I am a British/Belgian artist, theatre maker, and performer living in Ghent, Belgium. I collect and map stories about power/lessness, privilege, and activism. I make theatre, performances, and installations. As an artist, I have worked on the fault lines between art, activism, and performance. Teaching and engaging with participation in the arts, design thinking, radical pedagogy, queer and feminist performance, I am interested in creating fissures within worlds—temporary autonomous places for artistic experiment and political and social agency.
My current artistic research examines the dynamics between migration, power, and privilege. My parents chose to move to and live in South Africa during the Apartheid regime. My brother and I were both born there. For years, I did not tackle this fact and my own history in my theatre work explicitly. I felt I had no right to speak and worked solely with other people and their stories.
I was suffering from what anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler calls Colonial Aphasia: “a dismembering, a difficulty in speaking, a difficulty in generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts to appropriate things.” (Stoler, A.L. Colonial Aphasia, Public Culture, Vol. 23, 2011). I am no longer able to remain silent, and this has led me to a crossroads as an artist and theatre maker. I want to hold a mirror to myself and examine the white gaze as a white woman. How can I re-imagine what I see? How can it resonate and confront? How can I crystallize the existing elements in my work—documentary material, humour, direct contact with an audience, and a strong visual language—into a new artistic language and form?
I am interested in exploring how the normalization of privilege gives scope for agency. I hope that by examining everyday behavior, assumptions, and bureaucratic systems based on this privilege, I may better understand how (white) privilege functions in order to disrupt its power. I recently travelled to South Africa to talk to and interview people about their perspectives on these topics. More information can be found at: https://migratingdialogues.org.
The master’s program offers a good mix of input and mentoring to develop my own artistic practice and research methodology. Having the opportunity to work together with a small group of artists from diverse disciplines and countries is a great way to learn and grow.