MÉLANIE JANEL

Being a doula and an artist, I believe that caring is a poetic activist act. In my art work I care about the invisible, the unseen in the transformation of becoming a mother, and I co-create photography and art pieces that reveals this process. I find aesthetics in the poetry of life force that carry woman who becomes mother.

I make connection between art making and care, weaving in circles, with the community, committed to the transmission of knowledge for fertile emancipation, and reclaiming the aesthetics of doula care.

Valuing the power of bonding to weave an healthy and cooperative new earth, a Movement for Matriculture.

Mélanie Janel is a Portuguese and French Artist and Doula living in Portugal. Trained in contemporary dance, education and social intervention at the University of Paris 8 and in space design at the School of Fine Arts in Marseille. Over the years, she has developed her practice with the collective, committed to transmitting knowledge and facilitating creative circles for fertile emancipation. She questions the processes of personal transformation, how can symbolic death and mourning be spaces for the germination of creation? She specializes in supporting women who become mothers, from pregnancy to postpartum, and during abortion, always in favor of women's rights and for a regenerative feminist movement. Since 2 years she works on Matrescence, with film photography and writing, on how art process can be an act of care, and how collective acts of care and support can be a an art process.