WOMB SPACE
Dec 21, 2025
It is the darkest day of the year, my womb, nearly ready to shed. Let’s imagine our wombs mirror the seasons, menstruation then would be the winter phase. A descent into the underworld where blood becomes the teacher. Whenever possible, I choose to calm my movement at least one week before I flow. Between and beneath long stretches of slowness, an increased potential of erupting Kali energy brews. What longs to be transformed pours from my lips, insight rushes forth without the intervention of thought. After the release, a clarity fills my eyes as the settlement of the inner lake returns. In our society women are judged for giving voice to this primal channel. I have come to love her.
I was only four or five when I frequently entered the same nightmare; the blackest black, directionless, no form of life, only the depth of the yawning primordial darkness. I would shake myself awake to escape it, I would run, slide, leap down the stairs and jump into my mother’s arms — who comforted me but could never provide relieving answers. This childhood nightmare of falling into the dark abyss is a common phenomenon but before the child’s ego has formed, the void is too overwhelming. Those nights I was drawn into the belly of the Great Mother, the womb of creation, the threshold between dimensions, the darkest place within the body. Many years later I began to re-visit this place voluntarily and understood that what seemed the city of the dead, was actually a priming — an initiation that would one day allow me to dance toward this emptiness.
Ironically, it was the re-discovery of my vagina that pulled me inward. My womb and my blood connected me to the deepest trauma buried within my bloodline’s DNA. When our repair system has been compromised and our DNA has mutated, culture rushes to label it malfunction. Fear of dead soon inhibits us from living, aggravating the wound further. Healing is a generational undertaking. Our souls incarnate intentionally into a particular strand of the web of life to transmute certain wounds. In our quest for liberation, we must confront and untangle inherited stories. In this way, healing could be seen as a burrowing journey. Burrow deep enough, and we meet the dim abandoned pockets within ourselves. These are the places that long to open most. Shielded from the light, they may have hardened, yet continue to hold our wounds and wisdom with equal tenderness. Many spiritual and indigenous traditions have long embraced this paradox of the void, recognizing that darkness is not to be feared but honored. Slowly, here in the West, we are learning that our capacity for healing is not fixed or linear. It is fluid, adaptive, and profoundly intelligent. This intelligence is the language of the feminine, ancestral and patient, she carries our lineage in ways the mind cannot comprehend and thus urges us to plunge into our body’s memory.
WOMB SPACE is a ritual enactment of transformation and reconnection. It is the story of the dragonfly — emerging from the water to shed its old form and stretch its wings. Even in those dreams, she was there, the cyclical moon, the primordial Mother, guiding the inner voice of intuition to melt into the stillness and crack the chrysalis.
Suspended across a clearing in the Belgian forest, I encounter my 13 menstrual paintings. In a cosmic rite of passage, they orbit like sacred artifacts in the Metatron constellation. Serving as a mythic continuation of FLOW OF LIFE, I emerge from the embryonic chrysalis, my movement straddling the edge of alien and animal. Through somatic synesthesia I release into a deeper rhythm of existence. Reawakening in a bed of shiny moss, my gaze opens to a heightened realm — an enchanted, sensual world woven from the textures of Mother Earth.
A film by Double Being
Editing — Marisa Papen
Soundtrack — Michael Chichi
Cinematography — Esteban Wautier
Color Grading — Esteban Wautier
Poetry — Marisa Papen
Voice — Marisa Papen
Clay — Ellen Devos
Mastering — Joe Farr
Paintings Installation — Esteban Wautier, Michael Chichi, Robbe Papen, Marisa Papen, Piet Grouwels, Stéphane Becker
With special gratitude to the Forest Family, Grouwels-Martens and its gardener Akélah