Camino hacia la maternidad

Camino hacia la maternidad is an artistic an expositive project, which works as an installation, whose general objective is to represent and make the emotional complexity that carries the way towards motherhood visible, focusing on those emotions that arise and are generated mainly during the reproductive process, which includes both, the pregnancy search stage and the gestation period. These emotional changes that many women experience and suffer from various areas, physical or biological, social and labour or economic, and that we go through since the beginning when we try to get pregnant, even more when we discover that there are biological difficulties and infertility comes into play, as during the months of pregnancy or later during pauperium, have been silenced for centuries, as almost everything relating to women’s bodies and lifes. However, thanks to the latest feminism awakening in recent decades, women of my generation and those of younger generations, learning from the experiences of previous generations, we have begun to break taboos and make visible the exclusion and the inequalities that we suffer, which, in large part, have been defended and argued by the patriarchy using as an excuse the reproductive capacity of women.

Therefore Camino hacia la maternidad aims to show, on the one hand, the difficulties and the social, as well as the individual, pressure to which many women may be subjected during their process of having a baby. And on the other hand, it wants to break with the secrecy around this pregnancy search and with the stigmas that especially infertility entails, normalizing the processes of assisted reproductive technology, as the same time that it intends to expose and evidence, at the same time, that the pregnancy period is not always a period of joy and serenity as it’s imposed by cultural stereotypes, but often this reproductive stage of women, even for theses pregnancies which develops without risks and within normality, is a situation of stress or anxiety, for all that it implies. Usually pregnancy is something completely new for women and consequently it’s a period full of doubts, fears, insecurities and difficulties also due to collateral problems of a physical, psychological or social nature. 

In addition, this project has a specific objective: to analyse the visual language role in the construction and representation of concepts like infertility and pregnancy, as well as it’s impact in the evocation and recovery of all the emotions which are lived and felt through the different stages and life paths of infertile women during the reproductive process of trying to get pregnant.

This project proposes, through the recreation of concrete individual and collective experiences, a reflection on infertility and the emotional experiences of women in relation to pregnancies, especially high-risk ones. An artistic project born from a personal and individual need but which takes shape, mainly in its beginnings, thanks to the cooperation of a women’s network and therefore it advocates the participation process itself as an added value.

The main purpose of Camino hacia la maternidad is not the aesthetic dimension but the generation of knowledge and the activation of encounters, relational processes and debates that propose to rethink the barriers between the internal and the external, the private and the public as wells as the individual and the collective spheres.