Lot Louis Veelenturf, 4/5, home blogger ArtEZ Business Centre

A place of comfort

When I was ten years old or so, I liked to watch a TV-show on Z@PP called Veel tijd, weinig geld [Lots of time, little money], which taught kids things like how to stick a piece of cardboard to their bike with a clothespin, so that they could ride around their neighborhoods with amplified street cred. That’s comparable to my current situation in the days of Corona. No cash to spare, but plenty of fun stuff to do.

I’m not entirely broke, mind you. Yes, my workshops got cancelled and yes, some of my projects are on hold, but I still have my job in the clothing store, and it’s enough to live off. The part of the analogy that holds true is that I’m enjoying myself. That’s not a very nice thing to say when hundreds of people are perishing in the intensive care wards, but it’s the truth. Because I’m in a relatively luxurious position concerning my income (I see my privilege here), I’m able to finally focus on things that I still wanted (or had) do. 

So I cleaned my bathroom, updated my administration, bleached my hair, arranged the files on my laptop, vacuum cleaned my balcony, read two books, made ten-or-so collages, answered all my e-mails from the last three years and watched about 12 YouTube videos on time management.

Do I feel lonely? No. I have a house full of sweet people with whom I’m quarantined together. Am I bored? Nope. Do I feel like I could be doing more with my life? Yeah.

After about a week, the itch started. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy sleeping in every morning and spending an entire day embroidering a giant prawn on the back of my denim jacket, but every day the question in the back of my head – is this really what you want to be doing with your life? – is getting a little louder. I remember a teacher who told me ‘Nothing good ever came from a place of comfort’ and while that may sound drastic, I think he meant that you have to challenge yourself.

If I’m honest, I haven’t really challenged myself since my graduation. I find it quite difficult to motivate myself, especially now that the only contact I have with people (who aren’t my roommates) is through a screen. I notice now how important it is to me to be physically in the same space with people. To feel the energy (if you will allow me to get spiritual for a moment) they radiate when they’re excited about something, or their drive, or their worries.

One of the things that inspired me to make my graduation work was the idea, or the necessity, of bringing people together. To help members of the queer community meet each other in person, and that’s precisely what is now impossible. Of course, First Person is also an online platform, and so we’re still sending content into the world through a collaboration with Notulen van het Onzichtbare [Notes from the Invisible], a blog by de Nieuwe Oost. You can read this short story by Welmoed Jonas, or watch this collaboration between myself and Merit Vessies:
https://www.notulenvanhetonzichtbare.nl/notulen/plaza-de-la-paja/ and https://www.notulenvanhetonzichtbare.nl/notulen/vershoudfolie/).

Other than the fact that I find it enormously exciting and inspiring to keep reading and watching new work by other queer writers and artists, I also want to keep challenging myself artistically. Over the last few years in my Creative Writing program, I focused primarily on writing and editing, but lately I’ve found that I have a strong desire in my autonomous practice to create work that is also tactile. For some reason, a Word document as a final result is not really satisfying anymore, and I’m increasingly inclined towards analogue ways of working.

The last few weeks I’ve been drawing, making collages, and I spent hours and hours embroidering. The almost meditative state I attain while doing so helps me listen to my intuition, for the first time in years, without getting distracted by that pressure to answer all those e-mails that have been waiting for my attention for days (in part because my Corona to-do-list fixed that problem for me). I realized that I’ve been ignoring my own (visual) artistic practice for a while. I realized also that I haven’t asked myself in some time what I would really like to do, if I ignore my direct environment for a moment. And I realized mostly that I still want to learn a lot of things.

I decided to go back to school. I am very happy with all that I learned during my time at ArtEZ, but I think I can do more than just write. I want to broaden my horizon and meet new people. I want to make things, things you can touch and walk around. I want a group of people around me who inspire me and motivate me to do my best work. I want to study a little longer. After all, I’m only twenty-three.

This time has shaken up a lot of things. The year ahead of me is going to be messy; I’ll have to work a lot to save up for tuition, I will have to create a visual portfolio, I’ll have to decide what I want to dedicate the next few years of my life to and where I want to live. That’s challenging, but although I also think that you’re not really learning anything if it doesn’t hurt a little bit, I don’t fully agree with my teacher. It’s been a temporary place of comfort that helped me make this decision and I am hopeful that it will result in something good.

Translation by: Witold van Ratingen

Lot Louis Veelenturf - Creative Wrinting ArtEZ

2019 - Last summer I graduated from the Creative Writing program without doing the things I had planned to do. I didn’t write a book or publish a poetry collection. Instead, I founded an online platform for queer art and literature, named First Person. It’s a personal project, because I noticed that as a genderqueer author, there weren’t so many places I could publish my work without having to answer for myself, my identity and my pronouns. photography Leroy Verbeet.