A Second Beating Heart

The birth of a child is also the birth of a mother. Her body carries a second beating heart. When that second heart suddenly beats outside the body, everything changes.

»A Second Beating Heart« tells the story of Martha, a newborn mother, using documentary and autofictional strategies. A few days after giving birth to her first child, Martha no longer leaves the house.

What begins insidiously becomes a new reality. For almost three years the house becomes a shelter, a prison and a cocoon at the same time.

What many people experienced these years as a compulsion or an external necessity, the isolation at home, becomes a vital strategy for Martha: Inner spaces become outer spaces and vice versa.

A long term project about the many sides of motherhood, and about postpartum depression, a topic that is too often kept silent.

»A Second Beating Heart« was created over a period of four years. From 2017 to 2021 Rabea Edel staged the individual scenes of Martha’s story, which she came across in her own family by chance. The terms Postpartum Depression (PPD) or Postpartum Anxiety (PPA) were not as established in the 1970s, when Martha became a mother, as they are today. Rather, one spoke of an Episode, Baby Blues or Moods. Shame, ignorance of the frequency of this disease and a severe lack of information and preventive measures before birth have contributed to stigmatization and continue to do so today.

Postpartum depression, like the experience of motherhood, is a topic that is avoided as an intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological perspective in the arts and social discourses. A good 15 % of mothers develop PPD and 4 % of fathers are also affected; the number of unreported cases is probably higher.

Through the restaging and the combination of documentary and auto-fictional means, the artist and her child became protagonists of Marta’s story, which became her own story and which is, in variants, the story of many mothers out there.