Simone Engelen

“In 2006, while in the United States during an exchange year in high school, I was sexually abused by two of my peers. For years, I tried to bury everything connected to that experience. In 2022, I returned to the United States with my mother, retracing the journey as a road trip in which my camera became a filter — a way of holding the past at just enough distance to be able to face it. It was only through the lens that I found the courage to confront an event that had shaped my life so profoundly. The title refers to twenty-seven unfinished letters I rediscovered in an old diary, each addressed to the boys who abused me. 27 Drafts traces a fragmented process of remembering and confronting, and of slowly finding the words for something that had remained unspeakable for years.” – Simone Engelen