OYSTERS FOR NATURALIZATION, 2019, 4K video 12'.

In this short film we approach the Japanese oysters from the Dutch Wadden Sea (present in the Netherlands for several decades) with a surreal questionnaire. We ask them to give the correct answer to a series of multiple-choice questions that relate to how they should behave in relation to the flora and fauna in their immediate environment. The questions are inspired by the actual integration exam for immigrants who want to get Dutch citizenship. The starting point for our project is the analogy between the Japanese oyster and the economic migrants who both arrived in the Netherlands at the end of the 1960s and ‘70s. Both were meant to stay temporarily but remained. The Japanese oyster has now “supplanted” the Dutch oyster, however there is a recent experiment to make it possible for the original “Dutch” oyster to return to the Dutch seas. This film connects two social issues in the Netherlands and questions them in an ironic way. We use a specific ecological issue – to what extent can you intervene to reduce the expansion of the exotic Asian oyster in the Dutch Wadden Sea? – as a metaphor for the integration issue, a focal point of Dutch politics since the eighties. Music by Dario Calderone.

The project was supported by the Mondriaan Fund and Stichting Stookroos.