Emmanuelle Jacques mixes relational art, drawing, writing and printed art to create a currency featuring artists who combine their profession with their role as mothers.

She creates a meeting place where portrait sessions are an opportunity to discuss these women’s ambitions, the obstacles they face and ideas for improving their living and creative conditions. By talking about the sensitive subject of motherhood, she raises political issues from a feminist and libertarian perspective: economic exchanges, power relations, work organization, DIY culture, freedom seeking, oppression resistance.

By drawing on the experience of the participants, she foresees a system that would value not the production and accumulation of capital, but rather the work of “care”, or social reproduction (which makes it possible to maintain, perpetuate and repair our world: education, care, culture, environmental protection, etc.). For a long time confined to this parallel economy, mothers and artists have developed essential expertise to reverse this model. Emmanuelle Jacques therefore appropriates the commemorative role of money and turns it around to criticize this system of exchange, in a symbolic charge that links financial power and feminist struggles.

During this 9-month residency at L’imprimerie, the artist will continue her meetings with the artists, then engage in the design and printing of the currency with the centre’s equipment. Printed in large print runs, these currencies will form an artist’s book, or object book, which will be distributed to the participants and the public during a micro-residence/exhibition in 2020. By exploring ways of disseminating art on the fringes of a commercial economy, Emmanuelle Jacques imagines ways to build a social network where economic exchanges and artistic creation would be ways of taking care of each other.