Vijftien

Irene Wiersma received a contribution to develop her personal, musical project. Vijftien is a Dutch-language concept album about grooming and sexual violence. In album, Irene tells her story in eleven richly arranged songs: how, as a fifteen-year-old, she became a victim of grooming and sexual abuse by an adult man. Each song represents a different aspect of this complex story. Topics include grooming, the dependency relationship between perpetrator and victim, the silence and looking away from the environment, undergoing sexual violence, rebelling against it and eventually freeing yourself from the situation.

Irene is a singer, composer and writer and studied at the Academy for Pop Culture in Leeuwarden. She writes songs, poems and lyrics full of contradictions, of slightly disruptive signature, which take you into a personal world full of controversy.