Hi, I’m Julia! Since you’re here, I guess you want to know a bit more about me. I grew up in a small village in the countryside of the Netherlands. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved creating images and stories. When I started studying philosophy, I moved to the ‘big city’ (according to Dutch standards). I still live there, in a tower watching over the roofs of Utrecht.
While studying, I discovered that I did not just want to paint a painting, create a story or write a paper. I wanted my paintings to tell stories and my thesis to be a work of art. It became more and more difficult to distinguish between my art, stories and philosophy, but I did not know how to truly bring them together in one project. Ultimately I grew frustrated, since a large part of academic work is providing arguments and definitions, while art and stories convey truth in other ways. One day I saw some seagulls circling above me while listening to Rammstein and suddenly understood the pull of nationalism. Unfortunately, that type of understanding doesn’t translate well to a philosophy paper, though it could be conveyed in a very cool artwork.
After years of searching for a solution to this problem, I remembered the tiny tarot deck which I had bought as a teenager. I started playing with it again and decided I wanted a new divination deck, with big, beautiful images. I scoured the internet to find one, but quickly realized I wanted something so specific it didn’t exist. I said to myself: “No, I am not going to create a whole deck from scratch!” Luckily I was too stubborn to listen, because through creating these cards, I found out how to bring together my passions. The result is this Story Observatory, which is continuously changing and evolving, while I am learning. I hope it speaks to you.
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