MAX Charbonnages

Graphic design

Loup Lopez is a graphic designer currently based in Brussels. His multidisciplinary practice is mainly focusing on typography, and fosters the collaborative process through projects of artistic direction, editorial design and visual identities. On the other hand, he also works as a print designer for the clothing brand Bellerose.

• Personal website
• @xilo.center

mixed media, textual work, performance

Marjolein Guldentops is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brussels, researching textual experiences through writings and orality. Her exploration focusses on the interplay between the human body and its spatial surroundings, delving into the concepts of motion, place, and urban rhythms. She engages with a range of linguistic systems, leveraging the ambiguity and conventionality of language to convey multiple layers of meaning and interpretation. Her work takes the form of textual sequences that can be graphic or typographic images, spatial compositions, or song-like sequences.

• Personal website
• @marjolein_guldentops

Performance, Research, Education

Anastasia McCammon is a performer, teacher, and researcher from Cyprus, based in Brussels. Trained as a dancer and actor, her performance praxis now builds upon various methods of improvisation as tools for theatrical world-making and character creation. Anastasia is drawn to the interaction between objects and narratives. Through the use of movement and voice, its rhythms, characters and stories, Anastasia likes to ask: when does a character or disguise end... or begin... or dissolve? What are the signals or signs that tell you you are being watched/you are performing, that you are watching/are part of an ‘audience’? Furthermore, what types of storylines and ‘evidence’ emerge or fail when we feed movement, objects, words, characters, expressions and images into a live interaction? Anastasia is also curator of performance at the Cypriot-based Xarkis NGO Festival, and she holds an MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute (2020).

• @framed.jest

Research, Art History

Steyn Bergs is an art historian and critic whose work operates at the intersections of contemporary art, aesthetics, critical theory, political economy, and media theory. He is a lecturer in modern and contemporary art at Utrecht University, and obtained his PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2022. Currently, his research focuses on the aesthetics of infrastructure in contemporary art, as well as on artistic practices that address uneven development and trouble linear conceptions of time and history. His texts have appeared in numerous magazines, book publications, and journals, including Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, Afterimage, and Third Text.

• Personal website

Drawing, Design, Sound

Alexander Pfeiffenberger, often operating under the alias 'Spassberger,' is a graphic designer and artist from Bremen, Germany based in Brussels. Rooted in a Drawing practice, his work spans various mediums, including printed materials, animated films, and commissioned illustrations for clients such as cultural institutions, bands, and music labels. Next to his visual practice he is a DJ and member of the electronic music group ‚PFUHL‘.

• Personal website

Research, Law, Digital human rights

Wes Damen is a historian, data protection officer, and legal scholar. He is currently pursuing a PhD in law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (NL) researching privacy, state surveillance, and data protection law. Additionally, he is ethics & data protection advisor to numerous (medical) research consortia, and he consults on legal affairs to artists, curators and designers. He sits on the board of Brussels based MAX Collective and on the Advisory Board of the Rotterdam (NL) based Wet Film Collective.

• Personal website

Collective practices, project coordination, research

Based in Brussels since 2019, Colin Roustan has been developing a project coordination practice at the intersection of artistic, social and societal issues for several years. His approach tries to bring back art and life together, considering collective 1:1 scale projects as an artistic medium, oscillating between project management, curating, research, performance and pedagogy.
Colin is an active member of Gilbard collective @gilbard.e.s and initiated P(A)F - Pratiques (Artistiques) Fonctionnelles @paf_pratiques. Gilbard is a collective working from re-use material to develop local projects around art and design. P(A)F is a cycle of events, meetings and collective reflections, interested in contextual, use-oriented practices that have an artistic coefficient rather than an artwork status. In 2023, he started to teach collective practices organization at erg school.

• @colinroustan

isz szi studio is a duo of makers at the intersection of mediums. we work by commission and by desire. we are educated in graphic design and sculpture and engage on a daily basis with drawing, writing, coding and listening.

• Personal website
• @isz_szi_studio

Typeface Designer, Teacher, Researcher

Giulio Galli (IT, 1996) is a typeface designer, researcher and teacher based in Brussels, Belgium. He is a PhD candidate within READSEARCH Research Lab at the University of Hasselt, studying parametric typeface design for legibility purposes and human vs computational interpretation of letterforms. Since 2018 he is also associate typeface designer at CAST Foundry (Cooperativa Anonima Servizi Tipografici), in Italy, where he releases custom and retail typefaces. He teaches typeface design and typography at PXL-MAD School of Arts in Hasselt, Belgium. Other published and ongoing research focuses on aspects of the history of typography like Baroque types in Rome (Italian Baroque types at the Vatican Press 1588–1614, published in Journal of the Printing Historical Society, 2023), woodcut types by music publishers in the Lutheran reform, Art Deco and avant-garde lettering on album covers and music sheets covers in the early XX Century.

• Personal website
• @giulliogali_

Graphic design, design research

Dimitri Reist is co-founder of ¬Bonsma & Reist ¬Studio for visual ¬communication, based in Bern and Brussels. He focuses on the responsibility we carry as ¬designers to create cultural value that generates meaningful outcome. The studio is engaged in ongoing and long-lasting partnerships with artists, curators, editors, architects, designers and institutions. Since 2020, Reist is part of the fashion/artist collective NCCFN (Nothing Can Come from Nothing). NCCFN uses fashion as a medium to deal with and understand the social and ecological problems the global fashion industry is causes. Since its very beginning, NCCFN works with the existing, with overproductions and remnants of the industry, to develop methods to re-address these global products without origin. Next to his work as a designer, he is engaged in his personal research, where he elaborates on questions of responsibility and value-making in design. By creating space for voices and stories of others, he discusses with peers about the conditions in which graphic designers create work, and how these circumstances shape their daily practice.

• Personal website
• @dimitrireist

Performance, Visual Arts

Zachary Schoenhut (20/12/1991, NY, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and researcher. His focus rests within the political and theoretical implications present at the intersections of a variety of disciplines and discourses: queer theory, linguistics, performance studies, black studies, and ethnography. Zachary engages in a number of different practices that deploy multiple forms of performative, archival, sculptural, and digital methodologies.

• Personal website

Design Textiles Ceramics

Christoph Hefti is a textile designer and artist who was born in Switzerland, and now divides his time between Brussels, Paris and Zurich. After studying textile design in Zurich and fashion at Central Saint Martins in London, he started designing for Jean-Paul Gaultier and Dries Van Noten. On a freelance basis, he designed for various fashion houses. Christoph Hefti’s love for crafted textiles has taken him to Nepal, where he designs and develops his own series of hand-knotted rugs. He rediscovered the direct interaction between the designer and the craftsman and became fascinated by the use of traditional crafts in a contemporary context. He approaches the mystical and even spiritual tradition of storytelling textiles through his very personal yet worldly themes. In parallel, he is engaged with fairtrade Textile Projects in Nepal, creating in close dialogue with the weavers handwoven fabrics made on traditional looms. In the last years, Christoph has shown his Textile work, such as rugs, curtains and patchworks as installations in various galleries, museums, and fairs.

• @c_hefti_2017

Research, Collectivity, Visual Arts

The practice of Katinka de Jonge is a blend of theory and artistic practice. It unfolds itself in well-chosen settings, engaging in a dialogue that unravels the invisible power dynamics in everyday reality. She delves into the realms of collectivity, polyphony, and authority within
various professional and non-professional contexts. Through text, video, installations, relational performances, audio tours, and publications,
she captures these various dynamics, translating major issues of power into playful action. Currently a PhD researcher at Hasselt University, her exploration focuses on the boundaries between artwork and artist-run organizations.

• Personal website
• @p/C0bjhfmtWUC

Performance, mixed media, artistic research

Gary Farrelly (IE) is an Irish visual and performance artist based in Brussels. Recurring preoccupations in his work include the built environment, institutional power and magic. Manifestations of his practice encompass drawings, installations, performances, walking tours, and a radio show. Much of his work occurs within Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence duo with German artist Chris Dreier. Farrelly studied art at NCAD in Dublin and later at LUCA School of Arts and a.pass in Brussels. He currently lectures at La Cambre ENSAV and is a recipient of a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.

• Personal website
• @gary__farrelly

Text, performance, visual arts

Niels Poiz proposes an artistic research that builds further upon artist writing and écriture automatic. Utilizing sociology and communication in popular culture, cyberculture, mainstream media and pop music through performance, installation, prints, drawing, videos and micro-edition.
The artistic practice reflects on our personal sphere and what it entails, while simultaneously questions the choices that society makes for us: the desire for individuality, submission to political structures and laws, about how we place ourselves into society, within a community. The act of writing and the use of language via narration, translation and appropriation of text takes a central role. He mixes textual fragments that he appropriates while writing fragments of the everyday himself. His work depicts the time when language is disconnected from its (in)formative function and words are abstracted from their meaning.

• @niels_poiz

Ceramics, artistic research, education

Clémentine Vaultier is a French artist based in Brussels. She is an artist associate at Jubilee - platform for artistic research and an artistic assistant to the Ceramic department of La Cambre national school of arts (Brussels)

Her interest, although trained as a ceramist, is in the surroundings of the oven rather than the production it engenders. Her long term research on how we raise, use and diffuse warmth connects the worlds of ceramics, performance and pedagogy around the fire, literally and by means of documentation. The creating, collecting and (re-)arranging of technical, historical and archival material in dialogue with others allows to create narratives around 'warmth', as a basic human need and phenomenon. Doing so, Vaultier’s practice is necessarily plural, in dialogue, and the output intended to keep the fire going.

• Personal website
• @clementinevaultier

Graphic design, creative coding

Flo Fromager (she/they) is a designer currently based in Brussels. Initially trained in print graphic design, Flo gradually shifted towards digital design. Their multidisciplinary practice focuses on graphic design and web development for digital platforms, aiming to make them both engaging and captivating. They mainly work with cultural institutions, artists, and designers.

• Personal website

Multimedia artist

Stephanie Becquet is a multidisciplinary artist. She works with hand-spun threads, textile, sculpture, performance, painting, sound and video. Central to her work is her investigation into ‘it’, the attitude of the bricoleur, crafts, ancient knowledge, the power of curiosity, the invisible and chance.
Using quantum physical approaches, she seeks connections between ancient customs, rituals, legends, traditions, magic and contemporary problems. In order to help her in her research, she invites heroic female characters from the past, present and future. Therefore, she makes sculptural garments and tools for them. This way she transform their energy and knowledge into presence.

• Personal website
• @stephanie.becquet