Iara Sales
Born: Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
Lives: Vale do Capão (Chapada Diamantina), Bahia, Brazil
I am not here! Am I? (2022)
Photography
42cm x 59.4cm
Iara Sales (PE/BA) is a mother, artist, dance and performance researcher and educator, cultural producer, project developer, and graphic designer. Since 2021, Sales has been investigating the relationship between art and motherhood, the economy of care, and questioning the narrative of "maternal guilt." Issues such as maternal loneliness and social embargoes on the maternal body have developed throughout the research process, raising the question: What, where, and how is a maternal body allowed to dance? The idea is also to encourage the public to reflect on what it means to be a woman, a mother-artist, made invisible and "cancelled" by the patriarchal capitalist system that demands an accelerated production routine incompatible with the postpartum period of motherhood, straining the labor relations of mother artists within the patriarchy.
I'm not here! Am I? responds to the daily routine of motherhood, amidst the chaos, amidst the loss of identity, am I still here? The performer looks directly at the spectator, as if seeking complicity and maintaining a direct dialogue. By breaking the fourth wall, the performer invites the observer to enter the “scene”, to be involved in some way in the situation that is happening there. It is a call for co-participation, to mother together. Sometimes a cry for help, sometimes just dialogue - a lullaby.