THE BABY BUCHA PROJECT

Sammanfattning: For my bachelor's project, I am confronting the feelings of being transnationally adopted. I do not see adoption as a ”win-win” situation, and I would like people to both think critically about it and question its glorification. As a POC-child myself who grew up with white parents, colorblindness has made my existence rather difficult to deal with. Plagued with feelings I did not understand at the time, I became an isolated island. I want to visualize the feeling of estrangement and alienation from your own body and frightened to drown in your own skin. I have often felt the need to unzip my skin suit and to leave it in a pile on the floor, next to my trousers. In this project I am growing my own skin in a vat, or more precisely, I am growing a kombucha culture in tea and sugar. During the fermentation process, the kombucha culture creates a cellulose material that resembles human flesh. The process is slow, and the development of the material requires a lot of love and nutrition. In return, I get a self-produced material that allows me to work independently. My final piece communicates how it feels to not feel compatible with the body that encases you, as a result of the norms that are written onto your skin.