Emma Sulkowicz was raped the first day of her sophomore year at Columbia University and now the senior visual arts major is carrying her mattress everywhere she goes until the assailant is punished.
According to ThinkProgress, Sulkowicz is using the demonstration as her senior thesis, which will either be titles "Mattress Performance" or "Carry That Weight." She has called her piece endurance art because she is carrying an emotional weight as well as a physical one.
"Rape can happen anywhere," Sulkowicz said in a video posted by the Columbia Spectator. "For me, I was raped in my own dorm bed. Since then, it has basically become fraught for me, and I feel like I've carried the weight of what happened there with me everywhere since then."
By her own rules, she cannot ask for help carrying her mattress but may accept assistance from anyone who offers.
"The past year or so of my life has been really marked by telling people what happened in that most intimate private space and bringing it out into the light," she said. "So I think the act of carrying something that is normally found in our bedroom out into the light is supposed to mirror the way I've talked to the media and talked to different news channels, etc."
Sulkowicz was part of a group of 23 students that filed a federal complaint against Columbia for underreporting and mishandling sexual assault on campus, the New York Times reported in April.
"I was so naive that I guess I thought they would just believe me because I was telling the truth," Sulkowicz previously told the Huffington Post. "I didn't expect the school was going to try to not take my side."
Before the start of this academic year, Columbia did change its sexual assault policies, but without consulting the group that had been lobbying for it.
