Photo by Esrin Üsümüs
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
“‘hyperactive, creative, intense and extreme’. Once we had this lesson in the art academy where everyone had to write down characteristic words
about every fellow student. My name was surrounded by those words.
I studied at the Art academy in Maastricht and graduated here in 2008. During my studies I started doing background visuals for parties with Leo, just for fun. The people loved it, and all of a sudden we were VJ’s. I was also filming the graduation shows for the fashion department, which I still do, and now runs under the name FASHIONCLASH. At some point Leo asked me if I was interested to work together with him in a studio. My good friend Simon visited us on his birthday to check out the studio where later that night decided to start a video company together. While thinking about a suited name, Simon just said: “Yo guys, it’s WEDOVOODOO.TV since 2007”. He was right.”
What would you consider your distinctive achievement?
“We love to keep on surprising ourselves and we don’t want to do the same thing over and over again, otherwise we would be caught in a repetitive mode. We always try to reinvent the wheel, to make things more interesting than the usual, which keeps our brains active”.
What are you looking forward to?
“Many more healthy years! With the company: a lot of different projects. I like to work with interesting people. I have great friends which I like to create videos with. I’m a team player and I always try to involve inspiring people in the projects to make the working progress better and more fun at the same time”.
Which advice would you give to other professionals?
“Carpe diem, enjoy the moment. I know it sounds cheesy! But at the academy they always forced us to go through a kind of process and I was always annoyed by this, because I already had the final idea in my mind. After the academy, I realized that the process is really important because it’s not about the final moment which you want to achieve, rather every moment in life counts.You should be in a constant flow of happiness”.
What are the challenges we need to overcome to make cultural entrepreneurship more accessible?
“There are always going to be obstacles and problems in life which you cannot foresee. You have to keep on doing what you want to and you will automatically find out what your strengths and weaknesses are. Sometimes it helps to take a moment to think about what went well and what didn’t and what you want to focus on in the future. In the past I spent way too much time alone behind my desk, at one point I found out that I didn’t want to sit on my ass all day, rather I want to move from place to place, meet interesting people and feel the energy of every moment, because as they said, I’m hyperactive.”
