home italian version
old website version // new website is under construction https://almafutura.org/
ALMA Toolkit
Winner of STARTS Cross Fertilization Programme 2023 Women have been considered witches when society saw that they could heal, cure and care for themselves. Since then a culture of shame and taboo around the female body has pervaded our society, leading to crucial knowledge gaps in vaginal health. This has been compounded by social taboos around intimate health which additionally limit women from accessing knowledge, connecting with their body and learning about their vulvas and vaginas. Simple things such as knowing the genitals, interpreting fluids, recognizing ovulation and observing the cervix are considered experts’ skills. To address this, feminist activists and organisations have built crowdsourced educational resources. Our idea is based on the feminist practice devloped back in the ‘70 of self-gynecological visit, as a tool to confront medical violence, prejudices and hierarchy with the aim to empower women. Since not much has changed: reproductive rights are still rejected, the gender gap in healthcare and research is still broad and people with vagina continue to receive poor intimate and sexual education.
With this in mind we developed ALMA Toolkit a set of educational materials and tools designed to democratise and destigmatise intimate health learning and empower people with vaginas to self-manage their bodies. The kit is easy-to-access, low-cost, open-source and encourage participation.
ALMA Futura Illustrations
ALMA Toolkit is a feminist design-research project that enables women and gender-diverse people to reclaim knowledge about their own bodies. The toolkit comprises three interconnected modules: a consciousness-raising card game for collective dialogue, self-gynecology training with 3D-printed anatomical models, and citizen-science protocols for exploring vaginal microbiomes. It addresses a critical gap: despite widespread health information, cultural stigma and absent vocabulary leave people unable to interpret or trust their bodily experiences. Workshops across seven countries have created safe spaces where participants co-produce knowledge, develop shared language, and build practical skills, shifting power from institutions to communities.
ALMA Toolkit aims to reframe health literacy as collective practice, not individual consumption, enabling genuine bodily autonomy.
Ars Electronica Festival 2023
Reproductive health conditions, such as endometriosis, PCOS, fibroids, cervical abnormalities, vaginal infections, menopausal changes, affect the majority of people assigned female at birth, yet cultural stigma keeps these experiences invisible and under-discussed.
Conventional health literacy treats knowledge as individual cognitive skill; ALMA Toolkit reframes it as collective social practice.
The innovation is systemic: micro-level (consciousness-raising card game for dialogue), meso-level (self-gynecology and anatomical self-exploration), macro-level (citizen-science protocols for microbiome analysis). Inspired by 1970s feminist self-help and updated with open-science methods, the project redistributes epistemic authority: participants observe, interpret, and validate their own bodies without medical gatekeeping. No comparable project integrates all three scales into one modular, replicable kit designed for contexts where healthcare is limited, hostile, or stigmatized.
Module 1
Speaking Bitterness as it was called the practice of feminist consciousness raising, is a card game that allows a circle of gender oppressed people to create their own ritual of a safe space for sharing. Consciousness Raising is an intense experience, in which the systemic elements of violence emerge and make sense of individual experiences. The card game encourages storytelling and mutual listening.
Speaking Bitterness cards, ALMA Futura
Module 2
Self-exploration, reflects on the use of the speculum and pelvic examinations. The Speculum was invented by James Marion Sims, the “father” of modern gynecology, who committed torture and experimentation on slave women to test surgical tools and methods for vaginal fistula. The idea is to tackle the shame that occurs during the exposure of bodies during medical examination. The reclaiming of the object is also a political act of problematizing how those bodies have been considered during history. If we consider for example the contradiction between the latin word for Vulva, pudendum, which means “that of which one ought to be ashamed” and the word pubes, meaning the adult male participation into the public sphere. People with vulva are therefore invited to take the speculum in their own hands, use it and look at their cervix. The use of the speculum and its invention has made gynecology as the art of making visible what at the same time should be kept hidden. Through a collective experience of learning and showing, gynecological practice is challenged as it is not only the study of women's bodies but it makes female bodies.
Gyneacological self-exploration at WAAG Society (Amsterdam), 2023
Module 3
Biofilie Lab, a kitchen based educational lab to learn about the vaginal microbiome. The format invites participants to grow and observe their vaginal microbiome through hands-on practices, using simple tools and adapted laboratory methods. These activities connect scientific knowledge with personal awareness, encouraging reflection not only on intimate health but also on the cultural, political, and social dimensions of the microbiome.
This last part of Alma Toolkit has been explored and developed during the artistic residency in the Bio-Lab at Hangar, Barcelona and in the Wet-Lab at Waag Society, Amsterdam.
Protocol Instructions (ita/eng/es) link
Check Biofilie Lab page to read more about our protocol and workshops.
Biology Research Department at the University of Ancona, 2023
WORKSHOPS
All self-exploration begins with cosciousness raising, a political practice originated by feminist collectives in the 1960s in which skills, experiences and information related to the body and sexuality are shared. ALMA Toolkit is designed primarily for use in workshops and collective settings.
Soon we will also offer dedicated training for workshop facilitators. Most of the toolkit's physical objects and accompanying information will be released as open-source, with the option to customise them to fit different contexts. This means anyone will be able to freely download and build their own version of the toolkit. For those without access to makerspaces or bio-based materials, we will also offer the option to purchase directly through our website. Our current focus is on collectives and groups of people with vaginas, aged 18 and above. Looking ahead, we hope to explore redesigning the toolkit to meet more specific needs, including those of people with disabilities, teenagers, and vulnerable minorities.
We are designing and testing the toolkit with different groups and collectives based in Italy who are already exploring practices of empowerment in gynaecology but who also have different levels of knowledge and needs.
September 2023 - Pictures from the third workshop at Ars Electronica Festival - Linz (AT)
July 2023 - Pictures from the second workshop at Waag - Amsterdam (NL)
June 2023 - Pictures from the first workshop at the Consolturia Autogestita Caza Feu - Bussoleno (IT)
ALMA Toolkit is lucky to be mentored by
Rosanne Hertzberger - scientific researcher and founder at Crispatus
Gaia Leandra - scientific art researcher at Hangar
Klau Kinky - member and founder of Gynepunk
Whitefeather Hunter - artist, researcher and witch
Big Thanks to our collaborators
Seren Simoni - biologist at University of Ancona, helping us to develop Biofilie Prototol
Letizia - illustrator, creating the graphic and illustrations of Speaking Bitterness cards
Eva Maria Francesca Troia - designer, re-designing the 3D anatomical files
Amy Bravewaters - designer, developing two of the 3D anatomical files we then re-designed
TALKS
World Anthropology Day, Milano
2025
If the future isn't distributed equally, who isn't part of the conversation?
This and much more for @anthroday_milano, where we were invited to the opening conference to talk about Denied Alternative Emerging Futures.
When we engage with technology, we want to problematize - or rather, break with the epistemology of technology, and bring out all the forms of collective and situated knowledge-creation that we can generate around technology. 👾
Today, those who hold most of the control over technological development, and who are launching us into a dystopian nightmare, are in fact people who have openly taken racist, sexist, transphobic, and colonial positions. But from the margins, it's possible to bring forward not only alternative proposals to the futures that are emerging, but also practices of grassroots technology that already exist.
And indeed, ALMA Futura had a moment where we engaged with the world of FemTech [biotechnologies applied to the fertility market and reproductive health] but we chose, also for political reasons, to try to find new meanings for the concept of technological innovation itself. Trying to move beyond an Elon Musk–style innovative pessimism, made of gadgets launched into space, irrecoverable waste, and one that only contemplates a single possible vision of innovation — centralized, closed off in ivory towers, whose benefits and risks are distributed in a completely unequal way.
In the future we would like, there's one that's already here, that has always been here, and that considers that constellation of processes, knowledge, and artifacts born from relationships, collective thinking, and situated, participatory practices.
instagram post
ALMA Toolkit at the World Anthropology Day, Milano, 2025
ARTISTIC RESIDENCIES
Biofilie Lab: Growing vaginal microbiome at home
https://spearhead-amr.github.io/makeaware/workshops-biofilie-lab.html
PRESS
ALMA Futura a Sirene Festival 2026, Intervista per Scomodo link
“ Il laboratorio ha esplorato biosensori per i fluidi corporei, aperto test di gravidanza, parlato di automonitoraggio ormonale, Microbiota vaginale e pratiche open source per la salute intima - oltre che realizzato lubrificanti solidi e commestibili fatti in casa, smontando tecnologie e saperi che spesso restano chiusi, medicalizzati, inaccessibili. “
ALMA Futura: Rebellious Bodies, Self-Managed Gynecology and Feminist Biohacking, Mulieris Magazine link
” ALMA Futura is a community project and involves international networks of biohacking, technological feminism and biological art, from Gynepunka Bio to Art Coven, and tries to approach feminist productivity as a tool to shape new knowledge and practices beyond the borders of official institutions.
The claim of female bodies as political spaces, distinguished by experience, care and love, but also by fertile anger and the capacity of transformation is connected to liberation, a collective process that starts from the voice and daily practices of those who decide to take care of themselves and others.The female body in the capitalist system and for nationalist politics is seen as an assembly line, but women authentically create new life, giving birth not only to children (if and how they want) but to visions and thoughts necessary to sustain, comfort and improve human existence.Self-exploration is a practice that belongs exclusively and forever to us, and on which no one can speculate, neither in economic sense, nor advertising, nor institutional. “