LETTER [MOTHER]

The woman who gets pregnant and who has not given birth is a mother.

The woman who lost her offspring(s) during pregnancy is a mother.

The woman who rejects her offspring(s) is a mother.

The woman who abdicates herself and her dreams to be with her child(ren) is a mother.

A woman who works a lot and sees little of her offspring is a mother.

A woman who attacks her offspring(s) is a mother.

The woman who loves her child(ren) above all and all people is a mother.

The woman who cries for her cub(s) is still a mother.

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And yes, first she is a woman.

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Once a woman mother, always a woman mother, whether for those whose offspring(s)

[they were not born]

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Not every woman wants or can be a mother, however, once a mother, for the

for good or not, this radical and devastating condition transforms all women who

have gone through this rebirth experience. In it, society expects the woman we are to wither away so that, sacramentally, we can only incarnate the mother.

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That there is no possibility of carnal desires and material achievements, so

characteristic of westernized capitalist societies, as dreams to be achieved.

There are those who crave this place. There are those that have other perspectives that involve

their lives as women and mothers. This conformation is a deformation in that it does not contemplate all of us at all, however, it is imposed on us without negotiation. This woman mother, achiever, transformative, creator who intends to be in the world sharing and contributing with her power that goes beyond the limits of motherhood, is seen with bad eyes today...

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In our Christianized society, they see that to be a woman mother is to conform to the pink and baby blue form of motherhood.

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That sideways look for women mothers who still want to smile and live beyond

of their condition as mothers, is reiterated by the Brazilian population every time a

a woman mother is a victim of the many types of violence that permeate the experience of motherhood. If the naturalized violence that is already practiced against cisgender and transgender women were not enough, added to them and in another aspect are the countless violence against women mothers, from all the categories of mothers mentioned in the text.

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To be a woman mother is to be in a constant state of judice for any reason, including,

by those who concern the right to continue to be a woman and to have projects.

When women mothers are murdered because they express that in addition to being mothers

want to live their lives, we see the hypocrisies of the same people who fight

for the right to life when it comes to the right to the body of the woman who does not want to be

mom.

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Why don't these same people take a stand in the face of femicide that

pathologically become chronic in Brazil?

Why haven't we struggled and mourned with and for women mothers who lose their

daughter women, for the sister women who lose their sister women, for the

women daughters who lose their women mothers?

Why our struggle and our tears have been crossed by a selective morality that, when it is convenient, triggers Christianity and cries out for the right to life of the fetus in the womb of the woman who will become a mother?

Why have we allowed the woman mother who is the metonym of mother earth to be so brutally violated?

Because the colonial process and its savagery that choked us as a supreme form of civility, brutish our souls and desecrated dissonant worldviews. If the land has already been invaded and violated while providing us with land consecrated and mythologized in many non-Western cultures, why wouldn't the woman mother who also supplies humanity be?

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In our collective illness on the earth uterus, we add cement, asphalt, many types of pavement and forgetting that under our feet, on the floors of cut stones extracted from the bowels of the earth, there is a generation of life. In our collective illness of women mothers, we add so many interdictions, deprivations, burdens and responsibilities that we also forget that there is a life to be lived there and that this life by itself, whether this woman is a mother or not wanting to or being able to be, also has water with their existence other ones lives that are affection to them.

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We need to go back to being people living in a society with bare feet, which allows for intimacy with the earth, with feeling, with other forms of pulsating. Pulsar that is related to the throbbing wombs that generate life, creations, hopes. Walking without shoes in the outdoor area of ​​the Alfredo Volpi Cultural Workshop. Walking [without fear] through the streets of cities. Walking side by side with other women, women mothers who feel different from each other and who share, strangely, the same kind of fear about being a woman. And that shouldn't be naturalized.

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"Maternagem" by Bárbara Milano is an exhibition that could be presented anywhere in Brazil. To enjoy the exhibition and the problematizing and regenerating poetics presented in her works is to fertilize in the mind other ways of dealing with the pains of motherhood, acceptance, frustration, mourning, struggle, reliving. May this fertilization generate other sensitive and fair ways of dealing with crimes against women, against women mothers, all daughters of the land that is also the calf and that welcomes us later, after we are just matter, mother earth covers us and receives us from return.

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And in the heart of the woman who gave birth to you? Have you already found out what goes on in that

heart of a woman mother who gave birth to you?

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Our sincere hope that this reading will be consented to by your being.

Renata Felinto.

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