Gee: The struggle was also part of the fun I guess. We didn’t really know what we were doing, so it was very much an instinctive thing. We had to figure it out together. Actually, we didn’t know what kind of risk we were taking; if we had known, we would’ve been a bit more nervous and sweaty. So I’m conscious about that and am really happy that we’re still sitting here after all we’ve learned and keep learning. Because, in the end, what we keep doing a lot of times is look up where we’re not a hundred per cent comfortable. We just want to try things.

Gee: We spend most of our time together because of this excitingness. Before Patta, we were already friends and saw each other a lot, but the first couple of years, we saw each other every day. And this is what it is. We are cemented. This [exhibition] reminds me how cemented our relationship is.

Edson: He’s totally right. And also, our passion, our hobby made this whole thing. When we opened the store, we loved sneakers; we loved fashion already, so it was a logical step for us to open a sneaker store. Then, all of a sudden, we made some t-shirts with our logo. After that, we said, ‘hey, listen, maybe we should do a whole line. Game in?’ And we did. Within the first five or six seasons it didn’t work out that much, but we had trust and we loved fashion so much, so we kept on going. Now, fifteen years later, we have Patta store, Patta Soundsystem – because we love music –, Patta Foundation, Patta Club, and Patta Running Team – because we love sports. We started with the two of us and now we have twenty-six people.

Edson: Yes, and we never learned this in school; it’s not ‘school stuff’. It’s more like, ‘ok, what do we need?’ And we work it out. So we’re still learning. This [exhibition], for us, is also a learning thing because we’ve had to talk with the team at Het Hem and feel each other. We felt good so we said, let’s do it! When we don’t have this excitement anymore, we’re gonna stop. If it’s gonna be the same riddle, you’re gonna die inside. I’m 47 but I still feel like I’m 21! That’s the whole thing.

Edson: Our team is very strong. It’s not like we’re the boss and say, ‘you do this and you do that’. No. They come with ideas, which is what we want. Otherwise, we can’t live. And all this will sprinkle down to the younger generations. They’ll say, ‘look at these two black kids doing all this stuff. How do they do it?’ Because we have no investors, there is no one giving us the money. We work and we put our money back. That’s how we started Patta and that’s how we keep rolling. The only thing is that, of course, now we have more money. When we started, it was from zero to ten, ten to twenty, twenty to thirty, thirty to fifty. Now, we can easily talk about a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand. My man, you just bought a house! It’s crazy, that’s dope.

Edson: Of course, of course. But at the end of the day, it can go both ways.

Gee: Exactly, it can go both ways. It’s a quick business, you know. Buying a house or things like that are new certainties that we can start giving ourselves, but we’ve seen both sides of the coin. We’ve seen the side where we can buy a house, but we’ve also seen the other side where you think you’re going to lose everything. It is what it is. But we have fun still, which I think is important.

Gee: It’s how we go into every challenge. First, we discuss it together. I get approached or somebody pitches and idea to me, and then I explain Edson what is it about and what do I think. Then, he takes some time to also think about it and reflect on it. And then we decide. With Het Hem, what was really nice is that it was a conversation. Most of the things you see around here and how you experience them are the result of a dialogue. What is important for me? What is important for Edson? What are things essential to our characters, to the way we live, to what we think is exciting, to what we think good art is? What people are close to us? What people do we aspire to have here? We had very wide conversations. From there, we started putting things together and added pieces and pieces to the puzzle. It’s been very close teamwork between the curator, Rieke, and the director, Kim.

Gee: I can simply say that if I hadn’t come in contact with hip hop, I wouldn’t have been doing this. A hundred per cent sure. It opened so many doors to me! Hip hop to me is contact. I remember some rappers saying, ‘hip hop to me is like a place to be’. That’s the way I look at it. It’s so all around me that, sometimes, I don’t even want to talk with it anymore. I love it more than I can even express.

Edson: It’s deeply rooted. Also, the basic thing in hip hop is making something from nothing. That’s the basic principle. That’s what we’ve done here; that’s why it’s so wide and open. Hip hop is far wide open and influences the whole world. We wanna try to show people that hip hop is not only about golden chains and the bling; it’s more intellectual. Like Gee said, it’s around us all the time. The only thing is that we need to explain it to the world. And with Het Hem, we’ve done that. It’s beautiful!

Gee: Knowledge is power. Read, investigate, find your own voice. In this day and age, with all the information that there is and with so many things that can influence you, I think one of the most important things is to find your voice. And you do that by asking questions, looking around, being curious. By being open to other cultures, by travelling and by investigating, you get to find who you are.

Edson: Yeah, it’s one of the most important things for me too.

Gee: For a lot of that world, that might be something outstanding. But to us, it’s not more than what we deal with every day.

Edson: Yeah, that’s normal (laughs).

Gee: We are it.

Edson: We grew up with that. We grew up with a lot of gay friends, black friends, but also Hispanic friends, white friends; we grew up together! So for us it’s normal. We’ve been hanging around with women not because we wanna fuck with them, no; just talk, have discussions, etc. because we are curious. We go to different countries and we wanna learn more. We’re like a sponge. Like Gee said, this is us, it’s normal. And it should be normal for everybody.

Gee: I think it’s a goal. Of course, all the things you stated you should change and we understand that this is special because it’s done differently. But our goal is to normalize all these things. 

Edson: If everything is normalized, we can go to the essence. Who’s the best in this or that? People won’t ask, ‘oh, why is this gay guy exhibited here? Or this woman? Maybe they…’ No, we don’t think like that. We go with it because we think that they’re the best at what they do. If it’s a girl, ok, it’s a girl; if it’s a gay guy, ok, it’s a gay guy. Who gives a flying fuck? Be the best! We don’t even look at colour. But that’s their minds; our mind is different. If you just take a little bit of our mind, then you will probably grow. Everybody will grow. And at the end of the day, we will all learn.

Gee: The people we aspired to be were a little bit further – Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, fucking Frank Rijkaard. And then, maybe there were other people like a newsreader, but also very far away (and very few, only one or two). But this is everywhere. With teachers also. Or you go to the city council and think, ‘where are your people?’ Now, times are changing, so it’s important for people to have role models that are aspiring and touchable.

Gee: Team Patta, man, that’s our community! (Laughs) That’s what it is bro. No, listen. I like all these communities, so with that, I try to build my own. What I do is pick the people I find nice or that we can really connect with, and we form a team. And that’s a community that we form. For me to say, ‘I’m only of the hip hop community’ would be limiting, and I don’t like to limit myself.

Edson: And you put yourself in a box. But basically, we’re all just human. That’s the culture. Team Patta is our own culture, we have our own lane; if you wanna get on board, ok, then we need to talk. If you wanna be on board for the wrong reasons, we’re gonna let you go off. Bring something to the table. If you bring something to the table, we can roll together and we can build this whole community for the kids. A lot of people ask, ‘why don’t you make the strip logo, make a million of those and just get the money?’ Or get an investor. And I can’t name them, but we have many investors interested because they think that what we do is cool. But we can’t do it because then it would die. What we’re building is gonna die if we do that. Sometimes we struggle but we know what we’re doing it for.

Gee: It’s accepted now, it’s part of popular culture in that sense.

Gee: To me, personally, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll just do what I do anyway. It’s nice that people do it, but I don’t have anything to do about it. To me, whether you wear sneakers or sandals or high heels doesn’t really change what I do. The product is the product, but we do so much more than that. This type of things that we do (like this exhibition) are what gives the product life. A brand is also what’s behind it, what’s its backbone – music, culture, interests, etc. Maybe when we started Patta in 2004 our motives weren’t exactly the same as they are now, but we’ve learned and keep learning along the way. We travel, we meet people, we live new experiences and have new ways of looking at things.

Edson: It’s a cycle. Two years ago, you couldn’t go with sneakers inside a club. Now, you have to have the best ones! And to me, this is funny. And it can keep changing in the next ten years. Right now, what we ask for is to have fun.

Gee: I can very much say that, for one, we are pretty accessible. You’ll see us all engaging among the people of our community or the people that we work with. We just go there, organize stuff, we’ll be chilling. That’s not something special; it’s how we’ve always been. But that’s also because it comes from within. Edson is a DJ, so he plays still. And I’ve always been organizing parties or bringing people together, so that’s what I still do. You can’t say that about many companies – the owners being at the party and then going up and play some records; they hire other people to do that.

Gee: We’ve existed for fifteen years, so we’re gonna definitely have a couple of more surprises this year. People are gonna be shocked, which is fine because we like that. For us, it’s just a matter of keep doing what we’re doing now. We need to keep it together and just keep going.

Edson: The production is already done; we’re no busy for 2021. We wanna do more stuff with the foundation and the soundsystem. We’re just back from Nigeria, and Gee and I were talking about doing a tour in Africa maybe. We just did the Patta Asian tour, where we brought everything we have to Asia – the soundsystem as well as the running team, etc. We’re constantly seeking how to do more. As said in the beginning: no more excitement, we die. And we don’t want that.