Positionality

Our positionality

As individuals and as a group we recognise ourselves as artists residing in the Netherlands. We are using our understanding of what art can be to unfold our relationship with Article 1 and our collaboration with the Law Faculty in Utrecht. None of us has researched Article 1 before and we are not well-grounded in the history and the workings of Article 1.

According to Dutch law, all 5 of us that form this artist group are classified as migrants. Each of us has a different migration status which means we do not share the same privileges of stay and existence in the Netherlands. We do not possess a Dutch passport, and our nationalities differ. There are also different family constellations, race, gender, class, age, religious backgrounds and heritages that provide more complex intersectional points that cannot be ignored in our positions and experience of living in the Netherlands. Our relationship with Article 1, therefore, differs when considering stabilities and accessibilities such as housing, jobs, financial support and access to medical care, imagining futures in the Netherlands and what we dream of. We, therefore, speak from different social experiences and positions derived through varying power dynamics that define our realities.

Another common ground that we share is that our siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles live in other countries. Our partners are living with us in the Netherlands. Given the conditions of living separately from our extended families, we do require certain a freedom of movement of travel which has proven to become more difficult and complicated due to covid.

As artists, we also share the privilege of having been given the opportunity to work together on this project, and with quite some freedom of action. And we call it a privilege because this opportunity has been offered to us, without the need to go through an application or selection process. Given the precarity and the competitiveness of the art job market - entangled in the rules of capitalism as any other market - we recognise this as a privilege.

Given our positionality, we feel that our relationship with Article 1 is best further developed by engaging the purpose and leverage of Article 1 in relation to the everydayness of our struggles and hopes amidst the urgencies we find ourselves swirling in the present day.
Our transdisciplinary research has been fluid and underpinned by ongoing conversations, correspondence and frequent gatherings between ourselves and the law students. As we now begin to translate our critical reflections through analytical discourse, audio, materiality, visual, textual and performative gestures, we open-up a web of entanglements which we will continue to explore, until November 2023, marking 175 years of the Dutch Constitution.