Chloë Janssens ~ Alas, Your Mother
Chloë Janssens' "Alas, Your Mother" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 3, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Chloë Janssens' presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
Alas, Your Mother
Chloë Janssens' question: What are the legacies you choose to step into?
Chloë's introduction: Woke up and burned my roots. From not being sure. Scratched some filthy soil out of my mouth and abandoned my children. Spoiled brats they were. Ran for a while. Contemplated gender and love. Found a muse as my Mother. Assembled a family anew. Crushed my body on a cold stone. Attempted to choose Life instead. Returned and tried to speak. “Fucking Dicks.” The capacity of my body unknown but endless to me. Confidently preaching from the heartache, from the pain in my body. The miracles of my two mouths inspire me to sip and leak with rigor in your tasteless territory. BAM! I give birth in an endless scream birthing pomegranates on your ugly, tasteless carpet. I repeat the words my Mothers gave me and scream myself into your miserable life of numbness. Get out of your Death-drive. I dare you.
Bethany's report: The audience enters and is invited to sit on the stage, surrounding the performer. Under a pulsing red spotlight, and the chaotic lighting from a disco ball’s celebratory aura, the performer begins. The rhythm is discordant at first, a grinding beat that builds into a heavy drum, pulling everyone into its raw intensity.
The performers voice cuts through the soundscape, delivering spoken word poetry that feels like an invocation:
“ Grinding to a core that keeps and keeps escaping. Bouncing and crashing in and out of the grinder. In and out of each other and in and out of our Mothers”
The beat grows heavier, industrial, and the performer proclaims, "This life is exhausting. The world as I know it." Their voice oscillates between anger, prophecy, and rage. Laughing into the microphone, they chant, "Our mothers, Our mothers, Our Mothers” and begin to dance through the audience, their movements both playful, forceful and commanding. The performer engages with the audience, drawing them into the orbit of the song and the anthemic quality of the rhythm and words. The audience move with the performer. The grinding beat becomes the rhythm of a collective body, moving and dancing in an ecstatic purge of the toxic inheritances explored in the lyrics and words:
“ And if for a minute I’m granted the space of dreams. Here in this room that I hate, with all of us gasping for air. Like salmon on dry land.”
The performance grows in urgency as the performer shouts, "Listen, it’s exhausting. This life, it exhausts you." The tempo picks up, and the performer begins to headbang, members of the audience joining in, exploring movements as an exorcism of grief, anger, and joy. The stage transforms into a site of collective catharsis – anarchism explored through bodies at various scales.
"The taste of our bodies to serve a tame tongue attached to the hand that keeps pushing. Why continue this dread?
The beat becomes increasingly discordant, dismantling itself into a cacophony that reflects the chaos and destruction underpinning the world. The performer screams into the microphone, a sound of raw release, answered by the audience’s cheers and screams.
As the performance reaches its climax, the industrial noise shifts to a static hum, a dismantling of the world as we know it.
“Why not enter a state of crumbling?."
The performance ends as a communal exorcism, performatively invoking the grinding of it’s content through the rhythm, movements and affect. It is a spoken-word anarcho-feminist provocation to grind, and abolish, the oppressive structures that govern us – to access anger and agency, in order to reclaim that necessary energy to rebuild:
“Spiraling further, breaking down bits that need focus, crumbling bonds that are hurting. Grinding to a core that keeps and keeps escaping. Bouncing and crashing in and out of the grinder. In and out of each other and in and out of our Mothers”
Antonia Majaca: Antonia expressed her admiration for the performance, saying, "I thought this was so amazing. I think you’re brilliant, whatever you do." She highlighted the immense power of the work, remarking that she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen anything like it. She admitted to missing some of the lyrics but expressed a strong desire to have a longer conversation about them, as she wanted to delve deeper into the piece and its meanings.
She shared a related reference: a sculpture by Sanja Iveković called The Lady Rosa of Luxembourg. This work replaced Luxembourg’s iconic golden lady statue with a pregnant version, drawing attention to the presence of pregnant women in public spaces and how these spaces are often externally regulated. Iveković also inscribed derogatory words for women on the plinth of the sculpture, a provocative element that Antonia admired. "I love that piece," she said, finding a connection between its themes and the performance’s exploration of motherhood.
On the topic of motherhood and mothering, Antonia reflected on how intense and emotionally charged the day had been. She admitted, "I wasn’t ready for this level of self-exposure and exposure of vulnerability and this emotional content in this space, so I’m pretty overwhelmed by it." The performance, she said, confronted the audience with something "so much larger than we can have thought or that we should think."
She then asked profound questions: Who is allowed to be called mother? Who is allowed to become a mother? She reflected on the act of "mothering," exploring how we invite others to mother us, how we recognize our need to be mothered, and how we can express that need without being a burden on others.
Antonia concluded with admiration for the performance’s feminist themes, adding, "Me and you are going to have a long conversation about feminism because I just loved it." She closed with heartfelt praise, saying, "Just absolutely stunning. Thank you."
Ramon Amaro: Ramon began by expressing his admiration for the performance, saying, “I thought this was so amazing.” He shared how his own career journey began as an engineer but later transitioned to sociology, where he focused on studying rage. This path eventually brought him into a psychoanalytic space, which he described as “weird,” but also foundational in helping him understand emotional dynamics and relationships.
Reflecting on his earlier academic work, Ramon mentioned his first ethnographic study on Black punk communities in Chicago. This study shaped his thinking about Black thought and the intersections of rage, identity, and collision, ideas that have stayed with him over time. However, he noted a point where he began to deviate from traditional psychoanalytic frameworks, which he saw as being steeped in “mother-blaming.” He critiqued how psychoanalysis, particularly in its Freudian roots, often placed the emotional weight of the world on mothers, subtly holding them responsible for the problems of their children. This tendency, Ramon said, frustrated him and prompted him to seek out alternative perspectives.
One such perspective came from Donald Winnicott, a psychoanalyst writing in the 1960s, whom Ramon credited with shifting away from mother-blaming. Winnicott famously asserted that “there’s no such thing as a baby,” emphasizing that infants cannot be understood outside the relational space they share with their caregivers and environment. Ramon highlighted Winnicott’s idea that a baby does not know where it ends and the world begins, leading to an initial state of confusion. Over time, the child develops a sense of semi-independence, but along with that comes anxiety—the realization that everything could be lost.
Ramon found Winnicott’s work particularly impactful because it reframed the mother’s role as one of creating a space of care rather than assigning blame. Winnicott also suggested that therapeutic spaces could replicate the care traditionally provided by a mother if that relationship were disrupted. Ramon connected this idea to the performance, noting how it created a similar "pocket of care," holding space for the audience in its rawness and emotional intensity.
He expanded on this by referencing Simondon, who argued that emotions like rage, anxiety, and tears shouldn’t be suppressed but understood as signals or pathways. These emotions, Ramon explained, are like alarms—not necessarily indicative of danger but prompting investigation and engagement. He related this to the performance, which he described as working with rage and transforming it into something alive and vibrant. “You were actually working it, like knitting it into those knots we saw earlier, and then pushing it out as life,” he said. He noted how the audience responded differently—some relaxed, others sang—and how the performance held space for all of these reactions.
What struck Ramon most was the performer’s ability to use their own rage to heal the space. He found it “magnificent” that they could take something potentially painful and turn it into a gift of life and energy for others. He concluded by thanking the performer for such a jubilant and inspiring ending to the day, saying, “I feel energized again.”
Inti Guerrero: Inti began by sharing a series of associations and references that came to mind during the performance, inspired by its themes and emotional resonance. He reflected on the idea of stages of emotion, suggesting that it would be interesting to explore how these stages could be further articulated in the work. Drawing connections to historical and artistic figures, he mentioned a visionary dancer from the 1920s who approached performance in a radically unconventional way: instead of dancing, she spent three hours bathing in the room as the act itself. This performance art, Inti noted, was a profound exploration of psychoanalytic anger and performativity on stage.
He tied these reflections to, Sinéad O’Connor, describing her as a visionary whose resistance and artistry resonate deeply with the themes of the performance. Inti also referenced Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, a film about a circus act that delves into the complex and violent entanglements between a mother and son. In the story, the mother, whose arms were amputated in an accident, performs in the circus with her son standing behind her, re-enacting her lost limbs. Inti described this as “an incredible exorcist intention of understanding how we are this entanglement and violently wanting to break free from the figure of the mother.” He praised the film for its powerful iconography and its ability to articulate such complex emotions and relationships.
Finally, Inti spoke about another artwork featuring a neon sign that reads “Mothers,” written in the plural. This piece, he explained, is installed in a gallery space where the rotating sign creates a constant presence. The audience must navigate the space, kneeling and moving to avoid the neon light duet o being installed much lower that a normal sign would, all the while being acutely aware of its presence. Inti connected this work to the performance’s themes, noting how the multiplicity of “mothers” and the physical act of making space for their presence resonated with the ideas explored on stage.
About Chloë Janssens