¡MADRES! Madre por un día
Monica P. Mayer. ¡MADRES! Madre por un día, 1987.
Description:
In 1983 Maris Bustamante and I formed "Polvo de Gallina Negra," the first feminist art group in Mexico. Our name is a remedy against the evil eye, which we felt we needed being women, women artists, and even worse, feminist artists.
One of our first projects was ¡MADRES!, a long term social intervention on motherhood. The first thing we did was to get pregnant, with the help of our husbands who were artists and understood well our artistic endeavour. Obviously, we had daughters and they were born three months apart.
We enjoyed motherhood so much, that as part of the project, we decided to name 10 important men in our community Mother for a Day, because we felt they were being discriminated.
One of them was Guillermo Ochoa, a very famous anchorman. We did a performance in his program, which was seen all over Latin America, in which we disguised him as a pregnant woman and talked about motherhood and the female archetype.
In the photograph you can see Maris on the left and I am holding a doll I took with me dressed as the very evil mother in a soap opera airing at the time, in order to say that little girls should also practice being bad mothers. We are both wearing the lovely aprons with tummies the anchorman also wore.
Medium:
Performance
Tags:
Maris Bustamante, Polvo de Gallina Negra, madres, Mexico, motherhood
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