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In 1977, a group of mothers began to meet on Thursday afternoons in Plaza de Mayo, the site of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, to protest the growing numbers of the ‘disappeared’: thousands of individuals who were being abducted and murdered by the military government in Argentina Risking arrest or even death (three of the group’s original leaders were kidnapped and drowned), the women walked and chanted, carrying photographs of the missing children, with their names inscribed on their white headscarves, a symbolic reference to the white dove of peace Their meetings continue to this day   Making Love Revolutionary, the title of Anna Maria Maiolino’s survey exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery — her first major exhibition in the UK, with over 150 works on show — is a reference to the non-violent demonstrations led by the ‘Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’, who she encountered while living between Argentina and Brazil in the 1980s The phrase itself is taken from the final sentence of an unrealized installation project Maiolino began in 1991, in response to the mothers’ collective political challenge The title is a recognition of their maternal love as a potent language in the discourse of resistance against violence Throughout her practice, Maiolino turns to fragments, images, signs, and phrases drawn from her proximity to loaded histories — elements she endeavours to make cohesive through poetic contiguity rather than linear narratives   Born in Southern Italy in 1942, Maiolino emigrated with her family to Venezuela aged 12, in order to escape the economic hardship and food shortages caused by WW2, before finally settling in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1960, aged 18 Her experiences of cultural displacement and marginalisation are evident in her explorations of daily existence, domesticity, and bodily cycles In one of the earliest works in the show, the graphic woodcut print Glu Glu Glu (1967), a figure is sat at a laden kitchen table, their mouth gaping open The scene is paired with an image of a toilet, a doubling that functions as a diagram depicting the preparation, consumption, and expulsion of food, a physiological motif that Maiolino