FORGED THEORY

postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller / Peter Stamer FORGED THEORY

5-7 July 2016 / a.pass

artwork by Miler Lagos

„I remember this workshop where we were asked to write theory in support of our research. Not to go and read and quote existing work but to make it up, to quote from a fictional pile of books. What would be such a fictional body of writing to situate our work in? What kind of fanstasy discourse does our work exist in? To be honest: Is our work not already producing a potential yet unwritten discourse? We keep looking until we find that ghost in someone else’s writing, calling it research, no? Its divination, ghost hunting, séances. Can we go one step further and conjure up those voices we are looking for?

In that workshop we looked at the many fragmented ways those voices appear in a piece of writing: blurbs on the back page, quotes from form other literary works, footnotes, citations, bibliography lists and lists for further reading. All the ways a supporting structure of precedents is woven into and around an academic text. Mere fragments in themselves, they point to whole architectures of thought. Their distinct style, their no-nonsense-brevity speak volumes. How does an archeologist distinguish between a shard and a piece of pottery made to look like one? He cant help but imagine the vase.“

Richard Crane, Territorial Discourses Michigan University Press, 1998

“Contemporary art has two major problems. One is that it’s absolute meaningless when it comes to a larger scale. Whatever is being produced, performed, presented has no potency to leave the bubble of those who are in one way or the other involved in the respective field. The artistic practice is absolutely irrelevant and will have nothing to contribute in the forthcoming years to the challenges globalism already presents to our societies. The other huge problem even has a dramatic touch. There is not one single theoretical concept, not one philosophical idea that has been articulated or even thought within the contemporary arts that would have an impact on the ‚world out there’. Nothing that would provoke social discourses to rethink the accepted horizon of knowledge, nothing to at least create confusion in scientific environments. Instead, contemporary art theory is as stale as the beers the visual artists drink after they have opened their futile exhibitions, as silly as the babble theatre makers come up with in their meaningless funding applications, as impotent as the pieces dancers fabricate in their unattended off-off garages. Theory which has developed into the well-fed heir of contemporary artistic practice is in fact a motherless, dead-born child, and I couldn’t think of anything that would reanimate that poor and hopeless creature. What ‚theory’ is rather in dire need of is to be turned around in order to be taken from behind…”

Gianluca di Fratelli, “Standing on one leg while holding one’s breath. The Apocalypse of the Now”. Riders in the Storm. The Act of Nothing. Ed. by Meyers P. and Bozac S., Rome/Warsaw 1997. p. 233-234.

postgraduate program, workshop

Xiri Tara Noir Visiting the (un)safe

The Excursion-workshop Visiting the (un)safe is an individual travel through some specific spaces of Brussels. The excursion will ask of its participants to question how our identity(ies) are constantly formed and transformed by our physical surroundings and environment. Safe space is a term used for an area or forum where either a marginalized group are not supposed to face standard mainstream stereotypes and marginalization, or in which a shared political or social viewpoint is required to participate in the space. For example, a feminist safe space would not allow free expression of anti-feminist viewpoints. Physical safe spaces are often reserved only for members of the oppressed group.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert CONSEQUENCES

2-6 March 2009

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference
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postgraduate program, workshop

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert CONSEQUENCES II

1-6 March 2010

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference
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postgraduate program, project, workshop

Higher Performance!

7-18 May 2012

pic

Some workshopping in economics for artists is due!
At latest since 2008 it became clear, that the economic system we are living in and with is wacky, unjust and not sustainable. Many of its instruments are either exaggerated or exhausted. The bubbles it produces in different markets are getting out of control and deregulated fiscal constructions are dramatically failing.

postgraduate program, workshop

PIERRE RUBIO / PETER STAMER HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?

24-28 June 2013

What does critique aim at, and how does it epistemologically operate? How can we deal with its problematic relation to judgment and truth? What’s the relevance of critique within a system of criticality to overcome the vicious circle of belief and denunciation? What’s the role of discourse and theory in one’s research and practice in order to go beyond backing up one’s work but rather challenging it, eroding it, posing problems to it? Is discourse solving the crisis of practice or should it rather impose a crisis on practice?
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Elke van campenhout “general intellect ? – it’s not about you, stupid !”

3-7 March 2014

‘General Intellect? - it's not about you, stupid !’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the apass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective.
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postgraduate program, project, workshop

Occupy Democracy

29 September-3 October 2014

Occupation Precaire: one-euro-cents glued in public space

Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are determined: The workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day. The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio, Elke Van Campenhout Performance / Performativity / Objects / Subjects

19-23 January 2015

USA. Florida. Cape Kennedy. Space center. 1967.

Pierre Rubio and Elke Van Campenhout give will give time to discuss the basic concepts addressed in the block: Performance and Performativity.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Ana Hoffner Tools for artistic research – Beckett

2-6 February 2015

Beckett_Score

The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Joachim ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

25-29 May 2015

Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson

Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ wants to address critically the production of subjectivity. 'A revolution is as much a reorientation of our affective relations as it is of social relations and cannot be one without the other.' Jason Read, ‘Economies of Affect / Affective Economies’, 2013
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postgraduate program, workshop

Abu Ali * Toni Serra THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

8-12 June 2015

Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008

For this workshop Abu Ali offers a selection of footage from the video archive O.V.N.I (observatori de video no idenitficat) based in Barcelona, which deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections Abu Ali will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Elke Van Campenhout Who’s Afraid of the Subject?

18-22 January 2016 / a.pass

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In this theoretical and discussion workshop, we reconsider the notion of the subject today:

why, after all the turn-arounds of becomings, vibrant objects and a decentralisation of the human perspective, do we need to reconsider the subject as an important player in our discourses and practice?

well, to start with, because there is no personal agency or ethics without it. and also because there is a need for a consciousness of what it is that subjects us, what it is that turns us into speaking, experiencing and affecting human beings. but even more so, when and why these powers are denied to us, and why?

postgraduate program, research center

2016 BLOCK II

1 May-31 July 2016

2016 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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project

Block 2016/II: Uninvited research – Excursions

1 May-31 July 2016

Jean-Léon_Gérôme_003

Where do we practice our research, and how does changing that affect what can be talked about and experimented with? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move? We will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses.
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information, postgraduate program

Opening week Block II/2016

2-11 May 2016 / a.pass

Open up your practice to the others!
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postgraduate program

Block 2016/II: Uninvited Research

2 May-28 August 2016 / Brussels and beyond

Jean-Léon_Gérôme_003

Where do we practice our research? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move? This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. As a collective practice for this block each a.pass participant will propose a trip, or an excursion to a place that resonates with the topics of her research. We understand these trips as mini workshops. They will be attended by the a.pass participants and will also be open to the genreal public on a sign-up basis.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Elke van Campenhout / Vladimir Miller FEEDBACK

3-6 May 2016 / a.pass

WOAW_Resize_original

Since a.pass is a shared environment, we depend a lot on each other as sparring partners in our researches. As part of the Opening Week this workshop addresses very diverse feedback techniques: spoken critique, non-negotiated critique, direct feedback, indirect feedback, written, walking, one-on-one or transformative feedback.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Epifania Amoo-Adare (Un)thinking Research Practice

9-10 May 2016 / a.pass

Decolonizing Theory, Mobilizing Methodologies, and Open-Ended Becoming(s)

The premise of this workshop is that a critical pedagogy on the space of research knowledge production, and its related forces of (re)production, is a necessary condition for any intervention in (and of) that space. Consequently, we propose to challenge widespread understandings of research space and knowledge production as a binary researcher-researched structure that is given and fixed, in other words: a structure that is developed for and not a context that is developed by the various actors in the research process. We contrast this convention with an understanding of research space as both, a manifestation as well as a vehicle of the productive relations of power-knowledge.

postgraduate program

Dinner with Brussels

9 May 2016 / a.pass

In order to simulate our ideas for specific and challenging trips we would like to gather some Brussels ‘cracks’ – people who know Brussels form one or the other perspective by heart, know the hidden places and weird stories of this city – and invite them for a dinner at a.pass.

postgraduate program, workshop

Thiago Antunes Civic integration at Thermae Grimbergen

18 May 2016 / meeting at a.apass

Thiago

We are going to the Thermae Grinbergen, in Grimbergen, a municipality in the province of the Flemish Brabant. This spa is unissex and has two main parts, one naked area and another for people in swuimming suits. The participants can choose whichever area they prefer to start, but my invitation is for trying both.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Maarten Van Den Bussche PROTEST!

24-24 May 2016 / apass

Next Tuesday, the 24th of may, the three biggest labour unions of Belgium are calling for a collective demonstration through Brussels. They march against austerity measurements that weigh heavy on the general public but refuse to demand a similar effort of the top percent. They march against a deregulation of the working hours that would push burn-out and stress statistics to all time highs.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga ON MOVEMENT

24-24 May 2016 / a.pass

precipitations_EWH-FLH_05

A proposition to think through the multiple understandings of the word 'movement' both as a change of physical location over time and in the sense of social or political 'movements'
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end presentation, performative publishing, postgraduate program

TINNA OTTESEN Generously forceful / The doubtful wild

26-28 May 2016 / in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds

THREE VIVARIUMS / a.pass research presentation

poster_web_lands

If a place has a memory, will it sense your absence? How do we respond to materials, and to the sensations, the memories they evoke? And how can inorganic, industrial materials like latex & nylon, respond to elementary things in us? What are the transformative effects of space and beauty? Is it possible that spatial experience can change ones perspective and interaction with the world?
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sana Ghobbeh / Juan Duque Excursion

10 June 2016 / meeting at a.pass

We propose as an activity to gather at Gare du Midi market on Sunday and each of us, after finding a place, remain still in the same spot for about 45 minutes (or as much as the high activities of the context allow) before the finishing activity and dismantling of the market. A main question we want to explore: For how long can we remain? In which ways can our bodies be affected when we decide to take a position that is opposite to the majority of people surrounding us in such a busy place?
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sébastien Hendrickx A silent group visit to my father’s house

16 June 2016

Google

+/- 15 a.pass-participants and others travel to the place where the initiator of the trip spent most of his youth. The visit forms the basis of a collective writing score, inspired by the architecture of collaboration of a ‘writers room’ (a group of scriptwriters working on a TV series, a.k.a. ‘a bigger brain’).

postgraduate program, workshop

Esteban Donoso Mr. Ecuador

29 June 2016 / meeting at a.pass

Esteban

While swimming in the public pool at Jeu de Bal we will record sounds from the site, our conversations, and sounds sprout from talking practices I have been working on. When we are back in the apass studio, we will perform our swiming pool sound documentary.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Einat Tuchman A visit to the social cultural centers of Molenbeek

29-29 June 2016 / a.pass

Wondering around the community of Molenbeek we will enter four different social cultural centres. In each one we will get to know their activities , their aims and their relation to the political economical conditions of a community like Molenbeek.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Peggy Pierrot / Femke Snelting Modifying the universal

30-30 June 2016 / a.pass

Snelting-emoji-default-modifer

As an input to MOVING RESEARCH Femke will host a one day workshop, starting from the emoji modifiers case. We will discuss how and why mainstream communication infrastructures promote universalist values and at the same time provide means for separating users along fault lines of race, gender and age.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Gerald Kurdian Hot bodies of the future <3

8-9 July 2016 / Barlok, 9pm

Hot bodies of the future <3 is a scored investigation of body states in parties and clubs contexts. Experienced one night through and under coloured lights, it consists in a very sensuous and playful exploration, with scores, of some or our physiologic, erotic and imaginative relationships to sounds, body movements and space while club dancing.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Esta Matkovic Place yourself to receive

11-11 July 2016 / apass

My suggestion for excursion is to try perceive particular space, as still-non-defined-space. We will go to this kind of space, which has potential to stimulate different directions in conversation. We will stand in a waiting line with other participants and “receive” what this space gives to us. How do we perceive and measure this? What we are perceiving and how does this influence our behavior. Body position, relation, potential to become statement.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sina Seifee EXCURSION TO CEN

12-12 July 2016 / apass

(in the direction of my research; hastily opening the ontological envelope that saves a heart full of "list of specifications"...) the visit will be to the 'European Committee for Standardization' (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalisation), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of 'data', 'systematic knowledge', and 'specifications'. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of APASS and the representatives of CEN; and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their epistemological formations meet and intersect.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Luiza Crosman UNRAVELING INSTITUTIONAL DYNAMICS

13-13 July 2016 / apass

A one day practice-based and experimental excursion-workshop that will focus on reflecting on Art Institutions - how they present themselves and how we, as artists,art workers or general public, would act upon them, given the power to make decisions. During the excursion-workshop we will visit an Art Institution and, through a staff’s guided tour, we will learn about the “non visible” work that maintains and moves it’s dynamics, making it possible for its structure to be ready to receive art shows, projects, presentations, etc.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Christian Hansen Hoarding and Hiding

16-17 July 2016 / Station Haren Zuid

Together we will walk from Station Haren Zuid towards Brussels along the railways.
Underway we will exaggerate and share our urge to pick up and play with any things that trigger our curiosity and find temporary homes possible new belongings. After the walk we will set up a studio camp in a field between Gare de Schaerbeek and Gare du Nord where we can work with our findings and get some sleep.

postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller THEORIES UNDER THE COMMONS

26-30 September 2016

Commons is_

This workshop will be an attempt to „come to terms“, to create shared reference points within the commons discourse among the workshop participants. We will read discuss and map a selection of texts which lay the groundwork for understanding the commons debate today and we will make ourselves familiar with a reader, which can be a further reference for discussions and in depth reading throughout the block.
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information, postgraduate program

HALF-WAY-DAYS

17-21 October 2016 / a.pass

Practice your practice with the others!
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

2-9 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Sina Seifee

Reading Sessions of Donna Haraway's essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #5 Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound

16 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Peggy Pierrot

George Clinton emerges from Parliament-Funkadelic's Mothership on June 4, 1977, at the Coliseum in Los Angeles

Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digitized compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes? and what kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic ? We’ll build or we’ll destroy. We’ll learn about the Know-Ledge.
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lecture, postgraduate program

Book Club #7 Politics of Speculative fabulation

10 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Fabrizio Terranova

Dr Marboeuf

"We need new types of narratives and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made and experienced." In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis - Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble” and present the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sina Seifee Little Fables of Practice Workshop

24-25 July 2017 / a.pass 4th floor

Sina Seifee - Moon index in Sa'di world refraction poetics

In this two days workshop I like to propose the notion of keyword seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices. We will (re)animate our keywords as fables, which are operational metaphors that shape subjects and objects of knowledge. How can we participate in (re)shaping our objects of knowledge in terms of little fables?
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postgraduate program

UNINVITED RESEARCH II

1 September-30 November 2017

BLOCK III, SEPT-NOV 2017

photo by s. jouwersma

This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. We will use the methodologies of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk to reconsider the building blocks of our research and discover new ones.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Uninvited Research II Excursions

22 October-17 November 2017

IMG_7032 Kopie

In the course of the upcoming two weeks the a.pass researchers of this block will each propose an excursion coming out of their current research focus. You are cordially invited to join. Please sign up on the a.pass main page on the detail page for each of the proposals.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Eleanor Ivory Weber The World Today All In The Mind

23 October 2017

20171018_155743

“…a 100% probability of nothing happening, and that’s often when it’s more interesting…”
– Peter Ryan, ABC Senior Business Correspondent, 2 October 2017

On Monday 23 October 2017, several todays, today. An instruction-based, public yet solo, listening & reading exercise, derived from radiowaves. Thinking about the public mind and testing what is produced from chance and structure. How language functions on different registers, at once, in time, and beyond us.

postgraduate program, workshop

Pia Louwerens From I to we

24 October 2017

Excavating reality together, at home

IMG_6192

“From I to we” serves as an introduction into my practice inside its subjective core: my own home. After a performance the audience is invited to rewrite the script, rewarded with a warm meal cooked by the artist herself.

postgraduate program, workshop

Hoda Siahtiri If the past is really passed?!

25 October 2017

An introduction to co-experincing the others’ trauma

The city of Brussels is holding a part of my past. I will take you to one of the most historical places of Brussels. Please bring headphones if you have. It would be nice to have a piece of paper and pen. thanks.

postgraduate program, workshop

Geert Vaes La Flandre Profonde / Into The Heart Of Flanders

26 October 2017

pasted image 0

‘Het Gezin Van Paemel’ (The Family Van Paemel) by Cyriel Buysse is a 114-year old theatre piece that’s still showing the flemish what it means to be flemish. The excursion will bring us to an amateur theatre company rehearsing the piece. Why are they, and with them lots of other amateur companies, still so interested in this piece? Why am I? My questioning will be mainly about one scene in particular: the son who goes to tell his father he’s leaving for America. An America he only knows through stories, an America that personifies a better life. How is this flemish identity created (the I) by the staying and the leaving? And how is America (the other) created? And isn’t all emigrating originating in ‘The America of the Soul’? How is this construction of I a mask/conditioning? How is history as a re-construction keeping all these notions in place? How will I go from here to using masks again? And how will I finally get out of Flanders?

postgraduate program, workshop

Sven Dehens Untitled Excursion

27 October 2017

Critical voicing, reading, enactment of Alien (1979). Process of audio-visual documentation. Generation of a subtext to the script.

postgraduate program, workshop

Shervin Kianersi For to Know Nothing Is Nothing

30 October 2017

Imagine natural daylight, the best kind of light to see things clearly. Then imagine the light getting brighter and brighter, until it becomes so blindingly white that you are filled with anxiety. The information overload that we experience in our everyday lives is similar to that blinding light. Its origins date to the early 90s, when computer networks attained critical speeds and scales. Today, each of us yearns to be informed 24/7. The dictatorship of information creates in us a desire for round-the-clock information. We have become the organic components of an integrated global data and information system. Yet this yearning we feel is about our search for the Real, which a never-ending stream of information, that informs us only of the reality of facts, can neither satisfy nor fulfil. Because information is always directed at you. Information informs but is no guarantee of getting any closer to the truth. In fact, information sometimes operates as an obstacle to the truth. Instead, what if we started to filter out what we could of the information, in order to better understand the truth? What if we ignored information about the given facts and instead tried learn about something or someone for ourselves?

postgraduate program, workshop

Elen Braga The masters meeting: A Journey to the unpromised land and the magic balls

31 October 2017

DSC_0155

“- You shine through my atmosphere. And when you show up, my mountains move like bushes in the wind, and the rocks are scattered on all sides. I hear you. I hear an amazing bang like a storm to come. I hear the noise of thunder, the voice of demons, the winds, the monsters. The whole earth rises, dilating like the waves of the sea and my surface breaks down. My own ground seems to subside and… we need to find another ground to walk by: the unpromised land and the magics balls… “

postgraduate program, workshop

Leo Kay The time it takes to think

1 November 2017

IMG_2792

How can we think together? How can we make Space for deep reflection on complex issues? How can we come close enough without intruding? How can we engage in group dialogue and take the time that is needed to think before producing more, contributing more to the system we are locked within?
A day of observing, listening, walking, kneading, thinking, talking and baking, as we navigate a critical socio/political issue that effects us all and will continue to affect us in the forceable future.

postgraduate program, workshop

Luisa Fillitz A collection of Impressions

2 November 2017

Coming together in a place. Where and how do our perceptions, according to the surrounding/the place and the situation where we are, manifest themselves? Where and how can we locate them in our body? How is our intuitive reaction? Linked together in groups, we would then — following a score-proposal — try out how everybody`s own intuitional desire of where and how he/she wants to move is affecting the movement of the others in the group as well as their movement is affecting each one. Afterwards everybody is invited to create a zine in any form – according to ones wish – trying to remember the different impressions and the thoughts, feelings, that they provoked.