information, lecture, performative publishing, project, reading session
a.pass, Moussem, SOTA, Lagrange Points A global reading of the Gaza Monologues
29 November 2023 / The Whirling Ear - Kunstberg, 1000 Brussels
International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
GAZA EN
The ASHTAR Theatre in Ramallah is calling on theatres and artistic organisations around the world to perform the Gaza Monologues on Wednesday 29 November and share images of the performances on social media. The play, produced by the Palestinian theatre company in 2010, consists of 31 testimonies from children and young people who lived through the war in Gaza in 2008 and 2009. In short monologues they recount what happened to them during those weeks. As the violence in Gaza has viciously erupted again, the text is as relevant today as it was 13 years ago.
The United Nations General Assembly has declared November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. That is why ASHTAR Theatre is calling for the text to be performed again on that day.
Several cultural houses and many artists in Flanders and Brussels are responding to this call, as well as organisations in 40 other countries. Together with SOTA, Moussem and Lagrange points, a.pass will organise a reading of these monologues in different langues in the public space: at the statue of Godfrey of Bouillon in the heart of Brussels.
In exchange for the use of the text, a financial contribution will be made to ASHTAR Theatre’s fund, which is dedicated to the psychosocial well-being of Palestinian children and trauma therapy.
By reading these monologues, we want to express our solidartity with the Palestian people. Reading can give a voice to those unheard, provide a platform to the voices that are currently being silenced. We have read, heard and seen many testimonies of the victims of the brutal terrorist attack on 7.10.2023. We got to see their faces in the newspapers; on television, we heard their stories and got to know their families. And that is undoubtedly how it should be.
When it comes to Palestinians, however, we only hear numbers: 5.000 killed, 10.000 killed, 15.000 killed. Reading these 31 monologues is a call for putting a face and a voice to the thousands and thousands people, children, who lost their lives. Those that simply can’t remain unheard and unseen.
Wednesday November 29
15h-17h at The Whirling Ear Fountain
between Koningsplein/place Royale & Kunstberg/Mont des Arts 1000 Brussels
lecture, workshop
Áron Birtalan Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies
15-16 May 2023 / a.pass 4th floor
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Inspired by devotional practices from the Late Middle Ages, this workshop explores mystical languages as somatic and performative technologies. Focusing on spoken language and tactile ways of engaging with text and images, we will create affective relationships between bodies and matter. Contaminating the lines between a within and a without, mystical languages become an interface for intimate bonds with the unknowable and unreliable. Topics include: image as induction, reading as annihilation, text as embodiment and touch as giving birth. We will familiarize ourselves with the historical contexts and theologies of the body in Christian mysticism of the Late Middle Ages, using it a lens through which we can re-encounter the now.
Read more..lecture, postgraduate program
Oxana Timofeeva On the Soul
19 November 2020
Video recording - online talk
Oxana Timofeeva
On the Soul
A talk and a conversation on the soul. This talk took place on November 19th.
The talk was proposed by Adriano Wilfert Jensen and supported by the a.pass participants assembly as part of a new modality of participants curated content at a.pass.
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Close Encounters series Zones of disobedience
6-6 February 2020 / ISELP & a.pass
Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma
When institutions have come to embody their own institutional critique, when participatory art becomes the new weapon of the established normalising order, and when attempts to further develop forms of artistic resistance are almost instantly liquefied in the commodifying reason of the market, a series of questions arise: Is it still possible to disobey? What could the forms of disobedient work be today? What new strategies should be invented in this context? How can one give the public the incentive to transgress its fears, inhibitions and limitations?
Having these questions as a starting point, “Zones of Disobedience” opens up a space for discussion, reflection and debate. It presents examples from the past and the present and from across the spheres of the artistic and the political in order to problematise sets of relationships, conceptual frameworks and behaviors. These have to do with ideas about monuments, myths and experiences of the city as space but also as a site of memory, of belonging and of envisioning a future.
“Zones of Disobedience” offers an evening of contestation, blurred limits, shifts and negotiations.
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Close Encounters series Conditions for the work
5-5 May 2018 / a.pass, 4th floor
Sofia Caesar / Femke Snelting
times_to_reflect_on_16_670
For this episode of Close encounters, Sofia Caesar and Femke Snelting have invited each other for an afternoon of conversation about contracts as propositions and elements as conditions. Both are involved in related but very different practices that they will present and bring into discussion with each other and the public.
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Close Encounters Series
21 October 2017
Close Encounters is the name of a series of presentations and public conversations organized by the a.pass Research Centre, which takes place when researchers are invited, or feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. The series is curated by the associate researchers and the current research curator Pierre Rubio.
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Close Encounters series Semiotics of the Uncanny
21 October 2017 / a.pass 4th floor studio
Dr. Dalila Honorato / Isabel Burr Raty
Photo by Erik Peacock - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
Semiotics of the Uncanny will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior. Hybrid Art contributes to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creates new alternative technological materials and objects for empowerment and resistance against high-tech capitalist imperialism.
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Close Encounters series A dialogue on Active Archives
27 January 2018 / Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080
Nicolas Malevé / Femke Snelting
Active Archives
As a case study and exemplary project/practice, Nicolas Malevé, Femke Snelting and Pierre Rubio will discuss the long history of Active Archive.
What can the different iterations of Active Archives tell us about the condition of engaged artists-researchers-archivists? What were the historical conditions that stimulated its genesis? And after all these years -punctuated by profound technological, cultural and institutional changes- how is its evolution and relevance today?
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Close Encounters series A conversation-on-exhibition
25 January 2018 / Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080
Marcelo Rezende / Adrijana Gvozdenović
Adrijana Gvozdenović, "Who is Adrian Lister? or Уметник работник роботник", publication, 2016
Marcelo Rezende and Adrijana Gvozdenović share their stories and experiences about their (critical) practice of exhibition making. How can you produce meaning and experience that matters? Why do we still believe in reality?
Read more..lecture, postgraduate program
Book Club #6 A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY
9 March 2017 / a.pass
Book Club Series / Laurence Rassel
The Laurence Rassel Show
The a.pass Book Club welcomes “what if” expert-consultant Laurence Rassel. Long ago she diagnosed the vacuity of artistic practices when its formats of knowledge-production are not ‘situated’ in an ecology of art that encompasses social and psychological factors. Paradoxically she considers fiction, science-fiction, narratives and role plays as paramount tools to achieve that goal. Laurence Rassel will address the notion of ‘Radical Hospitality’ by revisiting Stitch and Split, and some of the curatorial operating principles and practices she developed in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona as an engaged feminist curator.
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Book club #7bis An Animal Escape Case
10 March 2017 / a.pass
Book club series special event / Sina Seifee
Tessa Farmer - 2010 A Darker Shade of Grey
The essay-performance plays with some standards of cross-species identification according to an Indo-Iranian mode of subjectivity and my own animal-findings in contemporary Tehran. We zoom in what the idea of "wilderness" withholds in technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate domestic life and quotidian of middle ages of this neighborhood. Through fairy-tale associations the lecture investigates operative non-understandings in old and new threads of cosmology that formulate reciprocity and being-with of the mediated non-humanity and investigates the cases of failed collaboration between species.
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Book Club #7 Politics of Speculative fabulation
10 March 2017 / a.pass
Book Club Series / Fabrizio Terranova
Dr Marboeuf
"We need new types of narratives and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made and experienced." In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis - Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble” and present the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.
Read more..lecture, postgraduate program
LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY
8 March 2017 / a.pass
screening and presentation by Dr EDWARD GEORGE
The influential Black Audio Film Collective crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. Interviews with esteemed musicians, writers, and cultural critics are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief,” who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future. Dr Edward George, the writer, researcher, presenter of this ground breaking science fiction documentary, will present and discuss the film and its themes of music, Diaspora, science fiction, and its engagement with Afro futurism.
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Veridiana Zurita don’t eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me
24-24 October 2015
invitation research sharing
Los Angeles, Kinderreiche Familie
24/10/2015, 7-10pm, a.pass studio, de bottelarij
In 2014 I started working as an artistic researcher in a.pass. Since then I developed three different projects. ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of a river community in the Amazon and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between me and my parents. Through these experimental set-ups I gathered a lot of materials of various kinds. Now I would like to share these video’s, texts, experiences and set-ups with you. I would be happy to host you during an evening-long sharing of materials from the research, and offer an idea of the contexts and imaginations that brought these ongoing projects to life.
More information here
lecture, postgraduate program
Patricia Reed mobile orders
30-30 May 2015 / aleppo
‘Order’ in and of itself, is a structural proposition in which sets of functions, behaviours, relations and norms can play out (while making other operations impossible or extremely difficult to carry out). Within the ‘social’, order is largely cultural, meaning productively artificial, subject to infinite mutability. So to demand ‘order’ is not (necessarily) to seek to submit oneself to relations of authoritarian dominance, but to seize upon structural possibilities as a project for construction. ‘Order’, in this way, is mobilised as an affirmative project – a freedom to construct new systems of cohabitation (rather than simply a freedom from something).
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Elke van campenhout the tender institute
12 January 2013
“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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