2025

Holding Space through Empty Form

An inquiry into origins and ways of being

1. Starting from Existence

This research began with a question that echoes through much of my work:
What remains when we strip away every structure to the essence of being?

I’m searching for a way of being in this world, in this life. A way that reaches deeper than organised, material, or popularised life can offer.

Originally, my research started as an exploration of interactive, origin-rooted rituals, searching for a way to reshape my artistic practice existing out of the building of sculptures, installations, and performances. But as I went along, I abandoned that course. I felt the urge to go deeper, to zoom in. That’s when I turned to Zen, not as a religion or aesthetic, but as a practice. A way of being.

I started noticing how certain Zen characteristics, like emptiness, naturalness, and asymmetry, not only shaped the way I presented my work, but also how I thought, saw, and moved through the world.

2. Emptiness and Origin

I became fascinated by emptiness: not as absence, but as a quiet field of potential.

At the same time, I returned to a long-standing question: Where does everything begin? And how do these beginnings shape our way of living?
Creation myths and scientific stories alike give shape to how we live. I found myself drawn to the image of zero — a point of origin, a holding space, a possibility. 0 = 1-1.  1 splits itself, becoming 2, 2 becomes 4, and so on. But where does 1 come from? How can one appear from a zero-space? How can something come from emptiness and return to it? 

This reflection culminated in the proposal No-Mind: Holding Space through Emptiness — a subtle scenographic work in nature. An open, meditative memorial space. A place to be. 

Read more about this in The Box, where every layer is carefully laid out.  

3. Where Meaning Emerges

In the final months, I found a missing thread: zingeving (meaning-making).
Not a fixed meaning, but a way of responding to life’s deeper questions — attentively, gently, in process.

In Zen, meaning isn’t something to be constructed or held onto. It arises, like a breath, from being-with: with space, with silence, with materials, with others, with oneself. 

Zen and zingeving met in the quiet gestures of this research.
Not as systems of belief, but as forms of attention. My practice became a way of making meaning not by defining, but by holding space for it to emerge. 

4. What Comes Next

This research became a terrain I can return to — a place that orients without fixing.

It feels like zingeving has closed the circle. It turned out to be a keystone – not only in my research, but also in my personal life. In acknowledging my own struggles with meaning-making, I found a framework that both grounds me and opens new pathways. 

Two directions, in particular, are unfolding:

– Giving form to what has been gathered, through new spatial works, installations and interactions, grounded in the above.
– I’ll Bring You Blue Skies — a follow-up project connecting artistic practice with zingeving in care contexts, especially for people in existential crisis. A shared space for holding what cannot be answered.

Later, more about that.