JOLIEN NAEYAERT

Jolien Naeyaert (°1989, BE) is an engineer architect who dances and a visual artist who explores alternative ways of researching and representing architectural places. By focusing on different media, she seeks for ways to actively approach places. The act of experiencing being truly in a specific place and discovering what lives in that particular place - through the presence of the whole body - is essential to her work. 

 

In 2015, she built her own ‘research center’ in a caravan and decided to wander around Belgium, questioning the notion of ‘landscape’. Today, this practice has evolved into a pattern of dialog, intimacy and process-based work. Artists who have already been guests of Jolien's Practice of Wandering: Elisa Schmitt (DE), Michelle Saenz (MX), Antigone Michalakopoulou (EL), Xaidi Tsirogianni (EL), Bára Sigfúsdóttir (IS), Ezra Veldhuis (NL), Leo Rottman (DE), Laura Muyldermans (BE), Christiane Blattmann (DE), Michaela Schweighofer (AT) and Kim Snauwaert (BE).

 

From December 2015 until May 2022, Jolien Naeyaert worked at Robbrecht en Daem architecten in Ghent. In 2018, she started writing articles for the Belgian architecture magazine A+, and in 2020 she began teaching at the Faculty of Architecture, Sint Lucas Brussels. Together with French cineast/ architect Anne Philippe, she founded the collective ‘desespiegles’. 

 

Recently she participated in a residency at The Green Corridor in St. Gilles where she decided to make drawings by hand. She also danced, improvised on her piano and wrote poetry. Resolute to focus on embodied knowledge, she continues this practice to this day. Jolien is also a member of the Brussels music group DÜNKE WELL and last year she joined Nadine, laboratory for contemporary transdisciplinary art. During spring 2023 she showed work in the showcase of NICC & Komplot in Anderlecht, i.c.w. Aleksandra Chaushova. Recently, her film essay 'Containment' premiered as part of the exhibition 'Images of the Book Tower' in the VANDENHOVE center in Ghent, curated by Steven Jacobs. Together with Kim Snauwaert, she did residencies this year at Leietheater Deinze and Theater Aan Zee in Ostend with the massage performance 'Do You Want A Happy Ending?' This project will also be seen at De Grote Post in Ostend, De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam and n0dine in Brussels. Currently Jolien lives in Brussels and has a studio at Level Five Brussels.