Patchwork Girl is a poignant lecture performance about sexting, exposing, slut-shaming, empowerment and owning your sexuality. 

Jantine was 16 when the trashy Dutch website GeenStijl published her nudes, together with a fake interview about her sex life. When Cyrina was 13, she made a sexy video for a boy. The next day the clip was spread at the schools in her village. Both girls blamed themselves for the slut-shaming they experienced.  

In this performance, Jantine reconstructs the traumatic events from her past, using the internet through which she was previously victimized. On stage, she is accompanied by five teen girls. What has changed in the intervening 20 years? How proud of her body can a girl be? They re-enact the experience of the 16-year-old Jantine, and the perpetrators. And they explore whether AI-generated apologies are more effective than the ones Jantine received. Cyrina shares her story, too, via a voice-over. AI artist Noelía creates an avatar based on Jantine’s nudes. This virtual girl who embodies the ‘male fantasy’, is first used to attract men in “expose groups” on Telegram and on porn sites. At the end of the performance, the avatar is 'dressed' in photos of the skin of the audience. Shielded by skin, this Patchwork Girl enters the world of expose groups and porn sites and speaks out. She engages in dialogue with the users, on behalf of victimized women. She gives the response they can't and reclaims their narrative. 

We encountered all sorts of obstacles while making Patchwork Girl, which confronted us with (the absence of) internet ethics. The performance thematizes these obstacles. A few of them: 

• We initially wanted to work with young victims of shame sexting, but none of them wanted to share their story live on stage. Jantine did dare to take on that challenge, but only after 20 years. Her story reveals just how traumatic events like this are for the victims. A sharp contrast to the ease with which nude photos are shared without consequences.  

• We discovered that avatars have better legal protection than women! It turns out that it is illegal to create a nude avatar. So we had to use the latest technology, that is still unregulated, and learn from scratch how to create her.  

• We planned to share our avatar to the big expose groups on Telegram, which have thousands of members. But recent media attention had made the groups suddenly disappear to an un-trackable corner of the Internet. We set up our own Telegram group to share our avatar. We got followers (!) but they were soon using our group to trade images of their girlfriends.  

• We got a tip-off that private photos were circulating on the porn site xHamster. We attempted to register our avatar with the site. Soon we found ourselves in a bureaucratic maze, trying to sort out who had the rights to the naked avatar. The issue is still unresolved.  

• We contacted GeenStijl to advertise our performance on their site. This was the least they could do, we thought, since it’s no longer possible for Jantine to sue the site for distributing child porn images of her, due to a statute of limitations. GeenStijl proposed to charge us €850 for the advertisement and made inappropriate comments in our email exchange, which made us shy away from collaboration.  

In making Patchwork Girl, it became clear that shame sexting and exposing are products of an indifferent man’s world, that is unlikely to change anytime soon. As women, our only possible answer is sisterhood. The performance ends with a profound act of solidarity: the girls stand around Jantine to shield her from the view of the audience, while she is making a new nude. On the screen above them, the avatar—now covered with photographs of the skin of audience members—talks about all that skin can mean: “She is all of us. She is carried by all of us.”