We maintain menstrual taboos ourselves. It’s in good taste to complain about your period. Interview with artist Iza Moczarna.
In your artistic work, you deal with the subject of femininity and its various aspects. You’ve been covering the issue of menstruation for several years now. Why the interest?
The issue of blood and menstruation came to me from two different places. On the one hand, there is this aspect of femininity that I deal with in professional, artistic and social work. In my work, I analyse the space broadly defined by culture as femininity mainly in terms of taboos. I explore what this taboo is, why it is the way it is and I often break it. And there are a lot of taboos on blood in our society. In the space of culture and automatically art, it is a strongly abject substance, and period blood in particular. So this is another taboo that I’m looking at. I definitely think they are worth breaking.
On the other hand, I’m someone who has started to live more in accordance with my own cycle relatively recently and has been getting a lot of strength from it. As I explored these spaces, I found that the cycle could give me a lot of good qualities in life. And since I’m around the menopausal age, my period will soon be over. It has made me feel that I might miss what this blood gives me in life and what it can give in general. I think it’s a really big gift that we have within us – people who menstruate, which usually means women. I wanted to honour it in some way. On another note, it’s also very much a generational issue, because when I started to discover what a great gift the cycle can be, my daughter started to enter that space. And while this initial period was very affirmative for her – she had her ceremony for entering menstruation – the clash with culture and what she received from the system and society made her enjoy it much less. I’d like to change that.
Why the taboo around menstruation?
It’s a very broad subject. I have a few leads of my own. Some obvious, some not. Generally, period blood is a part of what is considered exclusively feminine, and everything feminine in a patriarchal culture, which is hierarchical by definition, is inferior and treated with distrust. In the Bible, the most important book of the Judeo-Christian foundations of our culture, there are references to the impurity of menstruating women, the prohibition against approaching them in the time of blood and the rituals of purification after its completion. Menstruation is established on such a pattern. It is filth, impurity, shame.
In our culture, somewhat in contrast to Eastern culture, we also have a problem with bodily secretions, they are problematic, difficult on many levels. It is also worth remembering that we have only acquired the knowledge of how the human body functions relatively recently. We began acquiring it when science started to develop, but if we go back a few thousand years and look at the aspect of a being who bleeds once a month, is healthy and still functions well, and what’s more can give birth to another new life, it must have seemed strange and incomprehensible. Therefore, it could cause some kind of fear and thus be the basis for imposing taboos.
It’s one thing to have a taboo, though, but another thing to maintain it. We ourselves, as menstruating people who have grown in this particular culture, maintain the existing taboos and do not care much about breaking them. We often think that the time before menstruation and the time of menstruation itself is the time when we are weak, emotionally unstable, unavailable, not the way we “should” be. Even in feminist circles there is no acceptance of this time of being with oneself and within oneself. It is perceived as a weakness and this is something we cannot afford in the constant struggle against the patriarchy.
Today, we are at a point where, according to research carried out by the Kulczyk Foundation, one in four of us does not want to discuss menstruation in the presence of men.
I don’t think women really want to talk about it at all. In the presence or absence of men. This is interesting, because when preparing my project, I thought that I would create a space women would often, willingly come to, because they would want to talk about it – due to the inability to talk about it elsewhere. It’s an important part of their lives. But it turned out this is not the case. I often receive messages that this is a completely irrelevant topic, that it does not matter. There’s nothing to talk about. That is the silence of the taboo.
Tell us about the “Red Tent – Bleeding Exercises” workshop.
When I became interested in period blood, I spent a long time thinking about how I would like to work with this topic. I came to the conclusion that it would be important to create a platform to talk about it at all. As I said, one of the things that surprised me was just how silent people living in female bodies were about something that is an important aspect of their life. If we talk about it, it’s in a very pejorative context, which comes down to: “it’s best not to menstruate”. It is also in good taste to complain or have a “I grit my teeth and try to survive” attitude. Alternatively, it’s talked about in practical terms, asking if a friend can lend a tampon or a sanitary pad. This is a narrative that is very common among those involved, whereas there is almost no narrative around menstruation in the public space, it is practically not discussed. Only now is something changing around the world and in Poland. That’s why I wanted to create a platform to talk and share our own menstrual stories. Whatever they may be. It was important for me to bring the subject out of the area of silence. I was looking for ways to arrange it in the art space. The idea of a red tent was very close to my heart.
What is it about?
In some indigenous cultures of Africa, Asia, southern Europe and the Americas, the idea of a red tent, also called a lunar tent, was associated with an isolated space exclusively for women, where women celebrated their menstruation. And because they were cultures that lived in close proximity to nature, access to light, and how it was present, was a strong core of how they functioned. The menstrual cycle is a lunar cycle, as it is with a lot of other cycles occurring in nature. In connection with the occurrence of this lunar synchrony, all women of a given community had their periods at the same time, so they could celebrate the power of menstruation together, which turned out to be a source of great social strength. Depending on the culture, the practices of the red tent were different – sometimes they were associated with dance and movement, sometimes they were more static, but often mystical and spiritual. It was believed that the time of menstruation was a time for a woman to not only connect more and more deeply with herself, but also with her ancestors. Therefore, at that time, women prayed, meditated on their needs and sought a solution to problems not only for themselves, but also, and often above all, for the entire community. There were various transition ceremonies, such as the first menstruation or childbirth. Often it was a sacred time.
Of course, in a patriarchal context, the red tent has changed its meaning. We find references to how the Israelites sent women back to the red tent, not to seek solutions for the community, but because they were unclean and could not be part of the community. These days in Pakistan, for example, we find similar separation practices – locking menstruating women in isolation against their will. This takeover clearly shows how the same concept can be both reinforcing and oppressive, depending on how it is implemented. And what I wanted to do was go back to the original community aspect of the tent. I came up with the idea that we would sew one as a big patchwork consisting of small individual pieces that the women would create in my workshops. In the end, I would like this patchwork to actually become the Red Tent installation.
Was it about going back to having this shared experience?
As I mentioned, I wanted to create a space where we could talk about menstruation freely, but the collective aspect was an integral part of that. I think menstruation could be a tremendously powerful emancipation tool if we just wanted it to be. Menstruation is a phenomenon that has been given only to bodies with uteruses, and the vast majority of them are female bodies. It is an experience that, if only we broke the taboo around it, could create a huge relational ground for us women.
On a practical level, on the other hand, I went back to the idea of plucking feathers. This process in our culture was also collectively feminine. In late autumn or winter, when you wouldn’t work in the fields, women of different status and age met in the houses – maidens, girls, married women, widows. They sat and plucked feathers. Their hands were full, and their tongues loosened. It was easy to talk, tell stories, exchange experiences, joke – just be together. The tool for “plucking feathers” in this project is needlework. I invite menstruating people to create their object, a menstrual artefact – something that symbolises their menstrual experience. Then they sew these personal pieces onto a patchwork – the blood experience of other women, and in this way, from small individual stories, the great collective Red Tent is formed.
How do menstruating people talk about their periods during these meetings?
Very differently, because they are different and have different experiences. First of all, those people who come to the meeting are people who are willing to bring up this topic, which, as I said, is not that common. If they share their experiences, they talk about their first periods, about family relationships in this context, about men and women in the family, about how they experience their periods, about taboos and how difficult they are for them, about shame, about what it was like for them when they did not get their periods for various reasons, about how they waited for them. There are women who recount period-related trauma for the first time in their lives. Sometimes they talk about very difficult experiences, such as the experience of endometriosis. Sometimes they share their herstories for the first time in their lives. And sometimes they don’t say anything, they just experience being together. I remember a meeting where one girl kept silent the whole time. She made an artefact but didn’t say anything. When we were saying goodbye, she hugged me tightly and thanked me tremendously for the meeting, which, she said, changed her life. So sometimes something happens in the hidden space, because someone is not ready or there are no words to express the experience.
The most common narrative I encounter is that it is an unpleasant necessity that needs to be lived through somehow.
A lot of people think that. It doesn’t surprise me at all. The narrative around menstruation, if it exists at all, is uncool, and menstruation itself is unacceptable, painful and problematic in culture. And because there is a taboo around it, there is also a conspiracy of silence. Therefore, in the public space it’s not even appropriate to say that you’re on your period. Statistics show that staining clothes with blood, which is not anything unusual, often becomes a trauma.
Are you trying to change the attitude of women in the workshop, somehow disenchant the perception of menstruation?
That was not the idea. I would love it if women explored their cycle and their blood, because it is a wealth to really draw from, but I can only create and maintain the space to meet, to be, to exchange. Each person changes their attitude on their own if they choose to do so.
It would be good if the taboos around menstruation were broken in two ways – among women, but also by educating men. Unfortunately, you can still see comments from people who equate access to menstrual hygiene products in public toilets with access to razors.
Something that has been taboo for so many thousands of years is difficult to change by taking small steps only in the female aspect. The fact that we educate both women and men and the fact that the topic appears in public spaces is crucial. I believe that such an approach is associated with ignorance. We know a lot about the functioning of the male body, but not much about the female one. Even though it’s half of humanity. I’m talking about the publicly available knowledge we gain in school. The tendency to compare menstrual blood to faeces clearly shows that people have no idea how the female body functions, can’t tell one secretion from another. Of course, culturally, period blood is demonised because the context of disgust, the fact that menstrual blood in culture is unclean and disgusting, returns. The educational system, as we know, is based on a white heterosexual man as the default. It’s worth changing this, because even among women I observe a lack of knowledge about what exactly menstruation is, what the menstrual cycle is, where and why this blood flows. Or what the endometrium is. They have no basic knowledge of their own bodies. Now, in the perspective of building the “virtues of women”, I am afraid that they will know even less.
What’s the first step towards liking your period?
I have not yet met a woman who, while doing this “experiment”, if you will, that is deciding to live close and in accordance with her own cycle, would like to go back to where she was before. Learning about your physicality and recognising that you live according to a cycle goes against the grain of how culture wants us to live as women. Culture lives linearly and requires us to be productive 24 hours a day. Life according to a cycle means something completely different. It’s a complete break with this paradigm. The cycle shows you that you live according to a specific rhythm, where something begins, goes through a phase and ends. And it ends just so you can start over. It’s an experience that works on many very different levels.
For me, the cycle is quite a metaphysical experience and is, among other things, about passing. You go through a metaphorical death every month. You give away something precious. The possibility of a new life that flows with the monthly blood. You’re saying goodbye to it. Period blood itself, in a physiological sense, is a very valuable substance stuffed with all the best of the endometrium, which, when peeling, gives away what it has stored for a whole month in case the embryo should become implanted. So every month you say goodbye to something that’s important. You’re giving it a chance to die, so something new could be born. This translates into how you feel. You have moments during the month when you have more energy and readiness to act, you are more creative, but you also have moments when you don’t want to go after anything, just sit back. Lie down. Be. Our culture does not give much consent to “being” in opposition to “doing”.
It’s the little things like this that you start with – you allow yourself all the different states during the month, without judging it. You allow yourself to do nothing during menstruation if you have the option, of course, or reduce your activities significantly. To be more for yourself, less for the world. I deeply believe that if there is such an integrated decision about a change within you, then you are able to arrange this reality in such a way as to give this change the opportunity to happen. Moreover, I think that then the reality itself arranges itself in such a way that you have the opportunity to go through with this change. That’s my experience. In order to like your period, you first need to meet it, meet your body and truly acknowledge it.
Iza Moczarna - artist
Author: Justyna Grochal
Photo: artists private archives
The text was published in „Wysokie Obcasy” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 4 September 2021
