postgraduate program, research center

2013 BLOCK II

1 May-31 July 2013

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Daniel Kok
Gabriela Karolczak
Helena Dietrich
Luanda Casella
Lucia Rainer
Maité Liébana Vena
Maja Hammaren
Mala Kline
Nibia Pastrana Santiago
Raquel Santana de Morais
Victoria Myronyuk

Research End Presentations

Fleur Ordoukhani
Ive J.K. Leemans
Jaime Llopis

Partners

PAF Performing Arts Forum

Contributors for workshops

Adva Zakai
Anette Baldauf
Anna Rispoli
Chantal Mouffe
Elke van Campenhout
Nicolas Galeazzi
Nikolaus Gansterer
Peter Stamer
Pierre Rubio
Various Artists

Coordinators a.pass

Elke van Campenhout
Nicolas Galeazzi

Mentors

Claudia Bosse
Geert Opsomer
Peter Stamer
Robert Stijn

The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout (Research Coordinator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

20 – 24 / 05 / 2013

‘PERFORMING RESISTANCE IN POLITICS’
workshop around/with Chantal Mouffe by Anette Baldauf and Elke van Campenhout

This Workshop looks into Chantal Mouffe’s ideas on the political concepts of hegemony and antagonism as well as their relationship to the arts. Anette Baldauf and Elke van Campenhout will put Mouffe’s political theory under the microscope, by reading an anthology of her texts and discussing their relevancy for artistic research practices today. Finally, on the last day, Chantal Mouffe will offer her input, discuss with us the central trajectories of her work and elaborate on her special interest in the arts.
day 1. Introduction on Post-Marxism
day 2: Politics Today
day 3: Politics and Public Space
day 4: Art
day 5: discussion with Chantal Mouffe

27 – 31 / 05 / 2013

‘THE END OF PERSONALITY’
workshop by \/arious Artists

‘The end of personality’ is a series of actions, interventions and artistic research methods developed and guided by Various Artists. During five days, a program will be presented to the participants that deals with themes like authorship, default identity, straitjacket-creation.
Different Various Artists will guide the participants through research and interactive activities on several locations. The workshop is site-specific, the local context, and a few restrictions will be defining the content.
Various Artists is a collective of 24 ‘imaginary’ artists who for the last four years opened themselves up to be embodied by different physical persons. The artistic content that each artist creates belongs to the Various Artist, but the physical work can differ from owner. The complex and fragmented nature of Various Artists’ work deals with identity, artistic practice, and Gesamtkunst.
The workshop aims to question in different ways artistic identity.
Working methods, group sessions, and co-artistic concepts are examples of activities where personality, identity, and methodology will be tackled.

03 – 07 / 06 / 2013

‘BETWEEN TOOL AND MATTER – THE ART OF INTERVIEW’
workshop by Anna Rispoli and Adva Zakai

The practice of interview is living a golden age in visual arts and live art contexts. Often a series of interviews supports the creation of video-documentaries as a research tool, frame site-specific performances, or create the first bonding for community-based projects. At the same time it is not rare to experience works of art that take interviews as their conceptual object of artistic reflection. The difference between those two approaches often appears blurry. More so, it produces challenging ethical and aesthetic questions concerning the power relation between the interviewer as an author and the interviewee as an authority – or inverse.
Methodologies and perspectives from various fields will be reflected upon in relation to each other during the workshop: Artists who make use of the interview in their artistic trajectory will discuss their works with each other and the participants. Sociologists and phd researchers will introduce interview protocols and share their exploration of ethical implications linked to the relationship interviewee/interviewer. Specifically, we will exercise sensitive listening, watch and analyze case studies of interviews, and focus on the creation of subjective tales within the urban experience. Along the workshop days, participants will share and feedback the content produced during the workshop from the perspective of their own practice.

10 – 14 / 06 / 2013

‘CHINESE WHISPERS & ORIGINAL COPIES’
workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer

Nikolaus Gansterer works on a series of projects studying strategies of translation and forms of reproduction and appropriation. Here his attention is directed towards differences, misinterpretations and errors committed in the process of communication circles. What happens when an image, an object or movement is read, used, interpreted, understood without knowing its initial personal and/or cultural context? By regarding these gaps with their potential shifts of meaning as a vital source of artistic inspiration, Nikolaus proposes for the workshop setting up several circuits of interpretations exploring multiple and shared authorships to reflect on diverse cultural practices, identities and authenticities.

24-28 / 06 / 2013

‘HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?’
a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Peter Stamer

Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. ‘How about Critique, Criticality, Crisis?’ ties in on a field already explored by ‘Feedback and Critique’ in July 2012. Whereas the previous workshop focused on several feedback techniques to clarify the nature(s) and function(s) of feedback within a collaborative and self-organized artistic research environment, this one will focus on the challenging issue of ‘critique’. What does critique aim at, and how does it epistemologically operate? How can we deal with its problematic relation to judgment and truth? What’s the relevance of critique within a system of criticality to overcome the vicious circle of belief and denunciation? What’s the role of discourse and theory in one’s research and practice in order to go beyond backing up one’s work but rather challenging it, eroding it, posing problems to it? Is discourse solving the crisis of practice or should it rather impose a crisis on practice?
From critical readings of several texts on critique and criticality to film and performance analysis, from case studies to role-playing, we will come up with refreshed definitions of critique and renewed objectives of uncompromising aesthetic.

15-19 / 07 / 2013

‘SCENOGRAPHIC FUNDAMENT’
a.pass Basics workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Elke van Campenhout

Let’s stress the ‘s’ in a.pass and study its ‘scenography’ aspects. In this B-workshop we want to discover the base of what scenography stands for in our acronym. This will not be a work to understand scenography in general, rather, we want to detect, where each of us sets her/his focus in the artistically formed relationship between performance and space.
Starting point for this enquiry will be ‘the public’ – the public, for which a spatial condition is provided – incidentally, accidentally, explicitly or as an emerging construct. The public is taken here as sphere, where the social body meets it’s self-created structures. In this sense a scenography is a form of an organization of the performance of this social body – an aesthetic organization, which unavoidably presents and reveals it’s own politics.
Whether the scenography happens in the inside space of a theatre or a gallery, a flat, a foyer, or a dance floor, or if it happens in the outside space of a park, a parliament or the pavement, the crucial question is, to whom does this ‘scenario’ communicates itself and who is designing it for what? Then, what is the difference between a performative space and a scenography? Where do we break the fine line between them? And how to dance on it, without falling into the featureless?