Mamma Masochist

Mother Masochist explores the relationship between mother and son. The intimacy, the love, the pleasure and the pain push the concept into an exploration of gender within the heterosexual binary roles of man and women, non-sexual BDSM play through the relationship of mother/son/audience -and the intimacy, love and reassuring pleasure of consensual abuse.

In a space somewhere between a BDSM dungeon and a labourward this project explores co-dependency, infantilisation and expected adoration. We focus on the masochism of motherhood and the dominance of the child. An emotional negotiation ensues between the characters who stage themselves and their audience in this BDSM Motherhoodsession.

Further, the project investigates the shifting of power –specifically how suffering, or the nurturing of one’s own suffering caused by others, masochism if you will, can be used to control. Generally,we see this with leaders of states who tell stories of victimhood in order to elicitcompassion in the public for their cruelty. In this project specifically, we come closer, into the dominant Mother Masochist who narrates martyrdom, physical-and psychological pain in order for her to subdue the perhaps Sadist Son

The project is interested in the shifting of relationships:sociologically, psychologically and privately,as the son becomes a man and consequently the mother a woman. In this intersection I look for the possibly painful and violent consequences in the beauty of unconditional love.

The contrasts within the characters are important. I aim to rip them down themiddle as they are stretched between love and hate, the hate in love, pleasure and pain, the pleasure of pain, kindness and cruelty and the cruelty of kindness.

It is an exploration of gender and power when Daddy’s little princess gives birth to her very own, private little man