Bauge is a performance artist living and working in the Netherlands. Her work challenges the boundaries of gender, labor, and identity, using the body as a tool to deconstruct societal norms and provoke critical reflection.
Caritas. Mutual nurturing.
Commissioned for the Convergence Research series by Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, July 2020
Caritas is a performance about survival through tenderness. Created during the first COVID-19 lockdown, it draws from the ancient myth often referred to as Carita Romana—where a daughter secretly breastfeeds her starving father in prison. While later retellings twisted it into an erotic image of filial devotion to a father, the origin story speaks of something else: a mother saved by her daughter. A story of women, of solidarity, of care as quiet rebellion.
In Caritas, I reclaim this narrative. Filmed with Kea Fogelberg—a friend and collaborator who became my lifeline during isolation—the piece becomes a living embodiment of mutual nurturing. It is not eroticized. It is not performative. It is human. Vulnerable. Necessary.
Created in the shadow of global unrest—from the pandemic to the Black Lives Matter movement, to political upheaval in Belarus and Eastern Europe—Caritas resists spectacle. It speaks instead to the invisible revolutions of the body. To the private hells we endure. To the unexpected places where love shows up.
