Activating the Archive #3: On Aesthetic and Embodied Experience
Programme for artist-researchers of the Academy
Curated by Inge Henneman (ArchiVolt research group)
Tuesday 12 May – Wednesday 13 May 2026
Researchers of the Academy, past and current, are warmly invited to join us for a two-day programme.
For the third time, we are organising a gathering for a dedicated group of people in an engaged and active setting. We want to continue these exercises in collective research: exploring and thinking together, and creating a shared space for peer-to-peer encounters between artists across the Academy’s research groups.
ON AESTHETIC AND EMBODIED EXPERIENCE
Somewhere along the way, aesthetics has become a slightly suspect word in the arts – as if attention to form, beauty, materiality, or sensuous experience were a distraction from what really matters. And yet, this might be the one thing that is truly specific to our field. After spending our previous gatherings deeply engaged with political, social, and existential urgencies – care, memory, loss, conflict, migration – we now want to foreground something that often remains tacit or slips through our fingers: form, the bodily and sensuous experience, the gut, the material intelligence of making, the subjective and associative approach. Not as a retreat from meaning or engagement, but as a way of asking whether aesthetics might today be quietly subversive.
Rather than opposing aesthetics to politics, or form to meaning, we are interested in what happens when we refuse that split altogether – when we attend to the aesthetic experience as the specific, irreducible core of artistic practice. We keep returning, in this context, to Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, with its radical plea for an erotics of art instead of a hermeneutics. There is no “what” of the work that exists separately from the “how.” What the work is cannot be extracted from how it appears, how it moves, how it addresses our senses. Sontag’s call to reclaim our sensory capacities feels urgent again, particularly in a research context where artists are often asked to legitimate their work by reducing it to concepts, references, positions – translating experience into explanation.
This also resonates with Dirk Lauwaert’s critique of what he called “contemporary sophism,” and his insistence on staying close to looking and listening – close to experience itself. For him, aesthetic experience is not necessarily comfortable or clear; it can be resistant, opaque, contradictory, banal, even disturbing. His image of criticism as something like “vomiting pearls” stays with me: a struggle to see and to know that does not smooth things over, but remains with the work in its moment and movement of appearance – physical, visceral, concrete.
If we sense that aesthetics carries a particular agency – one that feels difficult to name today – perhaps it is because we lack a shared language for it. This gathering opens that space.
PROGRAMME
DAY 1: Tuesday 12 May 2026
Research Room, 13:00 – 16:30
- Group conversation initiated by Marianne Vierø
(from the Thinking Tools research group)
Despite being omnipresent in our field, talking about aesthetics within contemporary art is a kind of a no-go. Addressing this paradox with inquisitive curiosity, Marianne Vierø invites an open-hearted and open-ended conversation about aesthetics that, rooted in our subjectivity as artists and individuals, looks less in the direction of judgement and more towards the agency of its potential.
Bas Rogiers (from the ArchiVolt research group) will bring along a few excerpts from Aesthetics at Large. Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics by Thierry de Duve, a key source in his PhD research, as a contribution to the discussion.
Please bring an object that you find attractive and that in one way or the other is relevant to your practice.
DAY 2: Tuesday 10 February 2026
Research Room, 10:00 – 16:30 (including lunch)
- Workshop by Delphine Wibaux
(from the Art & Ecology research group)
On the second day, we turn toward embodied experience. Delphine Wibaux will lead a workshop titled s’encorporer – finding the ground under your feet. Through a simple body practice, a moment of listening, and an invitation to write or draw, she opens a space to attend to how lived experiences settle in the body over time. The workshop offers room for presence, imagination, and attention, with optional sharing.
Wear comfortable clothes and come as you are.
- Shared reading on Aesthetic and Embodied Experience
Short passages and notes from our readings, such as Sontag, Lauwaert, John Dewey (Art as Experience), Marc Johnson (Embodied Mind), Jacques Rancière (Aesthetics and Politics), Margaret Wertheim (Embodied Space) and more, alongside excerpts from Bence Nanay’s Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, will circulate as points of resonance to feed our conversation.
- Garden tour by Eline De Clercq
(from the ArchiVolt research group)
This garden tour draws focus on the recognition of plants and how we turn nature into an abstraction when our mind can't make sense of it, also known as plantblindness. We're going to tune in to the garden with our senses, and see, hear, touch, smell (but not taste) the garden while Eline talks about the history, the plants, climate change, and multispecies gardening.
- Brainstorm session by Inge Henneman and Track Report
We have started working on a publication as a growing, polyphonic reflection on these two-day programmes. We have already gathered several individual contributions from participants of previous editions.
While we are still exploring the most appropriate format and intention for this publication, we would like to brainstorm together about ways to create a multiplicity of perspectives on these shared experiences.
We deliberately scheduled this meeting during Antwerp Art Weekend 2026 (14–17 May), so you can combine your visit with gallery and museum exhibitions. Several researchers will also be presenting their work at the Academy!
(image: ‘Activating the Archive: On Loss and Love’, October 2025, photo by Wannes Cré)
