Clémentine Vaultier
Clémentine Vaultier is a French artist based in Brussels (b.1991). She dives into various media, sources, languages and fields of knowledge to weave a network of collaborative practices. Through observation of (art) history and iconography, architecture, ceramics, geology or food preparation, through drawings, photos, scans or transcripts of discussions, she collects, creates and organises in porosity with others material, narratives and events, discussions around objects and research.
Passionate about how people lived, live and can live together and how knowledge production and aesthetical gestures can be parts of those dynamics, Vaultier is interested in anything social, ritualistic, empowering, experimental and fun. Her subjects of interest are often object-based, taken as material witnesses to trigger the unfolding of stories. She explores social and ritualistic realms, through dynamics of fluidity, transmission, commoning, empathy, care, hospitality…
Vaultier co-initiated Atlas of Ovens, an ongoing collaborative research project on infrastructures of heat, with Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers. How and what do we fire, with whom do we share the resulting warmth? The artists research how these infrastructures can transform not only matter, but our relationships to communities and territories.
Vaultier is a member of Becraft, an association for and by Belgian art and crafts practitioners. She is part of the pedagogical team of La Cambre national school of arts (Brussels) where she coordinates workshops and a transdisciplinary research course on heat and collective firing for master students. She graduated from the master Autonomous Design at KASK, (2019 Gent) where she received the “Bruynseraede – De Witte honor prize” for her ongoing research on Warmth, a central topic she looks at as a physical as well as a social phenomenon. She also graduated from La Cambre (2017 Brussels) in Ceramics and Central Saint Martins (2011 London) in Fine Arts – contextual practice.
In the context of her master degree at KASK Gent (2017-2019), she initiated an artistic research on warmth, looking at it as both physical and social phenomenons, combining facts and fictions within an extensive and explorative process.
Can you feel the heat now?! approaches the practice of collective ceramic firing, taking the wood kiln as a hot point to gravitate around. Within this framework, Vaultier collects and produces both artistic and anthropological data to look at how we raise, use and diffuse warmth. The proposal anchors these theoretic points of interest in a tangible case study: a recently rediscovered wood kiln in Jolimont castle in Brussels that is no longer in use, and its potential restoration. The project proposes to gather people around discursive events on this specific ceramic oven and site. The project follows Vaultier’s methodology of research on warmth, questioning production of common resources, and gathering the worlds of ceramics, performance, community, and pedagogy around the fire.
Vaultier’s project moreover asks: how can a collective production tool such as this kiln become a place to experiment with participation? – thus reflecting on the oven’s role within its territory and surrounding community. Clémentine’s presented her workbook and various researches on warmth during a Caveat Reading Room. In the framework of her collaboration with Caveat‘s next chapter, Emptor, the artist will be sharing texts and research from the Jolimont project, focusing on patrimonial questions, property and commons. With the aim of gathering a network of artists, searchers and experts around this site study case, the artists wants to provide for a possible vertuous collaboration between institutions, private owners, and the users’ community.
Download Clémentine’s research document compressed for web (42 MB)
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Read about Clémentine’s work on the metadated research tool of caveat.be