information, performative publishing, project, workshop

Open Call for writers

©Bilal Kamilla Arnout

Am I Evil?* Brussels Edition 

by Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola with Els Moors

Can erotic writing become a place for decolonial and feminist exploration?How could one embrace the tools of erotic writing to unveil, investigate and question power processes of colonisation, discrimination, nanoracism, marginalization, exoticization, abuse and seduction from diverse perspectives?  

These questions are at the core of Am I Evil? process writers of all sorts are invited to embark upon.
On this journey the group of writers embrace erotic writing as a tool to investigate their own desire, and how this relates to the Other and the Unknown.

For the duration of the whole journey they stay in dialogue through a peer-to-peer editing methodology. Actually such a methodology is not ‘just’ editing. It is rather an intimate and radical way of dialoguing through re-writing.

Am I Evil? starts off with a-lecture introduction by Basani and Ciresola open to everyone about the legacy of Jeanne Walschot, the first white female dealer and collector of African art we know, active in Brussels from 1920s.

performative publishing, postgraduate program, workshop

26-27 June 2023 / a.pass

image

The 2 days workshop starts from looking into the possibilities given by the magazine as a format for artistic publications. 

If any publication implies a multiplicity of relations and functions, depending on different expertise in the editing and printing process, a magazine entails as well a variety of authors and sources, a diversity of literary genres, and a large spectrum of relationships between the writer/performer and the reader/spectator. A magazine can also alter and play with the tensions and the hierarchies between the serious and the banal. All these features would overflow the centralized and isolated role of the editor.

performative publishing, postgraduate program, workshop

29-30 June 2023 / a.pass

DSCF3068

Stage so near so far is a two-day workshop following the newly published issue of Pages and explores forms of reading based on the printed texts in the magazine.

The new issue consists entirely of plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer’s body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. 

performative publishing, postgraduate program, workshop

5-6 July 2023 / a.pass

Reading at one's own pace

The purpose of this workshop is to explore together (through talk, writing, scoring and movement) some key compositional questions. The particular focus is on length, experienced as sequence and duration, and how to achieve it. Long-ing: how to make things that carry on? (If only for a short while?) Once initiated, how and when to make them stop? Our work will involve looking closely at transitions: the links or breaks between the smaller parts of a composition, as well as beginnings and endings, rises and falls in energy and interest. It will draw on the processes operational in our most immediate surrounds (the different durations of the bodies, objects and forces composing our work-space) and use these as both constraints and materials. It will also involve bringing in certain powerful shapes and positions — social as well as aesthetic shapes such as the circle, the horseshoe or the line –, thinking about the work they do, then testing how to move from the one to other (from the clearing to the path, the scene to the summary). ‘I wish it were longer,’ it is written somewhere in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ‘for I like it truly.’ In the end, the project of long-ing might come down to this: to matters of feeling, liking or not liking, tensions producing curiosities or failing to, and we will consider these vital questions, too. 

postgraduate program, workshop

24-25 June 2023 / a.pass

dreaming collage by Anna Nowicka

In the workshop we will explore our unique languages of imagination. We will notice how images move us, and how our actions transform inner landscapes. We will shift perspectives, switch between giving and receiving, doing and observing, dancing and being still. With the help of shifting the eye within and without the body, we will build realities and let go of them, draw inner landscapes and quest into their mysteries. We will speak worlds into being and listen to how they resonate in the body. From this receptive place, we will form our unique dances.

workshop

12-13 May 2023 / a.pass 4th floor

an encounter behind closed doors

Body-Mind Centering sessions, followed by reading Towards a Transindividual Self: a study in social dramaturgy

In Tati(l)/Tati(s), we dedicate the morning to Body-Mind Centering-anchored practices of exploring the environment of self and other. While introducing some general principles activated through BMC, we dedicate specific attention to the exploration of embryological development of the heart. How do notions about ´listening´, ´conscious and unconscious dialogue´, a ´collective realm´ and/or ´repetition´ inform an explorative dance, as well as move concepts of research in various directions?

lecture, workshop

15-16 May 2023 / a.pass 4th floor

04_birtalan_a_tear_for_the_devout_2022

workshop

26 June-7 July 2023 / a.pass & rile*

Singed bible from the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory, in Rome

One publishes to find comrades! So says André Breton. The last block of a.pass ends with a focus on publishing, and the myriad of relations implied in committing something to print. Publishing is rarely something that concludes a confined process of solitary thought. It is a social process that — abstractly and manifestly — involves collaboration along the way: sometimes with fellow interlocutors, sometimes with an editor or designer at the other end of the table, sometimes with abstract ideas of what readership might entail, sometimes in dialogue with ordinary processes of living with, sometimes as a script with future enactment in mind, and most probably a bit of all of those at once. Rather than aiming for a book or for printed matter as a finite goal, we will take publishing as a pretext to build relationships that last over time. How can a publication be set up as an ongoing social gesture, a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance?

performative publishing, workshop

24 March 2023 / Au jus

workshop and book presentation

poster social dissonance @ au JUS (no txt)

Mattin’s work in the field of noise and improvisation seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Social Dissonance is the discrepancy between what we do (buying and selling commodities) and what we believe about ourselves as non-commodified entities. In shifting the emphasis from the sonic to the social, we discover that social dissonance is the territory within which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit. In order to deal practically with this, Mattin scored social dissonance as part of documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. For 180 days, four players used members of the audience as instruments, who then hear themselves and reflect on their own conception and self-presentation. The score Social Dissonance claims that, by amplifying alienation in performance and participation, can enable us a new understanding of structural alienation.

postgraduate program, workshop

15-16 March 2023 / a.pass

Workshop

Screen Shot 2023-02-02 at 21.05.17

Building on from a previous proposal (Night Shift) Nada Gambier in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit now invite you for the Two-Day Shift. 

In this working shift, we will dive into the problematics that arise from coming together, engage in improvisational games and strategies, have fun with speculation and bathe in inconvenience as a way to look anew at our practices and get to know our researches from another angle. Once again, our attention goes to what it means to be of service to each other and the works and how by attending to parasites we come to another understanding of what we are doing. The question of desire and learning from what we don’t know will also linger as a larger drive and disorganizing method for the group and researches. 

postgraduate program, workshop

1-2 March 2023

Cheese-making workshop with Robin Bantigny

Marseille-various-cheeses_lactic-photo

postgraduate program, workshop

9-10 February 2023 / a.pass

PA-curation proposed by Asli Hatipoglu

non-convention-lighting-laboratory-fluxlian-2

Martin Flugelman, from FLUXLIAN – a collaborative platform focused on light applied in arts, design, performance, and activism – introduces a two-day laboratory. The workshop consists of experiences and activities using the phenomena of light. We will collectively appropriate lighting technologies, hack and improvise devices to shift the appearance of bodies and space. How to integrate lighting to the artistic practice, staging, cyborging, and researching on light as a narrative element. This is a place to drift into alternative lighting aesthetics by using what is around us. How can we translate ideas in lighting terms? How can a light choreography produce an image-experience? What can we illuminate collectively?

postgraduate program, workshop

6-10 March 2023

Workshop

With Anne Juren and her lessons on fantasmical anatomy (March 6-10), we turn to the body as a familiar and unfamiliar site of experience, epistemology and eventually altered potentiality. If the body is a biological product, conditioned by medico-social practices and generational transmissions that precede our experience, how can we simultaneously approach our closest friend and/or foe as ‘a body project’, i.e. as a poetic, fantastical, speculative, imaginative and even monstrous site of investigation that settles and unsettles the conceptions we might have of ourselves, the world and the relations between us? In which way are metaphors influencing the imagination of the body? How is the speculative addressing of somatic practice disfiguring concepts of anatomy? Can horror imaginaries offer a mood to investigate and release our corporeal disorder and vulnerability?

workshop

31 January-1 February 2023

Workshop in the library

workshop-image-heide-vijai

10am – 5pm @ a.pass, 3rd floor

The workshop disseminated escapes focuses on the intertwining between art practice, publishing and library keeping, as means to ensure a suitable knowledge context for research-based art practices to exist. With the imminent future of the post-graduate program in doubt, we take a.pass library as a contextual framework, in order to reflect on questions regarding the responsibility of maintaining spaces and networks that foster a more diverse, queer, feminist, and non-hegemonic set of references and knowledge. We will deal with issues such as collectivity, connection, knowledge production, maintenance, responsibility, generosity, boundaries, funding cuts, continuation, letting go, and deaccession, and how they could be considered and dealt with as part of one’s practice.

workshop

10-13 January 2023

workshop on horror

Cover of Flesh-Colored Horror manga, written and illustrated by Junji Ito, published by Asahi Sonorama, 1997.

For the Opening Week of a.pass block 2023 I, Adrijana and Sina propose training/hanging-out/sharing/practice for artists researchers that focuses on the specific genre of horror to understand each other’s artistic commitments in a constraint and therefore generative way. Adrijana and Sina will introduce some of the historical elements of the genre, such as zombies, gore and torture of ghostly demons, vicious animals and cannibal witches, as well as medieval serial killer monsters, unnatural disasters, Frankenstein projects, and so on. Parallelly foregrounding different scales and registers of horror for reconsideration, ranging from speculative fiction, and sci-fi cinema, to medieval bestiaries, inducing “bad feelings” such as fear, uncanny, awe, mania, panic, loss, tension and anxiety.

postgraduate program, workshop

15-18 November 2022

proposed by Isabel Burr Raty

For the topic Earth of this block, Isabel Burr Raty invites to collectively think – Earth – by diving into polarities surrounding the fourth most abundant element in the observable universe and the 15th most common in the Earth’s crust: Carbon. Carbon, which originates in the core of stars, has the power to form life, yet to dissolve life as we know it on this Planet. Carbon is the chemical skeleton, required to shape complex molecules like DNA, needed for the development, functioning and uniqueness of humans and almost all other organisms. However, carbon-based fuels dominate global energy use and in the context of climate change, carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas released by human societies. Challenging transnational green efforts to establish post-carbon economies and cementing trans-human Directed Evolution.

During a 4 day encounter based encounter and a series of theory readings, we will be in touch with traditional and innovative practices around the carbon spectrum, as well as post-human critical perspectives on the concept – human – and –nature -. Fabulating with variant Sci-Fi myths be-coming-reality, to inspire alternative imaginaries for the role of the human within the Earth’s life cycle.

performative publishing, postgraduate program, reading session, seminar, workshop

gathering, seminar, performance

27 June-9 July 2022 / ZSenne ArtLab

In the context of Block II 2022: Scoring Intimacy of Discursive Others

File:Christine de Pisan and Queen Isabeau (2).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

For two summer weeks (June 27 – July 10) a.pass is moving to ZSenne ArtLab in downtown Brussels, where it organizes a gathering around autotheory that brings together several approaches to the term and its relation to artistic research practices. The program includes several working sessions, a reading group, a programme of performances, and is curated by Lilia Mestre and Goda Palekaitė. To set a theoretical framework, a two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library and methodological tools to be further explored during the two weeks. Associated researchers of a.pass Research Center – Gosie Vervloessem, Simon Asencio, Rareş Crăiuţ and Vijai Maia Patchineelam – will present their current processes. Finally, a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice will present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda with Charlie Usher, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen, Vladimir Miller, Gary Farelly and Adrijana Gvozdenović. 

postgraduate program, workshop

12 May-21 July 2022 / a.pass

Scoring intimacy with discursive others

kinsscore

The specificity of Kin(s)score is on the fact that we will participate in the score with our research kinships. We will speak with them, through them and us about the questions that our research make apparent. We will discuss and practice what are the political implications of authorship, collectivity and the other.

postgraduate program, workshop

7-11 March 2022

A proposition of the Participants Assembly

careapassB

CARE at a.pass

A longing for togetherness is inherent to the a.pass community. To ensure this togetherness it is necessary to have different strenghtening intra-structures within the larger institutional structure. Especially in disruptive times as we are living in right now – on a micro and a macro scale – the participants of a.pass asked themselves how also they can contribute one of those intra-structures in which we can provide and reflect on care.

CARE is an invitation to five days of five brunches and five talks. Together we want to find out what does care mean under the scope of a.pass as an institution focusing on artistic research. Where or what is care within and around artistic research? How is the act of caring resonating within participants’ practices? What and who needs (more) care? Is care (somewhere) missing?

project, workshop

24 January-11 February 2022 / a.pass

Image copyright: Robbie Shone

POLYSET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH

SCHEDULE

[disorganisation, mutable<>mutant, re-constitution, available space, usedesign, decoherence, constituent imagination, perpetual modeling, set / unset, cohab, sticky space, gel, semiset, accumulation, interim, tentative, fragile, actual, affine space, poligraphy, gathering, a walk in the dark with the flashlight pointing backwards, fugitive instituting, politecture, study, overflow, hangout]

a poliset is:

a practice of temporary research co-habitation, where the the researchers design their spaces of practice in one shared space

an indoor research hangout with available communal materials, tools, support structures and resources

a self-curated study, that works through an open network of invitations

consensual over-all-planning is an exception, while relational collaborative negotiations structure the space

-, postgraduate program, workshop

8-8 October 2021

by Agency

During Bleed is inevitable, Agency invokes Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable)), a copyright controversy related to a pedagogical program in prison and the oscar nominated documentary Scared Straight!. During the court case, the judge had to decide if the pedagogical program was a dramatization of prison life and whether it could qualify for the protection of copyright as a work of performance art. At a.pass we will revisit the moment of hesitation during the court case and dwell on the problem discussed in the case as a way to fabulate different outcomes. What happens if ‘facts’ become included in a reciprocal way within artistic practices? 

7pm @ a.pass!

postgraduate program, workshop

Conversation with Krõõt Juurak

A Good Workshop

postgraduate program, workshop

14 September-3 October 2020 / a.pass

The Unconditional Institution

Settlement 16

During the days of Sept 14th – Oct 3rd 2020 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called Settlement. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim 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. The schedule for these three weeks will be developed on site by its participants and shared online on the a.pass website.

please let us know if you want to join this workshop by subscribing a week before you come. covid measures will be followed in the shared environment to ensure it safety. 

research center, workshop

14-14 July 2020 / ZSenne Art Lab

How sound-space perception and spatial listening can be used as a tool for developing movement and creating performance works?

What knowledge/approach/way-of-doing do spatial listening and sound-space perception afford and how that can inform movement and performance work? How sound space awareness can turn or be translated into ways of moving, performing, and choreographing?

Can we think of specific ways to develop/approach movement and performance which are led by the ear-situated-in-space? What are the differences compared to a more eye-determined approach to movement and performance? What are the intersections and common aspects? And eventually, what are the consequences of this approach on other aspects of performance work such as set design, sound design and the positioning of the sound sources, dramaturgy, costumes, and the role/position of the audience?

research center, workshop

15-17 July 2020 / ZSenne Art Lab

How can we share the performative potential of public space to explore ‘mutual vulnerability’? We invite you to think physically during a series of ‘staged encounters’ in the wider environment of Zsenne Art Lab, between July 15 and 17.

Every encounter offers a space to negotiate proximity with a stranger, addressing the possibility for an intra-active (Barad) relationship. These encounters take shape as silent walks for two people on July 15, 16 and 17 (mornings, between 9 and 10 am). The endpoint of the walk is Zsenne Art Lab.

Through this practice of physical thinking, we aim to configure a layered understanding of the relation between self- and social identity within the urban environment. We explore how the environment plays a role in the construction of an ‘environmental identity’ (Clayton). On Friday July 17th at 14pm, a public discussion will take place for the participants of the silent walks and external guests to share thoughts on the question: ‘how do our practices contribute to the construction of an environmental identity’?

These activities are embedded in the long term research project HALL33, by TAAT. Between May and November we continue organizing ‘staged encounters’ as a form of social activism in Brussels (BE), Dundee (UK), Riga (LV) and Athens (GR). How vulnerable do we want to be towards strangers in a ‘socially distant’ society?

research center, workshop

15 July 2020 / ZSenne Art Lab

During this workshop Pia Louwerens will test scattered yet corroborating ideas and exercises linked to her research, grouped into two sessions. The first part of the workshop will revolve around the notion of being “embedded” and ways of becoming embedded on the one hand, and on the other hand the workshop as a superstructure, an exoskeleton, which adapts itself to its participants. Would it be possible to rewrite the workshop during the event itself, and what kind of structure could serve this soft workshop? For the second part of the workshop Louwerens will introduce new elements; attempts to evoke events which occured during her research trajectory in collaboration with several institutions in the Netherlands. We will become a loosely organized speaking-reading-writing-machine to collectively document these instances and provide them with an embedded subtext.

research center, workshop

13-14 July 2020 / ZSenne Art Lab

- Nice picture! Are you in it? :)

postgraduate program, workshop

9 October-7 November 2019 / a.pass

image: Milena Kipfmüller

postgraduate program, workshop

an instant conversation

IMG_20190615_145950

postgraduate program, workshop

Score for a boat trip

no-boat

postgraduate program, reading session, workshop

12-12 July 2019 / Square des Libérateurs, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean

postgraduate program, workshop

22-22 May 2019 / Start at Zenne Garden

a resilient movement for room to secondary river valleies

Ecole Mondiale

postgraduate program, workshop

straying

terrain d'aventure

postgraduate program, workshop

digging

Zenne Garden

This is an elaborate permaculture garden with many small experiments from water cleaning plants to interspecies labour. Kobe, who will also be one of the dedicated mentors – is working in this garden for 12 years together with a collective of various artists and activists. It is quite a sensitive ecosystem.

postgraduate program, workshop

24 June-29 April 2019 / Fribourg (CH)

crafting

unlearning center

postgraduate program, workshop

6 May-28 July 2019 / Zenne Garden et al.

the adoption project

regenwuermer

postgraduate program, workshop

4-8 February 2019

workshop with philipp gehmacher

This week’s focus lies on the idea and genre of the lecture performance in the performing and visual arts. Speaking out will be looked at as a performative act of sharing thoughts and concerns about ones own research and work. The questions often arising are: Why speak out about things at all? Why not let the work speak for itself, the research be mapped out and available? Is the speaking an extra layer of added information, at times rendering the ‚shown’ and presented more informal, even personal? Whilst in fact pointing at its surrounding, as much as the institution, is there a self-referentiality involved in speaking that we cannot escape whether we speak about ourselves, our concerns or just matters seemingly ‚worldly‘ and not personal? Speaking is however also about utterance and the speech act, performative as such, in the now, whether scripted or not. Speaking points out, maps out, accompanies actions and discursifes often all at once.

postgraduate program, workshop

7-26 January 2019 / a.pass

settlement

postgraduate program, workshop

25-28 February 2019

c_robinhinsch

postgraduate program, workshop

10 September-30 November 2018

A curatorial proposal by Adva ZAkai

* Images – screen-shots from https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/89465667

PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

This block is organized around a series of Study Days. Almost every Monday till the end of November, a.pass hosts artists, thinkers and researchers to contribute to the problematization of various issues that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics.

research center, workshop

11 June-15 May 2018 / Zsenne ArtLab

IMG_4131

research center, seminar, workshop

18-29 June 2018 / Zsenne ArtLab

a residency with Erin Manning in the frame of parallel parasite

sense-lab Erin Manning

research center, workshop

4 June-9 May 2018

School Of Love @ Parallel-Parasite

SOL

postgraduate program, workshop

16-16 March 2018 / a.pass 4th floor / 10:00 to 17:00

coppertone_by_diablomako_s

postgraduate program, workshop

30 January-3 February 2018 / a.pass 4th floor

Shaking down the entrepreneur

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This workshop takes place in the devastated landscape of the Creative Economy. Dipping cautiously into realms of business and economics (in which artists are generally and probably wilfully unschooled), we will take a pigeon’s-eye view (scrappy, opportunistic, only occasionally vicious) of worn-out tropes such as entrepreneurialism, human capital and cultural enterprise.