Non-familiar Self-Portrait

What other imaginaries can emerge when we look at the mother with different eyes and allow her to look back at us?

 

The Non-familiar Self-Portrait Project has been developed in co-authorship with my mother, Adair Martiól, since 2021. Through it, we produce images that consolidate a practice which strains the boundaries between authorship, intimacy, care, and shared creation.

My mother dreamed of having a daughter to accompany her in old age. I fled. I did not want to devote my life to caring for an aging mother. However, the pandemic in 2020 forced me to return to the maternal home. Since then, we have been recognizing one another. Within the domestic space, we have created an infamiliar territory, where love also bites. Yes, I became the daughter who cares for the old mother—but not in the way I feared. Our coexistence is mediated by art, which repositions us in the world in an active and political way.

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We resist domestication. We neither abandon nor deny the domestic space; we transform it into a trench.