Leo
Kees
Artistic Profile
His practice moves between artistic production, pedagogy, research, and public engagement. In recent years, his focus has increasingly shifted toward participatory formats that approach learning not as the transmission of information, but as a collective aesthetic, emotional, and social process.
Across these different settings, he develops performative environments in which attention, uncertainty, interpretation, and re-orientation become shared and negotiable experiences. He is particularly interested in how the fear of appearing uninformed, irrational, or ridiculous can be transformed from a social limitation into an intrinsic component of learning processes.
Many of his works examine how humour, group dynamics, physical presence, and collective attention influence the ways people position themselves in relation to knowledge, authority, vulnerability, privilege, and one another. Rather than approaching learning as a purely intellectual activity, he treats it as a process shaped by emotional states, social behaviour, bodily perception, and cultural context.
A migrant perspective runs throughout his practice—not as a fixed thematic framework, but as an ongoing experience of navigating between multiple languages, systems of knowledge, cultural codes, and forms of social belonging.
This perspective informs his interest in how assumptions, behaviours, normative structures, and ideas of legitimacy are learned, embodied, reproduced, and, under certain conditions, reorganised.
At the centre of his work lies the idea of permanent learning as a necessary civic and personal practice that extends beyond institutional education or professional expertise. Through participatory and performative formats, he investigates what enables individuals and groups to step outside habitual patterns of perception and behaviour, and how temporary shared experiences can generate new forms of awareness, imagination, and social connection.
Current Research & Production Focus
Thematic: Framing individual and collective learning as a performative practice; exploring the relationships between information, interpretation, and imagination; examining the tension between data production and the perception of reality; questioning established knowledge canons; and investigating the interplay between cognitive, somatic, and emotional dimensions of learning.
Formal: ANALOGUE: Performances for museums, theatres, conference settings, and unconventional spaces; intergenerational and durational works with fluid boundaries between observers and performers. DIGITAL: Interviews and audio recordings as tools for reflection and documentation; performances for digital spaces; use of AI for creative processes and artistic reflection.
Methodological: Using non-fiction books and essays as starting points for artistic processes; collaborating with scientists and researchers; fostering open and collective creation; facilitating experimental exchanges between professionals and amateurs; exploring the interaction between cognitive, somatic, and emotional learning.