“Girl, you should smile more” – Establishing a Scream Minute and the FLINTA Scream Archive

“Girl, you should smile more” is an ongoing participatory project by Lisa Maria Baier that responds to everyday structures of silencing and social control over female* and FLINTA (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans, Agender) bodies.
The work began with the introduction of a “Scream Minute” – a collective, public moment of vocal release. It transforms the traditional gesture of the “minute of silence” into a performative act of shared resistance and emotional reclamation.
The project invites participants to scream — together, loudly, vulnerably — in spaces where quietness and discipline are socially enforced. These screams are recorded, archived, and form the basis of the FLINTA Scream Archive, a growing collection of voices that testify to the psychological and political pressures faced by marginalized genders.
Through this act, Baier reclaims the scream as a medium of solidarity and feminist expression — not as hysteria, but as articulation.
The archive itself functions as both a document and a monument: it stores moments of collective power, grief, rage, and release. It also challenges dominant modes of memory-making that privilege silence, politeness, and composure over affect, vulnerability, and embodied resistance.
Ultimately, “Girl, you should smile more” questions who is allowed to be loud — and what it means to share one’s voice in a world that continuously disciplines it.