Portfolio
2024
1.
In the Softness of the Belly
2024 - Ongoing
2024 - Ongoing
Every year 73 million women worldwide have an abortion. In 2023 I was one of them. In the experience of facing my own abortion, the women around me started sharing their stories. These women were my mother, my grandmothers, my friends, acquaintances, and even strangers -women across several generation and several nationalities. I learned that I wasn’t alone in my experience or my feelings of shame but that they tied into a long lineage of women claiming the right to autonomy over their own bodies and lives. In this project, I delve into the interwoven care networks between women and their different perspectives on reproductive rights. This is facilitated through meetings and conversations among a group of women who all have a significant role in my life.
We all had our beginning.
A beginning where a fertilized egg attached itself in the womb.
The womb, at the center of the body of a woman.
A woman equally entitled to autonomy and freedom,
Freedom of choice.
Choice of what she does and doesn’t want to do with her body.
Her body, her reproductive rights.
In other words: basic human rights.
A beginning where a fertilized egg attached itself in the womb.
The womb, at the center of the body of a woman.
A woman equally entitled to autonomy and freedom,
Freedom of choice.
Choice of what she does and doesn’t want to do with her body.
Her body, her reproductive rights.
In other words: basic human rights.
When you are pregnant you don’t make up your mind that you want to have an abortion, you make up your mind that you don’t want to have a child”.
- Tracey Emin, “How it feels”, 1996, (min: 5:02 – min: 5:08)
- Tracey Emin, “How it feels”, 1996, (min: 5:02 – min: 5:08)
In the softness of the belly
Is a force of power
A fountain of joy and growth
Or a weapon of mass destruction
In the softness of the belly
Is a force more powerful than any gun
A force that can be abused
By those who fight with stolen weapons
In a war that was never theirs to fight in
In the softness of the belly
Is a force more powerful than any stolen weapon
The raw resilience
Of an intergenerational resistance
Demanding its autonomy
In the softness of the belly there is a war
It’s the war on women
- fought from within
Is a force of power
A fountain of joy and growth
Or a weapon of mass destruction
In the softness of the belly
Is a force more powerful than any gun
A force that can be abused
By those who fight with stolen weapons
In a war that was never theirs to fight in
In the softness of the belly
Is a force more powerful than any stolen weapon
The raw resilience
Of an intergenerational resistance
Demanding its autonomy
In the softness of the belly there is a war
It’s the war on women
- fought from within
“The sheets were stained with milk and blood. I thought: If someone took a picture of this bed, any decent person would think it was a reproduction of a young girl’s murder or an especially brutal kidnapping. I knew that a woman´s life can change into a crime scene at any point, I had yet to understand that I was already living inside this crime scene, that the crime scene wasn’t the bed but the body, that the crime had already happened.”
- Johanna Lykke Holm, Strega, 2020