I won't be an egg which you crack

“You are not going to defeat me,” I say
“I won’t be an egg which you would crack
in a hurry for the world,
a footbridge that you would take on the way to your life.
I will defend myself.”

—Anna Świrszczyńska, “Talking to My Body,” as quoted by Iman Mersal, [On Motherhood and violence], Makhzin.

Mothers make the world. 
In their scream, loud and silent, they sustain what is often framed as the foundation of humanity: birth. The ultimate act of creation, it is equally one of vital destruction; intimate, irreversible and world-altering. Birth tears the body open to let the world in, yet the cracks of this fracture extend far beyond this foundational moment. The mother keeps carrying long after birth. Like land, the birthing body is a site where power is imposed, resisted and remembered: the ideologies that press themselves into flesh, the dispossession that inscribes itself into land and lineage, the grief held quietly so that life can continue. The mother is the custodian from which this project unfolds; the embodied evidence through which broader, systemic struggles become legible.

In Yorùbá culture, women choose to be called mother without necessarily birthing, as the role is considered the truest practice of leadership, an impetus to building and holding community. Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí names this matripotency—the material and spiritual authority that flows from the act of bringing forth and sustaining life. To reckon with birth is to reckon with everything, and if we want to transform the world, we must begin by transforming how we hold the people who bring it into being.

"Cristine Takuá, a Maxacali midwife, told us that among the Yanomami—another Indigenous community in Brazil—all women are midwives, walking to the river to give birth alone; we simply need to relearn how to listen to the body, to allow our rebirth together with the child (co-nnaître son enfant). To care for the utmost moment of creation is to care for society itself—confronting the violence around pregnancy, labour and postpartum, and its links to state and police violence, while holding space for all who mother: non-gendered, trans, solo by choice, non-mothers too. This project treats the body as evidence, in dialogue between the Arab world I come from and Indigenous and quilombola knowledges in Brazil. It is TAP's continued commitment to public space, participatory commissions, and cross-disciplinary alliances."

— Amanda Abi Khalil (TAP founder & Curator) 

Building on TAP’s ongoing research on breath, the program echoes the four-count deep inhale of active labour by unfolding over four weekends in September, through an exhibition, film screenings, workshops, interventions in public space across multiple venues and institutions in Rio de Janeiro, and will be accompanied by a publication. 

I won’t be an egg which you crack: On birth, body, and the evidence it carries is an interdisciplinary program curated by TAP under the artistic direction of Amanda Abi Khalil in partnership with Instituto Comadre, as part of Evidence, an international festival by the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) at Bard, in association with the Fisher Center LAB. 

Locations
Casa Comadre, Capacete, Cinemateca do MAM, Museum of Modern Art Rio, Solar dos Abacaxis, various billboards across the city.

Artists and participants
Adriana Varejão, Amanda Devulsky, Ana Mendieta, Ana Paula Oliveira, Anna Costa e Silva, Ashkan Cheheltan, Bruna Silva, Casa das Mulheres Maré, Celeida Tostes, Claudia Casarino, Colectivo Textileras MSSA, Darks Miranda, Dora Selva, Escola Viva Baniwa, Fernanda do Vale Santos, Flávia Palladino, Franziska Pierwoss, Jacklline Oliveira, Jarbas Lopes, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Júlio Araújo Junior, Laura Lima, Lidia Lisboa, Mães de Manguinhos, Maiara Oliveira, Marcela Cardoso, Maria Antônia, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Maiara Oliveira, Mariana Pimentel, Mona Hatoum, Mônica Ventura, Patrícia Mothé Glioche Béze, Rami Nihawi, Redes da Maré, Tamar Ettun, Thaís Desana, Tracey Emin, and Yann Le Masson.

Curatorial interlocutors
Maìra Marques and Gabriela Davies (Instituto Comadre), Marilanda Lima (midwife), Danielle Makhoul (associate curator).