The maternal heart in space and time
**Par Lidy Mouw**

The mere recognition and physical awareness of my female self has been pivotal to my way of living and working, always being part of something else or bigger and simultaneously being able to initiate and inspire at a very individual level.

In arts men have been dominant also in my original field of art, in dance. But when it comes to dance development, women were prominent. Pioneers like Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham counting in Josephine Baker have emancipated the art of movement and have rediscovered its essence, its physicality. It was a man, Rudolf von Laban, who took all this inspiration to another level and its place in time and space in an important attempt to subdue this volatility into a notification system.
And although is stated by feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray in 1991 that it is the „concealed and perpetual matricide on which Western culture is founded by“, most persons I have been in direct contact with during the initiation and realization of dance projects were female. Indirect deciders, however, were mostly male.

Womanly communication in context to the other and the unknown to me is important, challenging and profitable.
Having been catapulted into the jungle of interdisciplinary postmodernism as a dance-student I have been rambling through and exploring many artistic disciplines, combining and rejecting the strict allocation of the male and female, the academic and non-academic the formal and informal, regretting the rebirth of artistic specialism.
In distinction the communal is imbedded. I respect all sides, levels and layers of genuine artistic creation.

The body in space and time has been subject of my interest and I’ve looked at it from the angle of a (female) dancer, choreographer, director, curator, project manager, conceptualist, mentor and teacher.
In collaborating with individuals of all ages, academically skilled or untrained, talented, engaged or indifferent, in creating for and with persons with all sorts of (develop) mental or physical abilities and limitations, in dealing with scientific institutions, non-profit organizations, public authorities and commercial companies my female subconsciousness collects and recollects, bonds and associates, zapping in and out of these micro and macro cosmoi. And so I create constructions, cultures in which initiatives can flourish and persons can develop best. Structures that are flexible and move along in close exchange with the dynamics of a project.

Transformation, curiosity and self exploration are also an immanent part of the artistic work of Elsa Tomkowiak. She mobilizes and communicates by creating structures that are flexible to the dynamics of the processes she is involved in.
Pioneer methodology: she arrives with a sole suitcase and with its content she fills out a whole natatorium.
Elsa Tomkowiak allows space and time to be main characters of her installations and constructional bodies. She turns space into context and materializes time.

Of subtle influence on any woman who creates must be the knowledge of her potential pregnant embodiment, the experience of her reproductive body and the maternal.

„Cells fuse, split and proliferate, volumes grow, tissues stretch, body fluids change rhythms, speeding up or slowing down“ describes feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva pregnancy in 1993.

A woman gives birth, becomes a maternal heart. She experiences how a part of her body autonomously grows, releases in partnership and transforms constantly without losing its identity. All her life she will be in transition, be a part and at the same time whole.

Elsa Tomkowiak exerts her energy in many ways. She is mother and mover, musician and composer, initiator, co-creator and communicator. Her work is transcendent and thus female.

At the same time Elsa’s work is rather virile. She features interaction and confrontation. Confrontation of colors, interaction of the transparent and the rigid, the organic and artificial collide.
In that sense her work also seems in line with more recent voices on feminism like Haraway who points out that:

“There is nothing about being female that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.” (Haraway 155)

Suggesting that already relations between science and technology are ‘rearranging’ categories of race, sex and class, Donna Haraway insists that feminism needs to take this into account.
An echo can already be found in the artistic work of women.

Lidy Mouw, Amsterdam, April 2012