NelNel

Design for Palestine Trans Rights Feminist Research Climate Justice Democracy Ballroom Affordable Housing Queer Joy Change

Brand designer for change - helping activists and mission-driven brands build movements that last. Grounded in research, guided by design. Collaborations include Uncommon London, The Ordinary, Plant an Olive Tree & Down the Rabbit Hole.

Based in 🇳🇱 -> working🌍

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(...) 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 (...)

(...) 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 (...)

(...) 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 (...)

(...) 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 (...)