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The project began with an invitation from the visual artists Hanna Steenbergen-Cockerton and Margherita Soldati. I was given the opportunity to premiere my collaborative work with Sabrina Huth, ‘Digesting Time’, as part of an event called ‘Agenda-Mania: Can You Live Without an Agenda?’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Agenda-Mania’), at the ‘De Bouwput’ gallery in Amsterdam.

‘Digesting Time’ is a piece created from ‘Saturday Digestion’, a practice that we have been engaging in since 2020, which focuses on collective rest and self-acceptance. I started this practice when I was reaching the physical and mental limits of my Master’s degree. I began working with Sabrina Huth with the aim of ‘digesting’ the vast amount of information I had taken in, and reclaiming space for imagination. Since then, I have held monthly sessions and shared this practice within art universities and dance communities in Berlin and Japan.

This ‘Digesting Time’ piece evolved from ‘Saturday Digestion’ into a performance through a research residency at NPO Dance Box in Kobe in the summer of 2024.

On the day of the performance in Amsterdam, the audience first joins in with a short ritual of removing their shoes and putting on the soft socks provided. The pamphlet handed out contains guidelines such as ‘yawning and snoring are welcome’ and ‘you can close your eyes and rest’. In this way, the audience’s role is transformed from ‘quiet observers’ to ‘physical, active participants’.

The venue is equipped with yoga mats, cushions and blankets. The performance experience begins with each person finding a comfortable spot. The performance starts quietly. Sabrina and I regulate our breathing at our own pace, meditate and begin to move our bodies. For the first few minutes, the audience observes our movements, but gradually their attention turns inward.

As time goes by, some people recline leisurely, while others begin to stretch, gradually blending into the performance. As we performers moved at our own pace and relaxed, we could feel the audience breathing at their own pace, too, as they “digested” the experience and gradually released their minds and bodies. During these 125 minutes, the boundary between us performers and the audience became blurred, and everyone present in the space experienced “rest” together.

After the performance, many people approached us, yawning and saying things like, ‘I felt so relaxed!’ The next day, artists we met told us that they had slept incredibly well the night before, referring to the night of the performance. This made us realise that our efforts were gradually having an impact.

Hanna and Margherita, the organisers of ‘Agenda-Mania’, have both experienced long-term burnout. As the duo ‘Burning Step’, they create artworks based on their experiences of burnout. In this installation piece, they exhibited the excessively packed schedules they had experienced just before suffering burnout, visualising the everyday stress that is hard to perceive.

This time, we performed in their installation piece. The very ‘busyness’ that made us start our project became the space itself. By overlapping our work with theirs, it created a performance stage where each concept complemented the other.

Another participating artist, Rosalie Bak (hereafter referred to as Rosalie), created a walking score titled Weather Together. She began developing this weather-walking piece around 2018 after experiencing burnout herself. During her daily walks through the same area, she observed how the weather changed. She found parallels between her internal state and the external weather conditions, finding reassurance in the thought that it was not just her internal state that was ‘crazy’.

Her process of meticulously transforming small daily observations into works over many years is profoundly personal. Because of this, her work possesses a delicate but solid stability, evoking a beauty that combines both fragility and strength and moves me deeply.

I myself experienced a prolonged period of burnout from October 2021. However, through Agenda-Mania, I encountered Hanna, Margherita and Rosalie, who had also experienced burnout. Engaging with their work and having dialogues with them made me realise how significant my own experience was, and it provided me with a lot of inspiration.

I have previously carried out research and created works based on the theme of ‘rest’, such as Saturday Digestion. However, participating in Agenda-Mania has clarified the challenges I wish to tackle in my future projects.

Before joining Agenda-Mania, I was preoccupied with a preventative perspective, asking myself, ‘How can we avoid burnout?’ However, after meeting them and having a dialogue with them, I developed a new mindset: ‘Perhaps those who need help are the people who are “after” they have burned out.’ Moving forward, I wish to share messages and information based on my own experiences, aimed at those who have experienced burnout or become completely exhausted, and convey them in my own artworks.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the EU-Japan Fest Japan Committee and the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst for the support that made this encounter, experience and discovery possible.