The Reflector is a trajectory that Domein previously organized with Festival Cement in 2021/2022. Together, they sought a sustainable way of reflecting on art, a new connection between artist and critic. In 2025/2026 Domein organized a new – dance – edition of The Reflector together with and made possible by Dansateliers Rotterdam. Read critic Joost Jungsik Vormeer’s short story The Braille Room here below. Read his Sidenotes here. Want to know more about this awesome project? Read a recap by mentor Anna van der Kruis.

She lost the ability to read in a filling station at the Rte de Thionville. There must be something wrong with my sight, Vasti thought at first. Actually, she was a little nearsighted and had needed glasses for years, yet at that moment she was able to see the woman behind the cash register with almost painful clarity. Looking down again at the list of ingredients on the fruit bar’s wrapper, their promises (nutritious) or warnings (E-numbers) simply escaped her. She could understand how the letters crept up against each other to form units and how interpunction separated or organised these units, but like an unknown script carved into a piece of stone they made no sense.

Walking outside, she had the impression people were looking at her, as though she was wearing this new condition on her face. 

At home, she immediately gathered all her books that were still in the boxes. She had been living in this house at the Rte de Thionville in Luxembourg-Ville for a few weeks and hadn’t had time to unpack. She opened novel after novel to discover that she couldn’t read any of them, as if she were a child before starting primary school. Panicking, she grabbed a pen and scribbled something in one of the more voluminous books – probably a Jane Austen novel – and her handwriting appeared in the margin like notes on a Post-it left behind by a stranger. However, she had the feeling that she could still write. Her hand seemed to remember literacy. The act of writing. Its particular movements.      

But what she had written she couldn’t read. 

She remembers an afternoon in the sandbox at the kindergarten in Seoul when she first started writing. She couldn’t read yet, but she had imitated the movements of the teacher who had shown her how to write Hangul. So she wrote in the sand in the gingko tree’s shadow, fourteen consonants and ten vowels. She liked the shape of the ㅅ especially. One person walking. Or the ㅆ: two people walking down the street, like her parents in the park on Sunday afternoons. Her most favorite double consonant was the ㅉ. Two people jumping for joy in sync together. Like dancing. But she also remembers how the sand wiped out the letters almost immediately. 

Outside, a traffic light switched to red, stripes on the asphalt indicated where to cross, a leather wallet held by an old lady suddenly caught the sun like it was another coin, but she couldn’t read the name of the street on a signpost. Or the message in German on the screen, when she pressed the traffic light button. 

A severe case of dyslexia, the first specialist told her. Speaking in French, she explained that she had worked as a critic for an international art magazine. How could she be suffering from dyslexia? Besides, she still had the ability to write. She showed him the pages of the book with her handwriting in the margin. 

He looked at her sympathetically. Some patients have become experts in masking, I’ve known too many of them, trust me, he said. 

Others assumed that she must be suffering from a severe burnout and prescribed a long period of rest as well as regular visits to a psychiatrist. Vasti suddenly thought of people, mostly women, who were diagnosed with hysteria in nineteenth-century Europe. They were told to lie down on a stretcher for months and do nothing. Since nothing was wrong with her vision or brain, it had to be between her ears.

She had grown up in different countries. As she moved from one place to the next, she had tried to learn one or two of the local languages. All these verbs with their pasts and futures, prepositions with their locations and directions, and nouns with their singulars and plurals have become mixed up in your mind, the Belgian friend said over dinner. Vasti tried to muster up a smile. But why do I still have the ability to speak and to listen? Last night, she started an audio book in Arabic without any problems in understanding the first chapter. The problem was with reading. How could she be an art critic if she wasn’t able to read? 

Using a navigation app she could find her way through the streets of the unfamiliar city, its deep gorges and high plateaus, but she had to rely on the speaker function. A voice who told her where she was and which direction to take next. It spoke to her in the tone of her kindergarten teacher. The same tone the waitress had used when Vasti asked her in French about the different types of coffee on the menu. It’s on the menu, madame. Will you read it for me? But our menu is in French, you can read it yourself. I’m afraid I can’t, madame. When the waitress started reading, Vasti put a note on the table and left. 

After that, she stayed home more often. 

She liked the new place at the Rte de Thionville, sheltered by trees on both sides, on the street and in the backyard, and how on warmer days the foliage created a temperate microclimate inside. It was an apartment with four rooms and a bathroom, far too spacious for someone living alone. Instead of reading and working, she spent her days unpacking boxes, decorating, trying to buy furniture online and calling a friend from Belgium when she needed help. 

In one of the unpacked boxes she found things that didn’t belong to her. A jar of wallpaper paste. A pirated martial arts movie burned on DVD, Johnnie To’s Throw Down. Some tools for gardening, like a weeder and a pair of trimming shears. 

She called the moving company and the employee told her she had labeled the boxes herself. Had she kept the label, he asked. She had. Well, is the handwriting yours? She thought so, because it looked familiar, but it could have been written by someone close to her, her father, her grandmother, or the friend from Belgium. 

The label had a list of items on it. She couldn’t figure out what the box was supposed to contain.

The room at the front was spacious, with white walls and wooden floors that reminded Vasti of a ballet studio from her childhood. In her mind, she tried to furnish the room. A piano in the corner. A desk by the window. Once she could read again, she would be able to work there. But she couldn’t actually fill the space. As if it resisted all efforts of occupation.  

One afternoon, while Vasti was cleaning the windows of the empty room, the white room, she noticed a boy lying on a mattress on the street below. He seemed to be sound asleep. Tourists dragging wheeled suitcases behind them had to step onto the road to avoid the mattress, which took up almost the entire width of the sidewalk.  

He doesn’t look like a homeless person, Vasti thought, and almost immediately she felt ashamed. 

The speech therapist Vasti visited every Tuesday morning had her practice in a house on the bank of the Alzette. She was the only professional who took her loss seriously, and she wasn’t convinced that  her patient had a burnout. Rather, it could be a case of memory loss. We have to help you remember, she would tell Vasti. In the consultation room, there were stacks of illustrated children’s books on the floor. As a child, did she have a favorite book? One that her parents read to her time and again? When she didn’t answer, the speech therapist picked up the first book from the pile and began reading aloud.

Every Sunday afternoon Vasti spoke to the Belgian friend on the phone, telling her what groceries she needed for the next week. The Belgian friend ordered everything online. The groceries were delivered to her address. Every once in a while, when Vasti had forgotten something, she went out by herself. At the supermarket, she couldn’t read the words on the packaging, but most products had their own recognizable shape—a bag of chips, a box of tea – that her hands still remembered. 

After two months, a long mattress had been formed on her street. Consisting of several single mattresses, it ran the entire length of the sidewalk. Every day, students from a nearby international business or language school would sit or lie on it, drinking soda and talking to each other. Playing old-fashioned children’s games, games that resembled Simon Says or Tip the Can or Pop goes the Weasel. When it rained, they covered themselves and the mattresses with a long tarpaulin.  

Vasti often took a walk in the backyard, past the fruit trees of a small orchard, past flower beds and a pond with carp, to the vegetable garden up at the fence. Barefooted, blades of grass tickling her soles. She didn’t know who owned the place. Maybe it belonged to her downstairs neighbour, though she had never met them. It estranged her that the garden often looked as if someone were working there at that very moment. A wheelbarrow filled with manure. Soil worked with a digging fork. Lettuce seeds ready to be planted. But she never met the gardener. 

The next day, the lettuce seeds were planted indeed. She noticed how carefully they had been committed to the earth. She bent down and the pressed soil felt so pleasant and smooth. 

The speech therapist’s boyfriend was a furniture designer and had made these beautiful wooden letters for exercises in the practice room. Most of her clients were children and occasionally she encouraged them to play with these letters. Now she created a short word in English, letter by letter, pronouncing it aloud. Tree. Vasti closed her eyes and touched the letters, one by one. Suddenly their shape made some sense. As if her body, the sensitive skin of her fingertips, still did remember how to read. 

In the city, more students began occupying sidewalks, creating long lines of single mattresses. On her walks to the speech therapist, Vasti noticed that, while they had initially used different mattresses of various sizes and colors, a standardisation had developed. Now they all used the same mattress in the same size. 

The newspapers called them the Homeless. Vasti didn’t know what to make of it. A protest? An artistic movement? Every morning she walked to the empty room, her own private ballet studio, her white room, and stood by its windows to look down at the street below. One of these mornings, she thought of a saying by Alice Neel. “I really live out my front room windows … It’s like having a street in your living room . . . Since I’ve always been claustrophobic, it is a great escape for me not to feel shut up in a room.” 

I’ve never been like that, Vasti thought. Quite the opposite. I’ve always felt at home in the smallest spaces. 

And while she stood there, some of the Homeless woke up. Two girls had been continually throwing each other down on one of the mattresses, like they were practicing judo. 

The summer storm suddenly became so severe that Vasti and her downstairs neighbour were concerned the trees in the orchard might fall over. The elderly woman served Vasti a glass of homemade apple juice in her kitchen. Vasti asked who owned the orchard and the vegetable garden. The orchard belongs to my house, the neighbor said, but the vegetable garden… She looked at Vasti, her expression almost betraying an inner smile. I thought you had been maintaining the vegetable garden. From the moment you moved in. Because it belongs to your apartment. I often thought, this woman must love gardening. 

It wasn’t me, Vasti said, I haven’t touched any of these things, the wheelbarrow, or the digging fork, or the lettuce seeds. Or the packs of manure. Shall we inform the landlord? she asked as she said goodbye. Whoever does the job, they have done it well, the downstairs neighbour said, barely audible over the sound of the torrents. 

Vasti didn’t understand why the library for the blind shared the same building with BNP Paribas. The library was open every Friday afternoon until 13:30 pm and Vashti was just on time, walking into a small room on the second floor. White shelves stacked with books. Their covers white as well. A young man at a desk asked if she wanted to borrow a book. Are you blind, he asked, with a hint of suspicion in his eyes. I’m not, but I cannot read, I cannot remember how to do it. I would like to learn braille language. You see, I’m an art critic, I cannot do my work without being able to read. But your problem is called illiteracy, the young man said, now with a hint of irony in his voice. It’s not a disability. This service is only for people who are truly blind.

A week later, on a Friday afternoon, the mailman delivered a package, containing a book with a white cover but without the name of an author, without any title, without any letters.  

Vashti opened it, her hands sliding over the paper, over the dots that felt as pleasant under her fingertips as the warm, dry sand in the sandbox at her childhood’s kindergarten. She had received a book in braille. 

Barefooted, Vashti took a step outside, stepped onto the mattress, tapped the nearest student. It was the same boy she had seen sleeping from her spot in the empty room upstairs. The boy who had arrived in her street first. She asked him what was written on the package. Whose name and whose address? Almost immediately, he shook his head. It’s just gibberish, he said. He tried to spell out the name, but stopped when he realised how confused she was. 

In the empty room, she tore the pages out of the book one by one. Using the wallpaper paste from the mysterious moving box that didn’t belong to her, she glued each piece of paper to the wooden floor. To her surprise, she didn’t have to cut them. With ten pages lengthwise she could cover the entire width of the room. 

When she had covered the floor like that, she walked over the dots, still barefooted, carefully. 

A few years ago, she had visited an acupuncturist who had told her about the pressure points under her feet. Now these dots felt like the same needles, little instruments that knew where to find the tension in her body, the pain that it had forgotten, the sadness of her loss. 

Perhaps she was making some progress. Every Tuesday morning, the speech therapist continued to create words with the wooden letters. Sometimes Vasti was able to read them with her fingertips, her eyes closed. Words like wood. Trunk. Road. But they noticed that this only worked with words from the English language. The meaning of a word in another language always escaped her. As if only the traces of the English language had attached themselves, imposed themselves, on the patterns of her fingertips. 

The next morning, her downstairs neighbour was standing at the door of her apartment, a crate of vegetables in her arms. Apparently harvested by the mysterious gardener. In her kitchen, Vasti examined the gift: lettuce, endives, cauliflower, winter carrots, and spring onions. She climbed down the stairs, walked through the hallway to the back door, stepped outside, and headed to the vegetable garden. It looked as if it was being prepared for winter. In the shed, she found a ladder, which she took upstairs. 

She had used around 200 pages to cover the floor. Using the same paste she wallpapered the other pages on the empty room’s walls. She wasn’t even surprised the last one fitted like the final piece of a puzzle. Now all the walls were completely covered in braille. 

At night she would sit in the braille room, the dots tingling against her soles, grounding her to the floor. A desk lamp in a corner. The sounds of the Homeless softly buzzed on the street below. 

Every night except Saturdays, when they used the mattresses to dance on, without shoes, to the beats of club music. After an hour, they stopped so as not to disturb the neighbours. On other nights, they would sit together on the mattresses, listen to lounge and ambient music, and Vasti would think about the time she used to do that with friends at a club in Amsterdam, when lounging was briefly in vogue. How they shared tapes with their favorite music. How cosmopolitan they’d suddenly felt. 

Sometimes when Vasti sat there, in the room’s semi-darkness, some of the dots would light up, forming a light-emitting snake, slithering across the wall or the floor, before disappearing. Sometimes even the whole wall would glow with a geometric pattern, but just for a few seconds. 

Other times she could hear the dots vibrating, humming a warm sound, like the bars of a vibraphone. 

On moments like these, the empty book stayed in her hands. A hardcover without any content. 

Sometimes during the day, when Vasti wasn’t in the braille room, she thought she could hear footsteps. When she walked into the room she never found anyone. Standing in the kitchen, she looked at the vegetable garden below. A shovel had been planted in the saturated autumn soil. The wheelbarrow facing the door of the shed, ready to be wheeled in. For a moment she thought it was moving by itself, but too slow for a human eye to register, like it was another natural process. 

I can’t stay here any longer, she spoke in a voice message to the Belgian friend. 

On her last night in the house at the Rte de Thionville she invited the Homeless inside. 

They filled the house like they were friends at her birthday party. What if it was her birthday party? What if they were her friends? She could imagine it all when she walked past them in the kitchen and the hallway and the rooms that were empty now. The movers had picked up her furniture already. There were only the summer jackets of the Homeless in the hallway. Empty bottles on the kitchen sink. 

She found him in the braille room. Alone. On all fours, touching the floor with his fingertips, word after word, line after line, page after page. For a moment he reminded her of a sower of seeds, seeds that has to be sown in the soil after dark, one by one. For a moment he reminded her of one of those people that are able to read the earth. 

Koreans used to believe in geomancy, she remembered, the knowledge of invisible meridians crossing the earth, of intersections that are supposed to bring good or bad luck. 

The desk light in the corner was on. He stopped reading. My sister is a blind person, he said. She had learned him how to read braille. But these pages on the floor and on the wall were not written in a language he could locate. He showed her a text on his phone. He said: I have made a transcription, but I think it’s just gibberish. Or an invented language, perhaps. Or a language that has been died out with its last speaker. 

Where did you find this book, he asked? 

It was the same boy she had seen sleeping on the street. The same one she had asked to read the address on the package.   

Then she remembered the Korean word for seed: 씨. She could see its shape. She could read the word in her mind. Two people walking. Or maybe dancing. And a door. Or a border, a straight line to walk on, to sleep on. She bent over and the innumerable dots on the floor felt like sand. She started to write the ㅅ with her fingertips like she had done in the sandbox of her kindergarten. Another letter. Then another one. And just like that afternoon years ago, in the shadow of the gingko tree, they left no trace at all.