Cranberryjuice is an action based artist collective focused on fighting internalised misogyny and raising awareness about the inequalities surrounding contraception and sexual health. After initiating the project in the beginning of 2021 I have been working together with Iiris Riihimäki and Maïa Taïeb to trigger discussions and activate a change of consciousness through propaganda, interviews, social media and art.
In March of 2022 we hosted our first exhibition with a live event at OT301 in Amsterdam, where we brought together artists, academics, performance and text to reflect on the many different aspects of medical misogyny. Our aim was to create an inspiring and eye-opening space where people could learn, share and engage on these important topics that are so integral to peoples lives, but rarely receive the attention they deserve.
Our first campaign was called Drop the Pill and spoke to the inequality surrounding contraception. The aim was to make people question why there still weren’t any long-term male contraceptives on the market in 2021 when the female pill had been available for over 60 years.
During this period of time we have sent men to the moon, developed artifical intelligence and created a vaccine for covid19. There is no doubt that the lack of urgency and pressure to launch a male contracpetive comes from a prevailing gender imbalance that views it as a female responsibility.
We started the campaign by making a deep fake video of Boris Johnson announcing the launch of a male contraceptive pill. By releasing the video online we simply wanted to state what our news outlets and medical institutions should be announcing, albeit long overdue.
We set up a website where we collected confessions and an instagram account where we published reels featuring interviews of people on the street and their opinions on the topic of contraception:
To women: would you be with a man on the pill?
To men: would you take the pill?
To everyone: should there be a male equivalent?
The reels went viral, collecting hundreds of thousands of views. There were heated discussion forming in the comment sections as to why the male pill still wasn’t on the market despite many years of research, the varying pain thresholds that is placed on different genders from the medical industry and whether women would even trust men to take a pill every day. It became clear that the topic of contraception and medical misogyny engaged and aggrevated people.
We also conducted longer interviews with women who had been through abortions or suffered from the many potential side effects associated with birth control. We also asked men about their opinion and experiences from being in relationships with women who took contraception. We spoke to Enguerand from Paris who is one of the pioneers in testing thermal underwear, an old method of male contraception developed by Roger Mieusset, a specialist in Toulouse. We also interviewed the sexual health clinic in Amsterdam on what they’re doing to make contraceptives safer, fairer and more accessible to everyone.
All the interviews are available on our youtube channel.
We started a new campaign titled ‘Gemeen Amsterdam.’ By changing the logo from Gemeente (municipality in Dutch) into ‘gemeen’ – (unfair), we were reminding them and the citys residents of how many important topics are left unaddressed and how much more can be done to challenge the mindset that places the responsibility of contraception on women alone. We believe that it is time our government inforced policies to reduce the prevailing medical and sexual inequalities, whilst making sure safe and effective contraceptives are free and accessible to all ages and genders.
We printed posters and QR stickers and hung them up around the city. At first glance it appears that the municipality was finally doing their part, on second glance it made people question why they weren’t.
Cranberryjuice event
In March 2022 we hosted out first live event and exhibition as a collective at OT301 in Amsterdam. After working mostly via online platforms it felt important to bring the work and discussions into a physical space so people could learn and engage on the topic in a diverse and inclusive environment.
We wanted to explore the field of medical misogyny through a diverse range of mediums, bringing together artists and researchers uner the same roof.
We curated an exhibition alongsise Leonore Larrera titled Treating/Treated/Loving/Loved. The exhibition was presented in 4Bid Gallery and featuring works by eight artists: Tabita Rezaire, Matilda Lövgren, Inkeri Virtanen, Jil Kunkat, Gaëlle Burckle, Morgane Billuart, and Tom Dulou.
Exhibition text:
The CranberryJuice Collective brings together artists, researchers and activists under the multifaceted issue of medical misogyny and sexual inequality in medicine. To understand some of its incarnations, we can quote here two realities that the collective is fighting: while hormonal birth control methods for the male sex have been studied since the 1970s, as of 2021, none are yet commercially available.1 Even with shared methods like male condoms, studies show that 90% of the time, women are involved in managing all instances of contraceptive use.2 By gathering artists with multiple experiences, bodies, struggles and approaches, the collective provides space to make visible the variety of realities that arise from and cover medical sexual inequality. Through this movement, the gap between art and activism, personal and collective, public and private is blurred.
— Leonore Larrera
You can watch the livestream of the event here.
