Bin bek cas
Why am I talking about memories?
Memories are what I hold on to the most when life starts feeling a little unmanageable. Perhaps it sounds a bit nostalgic or cliché but it’s what keeps me going on some days.
This is probably one of the reasons I like to take photographs, whether planned or spontaneous, because I know that in the future, the pictures will give me flashbacks of feelings I had at specific moments in time. This makes me think of when I see pictures of me at the beach back home. I can pick out a picture of me soaking up the sun and it’s like I can feel the warmth of the sun on my skin again. I can see pictures of rainy days on the island and it actually feels as though I can smell the surrounding.
These memories are what I hold on to the most.
I don’t really know how to begin. I know what I want to say but still it feels difficult to start.
This whole zine presents a series of pictures documenting what I did in the year of 2022. I have included images that are more personal to me, but also pictures of events that I feel led me to where I am today.
For me, starting something has always felt scary. I think this might be the case for a lot of people out there.
Beginnings bring a lot of internal debate. Will I achieve something with this new start? Will I do well in the process of starting something new? What will this experience bring me?
Jasmine Thomas-Girvan. "Bathed in Sacred fire" 2021-2022In the process of thinking about a new beginning, I also think about what is coming to an end.
In this zine, I want to express how I am experiencing shifts in time and how it feels to be undergoing different life changes.
My mental attitude in these moments of change is shifting.
Jasmine Thomas-Girvan. "Bathed in Sacred fire" 2021-2022
Iris Kensmil "Some of my souals" 2021-2022
Iris Kensmil "Some of my souals" 2021-2022
Lawrence Weiner
When I start something new, I dwell on all the negative thoughts and uncertainties I could face; the upcoming difficulties that might appear as a result of my choices. This is also the feeling I had starting this zine. I’ve been constantly debating which pictures I should use, and thinking a lot about how to get to this end product, rather than focusing on the process itself.
I do this a lot with other experiences in my life. I constantly find myself thinking years ahead, rather than focusing on where I am right now. Last year, I found myself in an environment where there were constant body movements, and this plays a big role in how I choose to move myself on a daily.
This made me reflect a lot on how I have been moving my whole life.It made me think about how I moved during the lockdowns.It made me think how this long pause we experienced during those times has made moving again feel very different and new.
Moving in Melly taught me that I am able to move in my own way. It taught me to move at my own pace. Moving through this space has made me feel more in control of my own motion.
What does m otion mean to me?
Motion is something we are constantly in. Motion can mean physically chose to move. Motion can be motion of thought patterns. Motion can be consistent choices we make every day.
Everything starts with motion.
I think even slowing down is an important matter of motion.
Motion sometimes feels as if it needs to be something fast pace all the time. Asking myself what motion means to me, made me realize that motion also means finding a slow pace to move on.
This slowing down became a big energizer for me.
Slowing down was difficult.
Before, I was in this constant flow of movement. I was always busy. I think a lot of us reach this point in life, where we constantly feel physically and mentally tired. We are always thinking about what needs to be done, but never feel like we’ve accomplished anything. This can apply to many different aspects of our lives.
I was pushing myself to do more than my body could manage because I also had persistent thoughts of needing to help my family back home.
I was always thinking about how I could be more helpful to my mother, who lives miles away.
How can I still be her safe space from where I am?
This would always make me think a few years ahead. I want to be able to give my family everything I saw them lose.
But at some point, in this continuous flow, I had to realize how there are things that are just not in my control.
I grew up thinking that I needed to fix every unpleasant situation my parents were in. I had to accept the fact that I can’t fix everything happening to the people around me. I had to unlearn this survival mindset.
Slowing down is teaching me to accept the things that I cannot change easily. We all have to make our own choices, and it’s important to realize that some choices involve mistakes, and that’s also something to accept.
Slowing down bringing me to the point where I accept where I am.
Always busy
Never stopping So constant you don’t feel it anymore Moving lost I wonder where this will take me
Movement brought discomfort.
I’ve spent my whole life moving from different houses. I spent most of my childhood dancing, which is why I think I felt right at home when I started the CLIP program at Melly. When we started to practice more movement, it felt as if I was going back in time to the days I danced, but it also took me back to the times where I needed to be in constant movement to avoid my home. I felt like these new movements brought these memories back to me. I pushed myself to forget most of the parts of my childhood that I didn’t want to remember.
I was constantly trying to forget the situation I was in when I was younger; going back home was my constant reminder of what reality was for me back then. Sometimes I would come back to an empty home. Some days I would come home to one parent being around. Some days I would come home and find nothing but chaos, hoping the people who dropped me off wouldn't hear the screams. Some days I found myself picking up my dad’s clothes from our yard, the ones my mom had decided shouldn’t be around anymore.
I sometimes wonder if my neighbors could hear the sounds coming from my house.
We began the movement journey in CLIP with the question: “If the body is home, who is our neighborhood?”
I guess my brain also decided to reminisce on what my body went through when I was living on the island. This question made me think a lot about all the different neighborhoods I encountered when moving to the Netherlands.
New connections were being made, deeper conversations would arise, and I was slowly learning how to move in a new way.
After this question I find myself constantly thinking about the neighborhoods I find myself in.
To go To stay To come back
On some days, I think about how so many of us are riding this chaotic wave.
Thoughts pace our movements; the faster you think, the faster you move. The slower you think, the slower you move.
Through collective movement within CLIP, I found that we are all finding our own flow in our own ways. It is also a form of practice to be moving intuitively from the body and not trying to dictate every movement by thinking.
At times, this is necessary.
When moving collectively in a group, some tend to look around and follow the other, but this can lead you to lose track of where you are and where you want to go.
Nowadays, I think a lot about my own movements, and I am also observing more of how other people move around in public spaces.
I find myself observing movements in public transportation.
Some of us make eye contact with each other, some of us are focused on our phones, some are just sitting staring out the window. Moving collectively for the grown looks different.
I also see a lot of kids being careless—in a good way. I see them hopping on and off of the metro to race each other to the entrance to see who will win.
I see little kids twirling around the metro poles laughing, unknowingly making this space their playground.
I look up and I also see other people looking at this child smiling. I wonder what they are thinking at this moment. Did their minds move to a certain memory? Did this remind them of a little munchkin they know? Did their mind think about what it could feel like to be this carefree in these spaces?
I also see a lot of adults being carefree in these spaces. Dancing while they wait for the metro door to open. Reading on their way to an unknown destination. I think a lot about these moments of movements. The fast pace of everything happening around me keeps my body moving forward, while my mind slowly wanders towards the strangers that cross my path.
This doesn’t happen all the time but when it does, my mind is most at peace. I feel like I have the ability to move my body separately from my mind.
I also experienced these moments in the CLIP program. The moments where my body was doing a new movement that my mind would usually feel uncomfortable doing—these moments made me realize how both of these things can be seen as separate. I found a lot of clarity from moving without thinking, rather than moving based on thoughts, plans, ideas.
In moments of chaos, I could only see more chaos coming, but moving without thinking of the outcome taught me to find balance in this chaos.
Now, I see how this carefree thinking helps the body move more fluently. I started seeing movements as a constant performance. Making a performance requires a lot of practice, a lot of thinking, and the environment in which you choose to perform plays an important role. Environment also affects the motion that you move in.
I think life is built upon these constant performances. We experience moments where we hit the wall and we need to retrace our steps. We have these moments of silence to bring ourselves back to our bodies. We have these moments of chaotic movements to release what the body has stored but can’t express with words.
For me, my movements are constantly changing depending on the environment, my thoughts and my willingness to create motion.
For me movements are constantly changing depending on the environment, thoughts and willingness to create motion.
I find myself observing movements in public transport.
Through different homes death and birth are inevitable – generating life after a wave of sadness.
After so much movement, I started to crave some slowing down.
After death, we go back to all the memories. I find myself thinking how these memories will not be moving forward anymore. Death brings a dead end, an end you can’t really turn around and get out of. I think of this dead end as a moment to stay for a while. To sit and loop through the memories made with the person who passed. In this moment, acceptance is hard, and later the thoughts of “what if they were still here?" inevitably follow.
I listen to a lot of music on the daily, and a common theme in the music I choose is rebirth and death—things these artists might have experienced in their own lives.
I would say my rebirth at my parent’s house happened on the day I decided not to be mad at them anymore. I woke up one day and thought, today, moving forward, I will not be mad at them for their shortcomings. I told myself I will try to be the best child for them in this situation, rather than making this harder than it already was. I decided to tell them, little by little, that I would support them if they would choose to get a divorce. I told myself that instead of involving myself in the fights, I would remove myself. I would close myself off in my room and hope that nothing would get out of hand. Sometimes, I would go outside to sit with my dogs and cry while they’d look at me with a very sweet and confused expression.
On that morning, when I decided to let this feeling of annoyance go, it felt as though I could breathe for a while. It felt like a rebirth: a change in who I was becoming as a person. It’s funny to write this now, with this perspective, from where I am now in life, because then I was around the age of 11–12 and I clearly did not know anything about life back then.
Your environment influences your way of thinking and way of seeing the world, and I knew life through how I saw the space around me at home. Last year, when I eventually got the chance to talk about these little moments that I encountered in my home, it felt like I finally got a new paintbrush with which I am now able to create a new meaning; a new understanding of what home means to me.
Death makes me think a lot about rebirth.
One can’t exist without the other. Experiencing death while growing up is weird. I remember when my grandfather died—the father of my dad—and it was weird. Being at the funeral was weird, seeing him lifeless in this box, which they proceeded to close and never open again. It felt intense. In this process, I still didn’t think much of the feelings I had. I spent the whole time alone in my house, staring at this one picture I have with the old pops; it was me at a carnival party and he was holding me. I felt sad but I still couldn’t grasp what it meant to never see someone again.
This was the first death that I actually remember clearly as a child. In 2021, my best friend’s mom died. She was an incredible woman. My best friend’s family welcomed me in their home when I felt the most lost. When my parents divorced, I lost a home, but at the same time I found another.
In their home, they always treated me like I was one of their own. Her mother became a second mother to me. I love this whole family with all my heart, because in the time where I hated “love” the most, they taught me how to see love in a different light. I never got the chance to tell her thank you for that. After she died, I wrote a lot to her, and I still find myself writing about her on some days. I write about how loved she made me feel, and how this continues to this day.
By Je-Anne G. Dirksz
Con bida a sigi despues di morto?
Bida a cambia. Mi a cuminsa move diferente. Mi a cuminsa pensa diferente. Poco poco mi ta siñando con pa accepta differente experiencanan cu bida ta trese. Despues di morto ma siña biba.
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How did life continue after death?
Life changed. I started moving differently. I started thinking differently. Slowly I am learning to accept different experiences life brings. After death I learned how to live.
The making of the zine took a lot of reflecting. I’m writing about things I thought I could never open up to another person about this. Last year was a year of movement for me. I keep asking myself where will I go from here. Unafraid of the new movements to come