Saskia Burggraaf.
ABOUT - AGENDA - CV
visual art & design - enhanced by writing, theory, research and workshops
Saskia Burggraaf.
ABOUT - AGENDA - CV
visual art & design - enhanced by writing, theory, research and workshops
Drawings,(screen)prints, sketching & etching
Saskia Burggraaf.
ABOUT - AGENDA - CV
visual art & design - enhanced by writing, theory, research and workshops
Making Worlds: Feminist Theory in activist performance for inclusive Belonging
How to make space when you take space within urban squatter movements
Abstract
My thesis considers how internalized inequity of the neoliberal housing market and its property
mechanisms manifest themselves within the Dutch squatter movement (NKB), causing it to replicate
some of the structures it purports to oppose. As a femme queer-identifying artist with a squatter history,
I am interested in the inter-relationship between (activist) communities,
individual performances of property/non-proprietary comportments,
and the way physical spaces retain complex traces of patriarchal economic structures within daily life.
Putting the Dutch housing policy and struggle in the current context of global capitalism, and
drawing on Marxist, autonomist and feminist spatial theory, I argue that squatting culture in the
Netherlands stymied its radical potential by its structural inattention to the non-binary complexity of
bordered, domestic and interpersonal scales of the political within its un/recognized histories.
This thesis takes an alternative approach from materialist feminist theorists of race, geography, normativity,
and the structurally oppressive household, including Silvia Federici, Sarah Keenan, Davina Cooper and Doreen
Massey, to challenge the masculine norms of Marx’s historical materialism and property critique. The
works of Margaret Davies, Nazima Kadir, E.T.C. Dee/Deanna Dadusc and an interview of Wendelien van
Oldenborgh are used to further contextualize my argument concerning the necessity of feminist and queer
occupations/cohabitations as resistance to both late liberal capitalist belonging within “property logic”
and masculine-normed ideals of autonomy. Material feminist analytics, including from performance
theory, in the scene of activism, here enable radical politics to emerge that are savvy to housing needs and
anti-authoritarian politics by imagining intersubjective worlds that move beyond philosophically limited
concepts of belonging and singular events of property repossession.
Dutch Art Institute (DAI)
Art Praxis Graduate School ArtEZ University of the Arts
Master of Arts Thesis
Supervisor: Rachel O’Reilly
July 2020
Saskia Burggraaf.
ABOUT - AGENDA - CV
visual art & design - enhanced by writing, theory, research and workshops
Under Contruction: TaxxxinomiA (fuck hegemony)
Video Installation | Mixed Media | 2026 | loop (this work is in the making)TaxxxonomiA – fuck hegemony radically questions and rejects the seemingly neutral ordering of the world—through taxonomies, power structures, and scientific systems. Through a hybrid narrative of text, image, body, and voice, the work weaves personal reflections with theoretical references (including Foucault and Donna Haraway) to expose the entanglements of knowledge, power, and identity.
The installation unfolds as a protest against hegemonic structures that define what counts as ‘true’, ‘logical’, or ‘natural’. Through an intimate dialogue with a dog as companion, the work opens space for alternative forms of connection—beyond hierarchy, beyond language, and against the logic of utility or control. The animal does not serve as a symbol, but as a living counterweight: a silent witness to systemic failure, as well as survival and friendship.
At the same time, the fragile ruins of a building become a tangible metaphor for broader socio-political decay: places where regulation, heritage status, and market logic clash with lived experience and collective memory. In these tensions between fragmentation and connection, between resistance and tenderness, something else begins to emerge—a form of refusal that resists classification, but insists on relation.
