The three works, angel complex, bffs, and machine girl are part of a series that emerged from my research on the phenomenon of girlblogging during the Lago Mio Summer Residency in Lugano in 2022. They display Tumblr-blog-style collages mounted on steel plates, interweaving diaristic poems, stickers, and found images. Formally and materially, the work points to bureaucratic everyday objects and elements: A4 grid paper, plastic sleeves, laptops/computers, file cabinets, typical office furniture, that evoke sterile, controlled environments, combined with an excess of traditionally feminine-coded signifiers. This tension between control and excess is central. Girlblogging/adolescent femininity is negotiated as highly regulated and self-surveilling. Conceptually, I draw on Tiqqun’s figure of the Young-Girl as the ideal consumer model; a subject defined through consumption and aesthetic labor, one that must permanently optimize, update, and put itself on display. However, I do not cite Tiqqun uncritically: their analysis is utterly girlphobic in its underlying stance and remains caught within a binary, largely cis-heteronormative framework. The notion of the Young-Girl therefore serves me less as an affirmative theoretical foundation than as a point of friction. Girlbloggers perform a hyperfeminine aesthetic fully aware that femininity is socially sanctioned once it becomes "too much." They consciously put this contradiction on display—not ironically, but with a seriousness and devotion that can outwardly read as somewhat obsessive, yet also as tender, reflected in the precise and time-consuming composition of the collages.
