Rosa Uribe

SERIES

The Spike of the Opuntia
Fraternize
Beyond Blame
But hey, I’m trying
Out of _
SMIRK
The hands that build me


FILMS

Mature for her age
I am sorry
Suicide and song
About grief

others

EXHIBITIONS

Royal Academy of Arts (KABK)

About me
Contact

Fraternize2024
In 2023, I read about a bangalijst made by male students from the Utrechtsch Studenten Corps. It contained the names and photographs of female students, alongside sexual comments about them. Banga is Dutch slang for slut. I am from Spain, and I had never heard of something like this before. I could not understand how a list like that could exist inside a student community and still feel ordinary enough to be made, shared and repeated. I started Fraternize because I wanted to get closer to that world and understand how women were spoken about when the men were among themselves.

At first, I interviewed fraternity members and asked questions such as, “What is a good girl to you?” But the things happening around the interviews slowly became more important than their answers. I learned that the fraternity I was photographing had its own bangalijst. The house itself was covered in sexual messages that had simply been left on the walls. “Can you send me some horny bikini pictures of your sister?” or “Blow jobs are part of it.” At one party, girls invited through these lists stayed behind to prepare dinner while the men left for the casino after shouting, “SEX PARTY, TONIGHT IS A SEX PARTY!” I left before the night unfolded. Later, my contact in the house told me that some of the men had also been making sexual comments about me. One of them said he wanted a “long and deep interview” with me while the others laughed. I stopped the interviews because I no longer felt safe doing them.

I no longer asked the men to explain the space to me. I photographed what was already there: the bedrooms, the walls, the lists, the jokes and the traces of the parties. What stayed with me was not only what I saw, but how little of it seemed unusual to the people inside. These fraternities are difficult to enter, but they are not separate from the rest of society. They are places where relationships, status and networks are built, and where a certain idea of masculinity is quietly rehearsed and strengthened. The men who move through them will leave university, build careers, and, in many cases, go on to occupy positions of influence and power. Fraternize began with a list, but became about the kind of environment in which a list like that can exist without feeling exceptional.