I had a boyfriend who didn’t want me to model, so I didn’t for a very long time. He and I eventually broke up, and around that same time I was watching my mother die of cancer. She died very young with many things unfinished and so many things she had wanted to do. I thought fuck it, the time is now, I need to just get on with this. My mother always pushed me to go for what I wanted, even if she didn’t agree with it.

He told me I looked sexy covered in his blood, I agreed and hit him a few more times until he turned his head and I connected with the side of his skull. I felt my hand break and I got even more pissed off, so started kicking him. I didn’t stop until someone jumped in and stopped the fight. When we were done it looked like a murder scene.

I kept the blood-stained white tank top I had been wearing as a trophy. I wanted to write something on it, and one night it hit me: “BELLA VENDETTA”

It’s Italian for Beautiful Revenge.

Bella Vendetta became a good response to a lot of things after that. I wanted revenge for everything— for our society, our country, our culture. I wanted revenge from every magazine or website that’s rejected my pictures because they were too racy. I wanted revenge and I wanted it to be beautiful.

If I was able to pay models I think it’d make more people want to pose, but I don’t want anybody whose sole reason for posing is to make money. Anyone whose first question is “how much are you paying” is someone that probably won’t fit well into the site. My main concern with money right now is making back what I put into getting the site up. Once that happens I hope to make a little bit of profit, but I’m not trying to get rich off taking advantage of anybody.

80s Trash: Roller-skates and prom dresses, leg warmers and cheap plastic jewelry.
Bathrooms: Public restrooms, bubble baths and shower scenes.
BDSM: Bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism and masochism.
Blood Sex: Play piercing, vampirism, and cutting. Currently all the blood play is real blood. Any sets involving special effects makeup or fake blood is in other categories.
Boots and Braces: Steel toes, suspenders, face smashing, shaved heads, white laces and bleached jeans.
Clowns: rubber chickens, face paint, clown shoes striped socks and big red noses.
Deprivation and Asphyxiation: Choking, strangulation, sensory deprivation of any kind, blindfolding and auto erotic asphyxiation.
Food: Food smearing licking, worshipping, insertion and cooking.
Foot Worship: Forced foot worship, foot portraits, cute toes, shoes, pedicures and foot bondage.
Genderfucking: Crossdressing, role playing, strap-ons, sissy boys in tutus and butchy women in suits.
Graveyards: Cemeteries, fucking gravestones and making imaginary love to the dead.
Menstrual art: This section is aimed to revolutionize menstruation. It’s revenge for any commercial girls have seen telling them their period is dirty and for any man who wouldn’t make love to them while they were on the rag.
Necro: Zombie porn, the undead, crime scene victims, sex where one partner plays dead and murder sets.
Pinups: Glamour shots, rockabilly kings and queens, classic beauty and cheesecake glam. Vintage girdles and nylons with backseams, fingerwaved hair and open toed pumps.
Smoking: Cigar, cigarette, blunt, joint, pipe, bong and gravity bong smoking.
Uniforms: Nazis, nurses, flight attendants, postal workers, military personnel, police officers, cheerleaders, waitresses and catholic school girl uniforms.
Water Sports: Golden showers, urination and women who can pee standing up.

After all was said and done I felt like I really just needed to finish what I started. I’m not the type of person that gives up, I was just having a moment of weakness. But I think it was important for me to step back and reevaluate why I was doing this and figure out the direction I wanted the project to take. It always seems like just when you want to give up everything falls into place and a fresh opportunity presents itself.

I don’t think I can fully avoid being prosecuted. I have to be prepared for at least some legal repercussions, and luckily all of my legal paperwork is in perfect order. Maybe what this industry needs right now is someone willing to stand up for what they believe in. Who is the US government to tell us what we are allowed to find sexy and what is “obscene.” I find it obscene and offensive that so many other “alternative” porn sites are altering the shoots they have up for fear of legal problems. I want to accurately represent this subculture, not hide behind a lot of pretty pictures, not tell my models that it’s wrong of them to have age play fantasies, etc. This is a community of consenting adults making art to share with the world, and I’ll stand by that 100%.

Love the industry. Know as much as you can about the people, events and practices— anything that has to do with body modification.

Have an open mind at all times. Don’t be judgmental about anything body modification related. You don’t have to participate in it yourself, but you have to accept that other people may do it and it’s probably important to them.

Ask interesting questions. Don’t be afraid to push people’s limits.

Work independently and work hard. Shannon and Rachel work very hard on their responsibilities within BME, the last thing they want to do is to have to worry about whether or not their employees are doing their job. BME should be your life, just like it is theirs. Shannon and Rachel’s lives revolve around BME and have for over ten years, so they want people who will work just as hard as they do.

It was a lot harder to “step back” from my video-article because I specifically wrote it from my point of view as a first-time-Suscon-attendee. I went to the event hoping to capture the emotion and vulnerability that goes hand-in-hand with suspensions, and I think I accomplished that. I wanted to do a video of the day’s events so the people who felt excluded (men, specifically) would feel better about the event and so they could get a feel for the atmosphere when it’s just women involved.

I also loved seeing the feedback in the forums after each article was published. The act of having my work published felt like an accomplishment alone, but to have people say such positive things about my work (on BME and on other sites) was really wonderful, in a completly narcissistic way. Any criticism I received allowed me to fix the things that needed it and made me work harder.

The reasons why I’m not more heavily modified are because I have a hard time committing to things, I’m a minimalist and I travel too much. I haven’t lived somewhere for longer than eight months since I was sixteen. I have never owned a cell phone or a car. I’ve broken every lease I’ve ever signed. I don’t currently own a plant, a table, a television or any of the other things that most people own, and I love it. If I can’t even commit to those things, I certainly cannot commit to a tattoo or other major work.

Because I don’t spend a lot of time in one place makes it hard to find professionals that I can trust. I don’t want to be tattooed by a stranger and it’s hard for me to find symbols to put on my body that represent things in my life because I’m constantly changing.

My lifestyle requires a lot of money, so when I have it I’m more likely to spend it on plane tickets or other travelling expenses. The things I’m most proud of having in this world are my ticket stubs, my journals and my photographs.

Cere was the first and only person to react to my lack of experience and mods (at least to my face), but I expected it from him— and I was honestly glad that someone finally brought it up, because I knew he wasn’t the first person to think it. It was nice to have it out in the open.

I’d love to get a ribcage piece of a large baobab tree with a comma incorporated to represent the time I spent living and working in West Africa’s The Gambia.

I’ve nearly run out of places to pierce, but I love nape piercings and will probably get it done at some point.

My dream modification is to get my ears pointed, though I’m not sure if I’ll ever go through with it. I love the way it looks and I’ve got small ears and I think it’d suit me.

My only opinion that’s changed is about suspension. Before working for BME, I had no interest in suspension and basically no knowledge about it because of my complete lack of curiosity. After meeting Clive (of the Uvatiarru and one-hook, one-elbow suspension fame), things changed. I became more and more interested in it, and have basically decided that I’m going to do a suicide suspension the first chance I get. After seeing my first suspensions during BMEfest (most memorably the one by IAM:spot and IAM:brion), I was convinced it was something I’d like to do, and this need was increased when I went to this year’s All Grrls Suscon.

How did moving to and living in La Paz affect your internship experience? Furthermore, was this effect positive or negative?

One of the main reasons why Clive and I left Mexico early was because we wanted to move to the British Virgin Islands. Clive was born there and feels a strong connection to the island on which he was born, and I love anywhere that is hot and has the ocean, so it sounded like a good plan. We planned to stay in Canada until November and save some money, but because of some very cheap plane tickets, we flew down on August 30. We camped for a week and we’re currently renting a small apartment on the top of a mountain. We’d love to have visitors, so contact us if you’re up for a trip!

Clive will be working at a day job while I focus on various web development work. (Shameless plug: if you’re looking for a web designer, please contact me!)

My long term goals are to settle down a little bit. I’d love to own a sewing machine again and have a garden with peas and carrots. I want to have cats. I really want to live in a farmhouse somewhere near the ocean.

I don’t think any one place can really make you want to stop travelling. If anything, a terrible experience would make me want to stay in one spot for the rest of my life. Visiting different places makes me want to keep doing it— it never has the opposite effect. In the past six years I’ve lead a very full life.

I’ve seen volcanoes in Italy, visited fetish bars in France, gone shopping in London, lived amongst some of the poorest people in the world in West Africa, worked for billionaires in Florida and millionaires in Luxembourg, gone on countless road trips through the United States and Canada, smoked hash in Amsterdam, sunbathed on black sand beaches in Greece, and most recently, camped in the jungle in the British Virgin Islands… I never want to stop, but I’ll probably slow down. My lifestyle is often exhausting.

That event ended up being an incredibly amazing experience as the IWC crew was really supportive of us as crew members. Some members of the TSD briefed us on some rigging techniques, and so began our beautiful friendship with those wonderful Texans! I believe that since then a lot has changed in terms of women’s involvement in the suspension community. There are definitely lots more women participating in suspension events and crews on all levels.

The other important factor to make the event a success was finding staff. The wimmin we knew that were qualified were from all over North America. Getting them all into my yard was the trick. We decided to hold the event on the weekend of BMEfest of last year because we figured that a lot of wimmin would be coming for that already, so it was a perfect opportunity.

As for running the actual event, Rachel and I had no problems. Many people helped with the prep work and the set up of the event. Rachel’s experience with suspension and my experience running events, it just sort of happened. Flawlessly I might add.

We had wimmin who had never suspended or pulled before and we also had ones that had, and the general consensus was that the vibe was great! I know many who couldn’t make it last year are making it a priority this year. I think lots of grrls were just happy to have a venue to be able to let go of any inhibitions.

My passion for eccentricity goes back to early childhood. Even as a small child, I was greatly unsatisfied with the ordinary reality, and though at that age I couldn’t fully realize how vile the world is, I already found it senseless and dull. At the same time, I was very much attracted to visual eccentricity. I clearly remember that when I saw unconventional looking people, I thought they were fantastic creatures who lived in a totally different, wonderful and exciting reality. I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to be. Obviously, I’m not nearly as romantic about it now as I was at the age of five, but I’ve carried that fascination throughout my life.

I already had quite a lot of piercings and I was a cutter, but I was really confused because cutting was always viewed as something negative and associated with masochism and depression, and I knew I had a totally different reason for doing it. Reading the book confirmed my belief that what I was doing was not something negative and self-destructive, but a wish to explore the effect that pain and body sensations have on the mind.

Also, at the time I was in search of an alternative spirituality. I don’t want to say I’m a spiritual person, but I always felt the need to have it in my life. Modern Primitives made me understand that body modification and body rituals can be a spiritual thing, and I can use my own body for spiritual growth, and that’s what I’m trying to do.

Suffice to say that for several years I was totally into this book. But as I grew older and as I re-read the book over and over again, I started to disagree with a lot of things written in it and my general opinion on it changed, but I still feel grateful for the huge impact it had on my life. It really expanded my horizons.

I’m still very much into indigenous cultures, but I separate aesthetics and spirituality from social order and the way of life that existed in them.

I feel that some people who were interviewed in the book were being conservative and almost close-minded because of their fixation on tribal cultures, criticizing certain types of modifications that were not practiced in them.

And finally, I don’t like the idea of putting all people who do body modifications under one tag — “Modern Primitives” or any other, as a lot of them wouldn’t identify themselves as such.

When I was up in the air, I was totally amazed and astonished by what I felt: there was hardly any pain (or rather, I found it easy to ignore), and I had an out-of-body sensation and the feeling of floating. I always pay lots of attention to the environment where I do my body rituals, and for my first suspension, I chose the seashore and I could feel a positive energy around me. At some point during the suspension, I started to think of different problems and hardships I had in that period of my life, but these thoughts were replaced by the certitude of me being able to live through them. I was surprised by how staggering and deep the experience was: I hadn’t expected that doing a suspension could get me into such an altered state of mind. I felt very strong and full of hope. My first suspension was pure joy!

By far, I found it easiest to transcend the pain in a suicide suspension. It was a bit harder during my coma suspension, but I enjoyed it a lot. What I really love about suicide suspension is the movement is less restricted and you can swing. I like to swing a lot and it strengthens the sensation of floating.

I still haven’t done all types of suspension: I still have a knee and superman to try, and I hope to be able to do them soon.

I don’t have particularly good feelings about that experience, but it remains important because it was the first time I did a play piercing, and because of it, I immediately knew it was something I wanted to continue to explore.

To be honest, before doing play piercing and suspension together for the first time, I didn’t know if I would be able to handle it. So in a way, it was quite a challenge for me to explore my limits. It was a wonderful experience and I got more confident in my potential and the next time I added chest play piercing to facial play piercing and suicide suspension. With body play piercings it’s the sensation of the piercing that makes the strongest impact, and though it’s an important part of facial play piercings as well, it’s surely the visual result that is the most striking.

My right arm tattoo design just came into my mind at some point, quite spontaneously. Because it’s a smile design, I had no problem explaining my idea to the tattoo artist, whose name is Yann, and who does some very original and stunning blackwork.

I’m a person that needs to be progressing in things I do. The same goes for my body: I really enjoy changing, modifying and playing with it, and not doing it makes me feel like I’m stagnant. I’ve always had an urge for creativity, and body modification is one of the ways I can be creative with my Self. I can’t predict the future, but I really hope I will never loose this urge and will never stop transforming, or in a way, creating myself.

In the body modification scene, most of the people I meet don’t understand nor care about the ideas and motivation that are behind the things I do, and I’ve had some disappointing experiences when body modifications artists lose interest in helping me when they find out that I’m not going to do performances. I’m not a performer, and I find it really upsetting that so many people in the scene can’t imagine things like facial play piercing done not as performances.

I perceive myself as a seeker and not a teacher because there are too many self-proclaimed “gurus” who don’t practice what they preach. I’m not even close the spiritual level I hope to be at someday for me to consider being a teacher to anybody, and honestly, it doesn’t really interest me. Plus, speaking specifically about body modification and body rituals, I think there are some things that are impossible to teach. For example, I often meet people who are very scared of pain, and it’s hard for them to understand that not everyone feels the same way as them. I don’t think they can be taught by anybody else but themselves not to have this fear. I think that the ability to explore, control and transcend intentional physical pain is something you naturally have or don’t have and it cannot be taught or discovered by somebody else — they have to learn about it themselves.

But I’m always willing to share, not teach, the things that I know in terms of body rituals and altered states if I see that people are really interested.