research portfolio

Unproductive will Jimena Pérez Salerno 2022

UNPRODUCTIVE WILL a choreographic practice installation 

a.pass postgraduate program 2021-2022

SEPTEMBER 2022

research portfolios 

PORTFOLIO block I Unproductive will click me!

PORTFOLIO block II Unproductive will click me!

PORTFOLIO block III Unproductive will click me!

project’s abstract

How can we create a different relation to time than the one the western worldview imposes on us? How can we produce market-wise non-productive things? 

Unproductive will is a choreographic practice installation that is part of a larger research. It suggests revisiting our relationship with the hegemonic notion of linear time and productive behavior. It proposes thinking of them as collective colonial wounds and impositions that run through our practices, affective bonds, and lives wherever we are. 

I am developing exploratory collective practices such as Kung Fu tuning (a counter-normative body practice using simple martial arts warm-up), Collective readings (Payada: a popular folk music genre involving poetic recitations), and Technologies of attention (peeling vegetables following a choreographic score) to name some of them. I work with the idea of a never-ending warm-up to re-think the idea of practice and to engage with everyone who participates as a collaborator. This process does not seek an end but wants to remain in the continuity of the search. 

I started my trajectory in a.pass exploring the normative notion of linear-productive time and how it is embodied in our behavior because I am interested in its political dimension. I observed how much thinking in a forward direction brings associations that build a certain life perspective. For example, forward-better-future-progress or backward-worst-past-degrowth. This reinforces a system of values creating a sense supported by binary thoughts. 

In an attempt against this logic, I followed a contradictory path. I stepped forward to my past. During the presentation, in a playful way, I will share practices and connections to my sentimental and cultural education, aiming to create an experience of political awareness. 

I am interested in observing the transformations the project traverses in each place it is presented. To change its language and perspective, that is to say, the thickness that its affective, geographical, and political implications take both for me and those who participate in the experience. This research challenges the definitions of audience-participant, performance-practice, and encounter-training affecting the presentation dynamic that sets all of them in motion.

This research takes the notion of Dispersion* as a method and the use of strategies such as inversion, interruption, bifurcation, turning back, or non-direct associations as its main tools. These words-actions served as an entry point to explore time logic as well. To work with the idea of Dispersion requires postponing the need to define a use for the research materials. It implies waiting until a dialogue emerges from the situation of being with the materials that are, in part, intuitively arranged. That enables a reciprocal path to relate the experiences and elements that set up the research. 

With the desire to articulate strategies that go in another direction than the notions of accumulation, linear time, and progression, I propose to look into the vibration between dispersion and attention strategies, enabling a mode of relation that seeks other possible ways of organization.

^{*Note: For an accurate translation we should have used the English word Scatter. The decision to use the word, Dispersion, follows the Spanish meaning and its resonances. Dispersion must be understood both on the level of the spatial distribution of things and on how the focus fluctuates.}

Bio 

Jimena Pérez Salerno is an Argentinian artist, based in Brussels (BE). She works and researches between Brussels and Buenos Aires. She experiments in the performing arts, artistic research, and teaching fields. As a dancer and choreographer, she collaborates and engages continuously with other artists as a fundamental part of her exploration of collective work. She considers choreographic practice like an expanded relations system that enables modes of imagination, attention, and coexistence. It leans towards performative practices that contemplate the activation of an unexpected context to think together through the experience of an implicated body. In her last project, she has been researching on the concept of expanded choreography as a critical modality for political awareness, reflecting on linear time and productive behavior.

+ info: https://cargocollective.com/jimenaps IG: @sashimishimi

Special thanks 

a.pass team: Lilia Mestre, Kristof Van Hoorde, Joke Liberge, Kristien Van den Brande, Steven Jouwersma, Sina Seifee, Hans. 

End communication researchers: Gary Farrelly, Amy Pickles, Inga Gerner Nielsen.

a.pass researchers during my trajectory: Carolina Mendoça, Chloe Janssens, Vera Sofía Mota, Ana Paula Camargo, Federico Protto, Nathaniel Moore, Tulio Rosa, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Aleksandra Borys, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Anna Lugmeier, Asli Hatipoglu, Lore, Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrovic, Nada Gambier, Sarah Pletcher.

research portfolio

amy pickles

flow through this link to amy pickles portfolio

research portfolio

Gary

Gary Farrelly (1983-2077) – IT IS OFFICIAL POLICY TO APPEAR UNMOVED

research portfolio

To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen

3 June 2022

Research Portfolio Chloë Janssens

Download here: Portfolio_mobile_CJ

Keywords: soil, underground, mediation, role play, rehearsal, semi-fiction, collectivity

I combine cravings and knowledge from climate activism and graphic design in an artistic practice that investigates the soil as a basis of place and futuremaking.

To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen 

“The sandy soils of my birthplace ‘de Kempen’, Belgium form the dry landscape of my research. I observe my ancestors preparing the earth for agriculture by obsessively moving cow-shit from the stalls to the fields. I can smell the cattle’s breath, the farmer’s spit, my grandmother’s sweat and the excrements in the soil. After the famine we begin to enrich our lands with chemical fertilisers and radio-active uranium ore. When I stick my fingers in the earth here and tune in I can hear metals nagging, minerals singing, and bones twisting and turning in the underground. My imagination is haunted by this vibrating mass of elements holding stories from elsewhere. What to do with this pulsing scoop of dirt in my hand? I hold it with disgust, I peak into it, twirl my fingers around. I try stamping on it to free its story.”

The research proposes that a collective reading of this scoopful of earth becomes a basis for an urgent reflection on our entanglements with the places that we inhabit. I invite the audience as a co-researcher in need of a tool for reading the soil. As a tool, I use literal and metaphorical sieves to better understand our positionality and implications in the soils condition. How do these polluted soils that we create and inhabit inform, shape and guide us?

Toolkit of the research

As a real Virgo and desperate prepper I’m looking for tools to assist me in my artistic practice. In this portfolio, I share with you the tools and skills I am discovering, developing or temporarily forgetting in my artistic research. I talk about my work through these tools to share with you my current methods and approach to research and art-making.

— Sieves

— Facilitation

— Semi-fiction

— Sensuous strategies

— Graphic Design

Sieves

I understand a sieve to be a dividing tool. A tool to temporarily separate certain bits to form meaning. The meaning can be read on the surface of the sieve as well as in the remaining mass. The sieves themselves determine what will be caught, and what is able to ‘escape’. Because the materiality of the device is in the thread as well as in the holes. Julian Barnes describes a net as “A collection of holes, tied together with string”. When I replace ‘string’ with ‘material’, this could be the definition of the sieves I have been using in this research. In that sense, the material is connecting the holes, keeping together what temporarily escapes. As a designer, I’m interested how the design of the sieve holds it’s outcome, or is it possible to design open-endedly? To not define what we want to catch or capture?  

Metaphorically, as an artist and Pisces moon, I think of what is flowing through the holes. Marilia Librandi wonders if we can spy the world through the hole, and which different perspectives this will bring for us. She is a scholar who thinks the net as a territory of activist, ecological and artistic interactions in relation to Amerindian and riverside cosmogonies. About her writing she says: “The pressure of linear story writing is very strong. More than the net, it’s the hole that I want to weave.” 

It’s an ongoing practice of letting the different holes in the narrative of my research exist and refuse weaving the thread combining them. Weaving the holes also means letting complexity be, and not forcing direct connections. 

Interpretation, meaning-making

I got this image and urge to put my hands into the soil and filter out meaning and guidance. To let the soil guide us, as we do with the stars. To add the gesture of looking down for guidance, to the gesture of looking up. By using my own hands as sieves, it isn’t only the remnants that speak, but also the experience of touching and feeling the mass. I will elaborate on ‘touching’ in the ‘Sensuous Strategies’ item in this toolkit.

When you’d search for options on ‘how to read the soil’, different search engines will give you a multitude on tactics. There’s pH strips or, when the soil is still in place, we can observe what grows out of the surface of the ground. Rather than the current vegetation, I’m interested in the seeds the soil holds for emerging futures. These seeds I don’t only see as literal seeds for plants, but also as a metaphor for materials in the soil holding questions and responsibilities for the future, which f.e. uranium is doing. Reading the soil for me became, among others things, both a historical as an intuitive practice.

Sifting paper

In a.pass (2021-2022) I engaged in a paper making practice. Making paper is done by using a sieve. First old paper is mixed with water until the paper completely falls apart. Then, this mixture is sifted and pressed on a cloth mostly in a rectangular shape. This process of working with old paper with texts we had been reading, or material I had been working with, helped me compost different entrypoints and interests in my research. By going through the printed texts again, I selected bits of my research that were important, and other bits that could go. The latter were mixed to pulp, and made into new paper. The images or pieces of texts that I considered important were mounted on top of the new paper. Holding it as a new material to work with into a new stage of the research.

Facilitation

I’m interested in negotiating collective conditions. During my time at extinction rebellion I grew an interest in collective conditions that are ‘doable’. No ideal situations, but pragmatic ways of being together with an openness to be ‘contaminated’ by the beliefs of others. Being on the intersection of the arts, activism and design, I feel there’s a lot to discover for me about the practicalities of collective conditions during polarisation.

In these collective conditions, I’m interested in the figure of the facilitator, a position that is in constant negotiation. Facilitators try to keep openings for things to emerge, and at the same time manipulate conditions to actually produce something; a decision, a conversation, new ideas,… This friction I find exciting.  

Chelsea Meijer

To deepen and further explore different perspectives, I started to work with role play. For myself, I created an alter ego called Chelsea Meier, that embodies my slightly militant and sexual fantasies. Chelsea is less of a people pleaser than I am, she dares to manipulate the conversation more and isn’t afraid to share her own thoughts, beliefs and knowledge with the group. Through Chelsea I’m curious to learn and question the role of the faciliator as a ‘neutral’ position. I’m trying to discover and play with manipulation from the ‘trusted’ figure of the facilitator. Chelsea, for me, talks to authority, control, guidance, leadership amidst emergency. 

Role play

Together with me, also the audience is invited to shapeshift. I wonder if changing body, can also influence your thoughts and behaviour. During my design education at the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, I was taught the ‘form follows function’ principle which states that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose. I am interested in the opposite. Being a shapeshifter myself I wonder, could changing ‘form’ change your ‘function’, or transgress the borders of ‘identity’ and negotiate new thoughts and new ways of inhabiting your form or body? Can embodying another point of view in a semi-fictional reality soften our beliefs in our everyday reality, and create openings for contamination?

On Coloniality

4-day event, 10-13/11/2021, KBK, Brussels

An actual setting where I’ve worked with collective conditions was the event ‘On Coloniailty’ that Amy Pickles, Tulio Rosa and myself organised in the frame of a.pass. ‘On Coloniality’ was a proposition for a temporary context for collective study. Through different artistic and theoretical speculations we studied coloniality and its manifold dimensions.

Our understanding of coloniality departed from ideas developed first by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, and later expanded by many others, such as the semiotician Walter Mignolo and feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. Coloniality is an idea that points to the modes of organisation of power in so-called colonized territories, and how this extends out into supposedly postcolonial states. It differentiates colonialism, as a historical process, from its legacies. We have been thinking about ways to describe how the colonial rationale is at the very basis of our modes of social and political organisation, how those supposed histories have collapsed into, resonate with, and form our present.

There is a shared desire between the three of us to learn how to articulate coloniality through artistic practices. Our collaboration has grown out of our individual motivations to discuss and re-narrate the colonial practices of the countries where we were born – UK, Brazil and Belgium- and challenge the dominant narratives that compose these histories. We are drawing connections between different times and locations by following closely methods of appropriation and extraction of land, resources, labour and data. Through different artistic practices we want to draw parallels, observe symmetries and find correlations across colonialism as it exists across all aspects of our lives; institutionally, economically, in corporations, governance, everyday structures of living and our bodies.

‘On Coloniality’ was hosted in KBK, an alternative space near Saint Cathrine, in Brussels. It was a porous programme open to the public. An exhibition hosted the programme that consisted of reading and listening sessions, screenings, a performance, workshops, public conversations and discussions.

For On Coloniality we learnt from and with: Jeyanthy Siva, EZLN Delegation (Gira por la Vida,) WORKNOT! X Sarmad (Alireza Abbasy, Golnar Abbasi, Arvand Pourabbasi) Daniela Ortiz, Saddie Choua, Satch Hoyt, Sami Hammana, Glicéria Tupinambá, Vermeir & Heiremans, Line Algoed, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Elodie Mugrefya, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Helena Vieira and the Institute of Colonial Culture (initiated by Philippe Mikobi and Maarten Vanden Eynde).

Semi-fiction

I often find reality stranger than fiction. I like to work on the verge of the almost believable. To keep a space open for a naivety that is willing not to learn. The semi-fiction interests me as a space in which many things are possible, and the actual is reconsidered. I like to look for the absurdity in every-day situations, and use that as gateways into a collective imaginary. Semi-fiction offers me a method to freely combine different times and places. Just like relativity theory in physics I try to access the complexity of everyday life by bending time and space .  

Brochure Hades

In the frame of my research on the geological disposal of nuclear waste in Belgium I worked with the HADES laboratory, an underground lab where every single test refers to a Greek mythological figure. The place itself was already loaded with such mythology, that it gave me a great entry point towards a fictional reading of this space. 

Chelsea researched the specific site of the HADES project and discovered another very important inhabitant of the infrastructure, a young child locked up in one of the tubes, meant for radioactive disposal. The happiness of the inhabitants of the area turns out to be directly linked to the suffering of the child. This case is strangely close to another story that was reported by writer Ursula Le Guin “The ones who walk away from Omelas”. Chelsea reported the situation in the area of the HADES project to be extremely urgent both for the child and for its overhead neighbours.

But also HADES itself understand its tricky situation. Recently they opened up a call for a ‘social project’ that wants to include ‘stakeholders’ in the decision making on how to deal with nuclear waste on the long run. Chelsea saw this as an opportunity to apply for the job to facilitate this process and has been organising councils on the geological disposal of highly radioactive waste since.

Semi-fictional surroundings

I am growing an interest in how surroundings and materials can support a semi-fictional narrative. While researching I like to’make things’. Being in touch with the materials of my research, offers me a dynamic place to interact with ‘what’s there’.

During the trajectory in a.pass, I experimented with paper making. Starting from the paper making workshops, I went to build little sculptures from the same material. I enjoy the ‘habitation’ of the research, to inhabit the materials, texts and places of the research quite literally.

Sensuous strategies

In the risky spaces which Chelsea proposes, I try to enter a semi-fiction through sensuous strategies. I’m a great fan of touching and listening. Some of my favourite materials to work with are: fonts by womxn, handmade, recycled papers, ropes and chains, sexy and furry fabrics, audioguides and soundscapes. 

Proximity is important in my work. Through the senses, I like to get close to things I don’t understand. 

Paper making

During my stay at a.pass I picked up a practice of paper making. I learned to make recycled paper when I was a child and had been practicing every now and then over the years. In a.pass it became a recurring practice that I revisited regularly over the span of the programme. 

In the paper making process I re-use paper from the bin and combine them with breadbags that my family collected during Sunday breakfasts. I like to think of the pulp mixture as a colliding of places. The paper bags have longer fibers, and they are able to hold together the short-fibered recycled paper from the bin.

Lately, I often leave the sieves for sifting the paper out of the pulp mixture aside, and use the pulp as a material for making cardboard, a table, a shelter. All kinds of substances can be added to the pulp such as soil, spinach, blue berries, coffee grind, stones, moss and ink.

Intoxication

To shapeshift, I’m experimenting with drinking a transformation poison. I’ve been thinking about this idea of intoxication or contamination as an alternative for polarisation. Could I allow myself to willingly let myself be intoxicated or contaminated by something other than myself. This openess seems so daring and naïve that it scares me. 

As a concept it’s huge, maybe touching or swallowing ‘otherness’ can make it more concrete and ‘doable’. I try and think about contamination through swallowing or touching that which is considered dirty. Dirtyness often calls for refusal, but could we also be with the dirt and let it shape us?

Audioguide Down Dwars Dela

Down Dwars Delà, Constant vzw, 2021, EbenEzer. Together with Olivia Joret and Amy Pickles. This work is an audio tour that we shared at the end of the Constant Down/Dwars/Delà worksession, close to the Eben Ezer tower in Bassegne, BE. 

(Text by Constant vzw) Down Dwars Delà is a trio of words from English, Dutch and French. These aren’t translations but instead position(ing) that we see as talking back to the places and postures we took, experimented with and visited during these two sessions. We look at these words as forming a vector between the beyond, the out-of-reach and the experienceable world.

Down Dwars Delà was the name of two connected sessions that took place one after the other during the summer of 2021, in two different places. One was hosted at the Eben-Ezer tower in Bassenge, Belgium, the other at the Bidston Observatory just outside Liverpool, UK . Both settings were approached as instruments to reconsider the modes of connection, observation and story-making they foster in relation with their wider historical, geographical, social, ecological, political and economical contexts. (end citation)

Our three voices, and narratives, are characters with different materialities. Rock is one, in its multiple, porous, breathing, extracted and exploited existences. Another is the gas nitrogen, whose role is shifting as rocks story changes. The third is a matrixial perspective, that brings our attention to borders and transferences between us. The tour began on top of the tower, then moved down to the stairs leading to it, a large pile of rocks and an old mine. The audience was added to a group chat on Signal in which audio fragments of the three characters were shared throughout the walk. The tour ended with a sound meditation by Pauline Oliveros in the mine.

We did an iteration of this performance for the group exhibition ‘Unfolding Down Dwars Delà’ in the weekend of 16-18th of December 2021 in SeeU, Etterbeek. In this space we shared debris from the live moment of the tour, in the form of props, sound and our script. Stoney soaps presented here confused senses, and could be carried away by visitors.

Graphic design 

Graphic design and I haven’t always been friends, although I can feel we’re growing closer again. Working as a freelance designer, I can feel how these skills inform a lot how I work with performance and scenography. When thinking about alter ego’s and role play, I often fall back on making moodbards as I would do for clients when designing their branding. 

I also think a lot through images and color. Through making images and collages I get visualisations of a cosmology or imaginary in my head. Through methods of visualisation I can see more clearly affinities between different holes in the net that symbolises my research. Through visualising I find it easier to think about stories in the research too.

On Coloniality, mentoring and publication with Nontsikelelo Mutiti

How to break loose from the grid? How to find a place to design from, a place of familiarity, something I know? How to work with what’s around and ‘make’ from this specific locality? How to relate to graphic design discourse without being burdened by it? These questions informed me during the process of making the design for our event ‘On Coloniality’ that took place from November 10-13th, 2021 in Brussels, Belgium. 

Design comes with the responsibility of directing people’s attention. I find that devastating. It’s a source of magic, to guide someones thoughts, and I have difficulties to negotiate that power.

In September I started teaching a Typography 1 course at Paris College of Art. An engagement that sparked my interest in typography and its political potency. Preparing classes, and meanwhile structuring my thoughts about typography, activated a renewed joy and curiosity in the subject. Seeing the mainly white, male graphic design canon made me aware of the importance to speak from a certain position. I started thinking about the position that I work and teach from. 

That spacial position was the fundament for the design of the visuals for our event ‘On Coloniality’. I started to work with what was lying around. I used scraps from brochures and folders of venues that we visited in preparation for the event. The biscuits and corn crackers I ate continuously got their own place in the design. I felt the urge to process the materials from the preparations into the design.

I was inspired by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, who’m I had the honor to meet for a mentoring in the a.pass programme. Nontsikelelo (among many other things) works with hair braiding as a communication technology to talk with her black community. Her way of working reminded me of the affectivity of communication design. How our communication becomes recognizable by the way it appears to our kin and communities. 

As Nontsikelelo says in our conversation: her education was a training in reproduction. Coloniality aims to make people reproduce what the knowledge-holder already knows. Students are not always trained into formulating their own thoughts. Consciously are not, my design education made me belief I had to reproduce a standard I had no understanding of. I feel this design process was a first step to untangle and get loose from those believes. To compost the thoughts I hold on what design is supposed to be, and find a more synced place to work from.

I published a zine that contains a 3 hour conversation I had with Nontsikelelo Mutiti covering different topics around coloniality in graphic design. We talk about books as objects of power, about design education, about reading and about who’s still doing minimal design?

research portfolio

Portafolio

21 January 2022

Ana Paula Camargo

pdf: Digestion _final 2p

research portfolio

Inter-Materiality Mode

Federico Protto

Various notes from my research period at a.pass from September 2020 until January 2022.

Mentors: Myriam Van Imschoot, Tom Engels, Lilia Mestre, Mika Hayashi Ebbesen, Benny Nemer, Lisa Deml, Isadora Gallas, Amanda Piña


www.federicoprotto.com


(file: 29.08.2020)

Komische Pan Figur, sitzt vorne, Effektmikro, verschiedene Effekte, verschiedene Sprachen 

ich konnte meine Models nie zahlen

ich wollte meine Models nie zahlen

ich habe meine Models nie bezahlt

 -> Beichten in verschiedenen Sprachen, 

bis sich die Sprachen vermischen in Klänge 

bis sich die Klänge auflösen in einen klaren Ton

Ton verwandelt sich in (chorale?) Melodie

sound Pan fängt an

[“i have laboured for free!!!” (???) ]

Song Pan, – adoration of the nature (god) of things

Baumstämme around Halbkreis, wie Waldlichtung, oder viele Objekte, nicht nur Baumstämme aber Klötze und andere bulky objects, natürlich, semi-natürlich, unnatürlich in einer Art größerem Kreis, Zirkel (neue Funde Stonehenge¹ als Vorlage) um eine Haufen Kleidung, gesammelt aus den Straßen Brüssels!

Eine Szene mit dieser Kleidung, Objekte werden beschrieben, teilweise unter hysterischem Lachen, Sound im Hintergrund, wie Motoren, Kettensägen, Ferraris², stressig, Beschleunigung, Fabrik, Produktion.

Zwei Stühle oder sowas, mit high heels dran, oder zwei Stühle als high heels verkleidet, somehow, whatever, Figur sitzt drauf, lacht hysterisch, geht nach hinten, weisse Vorhänge, lang, Nähmaschinen, die Situation von Arbeit, etwas wird genäht und immer wieder von hysterischer Figur zerrissen, Arbeiter nähen es wieder zusammen, 

durational

eine Chor situation sollte hier stattfinden (?).

–

“Und jetzt kommt ‘ne Strophe von Kunst:
‘The contemporary marketing of freedom and the transfer of revolutionary themes from the class struggle to the hedonistic entertainment industry and the creative industry of ideas has resulted in today’s art rarely being articulated along the lines of revolutionary utopia and the emancipatory thinking of the future.’”³

(Monday, November 9th, 2020)

I would like to start these notes on my first block at a.pass with a quote I got sent by a good friend just a while ago:

“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” ⁴
Donna Haraway
 

(File: Beginning of September 2020: Presentation of research in current state)
[updated on the 1st of January 2022]

More than ever it is clear that a sustainable way of working within the field of fashion is urgently necessary. Fashion, as an industry but also as a phenomenon, poses this problem as a systemic core issue of consumerism and a capitalist value system.

Regardless of several attempts of rejecting, and boycotting the fashion system, e.g. as proposed by numerous flip-charts and out-cries by influencers on social media, the question of why to bother finding solutions seems essential. Especially facing the current events of the pandemic, dressing our bodies, transforming ourselves, and role-playing, fashion becomes key protagonists in a lock-down-every-day. But not only that, more than ever, we cover our bodies: masks start to crawl up our faces, and besides being hygienic utilities, they become a further semiotic moment of dressing, a political zone of tension.

Our lives are ruled by everyday rituals, and getting dressed is one of the main acts we are all, collectively practicing. […] So how to tackle this ecological catastrophe ‘fashion’?
[…]

This research approaches ways how to bring fashion elsewhere. Where or what could that be? Could fashion be understood as a certain kind of mode? A state of at*tention and ad*dressing? If so, what is this mode’s materiality like? What are the methods of making this frictional zone of interstice permeable? 

Steinzeit Now:
Kleidung et Banana, Post-Post-Patchwork

‘STEINZEIT now’ is a string of my research stemming from a discourse circle which was first called ‘Kleidung & Banana’ […] initiated in 2016 in London with three fellow fashion design colleges and friends: Agnes Varnai, André Reiner Törner, and Wanda Wollinsky. 

‘KLEIDUNG & Banana’ is a collective discursive attempt rooted in a moment of 2016 when all of us were interning for different high-end fashion brands in London (Hussein Chalayan, Marques’Almeida, J.W. Anderson). This moment emerged from not only feeling exploited but feeling like deliberately incarnating a system of exploitation of young creative and physical labor force, feeling like voluntarily embodying an absolute forced upon crisis, feeling like trapped in the paradox of neoliberalism. From the desire to rebel against and boycott this shared common reality, we founded a fictive fashion brand called ‘Kleidung & Banana’.

[…]

In 2020 we had a short revival of the practice via online-conferences during various lockdowns. One of our main concerns and conclusions was that fashion is dead. This bitter, but almost-pathetic statement produced the idea to understand the current state of fashion as a sort of pre-stone-aged momentum, and the discourse group we formed as a prophetic preparation for a 21st-century fashion-ice-age! 

The proclaimed prophecy includes a manifesto of four pillars:

1 fun (recreate)

2 fuck the system (rebel)

3 cheap-ass (reflect)

4 free booze (re-conquer)

Despite that we all enjoy a drink or two at times, obviously, these four points can be understood as placeholders for methods of preparing for and surviving the upcoming ice age.

The idea is to be a fashion collective on the basis of being a fluid creative discourse circle, beginning from the wish to primarily exchange and communicate thoughts and ideas.

[…]

Moved by the idea of a current stone age of fashion and a possible upcoming world covered in ice, I set up to look into the predecessors of my methods and practices as a fashion designer: where does fashion come from, what are the history and genealogy of the tools and methods I use and practice? How can I unlearn ‘the future’ and ‘the new’ to re-learn ‘the present’ and ‘the now’?

Hence, one first experiment is a series of hand-stitched textile pieces titled ‘Post-Post-Patchwork’. Through investigating historical sewing needles, and hand sewing techniques from centuries BC, I tried to understand how a (larger) body is generated by uniting (smaller) bodies, and how one singular (body) is always multiple (bodies). I started to manically preserve every textile leftover I had, e.g. from scavenged and customized, cropped, or tattered garments collected from the streets, or leftover fabric scraps from designed pieces from previews fashion collections of mine, and interconnect these in a coincidental and raw manner.⁵

The resulting patchworks partly became simple flat textile pieces within the process of editing. Some others though developed into strange miss-fitting harnesses, maybe even into miss-functional porto-garments, questioning representation: not only did this practice create a fuzzy time tunnel, but also suggests an un-learning of the human anatomy, the human body, movement, performance. It trivially produced a meditative sensation of healing, a strange act of rebellion, and ultimately a clash of perspective. 

Esoterikosmos

Letter for K.⁶
30.09.2020

Dear K.!
I am Federico, I just started 1 month ago at a.pass and ur mom told me about this work of yours with your colleges at […], I went to see your musical-holistic performance, maybe you remember me, I was the awkward stranger with glasses, hehe. Anyways, your mum told me to go and see your work bc I am a fashion designer and mentioned that you made your costumes yourself during the period you spend within the location and she also mentioned that you would perform self-written songs. The day of your performance I was in a very bad mood, I don’t even remember why, I just know that I almost didn’t go, I am glad that I went at the end. You know, I never liked saying that I am an esoteric person, I would rather say I am a spiritual, but I started to understand that ESOTERIK just means – translated from Greek – THE INNER or INSIDE – and I think that in my work there is a part which strongly wants to unfold methods and practices which help as a guide o the ‘inner world’ (maybe something like ‘ESOTERIKOSMOS’).
So from my esoteric point of view, going to your performance was very important! The day before I have been writing with a friend of mine in Berlin to maybe record a song together and she plays the Klarinette. Being in a bad mood and then arriving at that location which seemed like an exploded version of your ESOTERIKOSMOS and you playing that exact instrument I had been thinking about – I connected the dots and my mood went up, lightly. I think it is crucial to keep noticing and keep reading these small symbolic ‘signs’, at least as directional meaning (to not give them a ‘good/bad’ interpretation). You know to me they represent a path, it’s relaxing. And then passing your little group in the café the day after it again lightened my mood so I decided to write you this letter, it’s my side of reading the signs.
LONG INTRODUCTION
In my path of arriving here to Brussels and a.pass there was one event which was very relevant for this direction. It’s a trance-like meditation a woman called ANITA practiced with me. It is about finding a place of safety and love and excitement one created within oneself as a child. I think there are several of these spaces within us, for different moments of our life, your performance and the space you created seemed like one of these.
[…]
THE VOICE. The voice is something very fragile, and I feel like even using my voice for 29 years on this planet, I often still have no clue about it. It comes from within! Esp. if used as we do for singing, performing can become a shamanic practice.
It becomes a shamanic practice because the voice, spoken or sung is something coming and activated from INSIDE and it goes also inside the other things, human beings around it (and it goes through us so it can also be understood as something cleansing, cleaning out, cleaning through…) To me the voice is something which very easily becomes a magical tool (or magic itself??) and the voice used in the purest sense (whatever that may mean to each one) is – in my ESOTERIKOSMOLOGICAL understanding – the most powerful. Your voice is powerful, it is really amazing and I loved that it didn’t try to be beautiful but it just was, by being itself, raw and porous and shy.
[…] I hope one day you can hear my voice too.
I want to keep striving for the porous voices, fragility, vulnerability – not singing nice – but           singing        ! 

that’s it!!!!
[…] TBC.

BXL 8/8/2021

Dear K. Now almost 1 year after writing the first part of the letter, I got the impulse to (finally) send it to you. Reading it back I discovered a lot that is very dear to me, which has been abandoned a bit in the depth of human-time-space.
So I believe that the almost-one-year-delay in sending this letter is a relevant factor to re-connect […]. On the 16^th I will sing in Volksroom and it would be awesome if you came!
[…] I am excited
FOR THE FUTURE
xoxo
Federico

Audio Guide:
Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?

(Email to humans, end of November 2020)⁷

Dear fellow Humans!

Here I share with You […] the 1st volume of an audiobook series with the work-in-progress-title

‘audio guide attempt to inter-material fashion research‘ 

****

You will find four approaches of my artistic research on the inter-materiality of fashion in a to me quite new format, the Hörspiel (‘listening play’). The four approaches of Volume 1 are:

1 Pan & the Dystopian Tendencies

2 Vessel of Knowledge 1

3 Excerpts from ‘Notes on the Indios Charrúas’ Translation

4 Augmented Reality

****

I thank Baptiste for his euphonium contribution and Vivian for the accompanying image.

AUDIOGUIDELINK1

1 Pan & The Dystopian Tendencies

[…]

When I was visiting my father in South America in January 2016 I wrote a piece of text with the title ‘I come from different places’. That poem became the Leitmotiv of my fashion collection ‘2017 non-corporeal’ and has since transcended into different forms and outcomes. It is also included in the following sound piece called ‘Pan’ I wrote and produced within the last year.

[PAN MUSIC VIDEO LINK]

Plato said – I quote out of Mladen Dolar’s Book ‘The Voice and nothing more’ – that ‘[…] in order to forestall a truly apocalyptic vision – the end of civilization, a return to chaos initiated by innocuous-looking changes in musical forms – one has to impose a firm regimentation of musical matters.”⁸

One of the rules, “[…] the prime antidotes for combating the monster […]” was to “[…] ban polyharmonic instruments that permit free transitions among the modes, […] in particular the flute […]. The wind instruments have the vicious property that they emancipate themselves from the text, they act as substitutes for the voice, they isolate the voice beyond words. No wonder Dionysus chose the flute as his preferred instrument (remembers also Pan’s pipes, not to mention the mythical connections of the flute with the Gorgon, and so on), while Apollo decided on the lyre.”⁹

Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature, shepherds, and the wilderness is associated with fertility and the awakening of spring. This goatish God, relative of the Satyrs and Fauns, is playing his flutes and borrows his name to the word ‘panic’. It is of no surprise that he is understood as relative of Christianity’s Satan. The death of Pan, which is said to have happened around the year 0, also marks a Copernican twist in the world view: it is said that Jesus was only born because Pan – as only Greek mythological god – had died. This marked a shift within beliefs and also allowed the big entrance of theology into our history. 

[…]

I welcome you on my journey.

****

 

We question materiality: what even is material? How do we store material and how do we identify material?
How do all these questions re-inform the work we are doing, the lives we are living right now?
And what is quality then? Where and how is quality being constructed? And who decides how many filters are just the right amount of abstraction needed to allow reality?¹⁰

Fashion Hypnosis

[…]

[SOUND ON machine forest] 

(maybe twice, je nachdem)

you are at the place of embarkment now.

the weather,

the temperature is the one you love most. 

you are embarking now.

you focus on your favorite body part. 

you focus on its contact with the outside world.

it is wrapped in the material, the fabric, 

you love most. 

it is warm. it is cool. slippery. protecting. maybe expensive.

you chose.

you see the color which makes you feel a specific way.

you are wearing this color at this moment.

you may have smelled the wind today.

you may have sensed it, you have heard it.

you are now wearing the wind. 

all around you.

the wind embraces your skin.

embraces you.

you feel the thin layer of wind between yourself and everything outside.

you consider becoming small. very small, super small, to investigate that sphere between you and outside. 

you jump right into it. 

mini-you jumps right 

into it.

you try this for a moment 

[…]

you try to remember your mother’s perfume the last time you have seen her.

you are embarking now

approach the magical object you are wearing today. 

it is a ring

it is a bracelet

a necklace

it is the wind

it is a building

it is a feeling

it is a memory

it is something hiding somewhere.

you think about its meaning.

What does it mean? this magical something you are wearing today

[…]

You sense the material:

cold, hard, heavy, smooth, 

–

strange

[…]

you breathe and you expand your field to a comfortable size.

U expand or become small.

What is the right size?

What is your right size?

How does this size fit?


You find the right size.

You define the right fit.

You decide to carry this field along for a while.

What is inside of this field?

You fine-tune the fitting of the field

when you found a comfortable fit, 

you spend time in that field.

[…]

[GONG]¹¹

Braids

(End of March 2021)
What are ways to (en)compass all the things that emerge within me?
Abundance VS abandonment?
What emerges from this juxtaposition?

[…] I wonder what string to follow, which thread to hold on to, how do I identify the freshly and finely cut end so that it can be threatened through the needle hole?
Which strings, which thread, which yarn to weave? Into a tapestry? Into a braid? Braiding.
I like braiding.

Recently I started braiding my hair into two tails.
There is something very primordial about braiding. Through simple movement and repetition of the movement, complex shapes, structures and ornaments are constructed.
Braiding hair feels like an act of prehistoric time,
a way to adorn yourself without any adornment,
you need nothing but your hair
and something to tie
you can even fix it with the hair itself.

Interesting that Björk used the hair-braid-artworks of the artist Shoplifter for her Medúlla album cover.¹²
It’s an album made entirely from human voices and sounds coming from the body.

It is like choral music, polyphonic singing,
Intricate, hypnotic, trance like structures, songs, lullabies
Are made entirely from human voices and sounds coming from the body.

Just like the braid itself: sounds and in this case composed sounds, musics, created only with ‘what we got’. […]

Direction is another such thing. Directions are made through the constellation of possibilities, which way to go? Which path to follow, How to move through certain spaces, how to navigate through them? The compass is a tool that tells you which direction to go. It tells you where is North. To know where is North, we also need to know where is East, West, and South.
South East and West are essential for knowing where is North,
South, East, and West are essential for the existence of North.
I want to feel less pressure to be all-encompassing, but let all these strings, all this hair, all these voices, all these directions co-exist, I want to let them breathe.

[…] 

Montevideo, Italy

(file name: HWD TEXT)

[INSERT SCREENSHOTS]

The hunted look, the haunted grace
The empty laugh that you cultivate
You fall into that false embrace
And kiss the air about her face
Who do you think you are?

The tres bon mots you almost quote
from your quiver of literary darts
A thousand or so tuneless violins
thrilling your cheap little heart
Who do you think you are?

[…]

Who do you think you are?
I close with my regards
Well I’m the red-faced gentleman
Caught in this picture-postcard
Who do you think you are?

Trying my best to make the best of your absence
Though the joke gets tired and sordid
And sea-shell hearts get trampled underfoot
Punchlines unrewarded

But even at this distance, it’s not easy to accept
The vision that I chase returns when I least expect it
I’ve fallen from your tired embrace
I kiss the air around the place that should be your face.¹³

Dear Human, [this is an ANGRY letter]

[…]

I want to show you the first source

[CONTACT MIC  EXPLORATION 1]

We should be listening-generators
I think what is extremely needed is that we should learn how to listen, how to bear, how to carry, how to support, how to sustain, how to care, how to be humble, how to be ashamed, how to be real, how to surrender, how to abstain, and how to learn again – to re-learn. I think what is extremely needed is that we should learn how to shut the f*ck up.

Some voices are less relevant at the moment, some voices have been too loud and are just boring now. I think some of us might have already realized that their time to speak up ‘n’ out is – for now – over. And no kicking and punching will help
 like an angry baby who 

JUST

SIMPLY 

WANTS 

THE 

LOLLIPOP (!)

the motherfathering lollipop is not gonna come. 

Upgrade yourself.
The door is locked.
The key is lost.

A genealogically, heritagely, and ancestral connection between us and us interwoven in time-space: who was/is/will be the god*des of our adoration? And how can we actually really channel them fairly and freely?
But in fact, that’s boring, this is not about you or me, but about the interstice between us.

State of  MAXIMIZED CONNECTIVITY.

Death, the Beyond, & Ghosts, the fabric for Vanitas darling: we are not eternal… 
Instead let’s deal here with the stretching we should do, the swinging back and forth. […] We have to develop a new form of ancestry cult, a new methodology to celebrate the past, and thus the present to also re-open the gate to direct our magic towards the future, the ancestors we will be for somebody or something in X years. I think if you understand and internalize this idea and realize that you are meaningless just by yourself, then we are on the same page to develop this new technology, to actually reach out. At this point I am not suggesting anything, I really don’t know what could be helpful to react from here and now on but I sense in my ‘being’ – and with this, I don’t mean a simple bodily notion, that would be too easy, neither a mental or academic one, because that’s not timeless enough, but a real SENSING, like when the bass of an immense sound system in a big fat-ass Madonna-concert arena booms literally through your body, makes the hairs on your legs and arms, all over your skin stand up and shiver, you feel it in your bones, it goes something like this:

BOOM [MAKE DEEP SOUND] – that we need this ancestral-upgrade-technology!

I also feel this: I don’t know my ancestors, where are they from, what did they do in their lives, how did they die, what were their favorite places, favorite colors, foods? What were their memories, desires for the future, what did they wish for, what were their kinks, which of those could they live out, and how? What did they want for me? What do they want from me?

I offer a closer look at the second source:
[CONTACT MIC  EXPLORATION 2]



So, I made a family tree, on my heritage.com. I can go back to about mid-19^th century, with the AI help of this webpage, and I discovered from my father’s motherly side a couple consisting of a man called [unknown] CANAPÁ and a woman called [unknown] FRAQUI. Both surnames are considerably rare to come across today, apparently, Fraqui is a surname appearing mainly in the south of Brazil and in Uruguay. Canapá could appear as a surname in Italy. But looking at the construction of the word, especially the apostrophe on the final a, it grabs my attention. This stressing of the final vowel makes it sound phonetically quite similar to a lot of southern Latin-American words and forms of speaking appropriated from indigenous languages. Even the names of the three biggest Indigenous groups found in the area of Uruguay, namely Guaraní, Charrúa, and Chaná, bear similar phonetic attributes (even if it is not really clear if those names were imposed onto them by colonial forces or not). 
[…] Believe, assumption, no historical notes found. […]. But even more so I wonder who […] are our ancestors, our predecessors? […] So that we can be here, sitting in this institution in Brussel writing sophisticated texts into our crazy techno-devices (for example those macbook laptops all around). Why did a large mass of humans decided pro religions which fix a certain kind of unknown distant spirit to rely on and, contra honoring and celebrating the real heroes: the ones who made us? How do I relate to the place I was born? How are we, foreigners, expected to relate?

[…]

Hello, my name is Federico, I am 29 years old, I was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Against the false belief of the commune worker of Forest in Brussels that Montevideo lies in Italy and thus the falsely noted statement of my birthplace as ‘Montevideo, Italy’ in my Belgian national registration data, I can confirm that Montevideo is pretty much embedded in Uruguay and even more that it functions as its capital city. 


I lived in Uruguay for about 3,5-4 years because after that, a part of my family moved to Germany. We all have Italian passports because our ancestors seemed to largely maybe have been Italians. We all have Italian passports because our ancestors seemed to largely maybe have been Romans. We all have Italian passports because our ancestors seemed to largely have maybe been Latins. Have Maybe been Greeks, maybe been Etruscans, maybe Umbrians, maybe
maybe
maybe
maybe
maybe
maybe.

…

maybe I should do a little dance at this moment, dance practices, dance pieces, and dance during performance applied by non-dancers, seems to be something very trendy at the moment, so as my background and consequently my research base on fashion, it seems that the notion of the following trend is somehow relevant, and to not contradict myself I will dance now a bit.


LUMIDEE FT SPEEDY, SIENTELO, REMIXED (max 01:30)¹⁴

[dann sich auf den teppich legen, evtl contact micro bissl den teppich abtasten, durchschnaufen]

Audio Guide:  À Mon Seul Désir¹⁵

AUDIOGUIDELINK

(filename: google search designer name_deisre)

Martin
– Margiela’s brand was acquired by the OTB Group in 2002 and industry insiders were quoted as suggesting that Margiela may desire to leave due to creative differences, or simply, “A desire to enjoy his life outside the insistent glare of the fashion world.

Viv
In [the collection]  ‘Too fast to live, too young to die’ mid-70’s there would be a lot of attitudes and a lot of what was to come. The desire to provoke would lead them to problems with justice for obscenity and indecency. Vivienne [Westwood] and McLaren counterattacked renaming the store ‘Sex‘, with a huge poster with pink plastic inflatable letters, and a collection inspired by BDSM and bondage. “Rubberwear for the office” featured latex garments, zippers, straps, thongs, garters, fishnet stockings, and exposed breasts. Punk was born.

Rick
Rick Owens’ desire to expand beyond the realms of fashion, into the worlds of interiors and furniture, has been well documented over the past decade. 

Hussein
His wish: that anywhere – whether he changes continents, cities, jobs, loves – he could find his native land, the one where life is born, is reborn. Nostalgia carries the desire, less for an unchanging eternity than for always-fresh beginnings. 

Gianni
There’s no question that Gianni Versace’s vision was crystalline, the desire he built around his collections dazzling and his commerciality indisputable (at the time of his death the designer had an estimated net worth of £362 million).

Donatella
These were clothes designed for desire, by a fashion figure as charismatic as Karl Lagerfeld or Jean-Paul Gaultier, both out of the immediate spotlight but instantly recognizable, Donatella used her energy and passion to keep Gianni’s dream alive. Today, she has nothing more to prove: Versace has remained a veritable weapon of mass seduction.
 

Various notes on the Indios Charrúas

Excerpt of translation of ‘apuntes varios sobre los indios charrúas’ by the Brigadier General don ANTONIO DIAZ (1861-1869?) published in a modernized version by Jose Joaquin Figueira for ‘estado mayor del ejercito, departamento de estudios historicos ‘divison historia’ in 1977.

[…]

Sheet C

[…]

I remember their stature, their colour, and other physical qualities. Their guttural and nasal way of speaking, opening the mouth very little, not even to laugh, which they never did create sounds of laughter. In times of cold, they would sit down squatting on their heels, in a row, remaining in silence or talking very slowly: generally, they would stay on horse, laying on the neck of the animal.

They lived naked, like in the state of nature, only covering their sexes with some kind of object or some ordinary cloth, the ones being very rare having a quillapí or entire cloth covering their whole body, even in the winter.

The women covered their waists in the same manner, and many, but not all of them, covered their breasts with a cloth or quillapí, tied together on its tips over the right shoulder, others made a sort of simple dress out of the same material, without sleeves, with holes for their arms; they carried their small children hanging on their backs inside a cloth with its four tips knotted in the front, forming like this a kind of bag, in which they put one or two children with heads out; the ones which had three children put the third tied in the front, and the one who had four children put the oldest of them on their haunches; other brought their smaller ones hanging on their backs and the elder ones on a horse which they themselves would carry to the right.

They would have no headgear, come along bareheaded, some of them girdling their foreheads with some rags forming a headband, some of them tied their hair with a braid.

They obeyed a chief, choosing for this position the one who received the most credit for his courage and audacity, and whose authority and no rules nor limits.

Before the Conquista, when the iron was yet unknown to them, they went to war armed with arrows, made out of flintstone, its shape resembling one of the bay leaves, but surrounded with sharp teeth in the opposite direction of the harpoon; later on, they substituted that stone with metal, which they sourced mainly from barrels, also to create spears, which they would always be armed with – same as with the bows and quiver – during peace and during wartime.

Ultimately they were very few ones keeping arrows, and most of them used spears.

Always bareback on horse, with only a simple rein, without breaks, they were extremely skilled in maneuvering the horse, same counts for their Bolas, which they would never cease to carry along on their hips.

[…]¹⁶

I AM

I am, I am, erm… I am a-, I am a…

I am clothing, I am a patchwork, I am an assembly, I am a cloth, I am fabric, I am a leftover, I am recycling, I am an up-cycling, I am a hybrid, I am a chimera, I am a monster, I am a t-shirt, I am a top, I am a shirt, I am a collage, I am M, I am S, I am XS, I am XXS, I am LARGE, I am X-TRA LARGE, I am XXL, I am XXXL, I am XXXXL, I am XXXXXL,  I am6 XL,
I am XM? …. I am unique.
I am a product, I am a design, I am fashion design, I am clothing design, I am cotton, I am a packaging, I am wrapping, I am protection, I am a result, I am a solution, I am a cover,
I am actually an album, an ep, an extended play, I am a CD, I am a compact disc, a carrier of data.
I am a sleve, i am a cd sleeve, I am a database.
I am work.
I am an artwork, I am an experience.

It’s 2021 and I am a non-binary object
I am a non-binary artistic object
I am a non-binary artistic body
I am a non-binary body
I am a body

*CLAP*
LIEBER GOTT IM HIMMEL,

Mach bitte, dass sich alle T-Shirts verkaufen! …

—
I am a body in space. And you are a body in space, and you are a body in spaces and you and you and you are all bodies in space, and YOU
Are a body in space who needs a new T-Shirt! 

EP LINK¹⁷

Auris-Them

Dear Myriam

I had a dream, or a lucid vision a week ago. 

I got into my head spiraling, thinking about how 

absolutely different our entire world would be 

if humans would have developed without 

the eyes, without the sense of the optic 

and visual. 

And first, I thought, ah we would all be blind, 

but oh, that’s not true. 

From the beginning, everything would be so different, 

how we perceived each other, 

what would be the idea of beauty, 

how we would talk and communicate, 

how we would dress, 

what we would move, 

technology, knowledge, wisdom, gender, art! 

Myriam, I truly believe the world would be a better place if ears and skin were our main senses.  

There is something very bizarre about the eyes,

They create distance. 

I sense a huge circle of humans, 

who managed to encircle the whole world, 

because it is a ritual of proximity and love, 

like a huge festivity, and they all hold hands, 

almost

but not really, they have their arms stretched out and 

enough distance between each other fingertips to feel the next persons 

warmth and scent and small sounds of movement, 

and they are wearing light bright robes, 

out of some material unimaginable to us

which is thin and warm and origins 

from a completely different technological approach to production. 

And we hummmm,   and zummmm. 

Like bees, a sonic ring of humming all around the world! 

Like the rings of Saturn, and this ring creates a balm for the soul for all living beings. So beautiful, 

not humans but Auris-Them.

****¹⁸

Playlist

(End of November 2020)

Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?

1 dj taunus – Hello and welcome back to Soft Post Apocalypse of Love (intro)

2 okay kaya – mother natures bitch

3 jessie ware – save a kiss

4 cookie kawaii – vibe (if I back it up)

5 abdu Ali – did dat

6 tami ti – single right now (ft juck)

7 thool – tepeu 

8 Gwen stefnai – cool (dj taunts edit)

9 MC dricka – foi bate bate

10 deli girls  – peg

11 Villa Elvin – Ettiquete Stomp

12 Pelada – Asegura

13 Madonna – Frozen (Hardtechno Bootleg)

14 Vessel – Paplu (love that moves the sun)

15 eurythmics – sweet dreams (medieval version by samusoridicus)

16 amar – tuhaimerasaman (federico luz edit)

17 Fleetwood Mac – dreams

18 nils bech – foolish heart 2019

19 J H Schein – 13 Suite No. 2 in D Minor (from Banchetto musicale, 1617) II. Gagliarda a 5

[PLAYLIST LINK]

¹ https://earthsky.org/human-world/discovery-massive-prehistoric-circle-trenches-near-stonehenge/
² ???
³ Lyric from the song ‘1988 Earthbound” by Federico Luz, written on9th of August 2020 in Paris, France, cites Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, John Hunt Publishing, 2015, p.10
⁴ Donna Haraway, 1991, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books. Quote sent to me by my dear friend Franziska Schneeberger
⁵ These post-post-patchworks finally becoming the base for the special edition release of my Federico 2021 Luz EP ‘Formulas’ in November 2021.
⁶ name changed
⁷ Wed, 25 Nov 2020, 00:59
⁸ Dolar Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuits, 2006, p.45-46
⁹ ibid
¹⁰ Excerpt from press text written by Anna Lugmeier & Federico Protto for the release of music video ‘Pan’ on PW-Magazine https://www.pw-magazine.com/2021/video-premiere-federico-luz-pan/
Pan by Federico Luz, Camera: Anna Lugmeier, Bo Vloors, Viktoria Bayer, Federico Protto, Edit/Concept: Anna Lugmeier, Costumes: Federico Protto, Additional Design: W&LT, bichofeo, Setdesign: Artemyi Shokin & Anna Lugmeier, Performers: Diana Barbosa Gil, Stefan Cantante, Anna Lugmeier, Federico Protto, Franziska Schneeberger, sound mastering: Witch Studios ?
Thanks to RENDEZVOUS3000 (Evamaria Müller, Anna Lugmeier)
¹¹ Gong-Sound from Amanda Lear, Follow Me,1978, released on Ariola Records
¹² Björk, Medúlla, released on 30 August 2004 on One Little Independent Records. Cover image photographed by Inez + Vinoodh
¹³ Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters, 1993, released on Warner Bros. Words, Declan MacManus & Marina Thomas, Music written by Michael Thomas
¹⁴ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5stjYUK-yg
¹⁵ This title is a reference to the series of six tapestries, today called ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’ created in the style of millefleurs woven in Flanders around 1500
¹⁶ ‘apuntes varios sobre los indios charrúas’ by the Brigadier General don ANTONIO DIAZ (1861-1869?) published in a modernized version by Jose Joaquin Figueira for ‘estado mayor del ejercito, departamento de estudios historicos ‘divison historia’ in 1977, p.7-8
¹⁷ Open Source Font used is called Kareu Kareu designed by Isabel Motz (Velvetyne Foundry & No Foundry) and layout for Federico Luz’ EP Formulas by Chloë Janssens
¹⁸ part of an email written to my friend Myriam in June 2021

Image Credits in order of appearance
Pan Single Cover, Viviane Gulacsy, 2020
Post-Post-Patchwork, Federico Protto, 2020
Arachne-Mag, Federico Protto, 2017
Video-Still Pan Music Video, Anna Lugmeier, 2019/2021
Braid Detail, Dora Denerak Galyas, 2021
Video-Still 1, Research Roulette 2021, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
Video-Still 2, Research Roulette 2021, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
‘welcome to your senses’, GIF from bjork[dot]com around the year 2000
Formulas Special Edition, documentation pictures, Federico Protto, 2021
Formulas EP Logo, designed by Chloë Janssens
soft post-apokalyspe of love (MIXTAPE) Cover, Federico Protto, 2020

research portfolio

Magdalena Ptasznik / Zigzagging through space to discover the intimacy of relating

Screenshot 2021-02-17 at 12.03.05

a.pass post-graduate program portfolio in the form of a self-interview

+

appendix: polish website/archive of the research project (the website is in Polish, but references and content materials are in English)

—

Self-interview

What brought you to the research that you have been engaged with at a.pass?

First, I want to talk about movement practice; it is my base and the operational system. The movement practice has always been experiential and collaborative. It has grown through learning from and with others, listening to words, moving, formulating instructions, exploring their potentials, or teaching. It has always been working with the space in which it was happening and the materiality of the body and those beyond it. I have been exploring this practice as a practitioner– a mover. As such, a performer is always an agent and an observer of the performative. To perform one needs to be aware of the performativity that is already happening both within and beyond them. I’m interested in making the experience of the ‘performer’ available, for the audience; that is, to become an agent on the inside. Through the audience/performer’s relation to the textual material they are invited to activate the words through their participation. 

Second, I will tell you a story:

We sit together on a blanket. We are seven, but I say we are five. We are on the lawn in front of a 19th century gallery building that hosts the performance that you imagine you are taking part in. I say all five characters’ names and indicate, with each, to a specific person sitting on the blanket (I don’t know your real names). I say: we are at the beach, we are wearing bathing suits, one of us is topless. I say: there is a birthday cake in the middle of the blanket.  I describe how it looks with appetite: it has three layers, covered with whipped cream, and decorated with a few strawberries. I say: suddenly, we hear the noise. I say: we turn towards it. I say: we see a dog, a big one, hairy. I say: it is running towards us, fast. I say: it is very close. I say: it is hitting the cake, eating it, destroying it, and making a mess. I say: pieces of cake and drops of whipped cream are landing on our bodies. I say: we are looking at each other, we see our bathing suits and skin are filthy. I say: we are leaving to take a bath in the sea, to rinse the remains of the cake. I get up and leave the place. You follow. (A performative walk in summer 2018)

What were the questions you entered a.pass with, and what was their trajectory? 

My a.pass research proposal had three questions[*] which I was busy with throughout. But, from the very beginning, there was also an underlying inquiry that I’ve only recently named ‘the undercover project’. I find it more important than the questions posed in the application. ‘The undercover project’, though not proposed directly in my application, was the real motive to enter the a.pass research environment. I unfolded the project in the following questions: How can I engage in research questions not by building a construction (a product) based on elements that are accessible to me in the moment of posing the question, but by continually digging into the problems they evoke? Can I, through practice, dig into implicit relations and assumptions within my research? Can I at least for a while, or sometimes, suspend the connection of my practice to the product it might bring? Can I, instead, turn around to the field I want to explore and experiment within it? Not to repeat the representations but go into interactions with them? Exploring these possibilities is important for me for further functioning within the arts, for refreshing the sense of it, for negotiating with its demands. It was necessary to ask how I want to cultivate my base of the practice beyond, or better to say, under different the manifestations that it may take. 

Through the research process, I realized that my initial questions were attached to a particular imagination of a product and the context in which it could circulate. I wanted to reformulate my approach to working, to look for other possible openings of my practice. At the very end of a.pass, I realized I was unconsciously repeating the logic of production; using research as a means to produce something. Whilst, I don’t see it as necessarily wrong to use research outcomes for further production, in my case, the logic of production was keeping my research in a very narrow frame, thinking towards the future in terms of production was haunting me. Therefore, through a.pass I was able to build skills of resistance. The skills to make a space in which I could engage with research questions and share them in new ways. The booklet I am sharing through the end-presentations is the unperfect footprint of risking entering a different mode of questioning. It is the beginning.

What is your current research? 

The research materializes as written texts, which experiment with the form of the score—a choreographic tool. These scores are to be read by a reader on their own. They are written as scores (in its broadest sense), as tools that produce a specific situation, but rather than thinking of them as instructions, I propose to think of them as a literary form. A score as an instruction assumes a particular mode of attending and a set of abilities to enact it; to focus, to imagine, to act. As an instruction a score attributes value to doing. Here, I counter that attribution of value by opening possibilities of various ways of attending and propose to look at the performativity taking place in an intimate sphere activated through reading. I understand it as an interobjective[†] space created by a reader, a score, and an environment. The participant is invited to explore different ways of engaging with and interpreting the score. The reading of a text is a way of following this proposition and observing one’s attendance.  I called this kind of attendance ‘speculative doing’—observing, sensing, perceiving, and maybe imagining a further action, physical doing. 

A score is a structure for participation. What do you propose to participate in through these scores? 

The score directs its readers’ attention towards the relations within an environment of which they are part. In particular, I explore how we take part in the materiality of the environment as well as the relations we are already engaged in and have potential to engage with. Building upon observation and somatic experience, I explore environmental relations through navigating attention and developing fictions. This begins with observing our own perceptual and imaginative patterns  by turning our attention towards our embodiment and our surroundings. Exploring the relationality through one’s sensual nature puts subjectivity in the network of dynamic relations where human and non-human materiality cannot be sharply separated. It engages the images, beliefs, and scores of ‘being a person’ and asks how, as such, do we understand our participation in the environment[MOU1]. Fiction is implemented here as a speculative tool for practicing relationality, a tool to create affects—fictional spaces can, and often do, influence patterns of perception.

How do you use text to explore these modes of participation? 

The way of attending I am exploring and proposing demands effort. As William James said: ‘Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.’[‡] To open up towards an experience of the material environment, I am looking for ways of giving attention to the possible mergers or dependencies between the bodies of participants and different materialities. An observation is an entry point, a practice to create attention. The research plays out in the area where we observe the grounds that we stand on; to give attention, ‘to excavate’ relations, processes, and influences we take part in, cause, or are submitted to.

If observation is a tool, what does it serve? Is observation a mindfulness meditation or an awareness exercise? Is your practice a form of human meditation within the earthy matter?

Observation is a tool for exploring the fantasmic minds—real or, at times, fictional sets of relationships that we are part of. It is a method to get acquainted with the unstable nature of fantasmic relations; their changeability, or even the transformation of the worlds known to us. To live with this transformation is to enter into collaboration with a process of decay, overcoming and transforming our own perceptual and existential limits or habits. The observation here (as opposed to how it functions in mindfulness) is not to experience ‘myself in the present’ but to direct the attention beyond the borders of my body, towards the other, our relation, dynamic of it, and the self, understood as being part of a bigger mind. Observation assumes the unknown (what is yet to come, what is excluded from perception) as potential and invites it to influence the known. 

As a presentation, you propose a booklet, an object to keep in hand, to read in your own space and timing. What kind of encounder do you propose?

Bridging the idea of reading with the participation implied in a score, entangles the readers body with the text in an intimate way. Attending to a conscious observation is a very personal and intimate engagement. I propose the exploration at this level to let this ‘close to yourself’ experience—the intimate—be influenced. To engage with observation is to explore how you, on this intimate level, are in, and develop, relations with others (human and non-human). How do you perceive and perform your participation within structures? What do you attend to? and what do you exclude yourself from? I was interested and inspired by the precarity of the proposed format and situation. Will the reader try to engage with the imagination within the text? or read across it briefly? Will they engage with the choreographic aspect and relate the text to the body?

On the other hand, I thought of it as the choreography of precarious times—’poor choreography’ or ‘poor people choreography’[§]. To create or participate in it, one doesn’t need any production machine, theater, scenography, or performers. One doesn’t need to buy tickets or even to go out. You can participate in it while being in lockdown, it is accessible wherever you need to be. These ‘poor’ conditions are interesting exactly because they activate a private space and a sense of public-ness within.

Observation and further speculation are ways to explore our position in the world’s material organization; in its systems and structures of power and control. A poet, Forrest Gander, talks about the ‘anti-spectacular’ potential of poetry which, using just words can focus attention for long hours and cause profound influence even in the context of the “resplendent visual world which often cannot focus attention on anything at all”[**]. I am looking for this kind of anti-spectacular potential of ‘written choreography’ operating on perceptions, senses, and imagination.

Attention and observation happen in time. Is time a theme in the research?

With this research, I reconsider what it means for a work to be time-based. The environment and the processes happening within it confront us with the passing of time. Different matters have different temporalities, temporal scales, and different dynamic registers of action. The ultimate reference and a tool to think with is, for me, geology, which brings us to the earth as the basic structure of our material being. Geological time teaches us about the constant movement of any and all matter, and it gives us a more-than-human perspective to time. 

I become troubled by thinking of the ‘nowness’ seemingly implicit in performance. ‘Being here and now’ is often the main category of performative practices. This ‘nowness’ is central to the somatic and improvisation practices that were formative for me and my work. Whilst I appreciate their methodologies—the ways in which they teach us how to give attention and how to be affected—they tend to give attention to an individual experience and place importance on what a subjective ‘I’ goes through. I have the impression that this approach to practices builds a community whose members develop a  sensibility for their own experience isolated in time and space. It creates a bubble of nowness that celebrates itself, that is, celebrates the individual, and does not create an idea of community with what is not immediately accessible, here and now. I try to work with elements of the somatic within an open-ended environment, in order to revisit individual or collective memories, create and share fiction, and re-observe the environment close to the body. Can we, with somatics, think of a body as something which is not determined by an ‘I’ and not limited to our materiality, but as an expanding entity in time and space? Can the performative act activate an embodied experience to explore an entity’s sensorial community of different matter and temporalities?

What would be the next step for this research?

I will keep on exploring writing. I want to work on a performative space where the intimacy of silent reading can perform in a public, social and collective space. I am thinking to collaborate with a visual artist to create a performative space where fiction-speculation is co-created by text, matter, words, and participants’ bodies.

—

[*] The central questions of the research proposal “Immersive speculation: choreography activating potentials” are: 

How can choreography be a form of speculation on environmental transformations?

How can this speculation address the actual environment in which it is happening?

How can the viewer with his/her presence be placed inside this speculation?

[†] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects; as explained in chapter Interobjectivity; University of Minnesota Press; 2013; s.81-95

[‡] William James, ‘Attention’; in: F.R. David, AUTUMN 2020; uh books with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin; s.39

[§] When I talk about precarity I’d like to refer to two artists who help me think about it. First of them is Ligia Clark and her Relational Object, second Lisa Nelson with her precarious composition scores, eg. one named ‘Poor people yoga’. 

[**] Usłyszeć ciszę, interview with Forrest Gander; in Julia Fiedorczuk, Inne Możliwości. O poezji, ekologii i polityce. Rozmowy z amerykańskimi poetami (Other possibilities. On poetry, ecology and politics. Talks with american poets); Katedra Scientific Publisher; Gdańsk 2019; s. 113.

Selected references:

María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care; University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; 2017

Julia Fiedorczuk, Inne Możliwości. O poezji, ekologii i polityce. Rozmowy z amerykańskimi poetami (Other possibilities. On poetry, ecology and politics. Talks with american poets); Katedra Scientific Publisher; Gdańsk 2019

Forrest Gander BĄDŹ BLLISKO (BE WITH), translation Julia Fiedorczuk; LOKATOR; Kraków 2020.

Peter Handke, The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling; Picador; USA; 2020

Philippine Hoegen ANOTHER VERSION ‘Thinking through performance’; Onomantopee; Brussels 20202

Toine Horvers, moving-writing; Toine Horvers and stichting Suburban; Rotterdam 2020

William James, ‘Attention’; in: F.R. David, AUTUMN 2020; uh books with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects; University of Minnesota Press; 2013

Georges Perec, PRZESTRZENIE (ESPACE), LOKATOR, Kraków 2019

Ana Vujanović, Landscape dramaturgy: “Space after perspective”; Ana Vujanović’s website (2018)

Kathryn Yusoff, “Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/121847/epochal-aesthetics-affectual-infrastructures-of-the-anthropocene/

Anne Juren, Fantasmical Anatomy research

Ligia Clark Relational objects

Ilana Halperin, Geologic Intimacy

Blocks in which I participated:

2 September-1 December 2019

BLOCK 2019/III 

A LOOMING SCORE – WE SHARE YOUR POLITICS OF DAMAGE

CURATORS LILIA MESTRE AND SINA SEIFEE

16 January-27 March 2020 (block closed)

BLOCK 20/I ZONE PUBLIC

CO-CURATED BY FEMKE SNELTING / PEGGY PIERROT / PIERRE RUBIO

4 May-31 July 2020 / home (partial participation)

IN CONFINEMENT

THE IN-BETWEEN BLOCK 2020 II

14 September-3 October 2020 

SETTLEMENT 16/ THE UNCONDITIONAL INSTITUTION

VLADIMIR MILLER

Thanks for…

The always generous support: Lilia Mestre
Mentoring of the end project:  Myriam Van Imschoot
Mentoring throughout the research process: Kristien Van den Brande, Elke Van Campenhout, Valentina Desideri, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philipine Hoegen, Myriam Van Imschoot, Krõõt Juurak, Anne Juren, Sara Manente, Anna Nowicka, Jeroen Peeters, and Femke Snelting
Facilitating the a.pass program through curating blocks: Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Peggy Pierrot, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, and Female Snelting. The companionship, support, and challenges: the a.pass researchers with whom I crossed (Deborah Birch, Rui Calvo, Ana Paula Camargo, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Signe Frederiksen, Quinsy Gario, Stefan Govaart, Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Mathilde Maillard, Muslin Brothers, Nathaniel Moore, Vera Sofia Mota, Flavio Rodrigo Orzari, Ferreira Lucia Palladino, Federico Protto, Piero Ramella,, Túlio Rosa Christina Stadlbauer, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc, Kasia Tórz, Katrine Turner, Amélie van Elmbt, Andrea Zavala Folache)
English proofreading and editing of my texts: Chloe Chignell
Making all this possible: the team of a.pass (Lilia Mestre Steven Jouwersma Joke Liberge Michèle Meesen)
Facilitating shifts of perspectives: Jakub Szymanik

My participation in a.pass and the realization of this research would not have been possible without the support of Grażyna Kulczyk’s Research Scholarship in the field of choreography granted by Art Stations Foundation.

research portfolio

Smarginatura {portfolio} | Kasia Tórz

Flemish wolf. “Metro” newspaper cutting, September/October 2019

SMARGINATURA_portfolio_Kasia Torz

research portfolio

PORTFOLIO

Rui Calvo

I am deeply grateful to Lilia Mestre and the a.pass researchers who worked in front of my camera, being vulnerable, violent, playful, cheating, confused, confusing and much more: Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Diego Echegoyen, Federico Vladimir, Flávio Rodrigo, Lucia Palladino and Nathaniel Moore. I also thank my mentor, Sara Manente, who participated as a performer in two videos. They were all engaged in doing and thinking with me, each with a different background and contributing in a unique way. The trajectory the research has taken is also due to their collaboration.

I have a background in cinema and I came to a.pass in order to take a distance from this field. I wanted to think of the audiovisual narrative otherwise. My initial questions surrounded different ways of filming bodies while not imprisoning them in rational discourse. How to create characters that push these limits and reject the logic of belonging, of confirmation? The a.pass proposals and the reading of different texts throughout the trajectory produced new desires that led the research into an eternal conflict between theory and practice. My focus was on filming bodies, their faces, their gestures. Over the course of my research trajectory in a.pass, the constant practice of shooting people from the program who were interested in taking part in the videos, and editing the material gradually, brought new important questions to explore, but the initial one always remained there, always being transformed and gaining broader implications. I have allowed myself to make choices that may be considered naivety or failure, but they were important for discoveries and new paths. So in this portfolio I will present the proposition of each video I made in a.pass; the instructions given to the performers to work in front of the camera; the videos themselves; some notes of the discussions with curators, mentors and researchers about the practice; and quotes of books and texts I was reading – all according to my point of view in the present, while writing and most importantly, editing, as a way of thinking, filming, and rethinking the whole trajectory.

FIRST BLOCK: TROUBLED GARDENS

In the beginning of the block, I had in mind:

• The body is disciplined to mean something, to the detriment of the dimension of presence. So… Reject psychology. Empty the inner meanings of the gestures and impulses. Refuse to know the mechanics of choice.
• Acting: a process of self-exploration according to the statement above. It’s fun, playful, madcap… Lived experience as much a product of convention as dramatic experience.
• Masks > Personalities. Masks are used to adjust oneself to the situation, to the other people involved in it and also to the camera. Deal with masks.
• Physiognomy: an interest in guessing what meaning lies behind this person’s face; an idea of revealing. Need for a social control of the inner person.
• Facingness: observe faces and gestures inside a narrative without converting them into signs to reveal the inner psychology – preserve the opacity of this person.
• Audiovisual narrative where the bodies are not a translation into images of a screenplay and/or a discourse. The production of the character is unstable and influenced by the filming process itself. More interest in the process than the product, in the strength of an instant than in the logic of an action. Create forces that burst open both narrative and representation: the relationship between an image and an object that it should illustrate.
• Not a screenplay: preserve the natural language of the performers. No learning lines.

“Une notion comme celle d’identité, aujourd’hui entièrement policière (connotations psychologiques comprises, du ressort des redresseurs de moi en tous genres), recouvre bien un aspect de cette perte: le visage doit être identique, non au sujet, mais à sa définition. Il n’est plus la fenêtre de l’âme, mais une affiche, un slogan, une étiquette, un badge.” A notion like that of identity, today entirely policed (psychological implications included, the responsibility of all kinds of redressers of self) does contain an aspect of this loss: the face must be identical not to the subject but to its definition. It is no longer the window to the soul, but a poster, a slogan, a label, a badge. – JACQUES AUMONT

FIRST VIDEO (june 2019)

https://vimeo.com/501681981/b76441f773

Shooting part I: frame Caterina’s body in wide shot. She is moving, dancing, rehearsing. An introduction to the next shot, creating a curiosity about her.

Shooting part II: Caterina’s face.

• practice my role behind the camera when I don’t have a script or a goal regarding content. What am I seeing through the camera in this context?
• practice a close relationship between the performer and the camera, or a dynamic of intersubjectivity between the cameraman and the model.

Instructions to Caterina:

1. Silence. Don’t talk. Stay in the chair. You can look around, you are not supposed to stand still. Sometimes I want you to look at the camera, establish a relationship with it, as if it were someone else, a character.
2. Staying in the chair, look for a spot in the room that catches your attention. Observe it and describe what you see.

Caterina’s feedback: “I was not super much thinking and I was just trying to be, like, calm. […]  At first I was trying to be pretty and then I was a bit bored of myself… And… It’s not that I, I was thinking into something… I was just trying to focus on being here […] But I was trying to be calm. To not to do, so… but I think I did a lot. […] Or try to not have an opinion of what I was doing.”

Shooting part III: Flávio’s face. It was filmed later, without Caterina and it was less improvised, since I was planning the filming according to what happened in the previous shoot.

Instructions to Flávio:

1. Silence. Don’t talk. Stay in the chair. You can look around, you are not supposed to be completely still. Sometimes I want you to look at the camera, establish a relationship with it, as if it were someone else, a character. I will not count the time, but you should stay like this for a few minutes. So, in your time, I won’t say anything, you look at the camera and say: “I’m gonna put a song” and then you get up and go left. When you return, talk to me but looking at the camera, I have questions for you. And you also must have questions for me. Do you think you are acting now?

Editing: connect Caterina’s and Flávio’s close-ups as if they were shot and countershot. Since they don’t interact and don’t talk about the same subjects, observe what their faces and gestures express in that mixture.

Video’s presentation feedback: Philippine Hoegen, one of the mentors of the block, sees a mixed relationship with the object, a game with it, in which there were no signifiers for Caterina. Surface x psychology. She says that the fact of framing implies a choice and immediately creates a relationship. Nicolas observes that a causality was created during editing, but not only that. A way of editing that controls and loses control, falls in love with faces. Caterina thinks I should be busy with clarifying the methodology of editing, and my role as an editor. It makes me think back to my interest in the strength of the instant over the logic of an action. How to play with this strength in the editing?

SECOND VIDEO (july 2019)

https://vimeo.com/500775699/6089a324a8

Unlike the first video, this one is about interaction between performers, and most of the time the camera is far away from them. The general situation of the scene is not clear, but each of them has two or three instructions to follow, a score in which they hover between fiction and being themselves – a creation of subjectivity through filming. None knows the instructions of the others. A score to ensure that the performers are not subordinate to the causality of narrative, that they surpass the limits of a given role and don’t reduce themselves to a character or an identity.

Instructions to the performers:

Flávio

. all the time you must be eating a fruit or talking

. you don’t want Diego in bed

Lilia

. read a book (Strangers to Ourselves or Sexus) that you find on the bed, sometimes aloud

. attentively observe Flávio and his body

. invite Diego to bed

. “Do you wanna go back to Brazil?”

Diego

. make questions about the couple Lilia and Flávio

. say many times: “I’m ok. Don’t worry.” “Do you want me to leave?”

. don’t look at them too much and when you look, disguise that you are looking

The close-ups are shot after the improvisation, a sort of interview in which I ask them questions related to subjects they were discussing in the shooting.

The improvisation is shot three times, alway restarting from the beginning, like in a rehearsal in which a scene is improved and a dramaturgy is created. But the aim is to create a score that allows people and relationships to be constantly in construction. To go further in this goal, the répétition (rehearsal and repetition in French) will be practiced in a different way in the following a.pass blocks, recording an ongoing situation that stops only when the shooting finishes (this subject will be explored later on). 

The wide shot shows the space in its entirety, a recognizable space (a bedroom) that somehow situates the fictional situation. But it’s more a backdrop for a pursuit. Placing people together in bed is charged with meaning, and I want to see how they would deal with this without having a clear fictional framing. 

Since the camera doesn’t get close to the performers, it doesn’t interfere much in the way they act. In some videos further on, I will hold it closer to them, making the intrusion of filming more noticeable, and opening the possibility for the performers to experience a different embodiment via the intersection of context and camera.

In this video, I don’t see a different temporality being created, nor a puncture (something that appears in the middle, between fiction and reality) or an awkwardness. Sometimes something close to this happens, like at 17:50 in the timeline of this video: Lilia says she feels more respected now that she’s getting older, then she covers herself with a blanket and talks about disappearing, not being framed. Her words cause discomfort in Flávio and Diego. There is a moment of silence in which they don’t know how to act. It’s an important quality in the development of the research, which I will go further with in the next videos.

During the video’s presentation in a.pass, Nicolas Galeazzi, curator of the block, observes that some instructions given to the performers have different qualities compared to others. For example, “all the time you must be eating a fruit or talking” produces something different to “you don’t want Diego in bed.” This is another practise I develop in the following block.

“Learning to be awkward, to be graceful, to leap, and to fall is a training in attention and also in revisceralizing one’s bodily intuition. It is a training that collapses getting hurt with making a life, but that includes the welcoming of exposure alongside of a dread of it. There can be no change in life without revisceralization. This involves all kinds of loss and transitional suspension.”  – LAUREN BERLANT

“Which is preferable: changing my personality and keeping my body, or changing my body and keeping my current manner of experiencing reality? A fake dilemma. Our personalities arise from this very gap between body and reality.” – PAUL PRECIADO

“Contrary to the Lacanian theory of the mirror state, according to which the child’s subjectivity is formed when it recognizes itself for the first time in its specular image, political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation. It is fundamental not to recognize oneself. Derecognition, disidentification is a condition for the emergence of the political as the possibility of transforming reality.” – PAUL PRECIADO

“Perhaps Lingin suggests, rather than transmitting clear meanings, the encounter rests on an acknowledgment of an elemental otherness that is related to our own. ‘We don’t relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth with our individual sensibility and sensuality’. We communicate to one another the light your eyes know…’” – AVIVAH GOTTLIEB ZORNBERG quoted by KAREN BARAD

“Living compassionately, sharing in the suffering of the other, does not require anything like complete understanding (and might, in fact, necessitate the disruption of this very yearning).” – KAREN BARAD

“Saying ‘the truth is a creation’ implies that the production of truth goes through a series of operations consisting in working a matter, a series of falsifications in the literal sense… each one is a falsifier of the other, each one understands in his own the notion proposed by the other. It is these powers of the false that will produce the true.” – GILLES DELEUZE

SECOND BLOCK: A LOOMING SCORE

One of the proposals of this block is a weekly meeting where each person presents 5 minutes of a practice, work, or something regarding their research, and about which another participant asks a question, and a third one answers on behalf of the first. Each asks and answers on the basis of his/her own research. I present videos that I shoot one day per week with performers and edit right after filming. Throughout this process, my questions from the previous block remain, but with new contours, and alongside new questions. The room where I film the videos is dark and not recognizable as a place: it’s not a living room, a bar, a rehearsal room, thus troubling the space where the performers can situate themselves (in fiction or reality). This creates the conditions for sub-narratives to arise and evolve. The instructions given to the performers have one or more of the characteristics listed below:

• that they stimulate repetition
• that they depend on personal interpretation according to their own feelings and opinions
• they don’t depend on personal interpretation, opinions, or feelings; the performers do it and right after have to process what was done: they are not protected by a character context
• that they demand attention to find the cue, a right moment to do it
• that they divert attention
• that they interfere in the flow of the action, of the narration
• that they activate an otherness (“Is it me who did it or not?”)
• that they demand the knitting of stories (the self does not produce fiction, but is instead produced by fiction); personal stories are mingled with tasks that move towards fiction

One new fundamental element of these videos is violence. There’s violence in the stories the performers are asked to tell, but none are told the instructions of the others, so there’s a tension of not knowing who has instructions that demand disrespect or aggression, nor what they might do with them (so they play a dynamic of glances). There is the violence of framing bodies, allowing the spectator to see what the performers see and also to watch the seeing, which the performers can’t. The cut in the editing becomes more prominent once the context (either real or fictional) is more unclear; every cut becomes an ellipse. The ellipse can be considered violent, but it can also be seen as a way of interfering in the moving image, freeing it from the surveilling eyes of the spectator.

Having to admit some aggression and to move within dissatisfaction (the inconvenience of other people), I ask them to not take the agressions too personally and to look for something in between the score and the improvisation. What kind of encounter is possible in such a context of tension, vulnerability, exposure to the other and to the camera, ongoing rupture, misunderstanding and indeterminacy? What kind of encounter is possible in a situation where the body has no stable response to an intention, because neither the filmmaker nor the performers have access to one? How much are these violent thoughts already embedded in the performers? If in the beginning of the research there was still an idea of character – though already unstable and influenced by the filming process itself – now this idea is even more troubled. What can be imagined in that scenario? What kind of alchemy is produced with those elements?

The instructions are given to the performers right before filming and, once I start shooting, I record uninterruptedly for one or two hours in the same space. So the actions, lines and stories contained in the instructions are repeated many times in an ongoing situation, creating a different temporality. The state of not knowing is prolonged. It’s a framed encounter in which improvisations are perpetually rearranged and rearticulated. The language spoken is mostly English, which none of us has as our mother tongue, and which therefore evolves as queered communication. This becomes an important element in my work within this context.

The video below is the final edit of all the videos I made throughout the looming score.

https://vimeo.com/496829852/95cb3f8106

Instructions for the visitors:

• watch the whole video before reading further
• then read the instructions for the performers 
• remember that each video was originally shown without revealing the instructions to the spectators
• and that the whole series of looming videos were shot without the performers ever knowing each other’s instructions

Instructions for the performers:

first part

everyone but Lilia

• you cannot be the first to say something.

Lilia

• first sentence you should say: “I realized that when you socially don’t notice the violence, it is because you do it.”
• take notes

Caterina

•  what are the others hiding or showing/revealing? 
• say “Stop that acting”
• always non-stop looking at the one who speaks

Flávio

• always start speaking using “I” 
• hit the table to get attention or interrupt someone

Lucia

• repeat the sentence until it is understood or you are convinced that you were understood
• when someone says something, you stare at him/her for a while

second part

Lilia

• tell again the train story you told in the first video, repeating it throughout the shooting, each time filling the story with more details

Caterina

• say to Flávio “Listen to her”

Flávio

• always start each sentence saying “I…”

third part

Flávio

• tell Lilia’s story about the train as if it had happened to you
• do not move while speaking, only when you need to show an object or make a clear gesture while telling the story

Diego

• ask details about the story, always mixed with comments about the perception of Flávio in the present, his behavior, his gestures (e.g. What are you looking at? You’re warm. Your eyes are tiny. Your eyes change when you say [this word]).

forth part

Lucia

• tell the story about violence that you told in the first video, making only important gestures in order to explain it. Stay clear-eyed in the scene of violence, repeat the story giving more details, creating facts, trying to communicate.

Flávio

• describe the gestures and behavior of Lucia and imitate them

Diego

• ask about the other involved in Lucia’s story, imagining this role in the story
• play with a balloon
• ask Lucia many times: “Is it violent?”

fifth part

Caterina

• Tell Lilia’s train story as if it had happened to you
• Touch Lilia
• Repeat some of Lilia’s words
• Smile a lot 

Lilia

• Say to Caterina that the story didn’t happened the way she’s telling it
• Ask Caterina to choose an insult against a woman and Lilia repeats it
• Describe people who pass on the streets and their behavior

The camera’s potential to interfere with the improvisation of the performers is not yet as incisive in these videos as it could be. Most of the time I am holding the camera far away and getting closer only by zooming in. In later videos, the camera, as well as my presence, will be more intrusive or at least there I will make attempts towards this. Jeroen Peeters, one of my mentors, participates in a filming practice as an observer and draws my attention to the question of whether I should be more present in the shooting. I think about my voice, my gestures (hors champ or not), the camera and my thoughts as possible agents of interference.* Jeroen also remarks on the private dramaturgy that is produced in each performer. I could also play more with my interference, allowing it to facilitate or threaten what is being produced.

* For me, it seems that “interference” is a concept that was always part of the research, but it was Lilia who drew my attention to it in a conversation in my last block.

“It is repetition that which ruins and degrades us, but it is repetition that which can save us and allow us to escape from the other repetition. Kierkegaard had already opposed a fettering, degrading repetition of the past to a repetition of faith, directed towards the future, which restored everything to us in a power which was not that of Good but of the absurd. To the eternal return as reproduction of something always already-accomplished, is opposed the eternal return as resurrection, a new gift of the new, of the possible.”  – GILLES DELEUZE

“Tout l’effort du développement ‘technique’ du cinéma […] revient à naturaliser l’image cinématographique, c’est-à-dire à la domestiquer, à la familiariser […] Adieu à l’inquiétante étrangeté, adieu à l’altérité non récupérable, adieu au réel non encore cadrable.” The whole endeavour of ‘technical’ development in cinema […] comes back to naturalising the cinematographique image, meaning domesticating it, familiarising it […] Goodbye to troubling strangeness, goodbye to irretrievable otherness, goodbye to the as-yet-unframeable real. – JEAN-LOUIS COMMOLI

“The lack of elements to glue things creates an openness, a possibility of never settling. We cannot block out the irrationality, the perversity, the madness we fear, in the hopes of a more orderly world. […] Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plentitude of nothingness.” – KAREN BARAD

“Relationality always includes a scenic component, a fantasmatic staging.”
“Transforming the story of cause and effect to a spectacle of cause and side effects.” – LAUREN BELANT

“…identity allows us to distance ourselves from any actual manifestation of queerness”
“…accept the inauthencity at the core of something, understand it as a social institution, while still self-consciously and undeceivedly, succumbing to it.” – DAVID HALPERIN

THE IN-BETWEEN (BLOCK) 

(an extra block to keep working on our research while having a lot of questions and a myriad of uncertain responses in self-confinement)

https://vimeo.com/502113573/783aa7dbda

https://vimeo.com/499227081/7b346852c7

https://vimeo.com/499345273/0150a29bd1

“Lies are so hard to keep track of. It’s like you’re constantly being reborn every time you begin a new sentence.” – DENNIS COOPER

“L’art de vivre, c’est de tuer la psychologie, de créer avec soi-même et avec les autres des individualités, des êtres, des relations, des qualités qui soient innomés.” The art of living is to kill psychology, to create with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, beings, relations, qualities.  – MICHEL FOUCAULT

“Ideia de identidade só funciona quando a subjetividade está reduzida ao sujeito”. The idea of identity only works when subjectivity is reduced to the subject. – SUELY ROLNIK

“Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and — performativity.” – EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK

FOURTH BLOCK: SETTLEMENT

The aim of the Settlement workshop is “to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass Settlement and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at the a.pass main space will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process.” Trying to adapt my research to this proposal, I work on making a set for my filming practice. A nondescript space, a potential landscape that doesn’t represent a specific place but whose elements engender different connotations according to the acting of the performers and how I choose frame (dark spots, a red curtain, a corridor).

The following video is shot in that space, mixing up a private and intimate sphere with a theatrical scene. Although the performers discuss the news, tell personal stories and perform violent gestures, there is no predetermined discourse. The aim is to have no project, to preserve a way of filming that is a form of thinking in real time, to create the conditions for something to emerge, to articulate new meanings or to dislocate the subject of meaning altogether. In this shoot, the performers acknowledge the camera and the viewer’s presence more, resulting in uncomfortable physical responses to the act of being filmed and encaged, or to the feeling of being “unmasked.”

My work with the camera and the editing opens a negotiation between what I watch, what I feel about it, what I would like to produce. There are moments that flow in their whole duration (“real time”) and other ones that I cut more, creating a cumulative effect of time.

https://vimeo.com/501671946/2d2e19e6f1

Some extracts from the interview with the performers of the video above (Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Lilia Mestre) about their experience and Kasia Tórz as a mediator. The transcription is faithful to the syntax of the speakers.

RC: How would you define the agency you had? 

LM: …is about interfering, possibility of interfering. Dislocating as well what’s happening. And also […] to not do, you can stop anytime. […] it’s not sequential instruction in a way. I think interference is the best word. Which is a generator.

[…]

I think we are on standby and then things start to happen. There’s quite some rupture […] It doesn’t need to be violent […] but to cut through.

KT: Andrea, do you also share this notion of interfering?

AZF: Yes, in the sense of… I thought the agency I was given or I was taken was one with autonomy, like that the agency was autonomous to… to be responsible of when to interfere or change track of things or when to enable the score or disable it. It makes me think also of interdependence, so interfering as a sort of… that this fear that creates the action where the three of us are agents, is one that is interconnected. So it’s an interdependent relationship of… I have my autonomy but it doesn’t take away the responsibility to actually, anything I do can be changing how things will resolve themselves or get lost.

CM: So for me about interference, I don’t feel it more in terms of the dramaturgy because I feel more the continuation actually, the repetition of the rule. And when I see interference is more in terms of the rhythm, so something in the rhythm of what’s happening is being cut but something that appears. But for me the agency is more related to how much can I push the rule, how much the rule resists. My agency is kind of being as obedient as possible.

RC: How much agency you have? Is it something you can play with or… are you in a trap? Does vulnerability allow boundaries to be open or the opposite?

LM: The instructions are my guidelines to interfere. […] I do feel trapped but not badly. It also feels like “Ok, this is what you can do”, so it’s also relaxing to know that “ok, this is what you can do”. It’s not a trap in a negative way, like finding our way out of there. But I feel that the conditions are well established, I can’t… I’m well situated. Maybe the environment defines very much where you are and how you can move within that space.

[…]

In terms of vulnerability, I do feel vulnerable… There’s nothing bad. I never felt bad. Neither to feel trapped. Neither to feel vulnerable. Neither to interfere. So there’s something there supporting these actions or these qualities that you are naming. So I also feel confident that I can feel vulnerable. Sometimes I think it’s needed somehow so I’ll work for that, to try to be in that place of vulnerability. This is my own thing.

KS: Have you ever questioned the instructions or had a desire to add something or to cheat a bit?

AZF: For me, the cheating is totally inscribed in the rules somehow. I am given enough information to know I can’t know all the rules… So there’s an impossibility for me to know everything, you know, to hold all the information of the rules. So then there’s gaps of interpretation that opens up a… Maybe that’s also for the agency, a sense of being able to interpret and cheat. But I think when I was performing… It’s kind of actually hard to cheat because the rules are not so many so there’s a lot of space to do many other things… so the rules imply that not everything that I would do it’s a rule or something the director has told me to, so then all those other things are they cheating? So to cheat I guess would be to not obey the rule so even that it’s impossible. I mean unless we have a long conversation about exactly how my interpretation can follow a rule, but so I feel like it’s a sort of puzzle that I enter. […] And the fact that I’m giving the information to have enough knowledge that it is a puzzle, then I feel a lot of trust from both Lilia and Caterina, and from Rui. And then the vulnerability can actually be embraced in a way. I like to think that vulnerability doesn’t contradict confidence. That in order to be vulnerable, especially in performing, you need confidence to actually be vulnerable for something. So that trust for me is really key. You know, that you trust my interpretations, my cheating, my following the rules, all of this is part of the puzzle. And I don’t feel totally trapped in it but I understand that walls are needed somehow.

RC: The instructions allow cruel actions, but these violences are not often followed by a reaction  (no punishment, no confrontation, no resolution). Do you feel surprised by some of the actions of the others and how do you deal with it?

LM: Instructions are not much given of how to react but more how to propose. (…) In relation to the one when Andrea calls me cunt, that was hard actually. I mean it was difficult to… And then it was very interesting to see how I could somehow compensate that humiliation somehow, right?  How can I reunite myself again as a character? So it’s a moment of being disarmed, you’re like “ok”, and then how do I build it up, how do I create some consistency that I don’t collapse. How to rebuild to be able to play, to be able to be there.

AZF: I also felt that when I called Lilia a cunt, the violence was in realizing that I would not do that in my life. So what am I saying “yes” to here?. Like am I doing it for the sake of art or a friend? So the fiction of the apparatus sort of save the violence but there’s still an ethical question in me of how far do I go for art. Because if I would be an actress following a script, people would know I’m a character. So it’s sort of excused in a way. And here because part of the script is taken out or something, it’s almost like I’m playing Andrea so I am close to reality. So people don’t know how I am playing with fiction actually, so the fictions that I play for myself are not totally visible. Then that kind of unappointed fiction or undefined fiction is what is the most violent of the work. But at the same time there’s still a part of fiction so I don’t feel extreme, not actually that it is causing any deep trouble.

CM: It often happens I’m kind of surprised in my interior. And then it’s a bit shocking because… the camera is there not far away… Depending on how this surprise is, I’m also trying to integrate it. […] A lot of things are happening because I’m always producing in relation to how I feel, to this surprise… And how I deal with this surprise.

LM: I was thinking about our relationship outside of the camera, the situation. So I mean the level of complicity or friendship that we have already between us and… How does this play within when we are playing? Because we are all doing indeed ourselves and we are all part of this program, so we carry something with us already in the projection of who we are towards each other, so there’s another score in there also. There’s a system of relations that it’s there. If we were foreigners to each other it would be another one. Here we have a degree of knowledge of each other that comes from a.pass. We are all very much foreigners, we all come from different parts of the world with different stories. So we carry that and then we carry some common ground within the program and then we go inside that room.

CM: The most violent is the editing, when I see how it’s also then afterward manipulated.

LM: Always something can turn, the things can turn around, into another direction. In this sense there’s a bit of maybe immanent violence, there’s a sense of this quietness. It can be fun… I always feel a certain tension there where things could turn. I put some violence there. (…) Like, something can come from the back, something can come from a place that you didn’t… So maybe this is because we know that the instructions are different and then we don’t know them,  so there is an alertness in a way.

RC: Each instruction has a different quality in the repetition. What does it do? It’s a skill-development instead of character-development?

LM: I think that’s very hard actually, to repeat. Spontaneous is maybe more “ok”, you just throw yourself, let’s try this. But then repeat that you have to think twice. And then I think in a way it’s there where the work starts. Like how do you say it, and then maybe sometimes you just say it halfway… This is one thing, there’s a lot of practice in there. I feel the most acting practice comes from that place actually, of how to repeat things. And then I also think It creates a certain intimacy. […] maybe not intimacy but history. Like I’ve been there before. I have heard it before. I’ve heard you say that before. I’m not telling that story myself. There is something that builds like a common history. Like the story of the train that it’s there since the beginning, now Andrea also knows that story but she doesn’t know exactly where it started, how it was originally. This story became something that we all know collectively and we all have different relations to that thing. […] You don’t know anymore if it was real not real, how and what happened actually, but somehow you have an idea of that story.

CM: [repetition] creates a condition that escapes, it’s escaping from the succeeds and failures, another condition of doing it. It doesn’t have to succeed because it doesn’t have to fail. […] It creates a condition to navigate in all […] What I like from repetition is that all the time it pushes me in the same position of doing something I don’t know if I would do it in a situation.

AZF: For me is also a concrete form of awkwardness, that I value a lot as well. It’s kind of like being “hey, how are you?”, “hey, how are you?”, “hey, how are you?”. Like if you just give yourself whatever word and then you repeat it, it becomes absurd as well. Or everytime you say, there’s no training of it, other than saying it, so the intention changes so it’s awkward to say it again without knowing what’s the difference in the intention […] If all I have to do is say a line and I have to rehearse it, but now I can’t rehearse but I have to repeat it, so it becomes more and more awkward for myself.

LM: For example, in the laughter, it’s an interesting one. To have to laugh. Because I feel definitely awkward because there’s no reason, right. But then at the same time I have to say it was like listen to yourself, I know what a laugh can be, a real laugh. There’s also the question of the real laugh. Can I really do it for real?

CM: All the time it allows displacement, the repetition. 

RC: And the role of the camera?

AZF: It’s like a level of being hyper aware, of self-awareness, alertness maybe, surveillance. I don’t think I forgot at any point that there was a camera.

KT: Did you enjoy it also?

AZF: Yeah. I guess that’s the creepiness of exposure and performance. It’s pervert. (…) I think I got at some point reminded that my agency has the right to challenge you as well and the camera. And I am so hyper aware of where it is that at any point I could just do this:

[Andrea is the one in the lower left]

LM: I think it happens more when you [Rui] are inside, in the beginning you were not inside. It was much more disarming because you don’t know at all, you just have the camera away with everything and you don’t know if it’s coming closer or further, so you are much more disarmed. Once you are there then… cause there’s also the possibility of getting away from the camera. You can also leave. You can also go. And in a way I think it becomes a character, there’s also Rui there. It’s also intrusive in a way, like “I’m looking at this, I’m interested in that”.

RC: But it’s less voyeur?

LM: Yes. I think it’s less voyeur.

research portfolio

Portfolio

Adriano Wilfert Jensen

Adriano Wilfert Jensen’s a.pass portfolio, January 2021

portfolio apass

research portfolio

Deviant portfolio by Muslin Brothers

Deviant portfolio Muslin Brothers

research portfolio

Flavio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira – Portfolio

5 November 2020

Click here to read the portfolio: portfolio_Flavio_Rodrigo

research portfolio

New Museums

Christina Stadlbauer

IKTI8729

My initial question for the apass research fellowship departed from the place where humans meet their non-human environment. From there it took a few turns.

*

In my artistic research, I explore the relationship humankind has with its other-than human-companions and the environment we are all sharing. The research started from my long term engagement with honeybees Melliferopolis – Bees in Urban Environments – and the work done by the Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity – an artistic container to explore the ethical implications of issues related with loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity. Lately, I have also started working with bacteria in the frame of my project Kin Tsugi Transformations and reflecting on the ethics implied with microbiological lab work.

Although the precise expression of a research question, keeps slipping and escaping, I got very interested with a procedure that has been unfolding around the “new” definition of museums, launched by ICOM, the international council of museums. (see more about the MuseumDefinitionProcess.)

From my perspective, although many aspects and possible roles of museums are considered in the re-definition, a major shortcoming persists. This has to do with a form of denial of other-than-human life forms needing to be acknowledged as also having rights. Taking this serious would give them a place in our re-thinking of the order of the world, and hence their inclusion in the definition and practice of museums.

To think this further, I propose practice based experiments and explorations of how we humans relate to other species, like plants, animals, bacteria and see what forms of communication can be installed to both create a “language” towards and with them, as well as ways to express the experiences.

Behind all this, is a wish to create a “museum of the future” that maybe calls for more than a redefinition but rather a deconstruction of the museum as such. It is a container that operates decentralized, ephemeral, at times paradoxical, and it does so by collecting practices, thoughts, interventions and embodied experiences.

During the almost 2 years of Apass fellowship, some experiments manifested – partly public, partly more intimate. 

*

March 2019, Contribution to Festival Performatiek, at Kanal:

“Diversity is all around”- Installation and video projection. 

Climate change poses a significant threat to the continuing existence of many species.
The Institute for Relocation of Biodiveristy identifies fauna and flora in danger, and creates video tutorials to assist the species in relocating to safety in a new natural habitat.

In the episode Diversity Is All Around, the Institute focuses on abundance of variety created through human intervention and care as well as surrogates to alleviate the losses.

During the first block of Apass, from January to April 2019, Vladimir Miller was our curator. The settlement practice that he offers led us ultimately, to settle our entire group and work at Centre Pompidou Brussels – Kanal brut, the newly designated Citroen garage building in Brussels. He also introduced the writing practice. Simply writing. No matter what. During this block, we also were offered some workshops, of which 

First thoughts about “publishing” and to make public (versus intimacy , fragility and vulnerability) were discussed, together with performativity – a term that I had to grow into, but that is today very much part of my thinking. Some of the co-curators gave important input, in these first weeks – for example Peggy Pierot, who launched us into the theme of nomadism and how and where to feel at home – a theme that touched me as it has a lot to do with my research. Also Philippe Gehmacher, Alex Artega. 

A workshop with Moritz Frischkorn about logistics and the choreography of objects, made me think about my Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity in terms of linearity, flow diagrams and processes. 

*

Summer 2019, Troubled Garden:

For the duration of a few months, apass moved headquarters to the Zenne Garden – a community garden in Anderlecht. Nicolas Galeazzi was our curator. He proposed being outdoors, getting in contact with the soil, the plants, the rain. And he proposed a practice of adopting. Everyone adopted from someone a project. One that was stuck, that I did not want to continue, that I have forgotten, no time or energy for and that I would like to pass on to someone else. 

I gave “Vegetal Speed-dating” to Laura Pante, and adopted a score from Pierre Rubio myself. A score to make an endless poem, an exercise of being present with what is and naming it. It is called “I am made of” and resulted finally in a Letter to a Wheatgrain – I am made of and became a contribution to Migrant Ecologies at Svalbard Seedvault in June 2019. Amongst other contributions, it was added to the seedvault in Norway, in a ceremonial performative act. 

Converstaions and mentoring with Pierre Rubio, Kobe Matthijs, Marialena Marouda, Philip van DeDingen, Sally de Kunst – all gave extra input to my research. 

*

Later in 2020, this place became an important refuge when the pandemic struck Belgium. Inspired by the exhibition Learning from artemisia by Uriel Orlow, I conducted some resaerch on the plant family Artemisia. They are called wormwood in English, and are used as medicinal herbs. Its antiviral properties can cure Malaria, but are also suggested for the cure of Covid 19.

I recuperated some plantlets of Artemisia annua from Joelle Corroy, that I had found via the Artemisia house and they grew, made seeds and will be distributed and planted again next year. A distributed plantation is emerging.

The Other Within

Foundation of a collective called the Other Other, later the Other Within (with Gosie Vervloessem, Kobe Matthijs, Marialena Marouda, Maria Lucia Cruz Correia) in the winter of 2018. with a first collective attempt to encounter the other and the other within during a sweat-lodge with Rik Verschueren in July 2019.
March 2020 – a hybrid conversation online and IRL, during the first days of the lockdown. In December, the collective is invited to Workspace Brussels for a residency to take the Others’ idea further. 

*

March 2020 ff, S/Corona

A part of the apass fellowship happened during the time of pandemic. The in between block was officially not curated, but Lilia Mestre proposed to keep us engaged with a score.  This became an online practice that we could do although we were confined and the school was closed. At times, we met with one or two other fellows, in the park. My brain was over-active, trying to understand what was going on and this practice was very useful to give my thinking shape, but also to stay in contact with others, and their thinking.
The score was repeated several times. The whole series of my questions and answers (the score) can be found here: S_Corona_March2020.

A collection of videos is part of it and was publicly screened in May and June 2020, in the shop window of nadine, Brussels: 

Park or Room Domestication

Infection is defined as the communication of a disease

Terrain and Germ

Biota

*

November 2020
A series of conversations about  “new museums” is published as podcasts for the end presentation on the website http://dismantle.space

*

Absorbing philosophical, biological, physical, institutional texts, talks, performances, exhibitions was part of the research. This was not always supportive in advancing my quest, but at times also very helpful. Some texts I had to repeatedly read, so as to find how it could connect and nourish the questions I hold. Some other texts talked so much to me that I ended up contacting the author inviting him/her to a conversation or a collaboration.

Quote by Vinciane Despret
I have sometimes thought to myself – and this is surely already the basis for a science fiction novel – that our imagination is so poor, or so egocentric, that if extraterrestrials were to visit the earth, we think it is us [humans] they would want to contact.

*

A selection of references that have helped this trajectory to unfold:

Agata Siniarska: In the Beginning was a Copy, 2017

Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel: Critical Zones – exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe -23.05.2020 – Sun, 28.02.2021

Bruno Latour: Down to earth, 2017

David Abram: The Spell of the sensuous, 1996

Deborah Bird Rose: Wild Dog Dreaming, 2012

Descola Philippe: Beyond nature and culture, 2005

Donna Haraway: Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016

Federico Campagna: Technic and Magic, 2018

Jonathan Franzen: What if we stopped pretending, 2019

Karen Barad: Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies, and Entanglements That Matter, 2007

Karen Barad: On Touching, 2012

Tim Ingold: What is an animal? 1988

Ursula Leguin: The carrier bag theory of fiction, 1986

Vinciane Despret: What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, 2016

research portfolio

P E N D U L U M /// p o r t f o l i o – a p a s s

Diego Echegoyen

Diego Echegoyen is an Argentinian theatermaker and performer.

His work in a.pass is a ritual disorganization of his family narrative & its myths,
his wounds & obsessions, the recent Argentinian history & his experience in Brussels as a migrant.

This portfolio composed by three episodes describes the journey that ended up in his performative installation 
“To be someone implies to be somewhere”.

PENDULUM I Portfolio APASS
PENDULUM II Portfolio APASS
PENDULUM III Portfolio APASS

research portfolio

CAVES 1 – ESCAPE

Deborah Birch

TERESA IN THE CAVE DOSSIER

research portfolio

CAVES 2 – RE-ENTRY

Deborah Birch

ANCESTRAL Ca2+ DOSSIER

research portfolio

LAURA PANTE // PORTFOLIO // A.PASS 2018 – 2019

LAURA PANTE // PORTFOLIO // A.PASS 2018 – 2019

The following pdf file comprehends the trajectory of Laura Pante‘s research through the context of a.pass. The contents of her research turn around the crafted concept of 2D Dance, a flickering and performative exploration around learning conditions, body language conditioning, and the double role of aesthetic models in the use and in the production of corporeal images. (clik on the following title not on the image to see the portfolio)

Laura Pante – 2D Dance – a research

research portfolio

Practicing Interstices_Portfolio by Nassia Fourtouni

Developing tools and methodologies for a dramaturgical practice informed by somatics.

I 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 I developed were about dialogue and conversation. Gradually, the scores and methodologies developed borrowed the form of a somatic lesson.

In my work I bring 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.

Link to the portfolio: Practicing Interstices by Nassia Fourtouni

research portfolio

Dear Visitor – a portfolio by Katinka van Gorkum

Dear visitor, this is the link to the portfolio on Vimeo

Please note that it is possible to change the quality settings within the menu of the video on Vimeo. The preferred quality is 1080p or even 2K. The consequence of watching the video in this high quality, is that the video will take some time to load. I kindly ask you for your patience. In case you get very frustrated waiting for the video to load, it is possible to send the video over wetransfer, just send me an e-mail (vangorkum.katinka@gmail.com).

research portfolio

Some activities to be recognised as Otherwise Exhibiting

Adrijana Gvozdenović

Some activities to be recognised as Otherwise Exhibiting (pdf)

research portfolio

Eleanor Ivory Weber / Subverses [summary of research trajectory]

25 January 2019

Research portfolio

Eleanor Ivory Weber is a writer and artist, whose artistic research is grounded in conceptual writing, psychoanalysis and vocality.

The following two documents summarise her research trajectory at a.pass, September 2017 through February 2019.

Read 1 (basics):

SUBVERSES-EleanorIvoryWeber-2019-part1

Read 2 (poetics):

SUBVERSES-EleanorIvoryWeber-2019-part2

research portfolio

Portfolio

Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

‘The Construction of Performative space’ – Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

Process review of the parkour in a.pass

End Presentation May 2018 – ‘This is 1000 liter fuel, so…’ DecorAtelier