Soup Session by Nicolas Baeyens
invited by research group ArchiVolt
Tuesday 5 March 2024, 12:30-14:00
at the Research Room, Academy
Nicolas Baeyens is associate professor and coordinator of sculpture (metal sculptures, research and documentation) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. As an artist he makes monumental sculptures out of steel, copper and paper.
Can a work of art be stripped of its static character by inscribing it in a cyclical system of recovery and recycling? Each work of art has a metamorphosis in the viewer's memory, does it still exist in its original physical form? In his PhD research 'The Medium is the Memory, the Support the Souvenir', Baeyens wants to go deeper into the memory that functions as a medium and the physical work of art that is reduced to the technical carrier of the concept. Is the artwork the packaging of an idea, just as our economic system stimulates the consumer with evocative packaging? The content is processed and the packaging is temporary and seductive. In this way he questions the material character of a work of art by viewing it as a changeable carrier of an immaterial message that is shaped and reformed by the viewer's memory.