Testimony: Survival and Artivism after Dutch Institutional Violence

I spent almost my entire childhood trapped within the Dutch youth care system. In this state-mandated environment, my identity, gender, and origin were systematically dismantled through institutional violence, suppression, and severe humiliation.

I grew up in forced social isolation, forced labor and was denied the basic right to play or connect with any other children. During these years, the system attempted to forcibly change my birth gender, resulting in lasting physical and psychological injuries. When I finally aged out of the system at twenty, I was broken down to nothing—a "non-person" with no knowledge of the world.  

After a suicide attempt at seventeen, the system’s response was even more isolation. I spent years surviving on the margins of society: homelessness, theft, prostitution, and living in complete solitude in the woods.

Rebuilding a life proved nearly impossible due to a total lack of support, empathy, or access to adequate mental health care (GGZ) in the Netherlands. It took decades to reclaim my gender and identity. Since 1992, I have used Trauma Art and Artivism as my primary language—a way to exist, to provide a visual testimony, and to communicate the hidden reality of systemic abuse in foster care to the outside world.

While I was almost completely erased by the system, my 'self' reclaimed my gender as boy and they never succeeded to erase my creativity, of which this archive is a testiomony.