In a snapshot:

The idea for this project was born out of curiosity when we discovered the Vagina Museum.
We started questioning why a Vagina Museum should exist, what kind of contributions it makes. Soon after this, it lost its space. We then saw it as an opportunity to challenge the idea of heritage spaces and think about how knowledge related to our cycles has been transmitted to us.

As we travel across the world we have been thinking a lot about our well-being. This has drawn attention to our hormonal cycles and how they affect our daily life. Bleeding is a fraction of the entire experience, and one that many people do not have.

Our approach includes intersectional, intercultural, queer-feminist lenses since we come from 4 different backgrounds and contexts (Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, India, and Colombia), and identify ourselves differently on the gender and sexuality spectrum.

Heritage is a version of the past received through objects and display, representations and engagements, spectacular locations and events, memories and commemorations, and the preparation of places for cultural purposes and consumption.
(Emma Waterton, Steve Watson, Heritage as a Focus of Research: Past, Present and New Directions)

Cultural heritage is, in its broadest sense, both a product and a process, which provides societies with a wealth of resources that are inherited from the past, created in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. (Unesco Culture for Development Indicators Methodology Manual, pg 132)

The concept we'd like to focus on is that Heritage is received, and although the word points to the past, heritage is lived and exists in the present. It is the way it lives in the present that decides how it is bestowed to future generations. We refrain from thinking about heritage in the biological sense, since we find that it can lead to discriminatory thinking, but also because it doesn't highlight the fact that heritage is knowledge, and knowledge is asymmetrically received and given.

We've seen various examples of performances in museums that are in conversation with museum curation, legacies and political presents and pasts. Museums are undoubtably sites where people view, learn about, and can access their own or others' heritage. And thus, should the opportunity present itself, this performance could be done in the context of a museum or gallery. However, to me, a museum is where heritage is transported and displayed. On a personal note, I feel no attachment to museums, and often am completely overwhelmed by the amount of information they present. I also see the heritage performed in museums as the heritage of ways of collecting, presenting, viewing, and consuming history. Until recently, I didn’t see museums as places where heritage could continue to live on, as opposed to be fossilized and preserved. Thus, limiting this performance to a museum space, reduced the potential of highlighting lived heritage; especially since it takes away an integral element of where such knowledge is transmitted- In spaces such as our homes. We want to view spaces related to the transmission of knowledge about our periods as sites of heritage. Furthermore, we want to think about the ways in which these sites have influenced such knowledge, be it through learned actions, mindsets, corporeal experiences, understanding of public and private, and social and medical attitudes.

The concept - Performance of Heritage- brings to mind many questions. The most preliminary being what is heritage and performance. Or rather, what became more important as we though about this project is - What do I/we consider heritage and performance to be. And then, the verbiage implores us to ask- what is the performance of heritage, or in other words, how and where can heritage be performed?

While it didn't seem so to us in the beginning, we often felt stuck as we tried to think about menstrual cycles as a whole. It was hard for us to move away from blood-centric thinking, also because we ourselves have only started to give importance to, and identify how we we feel at other times in our cycles. Bleeding is the part of our cycle that we can identify. This is despite having apps and resources that now ask us to log symptoms throughout our cycles. And during our research we also noticed that much work in museums and performances is done around bleeding, the taboos associated, and the activism required for equity.However, the same attention is not given to the experience of hormonal changes and cycles across ages and genders.

We want to reclaim spaces that are deemed mundane, as sites of heritage. Bedrooms, kitchens, toilets, gardens, nature, streets, classrooms, all hold special significance to how we understand and corporeally experience menstrual cycles. The savoir-faire around menstrual cycles is most often transmitted in these spaces, and this transmission influences a new generation’s ways of performing or performativity and approaches around this topic. This know-how is often transmitted orally, and today, in modern times, perhaps through new books aimed for youth, or social media. We inherit mentalities anchored in contexts, actions or one could say movements associated with menstruation and related objects, and interpretation of menstrual cycles through explicit transmission as well observation of gendered actions.

Heritage is a term that carries many meanings and connotations. Here are a couple of definitions that sparked some thoughts that propelled my thinking for this project.

The concept of Site is highly relevant to our performance since it is site-specific in its ideation but due to the fact that the performative actions and knowledge we acquire are specific to rooms, places, and locations. The performance is born from sites such as toilets, bedrooms, cars, gardens, nature and our aim is to perform them in such sites. A website I found particularly helpful as I tried and make sense of my intentions through theory is http://intermsofperformance.site/. Through Joanna Haigood, I thought of sites as places that held traces of memories and events. Through Simon Dove, I thought of Site as a place for which a performance is specifically made. Through Tania El Khoury, I thought of Site as a collaborator, an irreplaceable contributor to our understanding of heritage.

To perform is to do
To perform is to behave
To perform is to show
(Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblettt, Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium, pg 1–2)

What about the many performances in everyday life? Playing professional roles, gender and race roles, and shaping one’s identity are not make-believe actions (as playing a role on stage or in a film most probably is).The performances of everyday life ... “make belief”– create the very social realities they enact. In “make-believe” performances, the distinction between what’s real and what’s pretended is kept clear. (Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, pg 35)

While thinking about our performance, we found it important to think about 2 ways of framing the term performance-

1. Actions (the doing and behaving) around periods 'as performance'.
2. The performance- it's doing and showing- 'is performance'.

Part of our performance is inspired by actions, or things done that can be seen as performance, or even in some cases as performative. The performance also tries to make visible corporeal experiences of the phases of menstrual cycles through an installation, and give ethnographic accounts of hormonal cycle related experiences through cinetracts.