GMU:Patterns/Xenia Günther

MILK

ARTISTIC RESEARCH IN MOTHERHOOD // PREGNANCY, BIRTHING & PARENTING

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My project is called "MILK" and it explores the concept of alienation through the experience of motherhood.

For my Masters I’m interested in divers form of the topic Alien & alienation, based on my biography, scientific backgrounds and artistic researches.

One part of this biographical alienation-feeling happened to me during pregnancy, birth, and especially in the postnatal phase of feeding and pumping milk. I have experienced conditions where the body becomes both deeply intimate and radically foreign at the same time.

In that sense, I connect my work to ideas from xenology, the study of the foreign or the alien. But instead of looking at outer space or external others, I’m turning this perspective inward. The “alien” is not outta space, it emerges within the body itself.

At the same time, the project is grounded in feminist theory, especially in relation to embodiment and care work. It builds on the idea that knowledge is not only produced intellectually, but through lived, bodily experience.

Even though every human being is born from a body, and most have been fed in some way, these processes are still largely absent from art, public discourse, and even institutional archives.

So my project starts from a simple but urgent question

Why is something so universal so invisible?

To approach this, I also look at the politics of images and visibility.

Who is allowed to show their body? Who is allowed to speak about it? And whose experiences are systematically excluded?

Within patriarchal structures, the maternal body is often either idealized, controlled, or hidden and rarely shown in its actual reality. The last years i have seen more works and science about menstruation and disseas, but sspecially processes like lactation, exhaustion, repetition, and care are not considered worthy of representation.

My projects operates within the field of Artistic Research, combining personal experience with theoretical, historical, and scientific perspectives. I’m also interested in connecting to scientific research, for example through potential collaborations with the Universitätsklinikum Jena, where work on breast milk and neonatal care is already happening.

The core artistic format of the project is a performance.

The performance is based on the rhythm of milk pumping. Every two hours, I enter a defined space and put on a custom-made textile piece inspired by a pumping bra. The costume includes tentacle-like extensions with integrated headphones.

I then sit down for 15 minutes, which reflects a typical pumping cycle. I don’t perform in an expressive or theatrical way. I simply remain in that condition of waiting, existing, passing time.

Visitors can approach and listen through the tentacles to the sound of a pumping machine. What is usually private and hidden becomes a shared sensory experience. And also the topic of people connecting to a birth-giving body is there. If i want or not, if i am birth-giving i am availabe for comments, contact and critique if i asked or not.

In this moment, the body is not represented visually, but translated through time, sound, and presence.

The work engages with embodiment as a duration and as something that has to be endured.

At the same time, the situation is open and unpredictable. I don’t control how people react. Interaction, discomfort, intimacy, or distance all become part of the work.

The space itself can shift between an intimate, almost domestic environment and a more analytical, research-based setting, including visual and scientific material about milk and the body.

This project also reflects a feminist stance. It resists the extraction and display of the body as a resource, and instead reclaims it as something relational and situated.

Overall, the project aims to make visible what is structurally hidden. It brings together xenological thinking, feminist theory, and embodied knowledge to challenge dominant image politics and to open up space for experiences that are usually excluded from representation.

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SOURCES: // i have researched by now and will continue diving deeper

- Embodied knowledge of myself + Selfexperiences while being pregnant, birthing and nursing

- Xenology as science of the "other"/"othering"

- (Feminist) Theory: Donna Haraway, Judith Buttler, Julia Kristeva, Bracha L. Ettinger, Foucault

- Artist Referenzes: Marina Abramovic, Adriana Knouf, Patricia Piccini, Marni Kotak, Keirra O'reilly, ORLAN, VALIE EXPORT, Lisa Glauer, Irini Athanassakis