Noortje Haegens | for a while | 2022

The walk is the starting point of my work. It is the slowest way to travel. This gives me all the time to optimally observe the environment I am traveling through. This way I can really be in contact with the place where I am. As I walk, I experience a slowdown in my perception, returning to the power of silence. The work I make consists of photos and videos in which I try to capture my experience of the landscape. This simplicity plays an important role in my work. Central point is the delay of perception: in much of my video work there is hardly any movement. The duration of the endless repetition is important. As if time is stopped to give the viewer the opportunity to dream away and experience a timelessness in his or her hectic existence. Only a plume of smoke or a ripple in the water makes the image move, the rest stands still – or vice versa. The medium of film gives me the opportunity to play with reality and I try to make it a translation of my poetic experience. I set out as blank as possible, without a concrete goal. Wandering when walking is essential. While walking, the contact and / or idea arises and I often go back to a specific place to further explore a feeling.

Ying Liu | 108,883 | March 2022

During her residency at Witte Rook last year, Ying Liu’s way of devoting herself to her intuïtive ideas made a lasting impression, which led Jorieke and thereby us as a team to invite her for ‘long stories, short films’.

Ying Liu about this work: “Since one of my housemates moved out, I started to use the room he left as a meditation space before the next tenant comes. During the three weeks occupation in that empty room, I counted grains of approximately 3 kilos of jasmine rice. By sitting on the floor each day for hours and putting the grains one by one into separate piles in which each consisted of 1000 grains of rice, after in total 11 days of counting, I got to know that there were about 108.883 grains of rice in the plastic tray.”