Support Survivors' Voices with Project Galatea

Hello, beautiful strangers of the internet! If you do already know me, thank you for engaging, and if you don’t, my name is Gabriela (@legreatgabby on socials - I'm aware it's a silly handle) and I’m the artist and creator of Project Galatea, which currently lives online on my artist website at https://www.legreatgabby.com/projects.

What is this project?

Project Galatea is an ongoing auto-ethnographic portrait series depicting survivors of sexual and domestic violence and abuse. As a long-time survivor of sexual and domestic violence and abuse, my work exists as a series of interviews with fellow survivors from which a visual metaphor is drawn and incorporated into a photographic work. Began while I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, I have run Galatea intermittently on my own over the last six years.

A phenomenon often described by many survivors of this violence is the feeling of being frozen or stunned, like in the myth that gives this project its name. Galatea is a mythological Greek figure, a statue carved by the artist Pygmalion that was brought to life through his touch and became his literal object of desire. Galatea attempts to give agency back to those whose lives have been affected against their will.

This project exists primarily to bridge the numerous gaps in media representations of survivorhood by providing survivors a platform to control three major things: the narrative surrounding these kinds of violations, the kinds of information shared, and the kinds of information not shared regarding experiences in which their autonomy was taken from them. I do this by creating layers of anonymity in both images and words based on participants’ preferences, either obscuring identifying features and/or redacting identifying information. The object is to pull away from the forensic and into the personal.

Topics range greatly and have so far included some of the following: navigating queerness and sexual violence, unpacking rape and purity culture, domestic abuse within marriages and partnerships, behavioral health and substance abuse, cycles of abuse and the abuser/survivor binary, medical trauma and sexually transmitted infections, coercion/harassment in academia and educational spaces, religion and grooming, disability/neurodivergence and sexual violence, and state-sanctioned violence/abuse.

Sounds interesting. So, what's the process?

The current process is as follows: 1) an information session is scheduled that overviews the goals and full process; 2) a recorded, informal interview occurs either in person or over a secure video-conferencing platform of the participants’ choice; 3) I transcribe the interview by hand; 4) the transcript is provided to the participants for a) the ability to redact information and b) to agree upon a possible usable metaphor for the visual content; 5) a photoshoot session is scheduled based on the needs of the participant, 6) the image and transcript are approved; and 6) both go live on my artists’ website at legreatgabby.com under the Projects tab. If there is an exhibition or feature of the work, each participant is re-consulted for their consent.

This is a heavy topic. So, what about precautions?

Since participant safety is paramount, trauma-informed safety precautions are embedded in every level of the process of this project. To date, there have been twenty interviews, but only eleven have been published thus far, and five are pending. This is because at any participation stage, survivors are fully enabled to back out. Despite the significant workload, the project remains a single-person interviewer/transcriber/photographer project to further protect participants’ identities. Confidentiality is key in this process. Even in transcription, each participant is numbered rather than named. During the initial information session, I ask what subjects the survivor may not want to touch on to avoid specific triggers. Sometimes certain subjects can accidentally re-trigger the participants when delving into details they find themselves accidentally divulging, so I ask them to explore the possibility that this may happen. In addition, every interview and page of the resulting website materials includes tailored content-specific trigger warnings, as well as relevant online and phone support resources.

The question I begin the project with every session is simply, ‘What would you like the world to know about your experiences?’ and let them lead me where they feel comfortable. Both transcription and the interview itself are part of the art-making process, the dialogue and processing of the testimonies themselves. Information sheets are maintained as part of the internal process to keep up-to-date participant preferences in terms of dissemination.

Get to it! What is the plan for the project?

As I continue to broaden the scope of participation by traveling far and wide to meet new participants, I’m hoping to enhance the breadth of communities and topics represented within the project. Intersectionality is important to the heart of this project and I would like the representation to reflect that. These participants will have the opportunity to have their stories not only platformed permanently on the website but also in an exhibition of selected pieces occurring in late spring/early summer of 2025, ideally including programming surrounding topics raised by subjects from within the project. I plan to use this opportunity of platforming Galatea to bring the project to spaces to cities and universities outside of where the project began, namely the alma maters of previous and current project participants, to help build bridges surrounding the topic of sexual and domestic violence.

Up to this point, the costs associated with continuing this project have been out-of-pocket, but to expand the scope, I’m reaching out to the community I know that wants to see more of this content out there to help me make some vital steps forward. To support the longevity of this project, the first immediate phase of funding would involve migrating the current website content to a more sustainable platform to hold this expanding content volume. The second phase of the project is always hosting information sessions/interviewing participants, but this rarely has associated costs unless participants need in-person interaction. The third phase would be traveling to photograph participants, which has obvious associated costs. The fourth phase would be the exhibition of Galatea, creating a physical space where the Pittsburgh community can physically sit with these stories. However, funding of exhibition materials for a Pittsburgh exhibition will be used to make it possible for this exhibition to travel to other cities, potentially countries.

In the long term, I would also like to use this opportunity to spur on a future exhibition featuring artists, designers, and makers who do work centered on trauma to continue having these conversations in other spaces.

What are the associated costs?

These are the current projected costs, in order of immediacy (which are subject to change and expansion based on the growth of the project):

And, why?

As many know, funding for the arts is scarce these days and funding for works with this subject material are even scarcer. In the last year, there has, to my surprise, been an explosion of interest in this project. It is difficult to sustain the current exciting pace things are going at without a bit of assistance. With your help, the individuals who’ve entrusted me with their stories will have greater opportunities for visibility and, with any luck, connection. While I will not be selling prints of these works, in addition to a personal invitation to any and all exhibitions of this work, I extend to you, the audience, the formal opportunity to engage with our cohort of survivors by offering words of support through the project email. I have been given feedback that many of the participants have been greatly heartened by encouraging messages sent to me from viewers each time a survivor’s story is shared. Even the shortest good-faith message can do a world of good in supporting these individuals, some of whom have told almost no one in their lives. Equally, if you would like to request an information session or exhibition of this work, please do not hesitate to reach out.

Every dollar donated will bring these stories a step closer to the light. In addition to the works themselves, I'll be sharing some testimonials from subjects to give everyone a sense of what this project functionally does. Stay tuned for more!