Go under, cut open, bleed, stitch, scar: The post-surgical body in dance and performance

Archived Womb (2025) is a dance film conceived as a cinematic ritual that memorializes the metaphysical scars of nine endometriosis surgeries. Created in the months preceding a hysterectomy, it functions as a final dialogue with the uterus - an act of farewell, reclamation and existential preparation. Rooted in the feminist-crip praxis of netherness, the work engages surgical experience as embodied thresholds, through which pain becomes generative for aesthetic practice and, in certain instances, opens onto a spiritual dimension. Scars emerge as creative companions, mediating visibility, vulnerability and renewal. Through improvisation, poetic text and filmic layering, Archived Womb transforms pain into movement and atmosphere, revealing how art-making can function as ritual, witness and repair. At the same time, the article foregrounds a critical limit through the caesarean scar, framed as a ‘spiritual emergency’, which resists artistic integration and necessitates withholding. Positioned within performance philosophy and feminist disability studies, the article proposes netherness as a choreographic methodology that reconfigures pain as collaborator, witness and, at times, spiritual guide, while affirming the ethical necessity of what remains unarchived.