Porto Alegre, Brazil

“Breastfeeding”, 2022

Videoperformance, 1’

The video unfolds in two scenes, each centred on the act of breastfeeding. Yet instead of a child, the woman nurses two books: Contemporary Art: A Concise History by Michael Archer and The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich—the latter notoriously offering only a single mention of a woman artist. This substitution of infant for textbook becomes a pointed metaphor, transforming a gesture associated with care, nourishment, and transmission of knowledge across generations into a critique of the very narratives these books perpetuate.

By cradling and “feeding” these canonical texts, the work highlights how art history is itself sustained by selective storytelling—stories overwhelmingly authored by and centred on men. The performance exposes the uneven distribution of cultural nourishment: while certain artists and histories are continuously fed, others remain malnourished or erased altogether. The maternal body becomes a site of tension, both supporting and resisting the weight of tradition, suggesting that the labour of women has long been exploited to uphold institutions that marginalise them.