MAM! by Krissima Poba

Art, Science and Breastfeeding:
A Critical Satire of the Infant Formula Industry

At IPOV – Respectful Care, we share the audiovisual work in which artist and scientific mediator Krissima Poba presents her installation MAM! (Mamelles humaines), a project situated at the intersection of contemporary art, public health, and critical thinking.

Her proposal is not merely aesthetic. It is an exercise in scientific mediation that uses the codes of advertising in order to deconstruct them from within.

From IPOV, we consider that initiatives of this kind enrich the debate on motherhood, public health, and rights—inviting us to think, rather than simply consume, the messages that surround the beginning of life.

In this video, artist and scientific mediator Krissima Poba presents MAM! (Mamelles humaines), an artistic installation that reimagines breast milk as a supermarket product. Through fictitious advertising posters for “bricks” of human milk—complete with nutritional tables, percentages, and scientific references—Poba uses the visual language of commercial marketing to question it from within.

What is MAM!?

MAM! is an artistic installation composed of fictitious advertising posters for “bricks” of human breast milk. In them, human milk is presented as if it were just another commercial product, including:

Nutritional table per 100 g
Macronutrient percentages
Vitamins and bioactive composition
Scientific sources cited at the bottom of each piece

The gesture is deliberate: what would happen if breast milk were sold in a supermarket? How would our perception change if we saw it framed through the same visual and discursive codes used for infant formula?

The installation pushes satire to its limits. It replicates the visual and rhetorical clichés of infant formula advertising to reveal how the commercial narrative around early-life nutrition is constructed.

Art as Scientific Mediation

A central element of Poba’s work is that it does not remain at the level of symbolic provocation. Each piece includes references to real scientific studies. The work invites viewers to “consume information” critically.

This strategy is particularly relevant in the field of breastfeeding, where multiple forces converge:

Global industrial interests
Emotional marketing strategies
Structural inequalities
Cultural narratives about motherhood

Scientific evidence accumulated over recent decades shows that breast milk is not simply food, but a complex biological system that includes immunological components, hormones, oligosaccharides, and bioactive factors that cannot be fully reproduced in industrial products. Commercial communication, however, often reduces this complexity to isolated nutritional claims.

MAM! confronts that simplification by exposing a paradox: if we apply the same advertising criteria to human milk, the result exceeds any package.

Symbolic Reappropriation of the Lactating Body

The artist uses her own breastfeeding photographs to illustrate the posters. In her discourse, she points out that the image of the lactating “Madonna”—a recurring figure in Western art—has progressively been emptied of its visible bodily dimension.

At the same time, infant formula advertising has come to occupy the symbolic space of early nutrition. Poba suggests that this representation has, in some sense, been displaced toward industry.

Her work reclaims breastfeeding as a visible, real, and contemporary act. Not idealized, not abstract, but embodied.

From a rights-based perspective, this visual reappropriation resonates with ongoing debates about:

Bodily autonomy
The invisibilization of breastfeeding in public spaces
The normalization of commercial discourse in maternal and child health

Public Health and Global Justice

In the video, Poba also addresses the circulation of formula products in African and Afro-descendant contexts, highlighting the global dimension of the infant formula market. This connects with well-documented public health debates on:

Aggressive marketing practices in countries with weaker regulation
Inequalities in access to evidence-based information
Health impacts of inadequate infant feeding practices

The World Health Organization developed the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes precisely to limit such practices. However, its implementation remains uneven.

Poba’s work is not a technical report. It is a cultural intervention that translates these structural tensions into images.

Why This Work Matters for IPOV

IPOV – Respectful Care works to prevent obstetric violence and to promote childbirth care grounded in human rights and scientific evidence.

Breastfeeding cannot be understood independently of the context of birth, support, and maternal autonomy. Excessive medicalization, unnecessary mother–baby separation, and institutional dynamics directly influence the initiation and continuation of breastfeeding.

Krissima Poba’s work helps expand the conversation beyond the strictly clinical sphere. It raises fundamental questions:

Who constructs the narrative around infant feeding?
How do commercial interests shape individual decisions?
What place does scientific knowledge occupy in the public sphere?

In this context, art functions as a critical device.

References for Further Research on Breastfeeding, Marketing, and Public Health

MAM — Krissima Poba — https://www.krissimapoba.com/mam

MAMMIFÈRES — Krissima Poba — https://www.krissimapoba.com/mammiferes

Dossier de presse – Krissima Poba – MAM! (ARTSPOT 2024) — Être Contemporain (PDF)
– https://etrecontemporain.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Dossier-de-presse-Krissima-Poba-MAM-ARTSPOT-2024-web.pdf

How the marketing of formula milk influences our decisions on infant feeding (Report, PDF, 2022) — World Health Organization (WHO) & UNICEF — https://www.unicef.org/media/115916/file/Multi-country%20study%20examining%20the%20impact%20of%20BMS%20marketing%20on%20infant%20feeding%20decisions%20and%20practices%2CUNICEF%2CWHO2022.pdf

Examining the impact of formula milk marketing on infant feeding decisions and practices — UNICEF — https://www.unicef.org/documents/impact-bms-marketing

More than half of parents and pregnant women exposed to aggressive formula milk marketing (Press release, 22 Feb 2022) — UNICEF — https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-half-parents-and-pregnant-women-exposed-aggressive-formula-milk-marketing

World Breastfeeding Week: WHO and UNICEF warn about exploitative marketing of baby formula milk in Viet Nam (2 Aug 2023) — WHO — https://www.who.int/vietnam/news/detail/02-08-2023-world-breastfeeding-week–who-and-unicef-warn-about-exploitative-marketing-of-baby-formula-milk-in-viet-nam

The International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (overview/resources) — UNICEF UK (Baby Friendly Initiative) — https://www.unicef.org.uk/babyfriendly/baby-friendly-resources/international-code-marketing-breastmilk-substitutes-resources/the-code/

The International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes (full text, PDF) — IBFAN — https://ibfan.org/art/IntCode.pdf

Funded by the European Union Programme HORIZON-MSCA-2022-Staff Exchange. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.