Reproducing Motherhood

Abstract

Reproducing at L’Automatica, Barcelona is a week of reading, discussions, writing and making in the Catalan capital about maternity, as a mode of creation, care, and continuance. A collaboration between two experimental, autonomous collectives interested in the composition of publics — the online journal continent. and the print shop and community publishing initiative L’Automatica — we invite discussions that nurture the problems and potentials of giving birth to all things published, authored, built, generated, designed, shaped, knocked together and knocked up. Do the presumed public making labours of writing, making images, publishing, printing and reproduction require us to “love our monsters” and “kill your darlings”? Do these impulses speak to those same impulses of care, attention and guardianship, that are present in the consuming and ambiguous hardship, patience, love, altruism, friendship, attention and responsibilities of motherhood? What response-ability do we assume or presume when we give birth to words, to ideas, and weave them into a material (mater, or mother) of, for example, a printed page.

Over five days of collaboration in May, we invite writers, artists, thinkers, mothers, fathers, sons and daughters interested in this questioning of motherhood, to share thoughts, voice, words, texts, images, sounds and actions —new and old— that will find their way into printed object, produced and reproduced on site with L’Automatica. Resonances between motherhood and creative labor, from the anecdotal to the analytic, the philosophical to the everyday, are all encouraged and more than welcomed. By the end of these Spring days in Barcelona we hope to create, together, a compendium of care, a handbook of hospitality or a card deck of custodianship, gifted to all those in attendance, and beyond. Is there anything you would like to “bring up”?