​​Soft Architectures

Master's thesis publication & performance

University of Barcelona, Faculty of Fine Arts

Master's in Artistic Production and Research

Performance at La Capella, 17.06.2025, Barcelona

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Abstract: 

 

This project examines how maternal affective labor functions as an invisible infrastructure within North American capitalism. Rooted in feminist Marxist theory, affect studies, and performance discourse, it argues that care work, particularly maternal labor, is not a peripheral practice but a central, systemic mechanism that sustains capitalism while being systematically devalued and rendered inaudible. Positioned against the current political backdrop of reproductive rollbacks and domestic precarity in the United States, the work approaches motherhood not as a private relation but as a political category shaped by systems of economic, ideological, and affective control. By situating marriage and the nuclear family as a key structures through which maternal labor is shaped and regulated, this study critiques how cultural scripts of intimacy and sacrifice reinforce the invisibility of care within patriarchal and capitalist systems. The artistic component is a lecture performance that weaves text, archival collage, and looped sound to surface the temporal textures of care. Repetition and vocal layering become both a method and a metaphor, resonating with endurance, survival, and refusal practices while echoing the invisible rhythms of maintenance. A counter-archive is constructed by foregrounding what is often unseen, unheard, and unvalued, one that insists on presence, resonance, and historical accountability. The act of live performance becomes a method of resistance: an ephemeral, embodied way to insist on presence in the face of systemic erasure. It opens a space for critical engagement, makes audible the soft architectures that sustain everyday life, and asks what it means to live within a constant yet rarely acknowledged form of labor.

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Link to full document: Thesis PDF