Four Directions of Pleasure and Performance Activism

02

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 -Marita, Kyrgyzstan -Aiza, India -Anisha , and Colombia - Ana Gabriela), and identify ourselves differently on the gender and sexuality spectrum.

We are challenged by our blood-centric thinking when recalling our memories of our own experience. Bleeding was the part of our cycle that we could identify and we also noticed that much work in museums and performances is done around bleeding, the taboos associated, and the activism required for equity.

Reclaiming 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 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.

inspiration is coming from collective power of collaboration

And then the concept - Performance of Heritage brings so many questions. When I think about it first, the heritage for me as a Kyrgyzstani woman is a geoheritage (Sharples, 1993), so these are landscapes such as mountains, trees, rivers, grasses, ground, etc and rituals around those spaces. Rituals can be performative which has been always a huge part being nomadic Kyrgyzstani since Tengrianism, a cult of the sky, (Religion, State & Society, Vo!. 31, No. 2, 2003). as well as shamanism was a very important part of the beliefs and values of Kyrgyz people.

However, I question the conventional notion of rituals. For me, a Kyrgyzstani woman walking to the toilet during her menstruation can be perceived as one of her daily ritualistic routine. She usually prepares all necessary stuff to clean, change herself and wash her pads or panties discreetly. The whole body movements and necessary belongings for her hygiene, lack of conditions and access to the infrastructure can be seen as ritualistic performance so to say interaction with her own body and spaces (such as toilets) where personal is political. My goal of Performance is to immerse the audience into a performer's embodied lived experience.

"slowing down of the tempo characterizing daily life; less chaotic, more ordered and controllable where certain aspects of lived reality are scrutinized and others not" KJERTI LARSEN SAYS ABOUT RITUALS

Kapferers RECENT WORK DEFINES THAT RITUALS, ‘allows for all kinds of potentialities of human experience to take shape and form’

Public Toilet of Karakol Regional Hospital (Kyrgyzstan)

Photo credit by Folke Eikmeier

Usual common toilet in rural areas in Kyrgyzstan

Photo credit by www.diariesof.lu

4 sides of horizons, 4 sites of pleasure

This is a Future workshop I invite people to try with me in order to feel what is the emotional state of their bodies experiencing through engaging with four sides of horizons in the nature - East, West, South and North. This can be a performance of bodies moving and interacting Somatically with four directions, each of them has shamanic perspectives and narratives (Gaya Staff, 2020). What kind of movements are emerging when my body can feel each direction according to their shamanic characteristics?

What if I ask myself as a performer and interact with the audience, what I feel moving around the four sides of to be more exact to be aware of my cycles, of my emotional being? The question takes its point when the audience asks If I can find pleasure in my moving or not moving body?

What if I will not rationalize but rather feel what is going on right at the moment? Do I want to move or I do not?

This question is to experience how sides and sites can affect the body in finding pleasure in our bodies through making it performative.

I inspired by this Video made by Nastya Dmitreeva during my fieldwork on contact improvisation, almaty, Kazakhstan 2022. We started as a warm up to interact with a nature and then with each other. for me this extract of video can represent a PERFORMANCE of pleasure in our bodies.

I hope you can enjoy my workshop with me and find some plasure too,

with shamanic love, Aiza, 19.04.2023

Where is The pleasure coming FROM?

I do acknowledge and share with my shaman ancestors is that deep gratitude to the nature and from my shaman ANcestors is definitely rituals with water, plants, fire which are OT-ATA (Fire-Father) UMAI-ENEY (Mother-Earth), that the names I had keep hearing as a child from my mother and other female ancestors such as grand mothers and grand aunties. As a Erasmus student in mobile moving the last three years all the time and not having a specific place to live or specific feeling "home" I started to relate to a nature differently, to express my sense of be-longing that is how I can find in my body some piece or flow of feeling a pleasure and acknowledging my hormonal cycles despite where I’m right now through the spaces of my geoheritage. Idea of pleasure in movements comes from my experience in activism where activists politicized collective healing and well-being, where "Pleasure Activism" is becoming a separate movement. Each of us can define its own feeling of pleasure, one cannot know what is a pleasure for another. (brown, 2019)

Bibliography/Resources

Brown. A.M. (2019) Pleasure activism : the politics of feeling good, AK Press, Chico, CA, 2

Maj, J.(2013) The Significance of Intersectionality for Feminist Political Theory Available at https://www.e-ir.info/2013/11/01/the-significance-of-intersectionality-for-feminist-political-theory/ (Accessed: 10. 04. 2023)

Staff, G. (2020) The Four Directions and Medicine Wheel of Native Americans Available at https://www.gaia.com/article/four-directions (Accessed: 18.04.2023)

Carfax Publishing, Taylor and Francis group, Religion, State & Society, Vo!. 31, No. 2, 2003.

Larsen, K. (2009) Ritual, Performance and Bodily Transformation Available at https://journals.openedition.org/actesbranly/449?lang=en (Accessed: 18.04.2023)

My colleagues' links to their portfolio Anisha https://anishaanantpurkar.hotglue.me

Marita https://www.canva.com/design/DAFgYMWp33Q/Cg83SfmMUEH-J-S9G3jskg/edit?analyticsCorrelationId=6996803f-c71c-4ba2-b5e0-818b2506c7f4

Ana https://anagabis496.wixsite.com/hormonalcycles