If each word you said to others were to stain your skin forever, as well as staining the skin of the person you would be speaking to, would you twist your tongue six times before speaking out?

To explore this concept, five women and one man were asked to write down impactful words that family, partners or friends once said to them years ago, but that are still on their minds today. Elisabeth and helpers wrote those impulsive and hurtful words on the models’ bodies using black marker pens – the scribbles took about two days to vanish from their skins.

“I was hoping that this could be a therapeutic way for them to purge of those words, or at least, show their existence, which usually, are invisible when someone lays eyes on these people”.

The final portraits were exhibited in the hope to encourage viewers to reflect of their own role as a verbal violator or perpetuator. The interactive confessional booth invited visitors to write down phrases they wish they never had to hear. Those written words were burned after the exhibition, to liberate the visitors from these confidential
incantations.

A gentle and almost secretive soundtrack was hovering over the gallery room with interconnected murmurs of the six models reciting the lines they wrote, reciting what’s constantly rambling in their heads.

Cold-blooded-dermatographic-locutions – the film – following the same question – was produced the following months after the exhibition.