Making Waves 2
With Making Waves the Unda Foundation would like to collaborate with institutions and organizations to set up ‘events’ that delve into the topics of Flag of Compassion.
Making Waves 2 takes place during Winterlab, organized in collaboration with art academy ArtEZ in Zwolle. From January 22 until February 2, students of first, second, and third years bachelors in Fine Art and Design in Education, Animation Design, Comic Design, Graphic Design, Illustration Design, Interior-Architecture, and Theatre in Education are working in interdisciplinary teams on social issues. The Unda Foundation is invited to develop Making Waves 2 with 27 students during Winterlab.


One of the social issues is ‘What is privilege?’, formulated by Arend Mollee, student Comic Design. During a productive collaboration of two weeks, the students question in three separate groups the notion of privilege and the connections with the artwork Flag of Compassion. This raises extensive and lively discussions about the different interpretations of privilege, after which each group of students works on their own project to present their findings at the end of the two weeks. The first group makes a film and a series of photographs. Group two develops a board game and the last group works on a visualization of a performance.


Statement group A
Prejudices
After a comprehensive discussion about the question ‘What is privilege?’, we all defined our own meaning of this notion. In society privilege is interpreted in many ways, but we focus on the aspect of prejudices.
Having preconceived ideas is something through which privileges, as we know them, continue to exist. Based on privileges we create prejudices and as we act to these preconceptions the privileges sustain. Every individual, according to us, shows its privileges in its own way. Privilege is not connected to ethnicity or gender, because successful people of every color or sex do exist. Having prejudices is the foundation on which we communicate, because outer appearance is the first aspect that we take into account. Our aim is to make people aware of the way privilege is being expressed in society nowadays and the way it arises.
Our work exists of a film and a series of photographs that come together in our installation. In the film we make prejudices against several people perceptible and we show how privileges are being formed by ourselves. The film consists of film footage of people who we met in the streets. Subsequently, we give ourselves free rein to share our prejudices against these people, our unfiltered thoughts, by means of an audio recording. This confronts us and our audience with our prejudices.
Then the audience can formulate their own preconceptions with the help of the series of photographs. The photo series shows how much our thoughts and prejudices about a person are formed by surroundings and appearance.
Statement group B
Unawareness
The not very politically correct board game!
There are winners and losers, to which group do you belong?
Discover it during the ‘not very politically correct’ board game!
Your successfulness has all to do with privilege, and a bit of luck.
Likewise in this game.
Do you sprint to the finish like Roderick or Cheyenne? Or do you stick behind as one of the two?
You have no choice in your career, your appearance or your origin.
Pick a card for a character. Travel through the lives of your character and that of your fellow players.
Find out what privileges mean for you.
This game came about in correlation with the topic privilege.
We represent in a black and white way how society operates.
The idea for this game arises from the thought that unawareness is the biggest problem when it concerns privilege.
We think that the discussion that develops by playing the game, people will be confronted in a certain way with privileges that they experience and/or see with others.
Statement group C
Injustice
Econominie – game for the rich and the poor
Privilege is prerogative, mostly based on congenital characteristics and origin, thus unfair. In our opinion you cannot measure privilege or notice it on first sight. We think that an infinite amount of combinations of privilege exists, that you can or cannot have, and that the extent of privilege is very subjectively. One can experience a certain obstacle as burdensome, while it is for another way less stressful. Privilege is a grey area, in which you should not just point fingers to anyone, because you feel deficiencies on certain levels. Frequently, there is more concealed behind people than we can see. That does not mean that privileges cannot exist. People can certainly experience advantage or disadvantage as a result of how wealthy they were born.
We are focusing on the Dutch economy. We feel injustice in this domain and an activist attitude is rising in us. We resent the differences between the rich and the poor and the way the government is fooling us. Our project is not focusing on the privileges of the rich, but focusses on the injustice of the way the money distributed. We are investigating the Dutch economic system and we come across a lot of unfairness. We would like to raise awareness on these injustices and that is why we created the game Econominie.
Econominie is a game on life-size format that resides somewhere between Monopoly and The Game of Life. The game is an imitation of the Dutch economy. That is why it is called: Econominie. The game is played with designed playing cards and an own currency, the ‘neppie’. We would like the players to experience injustice by letting them win and lose money arbitrarily. In this way the players will think about the functioning of the economy.