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to find more information, film stills and excerpts.


















This island is my tool.














Through the revival of remnants from the past, present and future.







My father talked about his journey from Indonesia to the Netherlands. He fled in 1958. The family traveled a month with the ship the M.S. Sibajak before they arrived in the port of Rotterdam. He discovered that the spirits from Indonesia didn’t live in the Netherlands. He lost them on his journey. He figured it must be too cold in this place for them to survive.





INTRODUCTION

This semester is focused on methodologies. One of the first workshops began with readings on artistic research. I became more aware of how I can conduct my research and what it could be in comparison to more scientific approaches. It was insightful to think that artistic research can also create knowledge that might not always be possible to be articulated through language. It needs to be felt, experienced.

One of my goals this semester was to develop my research more in depth. Last semester I did a research into my relationship with handcrafting tools, but I couldn’t relate it yet to broader research topics that is more connected to society and to the here and now. It was hyper personal. How could I develop my research from the personal to the collective? Also, I learned that artistic research is a form of embodied knowledge. This gave me a new perspective and I tried to implement it. Looking back at past semester I can see how my research methodology has evolved and is still developing, not fully cristallised.

This semester I embodied my research. I explored sensually, emotionally and intellectually the research I was conducting. You will see this clearly throughout my critical review. This embodied way of doing research fits with how I work and think. I noticed, I’ve become more sensitive since I started this master, as if I developed my empathic and sensorial antennae. It also connects to my subjects. Through embodying my research I can place myself in the research. I wanted to gain more insight on an empathic level, I tried to approach the subjects with the goal to learn what it means from a human perspective and from a non-human perspective, how the dilemma’s and conflicts within the subjects are experienced. In some sense it felt like method acting. 



Reference: Mark Wolynn - It didn’t start with you
The stories led me to start reading the book ‘It didn’t start with you’ by Mark Wolynn. It’s about epigenetic traumas and how they are passed on from generation to generation. It opened my eyes to the impact that past circumstances have on the generations afterwards. I never considered this impact to be biological and traceable.





CHAPTER 2: STORY OVERVIEW

CURRENT FILM PROPOSAL

Three generations, three stories, all 7-year-old children:
1900 - Stolen Son of the Sultan - Muhammed Raden Nurpiah later called Joseph Charles Schift
1958 - The Journey with the M.S. Sibajak - Benjamin Glenn Schift
2002 - The boy who’s a girl who likes girls - Tosca Mechelina Schift