Una Jongenelis

Not everything moves in a straight line. Some processes unfold through hesitation and repetition that are never quite the same. What first may appear as a digression begins to fall into its own rhythm. Our conversation with Una Jongenelis follows this logic. It shifts between points, resonates, redirects, and refuses to settle too quickly. In doing so, it offers perspective into how her practice takes shape.

For Jongenelis, the medium is never the starting point. Ideas arrive first, often without form, and only later find their way into something tangible. “It’s not linear,” she reflects. “I don’t really separate them in my head.” This suggests not just interdisciplinarity, but a suspension of stabilising meaning too early. Each becomes a temporary container for something that could take shape elsewhere, should the idea demand it.

Still from animated short Thunderhead (2026)

That tension echoes her relationship to psychology. Although she stepped away from the field, its influence remains. Her work does not attempt to resolve emotional states but to sit within them without neutralising their intensity. Fear, for instance, is not framed purely as something to overcome, but as something functional, even necessary, rather than something to be eliminated. This becomes particularly visible in Thunderhead, her debut animated film recently premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Animation offers a way to externalise what would otherwise remain internal. “Animation gives me a lot of freedom,” she explains. “You’re not bound to reality in the same way. You can break physics, you can visualise internal states, like anxiety or fear, in a more direct way. You can make things visible that are otherwise abstract.” Instead of representing emotion, she constructs environments where it can exist materially, staged with weight, movement and consequence.

Yet this freedom comes at a cost. Animation and film demand structure, duration, and an engagement with systems that resist immediacy. “It took around three years to produce Thunderhead,” she notes. “You have to think about production, funding, and working with other people. It becomes much more structured.” Where drawing or music might allow for speed and directness, film insists on planning, coordination and patience.

In collaborative settings, projects like My Purse or Yodel Queen operate through collective input, where authorship disperses across multiple voices. “For us, being in a band is very democratic,” she explains, describing it as a process of constant negotiation as opposed to a fixed hierarchy. Decisions are shared, ideas are tested against each other, and outcomes are not fixed in advance. It is less about asserting a singular vision than about working through ideas collectively, testing and refining them in real time. The result is less controlled but more responsive, with risk rooted in relinquishing authorship and trusting the dynamic between participants.

"Una's Book Project Vol. 5: Little Heaven" (2026)

Performance enriches this further. It introduces the body, presence, and the unpredictability of an audience. When asked about masks, what initially reads as a metaphor becomes something more literal in her response. Masks function as tools, a way to enter performance while creating distance from the self that audiences might otherwise project onto. “I’m still figuring out how to be on stage,” she admits, describing the mask as something that helps her step into that uncertainty. It allows her to shift into a different mode, to exaggerate, to take up space in ways that might otherwise feel out of reach. The mask is not about hiding, but about allowing something else to take form. It creates a temporary separation that enables play, failure, and transformation.

This interest in shaping situations also informs her role as an organiser. Events become an extension of her practice, not as finished works but as situations. “I like influencing the possibilities, not the outcome,” she says. The focus lies in bringing people, ideas and environments into contact, allowing interactions to unfold without over-directing them. In this sense, her work moves beyond individual production towards facilitation. Looking ahead, Jongenelis remains open to expanding into new forms. Theatre, for instance, is something she mentions with interest. The direction remains responsive to the idea itself. The medium will follow the idea, not the other way around.