Heinde en ver

A longing to know - beyond the surface - a longing to wander back to one's roots - to know - to understand - to be acknowledged - a longing to be - a longing to be home - a longing to feel at home - a longing to belong - a longing to be part of something - a longing for balance - a longing for family, family ties, family history, a family tree, tradition - a longing for equality, for balance ... to no longer have to explain.

With the installation Heinde en ver, I explore the Black-and-white family line on my mother's side, placing them side by side for comparison in my installation for LANGSTME, the third triennial of Beetsterzwaag organised by Kunsthuis SYB.

Starting from an observation of general attitudes towards the importance of, and appreciation for, things like family, (family) history and tradition — and, as the sum of these, a perception of (cultural) identity — I try to gain insight into why this seems to be regarded as weightier, more important and more self-evident for one branch of my family line than for the other, and how this affects the way I look at myself.
How does your self-image develop when the backgrounds that produced you, and the places you come from, do not relate to each other on an equal footing? And what do you (consciously/unconsciously) pass on to the generation(s) after you?

In Heinde en ver too, the Dutch flag, as a symbol of national identity, played an important role.

Together with my then 93-year-old mother, I unpicked a Dutch flag thread by thread while she talked about growing up, her upbringing, the songs she learned to sing at school, and the resulting shaping and perception of her 'Dutch' identity. In the installation, I hung the threads back up, loosely separated with wider gaps between them. Sometimes they became entangled together again, but mostly not.