CALIBRATION MUM: I PREFER NOT TO

For the experimental documentary CALIBRATION MUM: I PREFER NOT TO, Elisa Jule Braun uses motion capture technology to translate the everyday chores of a mother—breastfeeding, changing nappies, playing, putting to bed—onto her digital avatar and its duplicates. The resulting scenes focus on the physical dimension of care work, abstracting bodily gestures while withholding private details.
Originally designed to optimize industrial processes, the motion-tracking suit is here adapted to record another kind of labor: unpaid, invisible, profoundly human. By inserting this technology into the domestic sphere, Braun renders visible the repetitive, robotic rhythms of care work while questioning the idealized myth of motherhood.
Projected into public space and stripped of context, these movements become a choreography—marked by exhaustion and tenderness. Care becomes both structure and statement: a practical act, a social imperative.
Throughout the documentation and data collection process, the mother figure must be constantly recalibrated. Her resistance—encoded in the avatars’ dysfunctional limbs—echoes as digital defiance. The work disrupts the distinctions between production and reproduction, public and private, and calls for a revaluation and aestheticisation of everyday actions. Alongside the video work, which forms the centrepiece of the eponymous exhibition, further pieces explore the embodied dimensions of maternal labour.