April 23–25, 2026
Revolutionary Motherhood. Asja Lācis and other Activist Mothers* (de/en)
WORKSHOP
Latvian theater maker Asja Lācis, a firsthand witness of the so-called Theater October 1917 in St. Petersburg and Moscow, was known for her unwavering belief in the revolutionary cause of the proletarian art movement and her theater work with proletarian kids and workers – she was also a mother herself and, according to her only daughter, a rather bad one: caring for the future of mankind and others’ children while neglecting her own (Dagmāra Ķimele, Asja,1996).
She was by no means alone in this conflict between socio-political engagement and artistic ambitions on the one hand and parental responsibilities on the other. Even Alexandra Kollontai, the great pioneer of the politicization of women’s issues, of comradely love and non-reproductive sexuality (until these topics faded into oblivion again under Stalin), addresses in her memoirs the emotional turmoil she felt when leaving her young son with his grandparents to devote herself to her studies. Whether to become a mother or not, and how collective child-raising could look (and feel) like are topics that traverse Kollontai’s literary work (Red Love, 1923), and prominently reemerge in the figure of Milda in Sergej Tretjakov’s I Want a Child (1924-1926). The question of how to reconcile parenthood and work or political initiative affected many women and fewer fathers of her generation in ways that may still seem all too familiar to us today.
Using Lācis as our reference point, we will continue to discuss accounts of other activist (non)mothers and draw connections across the past century to the Jetzt-Zeit: even today, activists and artists are still confronted with questions about the compatibility of family and political vocation and artistic aspirations. Even though the division of roles in many – though by no means all – private relationships may have changed in the meantime, patriarchal structures are regaining political power worldwide, and heteronormative and property-based concepts of love and family are being normalized in public discourses, especially on social media and in the so-called manosphere. In light of these developments, the political significance of the challenges of (equal and gender-sensitive) parenthood in activist-artistic fields of work is becoming ever more important.
April 23, Thursday
2 pm // WELCOME
2:30–4 pm // COLLECTIVE REVIEW OF SOURCES
»A stranger to her«. Lācis and the notion of estranged motherhood Sources by and aboutLācis as well as on socialist motherhood – Caroline Adler (Hamburg) and Mimmi Woisnitza (Lüneburg)
4:30–5:30 pm // INPUT & CONVERSATION
Mothering the Revolution? Collective Care in the Work of Alice Constance Austin and Alexandra Kollontai – Liza Mattutat (Hamburg), Moderation: Antonia Rohwetter
6–7:30 pm // LECTURE
Lācis as Litmus Test – Susan Ingram (Toronto) followed by an open conversation withworkshop-participants and audience, Moderation: Mimmi Woisnitza
Asja Lācis, or Anna? What’s the difference?
The comparatist Susan Ingram first addressed that question 30 years ago and returns to it now under the banner of ‚bad mothers‘ by putting work done by Lācis’s daughter and granddaughter in dialogue with Kathia Rock, a Canadian Innu singer.
Susan Ingram is a literary and cultural scholar and professor in the Department of Humanitiesat York University in Toronto. Since 2002, she has published extensivley on Asja Lācis’ multilingual, autobiographical writing style, including in the monograph Zarathustra’s Sisters: Autobiography and the Shaping of Cultural History (2003), and was the first to examine Lācis from a feminist perspective and positioned her within European culturalhistory.
8:30 pm // PERFORMANCE LECTURE & CONCERT
Variations of Bad Mother – collective reading and concert with Lauratibor Kiezchor (conducted by Öz Kaveller), Alice Creischer, Inga Gaile (Riga), Margarita Breitkreiz, Ingo Tomi, and others (DE/EN)
Artist Alice Creischer, author Inga Gaile and the activist oriented Lauratibor Kiezchor will bring their collaborative installation in the exhibition to a life performance. Structured by songs by Lauratibor Kiezchor (composed by Anders Ehlin), we will have a collective reading of Inga Gaile’s play „Bad Mother“ (2023, German translation by Lil Reif), a feminist review on Lacis’ life, working with lots of documents and humour.
April 24, Saturday
10:30–12:30 am // MORNING CONVERSATION
Calling Upon Bad Mothers: Poetic Intervention with Alice Creischer and Inga Gaile (EN/DE)
2 –3:30 pm // INPUTS & CONVERSATION
Social and very specific: Anna Seghers’ Literary Motherhood from Social Means to an Aesthetic Vision of Writing – Wiebke Bernstorff (Hildesheim)
Mother figures and unfulfilled motherhood: The Women surrounding Brecht – Sarah Ralfs (Berlin), Moderation: Caroline Adler
3:45–5:15 pm // INPUTS & CONVERSATION
Militant Mothers in West Germany: Feminist Film Practice after 1968 – Antonia Rohwetter (Lüneburg)
Auto- and co-production of paternal care. The Birth of Caring Masculinity from the Practices of the 1968 Movement – Florian Kappeler (Berlin), Moderation: Wiebke Bernstorff
5:15–6 pm // CLOSING CONVERSATION
Was tun, today, tomorrow? – Moderation: Mimmi Woisnitza
April 25, Saturday
5 pm // PERFORMANCE
Where should I look at? – Bühnen zu Baustellen | Baustellen zu Bühnen, Mariannenplatz
Together with the Berlin-based performers Anna Stiede, Martin Clausen and Ingo Tomi, and the scenographer Philine Rinnert, Konstanze Schmitt developed a performative research format based on Asja Lācis’ avant-garde manifesto New Directions in Theater Art (1921) and Gaile’s play Bad Mother(2023). The collective explores workers’ culture and songs, art as an anti-fascist intervention, and the figure of Asja Lācis, who herself worked in this field as a theatre maker. The question: How can art, how can we as artists, have a social impact today?
Followed by conversation & drinks @ Kunstraum Kreuzberg