The Egg, The Womb, The Head and The Moon.

Author: Marina Cavazza & Egle Kackute

Photos by Marina Cavazza, texts by Egle Kackute.

Marina Cavazza and Egle Kackute, expatriates from Italy and Lithuania respectively, have been photographing and interviewing other expatriate mums (and sometime dads) in Geneva for the last year.

While the stereotype of an expatriate family has it that dads are out working and mums happily stay at home looking after the children, Marina’s and Egle’s work brings to light a different image of expatriate women who often have a career and/or a professional identity to balance with their motherhood outside of their country of origin.

Far from their birth families, social and cultural networks, these women certainly have additional challenges compared to their settled compatriots.

However, their sense of belonging may vary depending on several factors such as their level of French and/or English, being able to afford child-care, their level of education, and field of expertise, to mention just a few. The various portraits speak of this very private balance that each expat working mum has found (or is still finding) in Geneva.

This work also suggests that while the specific cultural environment of Geneva, being in a foreign environment as well as their individual cultural backgrounds all add up to their challenges of motherhood (and fatherhood), yet another factor plays an important role. It is the way in which the society at large still insistently sees caring for children as primarily reserved to women and making it awkward for them to mother and carry on developing meaningful professional and personal lives at the same time (a prerogative often symbolically reserved to men).

The men portrayed here have similar difficulties dealing with this social norm, which probably calls for a reflection on child-caring and rearing patterns in our societies that goes beyond this work.

Working on this project has allowed these women to get together and talk about their stories, their challenges, and their strategies in living in a country that is not their own and where they will probably not settle for long. During the project, all these mums were really interested in listening and sharing with other mums and felt that it was a very much needed support to their life in Geneva, which is one of the additional benefits of this project.

Marina Cavazza, Italian free-lance photographer currently based in Geneva, working on personal projects, on assignment for NGOs and private companies. She chose photography as a tool to tackle subjects that she is personally and closely interested in and that require a delicate, slow (why not?) and in-depth approach. Mother of three, one girl and twin boys.

Egle Kackute is a Vilnius born Geneva based researcher, literary critic and cultural journalist interested in women‘s writing, gender, identity, and more recently, in motherhood and mothering in a culturally and linguistically foreign environment.