In 2024, while pregnant with her second child, Anneleen was invited by the Flemish cultural magazine Etcetera to write an essay on motherhood. She chose to focus on the relationship between her artistic practice and the practice of mothering. This resulted in the text Moeder-/kunstenaarschap.
It marked the beginning of a longer-term research project in which Anneleen spoke with 25 choreographers who are also mothers about the various ways motherhood shapes and transforms their artistic work.
These voices will come together in the publication Mother/Maker - Valuing Experiences of Motherhood in Artistic Practice in 2027.
You can find a link to the essay for Etcetera below:
Credits
Text Anneleen Keppens
A taste of our creative process
A Life's Work - Rachel Cusk
"Parenthood is redemptive, transformative, creative. It is the means by which the self’s limits are broken open and entrance found to a greater landscape."
Little Labours - Rivka Galchen
"In late August a baby was born, or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment..."
The Baby on the Fire Escape - Julie Phillips
"The term "maternal ambivalence" doesn’t evoke the full flavor, though Sianne Ngai’s term “stuplimity,” for what is both sublime and stupefying, might come close."
The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik
"The sense of magical possibility that is so vivid in children is also at the root of much that is real and important about our lives."
Of Woman Born - Adrienne Rich
“The void is the creatrix, the matrix”
Alle moeders werken al - Anja Meulenbelt
De Mythe van het Kerngezin - Lotte Houwink Ten Cate
Mother Reader - Moyra Davey
"To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can be, but it does not always follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim." (Ursula Le Guin)
Rage Becomes Her - Soraya Chemaly
"No one wants to acknowledge that taking care of the people we love sometimes makes us angry."
Milkyways - Camille Henrot
"Mothers do not have to reinforce old systems; they can rather inspire new models of care, resistance, and innovation."
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
"How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?"