20 August-13 October 2024

Open Call #2 for collective research residency

image by amy pickles

******——*****  IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO APPLY FOR THIS 2ND CALL ******——*****

What could be LEARNING GROUND or GROUND lying fallow  WITHin the COLLECTIVE arts ?

        This is the second call for a 2 months paid artistic research residency for collectives, existing or newly established on the occasion of this call, ideally 5 persons (min.3 max. 10 – NOT for individuals nor duo’s).

CONTEXT ? 

“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness

        By the end of 2023 a.pass (‘advanced performance and scenography studies’) entered a period of (self-)reflection and reimagination, a period of lying fallow: a field when it lies fallow – seemingly ‘doing nothing’ but in fact engaging in a deep process of rejuvenation and enriching as Rajni Shah says, a space for attention and transformation. Due to the ministry’s decision to end their financial support (based on radical savings and political choices) we were forced to end both of our educational programs: the Postgraduate Program as well as the Research Center that were at the heart of our co-learning environment for research-based practices came to an end, and by this also the educational institution a.pass has been for 15 years. The organisation entered a transition process, and an integral aspect of this process involves opening it up by inviting others to participate, to think together, to be together, to re-imagine a sustainable way forward for artistic research practices and their pedagogical aspects. Therefore, we are extending invitations to three collectives for a two-month paid residency to reimagine our fallow land and its implications for collective artistic research practices, methodologies, and sustainable harvesting. The first collective, One Field Fallow, has been selected in the first round in July and they will start their residency in September 2024. This call is to invite a second collective into this process.

9 April-9 June 2024

Open Call #1 for collective research residency

image apass - Open Call

******——*****  IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO APPLY FOR THIS 1st CALL ******——*****

What could be lying fallow in the arts?

This a call for a 2-month paid residency for collectives (existing or newly established on the occasion of this call, ideally 5 persons). The period of 2 months can be spread over a maximum of 5 months. Read more about the practical details further below. First we would like to give you more info about the context and the framework of this call.

CONTEXT? WHAT? MISSION?

“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness

For about 15 years a.pass has been hosting a co-learning environment for research-based practices, focusing on collaboration, performativity, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity. a.pass is an acronym for ‘advanced performance and scenography studies’: ‘performance’ refers to how practices act in their surroundings, ‘scenography’ is the production of space and context, ‘studies’ stands for a co-learning pedagogical approach and the prefix ‘advanced’ is a dedication to challenge the frames of existing disciplinary determinations.

In 2022 however, the Flemish Ministry of Education decided to end their financial support of a.pass by the end of 2023. a.pass managed to get a transition budget and after a period of conversations with different partners (Schools of Arts, workspaces, universities, places for artistic research), and working on a new plan in order to make a restart. Nevertheless, due to the financial inflation, the tight budgets and even budget cuts in the other institutions, the budgetary framework needed to make an adapted restart was impossible to reach without any structural support from the Ministry of Education. 

To make a virtue of necessity we chose for a more radical, more riskful path towards a possible future. Both programs, the Postgraduate Program as well as the Research Center, came to an end in 2023. We chose to embrace the fallow land that lays before us and a.pass entered a period of reflection, reimagination, and ultimately reorganisation: a field when it lies fallow – seemingly ‘doing nothing’ but in fact engaging in a deep process of rejuvenation and enriching as Rajni Shah says, a space for attention and transformation. An integral aspect of this process involves opening it up by inviting others to participate, to think together, to be together, to imagine a sustainable way forward for artistic research practices and for a.pass as a re-generated soil for collectivity and research. Therefore, we are extending invitations to 3 collectives (existing or newly established on the occasion of this call) for a 2-month paid residency to reimagine our fallow land and its implications for collective artistic research practices, methodologies, and sustainable harvesting.

postgraduate program

9 January-31 March 2023

photo_2023-01-11 10.22.26

Happy Endings On horror and/in collections

Wintertime in the Northern hemisphere, night falls early, huddled around one stove, a dog starts barking, birds flutter, an invisible presence, maybe, a figment of our imagination. The penultimate block of a.pass’ current lifecycle is dedicated to ‘horror and/in collections’, to familiar stories yet untold, or unknown tales needing to be retold. 

postgraduate program

5 September-30 November 2022

curatorial assemblage Radical_House, Martina Petrovic, Isabel Burr Raty

EARTH carbon imaginaries, image by Isabel Burr Raty

Block III of 2022 has a cascading structure. The backbone of the block is a mentoring proposition by Radical_House, who invite us to displace mentoring from a.pass’ communal 4th floor to a residential house that has been renovated to accommodate affinities and relations beyond the family that resides in it. In one-to-one or collective mentorings they propose to take this environment as a setting to look at the inheritances our practices stem from, and vice versa, at how we bring ecological/social/urban issues into our homes. 

postgraduate program

12-17 October 2022

A salon and mentoring cycle with jaamil olawale kosoko. PA-guest, invited by Alyssa Gersony.

PHOTO-2022-10-05-08-13-43

We are all in need of more care and care is an often invoked concept to cope with today’s global crises. But how do we practice care within performance? In their week at a.pass, artist, author, and curator jaamil olawale kosoko will consider dramaturgy as an act of care within contemporary performance practice. During mentoring sessions, a Friday-evening salon and a rist of other activities, participants and other cultural workers are encouraged to bring examples of care strategies they find useful in creating socially engaged performance actions that stretch textually and discursively across various genres of liveness and time based art forms. jaamil olawale Kosoko’s approach draws on research methods used in the fields of experimental dance/theater making and dance studies to see what the body can tell us about pressing social issues. From the stage, to the living room, to the nightclub, to the screen, to fantasy, to the privacy of one’s own room, we will explore how care rituals animate the physical art of living and creating in an ever changing world.

postgraduate program, project

5 September-30 November 2022

a proposal by Martina Petrovic

Is a series of dinner encounters which aims to map and introduce four collectives from the Brussels scene to a.pass participants from the September block 2022. Collectives: Common Wallet, Helectolitre, BOSCH and JUBILEE/EMPTOR, are self-organized, or which have alternative approaches on commons, organization, finances and ways of living and working as artists.

Through a format of dinner we will explore how these collectives operate, what are the politics behind the modes of being and working together, where are the difficulties and what are exciting new possibilities of working with different structures. Participants of a.pass will come to the dinners of these four collectives, after these four encounters for the final dinner a.pass will take the role of the host.

Sept 20th, 7pm: Dinner with Hectolitre

Oct 7th, 7pm: Dinner with Common Wallet

Oct 27th, 4pm: Reading Room and dinner with Jubilee/Emptor

postgraduate program, workshop

15-18 November 2022

proposed by Isabel Burr Raty

For the topic Earth of this block, Isabel Burr Raty invites to collectively think – Earth – by diving into polarities surrounding the fourth most abundant element in the observable universe and the 15th most common in the Earth’s crust: Carbon. Carbon, which originates in the core of stars, has the power to form life, yet to dissolve life as we know it on this Planet. Carbon is the chemical skeleton, required to shape complex molecules like DNA, needed for the development, functioning and uniqueness of humans and almost all other organisms. However, carbon-based fuels dominate global energy use and in the context of climate change, carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas released by human societies. Challenging transnational green efforts to establish post-carbon economies and cementing trans-human Directed Evolution.

During a 4 day encounter based encounter and a series of theory readings, we will be in touch with traditional and innovative practices around the carbon spectrum, as well as post-human critical perspectives on the concept – human – and –nature -. Fabulating with variant Sci-Fi myths be-coming-reality, to inspire alternative imaginaries for the role of the human within the Earth’s life cycle.

postgraduate program

5 September-30 November 2022 / Radical_House

a proposal by Simone Basani and Heike Langsdorf / radical_house

With Our Practices / Our Extensions we propose a self-observative and self-critical system for mentoring that acknowledges explicitly the socio-political meaning of such an activity of mentoring and being mentored – a practice in itself: attending to processes not being our own, and vice versa, being attended by eyes and minds outside ourselves.

Inspired by several conversations with current coordinators, alumni, and participants of a.pass, the mentoring system of places at its core the following questions: What do we talk/work about when we touch upon ecological/social/urban issues? How did those issues touch us/our bodies/our hi-her-stories? From which physical/emotional/philosophical site does our research start from?

We want to welcome a.pass participants by acknowledging that we all have different experiences and therefore some undeniable hunches, ideas, inheritances we are provided with by the way/s we live our life/ves and relate to others and other matter/s. Here we share a quote relating to this:

“… inheritance doesn’t come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.” ― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance

performative publishing, postgraduate program, reading session, seminar, workshop

gathering, seminar, performance

27 June-9 July 2022 / ZSenne ArtLab

In the context of Block II 2022: Scoring Intimacy of Discursive Others

File:Christine de Pisan and Queen Isabeau (2).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

For two summer weeks (June 27 – July 10) a.pass is moving to ZSenne ArtLab in downtown Brussels, where it organizes a gathering around autotheory that brings together several approaches to the term and its relation to artistic research practices. The program includes several working sessions, a reading group, a programme of performances, and is curated by Lilia Mestre and Goda Palekaitė. To set a theoretical framework, a two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library and methodological tools to be further explored during the two weeks. Associated researchers of a.pass Research Center – Gosie Vervloessem, Simon Asencio, Rareş Crăiuţ and Vijai Maia Patchineelam – will present their current processes. Finally, a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice will present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda with Charlie Usher, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen, Vladimir Miller, Gary Farelly and Adrijana Gvozdenović. 

postgraduate program, workshop

12 May-21 July 2022 / a.pass

Scoring intimacy with discursive others

kinsscore

The specificity of Kin(s)score is on the fact that we will participate in the score with our research kinships. We will speak with them, through them and us about the questions that our research make apparent. We will discuss and practice what are the political implications of authorship, collectivity and the other.

postgraduate program

2 May-31 July 2022 / a.pass

Block II 2022 (May - July)

Movie still Goda Palekaite

The Block II 2022 proposes to exercise a personal, immediate and performative relation with discourse – through autotheory, speculative history, conversation and collectivity – embodied in a weekly Score. It feeds upon the tension between one’s practice and the other, often absent other who is yet unescapable like one’s ancestor, lover, kin or friend. In other words, we are interested in how discursive beings – those that we encounter only through language – can guide us through our practices?

support the possible

“We are all very familiar with oppressive education; with its systems of reward and punishment, the stimulus of competition, the naming of the strong and the weak, the encouragement of reproduction by repetition, the reinforcement of norms and normativity, the unquestionability of the accommodating attitude towards the status quo, and its decision-making-educators—who by refusing dialogue—do not organise the people. The very goal of oppressive education isn’t to liberate nor to be liberated but to manipulate, control and generate conformism.

However, there is another sort of education that is precisely based on dialogue; a form of education that doesn’t function as a tool to facilitate anyone’s integration into the logic of the present system. It is the practice of freedom in its most germinating terms; the facilitation of critical thinking, creativity and citizenry.

end presentation

27-29 January 2022 / Gemeenschapscentrum De Kriekelaar

End Presentations January 27,28 and 29, 2022

re:source

project, workshop

24 January-11 February 2022 / a.pass

Image copyright: Robbie Shone

POLYSET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH

SCHEDULE

[disorganisation, mutable<>mutant, re-constitution, available space, usedesign, decoherence, constituent imagination, perpetual modeling, set / unset, cohab, sticky space, gel, semiset, accumulation, interim, tentative, fragile, actual, affine space, poligraphy, gathering, a walk in the dark with the flashlight pointing backwards, fugitive instituting, politecture, study, overflow, hangout]

a poliset is:

a practice of temporary research co-habitation, where the the researchers design their spaces of practice in one shared space

an indoor research hangout with available communal materials, tools, support structures and resources

a self-curated study, that works through an open network of invitations

consensual over-all-planning is an exception, while relational collaborative negotiations structure the space

postgraduate program

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.

research center

Initiated out of a desire to be a shared platform of exchange, support and publication for the a.pass Associate Researchers, this year-long initiative will continue to support and publish advanced research and investigate its trajectories within a.pass.

The Associate Researchers follow a part of their research trajectory in an environment of mutual criticality and institutional support. The Research Center welcomes radical and inventive research methodologies in order to contribute them to the larger a.pass environment. The Research Center supports and facilitates individual and collective forms of performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions, gatherings, etc), experimental research set ups, workshops and collaborations.

For the period of May 2021 to April 2022 a.pass is happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center Cycle III:

Joāo Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Gosie Vervloessem, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Simon Asencio.

The Associate Researchers will be hosted and supported during Cycle III by Vladimir Miller.

research center

IMG_0322

Initiated out of a desire to be a shared platform of exchange, support and publication for the a.pass Associate Researchers, this year-long initiative will continue to support and publish advanced research and investigate its trajectories within a.pass.

postgraduate program

6 January-31 March 2021

Block 2021 I curated by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout/The Monastery

mikel-iriberri-mental-asylum-01

An asylum is a place of refuge. Of taking leave of the world for a limited period of time. It is a place out of the world. Where rules function differently. Where people without a place of belonging are temporarily ‘parked’ in order to mend their ways. It is a place for the ones that don’t fit the grid: mental patients, refugees, people suffering from ailments of all kinds. Desiring bodies, in search of papers, legitimacy, acceptance, health, reconnection to the outside world.

In that sense it is also a place of hope, a world-in-a-world where difference can live and be accepted. Maybe even celebrated. Where the norms are temporarily suspended, and common sense rules no longer apply. In this gap, in this suspension, wild thoughts can go unchecked. Dubious behaviour flies under the radar.