Photo exhibition: Mijntattoo (location: Bekkerveld)

The former Mining Region has struggled with its identity since the mine closures in the 1970s. Negative feelings as a result of unemployment, the demolition of mining-era icons, and drugs and crime, meant that for a time there was little focus on the mining past. But times change, and attitudes change with them. Since the Year of Mines in 2015, the subject proved to be grabbed with renewed interest by publicists, researchers, theater makers, city marketers, residents and photographers. May 2022 marked the provisional culmination of this mining revival, with the opening of the beautiful, full-fledged Mining Museum in Heerlen-Centrum. The region has a renewed need to explore its history, to make it part of collective as well as individual identity. Like the many men and women who get tattoos related to the mining past. 

"I find this development particularly interesting. I see the history of the region being used as a puzzle piece in its own identity." said photographer and co-initiator of the photo exhibition My Tattoo. "One of those portrayed literally says that the region 'forms our DNA.'" This form of history thus goes beyond the traditional way of examining the past; it focuses on the experience of history, not the history itself. The phenomenon of the mining tattoo is thus an interesting way to explore this personification of the past; it is intimate and distinct and (often) carried by a younger generation that no longer has a direct link to that past. 

In doing so, it adds another layer to that history: what do we know about her? What do we learn from her? How does it help us to see the world today? To see myself? This exhibition is thus about the creative power of history, and how this history helps to find an identity in the present. It shows that something can belong to the past, but is not over with it. Or in the words of William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. The past is not even the past.'

Photo: Wouter Zaalberg