NELLA NGINGO

Why is that?

I think because we’ve been conditioned to always put a label on things – to see things and say; that’s a tree, that’s building, that’s a black person, that’s a white person. That’s what you see first, what your eyes perceive first. Not what you feel first. I would like people to see me as more than just black – because I am. But that’s the reality of things.

How do you see your own journey within self-expression and self-discovery through fashion, both as a person and as a working model?

Ever since I was young, fashion was my only way of truly expressing myself, I never learned how to communicate with words like a lot of the people in the western world do so I did that through fashion. It was making a statement, it was being rebellious, it was showing others who I was – that I was different. It was me telling my story which is a never ending story. So it has always been about self-discovery but without an ending point. Without thinking that I’m getting there because it’s constantly changing. I’m constantly evolving and the story gets more complex and differ day by day, year by year. That’s why I like it so much. It’s not something that will always be the same to me, it’s something that will always change based on my surroundings and how I feel. It’s storytelling to me, really.

First of all I nowadays feel truly privileged to be able to say ‘Burundi woman and a member of the LGBTQ community’ because growing up those two things were never allowed to coexist. So when I learned about the LGBTQ community I thought, because I was conditioned to think that way, that I was raised as a Burundian woman, in Burundian culture, by Burundian parents and Burundian food, and those two could never coexist together, so I felt like I had to lose one to gain another one.

A lot of my friends are from African descent and most of them are members of the LGBTQ community as well. We used to get together often and we found ourselves just talking and talking, and I would get back home and realize that it felt really good to know that I wasn’t alone and that was something that I needed when I first moved to Holland. So we wanted to provide that for other people of African communities who are members of LGBTQ communities. We worked together, we collaborated with a museum for a while and we grew further and now we have our own space that we also lend out to people who wants to organize talks, to show their art, to present themselves. We grew as a collective nad we now do much more than just panel talks – we do performances, we do healing sessions where we invite people of color to come and heal in other ways than the western way of healing. We’ve known how to heal for generations before talk therapy existed, so we’re trying to find different ways in which people can heal. We’re growing fast and I’m really, really excited to be able to do this with young kids, with the LGBTQ community, with people of color. It’s a collective.

Your personal style, how would you describe it? Do you dress to fit certain situations or is it up the given situation to fit the way you dress?

That’s a good question. My personal style is really hard to define in one word but I would say that I build my own way of dressing out of the feelings that I have within me and then I create the situation around it. I take control of it, basically.

In an interview you talked about ‘The law of attraction – if you fear something, you focus on it and make it happen. You manifest it’. Can you tell us more about that?

I think when I made that interview we were talking about the pandemic and everything that was going on and I thought the media was using scare tactics to provoke fear amongst people. It’s basic human psychology – when you’re constantly in a state of fear and worry, you create those kinds of thoughts and when you create negative thoughts you act negatively and negative actions create a negative reality. But you can easily shift the focus – if you think positive thoughts you create positive actions and a positive reality. We have that knowledge and if we can use it and utilize it we can create a better world for ourselves and everybody else as a collective but we can’t do it on our own.

What represents freedom to you?

I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to figure out what that means and I think freedom to me is the realization of presence – which is the true awakening. Even if it only lasts for a second or a minute, if you’re truly in the present moment nothing else exists. The only way the future can exist is if it’s in the present moment, so when you can let go of all the fear, worry and every external thing that is happening and you’re truly in the moment – me right here, you right there and that’s all there is, that’s true freedom to me.

How can we catalyze change?

It has to come from within. If I want to change the world around me I have to change myself. If I’m different from within, and you’re different from within, together as a collective we can change the whole world around us but it has to start from within. I can’t change anything if I don’t change myself.