Peter Vander Auwera

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

I'd like to do nothing for some time.

Be free, flying and gliding like birds in the sky. Left, right, up, down, up, down, Defying centrifugal forces. Unlimited by time, space, distance, force, like free painting, with myself as the paintbrush and the sky as canvas.

Four dimensional. Playful like the birds. Showing little tricks, challenge and pursue, but not limited by any form of danger.

I visited an exhibition of the Belgian fashion designer, Drives van Noten, who had his twenty years retrospective in the Museum of Fashion in, in Antwerp. I've never been interested in fashion. I just wanted where I've forced myself to go and see, people in spaces that were out of my normal network. And there happened to be an exhibition by Driss van Noten.

And I was absolutely struck by beauty.

It came in very deep.

It's very strange, but even after all these years when I'm sharing this story with other people, I, again, feel the emotional impact that that exhibition had on me.

It was almost beautiful to to be true.

So I I think that that it is at that moment that I wanted to change my career, and so this was also the moment of taking that sabbatical.

And I never came back.

So I think that with COVID and, the riots and the protests in The US. What people are going through is, a fear of loss of meaning.

Not the fear of missing out, but the fear of loss of meaning.

And I think that it's at that tipping point that people have this fear for losing meaning, of descending in the abyss from incomprehensible into meaninglessness.

And I I think I hope that artists can help imagine, a possible response.

In most of my life in business, the first question that you were asked is, and what problem are you trying to solve?

And I'm guilty myself because in the innovation startup space, we, as a team of innovators, we trained the start ups to do a 10 slide pitch, where the first slide had to be what is the problem you're trying to solve. So I think I have seen thousands of startup pitches that all started with what problem they're trying to solve. So at after thousand pitches, this, this is not satisfying anymore.

A much more interesting question is, what are you trying to create? Like like a painter, she the painter, she knows what she wants to create, and she tries to create some level of, skill.

Ideally, a bit of ambition for mastery, but some level of skill to create as good as possible what she wants to create, which is a completely different mindset than problem solving.

The response could be agency through imagination. So artists create agency, or incentivize agency with their audience through imagination, because usually they are more freer in imagining something than people who don't have the bandwidth or the time or never had the opportunity to draw or compose.

So I think artists, because they work, I mean, if they do a proper job, they work at the level of the unconscious, or at least the impact of their work is at an unconscious level, I think the artist can help see, new meaning in a situation.

Artists have a role of helping to see, Helping to see the unseen.

I think an artist has succeeded if he or she can get the audience in another space and time, context.

But I like to think of my work, my paid play, as creating spaces in a metaphorical way, and sometimes spaces in a physical, way as well.

Spaces for permission.

Permission of what? Well, probably of what was forbidden could be one angle at it. But spaces for permission to imagine, or spaces for permission to experiment, or spacious spaces for permission to be vulnerable, or spaces for permission to do nothing.

The perfect day goes like this.

I am completely disconnected, and I only take mails if they are announced by phone.

My mobile can only take calls and SMS.

I have stopped tweeting, Facebooking, etcetera.

Physical and emotional silence.

What I do does not scale and is not for sale. I focus on uniqueness, excellence. The beauty is in the perfection. I live in an other house with plenty of space, an attic studio, and maybe an art gallery. On the countryside: the humid heavy earth of Flanders, or in Toledo, Sebea, in the middle of the heat of the plain fields.

The crack in me, Dries van Noten, the tones of a Spanish guitar, the dry hot summer heat, and the shadow and olive trees.

I have become a hermit. Nothing should or must. There is no time pressure whatsoever. I'm in flow. Nothing needs to be proven, and I'm freed from desire.