Our voyage
Collage on paper ca 40 x 65 cm 2022
As an expert by experience, I wanted to provide information about foster care—how things could be done differently, from the perspective of the foster child. Foster Care Netherlands (Pleegzorg Nederland) refused me. They asked for a diploma to prove my experience, but they ignored the scars and my experiences which I might use to create better lives for children in care. I have no diploma, I have lived - experiences in their system as the truth.
For decades, I didn’t fit into any box. Not the gender norms, not the healthcare protocols, and not even within the communities that claimed to be inclusive. When you refuse to step into a predefined category, you quickly become an outsider. I have experienced firsthand how systems designed to protect can instead dehumanize and exclude.
Deported from Society
I have never felt at home in a society that judges people by their scars and the weight they carry. For me, there was no safe homeland, no flag that covered me. I grew up in a system that preferred to keep me invisible rather than acknowledge my complex reality. The result was a profound loneliness in a hostile world. But where society failed, art offered a way out. Art became my necessity—a way to build my own worlds when the outside world was uninhabitable.
The Triumph of Plurality
My art is not a hobby; it is my victory. It is the proof that the system failed to erase me. Today, I do not create alone, but in a powerful collaboration with my equal child co-identities, Tim and Alex.
They are not passive parts of me; they are the driving, creative forces behind the work. Where the system tried to reduce us to a "nothing," to an identity-less shadow, we chose to exist. Together, we take up the pastels and the brushes. We are going against the crazy rules of the foster parents, who considered all art on earth to destroy.
Every piece we create is a victory over the silence. We are no longer "nobody’s child" or a file number; we are the creators of our own reality. As the boys we choose to be, we have finally found a country where we are allowed to exist: our own work. We draw back. We are everywhere, but nobody knows who we are. We live in the Realms of the Unseen. We create and exist in our art.
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