What is something you hate dealing with and why?

When you just put on your clothes and fresh socks, and you walk to the bathroom to grab some things, and you step into something wet. This small and relatively harmless thing is very, very frustrating to me.

Less light-heartedly, people who choose to be ignorant and remain that way. Who don’t want to discuss certain topics, but just want to hear themselves speak.

Besides your artist talk Live, Laugh, Leitmotif, you were also part of the panel talk It’s the Media, Stupid in which the question was posed how artists keep their ideas accessible to an audience without losing their edge. Humour plays a distinctive role in your work. You use it to light the fuse. What makes humour the best way to do so?

I think humour is a very suitable way to address heavier and more serious subjects because, at first glance, it keeps things more light-hearted. It opens up conversations instead of shutting them down immediately. Because of this, people with different opinions than mine get the idea that even though we might not agree, I’m still willing to listen to them. This way, it’s an easy opening to talk matters through.

I don’t address every subject with humour, I’m more looking for strong contrasts in general. If I don’t use humour in a project, the contrast will often be found in the used materials (soft materials versus harsh messages) or the personal compared to the impersonal (using thousands of used buttons for embroidery versus the dehumanizing of an entire population as done by many governments).

Your work DR PILL is showcased in the festival exhibition The Cake Is a Lie. Combining medication from different patient information, this pill will permanently relieve you of all your troubles. What inspired you to create this wonder pill?

The main source of inspiration for this project was very simple: I got stuck at home with the flu and wondered why no simple solution was invented to cure this very frequently occurring disease. The flu can be very disruptive, on a personal level but also for society, so when you think about it it’s still a bit weird that we have to deal with this on such a large scale. Other than that, I have always had an interest in how we deal with our own privacy online. Who do you trust, and who do you mistrust? I wanted to test that with something seemingly innocent, just one big pill, but when you think about it, swallowing that pill could have grave consequences.

If you could offer a stage to one radical artist, who would it be and why?

Oof… that’s a tough one. I normally don’t highlight just one person, because I think it won’t do any right to all those others that you can’t highlight simultaneously.

But for now, I would like to offer someone a stage. She’s not an artist though, but I think her actions are very performative, and therefore she could be one. I would like to highlight Ahoo Daryaei. She is revealed to be the woman who recently undressed herself at Tehran’s Science and Research University as a protest against the morality police in Iran. A video of her went viral and made news headlines across the world, and now she has been held hostage at the Iran Psychiatric Hospital, where significant concerns about her safety and well-being remain. No one can reach her at this point, not even hospital staff can access her. I think her bravery deserves all the attention possible.