Julie Celina Linnebjerg

Applying the Lessons I Learnt in Anthropology to my Art

I want to apply the lessons I learned in anthropology to my art, and give more attention to the underrepresented and marginalised.
Denmark, Northern Europe

Story by Julie Celina Linnebjerg. Edited by Stéphanie Hamel
Published on April 15, 2021. Reading time: 4 minutes



I’m a Danish artist. I express my love and appreciation for cultural diversity through my paintings. For too long, Western people have been over-represented in art—their whiteness often considered the only acceptable form of beauty. If people from different cultures were painted, they would be shown as exotic, primitive and submissive. This has particularly been the case for women of colour.

Growing up, I went to school in an upper middle class neighbourhood where all the kids had the same hobbies and clothes. The girls just cared about makeup, boys, and designer clothes. I used to say they were all clones. I didn’t have the same hobbies and clothes as my classmates, because it didn’t feel like me: I liked making art. I felt misunderstood, like my opinions didn’t matter and my classmates didn’t care about an outsider like me. Even though I identify as a woman, I didn’t feel very girl-like compared to the other girls in my class. Since then, I have understood that there is great value in being in a diverse community, and there are important lessons to learn from people who are different from you. Because of my skin colour and the welfare system in Denmark[1], I am in a privileged position compared to truly marginalised people. However, since my experience as a school outcast, I have always sympathised with the misunderstood.


I paint the beauty I see in cultural diversity, and I let the diversity of people in this world shine through my art.

Animated by this curiosity for what is considered “the Other,” I decided to major in Anthropology. One time in class, a student asked why anthropologists mostly study the marginalised and not the powerful. To my teacher, the answer was simple: he believed that modern anthropologists give power to the people they study because they make those peoples' voices heard and their points of view understood. It made me want to do the same with my art, using the tools of anthropology to give the marginalised a voice. 

Later, when I was in art school, we were told to paint what we think is beautiful and what the other side of our pain looks like. In other words, flipping our trauma to its positive equal. In my case, it manifested into an appreciation of diversity. Beauty to me is a diverse world, where everyone is valued, heard and appreciated. In paintings, thin, white people are over-represented. I want to also portray people who don’t fit this description. I want to apply the lessons I learned in anthropology to my art, and give more attention to the underrepresented and marginalised. 

 

Women—especially women of colour—have a long history of being portrayed naked, exotic and submissive to the white man. I challenge this trend by painting women in strong or graceful poses. My art balances the raw and the refined to create a more realistic world, where imperfection and natural looks are beautiful and important aspects of human life. I paint the beauty I see in cultural diversity, and I let the diversity of people in this world shine through my art.

In my collection, United Colours of Women, I have portrayed ten women from ten countries across 5 continents to show the varied manifestations of beauty in women. This collection is a symbolic exclamation mark on how beautiful, and important every woman is no matter her race or wealth.

Julie’s art features on her website www.juliecelina.com

 


Footnotes

[1] The Danish government provides free healthcare and education to its citizens.


How does this story make you feel?

Follow-up

Do you have any questions after reading this story? Do you want to follow-up on what you've just read? Get in touch with our team to learn more! Send an email to
[email protected].

Talk about this Story

Please enable cookies to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Share your story

Every story we share is another perspective on a complex topic like migration, gender and sexuality or liberation. We believe that these personal stories are important to better understand what's going on in our globalised society - and to better understand each other. That's because we are convinced that the more we understand about each other, the easier it will be for us to really talk to one another, to get closer - and to maybe find solutions for the issues that affect us all. 

Do you want to share your story? Then have a look here for more info.

Share Your Story

Subscribe to our Monthly Newsletter

Stay up to date with new stories on Correspondents of the World by subscribing to our monthly newsletter:

* indicates required

Follow us on Social Media

Julie Celina Linnebjerg

Julie Celina Linnebjerg

Hey! I’m Julie Celina. I’m a 25 year old artist from Denmark. I am currently living in Aarhus and focusing on my paintings. Within my art, you can find a sense of mystery and awe. I paint to express my love for cultural diversity. I have always been fascinated by people, but after I finished my Bachelor's in anthropology, this fascination developed into a love and faith in humanity, which I strive to express in my art.

Topic: Gender




Get involved

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

Share Your Story

Community Worldwide

Correspondents of the World is not just this website, but also a great community of people from all over the world. While face-to-face meetings are difficult at the moment, our Facebook Community Group is THE place to be to meet other people invested in Correspondents of the World. We are currently running a series of online-tea talks to get to know each other better.

Join Our Community

EXPLORE TOPIC Gender

Global Issues Through Local Eyes

We are Correspondents of the World, an online platform where people from all over the world share their personal stories in relation to global development. We try to collect stories from people of all ages and genders, people with different social and religious backgrounds and people with all kinds of political opinions in order to get a fuller picture of what is going on behind the big news.

Our Correspondents

At Correspondents of the World we invite everyone to share their own story. This means we don't have professional writers or skilled interviewers. We believe that this approach offers a whole new perspective on topics we normally only read about in the news - if at all. If you would like to share your story, you can find more info here.

Share Your Story

Our Editors

We acknowledge that the stories we collect will necessarily be biased. But so is news. Believing in the power of the narrative, our growing team of awesome editors helps correspondents to make sure that their story is strictly about their personal experience - and let that speak for itself.

Become an Editor

Vision

At Correspondents of the World, we want to contribute to a better understanding of one another in a world that seems to get smaller by the day - but somehow neglects to bring people closer together as well. We think that one of the most frequent reasons for misunderstanding and unnecessarily heated debates is that we don't really understand how each of us is affected differently by global issues.

Our aim is to change that with every personal story we share.

View Our Full Vision & Mission Statement

Topics

We believe in quality over quantity. To give ourselves a focus, we started out to collect personal stories that relate to our correspondents' experiences with six different global topics. However, these topics were selected to increase the likelihood that the stories of different correspondents will cover the same issues and therefore illuminate these issues from different perspectives - and not to exclude any stories. If you have a personal story relating to a global issue that's not covered by our topics, please still reach out to us! We definitely have some blind spots and are happy to revise our focus and introduce new topics at any point in time. 

Environment

Discussions about the environment often center on grim, impersonal figures. Among the numbers and warnings, it is easy to forget that all of these statistics actually also affect us - in very different ways. We believe that in order to understand the immensity of environmental topics and global climate change, we need the personal stories of our correspondents.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender is the assumption of a "normal". Unmet expectations of what is normal are a world-wide cause for violence. We hope that the stories of our correspondents will help us to better understand the effects of global developments related to gender and sexuality, and to reveal outdated concepts that have been reinforced for centuries.

Migration

Our correspondents write about migration because it is a deeply personal topic that is often dehumanized. People quickly become foreigners, refugees - a "they". But: we have always been migrating, and we always will. For millions of different reasons. By sharing personal stories about migration, we hope to re-humanize this global topic.

Liberation

We want to support the demand for justice by spotlighting the personal stories of people who seek liberation in all its different forms. Our correspondents share their individual experiences in creating equality. We hope that for some this will be an encouragement to continue their own struggle against inequality and oppression - and for some an encouragement to get involved.

Education

Education is the newest addition to our themes. We believe that education, not only formal but also informal, is one of the core aspects of just and equal society as well as social change. Our correspondents share their experiences and confrontations about educational inequalities, accessibility issues and influence of societal norms and structures. 

Corona Virus

2020 is a year different from others before - not least because of the Corona pandemic. The worldwide spread of a highly contagious virus is something that affects all of us in very different ways. To get a better picture of how the pandemic's plethora of explicit and implicit consequences influences our everyday life, we share lockdown stories from correspondents all over the world.

Growing Fast

Although we started just over a year ago, Correspondents of the World has a quickly growing community of correspondents - and a dedicated team of editors, translators and country managers.

94

Correspondents

113

Stories

57

Countries

433

Translations

Contact

Correspondents of the World is as much a community as an online platform. Please feel free to contact us for whatever reason!

Message Us

Message on WhatsApp

Call Us

Joost: +31 6 30273938