2020-2021

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As a marker to the connection of the family I was reuniting with, I was instructed to use my menstrual flow to affirm my presence and theirs. The use of my menstrual blood reclaimed my sovereignty as a woman and positioned me as custodian in my claim to my birth rite (and this meant everything). This blood, symbolic for it would be the last flow of my womanhood, marked more than my existence, it was a ritual, a remembering of where I had been, come from and was part of. Those first marks made upon the walls that signal and verify not just proof of our existence back then, but our sustained presence. Is it not blood that was used. Is it not women that made their marks, counting the cycles of the moon. (Part of the series: The Object of my Gaze). 
 

©Marcia Michael, Visual Artist, London