Mothering Communities is a public art project focusing on maternal caregiving
– the continuous, repetitive, physical, emotional and at the same
time “invisible” work that is carried out for the nutrition, health, education
and general integrity of a child. The project explores forms of communal
care work: How can care work be shared beyond existing but often
inadequate family and institutional structures? How can caregiving be reinvented
and organised? What infrastructures, resources, forms of creativity,
and time and collaboration does caring for a future generation require?
Following the trajectory of these questions, Mothering Communities
brings together workshops for children and adults, performances, talks,
live concerts, listening sessions, an energy-autonomous solar kitchen,
picnics, play and experimentation on the grounds and in the garden of
Zentrum Fokus Forschung at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The
audience is invited to temporarily leave the isolation and singularity of
caretaking and to open up communal caregiving as a shared field of research
in the form of meeting, exchanging, caring, being creative, listening,
watching, experimenting and playing.
The central pivot and location of the project is the walk-in sculpture
Child Care Pavilion designed by Isabella Kohlhuber. It relocates care as
an intermediate activity between work and play, between the satisfaction
of children’s primary needs and amusement, shifting it into the public
space. As a sculpture and object of use, it mediates between inside and
outside spaces, serving simultaneously as a stage, a place to linger and

The central pivot and location of the project is the walk-in sculpture
Child Care Pavilion designed by Isabella Kohlhuber. It relocates care as
an intermediate activity between work and play, between the satisfaction
of children’s primary needs and amusement, shifting it into the public
space. As a sculpture and object of use, it mediates between inside and
outside spaces, serving simultaneously as a stage, a place to linger and