Metamodernism
Between hope and doubt, between feeling and thinking
Sometimes you read something that not only gives words to what you intuitively already felt, but also opens a new window onto the world. For me, that was the essay Notes on Metamodernism (2010) by Vermeulen and Van den Akker. This article became the starting point of a search that continues to this day. A search for connection: between the modern desire for meaning and the postmodern skepticism that relativizes every truth. Between engagement and irony, hope and melancholy, naïveté and awareness. But where these oppositions initially presented themselves as fields of tension, I gradually began to experience them differently: not as something that needs to be resolved, but as a movement in which one can live.
For me, metamodernism is not a theoretical framework applied from the outside, but an inner attitude. A way of being present in a world that is at once fragmentary and meaningful. It asks for the willingness to feel, while knowing that feeling does not guarantee absolute truth. To search for meaning, without the certainty that it will ever be definitively found. To love, even when you know that loss is inevitable.
In this sense, metamodernism touches on something fundamental for me: the human capacity to remain in relation, to yourself, to the other and to the world, despite doubt, rupture and uncertainty. Through personal experiences, encounters and inner crises, the ideas I once began to explore at the art academy have slowly shifted from concept to lived reality. What once began as a theoretical framework became an existential compass.
On this page, you will find my graduation thesis from 2018 at the Royal Academy of Art: a series of essays in which I explore the contours of metamodernism. Not as a fixed system, but as a continuous movement between opposites. A movement that cannot be fixed in place, but continuously unfolds in the space between extremes.
I invite you to move along within this world of thought: a world that finds its ground somewhere between hope and doubt, between feeling and thinking.
The connection with my broader work
In my philosophical work, love, empathy and connectedness continually return. Not as abstract ideals, but as forces that guide how we relate to one another and to the world.
Metamodernism offers me the conceptual space in which these themes can exist without hardening into dogma. It opens a space where vulnerability and reflection may coexist and where engagement remains possible without denying complexity.
For me, love is not merely an emotional experience, but a connective principle. A way of being present that seeks to bridge the distance between self and other, without fully dissolving that distance. Empathy, in this sense, is not something self-evident, but an ongoing practice. A movement toward the other that always remains incomplete and precisely in that incompleteness finds its meaning.
In a time in which cynicism and instrumental thinking easily take the upper hand, I experience metamodernism as an invitation to preserve the human measure. To continue searching for truth without falling into absolutism. To remain engaged without becoming naïve.
In this way, metamodernism forms the quiet undercurrent that connects my essays, artworks and reflections.
