KUNSTENPLATFORM PLAN B

Ciel Grommen & Maximiliaan Royakkers

Communicating vessels

Every year, more than 20,000 seasonal workers travel to Belgium to help with the fruit harvest. They work 65 long days in the fields and live in rationally organised facilities on their employer's property. As local residents, we are often barely aware of the presence of our temporary summer neighbours. Artists-architects Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers are fascinated by their story and role in our community. In 2018, they therefore set up the Seasonal Neighbours research project, which brings together artists and social scientists to work on this theme. One of the results was the construction of the house for seasonal neighbours next to the Aldi in Borgloon, which served as a public place for private time in the summer of 2018.

As part of Fieldwork I, Ciel and Max are revisiting this theme by exposing the international network of a fruit company. Through the farms, a Flemish rural village is in informal contact with a Romanian and Bulgarian partner municipality, creating communicating vessels. Ciel and Max investigate these invisible international links and look for ways to represent them. They spoke to seasonal workers and created collages that bring their diverse worlds together.

BIO

Ciel Grommen (°1989, BE) has a background in Architecture (KU Leuven) and contemporary art (Master HEAD, Geneva). From her transdisciplinary artistic practice, she creates frameworks that question social, political and ecological issues. She always starts by temporarily inhabiting a specific place, after which she invites others to discover these places in a special way through maps, images, instructions and installations. Her work has been exhibited at Artsonje Art Centre (Seoul), Live In Your Head Gallery (Geneva), Beursschouwburg (Brussels) and Z33 (Hasselt), among others. Her work also appears in the Klein Kasteeltje asylum centre in Brussels, in her neighbour's letterbox or in the Aldi car park in Borgloon.

Maximiliaan Royakkers (°1988, BE) studied Architecture at KU Leuven and completed a Master's degree in Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. In his spatial practice, he combines design with artistic research, focusing on a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach.  He regularly contributes to magazines and editorial projects and is involved in architectural education and pedagogical experiments. Maximiliaan's work has previously been exhibited at Bureau Europa (Maastricht), Jan Van Eyck Academie, De Singel (Antwerp), Z33 (Hasselt) and Stroom (The Hague).

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