Dear Fela from a month ago,

The text you read (Decolonization as Care by Uzma Rizvi) was a very good one for you and I have some questions for you according to the text. Is your work intersectional enough? Is it as intersectional you claim to be as a feminist? Is your work not just a big egotrip through the eyes or your ‘I’? How does your work care? Is it only meant to care for you? If not, how are you going to care for others within your work? As Uzma Rizvi claims, defining something like identity, changes over time. It is very important for you to document the changes in your work, as you do now. Much like Uzma Rizvi, you are a big believer of, through deepening out your own identity and struggles as a body, understanding others. Specific structures within society may only come clear if you first take time to look at your personal encounters.

My biggest question to you is: who is your work for? I know this is a hard question and you struggle to find the right answer for years now. But I want you to think about it more. You have a lot of opinions on social issues. You read and share a lot about the current issues concerning the oppression of POC. You know a lot about gender. How do you apply all this knowledge to your work? But first of all: do you want to? But you are not the oppressed. You are a cis, white, middle class girl living in the wealthy Netherlands. You struggles finding your own place, but some people can’t even get a place because of their skin color. Is your work meant for them too? Is your work meant for the homeless? Do you want to include everybody?

With painting, you allow yourself to care for yourself in this late capitalist society. With the rushing world and the fast pace in which emotions and stimulus are shoved in our system through media, you allow yourself to take hours to investigate a specific moment. Your brush caresses the complexity of a moment – or a feeling that lasted only a split second. By acknowledging your emotions so deeply, and by trying to transform it into shapes and colors, you take yourself very seriously and you let your heart speak freely without interrupting.

The work you made for P2, the autonomous and the social, are the first assignment-works you made in a long while, that really showed your true self. Your work is so close to you, that the lines between emotions, schoolwork, crisis and personal work begin to fade. It’s not an assignment that you have to do for a teacher anymore, it’s become a necessity to overcome fear and sadness. It’s a process, something you have to go through. As with your crisis that you are in now, you can’t expect your work to develop in faster than it should. You have to give it time and thought for it to become clear and purposeful. You can’t rush nor force it. In the future, I want you to work with the questions I asked you. Who’s your work for?

Sincerely,

Fela in the present