Murals
Name
Medrano-marmedr-march-arch-2023-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
5.54 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
acaaaa9866182f237a4aeaeeadc23bfb
Author(s)
Medrano, Mariana
Advisor(s)
Garcia, Deborah
Date Issued
June 2023
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This project emerges from the desire of making a mural for the interior space of an abortion clinic. In 2023, in the United States, reproductive agency is a threatened right, which makes abortion clinics spaces of resistance, alternative narratives, and radical care. The history of the care provided in clinics is older than what we may ever trace, because reproductive agency is a practice aided not only by contemporary medical professionals but also by the natural world itself. There is a historic plethora of herbs, roots, flowers, et cetera, that have been employed as abortifacients: Plants that when consumed cause the uterus to contract, thus inducing a miscarriage, or abortion. This practice, which unfortunately today is largely lost as a collective social knowledge, intersects with murals in that plants also provide us with pigments. A mural for an abortion clinic holds the ambition of elevating this historic narrative of reproductive care and agency by encoding knowledge in pigments, a lost history in images. For this project, a catalog of abortifacient plants and their corresponding pigments was created to inform the making of a mural. The pigments themselves were extracted and synthesized from organic matter, and each plant was considered as rooted in intersectional histories of medicine, power, gender, colonialism, divinity, and color.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
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