GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER
— Ève Chabanon and Anna Colin
→ 'EXPANDING ACADEMY'
→ 15.03.2022 at 19:30 → De Lange Zaal, Academie + live stream
Artist Ève Chabanon and curator Anna Colin are invited by 'EXPANDING ACADEMY' to introduce their project 'A body without plan. Landscaping with gut'.
Besides the public Guess Who's Coming to Dinner lecture on Tuesday 15 March, they will visit the studios of the master students.
'A body without plan' is an invitation to make a garden at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The project explores how a planted and landscaped environment can be political, resistant, non-binary and what the feel, look and values of such a garden may be. ‘A body without plan’ asks: How to circumvent the dominant cultural lenses (i.e. heteronormativity, racism, sexism, ableism, and binaries) through which the history and practice of botany and mycology have been disproportionally written and enacted? How to grow and maintain an environment with intuition? How to landscape with gut?
As a project involving the creation of a permanent space inhabited by various connective life forms, ‘A body without plan. Landscaping with gut.’ further broaches the questions of upkeep, responsibility, care, stewardship, and access. Through a series of hands-on workshops, seminars, reading sessions and visits, the participants, working in collaboration with artist Ève Chabanon and curator Anna Colin, will develop, landscape, craft, plant and inoculate a garden over the course of approximately 24 months. Participants will be able to join in at different points of the project.
Anna Colin
Anna Colin is an independent curator, educator and researcher based in East Kent, UK. Her practice often straddles the curatorial and the pedagogical, and currently engages with open spaces and the notion of value in the contemporary art sector. Anna was a co-founder and director of Open School East, an independent art school and community space in London then Margate (2013-20). She worked as associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2014-20), associate director at Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris (2011-12), and curator at Gasworks, London (2007-10). Alongside her freelance practice, Anna is training in horticulture and garden design, while completing a PhD in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. She works as a lecturer on the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths.
annacolin.co.uk
Ève Chabanon
Ève Chabanon (nb. 1989, France) lives and works in Brussels. They graduated from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg in 2013, before obtaining a Master’s in Curating at the Sorbonne Université in Paris in 2014 and participating in the Open School East programme in London and Margate in 2016. They took part in several residencies, including at the White House in Dagenham in 2017, the FRAC Grand Large in Dunkirk in 2018, and Te Whare Hera in Wellington, New Zealand, where they presented their first solo exhibition, Eating Each Other, in 2019. They were awarded the Prix Sciences Po for contemporary art in 2018 for their project The Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed. Chabanon's works have been shown in France at the Palais de Tokyo (2018), at Parc Saint Léger (2016), and the CAC Chanot, Clamart (2019). Other chapters of The Surplus of the Non-Producer were presented at Lafayette Anticipations (2018), Paris; Bétonsalon - Centre d'art et de recherche, Paris (2020); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2020); Beursschouwburg (2021), Brussel. Since 2021, they are a PhD candidate simultaneously at Villa Arson (Nice) and University Paris 8. They are currently working on public commissions in France and a public sculpture in Belgium.