Mother's Milk, 2020
HD video loop, duration 30min
Collected shreds of archive Montperrin psychiatric files.
3bisF Contemporary Art Centre, Aix-en-Provence (FR)
Manifesta biennial #13 – Les Parallèles du Sud

During her residency at Montperrin Psychiatric Hospital, Bourlanges worked closely with the institution's archivist. She was introduced to the protocol for destroying patient files ten years after death. Until 2006, French law had an exception for psychiatric medical records, stipulating that these files should be preserved due to their potential relevance for a patient's descendants. This practice presented a dilemma for archivists: should the files be kept for possible inquiries from the patient's family, or destroyed to mitigate the stigma associated with psychiatric patients—a "right to be forgotten"?
Due to budget constraints and the growing challenge of storing physical records, the law was revised in 2006, allowing public hospital consortia to destroy most psychiatric files, retaining only a 1% sample for academic research.

Through her connection with the Montperrin archivist, Bourlanges collaborated with the company tasked with destroying the medical files each month. She acquired a sample of these destroyed records, which she then chewed and spit out as part of a durational performance, sitting in a former isolation cell for women at Montperrin Psychiatric Hospital.