see a nesting Great Tit taking the wool I tied to a tree branch. She is using it to create the final layer of her nest inside our garden bird box, which contains a hidden camera. My partner, toddler son Ivor and I have been avidly watching the progress of the Great Tit together. The layers of her careful construction - twigs, moss and now wool - blur together with the layers in the images I am making: my grandmother cradling my mother in a colonial city that was their temporary home, my body performing maternal gestures four years before the arrival of my son, alongside the body of the Great Tit crafting her nest in circular form, softening the hard edges of the bird box she has occupied.
How can scenographic making prepare us (whether bird or human) for the unfamiliar land of motherhood? What is learned through performing the matrescent gestures of other people or species?
This chapter is proposed as a speculative narrative, superimposing matrescent bird and human gesture and scenographic making. Drawing on the worlding practice of Vinciane Despret which proposes the life stories of birds as opening up new methods of imaginative crafting and Donna J. Haraway’s contention that new knowledge derived from the stories of living beings beyond the human nourishes ‘a muscle critical for caring about flourishing’, this narrative will superimpose a colonial mid-century childhood and matrescence against the activities of a soon-to-be bird mother, to consider how and where we ‘make our nests’ and offer our bodies in service of this task.
References
Despret, V. (2022) Living as a Bird. Cambridge UK and Medford US: Polity Press
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Demeter Press |
| Publication status | In preparation - 7 Jun 2024 |
Keywords
- matrescence
- scenography
- motherhood
- ecofeminism