Under the guidance of Jan Grolleman, I took part in the project together:
'The Rotterdam Collection’, with 5 other art students.
We all used stories from Rotterdam's West-Kruiskade to create a performance for the ELIA conference 2018.
Jan Grolleman: 'Liselotte Backx does not shy away from risks. A student who not only accepts failure but becomes richer for it. In the interdisciplinary project The Rotterdam Collection in 2018, she was confronted with her source material; a story she did not understand, never could understand. An impossible task and a presentation doomed to failure. Two weeks before the deadline she decided to erase everything, and to work on a performance in which she gave shape to this very impossibility. A performance in which she asked the dramatic question: is it really possible to understand each other?’
'I’ve stumbled upon the word: ‘misverstaan’.
It’s a Dutch word.
If you ask google, translated to English it means: misunderstood.
But I’m not quite sure that word has the same meaning, so for now, you will have to do with my version of the word: misverstaan.
Misverstaan is something like, hearing each other but not being able to understand each other.
Can we do something about misverstaan?
If you look around at all of the books that are here, here in ‘de Leeszaal’, each one has its own story, its own cover and its own past.
There might even be two of the same stories with a different cover, or two identical books with the same cover but a different past.
Will I, or will you, ever be able to know every story, every cover and every past of each book here in ‘de Leeszaal’?
And if you are, will you be able to understand them all as much?
And if you aren’t able to know all the books, is that a bad thing?'
In my performance, I laid bare my ignorance of the Middle East at the time. I publicly put myself on the line about how little I knew about the people and stories around me.
Alongside my performance, I wrote a text about my quest to understand the other. I did not want to take this away from the audience and so it was a logical choice to convert it into a bookmark that would be handed out in the ‘Leeszaal’ after my performance. Because of its internationality, I also wanted it translated. So I asked my British friend and journalist, Jamie Firby, to translate the text. You can read for yourself that this did not quite work out with exactly the same meaning. This brought me back to the question: is it really possible to understand each other?
'Did you know all that? No, me neither..'
