Kristina Borg
Wombs on Strike
Soundscape, 12'30", 2024

Wombs on Strike* is inspired by a series of conversations with eight women – four born and raised in Malta, four born and raised in Spain, and who as adults lived across countries, including Malta. All aged between 30-45 years old, they have opted not to have children. 

Taking such a path, breaking the stereotype of women as mothers, has been described as a social stigma and considered a taboo subject. As one woman illustrated, such experience is akin to wearing a scarlet letter. Just like the rebellious, female protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter – who is accused and sentenced to wear a scarlet ‘A’, which in the story stands for adultery – the women who shared their experience of the no-child option also feel accused of being dishonourable and heartless, often denied agency rather than appreciated for their abilities. By exploring how this group of women take hold of the words used to shame their choice and shift such shame into resistance, the work also recalls the experience of past women who, in historical times, discreetly deposited their unwanted newborn babies inside the ruota – also known as a foundling wheel – of the former Santo Spirito Hospital, home base for today’s National Archives of Malta. Motivations for such an anonymous abandonment probably were various, yet remain undocumented. 

The work aims to open up a discussion towards mainstreaming diverse life choices with the hope of embracing better equality.

* In Chollet M. (2023). In Defence of Witches: Why women are still on trial. Picador, p.89.

Project artist, text and sound concept: Kristina Borg
Sound design and English/Maltese voice: Yasmin Kuymizakis
Spanish translation and voice: Guadalupe Cascardo
With thanks to the women who shared their story, including Celia, iella, Lucia Mella Fernández, Maryanne Caruana, Mireia Olivé, Noemi Deulofeu Blanch and Ritianne.
Thanks to Jimmy Bartolo for providing recording facilities.

Vanesa Varela
Drawing of a movement (domus 1)
Wood & dyed organic cotton, 200 x 150 x 150cm (2024)

This project is the first of several that examine the reproduction of life forms through domestication processes; complex processes in which the use of plants and plant-human interrelationships are shaped by history, by the physical and social environments and by the inherent qualities of the plants themselves. The house and its adjoining spaces domesticate humans and non-humans alike, entangled, knotted, and distanced in a continuous creation of possible worlds.

In this first piece, a series of elements are brought together to dialogue about this joint domestication: the greenhouse (a ‘house-space’ for caring), the plant Phaseolus Vulgaris (bean, here used as a dye) and Gossypium spp. (cotton, here used as a guide for the plant), both ‘successful’ species in achieving diffusion and multiplication via humans.

Irene Pérez
CONJURO I, II and III

The works CONJURO I, II and III are rooted in the connection and mutual support that women and people with uteruses who have knowledge about medicinal plants have generated for centuries in their communities, especially in relation to our reproductive health and autonomy. 

In CONJURO I: from them to me, from us to you, the family tree takes the form of braided hair, thus symbolising the knowledge and stories of care transmitted by grandmothers and mothers from one generation to another.

CONJURO II: medicine-woman is composed of several altars that hold drawings of plants made with a mixture of herbal pigments and menstrual blood and refers to and is a recognition of plants and their properties and how these are part of the ancestral knowledge of women -medicine, specifically in this case, these are plants that are related to decision-making and care regarding the course of a gestation process.

In CONJURO III: in our hands, weaving and un-weaving, a reflection is presented on the right to decide of bodies with a uterus and autonomy in making decisions about the safe and careful reproductive process, accompanied and supported by the hands of medicine-women and its relationship with the natural world.

Charlotte Nordgren Sewell
Lick Me to Life
Video and soft sculptures made with fabric, hair, latex, embroidery, stuffed with teabags of dried mugwort (2024)

The bestiary was one of the most popular texts of mediaeval Europe. It functioned as an encyclopaedia on the animal kingdom from a Christian perspective; rewriting the pagan beliefs on the more-than-human world, where the boundaries between human and non-human animals were often blurred and constantly shifting. It divided animals into the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’; thus reinterpreting nature through a binary lens which was then reinscribed into the language of nature, and prescribed to the people as fact. 

The bear, venerated by the ancient communities, was demonised by the Church as a rival to Christ and written into the mediaeval bestiary as an overtly sexual being who, unable to wait the entire period of her gestation, would give birth prematurely to formless lumps who she would then lick into their proper shape. The fertilising, artisanal mother tongue whose sensuous creation risked subverting the word of God. 

Lick Me to Life is a series of works inspired by the mother bear and her magical tongue. Multi-species care practices, tender objects and speculative fictions: a soft umbilical cord which is also a bridge between worlds, between different ways of knowing, of knowledge-making and storytelling in all its vicissitudes.

Raphael Vella

The Mother Whose Name We Bear
Video animation, 5'39" (2023)

L-Omm Ħares Mulej (Protect the Mother/land, Lord)
Ink and pencil on fabric, 260 x 160 cm (2024)

Raphael Vella explores themes of motherhood, politics and nationhood in drawings, archival films and stop motion techniques. 

Particularly interested in the way contemporary lives are controlled by institutions and other disciplinary measures, the artist presents, side by side, the underrepresentation of mothers in political life and the overrepresentation of mothers in political rhetoric. 

While a recent study conducted at the University of Gothenburg concluded that the political engagement of women decreases substantially during pregnancy and the first years of their children's lives, the maternal metaphor in the context of politics, nationalism and war is widespread. Hence, while gender gaps related to interest in political affairs increase as a result of women's increased engagement in childcare, the term "motherland" evokes a sense of emotional attachment to one's country as caregiver and is used in propaganda to rally popular support in times of war. In the artist's work, this military dimension is overlaid with references to obstetric violence, showing how even healthcare can be aligned with a coercive social order.

Agustín Ortiz Herrera
GRAVIDA
Table display case. Printing on cotton paper. Growth gelatin. Spores and fungi.

The natural sciences, specifically those dedicated to the study of life, had a starting point with the proto-encyclopedia of Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna 1522-1605). His classification of living things laid the foundation for a specífic way of seeing the world. Monstrorum Historia, one of his volumes, included everything that was difficult for him to explain scientifically. This strange and somewhat marginal work collects everything xenos of the time, such as malformations in plants and animals, fossils of extinct species or legends of mythological animals. But surprisingly, it also includes a study of the female reproductive system, androgyny, and people of other races. The work fluidly moves between the pre-modern scientific yearning, the naturalization of fantastic superstition, racism, misogyny and aberrant prejudice. Conceptual bases of Eurocentric colonialism. The question is how much of that substratum persists at the base of Western science and society.

In the artistic project GRAVIDA a selection of images from Aldrovandi's work are hacked by living beings that are somewhat difficult to classify. Fungi are distinguished from plants in that they obtain their nutrients through enzyme digestion of organic matter, indicating their phylogenetic proximity to the human species. Until 1969 they were not classified as their own kingdom. On the other hand, bacteria are the main biological group to understand the network of life, it is considered that we only know a tiny part of the existing species, which resist being classified by modern taxonomic parameters.

During the period of the exhibition living beings will expand, colonizing the surfaces where the images are installed, influencing and transforming their iconography. The queer power of nature interferes in the cultural conception of life sciences, reminding us of its colonialist, racist and misogynist past.