Koen Vanmechelen

Koen Vanmechelen

Koen Vanmechelen at Prix Ars Electronica 2013

Koen Vanmechelen with the Golden Nica for The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project at the Prix Ars Electronica 2013
Born 25 August 1965
Sint - Truiden
Nationality Belgian
Known for Multi-disciplinary art
Notable work Cosmopolitan Chicken (Research) Project, Walking Egg, Cosmogolem
Movement Conceptual art
Awards honorary citizen of Sint-Truiden, doctor honoris causa at the University of Hasselt, Golden Nica Hybrid Art, Best Artwork award from ISMB

Koen Vanmechelen (born August 26, 1965 in Sint-Truiden) is a Belgian multi- and transdisciplinary artist who began his career in the early 1990s. He is one of the most prolific and prominent contemporary artists in Belgium. Central to his extensive and innovative oeuvre is the concept of bio-cultural diversity, which he investigates through the Gallus gallus domesticus or chicken and its ancestral species, the red junglefowl or Gallus gallus.

Vanmechelen gained worldwide acclaim with his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP),[1] an international undertaking of crossbreeding national chicken species, in search of a Cosmopolitan Chicken. His 20th generation, the Mechelse Wyandotte, was born in September 2016 in Detroit. Vanmechelen has several projects parallel to the CCP: The CosmoGolem,[2] The Walking Egg,[3] MOUTH, COMBAT and The Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project (CC®P),[4] all of which he manages from his Open University of Diversity,[5] located in the old Gelatin Factory near Hasselt Harbour.

The artist's work is an investigation of and an ode to the beautiful diversity and hybridity of life:

“ Every organism needs another organism to survive. ”

Biocultural diversity and the consequent interaction between art and science form the core theme of his oeuvre. Vanmechelen often collaborates with scientists and experts from different disciplines, such as Jean-Jacques Cassiman, Rik Pinxten and Marleen Temmerman. He uses innovative technologies such as 3D-scanning, morphometrics, 3D-printing and interactive 3D visualisation. His works are inherently cross-medial and interdisciplinary. Vanmechelen creates, amongst others, expressive paintings and drawings, photography, video, installation art and wooden sculptures. The common visual theme throughout these various methods of expression are the chicken and the egg. These have, over the years, become important symbols to Vanmechelen, allowing the artist to interconnect scientific, philosophical, and ethical issues, and to frame the subject of debates and lectures.[6]

A new species of flat worm discovered in Venice (It) during the artist solo exhibition Nato a Venezia at the biennial of Venice was in 2013 named Trigonostomum Vanmecheleni in honour of the artist.[7][8]

Biography

Koen Vanmechelen, who lives in the Belgian town of Meeuwen-Gruitrode, is professionally based in Hasselt. He is a self-taught artist who studied hotel management in Antwerp and worked several years as a cook and pastry chef in Belgian top restaurants. His father is an artist, his mother a fashion designer. Vanmechelen’s interest in chickens and birds started at an early age, due to the trips he made with his uncle Louis Gonnissen, a famous Belgian ornithologist and television personality.[9] At the age of five, he says in an interview, he already had a breeding coop in his bedroom.[10]

Conservators Jan Kenis,[11] Jan Hoet and illustrator Gregie de Maeyer[12] launched him into the world of art in the early nineties. His first works consisted mainly of wooden constructions, assemblages and cages for birds. This aligns him with the Belgian tradition of assemblage artists. In the nineties, Vanmechelen quickly evolved into a conceptual artist and later on a multi-, trans- en interdisciplinary artist. During the late nineties, Vanmechelen launched his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP), which occupies a unique place in art history. It gave him fast national and international recognition in and outside the art world.

Despite his aviophobia, the artist has adopted a nomadic lifestyle. “Movement creates opportunities for transformation and mutation”, says the artist, who is always on the move and spends much of his time abroad. He is constantly trying to connect his projects to different realities planet wide, finding balances between art, science and the world. Vanmechelen: “I am trying to connect people and ideas, finding the right intersection of space and time to hatch the egg in the infinite collision of beautiful ‘accidents’ created by perpetual movement.” Hence Vanmechelen’s fascination for biological and cultural diversity, or biocultural diversity. Among the streams that facilitate the ebb and flow of endless motion, migrating people and other animals, he looks for the genes and memes that have always been gathering. Some of these he takes home. In his home base in Meeuwen-Gruitrode, he has collected scores of bird and other animals - and keeps more than one thousand chickens: Gallus Gallus, the 17 breeds of Mechelse hybrids and other species. In total, Vanmechelen has 3,000 chickens on eight farms on three continents.[13]

Foundations

Cosmopolitan Chicken Project

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (CCP) is an ongoing trans-disciplinary art project started in the late 1990s which aims to create a hybrid of all races of chicken in the world. At the moment is has reached its eighteenth generation, a crossbreeding between the Mechelse Styrian (the offspring of the sixteenth generation) and the Austrian Sulmtaler.[14] The CCP is a commentary about diversity, complexity and immunity. The breeding of a perfectly “cosmopolitan” chicken, carrying the genetic material of all possible races, is a metaphor for multicultural human society. According to Vanmechelen, humanity will only be able to thrive and stay “healthy” in a situation of maximized diversity, a notion reflected by the results of the repeated crossbreeding of races which had previously only been inbred: the offspring of the CCP have longer lifespans and higher fertility rates than the average domesticated chicken, as well as a more effective immune system, making them less liable to be stricken by disease.[15] This intercultural approach has resulted in a chicken carrying traces of DNA from chicken races all over the world: Belgium, France, the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Cuba, Italy, Senegal, China, Slovenia and Austria.[16] The CCP has also spawned a plethora of drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations.

Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Research Project (CC®P) is the more scientifically oriented half of the CCP. In collaboration with esteemed Belgian human geneticist Jean-Jacques Cassiman, Vanmechelen researches the genetic make-up of the chicken races participating in the CCP. The database generated by this research has been said to be the most extensive one in Belgium. The results of the research have been presented in the form of virtual representations as well as 3D-printed sculptures. The piece Evolution of a Hybrid represents three chicken chromosomes, two isolated from inbred, domesticated chickens, the third from a crossbreed: “Chromosomes are laid out in circles, connecting at one tip of the chromosome and wrapped in spherical shapes. The longest chromosomes (chromosomes 1 and 2) cross at the top of the sphere. The number of homozygous and heterozygous polymorphisms along the chromosomes are indicated by peaks pointing inwards and outwards, respectively. As a result, inbred chickens have relatively more peaks pointing inwards while crossbred chickens have more peaks pointing outwards.”[17]

CosmoGolem

The CosmoGolem foundation centers around diversity and children's rights.[18] Its main symbol is the CosmoGolem statue, a wooden giant four meters in height, based on an earlier, much smaller version created by a young Vanmechelen. All CosmoGolem statues are hollow on the inside, which allows for children all over the world to fill them with little bits of paper on which they have written their dreams and wishes for the future. The statues are opened via a small hatch located at their hearts. The aim of the CosmoGolem foundation is to build bridges between different cultures all around the world and to stress the importance of (cultural) diversity, and deal which also underlies the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. At the [19] moment, there are over 30 CosmoGolem statues, spread all over the globe, in countries such as the Netherlands, India, Pakistan, Tanzania, Poland, Chile and Belgium. The most recent addition to the project is the largest statue yet, inaugurated 9 May 2014 in Kruibeke, Belgium.[20] Complementing the project is the CosmoGolem Cycling project, which is centered around a couple following the CosmoGolem in its footsteps on their bikes.[21]

COMBAT

COMBAT is a project commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War.[22] It is an offshoot of parent project Coming World Remember Me (CWRM), a collaboration between Vanmechelen and Jan Moeyaert. The ultimate goal of COMBAT is to have produced 600,000 small clay statues, one for every soldier killed on Belgian soil during WW1, by the end of 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. The statues are made by the public, aided by international workshops. At the end of the project, they will all be part of a land art installation near the Palingbeek in Ypres, former no man’s land. The installation will cover a surface of several hectares.

The Walking Egg

The Walking Egg foundation is a non-profit organization focusing on the problem of infertility in developing countries,[23] and also conducts research in the field in collaboration with co-founder Willem Ombelet, who also founded the Genk Institute for Fertility Technology. A small egg, walking on two short chicken legs, forms the organization’s logo. In 2013, it was announced that the Walking Egg foundation had developed a much cheaper form of in vitro fertilization, reducing the cost of a single cycle with 90%.[19] This new method, instead of using expensive carbon dioxide, uses two much cheaper chemicals, citric acid and bicarbonate of soda, to produce carbon dioxide – making it a much more affordable process for poor people worldwide. The Walking Egg tries to bring inexpensive in vitro fertilization techniques to countries usually associated with overpopulation, yet also plagued by the effects of infertility: "If you don't have a child in Africa, or also South America or Asia, it's a disaster. It's a disaster from an economic point of view, a psychological point of view. They throw you out of the family. You need to help them and nobody helps them."[19] However, the techniques developed by the Walking Egg foundation aren’t destined exclusively for people in developing countries. Because of the cost of a conventional fertilization cycle, the cheaper treatment has received attention from wealthier countries as well.

Current projects

Wooden Coin

Wooden Coin is a project in collaboration with bpost, in support of SOS Children’s Villages. It consists of oak tree planted in the center of a roundabout near the future location of the OpUnDi headquarters in Genk. Five twigs, each originating from a different species of oak and representing the five world continents, are grafted onto the tree. The roots have been adorned with pieces of 1 eurocent. The project was accompanied by a complementary charitative initiative, encouraging people to donate 1 euro to SOS Children’s Villages. All contributors received a certificate of donation signed by Vanmechelen.

Arena de evolución

Arena de evolución is a Cuban-based project featuring four “arenas”, places of learning and research regarding themes such as biological and cultural immunity, diversity, fertility and ethics. Each arena is co-chaired by Vanmechelen himself and an expert in the field concerned. The findings generated by the research conducted in the arenas will be collected in the LOCK (Library Of Collected Knowledge) and presented at the Havana Biennial.[24] The project was kicked off with a symposium at the Open University of Diversity in Hasselt during which the core themes of the project were presented to the public by the scientific authorities involved.[25] In September of this year, an international and interdisciplinary team of thinkers traveled to Arusha, Tanzania to set up the second arena and to be immersed in the culture of the native Maasai. The views and opinions of the Maasai regarding nature, evolution, and the increasing influence of modernity on the natural world and environment form an integral part of the project.[26]

The Open University of Diversity

The Open University of Diversity

The Open University of Diversity (OpUnDi) is Vanmechelen’s headquarters, and the place where his foundations (CCP, CC ®P, CosmoGolem, Walking Egg and COMBAT) are gathered. It houses a variety of birds (both alive and stuffed) and works of art, as well as Vanmechelen’s atelier. The building, a former gelatin factory, is located at the harbor of Hasselt. It has been described as “… a think tank, a meeting place for people to discuss the core themes that are found in Koen Vanmechelen’s work: biological and cultural diversity, identity, hybridity and other scientific, political, philosophical and ethical issues. It is a global network of innovative minds and thinkers, a space for intellectual cross-pollination, a breeding place where innovative ideas find space to hatch.”[27] In 2015, the OpUnDi will move to a new location, the move prompted by the imminent demolition of the old gelatin factory. The foundations wille be moved to a new location, at the site of the former zoo of Zwartberg in Genk, and will be called La Biomista.[28] A second OpUnDi will be established in Detroit.

The Accident

The Accident is a biennial magazine published by Koen Vanmechelen which explores the main themes underlying his art: biocultural diversity and hybridity. Every issue deals with a specific topic. The Accident’s purpose is twofold. Firstly, it gives its international readers a better understanding of the core concepts of Vanmechelen’s hybrid art and its importance for contemporary society by putting his artistic quest into a multidisciplinary perspective. The magazine also serves as a breeding center for new ideas that can infect the artist himself.[29]

Exhibitions and awards

In 1996, he was awarded the Gustav-Heinemann-Friedenspreis, in 2005 he became an honorary citizen of his birth town Sint-Truiden and in 2013 he received the Golden Nica Hybrid Art for his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project.

Vanmechelen has presented his work on almost all continents, from the United States to China and from Iceland to Botswana. In Belgium, his work was exhibited in many museums and other loci. According to Vanmechelen art should leave the cage of the museum as often as it can. He participated in solo and group exhibitions in among others National Gallery London, Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Museum Kunst Palast (Düsseldorf), Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ (Amsterdam), Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern), MAD Museum (New York) and Pushkin Museum (Moscow). His work was also shown at dOCUMENTA 13, the Biennials of Venice (2009, 2011 and 2013), Manifesta, Dakar and Poznań, triennial of Guangzhou and the Shanghai World Expo 2010.

Bibliography (selection)

Expositions

Solo-exhibitions (selection)

Group exhibitions (selection)

Permanent works (selection)

Lectures/debates (selection)

Publications (selection)

Artistic-scientific projects

References

  1. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen » Cosmopolitan Chicken Project". Koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 2013-11-07.
  2. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen » Cosmogolem". Koenvanmechelen.be. 2013-03-01. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  3. ↑ "The Walking Egg". Thewalkingegg.com/. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  4. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen » Cosmopolitan chicken research project". Koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  5. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen » Open university of diversity". Koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  6. ↑ Biografie van Koen Vanmechelen op BAM
  7. ↑ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/11250003.2012.754058#.UZSS_oLrZEI
  8. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen - Nato a Venezia - 54Th biennial of Venice (Long version)". YouTube. 2011-04-14. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  9. ↑ "Dirk Van den Abeele » Blog Archive » Belgie verliest pionier van de vogelliefhebberij". Ornitho-genetics.info. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  10. ↑ De Standaard Online, 12 november 2005. Lees de kip en je weet waar we als mens naartoe gaan
  11. ↑ "Kenisgroep - Wie is Jan Kenis?". Kenisgroep.be. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  12. ↑ http://www.villakakelbont.be/html/auteurs/auteursContent.asp?show=id&id=934
  13. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen » Cosmopolitan Chicken Project". Koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 2013-09-01.
  14. ↑ "Welcoming the new, Noble, generation; Mechelse Sulmtaler - CCP18". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  15. ↑ "Op zoek naar de bastaardkip" (PDF). koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  16. ↑ "Stamboom" (PDF). Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  17. ↑ "Evolution of a Hybrid". ccrp.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  18. ↑ "Cosmogolem". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  19. 1 2 3 "IVF as cheap as £170, doctors claim". bbc.com. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  20. ↑ "Inauguration of largest Cosmogolem ever (Kruibeke, Belgium)!". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  21. ↑ "CosmoGolem Cycling Project". cosmogolemcyclingproject.com. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  22. ↑ "Comingworldrememberme" (PDF). gonewest.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  23. ↑ "About the Walking Egg". www.thewalkingegg.com. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  24. ↑ "Arena de Evolución, La Bienal de La Habana (CU)". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  25. ↑ "Kick Off Arena de Evolución, OpUnDi, Hasselt (BE)". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  26. ↑ "Preparing for Arena de Evolución – Maasai, Arusha (TZ)". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  27. ↑ "Open University of Diversity". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  28. ↑ "Koen Vanmechelen moves his Open University of Diversity from Hasselt to Genk". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  29. ↑ "The Accident". koenvanmechelen.be. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  30. ↑ http://2012.tedxflanders.be/program/open-university-diversity
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