LARP “Identities”

postgraduate program

LARP “Identities”

27-28 September 2021

by Amélie Orsel

Identities

Identities is a science-fiction LARP in which aliens of humanoid appearance from various planets are gathered for a very special experiment.

If you could become the person you dreamt to be, or at least someone who would function in harmony with the world around you instead of bumping into it, would you be tempted?

Whether it’s a dream or a necessity for you, the people of Cori, a type IV planet in the Omega 9 galaxy, can help you. Indeed, the Coriphes have psychic powers that allow them to durably modify one’s spirit and personality.

Identities is a science-fiction LARP in which aliens of humanoid appearance from various planets are gathered for a very special experiment. It is in this context that characters will integrate a session of the mysterious and expensive Cure. How does this Cure work? The characters know almost nothing. They arrived in the center the previous evening and briefly introduced themselves before getting some rest. The LARP itself begins in the morning, during the first activity related to the Cure. These activities will be repeated in a rather monotonous way, the goal being to transform the personalities of the characters in small increments, gradually modifying their reactions to a limited number of exercises. Alien artifacts will also be used. During the individual final scenes, each character will play the conclusion of their own story, happening elsewhere and in a near future.

Repetitive activities do not mean you’ll be bored. This LARP offers strong roles, emotions and questionings. One does not intend to give up a part of their personality without reason.

Friendship, fidelity, idealism, love, duty, revenge, despair …. What is the price of your identity? Is it ethical to sacrifice who you are if you do it by your own free will? Is it better to be modified with insidious softness or pain, whether physical or psychological? Since we are asking some questions, how do you define identity? Would a personality remodeled according to your wishes make you less real, less free?

More about the LARP.

Amélie, aka Saki Jones, great consumer of narrations of all kinds, and a weakness for science fiction and strictly no scientific training. What interests her in the future is the freedom to reinvent social frameworks, thus raising new questions, or very old ones that can be considered in a new light. She wrote, co-wrote and organized a dozen LARP of various formats, ranging from the multi-month campaign (Bloody Old Town) to very short formats (Oracle, Aymard’s Shortbread …). Her obsessions: creating group dynamics and keep LARPing accessible, while sipping a good chamomile with a pressed lemon juice.

postgraduate program

bleed is inevitable

6 September-30 November 2021

curatorial assemblage facilitated by Kristien Van den Brande

fangs kopie

The block “Bleed is inevitable” starts from the premise that we are inhabited by several voices – be them spiritual, psychological, political, juridical, institutional, identitarian, non-human, culture-historical, assigned or acquired, short or long term,… – and that we are subject to environments that bring these voices into dialogue or conflict, or muffle them. During the block, the a.pass researchers are invited to think their interactions from the perspective of role play, and to create artificial environments in which to experiment with and dis-equilibrate an individual or collective constitution of voices. It is a guided exercise in letting go of what one knows or thinks to know and a prodding for delineated and contrived spaces to speculate on different modes of being together in the world.

History will always be in the room though. In LARP (Live Action Role Play)-vocabulary ‘bleed’ refers to the experience of transferral between real-life and game-world. In-game experience inevitably spills back into life, and vice versa, one’s game character and world is inevitably inspired by real-life experiences and self-perception. LARPers have developed techniques to halt or hold this zone of oscillation, between what is and what could be. While closure of play might be a necessary tool to keep up with ‘real-life’, we could also question the ‘right to a proper end’ as particular to Western storytelling tradition, with consequences for what we think a proper life or story is. ’Bleed is inevitable’ invites the a.pass participants to question and reinvent assigned roles, investigate the ideological space of ‘bleed’, as well as experiment with techniques of game-design within artistic research.

“Bleed is inevitable” is an assemblage of different curatorial proposals that have been in conversation for a longer period of time. Not seamless, but definitely more than tangentially connected, therefore with the ongoing challenge to superimpose and retrace how they spill into each other.

postgraduate program

7 WALKS (resolution)

16-17 September 2021

Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason

58Monopole01

Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir take us for two walks in SPA in the context of their research ‘7 WALKS (resolution)’. The context of SPA offers the unique opportunity for a series of itinerant reflections on water and art. Drawing inspiration from the intangible legacy of historical walkers — kings and czars, political refugees, artists and philosophers — and, strongly anchored in a local context, Heiremans and Vermeir propose to explore a balance between private property of and access to resources that we hold in common as a society. Can SPA inspire to unbundle the proprietary rights that have been stacked around authorship and (land) ownership, i.e. two paramount features of Western subjectivity?

postgraduate program

Collective Conditions for Re-Use

5-5 October 2021

by Femke Snelting

This day is organised around a para-legal document, ‘Collective Conditions for Re-Use’ (cc4r). Cc4r is an authorship license in-the-making, a reluctant contract that tries to make space for collective care around authorial practice.

https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html

-, postgraduate program, workshop

Assembly Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable)

8-8 October 2021

by Agency

During Bleed is inevitable, Agency invokes Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable)), a copyright controversy related to a pedagogical program in prison and the oscar nominated documentary Scared Straight!. During the court case, the judge had to decide if the pedagogical program was a dramatization of prison life and whether it could qualify for the protection of copyright as a work of performance art. At a.pass we will revisit the moment of hesitation during the court case and dwell on the problem discussed in the case as a way to fabulate different outcomes. What happens if ‘facts’ become included in a reciprocal way within artistic practices?

7pm @ a.pass!

Open Call