Dear followers, art lovers and culture buffs,
for my MA dissertation I am starting up a project involving arts and politics.
The project will consist of several correspondences. I am looking for contacts of different nationalities and with different cultural backgrounds with whom I could enter into a correspondence about art and/ or politics and how both can influence each other.
These contacts can be of any age, can practise any profession and can have any political ideology, but must be able to communicate in either Dutch or English, or -if necessary- French.
Why use this particular form for my dissertation?
I strongly believe that the personal is political and vice versa. In 'The Personal Is Political', Carol Hanish gives a clear example. She writes about her experience in the so-called therapeutic sessions that were organised in the feminist groups of which she was an important member.
First and foremost she states that these are not therapeutic sessions, but analysing conversations. She considers them to be political actions.
She notes that the attending of these sessions and the listening to the personal stories of the attendees, don't just give a global image of a specific situation. She describes it as follows: "I went, and I continue to go to these meetings because I have gotten a political understanding which all my reading, all my 'political discussions', all my 'political action', all my four-odd years in the movement never gave me. [...] I am getting gut understandings of everything as opposed to the esoteric, intellectual understandings and noblesse oblige feelings I had in 'other people's struggles'."
I suspect that the collecting of these personal stories and ideas will offer me a different view, one that is much more profound and sincere than anything I could read in books, newspapers and other media.
If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact me for more information.
My e-mail address is verlinde_lara@hotmail.com
