I did several experiments for my project, but the core is always the group and the fact that people have relationships with each other. The project started with these sentences: "Independency = freedom = happiness", "independency is a lie" and "together we are stronger". It seemed to me that all these statement are true and at the same time contradict each other.

With this in mind I started seeing groups and relationships everywhere. In a interview Foucault speaks about groups in relation to power. He says power is not a thing, but the relationship between two parties. One will govern over the other. He applies it to several groups: "One can govern a society, one can govern a group, a community, a family; one can govern a person." (1) Power is nothing without the group to govern over. This links to the practice of system analysis, that teaches us to always see the the connection and not only the isolated thing. Only in the relationship to others power gets powerful.
In "Space, Place and Gender" Doreen Massey paints the mental image of an satellite high above the earth looking down: "…imagine not just all the physical movement, nor even all the often invisible communications, but also and especially all the social relations all the links between people." (2) She goes on and defines a place not only with its geographical borders or its place-based history, but as a constellation in a net of of social relation and links to other places, people or things. This can not only be applied to places, but also to people. Uzma Rizvi writes about why she looses the scientific 'I' in her texts: "By granting myself the 'I' everything was granted an 'I' and there was an intersectional subjectivity that provide a network of kin and care that went beyond a humancentric approach to the world…By reclaiming myself, I recognized the larger world within which I was deeply entangled." (3) Like Massey she uses the image of a network or a net to define herself. We are always part of a system. We can be found if one zooms in in the huge network we call the world. Only a person who is aware of this, can understand the Power Plays around oneself.

In connection to my project this comes maybe close to the statement "independency is a lie". If we define ourself as the intersection of the relationships around us, we can never be completely independent. With my conversation pieces, I hope to make the reader aware of these relationships, but also that they are not static, but a fluid system, open to change.