“This project started way back in 2008, when I decided to start a family with my partner. We managed it seven years later after a series of treatments. They were twins and it proved completely overwhelming. I have almost no photographs (apart from cell phone ones) of their early infancy, but I found the experience so incredible that I kept wondering how I might depict and convey just a small iota of that mad frenzy. I managed to start taking proper photographs when they were 4 years old just as we were saying goodbye to that first babe in arm stage of childhood.
This period of existential revolution led me to become fully conscious of the importance of the subject of maternity as a driving force for personal and social evolution and, most importantly, the role of art as a vehicle to convey in first person themes related directly to this sector of the population so meagrely represented –bar stereotypes and idealizations– in society and art.
Due to my research work for my doctoral thesis, which these pieces are part of, I was aware of the existence in contemporary literature and photography of an increasing number of authors who were speaking very frankly from their own experience. Reading Adrienne Rich, Jane Lazarre, Rachel Epp Buller, Laura Freixas, Patricia Merino, Esther Vivas, Carolina del Olmo, María Llopis, Julia Cañero o María do Cebreiro has been essential. Becoming familiar with the work of Ana Casas, Ana Álvarez Errecalde, Elinor Caruchi, Catherine Opie, Hannah Cooke, Megan Wynne, Jade Beall, Verónica Ruth Frías, Natalia Iguíñiz, Natalie Lennard, Carmen Winant, Irmina Walczak and Jess Dobkin, among many others (all of them artists that I admire greatly for daring to speak from their ‘shared room’), has given me the perspective and support I needed to embark upon a difficult job, one that might prove awkward or controversial in some of its more intimate aspects.
These are subjects about which it is worth speaking and which are beginning to be taken into account in the cultural sphere as well as in a feminist movement that is increasingly multifaceted and inclusive, capable of accepting a variety of situations of different types of women, mothers and people equipped with the ability to gestate and lactate. Indeed, over the last few years it is easy to trace the rising interest in Spain in discussing feminist maternities, the specific violence aimed at women and their young offspring, the care crisis, etc. An example of this is the appearance and rapid rise of the PETRA Feminist Maternities Association, of which I am a member, and the recent profusion of literature dealing with these subjects.
The Desapego project consists of an extensive group of pieces in a variety of formats (photographs, videos and installations) in which I explore the experience of my own maternity from a non-idealized point of view and using the contradictions and challenges that this life opportunity has given me to pose questions and grow.
The title refers to the ongoing process of separation that has occurred since the moment of giving birth (or a few months later, if we respect the dyad). Changing stages, continual adaptation and departing. A necessary and liberating evolution, which also involves a lot of confusion and mixed-feelings.
One should point out that in terms of a visual and performative approach, I decided not to cut my hair from the time of birth to the end of the maternal lactation stage which, in my case, lasted five years. Those long locks of time-consuming, uncomfortable hair, exuberantly dyed in two-colours, acted as a symbol of the bond and the knotty existential tangle intrinsic to the maternal experience of the first years of child-raising. Eventually my children cut those locks for me, after their lips had touched my breasts for the last time.
Most of these images were taken in 2020, quite spontaneously and precariously between my home and my parents’ house, where we spent lockdown. Additionally, in January 2021 we performed four action sessions at MARCO that interacted with the artists Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Zhang Huan and Masahisa Fukase.”
This project has been possible thanks to the support of many people; to the MARCO and its team, of course – they’ve made me feel at home. To those friends who helped me when I asked them to: Roberto Alonso, Carolina González, Diego Fernández; and especially to David Hernández and Álex Penabade, who made the four sessions at MARCO.
And my family, obviously, to whom I owe everything.
Andrea Costas Lago