Facts & Fables

She I: I am not a successor and also not inimitable.
She II: Like you, I am a changeable character that forms itself according to what influences me.
She I: Man and woman simultaneously.
She II: In possession of an animal instinct.
She I: Distracted and misled by primitivity.
She II: Whatever that may mean in the world of prosperity.
She I: I don't live but experience through my undefined self.

Originally in Dutch:
Zij: Ik ben geen opvolger en tevens niet onnavolgbaar.
Ze: Net als u ben ik een veranderlijk karakter dat zich vormt naar het geen wat invloed op mij heeft.
Zij: Man en vrouw tegelijkertijd.
Ze: In het bezit van een dierlijk instinct.
Zij: Afgeleid en misleid door primitiviteit.
Ze: Wat dat ook mag betekenen in de wereld van welvarendheid.
Zij: Ik leef niet maar beleef door mijn onbepaalde zelf.

TUSSEN FEITEN EN FABELS
With Inouschka de Nooijer, Galerie Lecq, Rotterdam, January 2020

Galerie Lecq sits in a bridge keeper's house on the Parksluis—a liminal space between water and land, between here and there. The space itself is tiny, claustrophobic even. We used that.

Inouschka and I had been in conversation about what it means to fight yourself back to being present after dissociation. Not the fracture itself, but that struggle to return—to distinguish what's real when your sense of self has split. Between facts and fables.

Our method was deliberately intuitive. We each pulled photographs from our personal archives: a pair of high heels abandoned on the street, shadows cast on a living room wall by incoming sunlight, a cut on your finger (the kind you photograph to send someone), pale white clothing hanging on a line. Moments that catch your attention precisely because they're slightly off, slightly wrong. The kind of images you just make without thinking about photography.

Then we paired them with fragments from texts we'd written—not matching meaning to meaning, but following instinct. A sentence would attach itself to an image for reasons we couldn't quite articulate. That pairing created something else: everyday life as evidence, domestic moments as proof you're still here.

We mounted these large photographs in the windows facing the street. Passersby would see these attempts to anchor yourself in the ordinary.

Inside, we constructed that twilight state between absence and presence. Plants and small, odd objects filled the cramped space—too much, almost overwhelming. Then we installed stark blue fluorescent lighting, but kept it hidden except through one narrow window we left partially open. That filtered blue glow: the only indication something else was happening inside. You couldn't see the full space, only fragments through that gap.

The exhibition held the question: how do you return to yourself? How do you determine what's real when your own perception has become unreliable? We wrote a dialogue between Zij and Ze—fragments of a fractured self trying to communicate, to find each other again.

The Riso booklet never got finished (we might, still). But the small room held what we needed: a space that acknowledged the struggle to be present, to distinguish fact from fable when both feel equally unreal.