Dear Ursula is in the semi-permanent exhibition Kruispunt Rotterdam until 2027, where my work is dialogue with the museum’s collection of joss paper. It serves as a kind of dialogue between then and now, near and far.
I’ve been commissioned to undertake a two year research project into unseen labour practices within the fashion industry. My focus is on the destruction of wool in the Netherlands following the dismantling of the domestic wool industry since the 1980s. Because wool processing is labour-intensive and costly, it has become economically cheaper to destroy raw wool than to process it. I will set out to investigate the industrial destruction process in parallel with a socio-historical research into the lamb as symbol of sacrifice.
Hannah Chris Lomans and Amy Suo Wu began their residency at Plaatsmaken. Their work and exhibition, “A Wound Is the Ground on Which This Body Rests,” focuses on marking as memory, just as a wound forms a memory on the skin. Together, they have chosen to use corrosive processes for this purpose. Working methods that erode, open, rot, fade, or even destroy the surfaces that bear their texts and images.
Embodied publishing talk and navel expanding workshop at the Critical Fashion Practices Master at Artez in Arnhem. Thank you Hanka van der Voet and Femke de Vries for inviting me once again.
I have started writing for a column called Dark Cousin on steganography and beyond, featured on the design platform SourceType.
Ghosts in the Family was a writing workshop co-hosted by Toni Brell and myself. The workshop was centred around the role of storytelling and fiction from queer, feminist and diaspora perspectives alongside each other. Toni explored ways to challenge and disrupt hegemonic narratives as potential gestures to create alternative realities, while I approached fiction and storytelling as tools for immersion and empathy in the mending of intergenerational and diasporic divides. A variety of collective and individual writing methods were practiced to conjure up and exorcise ghosts in the family.
On the occasion of the Onomatopee book launch of Research for People who (Think They) would Rather Create by Dirk Vis, I hosted a speedy Steganographic Poetry Workshop on the method of the Carden grille.
Lectures from across the ocean as a result of Corona. I had the opportunity to present my work at Rhode Island School of Design, California Institute of the Arts, California College of the Arts, Zurich University of the Arts and HfG Karlsruhe
The launch of ‘A Cookbook of Invisible Writing’ at Onomatopee, organised by Joanette van der Veer. I set up a UV lit demonstration room where visitors could test out invisible ink.
From invisible writing to visible mending. Thank you Shailoh Phillips for inviting me to spend an afternoon with Master Interior Design students at Artez Zwolle. It was a nice chance to talk about how invisible writing brought me to visible mending. The session was then followed by figurative mending while chatting about cultures of apology (making amends) and pondering about what over-mending and speculative mending could mean.
