We (Cayla Skillin-Brauchle and Danielle C. Wyckoff) have come together to birth Reproductive Media, a project that focuses on all things family, gender, sex, and reproduction. Iterations of Reproductive Media have included a Mobile Zine Library and performative actions and workshops in which we facilitate discussions on these themes. The Reproductive Media Zine Library’s collection includes dozens of contributors who have produced zines related to these topics, ranging from personal experiences to statistics and facts. Our curatorial vision for this library is inclusive: we encourage individuals to share diverse information, experiences, and interpretations. This collection is an ongoing and ever-growing library.
Part of Reproductive Media’s larger mission is to provide educational and advocacy materials and support. Current resources we have produced as free booklets include ways to advocate for family-friendly* workplaces, suggestions for creating more inclusive educational settings, and other tools to advocate for legislative change such as ones that would support families for medical leave. (*We recognize an inclusive definition of family and remember that people receive love and support from partners, elders, children, siblings, lovers, pets, friends, and more.)
Reproductive Media stems from our shared investment in discussion and because our individual artistic practices utilize conversation and crowdsourcing as a tactic to research and create projects. Wyckoff’s project, “Please Tell Me a Story About Love,” has traveled around the world asking folks to do just that. The project’s open-ended structure situates the artist as listener, hearing and recording stories about all forms of love. Skillin-Brauchle’s “Data Collection” performances seek to create local data sets by interviewing community members in public places. While disparate in their approaches, these projects act as non-judgemental agents, recorders of contemporary experience. Our projects focus on the ‘local,’ whether that be a site or a community, and both projects collect responses that fuel our individual artwork in other material forms.
We believe that critical discussions require space. Reproductive Media creates such a space, one that is a public yet private forum, to talk about all things family, sex, gender, and reproduction: the choice to parent or not; the experiences of non-binary lives; governmental policy that is restrictive and policy that is protective; the challenges and rewards of parenting; experiences of becoming a parent through adoption, foster care, birth, or other paths; LBGQTIA+ rights; infertility and the emotional, physical and financial implications; miscarriage and fetal loss; birth control; abortion; models of prenatal care and giving birth (medical model and midwifery model); reproductive rights; reproductive privilege based on identity and socio-economics; sex; babies; gender; consent.
I am fascinated by transformation processes.
I observe transforming spaces, economy, environment, cities, work, cells, bodies, knowledge, history, countries, roles, education, technology, relationships, selves, languages.
Becoming and being a mother is for me all about transformation. My first solo exhibition in the Zepter Gallery in Belgrade, Serbia was called Metamorphosis . The objects I made used banal everyday objects (plastic bags) and transformed them into an immense vagina or into umbilical cords falling from the ceiling. This story from 1999 was a intimate story of separating oneself from the primary family and a story about the everyday and the environment.
From 2006 to 2012 my partner and I went through a series of unsuccessful IVFs and several miscarriages. I did several sculptural works that documented this part of our lives - like the Womb exhibited in 2010 in Museum de Ceramica de l’Alcora, Spain. It was just about the pain, I guess.
In 2012, I was invited to make an urban intervention inside the Vesel Garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was three months pregnant with my son and did not know what to expect about the occurring pregnancy. So I did an urban intervention with a participative performance and called this work Embryo garden. It was all about the thin line between life and death of the child to be, but also of the artistic child within myself.
My experience as a parent has been both challenging and inspiring for me as an artist. I explored the relationship between the roles of artist and parent in my 2016 exhibition in the Glass Atrium of the City Hall of Ljubljana, called A Thank You Note To the Cleaning Lady. The work that lent its name to the exhibition questions the relation between reproductive, maintenance work and having greater purpose in life. As a whole, the exhibition was born as a product of broken antagonism between being a parent and an artist and of cooperation between the two roles. The installation To Include Everything, Everything, Everything, Absolutely, Absolutely, Everything especially focused on that. And the work The Map is about the child experiencing and learning by himself, and the artist-mother just observing and taking notes. In this process, I sometimes feel as if steeling from him.