We will regularly be presenting a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.

The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.

Title: Immigrants in Amersfoort
Artist: Yusuf Sayman
Artist’s Description:

These photographs document the lives of immigrants in Amersfoort. It is a series on the mix of civilizations, also the clash of. A series about the European experience of the “orientals.”

In my ten days in Amersfoort, a very beautiful, well planned, well designed and quiet Dutch city, I came in contact with families from Turkey, Morocco and Iraq. I spent time in a Turkish mosque, where Turkish nationalism and Islam met, the studio of an Iraqi artist who said Dutch people never have eye contact with him, a Moroccan home where an Arabic TV channel was always on. I heard similar comments from all these people. That they feel alienated. That they feel invisible. That life is too stressful.

I also heard from a very nice Dutch woman, “The only immigrants I know clean the floors and make coffee at work”, which made me think, is it nationalism or class that creates a “problem.” The clash of cultures was very visible, not only in store fronts, clothes and homes but also in peoples faces. I could feel between people who has been sharing the same small city for over 40 years a sense of “otherness”. The immigrants were foreigners, even when they were born and educated in Holland. They were treated as foreigners, but most also lived and felt as such.

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