A road trip in search of (radical) self-care by Alice Versieux and Marthe Van Dessel


 This is a trial to collect informations, resources about radical self-care with some personal stories and about differents collectives, places and people ..  this whole article is a trial, an attempt to gather/collect information, advice, inspiration, discovery of other practices to know, observe and experiment with our body. there are surely errors, misunderstandings, and illusions that make these questions and reflections possibe.
 
Poussy Draama  (*) : “For me there is a clear distinction. Self-care is about mental health, how do we treat ourselves in militant, activist, collective environments and self-help is in relation with the health of the physical body. It is a different imagination, for example is brushing your teeth self-help? Very basic, yes. It is anchored in how we take care of our bodies. It is for sure important and institutionalized, but what to do if you don't have the basic mental health to do this very basic act. In other societies, self-help is obsolete, as this knowledge is transmitted organically and not so artificial the shaman channels or passes, the sicknesses, beyond the glorification of the self.

<img:teeth>

“While self-help is connected to second wave  feminism, it evolves in certain environments, it is very embedded in the liberation of the white woman due to this history.”


an other (more general) quote on (radical) self care
Gaia: Radical self-care is a privileged and classist concept in Europe -opposed to e.g Mexico where it is popular and a (political) daily urgency


This summer, a little spontaneously we decided to head for the open doors in the post-capitalist colony, Calafou (*), leaving from Brussels and Antwerp through France to the North of Spain. Making different stops along the way where friends were spending their summer. The road and journey transformed into meetings with people and places in relation to radical self-care. Personal anecdotic positions in relation to a wider network of practitioners their views, practice and knowledge, exploring existential and philosophical ideas about ourselves, the health system and our society.


“RADICAL? It concerns the first, fundamental principle, which is at the origin of something, a phenomenon. Derived from the Latin radix ("root"), the denotation of radical has changed since its eighteenth-century coinage to comprehend the entire political spectrum—yet it retains the "change at the root".  (*)

Our first stop is Bretoncelles, a collective building in full rehabilation. After a guided visit and a long walk in the rainy woods, 'follow the yellow arrow and always straight, euh, gaily forward', we eat all together in what will be their future dining room. Drinks and (re)connecting with Cabiria, Celine & Charlotte, a moment to collectively remember existing projects -past and present- (*) around France and Belgium on self-care, self-help and self-medication.

(no recordings / no quotes > "je sais changer une roue mais je ne sais pas palper mes seins")

The next day we head out to the camping Boucocers in Lagrasse, where Poussy Draama (*) is staying, nearby a farm where she is doing an internship and training on medicinal plants. We descend to the village and get a table at a local restaurant where her friend is cooking. 'Moi en tout cas dans le coté un peu biographie, je vous l’ai fait là'.

“I had a project in which I impersonated Docteure Duchesne, and with my Tansutérus van, a cabinet of curiosities I travelled around. The evening before my first performance I aborted myself with the plant  Artemisia (*) . It was a total epiphany. All the energy I didn't want to put in my pregnancy, I projected in this character. Everything became clear. For a while, Docteure Duchesne did personal consultations, we were drinking tea, looked at anatomy images and we were speaking about sexuality. I tried to re-contextualize the intimate personal issues, people were talking about, politically.This personage was so positive, coloured, and the people left with a positive feeling while I was feeling more and more bad. After that I started more collective consultations, auto-examination and basic self-care workshops. I was questioning the art context and my position in it. I got invited by festivals on witchcraft but - it was only discourse, without supporting the actual practice. This character eventually wasn't me anymore, people also made a spectacle out of the moments of exchange. The personage's ego had to disappear. I wanted to work more collectively - community based. So I started to explore other environments for my practice, like (alternative) family planning, altenative contexts, where I felt more understood and people knew where they were going. But I realized I started to have some real mental problems, and yes, plants saved me!

Currently Poussy Draama is in the process of building a communal urban herbal garden and starting a business of her own herbal and medicinal creams and oils 

” if i feel really bad, i go to: i feel like shit, you feel like shit, it is a website with a questionary ” (*)

After breakfast in the village, we look for a river to cool down as back on the road it will be 40 degrees celsius. We pass threw the Pyrenees and in the early evening, we arrived in Calafou where they saved food for us. The next day under the crushing heat  and mosquito bites (*)we first do some gardening, and then visit the site: a huge, old colony – that used to be a sewing thread factory, with a church, a school and several homes. We follow some workshops, we upgraded the Anarchaserver (*), go to the beach, eat churros, nap, take care of marthe who had cracked though her upper back (*) and follow a course on how to grow mushrooms.
                          

                          

Luckily we localize Gaia in Manresa. On the way we stop at l’agroalimentaria d'igualada(*?) for olive oil, bread, cheese  and climb Mount Serrat. Gaia lived in Calafou 2 years ago and was part of Gynepunk - an autonomous research project on the history of gynaecology, and a radical proposal to re-write it. In their praxis they exchanged how medical institutions use prohibitive and creepy technologies, how they are patriarchal conservatives and use dark methodologies to diagnose how to build our-body politics. Gynepunk's intention is to decolonize the body and to update ancestral knowledge with the independent use of technology. Klau Kinky started Gynepunk making natural lubricants and treating vaginal diseases with plants. Together with Paula Pin, a biohacker and transnoise cyberwitch, and the support of the Hackteria network, they developed DIY biohacking tools ( a centrifuge, a microscope and an incubator) to analyse body fluids  and identify urinary and other genital infections. With her background in biology, Gaia was able to read the samples that were taken during the auto-examination. She insisted on defining a protocols, also for ‘coñogurt(*) - yoghurt made from the lactobacillus in vaginal fluids. 

Gatherings like Hack The Earth, the Transhackfeminist Convergence, and Gynepunk brought together a network of bio hackers, sex workers, scientists, anarchofeminists, artists and guinea pigs, around cyber witched cook pots of spells, herbs and never told facts, still floating around. .

gaia: “I studied biology,for seven years but I don't work in science anymore – It made me very tired, and I feel it's all super fake. In the laboratory’s that I worked- people don't know what they do, they just do. The process, to amplify the database, one more time. Genetics is a bad phase of science.. . I read The Selfish genes by Dawkins but agree with Lynn Margulis more.  She reacts:  the gene can't be an egoist. It needs a cell, for living, running, duplicating. It is symbiosis with a cell, one cell .. to another, it's a complex organism.” 

<img: of the symbiosis tree?>

On the terrace the baths for spirulina are empty, the door of the biohacklab got smashes with rhythm  of the wind, in Pechblenda electronic lab, you can probably still find some reminiscences but the transhackfeminists with their radical research are gone. “We all moved on...” Klau to Mexico supporting and exchanging with the local 'popular' health groups. Paula is moving around with her mobile lab and Gaia to La Ruda (*) -  Ateneu Anarchista La Ruda', an anarcho-transfeminista squat which exists for a few years. The apartments in this building could never be rented due to building defects. But it's all there, double glazing, terrace, door, bathroom, etc. Huge. The garage has been transformed into a boxing hall for the community. For 5 years, there was a group on self-medication which meet each week in the social center, people fom the neighbourhood, the living community and refugees or undocumented people would attend. They also did  "jornadas ginecologikas" with gynaecological self-examination workshops,  'no mixto for bolleras, trans y mujeres' like laboratorio Gynepunk biolab, discussions around the body decolonization but also projections, expo,...The group dissolved because of internal group dynamics and hegemony of the biomedical european system.

gaia:  "Medicine is good in the mechanical body and developed medical competencies to 'repair' the body but our physiology or biology is very 'unknown'. We don't have the knowledge and we use induction to make statements for knowing how functions and mechanisms work within our living system. And it changes throughout history- we are now in the genetic moment - 10 years ago the pharmacological. And we can't just make a list or map - a lot of factors are in interaction. A body doesn't stop with it's materiality (claro)
"

 <img: of the jornadas ginecologikas?>

Some days later in and around Calafou, we start driving north-east to go see Théa in La Borie, Cévennes. When we arrive, she is waiting for us with her flashlight and takes us to a caravan, our home for the night. The next day our conversation starts, with small interruptions for breakfast at the river, skinny-dipping and a hungry goat, all in a place Alice already knew but rediscovers.
                          
Thea: "La Borie is  located in Les Cévennes, the inhabitants installed themselves here. There is no definition for the place but since 2 or 3 years, it is more open to the queers. La Borie is also a place for mental health. Some people  feel that is good for them to go to the (psychiatric) hospital, but for some others is there that they will start to twist. We  don't say the hospital is not good, but La Borie can be a passage or a possibility, we will propose some alternatives, if you don't wanna go. This is place hosts life- nothing is formalized, it is an orality - somebody talks, somebody listens. We have time, a week, some days,... to meet, and in this 'rencontre', we can have personal transmission, which are quiet unique, there is an osmosis between the transmitter and the receiver.

Six or seven years ago, a collective was formed in La Borie. They wrote a brochure, S’armer jusqu’aux lèvres (*). Around 10 people, amongst some feminist inhabitants of La Borie and people of the region. They gathered in more intimate places during regular formal weekends outside of La Borie. They exchanged on difficulties, prejudgements, a priori's and constructions around medical clinical knowledge, and on women health, sexuality, gynaecology and the re-appropriation of the knowledge with people who has the experience and specialized in different fields. They learnt together about naturopathy and herbal medicine, cultivating and harvesting medicinal plants and herbs, transforming the plants in tinctures, oils, macérat... A delegation went to have a training with Rina Nissim, a swiss 'lesbian' who wrote a book on auto-gynaecology with plants "Natural Healing in Gynecology" about e.g. menopause or sexual transmissive diseases. What they learned, they could bring back to their localities in theatre action, festivals or familial planning groups and shared the methods. One or two year ago, the group stopped. If a group is a closed circled - and there were attempts to relate to other groups - it means after 5 years, all the questions are already asked and there is potential for interpersonal problems growing between the people. The group had an end but maybe that isn't a problem.

<img: la rue /rhinoceros map/arrow>
<img ? la rue ?>

“Lesbians, transgender, radicalized or undocumented people encounter difficulties or discrimination in the traditional medical system. We try to revisit and analyze these experiences, desacralize and restore the intimate knowledge of our bodies as women that has been historically given to the power of men." 

There is a pre-modern hypothesis that a medicine will only work within an environment/context. By taking e.g La Rue (*)  guided by a group of women who has the know-how of the plant, makes the healing efficient and not only the substance itself. In the book of Doctors and Healers - by Tobie Nathan & Isabelle Stengers, they described how the 'bewitched' got out the evil / pain by healing within its cultural and social context and environment. The medication is efficient because of the community surrounding it... maybe even with orthodox medicine, it works because there is a whole community and authority around who beliefs. 

In the construction of the medical power, the question of charlatan entered - somebody who heals or who pretends to heal - which is actually the same thing for me- with methods that cannot be evaluated by scientific procedures. The charlatan is not a witch but a healer who wants to pretend to enter in the caste of 'doctor'’. Like with Mesmer, a magnetist, they try to look for a protocol to validate or invalidate his practices, because he was putting the medical authority in danger. 


La Borie also had a herbalism (there are still some plants). It didn't survive with the risk of eviction, which makes it not easy to have a sustainable practice. There is stress, they cannot survive, a lot of things disappear. 


Last stop, a bit of a détour,  Saint-Gervais-les-Bains. 8 hours drive east. Alex and Younes had plans, take the little train to the eagle's nest and to finish on foot to climb the Mont Blanc. Get up 6h30 in the morning. I say ok, Marthe choose rest. 
We both choose to finish in the Spa because this village is known for its thermal water rich in minerals and oligo-elements and healing properties for skin. We sleep another night and go back to Belgium for administrative and medical appointments and a little wharf to make a mast base on our sailing boat. 

While we were writing this article, our  ..... continues :  zines in CCC camp, north Germany, in Komona Village (*), a non mixt self-help workshop in Brussel, building DIY micoscopes and self-examination with Klau in eclectictechcarnival in Greece.  .... blog

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(*) https://docteureduchesne.tumblr.com/
(*) political radicalism - Wikipedia
(*) https://www.zite.fr/parutions/z10/
(*) https://youfeellikeshit.com/

(*) http://www.calafou.org
(*) local repellent (based on tearea ... (ask sheila.)
(*) http://anarchaserver.org , feminist server  which develops autonomous infrastructure on the Internet for feminists projects. named after one of the slaves which was used for Dr Sims gynaelocogical experimentations
(*) http://www.hackteria.org/
(14) https://wiki.calafou.org/index.php/Receta
(*) Lynn Margulis, a brilliant critic


(*) Agroalimentaria d'Igualada, an agricultural cooperative (100years) 
(*) La Ruda
(*) https://infokiosques.net/IMG/pdf/S_armer_jusqu_aux_levres-pageparpage.pdf
( ) We really like Power Makes us Sick (PMS) a creative research project focusing on autonomous health care practices and networks from a feminist perspective. PMS seeks to understand the ways that our mental, physical, and social health is impacted by imbalances in and abuses of power. There base line is “Self-care can't Cure social diseases”. 
( ) Selection of Odile’s self-care offline chatbot :  "Vulnerability is strength."  “The waves ebb and flow. Listen.”  “Place your index finger all along the bridge of your nose, and feel it there for a moment.             
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 Alice Versieux, 
I was born under the cancer star sign in Charleroi, Belgium. As i'm writing this my CA125 (cancer antigen, a protein that we find in ovarian cancer cells/tumor marker specific for ovarian cancer) is 7 U/ml. If you are familiar with this medical metric system, you will agree that this seems rather low (or normal). But in the last 7 years, I have been an ontological test subject under the patient number 60383612, in the service of gynaecology of the oncology department of the Academic Hospital of Leuven in Belgium. As on the 26th of December 2012, I was diagnosed with an ovarian cystadenocarcinoma immediately extended to the peritoneum, the right pleura and supra-clavical lymph nodes. My friend who is an oncologist said to me that I will probably die. The tumor was 10cm on my left ovary, my first CA125 was measured at more than 4000. I started chemotherapy, different hormonal therapies, experimental and clinical essais, and some new medicines that my specialist was developing in pharmacological labs. But none of these seemed to help enough. On xx/xx/20xx I entered again in the xx clinical trial as my only other option. These worked for 3years, stabilized my cells and I was living in limbo / extra time. But on xxxx the lab decided to stop this medication (RO5520985) because there was no commercial interests for the pharmaceutical industry. At this point, my only option according to orthodox medical system was a surgery to remove my full reproductive system, and all the cells in the peritoneum and pleura.  This happened on March 26 2019. This is now three months ago, I am currently taking Mekinist and Dabrafenib as they don't know on a microscopic level if everything disappeared. The medical team thinks that it's only because of their medicine that I am still alive, but for me it is a different story. Ever since the diagnoses, I have been entering and looking into a vast spectrum of alternatives, to heal the side effects of all the treatment as well as the cancer. Every month I get my medicine and a blood test and a check-up every three months, thinking that nothing will appear on images. I went into an artificial menopause, as my feminine hormones were feeding my cancer cells. I am looking what will be my next alternative experiment to help with that. If someone has some ideas, let me know Invalid/disable status-always wanted to survive outside of a bed   ....?

Marthe van Dessel was born in a family of five generations of doctors. In her familial house was the medical practice of her father, who collected different historic books, tools, devices and medicines from the last century:  a medical emergency treatment box of world war 2, pre-anesthetic tools, samples of chloroform and pliers to get babies delivered. Growing up in an medical family means your father is your doctor, you never are a patient and medicines are easily subscribed. She considered a medical career but never pursued  because of the longterm studies.  Today she is 42, an age in which she is questioning whether she wants to inscribe in the medical regime by testing her hereditary chances of being a carrier of the degenerative  Huntington disease.  After her housearrest to process how to care for herself and her suroundings., she admits she fails over and over again.

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pd: I found that around diy gynaecology, there is a very essentialist movement. Sacred women, it is hallucinating ... that is the entrance door for a lot of people. There is a lot of knowledge but with a doubtful cultural appropriation, there is no respect for other sexual identities     - > “tu vas baigner/bénir ton utérus”

gaia: I don't make a difference between men/women bodies. And it is a fashion to speak about the sacred women who have the power. But why we always see women as mother of nature? it's not true, it is it’s based on some religion/belief.

pd: not why - but why are there profossionals and non professionals
and why do we want to be taken care by these professionals

thea: In my experience, imagination is more powerful than chemical products. Homeopathy is scientifically proven not to work, but we know it has healing effects on some people.”

thea: in the orthodox medicine is not  to heal but to impose a knowledge, a way of thinking, philosophy which is validating the medical modern world. The result is not to heal, but to impose the medical modern world (as we know it.)

gaia: I don't like medicine because they don't explain to you. It is a lot of terminology, you don't understand, they speak in code, and science is a fantasy of some people. Maybe they try to simplify the situation but in the meantime they are playing with the fear (timore) 

gaia: Sickness is part of the body,  so let's be in relation by preventing.