Astrid Feringa

filmmaker, researcher, and educator

Astrid Feringa is a researcher, filmmaker, and educator. She is co-founder and artistic director of Bureau Rizoom, Leeuwarden and lecturer at AKI/ArtEZ University of the Arts, Enschede. Her practice is interested in mechanisms of documentation and distribution, and their entanglement with sociopolitical power dynamics. Working with archival and found materials, and through a framework of critical media theory, she explores mediated strategies of political subversion in relation to hegemonic and counter-hegemonic formations.

During the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, Feringa will further develop Hardcore Soft Politics: an auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary research project that studies the early ‘90s Dutch rave subculture of Gabber, as it transformed from a space that facilitated the expression of discontent equally shared across urban and rural areas into a trope of nationalistic identity solidified along the lines of rural periphery in opposition to urban centers. Centered around notions of “the outsider” and “the underdog,” the project is concerned with the role of processes of mediation in the production of oppositional identities and in the normalization of exclusionary rhetorics.

Recent other work has been shown during: GoShort Festival, Nijmegen and Arnhem, 2022; Fiber Festival, Amsterdam, 2022; Videotage, Hongkong, 2022; CIVA, Vienna, 2021; IDFA DocLab, Amsterdam, 2019); Garage Rotterdam, Rotterdam, 2022; HART, Hong Kong, 2022; Phoenix Cinema and Arts Center, Leicester, 2022; Fabrica Gallery, Brighton, 2022; MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, 2021. Feringa lives and works Arnhem and is part of the BAK Cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.