What Should I Wear? questions the fragility of safety and protection within everyday life, gender, and public space.

A hard hat originally produced for occupational safety is transformed, through embroidered interventions, texts, and spatial installation, from a functional piece of equipment into a surface carrying collective memory. Constructed together with construction debris and temporary boundary elements, the installation creates a space where the promise of protection often remains merely a discursive sense of security.

The texts embroidered onto the helmet point to the continuity of violence directed at women’s bodies in domestic, professional, and public spaces, while questioning who is truly protected by the language of safety. Representing security through its industrial and rigid form, the object becomes fragile, bodily, and testimonial through hand-embroidered red threads.

The repetitive and time-intensive nature of embroidery carries traces of labor, memory, and record-making, while simultaneously producing a fragile yet persistent form of resistance.

Rather than proposing a solution, the question “What Should I Wear?” exists at a threshold where the idea of protection becomes insufficient. The work explores the limits of the language of safety and the visibility of precarity within everyday life.