‘Unfortunately last Sunday afternoon somebody left the door open...’, an exhibition in the frame of the project entitled ‘The estafette, looking at one hundred year of visual art in Limburg’.

Stijn Huijts has approached the Jan van Eyck Akademie for a collaboration on a project with the working title ‘45m boven NAP’ (45 meter above sea level), a measure taken at the museum entrance. Responding to the perhaps paradoxical situation of Limburg being geographically one of the most centrally located regions in Europe whilst on the other hand being self–defined and perceived as a ‘province’ within the context of the Netherlands as a whole, Stijn Huijts opens the museum door to a neighbouring Limburg institution, the Jan van Eyck Akademie. This initiative intends to challenge the traditional terminology such as ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, or ‘marginal’, as it accents not only a seminal Dutch institution — the only postgraduate studies with fine art, design and theory — but one whose hallmark is a vibrant mix of Dutch and international participants.

Octavian Esanu, former director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Chisinau, Moldova, and current participant of the Theory department at the Jan van Eyck Akademie was then invited to curate the project. "I was wondering: if Limburg is considered a periphery within the ‘Euregion’, what is then to be said about my home country — Moldova, which for most of the people I met during my stay at the Jan van Eyck was as unfamiliar as Limburg was for me before coming to Maastricht? Having had the experience of directing a Contemporary Art center in Moldova, I saw in such project an opportunity to work with the diversity of academy participants coming from different cultural backgrounds."

The starting point for the research was then reformulated by inviting the KSA:K-Center for Contemporary Art from Chisinau, Moldova, to join the Jan van Eyck Akademie and Museum het Domein for this project. Esanu offered Giselle de Oliveira from the Design department and Franziska Lesák from the Theory department to work with him as a research team for the project.

The project involves a two-volume publication and an exhibition. The research is conceived as an independent contribution of the curatorial team to the exhibition: an inventory for the continuous inquiry into the operational structures of art production, based on material from the artists and the institutions involved. The first volume addresses the Jan van Eyck Akademie and the KSA:K, the second volume will address the Museum het Domein and the exhibition projects.

The exhibition will bring together artists who are or were involved at certain moments as tutors or participants in the activities of Jan van Eyck, and those who are involved in the activities of KSA:K. It is configured in an 'inside out' format: the artists' projects (all commissioned for the exhibition) outside the museum and a 'navigator' consisting of archive material of the institiutions involved, placed within the museum galleries.
 
Participating artists:
Aline Bouvy (L), Guillaume Bijl (B), Meg Cranston (USA), Ryan Gander (UK), Lilia Dragnev (MD), John Gillis (B), Tina Gverovic (HR), Suchan Kinoshita (NL), Aglaia Konrad (A/B), Renée Kool (NL), Manfred Kroboth (D), Lucia Macari (MD), Timur Novikov (RUS), Willem Oorebeek (NL/B), Vasile Rata (MD), Mark Verlan (MD), Henk Visch (NL), Nira Zait (IL).
Estafette