“WASTED” IS THE RITUALIZED MEDIATION OF A TABOO.
This taboo serves to malign women. To make them feel ashamed of the biological working of their own body. To make them feel like a prisoner in their own body.
Menstruation still to this day in so-called “emancipated” Europe is an activity that is fraught with tension and fear for women.
Self-loathing, self-disgust are but some of the features of this taboo. This kind of attitude is not concommitant with the ostensible liberation that Western women have gone through over the past 40 years.
Wasted is an attempt to break through this literally “unspeakable” taboo; to meditate on, and to mediate on, the reality of women’s biology, of the working of the woman’s body.
Wasted, in its very title, speaks of the menstruation in terms that challenge existing preconceptions.
Is menstrual blood “waste matter”? For so it is represented in the barrage of advertisements that assail women on a daily basis, chanting the mantra of “hygiene and ease” at that “time of the month”.
Wasted refers ironically to the notion that a month that has gone by without a woman becoming pregnant is a month “wasted” - and the menstrual blood a sign of this.
Wasted as a multi-disciplinary “gesamtkunstwerk” deploys a legion of 12000 women whose evidence of bleeding combines with Tomoko Mukaiyama’s piano performance and sound recordings to testify of a growing new consciousness among post-feminist European women - that not enough has been spoken on this taboo subject, that the “secret” of the month must for once and for all be revealed.
One cannot but be reminded of medieval composer Hildegard Van Bingen’s great work for 10 000 Virgins, to which Mukaiyama seems to be obliquely referring in her monumental sound architecture Wasted. It would appear that those 10 000 virgins just started bleeding. The girls have become women. Viva!
aryan kaganof
september 2008
October 8th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
viva! un-secret the beautiful blood…
my wasted is when i drink too much and trip over things
October 10th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
why are we waiting…
1999!!!
‘when we come to recognise the taste of our menstrual blood on the lips or fingers or penis of a lover then maybe we will realise that it is…not dangerous…’
and…
‘the shedding of blood is not an excretion but protection of the sloughing womb from infection…’
g.g.
and….
‘Yesterday I felt like shit, so I rode my bike around town and repeatedly grafittied “The revolution is not being televised” in paint pen. It was a “pointless” action, but it nonetheless healed me to do this. It was an act of love for that “hooligan” Arundhati Roy. It was an act of self-love. I don’t expect it to change the world, but on the other hand, I know it will.’
i.m.