Biographies
Contacts
Vanessa Brazeau (b. 1986, Niagara Falls, CA) is a trans-disciplinary artist, producer, ice-breaker, collaborator, (un)educator working primarily in public space. She sees embodiment, physicality and play as tools for translating, simplifying and subverting complex sociopolitical ideas. Her motivation is to create inclusive, accessible, participatory projects that (un)educate and empower various publics.
Vanessa earned an MFA in “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” from the Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2016 and was hired in 2019 as an artistic associate and lecturer for the program as part of the Bauhaus Innovation Grant. During this time, she developed performative walks and strategies for public encounters in dialogue with students, in addition to imagining and implementing an experimental, embodied format for the social laboratory MIND PALACES at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar. She has collaborated with ccSPORT, a trans-local connective reclaiming and redefining the field of SPORT and since 2017 has been involved in processes of Commoning with Timelab as part of a working group devoted to shaping the ‘Artist Residency’ as a commons. She was the initiator and producer of Art Spin Berlin (2014-2019), a community based public art festival and bike tour of creative venues, art performances and site-specific installations throughout various Berlin neighbourhoods, shortlisted for the SPIEGEL ONLINE’s Social Design Award in 2016.
Vanessa is now based in Brussels.
www.vanessabrazeau.com
Claire Chassot (b. 1989, FR) is a French-Swiss artist, currently based in Marseille, working on the intersection of scenography, installation and performance art. She has an educational background in the fields of theatre theory, spatial design and contemporary art. Through different collaborative projects, Claire aims to gather subjectivities and express sensitive knowledges of the spaces we co-inhabit. Claire’s installations and performances have been presented in Festival JerkOff in Doc!, Paris, in Astérismes, Brittany, in La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse, in Galeria Nueva, Madrid,... Her master project at HEAD Geneva has been awarded by Ahead Foundation in 2015 and led to the artist book ‘Passengers’. In 2016, she was in residency with 40mcube and started to integrate ecological questions in her practice. She received a grant and a studio from the city of Rennes in 2018 and one of her last sculptures is part of the Contemporary Art Fund of Rennes. She places herself as an intercessor between different elements and subjectivities so as to reveal the relations that exist between them. Lately she is focusing on the relations between vegetal and human bodies, using her practice of basketmaking to create costumes, performance accessories and/or architectural objects.
www.clairechassot.com
contact: claire.chassot@gmail.com
dallas is an architectural collective born in June 2018 from the meeting of four young architect-builders. It works on projects of various natures and scales - ephemeral or perennial, objects, installations or spaces - questioning the uses, practices and perceptions of space, the city and materials. At a time of over-specialization, dallas aims more for a general practice, enhancing making, action and mixing skills ; a practice between design and construction, between architecture, art and crafts. It is a field of experimentation, a round trip between knowledge and doing, between imaginary and concrete. dallas gives a primordial place to the "chantier" - the french word for both the building site and the building moment -, believing that the soundness of a project is perceived during this stage. dallas aims to be flexible, open, leaving room for a wide spectrum of possibilities and enhancing the unexpected. Its sources of inspiration are multiple, they are drawn from the context, the meetings, the dreams ... All of which allow an answer that can only be singular.
www.collectifdallas.eu
Jonathan De Maeyer (b. 1994, BE) works and lives in Ghent. He holds a master's degree in Visual Arts - Photography from LUCA School Of Arts Ghent and works on autonomous projects as well as projects in collaboration with artists and musicians. He tries to understand his surroundings through his photographic work, films and texts. De Maeyer is working on a digital and analog image archive that forms the basis for associatively composed series that try to translate the desire to find an unknown landscape called ‘Locus Amoenis’. Additionally, the series are about the interpretation of place. The boundaries of perception seem to be determined by figures of speech and certain successful interpretations. In his work he tries to reinterpret landscape and give the viewer access to an alternative, personal perception. A representation of reality is already a perception. The representation of an image consists out of layers. Some see the space between these layers as emptiness, but De Maeyer likes to think of it as one containing endless possibilities from which viewers can interpret to their heart’s content. When images fail to communicate a certain meaning, it creates a blank canvas to project a personal perception upon. By adding these layers, he wants to slow down the process of seeing. It is not the image that fascinates him, but the image of the image, which is artificial. Does reality exist when it is not observed?
www.jonathandemaeyer.com
Anastasia Eggers (DE/RU) works in the field of speculative and critical design and design research. In her practice, she explores social, cultural, political and environmental issues, often choosing food and food production as a medium to create narratives around those topics. Her work often results in future scenarios that metaphorically speak about recent societal tendencies and show complex relations between design fiction and reality.
Anastasia graduated from the Social Master department of the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017.
www.anastasiaeggers.com
Ciel Grommen (b. 1989, BE) extended her training in architecture at the University of Leuven with a master in contemporary art at the HEAD in Geneva. What follows is a trans-disciplinary research practice from which she creates frameworks that addresses social, political and environmental issues about cohabitation. Collaboration and intense fieldwork are central to her methodology. Through maps, images, instructions and installations she subsequently invites the public to imagine another perception of space. Works have been exhibited in Artsonje Art Centre, Seoul; Live In Your Head Gallery, Geneva; Luma foundation Arles; Zolder Luchtfabriek; Beursschouwburg Brussels etc. Works even more often appear in the “real” world, such as Petit Chateau, asylum centre in Brussels; the post box of her neighbour; online; on the Aldi parking lot of Borgloon, ... Since 2018, she works intensively on "Seasonal Neighbours", an artistic research project on seasonality and cohabition in Europe's countryside, for which she works in close collaboration with Maximiliaan Royakkers and 14 other artists.
www.cielgrommen.com
cielgrommen@hotmail.com
Pia Jacques de Dixmude (b.1997, BE) is curious and a bit stubborn. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Amsterdam and Brussels. Her practice could be described as pragmatic surrealism, taking various forms according to the specificity of the context she works with. Pia is fascinated by the use of narration as a goal to justify and amplify a specific discourse. Research is an essential part of her practice going from archival documents, interviews, visits, discussions, administrative procedures, and spatial features. She uses speculation and recurrently humor to reconsider historical narratives for the present. She is part of the collective Seasonal Neighbours, co-founder of Belgian Institute of Graphic Design, and currently studying at the Sandberg Institute in the temporary master program F for Fact.
https://piajacques.be
Dieter Leyssen (b.1989, BE) holds a MSc in Architecture from the KU Leuven and is candidate MSc in City Making and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 2013 he is member of international architecture and urban practice 51N4E in Brussels. Both in practice and writing, he developed a specific interest in collaborative processes that improve, strengthen and interrogate socio-spatial transformations in society.
In 2013, he was awarded the Flanders State Architect’s prize for young graduates and in 2018 he received the Young Planner Prize from the Dutch and Flemish Planning Association. His work was exhibited in Metropolitan Exchange (US), DeSingel International Arts Campus (BE) and the Dojima River Biennale (JP) and published in Architectural Re- view Magazine (UK) and ARCH+ (DE) amongst others. He is co-editor of FoUL, an independent magazine on urban practices founded at LSE.
dieter.leyssen@gmail.com
Ioana Lupascu (b. 1989, RO) graduated with a Master in Architecture (UAUIM, 2014), followed by a training in urban play (Trust in Play, 2019) and a Master in Art Praxis from DAI (Dutch Art Institute, 2022). The audience's experience (ways of sending and receiving information or feelings) is central in her research. Ioana enjoys work that encourages critical thinking and playful interactions with a strong focus on process, making and methodology rather than a final artifact. This often leads to (co)producing and articulating: (audio) walks, texts, performances, movement sessions, games and workshops. She is currently exploring the topic of intimacy, constraints, desire and fragmentation.
https://www.ioana-lupascu.com/
contact: hello@ioana-lupascu.com
Ines Marita Schärer (b. 1987, CH) is currently based in Brussels and Switzerland and works across poetry, performance, installation, sound art and experimental music. She is concerned with the precarities and vulnerabilities of diverse beings within predominant (power) structures and explores voice and words as a means of establishing relationality and re-imagining their conditions and environments. Her practice is informed by the given context, permeable for various forms of alternative knowledges, nourished and driven by thinkers, co-thinkers, collaborators and allies.
Ines holds a Master in Art Practice from DAI, Dutch Art Institute in Holland (2019) and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from HKB, Bern (2012). She spent residencies in Paris (visarte Graubünden, 2013) and Vienna (Kanton Graubünden, 2014) and has participated in group exhibitions at the STADTGALERIE BERN or KUNSTHAUS LANGENTHAL, among others, and has participated in various projects in public space, such as ORTUNG in Chur, KUNSTWEGE in Pontresina, or KUNSTPLÄTZE in Bern. One of her main projects, +41 (0)800 00 12 16, is a voice message project functioning as an experimental platform for poetic pieces and voice based works (www.0800001216.ch)
www.inesmarita.ch
Karolina Michalik (b.1991) graduated from the Social Design master program at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018 with a background in architecture. Her interest is in subverting underwritten rules, codes and hierarchies of modern society by unmasking and dismantling their visual and spatial embodiments and in turn developing approaches for shaping collaborative built environments. In fall 2019 she took part in the NeverNever school and resulting publication with Spolka collective in Kosice, Slovakia, where she continued her focus and field research into informal building practices and their potential in disrupting aesthetics of commodification. She currently resides in Brussels, reconstructing second hand greenhouses for use by local farming organisations.
www.karolinamichalik.com
Yacinth Pos (b. 1994, NL) is a designer with a practice focused on the social, political and cultural field through a research driven approach. She explores social narratives through print and digital design, visual identity, illustration, research, installation and storytelling.
She graduated from the graphic design department at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2017. Since 2018 she is engaged in the project Camping Kafka, initiated by Academie voor Beeldvorming. Camping Kafka does research on the increasing habitation on holiday parks and campings by citizens who became stuck on the Dutch housing market. By doing fieldwork they develop different communicative tools that challenge the perception of policy makers.
www.yacinthpos.com, http://www.academievoorbeeldvorming.nl/camping-kafka/seizoenswerk/
Maximiliaan Royakkers (b.1988, BE) operates his tentacular spatial practice from Brussels. His work is committed to engage with our present political, social and ecological dynamics through space. This attitude produces output of various and ever growing kind: buildings and interventions in space, models and drawings, photography, installations and performances, exhibitions, writing and lectures, studios and workshops, research…He collaborates in a close network of people, places and institutions developing projects between practice and research.
Maximiliaan extended is his studies as an architect at Leuven University with a masters at the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. He is a regular contributor to magazines and editorial projects (Accattone, Oase,…) and is involved in teaching and lecturing (Antwerp University, ULB La Cambre Horta, ULiège, Faculty of Architecture Leuven University,...).
His work has been exhibited at a.o C-mine Genk, Bureau Europa Maastricht, De Singel Arts Center Antwerp, Z33 center for contemporary Arts and Design Hasselt, Jan Van Eyck Academy Maastricht, Stroom Den Haag.
www.maximiliaanroyakkers.com
maximiliaan.royakkers@gmail.com
Mona Thijs (1999) is studying a Master in Word Art at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp. Since childhood she has looked at the days as if they were little stories. Those stories sometimes find their form on paper, sometimes on stage, sometimes in audio. Mona published columns in dS Magazine and Klasse. Some of her short stories appeared in the literary magazine DW B. In the fall of 2021, as part of her master’s degree, she did an internship at theaterwerkplaats HETGEVOLG, where she co-directed and worked with people who fall outside the regular social circuit.
https://monathijs.portfoliobox.net/
Ewoud Vermote (b. 1992, BE) studied Social Sciences, worked in theater, and now studies Audiovisual Arts at LUCA School of Arts Brussels. From a research driven approach he seeks an audiovisual form for the visible and the unvisible in the structures that surround us. Besides making, he is also one of the driving forces behind Arts Platform PLAN B, a production/presentation/reflection platform focussed on collective, non-urban and small-scale practices.
www.kunstenplatformplanb.be
Ode Windels (b.1994, BE) is an anthropologist based in Brussels, interested in bridging research into the way people relate to their spatial environment with making practices. On a freelance basis she has been working for Damaged Goods (Meg Stuart), Decoratelier and Pool is Cool . In the past she has been engaged in the hospitality of minors with a migration background.
Vanessa earned an MFA in “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” from the Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2016 and was hired in 2019 as an artistic associate and lecturer for the program as part of the Bauhaus Innovation Grant. During this time, she developed performative walks and strategies for public encounters in dialogue with students, in addition to imagining and implementing an experimental, embodied format for the social laboratory MIND PALACES at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar. She has collaborated with ccSPORT, a trans-local connective reclaiming and redefining the field of SPORT and since 2017 has been involved in processes of Commoning with Timelab as part of a working group devoted to shaping the ‘Artist Residency’ as a commons. She was the initiator and producer of Art Spin Berlin (2014-2019), a community based public art festival and bike tour of creative venues, art performances and site-specific installations throughout various Berlin neighbourhoods, shortlisted for the SPIEGEL ONLINE’s Social Design Award in 2016.
Vanessa is now based in Brussels.
www.vanessabrazeau.com
Claire Chassot (b. 1989, FR) is a French-Swiss artist, currently based in Marseille, working on the intersection of scenography, installation and performance art. She has an educational background in the fields of theatre theory, spatial design and contemporary art. Through different collaborative projects, Claire aims to gather subjectivities and express sensitive knowledges of the spaces we co-inhabit. Claire’s installations and performances have been presented in Festival JerkOff in Doc!, Paris, in Astérismes, Brittany, in La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse, in Galeria Nueva, Madrid,... Her master project at HEAD Geneva has been awarded by Ahead Foundation in 2015 and led to the artist book ‘Passengers’. In 2016, she was in residency with 40mcube and started to integrate ecological questions in her practice. She received a grant and a studio from the city of Rennes in 2018 and one of her last sculptures is part of the Contemporary Art Fund of Rennes. She places herself as an intercessor between different elements and subjectivities so as to reveal the relations that exist between them. Lately she is focusing on the relations between vegetal and human bodies, using her practice of basketmaking to create costumes, performance accessories and/or architectural objects.
www.clairechassot.com
contact: claire.chassot@gmail.com
dallas is an architectural collective born in June 2018 from the meeting of four young architect-builders. It works on projects of various natures and scales - ephemeral or perennial, objects, installations or spaces - questioning the uses, practices and perceptions of space, the city and materials. At a time of over-specialization, dallas aims more for a general practice, enhancing making, action and mixing skills ; a practice between design and construction, between architecture, art and crafts. It is a field of experimentation, a round trip between knowledge and doing, between imaginary and concrete. dallas gives a primordial place to the "chantier" - the french word for both the building site and the building moment -, believing that the soundness of a project is perceived during this stage. dallas aims to be flexible, open, leaving room for a wide spectrum of possibilities and enhancing the unexpected. Its sources of inspiration are multiple, they are drawn from the context, the meetings, the dreams ... All of which allow an answer that can only be singular.
www.collectifdallas.eu
Jonathan De Maeyer (b. 1994, BE) works and lives in Ghent. He holds a master's degree in Visual Arts - Photography from LUCA School Of Arts Ghent and works on autonomous projects as well as projects in collaboration with artists and musicians. He tries to understand his surroundings through his photographic work, films and texts. De Maeyer is working on a digital and analog image archive that forms the basis for associatively composed series that try to translate the desire to find an unknown landscape called ‘Locus Amoenis’. Additionally, the series are about the interpretation of place. The boundaries of perception seem to be determined by figures of speech and certain successful interpretations. In his work he tries to reinterpret landscape and give the viewer access to an alternative, personal perception. A representation of reality is already a perception. The representation of an image consists out of layers. Some see the space between these layers as emptiness, but De Maeyer likes to think of it as one containing endless possibilities from which viewers can interpret to their heart’s content. When images fail to communicate a certain meaning, it creates a blank canvas to project a personal perception upon. By adding these layers, he wants to slow down the process of seeing. It is not the image that fascinates him, but the image of the image, which is artificial. Does reality exist when it is not observed?
www.jonathandemaeyer.com
Anastasia Eggers (DE/RU) works in the field of speculative and critical design and design research. In her practice, she explores social, cultural, political and environmental issues, often choosing food and food production as a medium to create narratives around those topics. Her work often results in future scenarios that metaphorically speak about recent societal tendencies and show complex relations between design fiction and reality.
Anastasia graduated from the Social Master department of the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017.
www.anastasiaeggers.com
Ciel Grommen (b. 1989, BE) extended her training in architecture at the University of Leuven with a master in contemporary art at the HEAD in Geneva. What follows is a trans-disciplinary research practice from which she creates frameworks that addresses social, political and environmental issues about cohabitation. Collaboration and intense fieldwork are central to her methodology. Through maps, images, instructions and installations she subsequently invites the public to imagine another perception of space. Works have been exhibited in Artsonje Art Centre, Seoul; Live In Your Head Gallery, Geneva; Luma foundation Arles; Zolder Luchtfabriek; Beursschouwburg Brussels etc. Works even more often appear in the “real” world, such as Petit Chateau, asylum centre in Brussels; the post box of her neighbour; online; on the Aldi parking lot of Borgloon, ... Since 2018, she works intensively on "Seasonal Neighbours", an artistic research project on seasonality and cohabition in Europe's countryside, for which she works in close collaboration with Maximiliaan Royakkers and 14 other artists.
www.cielgrommen.com
cielgrommen@hotmail.com
Pia Jacques de Dixmude (b.1997, BE) is curious and a bit stubborn. She is a multi-disciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Amsterdam and Brussels. Her practice could be described as pragmatic surrealism, taking various forms according to the specificity of the context she works with. Pia is fascinated by the use of narration as a goal to justify and amplify a specific discourse. Research is an essential part of her practice going from archival documents, interviews, visits, discussions, administrative procedures, and spatial features. She uses speculation and recurrently humor to reconsider historical narratives for the present. She is part of the collective Seasonal Neighbours, co-founder of Belgian Institute of Graphic Design, and currently studying at the Sandberg Institute in the temporary master program F for Fact.
https://piajacques.be
Dieter Leyssen (b.1989, BE) holds a MSc in Architecture from the KU Leuven and is candidate MSc in City Making and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 2013 he is member of international architecture and urban practice 51N4E in Brussels. Both in practice and writing, he developed a specific interest in collaborative processes that improve, strengthen and interrogate socio-spatial transformations in society.
In 2013, he was awarded the Flanders State Architect’s prize for young graduates and in 2018 he received the Young Planner Prize from the Dutch and Flemish Planning Association. His work was exhibited in Metropolitan Exchange (US), DeSingel International Arts Campus (BE) and the Dojima River Biennale (JP) and published in Architectural Re- view Magazine (UK) and ARCH+ (DE) amongst others. He is co-editor of FoUL, an independent magazine on urban practices founded at LSE.
dieter.leyssen@gmail.com
Ioana Lupascu (b. 1989, RO) graduated with a Master in Architecture (UAUIM, 2014), followed by a training in urban play (Trust in Play, 2019) and a Master in Art Praxis from DAI (Dutch Art Institute, 2022). The audience's experience (ways of sending and receiving information or feelings) is central in her research. Ioana enjoys work that encourages critical thinking and playful interactions with a strong focus on process, making and methodology rather than a final artifact. This often leads to (co)producing and articulating: (audio) walks, texts, performances, movement sessions, games and workshops. She is currently exploring the topic of intimacy, constraints, desire and fragmentation.
https://www.ioana-lupascu.com/
contact: hello@ioana-lupascu.com
Ines Marita Schärer (b. 1987, CH) is currently based in Brussels and Switzerland and works across poetry, performance, installation, sound art and experimental music. She is concerned with the precarities and vulnerabilities of diverse beings within predominant (power) structures and explores voice and words as a means of establishing relationality and re-imagining their conditions and environments. Her practice is informed by the given context, permeable for various forms of alternative knowledges, nourished and driven by thinkers, co-thinkers, collaborators and allies.
Ines holds a Master in Art Practice from DAI, Dutch Art Institute in Holland (2019) and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from HKB, Bern (2012). She spent residencies in Paris (visarte Graubünden, 2013) and Vienna (Kanton Graubünden, 2014) and has participated in group exhibitions at the STADTGALERIE BERN or KUNSTHAUS LANGENTHAL, among others, and has participated in various projects in public space, such as ORTUNG in Chur, KUNSTWEGE in Pontresina, or KUNSTPLÄTZE in Bern. One of her main projects, +41 (0)800 00 12 16, is a voice message project functioning as an experimental platform for poetic pieces and voice based works (www.0800001216.ch)
www.inesmarita.ch
Karolina Michalik (b.1991) graduated from the Social Design master program at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2018 with a background in architecture. Her interest is in subverting underwritten rules, codes and hierarchies of modern society by unmasking and dismantling their visual and spatial embodiments and in turn developing approaches for shaping collaborative built environments. In fall 2019 she took part in the NeverNever school and resulting publication with Spolka collective in Kosice, Slovakia, where she continued her focus and field research into informal building practices and their potential in disrupting aesthetics of commodification. She currently resides in Brussels, reconstructing second hand greenhouses for use by local farming organisations.
www.karolinamichalik.com
Yacinth Pos (b. 1994, NL) is a designer with a practice focused on the social, political and cultural field through a research driven approach. She explores social narratives through print and digital design, visual identity, illustration, research, installation and storytelling.
She graduated from the graphic design department at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2017. Since 2018 she is engaged in the project Camping Kafka, initiated by Academie voor Beeldvorming. Camping Kafka does research on the increasing habitation on holiday parks and campings by citizens who became stuck on the Dutch housing market. By doing fieldwork they develop different communicative tools that challenge the perception of policy makers.
www.yacinthpos.com, http://www.academievoorbeeldvorming.nl/camping-kafka/seizoenswerk/
Maximiliaan Royakkers (b.1988, BE) operates his tentacular spatial practice from Brussels. His work is committed to engage with our present political, social and ecological dynamics through space. This attitude produces output of various and ever growing kind: buildings and interventions in space, models and drawings, photography, installations and performances, exhibitions, writing and lectures, studios and workshops, research…He collaborates in a close network of people, places and institutions developing projects between practice and research.
Maximiliaan extended is his studies as an architect at Leuven University with a masters at the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. He is a regular contributor to magazines and editorial projects (Accattone, Oase,…) and is involved in teaching and lecturing (Antwerp University, ULB La Cambre Horta, ULiège, Faculty of Architecture Leuven University,...).
His work has been exhibited at a.o C-mine Genk, Bureau Europa Maastricht, De Singel Arts Center Antwerp, Z33 center for contemporary Arts and Design Hasselt, Jan Van Eyck Academy Maastricht, Stroom Den Haag.
www.maximiliaanroyakkers.com
maximiliaan.royakkers@gmail.com
Mona Thijs (1999) is studying a Master in Word Art at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp. Since childhood she has looked at the days as if they were little stories. Those stories sometimes find their form on paper, sometimes on stage, sometimes in audio. Mona published columns in dS Magazine and Klasse. Some of her short stories appeared in the literary magazine DW B. In the fall of 2021, as part of her master’s degree, she did an internship at theaterwerkplaats HETGEVOLG, where she co-directed and worked with people who fall outside the regular social circuit.
https://monathijs.portfoliobox.net/
Ewoud Vermote (b. 1992, BE) studied Social Sciences, worked in theater, and now studies Audiovisual Arts at LUCA School of Arts Brussels. From a research driven approach he seeks an audiovisual form for the visible and the unvisible in the structures that surround us. Besides making, he is also one of the driving forces behind Arts Platform PLAN B, a production/presentation/reflection platform focussed on collective, non-urban and small-scale practices.
www.kunstenplatformplanb.be
Ode Windels (b.1994, BE) is an anthropologist based in Brussels, interested in bridging research into the way people relate to their spatial environment with making practices. On a freelance basis she has been working for Damaged Goods (Meg Stuart), Decoratelier and Pool is Cool . In the past she has been engaged in the hospitality of minors with a migration background.