‘It is through the “not-knowing” that a stimulating and caring environment can be created to confidently share vulnerability.’
Risk Hazekamp is researcher within the Biobased Art and Design research group and tutor for the Art & Research study programme at St. Joost School of Art & Design.
Risk Hazekamp (pronouns: they/them) is an interdependent visual artist and researcher. Risk is also an art educator in the broadest sense of the word. For more than twenty years, their work has revolved around the complex and constantly changing relationship between body and image. Gender has been a central element, not only as a subject, but also as a theoretical framework. For the past ten years, Risk has applied questions formulated within the theme of gender to other socio-political issues. Through a combination of personal activism, decolonial practices and analogue (currently organic) photography, visual intersectional processes are developed to change existing systems. In doing so, Risk takes on the position of a student as often as possible to unlearn photography.
After their studies at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Risk worked and lived in Berlin for 11 years. Their work has been shown extensively at international art fairs, such as Art Cologne, Arco Madrid, Art Forum Berlin, Liste Basel and Paris Photo. In 2010, Risk decided to no longer participate in commercial art contexts. Since this decision, long-running often ongoing projects are preferably presented on locations where space, subject and time are interrelated.
Risk has taught at various art academies, including teaching Photography from 2010 to 2014 at the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts, and from 2015 onwards at St Joost School of Art & Design in the Art & Research department and the minor Arts & Humanity.
Most recently, they graduated ‘magna cum laude’ from the Advanced Master of Research in Art & Design of the Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp and took part in the Decolonial Summer School, a collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven and the University College Roosevelt of Utrecht University.
Unlearning Photography
Unlearning Photography is a research project in which living photography is investigated. As an artist working with analogue photography, researcher Risk Hazekamp is facing the two inherent downsides of the photographic medium: its toxicity and its racism.
Toxicity and photography are intimately linked: for example, in the preservation of analogue photos by chemical fixation. Almost all analogue processes use non-degradable chemical compounds.
Photography’s racism is embedded in how the medium has been shaped by and used in violent colonial practices of defining, categorizing and creating the visible. But it is also present in technical aspects, such as the fact that film emulsion could not register dark tones the same way as light tones.
Research Group: Biobased Art and Design
The research group Biobased Art and Design capitalises on the role of artistic practice in unlocking the unique potentials of living organisms for everyday materials and communicating these to a broader public. In doing so, the group aims to instigate and accelerate our widespread understanding, further development and usage of such materials. The group’s research approach encourages tangible interactions with the living organisms, such as algae, fungi, plants and bacteria, to explore and understand their unique qualities and constraints through diverse technical and creative methods taking artists, designers and scientists as equal and active partners in the material creation.
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‘The dynamic relationship between humans and living artefacts will continue to evolve reciprocally with mutual care.’
Elvin Karana 
‘In my work the concept of time is a recurring theme.’
Xandra van der Eijk
‘Bacteria, Fungi, Humans, all part of the same experiment.’
Ward Groutars
‘I am dust! People were created from the same particles as all other elements. Everything was created from dust and will return to dust. ’
Annemarie Piscaer
‘I’m interested in how we can implement situated learning within design education.’
Sarah Lugthart
‘Digital media help me to envision future interactions with living materials’
Jose Martinez Castro
‘I believe a collaborative and efficient lab can address both educational and research demands.’
Serena Buscone
‘Exploring and integrating novel perspectives to our everyday through the eyes of fungi.’
Wasabii Ng
‘I am eager to explore how unique qualities of ‘living materials’ can transform the way we think, feel and act.’
Hazal Ertürkan
‘Nature is a perfect example of an iterative design process. It is inspiring and full of exciting solutions.’
Clarice Risseeuw