About me

Gluten is what binds. Flour and water are nothing on their own.

Knead them and something forms that holds its shape, rises, and carries weight. What matters is not the ingredients, it’s what you form that holds them together.

I learned that with my hands before I had words for it. I was building a bakery in Antofagasta, Chile, and it was growing. Before that I lived and worked in New Zealand and Australia, where I met my wife. And when life asked for stability, I went back to the Netherlands. But honestly, I didn’t find it there. I found something else: a society living with claims that, to me, seemed increasingly difficult to defend, and holding on to them as part of its identity. Gluten gone wrong.

I saw how claims are woven together. I saw how easy it is to manipulate claims. And I saw how institutions can use claims against the people they serve. By accident or on purpose, I leave that open, because that is something better to test. The Gluten Project began there: to look at what holds, and to test whether it really does.

This project is also part of my personal development: it took me a lot of energy to step outside what I experienced as Dutch conformism, and once outside, I was struck by how many signals a bubble of social conformism can filter or distort. My early writing carries that shock, disbelief and eventual frustration. I now see it as a necessary phase, one that taught me what I needed to continue. Let’s be honest, frustration is easy to dismiss. Precision is not.

Now I test claims made by bodies that hold power over others, and I ask one question: can the people bound by that claim reach the evidence that could prove it wrong, without the institution’s permission? The method is Pascalism. Its earlier versions stay published, including the parts I got wrong.

Alongside all this, I have worked as a visual designer for twenty years, since I was sixteen, now through my own studio, Becker Hoff Design.

Pascal Becker Hoff