THOSE WHO DON´T CRY DO NOT GET BREASTFEED

This work was born from an intimate conversation among friends, many of whom have been shaped by the experience of migration and by having their families far away. We began sharing memories, desires, and questions about motherhood, care, and the body. For some reason, after that encounter, I started thinking about how I could pay homage to the gesture of breastfeeding a child, perhaps question it, and at the same time imagine the possibility that any body could nourish a baby, and that this action could be shared rather than belonging exclusively to the mother.

The work brings together nipples from diverse bodies—men’s and women’s—placed side by side, without hierarchies or distinctions. It proposes imagining a way of life in which any body could feed and soothe a baby. It invites us to think that a child might find comfort and a special bond in more than one chest; that mother and father, or whoever occupies these roles, could also share this primary act of care.

Those who don´t cry do not get breastfeed is composed of antique brooches intervened with transferred images of nipples. I am interested in working with these objects because they evoke the intimate histories of those who once wore them. I wonder who wore each brooch, which body inhabited it, what stories it passed through. I imagine that many of them once adorned women’s clothing and that, perhaps, they were inherited and passed down from generation to generation, resting again and again on different bodies.

The nipple is a part of the body that we all share, yet its meaning and social function have been constructed differently depending on gender and historical period. With this work, I propose a crossing between intimacy and memory, between what the body is and what culture has said it should be.

“This work is dedicated to my mother and father, who taught me to become the person I am today.”— Carola Etche