In 2015, I was commissioned to photographically archive a Swiss architect’s collection of dollhouses. The collection comprises around fifty pieces, mainly of German or English origin, built between the late 19th and late 20th centuries. For this project, I took typological and systematic photographs of their facades, in black and white and from a frontal viewpoint to avoid distortion and focus attention on their graphic and formal features. As I handled them and observed their interiors, I was struck by the sociological interest and narrative potential of these toy objects, originally made to playfully introduce little girls to their future roles as mothers, wives, and housewives.

These considerations resonated with other subjects I was studying at the time, namely the history of the invention of hysteria and the fabrication of representations of femininity through the medium of photography. The project then took on a broader and more personal dimension. It was approached as an anthropological investigation, continuing over several years. It is divided into several photographic series involving the collector herself in the roles of model, decorator, costume designer, theater wig maker, and contemporary dancer.