Actions for Knowledge Repair (Pink/Red/Purple)

5th June 1pm Lightfoot Room, Old Divinity School, St John's College

In the throes of desire, our bodies destruct. Skin speed-sliding over skin breaks the thin contraceptive layer of rubber between us. Already a breakout, a border transgressed.  Differences dissolve into formless liquid space and break loose into my body. The ‘swimmers’ are already on their way to my cervix. One must have flung itself into my ovum triggering that first doubling.  If not a violence, then certainly, a disruption of the rhythm of monthly menses, the pull and push of progesterone and oestrogen that has moved me since puberty in a tidal continuum. The contrapuntal patterns were now changed, pregnancy ensued and for a while, the foetus became our little ‘broken condom’.
 
Actions for Knowledge Repair (Pink/Red/Purple) will be a grid of moving moth holes mending and un-mending.  They will be accompanied by heartbeats that align and then don’t as they weave their contrapuntal stories. Those stories will map conception, pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding as small yet violent disruptions that discontinue and disrupt the continuum that came before, only - to begin another anew. 
 
In terms of public health, a condom breaking, a tooth cracking, an emergency caesarean or mastitis are meagre in significance, but the scale of these experiences feels gigantic when they happen to you.  If they can be told and retold, relayed and mapped as more than medical, there is an opportunity to learn and to heal which, changes the patterns again. If each small/large event is borne privately, women’s experiences can’t be fed back into practice (designed by others) to improve policy and healthcare.
 
Actions for Knowledge Repair will audit and make material these small but big disruptions to the body, the psyche and the timelines of our lives driving us to question the entangled futures of body, medicine, art, violence and repair at the most visceral level.

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