Notes on my practice, May 2025
Sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep, I think about rooms or spaces and I imagine what they would look like at t hat specific moment. All the spaces that come to my mind are most likely to be devoid of any human presence, depending on the time of daydreaming: the studio, the dentist’s office, the movie theatre. They have been pulled out of their daily functions (someone turned off the lights and the usual sounds that characterize the place are not present anymore) and just exist, waiting for the next day to dawn and for the theatrics of daily life to unfold once again. After establishing a mental image about what that space would look and feel like, dark and empty, I think about where in that room I would snuggle up with my blanket, and fall asleep.
There is something consoling to me about the idea of a space existing regardless of what occurs in it. It doesn’t judge or attach - it provides height, width and depth within which all sentient beings can move. Visualizing these spaces is a moment of meditation. At the border between sleeping and being awake, I imagine these rooms not being perceived. Similar to my own bedroom at that moment: I am about to become unaware of the space around me and instead drift off into my subconscious mind.
The studio is naturally an important space for me. In this small, dimly-lit room, my face is illuminated by the monitor of my computer on which I create digital spaces in 3D animation software. These rooms serve as both backgrounds and actors in my films: the staircase, the door, the walls, and the events they (pretend to) carry. In this digital realm, I am able to endlessly copy paste these weightless, fleeting spaces, which essentially consist out of numbers and data on my computer: not unlike the imaginative spaces that occur to me as projections in my sleepy brain. The lack of materiality in both these situations reveal that it is not about these rooms: I am rather interested in the sensory, bodily experience of perceiving them, and how that can affect the way I feel.
The rooms in my films are surrounded by domestic sounds coming from the other room: footsteps, clashing cutlery, slamming doors, the sound of a piano being played, sometimes even a cough. Small fragments from a narrative that never fully reveals itself, but that shapes and is shaped by a cinematic structure that allows for a somewhat calming, somewhat uncanny space for the spectator to reside in.
My own futile attempts to grasp that narrative is what drives my practice. These attempts make up an ongoing dialogue I'm having with the work itself: a continuous process in which I create, then deconstruct this creation, only to create from that deconstruction again, whether or not in a different medium from what it was originally made in. To exhaust the image, to exhaust the moment.