Noa Jansma is a Dutch multimedia designer. She completed her training at the Design Academy Eindhoven and has exhibited her work at renowned locations such as C/O Berlin, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles and Dutch Design Week. Using various media, including photography, video installations, educational programs and even apple pies, she explores topics as diverse as food, capitalism, ecological consciousness and rural-urban dynamics. This interview involves her inspirations, ideas and imagination; about the past and the future. She will be offering a workshop "Knotweed Crumble Pie" at Mediamatic for Japanese Knotweed Festival this year.
The contradiction and connection between matter and spirits play an indispensable role throughout Noa’s projects. She addresses that her family is a big influence on her approach of care to physical things while keeping focus on the spiritual world. Seeing through both lenses enables her to navigate a wide array of mediums in delicate storytelling. The mediums could be as unexpected as clouds, food recipes, or a dazzling imagination of a metabolism cycle.
In one of her projects Buycloud, clouds become such a metaphor to investigate capitalism in the current age. How do we process the fact that we can own lands and rivers and how does that extend to the clouds above our heads? “It is very interesting to find that we do affect oceans and mountains. Your actions do matter. And that (project) is something that I tried to find my positioning of being very humble, also understanding how powerful we are. It kinda freaks me out.” The expanding privatization corresponds to human’s growing greed that always yearns to seize more. Noa questioned this absurd system by turning clouds into commodities and inviting people to purchase these airy objects. Using contemporary technology, audiences are able to have a peek of capitalism’s exploitative nature. An invisible phenomenon is thus translated through material actions.
In a domestic setting, even an apple pie is embedded with complex power dynamics.
With a similar eye for societal context, Noa often involves food in her work. During the Covid-19 quarantine, cooking at home inspired her to reflect upon the political and cultural connotation of food in the domestic context: “You can see the world through food… a phenomenon that you could interact with in so many aspects.” In 2022, together with other co-designers Ilja Schamlé and Pollyanna Moss, she invited people to contribute to a cookbook with their own apple pie recipes, a pie that is often seen as traditionally Dutch. The transfer of knowledge through cooking and recipes fascinated her, but with it she also tried to reconfigure the meaning behind a “traditional dutch” food. Even though the recipe of apple pie exists in the Dutch kitchen, the main ingredients, including cinnamon, sugar, lemon and raisins, are hard to find within the country historically. This myth, according to Noa, is entangled with the Dutch colonial past, and how we understand the cultural context of food. Meanwhile, she points out, the division of labor by gender is bizarre: while men dominate professional cooking, why is it usually women who carry out “unmanly” baking at home? In a domestic setting, even an apple pie is embedded with complex power dynamics. It tells a story of labour and patriarchal power hidden deep within the tasty pastry.
Noa roughly classified her works into three categories: frustration, confusion and fascination, based on how a specific work was given birth to. The frustration comes from anger and is sometimes politically-driven, the fascination derives from pure admiration and the confusion may be located as to-be-answered questions, evoking genuine, “child-like” curiosity.
When thinking about her next project, she speaks with curiosity sparked from a quirky dream:
In Noa’s dream, a lion wanted to eat her. Oddly enough, it was conveyed in the simplest way, without aggression: she is going to be eaten. “When I woke up, I suddenly realized that I’m just flesh. And I think this realization that I am food is something that we don’t think about so often anymore, because there’s not so many big mammals that eat us in daily life. We are already food and we are being consumed by microbes and fungi. And after our death, there will be tons of organisms feasting on us.” Peeling off the systems, hierarchy, justice and injustice, we are merely vessels that happen to carry energy with us, and will end up ‘returning’ to nature. Such energy is transferred through characters, matter, and bodies continuously across species. “I just borrow this energy from what I eat, and then I pass it on to other microbes and animals, so that other plants and non-human creatures could exist. It gives me a humble position within the ecology and matter of the world, but also spiritually, it has been healing for me to deal with loss and grief and understand that we (will) always dissolve.”
“We belong to this planetary metabolism of everyone eating each other. And that is not a horror story, but a planetary orgy.”
It is a beautiful sight. Humans exist not to transcend, but to embrace and integrate. “We belong to this planetary metabolism of everyone eating each other. And that is not a horror story, but a planetary orgy.” With this thinking, to eat a carrot is to keep it part of ourselves and later pass it on to something else, and so on and so on. There would be a moment we want to ask: “I’m eating, but who’s eating me?” The reflection would inspire more love and respect when it comes to our food. Noa describes a feeling after eating carrots she grew in her garden, “I was caring for this carrot so much and I put so much love into (growing) it. The energy given suddenly became more precious, because I loved the energy of the food before it became food.” City folk may have long lost the feeling 0f nurturing and growing their own food. The connection or bond with the food is missing. Generally, we eat without thinking much about how the cucumber in the salad bowl got there. To reconsider the deeper meaning behind our food might be the first step towards retrieving the bond between human and nature.
When visitors provide their apple pie recipes, or choose to buy a cloud, the interaction becomes part of Noa’s work. “They are my performers.” She jokingly said. Therefore, she finds it important that people interact with her work. “I make my art to understand my position within the topics I’m talking about. And I would love for audiences to also reflect upon their position. For example, with the clouds, if all the steps of buying a cloud is a metaphor for a used system, what is their position within that infrastructure? And where do I stand in infrastructure? Where do I stand within histories or culture? So I’d love for people to reflect upon their own position. And sometimes by giving a metaphor or a narrative, it’s easier to understand that.” Noa sees this as a possibility to reverse the artist/audience or teacher/student dynamic, by turning the work to a sharing playground. “I mostly like to make work if I learn something from it. It’s like my school. People can teach me stuff.” The flow of knowledge still exists, but nobody is an absolute authority governing the regimes of truth. Everyone is welcome to have fun.
About the Artist
Noa Jansma is a Dutch multimedia designer. She graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven and has exhibited her work at renowned venues such as C/O Berlin, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles and Dutch Design Week. Using a variety of media, including photography, video installations, educational programs and even apple pie, she explores topics as diverse as food, capitalism, ecological consciousness and rural-urban dynamics. Noa strives to explore the interconnectedness and rigid infrastructure surrounding these themes in relation to humans. Among other things, this led to her graduate project Buycloud, where people could buy clouds. With this project, Noa questions the exploitation systems of nature. For more details of her works please visit her website.
