end presentation, performative publishing, postgraduate program
Nassia Fourtouni / Goda Palekaitė / Katinka Van Gorkum Body Virtual Institution
31 May-1 June 2019 / Hacktiris (6th floor) - Rue Paul Devauxstraat 3, 1000 Brussel
@ Hacktiris (6th floor) – Rue Paul Devauxstraat 3, 1000 Brussel
Doors open at 18:00
19:00 GODA PALEKAITĖ – How to Infuriate a Historian
21:00 NASSIA FOURTOUNI – Waiting Room Meditation
22:00 KATINKA VAN GORKUM – Distance Learning in Close Proximity
Virtual Body Institution is the coming together of the 3 concepts that intertwine in the End-Presentations of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė.
Their practices are very distinct from each other, in form as in content though they all engage with forms of sociability that enhance, propose and reveal the relation of the individual with the societal. Tackling this position from discursive, technological or body practices they invite the visitor to engage in thinking and embody modes of construction of the self.
Through their current practices of research and exposure – that use the personification of historical characters in a public discussion, the entrance into virtual space as a extension of the ‘real’ and the body as a perception machine – we encounter some of the contexts and mechanisms we inhabit in current western society.
Their proposals are not complementary but do co-habit through this event beyond agreement or disagreement by creating an area (spatial and experiential) of a temporary common.
The work of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė enacts research modes of activating and empowering the self as active part of larger technological concepts. One becomes aware through their piercing practices of the narratives that surround the institutional, the body and the virtual. They softly enable criticality in the moment of exposure by engineering transdisciplinary processes that fundamentally question what we are made of and how do we relate to it.
All researchers work with performance and with the performativity of the event as a field of exploration that deconstructs the world as a given. The making public of these concerns in a transdisciplinary manner, mainly want to politicise the individual as being an actant in the public sphere enacted by the event itself. The participatory is here seen as the moment of inquiry, experiencing and sharing that crosses through the individual to the communal and vice-versa in enabling the non expertise as potential for critical presence.
Are questions related to the self, isolated from the other? Is the self alienated from the communal, the historical, the technological, from the body? How do we practice the spilling of our personal concerns into societal concerns? Where and how do we politicise our practices? Where do we meet? Are we here yet?
Short description of the researches and links to the respective portfolios:
Nassia Fourtouni
is a dramaturg and dance researcher. She came to a.pass with a research upon dramaturgical practice with a focus on the initial phase of a creative process, namely the phase where things are not yet shaped, the phase of nothing.
Having in mind the dialogical relationship in which most dramaturgical practices take place, the first scores she developed were about dialogue and conversation. Gradually, the scores and methodologies developed borrowed the form of a somatic lesson.
In her work she brings together text and experiential anatomy, shaping an expanded dramaturgical practice that can vary in form and content depending on the given context. The aim is to facilitate the appearance of embodied aesthetic experience by addressing the inner sense.
The practice manifests in installations, scores and somatic lessons. Also, it functions as a critical commentary on authorship and the seductive power of language, mainly in relation to the use of instructions.
For the a.pass end-communications, she is developing an in situ audio installation based on a score about the past, the present and the future of the building, using excerpts from texts by Virginia Woolf, Robert Walser and Ivan Illich.
https:///www.apass.be/profile/practicing-interstices/
Goda Palekaitė
is an artist and researcher whose work can be described as a combination of artistic, literary and anthropological practices. Her long-term projects explore the construction mechanisms of historical narratives, political agency of dreams and imagination, and social conditions of creativity. Their outcomes usually manifest as performances, installations, scenographies, and texts.
In the context of a.pass Goda continued her investigations on the construction of historical and political ideologies, and the agency of imagination in processes of legitimization and instituting. Her interest lies in narratives, stories and characters of diverse identities, which operated outside the official discourses, and were seen as troublemakers. These people did not see themselves as artists, neither have they had a place in art history; yet Goda sees their modes of operation as comparable to those of some contemporary artists working today.
For the End Communications event at a.pass she is writing a script and directing a performance-conference where three of such characters meet. The debate will take place between a 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the ancient Greek female poet Sappho and a controversial Jewish-Muslim writer and journalist Essad Bay. This semi-scripted debate will manifest as a live discussion between three contemporary artists and researchers whom Goda encountered within the context of a.pass: Nicolas Galeazzi, Marialena Marouda, and Sina Seifee. They will embody the characters, yet contributing with their own practice.
https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=103
Katinka Van Gorkum
is a visual artist interested in the (domestic) interior as a figure for interiority. Previous work includes video, performance and installations, all with a strong physical component. She arrived at a.pass with a desire to explore further the concept of home and how it’s being shaped by ideas, ideologies, theory and philosophy. Besides that, she felt the need to dematerialize her art practice, experiencing difficulties with the inflexibility, heaviness (literally) and the origin of the materials she used. She also had questions about her work as a single-use artwork and art as an ecological act.
She started working with the 3D design program SketchUp which is used by architects and designers. In this virtual environment she tries to exteriorize the interior. Working in virtual space further problematized the question of exteriorizing the interior and brought up questions concerning (dis)orientation, scale, groundlessness, perspective, entering and sharing an interior.
Throughout the a.pass trajectory she has attempted multiple points and modes of entry to the spaces of the research. For the End Communications she intends to open the virtual research environments through a (lecture) performance and screen recordings of the SketchUp spaces, exploring the program as a tool for distance learning in close proximity.
https:///www.apass.be/profile/dear-visitor-a-portfolio-by-katinka-van-gorkum/