No Need to Confess

No Need to Confess is an installation initiated by Aimée Phillips and Nina Linde Läuger; in a multidisciplinary manner it aims to interweave different perspectives (historical, intimate and socio-political) on abortion and confession. In doing so, it aspires to offer a platform for practices that expose the taboos relating to abortion - being a practice that has been present throughout times. 

The installation combines and reworks (self-)fabricated archival material from different eras that have normalized and lived out misogynistic structures or represent empowering practises by people with wombs. As examples: the use of the peacock flower and penny royale as abortifacients, the Angkor Wat bas relief (A.D. 1150) from Cambodia representing a massage abortion and the aesthetics of the confession booth. Part of the installation is a sound work, leaking out of the confession booth, that encloses reworked fragments of interviews conducted by Femke Stasse with people who, directly or indirectly, experienced an abortion. 

The installation is an invitation to enter the layered narratives and complex relationships between image and imagination, the lived experiences of people with wombs, the hidden and the unfurled, and how abortion is submerged in taboo and censorship.

During the opening of  No Need to Confess artists Ann Rodriguez, Bel McLaughlin and Clara Saito will  carry out a performance. Ann Rodriguez and Bel McLaughlin will collaborate on a performative piece that carries the working title folding into each other. In this performance they will engage with the installation and work through notions of bodies, instruments, collective chanting, (re-)encounters, procedures, amongst more.

‘take out 

put in 

be putted in 

taking it out 

                                                        cold echo 

                        bright click 

              I bend in     your hands’

Clara Saito will carry out a performance titled The dance of choice: ‘When time hesitates, we take nature in our hands—parsley, a whisper, a chase. A dance of choice, of power, of play. A fountain flows, a body bathes, blood turns to rhythm, to riot, to release. In the end, a quiet moment—’Not now, my love, but one day, maybe.’ And the night moves on.’

Het AFK ondersteunt No Need to Confess met een projectsubsidie.

Datum: 06-03-2025 t/m 12-03-2025
Locatie: PAKT Foundation
Meer informatie: https://www.instagram.com/p/DFzpbmWKdER/