We are All Each Other’s Mothers
A performace during the 61st Bienalle di Venezia – In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh
At a time when billionaires buy mega-yachts and send women into space in the name of progress, women on Earth are still dying in childbirth from preventable causes such as hemorrhage and lack of basic care. The contrast between performative luxury and the reality of global poverty is impossible to ignore. In this context, the pregnant body becomes both memorial and warning: a living threshold between mourning and action.
The work enters the space of In Minor Keys as a quiet procession of grief. The black pregnant figure does not shout; she waits, and asks to be seen. By carrying the work outside the institution and into the public pathways of Venice, the performance insists that the questions raised by the Biennale do not remain contained within galleries or national pavilions. They spill into the street, into the body, and into the shared civic space where art encounters life.
The work listens to the lower frequencies of human life: birth, vulnerability, interdependence, grief, and repair. In dialogue with Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial invitation to slow down, breathe, and attend to wounded worlds, We Are All Each Other’s Mothers asks what it would mean to use our tools, wealth, and imagination not for spectacle or extraction, but for care.
Technology is present not as a futuristic promise, but as a practical question: how can the systems we have built — digital networks, AI, blockchain, mobile payments, global platforms — be redirected toward keeping people alive? The work becomes both protest and prayer: a demand that we remember our shared responsibility to protect one another, and a call to build systems worthy of that responsibility.
Those who feel called to participate are invited to make a donation directly to Village Health Works, an organization supporting maternal and community health. After donating, viewers may email their receipt to fiona@fionaaboud.com to receive a signed, editioned print, as well as a digital artwork inspired by the performance.
About the Artist:
Fiona Aboud is a Brazilian-American social impact artist whose multidisciplinary practice moves between photography, performance, sculpture, public intervention, and emerging technologies. Her work asks how art can move beyond representation to become a living system of care — one that redistributes attention, resources, and responsibility toward urgent human needs.