Benedetta Faccani

Throughout history, the term ‘girl’ has never been stable. Today, the girl’ is a figure of freedom, playfulness, and resistance. my room is our room <3 is a spatial multimedia installation that redefines the bedroom for the figure of the girl, activating it as a space of community knowledge making. Here, the girl is not defined by age or biology, but draws from Paul B. Preciado's refusal of stable gender categories in An Apartment on Uranus (2020) and on Mita Medri and Mela Miekus’s Silly Girl Theory (2024), which describes the girl as anyone who resists the hegemonic structures of consumer society and patriarchal life. To sillify is to reappropriate; to embrace frivolity, softness, excess, and quirkiness not as weaknesses but as deliberate political gestures. It means refusing efficiency, resisting adultification, reclaiming pleasure in things traditionally read as unserious, and using the visual language of girlhood as a tool of resistance rather than a mark of triviality.

The bedroom has historically been the central site of girlhood. In the 1970s, sociologists Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber named this phenomenon ‘bedroom culture’, observing how girls in post-war Britain, unable to participate in the public activities available to boys, were encouraged to spend most of their time inside the home, making the bedroom a place of identity formation and cultural production. But the bedroom can also be a space of confinement and tension, as I observed in my research, pushing me to redefine it beyond its four walls. How can the girl reappropriate this space, transforming the solitary and private into the collective and shared? 

my room is our room <3 is divided into two connected spaces: the first makes the research tangible, through a video essay; and the second is a curtained space, inside of which sits a bed. Outside, there are house rules, inspired by rules of girls’ bedrooms found on internet archives and the self-determined rules of queer spaces, where communities define their own values. These rules are not restrictive; they create the conditions for a different kind of encounter. The bed is my own single bed, which is extended in length to make room for others, stretching a private space into a communal one. The space will be activated during the graduation show by welcoming girls and different guests for recorded conversations. These conversations will explore forms of knowledge and experience that exist outside dominant institutions; embodied, communal, intergenerational, and resistant. The transcripts and stories collected will become an extension of the research and part of an ongoing archive.

Girlhood has been aestheticised, packaged, and sold back to girls for so long, but the actual experience of girlhood has rarely been given space. Marketing and design industries have always made the girl their most visible subject while simultaneously disregarding her interior life. In my practice, sillification becomes a design stance that resists the dominant values of the design field, such as efficiency and minimalism, while undermining the industries, from fashion to advertising to social media, that profit from girlhood while silencing it.