postgraduate program
bleed is inevitable
6 September-30 November 2021
curatorial assemblage facilitated by Kristien Van den Brande
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.
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7 WALKS (resolution)
16-17 September 2021
Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason
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?
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postgraduate program
LARP “Identities”
27-28 September 2021
by Amélie Orsel
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.
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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