The wind suits Nico Dockx well. The wind whirls around, it is free. Nobody owns the wind. Nobody can keep it. It touches everybody individually and everything in particular. That is what art for Nico Dockx can be. Soft as a breeze, or risky as a hurricane.
During the summer of 2017, Nico Dockx curated an intriguing series of public events for the Art Triennale Beaufort along the Belgian coast, as part of A Dog Republic, a collective with Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, Helena Sidiropoulos, architect Yona Friedman, and musician Krist Torfs. They built Friedman’s hula-hoop Iconostase on the shore, invited children to draw giraffe figures in the sand. And for 75 days the Standaard newspaper daily published ‘A Revolution a Day’, for which Dockx asked 75 people to contribute.
His doctorate in the arts in 2014 was part of a chain of events, which he started years earlier, titled The New Conversations. This is a series of gatherings, that activated archives and memories, and that connected people by thinking, cooking, reading, talking, exhibiting, each time on different locations. Like a nomadic academy. The windows are open.
The books were bound with Japanese binding, printed on Périgord Condat matt and each copy contains a little paper boat, folded by the artist.