Lito Kattou

Mother & Children

*realised during the residency of the artist at the Fonderia Batagglia

Milan, May - June 2023

The bodies of Mantises have been considered to have supernatural powers in many early civilizations not only for their praying posture but for being perceived as well as a trickster deity, a companion showing travellers the way home, an escort of the soul of the dead to the underworld, a necromancer, a soothsayer. The female mantis has been imagined as a femme fatale, a powerful predator and a symbol of female authority signified through sexual cannibalism applied in about a quarter of male-female sexual encounters of the species. Their body moves in repetitive swaying side-to-side movements as if resembling the vegetation in the wind, a mechanism also allowing them depth of field. Its praying posture and the fact that they can rotate their head fully makes them the only insects similar to human kinetic patterns.
In ‘Mother and Children’ the mantis is captured in a symbiotic state where its newborns are carried on its body. It is quite ambivalent if this is a peaceful co-existence. The integration of their form within their mother implies that they are constitutional for her body structure. The little ones consist and formate maybe her backbone amplifying in this way her body form in a state of a multi-being. In this way nurturing, upbringing, co-existence and the representation of the body are questioned, while all of them - mother and children - are extruded from a flat digital plain and are brought to life through the materiality of bronze.