This talk – or rather, a thinking exercise – explores how imagery of pregnant bodies can serve as a maieutic tool to imagine new modes of being through a critique of identity politics. The current geopolitical shifts — involving the flows of territories and identities — challenge our notions of borders, territories, and their control. Drawing from Western contemporary visual praxis, this talk will discuss transitioning pregnant bodies and transitioning geopolitical borders using both Derrida’s and Ettinger’s concepts of hospitality and the matrixial borderspace.
First, we will see how Western discourses alienate and erase the pregnant body from philosophical thought (O’Brien, 1980). In doing so, they falsely universalize it as a barren land out of which no meaning can be born (Haraway, 2019).
Second, we will see how visual arts address this emptiness, examining contemporary artworks that reintroduce the pregnant body to culture. These images will reveal how the Western system’s incapacity to conceptualize and regulate the pregnant body reflects its shortcomings in thinking about borders and co-existence.
We will see that pregnancy, as a space of refusal and abortion, generates social and grassroots action. It subverts traditional thinking about lack, and prompts us to rethink borders as spaces of autonomy, rather than limits.
Finally, we will offer alternatives to the Western ideas of borders and control, reflecting upon the pregnant body’s potential as a thinking tool.
Agata Wieczorek (b. 1992, Poland) is a visual artist and a filmmaker based in Ireland. Her practice revolves between staged documentary and documented fiction. By exploring medical institutions and concealed intimate practices where simulation and artificiality are at play, she investigates dynamics of power, systemic violence as performative cultural praxis. Topics: family, reproduction, childhood, pregnant bodies' medicalization; serve as lenses to understand Western thinking patterns on identity, intimacy, relation between the body and the State. She holds an MA from the National Film School in Lodz and from the Strzeminski School of Fine Arts. She was an artist in residence at Le Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporains, HELLERAU European Arts Centre, and PARALLEL Photo Based Platform, amongst others. She is an awardee of the IRC-Irish Government Postgraduate Award (2023-27). She now works on her upcoming films as a PhD candidate at Dublin City University, where she leads research on medical, reproductive cultures, and reproductive rights. Her artistic and filmic work has been showcased and awarded internationally, in art institutions and film festivals.
