By Katherine Adams
Care and motherhood are subjects that often conjure a sense of softness and safety, but in Zeelie
Brown’s Queer Mother’s Space, care also directly counters intense experiences of violence and
exploitation. Brown’s installations reflect a deep investment in restoration and recovery. They
imagine generous and materially layered forms of circulation for life-giving provisions, as well
as evincing a serious grounding in the invocatory and radical power of making. Through
installations and public works, Brown’s artistic practice extends here into infrastructural forms
that model new possibilities of refuge and care, drawing on sonic practice, ecological elements
such as plants and the actual nourishment of food, and spiritual sites of witness and ancestral
connection. Brown’s reflections on work, rest, queerness, and maternity take shape as invitations
to the viewer to step out of their ordinary patterns of toil. The artist attends to the viewer’s
nourishment and refuge, reminding us of the need for self-recovery in the face of the various
dispersions of our energy into mechanized forms of work. Brown has made the food and
preserves in the exhibition and its public events partly from the ingredients grown in her own
garden. The dishes evoke the motherly comfort of a familiar meal. In addition to its provisions of
food, Queer Mother’s Space intentionally provides space to welcome mothers, caregivers and
their children, with possibilities for play and rest foreseen and already carved out within the
exhibition. Other dynamics are also at play within the space—the shrine room makes appeals to
mother Yoruba gods. The self-theft/sand room creates space that acknowledges both the eye and
the body—it offers an immersion that is not merely optical, but which carefully regards the
physical presence of the viewer’s whole person. Throughout the exhibition, Brown proposes
deep forms of care and ritual as radical social structures.
In Queer Mother’s Space, mothering care is realized as a form of light and movable
infrastructure, a mobile assemblage that can step out to meet us where we least expect it—in the
midst of an ongoing pandemic, in the midst of a gallery space in a dense urban setting. There are
certain strains of inquiry in play here that, in the abstract, might seem contradictory—a subtext
of critical reflections on capitalist terms of work, along with a robust interest in the motherly
labor of maintenance, protection and restoration. Yet Brown conditions new compositions of
labor that are not transcribable into the strict score of ‘the market.’ Brown’s artistic practice
probes the core of self-sustenance in both its material and soul-giving terms. In his Discourse on
Colonialism, Aime Cesaire has written about the economic bases of societies prior to their
colonization: “I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted—harmonious and
viable economies adapted to the indigenous population…They were societies that were not only
ante-capitalism, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist. 1 ” Brown’s installations in Queer
Mother’s Space create environments through which social forces for and against ‘work’ (that, to
us, often seem opposed) mingle together in new ways. On second thought, these ways are not
really ‘new’, as Cesaire reminds us. Nor is their model of mutualism with the earth, and within
community, a model of exchange that slides easily back into a capitalist frame.
In Queer Mother’s Space, material and maternal reflections on distribution, circulation, and
economies of care, combine with spiritual and religious influences. In the theft/sand room you
can hear music made for the exhibition. Brown, who is also a cellist, continues inquiries into the
sonic alongside her reflections on paradigms of economic distribution. It is worth taking a
moment to reflect on the conjunction of these two interests. These investigations into the sonic
and the economic, seemingly disparate, can suggest mutual opposition due to the
incommensurable qualities of their materials—on the one hand, sound’s suggestive, potentially
uncontrollable resonances and on the other, economy’s highly structured, networked and
transaction-based form of sociality. The shelters created in Brown’s installations—like other
previous works that she has called “soulscapes”—are often acoustically full, or otherwise invoke
‘vibration’ in a looser sense, as a condition of spiritual contact across time. Brown’s work might
be seen, in part, as an investigation into what happens when we consider markets from a starting
point of sonic emanation—where transactions are not taking place at specific ‘points’ but rather
unfold through an environmental field. Guided by a sonified logic, Brown brings us into an
atmosphere of care, in which creation and maintenance is not exacted through a binary give and
take, but resonates out across myriad planes of space and life. Brown’s sonic environments are
immersive but non-spectacular. In them you can listen to others and to yourself. This is one
possible starting point for imagining queer motherhood. Brown’s interest in alternate economic
forms is also reflected in the artistic techniques she relies on—for instance, her interest in prints
and reproductions are partly driven by a desire for an art form that can be made easily and
serially. Like the other forms of care enacted in the exhibition—which combine lightness and
ease with deep and loving modes of labor—the print makes itself known as a seemingly
ephemeral copy but is inseparable from a laboriously made lithographic base, and all the exertion
required to enact images’ repetition.
Queer Mother’s Space turns the gallery into a place of nourishment, of hospitality, of refuge and
of ritual. It bears provisions that you can take with you. What does it mean to reimagine care
through the lens of this queer mother’s space, where it mingles with reflections on work and
economy, and where lovingly grown food offers itself up to the viewer, perhaps giving much
more than the visitor was expecting? Contemporary art gives us many models of social practice
or ‘participatory’ work, many of which also invite the viewer to eat or rest. Shifting the terms of
these models, Brown recovers the work in such relationality, the laborious relations sometimes
held at bay from figures of ‘interaction’ almost as much as working relations are obscured from
our generic paradigms of mothering. The weight of economic pressure is lightened for us by
Brown’s work—yet it remains suspended in the exhibition as a subject available for
contemplation, letting us ask: What distinguishes the merely uncompensated work or labor from
the gift? Recent art history has already proposed some models for the latter—the relational, the
participatory, social engagement. Relational aesthetics, perhaps the most fraught of these, can
feel self-reflexive, as though its generosity were merely a mechanism to construct an artwork’s
own public. A formally ‘relational’ work may seem to embed an element of surprise, seeking to
surprise its viewers through overturned expectations that alter the normal conditions of visibility
and change the artwork’s own terms of legitimation. The ‘relationally aesthetic’ assumes that we
do not expect (perhaps do not deserve?) the seeming generosity we are confronted with—a bowl
of soup, for instance. It asks us to be slightly disoriented, to be uncertain at first not only whether
this is art but whether we can come up to touch, eat, be with it. In its more formalized versions,
the relational’s trademark offering operates as a redrawing of the terms of the work’s own
publicness. It pulls the viewer into a new experiential artistic regime, as participant. The viewer
of Brown’s work, by contrast, is not a participant but a recipient. The food offered is not
exchanged for the price of artistic closure, but is given without expectation of reciprocation. Its
nourishment is not a condition of the artistic viability of the work or of the viewers’ mutual
recognition of it. Brown’s care is offered freely, not as a way to enlist the viewer in the
completion or realization of the piece. The artist creates a deep level of hospitality that
understands being nourished as the very condition of existence within the shared space of the
exhibition.
Another prominent, though subtle, element in Queer Mother’s Space is the evocation of water.
Throughout the exhibition, water meets us by turns as a borderland and as a hymn, offering up
access to the diaspora of objects, affects, feelings we have been suppressing or have lost through
time. This liquid zone is another extension of Queer Mother’s Space’s offerings of refuge. Water
shows up in literal ways through elements of the installations, and in symbolic ways through the
functional role of deities to whom Brown has dedicated the Shrine. In addition to her interests in
the sonic and in the lush potential of gift-oriented making, Brown’s work also engages
contemporary virtuality and the status of images that it underwrites. The virtual—including its
most ordinary mode of image-consumption-as-sociality—is often coded in terms of ‘flows,’
which offer a model for the ease of access to the virtual’s contents. In virtuality’s wake, one
might well think that anything can be found—or at least viewed. Whether viewing is in fact
finding is a question Brown puts into play.
Viewing—or looking—is often marked out as a representationally-driven practice (as opposed to
non-representational listening, which often symbolizes the resonance in sound). In Queer
Mother’s Space, Brown shows us how looking can become sonified. The artist turns the gaze
into a way of being ensconced, being encompassed, and of looking without fixing ourselves or
others. This sonified withholding and witnessing is a modality that queerness asks for—its off-
genres, its rich disjunctions between identity and body demand flexible, open, imaginative
looking in order ethically meet the other with an eye that welcomes, an eye that does not
anticipate or ask for expectations to be answered. Viewing is also a racializing modality. As
Achille Mbembe has written in Critique of Black Reason: “To a large extent, race is an iconic
currency. It appears at the edge of a commerce—of the gaze. It is a currency whose function is to
convert what one sees (or what one chooses not to see) into a specie or symbol at the heart of a
generalized economy of signs and images that one exchanges, circulates… 2 ” Queering race,
pulling race out of what Mbembe calls its strict ‘iconic currency’ requires pulling the racial away
from its underpinnings in that “generalized economy of signs.” Moreover, the intersection of
race and gender has always modified the latter through the estranging lens of the former—the
black female body is often recoded as masculine, or de-gendered entirely. Black Queer Mother’s
Space initiates the viewer’s experience through the vantage point of the maternal, while at the
same time diverting the usual tracks of gendered anticipation that society exerts on black and
other bodies.
At stake in the problem of virtuality and its interface with the broader environment is the
question of immersion. The art historical canon has supplied us with plenty of modernist,
‘environment’ type of immersive situations, in which the ordinary world is de-substantiated and
replaced with an elsewhere. Brown’s Queer Mother’s Space intensifies our experience of this
world—because it reverses processes of dispersal, centering the viewer through its offerings of
refuge and “self-theft.” It does not aim to fix the meaning of wayward symbols but rather to
delimit the circle of their wandering, so they become accessible and available to us. While the
signal-receiver model of communication privileges distance and the differentiation of a
message’s start and endpoints, Brown’s model of connection forms a sensorium, an environ that
is porous with those experiencing it, able to be used by them. Queer Mother’s Space creates
immersion as a site of nourishment rather than of otherworldliness.
Blackness structures the constellation of works throughout Queer Mother’s Space. It is present in
this new exhibition not only as a difference in subjectivity, but as a shared condition of economy.
It hovers throughout Queer Mother’s Space as a negative paradigm of the exploited self, of the
exteriorization of the body into things it is not—fungible, commodified. One cannot think
through the implications of ‘self-theft’ or self-recovery without passing through terrains that
have been continually inhabited by the black body. Blackness has often been marked as non-
geographic, placeless, infinitely diasporic—in addition to and as a byproduct of being thingified
as a product, or dehumanized as boundless labor. Self-theft opens the possibility of pulling
oneself back from this. In Queer Mother’s Space, self-theft moves the body away from economic
enclosure into its space of refuge. It prepares and welcomes you for a new kind of
movement—not one of being dragged or coaxed but of moving in a lively collective body that
builds and mends together. Fantasies of black maternity plague American culture—in which
black motherhood and even black authority is recast, in the culture of white supremacy, as an
alienating domestic obligation, reduced to caring primarily for others while being simultaneously
estranged from one’s own family and from one’s own self-nourishment. These limited
possibilities of care are opened up and surpassed in Queer Mother’s. Brown’s queer process of
care is not an intervention within a world pre-determined as a nuclear family unit, but rather is
self-sustaining, operating on its own and yet far more collective terms. Moreover when you
receive food in this exhibition’s space, it is not from within a colonized model, but from an
ecology that sustains itself. In this vein, Brown is not trying to imagine resources created from
thin air where they were not, but to reverse terms of engagement—it lets you experience
receiving from someone who was perhaps not expected to give nor to be present for you. In the
language of schizoanalysis, which has relentlessly challenged and rethought the configuration of
the nuclear family, Queer Mother’s Space allows for the familial and maternal to deterritorialize
itself beyond the family—on its own terms rather than in strict fealty to a form or a class that
isn’t one’s own. The care within the exhibition runs full circle, but never in one
dimensions—always towards a space without limit.
Another theme within Queer Mother’s Space’s offerings of care is ritual, devotion, and
ceremony. The exhibition’s Shrine is partly influenced by Santería aesthetics. Within this vast
ritual tradition, the creation of ritual objects not only “honors” but also “calls into presence” afro-
Atlantic spiritual traditions. 3 The Shrine calls in the Black ancestral sacred, while the room of
self-theft allows one to take oneself away, suggesting that these gestures are not discrete but that
in furtively taking oneself back from self-estrangement, one is making a gift at the altar of a
divine figure. How do you call yourself, identify yourself? With an image? No, rather, through a
theft of self. Through an invocation. The Shrine brings us into potential connection with
ancestors, as well as in touch with an Afro-diasporic religious tradition in which creation and the
continual creation of beauty is an important votive practice. Contemporary thinkers such as
Quentin Meillassoux have spoken about ancestrality in relation to the deep time of the Earth.
They ask, how can we make meaningful statements about events that refer back to our own,
human perception? That transpired before we were around to witness them 4 ? The reality of black
America is that certain truths about our experience, which still very much exist, are now present
within a language that is lost to us. Black America deals with history as an artifact and a fossil
that is present in material truth but whose interpretation is ambiguous. Cultures, names,
languages have erased across colonial time, leaving behind sentences that lost their terms of
expression, although their history remains. Brown’s model of self-theft proposes a model of
recovery that allows us to look into these indeterminate histories. While the Black experience is
often shot through with rifts, erasures, losses, forced substitutions, Brown presents sites of care
that enables self-recollection within and beyond. Her ceremonial undertones model a practice of
refuge.
Care can also be a way of allowing for restful disappearance, for covering and withholding
oneself from external viewers. The Santería aesthetic charts a manner of making that combines
both an object and its container—allowing for a sacred withholding of objects from view. When
Brown makes a case for the importance of the offering on a social as well as spiritual level, her
ways of offering also deflect the degrading fungibility of blackness and suspend restricting flows
of images. Silvia Federici’s account of the women’s movement connected with her “wages for
housework” campaign as described in her book Revolution at Point Zero, is interesting to
consider in connection with Brown’s use of spiritual ritual to disrupt the way bodies get drawn
into flows of capital. For Federici, bringing domestic work into a transactional framework was a
way of disrupting domestic labor’s naturalization in the context of capitalist relations. Federici
recounts how the program of asking for a wage for housework was not a way of entering capital
relations but rather of “break[ing] capital’s plan for women. 5 ” In the same way, ‘exiting’ the
sanctified art space by constructing a sanctuary to replace it with is not a way to impose the
space of the home on the gallery, but rather to change the terms of its institutional enclosure. As
Brown has stressed, Queer Mother’s Space models the exhibition space as a place of
nourishment, provision, and hospitality. We can also look at Federici’s work from a queer
standpoint. She notes “the attributes of femininity are in effect work functions. 6 ” Caring is work,
mothering is work, mothering can be queer. The emphasis on ‘care’ introduced during the
pandemic, and which rippled through so many contemporary art spaces as the paradigm of the
moment from which to create a newly viable practice, leaves us with the problem of how we can
continue this paradigm. What radical stance can care combine with that can counter the
continuing pressures of our ceaseless work? Care and sanctuary continue to create revolutionary
spaces for rest, as well as new models for collective infrastructure, generous labor, and recovery
of self.
Queer Mother’s Space models new infrastructures through a radical understanding of the gift and
with generously open explorations of mothering’s social reproduction. The viewer can furtively
withdraw, recover, rest, and imagine futurity from a new standpoint in which social
frameworks—as Lauren Berlant has written of infrastructures 7 --are fluid, affective and mobile
mechanisms. Brown imagines the labors of care not as purely mechanized nor as necessarily
restrictive, but as potential forms of refuge and restoration. Leaving the exhibition, one can take
one of the jars or cans that Brown has filled with food and preserves. These containers are also,
in a way, possible artifacts of a future self, models of miniature “self-thefts” existing in the fluid
borderland between necessity and possibility. Fundamentally, Queer Mother’s Space’s
reflections on care are also reflections on survival. The two are inextricable and moreover, as
Brown shows and continues to develop, they are important components of critical practice. In
thieving oneself out of circulation, one may chart new forms of caring movement within the
world.
NOTES—
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp.43-44
2 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p.110
3 David H. Brown, “Toward an Ethnoaesthetics of Santería Ritual Arts: Altar-Making and Gift Exchange,” in Arturo
Lindsay, Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, p.80
4 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008)
5 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (PM Press, 2020), p. 43
6 Ibid. p 28
7 Lauren Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” in Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space (vol. 34, no.3 2016)