“A love letter to the world”. About embarking on trauma experience, community, and agency in survivorhood

Conversation with Dan Dansen

Interview conducted by Timur Vorkul

Can you tell us more about the background of “Survivor Manifesto   ̶ The Art of Making Kin”? When did you first have the idea of making this movie?

Originally, it was planned as a longer project, and it still is. I started collecting materials in 2017. I found that there are very few voices on trauma that emphasize sustainability and also skills: what do survivors bring to relationships and to society in general? What did they learn from their survival and how could a larger community benefit from it? I started collecting material to do interviews. I conducted many longer, narrative interviews. Furthermore, I avoided asking too many questions unless people had difficulties figuring out what to talk about and explicitly asked me to. I was just telling people to focus on whatever they want to share about their traumatic experiences. What the survivors thought they had learned and what skills they had developed in everyday life, that was what I was curious about. Also, I talked to people who support survivors because that is another, very neglected, part of the narrative about survival. How do people actually support each other? This is such an important aspect of healing. Overall, I wanted to focus more on the healing aspect. “Survivor Manifesto” started out as an experiment in dealing  creatively with the material and then it developed a life of its own. This feels really powerful, I thought. Maybe it can have a life of its own and I can continue with a longer project based on this one.

So initially you did not intend to make a short experimental movie?

No, it was more of an experiment in what the feature could look like and where I wanted to go with the project. In a movie, it’s really difficult to tell a story  about survivorhood without the common images that come to mind, and without the social voyeuristic aspect that can be connected to it. Another concern was how to protect people because trauma is still highly stigmatized.

There is such misrepresentation of trauma in films. I was watching a lot of movies about trauma, and I felt like people were either super helpless, with the focus on the actual act of violence… It’s something you can depict easily, and it looks “good” on screen. You can make a lot of drama out of it. It came to my mind that it’s due to our storytelling structure that this narration is so prevalent. This way, you have a thing that happens, and then you can show how it unfolds in the life of a person and how they fail to cope. Or you have the initial act, and then the whole story about healing and how, mostly through romantic relationships, people are magically healed. And then they live happily ever after. None of these reflect the reality that I see in my life with friends or with experiences that I had. There is a gap that really needs to be filled with a different perspective. I’ve even heard people say it’s easier to show the perpetrators’ view because they are the ones who are acting, and it’s just more interesting. But we need to change the dramaturgical structure for this kind of narrative. That’s also the reason why I ended up making an experimental film. We have to try different ways of telling stories to be able to tell the stories we want to.

The movie is based on interviews with trauma survivors and their supporters, making it a hybrid of fiction and documentary. You don’t want to put the survivors themselves on screen and expose them to voyeurism. Can you still tell us something about them? Who are they, and what are their stories? Or is it your intention to not actually tell their stories?

No. I wouldn’t want to pick out the stories of particular people. It was more the idea of taking several stories, of people who are usually isolated, who might not even know each other, and merging them as if telling the story of a community. Trauma is so much about isolation, about the feeling that you have  nowhere to turn to, and that no one will understand you. It’s also not speakable. How can you relate to something that is not speakable? So, the initial idea of at least this short was to create a community. In a way, it is already there, it’s in friendships and it’s in support groups, but it does not exist as this kind of political agenda. But I think it should.

Is this the reason you chose the form of a manifesto? In order to start a community?

I wouldn’t really say that I chose a manifesto. I would rather say the manifesto chose me. When I was starting work on the movie, I was invited to give a talk on my current work. When it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to attend the conference, I was asked to produce a video. I guess the organizers had in mind some sort of talking-head scenario. It was during the Covid pandemic, and it was so boring to do that. I couldn’t stand any more of that.

It was more the feeling that the manifesto chose me to write itself. I think it’s a powerful format, and it’s really nice to be chosen by a format that is so much about agency and about having an agenda. Whereas, trauma is something that we perceive as rendering people powerless and helpless. What I most wanted to do  was to connect these two perspectives and to show that people who experience trauma actually have an agenda and they have agency. Survivors are so often framed as being deficient, being too much, being not enough or unable to cope. That’s only one aspect of reality. It might be true for people at some point. However, in general, they figure out plenty of clever ways to survive and still thrive. There are so many things we could learn from them. It’s wonderful to put all  that in a manifesto; it’s the format we actually need. It’s what we often miss in the discourse on trauma.

The film calls on us to work on our traumas so that we can come closer to a utopian society. The sentence that’s stuck with me the most is: “We know that turning to self-love is the hardest challenge for survivors.” How can that be done? How is it actually possible?

One key problem with trauma is that the ability to take care of oneself breaks down completely. If that has happened, and there is nothing you can build on, how can you build yourself back up from scratch? People have come up with so many creative and clever methods of caring for themselves. It’s the small things that interest me, and that’s why my focus is on everyday life. For instance, how do people take care of themselves every day? I asked people to be very precise about what constitutes self-care for them. For some, it’s to make a short plan at the beginning of the day. They ask, “What do I want to do today?” For others, it’s making themselves a cup of tea. It can be anything from tiny acts of self-love and self-care to a year-long trip. It can be bigger things too, of course, but I really believe it all starts with small routines like meditating or writing in a journal every day. It might seem so obvious or so small, but it can mean the world to people who don’t know what self-love is or how to take care of themselves.These tools that people have developed are so precious, and it’s about sharing these practices with the wider community. There are potentially no boundaries to this community,  sharing ideas and practices. It’s incredibly important. If everyone took good care of themselves, we would have fewer struggles in the world. I do think that many bad things happen because people do not know how to take care of themselves or how to regulate their emotions.

What are some practical examples of collective and mutual care and healing? Can you maybe even name examples of ways to acknowledge that we have hurt someone else? There are these two sides you talk about in the movie.

There are two different sides, but they can also be one and the same. The issue with trauma is that if it remains unresolved, we may find ourselves stuck in the situation. People can act out their trauma, which might hurt others, but they can also hurt themselves that way. It can be both sides, hurting oneself or hurting someone else. Even if a person is apparently just hurting themselves, it’s still hurting others who love them. There is no way out of this, which is also a kind of agency. So, it’s important to think about these two sides together. In black, indigenous and feminist communities, a lot of work has been done around community accountability and transformative justice processes, which, I think, is very precious. This work should be highlighted and supported more, to generate a society that is not based on punishment, but rather on development and the question of how we can grow. Because if a person gets punished, they might not think about how they can grow from a mistake they have made. They might get lost in resentment instead, or hold on to the idea of going to court and defending themselves. This system is not about acknowledging that you’ve harmed another person. It’s about defending yourself and saying, okay, but, I didn’t mean it, or, it wasn’t that bad, or whatever else. It’s not supposed to make you feel compassion for the other person, although there are some attempts to include accountability in court cases, too. And for those who have experienced violence, it would be great to hear from that perpetrator, or from multiple perpetrators, “I acknowledge that I hurt you. I am sorry.” Those words can be said in a matter of seconds, but if they are sincere they can mean the world to many people. At the same time, a person who has inflicted violence could ask themselves: Why did I actually do that? Am I myself hurt? Why was I so angry? What can I learn from it? If this person were to engage in this process and ask how they can grow from that, and get support during the process, that would be the worldI want to live in. There are projects doing this kind of work, and tiny steps are being taken in that direction in society. But it would be wonderful to have this on a larger scale.

People who have experienced violence, on the other hand, and who have worked through it in their own way, know what they don’t want and what they would need in order to heal. Survivors often have a clear idea of how life should be and how it could be better organized, as well as how to prevent violence. They know what they want society to be like: that is, without violence. Who wants to experience violence that is mute, that you cannot put into words? No one wants to be rendered that helpless and that powerless. And yet our societies are so firmly based on violence. The whole state is based on the concept of violence. The legal term “state monopoly on legitimate violence” is used to refer to the right of the state to use violence. Whole societies are based on that principle, probably worldwide. That’s also how we try to resolve international conflicts, with wars, which leads to more trauma. It’s a vicious cycle that we need to get out of. And I think we can only get out of it from the bottom upwards. Because being on top means executing violence. There are few examples where this situation was overturned by a person at the top. A lot of activism is needed to create another world in the here and now.

Turning now to the visual aspect of the movie, how were the images created? We see various means of transport, like the plane and the train, but also waves on the sea. What’s their significance? Can you tell us more about your aesthetic strategies?

The initial idea with the longer movie was to use the metaphor of a journey because you don’t really know where you’ll end up when you embark on a trauma experience. The idea was to use this metaphor to show the way that many people with traumatic experiences are constantly in motion. They feel restless, or they like being always on the move. At the same time, they can’t move  ̶ ̶  they are still, sitting on the airplane, sitting on the train. It’s got this dual aspect that trauma can also have. You’re stuck and you’re moving at the same time. You never really know where it will take you. For me, the waves are just about the subconscious. As with the means of transport, they are constantly on the move and transforming. Some things are coming up and some are being held down. You don’t know how deep the sea is. Will you ever touch the ground? No idea! Still, something is on the move and something is resolving. It was a very appropriate image to work with.

It was important for me to work with the layering of images to project a phenomenon that trauma survivors often describe: opposing realities can also be true at the same time. And this can be very confusing and disturbing. It’s also the layered nature of time: during flashbacks people feel as if they are  back in the actual situation, even though they know it’s the past and they are now technically safe. The layering of images was an experiment in capturing this strange state that trauma survivors frequently find themselves in.

How are you taking the topics of trauma, survival and queer kinship forward in the feature film? What have we got to look forward to?

The bigger project is currently on hiatus because I’ve been working on another feature film for the last two years. In the future, I would love to work more with the idea of community. The approach to the idea of community that I’ve used so far works well in an experimental short, but a longer feature-documentary will require human protagonists.

What I wanted to do with this short is to write a love letter to the world, and to provide a community for people who feel isolated. I hope this is a starting point, and I can get the bigger feature funded, so I can do the same thing on a bigger scale.

Can you talk about the  feature film you’ve been working on for the last two years?

The project is called “To My Ancestors“, and it’s about the search for trans ancestry in Europe. The past 200 years aren’t the focus, as there’s a lot of coverage of that period. We don’t know much about the times before that. I was wondering what it was like back in those days. So many societies all over the world have some conception of transness. I don’t want to impose the concept of transness on other societies, since it’s a very Eurocentric and Western perspective, but I am interested in some idea of people living between genders. How come we don’t have something like that in Europe? There have been indigenous communities in Europe too, but we have very little record of them. I wanted to find out more about that question, so I made a solo performance about it. It was first shown in Berlin last year and is now traveling. I’ve adapted it for a movie, and it’s almost finished now.

Is the movie a recording of your performance, or is it based on it?

No, it’s an entirely different work based on the same research but adapted for film. It’s a hybrid of different genres: experimental, a bit of fiction and documentary. It’s drawing from the best of all the genres.