September 29-30 Doors open at 5.30. Delaunoystraat 58.** There will be food and drinks. 6pm-12pm: welcome at a.pass for music, film, conversation, spoken word and a dream dungeon. Closing party on the 30th!
mlondiwethu, Carina, Amari and Lore conspire a presentation to conclude the end of a year spent together at a program for advanced performance and scenography studies. They decide to play a game and while they take a walk through the building that hosted them, they slip into character, speaking in the tongue of their research. Through this game they look at the implicit support structures and restrictions in place. They address and sound the different languages and methods they need to adapt to move on an uneven playing field, comparing their different needs, skills, and energy levels, discussing how they can share time and space, the rules they would like themselves and others to play by. This also becomes a metaphor for the spoken and unspoken rules of institutions, of group-making, of ongoing or not yet inscribed forms of collectivities.
For Carina Erdmann’s end-presentation, you will be invited to enter the DreamDungeon, a role-play game set in a subliminal architecture built from the merged dreams and associations of players and attending public. Train your mind in dream recall and submit your dream to become part of the collective memory space and soundscape. Submission will be anonymous.
Want to dive in deeper? We are looking for a small group of core players that attend the dungeon building on September 26/27 and proceed to play the game with the public present on September 29/30. No prior knowledge needed, small compensation, places are limited. Write to Carina (before September 20) if you are interested or have questions: ca.erdmann@web.de.
end presentation, postgraduate program, research center
Gathering around research publications and presentations.
15-30 September 2023 / a.pass
As well as a farewell party!
ant audience
September 15-16: Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Marko Gutić Mižimakov (post graduate presentations)
September 23: Caterina Mora, Gosie Vervloessem, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst, Túlio Rosa (Research Center presentations – Cycle 4)
September 29-30: Amari, Carina Erdmann, Mlondiwethu Dubazane, Lore D Selys (post graduate presentations)
More details very soon!
*
Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site ‘de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience.
The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.
end presentation, postgraduate program, research center
Gathering around research publications and presentations.
15-30 September 2023 / a.pass
As well as a farewell party!
ant audience
September 15-16: Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Marko Gutić Mižimakov (post graduate presentations)
September 23: Caterina Mora, Gosie Vervloessem, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst, Túlio Rosa (Research Center presentations – Cycle 4)
September 29-30: Amari, Carina Erdmann, Mlondiwethu Dubazane, Lore D Selys (post graduate presentations)
More details very soon!
*
Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site ‘de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience.
The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.
The 2 days workshop starts from looking into the possibilities given by the magazine as a format for artistic publications.
If any publication implies a multiplicity of relations and functions, depending on different expertise in the editing and printing process, a magazine entails as well a variety of authors and sources, a diversity of literary genres, and a large spectrum of relationships between the writer/performer and the reader/spectator. A magazine can also alter and play with the tensions and the hierarchies between the serious and the banal. All these features would overflow the centralized and isolated role of the editor.
Stage so near so far is a two-day workshop following the newly published issue of Pages and explores forms of reading based on the printed texts in the magazine.
The new issue consists entirely of plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer’s body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging.
The purpose of this workshop is to explore together (through talk, writing, scoring and movement) some key compositional questions. The particular focus is on length, experienced as sequence and duration, and how to achieve it. Long-ing: how to make things that carry on? (If only for a short while?) Once initiated, how and when to make them stop? Our work will involve looking closely at transitions: the links or breaks between the smaller parts of a composition, as well as beginnings and endings, rises and falls in energy and interest. It will draw on the processes operational in our most immediate surrounds (the different durations of the bodies, objects and forces composing our work-space) and use these as both constraints and materials. It will also involve bringing in certain powerful shapes and positions — social as well as aesthetic shapes such as the circle, the horseshoe or the line –, thinking about the work they do, then testing how to move from the one to other (from the clearing to the path, the scene to the summary). ‘I wish it were longer,’ it is written somewhere in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ‘for I like it truly.’ In the end, the project of long-ing might come down to this: to matters of feeling, liking or not liking, tensions producing curiosities or failing to, and we will consider these vital questions, too.
In the workshop we will explore our unique languages of imagination. We will notice how images move us, and how our actions transform inner landscapes. We will shift perspectives, switch between giving and receiving, doing and observing, dancing and being still. With the help of shifting the eye within and without the body, we will build realities and let go of them, draw inner landscapes and quest into their mysteries. We will speak worlds into being and listen to how they resonate in the body. From this receptive place, we will form our unique dances.
What is here is there. What is not here is somewhere, someone is doing something.
Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrović, Aslı Hatipoğlu and Nada Gambier invite you on a guided tour of wandering, exploring time, invisible structures, in-betweens, tastes of intimacy, heritage, abrasion, fermentation and reparation that ripple through space to mark the end of their research trajectory at a.pass.
There will be food, performances, boredom and a spa.
In the next Assembly of Practice, Emptor proposes the a.pass participants to examine collections as potential places of shared interest, zooming in on questions that come to the surface with the complexity of collecting contemporary art practices, which are increasingly immaterial, performative, situated, ongoing and collaborative in nature. The integration of such contemporary art practices in collections by means of documentation, reactivation protocols and complex contractual relationships may satisfy desires of collection(er)s but don’t seem to create change in terms of care attributed to the needs of a practice, its ecology and sustainability. Conservation and reactivation often stay disconnected from the driving forces, methodologies and contexts of the collected material elements, thus allowing the pieces nothing more than exposure in a curated frame.
Building on from a previous proposal (Night Shift) Nada Gambier in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit now invite you for the Two-Day Shift.
In this working shift, we will dive into the problematics that arise from coming together, engage in improvisational games and strategies, have fun with speculation and bathe in inconvenience as a way to look anew at our practices and get to know our researches from another angle. Once again, our attention goes to what it means to be of service to each other and the works and how by attending to parasites we come to another understanding of what we are doing. The question of desire and learning from what we don’t know will also linger as a larger drive and disorganizing method for the group and researches.
For this cheese-making workshop, a.pass post-graduate researcher Marian Rosa van Bodegraven invites artist and cheese maker Robin Bantigny to host a cheese-making workshop at Radical House.
Martin Flugelman, from FLUXLIAN – a collaborative platform focused on light applied in arts, design, performance, and activism – introduces a two-day laboratory. The workshop consists of experiences and activities using the phenomena of light. We will collectively appropriate lighting technologies, hack and improvise devices to shift the appearance of bodies and space. How to integrate lighting to the artistic practice, staging, cyborging, and researching on light as a narrative element. This is a place to drift into alternative lighting aesthetics by using what is around us. How can we translate ideas in lighting terms? How can a light choreography produce an image-experience? What can we illuminate collectively?
With Anne Juren and her lessons on fantasmical anatomy (March 6-10), we turn to the body as a familiar and unfamiliar site of experience, epistemology and eventually altered potentiality. If the body is a biological product, conditioned by medico-social practices and generational transmissions that precede our experience, how can we simultaneously approach our closest friend and/or foe as ‘a body project’, i.e. as a poetic, fantastical, speculative, imaginative and even monstrous site of investigation that settles and unsettles the conceptions we might have of ourselves, the world and the relations between us? In which way are metaphors influencing the imagination of the body? How is the speculative addressing of somatic practice disfiguring concepts of anatomy? Can horror imaginaries offer a mood to investigate and release our corporeal disorder and vulnerability?
What do you get when a female visual storyteller and a non-binary performance artist walk into a postgrad artistic research program?
–vessels🥚🦪
vesselsbrings the two practices of Anna Lugmeier and Sarah Pletcher together in live performance, process sharing, and ephemeral objects that are either a catalyst to or a product of these research practices. Two objects are being investigated specifically in this sharing of research; Anna’s oyster shells and Sarah’s slip-casted porcelain eggs. These objects serve as a vessel for their separate practices but also as objects to collectively work and question with, through, because of, despite of, and in collectivity with.
Horror stories tell us a lot about our embodied cognition, our ways of seeing, thinking and feeling the world. Without being too functionalist, these literary, comic or cinematographic stories and kids tales are staging fundamental needs linked to our survival: to be able to anticipate danger, to remain on the lookout, to defend oneself, to find resources, to eat, to protect one’s own – in short, to find adequate responses to the conditions of existence that have been ours since the dawn of humanity. At the root of anxiety and fear: is there someone following me? Is the Other a friend or a foe ? Can I trust this person? Will I recover from this unknown weird diseases? Can i trust new sciences ? Is there such thing as pure evil ? Will I be able to survive in inhuman or violent conditions? Have I chosen my home well? What is this shadow that follows me?
Wintertime in the Northern hemisphere, night falls early, huddled around one stove, a dog starts barking, birds flutter, an invisible presence, maybe, a figment of our imagination. The penultimate block of a.pass’ current lifecycle is dedicated to ‘horror and/in collections’, to familiar stories yet untold, or unknown tales needing to be retold.
Block III of 2022 has a cascading structure. The backbone of the block is a mentoring proposition by Radical_House, who invite us to displace mentoring from a.pass’ communal 4th floor to a residential house that has been renovated to accommodate affinities and relations beyond the family that resides in it. In one-to-one or collective mentorings they propose to take this environment as a setting to look at the inheritances our practices stem from, and vice versa, at how we bring ecological/social/urban issues into our homes.
A multilingual space for working together differently, in the unusual context of the night’s darkness. A shift of in-betweens where space is given to that oscillation between one thing and another, between being awake and sleeping, between doing and imagining doing, between one world and another.
We are all in need of more care and care is an often invoked concept to cope with today’s global crises. But how do we practice care within performance? In their week at a.pass, artist, author, and curator jaamil olawale kosoko will consider dramaturgy as an act of care within contemporary performance practice. During mentoring sessions, a Friday-evening salon and a rist of other activities, participants and other cultural workers are encouraged to bring examples of care strategies they find useful in creating socially engaged performance actions that stretch textually and discursively across various genres of liveness and time based art forms. jaamil olawale Kosoko’s approach draws on research methods used in the fields of experimental dance/theater making and dance studies to see what the body can tell us about pressing social issues. From the stage, to the living room, to the nightclub, to the screen, to fantasy, to the privacy of one’s own room, we will explore how care rituals animate the physical art of living and creating in an ever changing world.
The a.pass End Presentations of Gary Farrelly, Inga Gerner Nielsen, amy pickles and Jimena Pérez Salerno will take place on the 29 and 30 September 2022 at artist run space Meyboom, Boulevard Pacheco 34, downtown Brussels, from 18:00 to 22:30.
With singular questions, processes and approaches, the four researches intersect and expand concerns in Demolition, Damage, Deviation, Desire by bridging intimacy and politics in very different ways. Their practices extend from the lecture performance to performative installation, drawing, crossing ritual making and never ending warmups, to research, share and exchange - together with the audience - questions that are embedded in our everyday lives. Read more..
Is a series of dinner encounters which aims to map and introduce four collectives from the Brussels scene to a.pass participants from the September block 2022. Collectives: Common Wallet, Helectolitre, BOSCH and JUBILEE/EMPTOR, are self-organized, or which have alternative approaches on commons, organization, finances and ways of living and working as artists.
Through a format of dinner we will explore how these collectives operate, what are the politics behind the modes of being and working together, where are the difficulties and what are exciting new possibilities of working with different structures. Participants of a.pass will come to the dinners of these four collectives, after these four encounters for the final dinner a.pass will take the role of the host.
Sept 20th, 7pm: Dinner with Hectolitre
Oct 7th, 7pm: Dinner with Common Wallet
Oct 27th, 4pm: Reading Room and dinner with Jubilee/Emptor
For the topic Earth of this block, Isabel Burr Raty invites to collectively think – Earth – by diving into polarities surrounding the fourth most abundant element in the observable universe and the 15th most common in the Earth’s crust: Carbon. Carbon, which originates in the core of stars, has the power to form life, yet to dissolve life as we know it on this Planet. Carbon is the chemical skeleton, required to shape complex molecules like DNA, needed for the development, functioning and uniqueness of humans and almost all other organisms. However, carbon-based fuels dominate global energy use and in the context of climate change, carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas released by human societies. Challenging transnational green efforts to establish post-carbon economies and cementing trans-human Directed Evolution.
During a 4 day encounter based encounter and a series of theory readings, we will be in touch with traditional and innovative practices around the carbon spectrum, as well as post-human critical perspectives on the concept – human – and –nature -. Fabulating with variant Sci-Fi myths be-coming-reality, to inspire alternative imaginaries for the role of the human within the Earth’s life cycle.
a proposal by Simone Basani and Heike Langsdorf / radical_house
With Our Practices / Our Extensions we propose a self-observative and self-critical system for mentoring that acknowledges explicitly the socio-political meaning of such an activity of mentoring and being mentored – a practice in itself: attending to processes not being our own, and vice versa, being attended by eyes and minds outside ourselves.
Inspired by several conversations with current coordinators, alumni, and participants of a.pass, the mentoring system of places at its core the following questions: What do we talk/work about when we touch upon ecological/social/urban issues? How did those issues touch us/our bodies/our hi-her-stories? From which physical/emotional/philosophical site does our research start from?
We want to welcome a.pass participants by acknowledging that we all have different experiences and therefore some undeniable hunches, ideas, inheritances we are provided with by the way/s we live our life/ves and relate to others and other matter/s. Here we share a quote relating to this:
“… inheritance doesn’t come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.” ― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance
For two summer weeks (June 27 – July 10) a.pass is moving to ZSenne ArtLab in downtown Brussels, where it organizes a gathering around autotheory that brings together several approaches to the term and its relation to artistic research practices. The program includes several working sessions, a reading group, a programme of performances, and is curated by Lilia Mestre and Goda Palekaitė. To set a theoretical framework, a two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library and methodological tools to be further explored during the two weeks. Associated researchers of a.pass Research Center – Gosie Vervloessem, Simon Asencio, Rareş Crăiuţ and Vijai Maia Patchineelam – will present their current processes. Finally, a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice will present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda with Charlie Usher, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen, Vladimir Miller, Gary Farelly and Adrijana Gvozdenović.
Kinsscore will be practiced every Thursday of block 2022 II titled “Scoring intimacy with discursive others” (see block post)
The proposal for this score follows on previous iterations of Scorescapes as a tool to practice 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 in collective settings.
If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of one’s knowledge in relation with others’, then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen 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?
The specificity of Kin(s)score is on the fact that we will participate in the score with our research kinships. We will speak with them, through them and us about the questions that our research make apparent. We will discuss and practice what are the political implications of authorship, collectivity and the other.
This public presentation of Vera Sofia Mota and Chloë Janssens marks the end of the researchers’ trajectory at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). After following the year-long postgraduate program they will share their modes of doing, seeing and making artistic research public.
The Block II 2022 proposes to exercise a personal, immediate and performative relation with discourse – through autotheory, speculative history, conversation and collectivity – embodied in a weekly Score. It feeds upon the tension between one’s practice and the other, often absent other who is yet unescapable like one’s ancestor, lover, kin or friend. In other words, we are interested in how discursive beings – those that we encounter only through language – can guide us through our practices?
A longing for togetherness is inherent to the a.pass community. To ensure this togetherness it is necessary to have different strenghtening intra-structures within the larger institutional structure. Especially in disruptive times as we are living in right now – on a micro and a macro scale – the participants of a.pass asked themselves how also they can contribute one of those intra-structures in which we can provide and reflect on care.
CARE is an invitation to five days of five brunches and five talks. Together we want to find out what does care mean under the scope of a.pass as an institution focusing on artistic research. Where or what is care within and around artistic research? How is the act of caring resonating within participants’ practices? What and who needs (more) care? Is care (somewhere) missing?
Arquivo Atlântico is a multi-chpater research project by Beatriz Cantinho and Túlio Rosa, in collaboration with Jose Capela and Nuno Torres. Arquivo Atlântico is an investigation on the notion of memory, on the possibility of re-membering differently places, peoples and knowledges.
This is a non-exhaustive account of Ana Paula Camargo’s trajectory through a.pass, where she developed a big part of her PhD research. This is also a laboratory to experiment the boundaries where theory and practice finally blur each other. It is a celebration of collaboration (wanted and unwanted), of encounters, differences, misunderstandings and bonds.
The first block of 2022 will focus on politics of space and on care practices. It is build around the framework of ‘Poliset’ facilitated by Vladimir Miller with focus on collective building processes within institutional environments to shift the relationship between practice, space and authorship towards commoning and self-organization. The framework of the Participants Assembly will bring curatorial input on CARE on the second part of the block.
Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir take us for two walks in SPA in the context of their research ‘7 WALKS (resolution)’. The context of SPA offers the unique opportunity for a series of itinerant reflections on water and art. Drawing inspiration from the intangible legacy of historical walkers — kings and czars, political refugees, artists and philosophers — and, strongly anchored in a local context, Heiremans and Vermeir propose to explore a balance between private property of and access to resources that we hold in common as a society. Can SPA inspire to unbundle the proprietary rights that have been stacked around authorship and (land) ownership, i.e. two paramount features of Western subjectivity?
During Bleed is inevitable, Agency invokes Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable)), a copyright controversy related to a pedagogical program in prison and the oscar nominated documentary Scared Straight!. During the court case, the judge had to decide if the pedagogical program was a dramatization of prison life and whether it could qualify for the protection of copyright as a work of performance art. At a.pass we will revisit the moment of hesitation during the court case and dwell on the problem discussed in the case as a way to fabulate different outcomes. What happens if ‘facts’ become included in a reciprocal way within artistic practices?
Identities is a science-fiction LARP in which aliens of humanoid appearance from various planets are gathered for a very special experiment.
If you could become the person you dreamt to be, or at least someone who would function in harmony with the world around you instead of bumping into it, would you be tempted?
Whether it’s a dream or a necessity for you, the people of Cori, a type IV planet in the Omega 9 galaxy, can help you. Indeed, the Coriphes have psychic powers that allow them to durably modify one’s spirit and personality.
This day is organised around a para-legal document, ‘Collective Conditions for Re-Use’ (cc4r). Cc4r is an authorship license in-the-making, a reluctant contract that tries to make space for collective care around authorial practice.
The block “Bleed is inevitable” starts from the premise that we are inhabited by several voices – be them spiritual, psychological, political, juridical, institutional, identitarian, non-human, culture-historical, assigned or acquired, short or long term,… – and that we are subject to environments that bring these voices into dialogue or conflict, or muffle them. During the block, the a.pass researchers are invited to think their interactions from the perspective of role play, and to create artificial environments in which to experiment with and dis-equilibrate an individual or collective constitution of voices. It is a guided exercise in letting go of what one knows or thinks to know and a prodding for delineated and contrived spaces to speculate on different modes of being together in the world.
History will always be in the room though. In LARP (Live Action Role Play)-vocabulary ‘bleed’ refers to the experience of transferral between real-life and game-world. In-game experience inevitably spills back into life, and vice versa, one’s game character and world is inevitably inspired by real-life experiences and self-perception. LARPers have developed techniques to halt or hold this zone of oscillation, between what is and what could be. While closure of play might be a necessary tool to keep up with ‘real-life’, we could also question the ‘right to a proper end’ as particular to Western storytelling tradition, with consequences for what we think a proper life or story is. ’Bleed is inevitable’ invites the a.pass participants to question and reinvent assigned roles, investigate the ideological space of ‘bleed’, as well as experiment with techniques of game-design within artistic research.
“Bleed is inevitable” is an assemblage of different curatorial proposals that have been in conversation for a longer period of time. Not seamless, but definitely more than tangentially connected, therefore with the ongoing challenge to superimpose and retrace how they spill into each other.
June 11th 16-18h and June 12th 19-22h at De Markten
Dragon Love (?) gathers the research outcomes of Andrea Zavala Folache, performer, choreographer, visual artist and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc, performer, choreographer and film maker. After attending to the one year postgraduate program at a.pass.
Both artists address and investigate construction paradigms of the self. Their work studies auto-fiction in different ways, with the desire to develop tools to resist predefined categorisations of identity that bind us to expect certain formats of art production and ways of living.
Cracks and Containers is a small gathering organised by Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens and Túlio Rosa, it will take place on the 15th of May at a.pass from 12h to 18:30h. More than a place for presentations, it is thought about as a space to engage in dialogues and conversations, to allow thoughts and questions to emerge, to cross, combine, to be put in tension or to be desintegrated for a little while.
Cracks and Containers proposes to address questions around the notion of coloniality in relation to artistic practices, trying to understand what it might mean, what are the processes it includes, what images it produces or evokes, what dynamics it sustains. The desire being to understand how artistic practices, looking both to the past and to the future, can help us to navigate the present; how can we acknowledge our present with the urgency and criticality it demands. They want to do this together, by being inspired, challenged, contradicted, embraced, transformed.
Cracks and Containers hosts: Quinsy Gario, Saddie Choua, Sami Hammana, Sophie Deckers and Kristien Van den Brande , Amy Pickles, Choe Janssens and Túlio Rosa.
I feel like leaving the room is the title of the postgraduate End Presentations of researchers Rui Calvo (film maker), Quinsy Gario (poet, visual and performance artist), Adriano Wilfert Jensen (choreographer), Magdalena Ptasznik, (choreographer) and Kasia Tórz (dramaturg and writer).
After attending to the extended one year program at a.pass, the five researchers finish their trajectory with an online presentation of a collective website. Covid 19 and the restrictions of the confinement have framed the space of these public presentations in an uncanny entanglement between the private and the public. I feel like leaving the room is more than anything the (liminal) desire to come together. The form of this coming together takes shape around an ad-hoc TV show that will be streamed the 29th of January from the a.pass studio as an attempt to still intertwine thoughts and experiences.
In the beginning, the space for this public moment was imagined as a living room, as a place where the borders of the informal and the formal are blurred. Not as a real physical living-room but by using the conditions implied in such well known private (though public) environment, with the aim of engaging the audience in a different way. What happens when research becomes public as a workshop, a power point presentation, a film, a dance or a walk that steers from such a hangout surrounding?
As a consequence of the pandemic that determines the conditions of coming together – the living room became the desired ‘leaving room’ – a place, as well, between the private and the public but enclosing the publicness in separated private spaces with only one window – a window to the virtual. The artists researchers addressed that liminal space in various ways in accordance with the medium they mainly work with. Inevitably, the translations that will take place, address the current situation of the confinement, while trying to reach out to the world.
An asylum is a place of refuge. Of taking leave of the world for a limited period of time. It is a place out of the world. Where rules function differently. Where people without a place of belonging are temporarily ‘parked’ in order to mend their ways. It is a place for the ones that don’t fit the grid: mental patients, refugees, people suffering from ailments of all kinds. Desiring bodies, in search of papers, legitimacy, acceptance, health, reconnection to the outside world.
In that sense it is also a place of hope, a world-in-a-world where difference can live and be accepted. Maybe even celebrated. Where the norms are temporarily suspended, and common sense rules no longer apply. In this gap, in this suspension, wild thoughts can go unchecked. Dubious behaviour flies under the radar.
At the end of the every block the curator writes a documentation of what happened in the block. The reason to do it, is to pass on pass on some information to the other curators and also to develop on and add to the archive of methodologies at work at a.pass.
I will be writing this report as I am the designated block curator. It would be great to have a conversation about the work(shop) that you proposed. I suggested this interview format so that you don’t have to write a report. I have the Intuition that reporting would be strange in connection with your workshop and your work in general.
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.
For Dismantle Space, a website has been created in collaboration between the researchers and web designer and editor Sven Dehens in order to compile the works that have been developed in the frame of the artistic research environment of a.pass. This website hosts the complicities and differences of the four researches and it will address the infrastructural concerns each of them entails Read more..
To be a contemporary artist comes with a lot of prerequisites these days: unspoken discourse rules, critical norms, and a general salonfähig consensus about values like fluidity, horizontality, collaboration, etcetera… Often these values are taken for granted while a strong discourse is ruling the artist’s world, zooming in on any hint of postcolonial insensitivity, patriarchal blindness, gender observations, and faintly non-consensual power use. This attitude stems from the bountiful history of feminist and queer studies, cultural studies insights, and a general growing awareness of her-stories and the damage done by biased educations and cultural misgivings. But at the same time there are also a lot of other untouched territories underlying these value markers: 19th century romanticism, liberalism, humanism, … Each one carrying within it a very specific view of what it means to be a human being in this world, how we are connected and what we are able to convey.
As a performer you provide your audience with something that cannot be measured in material terms. As regards the activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity, your labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as work – activities involved in defining and determining cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and, on a strategic level, public opinion. As a performer you are primarily a producer of subjectivity. Typically, an artist’s value does not lie in what they “do” but in what they “are”. Now, remember, for example, how Richard Florida described the processes of gentrification caused by the migration of artists and creative workers – the artists may or may not be aware of the value of their mere presence but on a larger scale they produce “results” simply by existing. Survival in the (performing) arts requires creativity that goes beyond the artworks one creates. In fact, a typical performing artist spends about 99 percent of their time off stage – as an audience member, a critic, an administrator, a networker, friend, mentor, student, teacher and so on. Inventing and re-inventing oneself on and offstage, adjusting to various situations, restrictions, moving from project to project, one residency to the next, brimming with creative energy, training and forever educating oneself is the way forward.
