away with words is my most recent project as Artist in Residence at Vlerick Business School in Belgium. It is a large scale participatory project involving the creation of original paper pulp paintings from recycled material with an audio installation of personal stories from a community of 70 interdisciplinary researchers.

During my time with Vlerick, I’ve worked with many different groups of people within the school, virtually and in person: doing story sharing experiences, running workshops exploring vulnerability and multi-sensory listening.  

Through my engagement it became clear that the Research Sector of the school suffered from a lack of recognition and they could benefit from an intervention highlighting the impact they have on each other; that their work has on the school; and on the multiple fields in which they do significant research.  The leaders of the Research Sector wanted something to make a statement of cohesion, to celebrate them and to make them more visible.  away with words is targeted to address those things.  

away with words began with an invitation to attend a gathering on the  opening day of the annual “research week,” in which 70 researchers who are based in different cities and multiple countries come together in person to share work and practice. The invitation was and to bring with them a piece of research that has been pivotal to them–either one that they have written themselves, or one that someone else had written, but changed the way they thought about their work. 

During this gathering, one by one, the researchers got up and told stories into a microphone and recorder about the papers and what they meant to them.  Their stories were recorded as they spoke them, and after each person told their story, they were invited to then rip up the paper into tiny shreds and throw it into a bucket. 

After this session, we blended the paper into paperpulp. We mixed them with a selection of colors chosen to connect to their diverse work and backgrounds, and then poured into screens to make original paperpulp paintings. The audio of their stories were also edited into an overlapping  seascape of voices.  The paperpulp paintings along with the audio are installed in a prominent place in their Gent campus, where it was made. It will later do a mini-tour, traveling to their other campuses in Leuven, and finally live permanently in their flagship campus in Brussels.

About the project, from Ralf Wetzel @ Vlerick:

Research is all too often an invisible craft. Although it is the backbone of an academic institution like Vlerick, it lives hidden behind office doors, at the home desk next to the bed, in lonely travels to interviewees, in a regression analysis done between 3 and 4am at night or at remote conference rooms or in virtual libraries. Research has a life of its own, in all living colours we know: hope, passion, despair, love, trance, loss, depression, grief, success, failure, death, rebirth.

This audio-visual installation brings the colourful life of research at Vlerick and of the researchers at Vlerick to the foreground. We invited our research community to bring their research papers and research notes and share the stories that are attached to them. They came, and they shared the stories of published papers, of those which got rejected, of abandoned work who still live a life of orphans in the researchers’ heart. They shared stories of overcoming depression, of succeeding and succession, of pain and bliss. We recorded all of those stories and we asked the researchers to tear their papers apart, in an act of catharsis. We then shredded and blended those papers and created a paper slurry which was then poured into a frame to be dried.

Now, these papers have a new life, and received new colors to tell their own story to you, who might be a faculty, a client, a student or a researcher at heart. This is the Vlerick Research Community talking to you, sharing its many stories with you and showing you who they are. Come a little closer. What do you see? What do you hear?

away with words was a project and process I created entirely for the Vlerick community. I’d never made paper before designing this project. The following images on this page are from the process of experimenting with creating this technique and making connections across the Vlerick community, in preparation for the forthcoming making process.