I’m Just a Girl

An Installation by 2Win! Studios for Feria Clandestina

Set inside a real motel room, I’m Just a Girl recreates the psychological space of a teenage bedroom—where fantasy, shame, and performance coexist under pink lighting and naive bravado. The immersive installation by 2Win! Studios explores the pressures of growing up feminine in a city like Miami: a place where party culture, beauty expectations, and internet nostalgia all collide.

At the heart of the room sits a life-sized ceramic doll slumped on the bed, dressed in a Flanigan’s shirt and pink socks—posed like she’s waiting for something or someone. Viewers are invited to reposition her, underscoring the way girls are often seen as passive objects in their own stories. Behind her, balloon-like ceramic letters curve above the bedframe spelling “I’m Just a Girl” in a candy-coated Y2K font, at once playful and plaintive.

The vanity across the room holds ceramic replicas of a life lived under the gaze: a Cry Baby trophy, an Absolut Vodka bottle turned flower vase, a bowl of cereal with wide-eyed girl heads floating inside, and a pastel pill-shaped jewelry box. These items blend kitsch and vulnerability, showing how the ritual of self-beautification can mask anxiety, rebellion, and identity crisis.

A ceramic recreation of a Happy Bunny poster reads “Like I need your approval,” staged beside a motel nightstand topped with more faux-alcohol vases. Nearby, a dollhouse shelf displays figurines of women in traditionally respected careers—teacher, nurse, police officer—all reimagined as hyper-sexualized forms, critiquing the impossible demand to be both “respectable” and desirable.

A handmade shrine dedicated to Twilight’s Edward Cullen sits perched in the corner like a sacred relic of teenage longing. And tucked against the opposite wall, a large sculptural Polly Pocket opens to reveal a surreal Miami microcosm—complete with a disco ball-lit club, a tiny beach scene, and an alligator peeking from the shoreline.

I’m Just a Girl is both diary and diorama—offering a glimpse into the internal monologue of growing up femme, Latinx, and online. Through handmade objects, cultural references, and immersive design, the motel room becomes a space of tension: between being looked at and looking inward, between childhood and adulthood, between fantasy and fatigue