JORIK AMIT GALAMA

INTIMATE SYSTEMS

Jorik Amit Galama moves between fine art, literature, and cinema. After studying philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and graduating from the Image and Language department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, they got selected for the Slow Writing Lab by the Dutch Foundation for Literature in 2018. Their fiction stories and texts on art have been published in Metropolis M, Tirade, De Revisor, ZINK, Kluger Hans, Tubelight, De Internet Gids, EYE Filmmuseum Exposed, and various artists' publications. Recurring themes in their work are embodiment, self-healing, and intimacy, viewed through the lens of queer ecology.

jorikamitgalama.com jorikamit@gmail.com IG: jorikamitgalama

During the Master’s programme Jorik worked on several short and longterm film projects. One of the long-term projects is The Second Lily (working title), in which they focus on the socio-ecological tensions deriving from industrial lily farming in a rural community in Drenthe, the Netherlands, where they are from. By talking with locals who are affected and/or affecting, as well as following the many side stories relating to the lily supply chains and the history of the area and landscape, possibilities for transformation are mapped. In another long-term project Insurance Against Meteorites, a collaboration with fellow master researcher Natalia Śliwowska, they follow Natalia’s mother Wanda, who attempts to investigate police corruption and neglect surrounding the death of her son Bartek in a mysterious car accident. While gathering more and more information, and collaborating with a fortune-teller who predicted Bartek’s death, Natalia and Jorik portray different modes of mourning and remembering through the use of performative interventions.

We spoke with Jorik about their ongoing research and the works they will present during the Artistic Research Week.

Photo left and right: Research material The Second Lily

At first glance, The Second Lily and Insurance Against Meteorites might seem like disparate projects. What do you see as common denominators in these works? A recurring theme in my works is the vulnerability of the body. I want to center the body’s flaws, transformations, sensuality, scars, carnal archives, and porosity to its environment. On a deeper level this often links to traumas and oppression. I wish to honour the actions people take to transform the cycles of (self)harm that stem from traumas and oppression. In The Second Lily this entails ecological destruction, mental and physical illnesses and discrimination. In Insurance Against Meteorites family trauma and injustice are the primary focus. Both films share the strategy of gathering a mosaic of perspectives to foreground the intricate effects that a damaging event can have.

What moved you to making the uncovering of vulnerability the focal point of your research? To me vulnerability has a lot of layers. Obviously, there is the current digital layer that makes us experience more and more of our intimate exchanges online, where a lot of our complexities are filtered away. Intentionally reclaiming time and space for being vulnerable with others can connect to some vital questions about the way we live. What positions of dominance do I inhabit? Who are the bodies around me? How do they influence me? Do I influence them, and if so: for better or for worse? I think we can only heal ourselves and others by looking into these questions and answering them openly and honestly. Indirectly this can also question a tendency that I often observe; how we tend to repeat the way we describe our identities or the things we have experienced – how they can become stabilized stories. During interviews I often search for an opening in those stabilized stories. These are the parts of our psychological landscape where things are more fluid and less organized, and can therefore offer the chance to openly think together instead of stating conclusions. Somatic exercises, improvisational drama games and elements of spiritual rituals can function

as ‘tools’ to enable playfulness and a form of safety that allows for a meaningful encounter and respectful exchange. To maintain the intimacy I often work firstly with just sound and search for a cinematic or literary translation later on.

How do you reach such a translation? Often during these interviews, I get hit by something. You could say it’s the punctum or ‘the meaningful detail’, as they sometimes call it in prose writing. It’s often something small that shows the peculiarities of an experience in a very condensed way. These can become the ingredients that start to boil in my head. When I reevaluate the interview together with participants or collaborators, I start to propose ways to capture them in film or in writing. Sometimes this leads to a performative retelling or reenactment, other times I use the aesthetic outcomes of the ‘tools’ used to set the conditions for the encounter.

You spoke about wanting your filmmaking to become a form of slow activism. Could you elaborate on this? Firstly, I think there’s a risk of deflating the word activism, which to me primarily means direct action and selforganizing. I’m still navigating different strategies, like offering my filmmaking skills to NGOs and volunteering for a political party. Documentary filmmaking can feel like a very impractical way of spreading information. It also operates through rather elitist ways of production and distribution. At the same time, documentary filmmaking gives you the chance to register long-term processes. In this way, I hope to create some tiny insights on self-healing, building resilience, and networks of solidarity. This might be called slow activism. Maybe this can also be said about the process of filmmaking itself; the encounter you have with someone. I work from an ethics of care that puts the integrity of the process above an end product.

You view your work through the lens of queer ecology. What does this lens offer you as a filmmaker and writer? Queer ecology is one way to look at the socio-ecological

Research material The Second Lily systems we inhabit and the many harmful effects that they generate. It thereby vigorously questions what is considered natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal, and shows how those binary oppositions are often embedded in eurocentric heterosexism. For me, the lens of queer ecology offers a framework to see more of these effects, just like other branches of critical environmental justice like Black feminist ecological thinking. It reminds us how marginalized identities generate vastly different experiences of our environments, and risk very different dangers in relation to climate change. It reminds us how marginalized identities and human diversity in general, generate vastly different experiences of our environments, and also; cause very different risks in relation to climate change. Besides, by bringing in the dazzling manifestations of complex genders and sexualities present in nature, queer ecology can function as an inspiration for the way we relate to our own bodies and those of others. On a personal level, it makes me look more closely at myself as a kind of ecosystem, with certain strengths, weaknesses, pollutants, and seeds. It has been fruitful for me to view myself and the world around me in this manner because it offers a way to analyse, and assess where I have response-abilities.

Interview by Lianne Kersten

Still Reproduction Sites

Stills A Glorious Defence

Stills Decompression Room

Still Penis Flowers

BOY MODE OFF

Slightly wary, I walk past the groups sitting on benches along the walkways. In the sections where it is quieter, I feel my body returning from a divisible surface to a whole. I try to find the right inner attitude, to transform my gaze into a sharp point that pricks open the stream of observations to let a meaning pop out of them. The evening sun creeps up behind me.

The park is a living picture held in its frames with might and main, and sometimes brutal force. The picnic meadows are watered, a gigantic vacuum cleaner sucks up cans, balloons are cut from the trees, leaves are scooped from the waterfall, the love temple where couples say “I do” is temporarily closed due to danger of collapse. Two policemen with a muzzled dog speak to a homeless man. I count the dog's saliva droplets on the asphalt, seventeen, before they leave.

Every so often I pick up a pebble and put it in my bag. Before I went to Paris, my grandmother came to visit me in a dream. She was sitting in the back of one of those 1990s streetcars you hardly see anymore. She beckoned me to her, handed me a bag of coloured pebbles, and got off silently at the next stop. At home, I threw the pebbles on the ground. They clumped together into words that formed a message to my biological mother.

Did my grandmother ever stroll through this park? Is this octogenarian by the fountain one of the children she once cared for as an au pair? In my head I fabricate images of her and the man she was married to for several years after WW2. A Jewish man who had survived the concentration camps, the love of her life, according to my aunt. Evening walks, a kiss against one of the plane trees, seemingly dissolving into nothingness. Regularly in this park, as in the Vondelpark, I see women of colour pushing strollers with white children. It gives a feeling of nagging helplessness in which I find La noire de.... by Ousmane Sembène. Still a large proportion will give their youth for far too low a wage, and sometimes leaving behind their own offspring and dependents, for the reproduction of the elite of the Global North.

“Hey dude, nice dress!” someone calls out behind me while I let a hairy caterpillar walk on my hand. Like something cold, the words creep up my neck. I don't dare look back and walk away as fast as I can with the caterpillar on one hand, my handycam in the other. At the statue of the god Pan, I let the caterpillar transfer to a bush.

With invisible wires my body and the handycam are connected. In the morning I decide what I want to get out of the day, what setting I need to film what I would like to film, and thus how I should present myself. Do I turn on boy mode, to compromise on myself and glide through society more or less frictionlessly, or do I turn on femme mode, where I get closer to myself, but become something that the eyes snag on.

From the bushes a hedgehog crawls out, I run after him. “Why didn't she actually have a message for you?” my mother had asked. My grandmother's message had touched her, she said it was something she had felt but which my grandmother had never voiced. I pick up a pebble from under the bush. My bag is almost full, at home I will throw them on the ground.