Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg becomes the new artistic director of CIAP and FLACC.

The two merging organisations appoint a joint artistic director to build together the common future on the C-mine site.

Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg (NL), curator and initiator working from Europe and the US has been appointed as new artistic director of CIAP, platform for contemporary art, and FLACC, workplace for visual artists. She will lead the two organisations through the exciting transition period into the common future. Still this year, CIAP and FLACC will merge, and in 2022, already as one organisation will move to a new location on the C-mine site in Genk.
 
Gouwenberg brings to the table a fresh perspective, underpinned by a substantial international network and experience. Currently, she is the co-curator for Melanie Bonajo's presentation for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022. 
 
image © Roosje Klap
After running multidisciplinary exhibition space Expodium in Utrecht, Gouwenberg participated in the renowned de Appel Curatorial Program (2006-07) and worked at the research and production platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (2007-11). During the directorship of Defne Ayas at Kunstinstituut Melly, she was involved in major projects by Alexandre Singh, Michael Portnoy, and Rana Hamadeh. In 2010, together with artist Keren Cytter and curator Kathy Noble, Gouwenberg initiated A.P.E. (art projects era), which focused on the development of projects that cannot be realised within traditional institutional formats or frameworks. Since 2012 she’s part of the short and mid-length committee at International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2014, she founded the multidisciplinary residency program Deltaworkers in New Orleans together with Joris Lindhout, and in 2017, Gouwenberg joined the Performa team in New York as producer at large. 
 
The new director takes up the position in a particularly complex, fragile, and challenging context, but also one that requires new perspectives and experimental strategies. “It is an unprecedented time that calls for outspoken choices,” she says. “We are at the tail end of the pandemic that has held up a mirror to the fast-paced, overcrowded capitalist world and forced the individual, on the one hand, to revert to small, local, sometimes lonely, physical ways of living, and on the other hand, expanded the possibilities of communicating, working, and presenting online. It is, therefore, a particular moment to look at how two strong locally-anchored institutions can consciously operate locally as well as internationally; in physical and virtual space.”
 
CIAP and FLACC are convinced that Gouwenberg, with her versatile experience and unfettered enthusiasm, is the best person to take the lead in shaping the vision for the new organisation. “The DNA of the new organisation, originating from two existing institutions, is rich, layered and offers opportunities,” said the freshly appointed director. “It's like a lichen where ‘1+1=plural’ is the rule and where specific combinations of chromosomes create the shapes that no one could have imagined in advance. It is this polyphony that bears potential and that drives me. The program that I want to develop for FLACC/CIAP will be tailor-made and will have a socio-political focus, building on the already existing basis. The organisation grows from the programme, in which the importance of art, the interest of artists and the connection with the public are key.”

The call is open for all visual artists. Due to the diversity of our workshops, the application is open for projects in various media and disciplines. Projects with interest in artistic labour, challenging the notion of a 'workplace' or with a focus on experiment are preferable. The work period is three-month full time or around 90 days, divided in several smaller work periods between February 2022 and December 2022. FLACC offers an accommodation, a workplace, covered travel expenses as well as a small production budget.
More info here

An afternoon of talks and encounters
in and around the disturbed landscape

Saturday 03.07.21 from 3 pm

With Ciel Grommen en Maximiliaan Royakkers
Special guests: Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon
from Accattone magazine

Le Paysage Ménagé

Join us on the 3rd of July for an afternoon dedicated to the artistic and architectural practices dealing with landscape as a site of domesticity and hospitality. 
 
This special day marks a turning point for the long-term research project  Le Paysage Ménagé initiated in 2019 by Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers on commission by CIAP and FLACC.

Departing from the question of how to inhabit the ‘disturbed landscape’ of Winterslag, the project envisioned a series of spatial interventions, ‘furniture’ for the landscape that invite us to make new connections with and within it. Starting this summer, the heated daybed which the artist are currently constructing on the C-mine site, will become a public furniture, used by the art organisations, guests, neighbours, but also providing shelter for small animals and breeding ground for plants.

The talk is the first episode in the series of events planned on and around the heated daybed, and bringing together its different users. 

PROGRAMME

3.00-3.30 PM Artist talk with Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers
3.45-4.15 PM Talk with Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon from Accattone 
4.30-5.00 PM Q&A on and around the heated daybed
3.00-6.00 PM Launch of the edition Verwarmde aarde, verstoorde grond by Grommen & Royakkers

The afternoon starts with a talk by the two artists behind Le Paysage Ménagé Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers, who will take us on a visual journey through their research, going back to the concepts underpinning the project. Making their way through their archive, the artists will talk about their experience of working with ‘disturbed landscapes’, about  ‘furnishing’ instead of ‘developing’, and they will share amazing stories they ‘unearthed’ in the course of the project. It is a moment of reflection on the values and ambitions from which Le Paysage Ménagé originated, and at the same time, an opportunity to open the project up and re-embed it in a broader context.

This is where the presentation by Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon, the editors of Accattone magazine, comes in. Sophie and Carlo will share some insight into the making of the magazine — or, as they call it, ‘an exhibition on paper’ and they will zoom in on a few specific practices featured in the latest, 7th issue, deal with open-air domesticity and the diplomatic hospitality of land.

Following the two presentations, all guests are invited to join the artists and the editors for an informal Q&A moment on and around the platform. This moment will also mark the official launch of the edition Verwarmde aarde, verstoorde grond developed by Ciel and Max in collaboration with CIAP.

PRACTICAL

Both presentations will take place at C-mine (we meet at 3 pm in the exhibition space of CIAP, on the first floor of Energy Building) and the Q&A will take place at the heated daybed, on the C-mine site (see the map).

Throughout the entire afternoon, the edition, the 7th issue of Accattone magazine and other related publications will be displayed and distributed at the CIAP stand at the daybed.

SPEAKERS

Ciel Grommen (°1989, Sint-Truiden) and Maximiliaan Royakkers (°1988, Hasselt) are a duo of artists/architects, whose work on the threshold of artistic research, education and spatial design questions present social, political and ecological dynamics. Often taking complex social contexts and disturbed landscapes as a starting point, Grommen and Royakkers develop their projects through extensive fieldwork, spatial interventions, and other interactive, participatory formats. Their role as spatial practitioners involves weaving of new narratives into spaces and testing out alternative ways of living-together, inhabiting, and relating to our environments.

Accattone explores minor practices in art and architecture through the specific means of the printed magazine. As an exhibition on paper, each issue is a montage of contributions whose shared positions towards reality, history and representation resonate with one another. A-periodical, self-published and non-subsidized, Accattone was launched in 2014 by two architects (Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon) and two graphic designers (Ismaël Bennani & Orfée Grandhomme), joined in 2019 by architect Galaad Van Daele. 

Contributors to Accattone #7 (May 2021): Costantino Nivola, SNCDA et al. at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Aglaia Konrad, Alice Paris on De Smet Vermeulen, Osamu Ishiyama and Kenji Kawai, TEN, Wim Cuyvers, moilesautresart, DSCTHK, Piovenefabi, Emmanuelle Chiappone Piriou on Superstudio, Carlo Goncalves on Smiljan Radic, The Museum of Mistakes on Arakawa & Gins, and Zuber panoramic wallpapers.

—

This is the first in the series of events planned on and around the heated daybed, a public sculpture created by Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers within the scope of the project Le Paysage Ménagé. The project has been realised in co-production with FLACC, workplace for visual artists and with the support of the Flemish Community, the City of Genk and CIAP members. Le Paysage Ménagé is part of ELEMENTS — a collaboration between art and cultural institutions in Dutch Limburg, Belgian Limburg, Liège and North Rhine-Westphalia.

Jumana Manna’s exhibition at M HKA titled Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, is comprised of a new body of sculptures that move between the worlds of sewage, digestion and building sites. Central are two ceramic series: limb-pipes and rotten bread. The limb-pipes draw their primary reference from drainage tubing in use within urban and agricultural infrastructures since ancient times until today. Normally hidden behind walls, under pavements, and made to remove unwanted sights and smells from bodies, gardens and cities, they arrive at the site of the exhibition as metamorphosed conduits. The ceramic bread series exhibited in plastic bags and on metal fences, mimics the act of leaving old bread outdoors; a tradition of gift giving to an unknown receiver. These small-scaled sculptures consider the transformation of bread from an object of desire with nutritional value, to an unwanted anxiety; the sin of uneaten food – of wasted life.

Together with collaged scaffolding gauzes, rudimentary wooden planks and makeshift plinths, Thirty Plumbers in the Belly considers improvisational infrastructures in places where infrastructures are built to fail. The gathering of materials and anthropomorphic objects bears the processes of ruination and renewed symoblisation as both an aftermath and as a potentiality.

Jumana Manna’s exhibition has been produced through a collaboration between M HKA and FLACC – Workplace for Visual Arts, Genk, where the artist undertook a research and production residency during 2020 and 2021. Exhibition co-curated by Nav Haq, Associate Director, M HKA, and Luuk Nouwen, Artistic Director, FLACC.