As You Were (2024).

47min, HD, colour, stereo. Eng w/ closed captions. [German subtitles available].

How do our private experiences inform our professional selves that through our institutions impact the lives of others?

Pregnancy and birth trigger a shift in how we are seen in the world culturally, politically, professionally. As You Were speaks to the unseen details of these shifts that are shaped by institutionalised thinking. Made in conversation with maternity specialists from the UK’s National Health Service who have given birth themselves, the film queries the boundaries of professional, personal and institutional understanding.

Entangled in the uncertainties of her own experiences in art and academia around the birth of her daughter, Mann asks if there is an institutional context where such transformative embodied experiences might be imagined as a benefit to practice.

above: As You Were, (2024, video still).

cont.

Institutions borrow from our personal lives and co-opt the language of mothering as ‘practices of care’. Yet for their duration pregnancy and birth, as processes of transformation for the individual, hold little value in this system.

Embodied acts of non-institutional behaviour place us outside the dominant culture.

Footage of historical maternity instruments intersect with scenes of a women’s coxed rowing team, and intimate documentation of domestic and insect life. As You Were foregrounds women's voices and creates a space of listening to uncover the confidential, barely perceptible methods in practice that can challenge institutional behaviour.

Made possible by the generous support of Creative Scotland; Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh; Surgeons’ Hall Museums; The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; and NHS Lothian Midwifery Research Network.