Maximiliaan Royakkers
Maximiliaan Royakkers graduated as an architect from the University of Leuven (2012) and obtained a master’s from the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam (2014). His work spans projects of design, artistic research, teaching and educational experiments and contributing to magazines and editorial projects. His works have been presented by Bureau Europa and Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; De Singel Antwerp; Bozar, Brussels; Z33, Hasselt; and Stroom, Den Haag.
Royakkers co-initiated Atlas of Ovens, an ongoing collaborative research project on infrastructures of heat, with Ciel Grommen and Clémentine Vaultier. 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.
With Ciel Grommen, Royakkers initiated an extensive fieldwork at C-mine site in Winterslag (Genk), where CIAP kunstverein is settled. The ongoing project, entitled Le Paysage Ménagé, questions the ability to create an architecture that does not occupy a site, but rather inhabits it. The aim of the project is not only to mark the physical presence of CIAP on the site, but to enter into a dialogue with the local landscape and form new alliances between its different actors (organisations, artists, inhabitants, animals and plants), areas (existing architecture, civic infrastructure, spoil tips, empty lots), and functions (residential, educational, cultural, commercial). Pragmatically questioning land property, through uses and relationships, this research and practice are embedded in Emptor’s framework, Caveat’s new chapter on property.
Royakkers is part of the Master en Arts Politiques program at the universteit SciencesPo in Paris. The program led by Frédérique Aït-Touati, who has taken over this role from Bruno Latour.
Read about Max’s work on the metadated research tool of caveat.be