Off the Map at Mimik #6

• 17 October 2025

Two years after October 7th, 2023, and countless acts of violence later, we sought to create space between the lines that have been drawn between Palestine and Israel. Musician Jareach Gilula kicked off with a piece based on a 17th century Jewish prayer for peace on her impressive harp and journalist Jorie Horsthuis talked about her visit to the West Bank and Israel. The prelude to every war is fear of the ‘other’ and dehumanisation. With pictures of walls and checkpoints, Jorie showed how lines have been drawn that cannot easily be crossed. Tonight, we aimed to show how many similarities there are between peoples, and that fear is also a construct misused by people in power to keep the status quo.

From Israel and Palestine, we moved to Kashmir - a border conflict that appears less in the headlines, but flares up once in a while already for decades. Just a year before Israel’s date of birth in 1948, the British left India and devised a partition that would cause a lot of trouble in the immediate and later aftermath. Journalist Aletta André has been an India correspondent for 15 years at Dutch broadcaster NOS and Trouw and told us about the tensions at the border that keep rising up, as springtime 2025 showed.

The new map of India was drawn by the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never set foot in India himself or had ever made a map before, but was responsible for a territory of 88 million people. Some of the people in the border-area woke up on the morning of 15th of August not knowing which country they were in. This Partition of India and the independence of Pakistan led to violent expulsions and formed a blueprint for further tensions in the regions. Aletta visited Kashmir in the year before she left India and moved back to Deventer and showed us how the region is still volatile.

As all our evenings deal with border disputes and conflicts, we were curious: are there any borders that are in the exact right place? We asked this to our audience. NO, someone wrote, they are all capitalist inventions. Someone else wrote: I don’t know, that’s why I’m here tonight. Someone else said later on: ‘I wanted to write down hairline (haargrens), but just not mine.’

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were also interested in borders. Or actually: more in the notion of no borders. Imagine there are no countries, John sang in Imagine, a song that was written in collaboration with wife, he later admitted. Graphic designer Floor Koomen zoomed in on Yoko and her work as a musician and artist. Turns out, Yoko was also very much into maps! And together, they shaped the concept of Nutopia, a country without borders that you can become a citizen of just by thinking about it.

Jareach Gilula played another captivating piece for us on her harp, based on Psalm 122 and sang to it in Hebrew and in Arabic, inspired by a peace demonstration by people of a lot of different religious backgrounds she attended last spring in Jerusalem and conjuring up the hopes of humans.

Last but certainly not least, there was a quiz by researcher Suzanne Hendriks. From regional flags in Wales (thanks Hugo for sending the photos!) to the border of North and South Korea and to a forgotten autonomous Jewish state, our audience had to fight it out through a shoot-out. The winner took home a prize from Northern Catalunya, where Suzanne was last Summer. The prize was Pan con Tomate (pa amb tomàquet), which is a simple Catalan dish. The winner turned out to also have designed his own country.

In the night of 8th to the 9th of October, just after our show, the news came out about a possible agreement and ceasefire in Gaza and Israel. It’s almost surreal after two years of countless acts of violence and grief. We keep our fingers crossed as there is so much hurt, peace is brittle and hope is delicate.

A big thank you to our guests, the audience - attentive as always - the people at Mimik and Viorica Cernica for making these beautiful photographs.

Many thanks also to our funds: Fonds Bijzondere Journalistieke Projecten, Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek, BNG Cultuurfonds, Deventer Cultuur Club, Stichting Wesselings - Van Breemen and Iordenshofje.