Fontana Di Trevi
Video work/drawings
Fontana di Trevi is two sides of the same coin: On the head side you see a female breast in a close up, which spouts milk. There is no mouth of a baby being nourished by this milk. The motherly milk is wasted, and this is a statement about the perception of maternal nourishment in our times, which according to the present economical structures is not necessary and is a waste of money and time. Which values rule our society? Do I have to stop breastfeeding my child in order to follow the accepted norms of the contemporary economical world, where the combination of career and motherhood is seen as problematic? I say this with the thought in the background that breast feeding working mothers hardly get enough comfort to breast feed in offices in comfortable conditions; that their bodily capacity implicates an inclusion to the private field and an exclusion to the public working market. Am I as a mother really free to give value to the functions of my body?
In the video work my body part is exposed to the viewer and does not have its own voice. Voices from a news broadcast about the stock market and the economical break-down are heard and superposed.
When you flip the coin over and look at it from the other side, the milk suggests the existence of a depending baby. As a viewer you will remark a time friction between the visual part in slow motion and the voice over in real time. This opens up a time window in which the new physical rhythm as a mother, bearing milk for a human being at the beginning of his life, relates to my self-perception and happiness/astonishment of being a source of nourishment at the same time. I don’t feel the acceptance of these new limits as a burden, I have instead a feeling of strength and happiness, in contrast to the frenetic rhythm of today’s economy.
I do not want to give answers, I rather want to ask questions about the ambiguity which I find myself in.
Fontana di Trevi is a Fontaine in Rome, where a legend says you have to throw a coin into the Fontaine to make a wish and ask for good luck.