Sentir la propia sombra: Adriana Ciudad

 "Sentir la propia sombra" (Feeling One's  Shadow) is an ongoing project by  Peruvian-German artist Adriana Ciudad, which brings together watercolors, paintings, and poems with the aim of shedding light on the constellation of ambivalent emotions that women and other gestating identities experience during motherhood and the processes that constitute it: pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and child-rearing. Inspired by the Guarani people's concept of wisdom, which, unlike modern rationality, embraces integrating the darker and unconscious aspects of personality, the series title is an invitation to delve shamelessly into these often repressed and guilt-inducing feelings. 

 

In Western or Westernized societies, motherhood is perceived as a private experience; however, it is a matter of profound public interest and historically regulated to favor the patriarchal and capitalist interests of the nation-state. Indeed, successive waves of feminism have not been sufficient to liberate women's reproductive power, which remains hostage to male domination today. This situation is manifested in the control that men exercise over crucial aspects such as contraception, abortion, and even the legal framework governing child-rearing and custody. In this context of extreme surveillance, the mother-child relationship has paradoxically been condemned to ostracism and reduced to a purely biological and spontaneous phenomenon. The lack of recognition of maternal care as work and exclusion from the symbolic order is precisely based on this romanticized and essentialist narrative. 

 

Adding to an extensive genealogy of women creators who understand the personal as political, in "Sentir la propia sombra," Adriana Ciudad challenges the idealized representations of motherhood and makes visible that sustaining a life is neither an innate nor inherently satisfying task. Her works transport us to a twilight universe where female reproductive strength merges with nature to manifest in all its power. Thus, mountains transmute into fiery wombs or mighty breasts that eject milk and form rivers, while trees contain portals that are also vaginas and serve as a refuge for mothers and their babies. In this mythical space, women are of the same essence as the cosmos; they tend the fire, perform ceremonies in honor of the moon, sail rivers on pink dolphins, shed their skin like snakes, or rest after giving birth, waiting to be healed by Mother Earth. From the density of a present inheriting the female sexual castration of Judeo-Christian roots, Ciudad's works present themselves as scenes of resistance, where the sensual vitality of the natural environment paves the way for the emancipation of the reproductive forces of the mother subject.