SoAP Space oriented Artistic Practice.

SoAP Maastricht is Matea Bakula, Johannes Bellinkx, Famke Dhont, Christina Flick, Rita Hoofwijk, Breg Horemans, Anna Huizing, Theun Mosk, Salome Mooij, Paulien Oltheten, de nog ongekende kunstenaars, Alice Pons, Jakob Proyer, Olivia Reschofsky, Gert Jan Stam, Nick Steur, Anneke Tonen en Benjamin Vandewalle. 

SoAP Maastricht is the artistic platform for the work of artists from different backgrounds and disciplines, that explores interactions and behaviours in the public space that we might take for granted. Drawing on their individual training and expertise, the artists create analogue interventions that offer participants a new way to experience and perceive our public spaces. The SoAP practitioners are united in their vision: to create spatial projects, share their experience and practice(s), work collaboratively, and strive for independence.

We create work with and for the audience. For the people who are present. For those who use the public space. For those who happen to be passing, and pause to watch. We ask you, as a spectator or participant, to undergo a physical experience, to challenge your perceptions and to see things from a different perspective, physically and mentally. The creators involved with SoAP develop projects that encourage this receptive, questioning state of mind. Projects that are always rooted in engagement and exchange. Projects that search—on many levels—not just for ways of seeing but for multifarious ways of being.

As SoAP Maastricht looks back on the years 2017 to 2020, when the platform received its first structural subsidy from the Performing Arts Fund, SoAP figured as a space where work can evolve and grow, where practitioners inspire each other and themselves, where connections are made with likeminded organisations.

In the coming years, the space that is currently SoAP will be expanded with ‘plug-in’ initiatives, institutes, festivals, younger and older artists, other disciplines, and other perspectives, to extend and deepen the platform’s scope.

A key aim of the work(s) created as part of SoAP is to ensure that an artist’s practice is always independent: this includes varied tempos, and considering different ways of organising work, always motivated by respecting the autonomy of the artists’ practice. As a platform, SoAP seeks to use its strengths and resources to abandon conventional project-orientated logic if the need arises.

SoAP wants to encourage its practitioners to develop innovative artistic projects and be unafraid of exploring more orthodox production, presentation and distribution methods. By providing a stable, yet flexible, structure the platform offers every SoAP creator a chance to take those steps. Through sharing its expertise, the SoAP team provides each practitioner with an environment that is safe as well as sufficiently challenging, so that they can evolve at their own pace, where failure is an opportunity to grow.

SoAP is committed to being a space for the creation of interdisciplinary, hybrid projects, where relevant knowledge is shared. A space that is freely accessible, welcoming, inviting. Our work exists in the public space, engages with the public space, and connects with everyone who uses the public space.

SoAP Maastricht receives an activity subsidy from the Performing Arts Fund for the period 2021-2024. The core team and board of SoAP subscribe to the Governance Code Cultuur.