dear people who menstruate
dear people who menstruate
Embedded Files
Tampons bloom and flourish in a tribute to Judy Chicago‘s 1972 work „Menstruation Bathroom.“ Since that time, unfortunately, little has changed about the taboo surrounding menstruation. The taboo surrounding menstruation continues to threaten or limit the lives of many women and menstruating individuals, for example, through exclusion, lack of hygiene items, access to clean water, and lack of safe spaces. The title of the video piece refers to an online debate about an article that used the term „people who menstruate“ and opened up the topic of menstruation in terms of the diversity of people who menstruate. Unfortunately, this article was accompanied by a trans-hostile network debate. The film was made using an elaborate stop-trick technique. This technique provides a link to the first special effect in film history: the execution of Queen Mary - (1895).
Coincidentally, Bloody Mary is also a code word for menstruation. Special effects are interesting in the context of menstruation because it still causes a stir when the period is explicitly shown or thematized in films, while the depiction of blood in conjunction with violence is a common image in the film landscape.
Getting under the skin
Getting under the skin / A project with Alice Hulan 2021
Most of the time, grass grows over things.
We remove this grass to see what lies beneath in oblivion. These are names and stories of women* who were imprisoned and murdered in the Kaplanhof women's prison during National Socialism, forcibly sterilized and forced to have abortions in the Landesfrauenklinik or shot in the Schörgenhub labour education camp. There is not much room for commemorating the female* victims of National Socialism in a city that is full of architectural elements from the Nazi era that were built with the help of forced labor. The few monuments to resistance fighters are hidden or overgrown. The individual streets named after them are far away from the city center. Yet there is no lack of names or information about them: There are numerous interviews with these women in the archives of the city of Linz; they provide a detailed picture of their resistance, their time and conditions of imprisonment, their persecution. But these voices rarely leave the archive. The stories of the so-called Eastern workers, who were abducted in large numbers from their home countries, brought to Upper Austria and often forced into prostitution, are even more obscure.
Forced sterilizations and abortions were carried out on them in the former state women's clinic. After their liberation, the "Eastern workers" experienced decades of stigmatization as traitors in their home country. Their traumatizing experiences of deportation, sexual degradation and/or destruction as well as their deprivation are still a taboo subject today.
For the video installation, we used our fingers to remove moss and lichen from the overgrown inscription on the memorial, which is intended to commemorate the Schörgenhub labor education camp.
Remis, 2011, Videoinstallation von Romina Dodic, Rebekka Hochreiter und Elke Meisinger
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