Projects

This research project aims at investigating the relation between media and nation-building in Flanders. The project consists of two parts. First, the project focuses on film and nation-building in Flanders from 1945 until today. Through quantitative and qualitative textual film analyses, the project critically examines the cinematic representation of Flanders and Flemish identities. Second, the project places these findings in their broader ...

"From New Stagecraft to New Cinema: Silent Film Performs the Avant-Garde" is an intermedial undertaking geared towards redefining the evolution of cinema against developments in the historical avant-garde in performing arts.

The research group Thinking Tools from the Antwerp Academy for Fine Arts, proposes, in collaboration with the Antwerp Museum Mayer van den Bergh, a historical and artistic research project for the Museum's unpublished photo collection. The (photo) historical research into this yet to be disclosed collection and its background in visual culture then and now is also organized as a didactic project, and formulated as a challenging assignment for ...

The aim of this project is to connect up philosophical work on the appreciation of photographs and works of photography that raise philosophical problems themselves. The focus of the research is the ways in which the pictorial organization (or composition) of photographs contributes our general appreciation of what the photograph is about (and of). Bert Danckaert's photographs are very unusual and provocative in formal terms inasmuch as they are ...

This project consists of three interlocking components. The first one is the revision of my dissertation, entitled Between remembrance and glorification. A contextual study of Peter Snayers (1592-1667) topographical battle iconography for the Habsburg elite, for book publication in English in the peer-reviewed series Pictura Nova (Brepols Publishers). In the second part of the project Snayers paintings of the shooting of the jay by the Archduke ...

Post-war artists' periodicals are a prime example of the neo-avant-garde DIY ethos, and simultaneously constitute a crucial source of information about this movement. This project aims to digitize a substantial and representative corpus of Belgian neo-avant-garde periodicals. Subsequently, innovative language processing tools will be applied in order to extract and visualize the network of artists who were behind the periodicals.

17th-century Flemish tapestry production was exceptionally capital-intensive and perilous. Tapissiers had to find ways to maximize their creditworthiness and to minimize information assymetries between themselves and prospective buyers to avoid market failure. The question emerging from these observations is straightforward: How did they do it? How did 17-th century Antwerp, Brussels and Oudenarde tapissiers succeed in overcoming all these ...

Jimmie Blanton is widely regarded as one of the prime innovators of jazz bass playing. However, to date there has been no attempt to precisely and systematically determine in which areas he was innovative. Based on a strong theory-practice nexus, this artistic research aims to reach a thorough understanding of the innovative aspects in the jazz bass playing of Blanton, in order to fill the lacunae that still prevail on this issue.

This project aims to rethink the research field of nineteenth-century Belgian art along a new geographical and methodological model. Traditionally, Belgiums nineteenth-century art production is approached from a centre/periphery perspective that conceives of its object principally in its relation to French art. The construction of art historical narratives along this model, however, distorts reality. First, it ignores the fact that encounters ...