MilkyWay &
Threat Us seriously
MilkyWay
MilkyWay
Author: Anna Wańtuch
Photos and video taken and edited: Filip Wańtuch
Technique: Installation, digital photographs, ready-made objects, knitting, sound recordings,
video 6:21 min
Dimensions: 213x160
Premiere: 14/08/2024, group exhibition KOSTBAR, curator: Tatjana Hardikov, Künstlerhaus Wien
Feeding the baby is one of the basics of care. It not only responds to the need for food but also the need to feel safe and loved. By giving food mothers share their love and protection. They also need to be protected and supported but finding the way and response is challenging. MilkyWay is a trial of finding those pathways in the body that while feeding others lives in survival mode. Mothers produce the milk for the baby but their bodies are losing nourishment for themselves. In MilkyWay white fluid is tracing the body leaving its signs and staying on the body. It is a way of reversing the situation by nourishing the mother and feeding her with resilience.
In some cultures, milk is called “a gold fluid”. By this name, they show admiration, gratitude and value for it. Some writers also used milk as a metaphor for their creations. MilkyWay nourishes the body to speak about what is needed. It revives the movements and gives the directions for moving. The project is not only about the visibility of mothers but also about their audibility. MilkyWay is a radical voice of protection. This voice is simultaneously full of hysteria and love, anger and kindness. This mother’s voice smells the milk and is amplified by milk.
The idea for that project came with being fed up with experiencing systemic exclusion and erasing the mothers from artistic visibility. The obstacles are cultural, social and political. The erasement had double sources: making mothers invisible because of regarding them as not worthy and with low value and the second by putting sexual connotations to maternal motives making them dangerous and not appropriate.
In my first test photo, I tried to convey the phrase: Take us seriously and after posting a photo of my mouth with spilt milk on Facebook and Instagram, I was reprimanded for violating sexual policy and threatened with suspending my account. This is one example of the systemic exclusion of mothers from public space. In the response, I invited everyone to support the idea by posting similar photos with instructions helping to avoid being banned by adding the sentence “This is just a glass of milk”.
MilkyWay aims not only to take care of the mother’s body by herself but also to invite other bodies to take care and give a space for caring postulates and floating words allowing artistic creation and social coexistence. Exclusion and oppression might touch everyone and I believe that the idea of milky nourishment might be transferred widely and be experienced no matter if you have the experience of breastfeeding. I wish we could change the narration that to understand mothers you need to be a mother by yourself and that we could expand the empathy wider.
In this project, Milk is regarded by me as a nutritional material for movement, text and staying alive. Mothers feed the earth, so I used milk to feed myself and my creativity as a mother.
Open and not finished list of postulates:
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#nourish us
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#support us
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#treat us seriously
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#do not erase us
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#do not ask to cover ourselves
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#do not think you can shame us more
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#protect what is fragile
Treat Us seriously
This is my story about the Milkmaid. I am an artist touching on maternal themes in my works. Whatever we try to say or do is not taken seriously. When I started my own Resilience and Relief residency from the An Artist Residency in Motherhood kit, I wanted to create a visual (photographic and video) postulates about what we need as artists mothers to create. In many cases, the obstacles we face are cultural, social and political.
I use milk as a nutritional material. Mothers feed the earth, so I used milk to feed myself and my creativity as a mother. In my first test photo, I tried to convey the sentence: Take us seriously, and after posting a picture of my mouth with spilling milk on Facebook and Instagram, I was reprimanded for breaking the sexual policy and threatening to suspend my account. This is another example of the systemic exclusion of mothers from the public space and the fact that we are often erased because society gives sexual connotations to maternal motives.
It's not our fault that it embarrasses you when you see a woman's mouth filled with liquid and the algorithm doesn't recognize milk but semen (isn't it obvious that it should be semen?). Let's learn a different meaning for our lips, let our mouths be open and nourish the earth with pictures of resistance and relief.
To support this idea, share a photo of your milky lips with a hashtag #TakeUSseriously.
In my works, I use the idea of excess, which in this case also acquired the meaning of resistance to censorship. That's why I added a few layers that are listed in the instructions for the photo:
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Take a glass of milk
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Make a mustache out of milk
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Have milk on and out of your mouth
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Add a sentence : It's just a glass of milk
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Use the hashtag #TakeUSseriously
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Add a few words explaining why you think this is relevant to your personal perspective (optional).
The following artists responded to the invitation:
Alice Cork
Performer, careformer (her own concept, combining performance art with "care", i.e. care, interspecies care), ecofeminist, curator. For many years associated with the International Festival of Performance Art in Martinique.
Anna Maria Brandys
Doctor of Arts, assistant professor at the 1st Drawing Studio of Professor Joanna Imielska at the Faculty of Art and Design of the University of Arts in Poznań. President of the Jak Malowana Foundation, co-founder of the House of Fairy Tales and the Biennale of Artistic Fabric in Poznań. Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Awarded, among others, at the 7th International Painting Biennale
and Unique Fabrics or the 7th Biennale of Young Art Rybie Oko. For years she has been involved in animation and educational activities in Poznań, which was appreciated by awarding her twice, among others, a scholarship from the City of Poznań. In private, she is the mother of Marysia and Zosia, who proves with her professional practice that parenthood does not exclude from participation
in culture.
Catherine Grysko
Dancer, art therapist, cultural educator. Kasia uses the tools of dance therapy, movement analysis according to Rudolf Laban, choreotherapy and therapeutic dance. Her work focuses on the integration of body, mind and expression through movement. I write letters to my Body, I move and invite to move.
I use the wisdom of the body to deepen contact with myself and relationships with other people. o "If I lived in the Middle Ages,
I would probably be a vagabond. I cannot imagine life without wandering, dancing, music and contact with people and nature.
"Facebook: @Listopadowyprojekt / www.listopadowyprojekt.pl
Josef Ka
An international performance, visual and sound artist, Josef Ka combines diverse influences – from Butoh dance to cinema theory – with decades of nomadic world travel to create bold, deeply personal site-specific art.
The themes of Josef Ka's work range from examining the place of the human body in contemporary reality to examining the internal body as a system representative of our human and posthuman species.
Her artistic practice often actively invites the viewer into a kind of private reverie, making it deeply participatory; she actively collaborates both with her audience and with a wide range of other experimental artists.
In addition to her own work, Josef Ka curates regular series of events and exhibitions in her Helsinki space – Sauna Gallery – and teaches performance art theory and practice. She is also the creator of WORST THEATRE and her personal training system KA-YOGA.
https://eskargoeskargo.com @josefkartist
Magdalena Daniec
Graduated from the Art Institute at the Pedagogical University in Cracow. Diploma with honours in the painting studio in 2001. Her diploma series of 24 paintings, "Iconostasis" and another "Atlantis" (2005-2006), were sold in their entirety by the Space Gallery in Cracow, which represented the artist in the years 2001-2010. She is the winner of the main equivalent prize in the competition II Artistic Confrontations "Sacrum in Art" in Wadowice (2002). Her early paintings were discussed in Renata Rogozinska's book "Icon in the Art of the 20th Century" (2009).
Finalist of the 3rd All-Polish Leon Wyczółkowski Painting Competition in Bydgoszcz (2018), the International Painting Biennale in Chisinau (2017), and the 25th Festival of Polish Contemporary Painting in Szczecin (2016). Participant of Art Fairs in Geneva, Madrid and Warsaw, among others. Author of nine solo exhibitions. Participant in several group exhibitions in Poland, Lebanon, Switzerland, Germany, Moldova and Spain.
Selected solo exhibitions:
Nostalgia - Epicentrum Gallery, Chełmek 2022
Northern Sky Weather Forecast - Mobo Art Gallery, Krakow 2021
Recycling of stories without a punch line - Zalubowski Gallery, within the framework of "Krakers", Krakow 2020
Partial Anhedonia - Pragaleria, Warsaw 2016
Selected group exhibitions:
Antigravity - BWA Gallery, Tarnów 2021
Eight Women - Conductor House Gallery, Częstochowa 2017
Art Now in Poland - Souk Arkwam, Bejrut 2011
Meta-Image - exhibition accompanying the 6th Philosophical Film Festival, Cracow 201