The recent happenings around statues, streets, institutions, etc. that honour colonial terrorists brought me back to this space. It’s been a minute since I last posted something that wasn’t related to the promotion of an event but it’s my intention to bring this site back to what I had in mind for it.

If you can read Dutch, here are two older pieces (both written for OneWorld) that briefly outline my take on the matter of praising colonizahs in public spaces. Click here for “Colonial terrorists don’t deserve to have street signs” (originally published on October 30, 2018) and here for my piece about why Witte de With, center for contemporary art, should change its name (originally published on September 17, 2017).

For those who can’t read Dutch… there will be some English pieces coming your way soon.

… ’cause I need to do better when it comes to archiving my writings. Excerpts of two pieces I wrote recently:

“To mock someone who isn’t fluent in their mother tongue(s) is to ridicule their attempts to, and perhaps only in spirit, either return home and/or to carry it with them where they are now. Laughing at mispronunciations or remixed grammar is an embarrassing display of not understanding, or at least underestimating, that mental and intellectual warfare is a crucial part of colonialism. […] A robber always leaves something. Shards of the glass they shattered to get in, the rubble of a busted wall, that gnawing feeling that you are now unsafe in your own space… there’s always something left behind. One doesn’t cheat generations out of entire vocabularies and even alphabets without leaving something. Whether colonized or temporarily occupied… we all come from countries where colonial mentalities linger like vengeful ghosts.”
— Excerpts of  Language is the only Motherland, a call for patience in five considerations, written as part of the Language is the only homeland exhibition which will be up until November 11, 2018.

“A reckoning with history can and will only happen when a museum is deeply invested in a wrecking of structures. It would have to be a commitment that does not shy away from the scent of the proverbial red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. Repair demands a proper understanding of breaking. From the push and the tipping to the fall and her shards. It requires an analysis rooted in something deeper and stretched towards something wider than the mere wish not to be categorized with those who broke it.”
— Excerpt of Breaking Towards Repair, written for the SWICH Blog.