Rowan Smith
Bengal Submission
As I walked into the main doors of the Rendezvous during the first week of April, I was greeted with the “What Were You Wearing?” installation spanning the entirety of the Rendezvous main corridor, which I use to get to every one of my classes.
I knew I would want to make time to visit the installation sometime this month and interact with it. However, before I had the chance to find it, it found me.
Outfits that people were wearing when they were sexually assaulted lined either side of the hallway, along with testimonials from their owners. On each end of the Rendezvous is a piece of paper alerting those entering with a content warning for sexual assault, advising students and faculty to utilize university resources for “self-care.”
I have no issue with the concept of the installation itself — I was actively excited for it. My grievance is with the execution.
The Rendezvous portion of “What Were You Wearing?” fails to actualize a major theme of this entire month’s events: consent. Students and faculty are not allowed to give nor withdraw consent for their participation with this material.
Hundreds of students and faculty, myself included, must pass through the main hallway of the Rendezvous to get to their classes each day. They are not given a choice as to whether they want to participate with the installation, they must.
A content warning is meaningless when one is forced to engage with the content. Yes, there are other, less busy hallways in the Rendezvous building, but this never should have been in a place like this to begin with.
Assembling such an intimate and emotionally involved project in this particular space has caused a few major problems: 1) I, and many others, am forced to engage with incredibly triggering material every school day in a time and place that is wildly inconvenient to do so, 2) it is made more difficult to stop and give this collection the time and respect it needs to properly participate with it, because it’s the central hallway of one of the main buildings on campus, and 3) the survivors who chose to participate are not being respected by the placement of this piece.
Being sexually assaulted is important enough that people still remember what they were wearing when it happened, and those articles of clothing are now being hung behind tables and on salad bar sneeze guards. This all could have been avoided by using any of ISU’s galleries or any stationary room.
Everyone has been done a disservice by having this installation placed in a passageway: the curators who spent their time organizing it, the survivors who chose to participate and everyone who has interacted with it in passing. Every survivor who volunteered to make this installation possible deserved more respect.
Their testimonies, the things that happened to them deserved more respect. Our time to choose to commune with this project and its material deserved more respect.
