Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Idris Sevenans, and I started a ‘non-realistic initiative’ called ‘Troebel Neyntje’ , back in 2014. I’m aged 24, and as a front, you will see my logo: a drawing of a bald guy. Using ‘a front’ is important to me, it’s indispensable to keep a ‘collective feel’, in dealing with arts, artists and projects.
Since I skipped most of my school career, I was able to generate extra time to work on my goals, and to achieve the things in life that were, and still are, important to me.
What would you consider your distinctive achievement?
Getting together with, managing different artists of different generations, and gather them in the same exhibition is one of the things I’m most happy and proud of. It’s quite exceptional; it actually happens too few.
What are you looking forward to?
Spending more time on my own artistic work is one of the things I’m really looking forward to!
But at the same time I like to keep managing exhibitions at ‘Troebel Neyntje’. This is very fruitful. Getting together with other artists and sharing the same space allows to have and generate, cross-over experiences. There’s a lot of ‘learning on the spot’ involved, talking with other artists and visitors and at the same time, getting the chance to see each other’s work, in a quite different way.
This will allow other artists and me to grow further by learning from each other, whilst participating at the projects at ‘Troebel Neyntje’. It’s really work in progress.
Which advise will you give to other professionals?
For as much as possible: do what you really like to do and keep inviting other people to work together on your projects.. You will create new worlds, working, talking, and being together with other artists, and visitors.
What are the challenges that we need to overcome to make cultural entrepreneurship more accessible?
That’s a hard question to answer because ‘entrepreneurship’ in general is something most individual, and ‘entrepreneurs’ are a special kind of breed: they feel the necessity, the need to start up something (new), where most others do not.
Maybe our education system should focus more on creativity instead of simply focusing on reproducing existing facts, existing crafts and existing knowledge.
Special thanks to Ward Wouters for helping me with the interview – Idris
Thanks Idris & Ward Wouters then 😉