Wat Blijft | What Remains is a sound composition by writer Geert Vermeire (B) and musician Stefaan van Biesen (B), created by field recordings captured in Antwerp, Athens and Venice. Morning sounds and the quiet movements of passers-by form the foundation of this composition. Blending these everyday recordings with keyboards, samples, and subtle effects, transforming fleeting moments into an immersive reflection on presence, movement, and time.

Spoken text by Geert Vermeire, translated:

What Remains

Hands hold on, hands let go, in a single movement of carrying and laying down, of turning inward and returning, an opening that already contains closure, as gentle as a breath.

Hands reach out, hands fold into themselves, like water remembering its origin in the sea. Within arrival lies departure. Hands are travellers; they draw lines that disappear, cartographies rewriting themselves in a gesture of giving and receiving, without end. The horizon lies both before us and behind us. We follow a line that finds itself again.

Water drips from fingers, a slowness without time, a softness that extends the hands beyond their limits, where touching is also letting go. We move with the utmost care, every touch opening a world that cannot be closed. The smallest tremor ripples outward, a change reaching further than we can follow.

A hand touches lines where a hand can no longer reach. The visible becomes invisible; we reach out towards what slips away from us.Hands are books that touch, a library of skin. Our fingers read page after page, every word a touch, every touch a memory. In our hands lie the stories of every path we have walked, a palimpsest of closeness, each time overwritten by a new encounter. Ideas blossom through our hands, words become touches, every image becomes a feeling, like a soft wind passing through the body, present for a moment, then settling deep within our cells.

Our hands vibrate invisibly as another approaches, in a music of the spheres forming before the other becomes visible, like the sensing of planets drawn towards one another in distant, dark orbits, ringing like trembling glass, a sonorous embrace arising from emptiness and surrounding us with every step towards each other, coming and going.

And then, when one hand finds another, a beginning without an origin emerges, a journey opening in a movement that carries us without holding us.

Our hands carry hands, carry our bodies, beyond the horizon, translucent, bearers of what does not reveal itself. There, where the beginning is hidden within the end. Visible, invisible, one hand in another, and the moment when it lets go.That which remains.

Geert Vermeire 2026