Excerpt

I think of all my visual, conceptual, and sound pieces, publications, and exhibitions as belonging to a single writing project, which I call zaroum. They are mainly composed in English, German, and French. As I am a non-native speaker of two of these languages, the words are free of many associations that are built in for native speakers, and therefore more universal.

If there is one concern in my work, it is to reduce the form to the minimum necessary in order to visualize a thought or idea. In an interview with Wilma Lukatsch, Tomas Schmit put it like this: "What you can say with a sculpture you do not need to build as architecture, what you can do with a drawing you do not need to search in image, and what you can clear up on a piece of paper does not need to become a huge drawing; and what you can make up in your mind does not even need any piece of paper." This is something I can definitely relate to. In general, I try to keep a certain simplicity or minimalism both in writing and in visual expression, as well as in realizing the final object. This minimizing of means is also intended as a countermovement against today's massive flood of information and waste of material; my ideal would probably be a continual reduction towards almost nothing.