A Conversation with MAPs Students Renée Spanjer and Evangelia Moschou

FMI Graduation Show 2026 Interview Series

By Olivia Niuman

Two graduating MAPs (Materials in Artistic Practices) students, Evangelia (Eva) Moschou and Renée Spanjer, joined me in a conversation to share details about their time in the MAPs program and the projects that they are presenting at the graduation show in June. 

Both artists come from a design background — Eva first studied and worked in architecture, then after as a graphic designer. Renée also worked in product design, which she still teaches at Willem de Kooning Academy. The shared background in design is something that can be seen in their working styles and how they approach their projects. “There is a rhythm in starting a project,” Renée shares, “we start directly, hands-on, investigating and then refining, defining. And as a method that maybe converts, diverts, converts, diverts, which is design-related.”

“Yeah, and testing or prototyping,” Eva added. “These things have entered the art field, but I think they come more from this disciplined background of an industrial designer or an architect that needs to serve a client or an industry.” 

Coming to MAPs, Eva was able to gain a greater awareness of her material through hands-on engagement. “As an architect, you always design something that you never make. You usually supervise the people that are making it.” She reflected that after cutting a piece of wood herself for the first time, she realized that she could design things differently, after already having years of experience designing structures with wood. 

Renée, on the other hand, had been working directly with material for Studio Molen, where she was making large scale bronze sculptures. For her, the allure of the MAPs program was to gain a deeper understanding of material as something that can narrate stories. 

Through making her project throughout the study, Renée’s work became more specific to a location. “ I was quite holistic before about extraction and excavation as a human phenomenon, but now, I'm talking about one piece of land in front of the place where I live.” She sees her process as one that fluctuates between zooming in and out, but that over the last two years, it’s been more of a process of zooming in. 

Eva’s work had more of a substantial shift. She began by taking the position of a designer that was criticizing food waste. Then, a DC (Discursive Contexts) class called Caring for Material Lives with Ruby de Vos and Ann Sophie Lehmann prompted her to study a material that she found fascinating and inspiring, rather than something that gave her negative feelings. “Basically the main shift was the material,” she summarizes. “Finally, I was indeed doing material research, and that was the reason why I came here.” 

In their respective projects, both artists seem to deal with an idea about material violence done by humans to natural things. For Eva, the crying trees of Chios, and for Renée, the piece of land in front of her house that is due to be developed. I posed the question to them, asking if the idea of the wound or violence resonates with their work, whether they see that as a connection point between the two of them, and where their work might diverge from that point. 

Renée reflected, speaking to Eva, “What I find fascinating in your subject, the way you're working and the trip that you took is that the wound in the tree is also made by a human, but it's a craft. And they live from that craft – it’s very specific. But then if I'm thinking of the wound and the violence in my work or the subject, it’s not a craft at all. It's people from politics, financial people, marketing people, urban planners. It will probably feel like a mission and a passion to them, which can be respected, but it differs from the kind of intimacy inherent in craft.” 

“Every wound, it's a praxis, an act that the human does,” Eva explains about the mastic trees on the island of Chios, which is the subject of her work. The title of her graduation work is Kentima, which means embroidery in Greek. “This is what they call the wounding, which is also a paradox. Because you harm a tree with a knife, but you call it embroidery. You need to be gentle enough, because if you wound further than it's allowed, a few millimeters more, the wound never closes and the tree dies.” 

She agreed with Renée’s notion that the mastic harvesters have a different relationship to the trees because of their craft: “how close you are to the tree, how much you love your tree, how precise you are, how well you've studied the craft you're doing, your intention, your motive.” 

As we were discussing the relationships between other humans — the land developers, the mastic harvesters — and the land, I was curious how Renée and Eva saw their own roles. Are they more like observers and storytellers, or are they more active? 

“I think you change positions in your work always,” Eva answered. “Like when you visit the land and you're trying to observe and to study, you're becoming an ethnographer or an autoethnographer, and then you're back in the studio processing this stuff so you become a researcher. Most of the time, I see myself as an observer and a storyteller.” 

Renée answered, “Well, I'm not from Groningen, so I wouldn't say I'm really an autoethnographer. However, I've been living on that piece of land for these two years. So in that way, I have a bit more information than someone living in the city, in the center. I’m walking on that edge, following its contours, stepping into it, stepping out.” 

Renée’s graduation work is called Edgelander, and at the graduation show she will present an installation of photographs, metal sculptures, and video re-presenting the field. 

Eva is making a sculpture out of a found door and mastic resin. “Mastiha is mainly a metaphor for me to talk about all the things I want to talk about,” she clarifies. “It's not a work about the material. This is always a misconception in MAPs that most of the time you feel like it's just about the material. But at least in my case, it's a metaphor that allowed me by studying it to talk about life and death and act and value.”  
 

Renée and Eva’s work will be on view at the Frank Mohr Institute Graduation Show at the A-Kerk in Groningen from 25-28 June, 2026. For more interviews, information, and details about the students and their graduation work, keep an eye on the event page on our website and follow us on Instagram.