Moether
Mirene Arsanios
Translated from Spanish For:
Nour Bishouty, Unlikely Mother
Museo Universitario del Chopo (UNAM)
Mexico City, January 31 - May 24, 2026
Curated by Miguel A. LĂłpez
A note on language and translation:
This essay was written by the author in Spanish, a language she is using here for the first time as a writing language. The Spanish reflects a particular relationship to the language: one shaped by partial fluency, interruption, and displacement. The english version follows the texture, pace, and internal logic of the original, allowing moments of strain or awkwardness to remain present where they are part of how the text thinks. Language in this text is not merely a vehicle for content, but one of its subjects. The translation therefore aims for proximity rather than correction, and for fidelity to the text’s movement rather than to an abstract standard of fluency.
If there is feeling, is there instinct? And if there is instinct, is there language?
Fish, for the most part, are cannibalistic; they eat their progenitor without knowing why (questions belonging to human language). Catfish eat their own eggs. It is a way of absorbing new energy, energy they need to survive. And survival matters: an investment in the future of a reproduction you have just destroyed.
“Wordplay: creating and waiting for words” was a game Darwin and his family played together. Similar to Scrabble, the objective was to rearrange letters to form a dictionary word, stealing letters and adding others between them to make new words. Someone adds an M to the word OTHER. Darwin looks at the word for a long time, unable to recognize it. His mother died when he was eight years old.
At that age my mother was alive. She died when I was twenty-six. I still don’t know where she is. My eggs are running out. My reproduction is no longer guaranteed. The only thing that is guaranteed is the end of the reproductive phase. My blood is brown, as if I no longer had strength or power, iron or future. But saying that is vitalist, ableist: it assumes that only a body that functions normatively has power. How can one explain in words the small loss I feel for eggs I have never seen?
In the abandonment of children, humans resemble birds and other reproductive mammals—dogs, rabbits, pigs. Some fish abandon their eggs as well, scattering them across multiple sites to ensure reproduction. Abandonment becomes the norm when a mother decides to end her investment in a child. It marks one extreme of a continuum whose opposite is the mother who carries her daughter everywhere—an act that, too, can become a form of abandonment. Infanticide occurs when circumstances foreclose the possibility of abandonment. Morally and legally, the distinction is vast; biologically, it disappears.
Languages and mother tongues can also be abandoned. This text, written for Unlikely Mother, Nour Bishouty’s solo exhibition at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, should be in English, a language I learned to write as an adult. When I learned English, I abandoned French, the language of my childhood education. French did not disappear; it seeped into the sticky walls of English, laying eggs that disrupted my syntax with something foreign. Abandonment is always strategic. I abandoned French in order to reproduce myself in English, a language with greater professional advantage, one that secures my material survival at the cost of my affective one. What do I do now with languages of dry skin, such as Spanish or Arabic, which I never truly learned but which exist as a vestige of possibilities spliced ​​into my animal memory?
I remember the moment when I wanted to give her my hand, in Spanish, and she did not take it. Or moments of singular embraces, without reciprocity: like a body that is there, that wants to leave but cannot. I understand this body: a mother without the energy to reproduce herself. I understand her in her subaquatic reality.
In biological discourse, the human is an animal category; humans are mammals. In political discourse, reducing people to animals strips them of humanity, reducing them to flesh without dignity and without the right to live. When I think about humans and animals together, I think of “human animals,” the phrase the Israeli minister Yoav Gallant used to describe Palestinians, a description required to justify their extermination.
In my grandmother’s garden, beneath the mango trees, there was a pond. I no longer remember how to say pond in Spanish. In the water swam goldfish, the kind that grow until their color fades. They had thick, pronounced lips that opened to feed on small particles in the water, soaked bread I threw to them. For hours, watching these fish, I learned how to be a girl in a garden, beside a body of water I was not meant to fall into. I remember my anguish in the face of the fishes’ insatiability. There was no bread they could not consume.
Writing grows on the skin of other beings. As I write, I watch Catfish Mother Puddle of Juice, a film by Bishouty. In one passage, the voice-over notes that the fetus in the mother’s uterus can be likened to a parasite, a being that extracts nutrients from the body for its own development. This text, too, is a parasite. It feeds on the film: on its images of embalmed catfish; on the relationship between a girl and an older woman; on the architectures of hospitality and destruction embedded in language and in the biological world; on the ethical and physical distances required to think about affect, love, or loss; on the difference, if such a difference exists, between the symbolic function of language and its biological one.
A girl and an older woman use their hands to communicate, mirroring each other’s gestures. This is how one learns to speak: through repetition and imitation. The more a gesture is repeated, the more it is learned. The girl runs her hand through her black hair; the woman runs her hand through her gray hair. A life cycle between a girl and her shadow, between her shadow and her grandmother, presupposes an inheritance across generations. But the cycle of transmission and reproduction can take different forms, irregular forms that disrupt the process of transfer. Organized (human) violence and destruction also interrupt the life cycle, interrupting language (“there are no words to describe what is happening”).
My grandmother had very thin, soft skin, full of wrinkles I liked to stroke. Her skin smelled of talcum powder and roses. She abandoned my mother when she was young. A material and symbolic abandonment. My mother imitated her mother and symbolically abandoned her daughter. The daughter also abandoned the mother. An ancestral abandonment, necessary for self-preservation. Beyond imitation, language can say something new with old words. One can write in a language one has never written in before. Beyond evolutionary determinism, unpredictable forms begin to take shape, a dancing language of shadows with a life of its own, sentient and without imagination.
I write from memory, and my memories are not mine. They belong to the fish in the pond, a collective unconscious we all share. “A collective unconscious we all share” is an assertive claim. I am not sure how much I believe it. I doubt my own sentences.
In just a few months, the number of children killed in Gaza has surpassed the annual number of children killed in conflict zones worldwide since 2019. We will never forget. The word for this act is genocide. What is a “mother” to a girl who watched her mother burn alive before her eyes? What is a “mother” when you watch your enemies kill your daughter with sadistic pleasure?
Genocide is not evolutionary. Fish do not commit genocide. Humans do, and human acts settle into the memories of air, water, and fish alike. Evolution, like nature itself, is something human beings make with their hands.
There is no hope, but there is the thought that everything that exists could be otherwise. If there is total destruction, there can also be the total creation of new maternal, artistic, social, and animal forms. If there is instinct, there must be language.
Mirene Arsanios is a Lebanese-born writer and editor. She is the author of The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She is the program director at the Poetry Project and teaches writing at Pratt institute.
Unlikely Mother is Nour Bishouty’s first solo museum exhibition and her debut presentation in Mexico. The exhibition premieres her film Catfish Mother Puddle of Juice (2026). The film moves between scientific description, animal allegory, and an ambivalent mother-child relation to ask how acts of naming and identification fix bodies within recognizable categories, narrowing the possibilities of what they can be.
Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, moving image, works on paper, writing, and artist publishing. Her work attends to fragmentation in history, and the ways knowledge and fantasy are produced and withheld. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Museo Universitario del Chopo (2026), Mexico City; Liverpool Biennial (2025); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2025); Art Jameel, Jeddah (2024), La biennale de Québec (2024); Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2022); GTA21 Triennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2017); Casa Arabe, Madrid (2016); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2015); the Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); and the Beirut Art Centre, Beirut (2014).
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of
The Canada Council for the Arts
Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo
With thanks to
Cooper Cole, Toronto