As part of my doctoral research, I have been experimenting with my own menstrual blood. What I investigate is the aesthetic / erotic dimension of knowledge production, and how we can think together with what is normally hidden, what Bruno Latour calls the purification process of scientific making. So I chose to work with the leftovers that were supposed to be invisible, blood-stained toilet papers.
I learned since I was a little girl to fold these papers, once, twice, three times, so that the image of the blood wouldn’t bother. As my mother repeated almost exhaustively in an attempt to educate me, “no one is obliged to see”. With these remains, I perform a maneuver that consists of exploding the folds, and multiplying them to infinity, creating a kaleidoscope.
For Walter Benjamin, the kaleidoscope is a box of visual malice, which allows you to create history with the very debris of history. The closed and symmetrical perfection of the visible forms owes its inexhaustible richness to the open and erratic imperfection of a dust of debris. So is my kaleidoscope, malicious and seductive like a bloody trap.
You can see the kaleidoscope here. You can see below the original image I used in the kaleidoscope. It’s a photo taken from an experiment carried out in October 2021, where I gathered all the toilet papers I used during my period that month, and glued them all in sequence on a cardboard.
[work in process]