Anne Rombach

Again and again, I am drawn to imagine the seemingly impossible, the invisible and the unknown, to test meaning versus meaninglessness, to find a way to love what both fascinates and scares me, such as paradoxes, contradictions and uncertainty. I investigate my personal relationship with the unknown – and discover my own nature, potential, and validity, instead of fighting restrictions.

People often look up when they’re thinking, or narrow their eyes as if focusing on something in the distance. ‘Thinking’ is very often tied to ‘seeing’. “I see” is what you say when you understand something. “I see” is what I said when I focused on nothing – “finally,” I said, “finally I see something.”

In this sense, stumbling upon ‘something’ while focusing on another thing became a repetitive pattern in my practise. I try to welcome it instead of avoiding it. The result is that I’m becoming more connected to the world around me as opposed to living in the illusive place of thoughts essentially. I often felt heavy, but when I focused on nothing I could easily lift off, as if I had all of a sudden lost imaginary ballast. Nothing has changed and become something concrete to work with.

I realised how profoundly the system of language and symbols controls my perception. I deconstruct it, and intentionally misunderstand it, welcoming slips of the tongue and other linguistic accidents. I let different languages and meanings meet, thereby discerning between the tool and the trap that the world of language and thought can be. Deconstructing language can be mind and sense opening. It shows the limits of our linguistic world and the immense indescribable, unknown and empty space between the lines with which we interact.