The Word
Recyclery

The Word Recyclery is an artistic, participatory Pop-up Project. For two weeks, you can leave a troublesome word — a word that makes you anxious, angry, or sad — at the Recycling Park. Here online or at the place where we are guests. Then the park closes and the recycling team gets to work. A month and a half later, you are invited to a poetic-musical performance that has transformed all these words into beauty. A moment that touches and connects.

Leave a troublesome word.
Rediscover Beauty.

Perhaps you recognise it: the weight of words like unsafe, war, or genocide. They become embedded in your thinking and feeling. They colour your view of the world without you wanting them to. Or perhaps you live day in, day out with difficult words. Words related to loss, death, fatigue, illness, uncertainty, or conflict.

In The Word Recyclery, you may let go of words that chafe, confuse, or have lost their lustre. Words that weigh heavily — collectively or personally. Here they are listened to, dissected, cut apart, and brought back to their essence. Then they transform: into poetry, sound, silence, beauty. In the midst of pain, horror, and complexity, something new emerges — something soft, something beautiful, something that touches and connects.

This is no ordinary place. It is a living atelier where word art, music, and ritual come together. Where you may leave something behind, and experience that language is not fixed — but malleable, changeable, and full of potential. An open space where language and people may breathe again. So that we can meet life just a little differently. Softer in the body, clearer in the mind.

Beautiful, powerful, I really felt the strange and sometimes incomprehensible words

- Saskia

How it works

The Word Recyclery is a participatory and artistic Pop-up Project. For two months, we are 'in residence' at a location.

Everyone who leaves a word is warmly invited to the show, in which Stien, together with a musician, creates a performance based on everything that was left.

Even if you have not submitted a word, you are welcome. The show is a shared ritual — an invitation to presence, to listening, to being touched. A place where language moves, where beauty emerges from the difficult, and where silence says as much as words.

First two weeks of the residency

For two weeks, you can submit a word online, or hand it in physically at the pop-up recycling park where Stien is present as a listener.

Your word is welcome — whether it is everyday, loaded, confusing, or difficult to pronounce. Via a recycling menu, you choose yourself how your word will be processed: as poetry, sound, silence, with or without music, bittersweet, soft, spicy, or something entirely different.

Leave your word with us

Come to the performance

Last week of the residency

I am Stien, so glad to see you here

I am a word artist, singer-songwriter with STI.LL, ceremony speaker, facilitator, and multidisciplinary theatre maker. My work moves between word art, music, and ritual. With a heart for personal and collective transformation.

I love to make words resonate in circles, ceremonies, living rooms, and on stages — sometimes still, sometimes playful, always with attention to what touches. I believe that language can be healing, that silence may speak, and that humour is just as transformative as depth.

In my performances, I invite slowing down, being together in the not-knowing, letting breathe what wants to be said. This creates a space where words may live again — as ritual, as art, as encountering each other in our fragile humanity.

Letters, words, stories.
Healing and mending, eye opening.

Geert Degrande, storyteller and blogwriter

I want to have a word recycled

The Recycling Park is currently closed.
For the next opening, check the Agenda

Stay informed and become an honorary guest

Would you like to be notified when a Pop-Up Recycling Park opens its doors?
Sign up as an honorary guest and receive a timely notification!

Support this project

The Word Recyclery is a poetic oasis in a world adrift. Subsidies are being applied for and are particularly important. The places we visit contribute their share. And beyond that, all additional support is welcome.

With your financial contribution, we can continue to share this connecting experience with diverse communities. Every contribution, large or small, helps us to reach new places and touch more people.

Choose here a processing contribution for The Word Recyclery. Decide for yourself the weight of processing: €5 - €10 - €15