Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies

lecture, workshop

Áron Birtalan Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies

15-16 May 2023 / a.pass 4th floor

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Inspired by devotional practices from the Late Middle Ages, this workshop explores mystical languages as somatic and performative technologies. Focusing on spoken language and tactile ways of engaging with text and images, we will create affective relationships between bodies and matter. Contaminating the lines between a within and a without, mystical languages become an interface for intimate bonds with the unknowable and unreliable. Topics include: image as induction, reading as annihilation, text as embodiment and touch as giving birth. We will familiarize ourselves with the historical contexts and theologies of the body in Christian mysticism of the Late Middle Ages, using it a lens through which we can re-encounter the now.

Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, engaging in simple exercises that challenge perception and sensation. At large, the workshop invites us to be with language and touch as a place of possibility for encounters, relationships and becomings between active-passive and living-dead bodies. We will draw attention to how these possibilities can influence our own practices, showings, publications – and their embodied afterlife as a post-mortem artwork.

Prep for participants

Please bring 2-3 pieces of printed texts or images you can imagine playing with in the workshop based on what you read in the description. This can be something you yourself made, but also from someone or somewhere else. As formats, you can choose to bring a printed publication (book, zine, brochure, sign, etc) or loose pieces of paper. We will use these as playful starting points, so don’t think too much about what you bring!
For the first day, please bring a modern computing device that connects to the internet: smartphone, tablet or laptop. Please contact me with any questions about this.
Clothes you feel nice and comfortable in.

Content and accessibility

Activities are made to accomodate for different kinds of bodies and needs. Every activity will be introduced in advance and you are encouraged to take a step back if something is not working for you. In its themes, the workshop touches upon religion, mysticism, sex, ideas about the afterlife, grief, death and wounds.

Timetable

workshop sessions: 15 & 16.05, 10-16.00 each day including a break for lunch

public talk 15.05, 18.00

Participants

max ~16 participants for workshop. Please contact Hans if you’re interested to participate in the workshop.

Bio

Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician and a student of theology, whose work explores languages of pleasure and anguish between angel, creature and computer. Working together with participants and their imagination as an artistic medium, Áron creates guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts and publications. They are interested in a practice that acts as an interface through which intimate relationships with the unknowable may unfold. They received their education at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam and are currently a PhD candidate in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts with their research project ‘Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come’.

Invited by

Áron Birtalan and ‘Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies’ are invited by Carina Erdmann (Participant Assembly curation).

lecture, postgraduate program

Oxana Timofeeva On the Soul

19 November 2020

Video recording - online talk

Oxana Timofeeva

On the Soul

A talk and a conversation on the soul. This talk took place on November 19th.

The talk was proposed by Adriano Wilfert Jensen and supported by the a.pass participants assembly as part of a new modality of participants curated content at a.pass.

postgraduate program

Nada Gambier Nightshift

11-12 October 2022

PA-proposal

Night walks

A multilingual space for working together differently, in the unusual context of the night’s darkness. A shift of in-betweens where space is given to that oscillation between one thing and another, between being awake and sleeping, between doing and imagining doing, between one world and another.

postgraduate program, workshop

Martin Flugelman Non-conventional Lighting Laboratory

9-10 February 2023 / a.pass

PA-curation proposed by Asli Hatipoglu

non-convention-lighting-laboratory-fluxlian-2

Martin Flugelman, from FLUXLIAN – a collaborative platform focused on light applied in arts, design, performance, and activism – introduces a two-day laboratory. The workshop consists of experiences and activities using the phenomena of light. We will collectively appropriate lighting technologies, hack and improvise devices to shift the appearance of bodies and space. How to integrate lighting to the artistic practice, staging, cyborging, and researching on light as a narrative element. This is a place to drift into alternative lighting aesthetics by using what is around us. How can we translate ideas in lighting terms? How can a light choreography produce an image-experience? What can we illuminate collectively?

postgraduate program, workshop

About MILK!

1-2 March 2023

Cheese-making workshop with Robin Bantigny

Marseille-various-cheeses_lactic-photo

For this cheese-making workshop, a.pass post-graduate researcher Marian Rosa van Bodegraven invites artist and cheese maker Robin Bantigny to host a cheese-making workshop at Radical House.

postgraduate program, workshop

Nada Gambier & Jen Rosenblit Two-Day Shift

15-16 March 2023 / a.pass

Workshop

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Building on from a previous proposal (Night Shift) Nada Gambier in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit now invite you for the Two-Day Shift.

In this working shift, we will dive into the problematics that arise from coming together, engage in improvisational games and strategies, have fun with speculation and bathe in inconvenience as a way to look anew at our practices and get to know our researches from another angle. Once again, our attention goes to what it means to be of service to each other and the works and how by attending to parasites we come to another understanding of what we are doing. The question of desire and learning from what we don’t know will also linger as a larger drive and disorganizing method for the group and researches.

workshop

Eva Maes TATI(L)/ TATI(S)

12-13 May 2023 / a.pass 4th floor

an encounter behind closed doors

Body-Mind Centering sessions, followed by reading Towards a Transindividual Self: a study in social dramaturgy

In Tati(l)/Tati(s), we dedicate the morning to Body-Mind Centering-anchored practices of exploring the environment of self and other. While introducing some general principles activated through BMC, we dedicate specific attention to the exploration of embryological development of the heart. How do notions about ´listening´, ´conscious and unconscious dialogue´, a ´collective realm´ and/or ´repetition´ inform an explorative dance, as well as move concepts of research in various directions?

Open Call