Reproduction

Excerpt from Antoniadou (2023) Performance Art and Feminism: Bodies of Care and Patience, May 2023, Proceedings of the Global Conference Women’s Studies, 1 (1): 74-84

“In 2015, Fotini Kalle in her performance Reproduction, presented during the Athens Biennale, addressed issues around reproduction and the production of subjectivity. In a video projection during the performance a child was building a wooden tower; meanwhile, the artist placed pieces of carbon on a table. She took her clothes off, covered her eyes with a piece of tile and started breaking the pieces of carbon with a hammer. While the child built, the artist destroyed. Kalle then used the dust from the carbon to cover her face and body. According to the artist, the juxtaposition of the two events, creation and destruction, underlined the contradiction between reproduction, a natural process that encompasses life, and social reproduction, which involves death: “the death of ideas, thinking and existence”.(…) What Kalle juxtaposes in this performance is the life-making condition of biological reproduction and the vital but also destructive condition of social reproduction and production of subjectivity.”