Weaving Reproductive Justice

Introduction

The panel below is interactive. Use your mouse or tap left / right at the edges of the display to move through the pieces. You can also zoom in (magnifier bottom left) to see the pieces in more detail.

Content in here - transcription of copy for accessibility etc.

About the project

In recent decades, sexual violence in war contexts has gained an increasingly central place in the struggles for truth, justice, and reparations. However, this attention has not been extended to reproductive violence. Experiences such as forced sterilisation, abortion, contraception, and pregnancies, as well as parenthood that resulted from conflict-related sexual violence, continue to remain invisible.

The feminist collective SisterSong proposes the reproductive justice framework to think, organize, and advance towards bodily, sexual, and reproductive autonomy. This includes the right to have or not to have children; to experience pregnancies and give birth in contexts free from oppression, exploitation, and violence; and to rise families in dignified environments. Inspired by this framework, this exhibition is an invitation to consider how war has transformed the reproductive lives of people. It also encourages us to think about how to grant care, sexuality, and pleasure a central place in our struggles to build peace in a diverse and freeing way.

‘Weaving reproductive justice’ brings us closer to the experiences of four Afro-Colombian cisgender women and an Afro-Colombian transgender man who became pregnant as a result of sexual violence perpetrated by members of armed groups. For various reasons, that in some cases include lack of access to safe, free, and unstigmatized abortion services, gave birth to their children. In each piece, they share their frustrations, pains, joys, and ambiguities. They also share the networks of solidarities, of care work, that have enabled them to rebuild their lives and dream with futures free from reproductive violence.

The Team

Esperanza, artist
Alegría, artist
Fénix Renaciente, artist
Brigit, artist
Víctor Manuel Cortés Rodríguez, artist
Naki, directore artistique Posá Suto
Judith Barrera, directora creativa Pulpoink Casataller
Karol Cardona, maestra de patchwork apliqué
Andrea Herrera, maestra de bordado
Alejandra María Ochoa Zapata, psicóloga
Paulina Rivera, asociada legal Women’s Link Worldwide
Matilde Guerrero Gutiérrez de Piñeres, curaduría
Mauricio Ramírez Vásquez, producción
María Cecilia Ibáñez, abogada senior Women’s Link Worldwide
Tatiana Sánchez Parra, investigadora principal

This exhibition is possible thanks to the support of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the University of Edinburgh, Women’s Link Worldwide, Pulpoink Casataller and Posá Suto.

Fénix Renaciente - Ese embarazo fue un duelo

Fénix Renaciente gave birth to her first daughter at 15 years old. ‘That pregnancy was insane! I used to eat everything; chicken wings, choclitos, mango, even dirt! I loved it!’

A couple of months after her daughter was born, Fénix Renaciente was raped by a paramilitary and became pregnant.

Unlike the joy she felt during her first pregnancy, this one was a great sorrow. Instead of feeling and looking glowing and happy, this pregnancy nearly killed her; it was drying her out from the inside. ‘That belly was nothing’.

Fénix Renaciente - La cicatríz del Fénix

When Fénix Renaciente woke up, she was confused, and everything felt hazy.

In front of her, on a stretcher, was a man who was dying. On another stretcher, she could see a disassembled young man, barely surviving, connected to several machines.

It had been five days since she had an emergency caesarean section, and less than eight months since, at the age of 16, she had become pregnant after having been raped by one of the paramilitaries who had her community under confinement.

Amidst the fear and the pain, her memories are also blurry of when a man nurse told her to sign a paper so she wouldn’t have any more children, and of when, after she said she didn’t want to sign, the nurse replied that he could sign for her. ‘You didn’t let us do surgery. I’ll see you back here in nine months, once again with your huge belly’, the doctor said when he next saw her.

Esperanza - Una mujer de hacha y machete

From a young age, Esperanza has loved horses. Not only have they been her most loyal work companions in the field, but alongside them, she is a true warrior: a woman of the axe and the machete.

Esperanza spent her childhood at her father’s house with her stepmother, who never pretended to have any affection towards her.

Her memories of those years do not include games, friendships, or care; rather, they revolve around heading straight home from school to weed, uproot, plant yuca, and clean the house. Always anticipating scolding and mistreatment. Esperanza recalls the stone path to school without shoes.

She remembers the rice with meat and coriander that her stepmother cooked, and having to wait until the family was distracted to sneak a spoon into the pot and eat.

Esperanza had no boyfriends before she became pregnant. She was still at school the first time she had sex with someone; an older man from her community who joined the paramilitaries that had arrived at their vereda, and who stayed for over four years.

Esperanza - Maternaje colectivo

Both sisters were pregnant at the same time. In both cases, the biological father was one of the hundreds of paramilitaries that had arrived to their community in the mountains of the north of Cauca.

In Esperanza’s case, the man was from the community but had joined the organisation. In her sister’s case, he came from another part of the country. Esperanza gave birth first.

With her was her mother, who is a midwife and has delivered more babies than she can count. The labour started around one o'clock in the morning. Esperanza woke up sweating, overwhelmed by the intense heat emanating from her own body.

She went outside to splash water on herself from the lavadero; the heat and confusion only increased. Her mother heard noises and went out to see what was happening.

Happiness comes in the most unexpected forms. For Esperanza, happiness took the form of cheese with bocadillo, guava paste.

Even on the day she found out she was pregnant, while she sat crying on one of the pavements near the health centre, it was the bocadillo that sweetened her distress a little.

Reluctantly, Esperanza told her mother who the father was.

Her mother, always ready for action, confronted him, uniform and all: ‘Are you going to take responsibility?’

He never came near her again, and in the following months he sent some money: sometimes 50,000, sometimes 100,000 pesos. It wasn't much, but it eased the worries and expenses of the pregnancy.

It even afforded a bit of happiness in the form of guava paste wrapped in banana leaves.

Brigit - Brevo

‘A brew of brevo tea almost killed my daughter’, Brigit says, as if titling the story she’s about to tell about her childbirth.

Brigit was studying nursing, far from her homeland, when a fellow student advised her on how to shake off the chill before giving birth and avoid complications: brevo tea with cinnamon. You boil the brevo leaf with cinnamon and let it steep. When it's lukewarm, you drink part of it, and the rest is used to wash your belly.

The due date they had given her came and went, yet Brigit hadn’t gone into labour.

So, along with her mother, who had also had to leave her homeland and move to the city, they went to the market to get brevo leaves and cinnamon.

By eleven on Maundy Thursday morning, Brigit felt her first contraction.

At first, everything was as expected: manageable. By one in the afternoon, things changed.

With one contraction after another, they took her to the hospital, where she didn’t get a moment’s rest until, three hours later, her daughter was born.

Alegría - Bordando futuro, Weaving future

Alegría has the power of creation in her hands; as she embroiders flowers, she also weaves tranquillity for herself. Alegría’s son didn’t grow up with her; she had to send him to the city to live with her sister, which tied a knot in her heart that has only grown heavier over the years, growing inwards.

In the threads, Alegría finds the stitches to release the feelings that choke her. These are the feelings that settled in her body more than 20 years ago when she became pregnant by a paramilitary who forced himself upon her.

In the workshops she has attended, they’ve told her to speak, to tell her story, that ‘this way, you’ll free yourself, you’ll become a different person’.

But this is not Alegría’s experience; for her, words are loaded with pain, they scrape her soul because they invite the past to continue lodging in her life, ‘instead of forgetting, you end up remembering even more’.

Alegría - El sueño de florecer, The Dream of Blooming

She closes her eyes, and the scent of an unfamiliar flower reaches her. She can sense its sweetness, with tiny red petals, with leaves of a deep, intense green. The fragrance is so sweet that it envelops her completely.

She makes herself a cup of tea, and Alegría feels light. ‘Full of life, of joy. Of immense freedom’. She doesn’t know what it might taste like, but she is certain it will be a unique flavour she hasn’t experienced yet. ‘Of relief, of tranquillity’.

Alegría knows that the water from the flor de golondrina helps during childbirth, and that from the nacedero aids in bringing down breastmilk.

She knows that somewhere outside, in a garden she has not yet visited and does not yet know how to reach, there is a plant for what she needs more than anything in the world: happiness.