I am an art producer, curator, activist, an artist and a birth doula. I am a listener as much as an instigator. I thinks collectively and I bring people together. I have made of my beliefs an international movement for social change and womxn’s rights advocacy.
I am the founder and creative director of Procreate Project, a visionary and pioneering arts organisation supporting contemporary artists who are (m)others for the last eight years.
Procreate Project is a socio-cultural movement and non-for profit arts institution. It was born out of the personal inspiration of my pregnancy and the shocking reality of lack of support and representation that force womxn outside of the creative industries.
About:
Creative Directorship and New models
How do we expect the reinforcement of production of new work and therefore professional development if we don’t start thinking about infrastructure flexibly and with women’s experience in mind?
Only 3–5% of the artworks in major permanent collections in the U.S. and Europe are made by women artists; 28% of the artists represented by London’s major commercial galleries in 2018 were female...[From the Freelands Foundation report 2018]
If we were to look into how many of the works displayed in these shows were by mothers, the statistics would drop even more.
I look at the maternal experience as the main catalyst point for the decreasing presence of women in the creative industries scene. This is an invitation to analyse and design new models and platforms that suit the women’s experience.
Working towards equal opportunities and artistic development across sectors, I invite individuals and groups to embrace the risk necessary to achieve a sea change in the perception and normalisation of womxn’s artistic output as part of the cultural landscape.
See past and present projects See more performance works
Research, Performance and Images
Central to my thinking is the dismantlement and mobilization of old structures, imagery and languages, which oppress womxn’s sense of identity and freedom and casts them in tight roles and restricted ways of manifestation.
In her monumental work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich asserts that feminist mothering seeks to reclaim power for mothers; to imagine and implement a mode of mothering that mitigates the many ways that patriarchal motherhood, both discursively and materially, regulates and restrains mothers and their mothering. She posits that it is the institution of motherhood that feminists should challenge and change, and not the experience of mothering itself.
I am working to grasp the important distinction between the institution of motherhood and the experience, yet making the latter a worthy subject of art as any other represented in the cultural contexts.
Crucial to my research and multi-layered practices and personal form of activism, is the presence and absence of the children and how that plays and important component in the tailoring of women’s identity and ability of authentic expression.
Reimagining spaces where this choice is given to womxn and where the maternal is not restricted to specific looks and tasks, I challenge people and institutions to consider children as observers and participants.
Witnessing the unfolding of identities, the experimentation in the embodiment as well as rejection of roles in and out social casts, will allow new narratives to emerge and upcoming generations able to see womxn and the experience of ‘motherhood’ outside the social constructions.
© Dyana Gravina 2020 all rights reserved