Jonas Vansteenkiste

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Jonas Vansteenkiste’s Transit is a spatial and psychological meditation on thresholds—those physical and mental states that exist between departure and arrival, clarity and ambiguity, motion and stasis. The installation comprises two main elements: a sculptural corridor and a video projection. Together, they form an immersive environment that confronts the viewer with the disquieting sensation of arrested movement.

The architectural component presents itself as a freestanding corridor constructed from gyproc and wood. While the structure appears to function as a passageway, it ultimately leads nowhere. Its walls are painted in a deep grey, echoing the atmosphere of the video it contains. This corridor is finished only on the interior, resembling the sterile, impersonal feel of a newly built apartment. It is a space that simulates purpose—suggesting a journey or transition—but offers no destination.

This spatial suspension mirrors what anthropologist Victor Turner called the liminal phase in rites of passage: a threshold condition marked by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy (The Ritual Process, 1969). Liminality is not only a cultural construct but also a deeply psychological one. As such, Transit can be read as a metaphor for mental states of disorientation or paralysis—where transition is implied but not achieved.

The accompanying video projection shows a single bedroom viewed from behind half-open doors. Nothing moves except the shifting of light and the slow stirring of curtains in the wind. Initially serene, the scene becomes quietly unsettling over time. This sense of uncanny familiarity aligns with Freud’s concept of the unheimlich—the uncanny—as something simultaneously known and alien (Das Unheimliche, 1919). The bedroom, an archetype of intimacy and rest, becomes charged with absence and psychological tension.

Transit thus becomes a portrait of psychological suspension. Rather than depicting a subject, Vansteenkiste replaces the figure with architecture, using space itself as the container of emotion. The corridor becomes a kind of mental architecture, where the failure to arrive becomes a metaphor for anxiety, stagnation, or existential inertia.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the work resonates with D.W. Winnicott’s theory of transitional space—a conceptual zone between internal and external reality where meaning and identity are negotiated (Playing and Reality, 1971). In Transit, this space is unresolved; the viewer enters a zone where psychological movement is halted and meaning becomes opaque.

The corridor is also a non-place in Marc Augé’s sense—an anonymous, interchangeable space lacking relational identity (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995). Yet Vansteenkiste’s version of the non-place is stripped even of its transitory function. It is a corridor without an elsewhere. The installation thus evokes a state of existential entrapment, where the illusion of movement masks a deeper inertia.

Ultimately, Transit operates not only as an architectural gesture but as a psychological diagram. It embodies what theorist Sara Ahmed calls "stuckness"—a state in which affect becomes sedimented in space, and progress is imagined but perpetually deferred (The Promise of Happiness, 2010). By denying the viewer the closure of arrival, Vansteenkiste challenges us to confront the discomfort of suspended time, the unease of endless transition, and the architecture of psychological impasse.