At home in dark waters
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[ 29 min ]
10 am, June 10th, 2024.
It is an unusual rainy and cold Monday, for June. In this part of the world it’s supposed to be summer, -ish. It’s especially cold considering the warmish spring we had this year, and the abnormally hot 2023. But also because I’ve just returned from travel in South Florida, where I spend a month in an artists residency while the weather held a moist 35°C in what was to become a pivotal and deeply confrontational month.
Ever since EARTHSHRINE, I’ve been entering deeper and deeper into a zone within myself and my practice. I’ve been embracing the darker strata of my emotions and found I sit amongst a deep creative source that I’ve never before truly chose to interlink with. In my attempts to create utopia, green-permaculture hopefulness and inspiration, I seem to have missed out on a giant root-system inside myself; a dark wetlands mangrove that is deep not only in terms of emotional volume, but also in terms of the capacity to hold space.
A dear friend told me recently, that I have a great emotional availability. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard about myself and my willingness to converse, share and hear about the feelings and moods of my friends and myself.
It was beautiful to hear this sentiment, and in ways very healing, as I’ve not always felt very fitted in the modus-operandi of contemporary - “how are you?” - “Fine, how are you?” - Culture.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but in the United States, asking how you are is simply a friendly way to acknowledge the other person. All you have to answer is two words, like: “Fine, thanks!”. It is a simple truth that I did not know about until recently, and which I continue to fail at internalizing in my day to day navigating of the neuro-straight world.
I like to take this moment to apologize to the British girl who always said “how are you?” as she entered the studio building of the Piet Zwart Institute in the morning, prompting me to wax poetically about my last 24 hours.
White folx on Zoom
Some months ago I found myself in a short dialogue between a couple curators looking for artworks that would "stir controversy". Our dialogue landed on the topic of cultural appropriation. I mentioned that I have made several works I now consider controversial, but that I would never put them in a show purely to cause controversy. Namely because they were derived through a process of a layman individual attempting to make sense of a world so lost of its senses, in the odd isolation of the Dutch art-scene.
I’ve made things and wrote things under the passion of inspiration, under the craving of a more sensous world, lacking the guidance of elders and traditions and initiation, growing up in a place void of land-based connection and ancient wisdoms.
As a young person with a sensitivity for the voices and sentiments felt in the outdoors, I have always thought of having a kinship with the practices of shamanism and animism. Practices that I did not find through any source indigenous to the Netherlands. Like many, I set out into the world for countless trips to places faraway to search for stuff I felt I needed to exist in this bleak Neo-liberal and sober cultural landscape.
Mind you, we live below sea-level and we imagine ourselves on top of the world. Rationally fending off the crumbs of a dying and old Western paradigm, crashing to shit around us as we speak.
More than often the dialogue on appropriation focusses merely on what we can’t or shouldn’t do, or on who owns and who doesn’t own something, We have many passionate advocates that speak either on behalf of the rightfulness of ownership or those voices fighting against it for the vain pursuit of freedom, or for wanting to posses liberal expression and creativity.
What is often overlooked in this battle of who is right and wrong is the very reason why we talk about and wish to raise awareness of appropriation in the first place. Why it matters.
We might know of examples of indigenous groups who’ve had their entire cultural regalia stolen and then trademarked by Western fashion companies, or the countless Indigenous people residing in reserves without rights or power while their rituals are selling across the world as a means of personal development.
Yes, we white folkx growing up under Capitalism feel a humongous thirst for spirit, for connection and community with the world and each other. Capitalism is truly the opposite of community. I understand our craving. Like you, I’ve tracked practices and cultures that supplied me with substances that seemed to be antidotal to the soullessness of the West. And me and you are not new at this. It is also not merely a trait of white Westerners. Everyone is curious for the world in their ways, as they are curious for who they are themselves.
Yet it is striking, how we end up, through various attempts at decolonizing, at reproducing the very merits of the West we try to deconstruct: ownership, bloodlines, DNA tests, cancellations, policing, etc.
Yes, it matters to be critical and to question, especially those with tremendous privilege in the world. But we can not truly deconstruct something like appropriating using colonial/western values as the parameters of what is right, wrong - and true, even. The discussion about cultural appropriation is important, but at the same time talking about who “owns" something is again so deeply colonial. It seems as if the Western discourse eats itself up like the ouroboros that entwines the world’s oceans with it serpentine body.
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The point of decolonizing is not to produce a stagnant world of rightful owners and guilty folks on the other end. Yet still, my critique on this discourse is not to promote or regain “freedom of expression” or as to absolve us of being culprits or wrongdoers. In fact my critique is not a critique at all, rather a passage deeper below the surface of the discourse, into what I actually consider to be a decolonized space.
I’ll get to it in a bit. Cause this happened:
Someone in the zoom actually said: “We are not allowed anymore to freely create," before they continued to say that it was a sad thing that we are under the “scrutiny of these rules of appropriation”.
Yes, it was a white middle-aged man uttering those words.
I wonder if these “educated” and “liberal” white men are aware of how they carry the faint aroma of populist rhetoric around -unknowingly I hope- but filling the room nonetheless. Like how the great communal and political efforts to make the world more fair and just for marginal people seems to continuously prompt and center the stuff that privileged folks fear they are gonna miss out on.
It makes me think of the famed Luther King quote when he said: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the (…) great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season.”
Okay yes shady to quote Martin Luther as a retort to someone’s Zoom utterances, but bear with me, it’s a rainy day and I have chronic IBS. And besides, its an intensely poignant point.
It’s just that my ears peak when a White person resists a process that is meant to bring about a more equanimous world for those other than himself.
I get it, people fear they will lose terrain and freedom, and to a degree perhaps they actually will. But it is in the broadest sense a fantastical unwillingness to actually live in reality, this idea that justice means you loose terrain, I mean come on. Why does it remain easier to hold onto privilege, philosophically even, then it is to be fair and collaborative in the processes of the justice in the larger world? Why is it so hard to see that it is about the bloodiness of that privilege, about who is harmed, rather than what you might lose when you learn to let go of that stinging blade.
It makes me think of species loneliness, “[...] this state of isolation and disconnection stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors." Robin Wall Kimmerer uses this notion to speak about the islolation of humanity amongst the more-than-human, but take a look at White culture getting more and more insular in a vibrant world it tries to suppress.
Boo-hoo.
To me Whiteness means a cultural goggle, and upbringing or ontology if you will, that approximates near, centers and favors white people. This does not mean that a person of color is by default exempt from partaking in the industriousness of Whiteness, nor does it make every single white person the central and individual carrier of its operation. Whiteness, in truth, is a bloody mess. It is the sole issue at the heart of racism. It is frankly larger than the sum of its parts.
Trigger warning: White folx have exploited and studied Black and brown bodies for centuries, and still continue to do so. The legacy of this sickness is still deeply embedded in the predominantly White systems that "run the world", and it also leaks outside of it.
I believe Whiteness (or White Supremacy) can best be seen as something that one carries or propagates, consciously or unconsciously, like a virus of the mind, an error at best and an abhorrent misdoing at worst. It is a virus of culture if you will, but it is not something that one “is”.
Although truth be told, some people are so very very White.
Its been puzzling and interesting to unravel what Whiteness is to me, and where I trace it in myself and in society.
I like to put it this way; White people have "discovered" many things already known to many more people, they have "explored" the far reaches of the world, but the last thing he might discover is his own Whiteness.
Every white person reading this, I implore you to learn about it, and understand that when you are addressed or critiqued as White, it is often this faint-or-not-so-faint, consciously-or-unconsciously-carried, aroma of White Supremacy that is addressed, and not you as a person “because of your skin”. Honestly, lets not make this about our skin.
Truth is, this great White fear of losing out on liberties or access in the process of justice actually mutes our ears to the vastness that lies beneath our very own feet and dare-i-say within ourselves, and ultimately within community that is bound to rise through proper self work.
I speak here about depth and radical locality.
And yes, this sounds ironic from a person that traverses the planet frequently.
It was somewhere around 2016 when a couple of my friends wanted to buy a piece of land in Guatemala for a queer community when I began to really feel something was very rampantly undressed in White spaces. This is not to say that I think white people should stay on their “own” land, if such a thing exists, but rather that we are tremendously at ease not considering our actions in the larger community properly.
Again, no judgement on overseas projects or travels, I mean, first of all this world is way to wild to place imaginary boundaries on it and hold people behind them, that's disgusting. But more so, the world and ethnicities and migration is so much older and more murky and more messy than the contemporary rendering of issues of privilege and power can nicely put in a pie-chart.
Again, in our critical discourse we run the risk of turning the very alive non-linear and cross-pollinated world into a very linear and outlined map. This is something that some of our colonial forebears have done to the entire planet as well, cutting up communities and kin alike with Papal lines on seafaring maps.
May it be known that my attempt here is to return to the land, the body and the nuanced-ness and murkyness of those realms, rather than towards abstractions, no matter how crucial it is to hold both ways of being into our understanding.
Pre-Woke Era High School
Ever since beginning the process of stepping away from my adolescent inspirations and dreams of tropical worlds and shamanisms of the faraway as the only way to learn about myself, I have started to enter and create a storied-network of my own swamp-y homeland roots and belonging.
It began with artistic regurgitation of Druidry, a debated yet not-to-be forgotten aspect of pre-roman culture centred on wise initiate peace-keeper philosophers that held an upper class in Celtic societies. My exploration of these Euro-region-ish wisefolx was followed by creative-approximations of an imagined Pan-European pagan history. But truth be told, it is hard to look for cultural roots when they are both erased, frowned upon, and often imagined to unclear extend.
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Near the end of 2022, this process of investigating and finding my roots began to draw in my own childhood; one spent in seeking nervous-system regulation, spirituality and sexuality in the watery woodlands near my two teenhood homes. Escaping an overwhelming divorced parental realm, wherein one parent was in an abusive relationship with alcohol as a means to cope with their trauma, I was left barren for mental and physical abuse somewhere between my early 2000 high school, and the nearby swamplands.
Mind you, it was a pre-woke era. We did not have Sex Education on Netflix. No. We had Will & Grace, and Karen, who I remember wanted to park her car on top of a group of Mexican people - as, a, joke?
90’s television is wild.
Back in the day, I really deeply needed the swamp, more than I realized at the time. As a neurodivergence queer person dealing with trauma, I perhaps needed the outdoors more than most average hiker. It took me to about 35 years to realize how fully it needed it. How fully the wetlands tutored me, whispering to me as a child - and me whispering back.
Somewhere in the spring of 2022, a friend asked me if I had autism. She recognized my descriptions of feeling intuitively connected with the outdoors as something her own child on the spectrum experienced often. It was the start of a long process of homecoming. And of questioning my connection to the outdoors, which to me had always been something sacred and spiritual.
I mean, there are countless examples of people leaving offerings in bogs and swamps all over Europe, and I felt like my relationship was part of that work, but it seems something more neurological is intermingled here too.
Non-Binary Swamps
“Is the swamp non-binary?”
My friend Lee asked me this two weeks ago during the Q&A at the end of my artist talk at Green Space Miami, which was part of my residency at AIRIE Everglades, an artist-in-residency at the Everglades National Park; a unique World Heritage site and wetlands currently listed as in danger of disappearing forever.
“Yes, it is!” I exclaimed, “the swamp is non-binary.”
Unknowingly, it is exactly this aspect that has been drawing me into the swamp since childhood. A place that is neither land not water, neither wet not dry, neither day or night. A twilight zone of in-between, defying easy determination, easy extraction, easy access and understanding.
It is so Queer, and so defiant.
It was only as recent as 2018 that I realized for the first time that I was non-binary, after endless questions and scrutinizing therapy that wanted to know if I was male and who I wanted to have sex with - trust, I'll rant more about this in later writings.
I can see now how the swamp has always been a perfect terrain to imagine a non-binary spirit within. To formulate one, perhaps, within myself: a murky singing Goddess.
The swamp is also sadness. And boy, I did not know how much the song of sadness would find me through my recent song writing. And I am so moved, as it finds me as an evocative teacher-healer that I had carried with me all this time.
Through a multiple year psycho-therapy training focussed on childhood trauma in 2016-2018, I had learned to enter my body time and again. But I had never before put that in my visual work consciously, besides the video EARTHHURT.
It felt potent. It beckoned me.
Tricky as it is to weave deeply personal aspects of mental health into an art practice, over the last year and a half I’ve managed to delve more deeply into this dark watery realm of my soul.
Under the banner of Wetlands Worship, I began to create work where the abuse that my body and mind endured is mirrored in the abuse and terror that the landscape has undergone - especially wetlands. In the historic drainage and the current mismanagements of wetlands globally, I trace the marking of Western Capitalist-Industry, spawning from an older exploitative imperial modus operandi of nation-states.
It is striking to me, how the Texandri and the Erubones, the Celtic and Gaulish folx living in what is now the province of North Brabant -my birthlands- also found refuge in the swamps when they escaped the Roman Empire encroaching on them, spreading their creepy nationstate and religious oppression.
All throughout Europe, the UK, Scandinavia and the Baltics, Swamps provided hiding places for people escaping militarized nations. This is true also for other parts of the world, where wetlands and mangroves have provided shelter for indigenous folks, escapees, and maroons.
Autistic-Nature Kinship
A decade before the notion of Climate Grief became mainstream, Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd described their feelings of “deep ecological grief and shock” to their therapist. Without their knowing, Pınar was henceforth put on antipsychotic medications. In a recent text they published about the experience, they describe how it feels like the “ […] psychiatric and medical world want(s) to privatize and isolate these monumental feelings I (am) having, placing the onus on me to change, instead of society. Explicitly naming Indigenous grief in this project on settler colonialism ended in one of the deepest forms of colonialism there is – breaking down the bedrock of Indigenous reality and infusing the idea of “craziness” (…) as a mechanism for self-colonizing”.
In my own experiences with clinical diagnosis, I asked the psychiatrist if she ever considers cultures who live with spirits and ancestors in more direct ways – if her diagnosis could comprehend such realities or factor them in? She said she didn’t.
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Western mental health is to a large degree based on many White lies and colonial constructs on what a body, a person, an individual, or sanity is. I don’t mean to say that I have not found any help via conventional healthcare – pray tell, I and many others have done so. I do not wish to discredit the work done by both healthcare workers and by clients on their journey, but something is deeply absent from our health-systems, and I wonder if we can invite it back in, or if we need to burn it down like pyrotechnician working on a a field of weeds.
“This is not costume; it is my being,” said Vaid-Menon in this 2019 post.
The effervescent gender-non-conforming poet explain that the way we look at our bodies as “individually bounded and enclosed by skin” is a particularly Western conception of body. They mention how clothing is something that we put onto the body, and not part of the body itself, much like our environment: it is seen as something around us, rather than it being us, or us being with it, and it being inside of us.
“I am not dressing up as; I am being myself, […] enmeshed in my surrounding, not isolated from it.”
It reminds of the gruesome stripping away the hair and regalia of Turtle Island indigenous, who would be forced to cut off their hair, and dismember their appearances as to fit with the "dress codes" at boardings schools. It seeks to strip humans of their entanglement with their cultural roles, traditions, and religious expressions – it tears apart the body of flesh and story in which we live.
The conceptual constitution of our body, identity and belonging with the world around us matters.
The way in which we draw or suspend boundaries between where we end and begin matters.
But there she goes, Western health declaring that we start and end at the edge of our naked, and preferably thoroughly washed and odourless body, and not our communities or enmeshments. I mean ghee, I don't want to be smelly either, but if there is one thing I learned from the swamp is that life smells. And so does sex.
And death.
Since September '22, I am on a low-dose of ADHD medication. It came as a miraculous answer to a decade long journey. It was surprising in many ways. Mostly because I had been a ferocious advocate of natural remedies and spiritual work for the mind up until that point, but also because the medication dissolved a whole string of issues I had been dealing with in one go.
Did I think not having meds would make me more natural? And that is somehow better?
Funnily enough I have had a document laying about on my computer, one that I started working on in Brazil in 2014 (!). The animistic text stresses how there is no such a thing as soberness in the world. If it is not coffee or hormones, then it be political ideas, hunger, or the way we are thought to see the world. We are always under the influence of something.
It might take 11 years until you suddenly eclipse the topic of research by becoming it's embodiment. Maybe this is what artistry is, or what the life of a performer is: to form and become, to undergo as to understand, in order to create.
Thirty-five years on this solemn globe in the cosmos and no single doctor, not once, inquired me about ADHD or neurodivergence. I had litterally demand care, repeatedly, to prompt investigation beyond the usual paracetamol. It is shocking to come about your mid 30's with SO much information and access to a community centered on the stuff I've struggled with my whole life. A vast and expanding communal world of knowledge that is shared amongst fellow neurodivergent people has opened up me since the meds and the diagnosis of ADHD.
But not via any medical establishment, no, it's all instagram and friends, baby. A world of nuance and kinship brought to me. A gift as rich as the worlds I found through being Queer.
So, it is natural that I am saddened by the skepticism, phobia and unwarranted critique that the cis-hetero and neuro-straight world throws at those of us with more nuanced specifics. Especially when they make claims of us not being "natural". Just fuck off. Did you ever actually listen to the world spill its abundance? Pearls before swines.
The fallacy of critiques on many "woke"-identies, besides pretending that they are something new and superfluous, is the way they undermine and overlook the deeply rooted and intermingling knowledges that are stimulated and generated in the respective communities of all these special folx.
Epistemologies that are of course developed foremostly as a means of survival within a neuro-straight world, but beyond that they form a joyeus and exhuberant resource that can help to better understand what being a human (can) entail(s) in this enchanted realm-scape we co-habitate.
None of us are numeric indexable point on some AI algorithm, despite what the hellscape brought on by the contemporary Social Media and Algorithm science likes to dictate.
We are each infinitesimally unique and specific, albeit that not a lot of us are thought or invited to access that depth.
When Seeing the World As Alive is Called Madness
In the astonishing text When seeing the world as alive is called madness, Indigenous multi-species futurist Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd describes how they became friends with pigeons and squirrels. They then outline a groundbreaking framework that draws in the natural world as a partner in nervous system regulation.
“Co-regulation," they write, "is a term used for mutual nervous system regulation between two or more beings."
"Ecological Co-regulation is when we engage in a mutual nervous system regulation with the more than human world.”
What we see here is an indigenous experience of animism converging with a branch of contemporary Western psychology, namely that of attachment theory and of nervous-system regulation, which is a cascade of physiological responses that our nervous system makes in order to reduce heightened states of arousal and increase calmness during times of distress. Regulation is an important need of neurodivergent people, who often need to regulate their bodies and minds in a world not designed with them in mind.
The implications and meaning of Co-Regulation with the Natural World is huge for me. Both on a personal level, but also on a larger societal one. It bleeds into the understanding that we are in fact able to find secure attachment with the environment, was it not for that environment to be in such rampant distress itself. In a upcoming essay, I will dive deeper into the notion of secure attachment with and through our relating with the landscape. Coined by Dare Sohei, the field of Animist Somatics will show us just how deep the multi-generational wound which we facing is, a chasm that has left both our ecological systems as well as our communities cut up and bleeding.
I recall how during a mental health diagnosis in Amsterdam in the spring of 2022 I was asked if I ever see things that others don’t. ‘You mean like Racism?” – I offered, deadpan.
It is horrifying, truly, how the Western medical world all too often takes the deeply felt connection with more-than-human environments either too lightly, or worse, it literally pathologizes this as a sensitivity to ‘hearing’ and/or ‘feeling’ things that “aren’t there”.
I told the doctor that in most of my life I’ve been able to sense serious health issues inside someone’s body by placing my hand on them, and how strong pulls in energy and visible dense gray energies in zones in the park or the cityscape inform me not to go there, and that whenever I ignore these signals there is always either a group of homophobic teens, aggressively intoxicated people who throw things, or an ex-lover. Delusion? Trauma-informed childhood sensitivity skills? Witchcraft? Shaman? Who knows. The guidance is native to me like naps in shaded grass on sunny afternoons, or writing on a duvet-covered couch while June hail spoils the summer soils.
As we speak, I am wrapping much of what is written here into a larger publication that coils around all these interrelated topics, forming a rich mycelium centered somewhat on the notion of the “wounded healer”, an exploration that I began in my 2013 Graduation thesis at the Piet Zwart Institute.
The idea is that people who are wounded can become great healers. It is an ancient shamanic principle, but I also see it mirroring a lot of neuro-queer pride and community.
In the writing, I attempt to wrap all these notions together in a sort of field trip through histories of environmentalism and philosophies of health and the body, passing also through communities of sensitive somatic bodies, queer witchcraft, neurodivergence, and speculative spells that might be able to remedy a world driven by extractivism and greed. Paired with the writing, I’ve been doctoring the making of an artistic documentary video called Drained. Weaving the narrative of drained and tainted wetlands with the psychological maiming that has happened in my own life. “I only stink because you drained me,” I said, while performing as the Murky Murky Little Bitch Witch mid 2023, voicing the anger of the drained swamplands, and passages of my own history.
Don't miss out!
Rain strikes down the window of my illegal Jordaan subrent.
My boyfriend just went to work. It’s noon. I remember I set out to talk about appropriation and roots at the start of this draft.
I love that this cold rainy day prompted me to spill all this out. I am excited to write after what seems to have been a huge creative block since early October, and the darkness that followed.
I hope that the passage we went on has made it more clear how my own journey of rooting into landscape and trauma renders the desire for cultural appropriation utterly obsolete.
Is there even a need for someone else's culture when one finds their own? The body, in relation to land and spirit, and each other, that is.
Looking back at White Zoom guy, I just want to ask: do you even know what you're missing out on?
The appropriation of "other" cultures does not only produce an often facsimile, superficial and often commerce-based service and or product-verison of a deeply enmeshed cultural practice outside our full comprehension, it also often turns age-old wisdoms into mere anecdotes or inspirational quotes that we have to sell as artists-tutors during lectures. And yes, still we can find cultural theory and literature and practices of elsewhere vastly inspirational, and I am happy it is so. Thank fuck we have such an abundant world. But it is rare to have the study of other-than-western ontologies bring about a full understanding of the world they are embedded in, let alone our own.
I say rare, not to overlook the mystic soul, the deep wanderers and voracious academics and teachers that I know study the world and the self deeply and virtuously, but because nearly never this richness finds its way into pragmatic politics, applicable management systems or locally rooted cultural practices of our own.
Perhaps because we have so little to start with or stem those inspirations on?
The ecological tapestries of human and non-human existences have become deeply maimed by the onslaught of the ‘developed world’. I think the notion of stemming is crucial, in order to fully bring home something that has inspired us.
Stemming is a form of plant propagation which involves a part of something shooting roots in or on a existing base terrain. A "new" plant can grow from a source, such as seeds, cuttings, or another plant parts - but we need to plant it on something that is already alive for it to graft.
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Despite my deep understanding of the craving and the motivation of seeking out mysticism, wisdom and even leisure in the faraway in an attempt to cover the wounded void within our own cultures, I stress that in doing so we miss out on the murky wetlands, and other types of environments that are native to us, whispering to us. Trust, I love going to Yoga classes as well, and I do believe my own travels have made me predisposed of deeper understanding of my own soils, but no namaste or “peace wishes” ever truly brought me home to a realm where dark and light are merged like they do in the sacredness of my swamp.
The rooted homecoming in one’s own culture (that is, the praxis of embodied and storied relatedness to the environment, the self and our kin) actually brings us closer to the source of inspiration that we hope to find elsewhere.
In a paradox that is beyond my grasp, entering deeper into one’s own story seems to create bridges that travers cultures and histories, feeding connections with one-another, all stuck on this forsaken green sphere spinning in and out of fascism, while it circles the sun at some 1600 kilometers per hour, buccaneering its way across the galaxy.
XOX
Venus
- At home is dark waters is part of My Queer love of the Swamp, a collection of personal and autobiographical essays partially payed for RE_NATURE platform.
- Cover image: mangrove roots at Flamingo Point, Everglades National Park (USA).