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project, workshop
Occupy Democracy
29 September-3 October 2014
Occupation Precaire: one-euro-cents glued in public space
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guidos post
performance, project
BUREAU d’ESPOIR
2 November-31 March 2016
tarot0
Bureau d’Espoir is a long-term research project on hope, initiated by Elke Van Campenhout. Bureau d’Espoir researches the possibility for a new engagement with the concept of hope, both on a political, social, physical and spiritual level.
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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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PHARMAKON
Pharmakon : whitch culture ?
‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’, is a Thematics artistic research residency project, taking place in Brussels from the 15th of October until the 15th of December 2014. This residency is one of the stages in the development of the broader, transnational ‘Pharmakon’ research project undertaken by Institut Nomade. The ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference will last three days and will explore the theoretical and artistic approaches to dealing with an increasingly toxic economic, ethical and cultural environment, in search of other techniques by which to connect, share and imagine the fabric of our togetherness. As a ‘performative conference’, this meeting involves artists as well as theorists, dissolves the boundaries between ‘specialists’ and ‘public’, and between ‘performers’ and ‘theorists’, and opens up a space for desire and reflection.
Thematics is organized by Bains Connective, in collaboration with Institut Nomade, the a.pass research center and Kaaitheater.
Pharmakon: whitch culture?
This Thematics project builds on the notion of ‘pharmakon’ as coined by the contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler. In ancient Greece, ‘pharmakon’ was understood both as ‘poison’ and ‘medicine’, and in some cases also as ‘scapegoat’. The word might mean either the one or the other depending on the context, which implies a certain knowledge, or ‘knowledge-ability’. A skill of dosage and use, witchcraft involving insight and imaginative contextualization.
At the ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference, a group of artists and theorists will investigate the notion of ‘pharmakon’ in our society. As Stiegler suggests in his analysis of the need for a ‘pharmacology’ to counter the poisonous fumes of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment, it is clear that the fabrication of our culture(s) has urgently to be (re)questioned. What are the categories we use to produce and develop the culture in which we ‘individuate’ ourselves? What is the change in ‘technics’ that is needed to re-imagine our desires, stepping out of ourselves, as ex-isting in the public sphere? What sort of witchcraft is demanded from us, as artists, citizens and thinkers, to come up with the right spells and potions, and to dose our practices to transform poison into medicine.
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