Emma Sulkowiz, a senior at Columbia University, will carry an extra long twin mattress around campus daily in order to demonstrate the burden of victims of sexual assault for her senior thesis.

The 21-year-old's thesis combines performance art and protest and is titled "Mattress Performance" or "Carry That Weight," according to the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university newspaper.

Sulkowicz says she was raped in her dorm bed on the first day of her sophomore year at the school. She began carrying her mattress around on Tuesday.

"The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I've brought my personal story out into the light," she said in an interview with TIME. "This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength."

The student will carry the mattress everywhere -- including to class, the gym and the library -- until her alleged rapist is removed from campus, either voluntarily or through expulsion.

"Last semester I was working in the dark room in the photography department," Sulkowicz wrote for TIME in May. "Though my rapist wasn't in my class, he asked permission from his teacher to come and work in the dark room during my class time. I started crying and hyperventilating. As long as he's on campus with me, he can continue to harass me."

In April, Sulkowicz and 22 other students from Columbia University and Barnard University filed a federal Title IX complaint saying that the schools do not properly handle sexual assault claims.

"Rape can happen anywhere, but I was attacked in my own dorm bed," Sulkowicz told TIME this week. "For me that place that is normally very intimate and pure was desecrated and is very fraught. The piece is about carrying the memory of that everywhere I go."

Watch Sulkowicz discuss her thesis in Columbia Daily Spectator video below:


Follow Scharon Harding on Twitter: @ScharHar

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