F: We were never meant to be an artist duo or a collective, but we're actually very happy it turned out that way. We met when we were around 14 years old. As art students, we had a special privilege: access to the old attic and various basements. The school itself was a former clinic over 100 years old. Robbert and I often scavenged the basements, finding relics from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, which only fueled our curiosity.

R: Attending this school together was incredible for us. We shared a sense of curiosity and adventure. We often stayed long after school hours. At one point, we transformed an empty classroom into our first atelier.

F: The school was great, but it never actively encouraged collaboration. Yet, intuitively, we felt that working together was vital. We believed that combining our strengths could take us further. Outside school, our friendship deepened as we embarked on journeys together, like traveling hundreds of kilometers to visit an art exhibition in Germany or flying to New York for a self-induced residency. We became friends before becoming artistic partners, constantly talking things through. This open communication created a solid base that eventually evolved into a shared company. Today, we both work through our own organization, and we share everything - including our income, which we redistribute.

R: Our primary focus is making art together, really together.

F: To us, art is a vehicle for self-exploration - both of ourselves and each other. We often describe our process as “playing ping pong,” bouncing ideas, concepts, and narratives back and forth. Sometimes, it takes months or even years for an idea to fully develop. In the beginning, this slow pace was intimidating; we were impatient and eager for quick results. But we learned that patience is a strength. Everything needs time to unfold. So, to conclude, I would say that collaboration and taking your time were the two key things we learned outside art school.

F: The Snake!

R: Both Frank and I share the Snake in Chinese astrology, as we were born in 1989.

F: The snake represents various concepts, such as transformation - shedding its skin and growing anew - healing, and wisdom. It can signify (re)birth, but also danger and temptation, reminiscent of its portrayal in biblical and other Abrahamic traditions.

R: Frank’s interest in Jungian psychology and alchemy might be an engine for our continuous use of symbols. In our most recent art integration assignment, Mandorla, for Arcade VZW, we borrowed 64 symbols from dead languages and used them as timekeepers in a large sundial.

F: One symbol embodies the Ouroboros, in which the snake bites its own tail to create an endless cycle, often seen as representing eternal renewal and the transmigration of souls. The Ouroboros is a symbol that also returns often in our work. It's a powerful image. Everyone can project meaning onto it. The outer shape of the Mandorla installation is a flat eight, also known as an infinity symbol. The infinity symbol and the Ouroboros share the same symbolic meaning.

R: Shredding of Sorrows or Minor Destruction of Sorrows is a ritual involving two of our self-made wooden suitcases - one containing our alter egos and the other filled with various small tools. Participants are invited to write down a problem or sorrow on a yellow card, and together we destroy this sorrow by burning it in front of the alter egos. In return, they receive a small gift, either a Frank and Robbert coin (valid for one wish) or a ceramic amulet for good fortune.

R: As mentioned before... For us, an artwork is never finished. After a handful of rituals, we tried to capture the spirit of the performance itself again. We were kind of reluctant to take too many photos and videos of the ritual. Somehow it feels wrong to point a camera at people who are struggling to write down their personal issues. So instead of documenting the ritual in video, we made a clay tablet of the whole. This would later on lead to a series of clay tablets depicting other actions and performances.

R: Activating a public space is extremely difficult. And creating meaning in it is even more difficult!

F: People are so focused on their own tasks, there is not much mental space for anything else. But although it's a difficult place, it's also very liberating to work in public spaces because you can often do whatever you want without anyone really noticing what you are doing. People kind of ignore you until a certain level.

R: It takes a lot before someone finally asks a question - and that’s where it all begins. In public space, we can often unpack our wooden suitcases or our other artworks slowly and install them. Nobody cares… until the activation begins. That is usually when people look up. And once someone stops to ask a question, they have already broken out of their routine.

F: Around 80% of the people who stop are willing to participate.

R: Starting from this willingness, we began rethinking our work. What if we created objects that carry the promise of activation by anyone - not only by us as the artists? Almost like a board game: we design and invent the rules, others get to “play.” No winners, no losers. Activation itself is the purpose.

R: When we left our residency in Berlin, we were thrilled by how random strangers had activated our shrines. But we hadn’t fully realized that our shrines required multiple people to bring them to life. Every pair of hands altered them. Meaning accumulated through interaction. Recognizing this, we wanted to experiment with “single-use interaction.” What happens when a shrine is activated by just one person? Will that person develop a routine? Will the shrine become part of a ritual or daily habit?

F: This became the main focus of the project. And that is the reason why we made and distributed the DIY shrines. To test what people would do with the object on one hand, and to see if the object would be activated/ritualized on the other hand.

R: And again we found out that it is very difficult to make people activate the shrines. People took them home and assembled them, but then often lacked the time or the inspiration to do anything further. After three months, we contacted everyone who had received a shrine and asked them to send a photo and describe how they had activated it. This was largely unsuccessful. A handful of people painted their shrine or turned it into a unique object, but most simply treated it as a decorative object.

F: So we created a document with historical examples of different types of shrines and ways to activate them. We even gave a masterclass in the city of Leuven (BE) to immerse participants in the world of shrines. This helped. After six months, about 40% of participants had done something with their shrine. After a year, about half had activated it in some way.

R: We collected feedback, and two major obstacles emerged: time, and meaning itself. Although this project happened in the aftermath of COVID - an ideal time because people had time and they craved meaning and connection. And even then... People didn’t take the time to pause and reflect. Often they avoided this because they felt unsure about what to do with the shrine. They feared breaking it, ruining the artwork, or simply didn’t see the point. What is the point in making a ritual if you don't really believe in the ritual? Only when they overcame this hesitation did the shrine begin to grow into something meaningful.

F: We also received a lot of emails asking if we could instruct them to do something with them. This was a bit weird. It felt like people still needed us to help them activate the shrines.

R: We responded that we didn't want to help activate the shrines. We wanted the people to figure it out themselves. But we felt that we needed to play a bit with the COVID situation and lend the people a hand. So in the end, we came up with a solution - something playful and guiding, but also very open, with space for variations. We made a series of paper cut-out pages, each page representing a ritual or a Frank and Robbert scène. People could cut them out and make scenes themselves. The shrines became little theaters. And many people placed them near their windows for passers-by to spot them. This helped people activate their shrines. A lot of people made additional figures, representing themselves or other loved ones.

F: By doing so, people had tools to play and create meaning. And this was wonderful. But it really teaches us that not everyone can create meaning and content out of thin air.

R: Give every participant the possibility to get lost in a new world and follow their own path, where they experience a unique story based on their individual choices in that specific moment in time.

F: In traditional theater, the audience sits back, relaxes, and simply observes. It’s comfortable, but often limited. People told us that they wished they could join our world. With the Table Dialogues series, they finally can. The presence of the audience is essential. Without them, the worlds we build remain dormant, untouched… lifeless. The audience is what animates everything.

R: I’d say we’ve drifted from one element to another throughout our years together, and I imagine we’ll keep shifting as time moves on. I think WATER is the most essential element. Like when Bruce Lee said, "be water, my friend." Water is shapeless. It is adaptable and transformative. It literally takes the shape of the body that it is part of. A rather beautiful metaphor for friendship, no?

F: Talking about water. We recently built a giant stone wave...

R: Last year we did a lot of domestic travel: between Ghent and the city of Bornem. We also traveled to Wales and to various locations in Finland. We hired a camper van and packed it with artworks. Doing so, we could carry out actions and rituals along the way. We didn't have a firm plan. We just wanted to drive to our destination and do some slow traveling: visiting monuments, connecting with the landscapes, with the locals.

F: We also wanted to visit Neolithic sites. We love stone circles, dolmens, and that stuff. Connect with the things we don't know. There is so much mystery.

R: Look at the knowledge of the Stone Age with all these magnificent sites, always very huge and massive. Who built them, and what for? How are they so perfectly aligned with the summer and winter solstice? How come the ancients had so much knowledge about the planet(s) and the stars and the mathematics behind everything?

F: I personally believe in an ancient cataclysm. There is historical and archaeological evidence for a Great Flood. This flood washed away the old civilisation(s), and humanity had to start anew. It's a bit weird, but almost every nation on earth has its own flood story. Think of Noah's flood, the Sumerian epistle of Ziusudra, the Greek Deucalion and Pyrrha, the Aztec Nahui-Atl, the Chinese Gun and Yu the Great, or the narrative around the Polynesian figure of Nuʻu, and many, many more. It fits right in with other related stories. Think of Atlantis, or the Gilgamesh story.

R: In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim is the one human who was granted immortality by the gods after surviving the great flood. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, seeks him out late in the epic, after the death of his friend Enkidu shatters his certainty and fills him with fear of dying. Gilgamesh travels to the edge of the world to find Utnapishtim because he holds something Gilgamesh lacks: firsthand knowledge of how a mortal escaped death. Utnapishtim recounts the flood story, explains why immortality was a unique, unrepeatable gift, and tests Gilgamesh’s worthiness. Gilgamesh fails these tests. In the end, Utnapishtim does not give Gilgamesh immortality.

F: Gilgamesh returns home changed, no longer chasing eternal life, but recognizing that what endures are human works, memory, and the city he has built. This is a take-away for us too... We often consider our art practice as an alchemical process. Through art we explore. We try to make gold. Not real gold, but 'artistic gold'. The flood is destruction. But it's also renewal.

R: On top of the ruins a new house can be built. The flood is cyclical. It's a necessary step in the process. Utnapishtim's house is a sculpture that represents this, and therefore it's a key work.

F: The Flood was a huge inspiration. At Bornem we even built an indoor body of water: over 5000L in a circular indoor pool in which we present the sculpture along with many other works.

R: To a social worker, I would stress the importance of materiality and tactility in relation to people - the idea that objects can act as mediators. A good artwork functions as a bridge between you and something beyond yourself, whether that’s a new world of ideas, an emotion, or another person. The physical world has the capacity - almost alchemical in nature - to unlock non-physical, relational, spiritual, or emotional realms.

F: To give an example, we once built two small wooden doors. They were portable, with an entry door marked by a red handle and an exit door marked by a yellow handle. When presented as sculptures, they function perfectly well as autonomous objects. They are visually complete and beautiful. But when the doors are carried throughout the city and activated, when people crawl through them, something else occurs. The doors begin to define an invisible territory, a liminal zone in which participants are no longer entirely themselves. They become actors, agitators, within this threshold space. Passivity dissolves and action becomes unavoidable. The doors shift from neutral objects into portals. In this sense, all objects hold the potential to build bridges, to connect, and to transform.

R: The exact same thing as what I would emphasize to the social worker :)

F: Maybe I’d like to take it a step further. Being a software engineer fascinates me, especially now, in the thick of the A.I. surge. Ever since humanity started crafting reflections of itself, whether puppets, statues, robots, or code that hints at self-awareness, we’ve wondered what might be hiding inside the shell. Masamune Shirow’s manga and Mamoru Oshii’s unforgettable films dive right into that question. Their world orbits around Major Motoko Kusanagi, a pioneering cyborg who steadily feels her humanity thinning as her machine-self grows. Together with her team, she races to stop the Puppet Master, a runaway A.I. seeking to slip from the digital realm into a human body. Ghost in the Shell keeps returning to the same elemental inquiry: what makes a person a person? It wonders whether a 'ghost' can inhabit machinery, how memory shapes identity, and where the border sits between life and simulation. Is the 'ghost' unique? Or collective?

R: These questions echo our search for meaning. Not long ago, Frank read Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, which gathers a constellation of quotes to illuminate the creative process. Rubin suggests creativity doesn’t belong to us entirely; it rises from a deep, unseen source.

F: C. G. Jung might have called it the collective unconscious. Rubin argues that the ego has to loosen, even dissolve. Only when an artist feels genuine emptiness can he or she eventually become a landing strip for that hidden current. If the ego crowds the runway, the planes have nowhere to descend. That image resonates with the idea of the ghost in the shell. Perhaps humans are the shells. And the “ghost”… I’m not sure. Maybe there’s one vast soul, and we’re fragments of it. Or perhaps there are many souls, each sending only a sliver into a physical form, whether tree, cat, or person. When we make art, meditate, or otherwise clear space inside ourselves, maybe we reopen a channel to that larger presence.

R: For us, in Robbert&Frank Frank&Robbert, our artistic work feels like part of that quest. A voyage both inward and outward. Which is why, if we ever sit down with a coder or software engineer, we would love to explore this terrain together... Is there more hiding inside the code than we assume? And if not, could it eventually grow into something that feels alive? It almost touches upon religion, or ancient magic. And Frank is very much into that.

F: That’s true. I even carry an ancient symbolic tattoo connected to this theme. On my lower left arm, I have a small heka tattoo. In Ancient Egypt, Heka was both a concept and a deity: the embodiment of magic and medicine. It was said to exist “before duality had yet come into being.” Heka can be linked to the Taoist principle of the Dao, the One, the fundamental force that has always been part of the cosmos, the energy from which yin and yang emerged. In that sense, Heka represents not only magic and healing, but also the magic of life itself: the divine power to transform something lifeless into something with a soul.

R: The animation of objects is also central to our artistic practice. It was one of the key themes in our recent exhibition Solstice Stones at Fred & Ferry in Antwerp. We created a series of stone sculptures rooted in dreams and everyday anecdotes. Many of them took the form of archetypes: universal, inherited images that exist within the collective unconscious. These archetypes point toward larger ideas. Creating the works became a way for us to discover which archetypes recur in our practice and what they mean to us personally.

F: The exhibition presented outward sculptures that reflected inward journeys.

R: You can see this clearly in the structure of some pieces. Frank often shaped the stone bodies, which I then filled with molten metal. The fluidity of the metal stands in sharp contrast to the rigid stone form.

F: Real alchemy, if you ask me.

R: One book we both love is Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers. It inspired us so much that we used it as a starting point for our theatre production Don’t We Deserve Grand Human Projects That Give Us Meaning? (CAMPO, 2017). Like the book, the performance explores the human search for purpose and meaning.

F: It’s a remarkable novel because it speaks so directly to contemporary issues. The story follows Thomas, a man who kidnaps several people - including a childhood friend who became a NASA astronaut - and takes all of them (including his own mother) to an abandoned U.S. military base. There, he forces each abductee into conversations about the disappearance of a shared purpose in Western society.

R: These days, everyone is expected to be responsible solely for their own happiness and their own search for meaning. In earlier generations, individuals were often part of a larger societal narrative - think of the construction of the Great Wall of China or other grand collective projects. Feeling part of something bigger mattered; it gave people a place in a larger story. The individual and the collective were more entangled. Now, that collective sense has eroded, leaving many with the disillusionment of a generation navigating the search for meaning alone - carrying both the burden of loneliness and the pressure of personal responsibility. Everyone has to 'win' the game of life. But there is nothing to win; there is no race. Only with yourself :-)

R: Frank is really into podcasts - especially those about C.G. Jung, like 'This Jungian Life' (with Joseph Lee, Deborah Stewart, and Lisa Marchiano) and 'Digital Jung' by Jason E. Smith. Recently, he’s also been enjoying smooth jazz, whale sounds, and of course his absolute favorite: Hermanos Gutiérrez.

F: Robbert, on the other hand, is more of a fan of silence.