The project start with performative workshop in which I become the model for ten women from the Sevlievo State Psychiatric Hospital. The participants can position me, apply makeup, alter my posture, choose my clothes, and create “characters” using objects, garments, and cosmetics I provide. The photographs are taken by the women themselves using my phone. They decide how I am positioned and how the image is composed. Throughout the workshop, sound is recorded—both individual and collective laughter.

The work creates a space in which the participants are invited to make decisions and direct the process—an opportunity that is often limited or taken away from people living with mental illness. Through these encounters, authorship and control are temporarily shifted, allowing the women to assert choice, expression, and presence.

Live performance : 

I am accompanied by the sound of children’s lullabies performed by a local violinist, Christophor Mihailov. As he plays, I take the same medication I was prescribed in the mental hospital, which gradually causes me to fall asleep for the entire duration of the event. .

At the moment I fall asleep, the video begins.

The video is the result of a meeting with a psychotherapist working at the psychiatric hospital where I was admitted twenty years earlier. The conversation was recorded and later transcribed into text, from which I developed the script for the video.

The script is composed entirely of the psychiatrist’s words, which I edited and reorganized into thematic sections—normality, illness, the female body, motherhood, medication, and social norms. In this way, I return these words to the public sphere, reframed and recontextualized, exposing the thin and often unstable boundary between care and control.

In the video, I perform the role of the psychiatrist, speaking his words while wearing the clothes and adornments chosen by the women during the workshop.