The Mother Archive: Immersion, Affect and the Maternal in Museum Practice

Abstract

In a discussion of my digital archive project, ‘The Mother Archive’, I ask: what would a museum program about motherhood look and sound like? Identifying an absence of motherhood and the maternal as curatorial themes in Australian museums, I argue for a need to address maternal experience in museum practice. I then ask: how can digital technologies be used in museum settings to give us greater insight into maternal experiences? I suggest that the immersive technology of virtual reality (VR) could lead us to a deeper understanding of maternal subjectivity by enabling affective encounters. The immersive potential of VR has been used in areas including psychology (for instance trauma recovery) and workplace training. But its capacity to achieve affect in the context of museum environments has not been explored fully in scholarly work. While there is much conceptualising of VR as a tool of embodiment and empathy, there is no known scholarly work on how VR might enable us to engage with maternal subjectivity. My project strives to fill this gap in knowledge by creating a digital archive representing actual experiences of mothering as voiced by mothers. How does a mother make sense of her maternal experiences? The wellknown What to Expect When You’re Expecting, first published in 1984, now in its fifth edition, remains on the New York bestseller list. This book, along with countless websites targeted at expectant mothers, aims to educate women about each stage of their pregnancy. In this sense, there is little room for perspectives on ‘matrescence’, the transformation of first-time Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Number 26 58 motherhood, outside the parameters of medical language.1 My project, ‘The Mother Archive’ strives to create a digital archive of ‘inobservable worlds’ the actual experiences of matrescence as voiced by mothers.2 ‘The Mother Archive’ is an interdisciplinary PhD project based at Monash University. This project is informed by my curatorial research at Museums Victoria (MV) on their mother-related collection material, and my experiments with digital technologies to create an archive of maternal experiences, based at Monash University’s SensiLab. The aim of this project is to design a digital, immersive archive of motherhood (and maternal experiences) using digital technologies (including, for instance, virtual reality (VR), immersive sound design, and motion capture technology), with the aim of articulating experiences of mothering. The immersive potential of VR has been used in areas including psychology (for instance, trauma recovery) and workplace training. But its capacity to achieve affect in the context of heritage environments has not been explored fully in scholarly work. While there is much conceptualising of VR as a tool of embodiment and empathy, there is no known critical attention to how VR might enable us to engage with maternal subjectivity. My research seeks to fill this gap in knowledge by imagining how VR might be used in the creation of a ‘mother archive’ to be displayed in museum settings. By experimenting with immersive technologies including VR, I seek representations that challenge dominant discourses on motherhood. My project aims to bring more visibility to the role mothers have played in Australian history by representing maternal experiences in museum settings. In my practice-led research, I explore how immersive experiences might lead us to an embodied connection with maternal subjectivities. I suggest that various characteristics of maternal experience (for example, emotional 1 I would like to thank Professor Therese Davis, Dr Thomas Chandler, Dr Joanne Evans and Dr Vince Dziekan at Monash University for their thoughtful comments and encouragement. I would also like to thank Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy, at University of Melbourne, and MV Senior curator Deborah Tout Smith for generously offering me their time and expertise, and VR filmmaker Sojung Bahng for her valuable insights on VR cinema. I also acknowledge the support of the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and the Robert Blackwood Museums Victoria – Monash University Partnership Award in the writing of this article. Dana Raphael, ‘Matrescence, Becoming a Mother, a “New/Old” Rite De Passage’, in Being Female: Reproduction, Power and Change, ed. Dana Raphael (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 65–71, doi.org/10.1515/9783110813128.65. 2 Anne E Sexton and Dolly Sen, ‘More Voice, Less Ventriloquism: Exploring the Relational Dynamics in a Participatory Archive of Mental Health Recovery’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24, no. 8, (2018): 847, doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1339109.