Poetry International & Cross Comix

Poems can conjure up images with language, and images can be inherently poetic. What happens when you bring these two together? During this special collaboration with CrossComix, the platform and festival for visual storytelling in Rotterdam, the audience will experience what can happen when a storyteller who works with images teams up with a wrodsmith. Two couples have accepted the challenge to make unique interdisciplinary work together, which will be shown to the audience for the first time during this program. South African poet Toni Giselle Stuart will be performing with local maker Ibrahim Ineke and image artist Tja Ling will be working with Femke Zwiep  to link word & image together.  

Guests: Toni Giselle Stuart, Ibrahim Ineke, Tja Ling, Femke Zwiep
Host: Francis Broekhuijsen

Toni Giselle Stuart 
Toni Giselle Stuart is a South African poet, writer and spoken word artist and educator.  

With her poetry, Stuart aims to heal inherited and ancestral wounds and traumas as well as regain access to ancestral wisdom and gifts, bringing herself and her audiences closer to who they are. She is especially interested in discovering, re-imagining and rewriting the forgotten and buried histories and ‘herstories’ of mixed and creole South Africans and people of color. Furthermore, she seeks to connect these stories to the bodily experience, nature and the interplay of the two. In her live spoken word performances, she uses sounds and breath to create tension and emphasis.  

Stuart collaborates and performs across disciplines with filmmakers, musicians, visual artists and dancers. In 2016, she collaborated with South African filmmaker Kurt Orderson to create an audiovisual installation of her work Krotoa-Eva’s Suite, a Cape jazz poem in three movements. The piece was part of the exhibition Re(as)sisting Narratives which showed at Framer Framed Gallery in Amsterdam, and the District Six Homecoming Centre in Cape Town. Furthermore, she was the founding curator of Poetica at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town and founded the youth poetry programme Athlone Young Poets in Cape Town in 2018. In 2013 Stuart was named in The Mail and Guardian’s list of 200 inspiring Young South Africans. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, such as Looking Back, Going Forward: Young Voices on Freedom (2004).  

Ibrahim Ineke
Ibrahim R. Ineke (1976) is a draughtsman and curator, based in The Hague, the Netherlands. His drawings and publications utilize and deconstruct the narrative strategies and visual structures of the comic book medium, simultaneously asserting the autonomy and interdependence of the images. Through the exploration of the tropes and grammar of horror fiction, they make explicit the historical connection between the medium of static visual narrative and the 19th century Penny Dreadfuls, stating the case for comic books as the quintessentially Gothic art form. 

Femke Zwiep
Femke Zwiep (1999) writes poetry about illness, madness, faith and magic. She studied Creative Writing at ArtEZ Arnhem, read at Vers van het Mes and at Lowlands, among others, and published in DW B and Wobby.club. She is an editorial board member at Samplekanon and is currently working on her debut collection. 

Tja Ling
Tja Ling (1987) graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Design towards fashion but the fashion world turned out to be nothing for her. After this study, she discovered her passion for drawing and graduated from the Luca School of Arts in Ghent in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts after which she completed a Master in Fine Arts in 2016. A year later, she won the Fiep Westendorp Incentive Award. She won with a project depicting the journey her family took from China to the Netherlands between the 1930s and 1970s. For her family a quest in the hope of a better life and for her a search for identity. 

In her work, Tja Ling explores the human experience, breaking through the limitations of language and embracing the expressiveness of visual art. She interweaves personal stories and ancient mythologies, bringing forgotten tales and archetypal symbols to life in her work. Tja Ling seeks timeless themes and universal truths through a personal narrative. The work acts as a channel for shared understanding, testifying to the interconnectedness of our human stories and condition. 

After a residency at the Van Gogh House in Zundert, she expanded her artistic repertoire, integrating painting and ceramics into her practice. Her work has been shown at the Amsterdam Museum, Beurs van Berlage, the Scheepvaart Museum and Museum IJsselstein, among others. She also uses her passion for storytelling in her commissioned work as an illustrator. She has worked for the Volkskrant, NRC Handelsblad, de Correspondent and the VPRO Guide, among others.