Marlies Vermeulen first MERIAN PhD to defend her artistic research

Marlies Vermeulen is the first MERIAN candidate to defend her PhD at Maastricht University on 15 June 2026 at 12:45. Her PhD research is called: The Panoramic View of Cartopology: A journey on how to become a cartopologist. Marlies is an artistic researcher in the research centre What Art Knows (at Zuyd University of Applied Sciences), as well as a teacher and co-founder of the Institute of Cartopology. Early during her PhD research, she created the new discipline of cartopology. In her research practice she radically explores how to learn to become a cartopologist. Her work combines anthropological, architectural and cartographical methods to create unique maps of places. These maps are not artistic objects but aesthetic and critical instruments that help and challenge users to ask new questions about the places they are engaged with.

You can attend the defence (only online attendance is possible) via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKlBVgtNS6Q. There will be a celebration after the defence, for more information, see https://halverwege.sumupstore.com/product/summit-night-a-phd-celebration.

Marlies was supervised by Ruth Benschop (Zuyd University), Carolin Stapenhorst (RWTH Aachen) and Peter Peters (Maastricht University). In the course of Marlies’ research trajectory, MERIAN (the Maastricht Experimental Research In and through the Arts Network) was founded to create a collaborative institutional context to support artistic research and collaborations between artists and other researchers. Since then, more MERIAN PhD (and PD) candidates have joined the network. MERIAN invites established artists and academics to engage in collaborative research in between making and thinking. It is an institutional space for the development of new norms and forms of embodied knowledge. As a collaboration between Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht University, and the Jan van Eyck Academie, MERIAN renegotiates relationships between existing cultural and knowledge institutions and addresses urgent matters of societal concern.