Lara Demori – Disobedient Bodies: The Representation of Pregnancy in Latin American Art (1970s-1980s)

Disobedient Bodies seeks to investigate the power ascribed to the iconography of the pregnant body as a site of the intersection of culture, history, politics, and religion within Latin America. It examines how images of pregnancy are deployed, praised, and politicised in a time – from the late 1970s – when the body becomes the focus of art practices inside and outside Latin America.

The key objective is to analyse the image of the maternal body in artworks made by Latina and Latin American women and the impact it suffered by the political and cultural shifts from the late 1970s. Such an image is, in turn, a reproductive, pregnant, form, an entity charged with multiple meanings; it is symptomatic of both policies of control of reproduction and aspects of bodily normativisation. This correspondence unveils coercive elements and the contemporaneous lack of reproductive rights at that time affecting the majority of developing countries in Latin America.

The title Disobedient Bodies is inspired by the groundbreaking exhibition “Disobedient Objects” (V&A, 2014), which presented objects that go beyond traditional art history and have contributed to social change alongside music, performance, and visual arts Ultimately, this project combines a decolonial perspective that transcends modernist categories of thought and a transnational methodology that puts the subject in dialogue with Western artworks, deliberately questioning and complicating the concept of identity of such objects. On the other hand, by combining the two perspectives, this study seeks to expand the boundaries of current analysis by situating the representation of maternal bodies in a larger network of narratives and diverse histories.

Lara Demori is Scientific Assistant and postdoctoral fellow in the department of Prof. Dr. Tristan Weddigen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, where she works on transatlantic encounters between Latin American and Italian artists between the 1960s and 1980s. She received her Ph.D. in Contemporary Art History from The University of Edinburgh in 2017. Her thesis, “Art Degree Zero: Piero Manzoni and Hélio Oiticica”, will be published by Routledge in 2024. From 2017–2018 she was Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellow at the Haus der Kunst Museum, before moving to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) where she was Marcello Rumma Fellow in Contemporary Italian Art and then Research Associate. At the PMA, she worked on curatorial and research projects related to contemporary art from the post-war period to the present, and in particular on the work of Giuseppe Penone, Teresita Fernandez, Andrea Fraser and Nam June Paik.