EACH SEED that we plant can lead to exchange

Dear Saskia,

It is Tuesday, February 11th and I am in a theater space, sitting around a table with twenty-five other people when your email drops into my mailbox. Two days ago, you asked me if I wanted to write something about your short film 'the seeds of Simili' and there it is, the only thing I have to do is click the Url. I am curious but unable to leave the table or watch the work with attention.

During lunchbreak, fed up with all social chattering and networking, I withdraw from the group, and into a little corner with my noise-canceling headphones, in a half-dark theater space, I make a small cocoon and press play.

I feel a rush through my body, and I have to fight against the urge to PrintScreen the images or to write down every sentence you speak. They all matter equally. There is but the essence, and the rest happens inside my body, where energy moves and shakes between my head and toes. A short and internal earthquake emerges: tiny but sustained in time. I carry the work with me for several days like a stone in my pocket, a treasure found along the way, with which I am not sure yet what to do, except to carry it with me a little longer.

–

Over the past seven days, some of your images unexpectedly passed my mind. The tab with your movie has been open since that first screening as a continuous invitation. Its whispering softly asks me to return, as a siren song distracting each browse.

Today, I finally surrender to the siren song and watch the seeds of Simili with the care and attention it deserves. The birds and the winds call for my attention, they demand me to become fully present with those mountains in front of me. They give me the time to land, there where you are.

Your camera slowly guides my eyes over the surface of a stone wall, yet it feels as if my hand brushes the surface. The light grey cement lines, holding stones of all kinds of sizes and form together in a distinct pattern, reassure me you are there. This slightly diagonally tracking shot immediately addresses your architectural interest that spins through your work. In between its lines, I can see the fish grate flooring you puzzled with glass wool, the plastic plug that became a skyscraper before your photo-camera, and the wall you build from vintage jewelry boxes. As I think of these boxes, a hand-painted wooden example appears on a desolate road, on a rock, as the ones the house is made out of. Your voice draws me in. It addresses me with a story I might have taken part in but seem to have forgotten.

–

You time and again question how to make a home? And your suggestion seems to slowly take shape over the works you make. The close-ups of the hands unpacking these beautiful seeds guided by your voice place the spectator on the opposite side of the wooden tabletop, our heads only a few inches apart. In the unfolding, I recognize this beautiful way how jewelers, like my grandfather, care(d) for the precious resources they are about to work with, by wrapping them with tissue paper in a very particular way. He used to carry those packages in the chest pocket of his shirt, unnoticeable for others. Your voice addresses how our ignorant consumption of resources nowadays lacks gratitude, or any sense of preciousness, but in turn became ignorant for what the earth grows and gives us.

With the seeds of Simili you listened to the conversation of a place ‘in a language that is not your own’ (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2), the language of the winds, the mountains, the seeds, and those who live with and among them for many years, being it plants, birds or seeds. You question what we can learn from them.

In The Democracy of Species, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the wonderful story about the word Puhpowee she encountered in the writings of the Anishinaabe ethno-botanist Keewaydinoquay: “Puhpowee, she [Keewaydinoquay] explains, translates as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.’ As a biologist, I [Kimmerer] I was stunned that such a word existed”(3). You transmitted your listening to those languages and similarly to Kimmerer, you make painfully tangible how we unlearned the words and gestures of urgency, care, and preciousness that understand ‘a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything’ (Kimmerer 3). Both for you as for Kimmerer the only way to cultivate a home seems to be by taking ‘honorable harvest’ (Kimmerer 24) at heart.

You are both women with baskets to whom it matters how it is filled (Kimmerer 28) and who are eager to discover and implement the knowledge of traditional harvesters and sowers in a sustainable practice of building lifeways and homes.

At the heart of The Seeds of Simili, you invite me into a poetic, to become “inhabited by deep imaginings- visual and verbal, auditory and tactile – that we reinhabit in our own unique way” (Kearney xix). You share your twelve seeds for a home: clay, stone, wood, metal, water, apple, mirabelle, textile, lemon, bread, rosemary, and wind. I can taste each of these materials in the pauses between your words and sense how such a home would slowly unfold over time and across generations—through recipes that can only be passed down in the doing.

Due to your questioning at the beginning of the movie about how our world and living would change if nothing can be extracted but everything needs to be grown, it is as if you only suggest that kind of home, as if you plant the seed without knowing if it will take root or get lost in between the rocks. In doing so, you make palpable our scale and the serendipity of our existence, set against the shadow of a slower yet far more powerful geological timeframe—one in which we can, or perhaps should, be nothing more than humble.

The inclusion of bread reminds me of how, during wartime, sourdough starter was dried and carried along the road, telling stories of migration through its evolving taste when revived upon arrival. Your selection of materials is bound to the place where you resided while making this movie, yet it carries within it thousands of stories—of how these materials arrived there and how the environment, along with its inhabitants, has changed over the years.

Your unfolding home swells like a nest shaped by its surroundings. In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard compares the house to the nest. For him, a nest is a home built from the inside out, becoming “a swelling fruit, pressing against its limits” (121). In today’s world, the nest seems to have burst far beyond its boundaries. But can we begin again? Though you hesitate, the seeds of Simili testifies to your understanding that a home—a nest—“is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming […]” (Bachelard 122). Not necessarily about security, as Bachelard suggests, but about a way of living that has long been forgotten or overshadowed by human greed and excess.

I feel compelled to write more about how the seeds of Simili connects with Heidegger’s notions of the hut and Heimat—and yet, also alters them. But at this moment, I cannot quite articulate it sharply enough. So, I will leave you with one last quote from Bachelard, which, for me, encapsulates where our practices meet—especially in our shared love for everyday materials and speculative what if constellations:

“With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world. From then on, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and a simple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world” (Bachelard 153).

I hope to write to you soon.

With love,

Leonie

Welcome to the land of Saskia Van der Gucht & Leonie Persyn. Here, we explore how planting and growing seeds into each other's practices can lead to a fruitful collaboration where the seeds act and react and nurturing is the work.

After receiving your letter I've been thinking of ways to translate the seeds into materials and gathered objects throughout my house.

A wall in a toolshed also came to mind, what if these materials are tools to build something else?

A parable of paraboles
visualizing a possible relation between The Seeds of Simili

EACHSEED

I've been wondering if I could ask someone else to write about 'the seeds of Simili', a short film I've made in collaboration with Matthias Kreuzburg, filmed in Idanha-a-Velha, Portugal in the summer of 2024.

Your question about what kind of soil do seeds need in order to grow stayed with me.
I once came across the sentence "Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existance to a six inch layer of top soil and the fact that it rains." apparently it was Paul Harvey, a U.S radiohost, who said this on a 1970's show called 'The Rest of the Story'.

- January 2025

- May 2025

- June 2025

- July 2025

- June 2025

- July 2025

- May 2025

This image can grow smaller again if it becomes too big compared to everything else

Hi Leonie,

I hope you are well.
I made some changes to our shared corner of the internet here. I tried to make the design of the introduction a bit calmer and changed 'nurturing' into 'growing' as the last sentence mentions nurturing as well.

I changed the captions over the images from descriptive to a dialogue between you and me as we discussed the last time we talked.

I've added dates to show the passage of time and they also help group certain images together.

Your voice and mine have a different font, mine is the default one (it does not mention a name) and yours is the one you chose for your first letter, called 'DejaVuSansMono', it's the second to last, so nine clicks on the font button.

These other post-it like notes could be a temporary tool and we can delete them later. Or leave them up to guide the reader.

- June 2025

m4a

Dear Saskia,

Although I took on the voice of a dramaturg in my previous letter on your work, I nevertheless needed some poetic and visual imagery of my experience to get a grip on how to move on. I took the freedom to work with some images or phrases from 'The Seeds of Simili'.

So, while you have been experimenting with tools and carrier bags, I have been drawing parabolas, writing a poem, and making some photographs in an attempt to understand how the seeds relate to one another, why that door fascinates me some much and what it is that moves me in your work.

- July 2025

In the grid of the paraboles I found the corner of a door, that resembles the door to my atelier

- July 2025

She told me a story about a sower, and I could feel the wind on my skin as it came through the front door. It didn’t need the three steps as it could pass through the slightest crack. Every time I tried to retell her story, I could describe it no better than: c’était doux comme un souffle. A long and sustained whistle, slowly rising and falling in tone, resounded in my body in the most unexpected moments.

The wind came home and amplified the song silently hummed by the hillside. For years, she listened to that lullaby when she couldn’t fall asleep; it was what made this place her home.

Mornings arrived, and evenings lingered.
I forgot about her story and the song.

At least for a while.

Weeks later, I found some seeds in the hallway and helped them find ground.

And if I multiplied that door, it became the floor plan of an atrium

- July 2025

Dear Saskia,

Your work with carrier bags made me wonder how we not only pack our seeds, but also our words, and that packing always needs to be done with care.

In the Roman Empire, the atrium was a place where food was packed to be preserved, where it was stirred with care, where it fermented, and was stocked for the time being.

It was a space both private and public, yet intimate and soothing.

Dear Saskia,

Your experiments constantly bring to mind Ursula K. Le Guin's book 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'. Maybe we should (re)read it together one day?

P.S.: How wonderful does she look, smoking the pipe?

Ursula K. Le Guin (Photo: Media / Getty Image)

- October 2025

Dear Saskia,

After a well-deserved holiday break, we recently had some calls on the first steps we took in this collaboration. We questioned its form and discussed several formats before finding this way of interacting. It wasn't easy to find a form that allowed for an efficient and honest way of working and communicating.

During the short period of time between June and October we already touched upon an essence of what it means to collaborate. We learned to express our expectations and needs.

I am happy you found the courage to address how you struggled with how my drawings make use of the seeds of simili and the visualization of parabole. I want to repeat here that for me it was nothing more than a way to get a grip on things, a detour to find what more or else I could bring to the table.

I think it is time now for me to find the courage to dive into my own artistic practice and let my artistic voice exist on its own next to my dramaturgical one. So, in the upcoming month, I will, on the one hand, return to the original letter and to my own research titled 'What if a Spoon Could Hum?'

- October 2025

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it stir?
Would it scoop?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it spill the tea of a Royal banquet or transmit the warmth of all hands by which it has been held?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would I sense it?
Would I hear it?
Would I feel it?
Would I taste it?
Would I hum along?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would you sense it.
Would you hear it?
Would you feel it?
Would you taste it?
Would we hum along?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it tell a story about how the hand meets the mouth?
Would it function as a pitchfork for the engagement of bodies and objects in intimate and tactile stories of living together?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it invite us to listen?
Would it whisper or scream on the top of its lungs?

What if a spoon could hum?
What stories would it share about those who used it before you, about the sensations of their tongues, or about the times they attempted to balance it on their nose?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it resound how it used to be part of a tree or rather reproduce the hammering of the blacksmith and the burning fire?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it stir?
Would it scoop?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would we scoop or stir along, or use it like we do today?

If a spoon could hum
Imagine you're listening,

Self-portrait with spoons

- October 2025

Dear Saskia,

For a few months now, I have been wondering how an honorable harvest of energy could take shape.

You introduced me to this wonderful work of Valentina Schlegel when I was talking about how spoons used to be made of shells.

- March 2025

Her approach helped me find courage.

- October 2025

Dear Saskia,

Now that I re-read these words, there is a strange serendipity at work: Schlegel talks about the closed garden, a place where she received friends and guests. Her garden was private yet public, intimate and soothing, just like the atrium. It was a (work)space that mediated between inner spaces and the world.

I would love to re-read it, I actually have two copies of it at home; the small purple edition gifted by a friend. And loose copies on yellow paper advised by a teacher of mine. So you're not the first person to link my work with hers, yet it makes me happy you do too.

Did you ever read 'The Dispossessed'?

http://atticus.loganmillswalters.com/post/182250709294/ursula-k-le-guins-daily-schedule

- November 2025

This might be the first carrier bag I have ever made. I do not remember how old I was, however the sloppiness on the stitches would have me guessing no older then 10. The fabric is quilted - arguably too thick for its size - which gives it an interesting softness and volume and its color has faded strongly over time. It has a fine string attached, making it somehow wearable.
It now hangs next to my bathroom mirror and holds a small collection of objects; a tiny glass lightbulb, an earring found under the bathtub previously owned by my sister, a locket with a photo so precious to me I would rather keep it in the house. A yellow ring my godchild gave to me with the word 'love', it is so kitch that even with a background in jewellery design, I would wear it if it was my size. A piece of yarn belonging to a scarf in Germany, a brass and green enamel hand of Fatima charm and a pink stitch of fabric of which I have forgotten its significance.

- November 2025

El Badi Palace, Marrakesh

The walls are build in pisé-cement, made of red clay and chalk. The holes are remnants from wooden scaffolding and in current times still used for repairs and by birds nesting in them.

- November 2025

Dear Leonie,

I want to talk to you about this courage.

About how often fear and insecurity holds us back from saying, writing, making something.

How do you find courage? When and where do you find it?

How can we find it in other people's work and how can we help each other find it?

In 'Co-Art: Artists on Collective Collaboration' by Ellen Mara De Wachter there is an interview with a artist duo called Forsyth Pollard where they state "The choices we make are navigated by excitement and fear. Is it exciting? Yes. Are we frightened? Yes. Good, we're moving forward."

In the last week of October 2025 I helped organise a construction camp for children age eight to fourteen. By building their own huts and camps with real tools, cooking over open fire, carving spoons out of wood and plates out of clay, they engage in risky play and learn to trust their own ideas, bodies and abilities. They work with their hands and autonomously form teams, communicate with each other as their projects become parts of a whole. While planning the program of the camp and discussing the methods and themes, the word 'geborgenheid' and the question 'How to make a home' present themselves again.
Difficult to translate to English or French, as 'security' seems to be too broad and does not hint at space or shelter in the same way. To my delight I recently learned that the German 'geborgenheit' only differs in its last letter.

Weather forecasts predicting rain compelled us to come up with indoor activities. We thought of making necklaces with symbols for each day task on the rotating schedule (waterbringers, woodgetters, terrainkeepers and so on) and made natural dye from acorns, avocado pit and onion peel to color textile and thread. This is how I was introduced to a new tool: behold, a rope maker.

- November 2025

My notes and my thoughts are scattered when it comes to collective collaboration.
I'm preparing a class on it called:

One of my preparatory assignments for students is to borrow a tool from school that they have never used before. They borrow it for three weeks, use it for two prior to class and then bring it with them. I want to organise a conversation through these tools, similar to the one I had in Portugal in the summer of 2023 when 'the seeds of Simili' was made. The context then was a residency with Movimento, a collaborative cinema lab, open to anyone interested in film experimentation. One of the first conversations we had there with a group of thirty-five participants was on tools. What did we bring and what did we want to share with others?

One of the ways in which I am preparing for this class is by borrowing a tool from a friend which I was unfamiliar with and bringing it to class as well.

'How to grow one millimeter'
a class on collaborations, curiosity and collective care

This class is inspired by lichen; an ancient species of algae that collaborates with bacteria and fungi to help each other grow and survive. Understanding how they work together challenges the traditional western ways of seeing life driven only by competition and individualism, and argues to include collaboration.

We will work with gathered ideas and processes of mutual aid, non-competitive work, co-creation, collaboration and sharing, guided by principles of self-organisation.
The week is shaped in collaboration with the participants, by mapping the different skills and needs present in the group. From there we connect the different themes that run through your individual projects, we nourish the ground you need for your artistic practice or focus on detailed aspects you need help with.

We will learn to work with technical tools that are available at school, but that are unfamiliar to us. We will organize our thoughts through analogue writing. We will use urban waste foraging as a methodology to connect to the ecology of the city and find new materials, possibly making them into small talismanic objects, to carry in our pockets and pass on to one another.

- November 2025

'16.8 kg of sand' was stocked on display 3 weeks ago during our second iteration of the exhibition 'We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground', November 2025

image source: Dreamstime royalty free stock photo
www.marrakech-riad.co.uk/2015/01/the-mysterious-holes-in-the-walls-of-marrakech

custom pegboard by klolab.com

'Swallow Nests' 2024, an image from last year on a walk at the Baltic Sea side

- November 2025

Of nets and spoons?

image from an EOS insider newsletter article by Kim Verhaeghe

Swifts finding a home in 'het Faunahuis' in Zegelsem, Belgium

Dear Saskia,

How bizarre, you bring up swallows and swifts, as they have been tracing me over the past months. They accompanied me in a book by Ilija Trojanow, which I read this summer; they had a pivotal function in a PhD I had to evaluate, and they swirled around in one of my favourite artworks of the last few years by Ant Hampton. However, such coincidences make me a bit suspicious, I am nevertheless very happy to welcome them with utmost care.

Dear Saskia,

How bizarre, you uploaded these references to swifts and swallows. Over the past months, these creatures seem to have followed and crossed my path regularly. They have been swirling around in a book by Ilija Trojanow that I was reading last summer, just as they have played a crucial role in a PhD about playwriting I had to evaluate. Furthermore, they were very prominently present in one of my favorite artworks of the last few years by Ant Hampton, on which I was writing last December.

Fragment from Ilija Trojanow's book 'Vlucht'.

The image you posted of the nests in the rock formation made me think of Werner Herzog's documentary 'The White Diamond', in which, and you might guess it already, swallows play a crucial role. They nest behind this major waterfall. This documentary has been close to my heart for over 15 years, and I could never really pinpoint why. Since you posted your images, I rewatched this film twice, and I still did not figure it out, Although it might have something to do with the fragment below.

Dialogue and Stills from 'The White Diamond' by Werner Herzog.

"Just think about it that you have 7 900 miles of rock below you, wherever you are sitting on the planet. You have 7900 miles of rock. Imagine that huge amount of rock. I jump, gravity is a force that pulls me down, you can’t escape it unless you have something like a helium balloon or wings like those swifts. Those swift have a beautiful Latin name, aero nautus. Isn’t that a beautiful name, the way they dive down, become weightless before they dive into those falls, isn’t that beautiful?"
(Graham Dorrington in 'The White Diamond')

Mountain climber, physicist dr. Michael Wilk is going down on a rope to see the mysterious nesting place of the swifts. (Werner Herzog)

How do locals view the cave? (Werner Herzog)

“If I had wings, one of the first things I would like to know is what is behind there (the waterfall), there is the home of the swift of the roosts. Nobody knows what is behind there. (...) We have stories, the legends that behind them are big snakes that protect certain treasures, like diamonds, gold, whatever. I mean, that is a legend that says that. (...)Don’t publish the footage, it would lose the whole essence about/of our culture, which tends to die away, we would lose it." (Local)

December 2025

Dear Saskia,

No, I did not read 'The Dispossessed', but you make me curious. For now, I would like to share the fragments/highlights from my reading of 'The Carrier Bag Theory', which resonated in some way with 'The Seeds of Simili'.

December 2025

Fragments from 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' by Ursula Le Guin

December 2025

In 'The Carrier Bag of Fiction' Le Guin not only talks about stories and/as carrier bags but also about harvesting and tools we make to bring energy inward. Like a spoon?

Did you know that Lupus patients express the amount of energy they have a day in spoons? It is known as the Spoon Theory.

It inspired me to start a material experiment with spoons out of sugar, which we tend to crave when lacking energy, but which does not really provide us with sustainable energy, rather gives us a rush.

December 2025

If I present my research project 'What if a Spoon could hum?' I always read the text I shared earlier, while folding a spoon.

December 2025

Folding them in aluminium foil brought back a memory of my grandmother, who was always folding the aluminium foil from the chocolate she had, while continuing the conversation. Sometimes it became a swirl, sometimes a tiny square. Or if she did it with the paper around an orange, it became a turtle. Suddenly, these folded spoons, although not usable, became very precious to me.

December 2025

The past month I have been experimenting with what one could call the origami of spoons.

December 2025

Dear Saskia,

Due to the book 'Considering the Fork', in which cutlery is considered as one of the first technologies, I started seeing it as a tool. Last time I had to describe something as a tool, I referred to the following description by antropologist Tim Ingold: "No object considere purely in and for itself, in terms of its intrinsinc attributes alone, can be tool. To describe a thing as a tool is to place it in relatioin to other things withing a fiield of activity in which it can exert a certain effect (...) thus to call an object a tool is to position it within the context of a story (...)

Dear Saskia,

What a wonderful new tool that is. Especially since I started climbing, I started looking at how beautiful a rope can be and how important the color balance is. That spike of a bright color. It looks like a very meditative activity and look very playful and welcoming.

to name the tool is to invoke the story." (Being Alive 56). The last time I used a new tool was when I started carving spoons from branches I found in the Park. But for the ones on the left, my hands became the tools, molding the clay. Can hands also be tools?

My favourite tool is this old hand drill, from my grandfather's goldsmithing workshop. It has a simple esthetic just like your rope making tool.

A Series of one-minute-spoons in clay, researching the archetype of the spoon.

Dear Saskia,

I do recognize this slightly unbalancing combination of excitement and fear. I can feel it in my body. It is a tingling feeling in my stomach. Each time I feel it, I know that is the way to go, or the thing to make. But there is still a difference between feeling it and starting to materialize the idea and experiment. I think collaboration is a good strategy to deal with this feeling and to actually activate and use that courage, because it is not only a way to share the joy of excitement but also the weight and the pull of fear.

The tool, then, is a way to occupy your brooding mind and start using your hands. One of the ways I have been keeping my mind from worrying and brooding over the past weeks is by drawing. Although I started with tools I knew very well, like pencils, your proposal to use new tools once in a while encouraged me to experiment with some low-key lithography. Maybe I'll show you some images later.

December 2025

I would love to see images of the things you make and are unsure about. I imagine they could spark some interesting conversation between us.

I've noticed our post-it like notes here sometimes slightly differ in size and shade of yellow. At first i though this would be something we need to fix or solve, but now i've come to enjoy it. As if they might be different brands or some have them have faded by being out in the sun too long.

This could also be a beautiful subtle way to show a passing of time, more recent notes are brighter.

Dear Leonie,

i'm struggling with working on this shared project of ours. I think it somehow hits too close to home. There is a lot of freedom, besides wanting to take turns each month working on it, there are no other requirements or restrictions we've given ourselves. I notice I'm postponing this work even though it is so dear to me.
I'm hoping to have a conversation with you about it when we meet at the park in Brussels in 1 hour.

- February 2026

For a project I've been working on with the collective Spring Pears that I'm part of, i was searching for ways to make an object that would reference 7 other objects. I ended up making a notebook out of rice paper.

I'm fascinated by the material qualities of this bio-degradable material and the unpredictability of the texture and shapes.

Small test patches curled up into bowls and I decided to try to make cutlery out of them.

The objects are light and fragile and have an otherworldy character which feels strange and delightful. The contrast with cutlery being a very culturally loaded and human-specific tool seems to add to their attractiveness.

I feel excited about this work and nervous to share it online, I became protective of it, because I think the esthetics might be appealing yet at the same time very different from any work that I have made before.

- excerpt from lyrics of 'Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen)' 1999 by Baz Luhrman

sociable weaver birds make collective nests

weaver ants stitch leaves together with silk

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Weaver_ants_%28Oecophylla_smaragdina%29_nest_in
_Kinnarsani_WS%2C_AP_W_IMG_6012.jpg

He goes on to say: "The bird uses its beak rather like a needle in sewing or darning; in this the trickiest part lies in threading the strip it is holding under another, transverse one so that it can then be bypassed over the next. The strip has to be pushed under, and through, just far enough to entangle the bird to let go with its beak in order to shift its hold and pull it up on the other side."

I remember when I first learned how to braid hair, that the most difficult part was to make sure you were still holding the two parts that you were not focused on while folding the third one over. I somehow often still feel like that, as if loosely using your pink and ring finger to hold on to parts that you will need later while using your index finger and thumb to precisely maneuver what's right in front of you is quite the challenge.

from the book 'Materiality' (2015) edited by Petra Lange-Berndt
in the Whitechapel Gallery series Documents of Contemporary Art

- June 2026

A woven carrier bag I made for M. It is filled with memories, references and small objects to keep them safe.

a. The Nahal Hemar twined ‘napkin’; b. Coiled floor mats from Jericho; c. Coiled container from Umm Dabaghiyah level III; d. Container of collagen-covered cordage from Nahal Hemar; e. Matting in basketry twill from Jarmo; f. Imprints of tabby-woven textiles from Jarmo.

https://kids.kiddle.co/Sociable_weaver

- June 2026

- woven copper object, 2007

In a paper titled 'Earliest Evidence for Textile Technologies' found on https://journals.openedition.org/paleorient/2479 I read how "Plant-based materials rarely survive, while stone, bone, ceramic and metal are more prominent in the archaeological record. Textiles, matting and basketry must have been ubiquitous objects that had an essential function in ancient society, while both their use and their production have been underrepresented." For me this connects back to Ursula Le Guin's carrier bag theory of fiction, in which she writes about the dominant story of the violent hero and his sword while pointing to the importance of different kinds of stories and different kinds of objects.
I think we look back at history thinking life was all hard and heavy and sharp, when all the tools we used that were made out of plant-based materials, all the softness and care is lost on us because we haven't seen and so do not remember the objects that carry these stories.

It's difficult to reconstruct all parts of our conversation, but on the train ride home I'm thinking we might have similar concerns and ideas about care.

Sitting together underneath the trees with a carafe of sparkling water and talking all kinds of work, material qualities, meaning, time and pace and how to navigate institutional hierarchies, all while watching you gently trying to help a small bug off my computer screen somehow reassures me that it's safe to share things with you.

How much do we share?
What do we want to keep to ourselves?
With what do we trust each other?

We talked about the vulnerability of sharing unfinished ideas.

You said that if I would start making spoons, this would feel too close to home for you. I heard you and I recognise the trickyness. Are these our soft white underbellies?

We talked about Valentin Schlegel living as an artist, her practice not separate from anything else. And how we both long for this kind of life and have doubt about it still being possible in today's world.

the piece I wrote for Grounds and which sparked our initial conversations was published. I will bring you a physical copy today.

loose thoughts:

When i procrastinate, sometimes things turn out a certain way for the better. (I feel this way with how our conversation happened after i did not pass on this work back to you in January but in June.)
I told you that i'm often wondering when it is enough, because I always feel like I could work harder and longer on things.
I realised during the adma course on artistic research that longer and harder doesn't always mean better. And that the "results" at a certain moment in time have certain qualities, coincedences and stories which could also have been lost when you would have worked longer and harder on them.

I'm wondering now whether subconsciously I was nervous to share this work with you because i did not want you to feel disheartened that I made a spoon too. I think I was more nervous someone else would use the material technique.

I don't think I was thinking about your spoons when I came up with the idea, a fried round rice paper looked like a plate or a bowl and the reference between food and cutlery happened.

I want to reassure you, but I also don’t want to say I’ll never make a spoon again.
I’m interested in spoons, however I don’t plan on doing research or making vast collections of them, and I’m very excited that you are.

Let’s speak our fears and stay in touch?

July 2026

Dear Saskia,

I wasn't quite sure where to begin my reply after our conversation in the park last week and your summary of it on those small Post-its. Then yesterday, while running through the park, I was stopped in my tracks by this bandaged beech tree. It happens every time I pass it. Each time, it moves me. It evokes, simultaneously, the tenderness and the urgency of care.

For me, it also somehow captures—or perhaps summarizes—what is unfolding here on these pages and within our collaboration. These trees are bandaged to prevent their sap from evaporating.

The bandages are essential to the tree's chances of survival. At the same time, they signal the tree's fragility and embody an attempt to sustain life, even when much of the damage has already been done.

The close-up quietly resonates with the imprints you posted. It is as if the bark were a fossilized record of the tenderness and the violence the tree has experienced throughout its life.

Later that afternoon, I read Silvia Benso's chapter on tenderness. I'd like to share a few excerpts with you, because I think they may offer a response to some of your questions.

tenderness discloses an oversoft flowing and floating consistency that enables it not to solidify into limits that soon become limitations. Not contourless, but contourfree, tenderness continuously shifts into the different spaciousnesses described by the Fourfold (earth and sky, divinities and mortals) in things, and lets itself be shaped by them. Incessantly moving and rearranging its boundaries, in its rigidity and yet mobility, tenderness is able to approach disparate things without ever losing the features that characterize it. Although always tending to a particular thing, tenderness can truly be applied to any thing; the realm of its action is in(de)finite.
.....
The measure for the quantitative and qualitative practice of tenderness is not in the one who is tender, but in things themselves, in their ability to host, or not to host, the Fourfold. Ultimately, the measure of tenderness is in how thingly a thing is.....Although tenderness is ethical, its ethicity cannot be fixated into a morality. Rather, tenderness is a challenge, the stake of which are things, and for mortals, the possibility of dwelling by the things, and thus being truly mortal.
.....
The vulnerability of tenderness, its precariousness and fragility correspond to the structure of things, which are themselves vulnerable, frail, always on verge of disappearing. And from this same vulnerability, precariousness, and fragility tenderness receives its strength and reinforcement. Since things are so frail and precarious, and hence precious, tenderness needs to be ever more tender. On the things' behalf, it needs to resist always ever more. But also, since tenderness itself is so belated, tenderness needs to always anticipate itself, and, again, make itself ever more tender. In the end, all tenderness is an occasion for ever new tenderness.
.....
tenderness is the access to the ethical place in which an encounter with things may happen.

-The Face of Things. A Different Side of Ethics (2000: 169-172)

July 2026

Lately, I've been writing a great deal during these evenings. There is a story I have been running from, one that has now begun to impose itself with quiet insistence. It is written in our mother tongue, which makes it feel strange to share here. Too intimate, perhaps.

Still, let me take that risk and share, nevertheless, the fragment in which the swallows unconsciously found their way into my writing.

Waar the fuck ben je?

Eerst kom je parmantig bij de deurpost zitten om je vervolgens dagen, weken, misschien wel maanden niet meer te laten zien. Ik vloek binnensmonds tegen de auto die geen plaats laat, tegen de kleutertantrums die elkaar in sneltempo opvolgen tot bewegingen steeds geaccentueerder worden en deuren slaan. Waarom kan je niet, zoals de zwaluwen, elke avond spelenderwijs langs vliegen?

Ik neem afstand, verdraag geen ander ademend lichaam in mijn buurt. ‘Laat me met rust’, schreeuw ik, terwijl in mijn hoofd al urenlang alleen maar AaAaaAaaaaAAAAaaaaaaaAAaaaAaa klinkt. Eigenlijk schreeuw ik tegen jou, maar enkel zij zijn er.

Waar the fuck ben je?

Ik krabbel verbeten op een blad papier. De punt van de balpen prikt gaten op het einde van ieder woord.

Waar the fuck ben je?

Ik schrap met meerdere lijnen boven elkaar.
Ik herschrijf en voeg toe, tot er evenveel zwarte blokken en bollen op mijn papier staan als woorden. Is het nog wel een tekst?

Mijn hoofd raast, mijn hand probeert te volgen, bijna onleesbaar.
Mijn vingertoppen trekken wit door de druk op mijn bic.
Tot ik schrijf:

Laat me met rust!

Er volgt een kleine ontspanning tussen mijn schouderbladen. Het rollen van de punt over het papier vertraagt. Voorlopig geen gaatjes meer.

Geen woorden.
Even teken ik lelijke bloemen, zo vul ik wel vaker een stilte op.

Dear Saskia,

Now that summer has arrived and I am spending more time on the balcony, I've noticed that every evening, around nine o'clock, swallows swirl through our neighbourhood. Their presence and their calls have become a defining part of what home feels like to me.

There is such lightness in the way they move. Somehow, they have become inseparable from that particular feeling of being home on a summer evening. They announce the moment when it is almost time to let go of the day.

July 2026

I have been blowing spoons in sugar. They looked like glass.

I did not only struggled to assemble them,

but also to preserve them. They melted due to the heat waves and the humidity.

but I was unable to preserve them, as they melted into each other due to the humidity and the warmth during these two heatwaves the past couple of weeks

July 2026

These are some of the small images I made for a story about taking refuge in a little shelter in the breast pocket of a shirt.

Dear Saskia,

I like the idea of using the colour of the Post-its to indicate the passing of time. I tried it here. Perhaps we should go back and change the colours of our previous Post-its in retrospect.

I'm happy to show you some of the lithographs I made. At the same time, I'm glad I kept them to myself for a while before sharing them.

Sharing them with you now brings me back to our first conversation. I remember telling you that I would love to make a project about breast pockets.

It's funny how I forgot about that idea, and yet it seems to have taken shape nonetheless.

Speaking of form, it dawns on me that, somehow, over the past months, form has so often become stories.

With both the reappearance of the breast pocket and the emergence of storytelling as a form, I find myself amazed once again by the timing of ideas and by how they cannot be forced. They find their own way, in their own time.

Dear Saskia,

I'm not going to lie—it does feel a little strange that you made a spoon.

That said, what I sense in your images is that your interest lies less in the spoon itself than in the material. I say this because there is more happening in the fried square of rice paper, which resembles cotton or fabric, than in the pieces where you imposed a distinct form. It has something nurturing, almost nest-like. A materiality that I recognize from your earlier work. It reminds me of Welcome (2015), the glass wool object resembling a fishbone parquet floor.

It also brings to mind Maquette 3.1 (2016), a sheet made from the white ribbed ties that come with freezer bags, and Gevelleien, a small object made of synthetic silk, thread, and balsa wood.

The feeling I had when I saw the cutlery was very similar to what you described: not wanting someone else to use your material or your form. And yet, there is something about that feeling of fear that seems to point us in exactly the opposite direction. It tells us to stay with it—to keep working with the material, in your case, or with spoons, in mine.

A few months ago, I made this little catapult spoon for my daughter,

using a branch shaped like the initial of her first name. It became a very precious object to me and, instead of ending up in her toy trolley, it found its way onto the project wall in my little atelier.

Let me show you a picture of it, because its placement—which happened almost by accident—beautifully illustrates how coming (too) close to each other's practices can lead to something entirely different, even if only through a visual resonance.

For me, it is also important to keep that initial drawing, in which you shared for the first time your doubt and the fear involved in showing work in progress.

It reminds me, every day, of the intention with which I want to approach this project: one of softness and trust, but also of looking fear in the eye; of giving space to the things that initially scare me, and of offering you a space that is equally soft and open to negotiation, where you can do the same.

It is good that even from and with that fear, we keep encountering each other.

July 2026

Unbaked paperclay

July 2026

Unbaked black clay and white paper clay

July 2026

Unbaked black clay

July 2026

Last week, the heart of a gerbera daisy fell from the bouquet. It made me think of you. I have left it where it fell; it seems too beautiful to throw away. It reminded me of this fragment on tenderness.

Dear Saskia,

Before handing this page back to me to work on during the month of July, you told me how curious you were about the sonic aspect suggested by the question, What if a spoon could hum? For now, I can only say that I am curious too.

I haven't really ventured into it yet, partly because of a certain kind of fear—perhaps a form of imposter syndrome. What I did do, back in November 2024 when I started this project, was write a number of stories about spoons, some of them from the spoon's perspective. While I wait for the sound to emerge, let me tell you the first story I wrote.

Dear Saskia,

How funny that you shared an excerpt from this particular song. When I was writing these stories back in November 2024, as a response to the question What if a spoon could hum?, this song was part of my soundtrack. It has become very dear to me, not only because of its message, but also because of the way it weaves spoken word and music together.

After our latest conversation, you also sent me a link to Kae Tempest's The Book of Traps and Lessons.

I told you that I find it difficult to listen to. You asked, "Does it hit too close to home?", which was also how you described this project. I answered, "I think so." But I'm still not entirely sure, because I do miss lightness in what he does.

I think it has something to do with the way they compel me to listen. When one of their songs comes on, I can't do anything else, because every word matters, and then there is their sense of rhythm.