Inburgering

In an old Dutch scrapbook, royals hold bouquets. A Brazilian mother adds photographs of what grows wild in Amsterdam. Guided by her Dutch-born daughter, she learns to read the land, asking: is inhabiting a place the same as belonging?

Inburgering

Inburgering is the Dutch civic integration process that immigrants must complete to become part of Dutch society. Plants never take this test. Butterflies do not either.

For years, I photographed wild plants growing in Amsterdam: along canals, between pavements, in the margins of cultivated gardens. Plants that grow without asking permission. Among them is the passionflower, native to South America, now growing in the city I call home.

When my Dutch-born daughter began pointing at plants and naming them in Dutch, I realised I didn't know their names in any language. A three-year-old became my guide. Each plant became a question. Each season, a new lesson in attention.

Knowledge arrived through encounters. My daughter's Dutch grandmother taught her to recognise plants. A forager showed me that food and medicine grow in the streets of Amsterdam. This knowledge travelled through hands, kitchens, conversations and the smell of something simmering. Rarely written down. Never tested. Slowly, the landscape became something I could read through relationships.

Then I found a Dutch scrapbook assembled by Edith de Jong in the 1960s. Its pages preserved images of the royal family, with women repeatedly appearing among flowers: holding bouquets, receiving them, arranging them at ceremonies and celebrations. I am Brazilian; I never had a royal family. I began bringing these images into conversation with my own photographs of the plants growing around Amsterdam.

The women in the photographs are separated by decades, social positions and circumstances, but connected through gestures involving plants. In the historical images, flowers accompanied public rituals and representations of national identity. In my everyday life, they became a way of learning, connecting with people and putting down roots.

Through cutting, pasting, removing, drawing and rearranging, I began transforming the scrapbook into another archive, where inherited images and lived experiences could coexist without one explaining the other. My daughter's paintings entered these pages, weaving another generation into the narrative.

Inburgering is an ongoing photographic investigation and handmade artist book about migration, memory and the transmission of knowledge. The book opens with a Red Admiral butterfly, a migratory species that crosses European borders each year. It closes with my daughter blowing a dandelion over a Dutch polder at dusk. Between these images lies a decade of learning to read a place through what grows there.

I wonder whether inhabiting a place is the same as belonging to it. And if a landscape one day becomes entirely legible, what happens to the attention that first taught us how to read it?