Thanks for the interview Janka Gerritsen-Intribusova!

(in het Nederlands zie je beneden..)

1. What is your involvement in the SET & Buurt Community Garden?

It is my child, if I can put like this. I was the initiator of a plan to make the garden more than a few vegetable garden boxes and create a big community garden for social integration. Where people can not only grow their own vegetables but become connected through all kinds of activities. I had a vision about a place where we have a playground, sitting places, a herb garden, insect hotel, an open kitchen, a greenhouse, space for workshops… where we can literally get into the soil, can learn about herbs, flowers, but we can make art, can make paintings, work with wood. Or where we can do nothing, just having a picnic or to stop to have a chat with a neighbor. I imagined a place which somehow belongs to the people who use it. Not the municipality or some outsider professionals would come to maintain but we, neighbours take care of it.

• How did you come across the garden?

working and living together in a multicultural environment

Here comes an article about the first year of the implementation of the IRIS project in Amsterdam.

Pilot sessions are often isolated experiments with a random group of participants gathered just for that purpose. But that is not necessarily the case, as shown by our case study from Amsterdam.

Read further…

The garden may be the place of various births; birth of ideas, desires, inspiration…the garden is a metaphor but also real, physical full of smells of dirt, rain, flowers. I am proud being on board of the Art and Act – Marie Marzloff Award 2020: ´2020 has globally redefined our common lives as we have been forced to reconcieve them both in terms of time and space, leading us to a profound reflection on the social changes which will follow. As crisis exacerbates inequalities, new perspectives on dialogue and cooperation are emerging just when they seem more necessary than ever. ´More about the contest: http://cesie.org/en/artandact/.

´We are playing the piano not working the piano.  In music, one doesn’t make the end of the composition. The point is the composition. But we don’t see that as something brought by our education. We have a schooling system where we put the child in the corridor of the grade system. The constant question: what´s next? We always want to reach something. But we are cheated somehow ourselves the whole way down the line. We miss the point the whole way along. It is a musical thing, you are supposed to sing or to dance, while the music was being played.´

I so much agree with Alan Watts & David Lindberg – Why Your Life Is Not A Journey. It’s not a revolutionary thought. But still. Can we apply the secret of being present all along in our life? In our very daily life? Can we get back to this logic of presence that small children know so well? In all terrains of our life? Can we play? Can we forget about behaving, meeting expectations, let ourselves indulge in anything just for the sake being in it? To learn things because learning is fun? To work because it feels good? To be with someone without wanting anything, just being together?

Isn´t it the same with sex?  I see so many of us suffering from not being able to enjoy, be happy in our sexual lives or relationships. So many of us are asking the question: how it should go ideally? Compared to what we see, read or hear around us. Compared to norms and expectations about ideal bodies, sexual encounters, pleasure. We are talking about average times, and sizes, easy or multiple orgasms. We are reading tips and know-hows to achieve “ultimate pleasure”. We are busy with quite detailed imaginaries in our head about possible sexual scenarios about. how they should go. Instead of listening to our own personal ways of being present, connected, truly give and receive. In that very moment.

More

Because sometimes it is difficult to keep the balance in between multiple tasks, priorities, relations, roles within the family, in the relationship with our partner and within our own life. Because sometimes we need to step back to reflect, to have a quiet moment to listen, to feel, to ask some urging questions to ourselves… Sometimes it comes easier with someone who helps us to create this quiet space, keeping the distance from our own life, asking the right questions, keeping the mirror in the right angle and with whom we can share our confusing, sometimes secretive dilemmas.

sex related

I facilitate a process where my clients will be able to identify the real blockage in their sexual life or relationship. We work on issues such:

• sexuality / (changing) desire(s) in a (long-term) relationship
• parenthood and sexuality (pregnancy, postpartum, family life and sexuality)
• sexual identities and body issues
• self-confidence, body-image (every age) – how to find your own way within social, cultural expectations
• missing orgasm
• erection problems

migration, life transitions

To my clients, who moved from a place to another,  I give support to gain back their lost balance, to stay or get connected and activate all their (hidden) resources to feel empowered again. We work on issues such:

• relationship / self-image / sexuality imbalance caused by migration or other life transition
• how to manage conflicting gender roles due to becoming a parent or other life transition or due to the change in your cultural environment
• self-confidence, identity, motivation issues due to migration / transition- how to activate your resources, find a balance, get empowered again

I live and work in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, but I have clients from many countries in Europe.  Feel free to contact me.

Where am I coming from and where am I going…

I didn´t want to leave my country. I had everything for a complete life: beautiful home, family, successful profession, a garden, social life, respect. I had a mission, I had my duty there. And beyond, I had the language. I knew all the secrets of the places, all what is hidden, the invisible – the tastes, the smells, the nuances of the culture, I understood all the connections, social relations. I could read ´in between the lines´. It was an understanding deep from the guts. I knew everything which was invisible and of which I was even unaware; this was what it meant for me to be embedded safely in a society. Even if I was never fully satisfied with the rules, with the system, or even with the values, I still felt home, which meant that I felt potent. I was able and motivated to make changes. I was able to start new things and protest against old ones. I was able to connect with people, ideas. I was responsible.

Woman, mother, lover – Motherhood and Sex. My book is a Foucauldian analysis on the norms and beliefs surrounding the mother as a sexual object and on womanhood in our Western culture. I am writing about the medicalization of female sexuality, the Western cultural tradition and sex discourse especially in the intersection of the de- or asexualized myth of motherhood, the controversies on different female roles, the deep inner pain and difficulties being a girl, a young woman.

This book is somewhere between social science and literature but also very personal and contains many personal interviews of mothers and fathers as well as my own personal stories from my childhood. I am writing a serious social and cultural analysis that is approachable by laypeople.

The book is published in Hungarian, in approximately 3000 copies.

Culture, body, gender, sexuality in adult trainings

www.bodyproject.eu

For whom

Trainers, educators, counselors that are:
– engaged in intercultural approaches, with a multicultural student group
– involved in themes of health, gender, sexuality
– involved in physical / sports education
– teaching language for migrants
– wishing to acquire teaching methods that ar embodied
– involved in the accompaniment of intercultural mobility

Introduction to the intercultural approach of sexuality

Human sexuality – as deeply connected to the body and its biological functions – is often considered to be universal and treated as a natural phenomenon. Nevertheless, if we start to deconstruct the different elements of sexuality – from gender, emotions, social interactions, relationships, sexual habits, sexual orientations, different sexual practices even to the interpretation of erotic desire, the meaning or use the body – it turns out that everything around human sexuality is deeply determined by culture. To understand the complexity of various cultural identities, the overlaps and the fluidity of sexuality we can get closer not just to our own sexuality as individuals but we will able to understand why other people behave “differently”. In this article the author follows the different meanings and social functions of sexuality from culture to culture and even in different historical times to understand that beyond ethnic differences what else “culture” means in the context of human sexuality and to reveal the mechanisms how sexuality is deeply embedded in our societies and culture.