SERIES 'Without Madonna:Tim Draws Back'

a special project by Tim and Jimmy

 Forever  us

Photography 2025

Jimmy with  his mother 

Photography 1988

"The Dutch government forced us to attach to babies and toddlers, breaking the bond with our mothers and all adults, making it deliberately impossible to experience any vertical binding during childhood. Once we received this as a state imposed developmental blueprint for life, the same government considers us as criminals that should be cast out of society." 

Background

A State - Imposed Blueprint For Life

 

In the world of animals, we consider the deliberate separation of the young and its mother as a cruel act for both of them, leading to big trauma and serious behavioural problems in later life. This is exactly what the youth care system did to people, in the name of "protection".

In the 1960s, children entrusted to the care of the Dutch state were governed by a brutal regime. Babies and toddlers were forcibly torn from their mothers (and their fathers and siblings) and locked inside cold  residential institutions (such as the Helper Haven in Groningen), and deliberately left without any vertical bonding. Whereby adults became a complete side issue, nonsense: adults didn't speak, they didn't comfort, they didn't help...or interact...they were like cold creatures that look like humans but were more robots for care.

This state-enforced horizontal attachment implemented by forms of experimental 'therapy' aimed at babies and the toddler group as  being one individual altered their psychological blueprint for life, freezing their identity for belonging, intimacy, and safety. This was not an incident, like the government wants society to believe, this became a lifelong impact on all terrains of identity and belonging - like a ' born this way dna- print '

The very inconvenient reality of attachment outside the biological calendar -a lifelong blueprint of attachment to peers from childhood, deliberately concealed by the state to hide their responsibility-  is however a healthy, normal reaction to an insane and inhumane system imposed on the most vulnerable children, taken from their mothers, families and homes. Cowardly, to avoid their responsibility and accountability, the state responds with great hostility, gaslighting, criminalizing and victim blaming on the victims of  forced peer oriented attachment, leaving them in an absolute void as easy prey for society.

Pride

From ignorance, this frozen blueprint is regarded as 'wrong', 'deviant' and even 'criminal'' and generally rejected.  Completely excluded from society's modern concepts of inclusivity, diversity and understanding,  we are a tribe without a flag, yet we celebrate our identity with pride. 

And I'm not alone. There are many thousands, if not millions like me in society, all over the world,  that were not born this way, but made this way for life.  As Tim and Alex framed it:  They are everywhere but nobody knows who they are.

The project

This portfolio is the voice of Tim, a three-year-old co-identity. The work subverts the "Holy Madonna"—the Old Masters’ symbol of unbreakable motherly love. For Tim, this bond was forcibly shattered and replaced by an enforced intimacy and safety among peers and young children.
Tim cannot fight the system with words, but he "draws back." In each piece, the divine is interrupted. By capturing the desperate search for love, intimacy and connection while simultaneously crossing out the Holy Mother, he performs a visual rebellion against an "unholy world". 
 

Image: Tim crossing out the Holy Madonna like te state dictated.

Without Madonna, Tim draws back - the drawings

Mixed media on printed oil paint paper, 30 x 40 cm. Basic Outlines by Tim; finished by Jimmy, 2026 

Click to enlarge