The Exhibition "Europe. The Odyssey.", with images, video, and audio, was an attempt to take the audience along on my reflections on the idea of freedom of movement, built around the concept of ‘waiting’.
During my residency at VHDG in 2022, I experienced a strong contrast between my own traveling around within the Netherlands and the crisis situation in Ter Apel. This led to my observations on the refugee crisis from various angles, which resulted in a journey undertaken to Turkey, across land and sea. Leave Europe, and then go back again: a contemporary odyssey.
The Freedom/Restriction of Movement
I completed my residency at VHDG in the month of September, 2022. I wandered through Leeuwarden and tried to understand the dynamics within the city from a perspective of work and precarious working conditions, something experienced daily in the life of an artist. In this month I was also traveling extensively between Amsterdam – my home -, Leeuwarden – the residency -, and The Hague – my studies. In general, I experienced complete freedom of movement in the Netherlands, and with that also the possibility of not one, but two homes.
Parallel to my stay a humanitarian crisis emerged in Ter Apel, also in the North of the country. The refugee center in Ter Apel became overcrowded, and thus people were forced to sleep outside, underneath the open sky. The government knew it had to act, but remained indecisive for quite some time. I started mapping out the media landscape, and the flood of news articles around the refugee crisis of Ter Apel. I set a daily Google alert with certain keywords, which resulted in my mailbox overflowing with messages about the crisis. Every day I experienced the feeling of powerlessness: watching from a distance how my host country dealt with the situation and how it portrayed it in the media.
When I got the chance to travel to Turkey later that year, I decided to make the journey across land and sea – instead of traveling by plane – to better experience the power of my passport, as well as the slowness of traveling through ‘Fortress Europe’ (a term pointing out how the traffic and trade across the EU border is restricted; European protectionism and keeping out refugees) across multiple borders. My thoughts on my stay in Leeuwarden and the extensive traveling done were shaped by the contradiction of the liberty of movement a European passport offers and the limitations tied to the status of refugee.
The Waiting Room
The artworks that sprung from my stay in Leeuwarden, my slow travels throughout Europe, and my reflections, play around with the concept of waiting: waiting for departure; waiting during a long trip; waiting to reach a destination; waiting to cross a border; waiting to come up with an idea; waiting to make an exhibition; waiting for the first visitor.
From February 10 until March 12 I exhibited works that came out of my condition of freedom and stability and my experiences of how these things are limited in the life of another. The life of a refugee is put on hold, in uncertainty of the future, of a new destination. Uncertainty to be able to stay somewhere, to be allowed to build a new life there.
How does one relate to a crisis and a life in the waiting room if you’ve already reached the final destination? How does one relate to the uncertainty of the journey, the possibility of accidents, to traveling very slowly? How does someone experience travels when they seem endless? And what does it mean to truly arrive somewhere?