Eavatea at MACCH Annual Conference 2026, On Leaving: Contemporary Artists’ Estates and Legacies
Vermeir & Heiremans present a keynote lecture on Eavatea during this year’s conference of the Maastricht Centre for Arts & Culture, Conservation & Heritage (MACCH) which focuses on emerging networks of care around contemporary artists’ estates and legacies. At Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht
19/03/2026, 19:30h
In the opening keynote ‘Eavatea, archipelagos of artistic practices. A relational infrastructure as a dynamic archive‘ Vermeir & Heiremans will introduce Eavatea, a digital infrastructure that visualizes, archives, and interconnects collective trans-disciplinary artistic practices. In partnership with Atelier Cartographique and Nadine vzw, Jubilee is currently developing Eavatea. Vermeir & Heiremans will elaborate on Jubilee’s involvement with Eavatea, exploring its collective ownership and describing Eavatea as a relational infrastructure, an agora that encourages new ways of initiating and sharing collective research practices.
As a digital infrastructure, Eavatea is conceived as a dynamic artistic form that can generate encounters, discussions, and unexpected stories. Eavatea aims to become a living archive, where individual artists can reactivate their research or work, but which also enables all participants to use uploaded documents, images, sounds, etc. to explore unexpected connections between each other’s research and thus create new stories.
With an Eavatea prototype in the making, the ongoing participatory reflections on the further development of the tool focus on how to collectively manage and finance the platform in the long term, and how to disseminate and share it with other practitioners who would benefit from it. The goal is to create interconnected communities, both nationally and internationally, sharing ideas and commitments, that re-shape Eavatea to their own needs, but apply both its content-driven ambitions and its technical basis. This distributive idea of a federated archiving practice could also create the conditions to care and activate the work of participants in the long term, at a time when centralized care by government institutions is becoming increasingly uncertain.
This year’s conference of the Maastricht Centre for Arts & Culture, Conservation & Heritage (MACCH) focuses on emerging networks of care around contemporary artists’ estates and legacies.
Many contemporary artists are now leaving behind significant material and immaterial legacies. Increasingly, their estates are approached by private market actors such as gallerists, consultants, lawyers, and financial advisors, also in the context of what has become known as ‘the great wealth’ transfer of significant assets between the baby boomer generation and their heirs. At the same time, there are artists’ estates that require care despite not being considered immediately financially valuable or being in the public eye.
The conference starts from the premise that to ensure the preservation of contemporary art in all its diversity we first need to understand who cares: who owns, controls and manages contemporary artists’ estates and what legacies are being cared for, how and why? We aim to investigate who speaks authoritatively and legitimately about artists’ legacies (politics), how these legacies can be effectively shared and put to common uses (technologies), and how they can critically inform effective and affective networks of care for art and cultural heritage (ethics), now and in the future.
The MACCH conference is organized in collaboration with MERIAN (Maastricht Experimental Research in and through the Arts Network).
Practical
Location: Jan Van Eyck Academie
Academieplein 1
6211 KM Maastricht
The Netherlands
19-21 March 2026
Registration fees
-Regular Registration Full Conference: 50€
*Thursday 19 March: 20€
*Friday 20 March: 30 €
-Student Registration Full Conference: free
*Thursday 19 March: free
*Friday 20 March: free
Read more and register at MACCH