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| The Invisible Stains performance is durational and has been performed for up to 4 hours at a time. It engages with the many unanswered questions regarding Ireland's Magdalene Laundries that urgently pervade the present. Yet this performance does not provide answers to these remaining questions rather it contemplates the physical and emotional turmoil experienced by women forced to endure hard physical labour promoted as a means of achieving purity. It considers the losses, humiliation and anger experienced by these women who were wrongly designated as society's filth. This performance ponders the severing of the deep bonds between mother and child, a painful separation experienced by many women incarcerated in the laundries as a framework for thinking the desires and longings of those women enclosed and cut off from forming close human connections.
Invisible Stains explores the contradictions of post-colonial Irish society exposed by The Magdalene Laundries. In post-independent Irish society motherhood outside of marriage was deemed impermissible yet all forms of birth control were forbidden , women were denied access to sexual education and male sexual deviancy was dealt with leniently. In this society, as historical records demonstrate, women sometimes had no other choice than to kill their babies. This performance questions the negative essentialising of female reproductive biology by both the Catholic church and Irish state. In doing so, it protests the ongoing moral regulation of female reproductive autonomy through the remaining ban on abortion. Invisible Stains has to date been performed at the following events: The launch of the Fringe Out West, Strokestown Park House: The National Famine Museum of Ireland, September 2011 Right Here, Right Now - Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin - 4th November 2010 Response - Landguard Fort, Felixstowe United Kingdom - 22nd October 2010 Transversal- Block T- Dublin, 2nd October 2010 I'm With You - Powerscroft Road, London - June 2010 |
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