THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

postgraduate program, workshop

Abu Ali * Toni Serra THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

8-12 June 2015

Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008

Abu Ali * Toni Serra is researcher through video. He hosts and programs the Observatori de Video No Identificat based in Barcelona – an Observatory Archive, that is structured around particular themes, which encourage a critique of contemporary culture and society,

Using strategies of video art, independent documentary, and mass media archaeology embedded in this archive as source and tool to engaging with some of the dreams and nightmares of our times, he organizes frameworks for practicing and discussing perspectives beyond the visible.

For the workshop at a.pass he offers a selection of footage, which directly deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections he will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.

Normally we associate image with vision. But in a society of the spectacle images have become a form of blindness – an increasing veil, that prevents us from viewing. Our visions remains a prisoners of the images constructed by the entertainment, media and network apparatus, which not only tries to shape our vision but to colonized our dreams.

We need to experiment and to experience the Unseen as a way to live the plenty of a reality, that finally can not be appropriate, represented or de-fined by any means. The Unseen is the source of the limitless ‘all’, and can not be confined in a narrow horizon.

Here, closing your eyes means open them to another dimension, and not only disrupt the hypnotic flow of objective images, but “stops the world” around it to see. It is in this reality where a non return trip starts, beyond or before dualism: interior – exterior, to compose a world without borders between wakefulness and dreams, real and unreal, life and death.

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Biography

Toni Serra * Abu Ali Barcelona 1960

www.al-barzaj.com

Lives in between Duar Msuar (Morocco) and Barcelona (Spain). videos, mass-media archaeology,texts and other submedia

Member of OVNI Archives, he is also working in the research projects: Ru’a [visions] , disReality, The Colonial Dream, and Babylon Archives,..

His videos explore different visions between the essay and the poetry, with an evocation of trance and the realities of dream. His first works in New York and Tangiers were questioning the beauty and mystery of the ephemeral and marginal. In 1998 he finishes the TV Codes series: a critical immersion into the mass media mechanisms of alienation, a deconstruction and its hypnotical creation of social and identitary models. His last videos immerse into the relationship with the visionary, into the inner experience, the no man’s land between real and unreal, dream and awakeness, poetry and prophecy.,..as a way to deepen the criticism of reality.

As a founding member of OVNI Archives – Observatorio de Video No Identificado (www.desorg.org), he was doing research and programming around Exodus, The Margins of the Empire – Colonial Dream and Autononous Zones, Resistances, Rhizomes, disReality, Oblivion etc.

He is also founder of the research project Ru’a [visions] www.ru-a.org: An intersection between western criticism and the islamic rhizome. To deconstruct the media monotype imposed on islamic realities. A reflection on the image in its relationship with the dream and visionary and on the images ability to project reality.

postgraduate program, workshop

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert CONSEQUENCES

2-6 March 2009

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference
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postgraduate program, workshop

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert CONSEQUENCES II

1-6 March 2010

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference
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postgraduate program, project, workshop

Higher Performance!

7-18 May 2012

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Some workshopping in economics for artists is due!
At latest since 2008 it became clear, that the economic system we are living in and with is wacky, unjust and not sustainable. Many of its instruments are either exaggerated or exhausted. The bubbles it produces in different markets are getting out of control and deregulated fiscal constructions are dramatically failing.

postgraduate program, workshop

PIERRE RUBIO / PETER STAMER HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?

24-28 June 2013

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?
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Elke van campenhout “general intellect ? – it’s not about you, stupid !”

3-7 March 2014

‘General Intellect? - it's not about you, stupid !’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the apass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective.
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postgraduate program, project, workshop

Occupy Democracy

29 September-3 October 2014

Occupation Precaire: one-euro-cents glued in public space

Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are determined: The workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day. The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio, Elke Van Campenhout Performance / Performativity / Objects / Subjects

19-23 January 2015

USA. Florida. Cape Kennedy. Space center. 1967.

Pierre Rubio and Elke Van Campenhout give will give time to discuss the basic concepts addressed in the block: Performance and Performativity.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Ana Hoffner Tools for artistic research – Beckett

2-6 February 2015

Beckett_Score

The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text.
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postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK II

1 May-31 July 2015

2015 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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information, postgraduate program

Self-Interview & Peer-to-Peer mentoring

1 May-31 July 2015

self interview

SELF / Throughout the block we develop a self-interviewing practice. PEER / On top of the dedicated mentoring and the self-interview practice you will also mentor - and be mentored by -a peer researcher.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Nicolas Galeazzi BRICOLAGE

4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

a tool for opening the block

Bildschirmfoto 2015-04-03 um 21.49.02

Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology.
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postgraduate program, research center

a.pass research centre The House of Spirits

10 May-24 July 2015

The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.

postgraduate program, reading session, research center

Reading Circle

11 May-29 August 2015 / a.pass

Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu

As a red thread throughout the block the participants engage in a weekly communal reading practice of the book ‘Realist Magic – Object, Ontology, Causality’ by Timothy Morton.

Reading and discussing in-depth this one central text allows for the development of a common ground of reference and connection that functions as a backdrop to the workshops and practices that shape the block. The Reading Circle happens on Monday evenings from 6pm to 10pm.

performative publishing

Ricardo

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Nicolas

12 May 2015

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Elke

12 May 2015

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Vanja

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Yari

12 May 2015

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Mavi

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Kleoni

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Isabel

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Veronica

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Pierre / Super power

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Thiago / Fool dice totem

12-12 May 2015

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reading session

Culture: The Universal Animal – Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

13 May 2015

Contribution for the discussion about totemism, animism, and naturalism. Lecture by Viveiros de Castro. "Animism could be defined as an ontology which postulates the social character of relations between humans and non-humans: the space between nature and society is itself social. Naturalism is founded on the inverted axiom: relations between society and nature are themselves natural. Indeed, if in the animic mode the distinction "nature/culture" is internal to the social world, humans and animals being immersed in the same socio-cosmic medium (and in this sense, "nature" is a part of an encompassing sociality), then in naturalist ontology, the distinction "nature/culture" is internal to nature (and in this sense, human society is one natural phenomenon amongst others). Animism has "society" as the unmarked pole, naturalism has "nature": these poles function, respectively and contrastingly, as the universal dimension of each mode. Thus animism and naturalism are hierarchical and metonymical structures."
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Joachim ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

25-29 May 2015

Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson

Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ wants to address critically the production of subjectivity. 'A revolution is as much a reorientation of our affective relations as it is of social relations and cannot be one without the other.' Jason Read, ‘Economies of Affect / Affective Economies’, 2013
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sara Manente / Marcos Simoes THIS PLACE

1-5 June 2015 / a.pass

this place, Sara Manente & Marcos Simoes - photograph Marcello Mardones

The workshop unfold a series of extra sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The dispositives used, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is “a self”, “an entity” other than us, with own quality and ability to perform. Like an “experimental magic”: there will be magic without magicians. Can we create the magic by creating the situation for the magic to happen? We create the rules therefore we create the magic. Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation? With the stubbornness of “the idiot”, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the immaterial and the immaterial.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Oscar Parada TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

22-26 June 2015 / a.pass

oscar

The objective of re-knowing and re-producing the sacred in connection with a performative ritual space is to operate a transformation and that is what we can call medicine. Medicine is everything that transforms us. The workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal tool. We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean. Hence, the workshop will also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Peter Stamer / Luanda Casella SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

29 June-3 July 2015

Bildschirmfoto 2015-03-28 um 13.59.09

In 1969, the American psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a study to explore if two randomly selected individuals, strangers to each other coming from different American states, are nevertheless connected by acquaintances in between. Starting the test in Kansas/Nebraska, linking people to one individual in Massachusetts, the experiment suggested that an individual knows of any target person only by six degrees of connecting steps: Mr X from Kansas knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Mrs Z, living in Massachusetts.

performative publishing, postgraduate program

Magic Night / Crystal Seeds

15-15 July 2015

kleoni

5 crystals where used as seeds, to hold our intentions, our prayers to berry around the world in an effort to influence those events that seam to be so big, and beyond our personal capacities.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program, research center

MAGIC NIGHT

24 July 2015

_MG_3266

This is the time to come together. To celebrate what we worked on. To transform our preconceptions of rituals, of magic, of transformation itself. A pilgrimage of the self into the common and back again.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Self Interview Draft Pierre/Pierre

31 July 2015

alchemic self interview

On the black and icy waters of the Styx, in the infernal meanders of his arms, Charon's boat progresses about the kingdom of Hades. Aboard the vessel, you, me and a bunch of thinkers and activists, necessarily part of this globalised miserable journey. Of the nature of the swamps, of the depths of the mud in which we sink, of the once renowned magical properties of the river, we have lost track and memory. Sondes throwers more than prophets, advancing in the midst of experiments, we clumsily try to offer a tentative guidance...
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Self Interview draft Thiago written / Thiago transcribed

31 July 2015

Thiago’s Self-interview I write in Italic. I make the questions. Sometimes I explain things for you, the one who reads. I am a bit smarter than the others, but I don’t have a color. I am… I am a recorded voice transcripted. I am another voice, written.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Self Interview Draft Kleoni Black / Kleoni Pink and Green

31 July 2015

On the other hand I remember when I was living in New York, I had a friend that was making fun of my vegetarianism, he was asking how living in a city like New York could be an ethical choice. Just the existence and sustenance of this city means the death to other life forms. It is complicated but urgent. A very difficult task
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postgraduate program

UNTOUCHABLE/UNACCEPTABLE/INTANGIBLE

CURATED BY ELKE VAN CAMPENHOUT & NICOLAS GALEAZZI & PIERRE RUBIO

1 August 2015

about the imaginative aesthetics of change

Yupik Shaman Nushagak

In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies. Animating objects to animate our agencies. Fictionalising the real as a critique to produce alternatives to ideology. Speculating on the impossible to construct a possible. Considering imagination not as escapism but as an operative vehicle for change. The unacceptable reveals the limitations of the acceptable. The untouchable foreshadows the adventurous discovery of difference. The intangible offers a speculative sense towards the radically other.
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performative publishing, research center

Bureau d'Espoir SELF-INTERVIEW Elke – Elle

1 September-31 December 2015 / Abbeye de Forest

MNSTRY

Elke (a.pass researcher): Elle, with the new project ‘Mobile MNSTRY’ you again tackle some of the issues you have been dealing with in your extended project Bureau d’Espoir already for some years: the recuperation and embrace of practices and terms that have been categorized, marginalized and recuperated by capital strategies. For example: you worked on the mobilization of the concept of ‘anorexia’ in the Hunger and Anorexic practices as tools for rethinking our relation to the consumption of food, and our own place in the ‘food chain’ of capitalism. You worked in ‘Battery’ on the embrace of circumstances that are considered detrimental to the ‘healthy’ development of the individual: 21 days of imprisonment, hunger and lack of private space as a spiritual-aesthetic machine for the production of hope and change. Now you propose the Mobile Monastery: a practice that is based on rethinking the monastic rule, the disciplining and deep experience of the everyday, introducing ‘poverty’ and social service (karma yoga) into the practice. Your proposals all seem to verge on the extreme, uncomfortable, and frankly, possibly moralistic. How do you plan to make this collective practice seem inviting to collaborators.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Elke Van Campenhout Who’s Afraid of the Subject?

18-22 January 2016 / a.pass

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In this theoretical and discussion workshop, we reconsider the notion of the subject today:

why, after all the turn-arounds of becomings, vibrant objects and a decentralisation of the human perspective, do we need to reconsider the subject as an important player in our discourses and practice?

well, to start with, because there is no personal agency or ethics without it. and also because there is a need for a consciousness of what it is that subjects us, what it is that turns us into speaking, experiencing and affecting human beings. but even more so, when and why these powers are denied to us, and why?

postgraduate program, workshop

Elke van Campenhout / Vladimir Miller FEEDBACK

3-6 May 2016 / a.pass

WOAW_Resize_original

Since a.pass is a shared environment, we depend a lot on each other as sparring partners in our researches. As part of the Opening Week this workshop addresses very diverse feedback techniques: spoken critique, non-negotiated critique, direct feedback, indirect feedback, written, walking, one-on-one or transformative feedback.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Epifania Amoo-Adare (Un)thinking Research Practice

9-10 May 2016 / a.pass

Decolonizing Theory, Mobilizing Methodologies, and Open-Ended Becoming(s)

The premise of this workshop is that a critical pedagogy on the space of research knowledge production, and its related forces of (re)production, is a necessary condition for any intervention in (and of) that space. Consequently, we propose to challenge widespread understandings of research space and knowledge production as a binary researcher-researched structure that is given and fixed, in other words: a structure that is developed for and not a context that is developed by the various actors in the research process. We contrast this convention with an understanding of research space as both, a manifestation as well as a vehicle of the productive relations of power-knowledge.

postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller / Peter Stamer FORGED THEORY

5-7 July 2016 / a.pass

artwork by Miler Lagos

„I remember this workshop where we were asked to write theory in support of our research. Not to go and read and quote existing work but to make it up, to quote from a fictional pile of books. What would be such a fictional body of writing to situate our work in? What kind of fanstasy discouse does our work exist in? To be honest: Is our work not already producing a potential yet unwritten discourse? We keep looking until we find that ghost in someone else’s writing, calling it research, no? Its divination, ghost hunting, séances. Can we go one step further and conjure up those voices we are looking for? In that workshop we looked at the many fragmented ways those voices appear in a piece of writing: blurbs on the back page, quotes from form other literary works, footnotes, citations, bibliography lists and lists for further reading. All the ways a supporting structure of precedents is woven into and around an academic text. Mere fragments in themselves, they point to whole architectures of thought. Their distinct style, their no-nonsense-brevity speak volumes. How does an archeologist distinguish between a shard and a piece of pottery made to look like one? He cant help but imagine the vase.“ Richard Crane „Territorial Discourses“, Michigan University Press, 1998
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postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller THEORIES UNDER THE COMMONS

26-30 September 2016

Commons is_

This workshop will be an attempt to „come to terms“, to create shared reference points within the commons discourse among the workshop participants. We will read discuss and map a selection of texts which lay the groundwork for understanding the commons debate today and we will make ourselves familiar with a reader, which can be a further reference for discussions and in depth reading throughout the block.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

2-9 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Sina Seifee

Reading Sessions of Donna Haraway's essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #5 Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound

16 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Peggy Pierrot

George Clinton emerges from Parliament-Funkadelic's Mothership on June 4, 1977, at the Coliseum in Los Angeles

Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digitized compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes? and what kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic ? We’ll build or we’ll destroy. We’ll learn about the Know-Ledge.
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lecture, postgraduate program

Book Club #7 Politics of Speculative fabulation

10 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Fabrizio Terranova

Dr Marboeuf

"We need new types of narratives and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made and experienced." In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis - Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble” and present the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sina Seifee Little Fables of Practice Workshop

24-25 July 2017 / a.pass 4th floor

Sina Seifee - Moon index in Sa'di world refraction poetics

In this two days workshop I like to propose the notion of keyword seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices. We will (re)animate our keywords as fables, which are operational metaphors that shape subjects and objects of knowledge. How can we participate in (re)shaping our objects of knowledge in terms of little fables?
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postgraduate program, workshop

STUDY DAYS

10 September-30 November 2018

A curatorial proposal by Adva ZAkai

* Images – screen-shots from https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/89465667

PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

This block is organized around a series of Study Days. Almost every Monday till the end of November, a.pass hosts artists, thinkers and researchers to contribute to the problematization of various issues that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics.

postgraduate program, workshop

the Lecture, the Performance

4-8 February 2019

workshop with philipp gehmacher

This week’s focus lies on the idea and genre of the lecture performance in the performing and visual arts. Speaking out will be looked at as a performative act of sharing thoughts and concerns about ones own research and work. The questions often arising are: Why speak out about things at all? Why not let the work speak for itself, the research be mapped out and available? Is the speaking an extra layer of added information, at times rendering the ‚shown’ and presented more informal, even personal? Whilst in fact pointing at its surrounding, as much as the institution, is there a self-referentiality involved in speaking that we cannot escape whether we speak about ourselves, our concerns or just matters seemingly ‚worldly‘ and not personal? Speaking is however also about utterance and the speech act, performative as such, in the now, whether scripted or not. Speaking points out, maps out, accompanies actions and discursifes often all at once.

postgraduate program, workshop

Krõõt Juurak AUTODOMESTICATION

27-31 October 2020 / a.pass

Autodomestication

As a performer you provide your audience with something that cannot be measured in material terms. As regards the activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity, your labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as work – activities involved in defining and determining cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and, on a strategic level, public opinion. As a performer you are primarily a producer of subjectivity. Typically, an artist’s value does not lie in what they “do” but in what they “are”. Now, remember, for example, how Richard Florida described the processes of gentrification caused by the migration of artists and creative workers – the artists may or may not be aware of the value of their mere presence but on a larger scale they produce “results” simply by existing. Survival in the (performing) arts requires creativity that goes beyond the artworks one creates. In fact, a typical performing artist spends about 99 percent of their time off stage – as an audience member, a critic, an administrator, a networker, friend, mentor, student, teacher and so on. Inventing and re-inventing oneself on and offstage, adjusting to various situations, restrictions, moving from project to project, one residency to the next, brimming with creative energy, training and forever educating oneself is the way forward.

postgraduate program, workshop

Elke van Campenhout Debunking the Myth

16-20 November 2020 / online

or The Emperor’s New Clothes Revisited

NEW DATES!

16.-20. Nov 2020

To be a contemporary artist comes with a lot of prerequisites these days: unspoken discourse rules, critical norms, and a general salonfähig consensus about values like fluidity, horizontality, collaboration, etcetera… Often these values are taken for granted while a strong discourse is ruling the artist’s world, zooming in on any hint of postcolonial insensitivity, patriarchal blindness, gender observations, and faintly non-consensual power use. This attitude stems from the bountiful history of feminist and queer studies, cultural studies insights, and a general growing awareness of her-stories and the damage done by biased educations and cultural misgivings. But at the same time there are also a lot of other untouched territories underlying these value markers: 19th century romanticism, liberalism, humanism, … Each one carrying within it a very specific view of what it means to be a human being in this world, how we are connected and what we are able to convey.

performative publishing

Audrey

29 April 2021

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Open Call