In(ter)sect
A work in progress. First public showing during Art Rotterdam 2026.
Insects form the invisible engine of life on Earth. They pollinate three-quarters of all food crops, decompose organic matter, and keep ecosystems in balance. Without insects, birds, bats, and plants would disappear and eventually, so would we. Yet they are among the least loved creatures: we spray, swat, and crush them without hesitation, as if their existence held no value.
In(ter)sect starts from this paradox: the beings that sustain our world are the same ones we overlook or reject. The project is an installation of ceramic puppets; hybrid figures suspended in a web of threads, part human and part insect. Their magnified, expressive faces invite us to look closely at what we normally ignore, questioning why some forms of life are protected while others are treated as disposable.
Alongside the installation, I wrote a folktale titled The Intersects, imagining a world in which humans, through their disregard for insects, slowly begin to transform into in-between beings. As invisible threads snap, skin starts to tremble, eyes darken like resin, and language dissolves into a buzzing hum.
The Intersects
Long ago, when the earth still listened to its smallest inhabitants, humans walked among them, not higher, not lower, but part of the same rustling. It was said that every insect carried a spark of an ancestor, a soul too light for the human body, continuing on in critters. They showed us how life repeats itself in circle and crawl, how disappearing can sometimes be a form of staying.
But humankind grew loud.
We struck, we sprayed, we silenced the humming that once sustained us. And with every dead bee, fly, or ant, the earth loosened an invisible thread from our bodies. Everything in life is bound by countless invisible threads. We rarely notice them, until they snap.
The tale tells that these threads will all return one day as trembling beneath the skin, as eyes beginning to gleam, as words dissolving into hum. Thus were born the Intersects, creatures of remembrance.
They drift through our homes, sit quietly in corners of rooms, breathe within the walls, and keep you awake at night with a buzzing hum. They come not to punish, but to remind us that all living things are interconnected. And sometimes, when you lie awake at night and hear the humming by your ear, know this: it is they, warning you gently, that whoever squeezes a fly between their thumbs and places themselves above life will, in the end, leave their own body behind.
