Mother's Milk

Mother’s Milk (re)constructs the story of Ilse, the author’s grandmother. Alienated in the psychiatric hospital of La Timone, in Marseille, Ilse resided there from 1952 until her death in 1983. Bringing together archival material, correspondences and conversations narrated via documentary poetry, Marie Ilse Bourlanges assembles the fragments of a family history hiding in plain sight.

An undertow of embodied memory meets the flow of institutional remembrance, drawing parallels between the discarded material of archives and the necessary mechanisms of physiological forgetting. Mother’s Milk offers an intimate journey into madness, intergenerational trauma transmission and the role of artistic research in imagining a possibility of healing.