Oxytocin Festival
Oxytocin: Collective Care
Oxytocin is an interdisciplinary live event about mothers and carers that combines a bold programme of performances with discussion panels and workshops, bridging across midwifery/health services, arts and the lived experiences.
At its third edition, the event aims to create an art, health & community-driven programme to evaluate the effectiveness of Black and Brown, LGBTQIA, and disabled parents’ care, and the cultural sensitivity of primary care providers, administrators, and staff in maternity/health services.
Oxytocin Collective Care is a week-long festival taking place between Middlesex University and the Science Gallery London. It is conceived and curated by Dyana Gravina as part of the Procreate Project, a pioneering art organisation supporting the professional development of contemporary artists who are also (m)others working across disciplines.
The programme is supported by Arts Council England
Key dates:
Saturday 13 May at Middlesex University Campus: Sign up here
Tuesday 16 May at Science Gallery London: Sign up here
Thursday 18 May at Science Gallery London: Sign up here
Friday 19 May at Science Gallery London: Sign up here
Saturday 20 May at the Science Gallery London part of King’s College London Guy’s Campus. Saturday 20 May programme:
10.30 - 11.30 - Birth Cafe with Laura Godfrey Isaacs
12.00-13.30 - Inclusive Infant Feeding workshop with Anna Horn
1.15PM – 2.00PM - Lunch Break [please note this is not provided, the gallery cafe will be open]
2.00PM - Performance by Guadalupe Aldrete
2.45PM - Tea Break [please note this is not provided]
2.00PM - 4.30PM - Collective Care Workshop
4.30PM - Closing performance by Dagmara Bilon 'Homeless Garden', co-commissioned by The Place and Procreate Project.
Weekday workshops at Science Gallery London:
Tuesday 16 May, Gallery 1, 11.00AM - 1.00PM
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Meet in the Living Room and head up to the workshop.
As part of the Oxytocin Collective Care programme 13-20 May 2023, Procreate Project presents The
Free and Home Birthing Manifesto: creative writing on free birth facilitated by artist Poppy Jackson +
health/birth facilitator.
During this workshop we will utilise action, discussion and debate; writing, drawing and performance
in order to create a Manifesto to reclaim the act of giving birth at home. Freebirth is practiced without medical assistance, whereas in home births a medical professional is typically present.
Jackson will draw from her own personal experience of negotiating a home birth after receiving a call from her midwife stating that her right to home birth had been removed due to COVID-19 restrictions. The subsequent home birth of baby Wanda became the central part of Jackson’s Arts Council England project SUMMIT: The Politics of the Pregnant Body at our Current Time, through which the artist was able to regain autonomy and control over her own basic choices for her body and baby.
Poppy Jackson is a visual and performance artist exploring the female body as an autonomous zone. Book your ticket in advance here
Tickets are free but spaces are limited.
Book your ticket in advance.
Sign up here.
Thursday 18th May, Gallery 1: 10.30AM - 12.30PM
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As part of the Oxytocin Collective Care programme 13-20 May 2023, Procreate Project presents Zine
making on Vaginal/Home Birth After Caesarean and ‘high risk’ assessed pregnancies facilitated by
Sarah Le Quang Sang and health/birth facilitator.
In this workshop you will be supported in developing a zine exploring your views and lived experience of being categorised ‘high risk’ during your pregnancy. The artist Sarah Le Quang Sang (SLQS), together with an emotional facilitator, will create a safe and mindful space where individual zines are made and collectively shared. The techniques used will include writing, collage, drawing and mindfulness practices. Working in the tradition of DIY zine making by marginalised communities, you do not need any prior experience of zine making to join the session.
This workshop is facilitated by artist SLQS and inspired by her work ‘HBAC Performance Manifesto’
written from SLQS’s personal experience of being denied a home birth, having previously had a caesarean and performing a Home Birth After Caesarean (HBAC) assisted by independent midwives.
SLQS is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work questions the politics of space and who is excluded
from it. She invites her audience and participants to decolonise spatial orders from imperialism, sexist and racial structures.
Tickets are free but spaces are limited.
Book your ticket online in advance here.
Friday 19 May, 10.3AM - 12.30AM
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Meet in the Living Room and head up to the workshop.
As part of the Oxytocin Collective Care programme 13-20 May 2023, Procreate Project presents
Repair Work: from Sweet Nothings to Sweet Everything, disrupting the narrative to facilitate healing,
with Martha Joy Rose and Hannah Brockbank.
Creating healing practices, in a safe space, is essential to personal recovery and growth
post-pregnancy, especially for those whose outcomes have included trauma or illness. Using
creativity, spoken word exercises and conversation, participants will access ‘portals’ to healing using
disruption techniques.
This workshop encourages individuals to identify experiences, put word to page, and resolve voice
into action. Using sensory objects, tools from second-wave feminist consciousness-raising circles,
and autoethnographic memories, the goal is to begin the process of, not only recovery, but accessing
joy.
Martha Joy Rose is an award-winning artist and activist, and founder of the Museum of Motherhood
and the MOM Art Annex 501c3
Hannah Brockbank is a freelance writer, editor, and researcher from the UK
Tickets are free but spaces are limited.
Saturday 20 May Performance Programme:
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2:00PM
Some say that the way we are born, and what we experience immediately afterwards, has a great
influence on us; on our personality and even the way we give birth. This performance revisits the
violent birth of Guadalupe’s daughter and the trauma and disability she experienced as a result of it.
Combining visualisations with somatic and analytical approaches, the performance touches on
memory, consent, violation and ultimately re-emergence.
Guadalupe Aldrete is a Mexican artist currently based in Vienna and working across performance, photography, video, painting and installation.
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Science Gallery Courtyard, 4.30PM - 5.00PM
Performance installation exploring themes of migration, community, home and belonging.
Foregrounding intergenerational birth stories from diverse social, economic and cultural backgrounds, the work weaves in soil, plants, breath, and amplified live sound to create a piece of somatic poetry.
Dagmara Bilon is a performer and multimedia artist of German origin based in London.
This performance was co-commissioned by The Place and Procreate Project.
Workshops and Events:
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10.30AM – 11.30AM
Whilst some of us may birth, all of us are born. The aim of Birth Café is to foster and support conversations about birth in order to build understanding and respect for its psychosocial, cultural and bodily significance for everyone. Birth Café takes its lead from the Death Café movement, helping to provide a safe, non-judgmental space in which anyone and everyone is welcome to come and discuss their relationship to, and concept of birth.
Laura Godfrey-Isaacs is an artist, midwife, award-winning author and birth activist, combining her
artistic and healthcare practice, to bring fresh interdisciplinary perspectives to support reproductive justice, and evolve feminist readings of the body.
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12.00-13:30
This interactive workshop draws on the Black feminist tradition of storytelling to explore the
intersectionality of infant feeding, illuminating the systemic, cultural, and political drivers which shape how we choose to feed our babies. Connecting individual experience with cultures of infant feeding in the UK and USA, we will collectively re-imagine radical and life-affirming infant feeding support.
Participants are invited to take part in cultivating a safe space for collective learning and sharing as
we traverse the landscapes of infant feeding through racialised, gendered, differently abled, and
socially divided bodies.
Anna Horn is PhD student in anthropology at the Centre for Maternal and Child Health Research at City, University of London where her research investigates Black women’s experiences of group antenatal care in the UK.
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3.00PM - 4.30PM
This session is open to anyone who has attended any of the day’s workshops or performances. It is
an opportunity to gather ideas and responses generated during the day to inform a manifesto for
change. Thinking at both micro and macro scales, we will look into the future and consider what
tomorrow’s inclusive and collective care systems might look like.
This workshop will be facilitated by Dyana Gravina, founder and creative director of Procreate Project.
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Displayed within the Science Gallery London Living Room space will be a collection of posters from
the Procreate Project Archive, all of which are by contemporary artists who are mothers/parents. In
the context of the ongoing care crisis which fosters isolation amongst mothers and caregivers, and the invisibility of unpaid care work, this space is designed for mothers and primary caregivers to gather and re-occupy public spaces.