Milou Stella
Incubator for Anothertime (2023)
Audiovisual Installation with HD projections, Soundscape, 12min
Featuring: Trigger, soft sculpture, (2023)
Incubator for Anothertime is the result of Milou Stella’s ongoing collaborations with musicians, artists and the queer sociologist Dr. Lizzie Reed (University of Southampton). Embedded in the installation are the artist’s experience of infertility and IVF treatment, and the use of technology to question notions surrounding the ‘family unit’ and the images that power its formation. Part of a larger multimodal artistic exploration, this installation zooms into the concept of reproduction as both a process and a social, cultural, and biological phenomenon. It draws on texts such as ‘Staying with The Trouble’ by Donna Haraway, Xenofeminism and queer methodologies.
By immersing oneself in this temporary, expansive kinship system, Incubator for Anothertime becomes a site in which viewers are invited to step into and embody relationships beyond the confines of desire hierarchies perpetuated by traditional heterosexual relationships.
Through the act of collecting, discarding, and revisiting existing perspectives, this work positions itself as an ongoing project, one that remains open to the possibilities of radical recomposition in the future. It beckons viewers to engage in critical reflection and actively participate in shaping the evolving narrative.
Credits:
Music by George Paris and Berne
In collaboration with Dr. Lizzie Reed
Co-production with George Paris
Milou Stella’s interdisciplinary art practice merges digital technology, animation, performance, sound, and painting to challenge and question normative concepts of identity, gender, and social categorisation. Their hybrid artworks, including sculptures, installations, and multimodal performances, resist simplistic binaries and categories and blur boundaries through collaborations and research. Stella’s artistic practice explores the tension between the personal and the collective, rooted in folklore and storytelling. Her current work looks at queering family narratives through creative experiments that include participation, conversation, and devising techniques; they draw inspiration from thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Joan Joan, Michel Foucault, and ideas from Glitch feminism and experimental and improv theatre. Stella’s work celebrates expansive ways of seeing and being in the world, inviting us to question and deconstruct societal norms and embrace fluid and dynamic identities.