Reverb, Performing the Maternal Archive approaches the archive as a site of power, memory, and exclusion, tracing narratives of maternal experience that have been silenced in contemporary art history. Drawing on feminist theory and performance methodologies, the work positions motherhood as a critical lens for understanding care, memory, and artistic labor.
Working with four Athenian art archives (EMST, ISET, AMOQA, Benaki Museum), it maps both representations and silences, while exploring alternative modes of archiving through sonic, performative, and embodied practices. At the same time, it creates a living counter-archive with the participation of contemporary artist-mothers, gathering voices and gestures that resonate beyond dominant discourse.
The project unfolds around three questions: how can sonic performance function as a counter-archival practice? what narratives emerge when motherhood is re-inscribed into the archive? and how might the maternal body itself be understood as an archive? Rather than seeking to fill archival gaps, Reverb, Performing the Maternal Archive interrogates the very framework of the archive, questioning its nature and its limits. Its aim is to contribute to contemporary conversations on maternal experience, artistic practice, and the forms that archival work can take today.
Visual Reference, Reverb. Performing the maternal archive, Maria Sideri, 2025
Maria Sideri is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and mother based in Athens. In 2023, she completed her PhD with distinction at the University of Western Macedonia with the thesis “Convergences of Performance and Archive: Archives and Bodies in Flux.” Her work explores the intersections of corporeality and archival research, expanding the notions of archive and documentation through and with the body. She reconsiders the archive not as a static site of power but as a living and fluid medium, proposing embodied and performative approaches that reshape archival methodologies and knowledge production. She studied Classical Philology at the University of Ioannina and History of Religion at the University of Geneva. In 2012, she graduated with distinction from the MA in Creative Practice at the Laban Conservatory of Music and Dance in London. She has received grants from the Arts Council of England for the project Vibrant Matter/La Métachorie and from ARTWORKS (1st SNF Artist Fellowship, 2018). Her work has been presented in Greece and internationally at WAC (2025), Summer Festival Kampnagel & Theater der Welt (2023), In Lieu of a Prism (2023), Outraged by Pleasure (2023), This Current Between Us (2022), Phenomenon (2022), Kiev Biennale (2021), MOMus (2021), Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center - SNFCC (2019).