Reproducing difference and intimate othering
Draft artist statement
If reproduction can be a renewal in how life is produced, then what does reproducing difference look like?
How might pivoting from points of difference help us in reclaiming biopolitical autonomy through complex dynamics of division?
Can intimacy be a site for ‘innerstanding’ the Other in global shifts towards decolonial justice?
How do we receive the gift of neurodiversity without binding it to its difference?
Reproducing difference and intimate othering is an auto-theoretical creative practice that processes becoming mother of a differently-abled child in a mixed race family. It vibrates between the worlds of pregnancy, parenting Trisomy 21 and an Afro-Italian Jewish-Australian life partnership.
Amidst this matrix of relational difference, an intimate othering is emerging. A being-with difference that bares the bounds of difference itself. How might this emergent space offer practices that can assist collective movements of inclusion, cohesion and agency?
Over the final trimester of pregnancy and into the first year of her child’s life, anique will begin to bare her world of bearing with this. Through a collection of practices and processes through this field, perhaps some reproductive seeds might emerge that give others space to thrive.
anique vered, 7 July 2020