Welcome by KAOS vzw

(Ellen) Lili Vanderstraeten is artist-in-residence in the psycho-social center St. Alexius in Brussels. She moves between the atelier located in the Opperstraat, the living room in the center St. Alexius and one of the shelter houses where Lili stays over and lives with eight other people. When spending time in one of these three locations she works on textile pieces Lili named ‘Huskrooms’: a growing archive of duvets that carry carefully composed found objects and cloth.

For this KAOS Talk at Museum Dr. Guislain (in Ghent and online) she invited two other people, Rona Kennedy and Geert Opsomer, to have verbal and non-verbal conversation together with the visitors that attend the talk around topics such as ‘making art in the context of care institutions’, ‘the meaning that arises when building an archiving’ and ‘the constant need to recompose/decompose materials that are abandoned by others’.

For her KAOS talk, Merel Stolker invited two artists who both, in their own way, built a place where you can "be alone together". Elly Van Eeghem is an artist and founder of Campus Atelier in Nieuw Gent, a collective studio for public space. Malou van Doormaal is an artist and founder of the Drag Up Family, a learning community that comes together around drag culture. Together with Merel Stolker, they will engage in conversation this evening around the theme of loneliness. The conversation will be moderated by KAOS coordinator Mike Michiels.

“Doing friendship”, a KAOS Talk with Elien Ronse, Mirra Markhaëva and Ignace Wouters.

Elien Ronse is artist-in-residence in the psycho-social center St. Alexius in Brussels. She spends most of her time in the “living room”, where people ask each other how they are and conversations go from smalltalk to very intimate topics. In this context she questions how care takes place in our everyday relations and what the meaning is of friendship in our adult lives.