reproductive wildernessreproductive wilderness
Feed Overview

"Reproductive wilderness," a term coined by Helen Hester in her book Xenofeminism, is the focus of an artistic project that delves into the interconnectedness of human and non-human elements in the process of gestation. This project seeks to transcend disciplinary boundaries, engaging with the political discourse surrounding motherhood and reproduction. . .

... the womb is a more than human space, giving room to the stranger and its mutational politics... mamals apart a seed that holds the embryo of a plant and the expanding uterus of the hen that stretches to push the egg out of the cloaca are each renditions of the gestating womb’s temporality, tactility, and fluidity...

With advancements of new technologies such as full surrogacy, IVF treatments, and genetically engineered artificial wombs, the womb will continue to be caught in the tension between the generic (creating more of the same) and generative (becoming a site for varies mutations). The questions remain: where (in whose bodies, politics, and economics) will the womb reside? and who (which variants/ actors/ genes) will form the materiality of the womb as a generative space?

Excerpt from Spatial Folders, Extraction a transcalar enquiry, Reproductive Wilderness, 2023, published by MIARD

 


Reproductive Wilderness 



    Exhibitions; 
    2022 Neck in the woods, Rotterdam
    2021 Huiden Club, Rotterdam




Reproductive Wilderness is an interactive installation that generatively glasses 3D printed ceramic sculptures with reproductive fluids (MILK) in reaction to ambient sound. The instability of the organic (CLAY) like that of the human body contrasts with the mechanic of the 3d printer. Frequently breaking the pattern and mutating into forms outside of my drawing and vision as a producer. Creating its own language of variation and uniformity.
    Thus, Feeding an ecosystem that 
    establishes new social relations between the 
    organic, the machine, the human and the more 
    than human. The sketch mutates into growing 
    matter creating a new stage for the politics 
    of reproduction, making room for the 
    stranger.Resisting the idea of a fixed object 
    and giving room to the tactility and continuity of
    the womb.



In the making of the final ecosytem of wombs, a single sketch/drawing like a growing embryo was developed through 7 stages of evolution. These mutations took place through a series of digital and analog transformations.