Maxime Vancoillie (°1991) is a spatial practitioner based in Ghent. She has a spatial and artistic research practice and works as a teaching assistant in the Interior Architecture program at KU Leuven.

 

THEMES AND INTENTIONS

The projects in which I engage often have a relation to the theme and the question of how we inhabit our inner and outer worlds. There is always an attempt to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of our spatial and embodied experiences, dealings with and use of spaces, and the meanings we give to them.

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CONTEXT

The scale from which I depart, engage and intervene is that of people surrounded by their immediate environment, and in the interplay between physical and mental spaces (such as memory and imagination). It often implies one-to-one relationships and interactions with people in their immediate environment, and the act of moving (around), staying and hanging out in a particular place or situation.

 

WAYS OF WORKING

As well in my own practice, and in the educational activities I aim for an encounter with the world and different (often non-dominant) life-worlds. Therefore I am inspired by the method of hope by the anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki. It is a practice of responding rather than reacting. Practicing this method is not about describing or representing the world, but about opening up perception to what is going on, so that in turn you can respond to it.

 

This responding takes the form of long-term research processes where moving in a slow and resonant mode is possible. Through fieldwork, mappings, diagrams, scale models, installations and conversation formats, I want to raise spatial questions, rather than giving answers and crystallize my artistic research processes.

 

SPATIAL ARTISTIC OUTCOMES

The outcomes of the research processes are made in the same language as the one I interrogate: space. The spaces I create are not functional, but make invisible and often non-dominant themes visible. Nor are they necessarily three-dimensional; they express themselves equally well in images, texts and mental spaces. The outcomes are residues of long-term processes and sometimes appear as a trace in a lecture, exhibition or publication.

 

WAYS OF ORGANIZING

besides I am interested in ways of organizing spatial artistic practices, and have the wish to experiment with other practitioners with time-tested figures and formats such as the cartel , the archipelago, the circle, the network and economies of exchange to create a sustainable and deepening context for spatial artistic practices.

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