Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz is carrying her mattress around campus to protest against the university's handling of her alleged rape
Emma Sulkowicz will carry this mattress until her alleged rapist is expelled Photo: YOUTUBE/COLUMBIA SPECTATOR
An American student has vowed to carry a mattress everywhere with her until her alleged rapist is expelled from their university.
Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University student, has claimed she was raped in her bed last year at university by a fellow student.
She is one of three women who complained to the university about that student, but Columbia’s dean found him to be not guilty in each case.
Emma Sulkowicz
Since then, Sulkowicz, 21, has joined a federal complaint of 23 students against the university’s mishandling of sexual conduct cases.
“I think the school is pressured to find him not guilty because up until now Columbia could just push these things under the rug and no one would know,” she wrote in TIME earlier this year.
“But that means the Columbia administration is harbouring serial rapists on campus. They’re more concerned about their public image than keeping people safe.”
It’s why now she has decided to carry her mattress around the campus as part of her thesis for her Visual Arts major.
“For me I was raped in my own dorm bed and since then that’s basically become fraught for me and I feel like I’ve carried the weight of what happened there with me ever since then,” she said in a video for the Columbia Spectator.
“The piece could potentially take a day or go on till I graduate. The mattress is just the right size for me to be able to carry it and continue with my day, but also heavy enough that I have to continually struggle with it.”
As part of the project, Sulkowicz will not allow herself to ask people for help in carrying the mattress, but she will accept help from those who offer.
She describes it as “an endurance performance art piece” that “utilises elements of protest”- calling it Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight.
“I’m not as nervous about carrying a mattress around as I am with the attention it’s gotten,” she said
“Last night when I was shaking in bed and just thinking about how scary today was going to be, I was thinking about how I’m not really going to have anonymity anymore which is a really strange thing for me.”
Taken from
No comments:
Post a Comment