The Collective Body in MATERNAL FANTASIES as an Artistic Strategy of In_Visibility

This article looks critically at the value and desirability of ‘visibility’ in relation to art which revolves around motherhood and ‘artist mothers’ by focusing on the Berlin-based collective MATERNAL FANTASIES. I will not only situate MATERNAL FANTASIES’ collective art production as a posteriori critical-activist exercise in the context of artistic research, but I will also outline its self-reflexive, aesthetic, practice-based, and improvisatory methods for making meaning and recording knowledge. Specifically, I will look closely at two artworks by the collective to point out how their collective body becomes a method and a tool to make polyvocal, collective, lived experiences of motherhood visible at the expense of the individual body. In addition, I will use my entangled position as researcher and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES to investigate maternal in_visibilities and care work through collective art production together with its members. In doing so, I identify the concept of ‘autotheory’ as a central part of the collective’s artistic practice.