Imagine a person walking ahead of you. Who would it be? Their steps are light. They are walking faster than you, and the distance between you grows and grows. But you have entered a meadow, so it won't be easy to lose sight of them. They stop and look up at the mountains. You stop and look down at the forest. When you turn around, they are looking at you.

You climb on, following a trail that appears and disappears in the grass, and you don't stop until their expression is no longer a blur. They wipe the sweat from their forehead and ask, 'Are you tired? Do you want to keep going?' They look at your face and say, 'Yes, you do. Okay.' It takes you a minute to catch your breath, your heart pounding, and you think about what you will shout from the mountaintop.

Seven people, including me, settle around a kotatsu, a heated Japanese table that people sit around on cushions. Many Japanese households have one in their living rooms during the winter. Up to seven people gather, including me, and we drink tea and eat mandarins as I read out loud. The story takes the act of sitting and different types of seating in our homes as a starting point to look at how we inhabit our living space. The use of space is informed by work and leisure, social time and alone time, and considerations of function intersect with culture.

I reflect on the ways in which our surroundings shape our personalities and vice versa through the lens of growing up in Vancouver in a Japanese family. The story meanders through my grandmother’s house in Japan, my homes in Canada and Belgium, and invites you to imagine the sights and sounds of each place. Along the way, I encourage you to evoke places in your memory and linger.

In this project, I collaborated with people living with incurable diseases at TOPAZ, an outpatient clinic for supportive and palliative care founded by Wim Distelmans and affiliated with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Over the course of two years, I visited TOPAZ about once a month, sharing techniques from my artistic practice. Guests (TOPAZ’s term for patients) were invited to participate, sometimes in small groups and sometimes one-on-one. Gradually, I sensed that many guests longed for a holiday – a temporary escape from daily struggles.

Since physical travel was often no longer possible, I began to explore the limitless possibilities of the imagination. This became the seed for a performance conceived as a mental vacation. While lying in a hammock, listeners are guided by a story that takes their imagination on a getaway, accompanied by sensations of heat and water – weightless, floating, suspended. The resulting work, “Beyond the buildings, the clouds are a mountain range”, was presented at Performatik (Kaaistudio’s, Brussels, 2019) and at Beyond the Black Box (De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, 2020).

In this one-on-one performance, participants entered a darkened room where a hammock hung in the centre. They lay back in the hammock while I sat beside them on a chair. As we introduced ourselves, a waterbed was discreetly rolled in from behind a curtain, unnoticed by any of the visitors. With their eyes closed, I read a story that carried them from a family gathering, to floating in a pool of champagne, and finally to lying on a giant belly.

While they listened, they were slowly lowered onto the heated waterbed, where I created gentle waves by pressing the mattress. At the story’s end, they were lifted back into the air and softly swung from side to side as music filled the room. Participants were both immersed in the imagined world of the story and subtly engaged with their own bodily awareness, creating a quiet, shared moment of reflection and play.

This collaboration began in 2015 with a trip to La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. We were drawn to El Silbo, a whistled language once used by locals to send messages across steep valleys. With this in mind, we explored the landscape and reflected on how it shaped the language itself. Our main focus became the idea of communicating across distance.

The outcome is a performance within an installation – an audiovisual journey shaped by our impressions of the island. I guide two visitors at a time through the space, which includes maps, sound recordings, video, photographs, sculptures, a microscope, and a postcard. At each stop, I share a story that places you alongside us, shifting perspective from the minute to the vast, from the intimate to the cosmic.

This piece features a table with two shells placed on it. An inscription on the table instructs you to pick up the shell on the right and listen. As you lift it, a hidden Bluetooth speaker inside plays a recording, and you hear my voice tell a story about a man sitting in a car, about to leave on an undefined journey. After some time, you are prompted to pick up the other shell. With both shells held to your ears, a phone conversation begins. The act of picking up a shell and listening to the ocean is a well-known gesture.

I wanted to use this familiarity to set the mood for the story. The associations of beach visits, summer, and holidays create an atmosphere before the story begins, evoking sights and sounds that engage the imagination and shape the listener’s experience. After the phone conversation ends, you are invited to pick up the postcard from the wall. On its back and on the wall is a handwritten continuation of the story.

In this one-on-one performance, I guide you through making a drawing while blindfolded. You are invited to imagine your mind’s eye at the tip of your pencil, tracing the contours of what it sees. The drawing becomes a tool to focus your imagination, helping you closely observe your inner world. The act of looking inward matters more than the drawing itself. It is a meditative experience that calls for patience and focus. The encounter begins with a story that leads you into a forest. Within this narrative, I weave in suggestions of what to draw and questions about what they perceive. When the drawing is complete, they crumple it into a ball.

Afterwards, I slowly unfold it, revealing a new landscape on the reverse side, the surface transformed by creases. Together, we explore its topography and imagine where they might place themselves within it. The paper is then hung on the wall alongside others, forming a shared landscape with a hidden forest concealed on the back. The work also takes the form of a sound installation. Here, visitors listen to the story through headphones and create their drawing independently. In this version, they may choose to leave their drawing behind or take it with them.

My contribution included a performance in the form of a guided tour, connecting memories of my childhood home to Hans’s work. For the exhibition, this performance took the shape of a publication available to visitors. Its first section served as a guide, written as a dialogue between “you” (the reader) and “I” (Emi), imagining what I might say if we were walking through the exhibition together. The second section was a short story about two housemates, also “you” and “I”, whose relationship was shaped in unexpected ways by the house they shared.

Another element involved performers invited to inhabit the exhibition space and make it feel like home for them. Their actions, such as rearranging a rock collection or reading a book on a stool, created subtle interventions within the installations. Since Hans’s work often explores the tension between the functional and the sculptural, these gestures amplified that friction. Together, we wanted to invite visitors to connect memories of different homes and times, awakening their imagination, and filling in the blind spots of memory.

She then unfolded the fabrics, revealing that they were pieces of clothing, and placed them on the furniture. The surrounding space continually shifted as I read a story about two housemates whose relationship was shaped by the house they lived in, where poor insulation made it feel as if there were no walls. The piece connected viewers to a living space in constant transformation through the seasons. We adapted the performance to fit Art’s Birthday at M HKA (Antwerp) in 2016, choosing to separate Hans’s sculptures from my storytelling in order to create a complementary relationship between the two.

Two squares, each measuring 630×630cm, were marked on the floors of adjoining rooms in the exhibition space. In one square, Rowena moved the sculptures following the pattern Samuel Beckett created in “Quad”. In the other square, I read my story aloud. The cyclical movement of the cubes echoed the passage of time experienced by the characters through the changing seasons. The performance ran continuously for passers-by.

During The Image Generator II, a festival at the intersection of visual art and performance, Hans built a hallway inspired by an existing one in the display window of Extra City. Constructed like a set, the hallway allowed passersby to view the performance from the street. Not every wall and door was physically present, leaving parts to be imagined by visitors. An additional feature was a freestanding blue structure in the hallway, evoking the blue screen used to layer images or videos.

For the performance, I guided two visitors into the hallway and told a story about two people contemplating crossing a railroad bridge not intended for hikers.. The liminal space of the bridge parallels the hallway, providing a backdrop for the two characters as they navigate their relationship and their notions of home, particularly as one of them prepares to move away. During the festival’s first weekend, the installation functioned as a set for performances held every half hour. Afterwards, it transformed into a sculpture, with laser-printed quotes integrated into the installation.

During a six-week residency in August and September at the Laforêt Family Summer Vacation Project, I wrote site-specific stories for locations in and around the building and placed the texts on-site. Each story drew attention to the reader’s surroundings, inviting them to remember or imagine events that had taken place there. By using the location as a starting point, I sought to create a connection with the reader through my words and their imagination. In the future, I would like to turn the stories into sculptures by putting them on existing forms like a notice board, a picture frame, or a plaque. Because the objects are recognizable,

people will approach them prepared to read. With the function of these objects in a particular location in mind, I want to use them in order to add meaning to my stories. In a future form, I would like to transform these stories into sculptural forms by inscribing them on familiar objects such as notice boards, picture frames, or plaques. Because these objects are immediately recognizable, people will be naturally inclined to approach them and read. By placing the texts within objects that carry a functional presence in specific locations, I aim to deepen the interplay between place, object, and story.

For 24/7, a program at the Rotterdam Film Festival that relocated cinema into hotel rooms, I was invited by curator Edwin Carels to perform at the Hilton. I transformed the space by altering the light to evoke the blue hour – the fleeting interval between sunset and nightfall when the sky deepens to an intense blue. A concealed light installation behind the curtains created the effect, casting the room into a transitional glow. The blue hour is a threshold: an ending and a beginning. It is the in-between time when mysteries thrive, shadows lengthen, and possibilities feel endless.

Sometimes called the hour of the wolf, it is when the boundary between human and animal blurs, when the cultivated self is briefly overtaken by the primal, and one’s grip on identity loosens. While I read a story to two visitors lying on the bed, the light shifted from warm late-afternoon tones, to deep blue, and finally faded to black. The narrative began in the hotel room before unfolding outward into the city and beyond. The blue light stood in for the sky, but also suggested water. The room became both endless and enclosed—limited and limitless. It was a place where one could swim and fly at once.

During a one-month residency in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland (July–August 2013), I came to understand the importance of man-made structures within the park – trails, lookouts, bridges. Without them, much of the landscape would remain difficult to access. Equally vital were the park interpreters, who guided visitors and deepened their experience by sharing knowledge and stories. Inspired by these human interventions, I wrote a short story and created a frottage drawing of a wooden bridge along a hiking trail – a structure that carries you across an obstacle to a place otherwise unreachable. Often, something different awaits on the other side.

While making this work, I thought about what kinds of obstacles call for bridging, what kinds of bridges are needed between people, and what happens when a bridge is not meant to be crossed. In Japanese gardens, bridges often mark the meeting point of the ordinary and the sacred. The island at the centre of a garden pond may be linked to the shore by a bridge, but to preserve the island’s sanctity, the bridge itself must not be crossed. I was fascinated by this duality: a bridge that exists as both connection and barrier.

I covered my room with rice paper and made frottage drawings in graphite, capturing the textures of sand-finished walls, various woods, papers, and bamboo. These drawings were traces of reality, created through direct interaction with surfaces, embodying a physical dialogue between myself and the space. For the performance, I recreated the room with a wooden frame, hanging the drawings and illuminating them from the outside. The installation became a bridge between the tangible and the imagined. Working with these traces led me to explore my own interior world through writing. My story begins by inviting readers to imagine their childhood bedrooms, weaving their memories with mine, moving fluidly between past and present.

As I read my stories aloud, viewers are often unaware of their own physicality while listening intently; however, you are always two bodies, your physical one and your imagined one. If you visualize yourself climbing a mountain, it’s an imaginary body that carries you. Through embodied storytelling, my work draws your inner and outer worlds closer together to create a narratively immersive experience. With consideration for your physical presence, I create environments that complement the text and engage the senses through light, sound, motion, and heat.

Through a multidisciplinary practice that includes writing, performance, and installation, I layer elements of daily life with dreams and memories to create stories that you can explore and expand. My work blends your inner world with mine. I want to give you the opportunity to spend time in your mental space — for you to be curious, ask questions, and realize the power of your imagination. Central to my work is storytelling that cinematically guides you through your imagination. My stories are based on the everyday and are travels to different destinations in your mental world. They often explore my personal connections to Canada, Japan, and Belgium – the way these places intersect and diverge, and my search for home between them.

As I read my stories aloud, viewers are often unaware of their own physicality while listening intently; however, you are always two bodies, your physical one and your imagined one. If you visualize yourself climbing a mountain, it’s an imaginary body that carries you. Through embodied storytelling, my work draws your inner and outer worlds closer together to create a narratively immersive experience. With consideration for your physical presence, I create environments that complement the text and engage the senses through light, sound, motion, and heat.