VR EXPO: THERE IS NO ROOM FOR YOU
Audiovisual work There is No Room for You by Flora Lemmens & Hon Ning Cheung.
There is No Room for You is an audiovisual work about wanting closeness but never really finding it. On screen, blue blobs move, freeze, and drift toward each other, always stuck between being together and being apart. The intimacy you long for and the absence of a response. As the piece progresses, the shapes deform and stretch, torn into forms that no longer resemble what they started as. What begins as something recognisable slowly becomes abstract, unfamiliar, strange. Yet something in them keeps trying.
The work examines the feeling of distance between people. The closeness that is wanted but never arrives. The blobs reach for each other, trying to connect while being close to each other’s bodies but a feeling of confinement restricts their movement. They reach, but never far enough.
The work unfolds as a short audiovisual piece built around abstract blue blobs that function as bodies in space. Their movements are simple and repetitive: approaching, stopping, continuing, or remaining still. The focus is not on progression, but on staying with a single situation where closeness does not lead to connection.
The work features music by Hon Ning Cheung, a composer, chromatic harmonicist, and conductor based in Luzern. Cheung studied at the Conservatorium Maastricht and was awarded the Henriëtte Hustinx Prize (2024). Her composition Still Echoes (2025), written for flute, viola, and harp, commissioned by Musiksommer am Zürichsee, accompanies the visuals.
The visuals were developed as a complete work, with the music added as a separate layer. Sound and image move together in time, but do not explain one another. This creates space for distance, hesitation, and moments where nothing is answered. The work does not ask to be understood in a specific way, but to be experienced.
Flora Lemmens is an interdisciplinary artist from Sittard, a small village in the south of the Netherlands. She studied at Maastricht Institute of Arts and is known for her innovative and thought-provoking work.
Flora’s work explores the relationship between perception, the mind and reality, aiming to create a sense of disconnection and detachment. Praised for its emotionally resonant nature, her work has been exhibited in places such as De Meldkamer, Bonnefanten, Liberation Festival Roermond, Musica Sacra Festival, Noorderlicht Photo Festival, Theater aan het Vrijthof and Het Nieuwe Domein. In 2023 Flora won the incentive ScriptieKunst prize and was nominated as finalist of the Henriëtte Hustinx Prize with her graduation work “INSTAR”.
Flora continues to experiment and push the boundaries of her practice. Her work invites us to reflect on the relationship between the self, the world and reality, and to celebrate the power of the human experience. Through her use of digital art forms, Flora’s work inspires us to consider the impact of technology on our perceptions and experiences and to celebrate the power of human experience in a rapidly changing technological landscape.
