2025
This project investigates the hidden mechanisms of bodily control and power reproduction embedded within the mother-daughter relationship.
Drawing on Silvia Federici's research on the witch hunts, mothers occupy a dual position within historical power structures — both as agents of labor reproduction and as intermediaries of institutional discipline. As capitalism expanded, women's unpaid labor in the domestic sphere — housework, childcare, emotional sustenance — was gradually naturalized as an intrinsic feminine trait, concealing its true character as social exploitation. Women's reproductive bodies were institutionalized as a condition for capital accumulation, while their bodily autonomy was systematically stripped away.
Within this framework, the mother is transformed from a traditional transmitter of life into an enforcer of labor and ideological reproduction; the daughter becomes not merely a biological continuation, but an inheritor of the logic of social control. A mother's regulation of her daughter's body and behavior unconsciously transmits her own experience of dispossession — yet this discipline is not simply about control. It operates through an emotional logic of intertwined protection and fear: by imposing limits, she attempts to shield her daughter from the same oppression she once endured.
Through bodily imagery and narrative installation, the work surfaces the fractured intergenerational transmission of women's knowledge, exposes the social order forged in early capitalism through the demonization of women's bodies and reproductive power, and asks how motherhood， suspended between intimacy and violence — becomes a covert site for the reproduction of power.