A Conversation with MAPs Tutor Michal Kruger

FMI Graduation Show 2026 Interview Series

By Olivia Niuman

Four students are graduating from the MAPs (Materials in Artistic Practices) program this year, and I spoke to one of their tutors, Michal Kruger, about the students’ engagement with material in their practices throughout the course of the program and in their graduation work.

According to Michal, across the cohort there is quite a “cohesive thematic line between all four of them that is looking at specifically natural materials as they are related to a specific space and time.”

Renée Spanjer “is doing a very interesting project, looking at what she calls vacant land, which is a kind of intermediary piece of landscape that is destined to be developed on, but as of yet, there's nothing there.” For her thesis work, Renée uses Linda Weintraub's methodology for investigating a space. Michal describes: “you ask to the space, once you're standing in there, what is the furthest sound I hear, what is the loudest sound I hear, what is the highest thing I see, what is the lowest thing I see, and in this way you start mapping out the space in a perceptual way.” 

“So, themes of ecology, but also the kind of human landscape comes in, which to me is very related to a practice like Eva’s (Evangelia Moschou), which starts from her fascination with mastic, and her trip to the Greek island of Chios where mastic is produced, investigating not only the material affordances of the mastic and all the ways that it can exist and be shaped and melted, and how it's always transient, always changing, but how it's also very much attached to the history, the cultivation of this place, and the very poetic nature that is inherent in it.”

“And then we have Geo (Georgina Baker), who's looking at clay as a living embodied practice. She started off thinking about clay as something that you would just use for your own ends, and then ended up realizing that she wants to have a role as a custodian of this material. She has been experimenting with all these different wild clays that she processes and tries to find connections between the spaces where she gets it from and her own relationship to them.”

“Lastly, we have Mahsa (Mahsa Hosseini) who is now looking at death as a way of understanding her own place on Earth, but looking through it specifically through soil, and how soil is this material where life and death are constantly cycling each other. And she has come into it with death being this negative, quite difficult topic for her, to realize that it's actually also such a celebration of life.” 

I asked Michal if the strong ecological focus was something that each artist brought into the program, or if their practices developed this shared focus throughout the course of the last two years.

“The students always bring these things in, you know, I don't think that a program can ever force somebody to be interested in something that they're not interested in,” he shared, “but I think what the program did was reveal a lot of how these interests could be targeted towards the things that they actually cared about.” What the MAPs program does, in part, is to allow students to develop a practical and spoken vocabulary to articulate more specifically how and why the artists are drawn to certain materials. This often begins with an emotional connection that is then explored in more depth throughout the course of the program.

The MAPs students come from a variety of backgrounds – fine arts, industrial design, architecture, product design — and often what draws them to this study is that they’ve encountered a type of confrontation in their previous education or work experience. They may have been working with resources that were extracted, used, and discarded, and they felt an urgency to address and work against this kind of systematic logic.

The background of the students also varies geographically, both in where they come from and the specific localities that their work focuses on. I was curious if this then made it difficult to translate work into a format for the graduation show.

“That’s a very good question, because we do talk a lot about locality within the MAPs program. We ask students to consider where exactly they are right now.” Michal shared that there was a LABs week last year where the students spent a week developing work in relation to a church and its archive. In this project, the students were challenged to find ways for their work to intersect with the new context, and this is a skill that they will transfer again to the graduation show at the A-Kerk.

For the MAPs students, the opportunity to show their graduation work at the A-Kerk presents a chance to think about “a new negotiation with that space, and I think that they've all found very interesting and creative ways of engaging with the space to specifically speak to themes that are within the building itself.” He reflected, as well, that often in the process of making work for a new space, the students discover that the work they’ve done in a hyper-specific locality is actually transferable and relevant to other contexts, maybe in unexpected ways. Another important aspect of the program is thus asking students to think about their role in relationship to an audience, whether they are taking the position as a teacher, an investigator, an anthropologist, an autoethnographer, or a custodian, to name a few examples. 

As for the four students graduating, Michal is proud of what they’ve created and the way they have grown from the beginning of the program. “I think there is such an incredibly big shift, and to me that is the most encouraging thing of any education program: if somebody is leaving changed, and however that change happened, whether it was through difficulty or positive friction or whatever the case may be.” 

He is also proud of how the students have taken ownership of their work. “They have confidence in the thing that they are standing beside, the topics that they are interested in, and a very sophisticated vocabulary to talk about it, grounded in the making and in the material itself.” 

The MAPs students’ graduation work, along with the other three departments at the Frank Mohr Institute, will be on view 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.