- Resilience, everyday life, sense, autonomy, tiredness, bravery, differentiation, stress, teaching, strength, body, decisions, dysfunction of social life, wrinkled hands, hands that caress, hands that educate, hands that protect. Do we have to give birth in pain? Loneliness, patience, abortion. We are not invisible. We are not invisible. We're not invisible." All this and much more is heard in the continuous audio of the exhibition room El Furnace de la Ciudadela de Pamplona.
What is motherhood for you? The answers are collected in the work Tribe of the Pamplona artist Irene Cabañas, in audio and in writing. Cabañas has collected testimonies from nine mothers between 32 and 85 years old who combine their artistic activity with the exhibition that can be visited until 16 May. The women who are mothers in their tribe (the family) are the protagonists of the project. Everyone has answered the question and together with each written answer, their hands are present in sculptures made in a realistic way.
Exposition of
tribes When: until May 16
Where: Oven of the Ciudadela de Pamplona
The exhibition room The Citadel Kiln is round, small, “like the uterus,” says Irene. The oven also makes sense then. The testimonies of nine mothers are chronologically arranged, hanging on the walls; from left to right from the oldest to the youngest. We started with the testimony of the youngest. I imagine that the visit is going to change radically if you're a mother, and you're going to understand a lot differently. Also by age.
Number of answers for the same question. As women in life, some have experienced motherhood as an obligation, others as something that has happened to them and others have felt close to repentance. At this time when the idealization of motherhood is present, more and more mothers are showing the hardest faces of the experience, more and more are said to be those that until now could not be said, the testimonies are increasingly transparent. All of this affects mothers, and even more so, perhaps, we are not.
I've seen a room full of beauty and thought it was going to be for everybody. A woman then enters the room, holding a small child by hand. Woman with Western physical traits, Oriental child. The two have come out after having taken a look at the room and say “uff no, I don’t…”. And I've also taken a couple of steps down from the idealization cloud. Not all ovens are for pastries.
All the testimonies have been interesting and the courage to acknowledge. I've had some tattooed phrases in my brain, one in capital letters. “They tell you that it compensates for motherhood…: lie.”