In addition to being an artist, Niels Bekkema was a housing counselor for status holders in The Hague, a group that is ubiquitous in public polemics and politics on the one hand, but that on the other hand is tucked away in reception centers on the outskirts of the city. It is this contrast between invisibility and presence that he set out to explore during an artist-in-residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada. “On the basis of this contrast between the present and the virtually invisible, I will conduct visual research into what lies hidden in the background against which daily life is practiced.”

Although Bekkema's work is usually not so political, this plan fits into his artistic practice in the sense that he also operates 'in intermediate places', between literary and concrete. He is also a translator of the experimental poetry of Gertrude Stein. Since his studies at the Minerva Academy, he has been dissecting the boundaries between text, installation, sculpture and drawing as a writer and artist. How can a text be more than a description, how can it be an autonomous object? How can an image be a punctuation in space? He wanted to answer these kinds of questions in Banff, and the R&D committee saw the parallels he draws between text and human lives as an impetus for his work.

One of Bekkema's plans in Banff was to work in photography, a new medium for him. In the color darkroom there he discovered the photogram, in which you make images with shadows. The shadow as a material, which fitted in with his visual research into the contrast between the present and the virtually invisible, “to what lies hidden in the background against which daily life is practiced.” He combined this with disappearing words, with which he also stenciled a site-specific sculpture during an open studio day: with light and flour it became a evanescent shape. Back in Rotterdam, he went on to further explore these experiences for a solo exhibition at Onono in November 2018.