The group will hold an open presentation to the public of its project Pájaros en la Cabeza in the Old Laundries of the City of Culture.

Birds on the headIt is the result of an artistic investigation developed at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial during the period of time from September 2015 to March 2016.

This research had motherhood as its object of analysis, but not addressing it from an academic perspective, nor as an institutional meta-reflection on the conditions of contemporary art, but as a political and gender conflict.

Emulating Peter Weiss, Birds in the Head is an investigation for an aesthetics of resistance but, in this case we add, a gender resistance. The previous premise led us to approach motherhood from a perspective of conflict because, as Simone de Beauvoir already stated, motherhood is “a strange compromise between narcissism, altruism, dreams, sincerity, bad faith, devotion and cynicism” (Beauvoir, 1987I: 291). Not even in motherhood is love without blemish, along with love there is hate, there is rejection and satisfaction, resignation and enthusiasm; those things change in these and these in those. This is what motherhoods are like, experiences that are in themselves contradictory, for whose analysis we have used different tools and aesthetic approaches: biographies of objects, videographic records, film recordings, essays, sound documents, performance, photography, poetry…

All these instruments gave way to transversal, relational and, above all, emancipatory work. Well, if something was clearly revealed throughout this project, it is that we want to constitute a vein of resistance against the dominant modes of production of references about motherhood.

In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche asked “Does anyone want to look down a little at the mystery of how ideals are manufactured on earth?” As a collective of women artists we now return to that question to ask ourselves about the hegemonic model of motherly love: “Does anyone want to look down a little, at the mystery of how ideals are made on earth? “Who has the courage to do that?” At OFFMOTHERS we have had it and we invite you to take a look at that dark workshop.

Susana Carro, OFFMOTHERS Collective

OFFMOTHERS Collective: Susana Carro Fernández, Elena de la Puente, Natalia Pastor, Roxana Popelka, Blanca Prendes, Gema Ramos and Eugenia Tejón