Object of Disobedience
2020 - Assemblage, found materials, 37 x 45 cm - Sara Sani
Sara Sani (1984, Modena, Italy) is a photographer and visual artist that lives and works in Athens, Greece. After studies in foreign languages she moved to Barcelona in 2008 to pursue a career as a self-taught photographer. There she shot portraits and editorials for local streetwear and skateboard magazines, such as Lamono and Uno Skate Magazine. She continued her career as freelance photographer in Los Angeles and New York, where she focused on casting personally the people with whom she wanted to work. In 2014 she returned to Europe, based between London, Paris and Barcelona, to collaborate with international brands such as Stussy, Vans and Carhartt while working with the local youth underground scene. She spent 2017 in Tokyo where she was commissioned on various projects for magazines such as The New Order and Office, including a series on the practice of Shibari from a woman’s point of view. Between 2018 and 2020 she attended the MA Contemporary Images at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive.
https://cargocollective.com/sarasani
‘Object of Disobedience’
Text by Beatrice Zerbato
Object of Disobedience is a project that consists in the reconstruction of a Del-Em, an iconic feminist technology developed in 1971 by Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman, two American activists members of a reproductive health self-help group. Performed for women by women, it was conceived to perform ME (menstrual extraction) and early pregnancy terminations between women who cannot afford a private clinic, or that just want to pass their entire period all at once, avoiding cramps and mood swings.
Recently, this tool has regained popularity in countries where abortion is still illegal, between women that cannot have access to contraceptives and health support, or cannot travel to obtain an abortion.
The Del-Em acts as a political tool that restores to women the possibility of deciding autonomously on their reproductive feminine power. It is a symbol of technological feminism, which seeks autonomous alternatives to combat subjugation.
To mention Laboria Cubonik’s 'No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique.’ Laboria Cuboniks talks about Xenofeminism as a feminism adapted to a technological mediated reality, to abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. ‘This is a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position.’
Sara Sani chose the Del-Em as a modern symbol of disobedience against those powers that exercise control over the female reproductive system. This suction device undertakes an important social role because it can easily be assembled by converting cheap objects available at home, like flexible tubes and preserves jars.
The physical reconstruction of this device suggests a reflection on the importance of women’s independence over a medicine characterised by the professionalisation and masculinisation of its practice. It is a re-appropriation of the feminine knowledge excluded by medicine, that was part of a tradition associated particularly to herbalists, midwives and witches.
Based on a DIY (do it yourself) approach, the Del-Em assists the partecipative exchange of knowledge between women and offers the opportunity to confront a part of our biology that society still wants to suppress.
This self-experimentation on the corporeity and the participation of a community is an empowering experience for women who want to claim back the control of their bodies, and to counter the pervasive culture of shame around the reproductive body and its fluids. This homemade device is customised with pink and light blue ribbons, commonly used in Italy to announce new births, transforming it into a totemic object with a pop-kitsch aesthetic, not immediately refereable to the taboo of menses and abortion.
Read Sara’s essay on Beatrice Zerbato’s work HERE.
