Fragments about Space

What is space ? Perhaps not a room, nor the objects within it, but the interval between them, the quiet encounter between things, air and ourselves. Fragments about Space present three views of the spaces we inhabit: the ones that shelter our daydreams, the ones that gather worlds, and the ones that take us back to the present moment.

objects holds and open spaces ©2026 maison tombo

Space is not a room. Space is not objects. Space is what happens in the encounter between them: the interval, the breath, the air between a crackled vase and the flowers on the table, between us and a cup that we hold, between a closed box and the person who stands before it, wondering what it once held. 

The Latin root of the word, spatium, means simply an interval, a stretch, a gap between things. Space is what exists between. Every day we move through spaces, rooms, kitchens, gardens, temples, and each one is a container filled with light, wind, temperature, smells, and objects. The fusion of these elements creates a unique space at a certain moment in time. Going further, even objects hold or open spaces: not the clay of the teapot but its hollow, not the walls of the box but the dark interval they enclose.

Fragment I — Space for Daydreaming

Phenomenology tells us that space is where existence happens. It is not a geometric container but a lived field, shaped by our bodies, memories, emotions and objects. Space is always someone's space. It is always felt from the inside.

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes the house as a shelter for the imagination, a nest for daydreaming:

“For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.”

The house shelters daydreaming. The house protects the dreamer. The house allows one to dream in peace. A room without objects is not yet a space, it is only a volume. The objects make a space daydreamable. The corner of a room becomes meaningful because of the chair that stands in it. The shelf becomes a landscape because of that vase that rests on it. The object does not just decorate the space, it creates the conditions for the space to be felt. It also holds a space of its own: the hollow of the vase, the dark interior of the closed box, an interval enclosed within its walls. Lao Tzu saw this twenty-five centuries ago. In a text called Tao Te Ching, compiled around the 4th century BCE, he wrote that clay forms the pot, but it is the hollow that makes it a pot. Walls make a room, but it is the void within, the doors and the windows, that makes it livable. The object obeys the same law as the room. What we live with, in the end, is the emptiness that things hold open for us.

Romanticism, a small oval box hand-carved in Flores, Indonesia, has a softly domed lid fitted over a body of botanical motifs and scalloped edges, worn by time and restored with a dark waxed finish. Boxes like this one have long held personal treasures: handwritten notes, jewelry, tokens, small objects with meaning. Sometimes we tuck them away and forget, only to rediscover them years later, and remember who we were, or what mattered then. Closed things can be more powerful than open ones. An open box contains only what is in it. A closed box contains infinite possibilities. The lid is not a barrier,  it is an invitation to imagine. Left closed on a table, in quiet suggestion, the box shelters not just its contents but also our daydreams about them.

Fragment II — Space as a Connector

Everything is connected, and not only as a figure of speech. The carbon in our DNA, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood were forged in the cores of dying stars, billions of years ago. Matter itself is a form of inheritance. Some objects let us feel that inheritance.

Martin Heidegger made a distinction between a mere object, a commodity, described by its function, and a genuine “thing”, which gathers whole worlds into itself. His example is a clay jug. A physicist could describe the jug entirely in molecular terms and miss what it is. When the jug pours wine for a gathering, it gathers: the earth the vine grew from, the sky and rain that fed it, the mortals who drink together, and something sacred in the act of offering. The jug does not contain these dimensions the way a box contains its contents. It holds them the way a gathering holds people.

SPACE IS the interval between us and a cup that we hold. it also about THE QUALITY OF PRESENCE that WE BRING TO THINGS. ©2026 maison tombo

Crocodile & Turtle, an ikat from Sumba illustrates this point by being such a gathering, in textile form. Woven in natural indigo over months by women weavers, it tells the story of the burial of King Honda Rangga and Queen Rau Patuala, though it never names them. In Sumbanese tradition, the dead are not named directly, out of respect. The king and queen appear instead as a crocodile and a turtle. A horse carries their souls to the afterlife. A buffalo carries provisions for the journey beyond. Around them, figures join hands and march together, a whole community moving together. The weavers paired the cloth with two verses: Pai kilikukur which means to parade like a coiled eel, the community circling the tomb in protective, ceremonial motion and Tuna wiliwunjilu, referring to heaven and earth being under one creator.

Held in the hand, this cloth holds all of it at once. The indigo plant and the soil it grew from: earth. The divine order joining heaven and earth: sky. The weavers, the mourners, the king and queen who can no longer be named: mortals. And the souls being carried beyond, the sacred that exceeds all utility. It is a fourfold, in textile. 

Other textiles gather other worlds. A red ikat from East Sumba draws its color from Morinda roots, pounded and combined with loba leaves, the fibers first treated with candlenut oil so the dye will bind, and cycles of dyeing and drying repeated over months until the red reaches its full depth. Woven into its Patola flowers is the memory of Indian trade cloths, brought to the archipelago centuries ago as gifts for nobility, patterns of prestige that traveled across Java, Sumatra and Bali and never left.

Objects carry their histories with them. Walter Benjamin called this the “aura” of things: an authentic object carries the trace of everything it has passed through: the hands that made it, the time it has lived, the people who used it. Eau#2, a crackled vessel shows this openly. Its creamy glaze is webbed with fine crazing; its foot is worn, its glaze pitted, the clay's texture emerging where years of handling have thinned the surface. A few fluid brushstrokes in underglaze blue-gray evoke reeds, water plants, a fish, painting and calligraphy in the same gesture. It was made for use, for storing tea or grain. Benjamin observed that when we collect such an object, we rescue it from its function and return it to its purer existence: the vessel that once stored grain is no longer a grain vessel, it becomes itself, fully. Its imperfections are not flaws but testimony.

To bring objects into our homes is to resurface this interconnectedness. The Indigo textile whose blue deepened through repeated dips and oxidation, each thread absorbing the dye in its own way, carries the plant, the water, and the artisan's hand into the room. These invisible dimensions cannot quite be explained in words, they are felt through the senses. We can call it the magic space, the invisible space we choose, consciously or not, to live with.

Fragment III — Space as Presence

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote in 1942 in a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”. The quality of presence we bring to things and to people determines what they can give back to us.

Taiwanese tea culture understands this. Rooted in Chinese Gongfu Cha and touched by Japanese tea traditions, it treats the daily act of drinking tea as a ritual of presence: a moment to pause, to honor the beauty of nature and of ordinary life. Ceremonies unfold with intention, valuing fine utensils and the grace of gestures. One step of the ceremony is described in a poem as a row of clouds, running water: hot water awakening the leaves, then flowing gently over a line of cups to warm them. A simple act, and it sets the tone for the entire gathering.

Clouds & Water teapot made for this ritual carries the same attention in its form: a fine structure, a refined spout, a lid fitted with such precision that lifting it becomes part of the ceremony. Its ivory and ochre glaze is soft to the eye the way the ritual is soft to the day. An object held with this kind of attention returns us to the present moment. In that sense, objects become extensions of ourselves, not possessions, but instruments of presence.

To choose an object for our space is therefore never a small act. We are choosing what will gather around us: which earth, which hands, which time, which silence. We are choosing the intervals we will live inside.

Space is what exists between. It is up to us to inhabit it.

Written  by Mathilde Okuda, with Claude AI assistance.

References

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (c. 5th–4th century BCE)

Martin Heidegger, Unpacking My Library (Essay, 1931) & The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Essay, 1935-1936)

Simone Weil, Waiting for God (1950) 

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1968)