L: You said that you’ve been struggling with your identity, or with avoiding a narrowing down of your identity by others in different contexts. How did you go about defending or creating that space for yourself?
I think that has started at my upbringing. I come from a small city, which is very conservative, it’s part of the Dutch Bible Belt essentially. My parents also came from small, conservative backgrounds, but they moved out to study in Amsterdam, and when I was in a museum with my Dad last time, we were looking at a photograph exhibition, and I was like ‘Why is this so dear for you when you have never actually had any art education?’
And he mentioned ‘Well, the only thing I could get access to was music, and that was a representation of the life that I missed in my home village, so in that way I came into contact with all those cool artists and people that knew way more than where I came from, so going to museums with you is very important to me and in your upbringing, so I could give you that experience of being together, and stepping out of your comfort zone and defending that to you, too’.
My mother has the same thing, as I mentioned earlier, she always stands for whatever she feels is justice, and it’s a good idea of justice [laughs], it’s very unproblematic. And my parents always told me: ‘You should defend yourself’, and my immediate surroundings always told me: ‘You’re weird, you are different, why do you always have to act in different ways, why do you always have to go against the stream?’
But also I actually got beaten down for it, I felt very much depressed about it, like, yeah, ‘Why do I even do this? Why does it matter so much if there’s nothing I can be good at? What is the value of me even being here?’ But in the same question, I also answered myself ‘Maybe this experience is so unique for this place that I should defend myself, and I should speak out!’
“Maybe this experience is so unique for this place that I should defend myself, and I should speak out!”
So, even though now I make space for myself through art, I never had that space back home, so I did local politics, I did activism, I was engaged within the volunteer scene a lot to make people aware that your presence matters, you can speak up, you can make a difference. It doesn’t have to be your job, but you can do it in so many ways, you can be a volunteer and show that you can make someone’s day, just by being present. So, for me, finding space to defend my identities is in the gestures I show towards others.
L: That’s very beautiful.
Yeah, it is very beautiful! I always try when people ask me a question… like, I recently took part in a stage play, it was a youth stage play, and there were some highschool students and one was like ‘I need to finish a film by tomorrow and I don’t know how to get it finished – you do arts, maybe you know how?’ and I was like ‘It’s about time management!’
And the next rehearsal he came up to me and said: ‘I made it’ and I was like ‘Oh, this is so nice’. And that way, by helping him, I made him friendly towards me, and I allowed myself space, if you get what I mean? By showing a friendly gesture I allow myself to feel like ‘I am here, I have something to say that matters’, and then my presence matters too. So, after my gesture comes my presence.
So that’s maybe what I mean by saying ‘my presence can already be a lot’, just me doing a nice gesture, even if it is apolitical, non-activist, non-volunteer, can already be so much of an engagement, but if I have done that, I can also allow myself to say to those people: ‘Can you allow me some space, can you allow me some rest, can you stay a bit more quiet?’ So, yeah, it’s a back-and-forth, it’s very beautiful.
L: Maybe we could also talk specifically about how others can give you space?
Others can allow me space very much in the sense that… please listen to me when I ask something, when I mention I may feel uncomfortable, just listen, but as a pre-given, please don’t be judgemental, please mind your words, please mind your sound levels too, please mind that the space can be accessible for someone who might want to use it… just all the good stuff.
Be aware that there are people who are not like you and you can accommodate them in many ways; there can be so so so many things that can also be a nice gesture, you know? The one I give out can also be the one I get back, because only showing a nice gesture is already showing ‘I appreciate you for who you are’, and that’s so nice if we do that.
Be considerate, make sure the physical space you inhabit allows for people who are not you also to enter it, that you can also show love, it’s not only about action in the space itself, it’s also really about the mindset of being accepting. So when you talk to someone who might be queer, trans, a person of colour, just be nice, and you already show ‘I accept you for who you are’.
L: That is a topic that keeps coming up, like in a way we all want to be listened to and we all want to be heard…
How can you make someone else do that?
L: Yeah.
I don’t remember what this text is called again exactly, it’s this article written in the 60s about a group of Black femme lesbians, who discuss the fact that, at the same time, they don’t have white women with them because racism, and they don’t have Black men with them because sexism, then they don’t have straight Black women with them because of homophobia, and how they are like ‘It’s not our responsibility to fix all those issues, so how can we make a positive impact to our community and raise awareness for systematic issues? Is it neccesery for us to solve these issues? How do we take care of our trauma?’³
“How do we do that, making somebody open-minded enough that they will look up things themselves?”
And there was this beautiful thing about how even in being together and writing that down is already a practice of creating an archive, and the key is to make someone open-minded to look up those archives without pushing them explicitly, so that they will do that themselves. So how do we do that, making somebody open-minded enough that they will look up things themselves?
Like, a great example is the eye-colour-exercise⁴, I don’t remember who did it again, it makes people on a very apolitical level aware that you can be discriminated against, so maybe they are inspired then to look up archives, but then they also need educational skills to come to archives, know how to interpret them, work with them, and that also has to do with lots of classism, so I think it’s very rigid what you need to do, a systematic change.
L: It requires a lot of work from all parties.
Yeah, it requires activists to let their voice be heard, so that they are archived, it requires people who may not be in that circle to be aware that there are people who are marginalized, it also requires them to understand the archive, and that requires good education, and that is clearly not common, so it would have to be a systematic change of, I think, the education system.
³ just to avoid misunderstandings, this is not to suggest that it was racist, sexist or homophobic by this group to not have white or straight folks or men as members.
⁴ “exercise involving eye color and brown collars” by jane elliot (wikipedia link)
