I Am Not Your Mother

       

where the colonizer undresses her, the native’s nakedness stares back at him both as the defiled image of his creation and as the indifferent gaze that says, “there was nothing - no secret - to be unveiled underneath my clothes. That secret is your phantasm”
(Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 52)


Sacred Beings” Panel Discussion (EN), Review by Mark Williams (Circuit) at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020


Queer Against The Norm (Dutch), Review by Dana Linssen (NRC)
at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020


The touristic voyage gaze does not only create an object but also implies the desires and longings of the subject who stares and grasps. The westerners journey to know about oneself becomes a search for a counter-narrative where the new ‘orient’ is believed to provide the answer to lost origins and a shelter from problems.

In doing so they have appropriated the notion of ‘collective’ and ‘native’ and obscure the damages caused by imperialist attempts at colonization and power exploitation. Many do not recognize the lifestyles of non-westerns who do not submit to western standards with regard to fashion, self-narratives and occupied space. Many expect non-westerns to be passive and modest victims, available to offer them care and a sense of belonging.

With these videos, I want to convey to audiences the uncanniness of these relationships; as if they were orphaned and were to be adopted by the indigenous ‘mother entities’.



     
photos by IFFR