Rada Mateva

Re.born is an interactive AI-based video installation that investigates the hidden labour of motherhood and its entanglement with identity, care, and power. At its core lies a custom-made support bot trained on real-life experiences shared by mothers, which speaks back to the public in real time, offering responses weighted toward empathy, solidarity, and reflection. These conversations are translated live into abstract visuals that evolve throughout the exhibition, forming an ambient choreography of language, sound, and form. The project emerges from the tension between visibility and erasure: motherhood is central to the reproduction of life, yet often relegated to silence, shame, or glorification. Re.born challenges these binaries by giving voice, literally and visually, to the nuanced, plural realities of maternal work, mental load, and social expectations. By integrating artificial intelligence into this intimate terrain, Re.born addresses how knowledge and care circulate in dematerialised, deterritorialised ways in the age of algorithmic culture. The work resists static identities or institutional classifications; instead, it invites fluid, multilingual dialogue. Each user shapes the bot’s behavior and the visual environment through their questions, suggesting that identity is not a fixed archive, but a porous, evolving interface. The piece speaks to contemporary debates around borders, not only geopolitical, but emotional, bodily, and digital. It considers motherhood itself as a border condition: a threshold state between individual and collective, labour and love, self and Other. In doing so, Re.born proposes a shared space of reflection, where excluded narratives re-enter public discourse, not as data points to be sorted, but as living testimonies that reconfigure our understanding of care and community.