Born in Berlin and A Letter to Rosa are artistic projects carried out by Polish visual artist Joanna Rajkowska in Berlin in 2012. They were motivated by Rajkowska’s pregnancy and giving birth to her daughter Rosa and meant to address the trauma stemming from the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. During her pregnancy and labor, the artist created visual and narrative analogies between her experience and the topography and history of Berlin. She visited or intended to visit historically traumatic places, such as the Stasi prison, the Olympic Stadium where Leni Riefenstahl filmed Olympic divers in 1936 and a swamp at the edge of Teufelssee [Devil’s Lake], bordering with Teufelsberg [Devil’s Mountain] made from the rubble of the post-war Berlin. Rajkowska hoped that giving birth in Berlin, a gift that she offered to the city from which destruction had come, she would be able to achieve reconciliation and redemption. Born in Berlin and A Letter to Rosa generated much debate in academic and artistic circles, both in Germany and in Poland, and Rajkowska was accused of instrumentalizing her daughter in the name of art. To this day, the projects are among the most controversial pieces created in Poland that address war-related topics. At the same time, they are among the boldest and most unsettling artistic works that extrapolate from the intimate to the collective and use the maternal experience to artistically challenge the transgenerational transfer of trauma that still rates high numbers in Poland.

Although motherhood is a very common topic in art, the representation of birth is scarce. The omission corresponds to the opinions of many Western philosophies who are eager to “learn how to die” rather than address birth as a subject for philosophy. Birth is an uncanny topic that was propounded by feminist art in the 60ies in order to acknowledge maternal subjectivity and autonomy. Likewise, putting forward the experience of birth entails engagement with embodiment, materiality, and affect – the issues that for long have been ignored or downplayed, but in the last decades have attracted attention in humanities, social sciences, and art.

In my presentation, I would like to share a few works of contemporary art in Latvia that were created in recent years and address the question of birth. I will talk about works by artists Eva Vēvere, Elīna Brasliņa, and Vika Eksta. In these representations of birth, we can trace a spectrum of aesthetics that comprise documentation techniques and phenomenological accounts, embroidery, and found objects. Likewise, the notions of power and even sublimity of birth are entwined with feelings of despair, patience, disgust, and alienation. While thinking through these artworks, I will attend to their affective materialities and investigate their potential implications for body and gender politics in Latvia.

In 1967, Spanish writer and illustrator Núria Pompeia published her graphic album Maternasis, where she illustrated a woman’s experience of pregnancy in a new and critical way. In the book, she reflects on ambivalent feelings and emotions related to pregnancy and birth – none of which was a part of discourse surrounding women in Francoist regime, where motherhood was an idealized topic – although without using any words. About 50 years later, Norwegian illustrator Inga H Sætre and film director Yngvild Sve Flikke, pick up the same theme in their movie Ninjababy, where they let an imaginary animated doodle with a bandit mask represent a young woman’s ambivalent feelings towards her pregnancy. Despite different political contexts, time and space, that separate these two pieces of art, they both represent anxiety and doubt related to pregnancy and motherhood, and question more traditional positive perceptions of them. In our paper, we analyze these two representations of pregnancy, womanhood and (non-) motherhood from a critical feminist perspective, focusing on the differences and similarities across time and space, and the power of silence in their illustrations.