Action for the first live edition of PEPA (Small Performance Art Event) after the pandemic.
This is a square, in the Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid, on Friday, May 7, 2021.
I decided freely and consciously not to have children and I do not regret it. I have learned that making decisions always implies winning and losing, and with this choice, I gained what many others women yearn for (freedom of movement, more time for myself, dedicating myself to my artistic work…). However, this does not mean that sometimes I ask myself what my life would have been like if I had decided to be a mother and what I have missed (feeling and expressing a love different from the know one, caring for, educating, and being responsible for another being, the changes in my body…)
Apart from the fact that I am too old to even try, a few months ago my uterus was removed, so that decision became irrefutable. I think I’m still grieving over this unlived experience; something that apparently I cannot miss because I do not know it, but that I think I would also have enjoyed and that perhaps deep down I once wished. In this journey through a real non-motherhood, I have no choice but to use my work to reflect on this feeling and this non-feeling and create from my belly empty of uterus…
The video documentation of this action will be shown in autumn at the S-MOM Festival at the Meno Parkas gallery in Kaunas, Lithuania, at the Grüntaler 9 space in Berlin and at the Valie EXPORT Cube in Vienna in 2022. This project is organized by the S-MOM platform that investigates different aspects of (non) motherhood.
Photos by Carlos Felices and Vera León.
