NelNel

For every project, I examine social, cultural, and political undercurrents. From power structures to representation and collective behavior. This page gathers some of the sociological research, theories, and sources that inform my visual decisions.

(...) Amsterdam’s ballroom scene, which forms the living cultural soil of House of B, carries a specific genealogy. Born from Black and Latino queer communities in New York who built their own rituals of visibility when the mainstream world refused to see them, ballroom is not merely a subculture. It is a survival technology. Sociologist Marlon Bailey, in Butch Queens Up in Pumps (2013), theorizes ballroom as a community of practice – one that generates its own pedagogy, its own healthcare networks, its own kinship structures entirely outside institutional channels. The house is not a metaphor for family. It is family, built with intention, from necessity, and sustained by collective labor (...)

Where Queer BPOC Youth Grows

Change: Every name is a protest to end genocide

(...) KNOW THEIR NAMES documents not just the killings of the genocide, but the failure of recognition. The impossibility of grieving those whom Western, colonial systems have rendered invisible. The platform’s slowness makes space for a certain kind of 'haunting' (Gordon, 1997) to unfold.

Archives are often mistaken for sites of resolution. But KNOW THEIR NAMES insists on something else: an archive that unsettles. That disorients. That refuses to let the living forget the dead and refuses to let the dead be reduced to data. It opens a space where grief is collective, political, and uncontained (...)

Every Name as Protest to End the Genocide

Change: Every name is a protest to end genocide

(...) Education is never neutral. Every classroom carries the weight of history, the structure of power, and the possibility for transformation.

Karibu emerges in this tension with a clear vision: to reimagine the Dutch education system through community, representation, and care. At a time when schools and childcare centers are under immense structural pressure, Karibu offers a simple yet impactful response. It connects local role models, cultural practitioners, and community leaders directly to the classroom, not as outside guests, but as integral parts of the learning environment (...)

Redefining Education Through Diverse Perspectives

Change: Redefining Education Through Fresh Perspectives

(...) Yet while I see the importance of internal reform, I remain critical of the narrative that systemic change primarily comes from the inside. Too often, this perspective becomes a comfortable story that protects the status quo, allowing white hegemonic capitalist structures to claim they’re “changing” while continuing to extract, exclude, and consolidate power. Wiltgroei acknowledges this tension, and doesn’t claim neutrality. Their methods are confrontational in their softness, and alive in their contradictions (...)

Shaping Systems for Human Empowerment

Change: Shaping Systems for Human Empowerment