In 2014 a.pass was evaluated by an international visitation commission to establish the level of quality of the programs on an international level. the a.pass environment was marked as ‘excellent’ on all levels.

here you can read the report:

Evaluation report a.pass (Draft)

A group of artist becoming organic bakers or bee-keepers, curators turning into urbanist developers, managers following mindfulness courses, right-wing politicians using left-wing argumentations. In a deeply-felt anti-disciplinary movement, ‘workers’ today not only seem to question their ‘spaces of belonging’, but they actively start to reinvent them. For now, we call these acts displacements.

‘Displacement’ was the title of the end presentations of Luanda Casella, Raquel de Morais, Helena Dietrich and Nibia Santiago Pastrani. Click ‘more’ to read the interview with Nibia.

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Thinking about tools in the research environment of a.pass is a tricky ‘thing’. When we think about tools in everyday language, we think about ‘things that do something’. But not whatever. Tools are things that have their function inscribed in them, that are optimized for achieving a certain goal, like the radically specified instruments IKEA offers you in its DIY packages. In an artistic research environment the question thus to ask in the first place is: what kind of tools do we need to do what we do? …Read more

This text was written for the magazine of the Steirischer Herbst Festival (Austria). Although the text addresses the specific spatial situation of PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in Reims (a place where a.pass goes at least once per block for a week during End Week), the thinking and writing process around this text was largely constructed around the notions of space as developed in the series of Settlement workshops that were created by current APC Vladimir Miller, and that greatly influenced the notions of ‘performative space’ and scenography as they are developed in a.pass. …Read more

Curating as environ-mentalism ‘to find a frame, a timing or a situation within which suggestions of others can be realized’ tom plischke (1) 1. In this text I would like to focus on a particular form of curatorship: a practice that grew out of (and in opposition to) the ‘new’ style of programming of the 1980’s institutions. An attitude in thinking about curating in which the role of the programmer and the role of the artist start to intertwine. …Read more

THE TENDER INSTITUTE

In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute’s extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution.”

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“Other than the ‘artist’s research’, artistic research overwrites the isolation and the hermetics of art production in the classical sense, in addressing in one way or another a socially relevant problematics. This kind of artistic research opens up new ways for the creation of a ‘generous cultural memory’.”
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1. Food and Hunger

Knowing about food and where our foods come from, or even knowing what exactly it is we are eating, has been the leveller for a new movement of engaged and interested citizens-artists who want to come to an understanding of the different factors that are running the all-encompassing trade of our alimentary products. …Read more