Still: Nothing to See Here - Celine Daemen

The Venice Festival is a happy hunting ground for Dutch Celine Daemen, the transdisciplinary artist from Maastricht who has already built up a big international following with her virtual reality operas and immersive pieces.

“It is really fun to go back. It has become a yearly thing to return to Venice,” says Daemen, who is on the Lido this year with her new work, Nothing to See Here, presented as part of Venice Immersive (the section dedicated to XR expression: immersive videos, virtual and mixed reality, virtual worlds, XR and immersive installations).

Daemen has been here several times before, presenting Eurydice in 2022 and Songs for a Passerby in 2023 (which won the Venice Immersive Grand Prize), chairing the Immersive Jury in 2024 and pitching a new project, The Opposite of Being, at the Venice Production Bridge last year.

“We have been at all sides of the festival, and it has always been really inspiring,” she says.

Nothing to See Here, which has its international premiere in Venice after world premiering at IDFA DocLab 2025, is a deliberately disorienting experience in which visitors look through the peepholes of a mysterious box containing mirrors. They are given a bird’s eye view of themselves - but one that twists their normal perspectives of reality.

“That’s the fun side of the installation. It adjusts to the location where it is presented. It is made for any ‘in between’ space - shopping malls, train stations or airports - these spaces where people don’t usually stand still, spaces where you are passing through and where, in your mind, you are already somewhere else,” the director explains.

People tend to be taken by surprise. They don’t expect to see an artwork in a public place. “What’s this weird mirror box doing here? Oh, it makes weird sounds when we pass by. Maybe we should look inside it,” they might say.

The artist describes her box, which she made through her company Studio Nergens [founded in 2022], as “a project about reality and about how much reality is shaped by our perception and our embodied experience.”

As soon as you look inside the box, pigeons will suddenly seem to take fright and fly away and other animals will also scurry for cover. You will then begin to feel that you have two bodies.

“The video capture is played back and forth with the live capture of the spectators who kind of de-synch form their own bodies. That’s an interesting experience - it’s your real body but it behaves a bit differently to you at that moment. Maybe you scratched your butt at some point, but five minutes later, you see yourself scratching your butt - while you are not scratching your butt!”

Over the eight minutes that Nothing to See Here unfolds, viewers will have the sensation of profound bodily disorientation. “It’s a reflection that we are minds looking down on our bodies but, at the same time, that we are not our bodies,” the director elaborates. “It’s a little bit of a dilemma that we are thrown into.”

This isn’t one of those VR installations dependent on a cumbersome headset. The viewing box is “the device” which brings the project to life. The box itself was designed by Floriaan Egbers using reflecting metal. Daemen hopes viewers will regard it “almost as a scientific object.”

“One of the goals was to make an immersive piece that had a very low threshold for the audience to experience,” the director says. “We wanted something super spontaneous and that can be placed in a space where people already pass by.” (One idea, that may still be revived, is to put it in Centraal Station in the heart of Amsterdam).

The project was originally developed at the Lincoln Centre in New York where Daemen was selected for a Collider Fellowship, and where she and her key collaborator spent an 8-month residency. It was a tense time in the city, early in the new Trump presidency.

Daemen was partially inspired by her experiences in Washington Square Park where she encountered “people preaching and yelling and trying to convince each other of their ideas. This man just came up to me, looked me in the face and said: ‘you’re all being lied to!’ That sparked the idea I had to do something on these opposing realities. The piece is not that heavy, but it is about this tension,” she signs off.

Before the world premiere at IDFA, SEE NL spoke to Daemen in a video interview. Find out more about the Dutch line-up in Venice here.