Fotograf Zone – Sophie Lewis – Full Surrogacy Now. Feminism Against Family

Bluntly and brutally engaging with the morbid aspects of pregnancy, Sophie Lewis’ Full Surrogacy Now is both a well of largely ignored knowledge as it is a much needed mental stretching exercise towards something usually glorified as a ‘miracle’. Disclosing the biological horrors and capitalist aberrations of gestation alike, she delivers philosophical writing much needed in order to start thinking about surrogacy not as another damaging, illegal billion dollar industry but as a chance to reconfigure our limited views on kinship and genetic parenthood, because we all know it takes a village to raise a child.

Text: Laura Amann

Laura Amann

is a curator and architect living and working in Vienna. Currently she is a curator at Kunsthalle Wien alongside the WHW collective. Amann is the co-founder of Significant Other, a project space and curatorial platform concerned with the overlaps of art and architecture. More recent projects look at madness and insanity as forms of knowledge, and sensuality and how they produce spaces for disobedience.

#39 Delight, Pain

e feel like revising our relationships. This time, relationships between people. Relationships between genders whose borders are not as firm as we might have thought until recently – instead, they are entirely permeable. Society responds to non-binary or transformative identities in various ways: with sexism, vehement exclusion, hidden exclusion, glass ceilings or attempts at inclusion. The proportion of these forces is constantly developing and changing and we decided to focus on them, and not alone. We opted for an experiment, and invited, as guest editors, the collective of the studio of New Aesthetics at the Department of Photography at FAMU, Prague: Nikol Czuczorová, Nikolaj Jessen, Andrej Kiripolský, Zuzana-Markéta Macková, Tobias Páral, Ezra Šimek, Leevi Toija, Max Vajt and Hynek Alt with Jen Kratochvil. This collaboration broadened our perspective to include the age group of those currently studying. Together, we arrived not only at the result of the printed issue but also at a new form of digital content – a series of podcasts and videos. Our guests helped sensitize and materialize the themes depicted on the mental map they created when conceiving the issue, lobbying for a revision of our established perception of the selected aggregate that forms the backbone of the magazine’s content: pleasure, pain, chaos, jouissance, anxiety, responsibility, orgasm, non-binary language, activism, perversion, social experiment. The chain of association can continue as you browse the pages of the magazine or listen to the podcasts, whose considerable ambition is to use the spoken word to discuss visual art. It will be delight accompanied by pain – otherwise it would not be delight at all.