The Experience House grew out of my desire to bring my book IK BLIJF! to life in a different way. I wanted to go beyond telling the story of a family living with financial insecurity and invite people to step into the inner worlds of its members: a single mother, a father at a distance, five-year-old Reeza and her older brother.

What do they think, feel, dream and fear? How do their different perspectives shape one another and the complex dynamics of family life?

After two discussions of IK BLIJF! with the Citizen Advisory Panel at Utrecht University, these questions became the starting point for The Experience House. Together, we began exploring how lived experience, art and science could come together to deepen our understanding of everyday life. As an artist, I explore how individual worlds can take shape through materials, sound, touch, space and performance, and how visitors might experience them from within. In collaboration with people with lived experience and university researchers, we investigate what each perspective can reveal, how they challenge and inform one another, and what new questions emerge when they meet.

We are currently exploring the family members’ worlds one by one through artistic prototypes, each with its own materials, sensory qualities and ways of inviting visitors in. Over time, we hope to bring these worlds together in a shared space; a house, perhaps, although its eventual form is still to be discovered.

The first of these explorations is Stone by stone, an artistic world inspired by five-year-old Reeza, developed as a children’s story and art installation.

The project is both an artistic exploration and a research process: an ongoing inquiry into how we can move beyond looking at someone’s life from the outside and begin to understand the world from within.