Hallucinating Harmacies: A Spatial Reimagining of Memories in Medicine

Maaike Muntinga Hallucinating Harmacies: A Spatial Reimagining of Memories in Medicine

Never did and never will It’s just the way it’s always been I’ve made mistakes before I’ll make the same again And all this tension we ignore Surely works its ugly way inside

I have known that nothing’s fair Surely what did I expect? When magic slips into the air And every day’s another test And all this tension we ignore It surely works its ugly way outside

So let it build, let it explode Leaving blood and shattered bone Or bite your tongue Till you’ve forgotten what to say And take another step back Until you find you’ve walked away

Silence like disease But I dare not say it hurts ‘Cause if I honestly react Nothing’s ever going to work

Sebadoh Beauty of the Ride. Harmacy (1996)

1. Silence like disease

I am slouched in one of the stain-covered seats that cover the insides of a large, upward-sloped lecture hall. Around me the whispers of two hundred other medical students, below me the amplified voice of the lecturer, a physiologist. For the last ten minutes the physiologist has been sharing his grievances with animal rights activists: how they’ve tried to intervene with his important work on puppy brains, how their misguided values are undermining scientific progress and – he makes sure we all make the connection – human wellbeing. I am getting increasingly infuriated. When I cannot take it anymore, I sit up and raise my hand. All heads turn toward me. With a pounding heart and a shaky voice, I say I disagree. Countless animals are forced to spend their lives in cages while alternatives to animal testing have been available for years, I explain. Surely the pharmaceutical and medical industry can do better? After my monologue, the hall is silent. Then, without responding, the physiologist turns away and proceeds with his presentation. I am still shaking when he warns his audience: “If you’re against animal experiments, you don’t belong in medical school.” (Non-linear memory #1, 2004)

In this essay, I try to come to terms with a paradox that has pulled at me for two decades: the phenomenon whereby many of us depend on formal medical care institutions for our health and wellbeing, while at the same time we collectively experience these institutions as damaging, harmful, 174

and inequitable. I orient toward this tension as an insider-outsider, because biomedicine and I go way back. We first met in 2000, when I was a socialistleaning 17-year old with high hopes of changing the world. The most obvious place to start, I thought, would be medical school. I imagined myself as a good-doing doctor, attentively listening to heart beats, skillfully applying bandages, putting a gentle hand on a sad shoulder, and although I was slightly worried about what my future colleagues would think of my tattoos, these positive images persisted long after I first witnessed medical injustice. But I never became a physician. I dropped out of medical school unceremoniously several months after starting my clinical internship. The Anthropology Master I received during a much-needed time away from the hospital allowed me to do a PhD in Public Health. Soon I found myself researching health disparities, teaching ethics and humanities to reluctant medical students, and processing my frustration with the medical system by writing abstract academic papers.1 But, as hard as I tried, I could not heal. My stint in medicine had left me with a chronic bad taste and a mouth full of “why’s”.

As long as I can remember, I have turned toward and away from clinical medicine. Toward, because clinical reasoning and patient care excite me. As a child I used to love hospitals: the quiet hallways, the smell of bleach, the robed shuffling of patients. Away, because I have heard and told too many accounts of harm done.2 Kitchen tables, birthday parties and corridor chats with students have been my excavation sites for stories that reveal how encounters with the healthcare system have left many bruised, if not broken. For years I have been trying to wrap my head around the reality that an institution whose claim to fame is “care” has such

a consistent and sorted history of producing risk environments. Biomedical practice today is built on inherited harm: it is saturated with knowledge imperialism, toxic positivism, scientific racism, and institutionalised misogyny.3 For too many marginalised groups, the medical system is a violent system.

Two decades after I started medical school, my patience has worn thin. I now long to give words to the malign, below-the-skin proliferations, whose effects appear at the surface of medicine’s societal reputation only as an insignificant scratch. Words that help me give meaning to mine and others’ experiences of ontological and epistemic injustice and of straightforward physical precariousness in the medical system. Perhaps harmacy could be one of those words. In this essay I introduce harmacies as a visual imaginative for understanding adverse experiences in medical institutions. I orient inwards to investigate the painful distortion of practices that are sold to us as care and healing. Harmacies, I propose, are spatially arranged infraconstructures of harm that occur within care institutions as active production sites of violent not-care; in a harmacy, what we would generally understand as caring or soothing is inversely and absently twisted. I construct harmacies through my own lived experience, because systemic violence affects at the level of the individual. Hence, drawing from an archive of personal memories, I will articulate how medical harm came into my view, how I have learned to perceive it, and how I came to need restoration. Although I envision harmacies through a queer theoretical lens, the distinction I make between care and not-care is hierarchical, oppositional, perhaps even divisive. I will use the word ‘violent’ more than once. I will not be nuanced when nuance perhaps would be more appropriate. However, at the end 176

of it all, I promise to think with harmacies from a place of questioning.

The harmacy in the lecture hall is tunnelshaped and bouncy, the color of meat. It throbs and pulses. I feel small. Sounds are muzzled: nervous swallows, arrhythmias, absorbed echoes. I know I am at an epicenter. A machine zooms and whizzes. It makes a copy, and then a copy of a copy. My throat scrapes. I warn one of the copy-makers that the image is getting blurrier with every new copy. They look at me puzzled, say the copy is crystal clear. The zooming and whizzing gets louder. I panic, shout “BLURRY!” but my voice disappears into the harmacy’s thickness. Then a sudden, devastating quiet. When my body hits the swampy floor, I pick up a new frequency. I curl up, lick my lips, listen: hushed voices, swallowed tongues, held breaths. Slowly but steadily, the harmacy is filling to the brim with silence.

0. Blood and shattered bone Anatomy of the harmacy

Cranial (toward the head)

The harmacy is an organ, a space-within-a-space. Harmacies are enmeshed with care institutions: they cannot exist without them, only grow as part of them. The institution is the harmacy, and the harmacy is the institution.

Caudal (toward the tail)

Harmacies emerge in a care void, where they establish as the production site of not-care.4 Not-care is not care. The harmacy is a negative space.

Ventral (toward the belly)

Harmacies are not born from individual errors or flaws. They are collectively driven: there are no harmacists.

Dorsal (toward the back)

Some harmacies appear suddenly, without warning. Others have always been there, tucked away or translucently hiding in sight.

Proximal (closer)

Each harmacy connects to others through a network of shared practices, principles and truths. Tracing back a harmacy’s roots leads you to a single tawny string.5 Anti-harmacy campaigns might stop the local production of not-care, but will never eradicate the master radix.

Distal (further) When harmacies linger, they rapidly divide and multiply.

2. Dare not say it hurts

I am standing next to a hospital bed at an oncology ward. The patient is the drummer in our rickety punk band, one of my best friends. We write song lyrics on napkins and fall asleep together in the tour bus, dance to ‘Push It’, and hold friend-hands under the table. She dares and laughs and beams. But these days her light is dim: her body is hijacked by an evil tumor. A morphine bandage covers the tattoo on her arm. Some days are so bad the nurse tells me it is better to leave. On good days, my friend complains about the strawberry- 178

flavoured energy drinks and the cheap dairy desserts. She goes to a Reiki healer, and is outspokenly vegan and active in the animal rights movement. She hates the pale food on the recurring plastic trays, hates not knowing what enters her body through the IV in her arm. In an attempt to get our identity back, I massage her feet with Ayurveda oil, talk about my crushes, and buy her a record she likes.6 But all touch and sound hurts. I sob on my way to get watery coffee, then read to her from a children’s book. When she dies a few weeks later, I collapse on the floor of my queer share house room. (non-linear memory #2, June 2007)

I had imagined the future of our intimacy differently. Our band just recorded an album. She had a ticket for a Björk concert. We would get tattooed together. If futures lie in the hands of DNA – if our mortal connection was meant to end this way – I had wanted that end to be brighter, closer, bolder. I opened yellow-striped curtains and pulled straws out of cups, but wherever I looked I lost focus of her. Visitor schedules. Lukewarm black tea. Boiled potatoes or mash. In all the white rooms I searched, everyone suffered the same. Who she was before she came in did not seem to matter. The inked skin of her back, invisible against the mattress, revealed her heart in an optimistic ‘VEGAN’. I knew most of her doctors would never read it, let alone understand what that word represented. I was tracking a collapsing body in a negative pressure room.

Twelve years later, I understand her hospital stay as a harmacy. I understand it as violent and forceful, even though everyone involved in delivering the hospital’s products – nurses, doctors, dietitians

– gave their best efforts to help her win her fight. And so it is not her death, or the collective incapacity to prevent it, that my harmacy contains. It is the massive loss of self in the medical system, the structural erasure of her embodied and experiential knowledge through neutralised, universalised and objectivised biomedical practices that lies at the heart of the harm done.7 Abstractions come to mind. Evidence-based medicine. Randomised controlled trials. P-values.

This harmacy, like all harmacies, hates complexity. Normative roots thrive in normative soil. My friend simply was too deviant. In its bedside incarnation, biomedicine caters to a ‘norm patient’, a standardised average that is believed to represent all bodies, experiences, and preferences. But this ‘norm patient’, dutifully accepting biomedicine’s truisms – veganism is unhealthy, traditional methods of healing are ineffective, animal rights activists are misguided – is an invention of the dualist order it claims to benefit from, an idea construed from an ideology that derives reality from means, medians and modi.8 Words I heard many say un-ironically: ‘quackery’, ‘troublesome’, ‘woolly’. My friend was a victim of statistical ideology trickled down into patient care. As far as the system knew, she either was wrong, or did not exist.

This harmacy is a giant. Looming large, it is spherically shaped and has thick, metal walls. First, I don’t see anything. Then, a yellowy shimmer. I breathe in deep, taste the tickling smell of formaldehyde. At the centre of the harmacy stands a long, iron table. On it lies what I presume to be organs and body parts. Dreams? Lies? Discoveries? Something corrosive drips slickly from the 180

table onto the floor. It has carved a sticky hole. I alert the dissector, who shakes their head and snickers. “That is not a hole”, they gesture confidently, “it is a portal”. A flash catches my eye. In a corner, another table spins and bulges. Maybe she is on it, I think. But when I move toward it, I see the table is covered in sharp metal scraps. I look up. A crack. It starts drizzling, then raining metal splinters. Above our heads, with rapid speed, the harmacy’s arc lowers and crumples. The yellow air gets thicker and condenses; I can smell its nauseating edges. I am getting closed in. A realisation: the hole is my only escape. “Jump”, laughs the dissector, “or get crushed!” They wave their knife, keep pressing the button. I have no choice. I run, slip, and slide into a rusty green darkness.

3. Nothing’s ever going to work

I am sitting on the porch steps of a lush New Jersey home, head between my knees. I am not supposed to be here. I should be giving a presentation to the Internal Medicine department of a small Amsterdam hospital about – I look at my watch – right now. I realise I have just dropped out of medical school. I want to cry. I lift my head from my knees. My soon-to-turn physically abusive American girlfriend comes to check on me. She has been gaslighting me since we started dating and I am in a perpetual state of stress, but, in a classic Stockholm move, I came all the way out here to save our relationship. I am not doing so well. In the weeks after, I wait for a compassionate call from

the internship program, a check in about what is going on with me and what I need to get back on track. The call never comes. (non-linear memory #3, Summer 2009)

Reading this vignette still induces in me a burning shame-nausea. It is not the gaslighting I am ashamed of, or the fact that I stayed in an abusive relationship for way too long9. The nausea is caused by my failure to succeed as a medical student. The nausea tells me this is another harmacy. A harmacy that turns into a proposition: caring for students is antithetical to the system’s functioning, because injustice is conditional to preserve the normative processes that keep medical hierarchies in place. Is saying that I was double-victimised too self-pitying?10

The white coat does not fit everyone. Systemic dropout of students and doctors is often referred to as “the leaky pipeline”.11 Tons of research money has been spent confirming what we already know: it is not the ‘traditional’ students with plenty of social, class or white capital that do the leaking here12. Inequality of opportunity drives the medical system. Gendered, racialised and classed pushout mechanisms are solidly built in to the educational and work environment, and have constructed medical professionalism as synonymous to white masculinity; medical knowledge is normative knowledge, and its continuous reproduction cements the power of those who produce it.13 ‘Outliers’ who cannot keep up – people with a disability, people of color, queers, people providing informal care, people living in abusive relationships – disturb the system’s order.14 Many are forced out of the kitchen, to choose other careers. The system works exactly how it is designed to work: if you cannot let the 182

white coat erase you, you are too weak to wear it.

Somehow, the idea that institutional TLC could have kept me on track is restorative. I imagine a special protocol that was consulted, someone working hard to retrieve my cell phone number, and invitation to speak to a queer-friendly counsellor; me trusting that counsellor enough to talk about the abuse; a reshuffling of placements, and a relieved second try. But reality was not so. I remember the feverish months after coming back to the Netherlands when I realised that I flushed a lucrative medical career down the drain and needed a job as soon as possible. Sticking with the familiar, I found administrative work at the hospital I had also interned at months before. My main goal each day was to avoid people I knew. I had not, however, anticipated that I had become somewhat of a dubious celebrity. Going up on the elevator armed with a stack of binders, a white-coated intern I did not know stared at me, then said: “Aren’t you the one who quit?” Put on the spot and panic-flushed, I answered “Well yes, yes but I am going to start a PhD soon anyway.” I did not add that I had emailed my application letter only a few days ago. Retching with shame, I got off at the next floor.

The harmacy is an elevator.

4. It’s just the beauty of the ride

I have taken a break from medical school to play music, organise feminist punk shows and work at a health food store. Granting myself royal discounts on vegan seitan rolls, it feels like life has finally started. My best friend G., a talented bass player, applies to study Pop at the Amsterdam

Conservatory. For auditions, he has to perform live in front of a committee and has asked me to sing for the occasion. Together we play the melodic ‘Beauty of the Ride’ off Sebadoh’s sixth album ‘Harmacy’. G. gets in to the Conservatory, excited to pursue his musician dream. I play ‘Harmacy’ on repeat, make irresponsible long-distance phone calls to my girlfriend in the UK15 , and dread the moment I have to go back to medical school. (non-linear memory #4, Summer 2006)

This memory gives the feeling of harmacy because I lost hope of finding happiness in medicine. So, finally, this is where queer theory comes in. As a queer body, the fear of what was yet to come felt familiar. Why expose yourself to the violence of forced adaptation if you can be more authentically known elsewhere? “You were not securely attached, because you received inconsistent care from the institution,” a therapy-savvy loved one suggested. Maybe so. What is true is that being known by queer critique granted me the hopefulness medicine had reserved for others. In retrospect, I understand my encounter with the humanities as an intimately affective, cognitive, and intellectual intervention.16 An urgent and necessary one.

Experiences, like cardiovascular circulations, are closed systems. Although queer theory outfitted me with a new methodology to take the disorderly pulse of the system, there is no restoration in the here and now: my harmacies are stable and firmly rooted in the past. It is relieving, then, to imagine ‘thinking with queer’ in biomedicine as thinking with promising futures.17 Hope, like failure, is a dramatically queer endeavor.18 So without further 184

ado, here’s my instruction for a three-level ecological action model of queer potentiality for the biomedical industry:

MICRO Reanimate hopeful anticipation. Imagine silence as stored energy. Get energised. Find others. MESO Collect counter narratives to protocolled quotidian pragmatism. Reveal raptures seen and unseen. Reframe medicine as a site for queer social relations. Find others.

MACRO Resist ontological certitude. Reject systematised binaries as real and valuable. Disrupt normative knowledge production and the erasure of bodies and truths. Be radically drastically accountable. Find others.

Figure 1: Queer potentiality for the biomedical industry at the miso, meso and macro level.

I am on an endless plane, where the rain pours wetly and the sun burns hot. The harmacy is a squared opportunity, a simple

white box I could find shelter in. For hours, I drift toward it. When I finally open the door, I recoil at the doorstep. Stale air stands guard. I hesitate, seek balance with tense, remembering muscles. I realise this place has not seen a visitor in centuries. I need directions. I pat my pockets, pull out the damp map and unfold it. On it, scribbled in red ink, are two gentle words: “almost there”. Surprised, I swing my body inside.

1 Shapiro, J., et al. (2009) ‘Medical Humanities and Their Discontents: Definitions, Critiques, and Implications’, Academic Medicine, 84(2), pp. 192-198. 2 Atkins, C. G. K. (2010) My Imaginary Illness: A Journey Into Uncertainty and Prejudice in Medical Diagnosis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 3 Perez-Rodriguez, J. & de La Fuente, A. (2017) ‘Now is the Time for a Postracial Medicine: Biomedical Research, the National Institutes of Health, and the Perpetuation of Scientific Racism’, The American Journal of Bioethics, 17(9), pp. 36-47; Sharma, M. (2019) ‘Applying Feminist Theory to Medical Education’, The Lancet, 393(10171), pp. 570-578. 4 In the harmacy, not-care is actively produced through the absence of care. I define not-care as the opposite of care: as healthcare system output that is perceived, measured, remembered, or felt as damaging by human and nonhuman subjects. After production, not-care retracts with the harmacy into the interstitial spaces of the care system’s infrastructure, informal and unmarked. Sometimes, not-care is sold as a formal ‘care product’. 5 This weed was sown during the scientific revolution, when mechanical philosophy, sexual politics, colonial expansion, and capitalist enclosures provided fertile soil for the biomedical paradigm to thrive. 6 You Say Party! We Say Die! (2007) Lose All Time [Vinyl]. Toronto: Paper Bag Records. 7 Kuper, A. & D’eon, M. (2011) ‘Rethinking the Basis of Medical Knowledge’, Medical Education, 45(1), pp. 36-43; Kuper, A., et al. (2017) ‘Epistemology, Culture, Justice and Power: Non-Bioscientific Knowledge for Medical Training’, Medical Education, 51(2), pp. 158-173. 8 My students are slightly shocked every time I tell them that, just because we can calculate an average, it does not mean it exists. When they hear that statistical effectiveness is derived from calculating mean differences, and that, looking at the bell curve, a large number of people deviate from the (treatment) norm, it severely distorts their idea of what clinical 186

evidence is. Despite an educational push for the broader definition of evidence-based medicine (EBM) as also including patient preferences and physician experiences, medical discourse still propagates the concept of ‘(in)effectiveness’ as uncomplicated and universally true. 9 The main emotions here are rage, regret, and self-love. 10 In many ways, I was born into normativity: I experience few sociostructural disadvantages that mark me as ‘Other’, and those that do I can conceal. I therefore understand my dropping out of medical school and the ensuing academic opportunities I enjoyed as ‘privileged irresponsibility’ (Zembylas, M., Bozalek, V., & Shefer, T. (2014) ‘Tronto’s Notion of Privileged Irresponsibility and the Reconceptualisation of Care: Implications for Critical Pedagogies of Emotion in Higher Education’, Gender and Education, 26(3), pp. 200-214); my class and race privilege provided a safety net which allowed me to emerge from the consequences of my circumstances and choices relatively unharmed. 11 This analogy is in itself problematic, because it visualises the dropout as a passive process instead of an active one. 12 Upshur, C. C., et al. (2018) ‘The Health Equity Scholars Program: Innovation in the Leaky Pipeline’, Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities, 5(2), pp. 342-350; Avakame, E. F., et al. (2021), ‘Antiracism in Academic Medicine: Fixing the Leaky Pipeline of Black Physicians’, ATS Scholar, 2(2), doi.10.34197/ats-scholar.2020-0133PS; ‘Diversity, Equality and Individuality’, in Dent. J., Harden, R. and Hunt, D. (eds.) A Practical Guide for Medical Teachers, E-Book, Elsevier Health Sciences, pp. 463-470. 13 Spurlin, W. J. (2019), ‘Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/the Cultural Politics of Biomedicine’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 40(1), pp. 7-20. As Philomena Essed has so eloquently described, the process of “cloning the physician” reveals the self-referential mechanisms that reify professional normativity and promote cultural homogeneity (Essed, P. (2005) ‘Gendered Preferences in Racialized Spaces: Cloning the Physician’ in Murji, K. & Solomos, J. (eds) Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 227-247). Biases show up in hiring practices, where quality is recognised especially in candidates that look and act like the ones in charge of the hiring; classed performances such as sharing about expensive holidays, then, become an unwritten and unspoken ingredient for success (Leyerzapf, H., et al. (2018) ‘“We Are All So Different that it is Just… Normal.” Normalization Practices in an Academic Hospital in the Netherlands’, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 34(2), pp. 141-150). Masculinist work ethics create unsafe work floors and educational environments for those whose bodies and everyday realities do not or cannot adapt to the expectation of working long shifts, ignoring abuse, or hiding emotions and personal lives (Choo, E. K., et al. (2019) ‘From #MeToo to #TimesUp in Health Care: Can a Culture of Account-

ability End Inequity and Harassment?’ The Lancet, 393(10171), pp. 499-502; Godthelpt, J., et al. (2020) ‘Self-care of Caregivers: Self-Compassion in a Population of Dutch Medical Students and Residents’, MedEdPublish, 9(1), doi. 10.15694/mep.2020.000222.1). 14 I have encountered, and sometimes informally mentored, many such ‘outliers’: students who, like me, felt they did not belong in medicine. 15 Long distance calling was very expensive in 2006! 16 The humanities provided me with new ways of knowing, but it also gave me permission to embrace what I already knew. I am profoundly shaped by biomedicine, by anthropology, sociology and philosophy, by art, music and literature, by my own experiences and those of patients and research respondents. I am an amalgamation of both positivism and constructivism. And if that is a disaster story, then at least I want to watch the movie. 17 Muñoz, J. E. (2019) Cruising Utopia, New York: New York University Press. 18 Is this reference still fashionable? Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure, Durham: Duke University Press.

Eliza Steinbock & Imara Limon Doing Intersectional New Museology: A Conversation on “Outside” Activists, Artists, and Curators from the “Inside” of Heritage

This written dialogue is adapted from a public conversation between Imara Limon, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum, and Eliza Steinbock, Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies in Maastricht University’s Literature and Art Department, that took place during an ARIAS network meet-up titled ‘The Shadow of Knowledge’ on October 25, 2019, at the University of Amsterdam.1 Limon and Steinbock are both trained in the practice of cultural analysis, a research community devoted to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of culture (in different forms and expression) from a critical humanities perspective. While Limon works primarily as a curator and Steinbock as an academic researcher, in this conversation, they will be discussing the ways in which their work often meets and overlaps, particularly around new museological practices that have been born from activist and participatory forms of heritage-making. Their work engages with archival and museological practices in order to try to affirm ‘shadow’ or subaltern knowledges. With renewed force and ‘outside’ feedback from activist groups and grassroots organisations, Limon and Steinbock aim to reshape institutions and the narratives they tell. Taking the particular case of the ‘New Narratives’ programme at the Amsterdam Museum and the research programme of ‘The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking and Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces’ (2020-2025) funded by the Dutch Research Council, as starting points for their conversation, they hash out the tensions between professional applied knowledge, and ‘emergent-’ or ‘community-knowledge’. How can initiatives in the Dutch cultural sector become more intersectional, in the sense of developing multi-issue approaches to inclusion and accessibility?

Imara Limon This morning, De Volkskrant was reporting on the reopening of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York after they made changes to their permanent presentations, which it connected to similar developments in museums in the Netherlands.2 Here, many museums have started to think about their social identities while asking: “How can we become more relevant to a broader spectrum of the people in a society?”

For me, there’s a first step to reflection: self-reflection. No longer accepting the explanation of museums or art spaces to be neutral places, but looking at where their tradition comes from, and how these institutions can act accordingly. For me, cultural analysis is something that helps me to reflect in that sense, and to see that ‘the things we do’ are not ‘the truth’, but operate within specific contexts and disciplines. The discussion about intersectionality has grown quite a lot. Five years ago, the debate was focused on ‘diversity’: is diversity necessary, and aren’t we diverse already? Today, it seems we are already a few steps ahead, because now we’re thinking about how to do this, what it means, and for whom.

Eliza Steinbock Before we get into more detail about what the ‘New Narratives’ programme does, maybe I could ask you about the connection between working across different disciplines and, of course, your own training in different disciplines. How does the ‘New Narratives’ programme work with voices that are in disagreement, or offer different perspectives from outside the institution or museum? Do you feel that these ‘counter-voices’ are in conflict, or are competing with specific disciplines you are working in?

IL It is so important to talk more about these ‘counter-voices’ and what they mean. They are interpreted in different ways: as the people critiquing what museums and cultural professionals do, or as the ‘other’ that needs to be explained. How relevant are museums if they are unable to attract a more diverse range of visitors? But what do voices from outside the institution or museum actually mean to articulate or achieve? What are their aims? Is the goal to be represented by the institution, or is it to rewrite history? What are the risks, or what is the impact that you want, or do not want, to achieve?

For example, within my own practice inside an institution like the Amsterdam Museum, the discussion tends to be about welcoming other voices and perspectives, but not with the anticipation that it might fundamentally change the institution itself. ‘Counter-voices’ or ‘outside-voices’ add to, and, more importantly, break open and re-construct the narratives that are already present, in order to make them more visible.

ES I’m reminded of an essay by Jonathan Culler on the point of cultural analysis, which provided me great relief in his advice that cultural analysis helps us realise that ‘mastery’ is not the point.3 That you can read endlessly and still feel that ambition of wanting to know more and more and more; when it comes down to your relationship to knowledge, the ideal of ‘mastery’ should be replaced by curiosity-driven research. What do you make of this problem of establishing epistemological mastery? Do you think it resonates with what the museum should be doing, or who they should be speaking for?

IL The Amsterdam Museum collection consists of over a hundred thousand objects, ranging from textiles and paintings to furniture and contemporary art, as well as many post-war gifts to mayors of Amsterdam and pieces from councillors with relations abroad. An important part of the collection consists of heritage and artefacts from the 17th Century, when Amsterdam was at its height during the so-called “Golden Age”, as Dutch historical narratives tend to claim. Amsterdam was regarded as one of the world’s most important centres of trade, known for its achievements in the fields of art, science, and armed forces. But this is only one, albeit very dominant, perspective on this city’s history. To be able to talk about these narratives, you need to first identify them as being embedded in certain ideologies, rather than as being “truths”. As an art historian, it’s difficult to write and position yourself outside of an embedded ideology, because that’s what you’ve been studying at the University, or have been taught at school.

So, how does one value other forms of knowledge, and include the experiences of people who might have been on the other side of history: for example, the perspective of former colonies of the Netherlands? I think the first step is to see where you can have a common ground, a common understanding of the relevance of other perspectives of this history. I think we’ve seen it very recently at the Amsterdam Museum, where we announced that we would no longer use the term “Golden Age” as a synonym for this period in time. Of course, the point is not to ban this as a forbidden word, but to reflect on it: what does it mean? Why do we need this narrative to be a label for this art? Is it accurate for this history? What does it mean to which people? 194

ES What do you feel your ‘New Narratives’ programme does to affirm, and maybe even to excavate or recuperate, subaltern knowledges or those that are not deemed authoritative?

IL Our ‘New Narratives’ programme is based on the idea of ‘de-centering’ knowledge institutions, so as to avoid being only an authoritative voice explaining artefacts, or being the final gatekeeper that decides which histories can be taught.

I started working at the Museum three years ago as a guest curator for the exhibition project ‘Black Amsterdam’ (2016), a participatory programme during the very first ‘Black Achievement Month’ (a month celebrating Black history) that the Netherlands had in October 2016. The exhibition, part of the participatory programme, was about ‘Black role models’. We asked people to come to the museum and engage with with this theme. This led to a much larger discussion which I hadn’t expected, because the question of “Who are role models?”, to me, was quite straightforward, but apparently the question of “What is Black in the Netherlands?” was more complicated. We discussed whether Black role models had to be based in Amsterdam, or needed to have a connection to Amsterdam. And, what even is the concept of “Amsterdam”? Is it the borders of the city? Is it also the formerly occupied territories of the Netherlands during previous centuries.

All of these questions needed to be considered, also beyond this temporary exhibition. They need to be continuously asked. So we started ‘New Narratives’ to think about these questions outside the museum

as well. We wanted to avoid limiting this to being a conversation between only curators and educators, who are all trained similarly within specific institutions and have too similar an approach to art, history, and methodologies for research. So, the key element was to collaborate outside our bubble, but how do you do this?

ES Was this a way for you to introduce a difference of opinion or interpretation?

IL Yes, I think so. There are different steps. The first step was to hear different perspectives, and to publicly acknowledge that they exist. This acknowledgement contains a critical layer. These perspectives can be articulated inside the museum, mentioned in meetings, and we can even discuss it amongst staff. But what action do we then take further? Is there a follow-up action or directive? If you invite ten people to share their opinions about a certain way of framing a historic narrative, do you just say “Thank you for your input!” each time? When is the moment that you decide to actually act upon it? And who is allowed to do that? As a curator at a museum, you’re still this gatekeeper deciding when something is relevant information or not, so the authority is still there. So, in advance, there needs to be a structure that is based on a form of co-authorship that is able to push further into changing the working habits of a museum, externalising its authority in public space.

ES It sounds very difficult to start bringing people in to challenge the museum’s authority, authorship, and ownership. Do you have an example of some sort of radical openness that you tried, in terms of opening the 196

museum up to become a ‘participatory museum’? In order to make more concrete what this practice could involve, for example?

IL Well, something that’s often been said about the trend of the ‘participatory museum’ is that we have been doing this for decades. At the Amsterdam Museum, we’ve always collaborated with people in the city: we have always done participatory projects, and tried to be explicitly welcoming to everyone. It’s a city museum that aims to be there for everyone. But the next question would be: “What does it mean for someone to actually feel welcome?” And when do you decide if “everyone” is actually welcome? If you want to be welcoming to a large audience, you need to ensure that you put yourself in a position where you have no choice but to take action.

ES I can relate this to the rather sensitive statement of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who studied Dutch History, who publically said in Parliament that he thinks it’s “nonsense” that the “Golden Age” is not used as a title in one of the Amsterdam Museum’s exhibitions!4 The question for me here is not just about the narratives that are arbitrarily part of the Amsterdam Museum. They are a part of “common sense”, or a kind of natural attitude that is deeply embedded in white supremacy and an elitism of a certain sort that denies the reality of enslavement, poverty, and imperialist extraction that was happening during the same period.

How does narratology, one of the strands of cultural analysis, a strand that seems to be related the ‘New

Narratives’ programme, deal with the plurality of voices, or what we might call “focalisers” in the museum?

IL This is a difficult question, because it almost assumes that by being an institution that is open to everyone, or by arguing that there are dominant narratives to be changed, that the ‘voice’ of the museum itself also needs to change. Next to an understanding and willingness to achieve this, you also need a strategy. The only thing is: what makes us act upon all this intersectional, polyvocal knowledge? So, I found that interdisciplinarity doesn’t just take place theoretically, between these disciplines of history, art, and narratology, but it also has a very practical side when confronted with intersectional voices. By actually making it a priority to exhibit intersectional insights among the diversity of experiences and perspectives (for example, of a particular period, such as the 17th Century), it also becomes part of a policy plan. It becomes part of what a management team also needs to agree on, not only to the argument being posed for acting, but also in relation to the question of how to act upon it, because it has financial and other practical consequences.

ES So the rationale for adjusting the “focaliser”, or the affect-laden voice and perspective of the museum, needs to be formalised?

IL Yes, in the long-term policy plans. But also – and that’s something very interesting – I found that social media is a pressure point. Being part of the public debate catches the attention of museum authorities such as upper management and government workers, who then put these topics on the agenda. So as much as I’d 198

like to theorise more on why it would be important to become more inclusive, I found it doesn’t work that way. In my experience, it works the other way around: we have to be practical and find more pressure points to actually enact on these changes.

Let me clarify this in relation to the function of the ‘New Narratives’ programme. On the outside, it consists of public programmes: it enables difficult conversations, and, because we encourage colleagues to participate in the events together with the public, the discussions and voices are immediately brought into the institutional setting. This adds to our awareness of our ways of working, our selection of texts and images: all kinds of things that are considered “problematic”, or could be improved. So it is a learning process for the institution as well, and a pressure point to generate action. Institutions don’t act upon something only when the knowledge is there; rather, they act upon it because of applied pressure on the institution from outside.

ES During this final round of our conversation, I want to ask you about practicing solidarity with ‘counter-voices’ or ‘outsidevoices’. Do you feel yourself as a kind of “critical visitor” to your own institution? I use the word “visitor” here, and I don’t just mean people who come in to the museum, pay their tickets and go and have a tour inside the museum. The term “visitor” itself suggests a kind of passing through, maybe some nonchalance, or a lack of responsibility as to how things are being presented. But it can also suggest a kind of detachment, that could perhaps even be on purpose, like taking critical distance, or a kind of consciousness regarding the fact that “I’m not really a part of this, I’m just a visitor here.”

IL Yes, and no. On the one hand, yes, because I find it very important to hand out a key to different people and communities to be in dialogue with the institution. But I also know, as a former student trained here at one of the centres of Western Art History, that I am not at all a critical visitor: I reproduce many of the narrative assumptions. I might have a different skin colour or parents who were born abroad, but I also realise that being born and raised within this tradition brings many blind spots.

ES So your own kind of knowledge-map itself is very much in sync with the dominant “native” white Dutch norms?

IL I think we should all be self-reflective in that sense. It’s much too easy to say that “I’m here (as a person of colour) now, so we can present ourselves as a super diverse institution.” We’re not at all there yet, just by virtue of my presence on the team.

ES Indeed, tokenisation is no shortcut to actual transformation and change. I think this kind of “heritage work” that identifies the ideologies of collection and display practices does typically call out for the necessity for internal discussions and dialogue. But you have said that one of the biggest pressure points is through the museum’s self-representation and reputation, or how it appears to the external world. It seems to me that you have described both a kind of ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ work version of doing inclusion: light work involves hiring and building up internal awareness, while the heavy work involves setting priorities to change actual working habits and define collaborations. Do you agree with the critique that it can 200

just be a discursive ploy to say, “Yes, we are open and we are inclusive”, since this rarely seems to match up with the internal mechanisms or turmoil over leadership and decision-making?

IL Yes, maybe. I think it also means finding very concrete examples of histories that we don’t know. That’s why our collaboration on the consortium research project that you are leading, ‘The Critical Visitor: Intersectional Approaches for Rethinking & Retooling Accessibility and Inclusivity in Heritage Spaces’, which we are doing over the next five years, is so important. Past collaborations helped enormously to imagine how a visitor could be persuaded to look differently at a certain time period. It seems very logical, but we have to move away from the common-sense or ‘normative’ perspective of white Dutch people to do this work. It’s difficult. Maybe within academic fields, where we reflect all the time on these plural ethnic histories, it is almost obvious. But in daily practice at our museum, it’s sometimes unimaginable that somebody could feel or experience their colonial history in a different way. So how do you make that shift in perspective accessible to all of your audience, including people who are not thinking about this every day?

ES Well, on the topic of trying to shift perspectives, I, for example, advised the Museum of World Culture’s Tropenmuseum on an exhibition called ‘What A Genderful World’ (2019-2020), which for me involved three meetings.5 The first was just with the curatorial team, no marketing members where included, which was very interesting. They kept talking about “Well marketing hasn’t come up with a title yet”, and I thought: “Wow, that seems backwards!” I think it’s really

important to know “how the sausage gets made”, so to speak, so you realise where you can make a difference in the process of decision-making.

I was impressed with the kind of stamina it took for the curators to really put their ideas on par with the expertise and embodied knowledge of the people that were invited for an advisory sounding board. This group included Mounir Samuel and Aynouk Tan, people of colour who come from queer and trans communities, and other specialists in feminism. During the two closed roundtable discussions I attended, there was a lot of feedback about the title, the conception, the selection of materials, and even the infrastructure of the building (particularly the accessibility of toilets for non-binary and trans people). I do think it’s really an interesting kind of case study of how all of these different audiences were considered to have certain interests and knowledge. We learned that the Tropenmuseum staff believes their typical visitor is very young and very old. They said something like, “Well the general [white] Dutch person coming here expects something, so how can we challenge that? How can we make it educational?” What they ended up doing is using a lot of questions to prompt reflection on gender and sexual norms for each culture represented within the exhibition, instead of providing didactic explanations in their text. This was, I think, a good decision to address people who have rarely, if ever, considered their own gender and how it intersects with cultural and racial forms of ‘commonsense’. It was less exciting and dynamic for a visitor like me though, even if I appreciated not being preached to. So I think this threshold where programming, education, and curation meet seems to be a really important “edge of knowledge” for making things both practical and reflective. 202

IL And marketing is important. Because, who is this visitor? If you want to become a more inclusive institution, you cannot make exhibitions or projects just for either tourists or families anymore.

ES I want to ask if you have any thoughts on one more topic, because I have used the words “stamina” and “endurance”, and they are both related to resilience. Is resilience something that you’re thinking about institutionally? For instance, in the case of responding to the harsh criticism of sucessfully changing an exhibition title, and removing the phrase the “Golden Age”?

IL I think we find a lot of expectations, or hope, that becoming more inclusive is something very positive; but no, not everyone feels that way. Inclusion, I think, will be irrelevant until it hurts, until it becomes uncomfortable. So I believe resilience is required beforehand to keep searching for this place of pain, and to continue when we find it. When that happens, I’ll be happy, because although it’s exhausting work, it’s going somewhere. It’s very promising in that sense.

ES Yes, it is. But does this mean that there’s a cost to doing this work? First, somebody must be hurt. Pressure might be meted out, perhaps unevenly administered or felt. Maybe resilience in and around cultural institutions, in the practising of intersectional new museology, is engendered in the (potential) damage not just to reputations, but to the shattering of worldviews. It could be interesting to further consider the ways in which resilience names this compromise: to articulate one’s hurt or be drained of energy, in order to place enough pressure on an institution to enact

deconstructive programmes. Institutions can do this through appropriating the pain and converting it into a more generalised caring response. While resilience, in this case, seems to fall into the neoliberal bind of individualising struggle, I think the ways you have outlined arranging for collaborative, participatory musem practices demonstrates the need to establish solidarity to more evenly share the burden of speaking pain to power. Perhaps then we can also extend this solidarity practice to include sharing ways of expressing care towards people, which should always take precedence over managing “damage control” of an institution’s reputation.

1 The authors wish to thank Nienke Scholts, program coordinator of ARIAS, for her invitation to take part in the day and for the support and gifting of freedom for our conversation. 2 Pontzen, R. (2019) ‘Musea hebben te lang met hun rug naar de wereld gestaan en zijn bezig aan een inhaalrace’ (“Museums have been standing too long with their backs to the world and are starting to catch up to it”), De Volkskrant, 24 October. Available at: https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/ musea-hebben-te-lang-met-hun-rug-naar-de-wereld-gestaanen-zijn-bezig-aan-een-inhaalrace~baa9b162/. 3 Culler, J. (2014), ‘Introduction: What’s the point?’ in Bal, M. & Boer, I. (eds.) The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis, New York, Continuum. 4 See the quote included in this news article by Corder, M. (2019), ‘Museum Says Not Everything Glittered in Dutch “Golden Age”’, AP News, 13 September. Available at: https://apnews.com/5cad35e819b243329906ccb92d787f64 5 See the overview of the exhibition at the Tropenmuseum’s website: https://www.tropenmuseum.nl/en/ whats-on/exhibitions/what-genderful-world

About the Authors

Paula Albuquerque is an artist and scholar, the Head of the Master’s in Artistic Research programme at the University of Amsterdam, and a Senior Researcher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She has shown artwork at the Nieuw Dakota Gallery, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Bradwolff Projects Gallery (Amsterdam), International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Sheffield DOC|Fest. She has published the books Enter the Ghost - Haunted Media Ecologies (solo exhibition project book 2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). She also regularly presents at conferences, such as the Media in Transition, MIT, and Visible Evidence, School of Cinematic Arts, Los Angeles. She obtained a Postdoc in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam.

Jeroen Boomgaard is Professor of Art & Public Space at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. He leads the research group LAPS that focuses on notions of public domain and ‘publicness’, and the role of art and design in relation to these. He is in charge of the NWO/SIA-funded research project ‘Contemporary Commoning’, a collaboration between the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, University of Amsterdam, and Studio Rene Boer. He was Program Manager at ARIAS from 2017 until 2021. Until 2020, he was head of the Research Master’s in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. Boomgaard is also a member of the Stadscuratorium of the City of Amsterdam and of the City of Leiden.

Katie Clarke is a London- and Amsterdam-based writer, vegan thinker, and caretaker, who is currently the editor for the platform ARIAS.amsterdam responsible for the presentation,

communication, and coordination of its thematics. Next to this she works within restaurants as a vegan cook and as an advertising copywriter for various brands. Her current interest lies in exploring experimental publishing practices and refining her journalistic techniques. Katie obtained her MA in New Media and Digital Culture from the University of Amsterdam and BA in Creative Advertising from the University of the Arts London: London College of Communication.

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca is Lector and Head of DAS Graduate School at the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts in the Netherlands. Her books include: The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy (Routledge, 2020) and Encounters in Performance Philosophy (Palgrave, 2014), both co-edited with Alice Lagaay; Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (Palgrave, 2012); Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (Intellect, 2013), co-edited with Will Daddario; and Deleuze and Performance (Edinburgh, 2009). She is a founding core convener of the international research network, Performance Philosophy, the joint series editor of the Performance Philosophy book series with Rowman & Littlefield, and an editor of the open access Performance Philosophy journal.

Carlo De Gaetano is a designer and researcher at the Visual Methodologies Collective, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), specialising in data visualisation for social research. He is researching how climate change is represented and discussed online through digital and visual methods. He is also conducting experiments in (machine) learning from climate fiction in literature, 210

cinema, and social media, exploring how people imagine the future with a changing climate through participatory practices. He collaborates as information designer with the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, contributing to studies on climate visual vernaculars and climate movements. At the Digital Society School (AUAS), Carlo has been coaching international and interdisciplinary teams on projects about climate change solutions, climate activism, and climate misinformation.

Andy Dockett is a researcher and designer with the Visual Methodologies Collective, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), where his current work focuses on climate imaginaries and storytelling. With his colleague Carlo De Gaetano, he has been using machine learning and language models to research climate fiction and the portrayal of climate disaster in popular culture. He also has a strong interest in data visualisation and has developed impact assessment projects and digital platforms for environmental NGOs and governmental organisations. Prior to joining the Visual Methodologies Collective, Andy has worked in the creative industries in the Latin American region, and his latest projects are based on visualising the socio-environmental impacts of nature-based solutions to the climate crisis with Climate Cleanup and dutch provincial governments.

Sher Doruff works in the visual, digital, and performance arts in a variety of capacities. For the past twenty years her work has been situated in the expanded field of artistic research practice as an artist, writer, tutor, mentor, and supervisor. Her research practice explores fabulation and fictive approaches to writing in and through artistic research. She mentors the THIRD program

at the DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam University of the Arts, collaborating with 3rd cycle/PhD artist researchers. Her novella Last Year at Betty and Bob’s An Actual Occasion (2021) completes the Betty and Bob trilogy, published by 3Ecologies/punctum books. She has published numerous texts in academic and artistic contexts.

Raoul Frese is the initiator of the laboratory ‘Biohybrid Solar Cells’ at the VU Amsterdam where he and his team investigate the possibilities to interconnect photosynthetic materials to (semi-)conducting substrates for biosensors and solar energy harvesting. Next to this, he is Director of the VU Art Science Laboratory Hybrid Forms, where he and his team actively investigate transdisciplinary research methodologies, called artscience. Frese is also a member of the VU Art committee. Frese has previously led investigative research at Leiden University, Rutgers University, and University of Amsterdam with the NWO (Vidi) grant. He also holds a Postdoc in Nanobiophysics from the University of Twente.

Imara Limon is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum. Her work includes the exhibitions Black Amsterdam (2016), Monument of Regents: Natasja Kensmil (2020-21), the biennial Refresh Amsterdam (202021) and The Amsterdam Museum and the Colonial Past (upcoming, February 2022). Limon developed the New Narratives program for advancing equity in the Amsterdam Museum. In 2017 she was awarded the National Museum Talent Prize. In the summer of 2018, she was curator-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City. She is also Creative Director at

the Foundation Amsterdam 750, and a member of the Board of Trustees of Centraal Museum Utrecht.

John Miers’s

recent comic-based work deals with his experience of living with multiple sclerosis. His first comic on this topic, So I Guess My Body Pretty Much Hates Me Now, was produced during a Postdoctoral residency in the University of the Arts London’s Archives and Special Collections Centre at the London College of Communication, and was voted “Best One-Shot” in the 2020 Broken Frontier awards. Other recent and forthcoming publications in comic form include contributions to The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2021) and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly (2021); and in prose, chapters in Seeing Comics Through Art History: Alternative Approaches to the Form (Palgrave 2022) and Representing Acts of Violence in Comics (Routledge 2019). He is Lecturer in Illustration at Kingston School of Art and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins.

Maaike Muntinga works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Ethics, Law and Humanities of Amsterdam UMC. She studied Medicine, and has received a Master’s in Medical Anthropology and Epidemiology and a PhD in Medicine. Her research focuses on the investigation of gender, sex, and sexuality in the context of healthcare. Maaike gets inspired by the complex relationship between theory and (clinical) practice. She currently explores how thinking with queer theory and intersectionality can help find unexpected answers to difficult healthcare questions.

Sabine Niederer is Professor of the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she specialises

in visual, digital, and participatory methods for social research. Next to this, since January 2021, she is also the Programme Manager for ARIAS. In 2014, Sabine founded the Citizen Data Lab as a place to build collaborations between researchers from other research groups, students, issue professionals, local communities, artists, designers, and developers to work on participatory mappings of local issues. Sabine is also Coordinator of the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam.

Ektor Ntourakos is an artist and urban geographer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His practice includes interventions in the urban public space, installations, and the creation of situations. His research focuses on the urban public space and the practices, actions, and chains of actions that occur in it. He approaches public space as a social phenomenon which is an emergent property of practices. Social practice theories, assemblage theories and agonistic politics are important elements of his work.

Špela Petrič is a Ljubljana- and Amsterdam-based new media artist who has been trained in the natural sciences and holds a PhD in Biology, currently working as a Postdoc researcher at the Smart Hybrid Forms Lab at VU Amsterdam. Her artistic practice combines the natural sciences, wet biomedia practices, and performance, and critically examines the limits of anthropocentrism via multi-species endeavours. Petrič has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).

Prof. dr. Erik Rietveld is Socrates Professor and Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (AMC/Department of Philosophy/ ILLC/Brain & Cognition) and is a Founding Partner of RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. RAAAF is a multidisciplinary and experimental studio that makes site-specific art installations at the crossroads of visual art, architecture, and philosophy.

Ilse van Rijn is an Art Historian and writer. Rethinking the traditional, gendered relationships between the legible and the visible, theory and practice, words and things, her research focuses on the materiality of language in relation to feminist thought in a more-than-human world. She holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Jan van Eyck Academy (The Artists’ Text as Work of Art, 2017). Ilse has written extensively on contemporary art in general, and its relation to writing specifically, and has been contributing to books, journals, and magazines, such as De Witte Raaf and Metropolis M. She works as a tutor at Rietveld and the THIRD programme of the DAS Graduate School.

Nienke Scholts practices dramaturgy throughout manifold collaborations with performance artists (since 2007); with Veem House for Performance (2013-2019) - where she also developed the publication series Words for the Future (2018); as ARIAS’ programme coordinator (since 2019); and through her research as a fellow of DAS Research/THIRD, Amsterdam University of the Arts. Her research focuses on dramaturgies of work in artistic practices; unpacking notions like ambition and exhaustion, developing pausing

as a practice, and exploring her particular interest in darkness as a potential mode of thinking and doing (work) differently. In 2019 she received a Saari Residency grant. She loves to draw and to walk.

Alice Smits is initiator and curator of Zone2Source, a platform for art, nature, and technology in the Amstelpark Amsterdam. A space for artists scientists to think together on new imaginaries for nature-culture relations. Smits is currently a researcher at LAPS Public Space and City, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and Hybrid Forms Lab, VU Amsterdam, unpacking contemporary land art practices and theories on the anthropocene, and more recently in relation to artificial intelligence. Often you can find her writing as an art critic for magazines such as Metropolis M, or playing guitar with her improvisation band Oorbeek. She also holds an MA in Art History from the University of Amsterdam.

Eliza Steinbock is Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Maastricht University. Eliza’s research is committed to mapping out the interconnections of social realities with cultural productions, how art-making can be socially embedded and culturally transformative. They are project leader of “The Critical Visitor” consortium, developing intersectional approaches for inclusive heritage (NWO 2020-2025). Eliza has published 40+ articles on contemporary visual culture analyzing the intersecting dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. Eliza is the author of Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019), and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis: Aesthetic Resilience (Routledge, 2020).

Miha Turšič is a concept and project developer within the Make programme of Waag, Amsterdam. He works on international collaborative research and innovation projects involving art-science, open-source hardware, digital fabrication, material research, ecology, and space culture. He is closely involved with the planet B lab’s environmental efforts, and he is the founder of Open Space Lab within Waag.

Salomé Voegelin is an artist, writer, and researcher engaged in listening as a sociopolitical practice. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social, and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. She writes essays and text-scores for performance and publication. Her latest book The Political Possibility of Sound (Bloomsbury 2018) articulates a politics that includes creativity and invention and imagines transformation and collaboration as the basis of our living together. Voegelin’s practice engages in participatory, collective, and communal approaches and uncurates curatorial conventions through performance. She is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and currently represents the Professorship Sound Studies at the University of Art Braunschweig. www.salomevoegelin.net

Colophon

Editors Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke, Nienke Scholts

Authors Paula Albuquerque, Otter AI, Jeroen Boomgaard, Katie Clarke, Andy Dockett, Sher Doruff, Raoul Frese, Carlo De Gaetano, Imara Limon, Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, John Miers, Maaike Muntinga, Sabine Niederer, Ektor Ntourakos, Špela Petrič, Erik Rietveld, Ilse van Rijn, Nienke Scholts, Alice Smits, Miha Turšič, Eliza Steinbock, & Salomé Voegelin.

Graphic design Jeanine van Berkel

Copyediting Will Sharp

Editorial advice Sabine Niederer

Printing Drukkerij RaddraaierSSP Silkscreen cover by Darling

Binding Boekbinderij Patist

Paper Fedrigoni Materica Terracotta 250 grams Antalis Nautilus Classic 120 grams

Typeface design Charlotte Rohde

Typeface Keroine Doux Extreme Keroine Intense Legere

© 2021 arias.amsterdam and authors

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission for copyrighted material that appears in this volume. If any material has been used in error, please contact ARIAS at info@arias.amsterdam.

Acknowledgements

With special thanks to the ARIAS core partners; University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU Amsterdam (VU), Gerrit Rietveld Academie (GRA) / Sandberg Instituut (SI), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) and Amsterdam University of the Arts (AHK).

Many thanks as well to Jesse Ahlers, Morgane Billuart, Erin la Cour, Yi-Fei Chen, Christina Della Giustina, Inte Gloerich, Anton Kats, Just Lievens, Pei-Ying Lin, NWO (the Dutch Science Foundation), Prof. Klaus Schmierer and the neurology staff in ward 11D of the Royal London Hospital at Barts NHS Trust, Saša Spačal, Mai Spring, Sara-Lot van Uum, & Patricia de Vries – for their invaluable support and inspiration towards different contributions in this book.

Most grateful to all involved in creating this publication. It is without a doubt that such a publication, or platform, could not be what it is without the support of this art-research community - the ARIAS team cannot thank you enough.

ISBN 9789464372939