Manoeuvre is a visual platform for artists and diverse communities. There we create collective visual work where art, craft and everyday life meet. Manoeuvre facilitates development paths for artists in different contexts:

At our MAAKPLEK in the Rabot, we work with manual and slow techniques. A core of engaged local residents and makers from diverse backgrounds ‘inhabit’ the place and co-create there on fixed weekdays. They have extensive textile knowledge, linked to the neighborhood’s historical past. The residents with migrant roots know specific techniques and exchange them with the expertise of the regular artists. In addition to textiles, other crafts and forgotten knowledge are used, each time on a human scale. Throughout the process of making together, temporary collectives with artists emerge. We enter into further artistic trajectories with them.

Manoeuvre is helping to build a SITE, an open, experimental space in New Ghent. The SITE is a (semi)public place that currently consists of a fallow field, an apartment and a container. They are transformative places that, through their activation, enable debate about the development of the neighborhood as well as concrete actions on pressing social issues.

The place is “inhabited” by artists, local residents and a number of partner organizations. Together they form a social and artistic living organism. The SITE is a fluid, open space in which different individuals collaborate and create without the need for a predetermined artistic output. The artists work there relationally: movement, images and content are developed through active participation.

With maneuver there we question the boundaries between art and everyday life, public and private, individual and collective. The work created through interventions in public space is visual and experimental. Interactions with space and public are central: object-performances become an invitation to form new collectives in a playful and reciprocal way. These are in turn re-involved in other artistic trajectories of our operation.

Manoeuvre is UNDERWAY, moving rhizomatically through the rural landscape, in smaller towns or villages.
Manoeuvre regularly grafts itself onto existing initiatives, this operation we call UNDERWEG. This happens on our own initiative, by invitation or in co-production. This enables us to create multi-voiced collectivity in very different places. We always respond to local contexts or developments. The trajectories from the MAAKPLEK and the SITE form the impetus for new work that can take root in these places.

Manoeuvre works to create a MANIFEST IN MOVEMENT, fluid and polyphonic. Our mission is a manifesto in motion: the key words shift and make up our story. They are “verbs,” written by all involved. They transform with and through time. The manifesto is always unfinished. The manifesto is activating-reflective in nature. It consists of zines, publications, performances, tools and activating ‘we’ platforms aimed at art houses, where we address urgent themes and conduct practice research from different perspectives. Manoeuvre is co-building a site, an open, experimental space in New Ghent.

Manoeuvre vzw was part of ART STAND.

Website: https://www.manoeuvre.org/

(c) Giada Cicchetti