page_title: Eric Van Hove
section_title: Atelier Eric van Hove - Fenduq
hierarchical_section_title: Eric Van Hove / Atelier Eric van Hove - Fenduq
caption_attribution_description: English: v12 laraki, in Bank Almaghrib, by artist Eric Van Hove, for MB5
context_page_description: Éric Van Hove is a Cameroon-raised Belgian metamodern conceptual artist. He lives and works between Brussels and Marrakech. He is the grandson of Louis Van Hove, co-founder and CEO of the Structures Group, the largest post second world war functionalist architecture firm in Belgium.
context_section_description: In 2012, van Hove arrived in Marrakech, Morocco to resume work on an ambitious sculptural endeavor he had prepared for years: V12 Laraki. In the space of nine months, van Hove gathered around him 42 master craftsmen from the region and began rebuilding a Mercedes 6.2L V12 engine using rural materials and centuries old craft techniques from the North African country. Conceptually this sculpture is based on the story of the Laraki Fulgura, a Moroccan supercar by Industrial designer Abdeslam Laraki. While the Fulgura was entirely manufactured in Morocco to the exception of its engine, the artist decided to try and reproduce that cutting-edge component locally using craft, which accounts for 20% of the country’s work force and he saw as an unjustifiably neglected part of the national industry.
  That sculpture, displayed at the 5th Marrakech Biennale and soon acquired by the Hood Museum of Art, would rapidly become the cornerstone of a new chapter in his creative practice leading to the founding of his atelier also known as Fenduq or Atelier Eric van Hove: a context-specific production facility and, in his own word “a living socioeconomic sculpture”, from where the artist started working on “a renaissance of African craft”.V12 Laraki was later made into a comprehensive publication introduced by well-known African curator Simon Njami and distributed by Motto Distribution in Berlin.
  In the following years, many more sculptures came out of Atelier Eric van Hove including D9T (Rachel’s Tribute) in 2015, and Mahjouba I in 2016, which is a functioning replica of a Chinese electric motorbike using traditional African craft.  In turn, this grew into what the artist called The Mahjouba Initiative, a long term project mixing African craft, 3D printing, and industrial production. Mahjouba II, a second craft-made electric prototype was made later that year.  The Mahjouba Initiative is a long term on going artistic project aiming to re-integrate Moroccan craft into the mainstream industry via the manufacturing of electric mopeds for the local market using materials and techniques from the craft sector. The Initiative relies on two main facts: the presence in Morocco of nearly three million craftsmen whose trade is increasingly threatened by globalization, and the Noor Power Station Project by which the north African country plans to generate 42% of its energy from renewables by 2020. In 2018, Van Hove was a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College.
  Fenduq is a large retrospective exhibition the Fries Museum dedicated to the artist that opened in 2019, which will travel to Vandalorum, Sweden in February 2020.
caption: Eric van Hove - V12 Laraki, 2013. fifty-three materials including: Middle Atlas white cedar wood, high Atlas red cedar wood, walnut wood, lemon wood, orange wood, ebony wood of Macassar, mahogany wood, Thuya wood, Moroccan beech wood, pink apricot wood, mother-of-pearl, yellow copper, nickel plated copper, red copper, forged iron, recycled aluminum, nickel silver, silver, tin, cow bone, goat bone, malachite of Midelt, agate, green onyx, tigers eye stone, Taroudant stone, sandstone, red marble of Agadir, black marble of Ouarzazate, white marble of Béni Mellal, pink granite of Tafraoute, goatskin, cowskin, lambskin, resin, cow horn, rams horn, ammonite fossils of the Paleozoic from Erfoud, Ourika clay, geometric terra cotta with vitreous enamel (zellige), green enamel of Tamgrout, paint, cotton, argan oil, cork, henna, rumex.
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