Care, Labor, Candies:

Lactoland could not have been realized without the help of many.

Becoming Many

Directed, Written, and Produced by Clara Alisch

Milkworker 1: A Friend

Milkworker 2: Clara Alisch

Milkworker 3: Eszter Forgács

With my work, I provide a showcase for a theme that has no place in the public sphere and yet affects everyone. When I write about a “situation,” I do so in the sense of Donna Haraway, who describes situated knowledge as patterns given back and forth, enabling a new shared narrative to arise (Haraway 1995: 73-97). To conclude with Haraway: the construction of the situation is about nothing less than a localizable, better representation of the world (ibid.: 90). The everyday view of the dichotomy between production and reproduction changes.

I offer viewers the possibility to link to their own forms of knowledge and experience and to chat about the production of human milk and its consumption. I am only able to do this because I make myself vulnerable by situating myself in my work. In my art, I work with day-to-day experiences that I gathered as a young mother* and that resemble those of countless others who share them. They concern the feeling of having to be solely responsible for nourishing one’s child, solely by means of one’s own milk.

Consuming the candy provides the common point of departure. The moment of experiencing, tasting, and trying encourages viewers to recall their own experiences and thus connect with others about them, as well as about knowledge on the topic of breastfeeding. The work is designed so that viewers comport themselves towards the topic shown, react to it, and exchange with others—situating themselves. Only then, by initiating a situation by means of the candy, does the situation develop its full potential.

By creating a candy, I realized that both nursing a baby and manufacturing a candy are handwork.  Lactoland postulates a scenario in which any person qualified to do so can pump milk and make it available to others. Producing, and particularly processing, human milk is recognized as work that creates value. The candy in this setting helps to situate oneself. Through my staging, I detach myself from the prevailing ideas, stirring up and superimposing on gender-specific norms.

There are already concepts of milk siblings and practices of communal breastfeeding: whoever has more provides for other children. It would be great if this kind of sharing could be appropriately rewarded as recognition of the hard work involved in milk production. I find it interesting to think about new exchange concepts, the exchange of human milk and its legally legitimised transfer. I think it is important to create publicity and visibility for milk as a resource. I find the model of Commoning by the political philosopher Silvia Frederici particularly exciting in this context.

The work of breastfeeding is a temporary thing that eventually wears off as the child grows up. Often there is a backlog of milk when the child is weaned. A breast that has been trained by the pump first has to be weaned again, and that is not possible without a pump. It is emptied in ever greater intervals until at some point there is no more milk. Yes, and the leftover milk that is then no longer fed to the child is sometimes donated to milk banks in hospitals if it meets certain requirements, or it is simply disposed of.

I pour the milk into a pot. 

After the boiling process, I pour the milk, which has turned into a shiny gold mass, onto the countertop. 

I knead and roll it out several times, finally portioning it out so that it becomes individual, creamy candies. 

The transformation of human milk into candies makes human milk a sharable commodity—a commodity whose manufacture, kneading, and rolling out is evocative of manual processes transforming work into an activity, thus disengaging it from the body of the mother.

It all came about because I first realised my own posture when pumping milk. With my eyes lowered, I sat down and leaned further and further forward so that as much milk as possible ran. According to the pictorial motifs from art history, the symbolism of milk and the mother are two of the oldest subjects, represented in the Christian context as Maria Lactans (nursing Mary). She is hardly visible as an individual and is always depicted with a child standing over her, so to speak.

Right now human milk is experiencing major hype, not only through the hashtag #pumpingmom but also through the research of the milk pumping industry. The milk pumping companies are very keen to emphasise the positive qualities of human milk and they fund the relevant research. My mother couldn’t breastfeed me either, which is why the experience of feeding my child was such a sensitive topic for me. The exchange with my mother made this even clearer to me. Milk — especially women’s milk — is the only bread for children at the very beginning of their lives.

I refer to the fact that mothers* merge into a machine at the interface with the pump, that is, they become cyborgs. When writing 'Milchmaschine', I often had the cover of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in mind: a woman sits at a computer keyboard and her breasts are a kind of an interface, a circuit board (motherboard), like an artificial nervous system. In this picture I imagined the breast pump.

Until the 18th century, the Middle High German term Vrouwenmilch/Frauenmilch (women’s milk) was common. That is, until it was displaced in the context of breastfeeding campaigns and hygiene writings such as the Nutrix Noverca by the so-called naturalist Carl von Linné. Frauenmilch was thus excluded from the market as an economic commodity and the word Muttermilch (mother’s milk) was invented. Muttermilch implies that only the biological mother is responsible for the nutrition of her own child, excluding the possibility of milk from others.

In September 2019 I gave birth to my son Nikita Yael and three months after the birth I wanted to work in my studio again. For me to be alone there for four hours in the afternoon, special preparation was needed, and I had to take all the pumping equipment with me. Because, for Nikita, pumped milk had to be ready in advance and I had to pump to relieve the pressure on my breasts. I also pumped milk during visits to the college and realised later that I hadn’t really produced anything else.

In my piece Lactoland (2022), I combine my professional experience of care work with my personal one of breastfeeding. Lactoland is a fictional company and the setting for a film. It performs the revaluation of human milk. In this company, it is that the labour of reproduction – that is, milk production – is paid for. It shows the process of pumping milk in spatial isolation with its characteristic sound and then the production of candy from the laboriously extracted milk. Every drop counts.

A person* sits on an ergonomic chair, wearing work clothes and looking out of the window. They administer a breast pump to their bare chest with a routine motion. The place is reminiscent of a production hall. Sun is shining through the windows. The noise from the pump fills the room. A tinge of yellow. It all starts with a drop. Another drop. Each drop counts. A milk producer at work.