Jolien Naeyaert

Jolien Naeyaert (°1989, BE) is an engineer architect and visual artist who researches alternative ways of exploring and representing architectural places. Focussing on different media, she looks for ways to approach places actively. The act of experience, of really being at a particular place and discovering what lives at that specific place – through the presence of your whole body – is essential for her work.

In 2015 she built her own ‘research centre’ in a caravan and decided to wander around Belgium, questioning the notion of ‘landscape’. Today this practice has evolved into a pattern of dialogue, intimacy and process-based work. From December 2015 until May 2022, Jolien Naeyaert worked at Robbrecht en Daem architecten in Ghent. In 2018, she started writing articles for the Belgian architecture magazine A+, and in 2020 she began teaching at the Faculty of Architecture, Sint Lucas Brussels. Together with French cineast/ architect Anne Philippe, she founded the collective ‘desespiegles’.

Recently she did a residency at The Green Corridor in St. Gilles where she decided to start making drawings by hand. She also danced, improvised on her piano and wrote poetry. Resolute to focus on embodied knowledge, she continues this practice uptill today. Jolien is also part of Brussels music band Dünke Well and last year she joined Nadine, a laboratory for contemporary transdisciplinary arts.

Currently, she lives in Brussels and has a studio at Level Five Brussels.