Story of a Substitute is part of the System of Attachment series. In psychoanalysis, the substitute object is the replacement for the mother. For a child, a stuffed animal or toy acts as the substitute object that comforts the child in the absence of the mother or caregiver.
I realized that one of the key aspects of the mother/child, caregiver/child relationship is the dynamic of absence and presence.
Story of a Substitute points to the story of how we learn to love, and detach from love, how we learn to love again, to accept absence, and to accept loss and death as well. Through love and care, we also learn how to survive the loss of love, which is the story of our lives as humans. Only through attachment do we learn how to detach ourselves. See: system of attachment vs. system of exploration in human child development.
The sculpture has a hole at its center, where the belly of the mother should be. There is an absence, a missing part, that I wanted to be a central element of the work.
The head of the sculpture is like a boiled egg with a cracked shell. Through caregiving and witnessing the development of a child, the mother returns to an early stage of her own childhood. The cracks point to a form of destruction and identity crisis.
The child is engraved in the arm of the mother. This work is also about the absence of children. Whether we have or don’t have a child, there is still a child within. As much as the substitute points to the absence of the mother, it also represents the mother. The child is not really a child, but rather the idea of a child, what we might call a ‘dream child’, or inner child – a child that exists in the mind. Both mother and child are more than hierarchical family roles; they are a part of who we are in our loving and caring relationships – in a way, this sculpture is about love, what you lose, and what you become in the process. Always in the process of becoming. Mother and child are mental tropes more than physical status and lineage.
We are always pregnant with ideas, we are mothered by stories, by narratives, and our inner child stays with us forever.

Paul B. Preciado “Un Appartement sur Uranus”
« C’est un mensonge de dire que nous n’avons qu’une mère. Le corps social nous accueille avec beaucoup de bras, sans quoi nous ne pourrions survivre. Chaque enfant bourgeois a une autre mère invisible, chaque enfant de la bourgeoisie catalane a une autre mère cachée, galicienne, andalouse, Philippine ou sénégalaise, de la même façon que chaque enfant blanc élevé aux Etats-Unis à l’époque de la ségrégation a une autre mère noire, dans l’ombre. La fiction de la stabilité de l’identité raciale ou nationale ne peut se construire qu’a condition d’éliminer cette filiation bâtarde et métisse.
L’heure est venue de décoloniser nos mères, d’honorer les liens multiples et hétérogènes qui nous ont construits et qui nous maintiennent vivants. »
[…]
« Dans l’Œdipe noir, des nourrices et des mère, l’anthropologue argentine Rita Laura Segato étudie non seulement les relations politiques et psychologiques qui s’établissent entre un fille et sa mère, mais aussi entre la nourrice et le bébé dont elle s’occupe, et les liens qu’entretient l’enfant qui grandit avec sa mère et sa nourrice. »
[…]
L’invention de la figure sociale de la mère biologique-domestique a partit du XIXe siècle et la définition du lien maternel comme unique lien légitimement constitutive nous a obliges a gommer l’important d’autres relations.