information, project

21 March 2025

with a.pass and nadine

EVENT SPRING DRINK

March 21^st at 18h30
rue de Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek

Let’s celebrate SPRING ! nadine and a.pass are very happy to invite you for another Spring Drink! This time our friends from nadine will launch a new cycle of WAB (Wandering Arts Bienniale) and they will celebrate with us the end of our time at Manchesterstraat 17.

PROGRAM
 
   –  18:30:  doors open
   –  19:00:  work in progress (performance) by Helena Dietrich
   –  20:00:  work in progress (installation) by Annika Katja Boll
   –  Launch of a new WAB cycle (Wandering Arts)

9 January-28 February 2025

Open Call #3 for collective research residency

Open call #3-00

******——*****  IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO APPLY FOR THIS 3rD CALL ******——*****

HOW DO YOU CREATE THE CONDITIONS FOR YOUR COLLECTIVE ART PRACTICE TO LIE FALLOW?

          “(Lying Fallow) is, above all, a way of providing a frame within which a group of people might work through some ideas together. It’s a simple premise but feels urgent and exciting to me, because it invites the possibility of great change without determining how that change might happen, where it might come from, or what it might be.” Rajni Shah

           This is the third and final open call launched by a.pass for a 2 month paid artistic research residency for collectives.

This open call is to find a collective having an artistic practice that is research-based and active already at the time of submitting the application.

The selected collective is already busy with, or interested in, organising a sustainable ‘laying fallow’ period, observing what happens there, and in relation to other periods of production/development/presentation. Also, the collective wishes to share with others the research tools and methodologies used during/for the fallow period, and transmitting what was found fruitful during the residency.

The selected collective is ideally made of 5 persons (min.3 max. 10 – not individuals nor duos).

topote-logo

What could be learning ground or ground lying fallow within the collective arts ?

“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness

a.pass has been inviting collectives, existing or newly established ones on the occasion of this call, for a 2-month paid collective research residency. In total there will be three rounds, for this second round, with deadline October 13, we have made the selection of the second group!

In total we received 116 applications, our jury went through all the applications and selected 3 collectives with whom they had a conversation. Eventually, after listening to all 3 collectives, the jury (Goda Palekaite, Hendrik De Smedt (both from a.pass board/GA), together with One Field Fallow (the 1st residency collective) and the 3 external jury members Ash Bulayev, Damla Ekin Tokel and Kopano Maroga) has decided to give the opportunity for this 2nd call to the collective Topote de Acahual, the artistic and pedagogical branch of the ngo Vivero de Tebanca based in Tebanca, Los Tuxtlas rainforest, Mexico.

-, information, lecture, performative publishing, research center

16 October-29 January 2025 / Onderrichtsstraat 60, 1000 Brussels

Open School III : Holding Space: In- and Exclusivity

OFF-Open School-II

 In the context of their Collective Research Residency, One Field Fallow introduces their OFF Open School – a series of five sessions diving into the internal questions they’ve been dealing with the past two years. For every Open School, they will dive into one topic. Each time another collectove is invited to bring material to the conversation. Every Open School will be a dialogue between OFF, the invited collective and the audience. 

information, performative publishing, project, workshop

19 October 2024 / rue Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek

Public sharing moment

©Bilal Kamilla Arnout

Am I Evil?* Brussels Edition 

by Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola with Els Moors

Public sharing moment on Saturday October 19 from 16:30 on

Can erotic writing become a place for decolonial and feminist exploration?How could one embrace the tools of erotic writing to unveil, investigate and question power processes of colonisation, discrimination, nanoracism, marginalization, exoticization, abuse and seduction from diverse perspectives?  

These questions are at the core of Am I Evil? process writers of all sorts are invited to embark upon.
On this journey the group of writers embrace erotic writing as a tool to investigate their own desire, and how this relates to the Other and the Unknown. 

20 August-13 October 2024

Open Call #2 for collective research residency

image by amy pickles

******——*****  IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO APPLY FOR THIS 2ND CALL ******——*****

What could be LEARNING GROUND or GROUND lying fallow  WITHin the COLLECTIVE arts ?

        This is the second call for a 2 months paid artistic research residency for collectives, existing or newly established on the occasion of this call, ideally 5 persons (min.3 max. 10 – NOT for individuals nor duo’s).

CONTEXT ? 

“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness

        By the end of 2023 a.pass (‘advanced performance and scenography studies’) entered a period of (self-)reflection and reimagination, a period of lying fallow: a field when it lies fallow – seemingly ‘doing nothing’ but in fact engaging in a deep process of rejuvenation and enriching as Rajni Shah says, a space for attention and transformation. Due to the ministry’s decision to end their financial support (based on radical savings and political choices) we were forced to end both of our educational programs: the Postgraduate Program as well as the Research Center that were at the heart of our co-learning environment for research-based practices came to an end, and by this also the educational institution a.pass has been for 15 years. The organisation entered a transition process, and an integral aspect of this process involves opening it up by inviting others to participate, to think together, to be together, to re-imagine a sustainable way forward for artistic research practices and their pedagogical aspects. Therefore, we are extending invitations to three collectives for a two-month paid residency to reimagine our fallow land and its implications for collective artistic research practices, methodologies, and sustainable harvesting. The first collective, One Field Fallow, has been selected in the first round in July and they will start their residency in September 2024. This call is to invite a second collective into this process.

One Field Fallow

WHAT COULD BE LYING FALLOW IN THE ARTS?

“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness

a.pass has been inviting collectives, existing or newly established ones on the occasion of this call, for a 2-month paid collective research residency. In total there will be three rounds, for this first round, with deadline June 9, we have made the selection of the first group!

In total we received 55 applications, our jury went through all the applications and selected 4 collectives with whom they had a conversation. Eventually, after listening to all 4 collectives, the jury (Heike Langsdorf, Lilia Mestre, Hendrik De Smedt, together with the 2 external jury members Ash Bulayev and Kopano Maroga) has unanimously decided to give the opportunity for this 1st call to the collective One Field Fallow (OFF), an already existing collective housing in a former night shop in Brussels.

information, performance, performative publishing

7 July 2024 / rue Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek

with a.pass and nadine

SUMMER Drink -01

work in progress by Diego Echegoyen (sound performance) & Davide Tidoni (film)

July 7 at 18h30
rue de Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek

Let’s celebrate SUMMER ! After the Spring Drink nadine and a.pass are very happy to invite you for their Summer Drink ! This time with work in progress (performance, sound and film) by Diego Echegoyen and Davide Tidoni. 

Join us, together with our friends of nadine, for a free drink and 2 presentations!

PROGRAM:

   – 18:30 – doors open + drink
   – 19:00 – Invisible Cities by Diego Echegoyen 
   – 20:15 – The Birth of a Song/Come nasce una canzone by Davide Tidoni

9 April-9 June 2024

Open Call #1 for collective research residency

image apass - Open Call

******——*****  IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO APPLY FOR THIS 1st CALL ******——*****

What could be lying fallow in the arts?

This a call for a 2-month paid residency for collectives (existing or newly established on the occasion of this call, ideally 5 persons). The period of 2 months can be spread over a maximum of 5 months. Read more about the practical details further below. First we would like to give you more info about the context and the framework of this call.

CONTEXT? WHAT? MISSION?

“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness

For about 15 years a.pass has been hosting a co-learning environment for research-based practices, focusing on collaboration, performativity, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity. a.pass is an acronym for ‘advanced performance and scenography studies’: ‘performance’ refers to how practices act in their surroundings, ‘scenography’ is the production of space and context, ‘studies’ stands for a co-learning pedagogical approach and the prefix ‘advanced’ is a dedication to challenge the frames of existing disciplinary determinations.

In 2022 however, the Flemish Ministry of Education decided to end their financial support of a.pass by the end of 2023. a.pass managed to get a transition budget and after a period of conversations with different partners (Schools of Arts, workspaces, universities, places for artistic research), and working on a new plan in order to make a restart. Nevertheless, due to the financial inflation, the tight budgets and even budget cuts in the other institutions, the budgetary framework needed to make an adapted restart was impossible to reach without any structural support from the Ministry of Education. 

To make a virtue of necessity we chose for a more radical, more riskful path towards a possible future. Both programs, the Postgraduate Program as well as the Research Center, came to an end in 2023. We chose to embrace the fallow land that lays before us and a.pass entered a period of reflection, reimagination, and ultimately reorganisation: a field when it lies fallow – seemingly ‘doing nothing’ but in fact engaging in a deep process of rejuvenation and enriching as Rajni Shah says, a space for attention and transformation. An integral aspect of this process involves opening it up by inviting others to participate, to think together, to be together, to imagine a sustainable way forward for artistic research practices and for a.pass as a re-generated soil for collectivity and research. Therefore, we are extending invitations to 3 collectives (existing or newly established on the occasion of this call) for a 2-month paid residency to reimagine our fallow land and its implications for collective artistic research practices, methodologies, and sustainable harvesting.

information, project

9 April 2024

with a.pass and nadine

image by apass - ©Amari ©Shelbatra Jashari ©Anna Lugmeier

April 9 at 20h00
rue de Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek

Spring comes with a fresh new wind: a.pass installs a temporary place in Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek, where artists and alumni can organise gatherings and presentations in the coming months. For this spring event, a.pass invited nadine to host together an inauguration drink and an evening with screening of three short films by independent makers living in Brussels. 

Join us, together with our friends of nadine, for a free drink and 3 short films!

FILM PROGRAM:

   – Memories of a Camera Perspective by Anna Lugmeier
   – Show Girl by Amari
   – shemortelle by Shelbatra Jashari

information, performative publishing, project, workshop

Open Call for writers

©Bilal Kamilla Arnout

Am I Evil?* Brussels Edition 

by Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola with Els Moors

Can erotic writing become a place for decolonial and feminist exploration?How could one embrace the tools of erotic writing to unveil, investigate and question power processes of colonisation, discrimination, nanoracism, marginalization, exoticization, abuse and seduction from diverse perspectives?  

These questions are at the core of Am I Evil? process writers of all sorts are invited to embark upon.
On this journey the group of writers embrace erotic writing as a tool to investigate their own desire, and how this relates to the Other and the Unknown.

For the duration of the whole journey they stay in dialogue through a peer-to-peer editing methodology. Actually such a methodology is not ‘just’ editing. It is rather an intimate and radical way of dialoguing through re-writing.

Am I Evil? starts off with a-lecture introduction by Basani and Ciresola open to everyone about the legacy of Jeanne Walschot, the first white female dealer and collector of African art we know, active in Brussels from 1920s.

-, information

31 December 2023

IMG_0750

With us an end
by caterina daniela mora jara
(excerpt from The Annex, Research Center Cycle IV)

“It is of the nature of the rule to desire the death of exception.” Jean-Luc Godard

From May 20 to July 26, 2023
Rotterdam, PAF, Brussels and Stockholm

Dear you:

These words are written with the knowledge the a.pass program will no longer exist. The end for the research program that a.pass was running for 15 years has come, and in your hands, you hold part of this end. It is the last annex of the Research Center, even though The Annex is not the end. It may seem dramatic, but do not forget that I grew up watching telenovelas in Fiske Menuco and Villarica, in the Argentinian and Chilean Patagonia, where I come from.

This letter is a sort of farewell to the Research Center Cycle IV and to a.pass, to which I’m part of, to where I belong. Therefore, the need for a farewell. But what is a farewell? Is it a space where we say, “Oh, goodbye, you have been so critical and helpful; we will miss you”? No, that’s silly on my part. I prefer to say: “With us an end.” A farewell in this case means that some people will lose their jobs, some books will no longer have a shelf, the rooms and offices that a.pass occupied will be empty. It’s crumbling around me right now, it is collapsing around us right now. Yet, we have to give an end to the format. It is not only sad, it is very exhausting and stressful. It is not only a pity, it is hard, it is a fuck you gesture with my finger on this paper, it is a wound because we are losing a space of discussion, a place that stores things of artists, personal stuff and professional stuff, an institution where credits are not determined by how much you read and how much you have demonstrated what you have learned. We lose an educational context in which there is no validation through grades, nor pass/fail course approval.

end presentation, postgraduate program

29-30 September 2023 / a.pass

Exploration through research, play and art

Collective Channeling

September 29-30
Doors open at 5.30. Delaunoystraat 58.** There will be food and drinks.
6pm-12pm: welcome at a.pass for music, film, conversation, spoken word and a dream dungeon.
Closing party on the 30th!

mlondiwethu, Carina, Amari and Lore conspire a presentation to conclude the end of a year spent together at a program for advanced performance and scenography studies. They decide to play a game and while they take a walk through the building that hosted them, they slip into character, speaking in the tongue of their research. Through this game they look at the implicit support structures and restrictions in place. They address and sound  the different languages and methods they need to adapt to move on an uneven playing field, comparing their different needs, skills, and energy levels, discussing how they can share time and space, the rules they would like themselves and others to play by. This also becomes a metaphor for the spoken and unspoken rules of institutions, of group-making, of ongoing or not yet inscribed forms of collectivities.

end presentation, performative publishing, research center

23 September 2023 / a.pass

Research Center Cycle IV

Gosie Vervloessem "The Pleasure Garden", detail

Saturday, September 23rd 2023

18-22h

a.pass, Brussels

The a.pass Research Center* cordially invites you to an evening of research publications by Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa that will conclude the year they spent together as Associate Researchers of Cycle IV. 

During the timespan of Cycle IV the artists and researchers individually and collaboratively worked on hospitality as a curatorial practice, on conflicted embodiment of dance practices, on archives of colonial architecture, on the fiction of nature and on a historic opera as a foundational myth for the State of Brazil. In a series of collective practice meetings a shared discourse began to emerge that connected these works through an engagement with the responsibilities of redesign and reenactment, the tension of fiction and history in speculative practices and the embodiment of non-solutions. These intertwined processes and questions radiated into the practices of Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa as they hosted each other in their research and developed the idea of a research center as a prolonged group conversation with materials, practices, ideas and affects. 

On Saturday, September 23rd, the researchers will present their individual publications and research trajectories as well as the Annex – a shared collection of essays and interviews. For their Publications the researchers aim to provide an account of their process and to develop public formats of research-doing and research-sharing to accompany the more established format of an essay. In a scenography that will be a result of a communal atelier process the Publications of Cycle IV will engage the audience in a dialogue with texts, objects, conversations, installations and performances that can be reflected back into the research process. As Cycle IV concludes, the research itself is far from finished: Publications and Annex contextualize its collaborative, intense phase and give some insight into where it came from and where it is heading next. 

27 September-8 October 2023 / Zsenne Art Lab

Image credit: Amy Pickles

end presentation, postgraduate program

15-16 September 2023 / a.pass

graphic design: Amy Pickles

In-between researcher and research, one finds:

overlap, interests, themes, fiction, text, reading, body, duet, partner, “doctoring”, object, performance, bodies, relationship, questions, researchers, looking, things, going, us, traces, deposits, authors, architectures, dealing, bed, laying, bleeding, seeping, noticing, noting, narrating, unveiling, something, happening, discovery, methodologies, conditions, agent, asking, producing, responses, lethargy, collapse, training, experience, moment, future, here, now, concept, life, rhythm, goals, worth, cheese, workshop, ancestry, trajectories, senses, intimacy, strength, power, assertion, insistence, compassion, idea, artistic practice, descaling, focus, layers, dislocating, destabilizing, conditions, conditioning, negotiating, ways, humanization, humans, violent category, systems, disability, concrete, reference, ableism, contemporary, dance, thinking, practices, phenomena, embodiment, dancer, vessel, object, bodies, Marley, memory, erasure, obliteration, intangible, incomprehensible, determined, social, aesthetic, queer, sexualized, opening, gendered, human body, crossing, cultures, genders, generations, narrative, storytelling, voice, transmission, conditions, vs, context, decontextualizing, evaluation, affects, pieces, autofiction, mundane, erotically, charged, space, trip, supermarket, cup, coffee, Monday, morning, laying, down, convergence, blind/low vision, rehabilitation, ‘co-habilitation’, patient-therapist, flooring, prosthetic, patient, therapist, audiences, invitations, systems, dance, disability, together, final, transmission, trespassing, somatic, work, curation, drifting, vicinity, quantum physics, OOO, socio-ecological, hopelessness, seemingly, desperate, galactic points, gayness, history, AIDS, transgenerational, speculative fiction,  spoken word, theoretical, dramaturgical,  methodological, suggestions, Black Holes, celestial, entities, writer, producer, sexuality, vehicle, political ideology, drafts, prosaic, nature, political, administration, structure, Brazil, urban planning, Netherlands, 2019, masters, Moving Images, Belgium, 2022, interdisciplinary, Brussels, Rīga, New York City, orientation, mobility specialist, ‘the clinic’, ‘the studio’, western, lineages, contact improvisation, medical, models, disability, therapeutics, interabled, collaborations, experimental prosthetics, development, form, theatrical performances, electronic, sound, composition, 1:1, instruction, multimedia, installation, MFA, choreography, intermedia, 2021, 2022, adjunct, faculty, department, blindness, visual impairment, living, working, Zagreb, shaping, sensory materials, intimate, social processes, digital, palpable objects, animated, choreographed, sung, non-orientable, forms, different media, processes, translation, queer science fiction, speculative technology, mutual transformation, MA, animated, film, new media, rest, caves, shape, language, performativity, self, scores, …