Works/Plans

1. Works/Plans Sara Bloem

2. Independent Project • To produce a drawing series that explores the process of assimilation into a foreign culture through play with image spatial frequency. • What is a drawing?

3. Interest • The United States is known as a nation of immigrants – but soon, few nations in the world will be able to claim different. According to the United Nations’ International Migration report, more people are living outside of their native country today than have at any point in the history of our planet. As one-third of all immigrants alive have migrated in the last ten years, it seems clear that this trend will continue to restructure our world in decades to come as increasingly porous borders allow more and more people to relocate. • Less easy to quantify is what happens after the migrant arrives. The long and difficult process of assimilation has become a battleground in the countries which take the brunt of immigration flow. Assimilation, in its most basic dictionary definition, means “to incorporate as one’s own; to absorb”. In the context of acculturation, however, assimilation is a rarefied and constantly receding goal. In its highest form, one is expected not only to belong, but to become. In my independent study, I will examine the process of assimilation into a foreign culture through drawings which explore the journey in a multivalent way. What behaviors must be appropriated and discarded in order to assimilate? What level of assimilation is considered sufficient to navigate the social space? What is the process, and who judges? • I will use the postcolonial relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands as a case study in this project.

4. The Netherlands ruled Indonesia unofficially from 1600 to 1800 and officially from 1800 to 1942. As is typical of colonial powers, much of the country’s current success was built on Indonesia’s spices, sugar, and coffee. After the dismantling of the Dutch colonial state, the Netherlands welcomed back the large mixed Eurasian class that it had created through intermarriage in Indonesia and established a generous repatriation policy. Today, the Netherlands is considered one of the most tolerant countries in the world. • And yet: the Netherlands is still convulsed by wrenching debates over how well immigrants are integrating into Dutch society. Immigrants are seen as having built parallel societies that take away from the values shared by the Dutch people. Last year the Minister of the Interior stated that “the government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model” and that it would now “[step] away from the model of a multicultural society.” Even more disturbingly, the country’s third-largest party in 2010 rode a wave of anti-immigration sentiment to popularity. The party’s leader has stated, “You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves.” For immigrants and their children in the Netherlands today, the pressure to “vanish” into society has never been higher.

5. Purpose and Methodology • I hope that I, through this project, will gain a greater empathic understanding of how immigrants must navigate the social space in order to integrate. This process transcends any one nation or culture; it connects all of us and drives at the heart of what it means to belong. • My medium of choice is drawing. Drawing is an ideal method for my project because its flatness naturally mimics both a mirror – that which shows the self – and a window – that which shows the other. As assimilation, at its base, is about moving from the category of Other into the “normality” of what a native resident views as Self, being able to play between the two aspects is essential. I am particularly interested in creating what are known as “hybrid images”: optical illusions in which the low spatial frequencies of one image are laid beneath the high spatial frequencies of another. This process, which allows the perception of an image to shift depending on the proximity of the viewer, conveys the slipperiness of any attempt to reconcile past and present, two different cultures, and inner and outer perceptions of a person.

6. Thinking about… • Differentiating between the Self and the Other • Identifying with the Other over one’s “native” Self • Desire to become the Other

7. Frantz Fanon • Violence in 1950’s Algeria • “[In a colonial system] you are forced to come up against yourself. […] The Algerian’s criminality, his impulsivity, and the violence of his murders are therefore not the consequence of the organization of his nervous system or of characterial originality, but the direct product of the colonial situation.”

8. Visual Forms • Durational? • Repeated meditative experiences • Light sculpture

9. Artistic Influences 1

11. Artistic Influences 2

12. Artistic Influences 3

13. Spatial Frequency

15. Magic Mirror

21. Side_3 (raw footage) • Peephole_inside_1

22. Drawings

23. Het Tropenmuseum

27. Future • Reduced cabinet • Tearing apart, doubling, confronting with Other-as-Self • Magic mirrors?