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    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • block 2023/I
    • Whose collection?   Assembly of Practice
      20 February 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Jubilee/Emptor
    • 03 March 2023
    • Whose collection?  
       
       
       
      In the next Assembly of Practice, Emptor proposes the a.pass participants to examine collections as potential places of shared interest, zooming in on questions that come to the surface with the complexity of collecting contemporary art practices, which are increasingly immaterial, performative, situated, ongoing and collaborative in natureThe integration of such contemporary art practices in collections by means of documentation, reactivation protocols and complex contractual relationships may satisfy desires of collection(er)s but don't seem to create change in terms of care attributed to the needs of a practice, its ecology and sustainability. Conservation and reactivation often stay disconnected from the driving forces, methodologies and contexts of the collected material elements, thus allowing the pieces nothing more than exposure in a curated frame.
       

       
       
      During a day of closed collective reflection we will go into different practices, researching and/or implementing strategies to own, activate and conserve differently. The group opens up to the public at 17h with the intention to share concerns, questions, insights and ideas collected.
       
      10am-4pm: closed collective reflection. With (tbc): Teresa Calonje, Agency, Jennifer Beauloye, Raphaël Pirenne, Heide Hinrichs
      5pm-8pm: public programme. With: Eline De Clercq, Stijn Van Dorpe
      @ a.pass 4th floor
       
      More about Emptor
       
       
    • workshop
    • block 2023/I
    • Contingent Weirdness workshop on horror
      08 January 2023
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović
    • 10 January 2023
    • 13 January 2023
    • Contingent Weirdness

      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.

      The workshop starts by choosing an aspect of our individual artistic practices and imagining it as a horror story. Further abstracting the values and ethics that the practice promotes, and deciding what can be turned into horror with the help of the group. Doing so, the workshop explores the parts of our practices that are fucked-up, which means to what extent what we do can become disastrous, gruesome, and torturous. Starting from where one’s practice produces damage and from the point where thinking disintegrates and disorients, we will map what lurks in the peripheral vision. We will concentrate on both, to create horrors but also a specific setting, those which are important for the genre. Not only to set up the mood but to create an ambiance of the expectation of horror. In the workshop, we will provide basic accessories and tools to create settings – an ambiance of ‘expectation’ pregnant with horror. In relation to this, we will prepare references for the reading and/or watching selected films together. For the last day, we focus on composing singular pieces (around individual proposals or in small groups) which we will share at the end of the day in the setting of a ‘scary night storytelling.’

      The workshop is interested in horror as a genre. Because looking at genre can teach us how stories gather and stage their matters of care and teach a negatively affected audience to inhabit their world. Adrijana and Sina are interested in what comes from an atmosphere of contingent weirdness, creating experimental and personalized monsters of artistic work. A particular interest of the workshop is in those scales that are not necessarily correct and of good intention. How can we train ourselves in different kinds of reasoning? We propose to exaggerate consciously how great art practices are also awful, how the things we do are also often laden with damage and death, to trace our works in the matrix of rage, lure, and desire (and not necessarily in the matrix of truth, urgency, and achievements).

       

      Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović were both associate researchers at a.pass Research Center (2018-2020) when this workshop was first conceived in the crossline between Sina’s medieval bestiaries and Adrijana’s artistic anxieties.

      Using storytelling, video, and performance, Sina explores and teases with the heritage of zoology in West Asia. His work picks up on how epistemologies, jokes and knowledges get shaped in the old and new intersections of techno-media and globalism. (www.sinaseifee.com)

      Adrijana employs artistic methods to create ambiguous distinctions between practice and theory, theory and confession, documentation and production, artistic and curatorial, oral exchange and artistic form. (www.gadi.me)

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2022/II
    • kinship score
    • kin(s)score Scoring intimacy with discursive others
      11 May 2022
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • a.pass
    • 12 May 2022
    • 21 July 2022
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • kin(s)score
      Kinsscore will be practiced every Thursday of  block 2022 II titled "Scoring intimacy with discursive others" (see block post)
       

      The proposal for this score follows on previous iterations of Scorescapes as a tool to practice intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing in collective settings.

      If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of one's knowledge in relation with others', then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen  relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself? 

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

      INSTRUCTIONS

      -We meet every week on Thursdays from 16:00 till 19:00 on a.pass 4th floor studio.

      -We bring food and drinks to share.

      -We work with the people present. It’s not possible to participate remotely.

      -There is no audience. If one doesn’t have something to present, one can skip a session.

      -Participants of the score attend to minimum 5 sessions.

      The score is simple. It works as follows:

      To start:

      The first meeting each of us presents a 5 minutes sample of our research question. The sample is communicated as performance, text, object, dissertation,…It manifest the content of the research and the medium through which the research is taking place.

      The questions

      After assisting to each others presentations we assign by chance procedure who is offering questions to whom.

      There are two days to formulate a question to one of the researchers that has presented their work. Questions are sent by email maximum by Saturday midnight.

      The questions are a dialectic tool to engage in the discursiveness of artistic practice and research. They aim to argument what is at stake, its implications and further relations in the artistic research environment and in the world. They are the indicators of the dialogical potential of each research project. They are the motor of a process of sharing, contaminating, contradicting, thinking / making together apart. Questions are an intrinsic and important component of the score. Think them, contextualize them, offer them.

      The responses

      After receiving your questions you have 5 days to develop an answer with the medium you’ve chosen. You present your response the next Thursday you will attend within a 5 minutes timeframe .

      Conversation

      While we assist to the presentations we will write keywords. At the end of each sessions we will collect them and chose one to have a conversation about. The notes of the conversation will be documented through out the sessions.

       

      Documentation

      All the questions will be stored at the pads here bellow. The documentation of the presentations will an individual process.

       
       
      days 1
       
      days 2
       
      days 3
       
      days 4
       
      days 5
       
      days 6
       
      days 7
       
      days 8
       
      days 9
       
      days 10
       
    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Burrow Chloë Janssens and Vera Sofia Mota
      09 May 2022
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Level 5
    • 11 June 2022
    • 12 June 2022
    • Burrow

      This public presentation of Vera Sofia Mota and Chloë Janssens marks the end of the researchers’ trajectory at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). After following the year-long postgraduate program they will share their modes of doing, seeing and making artistic research public.

       
      Location:
      Level 5
      Rue van Meyel 49, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
       
       
      Saturday 11th of June:
       
      Vera Sofia Mota
      16-22h 1 on 1  presentations. We kindly ask you to sign up on site.
       
      Chloë Janssens
      16h installation on view + individual bike rides
      18h presentation in English
      19h installation on view + individual bike rides
      20h presentation in English
       
      18h general welcome, drinks and food
       
       
       
      Sunday 12th of June:
       
      Vera Sofia Mota
      16-22h 1 on 1  presentations. We kindly ask you to sign up on site.
       
      Chloë Janssens
      16h installation on view + individual bike rides
      18h presentation in Dutch
      19h installation on view + individual bike rides
      20h presentation in English
       

      18h general welcome, drinks and food

       

       

      Vera Sofia Mota (PT)

      Vera Sofia Mota is a visual, performance and dance artist. In her research, she explores how artists and artworks are constituted today in relation to the archive. Her initial practice unfolds as a series of conversations with dead and living artists. She assembles these conversations into a spatial and performative archive that explores the relationship between her own movement practice and canonised works of art. This archive is the space where the heterogeneous objects, relationships and practices intertwine around one of the many questions of authorship: how does an artist engage with the art of others? In its craftsmanship of reinterpretation and reproduction, her research awakens the ghosts of originality, ownership, status, and value. 

      Imprints

      Imprints is an installation-performance which gives access to references which populate my art practice. It comprises materials from my own archives and the archives of Nan Hoover (New York, 1931 – Berlin, 2008) and Lourdes de Castro (Funchal, 1930 – Funchal, 2022). Departing from the idea that performance practice is a process of re-appropriation of movement language of many others, this work is constructed as a transmission, reproduction and contamination of these influences. This collective archive of past and living artists is presented as a mobilised assemblage of texts, materials and body languages. The installation is built from documents which are digitally available to the public. Does this predispose them to transformation and alteration?

      We have today unprecedented access to information on and documentation of artworks, and yet many of them come to us, just as Walter Benjamin has described, as reproductions void of context. By decoupling my archive from a genealogical approach, I try to re-enter the ecology of practices, positions, materials and texts which bring my performance practice about. The work of copying and alteration frames the performance as a complex weaving of its influence. Foregrounding the ecology of the artworks’ gestation while it is being performed demystifies the ghosts of originality and authorship. Can we look at performance differently if we situated it in a world of altered copies?

       

      Chloë Janssens Janssens (BE)

      Chloë Janssens  combines cravings and knowledge from climate activism and graphic design in an artistic practice that investigates the soil as a site of place- and future making.

      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.”

      Chloe Janssens 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. She invites the audience as a co-researcher in need of a tool for reading the soil. Chloe Janssens offers literal and metaphorical sieves to better understand our positionality and implications in the soil’s condition. How do these polluted soils that we create and inhabit inform, shape and guide us?

      For this presentation Chloe (and her alter ego Chelsea) proposes to experiment with roleplay as a tool for collective decision making on geological disposal of highly radioactive waste. She will organise a fictional council and a series of tandem bike rides for the public of her presentation. Can roleplaying in a semi-fictional reality challenge our belief systems and create openings for epistemological contamination?

    • statements for a.pass 03 February 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
      statements for a.pass

       

      "We are all very familiar with oppressive education; with its systems of reward and punishment, the stimulus of competition, the naming of the strong and the weak, the encouragement of reproduction by repetition, the reinforcement of norms and normativity, the unquestionability of the accommodating attitude towards the status quo, and its decision-making-educators—who by refusing dialogue—do not organise the people. The very goal of oppressive education isn’t to liberate nor to be liberated but to manipulate, control and generate conformism.

      However, there is another sort of education that is precisely based on dialogue; a form of education that doesn’t function as a tool to facilitate anyone’s integration into the logic of the present system. It is the practice of freedom in its most germinating terms; the facilitation of critical thinking, creativity and citizenry.

      a.pass is one of such places, of permanent learning and of promotion of such form of education. I was privileged to have been a part of this program and to have developed there much of my understanding of artistic research and art.

      I sincerely hope this institution is granted the opportunity to keep on existing and help shape the artistic scene I am a part of."

      Luanda Casella. Schrijver en theatermaker. Artist in residence NTGent

      *

      “I arrived at a.pass in the crucial moment of my life and career while searching for a way to combine various interdisciplinary artistic and academic experiences and, thus, to define my research and practice. There, I found a unique environment - rigorous intellectual discourse, dedicated peers and mentors, supportive community, and freedom to work on what I needed at that time. Even though previously engaged in international scenes of visual arts, performance and social sciences, I did not know such a place could exist. Until now I do not know another institution comparable to a.pass, neither in Belgium nor internationally. A.pass was the context where I developed the professional trajectory that I now follow. After and thanks to the post-graduate program of a.pass, I started a PhD in artistic research at Hasselt University (fully funded), published two books, and created performances, films and installations in collaboration with such institutions as Whitechapel Gallery, Delfina Foundation and Arts Catalyst in London, Venice Biennial for Architecture in Venice, Kunsthal Gent, BOZAR Brussels, Konstepidem in Gothenburg, among others. In these projects I often collaborate with artists and researchers whom I encountered through the context of a.pass. I firmly believe the relevance of this institute to be invaluable for the fields of contemporary art, performance and artistic research, as well as its model as an institutional structure to be unique and experimental.”

      Goda Palekaite. Artist researcher. Ph.D. candidate at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts.

      *

      Een jaar op a.pass heeft me meer gegeven dan drie jaar reguliere kunstopleiding. Voordat ik naar a.pass ging dacht ik niet dat het mogelijk is: les krijgen van échte kunstenaars. In vergelijking met a.pass waren mijn jaren op theaterschool een omweg vol met vast benoemde docenten die te ver van de kunstwereld verwijderd waren. Juist doordat a.pass een uniek, steeds veranderende en hybride school is die niet onder één noemer te vatten is, slaagt de opleiding er beter in om in te spelen op de veranderende wereld. Participatie is er geen loos woord: participanten en docenten kunnen de vorm van de opleiding permanent bevragen en verscherpen. a.pass uit België halen betekent een enorme en onmiddellijke verschraling van ons kunstenveld.”

      Jozef Wouters. Scenograaf en theatermaker. Winnaar Ultima Podiumkunsten 2019 met Decoratelier

      *

      "As Brussel's only learning environment focused on artistic research and performance, a.pass serves a unique and irreplaceable function in the city. My work has been transformed by the intensive learning experience I've had there. It's more than just an institution, it's an international community coalesced around principals of rigor, collaboration and care. It gave me the confidence to emphasize knowledge production and performativity as the core strategies in my own art teaching practice."

      Gary Farrelly. Beeldend kunstenaar, performer en pedagoog bij La Cambre.

      *

      "As a past researcher at a.pass I would like to express my disdain and concern over the decision of the Ministry of Education to withdraw their support from the insitution. My time at a.pass has been a period of incredible growth as artist, researcher and in my apprach to pedagogy in the arts. The research I started there have since resulted in projects & research supported locally, nationally, internationally by funders as well as prestigious institutions in Belgium and abroad and continues to fuel my practice and thinking. I strongly believe that a.pass is a unique institution in Europe for the quality & rigour in their pedagogical approach and vocabulary of methodologies that represent an incalculable cultural value in its own right. Beyond this collective value a.pass is also a rich and diverse environement for individual artistic researches to flourish that not only allowed me access to an incredible breadth of thinking and practices, establish new collaborations but also continues and will continue to feed my research and practice multiplying manifold the investment of the ministry and adding values be they academic, cultural, financial, artistic, emotional to Belgian academia, the Belgian state and its people. As a resident of Brussels, as an artist, as independent researcher, as an alumni of a.pass and as a European citizen I call on the Ministry to reverse their decision."

      Eszter Nemethi, artist, curator
       
      *

      "I was a participant in a.pass in 2014 and it was an adrenaline injection into my practice. Vague ideas transformed into solid ground for a collaborative performative practice and it was a strong and formative influence also on my work as a teacher. Besides being an invaluable place of research and education, a.pass offers it's alumni a professional community that uniquely reinforces their work and careers. In this way it is a strong, constitutive player in the whole Belgian (performance) art field."

      Philippine Hoegen, artist, educator

      *

      “Als internationaal kunstenfestival met een sterke interesse voor artistieke pedagogie zijn we bijzonder bedroefd over het nieuws dat a.pass zijn werkingsmiddelen zal verliezen. Het ondoordacht en lichtzinnig schrappen van een artistieke onderzoeksinstelling als a.pass is een totale verarming van het kunstschoollandschap. Als we de toekomst van het Vlaamse kunstenveld willen bestendigen dan moet er blijvend geïnvesteerd worden in verschillende vormen van artistiek onderwijs. a.pass is daar voor ons een cruciaal en onvervangbaar onderdeel van.”

      Dries Douibi, artistiek directeur KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 

      *

      “Elk hedendaags artistiek ecosysteem heeft behoefte aan infrastructuur voor artistiek onderzoek. Sinds 20 jaar heeft Vlaanderen dit stapsgewijs verankerd in de grote academische onderwijskoepels. Sinds 14 jaar bestaat er een onafhankelijk, klein instituut, a.pass, wat fungeert als een internationaal laboratorium voor individueel onderzoek in een omgeving die zelforganisatie en solidariteit cultiveert. A.pass is daarenboven een unieke reflectiekamer over de methodieken en de ethiek van onderzoek. A.pass is een voorland, een stukje van dat ecosysteem dat bewezen heeft bijzonder goed in staat te zijn om het artistiek én het academisch veld te irrigeren met onvermoede voedingsstoffen. Zonder a.pass zou het programma van een huis als Kaaitheater verschralen.”

      Barbara Van Lindt, algemeen en artistiek coördinator KAAITHEATER

      *

      "This is striking and sad news: the Flemish government stops the support for a.pass artistic research school, and also for HISK/Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten/Higher Institute for Fine Arts. At the same time they decided to continue and increase the support for two other educational institutions: the International Opera Academy and the Orpheus Institute. Both institutions are focussed on western classical and contemporary forms of music.
      The political choice is clear, and is probably exemplary for the direction the Flemish arts scene is evolving to the next years: real experiment, more dissident or difficult developments of artistic practices are cancelled in favour of frictionless, bourgeois ways of relating to art. I am not calling out opera and music research, don’t misunderstand me here, my plea is to support different educational views on art and access to different ways of relating to art. This government has decided to slowly but surely cancel out a vivid and (politically) more critical part of the arts scene. Yes, we knew this already, now we see it in action."
      Michiel Vandevelde, artist, dancer
       
      *
       

      “Als commissie schreven we een inhoudelijk advies dat a.pass met een goed tot zeer goed rapport richting een toekomst loodst, waarbij een stopzetting van subsidiëring nooit ter sprake is gekomen en voor ons nooit op de agenda stond. In dit rapport beschrijven we op een constructieve en positieve manier hoe a.pass functioneert. Dit rapport kwam tot stand na het doornemen van hun benchmarking, analyse van de voorbije jaren, plannen voor de toekomst en inspirerende gesprekken met (ex-)studenten, mentoren, management, bestuur en collega’s uit het veld. We zijn dan ook verbaasd en teleurgesteld dat de minister dit gunstige advies naast zich neer heeft gelegd.”

      An Vandermeulen & Mira Sanders (evaluatiecommissie) 

      *

      “It is with shock and sadness that we receive the news that Minister Weyts of Education will not prolong the agreement with HISK and a.pass starting 2024. The reason given for this decision is the lack of added value to the ecosystem of educational art institutes in Flanders. As director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht I can only say that this is far from the truth and this decision will be a blow to the network of post academic institutes in Europe. HISK and a.pass are part of the postacademic ecosystem and fill in just as all the other post academic institutes the gap between educational/academic and artistic practice. This is the reason why so many international artists find their way to Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. There are no such institutes available in the world. Northern Europe has played a significant and leading role in nurturing and sustaining institutes like these for over 150 years starting with the Rijksacademy in Amsterdam. Also, postacademies push the narrative and discourse of artistic and artistic research practice internationally. This will be a blow to both fellow institutes and artists alike. I hope sincerely that Minister Weyts will reconsider his decision and will allow HISK and a.pass play the important role that they have been doing for so many years.” 

      Hicham Khalidi - directeur Jan Van Eyck Academie 

      *

      "a·pass has been coming to PAF every year as part of its research curriculum. The dedication towards experimental forms of education, practices of collective organization and the politicization of artistic research, makes it an invaluable institution in the landscape of school and educational programmes.”

      Simon Asencio, performing artist and pedagog. On the behalf of PAF - Performing Arts Forum - Saint-Erme, France

      *

      "What I found in a.pass is the art school I imagined to be part of when I first thought of becoming an artist. It just took me 10 years to get there. My art education begins at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Montenegro, through exchange programs in art schools in Vienna and Metz, Master's degree in Luca School of Art Brussels, postmasters in St Lucas in Antwerp, to having a research position at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. I can say with certainty that only after a.pass I gained the tools and confidence to be the artist I want to be. This is due to the experimental structure of a.pass that makes it a special place (and that transcends the borders of Belgium) - a well thought structure that allows a nonvertical approach to teaching, an open and transparent process that encourages all the participants to devote themselves not only to develop their own work but to do so by taking part in each other's practices, while they are co-making the institution they are part of. I think that to manage this way of working and to become this kind of institution it takes years of hard work and risk-taking, where governmental support is of crucial importance.

      Also, a.pass managed to create a truly transdisciplinary environment, focussing on the performativity of artistic research and the methods of sharing knowledge. This I experienced only as an aim of artistic research programs developing today in Schools of Art. Needless to say that visual art schools are far from this achievement as they are becoming more of incubators for only specific kind of artist and art production, falling under pressure and influence of art market demands. a.pass is not just a program to go though, a step in the career, but it is an artist-run educational platform that for sure wouldn't be able to develop as such if merged within bigger structures of the School of Art. 

      a.pass is for me not only a program I took part in, but it is also a base experience for a belief that things can be done differently and that this world can become a less hostile place through artistic means."

      Adrijana Gvozdenović, artist

      *

      "It’s very sad for me to read that the subsidy for a.pass will not continue. In January of 2012 I joined a.pass as a researcher. The time I spend at a.pass was extremely beneficial; a.pass widened my understanding of artistic research, pushed me to better explain my practice, and gave me the courage to articulate and share my research. I’m very grateful for that time and the connections made there. In a complex world we need more places like a.pass not less."

      Elizabeth Ward, choreographer, performer, dancer

      *

      "I attended a.pass in 2017 and 2018, and graduated in February 2019. Without a.pass I simply don't think I would be where I am today as an artist. I learned a lot from the teachers and peers in my program. The context of a.pass (including ongoing feedback, presentation moments, space, time, research trips, budget and one-on-one mentoring support) permitted me to try new things and test out new and experimental formats, within a supportive and critical environment. a.pass provided a crucial developing ground for me to better understand my artistic practice, research methodology and needs. a.pass encourages its participants to connect with other practitioners and institutions in Belgium, and this is a strong aspect of the learning offered. The presentation of my graduation piece was held at Hectolitre, Brussels, and was organised collaboratively with two peers from my cohort. The collaboration was an important part of what made that event so meaningful. We were supported to make an audio publication together, and conceive a coherent program for our three practices, creating something none of us could have managed alone. Held on two evenings, there was a large public present to experience our event, and the three jury members subsequent feedback was invaluable. This marked a significant moment for me. Since graduating, I have continued my artistic research and consistently been invited to present performances and publish writing in Belgium and abroad. The dedicated and ongoing feedback I received during the period of my study at a.pass was instrumental to the evolution of my artistic research. The community of a.pass students and alumni is strong and ever-growing; it is a diverse group of people whose coming together makes for a unique study program, not only in Belgium but internationally. The close and unpredictable encounters with artist researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds is rare and must be valued highly. a.pass creates a veritable surplus for the artistic, cultural and educational sphere in Belgium."

      Eleanor Ivory Weber, Brussels-based artist, a.pass Post-Master graduate

      *

      "This decision is a proof of incompetence by the Ministry when it comes to understanding the information and documentation they demand and are provided with. It is evident that those in power have horrifying little to no knowledge about their own cultural fields."

      Heike Langsdorf - radical_hope - a.pass alumna, artist and pedagog in KASK

      *

      "Minister Ben Weyts should understand the importance of a.pass for the richly networked ecology of the Belgian art field, where bigger and smaller institutions constantly nourish each other. I experienced the value of the a.pass program from close by in 2016-17. The careful pedagogy helped me to start developing my own artistic practice, next to working as a dramaturge for other artists, amongst which some a.pass alumni such as Heike Langsdorf, Luanda Casella and Jozef Wouters."

      Sébastien Hendrickx, performing artist, dramaturge, art critic

      *

      "I would like to testify to the great importance of the a.pass post-master program in the development of my artistic research and its outreach in Europe since 2016. It is now supporting other artistic researches in dance, performance and documentation through publications like "Mind the dance" a digital publication of REFLEX Europe, 3 years EU-project (2018), Body in Revolt, ICK Amsterdam Online Magazine (2017) and presented in renown European dance festivals and Arts institutions a.o: Charleroi Dance, Brussels (2021); Royal Conservatory of Antwerp-master program (2020 -2021) Independent Dance, London (2019); Kaaïstudio, Brussels (2018), ImpulzTanz, Vienna (2018; 2017; 2016); KASK school of Arts, Gent (2021-2018)."

      Anouk Llaurens, dancer, artist, researcher in dance and pedagogue

      *

      "Participating in the a.pass past-master program has been hugely important for my practice. It is one of the best environments I can imagine for an artist of maker to develop and improve their critical thinking. Especially the exchange between the different fields within the arts is very special and contributes in making anyone a better and more complete artist. At least that counts for me, since my end presentation in September 2019, I've become a curator, fund raiser and a teacher and a much more complete artist. I am slowly finding my position with the international art scene and art market and turned my practice into a much more sustainable enterprise."

      Maurice Meewisse, artist, curator

      *

      "Since 2015 a.pass offers me a unique pedagogical method and an international platform that provides the guidance of highly qualified professionals in the arts, culture, theory and sciences. Based on self organization, transdisciplinary peer exchange and multicultural community care, I find the freedom and trust to experiment with my creative, intellectual and production interests in a safe space. This has allowed me to find my research methodologies, strengthen my art practice and work, develop publishing, teaching, mentoring and curating capacities. In other words, to position my profession and be someone constructive in society."

      Isabel Burr Raty, artist

      *

      "I have been an associate researcher at a.pass in 2018/19 and this period of time had such an influence on my practice and on my desires in regards to where I want my work to go, and whereto I want to develop as an artist and as a human being. I had the feeling already that there is something very unique and something very special happening at a.pass when I partly joined one of their blocks as a visitors, a block that was topic-wise very much connected to my practice. And this vague feeling proved so to be so true. It is hard to put this in words. As a visual artist and artist researcher I seem to have a difficult, challenging etc relationship with language. I experienced a.pass a a ‚fermenting‘ place, as a very fertile ground for other kinds of thinking, making, doing to emerge, to imagine other kinds of futures so desperately needed. One major trajectory in this is collaboration and community. ‚We are not all and the same but we are in this together‘. Coming from an art education that mostly teaches very individualistic approaches to art practices, it was so revealing to experience a.pass and their collaborative teaching and learning methods in the making. Last year I had the honour to curate a block as well together with my research cycle I fellows, and I again the experiences I made, the conversations we had, the things we had done together with the people at a.pass and the participants is now very much influencing how I want to approach working, thinking, doing in my practice based PhD, which is mainly collaborative. I have quite a hard journey in front of me. Learning how to truly collaborate and work together is not easily done when one went through all the individualised art and other higher educations. But a.pass gave me the hope and the energy and the passion and the joy to really trying it, to seeing not onl the benefits but the needs to do so. Loosing a.pass as a psotmaster education institution will create such a loss and leave such a hole within the educational field of artistic knowledge making etc., and I dread to think of the consequences this will entail. Within the spirit of a.pass I still hope, however, that we will be able to change the course and continue supporting this amazing, ideosyncratic and so needed institution."

      Antye Guenther, visual artist

      *

      "I participated to the a.pass post-master program between October 2018 and January 2020. My experience in the frame of this institution has been that of an extraordinary exposure to critical thought and radical imagination. Not only in the context of a.pass I found a context to get in touch with the cutting edge of artistic research within an heterogeneous, international and rich group of peers and tutors, but I found also that the ever-changing and ever-challenging environment of the program regarded also the organization of the program itself. I have never met or heard, before or after my stay in a.pass, such a radical self-critical approach within an established art education institution: the program itself was a wider research project of which the participants were part of, getting influenced by it but also shaping it with their collective and individual presence. I believe that this specific fluid and self-critical approach points at the roots of what is at stake in the practice of artistic research and should be a precious model to think of its institutionalization in the context of art education - the presence of which constitutes undoubtedly a priceless treasure for Brussels cultural scene. The a.pass post-master program led me to re-imagine education, community and artistic practice as mismatched from what is already existing, to suspend given knowledge to foster the imagination of new possible realities, which I believe to be the very core of the role of "school" as an institution within our society."

      Piero Ramella, visual artist and performer

      *

      "Small is Beautiful.

      I joined a.pass in 2014, not knowing how much it would influence my practice, and how much of a large and extended family such a small organisation would connect me to. On a personal and artistic level, and through their subtly inquisitive, and insistently open approach to pedagogy, I was able to develop the courage to explore ways of presenting my work, and this is the reason I am where I am today. What I learned from people at a.pass, I keep very close to me.  

      We don’t only need traditional art academies, or the big names to which art schools are attached. These places may not be open to risk, but at a.pass, every problem is an opportunity to evaluate and reconsider the pedagogical framework that enables learning in ways that are present; present in the community, in the garden, in the city, in the performance space, etc. There is a clear commitment to community and sharing, in negotiating the decisions of how to learn together, and in publishing this information for others to learn from it. 

      While these may not be the most sought-after terms of engagement for politicians and economists, they are the terms of everyday life in any community. a.pass gives people tools for collective working, thinking, living, and making. We need these tools to re-think our relationships to the worlds we inhabit, worlds that are under threat because of the individualistic and money-driven attitudes that dominated our lives for too long.

      a.pass is not just in Belgium, it is in Spain, in Romania, in Turkey, in Sweden, in Palestine, in Germany it is in Jordan, in Iran, in Serbia, in Canada, in Brazil, in Holland, in France, in Poland, in Italy, in Mexico, in the USA, in Portugal, in Ruwanda, and Iceland—to name just a few. a.pass is what puts Belgium on the international art map. Decisions to cut it out of the picture should be in consultation with the people who thrive from it, not for the furthest person from its realities. We want a more collective approach to political decisions."

      Samah Hijawi, artist and phd researcher 

      *

      "In my experience, the unique added value of a.pass is unquestionable. 

      Personally, a.pass has had an instrumental function in my artistic career, giving space and time to develop my artistic practice and the opportunity to make connections with colleagues and professionals in my field. The artistic developments I achieved during my time at a.pass became the pillars of my artistic practice. The works I made during a.pass allowed me to leap my practice further into unknown places. The personal connections I made in a.pass are still very important to me personally and professionally. Since being at a.pass, I started teaching at Luca School of Arts in Brussels where I am also a PhD candidate, and I participated in several exhibitions and events in the Flemish art scene.

      Finally, a.pass is a pilar in its field, gathering artists from different disciplines into a truly unique institution. The artists that are formed in this institution are fresh, original, special artists, that together generate an artistic scene which is extremely valuable to the Flemish art scene as a whole. 

      To cut funding from a.pass is to cut out the core of a vivid and diverse art community."

      Sofia Caesar, visual artist 

      *

      “As one of the invited international peers involved in the benchmarking process initiated by a.pass in 2019, I want to express my support to a.pass and protest in the situation where the Ministry of Education has decided to cut the funding of a.pass. I am shocked to hear that the Ministry of Education uses “negative advice” coming from peers as an argument. If this refers to the benchmarking process I was involved in, it is clearly a grave misinterpretation.
      In my view, the operational and pedagogical foundation of a.pass that involves dynamic intertwining of self-organisation and collaboration for both the postgraduate and the research centre programs has proven highly relevant and successful. After a long phase of institutional legitimation struggles the international field of artistic research is actively looking for new forms of organisation and ways of engaging with the professional art field beyond the university system. In this situation, a.pass appears as a significant forerunner and should be seen as one of the cutting edge institutions in the field.
      Cutting the a.pass funding appears to me very short-sighted. I hope the decisions concerning this can still be reconsidered.”

      Mika Elo, Professor of Artistic Research, Academy of Fine Arts / University of the Arts Helsinki Finland

      *

      "It would be an immense loss to the landscape of art education if a.pass would close its doors!! For me, the time I spent at a.pass was very important, it introduced me to new perspectives on art making and artistic research. a.pass gave me constructive tools to understand and articulate my practice, in a supportive and challenging manner. I most appreciate the way we have learned with and from each other on equal terms, through our own and shared desires and concerns. I have been nourished with stirring moments, insights and questions which are still unfolding. I experienced it as a place open to experimenting, failing, falling, suffering, laughing, exploding, resting, resisting, doubting, and emancipating. places with this kind of freedom are of highest value to the art world.  Don’t want to have missed my time there – especially with all the wonderful and inspiring people that I know thanks to this place – it is an essential ground to the work i’m doing now."

      Agnes Schneidewind, artist

      *

      "I was privileged to be one of a.pass's first participants, witnessing the growth and impact that a.pass has had in the artistic community over the years of its existence; an impact that has proven to have national and international reach. I have continued to be present as a mentor, curator and research associate because a.pass has become a catalyst for dedicated, open and inspiring people. For most, a year at a.pass has been a career and a personal turning point. It has given me the opportunity to carve out a personal way of doing research and producing work, a chance to bring theory and practice together that my previous master's degree, a year of research at University and a year at Fine Arts Academy did not grant me. At a.pass, I met peers with whom I continue to work and discuss, people who over the years remain intellectual and personal references, weaving a network of relationships in which Brussels functions as a focal point.

      a.pass is an institution that keeps the dialogue between old and new alumni open, that is not afraid to rethink itself, that is not blind to systemic power dynamics and oppressive habits, that is made up of people who care about each other, about diversity in knowledge production, about interdisciplinary and critical thinking. If we are in a world that needs to change, we need the ability and the courage to look into it, not shut it down."

      Sara Manente, artist

      *

      "It is known that the future is a big question mark. Apart from the many crises we know, many will come that will again shake our grounds. Some authors say that in the future there will be a new class of people - the useless class - that are those that do not find a place in the work market because Artificial Intelligence will do all for us. To cope with this, the author's advice is to redirect educations' s purpose towards emotional education rather than the acquisition of specialized knowledge, so that humans learn to cope with change and find new interests and occupations. 

      I start this statement of support in this way because a.pass has been a place where, me, a specialised professional in contemporary dance in middle career, has been invited to explore issues that little or nothing had to do with my practice as a dancer, and from that, develop new entries to my body practice. I started a.pass when I was 39 years old, and previous to that, I studied dance in many different institutions. I started studying dance at 8 years old, and since then I never stopped. I did a dance school in Mozambique for 1 years, then a full dance school for 6 years in Santiago de Chile and I ended up in P.A.R.T.S doing 3 more years. I studied a lot because I wanted to know my theme well. I worked as a freelance dancer with many independent makers of the European dance scene and also with some very well known established choreographers. But throughout that journey, I also developed my own choreographic work, even though in a much more shy manner than with my career as a dancer. In my personal biography I am also an ex -exilied of the Pinochet dictatorship, and daughter of a committed left wing activist's parents in Chile. This political heritage accompanies my life, the reason why I studied Political Science at ULB Belgium and then I did a master in Art and Politics in Goldsmiths London . All this cv like text to explain that what allowed all those studies and personal reality to make sense, was what I could accomplish in a.pass, that without the trust that mentors and colleagues in a.pass gave me in my research project, it wouldn't have been able to happen. My research looked into the ways laws and norms choreograph the social body, and with this research I have managed to move back to Chile and develop the project further. I have taught secondary students a non-traditional dance or body class, where I have invited them to explore the way their bodies are subjected to norms. The class was given in the context of civics education class, where apart from learning how the country is organized, they have managed to integrate politics to their bodies and observe themselves through the lense of the ways power operates in their life, movements and actions. The same class was given to a labour union of cleaning ladies, where apart from being able to rest their tired bodies from the repetitive movement of cleaning by making other movements, they have explored the way their workplace is filled with domestic rules that aren't necessarily the ones they agree upon. These classes were interrupted with the Covid crisis but my plan is to do them again as I believe they create spaces of micro-emancipations where the sensorial, the mental, the private and the public, dialogue.

      I started this statement of support talking about the advice an author gives to the potentially useless class that will exist in the near future. A.pass has impacted my future becomings in a way that has vitalized it by giving me tools for creativity, finding solutions and allowing me to test out possibilities. The emotional educations i have managed to learn from my experience in a.pass is based in thinking that every thought is important and useful; that any opinion is worth listening and answering; that any project is an input; that colleagues are not enemies but collaborators; that intuition and theory are equality important; that knowledge materialized in a practice still has a lot to say, and it is not necessarily bounded to an aesthetical function; that artist have a role in the creation of happiness and wellbeing of society; and that artists are here to stay!"

      Varinia Canto Vila, artist, dancer, choreographer

      *

      "Outside of the Bologna logic of BA; MA or PhD and outside of titles and diploma requirements, a.pass looks for the criticism of the doing, of the practice.

      Inside of the capital of the European Union, a.pass has a fee potentially accessible to countries which currencies are not in euros. I am referring here at the fact that the Latin-American community that I have met in a.pass is numerous and grandiloquent: I met people from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador. 

      Inside of Brussels, a.pass is as diverse as the city which host it."

      Caterina Mora, artist, dancer

      *

      "a.pass is exemplary in forms of collective organization and through this changes the shape of artistic practices and their role in society. What I took from a.pass is that we should learn from each other and the best way to do that is to leave space for initiative, plurality, and deliberation. 'We are in this together' is a valuable lesson to learn, a.pass is a place where this is practiced and reflected upon every day, in this way artistic practices are redefined and that is what post-graduate education is about. The artists engaged in a.pass take these experiences with them, in their work and to their audiences, as a result the question 'we are in this together, now what?' becomes public and that is one of the roles art should take."

      Rob Ritzen, artist, curator of That Might Be Right,

      *

      "The artistic research program at a.pass was a turning point in my personal, political, and artistic life. The questions raised by this process are crucial to the definition of my artistic-political identity. The environment built up over all these years is one of the rare grounds for deep reflection on the practice and theory of performance. Losing a.pass means that we have entered a cultural and educational recession. It affects not only Belgium, but the entire international artistic community that finds in a.pass an asylum in these obscure times."

      Flavio Rodrigo, artist

      *

      The context of rigorous examination, practical exploration and support in the construction Of methodology for research gave the groundings for a robust practice that is now gaining interest and continues to develop in commercial and community contexts across the UK and further afield. 

      a.pass is a unique institution uniquely situated both geographically and in terms of the intersectional artistic/methodological/political and philosophical preoccupations that it holds as valued.

      I am incredibly disturbed to hear that the institutes money has been cut and that it will not be able to continue to support artist researchers in vital, pivotal moments in their careers. 

      I am without doubt that a.pass enriches the European artistic and academic community and I urge who ever has the power to intervene to reconsider this shortsighted decision. I would suggest that rather than support a stripping back, hollowing out and commercialising of artistic ventures that seems the order of the day, that the Belgium governmental decision making bodies make a stand, recognise the long term value to the health of the nation  and support a context that challenges, stretches, nurtures and give vital space for artist researchers from all areas of thought and expression to deepen and develop their practice. 

      Leo Kay, artistic director: Unfinished Business

      *

      "A.pass profoundly reshuffled my thinking about art and its relevance in society.
      It provided a fertile environment for experiment and freedom in questioning given categories."

      Kasia Tórz, writer & dramaturg

      *

      "A good way to attest of the pedagogical efficiency of a certain program is to do a « before & after » comparison. Having seen, throughout the years, many colleagues I knew enrolling in a.pass, I am confident stating that its approach has powerful effects.
      Artists having completed the program gain an in-depth understanding of their interest, craft precise tools to develop their work, and broaden their awareness of their perspective's relevancy to the larger context – artistic, social, and political. This often results in an increase of their credibility, visibility and recognition, and thus of their professionalization. But beyond that, it leads also many of the alumni to multiply the ways by which to reach a larger and more diversified audience. The utterly collective and experimental approach of a.pass gives indeed many tools to contribute with specificity and intelligence to the field–and society at large. It is not only anymore about creating « your » piece, but about sharing a process, discussing concerns, confronting point of views. Be it by organizing seminars, leading participatory practices, teaching workshops, intervening in the public space or publishing magazines...typically, a.pass alumni invent many ways to put their work into the world and let the world inform their work, implicating many diverse people along the way. Reaching out, questioning oneself, making proposition as to the place of art for this changing world of ours.
      Of all the virtues a.pass exerts on the artistic field (and beyond it), this is certainly one of the most rare and precious: to cultivate an art-making which is not about the author's narcissism nor the audience's consumerism, but about meeting, debating, searching and inventing together – crafting novel ways towards a shared relevancy, specificity and intelligence."

      Julien Bruneau, artist and researcher, mentor in a.pass, co-editor of Revue COI (TJP, CDN Strasbourg Grand Est), fellow of Third (Das Research, AHK)

      *

      Beste Minister Ben Weyts,

      Met ontzetting heb ik vernomen dat u de postgraduaatsopleiding a.pass niet langer zal subsidiëren. Dit is een enorm verlies voor het Vlaamse onderwijslandschap in de kunsten. Zoals u weet zijn onze reguliere opleidingen in de kunsten heel beperkt in vergelijking met buitenlandse onderwijsinstellingen. Waar wij drie Bachelor jaren aanbieden, volgen studenten in het buitenland vaak minstens vier jaren onderwijs alvorens een Bachelor-diploma te behalen. Nadien bieden we in Vlaanderen een Master-opleiding aan in één academiejaar; in het buitenland is dit meestal een opleiding die twee academiejaren beslaat.

      Gedurende dit ene jaar moeten MA studenten niet alleen een autonoom artistiek werk maken, maar ook hun portfolio en artistieke visie professionaliseren, een masterproef schrijven, netwerken in het kunstenveld, en vaak ook nog een stage volgen. Het spreekt voor zich dat dit niet evident is. Deze beperking van onze opleidingen werd tot voor kort in Vlaanderen gecompenseerd door de zeer sterke postgraduaatsmogelijkheden, waar geselecteerd wordt op kwaliteit en potentieel, ruimte is voor intense persoonlijke begeleiding, onderzoeksvaardigheden centraal staan, en een sterke peer-to-peer en netwerk-cultuur heerst. A-pass is in die zin een incubator voor kwaliteitsvolle kunst en duurzame, internationale netwerken. Jonge kunstenaars hebben dit nodig.

      Het is geen toeval dat deze opleiding precies in Vlaanderen de ideale bestaansvoorwaarden gevonden heeft om te ontstaan en te bloeien. Het is een initiatief van kunstenaars zelf en spreekt over hun noden en visie. Het is net uit de rijke Vlaamse artistieke ecologie dat de energie en inzichten, de autonomie en het ondernemerschap ontsproten zijn om zich in te zetten voor de jongere generatie. Om jonge kunstenaars alle kansen te geven om te groeien en aansluiting te vinden bij het internationale artistieke veld. De subsidies waren daartoe een belangrijke ondersteuning en boden de noodzakelijke input voor een duurzame groei en kwaliteitsgarantie.

      Maar niet alleen is a-pass noodzakelijk als een aanvulling op ons onderwijsveld en als incubator voor de lokale professionalisering en internationale uitwisseling. Het is ook een cruciale pijler van de internationale uitstraling van ons artistiek onderwijs. Het zet ons op de internationale kaart van onderwijsinstellingen en versterkt de reputatie van ons artistiek onderwijs wereldwijd. Door de subsidies van a-pass (en HISK) stop te zetten, maakt u Vlaanderen arm. Nederland heeft de Rijksacademie en de Jan Van Eyck Academie. Wat doet u met Vlaanderens internationale uitstraling op het vlak van postgraduaat kunstonderwijs?

      Het is niet zo dat u de waarde van a-pass niet erkent, en als oplossing suggereert u een aansluiting bij een andere artistieke instelling. U begrijpt dat u hen hier een onmogelijk scenario aanbiedt. De kunstinstellingen, organisaties en centra hebben zelf moeite om hun werking te garanderen en kunstenaars faire arbeidsvoorwaarden aan te bieden. Daar is geen financiële ruimte, meer nog: daar is ook geen expertise om onderwijs aan te bieden. Bovendien zou a-pass op die manier haar autonomie en haar internationale uitstraling als onderwijsinstelling zien verwateren.

      Inkantelen binnen een bestaande onderwijsinstelling is al even onrealistisch, gezien de besparingen en financiële uitdagingen waar het kunstonderwijs vandaag al mee te maken heeft. Ik sta zelf aan het hoofd van een kleine Advanced Master opleiding dat focust op onderzoek in de kunsten. Deze opleiding is enkel rendabel omdat we deze gedeeltelijk financieren met de aanvullende onderzoeksmiddelen. Binnen de basisfinanciering voor onderwijs is hiervoor geen ruimte, en het zou ook niet rechtvaardig zijn om extra financiële druk te leggen op het reguliere kunstonderwijs dat een democratische toegang tot de kunsten garandeert. Zoals u weet zijn de middelen in het onderwijs ontoereikend, ook in het kunstonderwijs, en we houden de boel enkel draaiende omdat het personeel vanuit liefde voor het kunstonderwijs en voor de jonge kunstenaars veel meer doet dan dat we redelijkerwijze van hen kunnen verwachten. Een postgraduaatsopleiding als a-pass incorporeren in het onderwijsaanbod van de kunstschool zou geen teken zijn van goed bestuur: het zou druk leggen op de middelen, op de ondersteunende diensten, en het zou bovendien de autonomie, de flexibiliteit en de internationale uitstraling van a-pass niet ten goede komen. Zoals de Rijksacademie en Jan Van Eyck in Nederland, kan A-pass net zijn wat het is omdat het opereert naast de kunstscholen, en op die manier met alle kunstscholen op een gelijkwaardige manier kan uitwisselen en samenwerken, in relatie tot van specifieke noden en opportuniteiten.

      Gezien de positieve evaluatie van a-pass en de kleine financiële impact maar de grote waarde voor het Vlaamse kunstonderwijs, voor de Vlaamse uitstraling en bovenal voor de jonge kunstenaars, vraag ik u de beslissing te herzien en a-pass het vertrouwen te geven om deze kwaliteitsvolle opleiding te kunnen verderzetten en uitbouwen.

      Met vriendelijke groeten,
      Petra Van Brabandt

      Petra Van Brabandt, Hoofd onderzoek en maatschappelijke dienstverlening, Sint Lucas Antwerpen, KdG

      *

       

    • research portfolio
    • Inter-Materiality Mode Federico Protto
      21 January 2022
      posted by: Federico Protto
    • case of: 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 16th 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
      Original-arachne



      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-19th 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

      welcome2large

       

       

       



      (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
      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
      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
      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

    • Diary excerpt from Live Archive,

      by Breg Horemans

       FULL PDF

      Siting Discourse is a dialogical diary that explores the protocols, politics and accessibility of a digital architecture-as-archive (www.taat-projects.com). Horemans shares the writing process through a recorded sequence of screen captures. Siting Discourse exposes the Live Archive´s digital spatiality and the implicit gestures, attitudes and coincidences of discourse making that it aims to facilitate. The title is a reference to the Live Archive as a (web-)site for discursive documentation and it addresses the academic citing mechanism as a form of “structural misquoting.” Siting Discourse is a collaboration between Siebren Nachtergaele (Social Sciences HOGENT, Theatre Studies UGENT, BE) and Andrew Filmer (Theatre Studies, Aberystwyth University, WA). Their first encounter was shaped by means of a drift.

      Breg Horemans is co-founder of TAAT, a liquid collective of artists working on the verge of performance, research and installation art. Since 2011, he renegotiates his relation to the architecture discipline through transdisciplinary collaborations. The desire of his research lies in shaping the spatial conditions for ‘sites of encounter’ that invite human and non-human entities to co-constitute each other. The projects initiated by TAAT generate spaces for co-activity and instigate fluid prototyping processes as ‘becoming spaces’. In the last two years, Breg is co-developing an online environment that enhance processes of open source writing, archiving and publishing.

       

       

       

       

       
    • PDF Preview

      Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics consists of a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflection, and motivational support, the publication examines the experiences, commitments and feelings that operate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces outside of art institutions; it’s a repository designed to inspire and encourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics.

      Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018). Davide’s work can be accessed at: davidetidoni.name

      price: 15 Euro

       

       
    •  

      Welcome in De Markten, Friday, 11th of June 2021.

      18-22h

      Subscribe for attendance. Or join us online. Details will follow.

      Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens

      will read, perform, discuss:

      a book as a prop for future performance, a poster that unfolds into a speculative discussion board game, a timed articulation in an archive that reiterates its own traces, a set of interviews that binds four generations of activism, a performative research method that paves the way for academic writing, and a collective online score that narrates how research interests were influenced by each others presence.

      *

      The researchers in Research Centre Cycle II — Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens — are ending their one year trajectory at a.pass with the launch of a series of (performative) publications.

      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. Rather than a book or printed matter as a finite goal, the researchers took publishing as a pretext to build ongoing social gestures, a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance.

       


       

      Programme:

       

       

      Pia Louwerens presents the artistic research novel I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad. I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist ‘differently’ through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens' labour as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of ‘performance.’ I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

       

      Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 - 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.

       


       

       

      Pop-Fi poster is a “choose your own adventure” game, developed by Lili M. Rampre in collaboration with Júlia Rúbies Subirós. The game is tracing pre-public discourse, semi-private collections of thoughts that, once shared and circulated, can shift a wider agenda on what matters to artists the most. The game aims to popularise common fictions and pop the bubble of others. Collectivising half-digested thoughts potentially means bridging between personal and structural to effectuate change. Pop-Fi poster is part of Pop-Fi; a multifaceted project, that entails a performative workshop ventriloquising popular movie icons, video installations and script-readings. Pop-Fi foregrounds concerns of an artistic community, through variety of formats that act as discourse prism. Pop-Fi poster is both a visual aid for the workshop and an autonomous object. Pop-Fi’s next step is developing strategies to funnel from anecdotal to factual and think about data and its visualisation techniques informed by direct experience, commitment to action and intersectionality.

       

      Lili M. Rampre is researching strategies to highlight “off stage”; processes, practices and actors behind, off, under or above the stage. Her focus lies on power relationships and the dynamics of disparities in cultural capital (audience-performer, fan-star, producer-artist). Her work has often a role-reversal in its core proposal, ventriloquism of a kind, or unreliable narration. Most recently Lili is looking into fandom and fandom civic practices authorising fiction to affect political action as an artistic methodology, to re-articulate essential parts of artistic production and circulation as fictional or factual aspects.

       


       

       

      Esteban Donoso presents Mand/inga. Mand/inga is a performance that entails a reading of a script, and a screening of a film at once. It’s an instantiation of a collaborative process with Thiago Antunes in which we re-visit our own family stories, tracing along our relation to such issues as gendering, religion, spirituality and race. The script and film register an ongoing conversation between friends, as well as a conversation with our own lived memory. This process is also an attempt to trace out a methodology for working with self-narrated queerstories and their interconnected resonances. Mand/inga is a term that takes many colloquial meanings in Latin America, in Brazil it usually refers to ‘black magic’ whereas in Ecuador it denotes the racial mixtures between black, indigenous and white backgrounds.

       

      Esteban Donoso is a choreographer, researcher and Performance Studies fan living and working between Brussels, Quito and Toronto. Currently towards the end of a PhD in Performance Studies, he is juggling to put together a practice-based methodology, his interest in feminist cinema and the writing of a dissertation about dance narratives and cultural memory in Quito-Ecuador. He researches the medium of film as a self-narrative device and as an interface for collective writing. In as much as it enables our appearance in a virtual space, it also allows us to create a third space in which we can look at our shared entanglements.

       


       

       

      Davide Tidoni presents Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics, a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflection, and motivational support, the publication examines the experiences, commitments and feelings that operate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces outside of art institutions; it’s a repository designed to inspire and encourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics.

       

      Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018). Davide’s work can be accessed at: davidetidoni.name

       


       

       

      Breg Horemans presents Siting Discourse, a dialogical diary that explores the protocols, politics and accessibility of a digital architecture-as-archive (www.taat-projects.com). Breg shares the writing process through a recorded sequence of screen captures. Siting Discourse exposes the Live Archive´s digital spatiality and the implicit gestures, attitudes and coincidences of discourse making that it aims to facilitate. The title is a reference to the Live Archive as a (web-)site for discursive documentation and it addresses the academic citing mechanism as a form of ‘structural misquoting´. Siting Discourse is a collaboration between Siebren Nachtergaele (Social Sciences HOGENT, Theatre Studies UGENT, BE) and Andrew Filmer (Theatre Studies, Aberystwyth University, WA). Their first encounter was shaped by means of a drift.

       

      Breg Horemans is co-founder of TAAT, a liquid collective of artists working on the verge of performance, research and installation art. Since 2011, he renegotiates his relation to the architecture discipline through transdisciplinary collaborations. The desire of his research lies in shaping the spatial conditions for ‘sites of encounter’ that invite human and non-human entities to co-constitute each other. The projects initiated by TAAT generate spaces for co-activity and instigate fluid prototyping processes as ‘becoming spaces’. In the last two years, Breg is co-developing an online environment that enhance processes of open source writing, archiving and publishing.

       


       

      And last but not least:

      What your research did to me, a collective online publication by a.pass Research Centre Cycle II, with excerpts printed in *The Annex*. What your research did to me is an online assemblage of conversations, film clips, letters, autotheoretical writings and a storytelling/feedback game, produced in response to a self-defined score. Published on madewitholga.be
       
       

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • A Good Workshop Conversation with Krõõt Juurak
      07 December 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • A Good Workshop
      Vladimir
      Hey Krõõt!
      At the end of the every block the curator writes a documentation of what happened in the block. The reason to do it, is to pass on pass on some information to the other curators and also to develop on and add to the archive of methodologies at work at a.pass. 
       
      I will be writing this report as I am the designated block curator. It would be great to have a conversation about the work(shop) that you proposed. I suggested this interview format so that you don't have to write a report. I have the Intuition that reporting would be strange in connection with your workshop and your work in general. 
       

      The last time we talked it felt to me that the way you propose things and the way the workshop was proposed it cannot be grasped with conventional questions of  "what did you do?" and other questions that point to to productivity. Productivity is so ingrained in the language which we use to describe proposals that it makes it hard to talk about proposals which challenge that concept. 
       
      I am curious how you think about this? Is there a language problem?
       
      Krõõt
      Yes, there is definitely a language problem, I agree. 
      First of all I didn't want to write the report about the workshop for several reasons... I don't want to be the ultimate authority on what we did and what that meant or what anyone learnt or did not learn. The workshop was proposed in such a way that it is not clear what the profits are and what the productivity of it is. I don't want to be the one who has the last word because this is counterproductive to the other participants of the workshop.
      Actually because I wasn't even taking this workshop I have the least idea about what we did or what it was good for. I would say that's the reason why I find it so strange and difficult to write reports. It feels like I'm patronizing the participants' experience. 
       
      Vladimir
      I know the feeling very well. When I propose a collective space in my own work it's also impossible for me to say afterwards what actually happened. I know what happened from my perspective, but then I was just one of the people who occupied that space. Producing environments in which you then yourself enter as a participant doesn't really go well along with conventional concepts of what work is or what education should look like.
       
      Krõõt
      And on the other hand — which is at first glance a little bit contradictory — I love the conventional way of educating, I like the formal structure of a school, where one person is the "teacher" and the others are "students". 
      As a role play, I think it's brilliant. It is not an environment where everything is everything. 
      have a rather difficult educational past. I struggled through primary and highschool, barely making it, but as I am getting older, I am almost 40 now, educational experiences have been getting better and betterAnd perhaps in developing these workshops I have been dealing with those educational "traumas". Most people come with some kind of baggage from their experiences in educational institutions and I am interested in how these experiences are still shaping the way we function whenever faced with a "school-like" structure.
       
      And secondly, since I have always hated school, workshops, any kind of educational experiences (I don't even have a driving license), I tried to do something that a person like myself could handle. I guess that's why this workshop is anti-productivity and anti-information. The proposal could also be: wasting time together and/or separately.
       
      And one fun fact: statistically speaking the main reason people take workshops is to meet other peopleI think that is a fair reason. Often you don't go there to learn a new skill but rather just to see who else is there. It is hard to meet people nowadays. As a workshop leader I try to keep this in mind, and try to make sure it isn't about me.
       
      Vladimir
      I think we have very similar reasons for why we do the work the way we do the work. For me the hardest part is  to navigate the persona of the initiator. I like that you described the teacher/student relationship as a kind of a role play. It's good to try and keep it a role play because this relationship constantly wants to become a reality. It's very hard to get out of the costume. 
       
      Krõõt
      We're so trained in believing these roles, we start to take them seriously. 
       
      I always try to keep in mind that in taking workshops people learn about giving workshops. And when you are giving one you learn about how to take one. I do not have a lot of faith in explanatory learning, we are animals and learn from example, unwittingly. 
       
      Vladimir
      In this workshop at a.pass, did you feel like the participants were aware of that roleplay? Did they get out of their roles? 
       
      Krõõt
      Perhaps the idea was rather to get into their roles, I would think that most of them became aware of the part they played, absolutely. 
       
      For example, I kept postponing this interview with you, and after the second postponement I stated that I have really good excuses. That moment I became aware of my recurring role as the artist-teacher resisting report-writing. It is tricky because we are not in a workshop and this is not as safe as a workshop would be. It is relatively safe because we are friends, but we are in a professional environment. It is more risky to come up with really good (fake) excuses.
      In the workshop I really try to create a ground where excuses and this cliche known as "bad student behavior"becomes a practice. An artist's practice. 
       
      So many of our artist practices are based on the so-called protestant ethic, where you have to be a good person with good wishes and of course good products. It is all based on a moral premise. Obviously turning that around isn't going to change it, but I think at least you can have a break from having to be so damn serious about being good all the time
       
      I struggle with that myself: Trying to keep up the play. I thought it would it would be a good idea to be an artist so I could decide for myself what work was and what life was. And at some point you notice that you take less risks because your income depends on it.  And then what you do doesn't appeal to you anymore and probably it will not be appealing to anyone else either. So it is a closed circle or a downward spiral:  when our livelihood depends on it, we start to fear and fear eats fun. I think workshops are great format to make a space for fun, for boredom and for doing nothing. 
       
       
      Vladimir
      There's a counter-institutional resistance in both of our proposals, a space to fail and miss the institutional brief. 
      And at the same time it is a narrow pathway how to do that properly, an other brief. I keep asking myself how to not to please the institution by critique-ing it in this way. 
       
      It is a matter of constant evaluation for me of what actually makes a good proposal? What am I satisfied with, what is the institution satisfied with, what are the participants satisfied with? Thinking like this I find myself mostly fighting against passing on the institutional pressure and established ideas (which we all have, all who take part in a workshop) of what a "good workshop is" . 
       
      Krõõt
      It is slightly more complex than being anti-institutional. But not very complex. In fact it is just about making a space within the space or using it for your own advantage and finding out the problems as they arise and trying  not to worry about anything else
       
      Vladimir
      A.pass is a special case: we welcome the institutional educational experiment. These are our questions as artists and educators. To a certain degree we are on a similar side of things. We are also bored with the conventional ideas of passing down knowledge. But I'm wondering how much is for you at risk in other institutions? Do you calibrate your proposals depending on where you go, or do you even radicalise them if it is a more conventional context?
       
       
      Krõõt
      I don't know if this is good or bad but I do the same thing every time. Let's say a very similar workshop works for nine-year-olds, tooPerhaps it is a very childish workshop and I wonder if it is more unusual for a.pass, Impulstanz or for real children.
       
       Vladimir
      I think you deploy a Trojan horse. You have a surface layer, structural layer in this workshop which is able to attach itself to the institution. But within that structure it feels to me like there's a space for absurdity and boredom and a collapse of reasoning.
       
      Krōōt
      Right. Let's say, if you ask me what we did, I could tell you exactly: we had a nap every day of 20 minutes, we wrote in our diaries, we sang karaoke, we had a silent meeting... We knew exactly what we were doing at any given moment but for a person randomly walking in, it would not have looked like we were doing anythingFor sure it did not look like we were working. 
       
       
      Vladimir
      There's again something language-related  that makes structural questions invalid here. I appreciate very much how your work can invalidated certain questions by answering them: they can be answered but they don't describe at all what was actually going on in your workshop in terms of .... not necessarily in terms of the process, because the process is easy to describe. But in terms of what it means, or what it actually produces, or what it triggers, or what kind of community it develops, or how practices resonated with each other. 
       
      There's a kind of a failure of of the institutional perspective which you trigger, precisely because you can answer to it. "Yeah, yeah, we did this, we did this". But it doesn't help to understand it.
       
      Krōōt
      Actually it is not quite accurate to say it was all anti-productivity: we had also had a couple of lectures, we discussed political performativity and artist solidarity. I try to combine as wide range of activities as I can. And since I am constantly doubting my own abilities, self-sabotage as a method is an important tool for me. Self-sabotage is a very common method especially in the creative field and  I think we don't cherish it enough. It takes such a large almost elephant-size part of our livesI want to know more about it.
       
      In this workshop I gave the participants the simple task to write a motivation letter, formulated as  "What/why you want to get out of this workshop?" And I formulated the task in such a way that I didn't notice it could be misunderstood. But when I read the letters everybody was writing on why they wanted to get out of the workshop. And I was genuinely confused and worried. Do they really want to get out of the workshop? And then I looked at what I had written and understood that I had unwittingly sabotaged myself.
      And then in one these letter somebody called this workshop a "procrastination conspiracy". 
       
      Vladimir
      I find interesting is that you identify self-sabotage as a useful methodology to pass on. So far I have only applied it to myself. In the collective gathering workshop I talk about "authority suicide": how to fail organize when you are proposing something? My initial response would always be to panic and to solve a situation when people don't know what's the plan is, when there is a feeling that people are lost. I have gradually developed a higher tolerance and now try to fail to do that or to do it badly or to accept not to know how to go on, in order to finally collapse this persona of the "responsible-when-it-fails" as the last piece of institutional structure. 
       
      But I never I never tried passing on this strategy as a skill. I think because there is still the expectation of organising differently, of self-organisation after the collapse. 
       
       
      Krōōt
      So, if I'm imagining what you do: is it a workshop or a project where it is difficult to say who's in charge or when it starts and when it ends?
       
      Vladimir
      Yes, thats the attempt. 
       
      Krõõt
      I admire people who are able to do this kind of free structure. Every time before a workshopI I think I should try that and I kind of coward out and still go with a very strict structure instead. Maybe some day. But I really admire when there is this kind of a situation where you are not sure if it is meant to be that way, is it really planned to be disorganized or has everything gone out of hand. It's risky. 
       
      Vladimir
      It is risky. It is one of those things outside of language. You can't really address it, because the only way to address it is to re-establish some kind of authority over it, to turn it into an institutional method yet again. So what you can do is to go for awkward silences and dance around it hoping that either it is a true failure and something else will come out of it, or that at least there's a kind of a meta-failure and people kind of are in on the joke. That people understand it that it is an unspoken, unspeakable thing that has to happen. 
       
      It's complicated, I don't really know.  I'm talking like it is a whole method but actually I'm always just trying to stretch that space. I try to realise when authority comes in, what are the performances of it and either not do them or wait as long as possible to do them.
       
      Krõõt
      It would be a paradox  if it would become a whole method.
       
      Vladimir 
      Yes, exactly. 
      What we say about a.pass as a structure is that it is engaging in the paradox of creating an open space. I think somehow your work(shop) deals with that as well. We do it from different sides: through over-emphasising structure or through building down structure. But the goals are quite similar.  I think a.pass keeps failing in that, because at the same time there is always the question of "Are we doing our job well?" Is there "progress", etc? There has to be a reason to engage in this communal project/institution, you want to end up somewhere in your work you would not be able to get to by yourself. 
       
      But I'm still wondering, if we take your method seriously,  if there should be some kind of a radical letting go of certain goals in this environment. Sometimes I still feel like we think to "educational".
       
      Krõõt
      Maybe it's because I'm doing psychoanalysis at the moment that I think this is also a psychological method.  You  become aware of your habits and then it's not about changing them, but about playing them. Performing them and enjoying it. Don't struggle. Or struggle but have have a good time struggling!
      We could have keep having this abstract idea of open space, but it's not open and it's not space. It is rather  our filters define how we understand something
       
      Vladimir
      I think the playful perspective helps me. When I'm explaining these thoughts to you, I see myself from the outside getting stuck in language loops. My wish would be to  get out of them. No to just keep explaining and subverting structures,  but to step out of it, to step somewhere else
       
      Here I feel the limits of a specific institutional language or culture to express spaces and proposals which are really beside them. There are some things which a particular language or particular culture of discourse cannot  reach. Maybe as we said, it can only be done in a sort of unspoken way, unspoken  in the sense of not using that language. 
       
      That thought is really fascinating for me because the way I usually proceed is through over-explaining and I  catch myself in this conversation that this might be a trap.  I have been polishing the language of my proposals, trying to subvert them within the proposal for quite some time now. Almost like trying to build a bridge from one language space to another. It's just that sometimes I get so busy building this bridge that I don't have  time for the actual work of inhabiting that space. Or rejecting the space, like the way you reject the idea of educational reporting. 
       
      Thank you for this conversation, dear Krõõt!
       
       
    •  

      Please note that all replies and comments in this report are not verbatim transcriptions but thematic summaries. For full statements made on the public Day 3 please see the video recordings.

      Introduction

      On July 8-10, 2020 a.pass has hosted the conference Research Futures. The conference took the form of a gradually expanding meeting of practitioners in the fields of art, education and artistic research. The conference was initiated by a.pass in collaboration with four other institutions of artistic research participating in a.pass' comparative benchmarking study: Dutch Art Institute, Jan Van Eyck Academy, UNIARTS Helsinki and Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The conference brought representatives from these five institutions together with professionals working in the field of education, arts, culture, artistic research, curation and activism to expand the result of the comparative study towards a series of questions concerning the futures of artistic research in relationship to its institutions.

      Background

      As a publicly funded educational platform, a.pass is reviewed by the ministry of education in regular five-year intervals. With the next review process underway, a.pass took the opportunity to propose a collaborative process of self-evaluation to four other educational institutions in the field of artistic research. This process was motivated by a desire to establish a platform for mutual criticality where institutions of artistic research are not pushed to compete against each other, but can meet as partners sharing many of the same stakes. This critical intra-vision is also a balancing measure to the tendencies of such evaluations to produce an equalizing standard in a respective field of cultural production. Instead we aimed to understand, compare and strengthen our differences, in order to create greater specificity and add complexity to the developing field of artistic research.

      By proposing the conference we wanted to better understand what is the range of educational and institutional strategies and practices operating in the field of artistic research today. Where do we see common struggles, pitfalls and current problematics with respect to our concerns with inclusivity, sustainable support structures, institutionalization of artistic research and politics of publication? By posing these questions we wanted to compare ourselves to the future: what are possible scenarios for artistic research to continue its contribution to the field of artistic development and production, and how can these contributions respond to the changing social realities of a challenging future?

       

       

      Day 1, July 8th

      On day one the representatives of the contributing institutions met to review the process of self evaluation so far. Moderated by Delphine Hesters, the independent researcher who compiled the comparative study, we looked for commonalities and differences between our institutions and how they operate and addressed the challenges we outlined together in our shared reports.

      ► expand

      The day started with a presentation of Delphine Hesters on the main conclusions of the comparative benchmark study. Delphine summarized her findings around following main areas, here quoted with brief excerpts:

      Artistic research

      "Defending or maintaining this open approach of artistic research is not self-evident. [...] Another kind of challenge is that the institute’s open approach of artistic research does not necessarily meet an equally open definition within the funding bodies upon which artistic research projects are dependent.

      If we recognize that breaking from the predefined and segregating boundaries between disciplines, professions and fields of knowledge is an essential part of artistic research, it is clear that finding strategies for dealing with conflicting norms and for crafting autonomous spaces is important for the future of artistic research."

       

      Individuality and collaboration

      "The dominant belief within the art field remains that artists are first and foremost individual creators or authors. Similarly, academic researchers testify to an individualized learning path from the bachelor’s degree to the PhD and beyond." Delphine concludes that among the participating institutions exists range of collaborative approaches to break away from this ideology of individual excellence and stimulate the collectivity of artistic and research practices alike.

       

      Selection of candidates

      "The selection procedures of the five institutes are rather similar and based on written applications, including a research proposal, CV, portfolio and motivation letter from the candidate.

      The selection in all the institutes is primarily based on the quality of the proposals and the artistic trajectory of the candidate. This ‘quality’ has no formal measure and is judged by selection committees (in different set-ups) with expertise in the field."

       

      Archiving, documenting, publishing and dissemination

      "The public events organized by the institutes, which equally take multiple forms, are important drivers for the dissemination of research, both as inherent parts of the research process and as markers of its end. They are also important for the creation of a critical community of participants, ex-participants and external people – researchers, practitioners and engaged others."

       

      Evaluation, sustainability and sustainable management

      "For independent institutions like a.pass or the Jan van Eyck Academy, building their own archives, administrational procedures or publication tools allows them to invent tailor-made solutions to their own questions about documentation, administration and publication and the ways in which they are interwoven. However, it demands a considerable investment of time and money, as well as in the knowledge of their teams. These institutes can establish diverse partnerships with other organizations, but they need to build them up and maintain them solely by their own effort. This is also true in regard to the development of procedures for preventing and responding to possible cases of discrimination or harassment. [...] The larger institutes also have more elaborate protocols available in regard to prevention of and response to forms of discrimination or harassment (while it remains up to each research or education unit to bring them into practice)."

      " [...] In short, the promises of working autonomously are powerful and important, especially given the core of these institutes is to create an open and adaptable context in which artistic research can be developed and expanded. However, whether this potential is realized and whether the institutions can bring their practices in line with their principles, depends on the means they are able to secure to invest on all of these levels."

       

      The shared overall outcome was that although the institutions represent a wide range of positions and practices on all of these topics, the study and the meeting showed that there exist a great commonality of sharing them as concerns.

      The subsequent discussion revolved among others around questions like:

      • what are the advantages of being part of a bigger (academic)structure? What are the possibilities of acting quasi independent within such structures? what are the needs to create frameworks beyond these structures ? How 'independent' are these frameworks beyond the structures?
      • how do "individual learning paths" that actually enable transversal processes relate to on one hand to "ideology of individual excellence" on the other hand "collectivity"?
      • how to institute transformation?
      • What will be the resilient future structures for artistic and academic development beyond the categorizations of culture, education, science and within the framework of social and environmental change?
      • Institutional challenges in the neo-liberal context: autonomy, self-organisation, "swamp-ness"
      • what can be institutional practices that can resist and reshape the complex of excellence, quality, authorship and individuality associated with academic research?

       

      The second half of the meeting was devoted to developing four topics to pass on to the next round of discussions the following day. The over-arching concern shared by all participants of Day 1 was the question of how to institute artistic research. The four topics were formulated in order to allow the table groups of Day 2 to speculate on possible and impossible futures: which contexts of artistic research will persist, which will change in the future? Which directions will current developments and status quo take? In short: which futures do we want to compare ourselves to? The four topics that were developed for Day 2 are:

      • Institutional Autonomy within Larger Systems
      • Internal Relations
      • How to be Public? Where to be public?
      • Instituting Transformation

       

      The topics themselves are reported on below, as they were included in the public introduction to the day.

       

       

       

      Day 2, July 9th

      For Day 2 of the conference we invited ca. 20 practitioners and professionals from the field of cultural production, education and artistic research to come together with us in a working session dedicated to the four topics proposed on day one. Gathered around the topics in groups, the main objective was for each group to critically develop relationships between present conditions and implications and their future scenarios. Each group was accompanied by a Reporter, an artistic research practitioner whom we asked to develop and facilitate a specific mode of conversations among the participants of their Table, and who took on the task of compiling a report on the work of the Table for the public discussion of Day 3.

      ► expand

      At the start of the day, Delphine Hesters introduced the results of the comparative study, the discussion of Day 1 and the four topics for the Tables. The Day proceeded by coming together in four groups around the table practices and topics. The following list combines the proposed topics with a brief overview of the proposed practice. The Day concluded with a collective feedback on the process and further questions.

      The reports of the Tables process and discussion were presented publicly on Day three and will be discussed in this report there.

       

      TABLE 1: Institutional Autonomy within Larger Systems

      What relations to build to 'the larger system'? How to position ourselves within the larger whole?

      Reporter: Kristien Van Den Brande

      Context:

      • categorisation and segregation of fields within arts (educational, artistic, social practices, etc) are working against the transdisciplinary conception of artistic research
      • what are the advantages of being part of a bigger (academic)structure? What are the possibilities of acting quasi independent within such structures? What are the needs to create frameworks beyond these structures ? How 'independent' are these frameworks beyond the structures?
      • what are the expectations and questions of the cultural / educational sector towards institutions and practitioners of artistic research?

      Questions raised:

      • How to create feedback-loops between the institutions and the larger system? How to be critical towards our own support structures?
      • How can we create and foster solidarity among the institutes?
      • Who are the future allies for artistic research?
      • What is the mission and task of artistic research as a publicly funded field?
      • Not only institutions position themselves, they already welcome distinct positions from participating artist researchers. What are the modalities of formulating a collective position within the institution?

      To facilitate these questions Kristien Van den Brande proposed a roleplaying game: The rise and fall of a dystopian regime for (institutional) artistic research. “Rise and Fall” is a role-play in which players create a dystopia, explore its rise to power, experience how everyday life operates during its tenure, identify how the regime is brought down and envision the reemergence of life in and beyond its ruins.

      The role-players were invited to explore the question: What are the roots of (institutional) artistic research during each of these phases, concretely or metaphorically?

       

      TABLE 2: Internal Relations

      How to build the relationships between the institutes and their participants?

      Reporter: Philippine Hoegen

      Context:

      • Questions of neo-liberalism in connection to education, regulatory dependencies and access

      Questions raised:

      • How to create not only critical but transformative feedback processes within our institutes?
      • Trust or control: An inclusive access policy relies on an elaborate regulatory structure within the institution. Deregulated institutions can run the danger of perpetuating status quo

      Phillippine Hoegen proposed to work with an online mapping tool. Several mechanisms of collecting keywords and grouping them into common concerns served as a visual tool to facilitate a self critical look at the organisation of internal structures and relations between participants and all persons working within the institution.

       

      TABLE 3: How to be Public? Where to be public?

      Reporter: Sébastien Hendrickx

      Context:

      • Publicness often serves as a "proof of work" and a measure of validity of the cultural sector and specifically artistic research
      • Growing importance of the countryside vs the city. In the past cultural production was more decentralised. Decentralisation is becoming more important also in response to climate change. Should artistic research dislocate from the urban and if yes, how?
      • Growing importance of regionalism and its emphasis on parallel and other histories, on subcultures

      Questions raised:

      • Visibility and need to be visible vs. the need for invisibility: how and how long to stay invisible?
      • Visibility versus performativity: what can artistic research do besides being visible?
      • How to communicate in process?

      Séba Hendrickx’ practice aimed at speculative collaboration open to neurodiversity. The participants of this Table were invited to make a pluralistic mind-map in form of a collective wall drawing. Each participant could elaborate on the drawings, diagrams and writings of the others. Misunderstanding and being lost in translation were inherent to the practice. With drawings or remarks of his own, the Reporter of this Table tried to push the map- and discussion-in-progress in specific directions.

       

      TABLE 4: Instituting Transformation

      How to institute transformation and what resists instituting?

      Reporter: Sina Seifee

      Context:

      • decolonial politics
      • growing importance of social and civic movements (MeToo, BLM,...) as future-shaping agencies. how are they different from institutions, how can we welcome their potential?
      • Transformation in the context of sustainability
      • Conditions of perpetuating of precarity: precarious institutions "pass on" the conditions to workers

      Questions raised:

      • How long does an institution need to live? When should it dissolve?
      • How to create adaptable / plastic (in the sense of plasticity) frameworks?
      • The question of activism of and within the institution and resistance from within.

      Sina Seifee proposed a Table-session as a moderated conversation around the central question of transformation in regard to artistic institutions and their sustainability. In the process of transformations whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable. Institutional transformations can reorder our sense of value and structure in the world, as well as change the way we embed social norms. The aim of the conversation was to give more specificity to the different kinds of transformation. The session began by asking the participants: what new forms of organization and community are emerging in your particular institutions? What power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy?

       

       

       

      Day 3, July 10th

      For this day a.pass invited all participants of the previous days and the public into the process. The link for online participation via a video conference platform was published online, and an invitation was sent out. After an introduction by Delphine Hesters, the Reporters of the Table groups presented their reports to the public. Each presentation was followed by a discussion and was open to questions, comments.

      ► expand

       

      Introduction to Day 3

       

      [video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Future-Research-Conference-introduction.mp4"][/video]

       

      The Introduction brought back some question and topics of the Groups of Day 2 to Day 3:

      • We must be aware of the different understandings of AR present in the room
      • What do we mean by collectivity and inclusion?
      • In connection to the PhD in the Arts boom: is academia a refuge for the artist?
      • How and why are theaters, museums and other art institutions committing to AR?
      • What different culture of/for AR to cultivate?

       

      Reports by the Reporters

      [video width="1440" height="1080" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/future-research-conference-Tables-smalll-2-1.mp4"][/video]

       

      Table 1 Report

      Kristien Van Den Brande

      ► Practice Presentation

      INSTITUTIONAL AUTONOMY WITHIN LARGER SYSTEMS

      Tackled through a role playing game.

      Roles:

      teacher

      dreamer (instagram influencer with a fashion line)

      uber-socialist (young artist)

      rebel (black-block activist seen as vandal)

      archivist (big data manager)

      Context:

      • categorisation and segregation of fields within arts (educational, artistic, social practices) are working against the transdisciplinary conception of artistic research
      • The condition of partial identities: being a part of multiple systems at the same time
      • What are the expectations and questions of the cultural/educational sector towards institutions and practitioners of artistic research? eg: a theatre: why do they engage with AR?
      • What are the (dis)advantages of being part of a bigger (academic) structure?

      2 problems:

      • What are the larger systems? (funding bodies, a bigger academic structure, art/social work/science, allies of AR). Why do we call them ‘larger’?

      • Is the word ‘autonomy’ creating an interesting horizon for the discussion? (Institutions are de facto mediators between (related) individuals who belong to other or larger systems. Autonomy as the awareness of non-autonomy.)

      1. Larger systems

      Instead of making an exhaustive list of ‘larger systems’, we created a (more or less) fictitious dystopian* world in which to position the question of (institutional) autonomy. The idea was to create 3 stages (rise, establishment, fall) of a dystopia, and to see how (individual and institutional) resistance and collaborations* operate in every stage.

      *relative term (where does it touch on utopia? Rise and fall have interwoven features.)

      *in the double sense: in the positive sense, and in the sense of (un)consciously being on the side of what is criticized.

      What were the features of the world:

      • complete commodification: no more public space, no more commons, instrumentalisation of art, art as a dialogic practice no longer recognized as art, false beliefs in the politics of images (protest is fashionable), always be positive (instagram culture) and gaslighting, neutrality of data, prevalence of entertainment industry
      • Radical exclusivity (segregation, nationalism, art having to express predefined values, ‘inclusive’ and ‘participatory’ becoming a facade for its opposite
      • Dominance of the virtual (over the sensorial, surveillance capitalism, ip-ification)
      • Money making more money
      • Mass unemployment

      Over-bureaucracy and looming of legal threats (seeking legal representation for conflict in the absence of a society of trust)

      1. Wrong horizon of the word ‘autonomy’

      Philosophically we are probably aligned in thinking entanglements rather than autonomy (Rancière, Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold). The only autonomy is an awareness of our non-autonomy.

      Creates a shift in the questions we can/should ask?

      Instead of thinking the borders of an institute, focusing on connecting lines: how to generate feedback-loops between ARers - the institute - other systems?

      Strategies

      • What instituting is needed: turning bureaucratic requirements from funding bodies into occasion for conceptualizing positions (eg this conference, relation to ones own board and GA: how to put it together, how to sustain and undermine its authority)
      • Role play in reality: the question of ‘who do you work for?’. Positioning the discourse/question to make visible ones alliances.
      • Methodologies of production (that include relation) is what is being produced in AR (eg: contracts)
      • Building the archive of methodologies, strategies - who owns the archive?

      ! Time-factor: what is the life span of an artist-run organisation, a research institute, a board.

      1. ANNIHILATION

      How to deal with the double threat of annihilation of the institute (it wants to be open to change) + the institute that takes care of itself when it panics?

      Threat comes from

      • AR itself (if AR includes the production of methodologies of production)
      • Funding bodies that understand how we establish and practice interdependence
      • Movements like #metoo, blm, collaborative structures that are not recognized by the board (eg: witte de with, netwerk aalst)

      Strategies?

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

      > “Me too” harassment, Black Lives Matters are all examples that need quick institutional responses but we are confronted with the SLOWNESS OF THE INSTITUTION. There is the threat of annihilation but also the institute takes care of its own survival. The moment of panic is very tricky! Which strategies do institutions have to deal with those panic moments? Example of criticism: Witte de Wit had to deal with its colonial past: they spend a long period of time in attempt to change the name and then director put out a new program. But corona and black lives matter happened and things escalated because institutions were too slow and got heavily criticized. An Institute is slow to react and there is a precarity within an institute that needs to be sustained by its partners.

      > What strategies can we think of to make such transitions possible, considering the kind of forces in question? Institutional memory should trace those moments and share the archive of these transitions.

      > All institutions are hierarchical so we could talk of institutional schizoanalysis. For my experience, at X university, when there is a personal change, everything changes . It's faster if the person at the top takes decisions already because of peer pressure: sometimes it can be interesting for peers to point out the weak points. At X academy there were ongoing debates and in two days the director reacted. We have to help each other (peers to director etc...). How do you become a better director and person?

      > What kind of feedback loops do we organize in order to catch up?

      > I'm happy that institutions are slow. Change is also slow. We are looking for ways to move together. The legal paradigm in which we need to inscribe in is organized hierarchically. To balance insecurity of AR and have an institution that gives you the opportunity to do the research.

      > People are divided in the classroom and I have the responsibility as a professor. We still don't recognize structural racism etc.. there's a lot to do. How fast can we catch up without making a quick fix? “Not too know” it's not good from my position while the world is on fire!

      > It is problematic having to respond fast because you are giving yourself the authority to do it. How to create a place of discussion instead of decision?

      > A level of transparency is needed so one can see the progresses. With opacity of institutions, there is no sense of what is possible.

      > there is a double bind of slowness/fastness. Slowness is resistance but “the world is on fire” and how do you respond? Maybe a way forward is in relation to what's happening to representative democracy (in Belgium). How to make it more participatory? You don't abolish existing institutes but you establish a faster reacting extra part of it. Could there be a way to make debate platforms in a more continuous manner and not ad hoc as a way to combine qualities of fast and slow.

      > “you have to be fast and you can't be wrong!” doesn't sound very interdependent.

      > don't forget that certain regulations come from a want, they are there for a reason.

       

      Table 2 Report

      Philippine Hoegen

      ► Practice Presentation

      Internal Institutional Structures for Instituting Artistic Research

      Introduction

      The aim of the discussion about internal institutional structures for instituting artistic research was to take a (self) critical look at the organisation of internal structures and relations between participants and all persons working within the institutions. We spoke through 3 categories: 1. structures of decision making and organisation, (including formal and informal hierarchies). 2. Structures and instruments of self- and external evaluation. And 3. Relations with participants and their agencies.

      Discussion Thursday 9th

      There were representatives from 2 different institutions at the table, in some ways opposites, especially in scale. One institution, although it doesn't see itself as big, is of a much larger scale than the other, and with that, there is automatically more formal structuring. One is coming from specialisation and moving towards interdisciplinary, while the other is interdisciplinary by nature. One contains BA, MA and PHD, the other is post-MA.

      None the less there were significant overlaps. And from this first glimpse it would appear that there are a lot of elements already present in the institutions which would be continued in a desirable future institution, but in some cases those are now present as concepts but not as practices. Or they are ambitions but not yet founding concepts. Other things are simply lacking, either as founding concepts or as practices. The most acutely missed factors are those that aren’t yet present within the ambitions of the institute.

       

       

      Several subjects surfaced of which three stood out:

      1. (Self)-evaluation. One situation sketched was: there are various structures for self-evaluation in place, but follow-up on the outcomes, and therefore actual change, is lacking. Another situation: there are many moments of feedbacking or evaluating the own organisation, but they are not formally structured. So, follow up is haphazard rather than structural.
      2. Continuity. In both cases, the search for time and money for the institution with which to ensure continuity – not only of the institution itself, but also of the work/knowledge flowing into and out of the institution – were not self-evidently part of the set of ambitions, let alone them being a founding concept or a practice. Continuity here is meant in various senses: contracts of staff members, long term plans / vision and follow up, longer relationships with alumni....
      3. Institutional engagement and responsibility. Informal relationships, collegiality, and frequent meetings amongst staff members, as well as personal and frequent contact with and amongst participants, are valued highly in both the larger and the smaller institutions. But this also assumes a high level of engagement and responsibility, in other words TIME, not always remunerated, or (in the case also of participants) not necessarily available or on offer. Instituting artistic research requires formal structures for informal organisation to take place. And it needs time management, something we are notoriously bad at in the art field, lavishly spending our own and each other's time.

      Discussion Friday 10th

      For the third day of the conference on Friday the 10th of July, different scenarios for each subject were projected, showing possible trajectories to engage with the different issues. The scenario for the problem of self-evaluation was: institutional (self)-evaluation / critique becomes an integral part of artistic research processes. Both staff and researchers / participants are allotted time for that, and also for proposing / effectuating follow up and change.

      For the issue of continuity, the scenario was simply: continuity is put firmly on the agenda of the institution. As simple as it sounds, it does come with the risk of further entrenchment in the neo-liberal conditions surrounding education as more money means more justification demands. The scenario that we discussed in particular was the one addressing institutional engagement and responsibility:

      Scenario: The extra time needed for engaging with the institution by all parties is taken into account in the budget, there are rotating shifts for taking different responsibilities, meetings are well structured, time is allotted and roles planned ahead.

      Questions and problems: -How to avoid becoming ensnared in tedious procedures? -How to measure what is a 'correct' spending of time? -The paradox of the formal and the informal.

      Debated Questions

      The question of measuring time led to a debate, with on one side those people who are convinced that the monetary measurement of time is a waste of time and an unholy quest.

      On the other hand, there were those who pointed out that remunerating time is simply fair practice, and a plea was made for considering administration as a form of care.

      About the roles and agencies of participants, most people felt participants should and do have an important say in how an institution is run, but also that they are sometimes blind to the struggles of the institution, and for what it can and can’t do.

      What we didn’t have time for, but might have been a necessary part two of that conversation is the other side of the coin: is potential of existing institutional blindness to some particular needs or struggles of participants.

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

      > Paradox of inclusion: inclusion asks also for diversity in abilities, backgrounds etc, but at the same time it requires that we treat everybody equally. Difficult!

      > What is the lifespan of the engagement with an institution?

      > What is slow, what is fast?

      > Question to other institutions: do you involve the other participants in the way the organization is made?

      > on the slowness of regulations: for example legislation was made for the PhDs in the Arts to exist, but labour regulations (time, wage) are still rooted in a Fordist era. They not adjusted to the artistic reality and administration needs to deal with that.

      > There is a lot of passion at institution Y, for the good and for the worst. There are practices of living together for a week, including the after-hours. Participants are living together, a group of 7-8 people. Different visions of roles, of labour and invisible labour co-exist. Covid was a bomb making those discussions blow up. Students positions are not that different from those of workers (crew/staff and tutors/guests). Alumni become crew and tutorial staff. We have political consciousness but budgets, regulations, hierarchies are also there. There's an urgency of many discussion. For instance, students have to work outside to pay the fee for Institution Y, but now they realized that their role is not so different from the guests and contributors. The director of Y is the only person with a full time wage and they have to do all the work that the others don't want to do. There is a difference between students and participants. There is a higher demand for accountability from students while they have to pay a fee.

      How to move away from neoliberal approach of the student's demand to the institution to "serve"? But we all share other ideals so this discussion became very explosive.

      >> counterargument: calculating time can save time. Taking care that tasks allocation is fair and equal.

      >> Is emotional time considered in this calculation of time?

      >> In Institution Z the age difference spans from 29 to 67 years old. Administrative care is needed. There is pressure on the institute to change: to enhance feedback process and evaluations. What is even possible?

       

      Table 3 Report

      Sébastien Hendricks

      ► Practice Presentation

      On the first day of the conference, four main topical fields were defined as a basis for the following day. Our table - table 3 - was going to deal with the publicness of artistic research: how and where should it be made public, if at all?

      The proposed practice aimed at speculative collaboration open to neurodiversity. Minds imagine differently: some tend to cohere, others to open up, analyze, criticize, associate, visualize, textualize, daydream, etc. There are advantages and disadvantages to mental slowness as well as to mental speed. We made a pluralistic mind-map: each participant could elaborate on the drawings, diagrams and writings of the others. Misunderstanding and being lost in translation were inherent to the practice. In order to prevent the whole group from falling off a cliff into a Sea of Randomness, a moderator lightly intervened from time to time. With drawings or remarks of his own, he tried to push the map- and discussion-in-progress in specific directions.

      The practice consisted of the following elements:

      • a big piece of paper hung up against a wall
      • some chalk markers to draw or write on it
      • a bench to sit on and take some distance to look at the collaborative map-in-progress
      • a laser pen to highlight specific details of the map during the group discussions which alternated with the more silent drawing and writing sessions

      We started from four distinct questions, which could be interrelated in various ways:

      (1) Can artistic research just be without being public? Why / not?

      (2) What are the advantages of secrecy for artistic research?

      (3) How could artistic research relate to traditional knowledges and practices?

      (4) Where to make artistic research public in 5 years from now?

      On the third and last day of the conference, the moderator transformed into a reporter who, with the help of the laser-pen, guided the audience along his subjective trajectory through the map. He more or less said the following:

      As our table dealt with the question of publicness, it is maybe not so surprising to see so many eyes show up on the map (which is actually, thanks to the horizon line, more of a landscape drawing - an image not drawn looking from the top down but while standing in the landscape itself). There is the many-eyed-monster who could be seen as a symbol for collective intelligence (or collective confusion, if you wish); there are the hollow non-eyes of a skull predicting the end of artistic research in the world to come; for some mysterious reason the dilettant is drawn with a pair of profoundly sad eyes; I particularly like the eye within the vague circle, which to me stands for the participant-observer, the researcher who’s more or less part of a field (with all the messiness, paradoxes and complexities such an involvement can entail); very different is the distant, so-called objective or scientific eye right next to it - maybe that one refers to the gaze of the Academicized Fartist, the proliferating mock-version of the artistic researcher - whose worst emanation could approach the God-like Gaze (also to be found on the map). Most of these eyes, however, seem to represent the eyes of artistic researchers, while our main questions were related to the issue of publicness, so to the eyes of others. One of those eyes can be found looking at a tower. The edifice itself has an eye drawn on it. The image suggests the tower can see while hiding from view what is happening inside of its walls. Artistic research could be a phase of invisibility for an artistic practice, a break in its publicness, a space for an artist to observe, try things out, transform, develop a praxis, all of this free from the pressure to be successful and productive, or to make sense immediately. As a basis for experimentation, the tower could be filled with lots of unfilled time, as is mentioned right underneath the image. Let us now move our attention to what some participants suggested could be called the Fartbox, even though the arrows clearly point out the cloudlike shape doesn’t forcefully leave but enters or envelops another entity. The box looks like a Russian doll: in the worldbox we can find the artworldbox, and in the artworldbox there is the artistic research niche or ghetto. When artistic research is made public, in which of these boxes does it appear? And how? In order to become public, does it have to adapt, does it have to become a box itself, a form that fits in? Or can it change - cloudify, melt or mould - the structures that be? The ghetto and the niche have another well known metaphor in their vicinity: the one of the church. Does artistic research only preach to the converted? Is its proud cosmopolitanism not much more than a rootless and at the same time profoundly provincial way of inhabiting the world? Considering the larger spheres of the Fartbox - the artworld and the world - one may wonder if artistic research first and foremost feeds into an artist’s career or rather into his or her life. The map also suggests that any possible answer to the question of publicness strongly depends on one’s definition of artistic research. Some proclaimed artistic research is not a phase, but more something like a form or a type of practice - maybe even a discipline? According to them, in a world in turmoil, this form or type or discipline could benefit from a more specific description. What if social innovation would be its main characteristic? Or social change (including tradition, next to innovation)? In that case, publicness wouldn’t mean becoming visible in the eyes of others, but acting (possibly in concert with others) upon the world. Could artistic research go viral? Could it be a tool for action and intervention - socially and culturally - or could it produce such tools? And which tools would be needed for this production? How would artistic research making use of rakes and spades and hammers and sickles instead of MacBook Pros, look like? What if artistic researchers would all give up on their latte frappe macchiato and massively migrate to the countryside to make their soft hands rough and dirty? The question each of them could at least ask him or herself is: if my research is a pebble, in which pond do I want it to make ripples?

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

      > Is AR an attitude or practice? And how much do we take contemporary art as synonymous with AR? There are examples where art is deliberately instrumentalized for a research that is artistic in its methodology or genealogy and has political effects: Forensic Architecture, Chimurenga Collective and Wochenklausur in Austria. Are we then on the verge of passing into social work? Hijacking art could mean that if we cannot have political effect, can use the position of artists as joyful dilettante, can we use the naiveté of not being burdened by specialization or by bureaucratic difficulties to oppose political and social problems differently? How can artistic techniques be hijacked for that purpose? There is also an epistemic benefit, because we learn something about learning. The question remains why we still call it art and not activism? Should it be social work?

      >> I change my mind about that question every day, on the days where I am more critical I see as Risk of diverging of political potential from real politics to symbolic places. From which position is that done? From a place of privilege?

      > How far is secrecy is helping? Secrecy as a power position is different than invisibility of being powerless, of non agency. In my professional experience of many years I used working systems, loving systems, reading systems without talking about AR. Lately I have been doing AR in a big institutions with money but the care or time was not being given for discussing of what is what. “We don't want a debate about AR”. The whole discussion become a political field. Opacity/Tower of AR is a problem: AR is elitist or considered as such.

      > there are different cultures of research: it gives space/time to certain practices, to different gestures, to safe spaces.

      > teaching as artistic researcher in Institution A, in relationship to the question of secrecy as potential (from Table 3): Maybe the question of making AR public is a question of how it positions itself within a social environment not of how AR makes itself visible. If we think of AR as something that acts upon the world then AR is already public because it is in an environment. If we think about it as some kind of a pause, it carries some kind of secret knowledge. It is problematic if AR is a secret knowledge that is being produced and served as a finished dish. AR has the power to dwell in a non-articulated phase, but also share from that phase. Seen like this AR is maybe an attitude. I prefer calling is pre-articulation.

      > Focused on AR, productions and fair practices within the arts. There is not an opposition between the public and AR, but it can be a weaving together with the public. One should not stay too long in the room, but share, get feedback and develop together with the public. Being artist and researcher is not a decoration, I think it's clear that is a real necessity of life. Neoliberal times makes seem the arts and AR useless. If so, then you can ask what is the legitimacy of all human endeavours (philosophy...), in the arts not everything should be productive.

       

      Table 4 Report

      Sina Seifee

      ► Practice Presentation

      The session was proposed in the spirit of conversation around the central question of transformation in regard to artistic institutions and their sustainability. In the process of transformations whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable. Institutional transformations can reorder our sense of value and structure in the world, as well as change the way we embed social norms. The aim of the discussion was to give more specificity the different kinds of transformation in question. The session began by asking the participants: what new forms of organization and community are emerging in your particular institutions? What power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy?

      During the session we talked about role of educational organizations in geopolitics as international relations influenced by geographical factors. The aspect of geopolitics relevant to this context can be defined as the question of who gets to move where at what cost. These topics were raised:

      • Inequality The notion of inequality was mainly understood and raised as financial inequality. And this was exemplified regarding the national borders of the European states where these institutions are located. Some of the participants postulated the implicit location of education within Europe's foreign policies. That means, how educational organizations becomes part of the decisions of inclusion/exclusion. One of the frontiers where this inequality was clearly felt in this discussion was visa applications and visa processes. This issue was raised in a wider series of questions regarding the distribution of wealth and privileges beyond national borders. Many involved institutions are ethically transnational, but contribute to the local. We talked about how the idea of "local" is shattered.
      • Scale (of administration) From the point of view of the administration workers present at the discussion, it seemed that larger organizations have more problems with the politics of inclusion/exclusion, with getting things done bureaucratically. The logistics and concerns of institutions dealing with inclusion change with their scale. Institutions are built within institutions, in a nested structure, causing the regulations to be conceived inside regulations. As the result of scaling up processes they do not always fit or continue to fit together. For instance, frictions occurs as one has transnational inclusion ethics, while the other has more domestic politics in mind. This friction can be felt in the ambivalence of support and limitation. As an institution gets larger in size (i.e. change in quantity), this leads to sometimes to a different logic (i.e. change in the quality of how it understands its world).

      Two distinct positions were articulated in the session:

      1. Solidarity and alignment. Working with the metaphors of "radical fairytale" (a form of radicalization, small but provoking thoughts), "flipping the coin" (how easy things can change to its opposite), and the "Fortress Europe" (the oversimplified question of "how to open Europe to foreigners"). This view operates by contentious direct-action approach to geopolitics in artistic research. Suggesting that we have to formulate the future and in doing so transcend our bad internationalism. The mentality of pushing our demands against the external social/systemic forces.
      2. Actor network perspective. Sometime having a "contact person" in the other institution from a different scale can do a lot for you. This contact person has to be cultivated and is achieved through heuristic talents of networking. In this view, you invest on networking and networks of relationships. The label "bureaucrat" was suggested as an inaccurate name for people with particular views and people with different privileges. Because you have to take feeling and emotions into account. For example you might find ways to have their "view" layered, and not necessary radically transform them.

      In this session we visited two modes of thinking togetherness in Europe: (1) internationalism, as mode in which one connects "among" the other actors. This position recognizes distance and domestic borders, but works in interaction with them. And (2), transnationalism, in which one thinks "beyond" what constitutes as difference and distance. The institution is invested in foreign operation, and acts beyond or across national boundaries.

       

       

       

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

      > Notion of the (g)Local was important for the discussion. There were several positions on how to see this.

      > Framing was discussed, bad local and good local are possible. Not traveling makes us rethink the idea of local. But it is also food for a nationalist approaches. How would we work with this idea?

      >> this conference is a good example of how to think this

      > Good and bad digital was mentioned. In the future scenarios mobility will be restricted to the 1%, and big tech will have the only means to educate. There is a danger of not coming together anymore. Mobility is already exclusive if you consider visa restrictions.

      > How to create longer phases of engagement and alternatives time zones in order to engage deeply with a place? Nationalism is not about the local, but about a specific layer of the society.

      > Institutions are nodes of international attraction. Can we think further than that? There is no culture of AR in many places (example Italy). It is important to include other localities which do not have cultures of AR.

      >> for example the rural vs the urban, to include the rural.

      > Trans means to go *(active movement) beyond, while inter is inbetween *(stuck, passive). Transnational and not International

      > Institutions have a wish for inclusivity as long as it does not change the culture of AR. Inclusion must come with the courage to change standards.

      > An open definition of AR is not open in the sense of "whatever", but in the sense of being open to actualization and transformation.

       

      Summary of Day 3

      [video width="1920" height="1080" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Future-Research-Conferencefinal-overview-and-Q.mp4"][/video]

       

      Delphine Hesters

       

      In the last hour of this debate, Delphine Hesters presented her summary of the discussions of the day and outlined trajectories of the debate so far. She proposed a mapping (see picture) where she outlined and grouped the topics discussed during the Reporter's presentations along a future timeline for a speculative year 2035. Her main groupings were:

      Practices to give up:

      Institutions as service provider

      inequality

      hiding behind slowness

      quick fixes

      being in the position in which we have to legitimate ourselves

      constant measuring of time in order to remunerate

       

      Practices to nurture:

      set up continuous debates that don't have to be conclusive

      take advantage of the slowness of institutions - possibility of thorough-ness, resistance, dialogue. (debates need slowness)

      administration as care

      having principles of self-evaluation

      (formal) structures to make informality happen

      accommodate different „time zones“, also the different requirements of time that different practices need. (but the question of how to measure time stays, we still are in an approach to time as labour and labour as time. it is a trap for AR and arts)

      tweaking of the bureaucratic requirements, pirate versions of existing models

      ask yourself - who has to move where at what cost

      the institution should be public - share your archive, show how you change, how you work

      ask yourself - in which pond do you make ripples? which circles you want to create?

      map your entanglements, know your dependencies and autonomies

      weaving with the public

       

      Values:

      trust

      vulnerability

      transparency

      trans(nationality)

      radicality

      Think what could annihilate your institution

      Balance self care & being ready for change

      'being public' as acting upon the world

      Think in terms of currencies instead of positions and hierarchies

      approach to AR as both open and specific

       

      General Discussion

      The day concluded with reactions, feedback and proposals for next steps. Here is a transcript of that discussion, without naming the contributors. Direct reactions are marked with >, responses to comments with >>

      > Repetition of wealth - for you a visa is a right but that doesn't count for everyone

      > Transparency adding nuance - an institution is not a homogeneous space, which moves within different worlds, there is also the importance to resist having to share everything,

      >> The demand for transparency comes from a lack of trust.

      >> Maybe also the idea of visibility and transparency as a system of control

      >> Transparency has to do with control, but also it is about complexity. For a lot of administrative people this is a mountain they have to move. Trying to communicate the artistic field to the administrative field, and the other way around. Like speaking different languages. Not necessarily about ill will. Maybe something for administrative artistic research.

      > The notion of safe space was dropped a couple of time, and I wonder to what extent the need for safe space is reserved for AR, or if it is intrinsic to the field of education.

      > Maybe all these things relate to institutions in general, any of these relate to artistic research as a discipline?

      > When we talk about visibility and communication it raises a lot of question about responsibility, who holds this safe space? Art is also social, modes of representation is really a task within AR. This is also a question of practices. It sounds abstract - bringing practices together. This is a selection process, if we are in the pre-articulated space, bringing practices together, articulating to each other.

      >> As an artistic researcher at a.pass my personal motivation was the possibility of taking a break. The shelter was needed to fail, if things were visible all the time, this would have been impossible. Being visible and producing artworks that nobody needs

      > Maybe we could think beyond binaries visible-invisible, etc, more think along the lines of what visibility should be, or transparency should be, determining what according to us is visibility, instead of letting it be determined for us

      > Measure of having no family or role model to look up to, in a queer way, from someone who mainly does research through queer perspectives. In these queer times it is interesting to be more radical, think more about negative decision making, thinking what is no longer sustainable, in the last ten years these MA PhDs didn’t give us perspectives that are useful in current years. Continuing is a luxury that very few will have.

      > First of all my gratefulness, because I didn’t want to go to AR conferences anymore. I really enjoyed the optimism. We missed the word queer in the last 3 days, but it is important to keep these spaces safe and open at the same time. Heard something many times and mentioned often in other AR conferences: also academics are coming our way to do artistic research. Important not to think within categories, we really have something to offer that transcends what we consider to be artistic research.

      > One aspect that I want to bring in or back, is that the future of AR has to rethink its notion of access in a radical way. What we have, no matter how hard we try its always based on conditions. What could be modes of unconditional access for researches, which doesn’t jeopardize the safe space and secrecy. Maybe this can cross the binary of the institution

      >> ’(digital) commons' :)

      >> what makes us want to say yes to this environment, and what do we lose with this unconditional access?

      >> something about the unconditional. There is multiplicity of societies that need specific access points. If we streamline we use very broad terms that a lot of people don't feel connected to.

      > Back to the question of transparency. We should define for ourselves, what it means for us. Delphine already mentioned it: sharing our vulnerability. Sharing of vulnerability brings us closer to the ethics of artistic researchers. Often we feel a big gap between the way the institution functions and the ethics of researchers inside of it. Institution introducing itself as a research in itself. There the ethics of the institution and the researchers in it come together. In that respect some us wouldn’t need to enter an institution in order to protect ourselves, because there would be a culture of risks, we wouldn't need to withdraw.

      > I was wondering about the notion of academia. I have read papers and essays from people at universities and they really transformed my thinking. How, if academia is so bad, they produce such amazing things?

      what happens to the sleepwalker if the world is on fire?

      Delphine Hesters than asked into the round:

      What can we do together? Continue to do together? And for what purpose?

      > We need to talk about the selection process at the part of the institution. It counteracts unconditional access.

      > Getting rid of labour or reformulating labour relations - if we open up the floodgates of imagination there are some things we will lose is social production.

      > Something institutions can consider is conditions of production. People don’t pay attention to what we are producing but the way we are producing. If we remember that the Israeli army reads situationist international: What are we contributing to neo-liberalism. It needs to be politicized. We have an expanded form of democracy coming our way, and we should think about how we are going to contribute to that, as researchers.

      > We need not only researchers or institutions people in our work groups, also managers and administrators.

      > What we need from both sides is a bit of courage. Art is in underdog position vs a terminator.

      > We started from an unspoken understanding of Artistic Research is and now have arrived at the question of not only what "artisitc" is but of what it should do. Independent of our disagreement about what Artistic Research is, its definitions should keep transforming for the future similar to the way in which art also always transforms.

      > Translations always have obscure sides and transparencies. I think it is important to talk together. AR's responsibility of searching it's own limits, and it this sense it's a contribution to the world.

       

       

      Conclusion

      A much needed conversation

      The three days of the conference were a multifaceted, engaged discussion on Artistic Research Institutions, an impression which was supported by many contributors and participants in the their feedback. The perspective of the institutions, installed here as a result of the benchmark process, created a much needed productive conversation around common concerns. There was a shared feeling that institutions do not exchange enough on that level: eye to eye as organizers and facilitators. Being able to discuss, self-critique, be open and constructive about the difficulties and pitfalls of organizing institutions is important to the field of artistic research and its current economical, educational and administrative context.

      ► expand

      While this institutional perspective allowed for a discussion among institutions and was a welcome change from discussions within their singular hierarchies of art education, there was also a shared agreement that this institutional perspective can only be a start of a larger series of conversations. An area of discussion that deserves its own focus is the question of how Artistic Research enters into the larger context of art and cultural institutions and the broader social context. Representatives from the broader field have participated in this conference and there is an urgency to continue to understand the work of Artistic Research as it ventures beyond the institutions which support it. The other important topic would be the artists' and students' perspective on Artistic Research and the institutions they take part in. This perspective should become the main focus of a next conference.

       

      Community

      A common point during conference was to pay more attention to the responsibilities of institutions of artistic research as community instigators. How can we continue to care for the researchers and concerns which leave the institution? How can we support the emergent community of artistic researchers and their professional networks? How can we support them as they in their turn instigate and interact with the communities outside the educational field? To accomplish this the institutions should not only connect among themselves, but foster a larger cultural network of Artistic Research that includes cooperatives, venues, social and activist initiatives.

       

      Administration as Care

      The perspective of care was also important in the discussions around administrative concerns. In these discussions administration was often framed as care. Administration actively co-creates the space of indeterminacy which Artistic Research relies on to be able to find its own limits, definitions and processes. This space is constantly foreclosed by educational regulations which operate from more traditional assumptions and policies of art education and research. To push against those boundaries and to reshape the regulatory structures from within is the work of administration in the institutions.

       

      Access

      Accessibility needs to be continually addressed as we develop these conversations. Here the administration also plays an important role, as it is the place where not only the conditions of access to the institution are being defined but also where the work of making them more permeable happens: negotiations around insurance, visa- and administrative regulations allow for the legal persona of the artistic researcher to exist within the administrative frameworks. Other processes of institutional access have to do with an understanding of the institutions as a resource for the larger community. How can institutions continue to develop modalities of sharing this resources alongside with the already existing admission policies? Admission policies are themselves in question: we have to pay even more attention to whom does our call for proposals reach and on which basis do we prioritize certain proposals over others in a field that is as amorphous as Artistic Research. To work on access we could question the call procedure as an accepted standard and discuss other potential models.

       

      Visibility

      The processes of making visible of artistic research is at the center of the questions of its relationships to a larger context and also contributes a further point to the discussion of access. On the one hand institutions of Artistic Research are seen as precious safe spaces, away from visibility and allowing for time and a place to experiment, fail and explore. On the other side of this argument is the question of contribution to the social and political sphere. How can we not lose sight of both necessities? Can a rethinking of publication as a modality of entering the public sphere contribute to this discussion? What kind of collaborations can be formed to share processes of investigation that go beyond production of art and the academic paper?

       

      Practice, Discipline, Methodology, Field

      The conference clearly showed (again) that many paralleled conceptions of what Artistic Research is and what it should do exist in the field. There were several calls to try and agree on a preliminary common idea of what we are talking about, while already going forward with the discussion of the implications of this practice in the field. Any further meeting on this topic should address a specific conceptualization of Artistic Research as a temporary proposal in order to facilitate deeper and more contextualized discussions of its processes and politics.

      During the conference two parallel modes of reaching this temporary commonality became apparent: One perspective argued that Artistic Research is inseparable from its search for its limits and meaning. This argument stems from a similar process of continued transformation of art as a cultural practice. It could be argued from this perspective that it is more important to share how artistic research is done that what it is. This "doing otherwise" is itself a valuable contribution to artistic, social and political fields. The other perspective on commonality or diversity of definitions is oriented by the question whether Artistic Research is an emergent discipline in its own right or a methodology which can be applied within exiting (research) disciplines. This might be a foundational question for institutions of artistic research and their self conceptualization, as it works in different ways within the tensions between their conceptual and artistic autonomy and educational policies.

       

      Outcomes

      For a.pass, as the instigator of this conference, some immediate and some longterm outcomes and commitments follow from this conference. This report will become a part of our evaluation process and application for funding for the next five years. We have proposed a so-called Steering Group to become a part of the a.pass structure. Our wish is that this group will – in two annual meetings – become a satellite of the institution and create a space for shared reflection, critique and continuity for a.pass as a research in education. The Steering Group is a step towards a greater permeability and will be a critical dialogue partner for the institution. It will engage a group of potential a.pass contributors from the larger field of artistic research including representatives from partner institutions, social initiatives and alumni.

      The institutions participating in this conference have expressed a clear desire to continue this conversation. A next step would be to make proposals of how this continuity could be installed. a.pass will engage in exploring the topics of these discussion in further conferences and contribute to a continued process of collaboration with the participating institutions.

      Thank you!

      We would like to finish this report with a big "Thank You!" to all contributors and the engaged audience of this conference. We appreciated the commitment to discussion, doubt and supportive critique in the complicated circumstances of this year. We are looking forward to continue and to meet again!

       

       

      Post Conclusion

      As a small outlook, we have recently asked the a.pass researchers why they chose Artistic Research as their field of work. Here is a small list of answers. We take them as seeds for a future conference on artists' perspectives on Artistic Research.

      To have time for a process, and work in a collective setting.

      To work with the patterns that research creates in artistic practice

      To be in dialogue with other researchers and colleagues.

      To share resources: in art practices resources are often use for the purpose of a singe artist or a singe project. In artistic research institutions resources can be shared and benefit more people.

      To understand our own process better: a self-anthropology of artistic labor.

      To practice clairvoyance

      To question the performance of authorship

      Hosting and crossing of disciplines, to engage in transdisciplinary practice. To engage with disciplines as conflictual zones.

      To engage in and share failures

      To unlearn productivity, to understand productivity not as a goal but as a contingent pattern of practice, a moment of crystallization. To split productivity from practice.

      To position artistic practices within society and away from producing products for society

      To understand the agency of a cut.

       

       

       

       

       

      Comments

      Please leave your comments and feedback in this collective pad

       

       

       

    • performative publishing
    • kitchen 01 September 2020
      posted by: Sina Seifee
      kitchen

       

      https://kitchen.apass.be/

       

       

      Kitchen.apass.be is an open source digital platform, programed and design by OSP for a.pass, to support the researchers in a process of exchange by enabling collaborative documentation and discussion. This platform is conceived as a website that can host the written, visual and sonic materials used during the processes of research. It will enable collective note-taking, co-writing and simple publishing. This tool is developed through thinking about the continuous processes of documentation and share-ability that are essential in research practices. Being open source is an important aspect of the new platform, which desires to be an accomplice in new forms of digital exchange, including free software, Free Art Licence and Creative Commons, all of which are in alliance with a.pass’ political orientation.

       

    • FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS brings artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there are no politics without form! With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several “Moments” that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into a single installation. This publication reshuffles documentation of these “Moments” as a visual reflection of the trajectory of this research.

      Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

      https://www.robritzen.info/actions/forms-of-life-of-forms/

      price 12 Euro

       
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • PUBLISHING ARTISTIC RESEARCH research center associates Cycle 1
      17 February 2020
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • Isabel Burr Raty, Antye Guenther, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee and a.pass
    • 01 February 2020
    • 35 euro = 4 publications + Annex
    • PUBLISHING ARTISTIC RESEARCH

      Documenting, archiving, and publishing are intrinsic to the ongoing practices of a.pass. They are seen as research tools that enable critical reflections through their exposure of artistic research processes. The program seeks to find public formats or outlets for research in the course of its ongoing development, and facilitates an understanding of the politics of such processes.

      With these concepts in mind, the a.pass Research Center (RC) began a new program in 2018 that hosts six Associate Researchers in cycles of one year as a platform for exchange in artistic research. Cycle I hosted Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen and Sina Seifee. They contributed to the platform through concerns, concepts and “ways of doing” inherent to their practices.

       

      PDF of the ANNEX you can read HERE

      a printed annex is added for free with every purchase
      of the Research Center Cycle I publications.

       


       

       

      ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive.

      Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

      Price 14 Euro

      ORDER HERE


      FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS brings artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there are no politics without form! With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several “Moments” that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into a single installa- tion. This publication reshuffles documentation of these “Moments” as a visual reflection of the trajectory of this research.

      Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

      https://www.robritzen.info/actions/forms-of-life-of-forms/

      price 12 Euro

      ORDER HERE

       

      ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM by Sina Seifee in collaboration with editor Renan Lauran and designer Foad Farahani, is immersion in the compiling and composing of Seifee’s notes on medieval bestiaries, and placing them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series that creates context and opens small descriptive steps towards (what Latour might call) “knowing interestingly” about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio-techno tales and old styles of knowing. As an “ecology of obligation” with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, is Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.


      Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      Price 5 Euro

      ORDER HERE

       


      NEOCORTEX is a textile poster publication. It can be used as a head or neck scarf, a hairband, a veil, a belt, a table cloth, an arm sling, a disguise in political demonstrations, a laboratory sieve, or a tool for receiving and transmitting alien thoughts. This scarf is the second materialization of ongoing research on neuroscientific visualization practices and questionable conceptualizations of our brains. Referring to the current trend in the scientific community to print posters on textiles rather than on paper, it combines reconstructed MRI data of the artist’s brain with various text fragments from science and science fiction.


      Antye Guenther is a visual artist and artist-researcher, born and raised in Eastern Germany. Drawing from her background in medicine, photography, and in the military, her artistic practice treats themes like (non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, scientific representations of cognitive processes and mind control, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and fictionality of science. Guenther studied at the art academies of Leipzig and Karlsruhe, and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 2019 she received the first Mingler Scholarship for Art and Science.

      https://aguenth.de/

      Price: 155 Euro

      ORDER HERE

       

       

       

      www.archivingartisticanxieties.me by Adrijana Gvozdenović in collaboration with Sina Seifee, Pia Louwerens, Kristina Gvozdenović and Goda Palekaitė, is a noisy visual archive and online publication that takes the form of an essay. This platform is a way to reflect and diffract from the different activities and events realized in the past year. The writing and editing processes are exposed and show the different steps of the collaboration and their constructive agencies.


      Adrijana Gvozdenovic has been for the last two years a researcher at a.pass. She proposes activities that push the borders between research, mediation and production as well as examine new formats of publicness. Naming these activities ‘Otherwise Exhibiting’, is an attempt to shift the focus from the object to relations. During the last year, her research project “Archiving Artistic Anxieties” was supported by the Royal Academy of Antwerp, which resulted in this online publication in collaboration with a.pass Research Center.

       

       

      BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

       

      Price: 10 Euro

      ORDER HERE


      4 publications + Annex = 35 euro
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 2
    • WHAT YOUR RESEARCH DID TO ME research center associates Cycle II
      17 February 2020
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens
    • 10 June 2021
    • 30 euro - annex + 2 books + 1 game
    • WHAT YOUR RESEARCH DID TO ME

      Performative publishing” opens other forms of doing that reflect the speculative attitudes of artistic research.

      a.pass Research Center hosts associate researchers in one-year cycles. Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens were part of “Cycle II 2020/21”. Their research topics range from cultural discourse analysis in the dance field, institutional critique and immaterial art production, architectural encounter dispositifs, decolonial dance history and politics of listening. Throughout the year, they contributed with concerns, concepts and “ways of doing” inherent to their practice. They share their research trajectory and their entanglements in singular performative publications, as well as a collective digital publication on madewitholga.be. Excerpts of their collaborative work are published in The Annex, which functions as a printed index to the online collective publication, as well as to the multiform performative publications of the individual researchers.

       


      THE ANNEX

      Collective publication

      What your research did to me is a collective online publication by a.pass “Research Center Cycle II,” with excerpts printed in The Annex. In response to a self-defined score, the associated researchers produced an online assemblage of conversations, film clips, letters, auto-theoretical writings and a storytelling/feedback game.

      In a collaborative research environment like a.pass, a lot of creative and critical energy is devoted to developing modes of sharing. These modes range from spontaneous and informal, to highly orchestrated, artificial, constrained and designed. Whether called hosting, adopting, participating, initiating, presenting, borrowing, testing, or what have you – they all come with a different distribution of entanglements with each other, and eventually with a wider public.

      The publication What your research did to me takes as a point of departure the fact that modes of sharing already happened, and that along the way, the initial projects lost their clear contours. They crossbred into each other and made (un)traceable lines and knots, without losing definition. When deliberating the making of a publication to impart something of the collective process, the first impulse was to find a common denominator in research subject (e.g. listening), if not in research method (e.g. note-taking). This strategy yielded a somewhat pernicious effect in that it tended to fade the singularities and intricacies of the approaches, how one inclined to another – but not necessarily to all. Sharing wasn’t the same as amalgamating into uniformity. Proximity engendered centrifuge as much as centripetal forces.

      The solution adopted was to list each for oneself, moments where one’s research was inspired by someone else’s, and to readdress that moment of implicit borrowing or appropriating back into collective work, either with the proprietor of the question or with the entire group, and in any case, witnessed by all.

      madewitholga.be or in print.

      PDF OF ANNEX II here > a.pass_annex_2021

      The Annex is 5 euro.
      You get the Annex for free if you order one of the publications.
      Price of Annex + the 3 printed publications = 30 euro


      What your research did to me, a collective online publication by a.pass Research Centre Cycle II, with excerpts printed in *The Annex*. What your research did to me is an online assemblage of conversations, film clips, letters, autotheoretical writings and a storytelling/feedback game, produced in response to a self-defined score.
       
      Published on madewitholga.be

      SITING DISCOURSE
      Diary excerpt from Live Archive,

      by Breg Horemans

      Siting Discourse is a dialogical diary that explores the protocols, politics and accessibility of a digital architecture-as-archive (www.taat-projects.com). Horemans shares the writing process through a recorded sequence of screen captures. Siting Discourse exposes the Live Archive´s digital spatiality and the implicit gestures, attitudes and coincidences of discourse making that it aims to facilitate. The title is a reference to the Live Archive as a (web-)site for discursive documentation and it addresses the academic citing mechanism as a form of “structural misquoting.” Siting Discourse is a collaboration between Siebren Nachtergaele (Social Sciences HOGENT, Theatre Studies UGENT, BE) and Andrew Filmer (Theatre Studies, Aberystwyth University, WA). Their first encounter was shaped by means of a drift.

      PDF FREE DOWNLOAD  > archive 10-6-2021_final

      Breg Horemans is co-founder of TAAT, a liquid collective of artists working on the verge of performance, research and installation art. Since 2011, he renegotiates his relation to the architecture discipline through transdisciplinary collaborations. The desire of his research lies in shaping the spatial conditions for ‘sites of encounter’ that invite human and non-human entities to co-constitute each other. The projects initiated by TAAT generate spaces for co-activity and instigate fluid prototyping processes as ‘becoming spaces’. In the last two years, Breg is co-developing an online environment that enhance processes of open source writing, archiving and publishing.

       


       

       

      I’M NOT SAD, THE WORLD IS SAD
      Artistic research novel,

      by Pia Louwerens

      I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist “differently” through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens’ labor as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of “performance.” Im Not Sad, The World Is Sad is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

      Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 - 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.

      price 15 euro

      ORDER HERE + preview PDF (coming soon)

       


       

       

      POP-FI POSTER
      A game,

      by Lili M. Rampre

      Pop-Fi poster is a “choose your own adventure” game developed by Lili M. Rampre in collaboration with Júlia Rúbies Subirós. The game traces pre-public discourse, a semi-private collection of thoughts that, once shared and circulated, can shift a wider agenda on what matters to artists the most. The game aims to popularize common fictions and pop the bubble of others. Collectivizing half-digested thoughts potentially means bridging between personal and structural to effectuate change. Pop-Fi poster is part of Pop-Fi: a multifaceted project that entails a performative workshop ventriloquizing popular movie icons, video installations and script-readings. Pop-Fi foregrounds concerns of an artistic community through a variety of formats that act as a discourse prism. Pop-Fi poster is both a visual aid for the workshop and an autonomous object. Pop-Fi’s next step is developing strategies to funnel from anecdotal to factual and think about data and its visualization techniques informed by direct experience, commitment to action and intersectionality.

      Lili M. Rampre is researching strategies to highlight “off stage”; processes, practices and actors behind, off, under or above the stage. Her focus lies on power relationships and the dynamics of disparities in cultural capital (audience-performer, fan-star, producer-artist). Her work has often a role-reversal in its core proposal, ventriloquism of a kind, or unreliable narration. Most recently Lili is looking into fandom and fandom civic practices authorising fiction to affect political action as an artistic methodology, to re-articulate essential parts of artistic production and circulation as fictional or factual aspects.


      Price 3 Euro

      ORDER HERE (coming)

       


       

      WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE
      BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS
      Interviews,

      by Davide Tidoni

      Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics consists of a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflection, and motivational support, the publication examines the experiences, commitments and feelings that operate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces outside of art institutions; it’s a repository designed to inspire and encourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics.

      Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018). Davide’s work can be accessed at: davidetidoni.name

      price: 15 Euro

      ORDER HERE + preview PDF (soon)


       
       
       
       
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      DIALOGUE

       

       

      I have a proposal to deal with this portfolio: both of us will sit at our tables and we will write to each other on a common document. The conversation will be slowed down by the timing of the writing while we will look back together to this year and a half in A.PASS, from September 2018 until January 2020. In this period we have been leading a continuous conversation between us, which is maybe the smallest brick of the whole process. And I love small talk.

      Let’s try. In time we have been asked many times to show the process of our reciprocal editing. We were sort of reluctant to be explicit about it in the beginning. Or we just thought that the two voices were already very clearly different, that they didn’t need to be further explicated. Or maybe we thought that it was just impossible to say who did what. 

      We’ll see if we’ll manage to enter some small talk in here!

       

       

       

      I Block//School of Love

      curated by Adva Zakai

      (September-December 2018)

       



      What do you remember about the beginning?

       

      I think that we started from the end. At the beginning we stopped. Maybe we were supposed to start but we didn’t. 

       

      We first tried to see where were we. What and in which shape, through which language we could relate to the context. We observed our practices, questions, our doing in relation to the new context of A.PASS and of the researchers that were there in that moment.

      We used the first four months to suspend our doing. We looked back at our artistic practice and research, we renamed it, we rephrased it.  

      Do you remember what was the question when we started?

       

      We had many questions, actually. At the beginning our work consisted mainly in formulating questions. Most of them would concern time, attention, peripheries, noise and translations.

       

       

      What is there?

      Is it possible to transform the perception of the instant in the construction of a duration?

      What is such a translation?

      What is noise?

      Why should the periphery of the perception become the center of the research?

      How can the center remain open?

      What is sacred?

       

       

      Are some of these words still with us? Did some of them change?

       

      Now that you brought back these questions I can see again that we started from the end. From this last question. 

      What is sacred?

      If I look back to it, I think that we tried to stay close to what was sacred to us. 

      I would say that what was sacred was the distance between us. We didn’t know how to name this alterity which is the unknown space between me and you.

       

      The distance is what allows being together.

      The distance is the space/time in between things.

      The distance is the space and the time between me and the other. If we can look at the distance, if we can perceive it, we can look at what we share. All that we share is this “in between” which is the distance.

      It is not only possible being together despite distances, but it is possible being together only thanks to these distances.

      The distance is what determines the relationship.

      Walking is a measure maybe.

      When I walk without knowing where I am going, without knowing the path, with no project, I accept the existence of an other, something I don't know.

      Not knowing is an obstacle between me and the other.

      It is the obstacle that allows me to see the other as different from me.

      Not knowing is a distance between me and the other, that I can run across.

      I can run across this distance thanks to its opacity.

      If it were transparent I would not see it, I could not run across it. I could only pass through it, without noticing it and without reflection, with no clash.

      Not knowing is a distance.

      A distance is opaque.

      Opacity allows me to meet the other.

       

      “Space was holy to

      the pilgrims of old, till plane

      stopped all that nonsense”

      (W. H. Auden)

      “Distance” and “opacity” are two specific concepts that influence very much our work. They were related to the problematic relationship between “center” and “ periphery”, which caused us many discussions. Actually for us these terms were time-related concepts. I can consider the peripheries only if I take the time to distance the usual path. The operation we were interested in was the dilation of time which allows previously unconsidered possibilities to emerge. Between our artistic practices, indeed, artistic research is for us a tool for self-critique. We got then interested in framing self-critical institutions, which would be institutions that are conscious about their situatedness and complexity, that allow space for self-sabotage and reframing. 

      A is not equal to A.

       

      We wrote the following two texts for a writing score Adva proposed at the beginning of the block: “How would the future be, if your artistic research would have taken over the world?”

       

       

      The world will exist in the interrogative form.

      The end will be close to us

      and we might be friends.

       

      We will learn from flowers:

      the truth about every man is that 

      he/she is about to die.

       

      Nothing will be equal to nothing.

      Everything will be 

      incommensurable

      irreplaceable

      incontrovertible

      irrecoverable

      irreparable

      irredeemable.

      -Money will be the principle of irreality-

       

      The dance of the dead will shape the light of the fire of the living ones.

       

      There will be no evolution, no revolution. We will keep on turning.

       

      We will wander in those utopian regions, placed somewhere and nowhere, between an infinite tenderness and an infinite solitude.

       

      Every road will be a cemetery

      and, in the crackles of the asphalt,

      there will be our little fallen flowers

      our masters

      our dead.

       

      There will be a desire hidden in every thing.

       

      We will become small

       - small, in order not to lose each other.

      ---

      Revolution is going on.

      It will walk in the forest. 

      It will breath, smell, look.

      It will be as an idiot. It will not know, like now, as a pioneer. It will say: I will not know but I will believe.

      It will be an animal. It will look around modifying the shape of its body to enter the forest.

      Attentively it will touch and get touched by the other. With no name, it will mutate and multiply, and it will continuously reverse the point of observation during its dance of attention.

      It will be multidimensional, it will be inhabited by a multitude of spectres corporeal and impalpable at the same time.

      It will not do a lot. It will not have anything to add.

      It will move with caution through words, bodies and light. It will be mostly silent.

      It will be stumbling, transforming judgement into motion.

       

       

       

      II Block//Troubled Gardens

      curated by Nicolas Galeazzi

      (May-August 2019)

      I would say that with the video “And the woods all around” we framed our use of the words center and periphery and, thanks to this restriction, something else broke in the scenario. 

      How did this framing transform these words? Would you say that, looking at it now, it made us move to the structure of the frame itself?

       

      We wanted to get rid of a problem we didn’t know how to solve. The dichotomy center/periphery seemed inadequate but still we wanted to use those words out of that geometrical/hierarchical relationship. According to the curatorial proposal of the block, we had to embody a question we were struggling with, give it in “adoption” to someone else and then eventually receive it transformed somehow by the “adopting researcher”. We created this video in order to hand our question to someone else and, in the moment we made it, the supposed content disappeared. What emerged instead was the problematic relationship between the artistic research and its documentation, which brought us back to the practice of framing self-critical institutions.

       

      This is how we started to look at the frame and observed where and how it would raise questions. We looked at the framed document as a "material", in Tim Ingold's terms: not as a fixed object that would encapsulate and preserve a point of view from the past, but as a malleable flux of possibilities. We tried to understand what kind of relationship it could open for the future. What did it do, for example, to call this video a "document"? What did it do to us, to observe it through its institutions (e.g. the video format, the website on which its accessible...etc)? What did it do to look at it from the situated context we were working in during the block - the "troubled" Zsenne Garden?

       

      Talking about self critical institutions, in this case the video attempts to show the complex cluster of media involved and the situatedness of their performativity. There is not a single possible mapping of this material, it aims to be open to critique and it does not pretend to have a “form” different from its “content”. For sure there has been a strong relationship between this operation and the fact that we were working in a permaculture garden.

       

      Twelve Permaculture design principles articulated by David Holmgren in his Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability:

       

      1. Observe and interact

      2. Catch and store energy

      3. Obtain a yield

      4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

      5. Use and value renewable resources and services

      6. Produce no waste

      7. Design from patterns to details

      8. Integrate rather than segregate

      9. Use small and slow solutions

      10. Use and value diversity

      11. Use edges and value the marginal

      12. Creatively use and respond to change

      We realized that there is no map from the outside and as soon as we try to create a document, a map, we are changing the landscape we are in.In the book "What would the animals say if we would ask to them the right questions?” Vinciane Despret observes how observers observe the animals. The way the observer position him/herself in the landscape changes the reality itself.

      I remember you wrote a story when you were at highschool. Can you write it down here?

      I love your stories.

       

      Which story? 

       

      The one about distance.

       

      It would have worked well before, actually, when we were writing about distance!

       

      Now we are far enough to read it.

       

      You are right.

       

      One day, the teleportation was invented. At first it was possible to transport datas anywhere, instantaneously and with no mistake. Then it became possible to teleport objects and eventually human beings too. That day humanity faced extinction.

      You are particularly concerned by the future...

       

      My affect towards the future is related to the fact that at a certain moment I started to realize that this word, “future”, wasn’t used anymore.I remember the future as science-fiction: it is amazing to think of unpredictable possibilities to come, to imagine them. For a long period, in Italy at least, we didn’t use that word anymore. Many generations of children without the word future in their bodies. In that moment I started to use it again, to say it, to see if it was possible to feed it and open for it new directions/horizons.

      What I love about your story is that it shows how errors are those that allow us to relate to something, to engage with it - until death. The story also suggests that when the space-time is reduced to zero, there is no more other to relate to. This reminds me of what Byung Chul-Han calls "the society of transparency", where the "dictatorship of the self" doesn't allow any otherness to exist. If there is no otherness, there is nothing I can imagine anymore...This is the way I perceive things now, at least.

       

      It seems that without accident there is no event. Without error there is no possible development. We are stuck playing the same scene again and again, if nothing goes wrong. The point is that we don’t have any direct access to the future, of course. In the present we have only access to the past and this means that in order to introduce some difference, we have to mess it up, lose something and highlight something else. We have to edit it. We actually do this anyway, since we are not omnipotent and omniscient. It’s about recognizing that any “closed” view of/from the past is not only impossible, but also undesirable.

       

      We can design maps for the future. These are not meant to be "true", neither as objective points of view from the past, nor as consistent pre-views of the future. Once we have them, though, they will start to influence us.

       

      Maybe they are not “true” now, but by drawing them they might become true in the future!

      A chair is not so much designed by the way my body “spontaneously” sits, but rather it tells me how to sit.

      This is exciting. And it works the same for the way we look at things, the way we formulate questions, the way we perceive things...etc. These activities are also designed by what surrounds us,

       

      And it seems logical that documents are especially involved in designing future practices. This turns a little upside down the cause-effect logic and the linear perspective of time. Sometimes I feel that something “comes from the future”, that it is not related so much to a “now” that has already been, but rather to a “now” that is yet to come. Like in Aristotle's “final cause” theory - which appears quite bizarre to our actual common sense. Talking about things from the past that seem to come from the future...

       

      There comes my fascination for the figure of the augur. For the ancient italic populations the augur was a priest that  would read the will of the gods in the flight of the birds. He would go to the “templum” to do so. The “templum” was a portion of time and space from which he could read the birds flights.The “templum” was actually each one of the lines traced by the augur to frame the sacred space, a "cut" into space and time, a temporary suspension that allowed a reflection, a reading - the word "temple" comes from "templum", which derives from the ancient greek "temno=to cut". Also "tempo" (“time” in Italian) has the same origin. The augury embodies the action of taking a position from which, by observing what is there, it is possible to relate with different kinds of time simultaneously. You have to go in that position though, you have to move towards that place. An effort is needed. This is the frame where a suspension can happen. It is a time inside the time itself. It is what Agamben calls “Messianic time”. The time of contemplation. Contemplating is then holding this position. It is about staying with what is there, with what comes, through a specific frame. If the way I position myself can transform what is there - and therefore the future itself -, then the contemplation is a active and political state of being. I like to talk of “contemplative activism”.

       

      I can see a strong relationship between artistic research and faith. You have to believe that something good will come out of it even if you can’t say exactly what and how. Nicolas’ proposal for the block, the “Adoption”, was very precise in this sense. To give away a piece of your work and to believe that it will be fruitful for it to be put in someone else's hands, you need faith. You can only take care, give all your attention to what you receive, and hope that the others will do the same. 

       

       

      A: Adopting is a big challenge.

      B: To receive back the material we left.

      A: To give up expectation of realization.

      B: Can the documentation be originated by a script?

      A: We wanted to avoid narration.

      B: Why?

      A: The narration tends to identification, often.

      B: “This” is “this”.

      A: To put things in one line.

      B: How to avoid to do what we would have done anyway?

      A: I don't know what this book is.

      B: We don't know what it will be.

      A: We didn't finish it, yet.

      B: It's about avoiding linearity as the only option.

      A: What I wanted to do was not only to write a book, but also to create an experience...

      B: The problem is to translate these experiences we worked with.

      A: When we entered this space we really felt “home”.

      B: We are translating one's experience to the other.

      A: We are translating each other's experience to the other.

      B: We didn't see each other's presentation.

      A: But I slept in your bed...That's very intimate.

      B: How to translate something that's so close to me?

      A: To work with someone else's project and not mine-still working on what I am interested in.

      B: I have a strong tendency in reacting.

      A: To embrace something that doesn't belong to me even when it starts hurting.

      B: “Maybe it's still possible, maybe it's still possible...”

      A: To work with the resistance, not against it.

      B: To move out of the landscape, to see how can I relate to it and then to move back in.

      A: It's not only to zoom in and out, but also to blur the lines.

      B: You don't know what belongs to whom.

      A: I like this a lot.

      B: To show the responsibility in the adoption.




       

      III Block//A looming score_sharing politics of damage;

      curated by Lilia Mestre and Sina Seifee

      (September-December 2019)

       

       

      Our third and last block has also been centered on an “adoption” process. This time, though, we would share some materials and we would adopt the other’s questions. The first thing we shared was a video which put together some shooting we did at Zsenne Garden during the summer and a text that we developed later on. 

       

      This video is a translation of a map we realised to observe the garden. This map would put in relation the landscape with the words we wrote about what our research would do in the future. My affect, when I arrived in Zsenne garden, was a portion of sky in between the trees. Being inside, immersed in the industrial area of Brussels, I could still have access to a vertical horizon. Then we imagined a conversation of the Augur with the birds.

       

      I liked the question Rui wrote for us after seeing the video:

       

      In the video, there are treetops framing the sky with clouds and the birds’ flight (frame inside the frame). There are dialogues between 2 non-visible characters (A and B) written on the surface of the image (these characters are around, in a place out of the frame but close to the borders, or not)? There are sounds of things out of the frame, but these things belong to that environment (a sound of something out of the frame could be from what is around or not). Is this set of things made for us to see the birds and the sky in a proper way or to see something else? The strength of your frame is centripetal (to the documented objects, even if it is multicenter) or centrifugal (there is an idea of whole, “from here_to_there”)? Is the documentation about something in the frame… or something around… or something else?

       

      I wouldn't be able to give him a singular answer. I liked though the idea of a centrifugal force, which preserves the possibility to have a central object of attention, but at the same time it indicates the presence of vectors - within the same system - that tear it apart, that spread it all over the place. Being the frame of the camera an institution, that looks like the description of a self-critical institution to me. 

      What got less clear, then, was if this had to be considered a “document” or not...but at this point investigating the definition of “documentation” was not the main issue for us...

       

      We wanted to re-open these documents, to see if and where there was space for us to enter. We slowly throughout the block tried to create space between the materials, between the documents, among the way they were translating each other in order to observe what kind of movement, what kind of dance they would bring.

       

      If the “form” and the “content” of the document cannot be separated, the documentation corresponds to its staging. We moved from “documentation” to “memory”, not as the ability to preserve in one’s brain the image of past objects and events, but as a highly performative operation that makes the past and the future converge in the present experience.  

       

      I have all the ages at the same time in my body. Memory is an agent on the present. Memory enlarges the space of what is here and now transforming a linear perception of going forward, of flowing, of proceeding, in a multidimensional and multitemporal landscape.

       

      Memory embodies distance and opacity.

      Before A.PASS we had been working a lot with games. How did they come back in?

       

      I always used games. It is a way to be with others. A game is a way to be fully involved and light at the same time. Whoever knows the rules can have access. And accessibility was an important point of our discourse as well.

       

      And rules also have very often the form of a “map”

      a game is a map

      a frame

      a self-critical institution

       

      you can put the game there, in the middle

      it’s clear that even if it is your game once you play it is not about you, it is about this middle space which is in between you and the others

      and I need the others to be different

      and see the difference

      which is the distance that allows us being together

       

      We were very happy to work with scores during this block: I would say that scores are a specific kind of games. To design scores was a great way to work on the staging of a map. The score draws a specific landscape, but - if it’s well designed - something unexpected will often emerge. The rules of the score are the “templum”, the suspension in space and time that dilate time and nourish our faculty of attention, just like the frame of the camera and the limits of the stage.



      NAME IT/Writing Score

       

      [There is a table. Two laptops on it. Two silent writers facing the public. One projector shows a blank page with the text on the wall behind the table. The public is witnessing]

       

      - You look, you sense, you feel everything which is happening in the room. Everything means 

      everything that catches your attention. Everything that emerges through you in relation with what is around you. Your writing is not traveling too far nor too close from where you are.

      - You can take your time, trust and write it down. 

      - You have to write 1st person, singular or plural - for example, if you see someone entering the space and saying hello to a friend you could write: "I entered the space, I said hello to my friend".

      - If by looking, smelling, sensing, perceiving the way you want what is around you a memory or a thought emerge, then take it as part of the space and write it down. Through this digression, you can distance yourself from what is around you and then come back.

      - The other writer is at your side writing with you on the same page. Try to consider it.

       

      I AM HERE. 

      ARE THOSE VOICES, THAT I AM HEARING?

      I AM READING. 

      I ENTERED BY THE ENTRANCE DOOR, AND NOW I'M IN. SITTING. 

      I REMEMBER STANDING FOR SOMETHING. 

      CAN I STAND FOR SOMETHING NOW? NOW SITTING? 

      I CAN FEEL YOU AT MY SIDE I CAN SEE YOU. 

      HOW MANY METERS OF AIR OVER MY HEAD? 

      I'M FLOATING, THE HEAD IN THE AIR. 

      I'M MOVING MY HANDS.

      I BREATH. THE HEART IS BEATING. 

      ONCE I SAW MY HEART IN THE ECOGRAPHY SCREEN. 

      BEATING. OPENING AND CLOSING. 

      LIFE IS STRANGE THROUGH A SCREEN.

      I'M WRITING. 

      MY GAZE WANDERS ACROSS THE DETAILS

      IS IT GOING TO END SOON?

       

       

      A fellow researcher in A.PASS, Adriano, asked us:

       

      A promise of observation. Observation from you - of what concerns most of us.

      You were sitting next to each other. Soft, patient, listening. An analogue complicity situated between one big and two smaller screens.

      Descriptions turn "poetic" "I'M FLOATING, THE HEAD IN THE AIR." "I REMEMBER STANDING FOR SOMETHING.

      CAN I STAND FOR SOMETHING NOW? NOW SITTING?" "HOW MANY METERS OF AIR OVER MY HEAD?".

      Not much is written, is this writing an excuse for sharing time/presence? For sitting next to each other and in front of us, while the laptops offer a small protection from full exposure and/or transparency.

      If that is so, what is the minimum of text and screen needed to give a cover for presence?

       

      We are interested in situations that are at the same time an exposure and a concealment. We wanted to show something that was clear and incomprehensible, intimate and universal. We imagined that “what is there” from my unique and ephemeral point of view, could be at the same time a paradoxical Manifesto.

       

      We tried to write a text that would manifest the operation we were doing through the score. That’s why it is a manifesto. It manifests a reality from a specific point of view, which is a map, or a game. In the score the sabotage is included. 

       

      To explore further the idea of “sabotage” we wrote an actual manifesto informed by our documentation criteria and created an “editing score” to make other people enter into it, moving it away from us and making it opaque again.

       

      WE ARE IDIOTS - MANIFESTO FOR NOW/Editing Score

       

      [There is a table. Two laptops on top of it. There are two people: the “writer” is facing the public; the “reader” is sitting with his laptop facing the writer. Two projectors overlap their projections on the wall behind the writer. One of the two is projecting a very slow motion video of an almost invisible, overexposed, white goat. The other one projects the white page on which the writer is writing a text - which occupies exactly that one page:

       

      I AM HERE NOW

      I TAKE A POSITION

      I REVEAL MY POSITION

      I AM AT THE ENTRANCE THE DOOR IS OPEN I ENTER

      I CAN RUN FROM HERE TO THERE FOLLOWING  STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW

      I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      I AM HERE

      I LOOK THROUGH THIS FRAME

      I AM IN THE FRAME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I FRAME INSTITUTIONS

      I MOVE BORDERS AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE

      I AM MANIFOLD

      I AM MULTIPLE

      I AM FOCUSED

      I AM PERIPHERAL

      I TAKE TIME IF NECESSARY

      I TAKE TIME

      LA VACHE EST UN HERBIVORE QUI A DU TEMPS POUR FAIRE LE CHOSE

      I TAKE THE TIME IT TAKES

      I AM AN IDIOT

      I AM A PIONEER

      I  DO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      I NEED NOISE

      I TRUST OPACITY

      I TRUST YOU

      I TRUST

      I BELIEVE IN THE PRESENT AS A PROMISE

      I BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE AS A LEGACY

      I BELIEVE IN COMPLEXITY

      I BELIEVE IN MAGIC

      FORSE L'AMORE E' CONTINUARE IL DISCORSO DI UN ALTRO



      After the writer finishes to write the text, the score starts.]

      - When the writer stops writing the “manifesto”, the public can start editing it

      - One by one, the people in the public can whisper in the writer’s ear up to 5 elements to cancel choosing between words, letters and empty spaces. The writer cannot discuss if the indication is not clear: he/she has to find a solution alone.

      - The reader keeps on reading out loud the “manifesto” while it is being edited, following its transformations until the end of the score. When he/she reaches the end, he/she starts back from the beginning.

      - When the public stops editing, a new text is done and the score ends.


      [21st November 2019, Bruxelles]

       

      I AM NOW 

      POSITIVE THE DOOR THERE FOLLOWING A STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW, I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      HERE

      THROUGH THIS FRAME

      ME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I BODER AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE OLD PERIPHERY

      I TAKE TIME

      DU TEMPS POUR FAIRE LES CHOSES

      IT TAKES AN IDIOT

      I AM WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      NOISOPACITY

      US

      THE PRESENT AS THE FUTURE MAGIC

      FORSE L'AMORE E' CONTINUARE    

       

      “Maybe love is continuing the discourse of another” wrote the Italian poet Milo De Angelis.

      I think that our experience in A.PASS had a lot to do with this. Giving attention to the other, adopting the other’s work, letting the other’s work enter yours, in a dialogue. 

      It is so precious to nourish our critical sense by continuing a discourse, without burning it.

      In the end it is really not about me and you, nor the others. It is about the discourse. 

      And, as always, it is a matter of love to make it last a little longer.

       

      Thanks to A.PASS. Participating has been a big privilege.

      Thanks to: Lilia Mestre, Nicolas Galeazzi, Pierre Rubio, Vladimir Miller, Joke Liberge, Steven Jouwerma, Michele Meesen. Thanks to all the mentors and participants and fellow researchers present, past and future.

      This is not the end.

       

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Precious indirection* End-Communications of Deborah Birch, Diego Echegoyen and Lucia Palladino&Piero Ramella
      13 January 2020
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Deborah Birch, Diego Echegoyen, Lucia Palladino & Piero Ramella
    • @ Needcompany
    • 24 January 2020
    • 25 January 2020
    • Precious indirection*

       

      Precious indirection*

      24-25 January 2020 @ MILL / Needcompany

      End-Communications of Deborah Birch, Diego Echegoyen and Lucia Palladino & Piero Ramella                                 

      “Precious indirection”*

      The a.pass End-Communications of Deborah Birch, Diego Echegoyen and the duo Lucia Palladino & Piero Ramella will take place on the 24th and 25th of January 2020 at MILL / Needcompany. End-Communications invite the a.pass researchers to share their subject matters, modes of seeing, articulating and making artist research public after following the year-long program.

      The practice of research in the cases of Deborah, Diego, Lucia and Piero each evoke radically different relations to language. From poetry to theatre, passing by automatic speech and writing, language embodies different epistemologies through these different modes of articulation and voice.

      It is important to emphasise how their performative situations propose a specific relation with the public and how, therefore, they instigate singular modes of participation.

      This relation is symptomatic of  the content of the different research proposals and activate different strata of intersubjectivity.

      *When writing about Roland Barthes’ inaugural lecture in “This Little Art” Kate Briggs notes about literature what could be seen as analogous for artistic research: “ ‘Literature does not say that it knows something, but that it knows of something, that it knows about something’, where the term literature is understood to refer not to a ‘body or a series of works, nor even a branch of commerce or teaching, but the complex graph of the traces of a practice, the practice of writing.’ The consequences of this of, of this about, – what Barthes also calls literatures’ ‘precious indirection’ – are in addition to what is already known, literature can also tell us of what is not yet known, it can gesture toward further, possible areas of knowledge, to what is unsuspected, unidentified, unknown.”

       

      This event is hosted by MILL.

      With the support of Needcompany.

       

      24 & 25 January,

      Doors Open 18:00

      18:00 > 23:00 – Pilgrimage / Lucia Palladino and Piero Ramella (ongoing)

      19:00 – To be someone implies to be somewhere / Diego Echegoyen (1 hour)

      21:00 – I Have Discovered That Peace is Losing Time Without Losing the Self /

      Deborah Birch (1 hour)

       

      Pilgrimage / Lucia Palladino & Piero Ramella

      Lucia Palladino is a dancer, choreographer and researcher. Piero Ramella is a visual artist and performer. They work as a duo in the fields of performing arts and artistic research.

      In the context of a.pass they investigated human and non-human presence in the landscape and within documentation, as a form of performance, which produces new landscapes to inhabit. Their research project was born from the urgency to take a position against the aesthetics of transparency. Beyond its apparent democracy, the ‘transparency society’ is the dictatorship of the self where no otherness is allowed. They believe that in order to transform information into resource it needs to preserve a certain degree of opacity: accessibility implies loss. They intend this practice as a form of contemplative activism which can transform our perception of the world around us and reality itself.

      Pilgrimage is an investigation of documenting as a work of translation. The English word ‘translation’ comes from Latin translatus, serving as past participle of transferre: ‘to bring over, carry over’. The document, then, as a translation, does something, it moves our points of view across time and space and it transforms accessibility: it is not an object, but a magmatic cluster of relationships. The characteristics of our movement within this dynamic system are those of the pilgrimage. For the early medieval pilgrims “it mattered little whether any physical record remained at each site of the personages or events with which it was associated.

      What was real and authentic about the sites, for them, lay not in the objects found there, but in the memory-work, the thinking to which they gave clues” (Tim Ingold). The objects in themselves are just pretexts: what is relevant is the movement they are part of and stimulate. The research is the practice of translating through different media which produce materials that can be shared, entered and altered by other people, other materials, other affections. This practice of documenting the landscape does not engage the modes of illustration or comment on the subject. The documentation aims at translating the landscape in order to undo our knowledge. Every embodiment, indeed, stands itself as a new landscape and produces a discourse that includes the mould and the cast, making new points of view possible.

       

      To be someone implies to be somewhere /Diego Echegoyen

      Diego Echegoyen (1981 Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a theatermaker and performer with a special interest in collaborative performance making, based in Brussels. He is interested in a speculative approach to the ‘political representation crisis’ in contemporary western democracies in relation to the simultaneous representation crisis which he perceives in the performing arts.

      His initial focus within the apass artistic research environment was on the agency of performing arts to act as a potential tool to produce changes in social reality, when placed in the public space, interrupting its regularity, its usual logic. 

      From the beginning his research followed a path of failure. It crashed and collapsed and that crisis opened a new territory for him to situate himself as a migrant artist from Argentina, where crisis is a given circumstance. He thus brings his specificity as a human being, as a political subject merging with his artistic interests. Within the a.pass platform his research becomes process oriented, his body becomes territory, his self becomes subject-matter.

      These three processes opened a dialogue with his background as a theater actor bringing in the sacred-secular notion of sacrifice. This ritual, featured within Grotowski and Artaud’s work, traversed the relation between object and spectator eventually arriving at questions surrounding his own family narrative, where after four generations this other sacrifice of migration becomes palpable.

      For his End-Communication he shares this ‘crisis process’ of his artistic research, the assemblage of components by neighborhood zones and the critical process of trying to make sense.

      The performative installation To be someone implies to be somewhere is his ‘unfolded self’ during that process. 

      It is a ritual disorganization of his family narrative & its myths, wounds & obsessions, the recent Argentinian history & his experience in Brussels as a migrant” 

       

      I Have Discovered That Peace is Losing Time Without Losing the Self / Deborah Birch

      Deborah Birch is a poet, primarily interested in the anagogical interpretation of the ordinary, and an academic working in the nexus between scientific systems and mystico-occult systems. Her work forms a lattice of literary, performative, and affective practises.

      I Have Discovered That Peace is Losing Time Without Losing the Self is the third part of her ongoing Caves project, which treats the cave as a space of access to a non-ordinary temporality and a mineral transcendence that is anchored in the flesh, not in denial of it.

      The calcium of my teeth and bones, and the calcium of the limestone cave, she says.

      The iron in my blood and the basalt of the gorge, she says.

      The salt in the sweat of the skin of my lover, she says.

      Microcosm, macrocosm.

      Tears, Trust, she says.

      A feminist re-reading of the allegory of the cave, I Have Discovered delves into questions of language, hesitation, and time. Unfolding and refolding scales and frames of reference, her End-Communication will invite the public into a poetic zone of the underground.

      The cave is not

      Home

      It is a pocket

      A chamber

      A cavity

      A shell

      Home is on the

      Surface and

      The surface is

      Burning.

      There will be some light, some time-travelling, some lying in the dark. There will be shoelessness, and bodies touching. The performance will last about an hour.

       

    • "Milieus, associations, sieves and other matters."

      "Ensemble of problematisations composing a processual environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves by shifting to new dimensions out of a series of confrontations with and temporary resolutions of problems. The basic grid is one of a series of self organised interactive events intersecting with a series of theoretical study days and a series of advanced forms of feedback." (May-August 2018, curated by Pierre Rubio)

      During my first block I spend most time trying to understand in what kind of environment I ended up and to learn the lingo. Besides that, it was urgent to reformulate my research question that come out of my practise.

      C.R.I. I

       

      The block was activated by C.R.I.'s (critical research interfaces) which raised questions about what does your research open up or makes you see and how does it function as a dispositif (from Foucault). For the first C.R.I. I stacked all the materials, from coffee cups and wall segments to research objects from other participants on one big pile in the middle of the room. I invited all my colleague to come the next day with a very simple task, walk around the pile with me sitting on top. Every time somebody completed a full circle I would read up one 'act' that composed the pile, and if somebody activated the horn, I would start over again from the beginning. After more 90 minutes they managed to walk all the 123 circles around me without stepping on the horn.

      C.R.I. II - A 40kg likable object to carry around

      During a day at ZSenne artlab we were invited to make a small scale C.R.I. for which I introduced my likable object that was filled with 40kg of sand. My request for the group and visitors was simple, please carry the thing and don't put it down!

       

    • "SOL is a collective platform that was initiated some years ago, inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world. SOL is practiced through regular meetings, but follows no curriculum. Instead, it develops a spontaneous program through the presence and interest of its participants. SOL is basically an invitation to hang out. But to hang out deeply. To practice school as a place of free time – free to study things as they appear, separated from the dependency on the time and space of social order and production. And to practice love – Not the kind of love that is generated through affirmation of who we think we are, but love as an act of giving by allowing it to transform us." Curated by Adva Zakai, Sept/Dec 2018

      The curatorial proposal seemed from the start interesting but problematic, so I decided to beforehand what my position should be and how I want to relate to the program and a.pass. From the start the claims made by the curator – it is not about love, but about political love, the willingness to let yourself be transformed by other, and that it was not a school, but there is an interest in school – formed the basis of my attitude of constructive opposition. In a not always subtle way I put the thesis of this block to test. The production of actual works was not the main goal of the block, they functioned more as conversation starters within the continuous political game.

      test - the tower

      I decided to start with a small provocation, in the middle of the space I build a tower where it was possible for one person to sit on top of. The tower formed a visualization of the attitude I approached SOL with. Halfway through the block, during some presentations I explained my motives and asked the people there if they thought that they excepted the tower. Everybody but one wanted to keep the tower – no unanimity - so the tower had to go.

      test - the class picture

      During the closing week of this block we traveled together to Performance Art Forum, in northern France. This school trip made me think about our group, what we are, what are status is and how we are related to each other. I decided to do an expiriment, with making a class picture - to see if that could clarify some those questions. I put up a camera on a stand and made every 10 seconds a picture, assuming that at one point everybody would have their eyes open. The actual picture didn't clarify much, but what remained was the act of the making the picture.

       

    • "During the days of Jan 7th-26th 2019 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." Curator Vladimir Miller

      The Settlement was prolonged and resulted in Unettled Study, as a part of Performatik19, the Brussels performance biennial in Kanal Centre Pompidou.

      In the context of the  Settlement I started a proces where I would explore themes like ownership, value and territory.

      Step I - Sitting

      The Settlement started as an empty space, and I needed to sit, but if you make only one stool, there will always be somebody on it, so I made a lot more.

      Step II - Helping

      I offered my skills to the group, if somebody wanted something, I would make it for them!

      Step III - Branding

      On the last day of the first week I branded everything I made with green and orange, in total 27 objects, after this I left the Settlement for two weeks.

      Step IV - Follow-up

        

      I told the settlers that all my efforts were for the benefit of the collective and that they should feel free to do whatever they want with the stuff I made. But after two weeks I came back to follow up on my work, and about half  'my' things were used in people individual projects - which was perfectly fine, but where I could find traces of my branding, I rebranded and spread my motif further.

      Step V - Outsourcing

      Again I was away for some time, but I needed to stay involved, so what better way then hire people to make me the things I desired? The assignments varied from things I actually needed, up to stuff I was curious about how my colleagues would react. "I need a flag and I pay € 10,- for it" - "I want something pretty for € 8,- " - "Could somebody make me a 10% oversized chair for € 10,-?" - "I pay € 10,- for something to organize all these jobs" ect.  In total 13 objects have been made based on those minimal guidelines, but there was always one hard demand, it needed to be branded! The resulting objects varied enormous, there were provocations, there were simple executions, useful ones and even a virtual one!

      Step VI - Selling

      The Settlement moved to Kanal Centre Pompiduo and transformed into 'Unsettled Study' as a part of Performatik19. In the middle of the group I erected a small shop, Meewisse Mobilier et Divers, where I engaged into negotiations to determine the value of the outsourced objects. The visitors had then the option to buy the object for that price. In that negotiation I was completely open about the procedure that led to these object and tried to sketch an as complete as possible image of the object. Factors like material, who made it, what is it for, what did I pay for it, is it art, is it something else, ect..?

      With special thanks to Katinka, Diego, Adrijana, Steven, Elen, Vlavio, Antye and Pierre for making objects!

       

    • In this block we were invited to imagine our research as an ecosystem. This was actually relatively easy, because since some I imagined my practice along these lines, although I prefer to use the term oikos.

      My attitude and relationship to the a.pass curatorial program has been different every block. Because the end is approaching I decided to use this block as an experimental playground and to start preparing my end-communication. It resulted in a series of small interventions and explorations in which the curatorial program was secondary. My focus was pointed at how to relate to specific perceptions of reality, and what became apparent during my period at a.pass, explore and question my own perception of reality. This block I explored the agency of smaller gestures then I used before.

      The concept of making kin from Donna Harroway was the bases of the adoption project that I found most interesting in this block. We were asked to give up for adoption a part of our research. I brought in a flag that was partly deconstructed and primarily based on naval signal flags to explore the ambiguity of those things. But since I gave this up for adoption, it doesn't play a role in the current narrative.

      Laura Pante gave me a lot of material for adoption, she gave nature, fascism, Jane Fonda, the pink, and other items and concepts. The big amount of the materials that I received forced me to select and edit, sometimes follow an idea, and sometimes store it for later. I was looking for connections and meaning through working with them, I presented those as rehearsal for a small exhibition. (I was asked to do something on the doorstep of NL=US, a gallery in Rotterdam, I used my adoption findings as the exhibition that was inside)

      During the halfway days we swapped adoptees, I recieved my new one from from Nicolas Y Galeazzi

      Who received 'Yggdrasil' from from Flavio Rodrigo. He gave me the number 1425, as a reference to a date imagined by Donna Harroway. Accidentally he talked about a 1000 years. I decided to not physically bring the number with me, even though I found out later that the proffered wood for an axe handle is actually ash. My explorations resulted into a presentation in 'Valhalla'.

      During dinner I spoke about the steps from tree and wood to lumber and timber, I made a huge 'buddha-bowl' which was mixed up to become pig-food, I showed a timber sample box with over 50 samples of wood from all over the world, of which some are now endangered, I did an experiment with some generated sound and I gave my adoptee to Nicolas is the form of a facses, and ancient ambigoues object.

      Some small gestures during

      I made and served jam made from Japanese Knotweed

      I weaponized the children that lived on the wasteland where part of the block was happening

      And when we asked to leave a trace at the unlearing centre we visited in Switserland, I cut of some centimeter from a chair so it would wobble.

      (some photo's of my intervention at NL=US)

      the cloths are adapted by the Muslin Brothers

       

    • NOT_index
    • filter --> TRT (Transversal Research Training) Caterina Mora
      03 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    • The 13th May 2019 emerged TRT --> how did I arrive to it?

                                             (in the dynamics of going through)

      props: mate / madera / creepy virgen / brillante paper

                                   This text can be a part of the script for my End-Presentation in PAF

                                                                                                                TRT or Trans-Re-Training 

      It is a political device for the my, our, yours, their  artistic practise     

      Instead to control, it engages with planning of time-work and keep time for contingence events.    Projection: photo of my planning

      It is not something new: it doesn't reclaim uniqueness or originality. It recognizes thousands of referents. Projection:  It defends shareability

      It tries to refuse FC, Instagram, Google, Snapchat.   Projection: it is looking for an open source web page (still in process)

      It conceives documentation as way to look backwards: what is it that transforms/modify/change you?

      It address explicitly to sexuality, sensuality, erotism and to the pleasure of communication, without take care too much of grammar. Désolé but I AM NOT SORRY. It is also adressing explicity.           Projection: pleasure   

      It is looking for transpirar la gota gorda transpiration. It encourages transunderstanding of transrelationships                                      

      It electrifies transience (transitoriedad) and transgress

      It develops transferable skill between readingwritingmoving

      It is aware about non-transparent power structures

      It exercises the magnetization of transimagination

      It takes care of context    (It question how much context the practise needs) IT IS SITUATED

      Descansa para desacatar                                                  IT IS TRANSDUCCIÓN

      The translation is feminist because is looking at gendered dances --> "The text that you translate determines which translation theory you need to use" (Mariana Pessino) 

      It encourages evident things (it uses what it has) --> please LISTEN it

      TRT is feminism busy with create vocabulary (Projection: thanks Butler), power structures (thanks Femke, she helped me finding something persistent as a problem in my daily life connected also with practice. And this that we find changed both: my daily life and my practice). TRT is feminism busy with  conditions of production (thanks Le Roy), contradictions (thanks Petra van Bravandt), abortion law (thanks la marea / the wage) argentina feminista, entertainment (thanks Lilia), promiscuity (thanks Juan), decolonial approach (thanks Lucas),  marxism and aesthetic experience (thanks Horacio Banega), Bologna process (thanks Susana and María Martha), BDSM (thank you), Aphra Behn (photo), Elvira Lopez (photo tesis), ways of sharing (thanks Segunda Cuadernos de danza), technical support (thanks Steven) limits and borders (thanks Marie).

                                                                                                 

                                                     

      This is its desing: 

                              TRT

                                    t t t ttttttttttttttttttt

    • block 2018/II
    • NOT_index
    • 1st block - ... starting to speak in English
      10 August 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    •  

      [embed]https://gph.is/2y38zRI[/embed]

      (this gift is made with images of the block)

      Before to start: Excerpts from my application     // Investigation purpose (2017)

      Title: Derivatives around the construction of “the Latin imaginary” in Brussels context

      Abstract

      This work takes the reflection as a topic concerning “the Latin imaginary”[1] in Brussels context. As a starting point, it considers “the Latin imaginary” as a construction which is imagined by people who perceive themselves like “Latin people”, in terms of Imagined Communities. The aim is to study how this imaginary is composed of images, desires and motivations depositories that move around in the plot of signs in semio-capitalism.

      The questions that give rise to this project are: how is “the Latin imaginary” constructed? Which signs are reproduced by this construction? How are Latin bodies perceived in Brussels context? And how is it possible to make artistic operation on this imaginary?

      Description 

      (...) First block: field work and theoretical tools

      Regarding theoretical tools, it is worth mentioning that “the Latin issue” is analysed taking into account the concept of Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. As a matter of fact, his work pays attention to the concept of nation, his definition is used here to talk about the “Latin Imaginary Community”. In relation to that, Anderson propounds that “it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (1983: 7). This description is useful to think about the imaginary shared with others in terms of community.

      Considering this, the field work relative to “the Latin imaginary” is focused on sign production in the current context of semio-capitalism. In this way, a study of the concept by Franco Berardi (known as Bifo) is carried out; he defined semio-capitalism “when informational technologies make possible a full integration of linguistic labour with capital valorisation” (2009: 149). In other words, when all acts of transformation could be substituted by information and the work process is based on signs combination. Bifo says that economy incorporates factors like instability and indefiniteness when valorisation depended on language, and “in turn language incorporates economic rules of competition, shortage, and overproduction” (2009: 149). Therefore, semiotic overproduction has consequences in the economy and in the psycho-sphere, due to acceleration of perception, which generates a dis-sensitization in bodies, and becomes pathologies and psychotropic drugs dependence. One of the possible ways for facing these symptoms is to go back to the question about body perception on others. In relation to this, the author proposes that “in order to experience the other as a sensorial body, you need time, time to caress and smell. The time for empathy is lacking, because stimulation has become too intense” (2009: 85).

      Finally, as a theoretical mention, contributions that promote and accompany these questions are taken into account transversely in relation to "the Latin imaginary”. On the one hand, the perspective of "internal colonialism", which refers to the reproduction of the colonialism towards the interior of the ex-colonies and which takes as a reference the centres of power in the North-Hemisphere (Gonzalez Casanova: 2015). On the other hand, the heteronormativity existing in the perception of the sexed bodies and the stability of the gender, which depends on the alignment among sex and gender (Butler: 1990).

      [1] Due to the absence of a more appropriate terminology to translate “lo latino”, it was chosen the phrase “the Latin imaginary” owing to its relevance in relation to the imaginaries.

      ----------------------------------------

      1st Block, curated by Pierre Rubio called MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…, here the link 

       

      Openning week

      It was the first time I explained this project in English, I learned by heart most of my presentation. As you can see in my application, I started looking at the stereotype construction of Latin-imaginary through two concepts: semio-capitalism and imaginary communities. I was busy with how reggaeton videos and specially Despacito framed a stereotyped way of look at "latiness". 

       

      Half way days  --> LONGER CRI and POCKET CRI

      -- Half an hour of latiness, or... or...

       

      Pocket CRI - Zsenne GALLERY
      1 min to arrive at the location (Place Jardin des fleurs near to Szenne Gallery)

      4 min to propose / choose / set up               

      Invitation 2 people to reproduce as much as possible one of the screenshot of Despacito. They chose between 4 options.

      If people don't want to appear, there were many options to be far away of the camera. It will not be public.

      Caterina bring some stuff in order to help in the reproduction and makes them indicate consent to publish photos of the participants .

      THOSE PHOTOS are only public for documentation. 

      [gallery size="medium" columns="2" link="none" ids="9025,9026,9028,9029,9030,9032,9034,9036,9038,9040,9041,9042,9043,9044" orderby="rand"]

       

       

      Longer CRI
      Session II

      Invitation à The only proposition was bring Latin clothes.

      Morning brunch at my home in Ixelles. Invitation to do this parallel activities --> 

       

      People were at the garden of where I live.

      It was a sunny day. 

      They marked in maps different places related to latin culture. 

      Here some pics

      [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="9052,9055,9057"]

      In my room: 

      - I showed the song that I did and the lyrics. Here you can listen here [audio mp3="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Reggaeton-I.mp3"][/audio]

      Here you can follow the lyrics

      Reggaeton 1 - My EDITION 
      Hello
      ton ton ton reggae ton ton ton This is a monologue, Mono mono monolo
      Gasoline Gasoline    We like don't like gasolineeeee

      I see dark hair   I see gold jewelry I see sun olive oil I see shiny skin   I see barbecue
      I see god

      And so far from god x3                  I am so stuck in this Latin body My hips

      Everything is dark now x2 its blank its blank You can comment
      This is the video Responder sexy body Sexy body RESPONDER

      short skirts skin shorts short skirts skin shorts large breasts shake shake

      short skirts skin shortsshort skirts skin shorts flat belly the motorcycle

      subjects objects x5

      or you just don't care

      Maradonna was fantastic but I love Messi love Messi Messi"Arriba arriba andele andele"

      Sexy ultimate sexy sexy ultimatelatino/latina
      gasoline spreads

      i find your spanish difficult to understand x2

      I like being latina I enjoy the fantasy of it.Is coolIs not coolIs Colonialists...ooooh

      Give me more gas x2
      This doesn't work, to be or to be, no sound, confused by the media acteur!Yes yes yes yeaaaaah
      I don't know about reggaeton
      I don't know about lyrics

      order insubordination submission
      I think the second video has some problemsnow I understand sorry KI can see it only in white without any images,is it the same for the others? x3

       

      - After, I asked apass people to choose a part of the lyrics and make a short video with that. They could recognize the lyrics that they wrote, or to choose one prhase. They had to create a movement for that. They shotted each other with the explanation and they could include the clothes. They gave me permission for internal use.

      From those videos I did another song. People were strefull because of the task of the camera. They name an anxious problem in my research and in the way that I was producing.

       

      --

      End presentation - PAF

      I explained the CRI. I sang both songs and exposed my problems. I said that I was doing a circular mouvement, because I was stereotyping all my view. At that moment, I was trying to understand who I am in the research. That´s why I presented the animal "Yaguateré". I presented the Reggaeton 2 with a an edited a video which has images of apass participants. I prefer to not pubic this video and the lyrics of the Reggaeton 2.

      Lyrics of Reggaeton 2 

      The body is a problem. We are busy with its problems // make sure that we have all the details // she flies // magical realism of South-America

      Fly movement

      Through imitating movement that I think they are latin but I can not really continue doing like this // I have a serious lack of knowledge of latin culture // I don't know anything that is latin-american 

      I guess.  Start // she give me this hat // C´est ca? C´est ca?

      You are completely disarm, freedom, you don't need to protect your body. // You feel good in it, you feel bbq. Leisure time. // body is so a costume, is difficult to get rid of. //  to lie down I chose and try to move without moving. 

      Latino stereotype,I think is not. // Not only because of the latino people // 

      “The hand of God” is Maradona scored against England. // I bought in Mexico, it has Jesus on it. // 

      catholicism and the imagery // To me is super latin // Shiny and synthetic. 

      Over commodify presentation of latino culture. // I am not sure.

      Gaze is on the back, someone enjoying it.  // knees are flexed, the pelvis is moving back and forward quite fast, // Breast, shoulders, from the left to right, fors coming movements. // Looking in the eyes // is active, seduces. // excites // excites // sexual desire

       

      I could recognize this big problem in my first Block. In Adva´s words: ‘ you stereotype me by asking me to stereotype you’. That´s mean that I was stereotying others.

      Somehow, I fell into my own trap.

      [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="9065,9066,9067,9068,9069"]


      I recognize this potentialities of this block, that are potentialities as inputs for transformation:

                                             The "trauma" → caused by necessity to answer, give, produce → the "conditions" of the experiments

                                             Obscenity: how to show the body (connected to media)

                                             In which sense do I want to talk? → stereotype way or not?

                                             Problems of images: how can I expand more, open, and not restrict them?

                                               What is Latin for me, NOW? → SUPER excellent question to continue

                                            What is doing the "the art of super identification"?

                                            The power role of being able to see and be seen --> what is producing the objectification?

                                           Reggaeton genealogy: resistance rythm from Puerto Rico. "Reggae in SPANISH" (important) / perreo is coming from                                                  Afro-descendient dispora (persecuted, silencED, acallada). --> how this can appear in the research?

        

      ----------------------

      Important readings: the book about Reggaeton (Rivera and others, Duke Press University); BDSM approach (Freud; Barthes; Pat Califia; Foucault), decolonial theory (Silvia River Cusicanki). 

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Exercises in Becoming Water Score for a boat trip
      16 July 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Marialena Marouda
    • Exercises in Becoming Water

      Introduction:

      This is a score for a multiple day boat trip for two or more people. It should last a minimum of two days. It can take place on any body of water large enough to sail on for a number of days: a lake, a canal, a river, a sea or an ocean. The boat you use, its size and form, can differ accordingly. This score invites you to spend time on this body of water and to see how it affects/ can affect your body, your thoughts, and your work. It proposes some tasks that you can try while sailing. It also suggests different texts that you can read during the trip. Each task can take as long as you need it to take, from a few minutes to several days. Take your time.

      1. Preparations

      Start by making sure you know the basics regarding how to sail the boat or that you sail with someone who is a captain. Let them show you the knots that you will need to navigate and to dock the boat. Read the book of rules of conduct on water and inform yourself about the conditions of insurance. If there is a VHF on the boat, make sure you know the basics of how to communicate through it. Sign all the necessary papers and register, if necessary, with the marine authorities, before you start your trip.

      2. Inhabiting your Boat

      Get to know the boat you are on and its history. How old is it, by whom was it made? What material is it made out of? Who owns it? Is it a shared boat, or does it belong to an individual? How come you are on it then?

      3. Inhabiting the Body of Water

      Get to know the body water you are sailing on, its set of conditions and its history. Is it an ocean or a sea? Which one, how much salt does it have? Are there tides or currents? Or, otherwise, how is this body of water connected to the ocean? Is it natural or artificial? If natural, how did it come about, and what is its age? If its a river, in which direction is it flowing? If artificial, when was it made and for what reason?

      How will you navigate through it?

      4. Noting Elements/ Affects:

      While you sail, try to take note of different elements/ particular that appear to you during the trip.

      What elements of the specific body of water and its conditions are most intriguing for you? What things interest you, touch you, connect you to this specific water body affectively, physically? How do you experience those things? Can you name them and list them? How do they affect you, what are the ways in which they communicate themselves to you?

      5. Doing work:

      Option a.

      Choose one affect that you noted before and demonstrate to each other how you experience it, how it affects you. You can use your body, voice, objects on the boat and anything else you need, as tools for this demonstration.

      Option b.

      Choose one affect that you noted before and try to present your work/research to each other through this element. How has this element affected your thoughts and work?

      or

      How is this element already present in your body or practice, or how has it affected it/ them?

      6. Logbook/ Documentation:

      A logbook is a book for narrating events that took place on the boat. There should be one logbook in your boat as well; you usually find it where all the maps for navigation are kept.

      Document your trip and the affects that you have experienced and performed in the logbook of the boat you are sailing on. You can choose how you want to do this. What traces of your journey would you like to leave in the book, for others to read? You can use parts or all of your notes and research from the preparation process.

       

       

       

       

      Some Reading to Accompany the Score:

      McMenamin, Mark and Dianna: Hypersea (New York: Columbia UP, 1994)

      Neimanis, Astreida: Bodies of Water:

      https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/bodies-of-water-posthuman-feminist- phenomenology/

      Water: a Queer Archive of Feelings” in: Tidalectics; Imagining an oceanic worldview through art and Science (Cambridge: MIT UP, 2018)

      Protevi, John: “Water” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/protevi.html#_edn8

       
    • SERVEZ-VOUS (a dialogical monologue) Flavio Rodrigo
      30 June 2019
      posted by: Flavio Rodrigo
    • 24 June 2019
    • 30 June 2019
    • case of: Flavio Rodrigo
    • SERVEZ-VOUS

      Earlier, everyone saw quite clearly that the question of limits would inevitably arise, but the shared decision, among the Moderns at least, had been to ignore that question bravely by a very strange form of disinhibition. One could go ahead and grab land, use it and abuse it, without listening to the prophets of doom, since the ground itself kept more or less quiet!

      (Latour, Bruno – Down to Earth)

       

      Inner Trace

       

      OUTER ME - What are the boundaries between learning and unlearning?

      INNER ME - I do not know, this week I felt that I learned many things, but I don’t know if I unlearned anything. Maybe I was amazed at things like: abundance, empathy, sympathy. Perhaps the idea of ​​unlearning something is located in the way we criticize and question the ways we commonly use to learn. My intuition is that is totally located in the revaluation of the “errors” in the process of learning. I hope to be able to develop this thinking better, for now it's just a clue that I intend to follow.

      INNER ME - How much freedom is there in abundance?

      OUTER ME - There are a lot, this week I could do a lot of things without worrying about having the necessary structure so I could do such things. Freedom consists precisely in being able to be delivered to the universe of things that are beyond basic needs. But I also found plenty of “prison feelings” in the abundance of this week.

      INNER ME - How much prison is there in abundance, so?

      OUTER ME - I do not know for sure, but all the time I felt like living a fiction. Such abundance holds me still more to reality, after all, everything seems slightly false, artificial. As if it were only the effect of a very powerful drug. As if the abundance only served to remind me that I am not part of this small portion of the elites. But this self-consciousness, in a way, also sets me free to enjoy it while I can. Changing the subject, what about the lake and the Alps?

      INNER ME – Unquestionable! Beautiful, challenging! Nature challenged me on many levels of my most recent fears in this week!

      OUTER ME – (start laughing)

      INNER ME – Why are you laughing? Don’t you think the same?

      OUTER ME – No! I mean… Yes, nature is definitely not lacking!

      INNER ME - You're going to write about it? Will you document everything that happened in some way?

      OUTER ME - Why are you asking this? I thought you didn’t have any desire of “documenting”.

      INNER ME - I'm completely unwilling to document. This probably wont interest to anyone! No one will read this again! Documentation sucks! This is probably going to disappear into the closets in Michelle's office on the 3rd floor.

      OUTER ME – Totally right.

      Outer Trace

    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • Victories over the Suns
    • victories over the suns projects / events / agenda
      24 June 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Research Centre Associates in residence
    • ZSenne ART Lab / Brussels
    • 24 June 2019
    • 14 July 2019
    • victories over the suns

       

       

       

      general presentation of the project here

       

       

      ---------research projects-events-and-agenda---------

       

       

       

      WICKED TECHNOLOGIES/WILD FERMENTATION

      By linking practices of fermentation, feminism and artistic research, SARA MANENTE hosts a space for thinking, perceiving and doing togetherness in live cultures and live arts.

      Sara is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher interested in narrowing the distance between the performers, the audience and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation and (aesthetic) value. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration et al.

      For Zsenne she proposes and activates a Discursive lab on “fermentation and wickedness”. She will first lacto ferment a summer vegetable while discussing collectively the meaning of wicked, queer, wild and technologies in relation to participants personal researches. She then will leave the ferments in jars to age in the space of the gallery. On the last day of the residency the researchers in Brussels will open and taste them while discussing the same topics, this time informed by 3 weeks of collective fermentation. Meanwhile Sara will be in Fahrenheit 451 House in Catskill starting new alive cultures with the artists/curators Inju Kaboom and Steve Schmitz and their guests as a relay game of bacterial process. Among all the present participants of the residency, Antye Guenther, currently in residence in Japan, will join this online collective fermentation dinner.

      Furthermore Sara will perform later in the week, an informal try-out concert on the multilayered and mashed sound that she has been making in the last few months : “Mush” musical cocktail.

       

       

       

      FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS

      ROB RITZEN assembles elements of his research as an associate researcher at a.pass. In several collective moments he will explore the idea that form is not only aesthetical but that there is no politics without form. If so those concerned with form everyday, artists for example, can bring forms into being that can generate (un)foreseen effects on the forms that dictate our everyday life and shape our world. With Forms of Life of Forms, in short, Rob wants to work with others to better understand forms in all their expressions and workings, but above all to gain insights into how we can use forms to change the world around us.

      With every moment he will add different perspectives and new layers to the notion of form; in-formation, political forms, network forms, value forms, organisational forms. Each moment brings forward a text and visual works that will be explored and discussed together. These elements will form a growing assemblage of written and visual works by Caroline Levine, Marco Lampis, Catherine Malabou, Antye Guenther, Marjolijn Dijkman, Mathijs van de Sande, Judith Butler, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, James Bridle, PA Consulting Group, Bureau des Etudes Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre, Nancy Fraser, Diego Tonus, and Zachary Formwalt. 

      Graphic design collective D.E.A.L will translate each moment and the added insights into a poster published for the following session.

      Rob works as a curator with a background in philosophy, museum studies, art and architectural history. His curatorial practice is focused on self-organised and co-operative formats in close association with cultural practitioners — consciously positioned on the margin of established institutions and outside of market oriented spaces, but in the middle of communities of cultural practitioners. Most recently he co-initiated That Might Be Right, an attempt to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

       

       

       

      OTHERWISE EXHIBITING ARTISTIC ANXIETIES AND THE WORLD

      ‘My desires (or wills) are always in being produced, instead of producing. But some sort of production is expected.’

      (Stefano Faoro, from the A4 press release of his solo exhibition ‘Soft Knees’, at Wiels project room 21.02 – 10.03.2019.)

      Back in February, ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ related her thinking to Stefano Faoro’s text and how he used the standard format of A4 exhibition guide to be the work in the exhibition and a press release at the same time. How to engage with the time in ZSenne Artlab as a residency, a semi-public presentation, an open project, a traject, aiming to examine the formats of publicness of artistic research that pushes the border between research, mediation and production?

      For three weeks, Adrijana proposes two ongoing practices that are at the same time a tool for conversation, an ongoing research and documentation process focusing on the temporal aspect of this kind of exhibiting. First, a cyanotype printing process, forming in time in relation to U.V. rays from sunlight to think together about traces and blueprints of and for the event, their sharp shadows and (non)transparency. Second, a one-to-one card reading, artistic anxieties and the world. In a 7 card spread Adrijana proposes to read (for and with) the artists and researchers - individuals that are concerned, fearful and hopeful, excited about their practice.

      Adrijana is a visual artist and a researcher. In the last two years, in the collective studying environment of a.pass, she has been proposing activities and formats to explore possibilities of what she calls  Otherwise Exhibiting, shifting the focus from

      object to process to change. Since the beginning of this year, as a continuation of these lines, she started doing one year research at the Royal Academy of Antwerp with a project ‘Archiving Artistic Anxieties’, a proposal for self-archiving as an artistic practice. Adrijana introduces the concept of ‘artistic anxieties’ which stands for an artistic practice that looks for developing a mode of critique from an unstable position, exploring uncertainties and ‘follow(ing) the treads where they lead’.

      *To take part in one of these two practices and contribute to the research, please send email adrijana.gvozdenovic@gmail.com 

       

       

       

      OTHER GEOMETRIES

      Femke Snelting develops research projects at the intersection of feminisms, design and free software. In various constellations she explores how digital tools and cultural practices might co-construct each other. She is a member of Constant, a non-profit artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. 

      She proposes for the residence a workshop : Other Geometries. It is an invitation to reflect on, re-imagine and train for togetherness with difference. It is a collaborative research-kit, a porous collection of trans*femininist renderings, eccentric imagery and recombinatory vocabularies. The kit is part of an ongoing conversation with activist collectives which rely on concepts such as 'sovereignty', 'freedom', 'independence' and 'autonomy' to ideologically motivate work on tools, networks and infrastructures we need and want. But by sticking to modes of separation rather than relation, we continue to evoke utopias elsewhere, instead of developing ways to stay with the trouble that we are already entangled in. 

      Other Geometries proposes 'complex collectivity' as a tentative framework to think with, for example, non-normative human constellations, or collectives where participants with radically different needs, backgrounds and agencies come together. ‘complex collectivity' can be self-chosen, or be the result of structural forces such as laws, racism, technology, wars, austerity, queerphobia and ecological conditions.

      Many of the items included in the kit modify existing concepts by introducing dynamic tension. In the workshop Femke will extend this method to the way we relay stories of complex collectivities or the kind of geometries we invent for them. We will try to be attentive to generative vibrations between ontologies and cosmologies and speculate with ‘infrastructures’ that could hold more than one form of togetherness together. What non-utopian models can we design to interface with multiple collectivities? How can we do that without making their intersections dependent on the rigidifying assumptions of sameness and reciprocity?

       

       

       

      MAKING PUBLIC

      After a.pass last audit in 2015, the Ministry of Education supported our institution by rating it officially “excellent”. Nevertheless the ministry encouraged us to become more visible and disseminate our knowledge practices on a more regular basis. This administrative curatorial invitation became a point of critical discussion and complex -conceptual and practical- development in a.pass under the name ‘Making Public’.

      Publishing more? But what and how? Are we not obliged to problematize what a publication of artistic research could be? And isn’t it as well coherent to question and develop other modes of publishing? Disseminating more? But in which direction, in which proportion and for who? What does quantity mean in a frame of experimental practice? And what is the public for artistic research if not one to be imagined and ‘actualised’ because it might not exist yet? Are we not supposed to speculate a public for speculative practices? 

      Since three years the different iterations and proposals under the ‘Making Public’ umbrella were numerous within a.pass at large and occupied quite some space in the newly reconfigured research centre. Going from the thorny problem of ‘contract’, to the dichotomy between ‘private versus public’, to the challenging concept of ‘performative publishing’, to discussions towards the development of experimental digital (non)humanities, to the ontological/political definition of publishing as an act, and more... our notebook and catalogue of actual practices is expanding.

      For this residence we propose a discussion day around ‘Making Public’ as a title, frame and horizon where the participants will contribute by sharing their own relational arrangement between their practices and the publication problem. They will also share their definitions and discuss together their concern starting from the question of urgency.

       

       

       

      CRITICAL BESTIARIES

      A lecture performance by SINA SEIFEE presenting the making of a mini-scale quasi-organization, called the critical bestiaries, to host/construct semi-sustainable structures for storytelling and questioning techniques of bestiaries. Namely, the questions of relational histories, technologies of memory, modes of attention, differential consciousness, and animal subjectivity. This project in the shape of a magazine will be a quadrilingual (German, Farsi, English, Arabic) online and printed form, and its topics are both thematic and epistemic. It is both an inspiration for storytelling and a reading apparatus, to give a chance to an interest for multi-species studies and to define a hybrid mode of discourse to talk about the conditions of storytelling today.

      This projects will practically address the question of: which sensory-technology for making are necessary to approach ‘description’ as speculative theory in practice of how a world works? The aim of the magazine is to entangle: design (making things that tell stories), storytelling (a materialist practice of how not to reach the end), science (an interpretative adventure), faithful and fantastic (mixture of the highly rational and the highly fabulous), boundary objects (workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination, sometimes collaboration, without consensus), objectivity (the possibility of unambiguous communication and of boundary articulations) and fable (relational and speculative empiricism).

      Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance and knowledge production. He is working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life.

       

       

       

      SCORESCAPES

      Lilia Mestre is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels working mainly in collaboration with other artists. She is interested in art practice as a medial tool between several domains of semiotic existence. Lilia works with assemblages, scores and inter-subjective setups as an artist, curator, dramaturge and teacher. From 2019 till 2021 she has/will collaborate(d) with Brandon Labelle in Social Acoustic project - a research project supported by the University of Bergen, Norway and with Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga in Contingent Agencies - a research project supported by PEEK -Vienna. Since 2008 she is involved in developing the artistic research oriented young institution a.pass -she is currently a.pass artistic coordinator and co-curator- where she has been developing a research on scores as pedagogical tool titled ScoreScapes.

      ScoreScapes is a research Lilia started in the context of a.pass, starting from questions such as: How to create an inclusive dispositive that enables learning through each other’s research proposals? How to deal with an un-disciplinary context that aims for transversal relations? By “score” Lilia means a set of instructions that can be repeated for a predetermined period of time. These instructions create a system through which participants interact, as the scores can be modified and used by anyone. Since 2014, she has developed four iterations of the practice: Writing Score, Perform Back Score, Bubble Score and Medium Score. And each iteration marked by the release of a conclusive publication.

      Recently Lilia wrote ‘Scorescapes’, a text about the project that points to its transversal qualities and delineates some problems about its nature. Is ScoreScapes an archive? A documentary production? An art practice? A social practice? How does the project relate to artistic research as an unstable and unframed mode of knowledge practice? Does ScorScapes project’s ungraspable definition create conditions for something to happen in term of publishing otherwise?

      During the residency in Zsenne ArtLab, Pierre Rubio will present the different dimensions and current state of the ScoreScape project with Lilia in an afternoon of collective reading, interview, Q&A and discussion.

       

       

       

      TOWARDS AN ECO-EROGENOUS PARA-PHARMACEUTICS VILLAGE

      In catastrophic times… Can the orgasmic body be a source for sustainable electricity production? Can the cavities that make up the landscapes of the human sexual organs be a territory for agricultural development? Can sex hormones offer alternative components for psychopharmacology and recreational drugs formulas? ISABEL BURR RATY is an independent filmmaker and performance artist, interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. In her films, Isabel embodies human cosmo-visions that are in eco-survival resistance, bringing the imaginative realisms of the camouflaged and their subversive sense of chronology into the screen. In her artwork she interweaves new media, body art, installation and performance proposing hybrid narratives and bio-autonomous practices that play with synthetic magic. In her current work, Isabel creates hybrid performances and installations that invite the public to queer fixed categories of production understandings and experience the benefits of embodying SF in real time. She is currently running a Mobile Farm that starts by harvesting human female sexual juices, to produce beauty bio-products in Portugal and Holland, and will evolve into an ‘Eco-erogenous Para-pharmaceutics Village’ in the Atacama Desert in Chile, where “every-BODY” will harvest and recycle each other. The village will be a tentacular community of synergic mutualism that goes beyond the idea of corpus/body as biological transmitter of kinship and situates the human as a non-human species that can offer solutions to the planetary crisis we live in.

      During the residence, Isabel presents three objects that revisit her project and outline a perspective towards the future of her research: Self facial abduction beauty treatment - This installation offers to the public the tester products of the unisex skin care lines manufactured in the Beauty Kit Female Farm and displayed in this Farm SPA. The visitors are invited to follow the application protocol an experience exotic transpersonal benefits - Male Farm : 1st encounter - To move the ideas of the project forward, during the residence, Isabel organises the first official Male Farm Encounter starting the conversation with a question: What’s happening with male sexuality today? A group of friends will join Isabel for an off conversation about how to address the incognitos around the male sexuality with the ambitious mission of transforming in the future male orgasmic genital and mental fluids in bio-autonomous technologies to produce electric energy. Beauty Kit Upgraded - Lecture Performance - In this lecture the artist hacks the focus group format to present the different lines of beauty bio-products that she conceptualized and manufactured using the female sexual juices that were harvested in her Mobile Farms. In this occasion the public is invited to help solving some of the riddles embedded in the alter-economic model of this project.

      Isabel is associate researcher in a.pass.be, teaches Media art history in École de Recherche Graphique Brussels and is artist in residency in Waag, Mediamatic and VU Amsterdam.

       

       

       

      POLITICS OF ENGINEERING

      ‘Politics of engineering’ is a one day of presentations and conversations about the questions of digital technologies posed by a.pass, as an institution, and addressed by its constituent knowers -Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Open Source Publishing - in the process of making three models and adjustment to the work of documentation and digital publishing that has been recently done or currently in the making.

      ---The day will start with a public conversation and an inconclusive study on the technical and epistemological assumptions that were made in the making of Parallel Parasite : Timeline Repository, a visual and discursive apparatus made by Sina Seifee after Parallel Parasite, a month residency at ZSenne ArtLab, produced by a.pass Research Centre and curated by Lilia Mestre in the Summer of 2018. 

      ---Afterwards we continue by a presentation of OSP (Open Source Publishing) an engaged graphic design unit founded in 2006 in Brussels. OSP comprises a group of individuals from different backgrounds and practices in typography and graphic design, cartography, programming, mathematics, writing, and performance. They will present their practice, commitments, tools and projects.

      ---We will then continue by publishing the RRadio Triton Data Retrieval Interface, a website hosting a collective and experimental radio project aiming at producing audio documents gathered and disseminated by the ad hoc fictional radio label/station, which is the outcome of voluntary contributions after the 2017 winter seminar of a.pass, curated by Pierre Rubio. The website will be presented by the makers, the result of the initiation and curation of Pierre Rubio with the artistic and technological dramaturgy of Sina Seifee. They will discuss the making of RRadio Triton Data Retrieval Interface as a hybrid dispositive, as a science-fiction entity, a problematic storytelling, a speculation site and some concerns around politics of imagination.

      ---Then, OSP in conversation with Sina Seifee, will question and problematise engineering mentality and the use-relation of digital technologies in/with the arts and complex artistic research practices and institutions.

      ---Finally, everybody will have a discussion/Q&A where complex politics of digital engineering can be addressed collectively.

       

       

       

      CONTINGENT WEIRDNESS (workshop on horror)

      Adrijana Gvozdenović and Sina Seifee propose Contingent Weirdness (workshop on horror)

      A two-days training/hanging-out/sharing/practice for artists researchers focusing on the specific genre of horror to understand each other’s artistic commitments in a constraint and therefore generative way. Adrijana and Sina will explore and reshape 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 and Frankenstein projects, and so on. Parallel we foreground different scales and registers of horror for reconsideration, ranging from speculative fiction, sci-fi cinema, to medieval bestiaries, inducing “bad feelings” such as fear, uncanny, awe, mania, panic, tension and anxiety.

      The workshop starts by imagining an aspect of our practices as a horror story, locating the fear, and deciding, with the help of the group, what can be turned into horror. Doing so, we are interested in exploring the parts of our practice that are fucked-up, that means to which extent what we do can become a disaster, gore, torture. Starting from where one’s practice produces demage and when thinking disintegrate and disorient, we will map what escapes our peripheral vision. We will discuss together (arche-)type of horror categories and make a cliche/scheme/model for at least one or two of them. Then we will chose an affective, atmospheric, compositional technique of horror to ask how does this story relates to which existing social, political, cultural phenomena today. We will concentrate on both, to create horrors but also working on a specific setting, which is important for the genre not only to set up the mood but to create an ambience of the expectation of horror. In the workshop we will provide basinc accessories and tools to create settings - an ambience of ‘expectation’ pregnant with horror. In relation to this, we will prepare references for the reading and/or watching selected films together. In the second day, we focus on composing singular pieces (around individual proposals or in small groups) which we will share at the end of the day in the setting of a ‘scary stories night’.

      Going through how this genre works is important, because genre is a way of gathering and staging what it cares for, in a performative and coherent way to teach a negatively affected audience how to inhabit their world. Adrijana and Sina are interested what comes out when we start from the fears and affects creating personalised monsters of our work and how will this training from another side of reasoning, while working in an atmosphere for a contingent weirdness, shape the language for not thinking clearly, yet precisely. Particular interest of the workshop is in those scales that are not necessary correct and of good intention. We propose to exaggerate consciously how great art practices are also awful, how the things we do are also often laden with damage and death, to trace our works in the matrix of rage, lure, and desire (and not necessarily in the matrix of truth, duty, and achievements).

       

       

       

       

      DEALING WITH POROSITY

      How to become porous? How to stay porous? Dealing with porosity, this quality or state of being permeable and/or capable of being penetrated, as a means to disrupt binaries, culture-nature, inclusive-exclusive, body-mind, information-matter... That is what Antye Guenther is up for.

      Antye is a visual artist and artist researcher, born and raised in Eastern Germany. Drawing from her background in medicine, in photography, and in the military, her artistic practice treats themes like (non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, posthumanism and mind control, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and science fiction. She is an associate researcher at a.pass and holds the first Mingler Scholarship for Art and Science/ NL. At the Arita Porcelain Residency in Japan, Antye is currently developing ‘brain vases’, to investigate the problematic metaphor of the brain as a container or vessel. Her brain was scanned at the Neuroscience Department of Maastricht University where the MRI data 3D (re)constructed it within a scientific visualisation programme and was used as a source material to fabricate delicate and desirable porcelain vases. But what if these vases are dysfunctionally engineered and are porous? What if a vessel as iconic as a porcelain vase leaks? The material metaphor poses some questions: How to stay porous? How to get severely entangled with and influenced by other people, new environments, other cultures etc.? How to take part in each other practice? How to engage in each others’ thought processes?

      For this residence in Brussels, and taking into account Antye’s geographical displacement in Japan, she proposes the following encounters: 1/ She will send every week an object in the form of an audio file to fill and potentially penetrate the gallery space and be discussed by the artists/researchers present in Brussels in her ‘absence’. The discussion will be recorded and sent back to her in Japan. 2/ One-on-one video conversations creating concentrated moments to discuss concerns in each others’ practices. 3/ a live video communication moment of presentation and sharing of Antye’s experiences so far at the Arita Porcelain Residency in Japan.

       

       

       

      ----------------------agenda----------------------

       

       

      *all the events are public, except noted otherwise

       

      FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS Rob Ritzen

      26.6 - 16-19:00h / FOLOF I - reading group

      1.7 - 16-19:00h / FOLOF II - reading group

      1.7 - 19-20:00h / FOLOF II - lecture by Mathijs van de Sande

      3.7 - 16-19:00h / FOLOF III - reading 

      8.7 - 16-19:00h / FOLOF IV - reading

      13.7 - 13-15:00h / FOLOF V  ultimate and complete form of the installation - open and public from 16h00 to 20h00

      [A series of reading sessions and installations that will add different perspectives and new layers to the notion of form; in-formation, political forms, network forms, value forms, organizational forms. read more]

       

      WICKED TECHNOLOGIES/WILD FERMENTATION Sara Manente

      25.6 - 12-14:00h / [by invitation]

      5.7 - 19-20:00h / MUSH musical cocktail concert on the multilayered and mashed sound

      13.7 - 18:00h / last poisoned supper of doom

      [A discursive lab about Sara’s notion of fermentation and wickedness, on the meaning of wicked, queer, wild and technologies in relation to the participants personal researches. read more]

       

      OTHER GEOMETRIES Femke Snelting

      30.6 - 12-18:00h [by invitation]

      30.6 - 20-22:00h / in collaboration with Sara Manente and the group : “other geometries non agonistic performative dinner” [by invitation]

      [Workshop with a collection of femininist renderings, eccentric imagery and recombinatory vocabularies, with ideologically motivate work on tools, networks and infrastructures to re-imagine togetherness. read more]

       

      CRITICAL BESTIARIES Sina Seifee

      4.7 - 19-22:00

      [Presentation of the “critical bestiaries,” a magazine in the making, a mini-scale quasi-organization to host/construct semi-sustainable structures for ‘storytelling’ and ‘questioning’ techniques of bestiaries. read more]

       

      POLITICS OF ENGINEERING Sina Seifee,OSP,Pierre Rubio,Lilia Mestre

      9.7 - 11-12:00h Parallel Parasite : Timeline Repository

      9.7 - 12-13:00h OSP presentation

      9.7 - 13-14:00h (lunch break)

      9.7 - 14-15:00h RRadio Triton Data Retrieval Interface

      9.7 - 15-16:00h Discussion between OSP & Sina Seifee

      9.7 - 16:30-18:00h Collective discussion and Q&A

      -from 18:00h on - open evening with the platforms available!

      [A day of presentations and conversations about the question of digital technologies posed by a.pass and addressed by its constituent knowers (Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, and OSP) in the process of making three models and adjustment to the work of documentation that has been recently done. read more]

       

      SCORESCAPE Lilia Mestre

      5.7 - 14-17:00

      [A transversal scoring practice, reading group/presentation/interview/discussion about the project ScoreScapes by Lilia Mestre. read more]

       

      TOWARDS AN ECO-EROGENOUS PARA-PHARMACEUTICS VILLAGE Isabel Burr Raty

      6.7 / installation: Self facial abduction beauty treatment

      6.7 - 11-13:00h / Male Farm : 1st encounter [by invitation]

      6.7 - 19-20:00h / Beauty Kit Upgraded - Lecture Performance

      [A collection of performances and installations that invite the public to queer fixed categories of production understandings and experience the benefits of embodying SF in real time. read more]

       

      CONTINGENT WEIRDNESS Adrijana Gvozdenović and Sina Seifee

      11.7 - 10-18:00h day 1

      12.7 - 10-24:00h day 2

      for registration email to sina.seifee@gmail.com

      [Two-days workshop, training/hanging-out/sharing/practice for artists researchers, focusing on the specific genre of horror to understand each other’s artistic commitments in a constraint and therefore generative way. read more]

       

      OTHERWISE EXHIBITING ARTISTIC ANXIETIES AND THE WORLD

      Adrijana Gvozdenović / ongoing practice

      for an appointment please contact adrijana.gvozdenovic@gmail.com

      [One-to-one sessions for artists and researchers, a card-reading and interview practice concerning individuals that are concerned, fearful and hopeful, excited about their practice. read more]

       

      CYANOTYPE PRINTING PROCESS Adrijana Gvozdenović

      ongoing / installation and practice 

      [Made of processing traces and blueprints of U.V. sun rays. read more]

       

      DEALING WITH POROSITY Antye Guenther

      ongoing exchange of audio files with the participants

      13.7 - 11-12:00h skype working session from Arite (Japan) [by invitation]

      [A series of inquiries in the form of interview between Japan and Belgian, one-one-one video calls, and recordings on individual bases. read more]

       

       

      --------------------------------------------------------------------

       

      The residence is produced by a.pass Research Centre

      and hosted by ZSenne ArtLab

      From June 24th to July 14th 2019

      9h00 - 23h00

      Anneessens 2, 1000 Brussels

      https://goo.gl/maps/nTVwbSAjK6yW76iY9

       

      The Research Center at a.pass is a platform for advanced research practices in the arts. It invites six associated researchers per one year cycle to develop their artistic research practice in an environment of mutual criticality and institutional support. In agreement with the individual research trajectory of the associate researchers the apass Research Center supports and facilitates forms of publications, performative publishing, presentations, experimental research setups and collaborations.  Rather than consolidating the existing discourse around the notion of artistic research, a.pass is committed to accumulating different understandings of artistic research through practicing its frameworks, archives and vocabularies. By bringing together differently practiced notions of artistic research, a.pass is reflecting on modes of study and knowledge practice within the artistic field. a.pass is interested in the actualisation of performing knowledge because it considers artistic research as a situated, contextual practice which is the consequence of ongoing negotiations between its stakeholders, contextual fields and discourses. a.pass interacts with academic, activist, or practice-based fields and methods of research, and supports the development of rigorous, inventive forms of artistic research on the intersections between those fields and in tension with academic artistic research as a developing discipline. The center itself is not a solid institutional body with its associate researchers as satellites, it is rather constructed as a support structure that brings different trajectories and fields of research to a multitude of temporary overlaps.  It’s institutional and long term structures work towards a repository of methodologies, forms of archive and ‘making public’ of artistic research practice.

    • newscaption

       

      CYCLE I: PUBLISHING ARTISTIC RESEARCH

      7 books launch

       

      Documenting, archiving, and publishing are intrinsic to the ongoing practices of a.pass. They are seen as tools for research and enable critical reflections through the exposure. This kind of "performative publishing" opens to other forms of doing and reflects the speculative attitudes of artistic research as a witnessing process of creation, contextualization, and doubt.

      With these concepts in mind, the a.pass Research Centre opened a new program that hosted in Cycles I (2018-19) six Associate Researchers as a platform for exchange. Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenter, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen and Sina Seifee contributed to that platform the perspectives and practices inherent to their research through individual publications.

       6 publications plus one Annex will be launched 

      27th February 2020 

      @ Level5  - Rue Paul Devauxstraat 5, 1000 Brussel (5th floor)

      Doors open at 18:00

      we will read, perform, discuss and open the famous bar of Level5

      The rile* bookshop will open its doors in parallel to that launch.


       

       

      Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

      ROT is the publication for "Wicked technology/Wild fermentation:" artistic research focusing on forms and practices of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making - as much as wilderness and domestication in art. Not asking why do we ferment today, but where does it stop? The glossy magazine performs the research by wanting to infect the reader, while at the same time, it's questioning how to spread, publish, and make the work survive.


      Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

      FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS artistic research into form - not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there is no politics without form! Concerned with forms everyday, artists can bring the kinds of forms into being that generate (un)foreseen effects on those forms dictating our everyday life.  With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several Moments that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into one single installation. This publication reshuffles the documentations of those Moments for a visual reflection on the trajectory of this research.

      SINA SEIFEE researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM is the result of being immersed in the process of composing and compiling notes by Seifee on medieval bestiaries and putting them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series, to set up context or to open in small descriptive steps, towards (what Latour might call) knowing interestingly about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio*techno tales and older styles of knowing. Working out an ecology of obligation with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, and Seifee's undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.


      ANTYE GUENTHER is a visual artist and artist-researcher, born and raised in Eastern Germany. Drawing from her background in medicine, photography, and in the military, her artistic practice treats themes like (non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, scientific representations of cognitive processes and mind control, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and fictionality of science. Guenther studied at the art academies of Leipzig and Karlsruhe, and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 2019 she received the first Mingler Scholarship for Art and Science.

      NEOCORTEX is a textile poster publication. It can be used as a head or neck scarf, a hairband, a veil, a belt, a table cloth, an arm sling, a disguise in political demonstrations, a laboratory sieve, or a tool for receiving and transmitting alien thoughts. This scarf is the second materialization of an ongoing research project on neuroscientific visualization practices and questionable conceptualizations of our brains. It features a combination of MRI data of the artist's own brain and text fragments from science and science fiction. It refers to the upcoming trend in the scientific community to print posters on textiles rather than on paper and combines reconstructed MRI data of the artist’s brain with various text fragments from science and science fiction.

       

       

      ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ has been for the last two years a researcher at the a.pass, proposing activities that push the border between research, mediation, and production and examine new formats of publicness. Naming these activities 'Otherwise Exhibiting', is an attempt to shift the focus from the object to relations. During the last year, her research project "Archiving Artistic Anxieties" was supported by the Royal Academy of Antwerp, which resulted in this online publication.

      www.archivingartisticanxieties.me is a noisy archiving online publication that takes the form of an essay. This platform is a way to reflect and diffract from the different activities and events realized in the past year. The writing and editing processes are exposed and show the different steps of the collaboration and their constructive agencies. Researchers, friends, and family make up the editorial team: artists Goda Palekaitė, Pia Louwerence, and the linguist/political scientist Kristina Gvozdenović together with artist Sina Seifee, developer and designer of the website. 

       

       

      ISABEL BURR RATY is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), leaving between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

      BEAUTY KIT - AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT is an experimental catalog that presents a summary of the research with the same name. It’s made in collaboration with dramaturge Kristin Rogghe, performance artist Gosie Vervloessem, graphic designer Pablo Diartinez, artist Tim Vets, and advised by designer Miriam Hempel. It also bestows a text contribution “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout. The researcher and the BK Patrona conduct the catalog by bringing conceptual perspectives and representing the frictions that this project entails.

       a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij
      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: lilia@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       
    • conference
    • project
    • research center
    • seminar
    • workshop
    • Parallel Parasite
    • Parallel Parasite Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre
      03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 04 June 2018
    • 30 September 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Parallel Parasite

      A month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence
      Gatherings of parallel parasite platforms  for practice based research in the arts > If you want to know, come!


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at ZSenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

       

      The propositions start from reading groups, activating thinking/doing practices, score -ing, speculative talks, and registration/documentation formats in order to converge multiple insights that might (and not must) infuse other formats of reflecting/experiencing framed by the quasi public environment of the gallery space. 

      The Research Center in residency invites several guests which are thinking and experiencing ‘gathering’ as a form of knowledge processing bridging theoretical and experiential approaches. These gatherings don’t depart from personal concerns but aim to mine inter-subjective frame works to question artistic research as a learning together practice.

      This point of address for the a.pass RC next block, comes from two main curatorial concerns. The first is about the publicness of a Research Centre for artistic research and its visibility, accessibility and share-ability.  What are the internal and external demands and needs of such environments? The second comes from an observation on what I’m calling parallel-parasite platforms for practice based research in the arts.

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, my proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such public-ness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass). These invited quasi – institutional setups affiliated in one way or another with the academic environment are experimental formats of learning processes that are critically challenging modes of knowledge production in artistic research. All these ‘parallel-parasite platforms’ or ‘ways of doing’ are engaged in thinking-doing practices that converge theoretical and artistic research practice approaches in the arts. 

      SOL / School Of Love is an initiative of students and teachers from the Autonome Vormgeving department at KASK. SOL came to existence spontaneously as a school inside a school, in March 2016, out of a workshop that explored the notions of Love and School as modes of attention. SOL has no predetermined curriculum. It avoids defining itself and its goals in order to allow activities to emerge through the presence and interest of its participants, who come from inside KASK as well from outside of the institution. Anyone can be a part of SOL, anything can become a project in it, and it can take place anywhere, as long as it’s stimulated by the will to re-think both school and love as charged with potential for change and engagement in society. It is what we make it to be. 

      AND

      The SenseLab is a laboratory for thought in motion.

      Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.

      Participants are held together by affinity rather than by any structure of membership or institutional hierarchy. The SenseLab’s event-based projects are collectively self-organizing. Their aim is to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act. The SenseLab’s product is its process, which is meant to disseminate. The measure of success is the creative momentum that spins off into individual and group practices elsewhere, to seed new processes asserting their own autonomy. The SenseLab makes no claim to ownership, operating as much as possible on the principle of a gift economy.

      This block will follow up on the thinking the archival concerns of artistic research at a.pass. The interest crawls out of the virtual into the physical public sphere wanting to add another aspect to it. The Zsenne will be taken as a sensor environment for the working upon collective processes of archive and anarchive. For this precise question we’ll be working with Erin Manning and her knowledge on the Anarchive as part of the Immediations project in SenseLab.

      Anarchive 

      1.The anarchive is best defined for the purposes of the Immediations project as a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.2.Thus the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.

      3.The anarchive needs documentation – the archive – from which to depart and through which to pass. It is an excess energy of the archive: a kind of supplement or surplus-value of the archive.

      In this movement between having to retreat from the world and then go back to the world as both places to make sense (study) of our relation with things,  various questions start to appear: What is the importance and articulation of doing/thinking practices? And what kind of positionality would this create in the semi-academic frame work?What kind of environments and practices can we envisage to share political/ aesthetic concerns? what kind of ‘library’ would we build to address these concerns?

      Each practice will have a specific way of opening to the public and more specific formats will be announced in detail as we go along. For now the basic structure is a daily private practice fora group of invited artistic researchers and an open door practice everyday from 17:30 till 20:00 where public conversations and doings welcome the interested and the passerby.

      The RC is mainly working with alumni and associated researchers linked with the a.pass Research Centre. For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Nico Dockx, Steven Jouwersma, Halbe Kuipers, Pia Louwerens, Sara Manente, Marialena Merouda, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Lilia Mestre, Martino Morandi, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Eric Thielemans, Femke Snelting, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita with Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann .

      and the post-master researchers: Elen Braga, Nasia Fourtouni, Leo Kay, Laura Pante, Geert Vaes, Maurice Meewisse, Caterina Mora, Ezther Nemethi, Hoda Siahtiri, Goda Palekaite, Katinka Van Gorkum.

      Forms of learning together is a central approach in the post-master’s program of a.pass (platform for artistic research practices) and has a background in art run organisations as models of self-organisation and collaboration.  It views art practice and artistic research as situated, critical and autonomous processes contributing for the politisation of modes of gathering and learning together. 

      ScoreScapes is a research on how to create frameworks for bringing together diverse artistic practices to ‘speak’ to each other without having a common constraint in terms of content or form. To find systems of interaction where different aesthetic experiences cohabitate, complement, disagree and motivate thirdness together with the possibility to trace it. Like a maze of potentials hovering over us participants of the score.

      A central concern in the ScoreSacpes research is the development of modes of being together with our individual backgrounds, moods, sensibles, political concerns, theories, … Through a system of questions and answers set in time, the scores propose regular encounters as a mode of intensive exchange about individual experiences that interconnect with others. In this sense the score proposes a form of sociability. To work with scores allows to follow up and evaluate these relationships constantly. The score evolutions are guidelines for the progress of the study and facilitate a chronological trajectory of the research. To make scores is also to produce documents in order to observe the paradigms that are at stake while making art. The unexpected and unforeseen event is always a surprising call to pay attention to the performative aspect of things, to the condition of all existence as experiential events. The score becomes a life art laboratory for multidisciplinary practices and pluri-focus presences. An attempt to shift from an art-to-look-at to an art to experience.

       
    •  

       

      Milieus, Associations, Sieves and other matters

      some orientation guidelines

       

      Today, to the question ‘what is technoscience?’ the answer is: it is the medium of knowledge. Just as technology is not the instrument of science but its epistemological framework, so it is not the instrument of our communication, but our medium of meaning. Everyone seems to admit today that we are inhabited by our habitat, built by our niche, processed by our technical environment, which is neither external nor peripheral, but inherent to our being and to all meaning. Now it seems obvious that it is one and the same milieu that surrounds and separates us, and that which crosses and connects us, but this environment has become technical. The co-birth of humans and technology means that the latter is both our medium (the midpoint through which individuals maintain each other) and our environment (our space-time). The technical environment perfectly illustrates the idea that our environment or what surrounds us is actually in our midst (au milieu de nous). That technology is both our exteriority and our interiority, our cage and what takes us away from it. How, in an artistic research environment, do these ontological, ethical and political contemporary concerns resonate?

       


      Proposal


      Composing a processual environment, the block consisted in a sequential ensemble of collective dispositives that were proposed to be appropriated, interpreted, developed and problematised by the artists and researchers. A metastable milieu in ‘crisis’ which evolved by shifting to new dimensions out of a series of analyses and temporary resolutions of problematics linked with the artists and researchers’ projects considered as technologies.

      The basic structure was an arrangement of 1-self organised interactive events intersecting with 2-a series of three theoretical study days and 3-a series of advanced forms of feedback.

       

       

      Organisation / Trajectory

       

      1. Twenty two self-organised interactive events of different dimensions : the C.R.I.’s
      (from May 31st to July 19th)

      The acronym C.R.I. stands for Collective Research Interface. The researchers were invited to compose and propose participatory events that one could identify as shareable practices out of/around/through their individual researches. Instead of qualifying -and reducing- simply the object by ‘collective practice’ or ‘workshop’, the name ‘Collective Research Interface’ produced momentary shared interstitial spaces between different scales (private, public, cultural, social, personal, artistic, aesthetic, political and so on…) and enabled and supported a certain mode of attention, the one of technical mentality. Experiencing with this mentality was possible as the mode of production of the C.R.I.’s followed a principle of compositionality. The performativity and meaning of the C.R.I’s, as complex technical ensembles, were determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the modes of relating/assembling used to combine them. A structuring loop was formulated : invent, invite, do, participate, share, document, discuss, reflect, problematisatise… and back again. The researches were not only presented but organised into shareable dispositives, that then were described, analysed, filtered driving the attention to their resonances in term of constructions and modes of assemblages. Their technological qualities.

       


      2. Three theoretical study days

              a/ The diagram and the residual (June 12th)
      The program visited the artist residency project ‘Villa Blanche’ within the Solvay Parc in Brussels with Martino Morendi (philosopher-hacker-activist) and Pietro Fortuna (philosopher-artist). The day was articulated around the tension between two conceptual outlines, two proposals that sketched complementary or opposite modes of understanding reality. The diagram, as the systematic representation of a set of relations between elements, where logics, organicism and industrial engineering converge in the effort to govern and organize these relations and the residual, as the irreducible part that remains beyond one's hunger to explain and describe, that recedes and escapes any attempt of organization and rationalization.
      United if only by their distance from the subject-object mode of disclosure, Martino Morandi and Pietro Fortuna oriented us through a series of ‘objects’ like an elegy by Rilke, passages from von Uexküll and Agamben, a bourgeois villa, a tree, a giant Olmec head made of stone, the Solvay ammonia-soda process ... and a series of readings of objects related to every researcher’s art and research.


              b/ on Participation (June 17th)
      The program visited the project ‘Precarious Pavillon #1 - Don’t eat the microphone’ -an artistic project initiated by Veridiana Zurita and Petra Van Dyck, curated by Michael Vandevelde and co-produced by Vooruit- happening in the garden of the Psychiatric Hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent.
      The study day was dedicated to the critique of participatory art and ideas of participation. Don’t Eat the Microphone represented for us a grey zone where we could think but also be challenged in our certainties about the nature and function of participation. Currently focused on the development of the Collective Research Interfaces and exploring the value of several modes of participation, we wanted to problematise the issue(s) in a problematic environment.             
      What is participatory art? What does it mean to participate?
      What are the relations between participatory art and utopia?
      Which kind of public space and social fabric participatory practices do (and do not) produce? What are the relations between participatory art and communicative capitalism?
      What is participation-as-injunction the diagram of? Is it still possible not to participate? Is it still possible even to imagine non-participation? How to foster (non) participatory arts and (un) communicative thus militantly collective aesthetic educations of possibilities? After a phase of various reservations expressed about the optimistic rhetoric accompanying collaboration and participation, could we now be entering a new phase of a practical re-invention of participation?
      This tentative list of problems and questions guided our study day displaced in the frame of Don’t Eat the Microphone. We read some Hal Foster , Chat Rooms / some Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells / some Yves Citton, Ecology of Attention / some Derek R. Ford and Tyson E. Lewis, On the freedom to be opaque monsters, and discuss in various ways our doubts on participative art with the curators of ‘Don’t eat the microphone’ project and the patients of the psychiatric hospital.


              c/ Poieien (July 14th)
      Invited by the summer program to structure a day around concerns traversing researchers and artists when thinking about methodologies and their politics, Bojana Cvejic, then-curator of the research program at p.a.r.t.s., guided the group of researchers and artists through a critical reflection that she currently conducts on methodologies, opposing practice and action to poiesis. During the encounter with the researchers of a.pass, she proposed two points of entry: how poetry pierces through other mediums than text and poiein, as in how to make, compose, form... more than do and act... a kind of thought that arises from within, or close to, artistic practice that in turn becomes an instrument of looking past art. She accounts for it by “poetics”, using the term to emphasise the productive power of thought as opposed to the genre of interpretation that classifies specimens of kinds. Bojana Cvejic shared that poetics entails engagement with art in imaginary and speculative senses that ‘theory’, tout court – in the way that it has become the superstructural element of art production in capitalism – no longer enables.
      The participants did map out their imaginary around their matters of concern, read some texts and discussed with Bojana.

       

       

      3. Three 'Sieves' proposed by three human 'analogous algorithms'

      The aim of these three advanced modes of feedback named ‘Sieves’ -performed by three ex-a.pass researchers identified as 'analogous algorithms'- were to create conditions that could define practices of creative feedback experimentations on artistic researches envisaged as technical dispositives to investigate how each rhetoric of presentation and its digestive techniques could be expressed in terms of data model (Sina Seifee in May), in terms of recipes and cook books (Gosie Vervloessem in June) and in terms of idiotic practice (Vanja Smilianic in July)

       

              a/ Sina Seifee / Filters
      The basic question of 'Filter'  was : what happens when linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants? The work started with working on/with the feedback material produced during the block’s opening week and processing this material in diagrams. The proposal centred on the notion (and practice) of topological analysis to investigate questions of connectivity and boundaries, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. This did direct us to construct ‘transversal objects’ actualising what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects in the culture of each participant researches.

      some documentation of the process here

       

              b/ Gosie Vervloessem / Vision and Digestion
      The protocol was to bring one’s research and start to think about the taste of it, the way it could move through one’s intestines and try to visualise the tools and methods one would use to transform one’s questions into a dish. How to boil down questions, how to crystallise the background dramaturgy of researches? As a way of documenting the symposium, Gosie proposed to write  the recipes of the ‘dishes’ and to edit the cookbook out of the ‘digested’ researches.

       

              c/ Vanja Smilianic / Idiotic Mandala attacked by a parasitic octopus
      The Idiotic Mandala  -indicating a weird circular configuration with a centre that radiates outward into compartmentalised areas deranged by the unvited presence of a creeping octopus-  asked to switch off one's rational thinking and opened it up to wandering and wondering. The practitioners were invited to introspectively transform the Vicious Circle ( sad passions at work disguised as set of tools and technologies that became behaviour patterns in one's research) into the Virtuous Circle (creating a universe in which idiots are able to act)

       

       

       

      Milieus, Associations, Sieves and other matters

      some justifications

       

              Thematics, Research questions, approaches, potentials, methodologies, relevance

      In response to a proposed frame given by a.pass coordinator and research center curator Lilia Mestre to structure the block in relation to the Senselab concepts and practices, postmaster program curator Pierre Rubio choose to design entry points to different set of practices and theoretical notions accessing a central theme for Senselab and him, the one of technical mentality. A few years ago SenseLab published a special issue of Inflexions ‘Simondon : Milieux, Techniques, Aesthetics’ and Brian Massumi’s lenghtly interview ‘Technical mentality revisited’ was published in Parrhesia. Rubio, since 2010, regularly revisits Simondon’s texts in relation to his practice as artist/dramaturge and observes the growing interest for the french philosopher's ideas in the academic and artistic fields. He curated an a.pass block in 2014 -'Milieu(s)'- that problematised some aspects of technical mentality within a collectively constructed ephemeral public school dispositive.  The possibility of considering artistic researches trajects and projects as technical objects and experimenting with technical mentality seemed to be relevant for this block especially in the vicinity of Senselab's residence invited by a.pass Research Centre within the 'Parallel/Parasite' project.

       

      -A poly semantic space to activate problematisations and progressive resolutions through concretisation

      -The individual CRI’s as case studies of non-autonomous technological open objects

      -Constructivism, technical mentality and artistic research

      -Simondon and artistic research : a promising diffractive equation

      .

      ... to be continued...

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • research center
    • seminar
    • Parallel Parasite
    • parallel-parasite Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre
      23 April 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Zsenne ArtLab
    • 04 June 2018
    • 30 June 2018
    • parallel-parasite

      A month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence
      Gatherings of parallel parasite platforms  for practice based research in the arts > If you want to know, come!


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at ZSenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

       

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

      The propositions start from reading groups, activating thinking/doing practices, score -ing, speculative talks, and registration/documentation formats in order to converge multiple insights that might (and not must) infuse other formats of reflecting/experiencing framed by the quasi public environment of the gallery space. 

       

      The Research Center in residency invites several guests which are thinking and experiencing ‘gathering’ as a form of knowledge processing bridging theoretical and experiential approaches. These gatherings don’t depart from personal concerns but aim to mine inter-subjective frame works to question artistic research as a learning together practice.

      This point of address for the a.pass RC next block, comes from two main curatorial concerns. The first is about the publicness of a Research Centre for artistic research and its visibility, accessibility and share-ability.  What are the internal and external demands and needs of such environments? The second comes from an observation on what I’m calling parallel-parasite platforms for practice based research in the arts.  

       

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, my proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such public-ness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

       

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass).

       

      These invited quasi - institutional set ups affiliated in one way or another with the academic environment are experimental formats of learning processes that are critically challenging modes of knowledge production in artistic research. All these 'parallel-parasite platforms' or 'ways of doing' are engaged in thinking-doing practices that converge theoretical and artistic research practice approaches in the arts. 

       

      SOL / School Of Love is an initiative of students and teachers from the Autonome Vormgeving department at KASK. SOL came to existence spontaneously as a school inside a school, in March 2016, out of a workshop that explored the notions of Love and School as modes of attention. SOL has no predetermined curriculum. It avoids defining itself and its goals in order to allow activities to emerge through the presence and interest of its participants, who come from inside KASK as well from outside of the institution. Anyone can be a part of SOL, anything can become a project in it, and it can take place anywhere, as long as it's stimulated by the will to re-think both school and love as charged with potential for change and engagement in society. It is what we make it to be. 

      AND

      The SenseLab is a laboratory for thought in motion.
      Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.
      Participants are held together by affinity rather than by any structure of membership or institutional hierarchy. The SenseLab’s event-based projects are collectively self-organizing. Their aim is to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act. The SenseLab’s product is its process, which is meant to disseminate. The measure of success is the creative momentum that spins off into individual and group practices elsewhere, to seed new processes asserting their own autonomy. The SenseLab makes no claim to ownership, operating as much as possible on the principle of a gift economy.

       

      This block will follow up on the thinking the archival concerns of artistic research at a.pass. The interest crawls out of the virtual into the physical public sphere wanting to add another aspect to it. The Zsenne will be taken as a sensor environment for the working upon collective processes of archive and anarchive. For this precise question we’ll be working with Erin Manning and her knowledge on the Anarchive as part of the Immediations project in SenseLab.

       

      Anarchive 1.The anarchive is best defined for the purposes of the Immediations project as a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.
      2.Thus the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.
      3.The anarchive needs documentation – the archive – from which to depart and through which to pass. It is an excess energy of the archive: a kind of supplement or surplus-value of the archive.

       

      In this movement between having to retreat from the world and then go back to the world as both places to make sense (study) of our relation with things,  various questions start to appear: What is the importance and articulation of doing/thinking practices? And what kind of positionality would this create in the semi-academic frame work?
      What kind of environments and practices can we envisage to share political/ aesthetic concerns? what kind of ‘library’ would we build to address these concerns?

       

      Each practice will have a specific way of opening to the public and more specific formats will be announced in detail as we go along. For now the basic structure is a daily private practice fora group of invited artistic researchers and an open door practice everyday from 17:30 till 20:00 where public conversations and doings welcome the interested and the passerby.

       

      The RC is mainly working with alumni and associated researchers linked with the a.pass Research Centre.

      For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Nico Dockx, Steven Jouwersma, Halbe Kuipers, Pia Louwerens, Sara Manente, Marialena Merouda, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Lilia Mestre, Martino Morandi, Xiri Noir, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Eric Thielemans, Femke Snelting, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita with Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann .

      and the post-master researchers:
      Elen Braga, Nasia Fourtouni, Leo Kay, Laura Pante, Geert Vaes, Maurice Meewisse, Caterina Mora, Ezther Nemethi, Hoda Siahtiri, Goda Palekaitė, Katinka Van Gorkum.

      Forms of learning together is a central approach in the post-master’s program of a.pass (platform for artistic research practices) and has a background in art run organisations as models of self-organisation and collaboration.  It views art practice and artistic research as situated, critical and autonomous processes contributing for the politisation of modes of gathering and learning together. 

      ScoreScapes is a research on how to create frameworks for bringing together diverse artistic practices to ‘speak’ to each other without having a common constraint in terms of content or form. To find systems of interaction where different aesthetic experiences cohabitate, complement, disagree and motivate thirdness together with the possibility to trace it. Like a maze of potentials hovering over us participants of the score.


      A central concern in the ScoreSacpes research is the development of modes of being together with our individual backgrounds, moods, sensibles, political concerns, theories, … Through a system of questions and answers set in time, the scores propose regular encounters as a mode of intensive exchange about individual experiences that interconnect with others. In this sense the score proposes a form of sociability. To work with scores allows to follow up and evaluate these relationships constantly. The score evolutions are guidelines for the progress of the study and facilitate a chronological trajectory of the research. To make scores is also to produce documents in order to observe the paradigms that are at stake while making art. The unexpected and unforeseen event is always a surprising call to pay attention to the performative aspect of things, to the condition of all existence as experiential events. The score becomes a life art laboratory for multidisciplinary practices and pluri-focus presences. An attempt to shift from an art-to-look-at to an art to experience.

    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Possible Bodies 05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • a.pass, 3rd floor
    • 01 January 2018
    • case of: Femke Snelting
    • Possible Bodies

      Possible Bodies is a disobedient action-research project that Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting have been developing since 2015. The project works with the concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that 'bodies' are, in the context of technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modeling and scanning. This collective research becomes especially urgent because through those performative and representational practices, intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface.

      The Possible Bodies inquiry operates along an inventory that by now contains a mutant set of artworks, scripts, documentation, manuals, guided tours, interfaces, vocabulary, performances, software-demos, tools, physical objects, animations, mathematical concepts, games, renderings, etc. This traveling collection forms a shared context to pay attention to the dimensional, notational, scalable and organisational apparatuses that make so-called-bodies appear and co-relate, and allows us to ask questions the matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present.

      At the start of 2018, Possible Bodies is one-and-a-half year under-way. It will have had rotations in an art institution in Stuttgart (Schloss Solitude), a technology-oriented centre for arts production and research (Hangar) and a design college (Bau) in Barcelona. From January onward, we open up the inventory in and to a.pass as a resource to be reworked, annotated, appropriated and expanded. Possible Bodies changes rhythm in order to prepare a fourth rotation in the fall that might take the shape of a publication.

      The presence of the Possible Bodies inventory, its methodologies and some of its agents at a.pass can hopefully allow further inquiries into the tensions between ‘probable’ and ‘possible’. As an object of study, we will for example be exploring the workings and worldings of Slicer, an open source software platform for medical image informatics, image processing, and three-dimensional visualization. The software ecology of Slicer interests us because it allows us to explore processes of articulation, dissection, separation, segmentation, segregation and difference.

      Jara Rocha (Barcelona) is a mediator/curator teaching projects at Bau Design College of Barcelona. She is co-inventor of the Possible Bodies project (Schloss Solitude, Hangar, a.pass, Constant) and participates in The Darmstadt Delegation. Jara often works with the materialities of present cultures (infrastructures, text logistics, body inscriptions) and tests non-formal ways of learning in collective situations like Euraca Seminar, Objetologías, or Relearn Summerschool.

    • 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. 

       

      26. Okt

      Eleanor Ivory Weber

      The World Today / All In The Mind

      "“…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.
      //// Please bring ID for library registration, a smartphone/laptop (with charger) and head/earphones. "

       

      24. Okt

      Pia Louwerens

      From I to we - Excavating reality together, at home

      From I to we serves as an introduction into my practice inside its subjective core: my own home at Rue Blaes 244. After a performance the audience is invited to rewrite the script, rewarded with a warm meal cooked by the artist herself.

      25. Okt 

      Hoda Siahtiri

      If the past is really passed?! An introduction to co-experincing the others' trauma.

      The city of Brussels is holding a part of my past, I take you to one of the most traumatic places of Brussels for me.

       

      26.Okt 

      Geert Vaes

      La Flandre Profonde/Into The Heart Of Flanders

      Visiting and interrogating theatre amateurs rehearsing 'Het Gezin Van Paemel', a flemish classic and theatrical mask for a flemish identity. The 'interrogation' consists of a group constellation + witnessing the rehearsal + an interview.

       

      27. Okt

      Sven Dehens

      Untitled Excursion 

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

       

      30. Okt

      Shervin Kianersi

      For to Know Nothing Is Nothing

      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? 

       

      31.Okt

      Elen Braga

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

      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 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 be subside, and... Take your hand car and come with me. We need to find another ground to walk by: the unpromised land and the magics balls...

       

      1.Nov 

      Leo Kay

      The time it takes to think

      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. 

       

      2. Nov

      Luisa Filiitz

      A collection of Impressions

      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.

       

      3.Nov

      Eszter Némethi

      War-/-Lace and Vertigo

      An excursion is a military term to describe a short entry to enemy territory without formal announcement of war. This excursion is an invitation to explore the ways in which spaces and materials can become instructions and how this relates to participation in complex systems. What is the the agency of things, participants and also the host. Can we listen to things in order to decipher their fictions? And can we remain complicated to each other? You will visit the Kantcentrum in Brugge and the NATO Headquarters in Evere . I will do my best to host you. You will be largely following instructions, reading, making, observing, walking and looking for gaps. You will then return to a playground for discussion at a.pass. I will make you dinner.

       

      17. Nov

      Marialena Marouda

      Flemish Marine Institue: Marine Station Ostend (MSO)

      A tour of the Marine Station Ostend and its research vessel Simon Stervin by marine biologist Dr. Andre Cattrijsee. My interest is to get a glimpse of the tools that the research institute uses in order to study the ocean. What language is used and what are the measurement instruments in the laboratories? What kind of ocean is produced through them?

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • Trouble seeing this email? Online version here.

      newscaption

       

       

       

      You are warmly Invited to 

      ____

      The
      Document

      Trans-
      formed

      ____

       Masterclasses and Seminar
      +
      Book launch 'Dirty room' Juan Dominguez
      a.pass research centre publication

      JUNE 22-23-24 @ LA BELLONE
      Rue de Flandre 46
      Brussels

       

       


      Curated by Sofia Caesar and Lilia Mestre, the public program “The Document Transformed” invites four practitioners that offer very distinct questions, methods, and proposals to problems related to documentation. Join Femke Snelting, Olga de Soto, Vincent Meessen, and Agency (Kobe Matthys), and others, for three days of presentations, screenings, performances and conversations. How does the document affect practices, bodies, histories, and experiences? The event brings together practices that not only give sight to the power relations engendered by apparatuses of documentation, but also move towards the transformation of the systems in which we produce history, law, art, and the body. Held in the context of The Problem of the Score, block curated by Lilia Mestre in the a.pass post-master research program and supported by a.pass. 

      In the frame of the seminar the book Dirty Room will be presented. It is the fourth and last phase of Juan Dominguez’s research, developed during 2015-16 as a.pass associate researcher.

       

      This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone

      PROGRAM 

      Thursday 22 June 

      10:00 > 13:00    Masterclass Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai)

      Friday 23 June

      10:00 >13:00     Exhibition visit ( Bozar ) and discussion with Vincent Meessen

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Olga de Soto

      To inscribe to the master-classes please send an email to production@apass.be
      1 Masterclass: 15 Euro, 2 Masterclasses: 20 Euro, 2 days: 30 Euro.
      Free for (ex) participants of a.pass

      Saturday June 24th 12:00 > 18:00 
      FREE, reservation appreciated 

      In this afternoon of presentations, screenings, and performances, the four invited practitioners will take us to dive deeper into different case studies.

      12:30    Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk
      13:00    Femke Snelting
      14:00    Olga de Soto
      PAUSE
      15:30    Vincent Meessen
      16:30    Agency (Kobe Matthys)
      17:30    Book launch with Juan Dominguez and Victoria Perez Rojo


      Don't forget to reserve for your Masterclass by sending an email to : production@apass.be

      DETAILED PROGRAM DOWN BELOW

       

       

      Detailed program:


       

      Thursday June 22nd

      10:00 > 13:00        Masterclass Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices? Intellectual property seems to be mostly reserved for “fixated” things. Although the European copyright law doesn’t exclude variability, during jurisprudences judges consider movements that are “recordable” in some way or another. Agency calls forth different controversies from recorded movements in dance and performance and sport. By paying attention to the consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property right for the protocols inherent to practices, the fragility of the mode of existence of singular art practices is made explicit.

       

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai)

      This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains one of the most commonly used file-formats for transposing movement captured in physical space, to a computational environment. Around this relatively legible format, a rich ecology of software tools developed. The file-format functions as a boundary object between practices and bodies, as it is used by animators, game developers, interface researchers, medical professionals, dance-historians, sports-analysts and engineers.

      Together we will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      The reading of the .bvh file format is developed with Adva Zakai in the context of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, and the matter-cultural conditions of possibility that render them present.

       

      Friday June 23rd

      10:00 >13:00        Exhibition visit (Bozar) and discussion with Vincent Meessen
                                       
      Starts at Main entrance of Bozar.

      In this afternoon, artist Vincent Meessen will take us through his Bozar show, that comes from his recent practice that involves research, historicization, and speculation about congolese works of art that have been commissioned and (re-)contextualized in the early 30’s. Starting from there, we can raise some issues about what a work of art is expected to be and how it can shift meaning with context and neighbouring artefacts.

      More about the show Patterns for (Re)cognition by Tshela Tendu & Vincent Meessen, Opening 16th June at BOZAR: http://www.bozar.be/nl/activities/124891-tshela-tendu-vincent-meessen

       

      14:00 >17:00       Masterclass Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share her research project that has Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table (1932) as a starting point. She will display the process, methods, research protocols and strategies that she has developed over time, and through which she addresses the question of reconstruction, re-enactment and revival from the perspective of the trace, both material and immaterial, in order to analyse the several charges the work contain (social, political, dramatic, emotional…).

      She will share with us how she approached Jooss’ work through the archive, the trace and the document, proposing to circumvent the traditional modalities of transmission in dance, in order to probe the archive’s “capabilities” to say the work, as well to examine the archive’s “becoming-work”.

      We will observe how the project and its process unfolded simultaneously into two levels: on a documentary research level and on a creation level. With the help of several documents, we will observe how the documentary research was developed, dedicated in part to researching and documenting the perception and transmission of The Green Table, seeking out iconographic material (through the gathering of numerous documents of different kinds), analysing the choreographic characteristics of the work and looking for witnesses – dancers and audience members from different origins and generations, in order to study the perception of the work through the prism of the viewer’s gaze (using the interview as a tool to collect memories, focusing on the importance of the testimony and oral sources).

       

      Saturday June 24th 12:30 > 19:00

      In this afternoon of presentations, screenings, and performances, the four invited practitioners will take us to dive deeper into different case studies.
       
      12:30   Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk

      13:00  Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting will present a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. Together they will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      14:00 Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share some excerpts of Débords, work presented at Les Halles in 2012, as well as some excerpts of the installation she is currently working on, and that was partially presented this Spring at Museum für Neue Kunst, in Freiburg. The presentation will be punctuated with a discussion on the work.

      PAUSE

      15:30  Vincent Meessen

      Vincent Meessen will screen “One. Two. Three.”, piece presented in Wiels in 2016, followed by a talk about his strategies of re-composition and counter-narratives.

      16:30 Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices?” Thing 001678 (Le Jeune Homme et la Mort) concerns a conflict between on the one hand Roger Eudes, Théâtre Champs-Elysées, and on the other hand Jean Guttmann (Babilée) and Jean Cocteau about the performance Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. On June 8, 1960, the court case Eudes c. Gutmann, Cocteau et autres took place at the Cour d’appel de Paris. Judge Rousselet had to decide who owned the rights over the movements of the performance, Eudes who hired Jean Gutmann to “translate” Jean Cocteau his drama into ballet movements or Cocteau who wrote the script of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.

      17:30 Book launch with Juan Dominguez and Victoria Perez Rojo

      The book Dirty Room is the fourth and last phase of Juan Dominguez’s research, developed during 2015-16 as a.pass associate researcher. Dirty Room is a collection of outlines, notes, ideas, reflections, photographic materials, maps, manifestos, fragments from diaries, transcriptions of conversations, interviews, email exchanges, memoirs, memories and scripts, among other documents from the working and research process that led to Clean RoomClean Room was a project based on the concept of seriality with a pilot and 3 more seasons of 6 episodes each that took place from 2010 to 2016.

      Dirty Room offers the readers an immersion in the process of the project Clean Room. It is a book in which there are no critical essays, or texts speaking only from the external position of the spectator. All of the contributions are part of the ongoing research and working process of Clean Room, either continually accompanying it over long periods or as one-off contributions at a specific moments. This decision highlights the great potential of the process in its fragmentary, undefined and open nature not only for the transmission of knowledge and ideas, but above all for stimulating imaginative processes to connect with the concerns that set the series in motion.

      Dirty Room

      Edited by: Juan Domínguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

      Editorial: Continta me tienes

      Executive Production: manyone

      Madrid, May 2017

      Translations by Ana Buitrago, Simon Malone and Catherine Phelps

      This is a publication by the a.pass research centre.

       


       

      About the participants:

      Vincent Meessen

      Through the use of various media, Meessen aims to ‘experience the document and document the experience’. His investigations lead to associations and appropriative gestures that are rewritten into critical narratives, pointing to the colonial matrix of western modernity. Meessen reactivates hidden traces of the colonial in the present and opens up new speculative scenarios.

      Both in his work as an artist and in his para-curatorial activities, Meessen likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives. With ten guests artists, Meessen represented Belgium at the 56th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include: OK/KO in the frame of Dans la pluralité des mondes / Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse (F), 2016; Sire je suis de l’ôtre pays in WIELS, Brussels 2016 and Patterns for (Re)cognition at the Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Recent group presentations include Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future, Taipei Biennale, Taiwan and The Family of the Invisible at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).
       

      Agency

      Agency is a Brussels-based initiative founded in 1992, which constitutes a growing list of ‘things’ that resist the radical split between the classifications of “nature” and “culture” and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and common, mind and body, etc.

       

      Femke Snelting (Possible Bodies)

      Artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, the Brussels-based association for arts and media, and co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP). With delegates Jara Rocha, Seda Guerses and Miriyam Aouragh she takes part in the Darmstadt Delegation, assigned to explore techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist practice and tools. She formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring and recently co-ordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a European partnership investigating inter-relations between free software tools and artistic practice. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (Master Media Design and Communication).

      Possible Bodies is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in contact with the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices. The research is concerned with genealogies of how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted. It interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modelling. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments. Collectors: Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting.

      Her collaborator Adva Zakai is a choreographer, performer and curator who explores how body and language are perceived through each other.
       

      Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto Olga de Soto is choreographer and dance researcher, born in Valencia, she lives in Brussels. She graduates from CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, after having studied classical ballet, contemporary dance and music theory in Valencia and in Madrid. Her creation work begins in 1992, and includes the creation of numerous works of different formats. Since the end of the ’90, her work focuses on the study of memory, and it questions the impact of live art, its usefulness its lasting quality, deploying itself along two axes. The first centres on the study of the body’s memory through the creation of works, aiming at a pluralistic approach to dance and the body, in works creations such as anarborescences (Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris, 1999), Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004-2009). The second axis explores works from the history of dance as part of an approach governed by the study of perceptual memory, that of spectators and dancers. The resulting projects emphasize the importance of the processes and pay particular attention to documents, to the process of documentation, to testimony, to archives and oral sources, narrative and storytelling, particularly in works such as histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), An Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010) or Débords (Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2012). These projects are interested in the experience of the viewer and in the anthropology of the spectacle, while developing through an approach that studies the aesthetic experience based on the oral history of works from the past. Her last projects genuinely mix the languages of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts and installation, playing with the porousness of these disciplines. The work of the choreographer also reveals the strong links between art history, social and political history, and personal paths. Olga de Soto’s work has been shown in some twenty countries, an she is regularly invited to teach and to lead workshops and classes in various universities, as well as to collaborate in conferences where she shares her research methodology and her documentation work. She was awarded the SACD Prize 2013 in the category of Performing Arts for both her trajectory and her research work on Dance History, and specially for her research and creation work on The Green Table.

       
       

      THE
      DOCUMENT

      TRANS-
      FORMED


      JUNE 22-23-24
      @ LA BELLONE
      Rue de Flandre 46
      Brussels

       
       


       a.pass

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • MEDIUM SCORE follows on previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing.

      If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of our relation with the world, then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen phenomenological relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?

      This time the practice of The Medium Score will focus on how different formats of communication intertwine in the making and the analyses of each others researches. Each time every participant will contribute with a 5 minutes template of his/her research as a module of knowledge processing within the common environment of a.pass post master.

      The score brings about the importance of art practice and research as a discursive tool. The score pushes for an assemblage of layers – philosophical, emotional, aesthetic, economic, critical, social-  that form a reflection of the world and the role of art within it. Every art work has a relation with multiple layers and constructs itself upon that basis. The context of each artistic research is variable and is therefor a contribution for a plural approach of relations.


    • Curated by Sofia Caesar and Lilia Mestre, the public program “The Document Transformed” invites four practitioners that offer very distinct questions, methods, and proposals to problems related to documentation. Join Femke Snelting, Olga de Soto, Vincent Meessen, and Agency (Kobe Matthys), and others, for three days of presentations, screenings, performances and conversations. How does the document affect practices, bodies, histories, and experiences? The event brings together practices that not only give sight to the power relations engendered by apparatuses of documentation, but also move towards the transformation of the systems in which we produce history, law, art, and the body. Held in the context of The Problem of the Score, block curated by Lilia Mestre in the a.pass post-master research program and supported by a.pass.

      This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone - Brussels

      To inscribe to the master-classes please send an email to production@apass.be


      JUNE 22-23-24 @ LA BELLONE
      Rue de Flandre 46
      Brussels

      Detailed program:

      Thursday June 22nd

      10:00 > 13:00        Masterclass Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices? Intellectual property seems to be mostly reserved for “fixated” things. Although the European copyright law doesn't exclude variability, during jurisprudences judges consider movements that are “recordable” in some way or another. Agency calls forth different controversies from recorded movements in dance and performance and sport. By paying attention to the consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property right for the protocols inherent to practices, the fragility of the mode of existence of singular art practices is made explicit.

       

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai)

      This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains one of the most commonly used file-formats for transposing movement captured in physical space, to a computational environment. Around this relatively legible format, a rich ecology of software tools developed. The file-format functions as a boundary object between practices and bodies, as it is used by animators, game developers, interface researchers, medical professionals, dance-historians, sports-analysts and engineers.

      Together we will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      The reading of the .bvh file format is developed with Adva Zakai in the context of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, and the matter-cultural conditions of possibility that render them present.

       

      Friday June 23rd

      10:00 >13:00        Exhibition visit (Bozar) and discussion with Vincent Meessen
      Starts at Bozar Main entrance

      In this afternoon, artist Vincent Meessen will take us through his Bozar show, that comes from his recent practice that involves research, historicization, and speculation about congolese works of art that have been commissioned and (re-)contextualized in the early 30’s. Starting from there, we can raise some issues about what a work of art is expected to be and how it can shift meaning with context and neighbouring artefacts.

      More about the show Patterns for (Re)cognition by Tshela Tendu & Vincent Meessen, Opening 16th June at BOZAR: http://www.bozar.be/nl/activities/124891-tshela-tendu-vincent-meessen

       

      14:00 >17:00       Masterclass Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share her research project that has Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table (1932) as a starting point. She will display the process, methods, research protocols and strategies that she has developed over time, and through which she addresses the question of reconstruction, re-enactment and revival from the perspective of the trace, both material and immaterial, in order to analyse the several charges the work contain (social, political, dramatic, emotional...).

      She will share with us how she approached Jooss' work through the archive, the trace and the document, proposing to circumvent the traditional modalities of transmission in dance, in order to probe the archive’s "capabilities" to say the work, as well to examine the archive's "becoming-work".

      We will observe how the project and its process unfolded simultaneously into two levels: on a documentary research level and on a creation level. With the help of several documents, we will observe how the documentary research was developed, dedicated in part to researching and documenting the perception and transmission of The Green Table, seeking out iconographic material (through the gathering of numerous documents of different kinds), analysing the choreographic characteristics of the work and looking for witnesses – dancers and audience members from different origins and generations, in order to study the perception of the work through the prism of the viewer’s gaze (using the interview as a tool to collect memories, focusing on the importance of the testimony and oral sources).

       

      Saturday June 24th 12:00 > 18:00

      In this afternoon of presentations, screenings, and performances, the four invited practitioners will take us to dive deeper into different case studies.

       

      12:30   Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk

      13:00  Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting will present a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. Together they will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      14:00 Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share some excerpts of Débords, work presented at Les Halles in 2012, as well as some excerpts of the installation she is currently working on, and that was partially presented this Spring at Museum für Neue Kunst, in Freiburg. The presentation will be punctuated with a discussion on the work.

       

      PAUSE

       

      15:30  Vincent Meessen

      Vincent Meessen will screen “One. Two. Three.”, piece presented in Wiels in 2016, followed by a talk about his strategies of re-composition and counter-narratives.

      16:30 Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices?” Thing 001678 (Le Jeune Homme et la Mort) concerns a conflict between on the one hand Roger Eudes, Théâtre Champs-Elysées, and on the other hand Jean Guttmann (Babilée) and Jean Cocteau about the performance Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. On June 8, 1960, the court case Eudes c. Gutmann, Cocteau et autres took place at the Cour d’appel de Paris. Judge Rousselet had to decide who owned the rights over the movements of the performance, Eudes who hired Jean Gutmann to “translate” Jean Cocteau his drama into ballet movements or Cocteau who wrote the script of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.

      17:30 Book launch with Juan Dominguez and Victoria Perez Rojo

      The book Dirty Room is the fourth and last phase of Juan Dominguez’s research, developed during 2015-16 as a.pass associate researcher. Dirty Room is a collection of outlines, notes, ideas, reflections, photographic materials, maps, manifestos, fragments from diaries, transcriptions of conversations, interviews, email exchanges, memoirs, memories and scripts, among other documents from the working and research process that led to Clean Room. Clean Room was a project based on the concept of seriality with a pilot and 3 more seasons of 6 episodes each that took place from 2010 to 2016.

      Dirty Room offers the readers an immersion in the process of the project Clean Room. It is a book in which there are no critical essays, or texts speaking only from the external position of the spectator. All of the contributions are part of the ongoing research and working process of Clean Room, either continually accompanying it over long periods or as one-off contributions at a specific moments. This decision highlights the great potential of the process in its fragmentary, undefined and open nature not only for the transmission of knowledge and ideas, but above all for stimulating imaginative processes to connect with the concerns that set the series in motion.

      Dirty Room

      Edited by: Juan Domínguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

      Editorial: Continta me tienes

      Executive Production: manyone

      Madrid, May 2017

      Translations by Ana Buitrago, Simon Malone and Catherine Phelps

      This is a publication by the a.pass research centre.

       

      About the participants

      Vincent Meessen

      "Transform documents into experiences and vice versa". This phrase by Aby Warburg could definitely be used to introduce Vincent Meessen's speculative realism, or as he calls it: 'documents d'expérience'. His archival investigations always lead to loose associations and appropriative gestures that are rewritten into critical narratives.

      In his latest modular installations he combines films with printed matter and sculptures. Meessen produces narratives that question our ability to deal with the colonial ghosts of modernity. In his recent Vita Nova, he makes use of the filmic essay to re-read Roland Barthes in various postcolonial African situations, applying Barthes's deconstruction tools to some of his famous texts. Vincent Meessen likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives and of conceptual characters. He is a founding member of the artist collective Potential Estate and of the platform for artistic research and production Jubilee (jubilee-art.org).  

      Recent shows include KIOSK (Ghent), ARS 11, Kiasma Museum (Helsinki), Stedelijk Museum Bureau (Amsterdam) and Contour Biennial for Moving Images (Mechelen). He worked together with the collective Potential Estate for the Brussels Biennial and M HKA (Antwerp). His filmworks were screened at Jeu de Paume, at Cinémathèque française (Paris), at Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), at the Swiss Institute (NY) and at international festivals such as IDFA (Amsterdam), IFFR (Rotterdam), Cinéma du Réel (Paris) and Transmediale (Berlin). His films are distributed by Argos center for art & media (Brussels) (see also section on Art Organisations). Meessen has curated several film programs and exhibitions for various institutions including Extra City (Antwerp), Argos (Brussels), C.E.A.C (Xiamen, CH), E.R.B.A (Valence, F).

       

      Agency

      Agency is a Brussels-based initiative founded in 1992, which constitutes a growing list of 'things' that resist the radical split between the classifications of "nature" and "culture" and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and common, mind and body, etc.

       

      Femke Snelting (Possible Bodies)

      Artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, the Brussels-based association for arts and media, and co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP). With delegates Jara Rocha, Seda Guerses and Miriyam Aouragh she takes part in the Darmstadt Delegation, assigned to explore techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist practice and tools. She formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring and recently co-ordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a European partnership investigating inter-relations between free software tools and artistic practice. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (Master Media Design and Communication).

      Possible Bodies is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in contact with the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices. The research is concerned with genealogies of how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted. It interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modelling. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments. Collectors: Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting.

      Her collaborator Adva Zakai is a choreographer, performer and curator who explores how body and language are perceived through each other.

       

      Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto Olga de Soto is choreographer and dance researcher, born in Valencia, she lives in Brussels. She graduates from CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, after having studied classical ballet, contemporary dance and music theory in Valencia and in Madrid. Her creation work begins in 1992, and includes the creation of numerous works of different formats. Since the end of the ’90, her work focuses on the study of memory, and it questions the impact of live art, its usefulness its lasting quality, deploying itself along two axes. The first centres on the study of the body's memory through the creation of works, aiming at a pluralistic approach to dance and the body, in works creations such as anarborescences (Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris, 1999), Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004-2009). The second axis explores works from the history of dance as part of an approach governed by the study of perceptual memory, that of spectators and dancers. The resulting projects emphasize the importance of the processes and pay particular attention to documents, to the process of documentation, to testimony, to archives and oral sources, narrative and storytelling, particularly in works such as histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), An Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010) or Débords (Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2012). These projects are interested in the experience of the viewer and in the anthropology of the spectacle, while developing through an approach that studies the aesthetic experience based on the oral history of works from the past. Her last projects genuinely mix the languages of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts and installation, playing with the porousness of these disciplines. The work of the choreographer also reveals the strong links between art history, social and political history, and personal paths. Olga de Soto’s work has been shown in some twenty countries, an she is regularly invited to teach and to lead workshops and classes in various universities, as well as to collaborate in conferences where she shares her research methodology and her documentation work. She was awarded the SACD Prize 2013 in the category of Performing Arts for both her trajectory and her research work on Dance History, and specially for her research and creation work on The Green Table.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2017/II
    • Medium Score
    • The Problem of the Score
    • The Medium Score Thinking making together apart
      07 May 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Lilia Mestre
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The Medium Score

      The proposal for this block follows on previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing.

      If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of our relation with the world, then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen phenomenological relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?

      This time the practice of The Medium Score will focus on how different formats of communication intertwine in the making and the analyses of each others researches. Each time every participant will contribute with a 5 minutes template of his/her research as a module of knowledge processing within the common environment of a.pass post master.

      The score brings about the importance of art practice and research as a discursive tool. The score pushes for an assemblage of layers - philosophical, emotional, aesthetic, economic, critical, social-  that form a reflection of the world and the role of art within it. Every art work has a relation with multiple layers and constructs itself upon that basis. The context of each artistic research is variable and is therefor a contribution for a plural approach of relations.

      GENERAL FRAME : MMM - Medium, Methodology, Model

      Medium

      Use the medium you wish. Answer the questions that will be addressed to you always with the same medium. Be aware you can change medium just once and when you do so you’ll have to explain why.

      Methodology

      Through the practice of the score the methodological approach of the singular researches will emerge by the way participants will compose their replies. The score allows for the cognition of the individual methodological approaches.

      Model

      By the end of the score practice each of us will make a model of each of our researches. A model is a visualisation of the connections that the researches propose and the links they have with modes of production, the societal environment, the philosophical, architectural, political, etc, fields that the singular researches entail.


      INSTRUCTIONS

      -We meet every week on Thursdays from 17:00 till 21:00 on a.pass 4th floor studio.
      -We bring food to share.
      -We work with the people present. It’s not possible to participate remotely by email or other telematic means.
      -There is no audience.If you don’t have work to present you skip a session.

      The score is simple. It works as follows:

      Proposition > (X 8 question > reply ) > model

      To start:

      The first meeting each of us presents a 5 minutes sample of our research question. The sample is communicated as performance, text, object, dissertation,…It manifest the content of the research and the medium through which the research is taking place.

      The questions

      After we assist to each others presentations we assign by chance procedure who is asking questions to whom.

      Each of us has two days to formulate a question to one of the researchers that has presented her/his work. Questions are sent by email.

      The questions are a dialectic tool to engage in the discursiveness of artistic practice and research. They aim to argument what is at stake, its implications and further relations in the artistic research environment. They are the indicators of the dialogical potential of each research project. They are the motor of a process of sharing, contaminating, contradicting, thinking / making together apart. Questions are an intrinsic and important component of the score. Think them, contextualize them, offer them.

      The replies

      After receiving your questions you have 5 days to develop an answer with the medium you’ve chosen. You present your reply the week after in a 5 minutes template. And so forth till the end of the block.

      Change

      If you want to change medium during the score practice it is possible to do it once. You have to argument your choice when you decide to do so.


      PUBLICATION

      We think together how we will publish the practice of the score. How do we make public our processes? The question of documentation and archive is a collective process. The result will be decided by all of us and the materials we generate. A publication will be issued after the block finishes.


    • postgraduate program
    • block 2017/III
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • UNINVITED RESEARCH II BLOCK III, SEPT-NOV 2017
      21 April 2017
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • 01 September 2017
    • 30 November 2017
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • UNINVITED RESEARCH II
      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.
       
      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 their research. The excursions will be maximum one day or night long and  be attended by the a.pass participants (and will be in most cases be open to the general public on a sign-up basis). Some of them will be collaborative experiments, some will address a specific question from a current research of the a.pass participant. All proposals will work with a specific practice of being on the move together, of doing research on site and of documenting and publishing.
        
      In collaboration with the Research Center we will explore the process of zine-ing (or making a zine) as a collective and nomadic publishing machine throughout the block and specifically towards it end. 
       
      On the theoretical and critical side of things 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. 
       
      To work on these themes the excursion practice will be supported by several external inputs from the areas of de-colonial theory, urbanism and feminist critique. More detailed information about those events you will find on our webpage soon.
      The preparation of, the excursions and the documentation will be done in three collective periods throughout the block. 


      Part one: Reading, Inspiration and Preparation 
      Sept 4th-30th

       
      OPENING WEEK : Sept 4-8th
      We will take this week to welcome the new researchers to apass and to meet the mentors. During the opening week we will present our researches to each other and get to know each others work in its current state. We will frame the presentations through a collective mis-reading of the zine of the previous excursions block and the themes and problems established there. 
       
      WORKSHOP Making Public Domain : 11th - 15th September  - Middelheim Museum - Antwerp 
       (free of charge for apass researchers)
       
      Summer School #2 ‘MAKING PUBLIC DOMAIN’ will examine how public domain can be made and what role art can play in this. The starting point is that public space does not actually exist, but must constantly be created and activated. Which strategies then - artistic, civil, activist, social, political, legal, etc - are able to generate public space?
       
      Artists, experts, policy-makers and academics (art academics, jurists, urbanists, media specialists and so on) will tackle a different theme every day. By means of workshops, lectures, artistic interventions and case studies, summer school participants will be actively involved in a 5-day exchange between artists and experts unravelling the concepts and practice of ‘making public domain’.
       
      The 5-day Summer School opens up an interdisciplinary network of professionals, knowledge and expertise, creating a shared scenario allowing for a collective and individual learning process. During the day an inspiring selection of relevant cases connected to the theme of the day will be introduced, allowing anyone to participate and contribute to the discussion from their own perspective. In the evening the Summer School offers insights on the topic to a wider public of stakeholders.
       
      PREPARATION : Sept 18-30th
      We will spend those two weeks reading, discussing and preparing our respective excursions with each other.  We will read on decolonial perspectives on research, ethnography and geography.  In addition to that several artists will join us for one-day inputs on research ontology, brussels lore, and spatial practice. The artist researchers Pierre Rubio (apass Research Center block 3 2017), Peggy Pierrot, David Helbig, the architect Miriam Rohde and the writer Luanda Casella have been asked to inform our preparation process. during those two weeks. 
       
      Part two: Excursions and Feedback
       
      EXCURSIONS: 23rd Okt - Nov 4th
      This will be the second big collective moment of the block. We will join each-others proposals. Each researcher will be responsible for organising one  (max one day) excursion for the others. We are planning for mentors to join some of the excursions, and we will facilitate two collective moments with the apass artistic team to start the week off and to engage in a collective feedback moment towards the end. 
       
      Part three: Documentation, Collective Zine-ing, PAF
       
      WRITING WORKSHOP Forged Theory
      with Peter Stamer and Vladimir Miller
      This workshop will engage in playful methods of writing theory by using methods of dialogue, stream of consciousness and combining them with a structural/analytical approach to reading theoretical texts: how are they made? Which rhetoric figures and structures of support of an argument are used? Can we use them as playful toolkit to make up our own theories in fragile support of our practice?
       
      COLLECTIVE ZINE-ING: 20-24th Nov
      As a documentation, reflection and review process we will engage in a collective process of making a zine or several zines together. We will tackle the Zine-ing in relation with and supported by a.pass Research Center to nurture a general concern around methodologies of documentation.  How will the documentation process of Zine-ing the excursions will affect our practices and experiences? And how the Zine-ing can constitute a model for experimental documentation? At large a.pass Research Center will focus on problematising the Zine-ing process as well as the Zine-ing will problematise some of the key concerns of a.pass around the nature and operativity of forms of documentation.
       
      ENDWEEK: 26th Nov-2nd Dec
      Performing Arts Forum - St Erme - France. 
      only for apass participants. 
       
       
      Mentors 
      Caroline Godart 
      Heike Langsdorf
      Pierre Rubio
      Peggy Pierrot



      More information about the block soon!

    •  

       

      Perform Back Score
      Conditions for the emergence of poetics
      A way of life



      Perform Back Score was a proposal for the block Jan/April 2015 of the post masters a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Brussels. The program is based on 4 months blocks throughout the year, each of them concentrating on specific curatorial proposals concerned with contemporary art practices, the present socioeconomic paradigm and the role of education.

      As associate program curator for the first four months of 2014, 2015 and 2016 my focus was and is on how systems of interaction in the arts contribute to the production (process? creation?) of knowledge, first of all in the educational context and consequently, in my belief, in other social environments. I take these systems as scores that, when followed rigorously, demand the implication of individual engagement and resources in a much needed share-ability within a system of production and observation.
      In the act of giving attention to one’s own work, to the other’s work but also to the group and its context, the ecological and social aspects of art making are reflected and expanded. The inter-subjective bound takes place beyond the art works and practices themselves but in the act of paying attention, of observing and being observed.

      In 2014 I proposed in this same context a score for dialogue through writing titled “Writing Scores” where the participants were invited to meet weekly for a Q&A format practice where writing was the tool to deepen the observation of one’s own work methodologies and interests as well as the development of writing itself. This score allowed for valuable understanding of the individual and collective practices and stressed writing as a working tool for collaboration. For this time the focus was on performance as a discursive practice.

      PBScore

      PBScore is a score based on performance as a form of dialogue. For each session each participant presented a maximum 5 minutes long performance  that were showed one after the other without interruption in our weekly meetings. While assisting in each other’s performances, participants took notes and from those notes key words were pronounced to start a discussion about our impressions. At the end of each session participants selected to whom they wanted to reply to the week after and
      in between sessions, a report was written based on the keywords and the conversation that followed. The 9 sessions took place once a week between January and March 2015.
       
      The score participant in each performance exposed his /her own semantics, by constructing a response to another participant, activating a critical standpoint that in its turn become the object of critical observation. The players, by accepting the pre-established rules agreed to play the game that excluded them from daily routine and brought them to a concrete situation limited in time and space. This specific score was dealing simultaneously with the exclusion from daily life or personal  practice and the inclusion in a situation of dialogue through singular aesthetics. The participants instead of relating to material that they select through their interests and methodology had instead to relate to material that came from the other participants, bringing them to relate in ways that were not their usual approach.  The overall format of presentation was also not a familiar one, even though it had the condition of a stage.  A small area formed by mobile walls created a room in a room, a video camera was standing outside the space in the centre, the other participants stood behind the camera unless it was assigned other wise by the performer.
      The same situation re-started the following week at point zero again. The number and the mood of the players changed each time we re-started allowing for radical exposure and deep critic. The week after, the players could have been others, the response to ones previous performance could have not been present ... By playing the score there was the acceptance of inconsistency, of moving in blurry waters, of taking care of the space in between.What kind of attention is given when one spends some time reflecting and trying to respond carefully to another's aesthetic proposal?

      There is a strong political stand point on the giving of time, of taking the other seriously, on paying attention to someone or something that might and most probably will not give you anything concrete back, apart from the sustainability of dialogue indispensable for practicing being alive, being human.


      The score as partner that speaks back /
      Performance as feedback study

      The first impulse to make such a proposal came from my desire to make  art speak through its own practice. I wanted to confront discourse to other forms of language, in this case performance and its discursive potential. Not in a linear, brick by brick, way of constructing meaning, but in an assemblage of atemporal experiences. The performances replied the previous performance creating another time space relationship with the questions that were originated. The meaning was build by bubbles that had affinities between them and these bubbles created a rhyzomatic structure of thought and experience.

      I’m very interested in the idea of emphasising method as a collaborator that makes visible and foregrounds the dialogue between several elements and layers of the art works. When we take the structure of a project as an active collaborator by making its conditions operational and visible, we engage in the observation of those conditions on the work itself, revealing their intrinsic potential for communication, sharing and learning. PBScore intention is to invite the structure to be a partner of reflection, encapsulating the work in restrictions (like time, spacial area, technical tools where all limited) but forcing it to spill over when manipulated, crafted and exposed to others. The score as a structure allowed to set up the rules of the game and generate a dynamic of encounters that were the container for the performance experiences.

      In other words, by proposing an observation standpoint, a frame to look through, the score reflects at the same time the event itself and our individual and collective relation towards it.
      In the case of PBScore, the co-habitation of the performances, the observation lens (score), the subjects and the time we shared, were all partakers in the action of learning and constituted the conditions for the emergence of meaning and its share-ability.

      For example some of the participants decided to work with a same material during the 9 sessions making the material work on its flexibility, adaptability to the other and therefor discovering situations that would not have come by themselves. In these cases the score worked as a lens, amplifying the potential of the material itself and shifting our attention as witnesses into the potential inherent to the material. Others worked more intuitively, choosing on element of the performance they had to reply to, and transforming it, giving it another meaning, deviating it from it’s first sense, discovering in this case what catches the eye. Others functioned was translators of performances and in other cases a subject as the ‘hand’ became topic for a long sequence of proposals and responses.

      Obviously not all these  responses worked as we wanted. Many questions appeared towards the sense one could make out of it. In some cases they worked critically, other times as negations, or as empathy.


      Laboratory/observatory

      As an  laboratory/observatory  this process raised some questions: What do we do when we are responding to each other? What criteria do we use to select what to respond to? Critical thought? The affect towards another? Philosophical stand points? Political correctness? Desire?

      PBScore wanted to isolate responses in time and space in order to observe and reflect on dialogical mechanisms between the object of observation and the observer, between the one who answers and the one who listens. The process of this observation was individual and private  in a first instance to then became  individual and collective in the moment of sharing with the other members of the group. The weekly meetings and the time for reflection and constructing responses had quite different qualities in the process of the score. On the one hand the in-between periods in which each participant had the other in mind, living together in a way, with the proposal s/he had to reply to, and on the other hand the exposure of each participant in the collective weekly moments. These two divergent poles of activity combined the subjective agency of the participants with the social agencies  created by the context of a.pass.

      These intimacy and ‘extimacy’ moments elaborated on the process of learning not just as an individual practice depending on each person’s singular perception, but extending it to social and collective environment. In this case the environment of the post-master participants in performance and scenography studies with a focus on self-education and collaboration. My interest at this point was to practice the construction of art (knowledge) through exposure, share-ability and critical endeavour in a context of plural aesthetics.
      What happens when one has to engage with the work of another when at first instance there is no affinity?  What happens if there is a void, an incapacity of response? Or the other way around, what happens when the work of another seems to speak a very close language?

      The interest was not in creating a common standpoint for our different perceptual conditions and reflections on the performance objects that  we were part of,  but in creating an environment where those conditions and reflections could co-exist and be exchanged, allowing for critical observation, empathy, accidental correspondences, nothing, etc.
      More than in a place for common understanding, we created an experimental surface for communication in artistic research where one could observe one’s own strategies but also the ones of others, all of them contributing in a singular engagement within a group of obviously heterogeneous beings forming a plurality.
      I mean by this that the multi focal lens of this  score / tool is an apparatus for the co-habitation of different aspects of the being together, becoming a mirror of the situation itself. A mirror for the sociability implied in art making.

      These aspect was also enhanced by some performances that asked for the participation of all people present, breaking the separation  between the performance and the audience and engaging in another form of socialisation. But big contrasts happened when the next performance was a dance solo exposing the fact of being traversed by vital forces or a video piece with historical concerns on the notion of display, having in both cases a classical relation between the performance and the audience.

      PBScore comes from my desire to use performance practice in the service of dialogical contexts such as schools, art laboratories, performative encounters or any other environment in which the study of art, perception and knowledge processes is at stake. It's a learning-by-doing tool that pays attention to attention, that wants to go beyond the production of art and wants to engage in the production of life through artistic practice. Is that possible?
      I’m interested in a ‘practice the practice’ tool that sustains the learning by experience and supports the development of our relations towards the world through our concerns about the practice itself. A way to get closer, to look deeper, and at the end a way to experience present and presence. A way to re-actualise ourselves through the politics inherent in such systems of awareness, collaboration and responsibility.

      Theatre

      I would like to make an analogy to the theatre apparatus where the performers and the audience use the physical, social and political conditions of that environment as indicators of a way of looking and that frame the aesthetic experience.
      The theatre is an observatory per excellence but maybe one that is a bit too well-known. I don't think the audience presupposes anymore that everyone that sees a performance at the same time would have the same kind of interaction with it. But I want to insist exactly in that point, and to try to not pre-suppose but to be there, regardless of a strong drive in actual politics for standardisation. I’m looking here at the physical theatre and at performance (in all its forms) as places/spaces of diversity and difference which propose a way of thinking the arts as a perceptual apparatus provoking singular relations between the individual, the collective and the political.
      And with this is mind my attention at this point goes to the question: What happens when the theatre also allows for forms of non-representation, for states of presence that enhance our sociability, our criticality, our life processing capacities? There is a lot to say about this and many works lately have been developed under this question from the academic realm to the social field. In the case of PBScore the art maker and the spectator were part of the same group, alternating positions and being knowledgeable of both sides, augmenting exactly the capacity of the feedback machine that art can be but also making from each of the participants a producer and dissolving the idea of audience.
      The PBScore is an individual learning tool in a collective environment not searching for a conclusion but for a way of working together as neighbours, as important feedbackers, as engaged partners, as critical colleagues, as potential opponents in a process of orientation towards something, towards the communication of perceptual knowledge, towards the political in art making.


      Score as ecosystem

      As an interface for communication the score allows for the emergence of different voices like ghosts haunting the sensible acknowledgement of knowledge, process and concepts of art. Each participant had the same conditions to draw intentions, design orientations, make statements, have fun, take a piss, etc…, through performance practice. The scored created a force surface for the exposure of multiple existences. But what maintained the desire to come back next week? Was it the responsibility towards the other? The curiosity for the next response? The will to belong to a group? The drive of performing?

      PBScore as a horizontal structure brought about the responsibility of the ones involved as far as they wanted to be involved. It’s a structure that sustained and renewed itself on the basis of the participants and their presence. Like in any ecosystem, the species that constitute it, are the creators and instigators of the development of the ecosystem itself, their interaction constitutes its sustainability. Interestingly enough, the positions of each participant were not stable and none of them represented a fixed part of the ecosystem, but rather all of them were mutating pieces of a puzzle that constructed itself on the go. Mutual opportunism and  generosity are two sides of the same coin, like a parasitic system without aim, living for the sake of living while deepening the understanding of that specific life.
      This experience brings to the fore a complex number of elements that are inherent to a way of feeling/thinking. It reveals a universe  of interrelations between the chosen elements, forming forces of speech and the sensible that contain political perspectives and ideological concerns. Both aesthetics and ethics are intertwined  in a concise moment of exposure and attention. Justification is out of the game and rather observation and the 'being with it' are the rules through which feeling and opinion appear. Every participant is a centre with a culture, a history, a socioeconomic reality, a philosophical attitude creating therefor a poli-centered temporary community. In my opinion PBScore enhanced being plural and different as fundamentals of an ecosystem where each of the participants has a voice, where there's no obligation, where the ecosystem can't exist beyond the presence and engagement of who is part of it but exists on the tension of the plural.

      It makes me want to write down some formats that were at stake with this group of people. From dream oracles exposed through dance,  an historical fiction figure revealed through lecture performance format, trans-gender being re-actualised through documentary and live transformation, pornography in internet as a result of internet research, self becoming though the extreme use of theatre apparatus (lights, costumes, seduction, etc),  the concept of the angel creating the availability to receive/ become and much more.

      Empathetic, disruptive, enthusiastic, doubtful or convinced forces were 'performing' each time without dominating in an absolute fashion the ecosystem. This experimental format functioned as a study about aesthetics and co-existence in the performing arts, it developed special awareness about ways of thinking,  composing, sharing and engaging with a group. It gave focus to the performer, the performance space and the context where it takes place as a micro environment where the language is performance, image, text, sound, action, painting or dance…


      Flexible community without aim

      This horizontal structure implied a flexible community. A temporary, always different group of people, formed  and unformed around the weekly meetings. This score allowed for the building of a temporary community that established relations between its members and developed the sense of the doing. Performance became the time we spent together, a language spoken within this community. The system built means for communication and created the conditions for the emergence of poetics like vessels, bones, particles, all in movement. The ‘messages’ circulated through those vessels, inciting exchange and therefor producing change as a ‘natural’ consequence.

      The temporality aspect of the event and therefor of the community are very important. The score is performed in time, when it’s happening, allowing everyone to work with the present conditions and not aim for ideal circumstances,  a idealised future, or for the definition of a stale identity. Following this thought, the system can’t be understood as a goal but as a medium taking care that the  ephemeral quality of this particular process produces a vulnerable attitude towards the experience of art. It’s enhancing the desire to exchange and share worlds through practice and is not aiming to get to conclusions. If the system becomes an aim itself , it will just reproduce what we already know incapacitating the playing as revelatory practice. It is a process and it exists in the process of just doing it. But why just do it?

      Here, I would like to make a parallel between a practice like yoga or dance or a reading group for example, happening in a collective environment, and the need for sociability that brings together the individual and the collective. These gatherings set ups are learning together tools based in attention and observation. The knowledge acquired doesn’t serve anything else the vitality of knowledge itself, allowing all participants to learn through the other. These social environments are like battery  centres that inform forms of life sustained by sociability itself.  The process of socialisation  (spending time together) is endless and is pregnant, as there is the potential for the dissolution of duality between me and the other as fixed territories, the desire to become many /one. Like in a house of mirrors, PBScore was a device to the reflection and refracting of one’s one image, opening up ways of seeing, feeling and thinking the self though the other.

      The contamination of the one by the other was one of the ‘technics’ that appeared through out the score in different fashions. I remember one day someone we didn’t know presenting himself as someone that was already part of the score group and playing her role. Or the physical transformation someone into another, becoming then 2 participants which we never knew who would come to play.


      On the presence of the body

      One of the strongest rules of the PBScore is that one can not participate remotely. The presence of the body was absolutely necessary to play and witness the process of dialogue through performance in this score. As I could observe in the Writing Score proposed in 2014 the fact of gathering weekly to read the individual writings and continue the 'game' always in the presence and gaze of the others, created a specific dynamics through the rhythm of the encounters.
      The collective agreement to meet weekly created a ritualised social time/ space where alliances were built. This way a group of people created an extra - everyday rhythm where we could question and celebrate our practices.

      One of the conditions of the performing arts relies on the presence of the performers and of the audience, on the act of exchange between both parties which dissolves once the performance is over. But also on the act of memory that is activated at the precise same moment the performance disappeared and which is followed by the action of re-telling or re-processing what has happened. The intimate experience of witnessing resonates in parallel with the distance it requires to process it afterwards, both these factors are indeed of major importance in the study of performance as a critical tool. Digesting the other is of major importance for a becoming of the social body, for the possibility of a future not yet known.

      The continuous necessity of presence and distance, of the communal and the individual spaces are the necessary conditions to unravel sense(s), the relation(s) that take place, the conditions for the emergence of directions, orientations or inclinations towards what is to come. Considering these thoughts PBScore was proposing performance as rumour, as the re-telling of what has happened in one’s own gestures and gesticulations in order to re-actualise the dialogue constantly.
      To be able to participate one needs the public and the private, the institution (the score in this case in the frame of a.pass) and the intimate. PBScore was an invitation to all participants to come back to the place of the crime. An invitation to re-read and re-write presences, to unfold the stories created by the gatherings, to reformulate what remains and transforms in memory and sets the ground for the present to be.

      Every moment is unique, this time is not like the next time, what I think and feel now in this situation will not be the same in another situation. I am here and I am processing and contributing consciously and unconsciously, together and alone, deliberately or not, to what is happening, etc. Performing arts create a ritual of  presences, create a contract of attention and response between all parties. Something is unfolding and we all are part of it, we all think it, feel it, share it, though no one owns it and no one is the same. What a beautiful state to be in!

      Documentation

      This publication contains reflections about what happened in those three months. The film documentation that was used through out the score will not be used in a public realm. All the videos were data to come back to one’s own performance or the performance of another in order to reply. The use of the video camera delimitated a space of action that also functioned as another rule of the score. I remember someone performing in darkness, or doing nothing or bringing the other participants to the camera field as ways to deal with the paradoxical situation of being filmed in this context.  I don’t think the camera was at the end of much use, even though for some people the concrete material became material to construct upon.
      Another insert in this publication are the 9 reports, 8 written by myself and 1 by Philippine Hoegen that follow up the content that came about after each session.
      What is more striking to me is the fact that there is rather an afterthought built in linear language, creating an history in contrast to an absence of poetics that were all there was to experience. Maybe there’s exactly where lays the potential of performance.
      Something to think about!


      Lilia Mestre

    •  

      Written translations of videos capturing the body movements and gestures of my mum taking care of the domestic environment. 

      These written translations take the form of poems/scores - set of instructions, sequences of movements.

       

      23 September 2016

      I start the translation of the written translation into a dance choreography.

      I invent the movements and I try to remember them during the same session. For that I practice what I invented right afterwards, repeating small bits of movements time after time, while trying to add something each time I repeat the sequence. I test the memory of my body in sparkles of joy. I try to build up fluidity and spontaneity of the body starting from a condition of constraint and given instruction.

      During the act of translation, I notice how high is the normative strength of choreography.

      In the practice both of the care taking gestures that I can reconstruct in my memory through the reading, and in the dance movements I am doing now, the wrists play an important role. I sense how they could be considered the site for tuning (regulating, adjusting) the degree of care one applies through the gesture.

       

      30 September 2016

      This second time I enter the resource, I am transforming my first experience and experiment into a commitment.. into a sustained practice.

      While addressing this resource, I in fact realize I am also working on the gap `practice`. 

      It is very difficult at first to cross the threshold of the space of the body, the space of the practice, trusting the letting go of the thought-processes where I am immersed. 

      After a week passed, I want to test my memory of the choreography by directly diving into it, without reading the written score of instructions.

      As during the first time of this try out, there is a video camera as an external device to record my movements and verify my memory from an outside source of documentation. It is also a tool through which I aim at observing my body position, the orientation of it in the space, and how to work on composition.

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • common thing - 28

      I am a dancer, a performer, a teacher, a researcher and a shiatsu practionner. Since I have encountered the work of Lisa Nelson in 1999, my dance practice shifted from exercising the body to exercising the attention. Now, I see the body as a vehicle for the attention and its dance a reflection of its state of awareness.

      I am currently leading a research on poetic, polyphonic and multi modal dance documentation. I am researching on poetic documentation because “Poetic experience” is my core interest, be it in the form of a dance, a text, a film, an object, a situation or a document. I love the definition that Georges Bataille gives to “the poetic” in ‘The inner experience’: “The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.”

      The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange… This kind of shift happens for me in the studio when, for example, I spend some time looking at things and people around me. Suddenly, everything is beauty; the old piece of bread crust that lies under the table becomes the most incredible sculpture and people around me are composing the most exquisite choreography. Nothing has changed but I see it differently. Everything is organized, in order, at the right place. “The poetic” happens when I pay attention to details so for me. Attention is what makes the ordinary extra-ordinary; It is a door to poetic experience.

       

       

      16 September 2016

       

       

      attention in the freezer

       common thing - 61

       

       

      !!!

      note: attention disappeared

      date: unknown

       

       

    •  

      This is my thread documentation on the Bubble Score, proposed by Lilia Mestre, and carried out every Wednesday from January till March 2016. Read about the score here.

       

       

      Bubble score #1 - THE GIFT

       

      The prophecy of the ceiling made of glass

       

      I have been here, waiting for something that would present itself to me, and behold something approaches, something unravels. Slowly, dragging, that is the way the hidden things present themselves. It is much like a cut through the skin or the opening of a fruit: It flows.

      It has been said that light would make it possible to see through, to see further. But I say, it is now known that that which is immersed in darkness enlightens the foreseeing eye. Light, as it becomes more dense by multiples visions, will blind those who thought they were ready to see it all.

      For when,

      the impossible becomes a recognizable shape

      and the rain, which sounds through the windows, becomes a rhythm

      and words, cast as a spell, fulfill their duties

      and magicians launch how to manuals

      and fingernails cease to exist

      for the period for claws is long gone

      Ours will be a world of

      forging mysteries

      and retelling of stories

      To remember will become a thing of the past and,

      It will be then that alarms will go off.

      Alarms that will resonate within every breathing creature

      who dared to watch the sun

      and it’s endless turns

      and having counted those turns, used it as a marker

      and for every creature the alarm will sound different

      But there will be no personal fortunes anymore.

      And people will say it is only white noise

      that which everyone else hears.

      And there will be a dispute

      between air and information

      having the world shrunken and having space become a matter of elections

      Some will argue in favor of the air

      claiming it the beginning of all things

      And others will argue in favor of information

      claiming it the reason for all things

      And even so, every side is full of good intentions,

      being for themselves or for all others,

      this dispute will continue for more then a thousand days

      And it will, somehow, be the carrier of the novelty,

      which will put the world in motion again.

      But, hear me as say, that the darkness which foresees is not the darkness of the closing eye. The darkness of the night as it falls, or the dreams, as it is remembered. It is the darkness of the ceiling of glass which revelas its fragility, and in doing so, make you look up while forgetting the hard ground in which you stand. And that is why it will still be important to sweat on your feet and feel neck pains.

       

       

       

      Bubble score #2 - THE BODY IS THE BRIDGE

      An answer to the question (by Esteban Donoso): 

      Dear Anouk,
      For me it was clear that we were dealing with traces, material traces and spatial configurations that were having a second life.
      During the performance, however, it became very much about our presence and present time experience, about inhabiting the fragment and the impossibility to see it-all. There was such a calm, open presence in your performance and subsequently we all became performers/onlookers/witnesses at the same time. Besides the blurring of time frames and your interest in trace as present experience, and perhaps a preoccupation for preserving something of the experience for future performers/onlookers/witnesses; do you also see a blurring of the subject-other happening? are we regarded as our own sensorial world, or, how do you understand the subject-other interface within this experience of blurred temporality?

       

      [easingslider id="4744"] - Collective performance. "The body is the bridge" - Bubble Score #2

       

       

      The body is the bridge score

      1.

      Ask a group of people to be around a table with it’s perimeter less wide then that of the group together.

      Some people will be naturally squeezed out or leave the cluster around the table.

      In the table there is one black paper. In each of people’s hand there is one piece of chalk.

      Ask people to draw “the body is the bridge” for 5 minutes.

      Climb on a chair and watch from above.

      2.

      Ask people, while they are drawing, if they are able to explain what they are doing and why.

      Listen to: “I am drowning! I’ve been pushed under the table”, “I am pushing my chalk into the paper”, “ha ha ha you are ripping the paper!”, “I am drawing the contour of hands”, and other things you will no longer remember because you will only write them down after one week.

      3.

      Notice as the space around the table grows bigger as people leave the group.

      There is more space. There is more possibility to move.

      Notice how people who kept drawing don’t take that space up. That space became a body.

      Notice how people turn the paper over or rip it and sometimes refer to their actions as being “violent”.

      The paper is not yet a body.

      Notice how people will draw on the table after the paper has been ripped.

      The table will become a drawing.

      Notice how the energy of the activity will go down as the paper becomes more saturated.

      The drawing will become a body.

       

       

       

       

      Bubble score #3 - THE ABYSMAL

      Arriana Marcolini to Juan Duque:
      "Here is my question:
      the first two words you use in your text are 
       
      Two
       
      ABYSMAL
       
      I was actually impressed by that. 
      The coexistence of two elements. But:
      is it one, repeated? is it that one is the copy of the other? were they born at the same time, from the same material, or..?
      what's the relationship between the two?
       
      2 + 0 = 2
      0 + 2 = 2
      1 + 1 = 2
      1 + 1 + 0 = 2
      1 = 1
      2 = 2 ..
       
      I read the relationship between the 2 as being the ABYSMAL.
      You wrote it like that, in capital letters.
      It sounded like a character from an epic tale - a hero, or the character from a cartoon.
       
      the ABYSMAL. I see it wearing a mask, almost like Tiger Mask.
      It is a wrestler.
       
      I imagine a wrestling match - 
      between you and the work of art;
      between a work of art and its copy (if such a thing as a copy exists at all);
      between the work of art and its other, whatever that is;
      between 1 and another 1..
       
      The abysmal, in this perspective and in my view, is also what happens between 2 
      facing each other, next to each other, close but never enough; 
      parallel, not reachable from each other's perspectives..that which escapes the cumulative.
      The abysmal is an in-between:
      that which is never reachable as a full state of being, of inhabited presence.
      It is being as the state of passage. 
      It is
      a hiatus, a longing,
      a bit like sehnsucht.
       
      What happens in this wrestling match?"
       
       IMG_6940
       
       

      IMG_6939

      IMG_20160320_102216272

      The abysmal drawn together with Arianna Marcolini.

       

       

      Bubble score #4 - WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I PRONOUNCE THE WORD ESCAPE?

      [easingslider id="4746"] - Collective performance. "What happens when I pronounce the word escape'?" - Bubble Score #4

       

      Audio: Texas chain massacre soundtrack.

      Lights: on or off.

      Go into a closed space.

      Put yourself in front of one of the walls facing it.

      Press it hard, in which ever way you feel like it: with your hands, body, forehead, shoulders.

      Press it like you want it do move, explode. Like the wall there is no right to be there and you want to remove it.

      Increase the force and tension. Feel it pressing you as well, but don’t decompress.

      When I say the word escape, let your body go.

       

       

       

      Bubble score #6 - I HAD A DREAM OF YOU

      On the question (by Lili Rampre): How do you manage affect in your work or relate to it - more straightforwardly - what is it that escapes and is unactualised within you research - purposefully so - fabricating that escape or without your direct control?
      What is the relation between how you perceive affect and how you transmit it to your audience?

       

      Screenshot_2016-02-17-20-44-05

       Screenshot of sent SMS to participants present - Bubble score #6.

       

       

       

      Bubble score #8 - CONCEPT-DRAWING READING SCORE

      Arriana Marcolini questions Mala Kline: "I have just experienced a work situation of this kind: the passage between phase A of the work and phase B wasn't regulated by the transformation (distillation) of the concepts formulated in one phase in order to bring this distilled material to the other. The passage was a jump. But not one that forgets what has left behind; rather, a jump full of the joy of discovery and of the wonder of surprise. To let yourself be surprised by the unusual, unexpected way a translation can take form. This way, leaving things behind keeps a lot of trust in the things themselves: the trust that those things can have their way to arrange themselves without me choosing a direction for them.

      I wonder about dream being the translation machine between one phase of a situation to another. I imagine sort of a magic box: what happens when we put our concepts inside and leave them becoming something else through the dream machine?"

       

       

       

      - Reading performance of concept-drawings maps - Bubble score #8

      password: bubblebubble / video by Mala Kline.

       

       

      Bubble score #10 - THIS IS MY ALIBI, PLEASE MEMORIZE FOR WHEN THEY COME FOR ME

      Sana Ghobbeh question to Nicolas Galeazzi: "My question is what happens when paradoxes come together?"

       

      This is my alibi, please memorize for when they come for me

      In July 10th 2028 a man was murdered on the streets of Botafogo, an active neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Although the neighborhood was known for its poor lighting at night time the crime happened in front of well lit busy street. A lot of people say to have seen the body falling down but no one could identify the murderer. It all happened during the opening of one of the neighborhood’s most traditional art spaces exhibition. Police investigation declared that the crime had nothing to do with the party; though the confusion on the streets caused by the great attendance to the event may have presented itself as the perfect opportunity for the murderer to make its move and then disappear mingling amongst those around. As a result, the police interrogated all the people present, including myself, but I was safe, I had an alibi.

      I was standing a few meters from where the man was hit, near the doors of the art space. I remember I knew I would need to be almost outside so that I could breath when the confusion started. I was positioned in such a way it was possible for me to see him falling down and to describe that to the investigation commissar. I did that on purpose, I wanted to be of some help to the future investigation. I was able to describe how the body fell in a very specific way. I had people all around me, we were having a conversation, one which I cannot recall, because I was looking straight ahead, looking for the body that would fall down. One police man asked me a funny question: “Could you have stopped the crime from happening?” he said; and maybe I could have, but instead I answered “I think I was meant to give you only a perspective of things, so that the investigation could move forward. Should I call the next person to be interrogated when I’m out of the room?”.

      On March 16th 2016 I wrote a text with my actions of that future date. I presented in front of a group of people so that they could know where and what I was doing at the moment of the murder. Since I knew the crime would come, I deeply invested myself in following each future step that would lead me to be at the right place at the right time on July 10th, that is: performing for the future and hoping that this written account could be enough to change the course of events.

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Bubble Score for performance and writing 02 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Lilia Mestre
    • a.pass
    • 11 January 2016
    • 25 March 2016
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Bubble Score for performance and writing

      General rules:

      • The score happens weekly throughout the block between January and March 2016. The day and hours will be agreed with the group.
      • The practices of the score alternate between performance and writing as modes of the performative. Performance doesn’t mean a concrete discipline but a materiality coming to presence. (Of course writing can be part of it. The question would be then the relation between several ways of writing). Participants can chose to start with writing or performance, after that each alternating consequently between the two practices the following sessions.
      • No remote presence is allowed. Meaning there can’t be works sent by email. If someone can’t be present during a session, the sequence will be picked up next time the person joins back.
      • All people attending the score meetings has to share work. There is no audience.
      • We'll discuss together about issues of documentation for this process containing different mediatizations. A publication will be issued out of the material produced.
      • The score will take place in the evening. We'll bring food and drinks to share.

       

      Playing rules:

      To start:

      1. Present max 5 minutes performance or write a text of maximum two pages. This first presentation is a gift to the group and the beginning of a process.
      2. After assisting to all presentations, each of us will select one  one performance or text to ask a question to and assigns who should answer that question.
      3. General discussion.
      4. We have 2 days maximum to address the questions. The next session will happen one week after.

      The week after.

      1. Present max 5 minutes performance or write a text of maximum two pages as a response for the question that as been assigned to you in relation to what you've witness and your interests in that. No interest is also a good motivation.
      2. After assisting to all responses, each of us will select one performance or text to ask a question to and assigns who should answer that question.
      3. General discussion.
      4. After assisting to all presentations, each of us will select one  one performance or text to ask a question to and assigns who should answer that question.
      5. We have 2 days maximum to address the questions. The next session will happen one week after.

      And so forth...

      A first meeting will happen during the opening week to define further rules and to precise ways of documenting the process taking in consideration the publication. Miriam Hempel the graphic designer will be also present in this meeting.

    • image

      How to desintegrate as quick as possible?

      I think it is better to put it this way.
      Skype mentoring with Luanda. The two of us sleepy, having coffe at a distance.
      Colonization, gamification, scores, characters, diagrams, schedules, plans. But, Luanda, how to live from art in Belgium? Should I prepare myself for being a Chef de cuisine at least to earn more mony from restaurants? Yes, of course, if you like it don’t lose your time. I regret not having done the same few years ago. It is hard to be an artist here, very hard, darling.

      How to clean the house and prepare lunch for husband and one guest as quickly as possible? With the hands I would say. But using all your body. Dividing attention between the right hand cleaning the toilet and the right foot smashing some onions. She is vegan. A vegan sex worker from Mexico. I have to improve my Spanish. Maybe in one hour I will be probably a native speaker, I just have to begin using my mouth too. Quinoa and beans, some bread. Very frugal. Exactly on time. After “Hola, que tal?” I gave up the Spanish. Everybody happy.

      How to desintegrate my belly fat in the GYM as quick as possible? Training in circuits, almost no pauses. Nobody will notice that I have never done it before, that I don’t even know how to use these objects properly, or which weight I should choose to begin. This paper with the circuit thing was on the floor of my appartment for some months, and I found it under the sofa probably. It was time to use it somehow. Looking to the mirror with confidence. Nobody noticed that I was an impostor. That I was not from there exactly, despite the confidence in my steps, in the certitude going from one spot to the other, completely determined.

      How to get money in a pleasant way? I should work in this Ethiopian café. It as really nice the flavour of that espresso. While I waited for Esteban one guy behind me was trying to integrate with everybody, speaking loud about Saint-Exupéry. Such a good writer. He was preaching, let’s put it this way. But everybody there pretended he was not there, and tried to maintain a civilised attitude. What is the ceremony of the Ethiopian café, madam? It is a bit hard for me to explain it in French, do you speak English, she said? I said I think I speak English, and it is a little better than my French. We smiled relieved. She explained the ceremony, but I couldn’t understand it really. But I was completely convinced that it would be a good idea to have it on my birthday. Unfortunately they don’t do it on Sundays.

      Let’s go to another coffee, Esteban. Maybe it is not the best place for a tarot reading. Or we can ask for the guy behind us to join, he is up for integration. Let’s go to a Belgian café, darling, he said. Or not exactly this way. I am not sure about the darling. And instantly we were in this Belgian café, ordering coffee and beer for our tarot reading. Long pause. How to doo tha?

      I should work as a tarot reader. In Belgian cafés, like Jodorowsky in French coffees.
      We were very integrated there. I wondered if I could work in that Belgian café. Maybe I could be a blond waitress too, and I could learn hoe to be sympathetic in Flemish and French. Even make some jokes, which certainly would result in more tips and loyal costumers.
      I was on time during the whole daym for every event. I could meditate, train Dutch, exercise my Brain with Lumosity, to have mentoring, to clean the house and receive guests, to go to the gym, to read tarot to a friend and to work. And all the time I was working on my research. Not so sure about the utility of my documentation for the workshop.

    • FRIDAY 17.00-22.00

      17.00-end: Video installations: ‘Excavate’ by Sara Santos, ‘Arena’ by Philippine Hoegen

      17.30-19.00: ‘Story Lines’ one-to-one performative installation by Cecilia Molano

      18.00-18.30: Welcoming

      18.30-19.00: ‘Tupperware’ performance workshop by Gosie Vervloesem, food introduction

      19.00-19.45: ‘Disruption is still to come’, table discussion with Petra Van Brabandt

      19.45-20.00: Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods) 16mm film by Sara Santos

      20.00-20.30: Break

      20.30-21.30: ‘Televizinho #1’ talk by Veridiana Zurita

      21.30-21.45: ‘Another Version’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

      after: Bar Talks

       

      SATURDAY 12.30-23.00

      12.30-15.30: ‘Drawing Askew’ Master class/workshop by Gonçalo Pena

      14.00-end: Ongoing video installations ‘Excavate’ by Sara Santos, ‘Arena’ by Philippine Hoegen. Documentation installations by Gosie Vervloessem and Cecilia Molano

      16.00- 16.15: Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods) 16mm film by Sara Santos

      16.15-16.45: ‘Borneo Trophy’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

      16.45-17.30: ‘Mobile Orders’ lecture by Patricia Reed

      17.30-18.00: Break

      18.00-18.30: ‘Regarding David’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

      18.30-19.30: 'The Wandering Singer of Tales’ lecture performance by Samah Hijawi

      19.30-20.00: Break 

      20.00-20.15: Screening ‘Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods)’ 16mm film by Sara Santos

      20.15-20.30: ‘Dividing David’ performance and participative installation by Philippine Hoegen, with Kristien Van Den Brande

      20.45-21.45: Discussion with guests and participants

      22.00 END

    • postgraduate program
    • project
    • Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics
    • Perform Back Score
    • Perform Back Score how to document performance?
      17 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 14 January 2015
    • 31 March 2015
    • case of: Mavi Veloso
      case of: Sara Santos
      case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Perform Back Score

      WEEKLY MEETING WORKSHOP: 

      Proposed by Lilia Mestre for the Block 2015/I (January-March)

      This score was a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?

      The aim was to develop systems to practice the staging of philosophy, critical exposure and the rhetorics inherent to any body, object, word, situation. It is a working score. Taking as a principle that the artwork raises questions and doesn’t give answers I would like to propose a Q&A in 9 sessions where we can just perform. The series of performances will function as replies that raise (an)other(s) question(s) or problematic (s). This score will also be a documentation practice that questions performance as a document.

      The performances can take any kind of medium, strategy. Just it would be good if you are a writer to work at least two times in another medium and if you are not a writer to reply at least two times with text.

      The invitation is to meet once a week for 3 hours and work together. These meetings will have to happen after 17:00 and can take place in different environments.

       

      Set up

      14 January in the afternoon. (last day of opening week)

      In this meeting we’ll set up the frame that will accompany the score for the 9 sessions.

      We’ll assign to whom we are addressing the first performances.

      First session

      *Every participant will display a 5 minutes performance as a gift.

      *After performance the participant will assign a participant that will reply the week after.

      *Discussion about the problematics that emerged.

      *We’ll choose for a space and time for the next session.

      Sessions 2 till 9

      *Every participant will display her /his response in a 5 minutes performance.

      *After all presentations we’ll assign together the next repliers.

      *Discussion about the problematics that emerged.

      *We’ll choose for a space and time for the next session.

      Documentation

      All performances will be filmed in the same format. Julia Clever (ex-a.pass working on documentary) will be working with us. All next repliers can take a video home to work on their responses.

      We’ll think and work together on the notion of archive and of performance as documentation.

       

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Audrey Cottin
      Danny Neyman
      Hektor Mamet
      JeremiahRunnels
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Mavi Veloso
      Philippine Hoegen
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Tinna Ottesen
      Yaari Shalem

       


      Research End Presentations

      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Stef Meul 

       

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Cecilia Molano
      Mala Kline
      Ruth S. Noyes,
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Partners

      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Ana Hoffner
      Antonia Baehr
      Daniel Blanga-Gubbay
      Elke van Campenhout
      Emma Cocker
      Eric Thielemans
      Lilia Mestre
      Mariella Greil
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Pierre Rubio

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Geert Opsomer
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

       

      ‘CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS’
      curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

      The proposal is to plunge into the conditions for the emergence of poetics. Poetics used here as acts that transform our ways of perceiving, situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

       

       

      14 / 01 -19 / 03 / 2015


      ‘PERFORM BACK SCORE’
      Weekly Practice by Lilia Mestre


      This score is a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?
      The aim is to develop systems to practice the staging of philosophy, critical exposure and the rhetorics inherent to any body, object, word, situation. It is a working score. Taking as a principle that the artwork raises questions and doesn’t give answers I would like to propose a Q&A in 9 sessions where we can just perform. The series of performances will function as replies that raise (an)other(s) question(s) or problematic (s). This score will also be a documentation practice that questions performance as a document.

       

       

      05 / 01 - 09 / 01 / 2015


      ‘REPERTOIRE’
      Workshop by Eric Thielemans


      For the last couple of years my artistic practice became more research based and reflective, and my work was touched by that evolution. The workshop deals with the notion(s) of repertoire. Of what stuff are they made? How did they come about? It will be a first time for me to adapt the questions and reflections to a wider and multidisciplinary field of expertise and practices.
      Repertoire(s) is a research and reflective workshop in which I see us all, like a bunch of passionate amateur entomologists , observe, index, taxonomize, and share the constitutive phenomenons of our life with our craft and the repertory of skills, tools, techniques, practices that we use to build that life. Furthermore we will investigate various strategies and ways to weave the sensibilities, disciplines and practices of each participant together into meaningful wholes or collective spaces and cosmologies.
      First the focus will lie on each of us individually. After that we will dive into group related observations. How do we behave as a group? What’s the repertoire of the group? Off course this separation individual-group is artificial and not always easy to keep but I think it will give us a strategy, plan, focus and ground during the work.
      At the end of the workweek, we will propose a showing of the work in which there will be place for each individual to share and propose some of his/her findings and reflections in whatever way suitable as well as there will be group propositions.

       

       

      19 / 01 - 23 / 01 / 2015


      ‘PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY / SUBJECTS / OBJECTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout


      ‘Performance / Performativity / Subject / Object’ is a b-workshop: it covers some of the basic knowledges we share on an (almost) daily basis in a.pass, and that need some in-depth attention. In this block we will read texts and discuss the problematics from the point of view of objects and subjects: how does an object perform its objectness and how does it perform us. In other words: how does the object perform our subject-ness? And how does the subject perform the object? Or: how can we replace our subjectness by objectness and what does that entail?
      In other words, although the basic performativity texts like the ones of Judith Butler and the speech act theory of Austin will certainly play a role in the backseat, in these reading sessions we will concentrate more specifically on object oriented philosophies like the ones of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, the ‘queer phenomenology’ of Sara Ahmed, go deeper into the concept of ‘compositionism’ as coined by Bruno Latour, and study the continuity between materiality and immateriality by reading some from ‘Action and Agency in Dialogue’ by François Cooren.

       

       


      02 / 02 - 06 / 02 / 2015


      ‘TOOLS FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH - BECKETT’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Ana Hoffner


      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. The challenge of the workshop will be to make those categories mentioned above appear as twofold: as artistic concepts from the past but also as embodied experiences and potential tools for our own artistic research. Each day we will focus on a different category from Beckett’s work in order to transform it, translate it and develop a better understanding of the way we as artist, performers and choreographers can use them in the present.

       

       

       

      23 / 02 - 27 / 02 / 2015


      ‘CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES - DEVIATIONS FROM THE LINE’
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Emma Cocker


      How might one devise a system of notation alert to the real-time circumstances of the practicing within practice, foregrounding process, and emphasizing the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live)? What forms of notation could be developed for articulating that which resists articulation, for that which is pre-articulation, or a form of representation for the non-representational? How can a form of notation communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within practice, without rendering them still or static, without fixing that which is contingent as a clearly readable or literal sign?
      To explore the performative character of notation, we practice kinetic as well as graphic modes of inscription, expanded tactics beyond apparent physical limitations (of the mind, the hand, pencil, and paper), attending to the integration of time, sound, movement, and narration. We propose the concept of the choreo-graphic figure, for investigating how the embodied practice of choreographic performance (in an expanded sense) might become a tool of inscription and notation in itself. The choreo-graphic figure is conceived as a notational event, incorporating the potential of both movement and materiality, a sense of both temporality and spatiality. Our shared quest is both for a system of notation for honoring the process of figuring (as a live investigative event) and for “choreo-graphic” figures for making tangible and communicating these significant moments within the unfolding journey of collaborative practice. We seek modes of notation between the lines, interested in the interval or gap between the choreo + graphic, sign + non-sign, visual + textual, extensive + intensive, embodiment + disembodiment, movement + materiality, being + becoming.

       


      02 / 03 - 06 / 03 / 2015


      ‘CONDITIONS FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN (LATENT PERFORMANCES)’
      workshop by Daniel Blanga-Gubbay

      Instead of thinking of the possible as an empty space, we should maybe see it as a space designed with conditions. Latency names the state of something ready to happen, ready to emerge. Within this space, something will happen: can we still be responsible for creating this space, without taking care of its result?
      This workshop puts first into question what does mean an act of transformation. Well beyond the notion of performing arts, performance can perhaps simply be thought of as any act that can modify the coordinates of the given. If we imagine reality to be a surface made of endless inclinations that determine movements and trajectories within it, then the proper task of performance is perhaps that of constructing the gesture that can refigure the surface for a while, releasing unimagined lines, opening up gaps between the permitted and the possible.
      How is it possible to go beyond the idea of creating something to suddenly create a space ready for the emergence of something unspecific to happen? By merging theory and practice, working both through interventions in given and constructed space – and through the categories of space of accident, risk, love – these days investigate not only the question "what is the condition for the emergence of an action", but eventually "what does it mean to create (and abandon) a space filled with unforeseen possible actions?"

       

       

      09 / 03 - 14 / 03 / 2015


      ‘WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME’
      workshop by Antonia Baehr


      In this workshop, we will investigate how scores can function as a constitutive factor for kinship relations. We will write scores as gifts to each other, and I will share some of the “make-up productions” working methods with you.
      We will make ourselves familiar on a practical level with the use of scores for performance. We will read and execute a number of found scores: historical ones (from John Cage’s Songbooks for ex.) and contemporary ones (from the projects Laugh, and Abecedarium Bestiarium, among others), some infamous and others entirely unheard of. We will write, interpret and perform scores for each other, pass them on, turn them literally upside down while swapping roles and places.
      Between the hierarchical pyramidal structure to the collective, there is an endless plurality of forms of collaboration possible. This workshop examines the boundaries between score/interpretation, rehearsal/performance, director/performer, and audience/presentation. This workshop’s focus is an investigation through praxis.

    • research center 01 July 2014
      posted by: Guido Lucassen

      The a.pass research center works on different levels. On a first level the centre brings together long-time researchers in a context of collaboration and sharing. On this level currently we have in the research center three kinds of workers: the PhD researchers, the associate researcher, the research coordinator and the independent researchers.   The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts. Since this function has only recently been developed we are still in the middle of the first year, working with ex-apass participant Veridiana Zurita, who develops her research project TVTV, in the context of the Guislain psychiatric institute, as well as in collaboration with an Amazon river tribe in Brazil (full project description in Annexe). The associate researcher is financially supported by a 0,4 FTE employment for one year, and the production support for the development of the public phases of the research, as well as through mentoring support. The independent researchers are only loosely connected to the research center, and are selected on the level of the interest of their already existing research trajectory. Current independent researchers are for example visual artist Alexis Destoop and his research into ‘landscape scenographies’ in the framework of the Anthropocene, and musician Eric Thielemans and his research on the ‘ensemble’ as instrument for the development of shared cosmologies and artistic instrumentarium. These researchers are only minimally and punctually supported at the moment of the publication (live or in writing) of their research results. The research coordinator (0,7 FTE) also develops her research within the research centre, which partly consists in analyzing, publishing, and making accessible a.pass research results and methodologies (through publications, outside workshops and lectures, conferences, etc…) and partly also consists of her own collaborative research trajectory Bureau d’Espoir, that looks into a contemporary and performative redefinition of ‘hope’ through the lenses of political philosophy, choreography and spiritual body practices. (see full overview of Bureau d’Espoir in Appendix). On a second level, the research centre also documents, archives and opens up research results and methodologies on a larger scale. Through the creation of a larger context for the end communications of the participants, through the publications, conferences, workshops and lectures, experimental collaborations etcetera. A lot of these activities will be mentioned again throughout the development of this report, but a full list of activities of the research centre, and its collaborations can also be consulted in the overview pages in the Appendix. Goals of the a.pass research center The main goals of the research center are to develop a ‘sustainable ground’ to analyze, document and share the knowledge that is being developed in the a.pass environment, opening it up to public sharing, discussion and debate. The research centre also aims at feeding the a.pass programs through the development of experimental, challenging, nomadic research set-ups that question, disseminate and test the a.pass principles within a larger context. The research center also tries to relate the individual interests of the researchers to a larger commonal context of knowledge processing and dissemination, and make the movements of knowledge processed in the a.pass research projects visible on a larger, shared and transindividual level. The researches developed at the research center experiment the notions of research and artistic methodologies of research to their limits, so as to come to a clear understanding of the potential subversive qualities for change that are specific to the artistic research field. On the level of documentation and communication the a.pass research centre aims at: -developing tools for the development of artistic research on an advanced level (PhD and others) by -developing methodologies, strategies and critical criteria for knowledge development within artistic research contexts -archiving and making accessible interesting research results and methodologies through publication of these results in a written or live form -developing tools for the international communication of the results of the advanced researches

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Scores
    • 2014 BLOCK I 01 January 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2014
    • 31 March 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Carolina Goradesky
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Julia Clever
      Philippine Charlotte Hoegen
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Ramos Pereira

       


      Research End Presentations

      Chris Dupuis
      Karl Philips

       


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Partners

      Les Bains
      PAF Performance Arts Forum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre
      Lisa Nelson
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Pierre Rubio
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      ‘SCORES’
      curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

       


      13-17 / 01 / 2014


      ‘SCORES GENERATOR’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre


      In this workshop, I’ll introduce a writing score, which was tested already in the research residency Thematics: Author/Authority that I curated in Les Bains last year. This score is based on question&answer dialogues between the participants and will be continued in a regular basis, after this one week workshop, in open weekly meetings during the block. With this writing score, we’ll produce a documentation booklet at the end of the block. As an example, you can find here the booklet that was made for Author / Authority.
      The aim is to discuss and write as a regular practice and to use encounter, dialogue, each others knowledge in the elaboration of the discourse about one’s own researches.
      I will introduce two performance scores I worked with: one on sounding objects /affective spaces from performance ‘ Moving You’; and another: from gesture to utterance to language that comes from my latest performance with Marcos Simões: ‘Ai! a choreographic project’.

       

       


      27 / 01 - 07 / 02 / 2014


      ‘LABORATORY: TUNING SCORES’
      (composition, communication, and the sense of imagination)
      workshop by Lisa Nelson


      The Tuning Score -a performance research format- asks what do we see when we're looking at dance. How does composition arise in the body and its environment? The research focuses on the physical base of the imagination. By altering the way we use our senses while moving and watching movement, we can begin to tease apart the genetic and acquired patterns our senses use to construct our experience. We will look at ways these patterns influence how and why we move, shape our interaction with our inner and outer environments, and inform both our desire for action and what we "see" when we are attending to anything.
      Two aspects of practice are described by the name Tuning Scores: a solo warm up, and interpersonal composition games. The solo practices are a kind of pre-technique––a physical-attentional warm up to one's inner composition, and provide an inner score for the ensemble games. Focusing on vision, touch, and hearing, the scores provoke spontaneous compositions that make evident our opinions about who/where we are, how each of us senses and makes sense of movement, initiating a dialogue between inner and outer organization, about space, time, movement, and the desire to compose (a satisfying) experience.
      The Tuning Score is an improvisational composition practice that is a performance in itself. It offers tools and a framework for communication and model of collaboration that is constructed by the players in the act of doing. As a practice of real-time editing and instant replay, Tuning is an aesthetic game and a self-balancing system that uncovers its intention each time anew.

       

       

       

      17 - 21 / 02 / 2014


      ‘ARTISTIC RESEARCH’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi, Lilia Mestre, Veridiana Zurita, Elke van Campenhout


      It comes in waves, sometimes it’s a fever, sometimes a dispute and sometimes energy boost: the discussion around artistic research is a core issue at a.pass. Its notions go in various directions, follow diverse protocols and curl around manifold practices. In order to keep this controversy discussion alive we would like to design a workshop with four different approaches and definitions of artistic research provided by four people in the a.pass surrounding : Elke Van Campenhout, Veridiana Zurita, Lilia Mestre and Nicolas Galeazzi. Following a score, all four try to communicate their thought lines of artistic research practices. The score not only asks for their proper view, but also for supportive foreign material and for its antonyms.

       

       


      3 - 7 / 03 / 2014


      ‘GENERAL INTELLECT ?’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout


      ‘General Intellect?’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the a.pass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective. What is this relation, how does it function? Is it the individual that creates the collective? Or is the collective the base structure on which individuals can work and organize themselves? Specifically within an artistic research environment where the institution is constantly reformulating itself out of a multitude of individual inputs and where the individuals, in a state of ‘crisis’, are constantly self-constructing, confronted and challenged by a collective project.
      Can there be a mutual constitutive relation? A relational machine we can call ‘General Intellect’ or ‘Transindividual Space’ operating between and through the individuals, creating an 'ensemble' through their practice?
      From reading sessions to diverse practice formats, we will come up with refreshed perspectives on what collective working and thinking can do.

       

       


      10 - 14 / 03 / 2014


      ‘NOTATIONS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND MATTER”
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer


      Scores are translations. They transform one thought into another. They are also invitations to understand and interpret one reality through another. In a five day workshop led by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer, we will collaboratively explore the complex relationship between drawing, writing and movement.
      What is exactly happening when a thought and/or movement becomes a score? What
      kind of translation process is taking place between thought and matter? And again what is happening when a notation is being read, interpreted and performed by others? What kind of movements, transcriptions and acts of inscribing take place when we project a cartography of the body? What kind of tool set can we develop to map this intertextual language? What else can become a score?
      Within the workshop, drawing scores is to be extended along the categories of time, space and movement. So to speak a line of thought becomes a line on the paper, can turn into a line in space, a line verbalized, a line drawn with the whole body.
      The workshop will interrogate these interstitial processes, practices and knowledges produced by scores, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Settlements
    • 2013 BLOCK III 01 September 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2013
    • 30 November 2013
    • 2013 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson,
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Carolina Goradeszky
      Chris Dupuis
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Julia Clever
      Karl Philips
      Maité Liébana Vena
      Maja Hammaren
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Stef Meul
      Victoria Myronyuk


      Research End Presentations

      Helena Dietrich
      Luanda Casella
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline

       

      Partners

      Uferstudios (Berlin)
      PAF Performance Arts Forum
      Bâtard festival
      RITS
      P.A.R.T.S.


      Contributors for workshops

      Claudia Bosse
      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Geert Opsomer
      Lilia Mestre
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      ‘SETTLEMENTS’
      curated by Vladimir Miller (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

       

      09 - 13 / 09 / 2013


      ‘(PRE)CONDITIONS OF ACTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Claudia Bosse in the form of a city space action laboratory

      The main focus is to analyse and understand the contextual and spatial dependency of space and of each artistic practice, to invent translations, spatialisations and sharable constellations for each one’s specific research. What is given in a space, and how this information is manifested. What is inscribed in a space as its function, economy of transfer, context of its users, politics of its realisations and time?
      Scenarios of the personal research will be developed, used, transferred, implanted and tested in different spatial conditions of urban zones and zones of social contracts. This means, that we will try to put the consistency of our different research approaches in dialogue with urban and social spheres. How will they be infected, destabilised or clarified?
      The communication and observation will have to focus on following two aspects of scenography: the organization of space as a basic condition of artistic production and the (re)presentation of space in dialogue with the different understandings of the surrounding contexts. No space is inculpable, but at the same time the concrete condition for each artistic formulation and appearance .
      By interacting and criticising via concrete propositions, we try to create a practice that reacts on the proposed practice of the other workshop participants and the city and its users and inscribed different contexts. Everyone is writing a journal of documentation which will be publish on a blog with reflections about the space, the propositions and the influence towards your own research.

       

       

      16 - 20 / 09 / 2013


      ‘FEEDBACK’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Elke van Campenhout


      In this second feedback workshop, we take the end presentations of the previous week as a starting point. On the basis of what the participants that finished their trajectory showed to the public, and on the basis of what they choose to share on the level of their research methodologies to the group, we confront the relation between research and its relation to an ‘outside’ (the public, the research fellows, the internet, …). Since in a.pass we use feedback as a basic tool for the construction of a common ground, and of a collaborative working environment, we try to develop different methodologies to construct a critical culture of mutual support. But: since a good feedback needs a precise point of entry, a clear presentation, or a generous invitation, the feedback workshop works at the same time also on the requirements of a research presentation, and the different attitudes of feedbacking this makes possible.

       


      30 / 09 - 20 / 10 / 2013


      “SETTLEMENT’
      workspace proposed by Vladimir Miller


      In the last years a.pass already organized seven Settlements in the program. Some were organized in our studio, some on location. Vladimir Miller proposed the Settlement as an open and collaborative research space that takes on different forms in different locations. This time he invites us for a slightly transformed Settlement at the Uferstudios in Berlin.
      A Settlement is a workspace that explores the relations between space, (artistic) practice, and the politics of the commons.
      The basic practice of this collective set-up is to occupy together one large space and build everything required in that space from a common stock of materials to enable the individual practices. Next to providing the practitioner with the possibility to re-negotiate the spatial manifestations of his or her individual practice over the three weeks, the Settlement explores the potential of unstable architectures, the emergence and disappearance of property and territory in collective practice, and the agency of objects in establishing communal structure.
      Following the idea that the material choices determine the set of possibilities of any given practice, for this episode we would like to work with materials that are not chosen by us or Vladimir but are randomly gathered from already existing workspaces in Berlin. This choice is also informed by a raised awareness towards questions of sustainability within research environments. The material will thus be largely provided by artist and architects studio’s that will contribute objects and left-overs of previous practices, which will be used as a starting point of a material collection for this project.

       


      11 - 23 / 11 / 2013 & 02 - 07 / 12 / 2013


      ‘CONCERNS IN MOTION’
      laboratory, workshop and performative conference
      in collaboration with Bâtard festival, RITS, and P.A.R.T.S.


      This year the Bâtard festival was calling for projects reacting to the evidently generic question “What are your concerns?”. All addressed concerns - of selected and non selected propositions - were mapped out and shall be the starting point for setting up a performative congress related to the festival concerning the activation of concerns. The question of “what to do?” - if you are clear about your concerns - not only triggers the classical grassroot-questions concerning our capacity of inducing change, but is also confronting us with a lot of political, ethical and aesthetic paradoxes of political and artistic activism.
      The strategies we have at hand or in mind are often very controversial, just because of the always inherent potential of being recuperated by the opposed issues and powers. We see it as an artistic duty to constantly re-discuss and re-negotiate the relations of politics, art and activism, the relation of the artistic sphere and the surrounding society, and we have to search for consequent and radical solutions for approaching our concerns.
      The Bâtard festival invited the three educational institutions: a.pass, P.A.R.T.S., and RITS to be engaged in the setup of this congress and we react to this invitation by inviting our students and/or participants to collectively develop material in a two week long workshop and to perform the congress together.
      The whole congress should be built on our reactions to the Map of Concerns and the proposed strategies of activism of the guests invited to the workshop.

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2012 BLOCK I 01 January 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2012
    • 13 April 2012
    • 2012 BLOCK I

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Elise Goldstein
      Elizabeth Ward
      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Frank Pay
      Ive Leemans
      Jaime Llopis
      Oshin Albrecht
      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
      Sara Dandois
      Simon Loeffler
      Vicente Arlandis

       

      Research End Presentations

      Caroline Daish
      Doris Stelzer
      Margareth Kaserer
      Marilyne Grimmer

       

      Partners

      Thematics/Les Bains
      Triennal Hasselt
      PAF Performance Art Forum

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Akira Hino Sensei
      Alexander Schellow
      Annu Pennanen
      David Bergé
      Deufert & Plischke
      Einat Tuchman
      Eleanora Sovrani
      Kobe Matthys
      Lilia Mestre
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Stephane Querrec
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre


      Mentors

      Marie de Brugerolle
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Robert Steijn
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

       

      17 - 20 / 01 / 2012


      ‘WHAT’S THE CASE ?’
      (methodological warm-up)
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Lilia Mestre


      This workshop is questioning the basic gestures of your artistic research.
      In the search for descriptions of their methodologies, artistic researchers are developing an infinite spectrum of phrases, idioms and other grammatical constructs, to filter out the basic gesture of their own practice.
      Understanding individual research as “cases” possibly enfolding fan of possibilities, and the artistic choices taken within the case as the specific politics of your research, in these four research days, we try to get an overview of this spectrum and discuss this range of approaches to artistic research in relation to your own ‘case'.

       


      01-04 / 02 / 2012


      ‘DIGITAL CRIMINAL’
      workshop by David Bergé


      What is an analogue experience in relation to a digital one?
      In this workshop we will explore together notions as the possible, the virtual and the potential in relation to the analogue versus the digital. How to define the choice for a digital or analogue process and what are its consequences towards an outcome and audience experience?
      On the table will be 'On the Superiority of the Analogue' by Brian Massumi and videoworks by Michael Snow, Derek Jarman, Holis Frampton, as well as 70’s land art projects and their documentation, such as 'seven winter midday shadows' by Hamish Fulton and the documentary of 'spiral jetty', made by Robert Smithson himself,… as well as photographic projects by Edmund Engelman, Mike Mandel, Larry sultan and Jon Rafman.
      Goal of the workshop is to define our own practice through what is on the table.

       


      23-27 / 01 / 2012


      ‘AKIRA HINO SENSEI’
      master class


      Akira Hino Sensei is a master of budo, an ancient Japanese martial art, who worked -between others- with the Forsythe Company, where he has regularly given workshops since 2005. His lessons have greatly influenced both their own work and that of the Forsythe Company. For a week Akira Hino Sensei will focus on feeling the body with the aim of connecting up to movement, both one's own and that of the other. Budo is therefore a way of exploring the body and developing physical communication skills.

       


      28 - 31 / 01 / 2012


      ‘EMERGENCE ROOM’
      workshop by Deufert&Plischke in Hasselt


      Emergence Room is a live-workspace, where all participants (performers and spectators) join to work in silence on pre-set themes. The workspace is built temporarily into an existing environment like a museum, a festival center, an academy, a retail store. The work-process is based on a circular structure of passing on containers of material. Its procedures are proliferation and reformulation in order to create topologies and maps that are related to the underlying theme. These topologies and maps serve as a common denominator for projects that will be individually developed, not by an individuum (a singular author), but individually as a project in the co-authorship of reformulation. The theme of the Emergence Room in Hasselt will be the myth of Arachne. It focuses on the difference between art and craft, symbolism and realism, doing as if and doing in the here and now. Athene weaves carpets that show the glorious deeds of the gods, Arachne weaves the everydayness of the relationship of humans and gods and its brutality. The figure of Arachne bares and exposes lots of topics and questions still relevant and unanswered in our time. What is the responsibility of the artist? What do we risk with art? How do we judge art works? How can artists and critiques coexist and collaborate?
      During the four days workshop all participants will work together on these topics and questions and formulate and proliferate material, create story boards together, that will later be exposed in the Emergence Room Hasselt in the frame of the exhibition SuperBodies (Hasselt Triennale).

       

       

      06 - 28 / 02 / 2012


      ‘THE SETTLEMENT: ALIEN LOGIC’
      working space by Vladimir Miller


      The settlement is a model to engender and structure work, knowledge, events and encounters. In a shared space, the participants function as an open group where questions of territory, negotiation and hospitality in art production surface. Settlers build a station suitable for their own artistic research and, by doing so, enter in a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas and events. The settlement allows negotiating many gradations of participation and influence; it also provides different modes of engagement between inside and outside. A settler can leave, a visitor becomes a tourist, a frequent visitor can eventually settle in the space. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement praxis actively searches for a spatialized production of dis-agreement. This Settlement is the 5th in a series of Settlements, developed within or outside of the a.pass context. The guiding principle of the Settlement this time is ‘Alien Logic’.

       


      27 / 02 - 2 / 03 / 2012


      ‘MICRO HISTORIES / 1 / OPENING WEEK’
      workshop by Thematics/Les Bains


      Curated by Lilia Mestre/Les Bains with invited artists Eleanora Sovrani (it/be), Einat Tuchman (is/be), Annu Pennanen (fi) and Stephane Querrec (fr) and Kobe Matthys (be), Micro Histories researches the processes of documentation and presentation of the ‘Micro Histories’ collected in four different Brussels areas: Vilvoorde, St Joost, Brussels Center (EEC quarter) and Forest. We aim to investigate, challenge and discuss cultural phenomena and their construction through field research. During the opening week the participants of the Thematics and the participants of a.pass meet to lay out the themes that are driving this research: what is the sense of history? what kind of methodologies do we use to register ‘what has happened’? How do we create our own histories, or make history appear where it is not considered likely to be found? What is field research and how do we set up a valid research environment on location? This workshop is the introduction to the His/Herstory workshop, during which these strategies are put to the test in individual research field trajectories.

       


      05 - 09 / 03 / 2012


      ‘MICRO HISTORIES / 2 / HIS/HER STORY’
      workshop by Alexander Schellow


      The second week of the Micro Histories workshop offers the opportunity to all participants to develop an individual history project, choosing their own location in Brussels, working on practice based field research, together with artist Alexander Schellow. In his work, which is located between artistic and scientific research-practice, he follows different strategies to translate fictions and questions into concrete narrations – as films, interventions, installations, drawing-series or spatial performance concepts. Narrations that one literally finds on the street.
      One keyword here is: practice. Not seen in the constructed and fairly imprecise dualism of practical versus theoretical, this becomes a very relevant term as well as concept. How can a practice (of observation, recording) be framed methodologically in different ways, in order to make it (and not just: combine it with) a tool of reflection? The workshop aims to trigger your own concepts and practices to react in their specific way on the above-mentioned questions/problematics. We will develop individual starting points for projects and follow them at least for a few first steps. In central group discussions those experiences and case studies will be shared and questioned with regard to methodology as well as content.

       

       

      19-23 / 03 / 2012


      ‘THE WALK - PREPARATION’
      preparation for a walking workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      In preparation of a month long walking workshop on mobile archiving/narrativizing the landscape, interested participants share for one week the development of possible walking scores, the fabrication and reconstruction of traces, and the possibilities of urban/non-urban routes. Every day we test out another walking score, and try to get further into the philosophy and reality of a walking workshop.

       


      10 - 13 / 04 / 2012


      ‘SPECIAL EFFECT MANUAL’
      workshop by Lynda Gaudreau


      This workshop is above all a research space around scores and working themes such as, speed, accidents and precision. Lynda Gaudreau's partitions constitute environments, "maps " integrating scenography, light, sound and relevant activities. The partitions include activities totally unrealistic, impossible to accomplish but that must be resolved at very precise moments. These scores open to a multitude of strategies to execute the tasks and generate what so called "side effects”. The workshop will be divided in two parts : conceptual and practical and participants will elaborate scores in a collaborative process. Open to choreographers, composers, visual artists interested in producing "special effects" in their works.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2011 BLOCK I 01 January 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2011
    • 31 March 2011
    • 2011 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Alessandra Coppola
      Caroline Daish
      David Zagari
      Doris Stelzer
      Esther Francis
      Iris Bouche
      Margareth Kaserer
      Marilyne Grimmer
      Michiel Reynaert
      Philippe Severyns
      Rodolphe Coster
      Stephen Bain
      Timothy Segers

       


      Research End Presentations

      Einat Tuchman
      Katrin Lohmann
      Sven Goyvaerts

       


      Partners

      Kaaitheater
      Damaged Goods
      RITS
      Burning Ice festival.
      Pact Zollverein
      De Singel
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Anette Baldauf
      Aras Ozgun
      Christian Rizzo
      International Errorist
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Leo De Nijs
      Meg Stuart
      Various Artists
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lilia Mestre
      Pierre Rubio
      Vincent Dunoyer

       

       

      03-13 / 01 / 2011


      ‘A SETTLEMENT ON ALCHEMY, ALLIANCE , ANARCHY’
      workspace by Vladimir Miller


      The settlement is a model to engender and structure work, knowledge, events and encounters. In a shared space, the participants function as an open group where questions of territory, negotiation and hospitality in art production surface. Settlers build a station suitable for their own artistic research and, by doing so, enter in a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas and events. The settlement allows negotiating many gradations of participation and influence; it also provides different modes of engagement between inside and outside. A settler can leave, a visitor becomes a tourist, a frequent visitor can eventually settle in the space. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement praxis actively searches for a spatialized production of dis-agreement.
      In the context of her two-week ‘Atelier’ in the Kaaistudios, Meg Stuart invited Vladimir Miller to localize his settlement in the dance studio. During these two weeks a.pass settlers and Atelier members will try to find moments of common ground, confronting the ideas and topics emerging in their respective territories.

       


      17-21 / 01 / 2011


      ‘ERRORISTA’S’
      workshop by a.pass in collaboration with Kaaitheater and RITS in the context of Burning Ice festival.


      The International Errorist is an artistic and cultural movement whose nucleus is the Buenos Aires-based artist collective Etcétera… The Errorist is also the most recent iteration of Etcétera’s unique fusion of aggressive street theater, political critique, and direct-action protest, which is equally marked by the group’s formative militancy within Argentina’s human rights movement as it is the artists’ ardent fealty to surrealism. Since the group’s formation in 1997, Etcétera has produced a myriad of photo- and video-based works, poetic manifestoes, theatrical works, and interventionist performances. Few have been created specifically as artworks to be exhibited in traditional fine arts contexts or destined for the publics proper to such contexts. Rather, Etcétera…’s works most often begin as performances in the midst of political demonstrations, unannounced street actions that target unwitting passersby, or as images and texts crafted to circulate within the mass media and/or amidst publics associated with left social movements.
      The International Errorist constitutes a critique of the contemporary discourse of terrorism, where this discourse is understood to be an instrument of statecraft. Etcétera…’s work explores terrorism as an ideological mediation whose function is not only political -- as it bears upon interpretations of political violence, for example-- but specifically biopolitical, as it concerns the calculus of the differential value of human lives and the state’s exercise of biopower over groups delineated according to this logic.

       


      24-28 / 01 / 2011


      ‘EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY’
      workshop by Anette Baldauf & Aras Ozgun


      This workshop aims at discussing some of the basic notions and problematics of visual ethnography, contemporary experimental practices in this field, and the practical potentials of digital media technologies for ethnographic research purposes. Starting with a critical historical overview of visual ethnography, the workshop examines various aspects of the problem of representation in visual ethnography. Representation of non-western “others” in the colonialist representation regimes, the “realism” and the “truth-value” of visual representation in general will be a part of this discussion. Following this discussion we will focus on non-mainstream ethnographic approaches and experimental documentary film practices, including so-called fake documentaries, which reflect upon and cultivate this problem of representation itself, and seek to create alternative modes, regimes and techniques of visual representation. Finally, we aim to familiarize ourselves with some of the basic techniques of ethnographic fieldwork.

       

       

      28-30 / 01 / 2011


      ’CURATING IN PERFORMING ARTS’
      workshop by a.pass in collaboration with Pact Zollverein, Essen.


      This workshop is organized over two weekends: one participating in the colloquium on curating organized by Pact Zollverein (Explorationen 11: Beyond Curating), and one discussing and proposing a new thinking about curating in the performing arts in deSingel.
      The currently vibrantly beginning discussion about curating in dance and performance comes at a moment when, on the one hand, ever new courses of study in curating are being launched for visual art and, on the other hand, the shape of the curatorial profession, in its authorial intervention and its omnipresence in the art market, has everywhere become the focus of massive criticism – as it was in the 1970s.
      At the same time, the entanglement of theory and practice has become ubiquitous, not least because of the transformation and revaluation of art colleges and art academies into universities. In what is currently happening in art, the art museum is testing the performative and processual exhibition, while the dance and performance house oriented toward performative arts is developing the live course or the "Musée de la danse". In the field of dance, since the end of the 1990s, artists' initiatives have been developing that introduce new artistic practices and criticize the existing organizational models (for example, from choreographs and performance artists like Xavier Le Roy, deufert + plischke, and Boris Charmatz). Substantively and structurally, organizers took up important impetuses from artists, whether in the form of a thorough interlocking of theory and practice or of the establishment of artist and co-curator teams, artistic laboratories, or residence programs.

       

      31 / 01 - 04 / 02 / 2011


      ‘NEW-YORK’
      workshop by Elke Van Campenhout & Bart Van den Eynde


      In the context of the ‘New York festival’ organised by deSingel, a.pass organizes an intensive discussion workshop. We take a close look at the recent New York performance scene and analyze how pop esthetics, cinematographic editing principles en trans-medial dispositives influenced a specific language of theatre, dance and performance. Video material, texts and talks with the artists present in the festival will be the starting point of the conversations. possibly Natural Theatre of Oklohama will also add a more practical section to the workshop.

       

      07 - 11 / 02 / 2011


      ‘BUREAU OF UNTITLED’ / EXERCISE IN COMMERCIAL ART’
      workshop by Various Artists


      Being a Various Artist is a series of interactive installations by Various Artists in which artists are invited to identify with one of Various Artists. The format is not so much about learning but it also produces new work of which the author is the Various Artist, at the same time remaining the property of the participating artists. The event that Nadine organizes in February is dealing with Various Artist Liam Drib.
      Liam Drib, born in Liverpool 1961, well known for Mes Amis Belges, Cobalt Thoughts and his Evil Olive pub realisation, will be the centre artist of a new Being a Various Artist Workshop with an emphasis on commercial art and dazzling ideas.
      To support this theme, Liam will organise a Bureau of Untitled (BoU) with the participants of the workshop.
      The mission of BoU is to propose new ideas to artists that have a financial value on the art market, meaning their works can be traded. BoU is about making money with art paid by art money. The context of BoU at PAF is the arts lab Being Liam Drib.
      The structure of BoU approaches the structure of a sports game, including 2 teams (one black on white and one white on black) and a referee (black and white). Initially an artist is proposed, voted and processed Ideas, fitted to the work of the chosen artist, are being generated at a continuous pace which will be stored in ascending price categories. The sealed ideas will be offered for sale to the artists on an international art fair in the near future.

       

      07 - 12 / 02 / 2011


      ‘SENSITIVITY, SPACE, STAGE’
      workshop by Laurent Liefooghe


      Through texts and references this workshop wants to introduce some concepts and concrete examples of spaces and how these function as a ‘stage’. Simultaneously it will explore the idea of the ‘stage’ (the place of the performance) as an ideological space.
      The workshop will use the work Theater-Cinema by Dan Graham as reference, a crystallization point around which we will try to examine concepts of performance spaces and the power mechanisms involved.
      The ambition is not to give an exhaustive and historical overview, but rather through the reading of specific texts and trough concrete practices to explore a personal spatial sensitivity.
      The Texts will touch upon diverse themes as: the ‘theatro del mondo’ (the ideas of the stage as a metaphor for the world / the world as a stage), the baroque urbanistic interventions of Pius X (the city as a theater), the black box as a monadic space,. etc.
      The introduction of specific examples of spatial practices leads to concrete questions on the production of space. What does it mean to first conceive a space – to first ‘represent’ it -and then realize it? Through examples of existing practices different means and methods of representation in function of production are investigated.



      14 - 19 / 02 / 2011


      ‘SPACE OVERLOAD’
      workshop by Christian Rizzo


      Christian Rizzo wants to use the projects of the a.pass participants as a basis for a research on the collective production of space. How to spatialize one’s own practice and by doing so create an environment for other practices. How to be present in silence. How can the group’s activity be the scenography for an individual practice and the other way around. How to deal with an overflow or with a lack of spatial information.

       


      28 / 02 - 04 / 03 / 2011


      “LOCATION”
      workshop by Leo De Nijs


      Location is a practical workshop in an enormous building with empty class rooms, a theatre space and offices that was once the location of a theatre training. As a start there will be an investigation into different ways of exploring the building and expressing the specificity of this/a location through different media. The question how to use a found space as a location will then be translated in the concrete realisation of an installation starting from the personal researches of the participants.

       

      14 - 18 / 03 / 2011


      ‘THE ARCHIVE AS GENERATOR’
      workshop by Adva Zakai


      Which archive could generate the future rather than preserve the past?
      Coming out of the experience of ‘d o m i n o k i n g d o m’ where each work lives on in the next because works are made as a reaction on previous ones, I am interested in delving more into the possibility of generating present and future out of a direct confrontation with past experiences: formats that make the past, present and future influence each other, can trigger a constant re-evaluation and challenge of our knowledge and perception.
      Archiving, be it in the artistic, educational or any other field, is considered important because it ‘proves’ the (past) existence of a past events and thus enables them to continue to exist and to be (re)visited. But imagine an archive that is not trying to capture fixed ‘images’, that is not referential. An archive that is a living process that keeps modifying itself constantly, triggering new processes instead of being a mere documentation, always lost in the past.
      How does an archive functions that is looking forwards instead of looking back?
      This question will be explored through reading, discussion and guest lectures.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK III 01 September 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2009
    • 30 November 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Agnese Cornelio
      Alejandro Petrasso
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Fien Wauters
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Sara Vilardo
       

       


      Research End Presentations

      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow

       


      Partners

      Theaterfestival
      De Singel
      CIFAS
      Bourla Theater
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Arco Renz
      Benjamin Verdonck
      Hans Op de Beeck
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lotte van den Berg
      Meg Stuart
      Moritz Kuhn
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi
      Rabih Mrouéh
      Renée Copraij
      Stefan Heinric
      Stijn Bussels
      Timothy De Paepe

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde   

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THEATERFESTIVAL’

      ‘Performance in public Space’ : reading sessions & artist talks by de Singel and a.pass

      The Theaterfestival offers a perfect occasion to make the a.pass training more visible. Three participants show their researches in the context of the festival ( Ariane Loze, Michel Yang and Jozef Wauters) and the reading sessions are open to outsiders. Several artists will be invited to discuss the theme of ‘performance in public space’ with the participants (Benjamin Verdonck, Moritz Kuhn and Lotte van den Berg), combined with a close reading of theoretical texts.  

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN III’

      workshop by Arco Renz  and Stefan Heinrich

      A scenography workshop with a choreographer seems a necessity for a.s. Working on a new project, Arco Renz works with the participants on the development of a - hypothetical - stage design for his choreography. Without the help of a 'performance text' the participants will enter his world and find connections with their own interests, measure up the artistic and practical limitations of the project and find a scenographic vision which inscribes itself in Arco Renz' universe.  

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THE ART OF MISUNDERSTANDING’

      workshop by Nicholas Y Galeazzi

      Nicolas Y Galeazzi’s workshop 'The art of misunderstanding' explores the different ways in which artistic research is or can be organized. In a very practical setting, the participants will develop one (room-sized) 'paper' on artistic research, using their own attitudes and methodologies for a more thorough mapping out of the field. The workshop both challenges the imagination of the field of knowledge production, as offering a lot of theoretical texts explorations, introducing artistic examples and opening up a lot of discussions.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘VENICE BIENNALE’

      journey to art biennale by a.pass 

      The visit of the Venice Biennale is a possibility for a focussed confrontation with the referential current visual arts context. Hybridity and the confrontation of cultures, identities and art languages are at the heart of the festival and the context of a cultural event of that proportion, exposure and 'fame' is in itself an important issue of discussion. Parallel with the Biennale there will be also other major exhibitions in Venice: the opening of  Punta della Dogana Art Museum and In-Finitum in the Palazzo Fortuny. There will be no organized workshop and there will be no fixed itinerary, participants will be free to completely self organize through the four days in Venice.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ART AS DOCUMENT / DOCUMENT AS ART - RABIH MROUÉ’

      Two weeks workshop with artist Rabih Mrouéh, in the framework of the RITS research project Art as a document/The document as art. Participants will join in first instance in day-long discussions on central topics within the working field of Mrouéh: what is history, what is fiction? can you create your own history? what is latency? when does your personal history become shared? how to create documents? how do documents function? how can you be your own actor?

      In a second phase, the participants will work with the material in a performative way.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / MEG STUART’

      Choreographer Meg Stuart discusses her development as an artist, the evolution of her work and how she relates to other art forms than dance. Being very aware of the artistic research context of a.pass, she will elaborated on working processes and tools for collaboration as well as the dramaturgy of her performances. 

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘RADICAL HOPE’

      An hybrid program of reading sessions, discussions with guests and practical interpretation of the concept of Hope, ending by the preparation of a 'hope dinner' in a.pass kitchen.

      'Radical Hope, Ethics in the face of Cultural Devastation', Jonathan Lear

      'Hope, New Philosophies for Change', Mary Zournazi: interview with Brian Massumi and Isabelle Stengers

      Guests : Renée Copraij: choreographer, dancer and curator of Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht and Laurent Liefooghe: architect, performance maker

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / HANS OP DE BEECK’

      Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck discusses his development as an artist, the evolution in his work and how he relates to other arts. Using a lot of visual material from his installations and models and fragments of his videoworks, he will sketch an artistic process and an evolution through trial and error. Also elaborating on the practical circumstances of his life as an artist: economics, reception, education, the relation with critics and galleries and museums, etc..

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘CONTAMINATE THE CITY’

      artistic practices in public space

      For this workshop we will join the workshop program of CIFAS in Brussels. ‘Contaminate the city’ is a workshop on artistic practices in public space, trying out different practices and actions, and gradually developing individual projects within the city.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘AN HISTORY OF DANCE’

      reading sessions by Katie Verstockt

      Starting with a minimal historical introduction from dance as a ritual to the dance history in Europe (focusing on the act of seeing and the scenographic performativity), dance theoretician Katie Verstockt will discuss mainly the important 20th century movements (Modern Dance, Ausdruckstanz, Ballet Russes, Ballets Suédois, Post Modern Dance, Butoh, Contemporary dance, ...) in their more general cultural context. 

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘BAROKTHEATERS’

      lecture by Timothy De Paepe at Bourla Theater

      Scenography researcher Timothy De Paepe will give a lecture on theatre architecture, stage machinery & scenography in the baroque era 1600-1750 based on his research and reconstruction of theatre buildings and stages out of the area of Antwerp. With an historical introduction on the evolution and social context of theatre and illustrated with an impressive visual documentation, this presentation will a perfect introduction to a visit of the Bourla Theater.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THEATRICALITY’

      lecture-workshop by art historian Stijn Bussels around the term ‘theatricality'. 

      Following Collins Dictionary it means ‘of or related to the theatre or dramatic performance’, but also ‘exaggerated and affected in manner or behaviour’. How the theatre is related to society? How the theatre is used as a concept that explains conduct outside the norm? However, this negative connotation is historically determined. In the Renaissance, the metaphor of theatrum mundi became a dominant model to show that society is fashioned by role play and scenario’s. This view, however, was not primarily put in a negative context. There is a clear shift in eighteenth-century thought. In this period, our contemporary use of the term ‘theatrical’ comes into being.

      The lecture will focus on the early modern era. By doing so, it will try to make clear how the theatre is divergently appraised in its representational aspect. The theatre is evaluated as reprehensible deception, but also as revealing deeper truth. This evaluation can be linked with views on historical societies where artificiality is not always predominantly coupled with dishonesty, but with skill and learning. 

       

      Fall 2009

      (IN) VISIBLE 

      workshop-research by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and Bart Van den Eynde

      "The reality: “The Giant Scenario”? Are we participants in a scenario created by humans? Is our reality a scenario built in real scale? Does the space feel that we are there? Does our existence depend on the space, or is it the space that depends on us?" Starting from the distinction between what is "visible" and what is not the participants are invited to join a research of the city in the city. Together with coordinator Bart Van den Eynde a syllabus is proposed (Simmel on ‘Metropolis’, Debord on ‘Derive’ and Marc Augé on ‘non-places’) and the creation of a context for city walks and consequent mapping and reporting. 

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK I 01 January 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2009
    • 31 March 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK I

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program
                       
      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow
      Fien Wauters
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Marcos Simoes
      Michel Yang
      Sungmin Hong


      Partners

      Buda Kortrijk
      University of Ghent
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)


                        
      Contributors for workshops

      Dora Garcia
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Jan Maertens
      Kris Verdonck
      Marianne Van Kerckhove
      Miguel Clara Vasconcelos
      Peter Stamer
      Stefan Heinrich
      Tine Van Aerschot
      Tom Plischke-Kattrin Deufert
      Yosi Wanunu

       


      Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout (a.pass coordinator)

      26 / 01 – 06 / 02  / 2009

      ‘VIDEO STORYTELLING AND EDITING’

      workshop by Miguel Clara Vasconcelos

      The workshop aims at setting up a film shooting and editing process out of the personal stories of the participants. Every participant constructs a personal story (out of objects, memories and scars) and throughout the first week re-constructs this story into a workable film script. During this first week Miguel Clara Vasconcelos will also provide film excerpts and examples and will go deeper into the theoretical approach of script writing and editing.

      In the second week, the participants will work on a collaborative shooting and editing of one collective script, assembled out of the different stories. 

       

       

      02  / 2009

      ‘LIGHT & DESIGN’

      workshop by Jan Maertens

      In his workshop on light design Jan Maertens will sketch out the light designer’s tools, reviewing the technical light equipment of a theatre. He tackles the ‘functionality’ of light design as part of the scenic environment and then focuses on light design as an independent co-actor in the artistic process. The workshop consists of three sections : a general introduction, from the principles of visual perception and light as a medium to the toolbox the theatre provides for the light designer, and a reflection on the position of the light designer as an artistic player in the multimedia performance field. Secondly, the participants have a close view on the development of a light design with all possible practicalities and artistic discussions in the concrete context of the working process for Meg Stuart’s creation 2009. Third, there will be a photo shoot of the light design for ‘Maybe Forever’ with photographer David Berger : a try-out on the documentation and archiving of light design.

       

       

      02  / 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 01’

      coaching by Stefan Heinrich

      Scenographer Stefan Heinrich coaches the program participants in the development of a scenography based on a personal fascination, for Fien Wauters ‘Hercules 2 or the Hydra’ (a text by Heiner Muller) and for Jozef Wouters ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ (a documentary by Werner Herzog). The idea is to take this personal relation as a motor for a scenography without interference of a director's concept, dramaturgy, historical context,... For Heinrich the translation of a first fascination into a coherent story and concept and the technical development of the stage design (for a concrete theatre space) are the axes of the workshop. 

       

       

       

      16-20 / 02 / 2009  

      ‘LOW TECH PERFORMANCE / COLLABORATION AT A DISTANCE’

      workshop by Dora Garcia

      The workshop proposes to research strategies and contents that need nothing but a performer to create the work. Specific attention is given to keywords such as audience, duration, visibility, infiltration, subversion and commitment.

      The workshop starts out of mutual interest, discussion, and information. In the first days, Dora Garcia gives a short presentation of her work and adds some "affinities" with other artists that she feels close to. Then the group discusses the concept of the workshop, "LOW TECH performances". The title, ‘LOW TECH’ refers to a type of performance stressing the content over the appearance, disliking complicated scenographies and props, rethinking conventions such as audience, stage, backstage, duration, character-playing, and using the technology that is available to everybody. 

       

       

      02-06 / 03 / 2009

      ‘CONSEQUENCES’

      workshop by Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

      The most important element of our working process is writing and transference. It allows all participants to work in silence and not to be bothered by producibility. The constant passing on of written material and the permanent reformulating, contextualizing, expanding, and reflecting of the written material serve as a basis for the creation and composition of movements, texts, sounds, or images. But within this procedure all realizations are based on  temporary decisions depending from the material that is handed over from the other and not because the medium of realization is chosen beforehand. Our working procedure could best fit into the motto: ‘Give me your material and I show you what you're not doing with it’.

      Sourcing the creation-act out and rendering oneself into the pendency of writing instead permits a disciplined work in silence, in which each participant and partner can raise her/his voice on the paper independently from its volume or the amount and position of knowledge. Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (Re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. The place of the individual argument, the singular voice is taken by an instance of polyphony, similar to the Cadavre Exquis, which is a game that was invented by Surrealists in 1925. It is quite similar to an old english parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Unlike the surrealists, we don't hide what has been written previously. For us it is a downright challenge to deal with the input of the others and to come into thinking with it, to expand ideas and suggestions, to combine sketches, to suggest a possible proceeding. It is only very late in the working procedure that we ask about the medium in which this material is to be realized. In this sense, the medium becomes a part in the decision-making, in the claim of form (or format). It is not set a priori and thus has to be in reference, translation, transference to the material: it has to be a decision and not a choice.
 Because of this it is fundamental in this principle of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one's decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (Re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. Just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

       

       

      01-30 / 04 / 2009

      ‘TOOLS FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARITY : DRAMATURGY IN REAL-TIME’

      workshop by a.pass

      This workshop is open for three different groups of participants:

      -aspiring dramaturges from the Theatre Sciences department of the university of Ghent and Antwerp


      -scenographers/sound designers/light designers

      
-'professional' dramaturges with the artists they regularly work with.

       

      The mentors of the project are:

      theatre maker Kris Verdonck

      dramaturg Marianne Van Kerckhove

      theatre maker Tine Van Aerschot

      dramaturg Elke Van Campenhout

      theatre maker: Yosi Wanunu (Toxic Dreams)

      dramaturg: Peter Stamer

       

      In de Buda Tacktoren, we form sub-groups of one artist/dramaturg, one scenographer/../.., and one aspiring dramaturge, each one occupying one studio of the Tacktoren.

      In preparation every one of the participants will receive the initial idea, or starting point (a text, a choreographic phrase, a political issue, a question), from the prof. team. Starting from this basic material they will already come to the workshop weaponed with some initial ideas, images, related texts etcetera,... (which we can call 'mood boards), to start the discussion. During the first week, the participants will discuss and work out ideas with the artist in question, and get feedback from the prof. dramaturge in the evening. Scenographers work on scenographic proposals, but work also closely together with the aspirant dramaturges, and the other way around.
 Every day they share their results with the rest of the group. At the end of the week, we will decide where every project is going to lead to: a short performance, an exhibition of drawings, ideas, concepts, a discussion...
In the second week, the results will be shared with the public. a.pass will provide the necessary contextualization of the project to communicate its status to the public.





APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

Unfortunately we no longer have applications. Both programs: the Postgraduate as well as Research Center have come to an end due to the decision of the ministry of education to stop financing a.pass. At the moment we look into new plans for the future. More news soon on our website.

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