26 - 29 September 2023
Curated by Expanding Academy & Endeavour
'Feeling things together - The Studio Stadswaag Summer School' at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts aims to generate a space of exchange and exercise for feeling and prefiguring a newly situated learning environment that connects the academy to the Stadswaag’s neighborhood.
Expanding Academy, together with Endeavour and Studio Staadswaag are inviting the artists Morten Goll and Joachim Hamou (co-founder of Trampoline House), Adva Zakai (artist, co-founder of School of Love), Brandon LaBelle (founder of the Pirate Academy), Johan Pas (dean of the Royal Academy of Antwerp) Seppe Nobels and Instroom Academy, Globe Aroma, Fran Edgerley (ex-founder of Assemble and founder of research network ab_), PubliekPark collective with Sophie Holst and Mathias Mu, Vincent Meessen, to explore with the students from 25 - 29 September, 2023 how this new space of imagination and care could conduit knowledges and skills across various communities and fields of action in the future.
Studio Stadswaag is a co-creative process in which artists and (former) students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, together and in dialogue with the neighborhood of the Stadswaag (a square located on the North of the Academy Campus) and its residents, examine what the stratification of the Stadswaag consists of today, what is in the balance, and how we can create harmonious connections and new realities through art in the public space.
Studio Stadswaag has been Initiated by Johan Pas, Nico Dockx and Maarten Desmet in collaboration with Wouter Bolangier and others. It’s a collaboration between the District of Antwerp, the Flemish Community, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Stadsform vzw, and the University of Antwerp - Faculty of Design Sciences.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. Guided by situated and collaborative methodologies, he develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, mostly working in public and with others. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling, and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making, as well as extra-institutional initiatives, including The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-ongoing). From gestures of intimacy and listening to critical festivity and experimental pedagogy, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of radical hospitality
brandonlabelle.net
Fran Edgerley is an initiator of the new interdisciplinary action research network ab__; a decentralised organisation of people practising more equitable worlds. Through this, they are trying to build knowledge around the invisible structures and dispositions that produce and are reproduced by our social and physical architectures. This includes projects investigating the means and possibilities of land redistribution, the reorientation of power through the delivery of capital projects, improvisation in housing and the hostile UK asylum system.
Prior to working as ab__ Fran was a founding partner of the architecture and design collective Assemble, with whom they worked for 12 years to look critically at the processes producing our built environment. Through work with Assemble, an interest in how the physical world is made evolved into a commitment to build projects with communities, expanding that experience of making and remaking the world. This motivation has been a driving force behind many projects, including Otoprojects, Baltic Street Adventure Playground, Granby Workshop, Transnational Interstate Art Agency, Pioneering Places and House of Annetta. Fran’s practice includes work with democratic education, collective somatic explorations of space and filmmaking. Over the past decade, they have worked on a range of projects—both material and relational—alongside communities in Scotland, England, Portugal, Iceland, Germany, the USA, Holland, Peru, Denmark, and Estonia. Fran intermittently teaches at international academic institutions on the intersection of architecture and adjacent subjects. Fran is a trustee at Baltic Street Adventure Playground.
Globe Aroma is an artistic work and meeting place that offers space, time and a network to artists, co-creators and art lovers with a background as a newcomer. Globe Aroma supports people who, due to their precarious citizenship status, often experience specific challenges in accessing the arts sector and developing artistic practices. Globe Aroma is therefore building, in alliance with the Flemish, Brussels and international cultural, educational and migration sectors, on a mental and infrastructural intermediate space in which a community can create, discover and share art with a wide audience
Sophia Holst is a Dutch architect researcher, active within the architecture fields of Belgium and the Netherlands. She obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and a Master's in Architecture at the KU Leuven in Brussels. She has collaborated with architecture offices such as Studio Anne Holtrop (NL), Nu architectuuratelier (BE) and CRIT architects (BE). In 2021 she completed her residency at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Supported by Creative Industries Fund NL, she currently works on the foundations of an independent architecture and research practice, with projects such as Cité de la Philanthropie/Stad van Menslievendheid (BE), Geleefde Monumenten (NL, collaboration with Andre Cramer) and Housing Pain, Healing Strategies (NL).
Instroom Academy. Seppe Nobels started Instroom, a culinary and educational project in the port of Antwerp at the beginning of June 2021, together with Chris Bryssinckx, Arne Cremers and the city of Antwerp. It’s a restaurant and an academy, where he prepares newcomers from all parts of the world for a career in the hospitality industry. An intensive project around diversity and inclusion.
Vincent Meessen lives and works in Brussels. Meessen’s work has been presented at WIELS (Brussels, 2016), BOZAR (Brussels, 2017), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2018), the Power Plant (Toronto, 2019), and in numerous biennials including those in Venice (2015), Taipei (2016), Shanghai (2018), Chicago (2019), Lubumbashi (2019), São Paulo (2021), Dakar (2022), and Berlin (2022).
He is a co-founder of various organizations and alliances : Universal Embassy (2001-2005), Potential Estate (2005-2010), Jubilee - platform for artistic research (2013-...)
Mathias Mu is a multidisciplinary artist from Antwerp. In his practice, Mu embraces digital cultures, technoromanticism and hyperspace, as well as emerging technologies and media, exploring their potential for artistic expression within the context of contemporary art. Mathias Mu creates objects, performances, sound works and installations. His work questions the increasingly blurry boundaries between the physical and digital, as well as the organic and artificial. In their creation, Mu’s sculptural objects transform from two-dimensional sketches to three-dimensional renders, to AI-generated forms, into digitally fabricated physical objects. Additionally, the artist takes a critical look at various issues linked to sustainability that digital production insinuates, exploring the use of 3D printing in biomaterials
Johan Pas is dean of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, School of Arts of the AP University College. Pas holds a PhD in art history and is a lecturer, author and curator.
His research focuses on exhibition and publication history of 20th century avant-gardes. He also collects and studies artists' publications. In 2015 he founded CRAP, the Collection for Research on Artists' Publications. In 2017 his most recent book, Artists' Publications: The Belgian Contribution (Koenig Books, London) was published
Publiek Park is a nomadic contemporary art project which takes public city parks and gardens as its exhibition grounds. We invite international artists to create newly commissioned works that draw inspiration from and shed light on the surroundings of the location in a site-sensitive manner.
Each edition is accompanied by a rich public programme, including music concerts, film screenings, performances, lectures, workshops, guided tours and more.
The historical and artistic research, contextualizing the location and the programme, is published in the form of a Walking Guide, issued upon each edition of Publiek Park.
The project aims to establish unique collaborations with artists and local organizations, activating the cultural ecologies of a city within a natural and architectural environment.
Publiek Park is initiated and curated by Jef Declercq, Anna Laganovska, Koi Persyn & Adriënne van der Werf
publiekpark.be
Trampoline House was formed in 2010 by a group of artists, curators, refugee rights advocates, and asylum seekers as an antidote to Denmark’s asylum, refugee, and immigration policies.
For more than ten years, it was a space where people who have escaped war, poverty, or human rights abuse could find ways to participate in their new host country and feel a sense of belonging again. The House offered legal counseling, language classes, job counseling, programs for women and children, workshops, debate events, art exhibitions, and weekly House meetings, where members and staff shared news and discussed urgent issues related to the House and refugee conditions. Due to lack of funding, the House had to close at the end of 2020. In January 2022, Trampoline House reopened in a smaller version under the name Weekend Trampoline House. The volunteer-run house is located in the Apostle Church’s parish house in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro neighborhood. The re-opening as Weekend Trampoline House creates the possibility to continue with the work for a more humane refugee policy, to resume the most popular activities and to create a model for a new, self-sustainable Trampoline House.
trampolinehouse.dk
Adva Zakai combines her background in dance and performance with the creation of participative, educational, and life practices. She develops those formats together with the collectives she is a part of, each engages with art and commoning practices as an attitude and a relational practice in different life fields : Common Wallet (finances), The Potatoes (urban – nature ), Co Post (housing) and School Of Love (pedagogy). She is a regular teacher at KASK school of arts in Gent. She approaches teaching as an artistic practice, collectivity as a lab and a learning space, and art as a mode of being that takes no reality for granted. She is trying to never work alone and to never work too much.
Studio Stadswaag is a co-creative process in which artists and (former) students of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, enter into dialogue with the neighborhood and the residents of the Stadswaag (a square located on the North of the Academy Campus).
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