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.
Madonna Pandemica
The performance for camera is filmed in an abandoned greenhouse in Weelde, Rotterdam (2021)
Photography by Baiba Yurkevich, commission by Florian Borstlap.
Madonna Pandemica is created during the isolation and uncertainty of the COVID-19 lockdown. I return, again and again, to an abandoned greenhouse where poppy flowers bloom and decay—mirroring the slow transformation of my own body as it moves through late pregnancy.
Eight months pregnant, I appear naked, wrapped in a plastic sheet, wearing a surgical mask—icon of the pandemic. I emulate the sacred figure of the Madonna, reimagined for our era of confinement and fear. In this fragile space, under plastic, among fading petals, life insists.
Under a plastic shield, flowers are born.
Under a mask, I am becoming a mother.
Madonna Pandemica is a meditation on resilience, the cycles of nature, and the quiet defiance of hope. Even in abandoned places, even in uncertain times, the body blooms. Life finds a way.
