Bas Ketelaars explores the reciprocal relationship between people and their environment through drawing, walking, field photography and printmaking. At the heart of Ketelaars’ work is a simple but fundamental question: does humanity shape the landscape, or does the landscape shape us? His practice has traditionally developed from the studio, combining contemplative and observational forms with an increasing interest in research, fieldwork and the landscape as a shared living environment. Alongside his artistic practice, Ketelaars has become involved in bat research and in collective forms of reading, walking and thinking about our relationship to the environments we inhabit.
During his residency, Ketelaars will bring this research more explicitly into the field through a project provisionally titled Who’s in charge of the dark?. The project approaches darkness not as the absence of light, but as an ecological quality: a shared space and habitat for nocturnal life.
Beginning with an exploration of the area surrounding Greylight Projects and relevant sites across the Euregio, Ketelaars will investigate the capacity of landscapes and architecture to accommodate and preserve darkness. Through walking, photography, observation and documentation, he will map buildings, landscape elements and places from the perspective of the night. The resulting research will form a provisional ‘state of the night’: a cartography of places where darkness is maintained and where nocturnal species can thrive.
The research will subsequently move towards a more tangible intervention: the design and realisation of a modest temporary or semi-permanent structure dedicated to darkness. Rather than architecture designed primarily around human use, Ketelaars imagines a refuge for nocturnal life — a structure open to the night and resistant to the day, connected to the ground and to the surrounding ecology.
With its focus on observation, hidden ecological structures and the relationship between human activity and the environment, Ketelaars’ research connects directly to the themes of Protocols for Observation / Hidden Structures. His residency shifts attention away from what is immediately visible in the landscape towards the conditions, species and forms of life that emerge when we allow ourselves to look — and listen — differently.
In 2009, Bas Ketelaars graduated from the Master of Fine Arts at Sint Lucas Antwerp. Since then he focuses mainly on drawing and (analogue) photography around the theme of nature. Ketelaars’ art practice consists of a combination of studio work, exhibitions, residencies and projects. The first results of his ongoing project ‘Edges of Landscape’ were published by The Eriskay Connection in 2025. He is co-founder of Foundation Wo Meine Sonne Scheint (Rotterdam, 2013) which is an artist-run initiative, currently being transformed into an experimental platform exploring questions around the landscape.
Is nature a place, an all-encompassing system, or an ideal that we carry within us? The work of Bas Ketelaars (NL) emerges from a curiosity about the different ways our relationship to nature takes shape as landscape. A nature that is unreachable far away and yet all around us. Landscape that is bounded but not bordered. Drawing on various traditions, Ketelaars explores ways of relating to and engaging with the environment, primarily through photography, drawing, and fieldwork. These direct and experiential encounters result in an imagery in which different systems are not so much opposed to each other, but rather produce the image together.
This residency is part of the Borderland Residencies programme, a collaborative initiative that brings together eighteen art institutions across the Dutch-German-Belgian border region of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine. Among them are Ludwig Forum Aachen, IKOB Eupen, Greylight Projects Heerlen, Weltkunstzimmer Düsseldorf, Museum Goch, Internationales Atelierstipendium Mönchengladbach, Buitenplaats Wijlre and Odapark.
Together, the participating institutions create a context for artistic development, research and reflection that extends beyond individual residencies. Over a period of three months, artists take part in shared field trips, meetings with curators and art institutions, and studio visits on both sides of the border, creating opportunities for exchange and deeper engagement with the region. The programme concludes with a joint publication or exhibition, bringing together the different perspectives and research developed throughout the residencies.
