Māter means ‘mother’ in Latin, but its etymological roots can lead down some diverse and unexpected paths, arriving at references to motherlands, political suppression, mating, education, killing, and even the word tomato.

This multiplicity of meaning is what inspired Barcelona-based Alexia Medici to bring together a group of curators and artists to create an exhibition taking the word as its inspiration and starting point.

The six artists (two from Malta and four based in Barcelona) were asked to explore themes of motherhood, maternity and procreation, taking a wide viewpoint and drawing in ideas of autonomy, the shifting nature of scientific knowledge, and acts of resistance alongside religious authority.

The exhibition has been developed around two historical sites, each with its own connections to maternity as well as to archival practice; the National Archives of Malta, site of the former Santo Spirito Hospital in Rabat, which in past centuries housed a ruota or ‘foundling wheel’, and the Provincial Maternity and Foundling House of Barcelona (la Maternitat), home of the Historical Archive of the Barcelona Provincial Council.

Lick Me to Life (2024, video still) by Charlotte Nordgren Sewell.

The exhibition will first be shown at the National Archives, before travelling to Barcelona to be shown in May.

While the six artists’ practices vary in approach and media, they also share commonalities in their philosophies and research areas. The exhibition is characterised by multilayered perspectives, fostering a dialogue between the works and the historic sites which will host them. Some draw from archival material, others refer to more contemporary realities, while all question stereotypes around motherhood, maternity and procreation.

First and most visually playful (although not without its darker implications), Charlotte Nordgren Sewell’s work Lick Me to Life is inspired by the mother bear’s writing into the Mediaeval Bestiary as an overtly sexual being, who would give birth prematurely to formless lumps that would then need to be licked into their proper ‘bear’ shape by their mother. Her large mother bear, reminiscent of an overgrown child’s teddy, has hints of the nursery-gone-wrong; the teddy bear’s picnic that got lost in the woods.

Detail of spores and fungi which the artist Agustín Ortiz Herrera allows to grow during the exhibition as part of his installation.

Also defying categorisations of good versus evil, Agustín Ortiz Herrera makes reference to the proto-encyclopaedia of the Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi; in particular his Monstrorum Historia, an early encyclopaedia about rare biological phenomena, which unusually for the time includes studies of pregnant women and foetuses. The artist ‘hacks’ the pages by infesting them with on-site sporous fungi – a living being which – in its difficult-to-classify state – exudes a particular non-binary and reproductive power, and will grow and expand for the duration of the exhibition.

Similarly drawing from the natural world and reproductive systems, Vanesa Varela presents the domestication of plants such as cotton or beans that have proved vital to the human race; the plant-human relationship, which she describes as ‘entangled and knotted in a continuous creative act’. Her ‘greenhouse’ refers to this symbiotic domesticity and the processing of natural materials for human consumption.

Multilayered perspectives, fostering a dialogue between the works and the historic sites which will host them

Irene Pérez Gil’s work is simultaneously political and ancestral; her work draws strongly from care practices and herbal knowledge, in the past passed down through the matriarchal line; a knowledge that over centuries has been successively honoured, vilified, feared, and dismissed. Her work is quietly visceral, making reference to menstrual cycles and reproductive autonomy through this ancestral herbal knowledge and using natural materials.

A page from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s proto-encyclopaedia Monstrorum Historia, which is used by Agustín Ortiz Herrera to create his work.

Tackling reproductive autonomy more directly and taking inspiration from Mona Chollet’s In Defence of Witches: Why women are still on trial, Kristina Borg’s work Wombs on Strike is inspired by a series of conversations with eight women – four born and raised in Malta, and four in Spain, who – for many different reasons – have opted not to have children.

The women share the experience of being labelled dishonourable or heartless, and often denied agency, but Borg’s sound-piece shifts the feeling of shame into an act of resistance.         

Raphael Vella meanwhile explores themes of motherhood, politics and nationhood; his stop-motion film is unflinching in its journey from childbirth to war-fodder.  In this world, the mother’s role is simply one of production for the ‘motherland’ – a subversion of juxtaposing the underrepresentation of mothers in political life and the overrepresentation of mothers in political rhetoric.

L-Omm Ħares Mulej (Protect the Mother/land, Lord) (2024, detail) by Raphael Vella

Ultimately, Māter is a feminist review, calling on folkloristic strength, on the powers of reproduction, and the importance of self-determination. It does not say ‘all women should be mothers’, or ‘no women should be mothers’, but rather it attempts to expand the horizons of how motherhood, mothering and procreation may be understood along binary, non-binary, human, and non-human lines.

It defends mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, as well as those who actively choose another way to be. It reserves judgement for the societies that themselves marginalise other forms of knowledge and persecute those who choose their own path.

Māter will be presented at the National Archives of Malta (in Rabat) between March 9 and 30, and will evolve at the Historical Archive of the Barcelona Provincial Council (at the Provincial Maternity and Foundling House of Barcelona), between May 9 and June 10. Participating artists are Kristina Borg (Malta), Charlotte Nordgren Sewell (England-Sweden), Agustín Ortiz Herrera (Spain), Irene Pérez Gil (Spain), Vanesa Varela (Spain), and Raphael Vella (Malta), invited by co-curators Alexia Medici (Malta-Spain), Pilar Cruz (Spain) and Margerita Pulè (Malta). Māter is supported by Arts Council Malta, the Malta Tourism Authority and the Embassy of Spain in Malta.

For more information, please visit www.unfinishedartspace.org/projects/mater.