Embodied Encounters: Decolonizing Motherhood/ M(other)ing Exhibition w/Boundless Bound Symposium & Art Book Fair

Boundless Bound Publishing in
Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art
James Madison University, Virginia
2025

As Zazu’s mother (Zazu is my 14-year-old son—we shared an unassisted homebirth on my 40^th birthday), I practice embodied interdependency through what I call apocalyptic parenting. Apocalyptic parenting refers to the conscious act of revealing hidden infrastructures that maintain entangled systemic oppression and ecological devastation. It is a “radical” (from the Latin, meaning “root”) parenting practice because it challenges the roots of normalized institutions. Apocalyptic parenting is an antidote to petroleum parenting—what I identify as the decisions parents often make that overwhelmingly contribute to both environmental destruction and body-phobic institutional practices. Petroleum parenting reifies the status-quo and our myopic capacity to engage beyond our shame-based, accumulationist individualism. In contrast, apocalyptic parenting can be an art and science of collaboration.

My project for “M(other)ing,” integral to my forthcoming book, Radical Art in Action: Unlearning What We Think We Know (Vernon Press, 2026), is part of my community-based interactive workshops/ pedagogical-parenting performances—autoethnographic eco-justice projection-installations. In the context of intimacy and climate chaos, I explore the “illusion of movement produced by stillness” (Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture). Zazu’s name comes from the Hebrew word Movement.

The audio for Video #1:
1. My son, Zazu’s in utero heartbeat, 2011
2. Audio and visual excerpts from Darian Stansbury’s film, The History of Women. The images include one of my gestation self-portraits, our placenta birth, umbilical cord cutting, and Zazu breastfeeding, 2014.
3. Daisy Saragoussi reading a proverb from my family’s lineage in Ladino: Lo ke se aprendre en la kuna, sien anios dura (What you learn in the cradle lasts a hundred years.) and my voice translating the proverb
4. Now 14-year-old, Zazu’s voice reading an excerpt from his essay written at age 12, “A Foot in Both Worlds”—Zazu’s struggle as he straddles “the modern convenience world” versus “the barefoot world,” 2023/2025.

The images for Video #1:
1. A self-portrait video days before Zazu was born—an unassisted homebirth on my 40^th birthday, also Zazu’s due date, 2011.
2. Audio and visual excerpts from Darian Stansbury’s film, The History of Women. The images include one of my gestation self-portraits, our placenta birth, umbilical cord cutting, and Zazu breastfeeding, 2014.
3. Zazu’s drawings that correspond with his story, “A Foot in Both Worlds.”
4. Images of our climate justice, eco-art converted school bus tiny home.
5. Stills-as-video that Zazu photographed of me in a variety of environments (including our permaculture apple orchard (playing with the cliché/saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”) interspersed with family shots and images from Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate-justice book (2024 edition Foreword by Vandana Shiva, endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Paul Hawken, Eve Ensler, Bill McKibben, Thom Hartmann, Shock G Humpty Hump, Karen Barad, and many other scholars, activists, and artists).
6. Zazu’s feet that he photographed at the end of our apple orchard photo shoot.

The audio for Video #2:
Silence interrupted by Zazu’s both/and reflection: “I would change my choices if that was the tipping point, but it’s not so I won’t. Then again, thinking like that is why we are in this situation in the first place,” 2025.

The images for Video #2:
1. Multiple Self-Portrait Gestation Series, 2011.
2. Zazu as a suckling, pooping newborn, then gesturing baby.
3. The connective tissue weaving Zazu in utero in multiple environments and Zazu assisting my self-portrait Boneyard EcoTourism of the Anthropocene series.
4. In my Boneyard EcoTourism of the Anthropocene series shot at Jekyll Island, Skeleton Beach, Georgia, 2025, I am dancing the Trickster. My images move beyond the “I,” revealing ritualistic Butoh-like provocations. I frenetically tease the tourists—ranging to about four million per year—all with their smartphones taking selfies among the “live oak” trees, the marine forest deadwood that has been ravaged by the continual hurricanes. At the same time, I seek audiences who are receptive to satirical cultural critique. Framing my m(other)ing story in the form of performance-based satire allows entry into otherwise potentially overwhelming, confrontational topics; and, as with strategic uses of humor and parable, my subject can be received with greater openness and less fear or resistance. By entering one’s consciousness through the mediated vehicle of somatic and visual storytelling, I hope to surprise my audience—evoking the possibility of reconsidering consequences of one’s habitual daily choices. As a response to systemic oppression inherent throughout ethnic cleansing, institutionalized misogyny, and climate crisis, this cinematic series brought to life through Zazu’s participation suggests an interspecies tapestry as a strategy to ignite social justice dialogue, ecological consciousness, and collective action—and most of all, what it means to mother (as a verb) in the 21^st century.