Propio II

A project on motherhood

Having children, not having them, developing them, adopting them, having them at home, in the hospital, wanting or accepting them. These questions, which correspond to individual or couple life plans — at most — are in the collective domain. Especially when they happen in a woman's body, external opinions do not wait. Whether it is the state and its prohibitions on the autonomy of people with a uterus, parents who want grandchildren, friends or relatives who expect women who have a partner to become mothers. And for the women who do want to have them, the decision and the process are equally public: it is the lady who touches their bellies in the market, the advice of strangers on how to eat, where to go and how long to stay, the recommendations fatalists about the dangers of childbirth at home, or in the hospital; to increase or not to increase, and for how long. In recent years, thanks to feminism and as a denunciation of obstetric violence, more and more people with children have shared their stories of motherhood / fatherhood, and we increasingly claim the right to autonomy of our bodies. The sacred place, and therefore sometimes solitary and silenced of motherhood, is subverted daily with relevant information and life stories of people who breed and raise and want to be recognized as individuals not only in relation to their children and their social function.

In her photography project, Victoria Holguín explores these and other dimensions of the experience of people who breed and raise. His series are visual testimonies of the bodies with uterus, of their discomforts, of their affections, but mainly of plural and unique realities. In them, the photographer investigates the place of motherhood as fact, but also as desire, as imposition and as a symbol.

Pregnancy is a process that happens in a body. That body is a necessary condition for that function. Although today there is talk of an artificial uterus, which will help premature babies to finish their pregnancy, there is still no way to complete the process of a pregnancy without a human body with a uterus; and that body changes. In the series Own II, Victoria portrays mothers barely covered by their own skin. The photos show slightly uncomfortable women, - hardly one of them looks directly at the camera - but above all they show diverse and real bodies. Serving bodies have served as places of motherhood.

Many women claim that they disappear behind their children and in their role as mothers, and their self-esteem suffers, because there is a double imperative that forces them to channel all their energy into their children at the same time that they are bombarded with images of the industry. of the beauty in which models and celebrities lose the weight of pregnancy in record time. The covers show them beautiful, illuminated, skinny and without striations, carrying equally beautiful babies, as a sexualized update of the image of the Virgin Mary with the Child in her arms. The images of Propio II present them in a different way: accompanied by other collective women, without their children. Changed bodies that accompany each other and are beautiful, natural, their own.