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Between September 2023 and July 2025 I studied for an MFA. When I started this study I was 41 years old, with three jobs, a young child and a busy, somewhat messed up life. My creative rhythm, as well as almost any other set rhythm I might have had up to that time, was disrupted, and most works that came out during this period were not products of the pure joy of making (one day we'll talk about the process as well as the outcome of this study). However, there were those moments that somehow slipped through the fingers of institutional creativity and then several little projects appeared. However, because they came to life in fragmented, seemingly unrelated moments, I failed to see them as a whole and I also failed to see from the start their immediate connection with the topics, materials and methods that I chose for my 'institutional' projects.
Self-portrait was the first one of these side projects. It came to fruition during a ceramics workshop around Halloween. I decided to use acrylics and varnish (nail polish) instead of glazing it. The topic of identity, stereotypes and gender roles, that would later emerge in my graduation project, as well as masks as a medium, would only become concrete about a year later in my practice. Picnic was a child of found objects. The discarded, the every day, the unfitting. From the wooden board to the plastic threads, all objects in this assemblage are items that would have otherwise ended up in the trash, which was also meant to be a performative building element that would shape the sculptures in identitours. Wall was the last one. The bold color palette is there, as well as the found objects. Underneath, on the found canvas, you can see parts of an underlying painting of a woman. But it's not a message of despair. This wall is a live wall, a lived wall, against the sterile white of decorum, and is in fact a happy expression of that woman. Looking back, those choices I made unconsciously were expressions of and foreshadowed the concept of virtuality, that I also embrace in identitours. It seems that there is always a little bit of us in everything we do, one way or another.
My master's thesis, connected to the graduation project "Identitours": Shifting Identities
From the Introduction:The narrative The text examines how identity is shaped, while it presents the process of subjectformation as a constant negotiation with external forces. How do we come to knowourselves when the terms of self-definition are not entirely ours to begin with? Isthere a core, an ultimate self that we can reach? This project aims to show that identity is not fixed, but layered and shifting, andthat while categories, such as gender, age, and motherhood, operate as structuringforces, we can resist binary oppositions and pull towards multiplicity, using thepotential and the generative qualities of language. Person and pronouns change constantly in the narrative: to what extend do genderand grammatical number dictate our understanding of the story? Semantic fluidityand shift, resistance, and the pull towards certain word clusters are battlefieldswhere meaning and identity are resolved and at the same time created, in parallel.Interactivity and the social dimension are emphasized in the story as essential forproviding affordances that help us move away from unconstructive polarities. The thesis There’s a methodological ambition here: Phenomenology, linguistics, narrativepsychology, and social theory come together in a hybrid approach that performsthe complexities of identity through form. The thesis has developed organically from annotations of the text and functions asa critical apparatus, an inner dialogue that shapes the way the story is understood,reinforcing the idea that meaning is constructed in layers, that identity is alwaysin negotiation between text, interpretation, and context. Writing becomes arecursive system, a form of computational poetics, self-examining and self-modifying,shifting meaning through time and perception, mapping how identity is bothemergent and imposed. The arguments go beyond explaining, to enacting theinstability of meaning and the fluctuation of categories. Fiction and critical theory intertwine in a layered approach, in a meta-text thatdoes more than narrate: it dissects, performs, and destabilizes notions of identityand meaning-making, offering both an embodied experience (the protagonist’sjourney) and a meta-awareness of the forces at play (the thesis).
Eight masks, eight labels, eight stops in the audio walk I prepared for the XPUB graduation exhibition. A site-specific transmedia installation that discusses what happens after being exposed to biases and stereotypes and how we gain agency in the creation of identity. Identitours: A transmedia audio walk [external application] The JourneyMy journey starts from the definition: Words set perimeters, but also bridge rivers, carve new paths. The map leads to wondrous and sometimes fantastical transformations in the garden of Buitenplaats Brienenoord: Masks — expressions of virtuality, of the possible as a reality, built with everyday means. Audio pieces guide you through a personal, evolving relationship with labels and exhibit the ways in which I reject, reclaim or reinterpret words. Your walk between points is a performative manifestation of my inner dialogue, the space where meaning and identity are negotiated.The Start (audio)The start is a point in time and a point in space. Surrounded, preceded, followed, extended, completed by other points. I have been called, among others, “complicated”, “naive”, “strong”, “caring”, “smart”, “stubborn”, “crazy” and “wild”. These saturated by context, circumstance and intention words are my starting points in a journey of performing and transforming meaning. The MasksMasks are used in my practice as a primary metaphor, a materialization of the deeply personal answer to the question “What is the way out?” of the boundaries labels set for identity. The whole process of mask-making relates to the building and re-building of identity, to the perpetual performative and relational process of looking at what is available, picking and combining elements, (re-)imagining andcreating new forms of existing. Materials that are salvaged, recycled, forgotten or not fitting anywhere else; carton, paper, scraps from old textiles and broken toys, are used to express virtuality, an endless potential for change and re-invention. In this sense, masksare not used to conceal but to create space and potential.
The publication: Shifting Identities
A final take on biases: The third and last part of presenting Labels, but not for clothes focuses on "the way out" of the confines of labels. After discussing the impact of labels especially during the formative years in the first public moment, and systemic biasing in the second, this last exhibition focuses on affordances, performativity and virtuality.
Leeszaal in Rotterdam hosted on Monday 24 March 2025 a very important public moment. Among the works exhibited was the second part of the project "Labels, but not for clothes". What was presented in this installation: A "game", demonstrating how systemic exclusion supports labeling, based on the actual directives of the latest US administration. [external application] A video piece with main source material TV ads from the 80's and 90's setting impossible standards that support stereotypes through repetition. The video presented (below) was silent and included footage of myself mimicking the repetitive gestures in these advertisements.

There is also a slower version of this video, that wasn't part of this exhibition but has its own charm and is a bit different, as it has sound but no footage of a person mirroring the moves and expressions they witness in the ads.

The bureaucratic, dark setting of the installation emphasized the bleak dystopia where decisions that reinforce systemic biases through repetition and exclusion, with or without words, are made.
The umbrella project "Labels, but not for clothes" approaches the topic of labeling and stereotyping from different angles and calls for participation and has developed as a triptych. The project had its first public moment in November, in the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NL. The purpose of this first part: To show the impact of exposure to biases and labels at an early age. In what ways do words shape us?
The second part, presented in LeesZaal West in Rotterdam explored through a video piece and a web 'game' how stereotyping is systemically reinforced through repetition and exclusion.The third and last part, identitours, a site-specific transmedia installation in Buitenplaats Brienenoord, was also my graduation project, and the one that took the discussion further, to what happens after being exposed to biases and stereotypes and in the creation of identity. It is tightly connected to the thesis Shifting Identities where the conversation unravels in some depth.