[###style:theme-schedule] [###style:theme-event]

RAUMTE

←back to index

2013 - 2015; collection of young artists, with Joachim Beens, Karina Beumer, Karolien Chromiak, Winnie Claessens, Valerie de Ghellinck, Rogier De Maker , Alex Herzog, Jonathan Huygens, Pieter Jennes, Maxime Peeters, Yasmine Van Der Rauwelaert, Kylian Van Der Haven, Karina Van Leengoed, Dennis Ramaekers & Frederik Vergaert & Frederiek Weda


On self organization and infrastructures for representation

Raumte was a group of young, just graduated artists & art-students who organized a shared space for artistisc creation and who took up the challenge of collaboratively defining artistic projects and works.

A shared studio space was installed with ~15 people, on the topfloor of Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (BE). This practical collective endavour brought up some basal infrastructural & administrational challanges: how to share a contract between an institution and a collective? What happens when some individuals of that collective leave earlier?(*) How do we get the space warm? Who will get which spot, are there needs per practice we can base oursleves on for this?
We built a pellet heater, and quickly signed a contract. (*) This question however was not yet posted, but had to be dealt with later "in the heath of the moment"...

Though admittedly, getting to know the ins and outs of signing contracts, building diy heating systems in unconventional buildings, or matters as basic as space divission can be truely challenging at a young age in a collaborative setting. 
However, it seemed that because we were doing this under the watching eye of an art institution, we managed to get the status of "innovative young artist run collective". And before we knew it - or before we even really got to know eachothers artistic aspirations, we were invited to establish a public collective under a common name and were offered an exciting - yet in hindsight probably absurd - amount of "exhibition opportunities".

Ranging from galleries and off-space art fairs, over museal contexts and performative- and self-organised events were all opened for us and we took up the each of those occassions to formulate exhibition formats that could facilitate our very diverse practices. This was my biggest contribution to the group, see bellow for some of the forms I proposed ↓

At a later stage we became the subject of an academic case study that was researching self-organisation as artistic strategy for early carreer artists. The 2015 summerschool "Mobile Autonomy" was organized in close proximity to our work. Raumte split up before it took place, but some of us still followed up and were present during the events.


EXHIBITION FORMAT:
The exhibition as infrastructure for multitude of practices