Mother.Lab
Mother.Lab
Founded in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Mother.Lab is a Johannesburg, South Africa-based hub for mothers and caregivers. What started out as a creative research project, continues to grow into new iterations of moving physical and digital parts around the labour, experiences and everyday stories of mothers and caregivers. Mother.Lab is not a support group - it is a critical, creative space through which uses narrative to make room for the labour, words and feelings of those who do care work. Mother.Lab is a research project which seeks to explore mothers and caregivers' role in their homes, in their societies and as change makers. Mother.Lab considers care work as acts of service that need to also be considered through the lens of sustainability and wellness. More than this, Mother.Lab sees mothering and care work as critical work, contributing to affective, aesthetic and material discourses that intersect all our lives, everyday.
About Dee Marco
Dee Marco is a creative research scholar based in Johannesburg, South Africa.Dee’s research pivots around social and cultural practices and experiences of the everyday, particularly in relation to person-hood, mothering identities, Black feminisms, practices and communions of care and critical joy finding in an exhausting world. She is the founder of the multimodal research project, Mother.Lab and is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Wits University. Dee’s research is also broadly interested in visual culture, cinema and black women’s methods of narration and story telling. Dee is a research associate in The Centre for Race, Gender and Class at The University of Johannesburg.In addition to critical creative work, Dee hosts diversity workshops and conversations with caregivers and mothers. Dee is the co-editor of the book, Sasinda Futhi Siselapha: Black feminist approaches to cultural studies in South Africa's twenty-five years since 1994. Dee has contributed to various academic journals, newspapers and podcasts, including one she co-hosts, titled Mamas with Attitude.
Dee's work through Mother.Lab focuses on a series of critical public engagements over stretches of time. Some of the projects are: House of Complaints, Tiny Letters and a collaborative data visualisation project called, Tiny Letters for Mothers. Critical to the work is the collection of data about motherhood and mental health as well as the visual and aesthetic attention and experience brought into the work as a way of consistently marking the various and ongoing labours of mothering and/ or care.
Image courtesy of INCCA
Links to Mother.Lab
media/work
House of Complaints
Images: courtesy of INCCA, WIX and Jodie Pather
House of Complaints (2021 - )
Inspired by Complaint! (2021)
House of Complaints is a visual representation of mothering (caregiving) stories and narratives. Women are invited to a curated lounge space which emulates Dee's home. Depending on where the House of Complaints is set up, women from all walks of life may be in the space and are invited to meditate on any complaint they may perceive as a mothering complaint. To this end, complaints are invited by all caregivers, not only mothers and the emphasis is on the method of complaint (Ahmed, 2021). In the act of complaining, we are invited to pay attention to the very nature of the complaint (concern/ issue) and the complainant. The complaint is then put on a wall with other complaints, accompanied by a photograph if the person wishes to have their photograph taken. House of Complaints is a space to build a public series of the unsightly, the things we do not wish to see or hear or read about mothering and caregiving - it is intended to be a space in which these complaints live lives across borders, beyond single languages and through which all mothers and caregivers can find global resonances of recognition and solace. The intention of House of Complaints is that in its dual experience - both highly public and on the structural walls of a space and, at the same time, interior to each complainant - we do not place the complaints in a drawer and close it, hoping that patriarchal structures of law, colonial societies or governments, will solve any of these matters. No, House of Complaints simply lays it all bare. Each exhibition includes food as central to the presence of the mothers (caregivers) and tea, both as markers of the domestic and notions of communing.
 |
|---|
The First Forty Days Post-Partum: Tiny Letters (2023 - )
to myself... and others out there who feel like they are losing themselves to the milk.
The Tiny Letters project started in the post-partum period after the birth of Dee's third child. An unexpected labour and delivery led to post-partum complications - physical and emotional and these led to a need for the words to land somewhere. The intention was to document, however messily, the first 40 days post-partum as a ritual of gratitude for having arrived earth side. The blog started on a platform called Tiny Letters and so, the products became called tiny letters to the self and to mothers who Dee felt an urgency in communicating and communing with while in the throes of a very complex time.
When Dee reached the 40 day post-partum mark, a spiritually important time in many cultures, as a time to mark the rest of a mother and the gentle arrival in this world, for a baby, she felt more needed to be said and so, the blog continued into a series of reflections about mothering three small children in Johannesburg, South Africa. The blog continues and has started to live other lives, beyond what Dee, on her blocky blue couch with leaky boobs and a small baby and a laptop on her lap, could ever have imagined possible.
While the blog, now on the Substack platform continues, Dee hit multiple moments that were indescribable in words - these moments brought on colour and drawings of things for which there are no words, only feelings and affects.
Tiny Letters for Mothers: A data visualisation project (2024 - _
In collaboration with Lara Koseff
The data visualisation project, Tiny Letters for mothers, started because of a growing awareness of maternal mental health, particularly among post-partum women. When Dee started writing the substack called Tiny Letters 40+ days post-partum, she also realised the many, seemingly small complex moments within the early days of becoming a new mother - often there is unspoken trauma about the birth, loneliness, fear, physical pain and so many other elements that require care for the mother both physically and emotionally.
After months of discussing the various challenges around post-partum life and, in light of the deeply vulnerable and personal pieces of writing, the pair embarked on the journey of gathering post-partum data to create data stories for mothers or people who have birthed. The intention behind this project is to build a repository of narratives, memories, affects and experiences that centralise birth stories. Birth stories are the building blocks of recognition for new mothers., no matter how many children she or they has brought into the world. Please fill in the Google form to have your information captured and for your data to become part of our data visualisation project.
 |
|---|
Images by Bailey Jane, Naadira Patel and Dee Marco