postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK III

1 September-30 November 2015

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Agnes Schneidewind
Anouk Llaurens
Arianna Marcolini
Brendan Heshka
Christian Hansen
Esteban Donoso
Hektor Mamet
Isabel Burr Raty
Mavi Veloso
Sofia Gerheim Caesar
Thiago Antunes
Varinia Canto Vila

Research End Presentations

Audrey Cottin
Danny Neyman
Jeremiah Runnels
Silvia Ramos Pereira
Vanja Smiljanic
Verónica Cruz

Research Centre Researchers

Adriana La Selva
Juan Doninguez
Ricardo Santana

Partners

Les Bains / REcommerce
PAF Performance Art Forum

Contributors for workshops

Elke Van Campenhout
Juan Dominguez
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

Mentors

Abu Ali * Antonio Serra
Bart Van den Eynde
Lilia Mestre

The block is curated by Elke Van Campenhout (a.pass Research Coordinator)

14 / 09 – 02 / 10 / 2015

‘SETTLEMENT VIII – TOWARDS FRAGILITY’
workspace by Vladimir Miller

What can be a truly feminist architecture? One that does not create territory, does not claim, does not exclude. How much of the utopia of Occupy is due to the haphazard conditions of camping and DIY? Should we be sad that it’s gone? Or is its ability to disappear its most precious, most pioneering trait? Every social movement must find, claim and hold a space or perish, yes? – become an institution or die.
But how to keep on dying?
Processes of institutionalization are also processes of architectural shifts away from the fragile: from sticks and fabrics to metal and concrete, from sit-ins on the floor to tables and chairs, from open spaces to chambers with doors, from expanding circles to sitting arrangements. All of these we justify with productivity concerns. So maybe the question is: how to be productive and fragile at the same time?
Settlement is a spatial proposal that tries to sustain its architectural fragility hoping in this way to initiate a temporary social, organisational and ideological one. Simply put, it is a collective workspace, a camp and a hangout, open to all who step by and would like to contribute to it. It is a space for practices instead of products, a place where our individual ideas and processes have not yet achieved a solid state and can flow into each other.
Settlement starts with a haphazard collection of materials in an otherwise empty space. Settlement is a space that tries very hard not to settle. Its instability naturally works against the establishing of clear boundaries between „your space“ and „my space“, what hopefully follows from that is that it is very difficult to establish boundaries between „your work“ and “my work”. I believe that practice is bound by space, and if space gets shaky, unstable, shareable, so does the practice.
By starting from scratch Settlement invites a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. In the course of the three weeks Settlement lets your particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the encoded behaviors of ready-made spaces such as “table”, “studio”, “meeting”, “gallery”, “venue”, “library”, etc. The politics of practice in terms of co-habitation and co-working, of claiming one’s own space, inviting or excluding the outside, communication of ideas, inviting change and influence are all there to be questioned within this setup. As a practice is (in some ways) „re-built“ during Settlement, one can come to question its very construction.

12 – 22 / 10 / 2015

‘DIRTY ROOM’
workshop by Juan Dominguez

In these 10 days we will work together. That would be the most important. The togetherness. Working together, spending time together.
I will ask you a lot of questions, over and over. I will question you, you will question everybody, we will experience suspiciousness I guess.
In which conspiracy are you involved at the moment?
We will trip for sure, all kinds of trips or maybe not all kinds but different trips.
We will share expectations.
We will build new fictions and devices.
We will not go out, we will be trapped like el angel exterminador from Buñuel and we will not go, the negative of el angel exterminador. We will watch this movie again.
We will cook for each other.
We will sleep together.
We will gather people, as many as we can.
We will spend time, we will understand time and the time we want and what we want from time.
What are we going to do together that we cannot do alone?

09 – 22 / 11 / 2015

‘MOBILE MNSTRY’
workshop by BUREAU D’ESPOIR / ELLE

The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbey of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.
During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original ‘monastic’ score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.
The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d’Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Les Bains) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community will start to grow.
The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged…