ABOUT
I search for ways to create and recreate stories. Exploring subjects such as romantic love, artists' myths and idols through performative methods inspired by my own fangirling, but also by artists like Tehching Hsieh and Sophie Calle.
The result is shown in art installations, videos and performances, as well as in books and other publications.
I think about the connection between feeling and naming, being and performing, living and writing. “With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire.” The author Gustave Flaubert once wrote, connecting his bodily experience to his words. I think about that sensation. How do experiences of flames turn to language? And what happens if I put it the other way around: Is it possible to set my hand on fire by writing about lighters and gasoline? If performativity is a force that goes in both directions, from being to naming and from naming to becoming, it is. Written stories always bleed into reality.
I think about desire and romantic love. In one of my works I travel to Tulsa, Oklahoma to search for my first love, the singer Taylor Hanson. Nineteen years have passed since his band Hanson made it big with the song MMMBop and I dreamed of a life together with Taylor. The background is the fact that I was obsessed with him as a teenager. But at the time of my travel, my desire for him is not driving me mad to meet him no matter what. No, my desire is to explore our relationship through art and writing.
At a café close to Taylor’s studio I write about how it feels to sit there. The situation is staged, but it is not a theatrical staging. I do not play a role, and the course of events is not pre-decided. Will Taylor pass by? How would I feel if he did? My feelings are very true, but at the same it is not life as usual. It is something in-between. Art? Diary writing? Performance? The closest I have come to describe this method to something most people know about, is a romance. It can be long or short, but always creates a life in itself, some sort of bubble which later must crack.
