The book A Small Collection of Innocuous Objects is also available in Dutch – Een kleine verzameling onschadelijke objecten.
Beautifully designed by Marit van der Meer of levievandermeer, the book has been produced as part of the installation Nr.1 Tourist Attraction in the Amsterdam Museum (1 Nov 2019 – 1 March 2020). You can flip through the first half of the book HERE.

The first section of the book contains photographs of 80 different tourist souvenirs purchased from gift shops, tobacconists, florists and kiosks in the Amsterdam Red Light District between 2015 and 2019.

The photographs are accompanied by a description analysing each artefact in detail, unveiling the subliminal message conveyed by the imagery and linking it to related historical facts or statistics, enabling that message to be reinterpreted.

The second half of the book contains a number of testimonies from women (and one man) involved in prostitution. The sources of these particular testimonies, though not anywhere near a comprehensive overview of the Dutch situation, are nonetheless varied. The majority resulted from a month spent as artist-in-residence for CBK-Southeast in the Bijlmer neighbourhood of Amsterdam, during which time I met and was able to interview a number of survivors who had been trafficked into the sex industry in the Netherlands.

Each of them began life in a West African country, and ended up in the unlicensed sector of the Dutch prostitution market. Their stories as they are reproduced in this book, though shortened, are taken verbatim from those interviews. Other testimonies included here are taken from a series of court cases I followed over a lengthy period of time in the Amsterdam courthouse. These concern women from various countries in Eastern Europe all of whom were exploited in the licensed sector, in the Red Light District of Amsterdam. (A much larger number of testimonies from women involved in the Dutch sex industry was earlier published in my 2014 book, Mulier Sacer.)

Only one single testimony comes from a woman of Dutch origin. She talked to me for eight and a half hours, and as a consequence, I had to edit her interview substantially! We had met one another at a symposium in an academic setting in Amsterdam. She had been one of the subjects of the research being presented there. During a round of audience questions, she spoke out, condemning the research as superficial and thus inaccurate.

Her comment went something like this, “I don’t know who all you spoke to for this so-called research, because we can call ourselves lucky that we are part of the two percent who have supposedly ‘chosen’ to do this – although as I see it, forced through necessity is also forced. All those other women, you don’t get to speak to them. I can hardly find a way to exchange two words with them, so you certainly didn’t. And without their voices, this whole presentation is just nonsense, fake.” This comment, particularly coming as it does, from someone who still finds themselves in a situation of prostitution, hits the nail on the head – exactly whose voices is it that we are hearing when we are told that ‘sex workers’ have supposedly been included in the debate or decision-making process?

It is my hope that this book contributes to a widening of the debate, by providing a place for the voices of a few of those others who generally go unheard; to encourage us to question who is behind both the images we are seeing and the voices we are hearing; and to better understand “how some narratives are promoted while others are repressed to represent a particular version of history” (Erica Rand in The Ellis Island Snow Globe).

You can order your copy of A Small Collection of Innocuous Objects / Een kleine verzamelijk onschadelijke objecten, by sending an email to: Books@HowToGoOn.com