The question ‘where are you from’ was the reason for Van Wyk for the photo series Mixedness is my Mythology (2020-2022), for which she portrayed her own family on the farm; her parents and her brothers Alexander (20), Marck-Anthony (17) and Benjamin (11). “During the corona lockdowns, I had just returned from six months of shooting in South Africa, my brothers were at home a lot. They didn’t have to go to school, there was peace. They watched American basketball, and movies and series; Shaft and Colin in Black & White, in which African-American culture plays an important role. They were engaged in: how do you make waves in your hair, or braidslittle braids on your head. A very different world from the one they knew – the school, the church where they go every week with our parents. The world they immersed themselves in, that of people of color, of rough city life, contrasts strongly with the farm and the place where we live. With 7 hectares of land, with barns, trees. Grass on the land in front of our house, corn behind it. I started looking for: how can I bring those worlds together?”
Do people see him as a Dutch farmer? Or do you have to be blonde and have blue eyes?
Van Wyk photographed her parents, her brothers and herself, playing with stereotypical elements belonging to different cultures. The overalls, the clogs, the shovel, the pitchfork, the tractor – symbols of traditional Dutch farm life. The waves and the braids, the chains (gold chains), the durags (kind of cloth over the head), the T-shirts of rappers like Tupac and Biggie – which represent black street culture. “If Alexander wears overalls with wooden shoes, do people see him as a Dutch farmer? Or do you have to be blonde and have blue eyes? I portray myself as a Greek Venus or as the Virgin Mary – commenting on art history, which has been shaped mainly by white people. Or I hang a big white sheet behind a picture of my brothers and me; a reference to the itinerant anthropologists who recorded the population of South Africa as exotic objects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The traumas of the past thus play a role in my work.”
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