Jikke Lesterhuis

We are living in a complex world. In order to feel control over the world, we constantly organize and categorize incoming information. As a consequence out of it, we create ideas about how the world should look like. Think about Christian Church creating the belief about sexual desire as morally wrong or the fashion world having a major influence on our ideal body image. Overtime these ideas gained so much power that they became the ‘norm’. You could see them as the building blocks of our society.
Imagine having a few of those blocks. You could create a tiny wall around you to preserve your space. But what if we construct even more building blocks? Building the most incredible stairs to give ourselves the experience of a wider view and at the same time contribute to a more diverse landscape.
It works the same way in our society. When we hear different views on the world we no longer get stuck in that old dusty script full of ideas about gender, sexuality, social classes or, origins. We s ee possibilities and a completely different landscape. We see how the world could look like and who we could be.

Let’s take a closer look at this light installation.
The cubes need light to be seen, but it’s about how the cubes are positioned that determines the look of the physical surroundings. Now let’s imagine the installation in front of you is a micro version of society. The cubes are the people and the lights are constructs. Constructs fight their way into our systems, we carry them with us for a while and we share our ideas with the world. But at the moment we carried them, something changed! We gave our own spin to the information. Do you remember the whisper games in school? A story is always changed by the storyteller! Just like that you have the power to change and adjust the construct, or not to release them at all. You are the processor of the ideologies and you decide how to use your light to alter our environment. You add your own unique set of colors to the world. Then, and only then, we can write a new script that fits our zeitgeist.
To understand this idea you need to know two things.
First, there is such a thing called hidden script. All the norms in the script read together like a manual of life, rules about how we should live, a so-called hidden script. If you

want to change things up, it starts by being aware of this system. That it is not visible, doesn't mean that is non-existing. The opposite is true, we are constantly surrounded by the system. This hidden script is constantly reproduced and performed, in what we call the theatre of society, without us even noticing that they no longer fit into the current zeitgeist. It's in the material, it's in our language, it's in our homes, it's everywhere. We keep on judging the world based on these scripts for a sense of control and a feeling of safety. By doing this we create outcasts, people who don’t fit into our normative framework. But don’t we all know the discomfortable feeling of being not understood and that we are judged?Remember when we talked about sexual desires? An idea that is closely connected to the idea of sex as a means of reproduction which, as a result, constitutes a hetero- normative ideology wherein people with different sexualities are still looked at as being 'different'. In order to change this we need to flip the script.

Flipping the script in the second part of what you we want to show you in LEVENSLANG.
People who feel imprisoned by society's normative framework take the hidden out of the hidden script. Already by being aware of the prescribed rules, they show us the power of the beliefs society curated for us. If they decide to stop conforming to these frameworks something major is changing, they are flipping the script! Flipping the script means being aware of those hidden norms and reversing the situation. Showing how things could be done differently, expanding the normative frame, creating a bigger range of constructs and show what the world has to offer us, what unique combinations we can make with all of the building blocks.

Using our autonomous minds and self-expression is therefore of enormous importance to rewrite the script. The photos in this space are taken by Miss Toto Rodgers, a lens based artist who flips the script. Whereas the white cubes show us two of those hidden script.
If you are familair with these terms you can start to rethink our society. To start being aware and turn the hidden into a public script. So we can all take a critical look at which script we want to write and perform in society.