Ruby Friday | The Calla Campaign: The Art of Self-Exploration

The Callascope is a device developed in Nimmi Ramanujam's Biomedical Engineering lab at Duke to aid in the visualization of the cervix without the need for a speculum. In addition to its clinical utility screening for diseases such as cervical cancer, the device has become the inspiration for an art project, the Calla Campaign, in which it is being used to empower women through literal self-exploration. The campaign has organized artist-led workshops in which participants utilize creativity and art to explore the self. The workshops, in turn, provide raw material for an art exhibit, which will engage an even broader community on the important conversation of self-exploration for empowerment.

For this Ruby Friday presentation, four students involved in the project will tell the story of this unique, interdisciplinary exhibit: how a new medical device became the basis for an exhibit focused on self-exploration, what the primary material for the exhibit was and how it was collected, and how engagement with women in workshops and elsewhere has showed that self-exploration of the reproductive anatomy-both literal and symbolical-can be an empowering experience.