During the research process that preceded the creation of Motherwort, Setničar turned to literary texts that approach motherhood not as a biological destiny, but as an existential and ethical decision. While originally researching narrative motivations for fictional characters, these readings gradually became a conceptual foundation for Motherwort itself. They opened a space in which motherhood could be understood as a site of tension between personal desire and social expectation, intimacy and autonomy, continuity and interruption.
A crucial reference point was Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood, in which the author famously approaches the question of having children through chance procedures, drawing on the divinatory logic of the I Ching. By submitting deeply personal questions to random yes-or-no answers, Heti arrives not at certainty, but at an acceptance of ambiguity. Her concluding realization- that one does not need to live every possible life or experience every form of love- articulates a crossing of an internal threshold rather than a definitive answer. Writing itself becomes a symbolic child: something that, once mature, can be released into the world.
Within Motherwort, this thought opens a radical space: the interruption of the family tree as an ethical gesture. In patriarchal logic, children are treated as possessions “my son”, “my daughter” - despite the fact that they ultimately belong only to themselves and to the world.
Author’s statement
I first encountered the question of motherhood at the Oncology Institute, when I was informed that, due to the unavoidable consequences of chemotherapy for late-stage lymphoma, I would most likely - at least temporarily - lose my menstruation. At the time, the question did not strike me immediately. The procedure of egg preservation, which allows patients to decide on assisted reproduction and potential motherhood in the future, takes several weeks. For men, fertility preservation is reduced to a matter of minutes; for women, it requires the immediate stimulation of egg production through complex hormonal therapy.
Because of the advanced stage of the disease, the oncology team decided that treatment with chemo-immunotherapy and biological medication had to begin as soon as possible in order to keep me alive. There was simply no time for egg retrieval - a procedure to which all female cancer patients are formally entitled before undergoing aggressive treatment. Moreover, the condition of my uterine cells was already uncertain, as changes had been observed due to the systemic impact of cancer on my body.
Motherhood, whether in a biological or emotional sense, had never been central to my self-understanding. I believed that the question of having children would resolve itself with time, or that an overwhelming desire - so-called “baby fever” - would eventually appear and demand fulfillment. Yet despite my conviction that reproduction was not my life’s calling, the realization that I might not have a choice - that the question itself could be taken away from me -was deeply unsettling.
Motherwort is ultimately a work about the decision - or the impossibility - of continuing the maternal family tree. (The next phase of the work is to accompany the sound narrative with video, which is already in production).
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair.
Author
Špela Setničar
Špela Setničar (born 1996) is a Slovenian poet, scriptwriter, radio host, and performer, working as a self-employed cultural worker across literature, film, radio, and contemporary performance. She is currently completing parallel MA degrees in Comparative Literature and Screenwriting. Her poetry has been published in numerous Slovenian literary journals and anthologies; it was translated to Serbian and Croatian in literary magazine Fantom Slobode and anthology Rukopisi 47.
In 2024, Setničar published her poetry debut Everything I Need to Tell You, a collection that explores the embodied, sensory experience of girlhood and womanhood through an intimate engagement with death. The book traces a developmental arc from early childhood encounters with the death of domestic animals, through adolescence marked by symbolic deaths connected to formative and often fatal love, to the mid- and late twenties, where both the lyrical subject and the author confront a life-threatening illness - cancer. The poems move between tenderness and severity, naïveté and erotic humour, gradually articulating a struggle with mortality and the question of how writing can preserve what is otherwise transient.
The collection was met with strong critical reception and was recently nominated for Best Literary Debut at the Slovenian Book Fair. Critics have emphasised Setničar’s precise, imagistic language and her ability to articulate vulnerability without sentimentality, transforming personal experience into a shared emotional and physical space.
An important part of Setničar’s artistic practice is performance, where poetry extends beyond the page into sound and improvisation. Her live work combines interpretative speech with improvised music, treating the voice as both a semantic and sonic material. In collaboration with guitarist and instrumentalist Luka Flegar, she explores intuitive approaches to connecting sound and language, emotion and rhythm. The piece presented here is a recording of a musical improvisation and live reading which, through the gradual layering of effects and guitar melodies, transforms into an autonomous sound work.
In this current project – titled Motherwort, Setničar focuses on the sonic and narrative articulation of her maternal family lineage. Through spoken word, she constructs a matrilineal narrative that reflects on memory, inheritance, care, and the transmission of female experience across generations. The project will be further developed through video and visual elements, merging spoken text and sound into a cohesive interdisciplinary performance.
A central thematic axis of the work is maternal care understood as a desire for endless, intimate closeness that binds mother and child. This question resonates with the writings of numerous feminist authors who have addressed one of the fundamental dilemmas of female subjectivity: whether to have children or not. In the poetry of the sound recording, Setničar exposes this intimate inquiry by asking whether parenthood is ultimately a form of egoism -whether it means possessing a bird- or whether it is more ethical to merely observe it, preserving one’s own freedom (slightly referring to the poem: I am the queen of birds). These reflections are woven into the sonic texture of the piece, where voice, sound, and silence open a space for ambiguity rather than resolution.
