Sébastien Hendrickx Sébastien Hendrickx Sébastien Hendrickx Sébastien Hendrickx Sébastien Hendrickx

Within the frame of an artistic research funded by KASK School of Arts (2022-2026) I started studying and creating cosmograms, objects that represent cosmologies or worldviews. They exist in iconographic, narrative, performative and architectural forms, and are produced within scientific, spiritual and and artistic contexts. They have been around for millennia. Think, for instance, of city plans of the Mayans, which reflected their idea of the cosmos, the spatial arrangement of the afterlife in Dante’s Divine Comedy or the contemporary speculative cartographies of Alexandra Arènes.

My own cosmogram drawings are portraits of diverse places, processes and experiences.

Since 2023, I organize cosmogram drawing sessions, inspired by diagramming techniques. The sessions are open to artists and non-artists from different disciplinary backgrounds. Participants don’t need to have any experience with drawing. Sessions have taken place at KASK School of Arts, DAStheatre (Amsterdam, NL), Performing Arts Forum (Saint-Erme, FR), Radical House, MANCHESTER, L’Art Rue (Tunis, TS) and Deutsches Theater (Berlin, DE).

Pedagogy is about generating a context in which attention – for a specific topic, a text, a situation or an environment – is made possible. In that sense, I consider my scored walks to be pedagogic practices.

For Silent Group Visit to My Father’s House (2016) a dozen participants travelled to Wevelgem, a small-town in West-Flanders. They made a one hour walk through the house where I spent most of my youth and where my father still lives. The score was very simple: the visit was to last one hour; the participants could enter the garden and each of the rooms; they were not allowed to speak, nor to touch anything.

For Silent Walks through the Palace of Justice (2024) I invited one single guest at a time to join me for a one hour walk in silence through the Brussels Palace of Justice. The guests included a legal scholar, a sociologist, a UN-employee, a dancer, an environmental activist, an actor and a playwright. Each of them was invited to take on the role of the guide: they decided where to go, and could take pictures of whatever caught their attention. The gigantic Brussels courthouse – bigger than the Saint-Peter’s Basilica in Rome – is a publicly accessible building, but the boundaries between the public and the more private-professional parts are rather blurry.

Scripts for TV-series are often created by dozens of writers. These artists are hierarchically organized in what is called a ‘writers room’. Inspired by this type of collective labour, I design scored group writing practices.

In 2018, a group of artists participated in making a collaborative ‘ethnographic’ portrait of the Performing Arts Forum. PAF is a self-organized artistic residency space located in a large convent in the French small-town of Saint-Erme. It was founded by the Dutch theatre director Jan Ritsema (1945-2021). The participants created the text Food, Water, Wifi by working in an online collaborative document. It was divided an ‘attic’ and a ‘living room’ – the former being the space in which the participants entered their separate writings, the latter the one where the collective text took shape. For the creation of the first part, I acted as an editor, gathering materials in the attic and assembling them in the living room. The second part started from a pre-written paragraph – the beginning of a story – on which the participants could elaborate, this time engaging with each other directly, without the interference of an editor.