About

In February 2016 I, Ingmar Nieuweboer, hitchhiked from the Netherlands to Berlin to discover what it is like to make a living from scratch, to immerse myself in a place where I have no friends, no family, no education, no job, not even a common language, and somehow make ends meet. After a life of self-evident comfort, called the Dutch welfare state, I owed it to my sense of independence to know what it is like not to be able to rely on any external powers, relatively speaking.

I remember vividly waking up the first morning and being afraid to get out of bed. The prospect of having to expose myself to such a big and unknown place, not to mention to potential employers whom I needed to convince to hire me, was so overwhelming that staying in bed seemed like a much safer alternative. But I managed to get out and after two weeks, and about two dozen applications, I found a job at the Heart of Gold hostel, “I made it!” I thought. Yet, a couple of days earlier I spotted another opportunity of a rather different sort and just one week later I was back in the Netherlands to start an internship as an editor for Next Nature Network in Amsterdam. Berlin and the Heart of Gold hostel could wait.

In hindsight my experiment had only begun after those two weeks, but it was, nonetheless, a personality-shaping experience. This year the opposite happened, while being in the Netherlands I found an internship in Berlin at the design studio Fundamental, as a part of my study Industrial Design in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

At first I decided to start a blog while I’m here for practical reasons, but it has gotten to be a creative outlet in itself. Next to telling about my experience of the city Berlin, of my internship and of everything else that interests me, I will also create low-level artworks for the sole purpose of this blog. Every image you can find here is made by me. I hope that you will enjoy reading my blog and find some inspiration or laughter in my artworks and please comment on the blogposts if you feel like it!

“About” over and out.