Our Story​​

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We live in a time of endless distraction. Our concentration grows shorter, and with it our capacity to listen and to relate to one another with authenticity. Rong Place started with an empty room, a few people, and the intention to make space for creative agency, undivided attention and collective belonging in a time of social isolation and global uncertainty.

 

Founded in Puglia, Italy in early 2020, Rong Place is a participatory art and research project exploring how shared creative action in an intentionally empty space can change the way people relate to space, to one another, and to the unfamiliar. 

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The project became an official non-profit organisation in 2021, Rong Place ETS, and its experimentation phase was supported by the PIN grant (Regione Puglia, 2021–2023), co-financed by the European Social Fund. Between 2020 and 2023, more than 30 participatory practices were tested inside a 14 m² empty room, engaging a total of over 500 participants across Italy, Switzerland, Brazil and China.

 

Emptiness was treated not as absence but as a generative condition. We called it the Zero-Point Energy Space: a spatial and relational practice in which everything unnecessary was left outside, and meaning emerged through presence and interaction rather than consumption — giving rise to spontaneous collective installations. 

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This first phase of this project is documented in the Archive 2020–2023. In 2024–2025, the project paused due to lack of funding which led to further research (Space Blank), revisiting what the initial phase had revealed.

 

In mid 2026, Rong Place enters its second phase: Active Void, which brings the empty room into schools, educational and cultural places as permanent rooms, mobile installations and workshops. The formal entity remains active for research collaborations, artist residencies and grant-funded projects. 

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