artistic researcher, filmmaker and educator based in-between Arnhem (NL) and Reykjavik (IS)

contact@astridferinga.com

CRISIS is a short documentary by Astrid Feringa and Lindsay Stegenga, about the impact of Lindsay her hospitalisation in a Dutch mental healthcare facility. The film takes you along (a selection from) the clinical reports, kept on Lindsay during her time there. These fragments, interspersed by personal memories from before the hospitalisation, question themes such as framing through diagnosis, institutional power-dynamics, (self-)stigmatisation and inaccessibility of specified treatment, to ultimately reflect on the broader functioning of the mental healthcare system in the Netherlands.

For more infomation, see: www.cr-s-s.nl or contact: contact@cr-s-s.nl

Supported by GoShort International Short Film Festival, Omroep Gelderland, CineCrowd and Angst Dwang en Fobie Stichting

What they destroy, we will build again is a video installation and research that uses the recreated Arch of Palmyra as a case-study to excavate landscapes of power, and to talk about neo-colonial appropriation of heritage in an age of digital reconstruction and contemporary iconoclasm.

In May 2015, IS militants occupied the ancient Syrian excavation site of Palmyra and demolished most of its structures, including the triumphal arch. As “an act of defiance” against this cultural censorship, the British Institute for Digital Archaeology replicated the demolished arch; on 19th April 2016, the life-size scale reconstruction was erected at Trafalgar Square, London, and has since travelled to several cities across the globe.

In his speech during the unveiling ceremony, (then-) London mayor Boris Johnson said: “What they destroy, we will build again”, with these words posing a powerful and binary narrative that presents construction as the opposite of deconstruction; inexhaustible, idealistic construction as the solution to inexhaustible, idealistic deconstruction.

But does recreating, placing and unveiling a monument not create a landscape of power, just as much as iconoclastic destruction is creating a [non] landscape of power; both in physicality as in narrative?

Part of: KABK Lectorate “Design and the Deep Future” — part of: MIT Docubase Open Documentary Lab — Mentioned in: Voices of VR Podcast by Kent Bye — Part of: IDFA 2019 Doclab “Domesticating Reality” Spotlight selection — Screened during: ‘A Slippery Slope’ exhibition in Garage Rotterdam — “Monumental Fluxus” exhibition for Young Art Weekend, Expoplu Gallery Nijmegen.

Making the analogy with the terrestrial world, where architecture is known to be employed as tool for establishing power, Platform Warfare: Digital Architecture of Occupation is a thesis that poses the digital platform as the architecture of cyberspace: a new virtual landscape, that too is subject to and based on different power structures and concepts of territory.

Using the issue of Airbnb operating in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank as case-study, the thesis makes a parallel between disruptive tactics that structurally underlay the functioning of digital platforms, modern day traveling and settler colonialism, by this pointing out the relation between colonialism and digital technology as a wider, emerging issue.

Is representation of nature through media and entertainment more real to us than nature itself? The short video essay ‘This is not the Amazon’ investigates how the concept of wilderness is constructed through different perspectives and economies, simulated over and over again into an image that may never have existed in the first place. In collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Castel.

Shown during: Both Sides Now Film Festival (UK/HK) — FIBER Festival Short Film Programme (NL) — CIVA Festival (AT) ‘When I look through my browser window I can feel the fresh air’ film programme — PRESENT AND UNACCOUNTED FOR short film programme (NL) — Cinema Underexposed Festival (NL) — IDFA DocLab 2019, Artificial Futures artist talk (NL) — “Mag Het Licht Aan” festival (HIVOS) — NEST - KINO Open Air Cinema / The Hague Contemporary — “Views From Above - Networks, Colonial Vision and Indigenous Resistance in the Brazilian Amazon” exhibition. Mentioned in: feature for It’s Nice That

Collaborative research project and exhibition, between the MA Non Linear Narrative (Royal Academy of Art, The Hague) and Greenpeace Nederland, investigating the impact of deforestation on climate change. Shown at KABK (The Hague) and during “Mag het Licht Aan” Festival, organised by HIVOS (Amsterdam).

A symposium on public security under algorithmic control, collaboration between Non-Linear Narrative students and tutors, and Politie Nederland.

“Belong Anywhere” is a film installation about the involvement of Airbnb in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Palestine. The film exposes the ways in which Airbnb is propagating structures — or infrastructures — of occupation towards Palestinian users and, by this, indirectly maintains the occupation. The viewer is taken on a journey to the occupied West Bank, visiting Airbnb accommodations in both Palestinian villages and illegal Israeli settlements. By comparing these two, it becomes clear that in fact, both are not given the same options thus treated equal — this in big contrast to how Airbnb presents itself.

The film shows that the notion of traveling itself is a political construct in an area where for a certain demographic group, freedom of movement is not at all self-evident. The journey, that starts as an adventurous road trip becomes more and more uncomfortable when these constructs come to light and show how Airbnb, by allowing listings in illegal Israeli settlements, actually facilitates a platform for financial and ideological support towards the occupation of the West Bank.