Dem Mond geht es gut

Motherhood is a web of contradictory feelings. This performative reading deals with social constraints on the female body.

Societal demands on the female body—its availability, its function, its supposed purpose—have a profound impact on people’s lives. And they leave behind complex traces. A fragile field of tension arises between medical technologies, cultural expectations, and psychological inscriptions. Physicality becomes a place of control and longing, as well as imposition and self-assertion.

In this context, the performative reading of Paulina Czienskowski’s novel Dem Mond geht es gut (2025) initiates a dialogical process that deliberately blurrs the boundaries of what can be said about motherhood, silence, coercion, anger, and joy. The novel—poetic, fragmentary, and introspective—follows a young mother who, after the birth of her child, navigates a web of contradictory feelings, memories, and expectations.

The evening opens with Sandra Bejarano’s performance Conquer the Moon (2024). She intertwines the live ultrasound examination of her empty uterus with images of radar surveillance, IVF processes, drones, and moon missions. Her work shows how deeply the logic of conquering bodies is inscribed in the perception and treatment of the female-read body—and that these encroachments begin long before the medical space: in the cultural imaginary and in societal ideas of motherhood.

The reading from Dem Mond geht es gut responds to this with an inner perspective. It makes audible the experiences of those bodies that actually live motherhood—with all its ambivalences, ruptures, and philosophies of everyday life. While the performance highlights the external forces that affect the non-maternal body, the text focuses on the internal resonances and cracks that motherhood itself can produce: responsibility and liberation, closeness and detachment, memory and new beginnings.

The interweaving of both works creates a sensitive space in which social structures and personal feelings mirror each other and the question of self-determination of the female body is renegotiated. The subsequent artist talk invites us to continue exploring these areas of friction – between intimacy and public life, between expectation and experience.

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Sandra Bejarano

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Sandra Bejarano

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Luise Spielhagen

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Valentin Hansen

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