The award for which this object was created is given annually to the best cultural institution in Arnhem. It always takes the form of a ring, and each year a different artist is invited to recreate it in their own interpretation. This time, the honoured institution was the city’s open‑air museum, the Openluchtmuseum in Arnhem.
A gesture directed toward many people confronted me with a simple yet surprising question: how do you give a single ring to an institution that is a community, a place and a memory? I decided to create a ring that could hold all of them, not only symbolically but also in scale and meaning.
I wrapped several hectares of the museum grounds with a single thread of gold. Thin, yet unyielding, like a thought that refuses to fall apart. I wound the entire thread onto a large spool that became the core of the object. On its rim I engraved a palindrome shaped as a ring: IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI. These words do not merely describe movement, they initiate it. They turn meanings around, draw attention, and remind us that every distinction carries both brilliance and the risk of burning.
In my reading, the palindrome does not refer to people but to a place. The open‑air museum, as an institution that preserves history, is itself sometimes consumed by the fire of memory, by the heat that transforms objects into stories. The ring thus becomes a vessel for this motion: the circulation between memory and transformation, between preservation and loss.
This is how a conceptual ring came into being, likely the largest in the world. An object that holds within it a place, its people and the echo of a Latin verse that says: we circle, we return, we are consumed.