BLOODY BEAUTIFUL COMES TO TOKYO
Part of the BLOODY BEAUTIFUL programme.
In March 2024 Klasien and Natalie from the affect lab team travelled to Japan for field research and to meet kindred spirits who share our passion for menstruation and menopause rights. We teamed up with our cherished collaborator Hiro Ozaki (artist name Sputniko!) to present our collaboration to a Japanese audience for the first time.
We spoke about our one-of-a-kind-dance-party-come-protest at Paradiso, an iconic night venue in Amsterdam in 2023 where we danced for more inclusivity in the virtual world. Why? Because currently it’s impossible to show menstrual blood in metaverse environments or generate AI images with menstrual blood (for example on a tampon). And we want to see that change. Bodies bleed. Being restricted creates barriers where some bodies are “accepted” but others are not. This matters. We want to see all bodies in the metaverse and we want to have the choice to be represented in all our bloody beauty.
SPUTNIKO! designed and developed a series of avatars based on her project Menstrualverse - which we let loose on a virtual dance floor so participants could dance with a bleeding avatar in Paradiso. Yes, this really happened.
We showed a video of this party-come-protest to our audience in Tokyo and the response was incredible. We received countless stories about the social conditioning around menstruation in Japan (just push through!), manga comics that caused a stir amongst menstruators, android intimacy, queer and trans bodies (not being seen and heard enough), and many calls for “can we make menopause fun?”. The quick answer: Of Course.
We were honoured to share this work with our new friends in Tokyo, we hope to see you again soon!
Photos by Fullhouse Japan. Special thanks to Chargé d’Affaires Theo Peters, Press & Cultural officer Bas Valckx and the rest of the embassy team. A special thanks to embassy chef Richard Finnman for making all the food red ;-) this was BLOODY BEAUTIFUL.
BLOODY BEAUTIFUL
BLOODY BEAUTIFUL is a movement for normalising conversations about menstruation and menopause. Our goal is to creatively propagate new public narratives about the topic in a gender-forward way.
Photography by Fullhouse Japan