Various Artists is an imaginal collective that repositions artworks from autonomous objects to catalysts for shared experience. It deliberately dissolves singular authorship, relocating artistic agency from the individual creator to the dynamic interaction between works, participants, environments, and time. Audiences are not passive recipients but conscious or unconscious co-creators within processes of collaboration, erosion, translation, and communication.
Ecological and social awareness are embedded at the level of method. Materials are often reclaimed, fragile, or time-sensitive, valued for their histories and vulnerabilities rather than permanence or market value. Decay, repetition, and transformation are embraced as active collaborators, allowing works to evolve, destabilize, or disappear. This approach resists extractive production models and mirrors ecological cycles of care, exhaustion, renewal, and loss.
Various Artists.ALL, Boucalais, Groupduck.i, Wimereux, 2012
Collaboration operates across multiple scales. The collective works with invited artists, local communities, accidental participants, and non-human agents such as materials, tools, algorithms, weather, and time itself. Projects are shaped through negotiation, friction, misunderstanding, and shared responsibility. Wear, transformation, and disappearance are not treated as failures but as constitutive forces.
The practice privileges slowness, repetition, and sustained attention. Installations, walks, publications, and live works function as open frameworks for gathering, listening, and reflection. Rather than representing experience, the work creates conditions for encounter, situating participants within networks of human and non-human relations.
Creative processes remain porous to external forces — natural systems, chance encounters, intuitive and unconscious dimensions. By prioritizing encounter over performance and experience over artifact, the practice rejects the illusion of autonomous objects and singular genius, cultivating instead a relational form of art grounded in shared responsibility.
Ultimately, its transformative power lies in gently shifting perception through care, openness, and sustained engagement. Collaboration is not a tool but a condition: meaning emerges through trust, attentiveness, and long-term relational commitment.
Various Artists, Groupduck.h, 2024
in order of appearance
BLF (Bren Leroy)
INT (Intrudor, Armin Turing)
NN (Innumerat Roselare)
JKO (Johannes Korstjens)
LIB (Lima Drib)
NEB (n.e.b.u.s.i.)
DIG (Délia Sheehy)
DEP (Willy Depoortere)
ATH (Aude Thensiau)
CXM (Christl & Martn Coppens)
MAQ (Martaque, Vali (✝1994), Jamila and Fala Al Khawarizm)
ZOO (Stann Zooeydóttir)
LTE (Late Trudo Engels (1962-2009))
VDS (Valereson da Silva)
OMA (Omar, Ana and Nada Omandichana)
CIN (Cindy Janssens)
WAR (Freddy Grant)
BOB (Robert Ingelbreć)
DDW (Diederick Dewaere)
MAB (Marcella.B)
MdL (Morice de Lisle)
SUF (Sufferice, Albert Savereys)
HTH (Hélène Thensiau)
MUM (Mumei)