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).