My project explores the fusion of physical and digital elements to create a multimedia experience. I will incorporate textile components alongside 3D and mixed reality technologies, drawing inspiration from Lanzarote's unique landscapes, structures, and natural features to develop a dynamic work that bridges the digital and physical worlds.

I would like to work on my series “I coloured it for you”. In this series I make drawings using oval and circular stencils and a protractor. When the outlined drawing is complete, I carefully color them in with coloured pencil. I like to see them as these children colouring pages that I make for myself. Sometimes I leave months in between drawing the lines and colouring them in. So that I can forget the drawing before I colour it in and almost forget that it was me who made the line-drawing.

Each drawing is constructed using a set of rules and steps I set for myself. I find it difficult to create something from nothing and these rules provide a structure where I can let my intuition flow. Because of the systematic and playful process, these drawings are a form of introspective order for me.

Though I’ve already created many pieces in this series over the past year, I feel like it’s just the beginning. The rules I set up for myself evolve as the series progresses, making the possibilities feel endless. Currently, the drawings feature simple shapes and symbols like stars and hearts, but what if I introduce more complex forms? Will the drawings retain their impact? Or, what if I focus more on the texture of the coloured pencils to shape the image itself? These questions, and many more, I would like to explore at the residency.

Lucas Lai is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice explores experimental photographic material processes, informed by a deep appreciation of mono no aware — the awareness of beauty in impermanence. His work engages landscape as both subject and collaborator by using analog and site-responsive techniques to examine ephemerality, place, and time. 

During his residency at Hektor, Lucas’ project focuses on alternative photographic processes, including anthotypes and digital-negative contact printing. Drawing pigments and materials directly from the surrounding environment, he works with plants and sunlight to create images that are contingent on ecological conditions and temporal change.

Lucas is also the founder of Curio, a regenerative travel advisory that curates purposeful designed retreats for creatives around the world. Alongside his studio practice, Lucas will be in dialogue with the local community to explore models of tourism that are more sustainable and mutually beneficial, considering not only human stakeholders but also the broader ecological systems of Lanzarote.

Ellie Foreman-Peck is an artist and illustrator who moved to London after graduating with a degree in illustration from the University of the West of England. Her commercial work ranges from humorous caricatures to bold editorials and prints, visualising narratives and ideas with expressive line work, collage or photomontage. The medium is chosen according to the brief’s required mood or message. As well as editorial and commercial briefs, Ellie’s practice includes painting, ink work, screen and mono printing, animation, book covers, ceramics and posters. Ellie is always searching for new ideas, drawing on nature, people and the apparently mundane. She records and sketches these ideas, some of which end up in exhibitions and in her online print shop which you can see here. Inspiration and influence come from a wide range of places, particularly the work of Hogarth for his sequential visual story telling and Gillray, George Grosz, Daumier and Ralph Steadman for their expressive use of line, lampooned characters and witty satires. She has always greatly admired the traditional Japanese woodcut prints for their story telling, colour, composition and texture along with Aubrey Beardsley for his dark and decorative depictions of narratives. Clients include: The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Economist, The New York Review of books, The Idler, Random House, Pentagram and The New Yorker. 

Starting with sketches and ideas taken in my sketchbook, I will explore the surrounding landscape and wildlife of Lanzarote. In the studio I will work these sketches up into large scale drawings and paintings that explore the details and patterns of plants and landscape in a mediation on nature.

These works will culminate in a series to be exhibited and go into my online printshop.

Nina Backman’s artistic practice explores art as a shared, participatory experience that fosters connection, awareness, and collective responsibility. Her work brings people together through embodied encounters that invite reflection, listening, and action in response to pressing social and environmental challenges.

Silence Meal is a performative dining experience centered on shared silence. Participants gather around a table and share a meal without verbal communication, creating a space for deep presence, attentiveness, and non-verbal exchange. The work encourages reflection on how we relate to one another, to food, and to the environment, offering an alternative model for social interaction based on care, listening, and mutual respect.

Alongside Silence Meal, Backman presents the Gift Series, a long-term artistic and environmental initiative based on acts of giving: planting trees, sharing knowledge, and connecting people across communities. The Gift Series functions both as a social artwork and as a concrete environmental action. Tree planting becomes a symbolic and practical gesture of responsibility toward future generations, while workshops, conversations, and shared activities build networks of learning, collaboration, and ecological awareness.

Together, Silence Meal and the Gift Series create a platform for participatory engagement.These initiatives invite diverse audiences to take part in meaningful actions that bridge art, ecology, and everyday life, fostering a sense of shared ownership and agency in shaping a more sustainable and connected society.

Nina Backman is a Finnish-born, Berlin-based artist and curator whose interdisciplinary practice spans performance, installation, and socially engaged art. She is the founder of the Silence Project, which explores the intersections of silence, communication, and shared human experience. She graduated from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) in 2000.

Backman’s practice also extends into ecological interventions, most notably her ongoing tree-planting initiative A Million Trees to Finland, which merges art, community participation, and environmental restoration. By combining contemplative social rituals with tangible acts of ecological care, her work invites audiences to slow down, listen, and engage with both one another and the natural world.

Her work is held in both public and private collections, including the Roosen Trinks Collection in Germany and the Finnish Literature Society in Helsinki. She has exhibited internationally at venues such as Nordic House in Iceland, West Bund Art Center in Shanghai, Punkt Ø Galleri F 15 in Norway, Malmö Museum in Sweden, her performative work has been shown in the venues such the Berliner Festspiele, Flagey in Brussels, Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin, and Punkt Ø Galleri F 15 in Norway. Her environmental tree events have been featured in leading Finnish museums, including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Amos Rex, Taidehalli, Turku Art Museum, EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art and the Serlachius Museums among others.

In 2023, the Silence Project was awarded the title of Most Innovative Social Art Initiative in Europe by the European Enterprise Awards. 

After several years of traveling alone finding time and space for myself and art, I started to have the desire to find a collective place. I’m coming to Hektor to resource my body and soul deeply, in a very different environment, peacefully leaving the city’s stimulation behind.

Being daily connected to nature is a luxurious workshop.

Line Pillet is a filmmaker based in Brussels. Through 16 mm imagery, her work gazes with tenderness at those who live on the margins. In her films vulnerability becomes a source of beauty. Her characters often anonymous or displaced, inhabit a world that excludes them, yet they keep reaching for connection.

In 2020, she was selected by Cité des arts Internationale Paris for a writing residency where she developed the script of her short film Window. The film premiered at Regard Festival 2023 (CA) where it was selected for the official competition. Afterwards, the film had a national premiere at Film Festival Oostende. This was followed by a selection at Cut To: Gent festival where the film won the award for best cinematography.

Her latest short film Un Matin was selected for the official competition of International Short Film Festival Leuven 2024 where it premiered for the opening night. In September 2025 Un Matin was screened as part of the official competition at the Greek Drama International Short Film Festival (DISFF).

WORK

2024 / Un Matin

2023 / Window

2021 / Chorus 

Glenn Sanders (b. 1989, Belgium) is a Brussels-based artist whose practice unfolds through layered explorations of space, perception, and material presence. Educated at the Academie Jan van Eyck in Bruges and later at the School of Arts in Ghent, he holds both a Bachelor and Master in Fine Arts and recently followed a seminar on colour with Félix A. D’Haeseleer.
His work has been featured in exhibitions including Spaces, Superposed States, MANUAL, Dark ’n Stormy, Wandelgangen, A Garden Party, Blue blue blurb blue.. Projects have been shown at Komplot Brussels, L’ Édition populaire Antwerp, Fred&Ferry Gallery Antwerp, Superdeals Brussels, Katapultt Gallery Scheldewindeke, and other venues across Belgium.
He continues expanding the dialogue between artistic research, built environments, and lived experience.

Artist Statement

As a studio-based artist, I use observations from my working environment and from the broader processes of material production as points of departure. For example, the repeated rolling and unrolling of linen during manufacturing, storage, or transport becomes a gesture I reintroduce into my practice. By applying diluted paint while manipulating the linen in this way, patterns and traces appear that often escape my control. Only at a later stage—through cropping, cutting, and framing—do I re-claim the image and give it a defined form.

This interplay between control and unpredictability lies at the core of my practice. It allows me to question the relationship between process and outcome, and to explore how material behaviour can shape the final work.

Eline Boon is a writer and EU policy expert based in Brussels, inhabiting the friction between systemic architecture and the human pulse.

Driven by the conviction that the collision of Art and Science is the only catalyst potent enough for our time, her work is a constant act of translation. As an editor at Rephrase Mag and advisor at MUCE, she dismantles the exclusionary jargon of ivory towers, re-authoring the cold mechanics of legislation into narratives that breathe. She treats storytelling as a tool for political disruption—an invitation to move beyond abstract theory and into a visceral, shared reality.

During her residency at Hektor, Eline will be listening to the volcanic resonance of the landscape to craft a sonic voyage. Through a sequence of short stories and field recordings, she seeks to bridge the gap between systemic transition and lived intimacy. Her project is a grounding exercise: an attempt to make a better future audible, shifting it from a distant utopia into a tangible, resonant home.

Begum (b. 1999) is a Turkish artist working between Istanbul and London. Her art explores the intrinsic relationship between reality and fiction, reflecting the fluid and dynamic nature of collective memory. Engaging deeply with her cultural heritage, she examines how memories are shaped and transformed through a humanistic and intuitive lens.

In her practice, Begum navigates fundamental themes of existence, investigating the formation of personal and cultural identities and the connections that bind humanity to nature. To bridge the past and present, she employs a diverse array of media, including analog and digital film, hand-drawn and digitally-created illustrations, embroidery, collages, and writing. Her work embodies a playful spirit, intertwining fiction and non-fiction in a theatrical restaging of narratives.

As a contemporary artist, Begum actively seeks to uncover and preserve the past, embracing its vast possibilities while remaining open to new interpretations as her practice evolves. To her, the past is a mystery to be unraveled, one that requires the slow weaving of a tapestry across time and space, reinventing the unknowns through creative storytelling. In this process, she aims to construct a personal archive that examines expressions of memory—dreams, myths, and stories—developing an alternative historical perspective on human experience and deepening her understanding of the self.

Begum Malkoclar earned her BA from Pratt Institute in New York City and a Master’s in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions across New York, London,and Istanbul. In 2025, she debuted her first solo exhibition, Pale Blue Dot, at Büyükdere35 Gallery in Istanbul. That same year, she was selected for the prestigious 44th Akbank Contemporary Artists Prize exhibition.

Website: bedoojournal.com

What drives my art? The answer has to be the impulse to create and continually push myself to discover new ways to describe the world within me and around me.

Sylvietta is an artist Based in East London, her mixed media work spans from dynamic cityscapes to expressive portraiture, with each focus evolving along its own creative path.

My work embraces the vibrancy of collage, weaving together layered stories through recycled paper and found materials from her surroundings. This sustainable approach not only reflects her commitment to environmental responsibility but also serves as a defining signature in her art. -a collage can be an infinite work of art, you can add more pieces of paper or figures and go beyond the limit of the piece of paper again and again.

Sylvietta is also part of the #draweachoter art group, a global open community of artists that draw each other's portraits that in London and now is spread all over the world, her artworks are being sold in London and around the world.

Nicola Tremain is a self-taught artist producing expressive, intuitive work. Each piece begins without a plan, evolving organically on the panel. By spraying, smearing, or scraping paint to relinquish control, she taps into memory and imagination, allowing abstract forms to shift into landscapes, still lifes, or portraits - and sometimes back again. The history of this transformation remains partially visible, adding depth, texture, and unexpected meaning. In this process of evolution, happy accidents often align to reveal deeper symbolism, with the story or lesson behind a piece only becoming clear upon completion.

For her portraits, Nicola works from life. Free-flowing conversation during a sitting enables her to get to the heart of a person. Placing colours freely and intuitively she builds a fleeting frame that captures their essence.

Beyond the studio, Nicola is an Emmy-nominated documentary director, traveling to remote corners of the globe. These immersive experiences inform her artistic exploration of storytelling, bridging the external world with the internal dialogue of envisioning a better future.

Anne Ballon (she/her) is a writer and jeweller based in Brussels. Her texts have been published in several magazines, among others, in Rekto:Verso, Deus Ex Machina, deBuren, De Reactor and Hard//hoofd. Anne is part of the writers’ and artists’ collective Hyster-X. She is a VLOED laureate.

During the residency, Anne will work on Buiten, in de dingen, a work of poetic prose. In this text, a group of anti-mothers must reorient themselves after a cosmic event has overthrown an oppressive, totalitarian regime. How do they recover from this, and how do they learn to live together?

Bill Oliver is the award-winning director of Our Son, starring Billy Porter, Luke Evans, Robin Weigert, Andrew Rannells and Phylicia Rashad, which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film - Limited Release, and is distributed by Vertical. His first feature, Jonathan, starring Ansel Elgort, Patricia Clarkson, Suki Waterhouse, and Matt Bomer, won the award for best first feature at the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival and was released theatrically and on-demand by Well Go USA Entertainment. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the American Film Institute.

Born 1997, Białystok, Poland

Graphic artist and painter. She completed Art High School in Supraśl with a specialization in artistic printmaking. She is a graduate of the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, where she earned her diploma in Graphic Design in 2022. Since high school, she has been strongly interested in painting and color. Both her paintings and prints are characterized by vibrant, expressive colors.

Her inspiration comes from folk culture, the Polish landscape, and, above all, contemporary social issues. She has participated in exhibitions and international projects, including “Un Ballo in Maschera’ pelo Chiado, Carmo e Paris” in Paris, Lisbon, and Florence, as well as the “1066 Bonn Exhibition” in Bonn. She is a two-time laureate of the prestigious Strzemiński Fine Arts Competition in Łódź (2021 and 2022).

“Emotional Anthropocene - Painting in the Context of Social and Environmental Change”

This project explores the relationships between landscape, memory, and emotional states within the context of environmental transformation. Through expressive and vibrant color palettes, layered forms, and symbolic figures, it aims to capture the impact of ecological shifts on the inner world of human beings. During the residency on Lanzarote, I will work with the local landscape as a source of both observation and inspiration - creating a series of paintings that act as an emotional map of contemporary life and a dialogue between humans and nature.

Can I Come In? explores how home, intimacy, and routine are constructed within a nomadic life shaped by separation, and constant relocation. Through a series of twelve still-life paintings—each based on a meal prepared in a different sublet—the work examines how cooking becomes a grounding ritual and a form of emotional survival in unstable environments. Drawing from lived experiences across cities and temporary homes, the project connects personal displacement to broader contemporary conditions of mediated mobility, remote living, and fragmented domesticity. The series will expand into an artist’s book combining paintings, recipes, and essays, forming an archive of temporary homes and a guide to finding care, presence, and belonging within impermanence.

Sara Dal Mas is a ceramic artist based in Venice, Italy. She runs her studio, Verderame Pottery, where she works as an artist and ceramic instructor, organizing workshops, teaching ceramics, and collaborating with schools.
She was born on January 26, 1995, and graduated with honors (cum laude) in Painting and Decoration from the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice.
Her practice focuses on ceramics, combining wheel-thrown and hand-built processes, and is influenced by folklore, popular myths, and traditional narratives.
Alongside her studio activity, she is a part of a cultural association and she organizes a book club, reflecting her strong interest in literature and storytelling as part of her artistic research.

During the residency, I plan to develop a series of ceramic sculptures and vessels that combine wheel-thrown forms with hand-built elements, inspired by the volcanic landscape, local folklore, and the relationship between humans and elemental forces.
My research focuses on creating objects that feel both functional and symbolic, exploring clay as an ancient material connected to ritual, memory, and transformation. I am particularly interested in experimenting with surface treatments and atmospheric firing to reflect the raw, mineral qualities of the island.
The project will be a visual and material dialogue between my personal language and the territory of Lanzarote.

 http://www.verderamepottery.it

Jesús Vacas (Seville, 1977) is a Spanish artist and designer. He holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Seville and furthered his studies in Madrid, where his exposure to the world of fashion would decisively shape his career. He currently divides his time between Galicia and Madrid, combining his work as a menswear designer with his passion for oil painting.

His work focuses on the male figure, blending the rigor of classical training with a contemporary perspective influenced by fashion. Intimate and direct, his paintings o er a pause from the fast pace of the digital world, inviting us to rediscover the simple beauty of being human.

Willem Vermoere (b. 1960 B) studied cinearts and photography at KASK, the royal Academy of Fine Arts in Gent, Belgium in the eighties. After a brief career in video production and in commercial photography he started teaching at KASK. Teaching photography and ‘fine arts’ students alike, the art practice position he stood for was about the place of photography within the fine arts. Meanwhile Willem Vermoere developed an art practice concentrated on constructed photography, figures of speech and theatrical performance in or outside the studio environment. Recent exhibitions (2018-25) include: The Golden Ass (g), Cargo Cult (g), De Maat der Dingen (s), Leçons de choses (s), Constellaties (duo), Chalk & Cheese (s) and HOLA! (g) Mr. Man, CHIVALRY IS DEAD January 2026 (with Lotte Toke Lelo Maes) 

Frederik Schnieders, a 45-year-old Antwerp-based painter, is renowned for his evocative and dynamic approach to art. His work blends the boundaries of impressionism, realism, and surrealism, creating a vivid and expressive narrative on canvas and paper. Graduating from the esteemed Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Schnieders' passion for portraiture and figurative art was kindled through intensive figure drawing studies. This foundational experience propelled him into an in-depth exploration of oil painting, where he strives to balance color and technique, drawing inspiration from both the Impressionists and Renaissance masters. Schnieders' subjects are eclectic, drawn from his immediate environment, the vast expanse of the internet, video stills, and his extensive magazine collection. This diverse range of sources fosters a constant dialogue within his paintings, allowing the figures and personas depicted to evolve and offer viewers a thoughtful and authentic perspective. Shifting between oil and watercolors, Schnieders' recent works are a testament to his adventurous spirit, delving into various pigmentations and color thresholds. His art is characterized by its multi-layered complexity, producing a lush oasis of color and depth that captivates the observer. Apart from his artistic pursuits, Schnieders is an avid surfer and has a deep appreciation for new wave and electronica music. His interests extend to Japanese culture and history, as well as vintage fashion from Italy, England, and France. As Schnieders continues to refine his technique, his focus remains on expanding the scale of his work, aiming to translate his intricate and vibrant style onto larger formats. This ongoing journey of artistic development ensures that his work remains fresh, engaging, and profoundly impactful.