The feminist art collective MATERNAL FANTASIES uses rotational authorship, immersive site related residences, mixed autobiographical and historical references as methods for creating critical artworks around the institution of motherhood. Mothering is not exclusive to a physical and fixed category or identity, but instead represents dedicated time, attention, nurturance, protection, and an interrupted state of mind, which gives rise to a distinctive discipline of thoughts.

Composed of 7 interdisciplinary artists | mothers and 10 children, we explore constructions around the theme, in a broader spectrum of care work, stretching tensions between social invisibility and fantastical visibility. In our film experiments, we propose new vocabularies and visual performative translations of the maternal experience with the goal of integrating intergenerational knowledge, connecting female ancestral discourses to our own stories and to future narratives of our children.

“In “Suspended Time, On Caring” we combine colourful Tableaux Vivants, – re-stagings of art historical references – with chimerically orchestrated scenes, and playful and improvised performances in a low-tech, DIY-style surrealist setting. Through interactions between bodies, objects, and spaces, mothers and children re-re-re-assemble and turn maternal fantasies into playful experiences, personal narratives into social questions, and body dimensions into fields of interaction.”

— MATERNAL FANTASIES (2020)

a film by and with MATERNAL FANTASIES collective

text excerpts from

ABC of Motherhood by MATERNAL FANTASIES

Generational Line by Magdalena Kallenberger

W for Work by Isabell Spengler

Of Women Born by Adrienne Rich

The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous

Enduring Time by Lisa Baraitser

concept, direction, performance, voices, camera, sound, costumes and props by MATERNAL FANTASIES

dramatic construction, editing and sound design by Isabell Spengler

music by Melanie Schlachter and by Daniel Adams & Emmanuel Geisser