L: You talked about being a queer person, and about many different spaces and systems that you have navigated. Could you also tell me what a specifically queer space would look like for you?
I feel like a lot of people have different understandings of the word queer. For me, it means something that deviates from the norm, so not only sexuality or gender deviance, but also neurodivergence, for example. For me, being queer is going against so many things that our environments tell us that we should be, going against that. I feel like sometimes, when I say ‘going against it’, people tend to believe that it’s something that we actively do, but that’s just us being, you know, we are that, we can’t not be that, so it’s actually not going against, it’s going with who we are.
So, in a queer space, there should be space for those deviancies from the norm. Spaces in which we don’t have these preconceived ideas of how we should act, how we should be, how we should interact with each other, how we should make a living, what is good, what is bad… Even with being nonbinary, there is no right way of being nonbinary, there’s no right way of being gay, there’s no right way of being anything, there is no right way of being queer. So, I feel like that’s what makes a space queer for me, having space to be who you are, really.
“What makes a space queer for me is having space to be who you are, really.”
L: That’s beautiful. It’s very difficult to find a space where you can just be yourself, so I also wonder what things would make you feel safe in an environment.
I think, mostly no hierarchies, that’s the baseline. And also going against this idea, this very capitalist idea that time is money, that we have to do everything fast, that it has to be done fast. And then having more space for each other that way, to really talk to each other…
For example, as I said earlier, we have this peer support system at my university, and these smalls moments where you sit with each other and maybe you’re not super good friends with your peer support partner, because I’m not friends with mine, but I can tell her what my struggles are, and she tells me about her struggles, and we both know what we’re struggling with. So, just really getting to know each other, on a very… I don’t like this expression, but on a ‘human’ level.
“I sometimes struggle with spaces where everything has to be cool and nice and fun, because that’s not real for me, you know?”
I sometimes struggle with spaces where everything has to be cool and nice and fun, because that’s not real for me, you know? There’s so much more to us than just the nice sides, and I feel like when we connect to each other and make space for our struggles and we’re talking about it, we see how alike these struggles are, right? And how connected we are in the struggle. That’s also something that capitalism takes away from us, and that actually keeps capitalism in power, because we don’t really know that we’re all struggling.
And some people don’t even know that they’re struggling, because they have normalized what they are experiencing, because they don’t have these other views on the world and maybe they don’t validate their feelings as much. And I feel like that also happens with other oppressive systems, right? With the patriarchy etc.
There’s this other really cool zine that’s called We Are All Very Anxious, and it’s super interesting because they talk about how important it is for us to start from our experience and from there to build up and create a movement that liberates us. Because how are you gonna know what you need to be liberated from, if you don’t connect to your struggles and to your communities’ struggles?
And sometimes I also think, like for example here in Groningen, yeah, we have some struggles, but we’re very privileged to live in the Netherlands, we’re privileged by colonialism and by whiteness, so… but there’s still things like for example the state. I’m getting super anarchist again [laughs]. We don’t really talk about these things with each other, we don’t really see how big the problem is. I feel like if we connected more with ourselves and with each other and talked about these things… Like for example with this project, I imagine there will be a red thread across the conversations, and that’s kind of how you spot the problems, you know?
“How are you gonna know what you need to be liberated from, if you don’t connect to your struggles and to your communities’ struggles?”
So, this zine talks about how important it is to really connect to our experience and to start writing and creating content to connect to each other and to make sense of our experience, to make it something more concrete. And then again also rejecting this idea that we have to look at authorities to know what good anarchism looks like or what we should do to smash the state. It’s about how connecting is so important.
For me, it’s safe when there is space to exchange who we really are. I feel like I’m saying things over and over again, but for example, with art therapy, there’s a lot of exercises that you can do to see how people interact with each other in spaces, just by making a collective drawing and seeing who takes up more space on the paper, for example. Obviously there’s always dynamics in relationships, and it would be naïve to think that we’re above hierarchies or that we’re above dominator practices, but I feel like there’s a lot of tools available for us as a community to practice things with each other that can also reflect how we have internalised these things and how we can look with each other for solutions as well. So, that’s another thing I really like about art therapy.
