Lot Louis Veelenturf, 5/5, home blogger ArtEZ Business Centre
Creative Writing
Experiment
So here we are, this is my last blog. A year ago, I signed my diploma, organized the first presentation of First Person Magazine and was completely exhausted. Since then, a lot has happened, and I’ll talk you through it with the help of a few photos.
1. It’s time for something new. The sun is shining, it’s warm, and I’m working hard for my admissions. One of the assignments is making a zine, and I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoy making visual work. I went on a treasure hunt, collected all sorts of things, scanned them and then added other stuff to tell my story. It’s become a visual essay about being a non-binary femme, a part of my identity I haven’t written much about. In the zine, there is a page where I scribbled a quote over a scan of some panties: ‘To be femme is to give honour where there has been shame.” I first encountered that in Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’ and it’s stuck with me since. I think every year I understand a little more of what it means, and every year I feel more connected to it.
2. Now that the summer is approaching and a new batch is about to graduate, Merit Vessies and I were asked to interview the students for their graduation podcast. Since they weren’t able to present their work at an exhibition or performance, they opted for audio to give audiences and potential clients a taste of their work. Audio is one of my favorite media to work in: it’s intimate, personal, and also has a mysterious side. Besides, interviewing talented and passionate people is enormously rewarding, so this was a delightful commission to get. Interviewing, presenting and moderating are some elements that I’ll focus more on in the future.
3. and 4. These are two photos of pieces of clothing that I embroidered on. Years ago, I started embroidering simple shapes and over time I fell in love with the technique. Its slow, almost meditative nature is something that inspired me a lot these past months. The humanity of it (every work has small mistakes), the personal aspect (I made something I’m literally wearing on my skin), are things I want to preserve in all my work. Writing has one major flaw, to me, and it’s the fact that you can’t touch it. You can’t walk around your story or hold it in your hands for a bit. The discovery of textiles made that possible for me.
5. Here’s a project that I started out of love for textiles. I want to get to know fabric in all its forms, and I think weaving one or multiple patterns every week will teach me how fabrics are constituted, so I can work with them however I want. I think you can tell a story with textile as well as with text, and so I am now – if you will permit me to be cheesy for a second – learning my ABCs.
6. One of the stories I want to tell (with other materials than just text) is one you don’t hear so frequently. It’s the story of someone who was registered as a woman at birth, but found out they weren’t a woman at all. A person who felt at home with the word non-binary, doesn’t feel good about being read as ‘woman’ on the streets every day, but still identifies as ‘femme’. What does that word mean, anyway? It’s a search that won’t yield a clear answer. But trying to represent that feeling in visual language is a new way of researching for me, which is yielding many new insights.
7. Another project that I’m working on now – a long-running one that started during my studies and will (hopefully) never finish – is my research on racism. I kind of think every white person should do this (others have rightfully called this ‘homework’) but until then, I want to try to remind as many people as possible of the fact that white people benefit from racism to this day, and we should stop being sanctimonious about it. I’m not an Instagram activist – activist is a title I don’t want to take on, anyway – but I like to engage in conversation with people. Sometimes that’s difficult, if that means you have to address a problematic remark your boss made on the work floor, but I think we should take responsibility for that. It’s literally the least we can do.
8. Other than talking to people, I think we should support the Black Lives Matter movement financially. If you have money, you can donate; if you don’t, you could watch videos on YouTube where the advertising proceeds go to initiatives that support BLM. The image you see here, made by Clodagh Read, is a post by First Person. We made this statement because the queer community has black people and people of color to thank for literally everything, and we can’t abandon our ‘family’ in this crucial moment. If you support the LGBTQIA+ community but oppose Black Lives Matter, you’re not being a true ally.
9. Back to stories, and research. In this book, ‘Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl’ by Andrea Lawlor, Paul can transform into a woman at any desired time. Nobody bats an eye. Transformation in that way has always been the superpower I desired most for myself. Not necessarily to change my body into a man’s, but to be able to alter my body parts at will to express how I feel that day and how I want to present myself. The enthusiasm I felt when I picked up this book is something I want to cultivate in the people who will see/read/watch/hear my future work.
10. What exactly that ‘future work’ will be, is becoming more uncertain every time I think about it. And that’s exciting. It could go in any direction. This last photo is one of an accidental artwork. While printing the first zine of First Person (a beautiful Risoprint edition by Knust, designed by Clodagh Read and Oscar van Leest), something went wrong, resulting in a mix-up of different layers of different projects. I see it as a metaphor for my own future. Graduating with the platform that First Person is, has given me a foundation that I can now try to carry over into other projects, by going back to school and experimenting with new things. Hopefully, the results will be equally beautiful.
Translation by: Witold van Ratingen
Lot Louis Veelenturf - Creative Wrinting Arnhem
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.