Parturition

The project looks to take childbirth outside the hospital, as it is neither a disease, nor an illness but to introduce such as an expansion of the National Health Service.

The proposal is to deinstitutionalise birth by turning the birthing mother from a medical object to a celebratory matriarchal reproductive economy. 
It uses the procedures of labour and birth as instruments to trace a journey, one that is outside memory and rational thought, leading to a place where matter and meaning remain forever out of reach. Birth is a beautiful voyage of struggle through unknown landscapes and dimensions, which leads to an even more remarkable experience – the one of motherhood. 

During birth one is provoked by the question of labour, asking whether the labour of giving birth begins when the female body first experiences it or when she is admitted by the hospital personnel. The research has attempted to explore and to grapple with this question by the creation of a film, where the birthing mother is treated as a collection of motions, contingent on both natural external and internal forces. 

The design has been informed by using the symbolic relationship between the mother and the foetus and their world. The architectural proposal attempts to explore and to compose out of unarticulated images and unmediated communication and metaphors illustrating pregnancy and birth, such as the klein bottle (a body within a body as two constituent, yet always distinct elements).

Tota Mulier en Utero or The Woman is a Womb

Erotic Kit for Internal Selfies

Tota Mulier in Utero - The Woman is a Womb

The site of the project is the female body as a place. The woman as a place origins in the chora (derived from the Greek word for both womb and space/place). The chora creates ‘unformed amorphous origin of all morphology…transmuted by/for analogy into a circus and a projection screen, a theatre for fantasies.’ (³) The woman’s womb is the inner frame that contextualises the surface image of the foetus. The womb is the first ever environment where we originate from, where we take shape before we even gain consciousness or position within society, culture or state.

The project would like to raise questions about the womb as a spatiality and whether it represents a negative space which is at once limitless and claustrophobic, an inescapable but unknowable point of
origin. Or whether is the ultimate space, ‘the federal reserve cave’? (⁴)

The pregnant female body becomes the site for the architectural project with its all physiological, psychological, emotional and material transformations. (Fig. 1)

The mother can feel constant tumult as the baby hiccups, flexes her body and tests with elbows, knees and feet the limits of her inner space. The baby becomes a bulky, impertinent, spirited presence within the maternal-feminine body, simultaneously an integral part of her and an independent entity.

The project would like to expand the limited metaphors used to illustrate pregnancy. The author would like to find a highly spatial language which would allow the project to evolve into a tangible quality.

In order to achieve more immaterial, metaphysical approach to the area of interest the female body as a place would be observed beyond the pregnancy. The woman as a place, as an envelope and container and the way the maternal-feminine remains a place separated from its own place, hence re-envelopes herself within herself twice – as a woman and as a mother. The female body would be witnessed as a served place where the man and the woman are able to stay contained/enveloped. A place which transmits itself from one envelope to another, modifying itself moment by moment. The woman as a habitat for both matter and nature. The mother-innkeeper as an environment and the foetus as its occupant.