Landpartie
In the field of art, the care work practiced by artists/mothers resonates as peripheral discourse. It is in this context that the Berlin-based artistic collective Maternal Fantasies emerges, formed by ten female artists and thirteen children from different cultural contexts and artistic disciplines. Through immersive artistic residencies, the collective acts as an experimental environment where the collective artistic production is facilitated by a set of self-imposed rules. These rules include mixed procedures from activist movements, artistic tools, automatic (autobiographical) writing and kids’ games, in order to generate poetical fictions that critically address the representation of motherhood, maternal isolation, and social exclusion. The artistic practice of the collective opens an ironic polyvocality that interrupts the flow of social reproduction, highlighting the tension between private and public, historical and contemporary struggles.
This series of images were produced during the collective’s Landpartie 01 residency in 2018 at BetOnest, an art space located in a former cement factory in the village of Stolpe/Oder, Germany. The set of rules involved a dialogue with classic painting references, which were re-staged as tableau vivants.