A psychologist, dancer, and researcher from Colombia.
Bleeding is a fraction of the entire expierence,
and one that
many people do not have.
Cycles
A new approach for periods and heritage
Once we discovered the existence of the Vagina Museum, we started questioning why a vagina museum should exist and what kind of contributions it makes. Soon after this, it lost its space. We saw it as an opportunity to challenge the idea of heritage spaces and think about how knowledge related to our periods and bodies has been transmitted to us.
The first image coming to our minds was the blood, but why do we associate periods solely with bleeding? How do we move away from this overfixation with blood in the representation and understanding of menstruation? This was one of the first questions we asked ourselves as we travel across the world and we started thinking about our well-being. This has drawn attention to our hormonal cycles and how they affect our daily life and decision-making.
During the process of thinking, we realized that most of the knowledge (or lack of knowledge) regarding this topic was transmitted from one generation to another in the most intimate spaces since periods are considered to be a private experience.
Thus, this journey started, sharing stories and having discussions around the concepts of periods, heritage, and historical spaces...
Our Team.
This project was created with an intersectional, intercultural, queer-feminist approach since we come from 4 different backgrounds.
Positionality
My name is Ana Gabriela Hernandez
I was born in Cúcuta, Colombia, just on the border with Venezuela.
I am the daughter of a single mother who is a lawyer.
I grew up in a very catholic family.
I never lived the internal armed conflict of my country directly, only through my mom's stories in the court and the forced displaced women who worked in my house and looked after me when I was a child.
I came to Bogotá to get my bachelor's in psychology at a public and left-side university.
I studied a postgraduate program in peacebuilding at the same university.
I came to Europe to study for a master's degree in dance anthropology and to live in English for the first time.
I have been training in belly dancing for almost 9 years now and I am a social dancer since born.
I have worked with children, elder women with disabilities, refugees, victims, and queer people.
I am queer.
I got my first period when I was 14.
I have had a regular cycle from the beginning, not particularly painful except for some periods in my life when I have vomited and almost fainted during the first 2 hours of my menstruation. I still don't know exactly why it happens and why it stops but I suspect it is a kind of somatization, and in each moment of my life, I've somatized for different reasons.
I am against every type of hormonal contraception due to the hard effects it implies, even though I have used the pill without secondary effects before and it meant empowerment at some point in my life. I feel my body works perfectly without it and I don't want to ruin its balance.
I have particularly difficult PMS, I feel I become insane before my period, I cannot control my feelings and I actively avoid making decisions or getting into difficult conversations during these days.
Since I started dancing, having control and understanding of my body has been particularly important for me, I am very aware of my body as the mean through which I get to know the world and I like feeling control over it, reading its signs and giving it what it needs at each moment.
Our stories
I kneeled on the floor of a dirty hostel's toilet and vomited for the first 2h of my period, I felt my uterus wanted to kill me while my friends feeling worried and impotent brought me some tea and painkillers. This happened every month since I moved abroad. I talked to my doctor and shen said it was not my period, it was actually the PMS, the pre mentrual syndrom you know, but is there even something happening before and after bleeding?
Also, talking to my therapist she said it may be my body trying to throw out something that's repressed inside, ¡oh my God! wait, I may be gay, I thought. Since then, each time I feel nauseous in the beginning of my period I talk to my uterus 'we already know we're gay, you can calm down' and it stops.
We have so many stories and when we challenged ourselves to think outside of bleeding, we had many more.