Our performance will take place in a house, which we consider a site of heritage. For our performance idea, we need 4 rooms. Thus we will choose a house that has a bedroom, a kitchen, a toilet, a garden and a communal space. There, we will guide the audience to visit in a private space where personal experiences become public through the interaction, where private discussions happens publicly.
There are three main components to our installation:
1. Projections of short ethnographic accounts in the form of cinetracts. The films are of people’s experiences with endometriosis, PCOS, menopause, Hormone Replacement Therapy.
2. We want to work with an artist, who can make a sculpture of figure or body that highlights the somatic experiences of hormones through a light installation.We would like to place lights inside the sculpture in order to visualize these experiences and make them visible on the body. This attempts to depict and make public individual, private, and often silenced somatic experiences.
3. We will place objects that make this supposedly private experience public. These objects include, stained clothes, water jugs, menstrual products, warm water bottles, natural remedies for skin care, and clothing items etc.
We currently imagine 3 live performances located in the toilet, the kitchen, and the garden.
In the toilet we envision a live performance including storytelling while enacting different movements related to transmitted knowledge about how to change the pads, faced challenges in the toilet like not finding a bin, washing, cleaning, everything while trying to make it discret.
In the kitchen the audience will be immersed sensorially through the smell of natural remedies, the performers preparing them and explaining how this knowledge was transmitted. In this room, the public will be allowed to interact and ask questions to the performers, as well as perceiving the kitchen as a place of reflection and transmission happens.
The last part of the performance happens in the garden where the performer walks with a wash jug and basin (to wash pads and underwear) approximately 500 meters to reach the toilet. After a performer washes their underwear and tries to secretly change their pads behind the toilet. The garden performance shows infrastructure and its obstacles and how the private intersects with the public.
In the largest room of the site, at the end of this journey, a communal activity will take place.
About the Audience
We would like the space to welcome all types of audiences; a space that emanates care so that everyone feels invited to join with their family and friends, a space that gives food for thought for children and adults, people with diverse gender identities, and different cycle experiences. The project does not target a niche community but rather aims at sharing knowledge and advising awareness as a way of conversing between different generations, cultural backgrounds, gender identities, stories, etc. The aim is to bring the public into a private space while experimenting with the established boundaries of what is publicly shared about cycles and what is kept private.
Gathering is part of the performance. We want to involve narrations, stories, conversations, open debates, exercises, etc. open to all (we could go up to 15 people per journey). The public is allowed to react and becomes part of the performance through their interventions, drawing, moving, etc. The aim is allowing the audience to speak, thus, to sentitize, to build knowledge and for activism.
Notes on Curation:
For the curatorial practice, we acknowledge that we have an agency over our selective process and the projection of collected stories.