Cross-border Motherhood is an experimental photographic project, of an unprecedented nature, in which I investigate motherhood, upbringing and care, from a feminist, decolonial and situated perspective, taking as a starting point my own experience as an artist mother and migrant woman from Chile, living in the Valencian Community. The project seeks to portray various migrant mothers and/or caregivers from the global south who live in Spain, through the use of experimental photographic techniques, which, as a ritual, will be activated with significant organic objects for each person portrayed. Proposing from the identity aspect to make visible their experiences to install multiple reflections through photographic language about the complexities, resistance and reception in migratory processes, as well as the contradictions in north-south relations, and the symbolic asymmetries that this entails to move from the intimate to the social body. For this, it will seek to generate a safe photographic space with each portrayed, a place where parenting experiences are addressed, reinforced through a series of motivating questions, invitation to work with objects of personal memory, to later reveal with organic materials with which each caregiver identify your experiences as if a spell were performed, through the photographic technique called “filmsoup”.

Fundamental to this proposal is the concept of “motherhood” coined by the feminist theorist Adrienne Rich, who conceives motherhood as the ability to raise and care, beyond the biological, understanding it as an emancipatory activity, which implies holding, nurturing and caressing.

The Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana GVA has collaborated in the development of this project with its Resident Culture program, as well as funding from Fondart of the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage.

Spurensicherung in “Cross-border Motherhood” by Gabriela Rivera Lucero

Learn from the stone. Presentation of the Barda del Desierto Museum (North Patagonia)