THIS BABY DOLL WILL BE A JUNKIE was an international art project which consisted of audiovisual portraits of members of a growing group of European outcasts, based on rarely heard statements of junkies about their lives before and after they got addicted. The resultant work was a series of identical porcelain dolls that related decisive turns in the life of a female drug addict. For her project, Ulrike Möntman had developed a conceptual layout of four rooms for different levels of process and meaning to emerge.
In the Isolated Room several (jailed) women recounted their biographies and produced the dolls. In the course of the working process, one biography was selected to be recited by dolls (with each doll pronouncing one sentence). The number of dolls used was dependent on the number of sentences available.
The doll series were then temporarily taken in by a cultural institution and thus assigned a space in the Cultural Room (the Viennese biographies were visible and audible inside and outside the cube). Here, an exchange of opinion with experts was held and possible approaches as well as questions raised by the project were discussed. Drop-off referred to the act of installing TBDWBAJ in the Public Realm. The dolls from the series were “dropped off” individually without any further supervision in different public places that were part of the living environment of drug addicts. They were accepted or rejected, ignored or destroyed by locals and visitors to the city. In the Virtual Room, the collected biographies were published as a seminal archive of a constantly growing community of European outcasts. In the course of the project, comparisons of cultural, political and social differences and correspondences in various countries were made possible.