Geert Vermeire, a curator, poet and artist, from Belgian origin, moving constantly between Greece, Portugal and Brazil, will be the guest of the international practice-based project Collaborative Art Project II which is organized for a second year by CUT Contemporary Fine Arts Lab of the Department of Fine Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT). The Collaborative Art Project was successfully launched in 2020 by the Professor of the Department of Fine Arts Klitsa Antoniou with guest artist Maria Loizidou.

Within the framework of this program, artists with international recognition and significant work are invited to share aspects of their work with the students of the Department, as well as with the general public. The aim of the program is on the one hand to offer participants a "toolkit" for observing, recording and analyzing the work of the invited artists, which they will be able to adapt later in their own artistic process, and on the other hand to familiarize them with experimental artistic interventions of a collaborative nature. 

Geert Vermeire will deliver an open lecture (*) entitled “Walking Arts 2.0” on 19 October 2021 at 20:00 which will take place at CUT’s Amphitheatre 1, Tassos Papadopoulos Building, Corner of Themis and Ifigenias Street, in Limassol. Vermeire’s lecture will be on his professional itinerary, presenting different projects in the academic, curatorial, and artistic sphere. The lecture will revolve around Walking Art Practices in the 21st century.

Through collaborative processes, departing from the ethical involvement of cultural action, he has rooted his work in walking arts, extending it into sound art and digital art. He is one of the pioneers in locative media, with a focus on spatial writing, locative sound & performance and social practices. Since the early 2000s walking is key to his artistic work, centered around place and ecology, relating to our planet in crisis, unfolding around human connections, text and space, with works of arts, site-specific interventions and artistic walks engaging both with the landscape and with those walking through the landscape. 

Geert Vermeire will collaborate with the department by offering an experimental workshop, to be held on 18-21 October, which will address artistic locative practices related to the projects Supercluster and CGeomap, coordinated by Geert Vermeire and Fred Adam. These two connected projects offer a simple online platform to collect, map and share everyday local and global experiences in a way that other media struggle to do.  

To date, Supercluster has worked together with researchers, designers, technologists, artists, cultural institutions and policy makers around the world to further develop its open-source, mobile-ready web app and editor that can be used to collaboratively map stories, sounds, videos and images. 

Additionally, the project created a set of collaborative methodologies for using this locative media app, which has included the development of local-global walking workshops and academical courses.

The rationale of the project is that we need to respond to global crises by connecting local experiences of place and sharing them with different people from different locales around the world.  

Previous projects by Vermeire were realized at the University of Sao Paulo, the British Library, King's College London, the University of Leuven, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Canberra, and now at the Fine Art Department of the Cyprus University of Technology. 

More information about the Supercluster and CGeomap projects can be found by clicking on the following links: https://supercluster.eu/ and https://cgeomap.eu/info/

Geert Vermeire: Biography

Geert Vermeire, is a curator, poet and artist, moving constantly between Greece, Portugal and Brazil, with a focus on spatial writing, locative sound & performance and social practices. He develops collaborative processes, departing from the ethical involvement of cultural action, together with other creatives and activists including ecologists, anthropologists, musicologists, engineers-software developers and multimedia artists. 

He manages walk listen create, a web portal and online community for walking artists, coordinating Sound Walk September. He is also co-founder of Supercluster, a platform for learning and creating with site specific and locative media, leaning on deep knowledge and agency for a more than human planet, next to next being the European curator of the Into the Artmosphere/Oika project, that he coordinates together with environmental scientist Rich Blundell. He coordinates, together with Yannis Ziogas, WAC, bi-annual International Walking Encounters/Conference in Prespa, Greece. 

Specific interest in his practice goes to walking as a creative instrument, unfolding around human connections, text and space, resulting in works of arts, site-specific interventions, locative media and in creative walks engaging both with the landscape and with those walking through the landscape.

(*) All applicable health measures against the coronavirus pandemic will be observed during the lecture and entry will be allowed only by presenting a Covid- 19 vaccination or recovery certificate according to the decision of the CUT’s Senate dated 24.8.2021.