The project explores the use of art to affect
social change. Specifically, it focuses on representations of female junkies, one of the most vilified marginal groups in
society, in an effort to challenge preconceptions, by displaying, in the public domain, events that are generally concealed.
THIS BABY DOLL WILL BE A JUNKIE [TBDWBAJ] is an interdisciplinary 'community art' intervention incorporating audio-visual
portraits of female drug addicts living in Europe. The project consists of several stages:
- A preparatory stage
including consultations with relevant experts;
- Interviews are conducted with each inmate in the group, to absorb the
specific facts of her background.
- These facts are collated and presented using keywords and a specially prepared 'matrix',
thereby distilling a biography devoid of overt emotional content. The participant checks this account and records it on audiotape.
- Simultaneously
with this process, the women produce identical porcelain dolls, which will serve as the 'receptacles' for the audiotapes.
- The
audiotapes are inserted into the dolls, each of which is labelled with a name and the project website.
- The Baby Dolls
are displayed for some time in an art institution.
- Each Baby Doll is then 'dropped' at a predetermined location in
the public space, somewhere of a certain resonance for those concerned, and abandoned to an unknown fate. The biographies
are preserved in the project documentation and online.
- In each country, the project concludes with an Expert Meeting
(recorded and documented) attended by diverse academics, politicians, and other interested parties.
Collaboration
is a core element of my artistic work at several levels: first, in working with female addicts who are being held in detention
facilities; second, in my close cooperation with a wide range of related institutions; third, through programming and debate
in the institutional cultural arena; and finally, through my intervention in the public domain. The use of different distribution
channels and forms of disclosure in the public domain (online archives, debate) is not only an important vehicle in making
my work known to a general public ? that is, the members of political society – but it also helps to connect target groups
that would not otherwise have any contact, and confront them with each other. The debates broach themes such as the quality
of democracy in a society whose public space is 'purged' of undesirable elements, the relationship between intuitive artistic
practice and precise artistic action, and the implications of the knowledge generated by TBDWBAJ for other forms of community
art intervention.
