{"id":2724,"date":"2020-02-03T16:35:21","date_gmt":"2020-02-03T14:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/howtogoon.com\/?page_id=2724"},"modified":"2020-10-19T18:53:13","modified_gmt":"2020-10-19T16:53:13","slug":"a-small-collection-of-innocuous-objects","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/a-small-collection-of-innocuous-objects\/","title":{"rendered":"A SMALL COLLECTION of INNOCUOUS OBJECTS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The book A Small Collection of Innocuous Objects<\/strong><\/em> is also available in Dutch – Een kleine verzameling onschadelijke objecten<\/strong><\/em>.
\nBeautifully designed by Marit van der Meer of levievandermeer<\/a>, the book has been produced as part of the installation Nr.1 Tourist Attraction in the Amsterdam Museum<\/a> (1 Nov 2019 \u2013 1 March 2020). You can flip through the first half of the book HERE<\/strong><\/a>.
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\nThe 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.
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\nThe 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.
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\nThe 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.
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\nEach 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.)
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\nOnly 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.
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\nHer comment went something like this, \u201cI don\u2019t 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 \u2018chosen\u2019 to do this \u2013 although as I see it, forced through necessity is also forced. All those other women, you don\u2019t get to speak to them. I can hardly find a way to exchange two words with them, so you certainly didn\u2019t. And without their voices, this whole presentation is just nonsense, fake.\u201d This comment, particularly coming as it does, from someone who still finds themselves in a situation of prostitution, hits the nail on the head \u2013 exactly whose voices is it that we are hearing when we are told that \u2018sex workers\u2019 have supposedly been included in the debate or decision-making process?
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\nIt 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 \u201chow some narratives are promoted while others are repressed to represent a particular version of history\u201d (Erica Rand in The Ellis Island Snow Globe).<\/p>\n

You can order your copy of A Small Collection of Innocuous Objects<\/strong> \/ Een kleine verzamelijk onschadelijke objecten<\/strong><\/em>, by sending an email to: Books@HowToGoOn.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 1 March 2020). You can flip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2724","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2724"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2821,"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2724\/revisions\/2821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/howtogoon.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}