Filmed and edited by Izzy Pye
Wed, Mar 6, 4:22pm
from: Madeleine Vietmeier <madeleinevietmeier@gmail.com>
to: PINK Manchester <pinkmanchester@gmail.com>
The short of it:
Local artist Madeleine Vietmeier is hosting ‘Mother’: The Lesbian Bread Project, a workshop based documentary project interrogating the realities of lesbian/same-sex-attracted female motherhood through the medium of sourdough bread making. This project explores the genealogical parallels between nurturing sourdough and LGBTQIA+ parenthood. This initial 'taster' workshop at PINK gallery in Stockport 23rd and 24th of March 2024 is the preliminary to a larger workshop to happen later this year.
The long of it:
Sourdough bread making as a practice; it requires patience, trial, focus and presence. In making sourdough, you never use fast action yeast to speed up the process; you must start with a ‘Mother’. To make a ‘Mother’, you commit a period of time to feeding, monitoring, and nurturing flour and water until it is a stable living thing. In making this ‘Mother’, your fingertips shed into the mixture and she inevitably and irrevocably becomes ‘of you’. Every person that then shares in this ‘Mother’, adds themselves to this lineage. There is a genealogy in bread, a material reflection of ourselves and our environment. Sourdough bread demands commitment, and is always a choice. As a daughter in a maternal line of fierce women, I think about motherhood often. I think about motherhood and the things we carry, of them, as daughters. As a lesbian, I think about the realities of motherhood and its’ (in)accesibility. I think of how queer parenthood is rarely by accident; most often made through choice and commitment. In this way, I see the parallels between making a loaf of sourdough and choosing to become parents; the patience, concern, attention, monitoring, and hopefulness. When two women make a loaf of sourdough, they have created something that is indisputably ‘of’ both of them.
In political context, I consider the access to fertility treatments, sperm donors, and the grueling process of adoption that gay couples face when choosing to become parents. On top of that is the onslaught of homophobic opinion and disdain those parents continue to face before and after having their child.
‘Mother’ is a project that materializes as a sourdough workshop with lesbian parents and parents to be. Each single person or couple makes a sourdough loaf with me over the course of two days. In the natural interims of this process (most steps in bread making require 45 minutes–one hour of rest in between) there will be discussions on their experiences, their stories of becoming or trying to become parents, and exercises in loving care. I will have a team of two other artists–a photographer and videographer. All participants will be documented as they learn to make a loaf of sourdough and in discusson on their parenthood experiences. This workshop will culminate in a short film and photographic works of the process, and a show of these works.
If you are interested in participating, please email Madeleine Vietmeier at madeleinevietmeier@gmail.com with the subject line: 'Mother': The Lesbian Bread Project
Photo by Oliver Clarke.
Photo by Oliver Clarke.
Photo by Oliver Clarke.
Photo by Oliver Clarke.
Photo by Oliver Clarke.
Photo by Oliver Clarke.
