In sixteenth-century Japan, Sen no Rikyū designed the tea room. Its entrance — the nijiriguchi — was deliberately so low that even the most powerful samurai had to bow, lay down his sword, and crawl in. Once inside, rank disappeared. Everyone sat beneath one roof.
Three centuries later, in Vienna, Schubert and his friends made music in salons where aristocrats and craftsmen sat side by side. In the twentieth century, Martin Buber gave the same idea its philosophical voice: "All real life is meeting."
The same question, again and again. Where is a person allowed to be themselves? Where are the unfinished, the unresolved, the silent allowed in?
In Schubert's Vienna, it was not the institutions that kept the evenings alive. It was the ones who opened their homes. Who hosted gatherings that produced nothing — no verdict, no record, no useful outcome. Aristocrats sat beside craftsmen. The music was played once and disappeared. No one could have explained, in advance, why it mattered.
And yet something from those rooms has lasted two centuries.
The people who made that possible understood something quietly: that a world without space for the purposeless loses, over time, the capacity to feel anything at all. They did not invest for return. They simply sensed that the room was necessary.
Something similar is happening now. People are returning to what cannot be scheduled — to forests, to unplanned evenings, to music in small rooms, to conversations that trail off without conclusion. Something in us seems to know this before we can say why. In a world where everything can be optimised, the one thing that cannot — sitting with an open question — is becoming the thing people are quietly looking for. Perhaps the patrons of our time are already moving. They just haven't been given a name for what they're sensing.
We could have chosen something that pays. We chose sincerity instead. This project asks what that cost us.
What Are We Worth? grows out of this long line. We talk about money because money is what isn't talked about. We talk about loneliness because it hides behind the perfect performances our world demands. And for one evening in Feldkirch, we are building a room — where students, teachers, audience, and institutions can sit beneath one roof. As themselves.
It is not a new idea. It is a very old one that needs to be heard again.
A question without an answer is not a weakness. It is a place.
This work is part of a longer inquiry into spaces without answers.