Deipnophoroi

Deipnophoroi, a sequence of short two-channel videos, explores how mothers prepare their children for the unutterable, translating into contemporary language and anxieties an ancient Greek ritual, the Oschophoria, in which women (deipnophoroi, or “food-bringers”) re-enacted comforting their children with stories before sending them to the Minotaur and a certainly horrible fate.

Each video in this series represents a preparation: for death, enslavement, rape, being eaten by monsters. Each was created as a mini-collaboration between myself and another performing artist, dancer, choreographer or actor who is also a mother.

As such, the project—which is ongoing—begins to create a taxonomy of maternal language and strategies, well beyond normalized and toothless cliches of motherhood.

The first eight videos for Deipnophoroi were developed as an Artist-in-Residence project at the Grand Central Art Center with the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, where it was on exhibition from October 2017 to February 2018.