to Mother.Lab
Welcome
An innovation and care studio for people, projects, and systems
Mother.Lab
Mother.Lab is a research and practice-based platform responding to the realities of mothering and caregiving in South Africa, where care is largely privatised, feminised and unevenly held. It begins from the understanding that burnout, exhaustion and disillusionment are not individual failures, but systemic outcomes of social and work structures that do not account for care across the life course.
Mother.Lab works to make care visible, strategic and sustainable. Through audits, creative research and system redesign, it supports organisations and households to embed layers of care into their infrastructure, reducing burnout and redistributing labour, particularly for mothers and primary caregivers. This work is grounded in long-term research and supported by a multidisciplinary team spanning organisational psychology, HR, culture and communications.
Alongside this, Mother.Lab delivers numerous creative workshops, talks and facilitated conversations within organisations, as well as in creative, arts-based and university spaces. These engagements address care, labour and the care economy, mothers returning to work, sustainable human behaviour after children, navigating schooling in South Africa, and the often-overlooked pressure points women face later in life, including perimenopause and menopause, stages that are statistically linked to increased mental health vulnerability.
Across all its work, Mother.Lab insists on care as a collective responsibility and a critical site of social change, while holding space for critical joy in an otherwise exhausting world.Mother.Lab works with organisations, institutions, creative and cultural spaces, universities, and communities seeking more sustainable ways of working, living and caring.
Meet Dee Marco
Dr Dee Marco identifies as a South African Vereinbarkeitsmanager, translated in this context as a Human Sustainability, Culture and Care Strategist. She is an academic and creative research scholar whose work, across these intersecting portfolios, centres on women’s wellbeing and human sustainability in a world that continues to undervalue and overlook the complexities of women’s lives. Dee approaches many of the challenges women face as systemic rather than personal, and therefore fundamentally changeable through the redesign and reordering of social, organisational, and domestic infrastructure.
She is the founder of Mother.Lab, through which she offers research-led, creative, and strategic responses to complex questions around caregiving, human sustainability, and how it is designed in South Africa. Her work sits at the intersection of care, labour, and lived experience, attending closely to how systems shape, strain, and sustain those who move through them. Dee's consultancy work spans diversity, equity, and inclusion in organisations, and through talks and journeys with organisations, she has found that allowing space for people's stories is the best avenue for bringing about change.
Dee is the author of How to Choose a School and has contributed to a range of academic journals, newspapers, and podcasts, including one she co-hosts, Mamas with Attitude.
Her work through Mother.Lab unfolds through long-term public and participatory projects such as House of Complaints, Tiny Letters, and Tiny Letters for Mothers, a collaborative data visualisation project. Central to this work is the collection of data on motherhood and mental health, alongside careful visual and aesthetic practices that make visible the ongoing, often unrecognised labours of mothering and care. Most recently, Tiny Letters was exhibited at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and contributions to this platform are warmly encouraged.
Links to Mother.Lab
media/work
House of Complaints(2021-)
Inspired by Complaint! (2021)
House of Complaints is a visual representation of mothering (caregiving) stories and narratives. Women are invited to a curated lounge space which emulates Dee's home. Depending on where the House of Complaints is set up, women from all walks of life may be in the space and are invited to meditate on any complaint they may perceive as a mothering complaint.
To this end, complaints are invited by all caregivers, not only mothers and the emphasis is on the method of complaint (Ahmed, 2021). In the act of complaining, we are invited to pay attention to the very nature of the complaint (concern/ issue) and the complainant. The complaint is then put on a wall with other complaints, accompanied by a photograph if the person wishes to have their photograph taken.
House of Complaints is a space to build a public series of the unsightly, the things we do not wish to see or hear or read about mothering and caregiving. It is intended to be a space in which these complaints live lives across borders, beyond single languages and through which all mothers and caregivers can find global resonances of recognition and solace.
The intention of House of Complaints is that in its dual experience both highly public and on the structural walls of a space and, at the same time, interior to each complainant - we do not place the complaints in a drawer and close it, hoping that patriarchal structures of law, colonial societies or governments, will solve any of these matters.
No, House of Complaints simply lays it all bare. Each exhibition includes food as central to the presence of the mothers (caregivers) and tea, both as markers of the domestic and notions of communing.
Tiny Letters
Images by Bailey Jane, Naadira Patel and Dee Marco