Lilia Mestre
LILIA MESTRE (Lisboa 1968) is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels working mainly in collaboration with other artists. She interested in art practice as a medial tool between several domains of semiotical existence. Mestre works with assemblages, scores and inter-subjective set ups as an artist, curator, dramaturge and teacher.
As a researcher Mestre is interested in forms of sociability artistic practice propose. She thinks that those forms of sociability display ecologies of relation that become perceptual learning processes constitutive of affective and ethical value. From the black box, to the white cube, the class room, the auditorium, to the public space she has been developing performative strategies to engage in the questions of what is present and how can it manifest itself in each particular situation. More specifically what kind of singularities appear between the individual, the collective, the material and the environmental.
She was co-funder of Bains Connective Art Laboratory in Brussels (1997). An artist run, pluri-disciplinary working place for experimental practices where she took the role of project dramaturge in 2006 and artistic coordinator between 2009 and 2016.
Since 2008 she has been mentor, workshop facilitator and associated program curator at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) - a platform for artistic research practices in Brussels - where she has been developing a research on scores as pedagogical tool titled Scorescapes.
In 2019 - 2021 she’s collaborating with Prof. Jill Halstead and Prof. Brandon LaBelle in Social Acoustic - a research project supported by the University of Bergen, Norway. And with Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga in Contigent Agencies - a research project supported by PEEK -Vienna, AU.
Since 2017 Mestre is artistic coordinator and co-curator of a.pass
block information, project, winter program
A looming score – we share your politics of damage
2 September-1 December 2019
Block 2019/III curators Lilia Mestre and Sina Seiffee
titanus scylla by ladalbarran2000
Why loom? We were thinking about the loom’s invocation of the closeness of the textile sense, fabrics that bind our desires and bodies. The loom means also the threatening feeling of an inevitable terrible thing as it approaches. And the possibility of b-looming, from the rest, waste, residue, remainders of the storm. Furthermore, loom echoes a gendered practice of writing textile; in the making of fabric like Arachné, that talented mortal weaver who challenged the god of wisdom, as well as Penelope, who weaved and weaved (a mournful making and unmaking fabrics) to postpone her arranged marriage. The loom is a metaphor that invites us to think of reality as something deeply embedded within context, like “the weaver’s loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves” (Veena Das). That means, modes of knowing constitute the objects of knowing in a manner that profoundly affects how one comes to inhabit a new reality.
That is just the conceptual backdrop for us. In this block we want to focus on a support structure that will help each other research and continue what has been initiated in the past block, ‘Troubled Gardens.’ We transport what has been found out there and elsewhere into looming (transposed into weaving + feeling the darkness of it). That is to sustain being immersed in the subjects of ecology, feminism and their possible political agency in this unpredictable and precarious world we are living in. In the coming block, we’ll take these lines thought while going back “home” (we will land somewhere in a.pass studios hosting three scenographies from Laura, Maurice and Caterina for their End-Communication). We would take the movement of going inside as the one to prepare for winter: gather, digest, tell stories, imagine futures. As a curatorial approach we are not interested in obsessing on these concepts per se, but working in and through the particular challenges of our researches.
Read more..project, recent past, research center
Parallel Parasite
4 June-30 September 2018
Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre
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From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at ZSenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.
Read more..end communication, recent past
This is 1000 liter fuel. So – & book launch
24-26 May 2018
End-Communications + a.pass publication
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END-COMMUNICATIONS @ DecorAtelier 24 and 25 May from 17:30 till 22:30
Rue de Liverpool 24, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
BOOK LAUNCH Medium Score -Tectonic Friendship & End Communications Writing Score
@ Brew 26 May from 17:30 till 19:30
1 Rue du Pene, 1000 Brussels
Read more..-, block information, gathering, research center
Lilia Mestre Fragile Community Score + Score for entering a place / Lilia Mestre
11 June-15 May 2018 / Zsenne ArtLab
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SCORESCAPES: Thinking Scores as Pedagogical Tool is an ongoing research in the context of a.pass.For this occasion the score will serve the question of 'being in an (other) place' which is not home, which is semi-public, which will constitute a composite body and which will be in the 'here' of the public space and of the a.pass Research Center. Which tender social formation will take place? What will appear from the rubbing between institutional paradigms and the discourses that resist? The score wants to make appear narratives localized in that time/place frame work. We will work with writing and physical forms of presence and we'll go in between inside and outside, the individual and the group, in between the here and there, between being part of and being other.
Read more..archive, block information
The Way of the Anarchive
18-29 June 2018 / Zsenne ArtLab
a residency with Erin Manning in the frame of parallel parasite
sense-lab Erin Manning
From the 18th till the 29th of June the a.pass Research center will engage with Erin Manning on the practice of the Anarchive developed in SenseLab. For the last weeks of June a group of a.pass researchers and guests will work during the day and will open up to public discussions almost every evening at 19:00. **************************
Some of the days during this period public encounters with Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Alex Arteaga, Nico Docks, Adva Zakai ... will take place. Please check schedule bellow!!!!!
Read more..block information, gathering, research center
Instead of Needing to Know
4 June-9 May 2018
SOL/School Of Love in the frame of Parallel-Parasite
SOL
Residency at a.pass/ Zsenne gallery, Brussels
4 – 9 June (except for June 6th), 2018
If both Love and School engaged in the practice of being open to change through encounters with others, we might develop sensitivities to deal with unknown paths better. Maybe we would be better off improvising through, with and within the unknown, instead of needing to know. Maybe improvisation today can be approached as a mode of resistance to a life dedicated to an anticipated and defined future.
Please inscribe here : https://bimestriel.framapad.org/p/VoV7C6HGQX
Read more..archive, reading session, research center
Monday Readings Streaming media
16 June 2018 / Szenne Artlab, Anneessensstraat 2
on demand, content-delivery, broadcast
dennenprocessierups
This extra edition of the Monday reading actually takes place on a Saturday in Szenne artlab. In the context of Parallel-parasite, a residency of the a.pass Research Center, we will focus on the shape-shifting nature of streaming media. After sessions on text processing, local servers and key cards, we will continue with an exploration of streaming, a coverall term for the dominant way that audio and visual content is being delivered on the Internet today. We will read into the different technical protocols that are regulating those flows, and the diverging economies that software like Torrent trackers and companies like Youtube, Netflix construct. By considering how the continuous experience of streaming relies on various politics of separation, re-ordering discrete elements on delivery, we will observe how the production, sharing and consumption of media is radically changing. Session organised with Martino Morandi.
Read more..atelier, block information, recent past
Lilia Mestre The Medium Score
Thinking making together apart
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The proposal for this block follows on previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing.
If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of our relation with the world, then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen phenomenological relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?
Read more..block information, recent past
The problem of the score
Block curated by Lilia Mestre / May > July 2017
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From May till July 2017 the a.pass post-master program questions how structures pre-determine singular outcomes, and to what extent they imply relationality. Every system is a network of connections and the way the system is set to operate defines forms of relation which reveal ideological standpoints. In other words modes of interaction are formatting forces that construct worlds. If we think that way, what kind of problems do our research structures entail? And if we can think a polyphonic world , constituted by multiple models, how do we consider our own structure as a relational one? What kind of technologies are we putting into place? What kind of invitation are we making? And to whom?
The notions of ‘apparatus’ and ‘tentacular thinking’ will be key to understanding and experiencing the problem of score in contextual ecologies. Apparatuses, as coined by Foucault and Agamben, are systems of governance that enable relationships between beings and structures through which the subject is constructed. During former block Donna Haraway introduced us to tentacular thinking as a place from which one can build relations to economical, biological, philosophical, productional, institutional, etc orders. Together with the a.pass researchers, workshop givers and guests we reflect on them, challenge our practices and relate to other authors and art makers.
Read more..publication
BUBBLE SCORE / Lilia Mestre
Book
a.pass publication
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BUBBLE SCORE – The Relation between Performance and Writing is the third book of the ScoreScapes publications series. The book contains texts by a.pass researchers, collages as well as Scores for the Reader inserted at the back of the book.
price: 10 euro
Read more..Order this publication.publication, research
Juan Domínguez DIRTY ROOM
book
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CLEAN ROOM is the name of a performance project created by Juan Domínguez and several collaborators that was developed as a three-season series with six episodes in each season. Its name refers to a spotless space, with low levels of external pollutants and controlled environmental parameters that guarantee minimum interferences in the developments of experiments.
price: 16 euro
Read more..Order this publication.publication
Perform Back Score / Lilia Mestre
Book
a.pass publication
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The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.
price: 10 euro
Read more..Order this publication.conference
a.pass, KaaiTheater The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting
25-26 November 2016 / KaaiStudios - Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 // 1000 Brussel.
(self) Education of new subjectivities
the artist commoner
During a two day event, a.pass welcomes a gathering of researchers, artists, a.pass program participants and public to engage with the struggle of being an artist commoner today, and the role of (educational) institutions in bringing this subject about.
Two days of presentations, exchanges and commoning practices. Two days of ateliers, books launches, performances, workshops and discussions.
Read more..workshop
Lilia Mestre Bubble Score for performance and writing
11 January-25 March 2016 / a.pass
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This is a score to explore the different notion of presence in performance and writing. It is acted out as a weekly meeting throughout the block between January and March 2016. The practices of the score alternate between performance and writing as modes of the performative. All people attending the score meetings have to share work. There is no audiance.
Read more..block information
Lilia Mestre Block Focus: Sub -(e)ject
4 January-31 March 2016 / a.pass
The relation between writing and performance
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The proposal for this block follows up on scores as a tool to organize dialogical or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic practice and research. In the past two years I developed in the frame of a.pass a score for writing practice, ‘Writing Scores’ and a score for performance ‘Perform Back Score’, both as discursive tools. Both scores created a platform for the different researches to co-habitate and to reflect back the methods and strategies each of us use in the making and thinking of our practices. The main questions are: How do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity in a collaborative environment? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?
Read more..project
Perform Back Score
14 January-31 March 2015
how to document performance?
PBScore
WEEKLY MEETING WORKSHOP:
Proposed by Lilia Mestre for the Block 2015/I (January-March)
This score was a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?
Read more..conference
PHARMAKON
1 October-30 November 2014
Pharmakon: whitch culture?
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’.
Read more..publication
Writing Scores / Lilia Mestre
Book
19 September 2014
a.pass publication
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The book Writing Scores is the result of 3 months of written dialogues produced within the group of artistic researchers of a.pass.
Read more..Order this publication.block information
Lilia Mestre BLOCK FOCUS 2015/I
5 January-30 April 2015
CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS
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The proposal is to plunge into the conditions for the emergence of poetics. Poetics used here as acts that transform our ways of perceiving, situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.
If we think performance as the coming-forth of those acts, as a framed re-actualization of what is there (a part of the world) we can give focus to the relations
Read more..
