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    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Printer's Devils
    • LONG-ING 13 June 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Kate Briggs
    • a.pass
    • 05 July 2023
    • 06 July 2023
    • LONG-ING

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

      Working times: 11am- 1pm & 2-4pm

      Plus: July 6, 6pm: book launch 'the long form' at rile*

      a.pass is located on the 4th floor inside the Brussels Event Brewery building. The studio is wheelchair accessible via elevator.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2023/I
    • Fantasmical Anatomy lesson Workshop
      11 January 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Anne Juren
    • 06 March 2023
    • 10 March 2023
    • With Anne Juren and her lessons on fantasmical anatomy (March 6-10), we turn to the body as a familiar and unfamiliar site of experience, epistemology and eventually altered potentiality. If the body is a biological product, conditioned by medico-social practices and generational transmissions that precede our experience, how can we simultaneously approach our closest friend and/or foe as ‘a body project’, i.e. as a poetic, fantastical, speculative, imaginative and even monstrous site of investigation that settles and unsettles the conceptions we might have of ourselves, the world and the relations between us? In which way are metaphors influencing the imagination of the body? How is the speculative addressing of somatic practice disfiguring concepts of anatomy? Can horror imaginaries offer a mood to investigate and release our corporeal disorder and vulnerability?

      Morning class 11am-1pm. + individual sessions in the afternoon.

      Bring warm clothes, yogamat and blanket, some pencils, as well as something (a concept, an object) related to your research work. The class might include non-intrusive touch.

      The morning class has some spots open to non-apass people. Please email if interested to participate. 75€/5 days.

       


       

      BOOK LAUNCH, 9th of March @ rile*

      Rile* and Varamo Press invite us for the book launch 'Lesson on gravity', with a performance. 

      More about the performance.

      More about the book

       

       


       

      Anne Juren is a choreographer, dancer, and Feldenkrais practitioner.  She lives and works in Vienna. In 2003, she co-founded the Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung association. Juren’s choreographic pieces and artistic works are shown worldwide in theatres, festivals, museums, and art venues. Since 2013, Juren has been a Feldenkrais® practitioner. Between 2014 and 2018, she was a member of the Artistic Committee of the Master Programme in Choreography at DOCH in Stockholm. Recently, she finished her PhD at the Stockholm University of the Arts under the supervision of André Lepecki and Sandra Noeth.

      More about Studies on Fantasmical Anatomy

    • postgraduate program
    • Our Practices / Our Extensions - Mentoring practice - Block 2022 III a proposal by Simone Basani and Heike Langsdorf / radical_house
      30 July 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Radical_House
    • 05 September 2022
    • 30 November 2022
    •  

      With Our Practices / Our Extensions we propose a self-observative and self-critical system for mentoring that acknowledges explicitly the socio-political meaning of such an activity of mentoring and being mentored – a practice in itself: attending to processes not being our own, and vice versa, being attended by eyes and minds outside ourselves.

      Inspired by several conversations with current coordinators, alumni, and participants of a.pass, the mentoring system of places at its core the following questions: What do we talk/work about when we touch upon ecological/social/urban issues? How did those issues touch us/our bodies/our hi-her-stories? From which physical/emotional/philosophical site does our research start from?

      We want to welcome a.pass participants by acknowledging that we all have different experiences and therefore some undeniable hunches, ideas, inheritances we are provided with by the way/s we live our life/ves and relate to others and other matter/s. Here we share a quote relating to this:

      “… inheritance doesn't come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.” ― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance

      Concretely speaking, we consider our practices being extensions from ‘where we come from’ – how we relate to the journey of our lives through what we do/propose ‘in practice’. For working collectively with our inheritances (and detect if/how/where they found their place within our practices), we propose to work – practice, discuss and exchange – at radical_house: a typical but recently modernized Brussels family house, being developed into a project with the same name during the last few years by radical_hope: Heike, Simone and many other practitioners. This place will be an anchor point, an object for thinking, a site of exploration for us and the participants, to unfold questions connected to their interests and practices.

      radical_house, Luikenaarsstraat 2, 1050 Brussels (bus 95, tram 81: get off Germoir), will have a physical and receptive presence during this block, and be accessible for the participants to meet, be mentored (one-on-one or in constellation), research, rest, cook, present / share their practices etc.

      By reacting, reading, accepting or rejecting this place, we will try to understand it as a dynamic constellation of traces, artifacts, spaces and relationships that might trigger further reflection about the artistic/social/political practices we are currently maintaining.

       

      Practically speaking, we invite the participants of a.pass at given moments of the week (we will choose them together during the intro-week based on everybody’s availability) into radical_house and share a set of protocols/scores for using a certain space as a site of practice-exploration. Those scores we’ll script or re-script together with the participants themselves on the basis of their interests/needs/desires (heard during the introduction week) and the geography-functioning of the sites we chose.

      radical_house’ proposition resonating with the Streets and the Earth: In the context of a.pass’ block 2022 / 3, while Streets and Earth raise a series of research questions connected to ecology, sustainability of art practices and, more widely, working life in the artistic field, Our Practices / Our Extensions is proposed by Simone and Heike as: 1. a methodology for mentoring & individual + collective reflection/exploration and 2. an explorative usage of a physical place where to stay, think, shelter, rest, continue... This place, radical_house, will be a place to ‘breathe with’ (or digest) the questions coming from Streets and Earth and from the physical-relational spaces of radical_house itself.

       

       

      BIOs of Simone, Heike and radical_house

      Simone Basani

      I spent a large part of my life in Milano and its outskirts, where my biological family still is. The last five years of my stay in Italy have been in Venice though, before migrating abroad as many members of my non-biological family have done too. In Milano, I have been trained in community drama, dramaturgy work, performance making in a theatre that was in the last phase of its dying process. In Venice I have studied the lexicon of visual arts, semiotics, curating, and finally started to apply this knowledge to my own public art projects. Once I arrived in Belgium, eight years ago, I started to apply that knowledge to projects of other practitioners as well – out of necessity and out of curiosity. Now I mostly conceive curatorial and performative formats where I invite artists to react on a specific proposition of mine. This is also a way to get to know their work better. Very often, Alice Ciresola (a member of my non-biological family) helps me to produce and communicate these formats. Some of them are: NittyGritty, Galeria Gdansk itd., What Remains of a Rembrandt.. and the most recent ones: Jeanne. Or the Western Touch that she co-curates, and Unrequested Services). I like these formats to have their own life quite soon after their conception, to get out of my control. Besides this, I have been collaborating for almost four years on a stable basis as dramaturg and creative producer with Heike Langsdorf/radical_hope, and David Weber-Krebs. Heike has invited me to edit one book of the series she created with Alex Arteaga `Choreography as Conditioning`. Currently I am working on the dramaturgy of a Post Pandemics version of her performance Mount Tackle. With Heike and other artists I take care of the life in and around radical_house. Hans Bryssinck, Heike, Miriam Rohde and I have initiated a `house of practices` inside radical_house.

      Heike Langsdorf

      I grew up on the German/Austrian border in the very South-East of Bavaria, and after some years in Arnhem/Amsterdam, I ended up in Brussels as my home base. With a background in dance and performance making, I am exploring the performative qualities of choreographing and conditioning within and beyond the art-institutional field. I connect to artistic making, thinking and researching through a continuous exploration of movement and choreographic principles. Since 2010 I developed (starting at a:pass) radical_hope as a working attitude supporting (my) various distinct practices. Today radical_hope identifies as framework/s for artistic research/es and co-creation/s under un/ideal circumstances. Next to realizing various and numerous projects, performances, interventions and programmes throughout the years, I have always been and remain very invested in understanding what gives rise and makes develop practices: how do practices mature, shift, transform, change direction and so on? This made that what I choreographed and co-curated became rather ‘spaces for gathering through practices’ than ‘pieces for stage’. I mention here some: Changing Tents (2011), Sitting With The Body 24/7 (2014/15), Mount Tackle (2017/2019), Un/Settled Residency (2018), …Through Practices (2019). Since 2018, informally, and since 2020 in a more formulated way, with the curatorial and productional support of Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola and in dialogue with other practitioners, I develop the long term project radical_house. Together with Alex Arteaga I co-edited the book series Choreography as Conditioning which was launched end of 2021, together with a long-term project stemming now from the written texts (find here more info and all credits >>>) . The writings of this series are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students worked together with invited guests and myself. They explore notions of choreography, understood as ways of organising subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making.

      radical_house

      radical_house is a long term project that stems from radical_hope's practices: it presents a physical place, a framework and a reasoning. It is also a possibility for Heike Langsdorf to connect, together with others, her pedagogical experience (which she could gain during the last ten years) back to the artistic field: - How can 'just another' house become a relational tool? What if one frees 'the house' of its usual connotations presenting "neither a property nor territory to be separated and defended against who does not belong there"? (*) It then could be considered "a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves". (**) (*/**) Roberto Esposito, Communitas - the origin and destiny of community, 1998

      The renovation (2016-19) of a Brussels family house, together with architect Tania Gijsenberg, into a place for 'more than family' is a relatively new reality, with three work paths that are temporally and spatially entangeled. Here just a short overview: Luikenaarsstraat 2 is the address of the house -- its physical appearance -- where people can live, work and present together. 'Just another house' (in 'just another neigborhood'). After its renovations this house now has the possibility to host more than their two permanent inhabitants: by opening and reducing the staircase to half its former width, a dark cellar (previously packed with unused stuff) became an atelier and the groundfloor became a studio with guestroom. A big window gives view to the streets, vice versa big parts of the working spaces can be seen from outside. The second floor is now an open co-working space with kitchen. Dismantling some little unused inbetween chambers on the same floor made two outside spaces possible: a little courtyard and a terrasse. Under the roof are two rooms for the permanent inhabitants to withdraw into.

      Some impressions

      Bridging from School: In 2021/22 radical_house develops the framework Bridging from School: first and foremost a way of working with young people, who are still studying or have just graduated, to make their practices not yet introduced to the field: this is done not only by following their work, mentoring or coaching them, giving them feedback but very concretely by setting up projects which need the presence and knowledge acquired in their practices. Like this they are actually introducing themselves while practicing, not by presenting their ideas and philosophies via dossiers and portfolios. Currently, as part of a recently started collaboration with Demos (Arts In Society Award), Simone Basani and Heike Langsdorf are mentoring their candidates.

      House of Practices is exploring permeability: how to make space in existing places? In dialogue, through their practices and those of guests, initially, Simone Basani, Hans Bryssinck, Heike Langsdorf and Miriam Rohde aimed to come closer to what the transformative power of a physical place could be: What does a place with its specific history, former and current inhabitants/users allow for? What makes it relational and permeable and for whom? How do our practices create closeness and distance to one another? What of it contributes to the making of community, and what to avoiding or even destroying it? In 2020/21 House of Practices received a research grant by the Flemish Authorities. In 2022 Simone Basani, Heike Langsdorf and Miriam Rohde continue the quest.

       

    •  

      In these circumstances: On collaboration, performativity, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity in research-based practices is a publication about artistic research as it is practiced within the co-learning environment of a.pass. This book brings together an assemblage of curatorial, artistic and pedagogical approaches emblematic of an institution that fosters collaboration, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity in research-based practices.

       

      The book presents itself as a printed version of the educational model of a.pass. It enacts its characteristics in a conversational and experimental mode, exposing questions and doubts as much as insights and convictions. It conveys a history of the stakes, qualities and methods of artistic research in the context of both an ongoing academisation of art education, as well as an abrasion of the once unbridled scene of artist-run organisations in Northern Europe. Documented here is how a.pass has carved a space for artistic research to deploy its tentacles with joy, risk and excitement, to imbricate in fields of both art and education, and to stir the sediments of disciplinary enclosures.

       

      To buy the book please visit the publisher's website: https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/in-these-circumstances/

      The book can be purchased during the launch event hosted by a.pass on the 20.May.2022. For more info about the event visit https://apass.be/the-apass-book/

       

    • What your research did to me.
      the (performative) publishing launch of Associate Researchers Cycle II

      Dragon Love (?)
      the a.pass End presentations of postgraduate researchers


      Friday the 11th and
      Saturday the 12th of June

      at: De Markten,
      Rue du Vieux Marché aux Grains 5, Brussels 

      No need to subscribe or reserve
      Only a live program!
      We have a max capacity of 80 people in the space.

      Welcome!

       
      FRIDAY 11th of June : 16h till 22h
      16.00  Doors open
      16.00 - 17:30  Dragonlove (?) preview
      Andrea Zavala Folache and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc

       
      What your research did to me -Associate Researchers Cycle II
      18.00  Welcome 
      18.15  I’m Not Sad, The World Is SadI’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad + Q & A,  Pia Louwerens 
      18.40  Siting Discourse - Breg Horemans
      19.00  Pop-Fi Poster - Lili M. Rampre
      19.15 -break-
      19.30  Mand/inga - Esteban Donoso
      20.30 -break-
      20.45  Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics + interview, Davide Tidoni
      21.15  Presentation common publication / Olga / annex
      21.30  Q & A moderated by Vladimir Miller. 
      22.00  END
       
      Saturday 12th of June: 18h till 22h
      17.45  Doors open
      18.00  Mand/inga - Esteban Donoso
       
      19.00  Dragonlove (?) - exhibition and performances
      Andrea Zavala Folache and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
      22.00  END
       
    •  

      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
       
       

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2021/I
    • I feel like leaving the room End Presentations 2021 I
      16 January 2021
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • online: https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online
    • 28 January 2021
    • 29 January 2021
    • I feel like leaving the room

      a.pass welcomes you the:
      29th January 2021 – 19:30 – TV show -Collective presentation – 2h30 hours

      Join Zoom Meeting
      is finished.... 

      Check out :  https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online/

      I feel like leaving the room  is the title of the postgraduate End Presentations of researchers Rui Calvo (film maker), Quinsy Gario (poet, visual and performance artist), Adriano Wilfert Jensen (choreographer), Magdalena Ptasznik, (choreographer) and Kasia Tórz (dramaturg and writer).

      After attending to the extended one year program at a.pass, the five researchers finish their trajectory with an online presentation of a collective website. Covid 19 and the restrictions of the confinement have framed the space of these public presentations in an uncanny entanglement between the private and the public. I feel like leaving the room  is more than anything the (liminal) desire to come together. The form of this coming together takes shape around an ad-hoc TV show that will be streamed the 29th of January from the a.pass studio as an attempt to still intertwine thoughts and experiences.

      In the beginning, the space for this public moment was imagined as a living room, as a place where the borders of the informal and the formal are blurred.  Not as a real physical living-room but by using the conditions implied in such well known private (though public) environment, with the aim of engaging the audience in a different way. What happens when research becomes public as a workshop, a power point presentation, a film, a dance or a walk that steers from such a hangout surrounding?

      As a consequence of the pandemic that determines the conditions of coming together – the living room became the desired ‘leaving room’ – a place, as well, between the private and the public but enclosing the publicness in separated private spaces with only one window – a window to the virtual. The artists researchers addressed that liminal space in various ways in accordance with the medium they mainly work with. Inevitably, the translations that will take place, address the current situation of the confinement, while trying to reach out to the world.

      Rui Calvo's research on non-linear narratives in cinema, has worked  with a group of performers in closed environments, claustrophobic settings, directive instructions that constrain the performers, as much as the audience, in a enclosed space of angst. In his films, no-one knows what, where and how these characters got together and which forces bind them to the situation they find themselves in. Like in a ‘chamber piece’ a small number of characters interacting over a short period of time in a limited environment create an awkward intimacy caught by the camera, from which they (maybe) want to leave. There is always the promise of an outside world created by a window, a curtain or the staircase, a promise that is never fulfilled. Cinema (audiovisual setting) is the medium by excellence we can access during the times we live. The medium that allows us to escape from the living room. But to where?

      with Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Diego Echegoyen, Federico Vladimir, Flávio Rodrigo, Lilia Mestre, Lucia Palladino, Nathaniel Moore and Sara Manente.

      Quinsy Gario's research focuses on de-colonial practices by revisiting archival material, institutional protocols and historical facts questioning the politics behind who gets to speak, when and how. By re-using existing materials, his work re-calls systems of oppression and proposes strategies and tactics of epistemic disobedience and fugitivity. For his End Presentation, Quinsy thinks through the Fragile sticker, used in the transport, and the imagery of travel, migration and seeking refuge elsewhere. The proposition gives attention to the precarious status quo of mobility and the destitution of private space of diaspora and fragile groups, specially threatened in time of forced confinement.

      Adriano Wilfert Jensen ’s research followed three interrelated paths:  spectatorship as practice, dance as a labor of depersonalizing the self and politics of collaboration. Through collaborative processes Adriano, developed dances that sought to cultivate response -ability in spectatorial practice. For his End Presentation he will present a letter on practice based spectactorship along with commented dance scores on the webpage of the group.

      Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.

      Kasia Tórz's, research on the notion of dissolving boundaries (smarginatura) engages in the liminal space between the private and the public, the textual and the image, reality and imagination, the conscious and the unconscious. Smarginatura makes reference to the writer Elena Ferrante and the main character of her Neapolitan Novels, Lila Cerullo, who experiences losing her solid outlines and melting into her surroundings. Kasia experimented with expanded forms of storytelling by engaging with image, voice, body practices and performance in her writing, by blurring the lines between reality and fiction in a daily life basis. For her End Presentation she will invite the audience to a nocturnal session.

      This introduction took the flavour of a weather report. As times change in unforeseen ways, as complex forces conduct the environment, as the temperature is warmer than normal, as violence is unrated, as the soul is disoriented, as politics are going ashtray, the weather, here in Brussels, is grey and symptomatic of great confusion.
      Stay home for now, imagine spring is coming soon and we all feel like leaving the room. 

       

      *

       

      BIOS ad extra content

      Rui Calvo is a Brazilian filmmaker who works as screenwriter, director and editor. He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a degree in Audiovisual Arts. Among his short films are “Whole Man” and “Quito”, which were screened at festivals in different countries, as Canada, England, South Africa and Argentina. “The Death of Helena”, his first feature film as a director and screenwriter, was recipient of a grant for film project development in Brazil. Now he is looking for opportunities to produce the movie in a country governed by the far-right and which has been destroying, among other things, the cultural sector.


      In most of Rui's previous short-films, the discomfort regarding one’s own body and the non-belonging feeling (or the lack of identity) are part of the content. Formerly, these concerns were built in the script in a linear narrative way and then translated into images. Coming to a.pass was a way of take a distance from the cinema field and think of audiovisual narrative otherwise. Through out the program, Rui addresses his initial question, on how to film bodies and not imprison them in rational discourse by taking “real life” as much as a product of convention as acting, by giving instructions ( that do not build a character) to the performers to play with in front of the camera and by creating filming settings that don't reassure a fictional background where the performers can situate themselves. In this way, the production of fiction is unstable and influenced by the shooting process itself, in which the performers hover between being characters and themselves, creating subjectivity through filming. The alchemy of these elements produces encounters filled with tension, vulnerability and exposure to the other and also to the camera, which is left with an undergoing process of rupture, misunderstanding and indeterminacy, creating this way conditions for under-narratives to appear.

      *

      Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten, two island that share continued Dutch colonial occupation. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario's most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012). As a member of the collective Family Connection established in 2005 by Glenda Martinus and Gala Martinus, respectively his mother and aunt, his current research is attempting to institute another way of archiving. He is a Utrecht University media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies alumnus and a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague. He is a 2017 Humanity in Action Detroit Fellow, 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, 2019/2020 APASS participant and a 2020/2021 Sandberg Institute Critical Studies Fellow. Gario received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in among other places Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), TENT (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg). Gario is also currently running for Dutch parliament as a candidate for the political party BIJ1.

      Quinsy entered the program studying practices of refusal as found within Caribbean performance practices and his research trajectory brought him to the Baltics thinking through postsocialism and postcolonialism. For the a.pass End Presentation Quinsy is presenting #FragileRoots which is a companion piece to #FragileRoutes, a work presented at the Bâtard Festival 2021 and part of a larger series of work and research. At the center of the proposition is the suitcase bought in Hong Kong by the Estonian artist Kristina Norman and gifted to Quinsy during his research residency at the Estonian Art Academy. The residency was to further research into the depiction and usage of the depictions of St. Maurice in the Baltic region. The Sudanese Catholic saint had been adopted as the patron saint of the Blackheads Brotherhood, a merchant guild of unwed men in at the end of the 14th Century. After the end of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic region the various countries of the Baltic became nations again and started to further develop national narratives which included or excluded the remnants of this guild. Through the series of works Quinsy is reflecting on Blackness, migration, improvisation and practices of refusal. This particular piece consists of the remnants of the aforementioned suitcase, stickers bought at the lowbudget department store Daily Style and slides that were bought at a second hand store in Estonia.The stickers are used for precious cargo and contain the word 'Fragile' and the slides depict images from the Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 missions and a vacation by an unnamed group of white individuals to Cuba in the 1960's. Together with toys depicting underwater sea life, extendable mirrors and coasters with black glitter #FragileRoots pushes for epistemic disobedience and fugitive approaches to our collective presents, pasts and futures.

      *

      Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public (Microclimates I and II, Zachęta National Gallery 2018-2019, Cli-Fi at BWA Gallery Wrocław 2019). Magdalena is a member of a collective of choreographers Centrum w Ruchu (Warsaw), graduate of School for New Dance Development (SNDO), and sociology at Warsaw University. Since 2015 together with Maria Stokłosa and Renata Piotrowska she has been developing in Warsaw an educational project Choreography in Motion: Experimental Choreography Course. She lives in Amsterdam and Warsaw.

      “My research materializes as written texts, which experiment with the form of the score—a choreographic tool. I started this journey with the idea of creating scores for collective participatory performances. Throughout the process, and the period of confinement we found ourselves in, the research transformed into an exploration of writing. I’m looking into what kind of performance these texts can produce with a reader. I propose to look at the performativity taking place in an intimate sphere activated through reading. I understand it as an interobjective space created by a reader, a score, and an environment.  Scores direct its readers’ attention towards the relations within an environment of which they are part. In particular, I explore how we take part in the materiality of the environment as well as the relations we are already engaged in and have potential to engage with. Building upon observation and somatic experience, I investigate environmental relations through navigating attention and developing fictions. The ultimate reference and a tool to think with is, for me, geology, which brings us to the earth as the basic structure of our material being. Geological time teaches us about the constant movement of any and all matter, and it gives us a more-than-human perspective to time.”

      *

      Adriano Wilfert Jensen works with dance and choreography to analyse and produce conditions of relations. His practice manifests in making, performing, writing about, curating, representing and dealing choreography, dancing for other artists, as well as other occupations like a series of cocktail hang outs, publications, research projects, teaching etc.

      Together with Simon Asencio he is since 2014 running Galerie – an immaterial gallery for immaterial artworks. And with Emma Daniel he is dancing for the dinosaurs in Spending Time With Dinosaurs. Together with Linda Blomqvist, Anna Gaïotti and Emma Daniel he organized Indigo Dance Festival, Magazine and Tink Thanks at Performing Arts Forum. In 2017 he initiated the research project analysis of which his a.pass research was part. In 2019 he premiered the group piece feelings as part of the research analysis, and in the summer 2021 he will premiere a new group piece informed by his research at a.pass.

      Adriano, has been researching on what he calls practice-based spectatorship and dance as a labour dispositif for depersonalizing the self. He wrote a letter developing the notion of practice-based spectatorship as a tool to study how different dance works, which have shaped his own practice, condition spectatorship conventions. Through this letter, a contextualization of how his practice is situated by and indebted to the work of others, takes place. In addition, Adriano also developed a series of dances by analyzing and intervening in existing historical dance protocols. Working on these dances together with the research of spectatorship he questioned how to re-relate to the self beyond individualism, in dance and its spectatorship.

       

      *

      Kasia Tórz. Writer, dramaturg, researcher, is seeking for other than language-based ways of writing, i.a. working with images or body practices focused on internal movement. In that framework, she is interested in the melting points of the poetic, existential and political. Graduate from Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, participant of doctoral studies at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. Between 2007-2011 she collaborated with Twożywo – a no longer existing Polish urban art group – at projects like: Zaciemnienie / Twilight and several wall paintings. Between 2008-2019 she has programmed a thematic section of the Malta Festival Poznań (PL) called ‘Idioms’. Since 2019 she has worked with Needcompany – a Brussels based theatre collective, as artistic & programme developer.

      Smarginatura {this is a demo}
      How are we touched by and through the live act – the act of seeing? What goes through the porous surface of our skin? What kinds of experiences expand our sensitivity? Who sets the scale of the image? The contour of the skyline? When do we break upon the pressure of impulses, when do we freeze, and when do we burn? What are the politics of seeing that we adapt to and how to alter them? Smarginatura {this is a demo} is a radio- broadcast, a live-like transmission of words, images and sounds. It invites the audience to explore the depth of the surface.

       

      *

       

    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Dismantle Space 30 October 2020
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Chloe Chignell / Muslin Brothers / Flávio Rodrigo / Christina Stadlbauer
    • online: http://dismantle.space
    • 11 November 2020
    • 14 November 2020
    • Dismantle Space

      With Chloe Chignell, Muslin Brothers – Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi , Flávio Rodrigo and Christina Stadlbauer

      NOT at ZSenne ArtLab and NOT at Rosa Library, downtown Brussels


       

      Website: dismantle.space

       


       

      Dismantle Space gathers the research outcomes of Chloe Chignell, choreographer, editor and writer; Muslin Brothers – Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi – fashion practitioners and visual/performing artists; Flávio Rodrigo, theatre maker and teacher; and Christina Stadlbauer, visual artist and scientist.

      A practice of dismantling directs the conceptual and experiential nature of all their works. More than ever it is necessary to disassemble the mechanisms that form our relationships with the worlds around us in order to rebuild perspectives on those same worlds.

      Using very different tools and methods the presented research insists on making visible the cultural constructions that knit our perceptions of history, language, science and fashion to their instituting frameworks. They dismantle the structural attachments we have to those institutional machines and re-tell other possible relations to them by opening up the capacity of bodies to their collective and personal resilience.

       

      The capability of bodies to create spaces to nurture, find out and experience muted or unseen connections, may they be social, personal, economic, environmental, racial... Through performative virtual installations, readings and conversations, these research projects unfold space to engage differently in ecosystems of relations that permit perspectives affirming something other than the status quo.

       

      For Dismantle Space, a website has been created in collaboration between the researchers and web designer and editor Sven Dehens in order to compile the works that have been developed in the frame of the artistic research environment of a.pass. This website hosts the complicities and differences of the four researches and it will address the infrastructural concerns each of them entails.

       

      For the End Presentations, a.pass invites three Visitors for a feedback conversation with the participants. The visitors of *Dismantle Space* are writer, editor, and dramaturge Caroline Godart, performance curator Guy Gypens and artistic research director Hicham Khalidi.

       

      This public event is co-curated by the participants with the support of a.pass. In response to the Covid-19 imperative of not being able to gather and to accommodate the different natures of the works, the presentations will take place online. The construction of the website was a way to keep the works connected and conversing with each other.

       

      Many thanks to ZSenne ArtLab and Rosa Library for their support, Sven Dehens for the website and Deborah Birch for text editing.

       

      *

      Dismantle

      Space


      *

       

      The research and work of Chloe Chignell is situated between choreography and literary practice. Throughout her a.pass trajectory Chloe worked with several performative dispositifs which use scores as mediators between body and language. With much precision her work performs the intra-dependencies between them in ways that facilitate and provoke in the viewer another understanding of how the body writes and reads itself.

      Dismantle
      Her work Poems and Other Emergencies dismantles the preconception that language can decipher and translate the body in an absolute and unidirectional manner. The prevailing cultural supremacy of language holds back other forms of knowledge and understanding of the body as a complex entity.

      Space
      While working at a.pass the processes Chloe created in physical space or on the space of the page triggers in the audience unforeseen attachments to cultural, social paradigms and relations between languages and mediums. For her End Presentation, the book becomes an object that expands the dimensions of the page, with the essays Language as Prosthesis and The Complete Text Would be Insufferable asking questions of the reading body, your body.

       

      *

       

      During their trajectory at a.pass, the research project of fashion practitioners Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi -had focused on the uniform in correctional facilities. Their involvement with prisons and prisoners’ statements opened up a complex questioning of the garment-as-uniform and the process of uniformization. Using installation-performance as a research tool the artist duo created participatory situations that repositioned the role of the garment in its social, political, and economic functions. From staging the tailor’s atelier in several formats, the prayer book as a scored assembly, or audio files for confined self-appraisal they created critical environments that work to de-gender, de-class, and de-colonise clothing in contemporary society.

      Dismantle
      Their research dismantles the production chain and the economy behind the garment. Their work looks at fashion through the economy of belonging, establishing the strong relation between who-wears-what and the creation of harsh social segregation.

      Space
      Their research is manifested in performative installations that delay an easy identification with the garment by softening a space in which the participants can elaborate a collective and participatory questioning about this often ignored terrain.

       

      *

       

      Flávio Rodrigo’s research is a continual overlapping and unfolding of autobiographical writing, storytelling, and ritual. His work continues an oral tradition of recounting and holding to account that can re-tell history from the place of the minority. His research creates intersections between stories of racism and homophobia, auto-fiction, and ritual in order to claim power against normative politics in a non-normative way.

      Dismantle
      Flávio's research investigates the body by shedding light on the scars we all have. Working with scars as relational objects from which narratives unfold, he creates the possibility for an understanding of the self as relation between physiological trace and mythical, political, and personal time.

      Space
      Flávio crafts rituals and participatory performances as a collective investigation into both the trauma and the many forms of healing that scars represent. These storytellings open up a space for the personal to be continuously woven into collective, political history, and affirm that the possibility of transformation is embedded in each of us, and in all of us collectively. For his End Presentation Flávio worked on a performance series The ghost scar solo that will be streamed in three episodes.
      11th - 20:30 - Episode 1 - the ghost and the milk
      12th - 20:30 - Episode 2 - the tent and the mirror
      13th - 20:30 - Episode 3 - the body and the plate

       

      *

       

      The research of Christina Stadlbauer addresses the relationship between humans and other-than-human companions in the environment *we* share with *them*. Her approach tackles the ethical implications of the loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity. Christina engages with multiple actors in the fields of science and art, as well as with inhabitants of urban and non-urban environments, animal, vegetable, and mineral beings. She uses interviews, video footage, and performative installations to shine a light upon muted or undervalued situations of imbalance between human and other-than-human existences.

      Dismantle
      The recent focus of her work has been on the Museum as a public display of knowledge. Christina questions and deconstructs the infrastructure of the museum as a colonial institution which acquires, catalogues, and communicates knowledge in a human-centered manner, neglecting other life forms. Even though at this point in history, with an attempt to reformulate the definition of the Museum, lead by ICOM – the International Council of Museums – she maintains there is a persistent neglect of other species´ knowledge.

      Space
      Christina’s research engages in a re-imagining of the museum. A museum which explores through practice-based experiments and explorations how humans relate to other species, and dedicates itself to different forms of communication in search of a language between all parties.
      For her End Presentation, Christina set a series of conversations with Agata Siniarska, choreographer, dramaturge and author; Lesley Kadish, anthropologist and specialist of disabled people in museums; and Maria Ptqk, curator and director of Museum Cabinet Sycorax. These conversations will be presented as podcasts and transcribed in text.

       

      *


      BIOGRAPHIES

      Chloe Chignell
      Chloe Chignell (Australia) is a dancer and choreographer based in Brussels working across text, choreography and publishing. In 2019 she opened rile* a bookshop and project space for practices moving between publication and performance, with Sven Dehens. Her most recent work Poems and Other Emergencies premiered at Batard Festival Brussels 2020, and was supported by WorkspaceBrussels, BUDA Kortrijk, Lucy Geurin Inc and La Balsamine. She graduated from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (Brussels, 2018),  She has a Bachelor in Dance from Victorian College of the Arts, (Melbourne, 2013) and studied a writing and residency program at DOCH (Stockholm, 2017). As a choreographer Chloe has been commissioned by the Keir Choreographic Award for the creation of Deep Shine (Melbourne) touring to Japan for The Awaji Art Festival. She presented a short work forever in both directions for the Venice Biennale’s Biennale of Dance (2017). As a dancer Chloe has worked for Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Ingrid Berger Myhre, Anna Gaiotti, Gry Tingskog, Atlanta Eke, Ellen Söderhult, Phoebe Berglund and James Bachelor performing in Australia and across Europe. Chloe is co-editor of This Container magazine, currently in its 8th edition based between Stockholm, Brussels and Melbourne. Her writing has been published by This Container, Koreografi, Indigo Dance Magazine (PAF) and Realtime (Australia). She has developed choreographic writing and reading formats hosted by Kottinspektionen (Stockholm), PraxisFestivalen (Oslo), PAF (France) Scene:Bluss (Norway). She is co-initiator of PO$$E a dance and reading group .
      www.chloechignell.com / www.rile.space / www.thiscontainer.com

      *

      Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi
      Muslin Brothers (Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi) acts as both a fashion brand and research studio speculating on the way personal, social, and political systems shape and are shaped through clothing. It is named after the muslin fabric widely used to make veils, men shirts, and clothing prototypes prior to production.
      The duo’s work overlaps between wearables, spatial, performance, image-making, and exchange of information, using the technologies of clothes-wearing and clothing production lines for a poetic investigation into the biography of non-designer design.
      They hold a B.A in fashion design, from Shenkar, college of engineering, design and art, Israel.
      Their work has been shown in platforms such as the Kanal centre Pompidou Brussels, Parsons New York, Stockholm Art university, Israeli Museum,  the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jerusalem design week, and London and Tel Aviv fashion weeks. They were designers in residency at Arad contemporary art center (2020) Artez Academie Arnhem (2018) and London's college CFE (2016). Winners of design award from the Israeli culture ministry (2018), and the pais grant for fashion design (2016).
      www.muslinbrothers.com

      *
      Flávio Rodrigo
      Flávio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira, 37, gay, brazilian, artist, lives in Brussels. He is a performer. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Scenic Arts from State University of Campinas – UNICAMP (2004), a Specialization Degree in Psychopedagogy from FHO – UNIARARAS (2012), a Specialization Degree from UCB (2013) and a post-master degree in Performing Arts in a.pass (Advanced Performing and Scenography Studies – 2020). He is now undergoing a Master's programme in Speculative Narration and Videography at the ERG (École de Recherche et Graphisme) de l'Université Saint Luc.

      *

      Christina Stadlbauer
      Christina is an artist and researcher. She works at the cracks of arts and sciences, and develops her research around non human agencies - collective intelligence, interspecies communication and the relation between culture and nature. Christina obtained a PhD in Natural Sciences and her practice is informed and influenced by her scientific understanding. She has launched several artistic long term initiatives: like Melliferopolis, an artistic platform to engage with honeybees and their worlds, the Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity – an artistic container to explore the ethical implications of issues related with loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity, and Kin Tsugi Transformations, a work strand with bacteria that reflects on the ethics implied with microbiological lab work and our strive for control and imperfection.

       

    •  

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

      *

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

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

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

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

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

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

      *

      March 2019, Contribution to Festival Performatiek, at Kanal:

      "Diversity is all around"- Installation and video projection. 

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

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

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

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

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

      *

      Summer 2019, Troubled Garden:

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

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

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

      *

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

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

      *

      Fribourg, Blue Factory - the unlearning centre - a trip to Switzerland in the heat of the summer 2019. 

      mini conferences (2 participants) on the topic of dispersing, dry toilets and 

      Collective reading moments of Bruno Latour Down to Earth and Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble. Very helpful!!

      A reflection about Abundance at the Unlearning Centre, Fribourg. 

      *

      The Other Within

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

      *

      March 2020 ff, S/Corona

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

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

      Park or Room Domestication

      Infection is defined as the communication of a disease

      Terrain and Germ

      Biota

       

       

      *

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

      *

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

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

      *

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

      Agata Siniarska: In the Beginning was a Copy, 2017

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

      Bruno Latour: Down to earth, 2017

      David Abram: The Spell of the sensuous, 1996

      Deborah Bird Rose: Wild Dog Dreaming, 2012

      Descola Philippe: Beyond nature and culture, 2005

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

      Federico Campagna: Technic and Magic, 2018

      Jonathan Franzen: What if we stopped pretending, 2019

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

      Karen Barad: On Touching, 2012

      Tim Ingold: What is an animal? 1988

      Ursula Leguin: The carrier bag theory of fiction, 1986

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

       

    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • ROT Sara Manente
      02 March 2020
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • 01 February 2020
    • 14 Euro
    • ROT

      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

       

       
    • 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
    • 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

       
    • Newsletter January 2019 13 January 2019
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

      24-25 May: THIS IS 1000 LITERS FUEL SO... @ Decoratelier

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

      4 till 30 June : PARALLEL-PARASITE @ Zsenne ArtLab. 

      30 April till 2 September: Block II 2018 - MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND  OTHER MATTERS…

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

      24 and 25 May, @ *Decoratelier. 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels

      Doors: 17:30, first performance 18:30, end: 22:00.

      a.pass end-communications of: 

      Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong,  Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi

      For this End-Communications, the six researches come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?

      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. 

      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. 

      Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. 

      Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. 

      Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist.

      Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

      *Decoratelier is an ongoing and constantly evolving project by autonomous artist in residence, Jozef Wouters.

       


       

      Scorescapes

      26 May @ *BREW, Schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene, 1000 Brussels

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

      Another iteration of the ScoreScapes research by curator Lilia Mestre took place in block 2017/II The problem of the score. The publication Medium Score - Tectonic Friendships is a reflection of that iteration. Together with the six a.pass researchers finishing the post-master program we decided to do a combined publication for the Medium Score and the End- Communications.

      Come to the book launch and have a chocolate cocktail with Shervin Kianersi Haghighi.

      *BREW is a new space in Brussels which organizes and hosts events and activities in the field of contemporary art. Initiators: Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


      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.

      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, Lilia Mestre's 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 publicness 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).

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • Newsletter January 2019 13 January 2019
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

      24-25 May: THIS IS 1000 LITERS FUEL SO... @ Decoratelier

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

      4 till 30 June : PARALLEL-PARASITE @ Zsenne ArtLab. 

      30 April till 2 September: Block II 2018 - MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND  OTHER MATTERS…

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

      24 and 25 May, @ *Decoratelier. 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels

      Doors: 17:30, first performance 18:30, end: 22:00.

      a.pass end-communications of: 

      Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong,  Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi

      For this End-Communications, the six researches come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?

      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. 

      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. 

      Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. 

      Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. 

      Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist.

      Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

      *Decoratelier is an ongoing and constantly evolving project by autonomous artist in residence, Jozef Wouters.

       


       

      Scorescapes

      26 May @ *BREW, Schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene, 1000 Brussels

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

      Another iteration of the ScoreScapes research by curator Lilia Mestre took place in block 2017/II The problem of the score. The publication Medium Score - Tectonic Friendships is a reflection of that iteration. Together with the six a.pass researchers finishing the post-master program we decided to do a combined publication for the Medium Score and the End- Communications.

      Come to the book launch and have a chocolate cocktail with Shervin Kianersi Haghighi.

      *BREW is a new space in Brussels which organizes and hosts events and activities in the field of contemporary art. Initiators: Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


      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.

      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, Lilia Mestre's 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 publicness 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).

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • This is 1000 liter fuel. So - & Tectonic Friendship book launch 21 May 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Luisa Fillitz / Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado / Eunkyung Jeong / Marialena Marouda / Ekaterina Kaplunova / Shervin Kiarnesi / Lilia Mestre
    • 24 May 2018
    • 26 May 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • This is 1000 liter fuel. So - & Tectonic Friendship book launch

       

       

      This is 1000 liter fuel. So-

      For this End-Presentations, six researchers come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?
      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist. Shervin Kianersi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

       

      SCORESCAPES BOOK LAUNCH

      Medium Score -Tectonic Friendship & End Presentations  Writing Score

      a.pass book launch @ Brew with a dialogue facilitated by Philippine Hoegen and chocolate cocktails by Shervin Kianersi Haghighi!

      We will engage in a collective discussion with Philippine Hoegen and will perform parts of the publication.

      This publication serves the SCORESCAPES research - scores as pedagogical tool by Lilia Mestre and the End-Communications of six a.pass researchers. Medium Score builds on the previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue and intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research.

      Before finishing the a.pass program in May 2018, the six researchers Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong, Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova and Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi worked for a month and a half in an adapted Writing Score to produce this publication.

      Design: Miriam Hempel www.daretoknow.co.uk

       

       

      END-PRESENTATIONS @ DecorAtelier 24 and 25 May from 17:30 till 22:30

      Rue de Liverpool 24, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean

      BOOK LAUNCH Medium Score -Tectonic Friendship & End Communications  Writing Score

      @ Brew 26 May from 17:30 till 19:30

      1 Rue du Pene, 1000 Brussels

       

    • Newsletter May 2018 13 May 2018
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

      24-25 May: THIS IS 1000 LITERS FUEL SO... @ Decoratelier

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

      4 till 30 June : PARALLEL-PARASITE @ Zsenne ArtLab. 

      30 April till 2 September: Block II 2018 - MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND  OTHER MATTERS…

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

      24 and 25 May, @ *Decoratelier. 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels

      Doors: 17:30, first performance 18:30, end: 22:00.

      a.pass end-communications of: 

      Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong,  Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi

      For this End-Communications, the six researches come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?

      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. 

      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. 

      Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. 

      Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. 

      Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist.

      Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

      *Decoratelier is an ongoing and constantly evolving project by autonomous artist in residence, Jozef Wouters.

       


       

      Scorescapes

      26 May @ *BREW, Schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene, 1000 Brussels

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

      Another iteration of the ScoreScapes research by curator Lilia Mestre took place in block 2017/II The problem of the score. The publication Medium Score - Tectonic Friendships is a reflection of that iteration. Together with the six a.pass researchers finishing the post-master program we decided to do a combined publication for the Medium Score and the End- Communications.

      Come to the book launch and have a chocolate cocktail with Shervin Kianersi Haghighi.

      *BREW is a new space in Brussels which organizes and hosts events and activities in the field of contemporary art. Initiators: Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


      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.

      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, Lilia Mestre's 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 publicness 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).

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 


       RECERTIFICATION! 

      Saturday 26th of May,
      the BOOKLAUNCH  (at 17:30) of Scorescapes
      at BREW was announced with the wrong address!

      >>> BREW = Schootstraat 1 Rue du Pene <<<

      Be welcome! 
      With chocolate cocktails by Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi
      and a dialogue facilitated by Philippine Hoegen.

       


      APASS and GDPR

      We would like to keep you informed about interesting news about apass. In the context of the new GDPR, we would like to point out that if you do not want to receive news from us anymore, you can very easily opt out of new postings. This can be done as usual via "unsubscribe" at the bottom of each e-mail. But of course we hope you do not press that button and we can just keep you informed of all interesting developments and announcements about apass


      PS...


      TODAY Friday the 25th of May
      THIS IS 1000 LITER FUEL SO…

      a.pass end communications 
      @ Decoratelier 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels
       

      PROGRAM 

      17:30 Doors open
      18:00 Introduction
      19:00 Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado (25 people max)
      20:15 
      Marialena Marouda
      21:00 
      Marialena Marouda
      23:00 end. 

      Ongoing: 
      Luisa Fillitz, Eunkyung Jeong,Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi. 

      Catering on the spot by Sara ten Westenend. 

      More info 

       
        
        a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 – 1080 – Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be
    • Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 


      REMINDER:

      Thursday 24th and
      Friday 25th of May 

      THIS IS 1000 LITER FUEL SO…

      a.pass end communications 
      @ Decoratelier 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels
       

      PROGRAM for both days

      17:30 Doors open
      18:00 Introduction
      19:00 Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado (25 people max)
      20:15 
      Marialena Marouda
      21:00 
      Marialena Marouda
      23:00 end. 

      Ongoing: 
      Luisa Fillitz, Eunkyung Jeong,Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi. 

      Catering on the spot by Sara ten Westenend. 

      More info 

      PS:
      Saturday 26th of May 
      book launch "Scorescapes"
      17:30 @ Brew schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene
      with a dialogue facilitated by Philippine Hoegen and chocolate cocktails by Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi! 

       

      PARALLEL PARASITE, a month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence

       

      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 at ZSenne, 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.

      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 practices approach in the arts.

      The three main proposals for the a.pass Research Center in dislocation are:

      Week 1 > 4 till 9 June
      SOL - School of Love - Instead of Needing to know

      This working session needs inscription please follow this link https:///www.apass.be/instead-of-needing-to-know/ SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai

      Week 2 > 11 till 15 June
      SCORESCAPES > Fragile Community Score proposed by Lilia Mestre

      This working session needs inscription please follow this link https:///www.apass.be/fragile-community-score-score-for-entering-a-place/

      Week 3 and 4 > 16 till 30 June
      THE WAY OF THE ANARCHIVE proposed by Erin Manning

      This working session is under invitation. For public discussions check schedule. https:///www.apass.be/the-way-of-the-anarchive/

      and

      More info on Parallel Parasite https:///www.apass.be/parallel-parasite-platform-for-practice-based-research-in-the-arts/

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

      For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenovic, 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.

      PUBLIC EVENTS:


      WEEK 1 - PUBLIC TALKS:
      Monday 4 > 19h :00 > Introduction of the School Of Love
      Thursday 8 > 19h30 > SOL interview by Lauren Grusenmeyer for the WORKOUT publication

      WEEK 2 - PUBLIC TALKS:
      Monday 11 > 20:30 > Concert with Eric Thielemans “Bata Baba Loka: Extacy and overflow.”
      Saturday 16 > 11:00 till 16:00 > Monday readings > Femke Snelting and Martino Morandi (more information soon)

      WEEK 3 and 4 - PUBLIC TALKS:
      Tuesday 19 > 19:00 > Encounter with Erin Manning on the Anarchive
      Thursday 21 > 19:00 > Encounter with Nico Dockx: Every Archive Hides Another Archive
      Tuesday 26 > 19:00 > Encounter between SenseLab and SOL
      Wednesday 27 > 19:00 > Encounter with Alex Arteaga; Embodied Architecture/ Aesthetic Experience
      Thursday 28 > 19:00 > Encounter Erin Manning and Brian Massumi – Crypto Economy of Affect
      Saturday 30 > AFTERNOON > Nikolaus Gansterer (Translecture)

       

       


       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

        a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 – 1080 – Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be
    • research center
    • seminar
    • block 2018/I
    • What are you training for? On acting and performance techniques - Current directions for embodied research in the performing arts
      20 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Dra. Adriana la Selva
    • 10 January 2018
    • 11 January 2018
    • What are you training for?

      Adriana La Selva is participant of the a.pass PhD research program and proposes the 2 day seminar "What are you training for?" in relation to her home university U-Ghent. The topic addresses the conditions of the body in relation to its performativity. Starting the investigations of the self-creation of conditions at the body seems to comply with the intentions of the block MAKING / CONDITIONS perfectly.  We therefore decided to join this seminar as part of Plenum I. The first round of the individual research presentations of each a.pass participant will take place within this seminar and amongst the seminar participants.

       

      outline

      This inter-university specialist course intends to investigate acting and performing techniques as a field of knowledge separated from those of the representation and spectacle.

      In which ways can performer’s technique (a range of codified skills one chooses to learn) and performer’s training processes (how you engage with techniques towards creation or, how you create a certain routine to deal/improve these techniques), dialogue with other fields of study, such as philosophy, sociology and politics? Can we look at technique as an aesthetic/poetic device on its own? What is performative about it?

      The designed programme seeks to investigate and challenge what acting and performance technique is, and how it is disseminated through artistic, social and political agency.

      We will tackle this frame in both theory and practice, with interactive workshops, work demonstrations, reading seminars and lectures, where acting and performance technique apprenticeship will dialogue with a philosophical context which unfolds the notion of epistemology: the study of the nature of knowledge itself and how it is sourced.

      The course is open to all contemporary art scholars, both in an academic and a practice-based sense, working on artistic and everyday life techniques as embodied discourses. Participants are invited to elaborate on different training methods and art practices, as much as on theoretical models, and to experiment with their individual approach to artistic work from a technical and training-like perspective.

       

      guest lectures

      Lecturers will work out the above frame in two levels:

      1. on a theoretical level, with the reading seminar sessions and the lectures of Prof. Dr. Ben Spatz (Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at Huddersfield University), Nicolas Galeazzi (a.pass) and Odin Teatret’s performer Iben Nagel Rasmussen. Still active, she is considered a living archive, carrier of a legacy that dates back from the beginning of a particular physical theatre culture started by Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba in the 60’s.

      1. a practice-based level: the participants will participate in training exercises with Ben Spatz, and will watch the work demonstrations of Esa Kirkkopelto (Senior Lecture on artistic research at UNIARTS Helsinki) and Carlos Simioni (Performer at Grupo LUME, Sao Paulo), followed by an open talk. The first from Finland, the latter from Brazil, these are two performers that found a precious way of seeing technique as a poetic object on its own, which they use to create radical interactions with the communities they belong to. Throughout the two days of this course, we will investigate the notion of embodied technique - both in artistic and everyday life practices - as an epistemic field, i.e. as a resistant and potentially radical strategy for knowledge of and/or dialoguing with a broader social/political context.

       

      tentative program

       DAY1: 10/01/2018
      10:00 to 17:00including 1 hour lunch break + evening event (total of 8 working hours).
      09:30 to 10:00Coffee and attendance list
      10:00 to 10:30Introduction by Prof. Dr. Christel Stalpaert and Dra. Adriana La Selva on the overall topic.
      10:30 to 12:00Prof. Dr. Ben Spatz, who will give an introductory lecture on embodied research and his current artistic outcomes.
      12:00 to 13:00 Nicolas Galeazzi: "Unfolding performance notions and the conditions of the making".
       13.00 to 14.00 Lunch Break
      14.00 to 17:30

      Workshop session 1. Presentation and discussion of material linked to participants‘ research projects and art works. Participants are asked to prepare small presentations approaching corporeality and technique in relation to their own researches. This work will then be further developed in the workshop sessions, led and feedbacked by Ben Spatz.

      19:00 to 21:00

      Evening event: Esa Kirkkopelto/ Other Spaces will bring a lecture/performance on embodied research and different modes of being, also other-than-human.

       

       

       Day 2: 11/01/2018
      10:00 to 18:30including 1 hour lunch break+ 30 min refreshments break (total of 8 working hours)
      10:00 to 13:00Practice-based Workshop with Prof. Ben Spatz where theory and practice aggregated in the previous day with the students will be exposed through an epistemological practice-based work on the very notion of technique.
      13:00 to 14:00Lunch break
        
      14:00 to 16:00lecture / artist talk with Iben Nagel Rasmussen in which she will reflect on her life-long commitment to training and the unfolding of physicality in political and social spheres. The lecture will unfold as an interview, led by Prof. Ben Spatz.
      16:00 to 17:00Launch of Rasmussen’s book The Blind Horse. Round table with the author and Dr. Adriana La Selva.
      17:00 to 17:30 Refreshments break
      17:30 to 19:30Carlos Simioni carries out a work demonstration on his long term collaboration with Iben.

       

       

      organising and scientific committee

      Prof. Dr. Christel Stalpaert,

      Full professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at Ghent University, Director of the research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts and Media) and PEPPER (Philosophy, Ethology, Politics and Performance)

      E-mail: Christel.Stalpaert@Ugent.be

      Prof. Dr. Jan Steen,

      Lecturer in acting and head of Drama Department, KASK-School of Arts

      E-mail: jan.steen@hogent.be

      Drs. Adriana La Selva,

      PhD Researcher at UGent (S:PAM) and KASK

      E-mail: AdrianaParente.LaSelva@Ugent.be

      Prof. Dr. Luk Van Den Dries

      Full Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Antwerp and head of the department of Literature.

      E-mail: luc.vandendries@uantwerpen.be

      Prof. Dr. Bart Philipsen

      Full Professor in the Faculty of Arts, coordinator of Literary Studies Research Unit KULeuven.

      E-mail: bart.philipsen@kuleuven.be

       

      partnership

      PEPPER - Philosophy, Ethology, Politics and PERformance, UGent

      Research Center for Visual Poetics - UAntwerpen

      Embodied Research Working Group:

      a.pass : advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels

      NORDISK TEATER LABORATORIUM

    • Newsletter March 2017 13 November 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande

      newscaption

       

       

       

      a.pass proudly invites you to its homebase

      for a cluster of talks, discussions, screening and performance-essay

      with special guests Edward George, Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova and Sina Seifee.

      on March 8-9-10 @ a.pass, 4th floor

       


       

      SCREENING & PRESENTATION BY Dr EDWARD GEORGE

      THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

      Wednesday March 8th (7.00pm-10.00pm)

      The Last Angel of History is a groundbreaking video-essay from the 1990s that influenced filmmakers and inspired conferences, novels and exhibitions. Black Audio Film Collective’s exploration of the chromatic possibilities of digital video is embedded within a mythology of the future that creates connections between black unpopular culture, outer space and the limits of the human condition. Interviews with esteemed musicians, writers, and cultural critics are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief,” who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future. Edward George, writer, researcher, presenter of this ground breaking science fiction documentary, will present and discuss the film and its themes of music, Diaspora, science fiction, and its engagement with Afro futurism.

      Dr. Edward George is a founder of Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), the multimedia duo Flow Motion (1996-present), and the electronic music group Hallucinator (1998-present).

      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      TALK BY LAURENCE RASSEL

      STITCHED & SPLIT HOSPITALITY

      #6 in Book Club Series

      Thursday March 9th (10am-1.30pm)

      Cultural worker Laurence Rassel has long ago diagnosed the vacuity of artistic practices when its formats of knowledge-production are not 'situated’ in an ecology of art that encompasses social and psychological factors. Paradoxically she considers fiction as a paramount tool to achieve that goal. Laurence Rassel will address the notion of ‘Radical Hospitality’ by revisiting some of her past curatorial operating principles and practices developed in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. Her science and fiction approach in Stitch and Split is an early exemplarity of hybrid curatorial practice that steers towards a politics of imagination-as-critique and alternative forms of life and work ‘invented’ in common.

      Laurence Rassel is a Brussels based cultural worker who acts as curator, teacher, organizer. She is currently the director of ERG (École de recherche Graphique). From 2008 to 2015 she was the Director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, an institution created in 1984 by the artist Antoni Tàpies to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. From 1997 to 2008, Rassel was member of Constant, a Brussels based non-profit association and interdisciplinary arts-lab that advocates free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism.


      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      TALK BY FABRIZIO TERRANOVA

      POLITICS OF SPECULATIVE FABULATION

      #7 in Book Club Series

      Friday March 10th  (10.00am-1.30pm)

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

      Fabrizio Terranova is a film-maker, activist, dramaturge, and teacher at ERG (École de recherche Graphique) in Brussels, where he launched and runs the master’s programme in Récits et expérimentation/Narration spéculative (Narrations and experimentation/ Speculative narration). Terranova is the author of Josée Andrei, An Insane Portrait, an experimental documentary. He is also a founding member of DingDingDong – an institute to jointly improve knowledge about Huntington’s disease. He has recently published “Les Enfants du compost” in a publication edited by Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise : Gestes spéculatifs (Les Presses du réel, 2015). Terranova directed a documentary/film on/with Donna Haraway – ‘Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival’. The film will be presented at the end of March 2017 in Brussels within a series of conferences with and around Donna Haraway.


      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      PERFORMANCE-ESSAY BY SINA SEIFEE

      AN ANIMAL ESCAPE CASE

      #7 in Book Club Series “Special event”

      Friday March 10th (2.30am-3.30pm)

      The essay-performance plays with some standards​ of cross-species identification according to an Indo-Iranian mode of subjectivity and Sina Seifee own animal-findings in contemporary Tehran. We zoom in what the idea of "wilderness" withholds in technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate domestic life of this neighborhood. Through fairy-tale associations the lecture investigates operative non-understandings in old and new threads of cosmology that formulate reciprocity and being-with of the mediated non-humanity and investigates the cases of failed collaboration between species.

      Sina Seifee is an interdisciplinary artist working in the field of computer art, writing, drawing and performance. He is involved in research and work on technology, narrative, globalism, and intercultural mythologies.


      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      The Book Club Series during 'Trouble on Radio Triton'

      During the Book Club a.pass invites engaged practitioners (Sol Archer, Peggy Pierrot, Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova…) for a series of reading sessions, talks and discussions about their efforts to create conditions for imagining otherwise. The series is initiated by Pierre Rubio and realised in collaboration with some of a.pass’ artist-researchers. For the most part Book Club is scheduled on Thursday mornings and are open to the public.

      Trouble on Radio Triton (Jan-March 2017) is the name of the current a.pass block curated by Pierre Rubio. It is a ‘Sci-Fi terraforming mode of attention’, a metaphoric multipolar dispositive that challenges our abilities as artist-researchers to ‘render our world habitable again’. Far from proposing innocuous escapism in a false paradise of disembodied utopia, the dispositive seeks to invent and activate political potentialities of artistic research through an immersion in different types of (speculative) fiction.

      Check here for more about the current a.pass-block.

       


       

       Save upcoming dates:

      March 14-15: The Tea Party (workshop by Helena Dietrich)
      March 16: Book Club #8 : Accelera.pass! (with Vandevelde & De Raeve, cur. by Sébastien Hendrickx)
      March 17: Book Club #9: “On language as such” (with Caroline Godart, cur. by Marialena Marouda)

       



       a.pass

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

       

       

    • 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

       

       


    • 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
    • block 2017/II
    • Medium Score
    • The Problem of the Score
    • The problem of the score Block curated by Lilia Mestre / May > July 2017
      21 April 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The problem of the score


      From May till July 2017 the a.pass post-master program questions how structures pre-determine singular outcomes, and to what extent they imply relationality. Every system is a network of connections and the way the system is set to operate defines forms of relation which reveal ideological standpoints. In other words modes of interaction are formatting forces that construct worlds. If we think that way, what kind of problems do our research structures entail?  And if we can think a polyphonic world , constituted by multiple models, how do we consider our own structure as a relational one? What kind of technologies are we putting into place? What kind of invitation are we making? And to whom?

      The notions of ‘apparatus’ and ‘tentacular thinking’ will be key to understanding and experiencing the problem of score in contextual ecologies. Apparatuses, as coined by Foucault and Agamben, are systems of governance that enable relationships between beings and structures through which the subject is constructed. During former block Donna Haraway  introduced us to tentacular thinking as a place from which one can build relations to economical, biological, philosophical, productional, institutional, etc orders. Together with the a.pass researchers, workshop givers and guests we reflect on them, challenge our practices and relate to other authors and art makers.

      Every Thursday we meet at a.pass 4th floor for movement practice with Anouk Llaurens, followed by a reading and reflexion group that tackles emergent issues and in the evening we play ‘The medium Score’. Through the score we concentrate on Medium, Method and Model in our researches as points of analysis and tools to craft relations. The MMM attempts to understand the implications of our works in our environmental context. The crazier the better!

      The Medium Score is a next iteration of Block Curator Lilia Mestre’s research on scores as collaborative tools for production, pedagogy and discourse. A variation of Writing Score https:///www.apass.be/writing-scores-the-book/ but this time each score participant will focus on his/her own medium. Scores are seen as dispositives of collaboration, of conversation and practice that tie together a plurality of concerns of a.pass researchers. More information about the previous scores at the ABCDAIRE > entry = Scores

      In what concerns workshops, Vladimir Miller and his project Settlement is in for a 2 week investigation on how spatial setups embody and facilitate certain ideologies of togetherness. Jennifer Lacey gives a week workshop on choreography and dance. Her approach consists in the development of processes specific to each project and its resources of production. Through her methods we produce aesthetic rules, body vocabulary and behaviour related to us as a group in context.

      In collaboration with former a.pass researchers Sofia Caeser we organise a seminar at La Bellone with focus on the status of document and display as structures that reveal power relations and equally structures that can be transformed and modify those same power relations. The full programme is under construction but we can already announce that artists Vincent Meessen, Olga de Soto, Kobe Matthys and Femke Snelting are invited to give public talks and masterclasses. Former a.pass associate researcher Juan Dominguez launches the book that results from his research on conspiracy.

      During The Problem of the Score the concrete models under consideration are the methodologies of researchers, the devices proposed by workshop givers, the structure of a seminar and the score as learning through practice tool.

      More information about the block soon!

    •  

       

      Book Club #7 with Fabrizio Terranova

      Politics of Speculative Fabulation

      March 10th - 10am-1.30pm

       

      In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking” and talk about the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.

       

      "We need new types of narrative", once wrote Haraway (1). We follow in her tracks. Indeed we need new types of narrative and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made. And even making them does not suffice, it is necessary to learn how to fabulate what concerns us, what we are confronted with, that is to say, to venture into narrations and cosmologies that can welcome these sensibilities, vitalities and crossing unrests. Fabulating is indeed a new kind of construction, at least for those who seek knowledge and in our opinion, fabulations are those narratives that dig interstices in our world, queering and manipulating it in a more than imaginary take off’s until sparking new attachments and forcing the investigation to be reopened, so that we may once again explore this forsaken territory, which did not seem to deserve even a bit of our attention. Fabulating is an act of repopulating which will no longer be trapped by the limited question of True and False. Stuttering the real, launching the orderly sabotage of the categories of thought, enlarging the spectre, bringing out connected and baffling new worlds, deploying them by triggering desires for the possible and shifting a too well described overwhelming World. Finding tricks, playing, tirelessly returning to our practices, affirming the necessity of new ways of telling and experiencing these worlds, is what we must learn to do.

      Fabrizio Terranova

      (1) D. Haraway, “Primatology is Politics by Other Means”, 1986



      Fabrizio Terranova, who lives and works in Brussels, is a film-maker, activist, dramaturge, and teacher at erg (École de recherche graphique) in Brussels, where he launched and runs the master’s programme in Récits et expérimentation/Narration spéculative (Narrations and experimentation/ Speculative narration). Terranova is the author of Josée Andrei, An Insane Portrait, an experimental documentary that was turned into a book published by Les Editions du souffle. He is also a founding member of DingDingDong – an institute to jointly improve knowledge about Huntington’s disease. He has recently published the article “Les Enfants du compost” in the a publication edited by isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise : Gestes spéculatifs (Les Presses du réel, 2015). Fabrizio Terranova directed a documentary/film on/with Donna Haraway - 'Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival'. The film will be presented at the end of March 2017 in Brussels within a series of conferences with and around Donna Haraway.

       

      https://vimeo.com/188121629

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFGXTQnJETg)

       

       

      Fabrizio Terranova’s cinematic choice, a pseudo-realist but discretely fictional one, corresponds very precisely to the mode of presence that makes this portrait a model of integrity. Neither taking over nor offering a neutral opinion, it is a device that constrains Haraway no more than it constrained Josée Andréi, the subject of his first, admirable film, but leaves them to use their own mode of being honest and entrusts in the work of the image the responsibility of turning this recorded document into a co-created documentary work. I am profoundly grateful to this director for knowing how to use his talent, his intelligence and his sensitivity to serve what will be a real transmission of intelligence and emotion. I would also like to emphasise the exceptional confidence that he was able to inspire in Haraway, whose recorded lectures are so far all we know about her, allowing her to give free rein to a “thought” live.

      Isabelle Stengers

       

       

      Book Club #7 with Fabrizio Terranova

      March 10th - 10am-1.30pm

      Participation to the costs : 5 euros

       

      at 2.30pm, an essay-performance will follow Fabrizio Terranova's presentation.

      "An animal escape case" by Sina Seifee

      https:///www.apass.be/book-club-series-7-an-animal-escape-case/

       

       

       

    • conference
    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting (self) Education of new subjectivities
      30 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass, KaaiTheater
    • KaaiStudios - Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 // 1000 Brussel.
    • 25 November 2016
    • 26 November 2016
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
      case of: Vladimir Miller
      case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting

      When we talk about commoning in the arts, or of artistic production as a site of commoning, or the arts as a common good, we evoke economies of material and immaterial labour within the field of art. But we seldom consider the changing understanding of what an artist is, and how this historic subjectivity possibly undergoes a dramatic shift in response to the resurgence of the commons debate in the last few years. Not only do we need to ask ourselves how to be an artist and a commoner today, and how to produce art within commoning processes, but also what kind of a new artist subjectivity is summoned by the commons. Long gone is the conception of the artist as a craftswoman, long gone the conception of a solitary genius, yet the market still welcomes the individualistic producer, enamoured with the beautified reflection the neo-liberal consumer finds in the persona of the free-to-do-anything, singular novum-art-maker. At the same time the contemporary art market (at least its attention, if not its monetary economy) has embraced commoning as a method for artistic production and encourages the artist to engage with the surrounding world. But is it really the same type of artist that emerges in the (economic) contexts traversed by the artist commoner? She travels from commoning to capitalism, to gift economy, and back. How are those subjectivities negotiated with the citizen of capitalism who she inadvertently also is?

      Does commoning, as a means of artistic practice, require a radically different self-conception of the artist? And if we see the emergence of a different artist subjectivity, what role does (self-)education in the arts play in fostering and welcoming this subjectivity? What kind of (educational) institutions can the artist-commoner take root in? How can these institutions engage not only in educating the artist about the commons but in developing radical methodologies of commoning education?

      During a two day event, a.pass welcomes a gathering of researchers, artists, a.pass program participants and public to engage with the struggle of being an artist commoner today, and the role of (educational) institutions in bringing this subject about.

      Two days of presentations, exchanges and commoning practices. Two days of ateliers, books launches, performances, workshops and discussions.

      free admission -  except the performance of Juan Dominguez - tickets

       


       

       

      PROGRAM

       

      Friday November 25

      10:00-16:00: Open space / habitat, with: a.pass participants. (@dance studio)

      11:00-15:30: office-work,
      with Femke Snelting, Kate Rich, Magda Tyzlik-Carver.(@concert studio)

      15:30-17.30: Regime Change, presentation after office-work,
      with: Femke Snelting, Kate Rich, Magda Tyzlik-Carver. (@concert studio)

      18:00-23:00: Common Sweat sauna,
      with Steven Jouwersma.

      18:00-19.30: Turn, Turtle! panel,
      with: Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay. Followed by The Missing Chapter, by Guy Gypens & SPIN.

      Food: catering at Kaaistudio-bar

      20:30-21:30: SITUATMENTS,
      with: Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio, Kristien Van den Brande & Cecilia Molano, Steven Jouwersma, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman (@concert studio).

      21.30-02:00: PRACTICES. Mobile Interviews + City of Commons + Reading out loud & von unten + Common Sweat Sauna + ArtsCommons rehashed

       

       

      Saturday November 26

      12:00-15:00: Open space / habitat, with: a.pass participants. (@dance studio)

      15:30-16:30: Figures of commoning,
      introduction by Rudi Laermans

      16:30-18:00: Launch Bubble Score publication,
      with: Lilia Mestre, Philippine Hoegen, Miriam Hempel 

      17:00-21:00: Common Sweat sauna,
      with Steven Jouwersma.

      18:00-19:30 : Presentation of the ThK Journal #23, Commons / Undercommons in art, education, work…’,
      with: Bojana Cvejić interviewed by Pierre Rubio.

      Food : catering by Kaaistudio-bar

      20:30-22:30: Between what is no longer and what is not yet,
      performance by Juan Dominguez - ticket requiered

      22:30-02:00: introduction Dino Sound System + DJs: party!

       



      OPEN SPACE / A COMMON HABITAT FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH
      with Nicolas Galeazzi and a.pass-participants

      Friday 25 November: 10:00-16:00

      Saturday 26th November: 12:00 - 15:00

      Every Friday of the last three month a.pass participants met for a concentrated commoning experiment.

      With this practical inquiry into artistic research as a commons we try to establish an Open Space practice, that allows pursuing the individual researches while observing at the same time the general picture that these activities generate together. Every artistic element within that space is considered as a common good. Training the simultaneity and interdependence of individual and common interests not only puts our commons economy at work, but also lets us investigate the personal and collective effects of this structural shift.

      For the ‘The Artist Commoner‘ meeting we move the Open Space Practice to the KaaiStudios and continue our work under the new spatial conditions, inviting you as a potential Open Space commoner into these investigations. You are welcome to explore, expand, dismantle and recharge this space with whatever you consider as your current work. Please bring at least a vegetable for the common cooking.

      10:00 to 11:00 warm up; 11:00 to 13:00 practice; 13:00 common soup and discussion; 14:30 to 15:30 logging.

       

       

      REGIME CHANGE
      with Kate Rich, Femke Snelting and Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver

      Friday 25 November, office hours: 11:00-15:30

      Presentation: 15:30-17:30

      A day long session, aimed at aligning the a.pass computing infrastructure with the ambitions and aspirations summoned by the commons. Tech giants currently dominate all forms of digital communication, from cloud-storage to production tools and archiving systems. For cultural institutions like a.pass and many kindred spirit organisations, there is potential for resistance. Kate, Magda and Femke will use the common power of their intersecting practices in art, technology and theory, to break the spell of this paralysing digital regime. With the aid of Free, Libre and Open Source software, the transposition agents will begin to transform the relation of a.pass to its computing technology. Throughout the day the trio will conduct fieldwork, draw up solemn oaths & commit the institution to a rite of passage: from efficiency to curiosity; from scarcity to multiplicity and from solution to possibility. Champagne served all day.

       

       

      
TURN, TURTLE! PANEL
      with Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay, Guy Gypens, SPIN.

      Friday 25 November, 18.00-19.30

      We would like to draw your attention to the publication of the book ‘Turn Turtle, Turn!’, a creative and intellectual analysis of the new turn in the perception and workings of institutes in the performing arts.

      What has become apparent in the last ten years or so is a move towards an engaged re-appropriation of of arts institutions in artistic (performance) practices, and a more in-depth collaboration between institutes and artists in rethinking the functioning, position, and decision-taking structures of these organisations. We asked several artists, programmers and thinkers to contribute to this publication from the viewpoint of their practice and experience within the institutional framework. Turn, Turtle! Re-enacting the Institute is the second part of the publication series Performing Urgency, commissioned by European theatre network House on Fire which will continue half-yearly.

      For this edition launch in Brussels, the artists Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galleazzi and Daniel Blanga-Gubbay will debate on these questions. The panel is followed by The Missing Chapter, a discussion between SPIN and Guy Gypens.

       

       

      
SITUATMENTS
      with Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Kristien Van den Brande, Steven Jouwersma, Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman.

      Friday 25 November, 20:30-21:30

      Collective scheduling and set-up. The first evening of The Artist-Commoner meeting is structured as an overlap of practices, talks and mini-workshops. We would like to provide a space and time for the audience to engage in the politics, pragmatics and poetics of collective scheduling and setting up, believing that commoning begins where stakes and engagement are developed within a framework that is open to change by its outsiders. On Friday evening we come together to introduce and situate our main concerns and give space to a self-organization of the evening. Guided by open space principles, the audience is invited to take active part in existing proposals and schedule other circles and meetings around possible emergent topics. All proposals will be organized and communicated on a central wall paper. This sprawling exploration of the conference themes will be injected into the discussions and presentation of the second day.

       

       

      PRACTICES
      with Vladimir Miller, Kristien Van den Brande & Cecilia Molano, Steven Jouwersma, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman.

      Friday 25 November, at 21.30pm-02:00

      Mobile interviews - Pierre Rubio

      Pierre Rubio will conduct several nomadic interviews with the participants and with the audience throughout the two-day event. They will revolve around preconceptions about and definitions of the very terms of the a.pass event. What does ‘commoning’ mean? Who is the ‘subject’ producing and operating the commons? What is a ‘commoning practice’? What can ‘commoning’ do? What is the relation between the production of subjectivity and the production of a commoning theatre of operations?

      City of Commons - Vladimir Miller

      In 2015 Stefan Gruber and Vladimir Miller began working on a series of speculative vignettes imagining and discussing a city (or rather a multitude of cities) where certain key institutions are based on practices of commoning. These fragmented utopian visions do not necessarily function or come together as one proposal, but are tools to explore critical positions towards the commons. The texts approach commoning not from the present state of things but speculate from within an imaginary state of commoning as a status quo, thus shifting critique towards a position of inner logics. Rather than discussing commoning practices by comparing or contrasting them with present day structures we jump to a discussion of commoning from within its own possibilities and contradictions, on its own terms. Vladimir Miller will facilitate a work session where together we will develop and discuss visions of institutions as radical spaces of commoning.

      Reading out loud & von unten - Cecilia Molano & Kristien Van den Brande

      Out of the clear, critical light of day, where black night is falling, let's do something as simple as reading a novel to each other. From beginning to end, von unten and out loud, with no particular perspective in mind. Vocalizing writing in order to actualize it, like visualizing it, is not without danger, says Lyotard. Let’s see. If on your bookshelf you have a copy of anti-bildungsroman Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser please bring it. Books-with-scribbles-in very much appreciated. Starting at 9.30 pm, until the last page is turned.

      Common sweat sauna - Steven Jouwersma
      extra session on saturday 17:00-21:00

      The Common Sweat Sauna is a real working sauna made only from recuperated materials. It was built in the public space of Brussels and immediately opened up to the public. The project intends to create a free nomadic urban sauna space that diverts from the logic of commercial and individualized wellness and that de-colonizes the public space. The sauna moves from place to place in Brussels and gathers a growing crowd that takes care of the sauna.

      please bring your sauna gear.

      ArtsCommons - rehashed & common zapping (Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman & Nicolas Galeazzi)

      Based on their experience with an attempt to create a commons for the arts, Einat Tuchman, Philippine Hoegen, Nicolas Galeazzi will discuss the difficulties in practicing the commons as an artistic form. Their discussion is ongoing, temporarily settled at a table next to the bar, open for everyone and will be supported by a common zapping through YouTube clips.

       

       

      Figures of Commoning 

      with Rudi Laermans

      Saturday 26 November, 15:30-16:30

      Commoning, or the collective production of a common (a commonality, a common good), is the essential practice through which the social instantiates the political, be it on the macro or the micro level. Evidently, there exist various modes of commoning - of being with and for, social giving and taking, sharing and co-creating. The presentation focusses on some of these practices, ranging from discussing to complicit action to doing nothing.

       


      LAUNCH: BUBBLE SCORE 

      with Lilia Mestre, Philippine Hoegen, Miriam Hempel, and a.pass-participants

      Saturday 26 November, 16:30-18:00

      As a program curator of a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies), Lilia Mestre has since 2014 developed ScoreScapes, a research on scores as pedagogical tools. Her theoretical interest focuses on performativity as a discursive practice leading to a method based on dialogical and intersubjective formats that function as enablers of exchange within artistic research. Working with this method led to various ways of reflecting on the participants’ work, such as the question of authorship within a scored situation and the bearing of individual creativity within a collective. Bubble Score is the third score created for this context; on the occasion of ‘The Artist Commoner’ a publication will be launched to share and open up the discussion ‘of’ methodologies of commoning education.

       

       

      ‘COMMONS / UNDERCOMMONS IN ART, EDUCATION, WORK...’

      with Bojana Cvejić (ThK - Walking Theory), Pierre Rubio (a.pass)

      Saturday 26th , 18.00-19.30

      a.pass welcomes Bojana Cvejić to discuss the last issue of the journal TkH/Walking Theory : ‘Commons / Undercommons in art, education, work…’ (2016).

      In an interview by Pierre Rubio, co-curator of the apass program, Bojana Cvejić, co-editor of the journal, will address a few problems and questions following from 'The Public Commons and the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labour’ conference (Frankfurtlab 2014).

      Taking a cue from Jason Read’s contribution to the conference and journal: ‘Individuating the Commons’, Cvejić will account for the approaches and arguments around the Common, its practices and plea for new subjectivation. Her own stance recasts collectivity through the questions of the preindividual and transindividual (in Gilbert Simondon, Paolo Virno, and Jason Read). Cvejić recently gave a lecture using these very concepts ( ‘Radicalising a condition into a practice : Transindividuality’ London, Sept. 2016) to critically problematise art as “a site of intensive expression of individualism”.

      Why do concepts like ‘individuation’ or ‘transindividuality’ seem operative today for Bojana Cvejić to expand the narrow individual interest to a broader horizon of collective transindividual solidarity?

       

      BETWEEN WHAT IS NO LONGER AND WHAT IS NOT YET
      
with Juan Dominguez

      Saturday 26 November; 20:30-22:30

      Juan Dominguez suspends events and creates an interval of time in which he tries to integrate his past into his future. He translates his visions and his desire to encounter the unknown through language. For the first time in 14 years Dominguez is working alone, giving rise to a self-portrait that cites himself and some of his friends.

      tickets on Kaaitheatre website

       

       

      Dance with the DINO SOUND SYSTEM
      
with Christophe Meierhans and Ant Hampton

      Saturday 26 November, 22:30-02:00

      To round up this public meeting, we will party. The sound will be produced by a sound system that is considered a common good – the ominously famous "Dino Sound System". Driven by the need to dance - a group of artists, djs and friends around Christophe Meierhans and Ant Hampton joined forces to construct an extraordinary loudspeaker system that can be used by any of the contributing ‘Dinos' for whatever event they’re planning. For our party, the system will experience its second test phase and official inauguration, with music played by a many-armed, collective DJ. Bring your ears for a listening event at 22.30 and you’ll not be able to hold your legs back!

       

       

      ONGOING

      A.pass books on display / for sale

      The stock of books, artist-publications, posters, leaflets produced by a.pass-curators, researchers and participants will be on display and for sale during the Artist Commoner public meeting.

      publications of a.pass

       

       

       

    •  

      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.

       

       

       

       

    •  

       

      This is the time to come together.

      To celebrate what we worked on.

      To transform our preconceptions

      of rituals, of magic, of transformation itself.

      A pilgrimage of the self into the common

      and back again.

       

      This is a transformational journey

      that displaces our relation to our bodies, to nature, to objects

      by recognising the recuperation and commodification

      of these relations by capitalism.

       

      We come together

      To inspire different ways for counteracting

      oppressive operative systems

      of knowledge, love, work, and metaphysics.

       

      We come together

      To create a counter-spell for colonising forces

      that suppress, limit, undermine our natural virtual powers

      to resist, to perform, to be part of the world.

      To create a shared awareness of the recuperation of magic,

      of ritual commodification, of the reduction of everyday life

      by machines of correction,

      perverting our desires,

      crushing our potential selves.

       

      The world is full of magic unaccounted for

      We need to acknowledge its power

      and share it with others to empower their lives and dreams.

      We invite you as helpers, as energetic vessels

      to play with, to discover new ways of being together

       

      The artist can be the poetic warrior

      fighting for power and courage

      awakening the sense of self

      to write his alternative myths on the surface of reality

       

      Tonight we have the opportunity to experience and experiment the no-difference

      between the I that performs, and the you that undergoes

      Not as a closure but as a beginning

      A nudge to push us over the edge

      to allow us to spill over, grow wings

      and launch into transformation.

       

      We celebrate our schizophrenic adaptations

      of foregone cultural debris

      of ritual rumours and phantasies

      into operative practices for today’s crises.

      No exotic imitation

      but inventive re-draftings

      of what it is to be:

      a hybrid magic body

      that reinvents itself and all there is

      every day anew.

       

      We are virtual bodies,

      filled to the brim with knowledge

      we can not grasp through lack of words,

      we can not operate through lack of awareness

      we can not read through lack of skill.

       

      We are virtual bodies

      that have the power to overcome

      the limits of fear, guilt and physicality.

       

      We are beings on the edge of awakening

      generous souls that want to share their transgression

      expanding it over the edges of the precious circle

      into the heart of the matter

      into the matter that matters.

    • I would like to start with a recapitulation of the substantive points made last Tuesday. The purpose of these lectures is to follow the implications of Amerindian "perspectivism": the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view. This conception was shown to be associated to some others, namely:

      (1) The original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality, but rather humanity;

      (2) Many animals species, as well as other types of "non-human" beings, have a spiritual component which qualifies them as "people"; furthermore, these beings see themselves as humans in appearance and in culture, while seeing humans as animals or as spirits;

      (3) The visible body of animals is an appearance that hides this anthropomorphic invisible "essence," and that can be put on and taken off as a dress or garment;

      (4) Interspecific metamorphosis is a fact of "nature" - not only it was the standard etiological process in myth, but it is still very much possible in present-day life (being either desirable or undesirable, inevitable or evitable, according to the circumstances);

      (5) Lastly, the notion of animality as a unified domain, globally opposed to that of humanity, seems to be absent from Amerindian cosmologies.

      Let us go back to the conception that animals and other ostensibly non-human beings are people.

       

      Animism, or the projection thesis

      You will have probably noticed that my "perspectivism" is reminiscent of the notion of "animism" recently recuperated by Philippe Descola (1992, 1996) to designate a way of articulating the natural and the social worlds that would be a symmetrical inversion of totemism.[37] Stating that all conceptualisations of non-humans are always "predicated by reference to the human domain" (a somewhat vague phrasing, it should be said), Descola distinguishes three modes of "objectifying nature":

      (1) Totemism, where the differences between natural species are used as a model for social distinctions, that is, where the relationship between nature and culture is metaphorical in character and marked by discontinuity (both within and between series);

      (2) Animism, where the "elementary categories structuring social life" organize the relations between humans and natural species, thus defining a social continuity between nature and culture, founded on the attribution of human dispositions and social characteristics to "natural beings";

      (3) Naturalism, typical of Western cosmologies, which supposes an ontological duality between nature, the domain of necessity, and culture, the domain of spontaneity, areas separated by metonymic discontinuity.

      The "animic mode" is characteristic of societies in which animals are the "strategic focus of the objectification of nature and of its socialisation," as is the case amongst indigenous peoples of America. It would reign supreme over those social morphologies lacking in elaborate internal segmentations; but it can also be found coexisting or combined with totemism, wherein such segmentations exist, the Bororo and their aroe/bope duality being such a case.

      Descola's theory of animism is yet another manifestation of a widespread dissatisfaction with the unilateral emphasis on metaphor, totemism, and classificatory logic which characterises the Levi-Straussian concept of the savage mind. This dissatisfaction has launched many efforts to explore the dark side of the structuralist moon, rescuing the radical theoretical meaning of concepts such as participation and animism, which have been repressed by Levi-Straussian intellectualism.[38] Nonetheless, it is clear that many of Descola's points are already present in Levi-Strauss. Thus, what he means by "elementary categories structuring social life" - those which organise the relations between humans and natural species in "animic" cosmologies - is basically (in the Amazonian cases he discusses) kinship categories, and more specifically the categories of consanguinity and affinity. In La pensee sauvage one finds a remark most germane to this idea:

      Marriage exchanges can furnish a model directly applicable to the mediation between nature and culture among peoples where totemic classifications and functional specializations, if present at all, have only a limited yield. (Levi-Strauss 1962b: 170)

      This is a pithy prefiguration of what many ethnographers (Descola and myself included) came to say about the role of affinity as a cosmological operator in Amazonia . Besides, in suggesting the complementary distribution of this model of exchange between nature and culture and totemic structures, Levi-Strauss seems to be aiming at something quite similar to Descola's animic model and its contrast with totemism. To take another example: Descola mentioned the Bororo as an example of coexistence of animic and totemic modes. He might also have cited the case of the Ojibwa, where the coexistence of the systems of totem and manido (evoked in Le totemisme aujourd'hui) served as a matrix for the general opposition between totemism and sacrifice (developed in La pensee sauvage) and can be directly interpreted within the framework of a distinction between totemism and animism.

      I would like to concentrate the discussion on the contrast between animism and naturalism, for I think it is a good starting point for understanding the distinctive stance of Amerindian perspectivism. I will approach this contrast, however, from a different angle than the original one. Descola's definition of "totemism" also deserves some comments, which I shall present for your consideration after contrasting animism and naturalism.

      Animism could be defined as an ontology which postulates the social character of relations between humans and non-humans: the space between nature and society is itself social. Naturalism is founded on the inverted axiom: relations between society and nature are themselves natural. Indeed, if in the animic mode the distinction "nature/culture" is internal to the social world, humans and animals being immersed in the same socio-cosmic medium (and in this sense, "nature" is a part of an encompassing sociality), then in naturalist ontology, the distinction "nature/culture" is internal to nature (and in this sense, human society is one natural phenomenon amongst others). Animism has "society" as the unmarked pole, naturalism has "nature": these poles function, respectively and contrastingly, as the universal dimension of each mode. Thus animism and naturalism are hierarchical and metonymical structures.

      Let me observe that this phrasing of the contrast between animism and naturalism is not only reminiscent of, or analogous to, the famous gift/commodity one: I take it to be the same contrast, expressed in more general, non-economic terms.[39] This relates to my earlier distinction between production-creation (naturalism) and exchange-transformation (animism).

      In our naturalist ontology, the nature/society interface is natural: humans are organisms like the rest, body-objects in "ecological" interaction with other bodies and forces, all of them ruled by the necessary laws of biology and physics; "productive forces" harness, and thereby express, natural forces. Social relations, that is, contractual or instituted relations between subjects, can only exist internal to human society (there is no such thing as "relations of production" linking humans to animals or plants, let alone political relations). But how alien to nature - this would be the problem of naturalism - are these social relations? Given the universality of nature, the status of the human and social world is unstable, and as the history of Western thought shows, it perpetually oscillates between a naturalistic monism ("sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology" being some of its current avatars) and an ontological dualism of nature/culture ("culturalism" and "symbolic anthropology" being some of its recent expressions).

      The assertion of this latter dualism, for all that, only reinforces the final referential character of the notion of nature, by revealing itself to be the direct descendant of the theological opposition between nature and super-nature. Culture is the modern name of spirit - let us recall the distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften - or at the least it is the name of the compromise between nature and grace. Of animism, we would be tempted to say that the instability is located in the opposite pole: there the problem is how to deal with the mixture of humanity and animality constituting animals, and not, as is the case amongst ourselves, the combination of culture and nature which characterise humans; the problem is to differentiate a "nature" out of the universal sociality.

      Let us return to Descola's tripartite typology.[40] Given the nature/culture polarity, Descola distinguishes three "modes of identification" (these being our familiar triad of totemism, animism and naturalism), then three "modes of relation" (predation, reciprocity, protection), then an indefinite number of "modes of categorization" (left nameless and undetermined); the combinatorial possibilities within and across the three modes are not totally free. Now, I believe that the absence of any specification of the "modes of categorization" is more than a temporary vacancy (but I can always be surprised, of course); it points to a conceptual problem related to the definition of "totemism" used by Descola.

      The typology seems to suggest, correctly I think, that the pre-eminence of the nature/culture opposition in our anthropological tradition derives from the joint privilege of the totemic and naturalist modes, both characterized by dichotomy and discontinuity (the first supposedly typical of "savage thought," the second of "domesticated thought"). Descola's emphasis on the logical distinctiveness of the animic mode - a mode he considers to be far more widespread than totemism - is intended to correct this distortion; it also destabilizes the totemism/naturalism divide and the nature/culture dualism common to both modes.

      Descola appears to adopt an institutional reading of totemism, whilst Levi-Strauss had taken it as a mere example of the global style of the savage mind; the cognitive form exemplified by totemism is considered by Levi-Strauss as much more important than the contingent conceptual and institutional contents to which it is applied. We are accordingly led to infer that animism is also conceived by Descola in an institutionalist key, and that it would be then possible to reabsorb it in the sacrificial pole of the famous Levi-Straussian contrast between totemism and sacrifice, if we interpret it as a general cognitive distinction and not in terms of its somewhat ill-chosen institutional labels.

      If I am right in drawing these conclusions, where does totemism stand? Totemism seems to me a phenomenon of a different order from animism and naturalism. It is not a system of relations between nature and culture as is the case in the other two modes, but rather of correlations. Totemism is not an ontology, but a form of classification - it would not belong, therefore, to the category of "modes of identification," but rather to that, left vacant by Descola, of "modes of categorization." The totemic connection between the natural and the social series is neither social nor natural - it is purely logical and differential. By the same token, this connection is not metonymic and hierarchical as is the case with animic and naturalist modes of relating and defining nature and culture - it is a metaphoric and equipollent relation. This would explain why totemism, as a form of classification, can only be found in combination with animic systems: even the classical totemisms suppose more than a set of symbolic correlations between nature and culture; they imply a relationship of descent or participation between the terms of the two series (Levi-Strauss called this latter relationship the "imaginary side" of totemism - but this does not make it any less real, ethnographically speaking).[41]

      In sum, I believe that the really productive contrast is the one between naturalism and animism as two inverse hierarchical ontologies. Totemism, as defined by Descola, seems to be a different phenomenon. However, let us suspend our judgement till we explore more fully the notion of animism, for it may be the case that totemism and animism reveal themselves to be related by more significant similarities and differences.

      Problems with projection

      The major problem with Descola's inspiring theory, in my opinion, is this: can animism be defined as a projection of differences and qualities internal to the human world onto non-human worlds, as a "socio-centric" model in which categories and social relations are used to map the universe? This interpretation by analogy is explicit in some glosses on the theory, such as that provided by Kaj Arhem: "if totemic systems model society after nature, then animic systems model nature after society" (1996: 185). The problem here is the obvious proximity with the traditional sense of animism, or with the reduction of "primitive classifications" to emanations of social morphology; but equally the problem is to go beyond other classic characterisations of the relation between society and nature.

      I am thinking here of Radcliffe-Brown's 1929 article on totemism, where he presents the following ideas (1952: 130-31):

      (1) For "primitive man" the universe as a whole is a moral and social order governed not by what we call natural law but rather by what we must call moral or ritual law.

      (2) Although our own explicit conception of a natural order and of natural law does not exist among the more primitive peoples, "the germs out of which it develops do exist in the empirical control of causal processes in technical activities" - we find here the "germs" of Leach's distinction between technical and expressive aspects of action, and perhaps also of Bloch's distinction between cognition and ideology.

      (3) Primitive peoples (in Australia, for example) have built between themselves and the phenomena of nature a system of relations which are essentially similar to the relations that they have built up in their social structure between one human being and another.

      (4) It is possible to distinguish processes of personification of natural phenomena and natural species (which "permits nature to be thought of as if it were a society of persons, and so makes of it a social or moral order"), like those found amongst the Eskimos and Andaman Islanders, from systems of classification of natural species, like those found in Australia and which compose a "system of social solidarities" between man and nature - this obviously calls to mind Descola's distinction of animism/totemism as well as the contrast of manido/totem explored by Levi-Strauss.

      Some ethnographers of hunter-and-gatherer economies have appealed to the ideas of an extension of human attributes to non-humans and a metaphorical projection of social relations onto human/non-human interactions. Such arguments have been put forth as weapons in the battle against the interpretation of these economies in ethological-ecological terms (optimal foraging theory, etc.). As Ingold (1996) most convincingly argued, however, all schemes of analogical projection or social modelling of nature escape naturalist reductionism only to fall into a nature/culture dualism which, by distinguishing "really natural" nature from "culturally constructed" nature, reveals itself to be a typical cosmological antinomy (in the original Kantian sense) faced with infinite regression. The notion of model or metaphor supposes a previous distinction between a domain wherein social relations are constitutive and literal and another where they are representational and metaphorical. Animism, interpreted as human sociality projected onto the non-human world, would be nothing but the metaphor of a metonymy. [42]

      The idea of an animist projection of society onto nature is not in itself a problem, if one abides by the doctrine of "particular universalism" (the term comes from Latour [1991]), which supposes the privileged access of one culture - our culture - to the only true, real Nature. This particular universalism would be, says Latour, the actual cosmology of anthropology, being in force even among those who have "cultural relativism" as their official creed. It would also be the only possibility of arresting the infinite regression that Ingold rightly sees in the relativist cliche "Nature is culturally constructed." Particular universalism brings such regression to a halt because it subordinates the Nature/Culture dualism to an encompassing naturalism, according to which our culture is the mirror of nature and other cultures are simply wrong. But all forms of constructionism and projectionism are unacceptable if we are decided not to let "animism" be interpreted in terms of our naturalist ontology.

      Allow me a further comment on Latour's idea that particular universalism is the practical ideology of anthropologists - their official or theoretical one being cultural relativism. While agreeing with Latour, I would just remark that the really characteristic relativism of anthropologists seems to consist less in a clandestine appeal to particular universalism than in a kind of distributive inversion of it, which carefully distinguishes culture (as human nature) from (cosmological) nature. Since every culture studied by anthropology is typically presented as expressing (and recognizing) some deep hidden truth of the human condition - a truth forgotten or denied by Western culture, like, for instance, the very inseparability of nature and culture - the sum total of these truths leads to the dismaying conclusion that all cultures, except precisely the (modern) Western, have a kind of privileged access to human nature, what amounts to granting Western culture an underprivileged access to the universe of culture. Maybe this is the price we feel we have to pay for our supposedly privileged access to non-human nature.

      Now, what is Ingold's solution to these difficulties he found in the projection argument? Against the notion of a social construction of nature and its implied metaphorical projectionism, he proposes an ontology founded on the immediate "interagentive" engagement between humans and animals prevailing in hunter-gatherer societies. He opposes our cognitivist and transcendental cosmology of "constructed nature" to a practical, immanent phenomenology of "dwelling" (sensu Heidegger) in an environment. There would be no projection of relations internal to the human world onto the non-social, i.e., natural domain, but rather an immediate inter-specific sociality, at the same time objective and subjective, which would be the primary reality out of which the secondary, reflective differences between humans and animals would emerge.

      Ingold's inspirational (and influential) ideas deserve a discussion I cannot develop here. In my opinion, his perspicacious diagnosis of metaphorical projectionism is better than the cure he propounds. For all their insightfulness, these ideas illustrate the inversion of "particular universalism" I alluded to above. Ingold never makes it quite clear whether he takes Western constructionism to be absolutely false (that is, both unreal and malignant) - I feel he does think so - or just inadequate to describe other "lived worlds," remaining true as the expression of a particular historico-cultural experience. But the real problem lies not with this. My structuralist reflexes make me wince at the primacy accorded to immediate practical-experiential identification at the expense of difference, taken to be a conditioned, mediate and purely "intellectual" (that is, theoretical and abstract) moment. There is here the debatable assumption that commonalities prevail upon distinctions, being superior and anterior to the latter; there is the still more debatable assumption that the fundamental or prototypical mode of relation is identity or sameness. At the risk of having deeply misunderstood him, I would suggest that Ingold is voicing here the recent widespread sentiment against "difference" - a sentiment "metaphorically projected" onto what hunter-gatherers or any available "others" are supposed to experience - which unwarrantably sees it as inimical to immanence, as if all difference were a stigma of transcendence (and a harbinger of oppression). All difference is read as an opposition, and all opposition as the absence of a relation: "to oppose" is taken as synonymous with "to exclude" - a strange idea. I am not of this mind. As far as Amerindian ontologies are concerned, at least, I do not believe that similarities and differences among humans and animals (for example) can be ranked in terms of experiential immediacy, or that distinctions are more abstract or "intellectual" than commonalities: both are equally concrete and abstract, practical and theoretical, emotional and intellectual, etc. True to my structuralist habitus, however, I persist in thinking that similarity is a type of difference; above all, I regard identity or sameness as the very negation of relatedness.

      The idea that humans and animals share personhood is a very complicated one: it would be entirely inadequate to interpret it as if meaning that humans and animals are "essentially the same" (and only "apparently" different). It rather means that humans and animals are, each on their own account, not the same - they are internally divided or entangled. Their common personhood or humanity is precisely what permits that their difference to be an inclusive, internal relation. The primordial immanence of myth (never lost, ever threatening) is not absence of difference, but rather its pervasive operation in a "molecular" mode (Deleuze & Guattari 1980), as difference not yet "molarized," i.e., speciated. Immanence is not sameness, it is infinite difference: it is (molar) difference preempted by (molecular) difference.

      Among the questions remaining to resolve, therefore, is the one of knowing whether animism can be described as a figurative use of categories pertaining to the human-social domain to conceptualise the domain of non-humans and their relations with the former, and if not, then how should we interpret it. The other question is: if animism depends on the attribution (or recognition) of human-like cognitive and sensory faculties to animals, and the same form of subjectivity, that is if animals are "essentially" human, then what in the end is the difference between humans and animals? If animals are people, then why do they not see us as people? Why, to be precise, the perspectivism? We might also ask if the notion of contingent corporeal forms (clothing) is properly described in terms of an opposition between appearance and essence. Finally, if animism is a way of objectifying nature in which the dualism of nature/culture does not hold, then what is to be done with the abundant indications regarding the centrality of this opposition to South American cosmologies? Are we dealing with just another "totemic illusion," if not with a naive projection of our Western dualism? Is it possible to make a more than synoptic use of the concepts of nature and culture, or are they merely "blanket labels" (Descola 1996) to which Levi-Strauss appealed in order to organise the multiple semantic contrasts in American mythologies, these contrasts being irreducible to a single massive dichotomy?

      Ethnocentrism, or the rejection thesis

      In a well-known essay, Levi-Strauss observed that for savages, humanity ceases at the boundary of the group, a notion which is exemplified by the widespread auto-ethnonym meaning "real humans," which in turn implies a definition of strangers as somehow pertaining to the domain of the extra-human. Therefore, ethnocentrism would not be the privilege of the West, but a natural ideological attitude, inherent to human collective life. The author illustrates the universal reciprocity of this attitude with an anecdote:

      In the Greater Antilles, some years after the discovery of America, whilst the Spanish were dispatching inquisitional commissions to investigate whether the natives had a soul or not, these very natives were busy drowning the white people they had captured in order to find out, after lengthy observation, whether or not the corpses were subject to putrefaction. (1973 [1952]: 384)

      From this parable, Levi-Strauss derives the famous paradoxical moral: "The barbarian is first and foremost the man who believes in barbarism," which, as Aron (1973) noted, may be taken to imply that the anthropologist is the only non-barbarian on the face of the earth. Some years later, in Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss (1955: 82-83) was to retell the case of the Antilles, but this time he underlined the asymmetry of the perspectives: in their investigations of the humanity of the Other, whites appealed to the social sciences, whereas the Indians founded their observations in the natural sciences; and if the former concluded that Indians were animals, the latter were content to suspect that the whites were divinities. "In equal ignorance," says our author, the latter attitude was more worthy of human beings.

      The anecdote reveals something else, as we shall see; something which Levi-Strauss came close to formulating in the Tristes Tropiques version. But its general point is quite obvious: the Indians, like the European invaders, consider that only the group to which they belong incarnates humanity; strangers are on the other side of the border which separates humans from animals and spirits, culture from nature and supernature. As matrix and condition for the existence of ethnocentrism, the nature/culture opposition appears to be a universal of social apperception.

      At the time when Levi-Strauss was writing these lines, the strategy for vindicating the full humanity of savages was to demonstrate that they made the same distinctions as we do: the proof that they were true humans is that they considered that they alone were the true humans. Like us, they distinguished culture from nature and they too believed that Naturvolker are always the others. The universality of the cultural distinction between Nature and Culture bore witness to the universality of culture as human nature. In sum, the Levi-Straussian answer to the question of the Spanish investigators was positive: savages do have souls. (Note that this question can be read as a sixteenth-century theological version of the "problem of other minds," which continues to this day to feed many a philosophical mouth.)

      But now, in these post-structuralist, ecologically-minded, animal-rights-concerned times, everything has changed. Savages are no longer ethnocentric or anthropomorphic, but rather cosmocentric or cosmomorphic. Instead of having to prove that they are humans because they distinguish themselves from animals, we now have to recognize how in-human we are for opposing humans to animals in a way they never did: for them nature and culture are part of the same sociocosmic field. Not only would Amerindians put a wide berth between themselves and the great Cartesian divide, which separated humanity from animality, but their views anticipate the fundamental lessons of ecology which we are only now in a position to assimilate (as argued by Reichel-Dolmatoff [1976], among many others). Before, the Indians' refusal to concede predicates of humanity to other men was of note; now we stress that they extend such predicates way beyond the frontiers of their own species in a demonstration of "ecosophic" knowledge (the expression is Arhem's [1993]) which we should emulate in as far as the limits of our objectivism permit. Formerly, it had been necessary to combat the assimilation of the savage mind to narcissistic animism, the infantile stage of naturalism, showing that totemism affirmed the cognitive distinction between culture and nature; now, as we have seen, animism is attributed once more to savages, but this time it is proclaimed - though not by Descola, I hasten to note - as the correct (or at least "valid") recognition of the universal admixture of subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, to which we modern Westerners have been blind, because of our foolish, nay, sinful habit of thinking in dichotomies. Against the hubris of modernity, the primitive and post-modern "hybrids," to borrow a term from Latour (1991).[43]

      It looks like we have here an antinomy, or rather two paired antinomies. For either Amerindians are ethnocentrically stingy in the extension of their concept of humanity, and they "totemically" oppose nature and culture; or they are cosmocentric and "animic" and do not profess to such a distinction, being (or so has been argued) models of relativist tolerance, postulating a multiplicity of points of view on the world.[44]

      I believe that the solution to these antinomies lies not in favouring one branch over the other, sustaining, for example, the argument that the most recent characterization of Amerindian attitudes is the correct one and relegating the other to the outer darkness of pre-afterological anthropology. Rather, the point is to show that the thesis as well as the antithesis of both antinomies are true (both correspond to solid ethnographic intuitions), but that they apprehend the same phenomena from different angles; and also it is to show that both are "false" in that they refer to a substantivist conceptualization of the categories of nature and culture (whether it be to affirm or negate them) which is not applicable to Amerindian cosmologies.

      The subject as such: from substantive to perspective

      Let us return to the observation by Levi-Strauss about the widespread character of those ethnic self-designations which would mean "real humans" or some suchlike myopic conceit. The first thing to be considered is that the Amerindian words which are usually translated as "human being" and which figure in those self-designations do not denote humanity as a natural species, that is, Homo sapiens. They refer rather to the social condition of personhood, and - especially when they are modified by intensifiers such as "true," "real," "genuine" - they function less as nouns then as pronouns. They indicate the position of the subject; they are enunciative markers, not names. Far from manifesting a semantic shrinking of a common name to a proper name (taking "people" to be the name of the tribe), these words move in the opposite direction, going from substantive to perspective (using "people" as a collective pronoun "we people/us"; the modifiers we translate by adjectives like "real" or "genuine" seem to function much like self-referential emphases of the type "we ourselves"). For this very reason, indigenous categories of identity have that enormous variability of scope that characterizes pronouns, marking contrastively Ego's immediate kin, his/her local group, all humans, humans and some animal species, or even all beings conceived as potential subjects: their coagulation as "ethnonyms" seems largely to be an artefact of interactions with ethnographers and other identity experts such as colonial administrators. Nor is it by chance that the majority of Amerindian ethnonyms which entered the literature are not self-designations, but rather names (frequently pejorative) conferred by other groups: ethnonymic objectivation is primordially applied to others, not to the ones in the position of subject. Ethnonyms are names of third parties, they belong to the category of "they," not to the category of "we."[45] This, by the way, is consistent with a widespread avoidance of self-reference on the level of onomastics: personal names are not spoken by their bearers nor in their presence; to name is to externalise, to separate (from) the subject.[46]

      Thus self-references such as "people" mean "person," not "member of the human species"; and they are personal pronouns registering the point of view of the subject talking, not proper names. To say, then, that animals and spirits are people, is to say that they are persons, and to personify them is to attribute to non-humans the capacities of conscious intentionality and agency which define the position of the subject. Such capacities are objectified as the soul or spirit with which these non-humans are endowed. Whatever possesses a soul is a subject, and whatever has a soul is capable of having a point of view. Amerindian souls, be they human or animal, are thus indexical categories, cosmological deictics whose analysis calls not so much for an animist psychology or substantialist ontology as for a theory of the sign or a perspectival pragmatics. (In a previous version of this argument, I used the expression "epistemological pragmatics" where now I prefer to talk of perspectival pragmatics. This is because in the meantime I developed a deep mistrust of "epistemological" interpretations of Amerindian ontological tenets.)

      So, every being to whom a point of view is attributed would be a subject; or better, wherever there is a point of view there is a subject position. Whilst our constructionist epistemology can be summed up in the Saussurean formula: the point of view creates the object - the subject being the original, fixed condition whence the point of view emanates - Amerindian perspectival ontology proceeds along the lines that the point of view creates the subject; whatever is activated or "agented" by the point of view will be a subject.[47]

      This is why terms such as wari' (a Txapakuran word), masa (a Tukanoan word) or dene (an Athapaskan word) mean "people," but they can be used for - and therefore used by - very different classes of beings: used by humans they denote human beings; but used by peccaries, howler monkeys or beavers, they self-refer to peccaries, howler monkeys or beavers (Vilaca 1992; Arhem 1993; McDonnell 1984).

      As it happens, however, these non-humans placed in the subject perspective do not merely "call" themselves "people"; they see themselves anatomically and culturally as humans. The symbolic spiritualisation of animals would imply its imaginary hominisation and culturalisation; thus the anthropomorphic-anthropocentric character of indigenous thought would seem to be unquestionable. However, I believe that something quite different is at issue. Any being which vicariously occupies the point of view of reference, being in the position of subject, sees itself as a member of the human species. The human bodily form and human culture - the schemata of perception and action "embodied" in specific dispositions - are deictics, pronominal markers of the same type as the self-designations discussed above. They are reflexive or apperceptive schematisms ("reifications" sensu Strathern) by which all subjects apprehend themselves, and not literal and constitutive human predicates projected metaphorically (i.e., improperly) onto non-humans. Such deictic "attributes" are immanent in the viewpoint, and move with it. Human beings - naturally - enjoy the same prerogative and therefore see themselves as such: "Human beings see themselves as such; the Moon, the snakes, the jaguars and the Mother of Smallpox, however, see them as tapirs or peccaries, which they kill" (Baer 1994: 224).

      We need to have it quite clear: it is not that animals are subjects because they are humans (humans in disguise), but rather that they are human because they are subjects (potential subjects). This is to say culture is the subject's nature; it is the form in which every subject experiences its own nature. Animism is not a projection of substantive human qualities cast onto animals, but rather expresses the logical equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves: salmon are to (see) salmon as humans are to (see) humans, namely, (as) human. If, as we have observed, the common condition of humans and animals is humanity not animality, this is because "humanity" is the name for the general form taken by the subject.

      Let me make two remarks by way of conclusion. The attribution of human-like consciousness and intentionality (to say nothing of human bodily form and cultural habits) to non-human beings has been indifferently denominated "anthropocentrism" or "anthropomorphism." However, these two labels can be taken to denote radically opposed cosmological outlooks. Western popular evolutionism, for instance, is thoroughly anthropocentric, but not particularly anthropomorphic. On the other hand, animism may be characterized as anthropomorphic, but it is definitely not anthropocentric: if sundry other beings besides humans are "human," then we humans are not a special lot. So much for primitive "narcissism."

      Marx wrote of man, meaning Homo sapiens:

      In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being. . . . Admittedly animals also produce. . . . But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, while man produces universally. . . . An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. . . . An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance to the standards of other species. (Marx 1961: 75-76 apud Sahlins 1996: 400 n. 17)

      Talk about "primitive" narcissism. Whatever Marx meant by this idea that man "produces universally," I would like to think he is saying something to the effect that man is the universal animal - an intriguing idea. (If man is the universal animal, then perhaps each animal species would be a kind of particular humanity?). While apparently converging with the Amerindian notion that humanity is the universal form of the subject, Marx's is in fact an absolute inversion of it: he is saying that humans can "be" any animal - that we have more being than any other species - whilst Amerindians say that "any" animal can be human - that there is more being to an animal than meets the eye. "Man" is the universal animal in two entirely different senses, then: the universality is anthropocentric in the case of Marx, and anthropomorphic in the Amerindian case.[48]

      The second remark takes us back to the relationship between animism and totemism. I have just said that animism should be taken as expressing the logical equivalence of the reflexive relations that humans and animals each have to themselves. I then proposed, as an example, that salmon are to salmon as humans to humans, namely, human. This was inspired by Guedon's paragraph on Tsimshiam cosmology:

      If one is to follow the main myths, for the human being, the world looks like a human community surrounded by a spiritual realm, including an animal kingdom with all beings coming and going according to their kinds and interfering with each others' lives; however, if one were to go and become an animal, a salmon for instance, one would discover that salmon people are to themselves as human beings are to us, and that to them, we human beings would look like naxnoq [supernatural beings], or perhaps bears feeding on their salmon. Such translation goes through several levels. For instance, the leaves of the cotton tree falling in the Skeena River are the salmon of the salmon people. I do not know what the salmon would be for the leaf, but I guess they appear what we look like to the salmon - unless they looked like bears. (1984a: 141)

      Therefore, if salmon look to salmon as humans to humans - and this is "animism" - salmon do not look human to humans and neither do humans to salmon - and this is "perspectivism."

      If such is the case, then animism and perspectivism may have a deeper relationship to totemism than Descola's model allows for. Why do animals (I recall that by "animals" I always mean: each animals species) see themselves as humans? Precisely because humans see them as animals, and see themselves as humans. Peccaries cannot see themselves as peccaries (and then speculate that humans and other beings are really peccaries behind their species-specific clothing) because this is the guise in which peccaries are seen by humans.[49] If humans see themselves as humans and are seen as non-human (as animals or spirits) by animals, then animals must necessarily see themselves as humans. Such asymmetrical torsion of animism contrasts in an interesting way with the symmetry exhibited by totemism. In the case of animism, a correlation of reflexive identities (human : human :: animal : animal) serves as the substrate for the relation between the human and animal series; in the case of totemism, a correlation of differences (human ≠ human :: animal ≠ animal) articulates the two series. It is curious to see how a correlation of differences (the differences are identical) can produce a reversible and symmetric structure, while a correlation of similarities (similarities differ, for animals are similar to humans because they are not humans) produces the asymmetric and pseudo-projective structure of animism.

      37 Descola's inspirational articles on Ameridian "animism" were one of the proximate causes of my interest in perspectivism.

      38 To remain on an Americanist ground, I might mention: the rejection of a privileged position for metaphor by Overing (1985), in favour of a relativist literalism which seems to be supported by the notion of belief; the theory of dialectical synecdoche as being anterior and superior to metaphoric analogy, proposed by Turner (1991), an author who like other specialists (Seeger 1981, Crocker 1985) has attempted to contest the interpretations of the nature/culture dualism of the Ge-Bororo as being a static opposition, privative and discrete; or the reconsideration by Viveiros de Castro (1992a) of the contrast between totemism and sacrifice in the light of the Deleuzian concept of becoming, which seeks to account for the centrality of the processes of ontological predation in Tupian cosmologies, as well as for the directly social (and not specularly classificatory) character of interactions between the human and extra-human orders.

      39 "If in a commodity economy things and persons assume the social form of things, then in a gift economy they assume the social form of persons" (Strathern 1988: 134 [from Gregory 1982: 41]). The parallels are obvious.

      40 Let me say I have nothing against typologies as such, which I deem an important step in anthropological reasoning: typologies are like rules - we need them in order to break them. And butterfly collecting is a most honourable and rewarding occupation - if carried with ecological circumspection - unjustly reviled by one of our eminent forebears.

      41 Totemic orderings can also be found in combination with naturalist schemes, as shown by modern genetics and its correlations between genotypical and phenotypical differences (the "more natural" series of the genome and the "more cultural" series of its expressions), or by linguistics - the formal model of Levi-Straussian totemism - with its vast repertoire of differential correlations between signifier and signified, physico-acoustical and mental-conceptual series, etc.

      42 In the article referred to above, Radcliffe-Brown also proposed, in contrast to the Durkheimian idea of a “projection of society into external nature,” that “the process is one by which, in the fashioning of culture, external nature, so called, comes to be incorporated in the social order as an essential part of it” (1952: 130–31). This is an interesting anti-metaphorical remark, which Lévi-Strauss (1962a: 84–89) interpreted quite unfairly as a kind of utilitarian argument. Radcliffe-Brown’s point reappears almost verbatim in Goldman (who does not mention Radcliffe-Brown’s article): “To Durkheim . . . it was easy to imagine that ‘primitive’ people projected their own natures onto the rest of nature. It is far more likely that Homo sapiens sought to understand himself and all other realms of nature through a dialectic of interchange, of understanding the outer world in terms of his own nature and his own nature in terms of the outer. If Kwakiutl attribute human qualities to the grizzly bear, they have also learned to define and to regulate their own qualities of physical strength and fearlessness in terms of their knowledge of the bear. . . . Kwakiutl do not merely project themselves on the outer world. They seek to incorporate it.” (1975: 208; emphasis added).

      43 Latour has provided here only the term, not the target: I do not intend his work to be identified with anything I say in this paragraph. By the way, there is another familiar variant of this change in the way "we" think "they" think. At the time La pensee sauvage was written, it was deemed necessary to assert, and to provide abundant illustration thereto, that primitive peoples were endowed with a theoretical cast of mind, showing an authentic speculative interest in reality - they were not moved by their bellies and other such purely practical considerations. But this was when "theory" was not a word of abuse. Now, of course, everything has changed. These peoples have returned to practice; not, it goes without saying, to practice because of an incapacity for theory (well, the "oral vs. written" or the "cosmological disorder" schools would disagree here), but to practice as anti-theory. Be that as it may, not all contemporary primitive peoples seem to agree with our current interest in practice; perhaps because they are no longer primitive (but have they ever been?). So, in Fienup-Riordan's latest book (1994: xiii), we can read the following introductory remark from a Yup'ik man: "You white people always want to know about the things we do, but it is the rules that are important."

      44 The uncomfortable tension inherent in such antinomies can be gauged in Howell's recent article (1996) on the Chewong of Malaysia. Chewong cosmology is paradoxically - but the paradox is not noticed - described as "relativist" (p.133) and as "after all . . . anthropocentric" (p.135). A double mislabelling, at least if carried to the Amerindian universe.

      45 An interesting transformation of the refusal to onomastic self-objectification can be found in those cases in which, since the collective-subject is taking itself to be part of a plurality of collectives analogous to itself, the self-referential term signifies "the others." This situation occurs primarily when the term is used to identify collectives from which the subject excludes itself: the alternative to pronominal subjectification is an equally relational auto-objectification, where "I" can only mean "the other of the other": see the achuar of the Achuar, or the nawa of the Panoans (Taylor 1985: 168; Erikson 1990: 80-84). The logic of Amerindian auto-ethnonymy calls for its own specific study. For other revealing cases, see: Vilaca (1992: 449-51), Price (1987), and Viveiros de Castro (1992a: 64-65). For an enlightening analysis of a North American case similar to the Amazonian ones, see McDonnell (1984: 41-43).

      46 It has become quite fashionable to drop traditional Amerindian ethnonyms, usually names given by other tribes or by whites, in favour of more politically correct ethnic self-designations. The problem, however, is that self-designations are exactly this, self-designations, which when used by foreigners produce the most ludicrous referential problems. Take the case of the Campa, who call themselves "ashaninka," and who accordingly are now called "Ashaninka" by well-meaning NGO people (I thank P. Gow for this example). The root shaninca means "kinsperson"; ashaninca means "our kinspeople." This is what Campa people call themselves as a collectivity when contrasting themselves to others, like viracocha, "Whites," simirintsi, "Piro," etc. It is easy to imagine how strange it may sound to the Campa to be called "our kinspeople" by a viracocha, a white person, who is anything but a relative. It is more or less like if I were to call my friend Stephen "I," because that's what he calls himself, while "Stephen" is a name which someone else gave to him, and which other people, rather more frequently than he himself, use to refer to him.

      47 This idea comes from Deleuze's book on Leibniz (1988: 27): "Such is the foundation of perspectivism. It does not express a dependency on a predefined subject; on the contrary, whatever accedes to the point of view will be subject." The Saussurean formula appears on the beginning of the Cours de linguistique generale.

      48 Be that as it may, Marx's notion of an universal animal - capable of "producing in accordance with the standards of other species" (whatever this means) - is an accurate anticipation of another universal metaphorical being. I am referring of course to the universal machine, the machine capable of simulating (i.e., re-producing) any other machine: the Turing-Von Neumann computer.

      49 This would be our version of "perspectivism," namely, the critical stance regarding anthropomorphism (here crucially and mistakenly conflated with anthropocentrism) as a form of projection. It was advanced two and half millenia ago by Xenophanes, who memorably said (though what he meant is very much open to debate) that if horses or oxen or lions had hands, they would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, oxen or lions - a point which reappears under many guises in Western tradition, from Aristotle to Spinoza, from Hume to Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, etc. Characteristically, our problem with "anthropomorphism" relates to the projection of humanity into divinity, not animality.

    • Curating as environ-mentalism 'to find a frame, a timing or a situation within which suggestions of others can be realized' tom plischke (1) 1. In this text I would like to focus on a particular form of curatorship: a practice that grew out of (and in opposition to) the 'new' style of programming of the 1980's institutions. An attitude in thinking about curating in which the role of the programmer and the role of the artist start to intertwine. I'd like to talk about a curatorship that tries to redefine the boundaries put up by the institutions that were built for the production modes and logic of a generation of autonomous artists, a rethinking of the role of the institution by introducing the notions of vulnerability, risk and imperfection into the programming idiom, and a translation of the 'relational esthetics' of the visual arts towards a more ecological phrasing of the time and space shared by the performers, 'spectactors', public members and the resisting (art)objects they encounter. An important experience for me in my role of spectator, and a starting point for this ramble through the focus points of my memory, was the 10 day performance event BDC/Tom Plischke and Friends organized in 2001 in the temporary site of the Beursschouwburg in Brussels (which was at that point being renovated): the BSBbis. Talking to then dance programmer Carine Meulders, it became clear to me that this project already introduced a lot of elements that in the next 10 years would become important tools in rethinking the performance arts notions of curatorship and the role of the artist/curator, but also the re-creation of the institution by introducing derogatory practices within its territory (another use of space, time, and the distinction between performers and audience members), and another way of thinking the social body of participants of the environment created by (but not limited to) the programmed events. Practically BDC/Tom Plischke & Friends started as the idea to show two of the BDC performances (Affects and (Re)SORT), while at the same time creating a completely new environment of parallel performances, workshops, discourse sessions, concerts , films and informal encounters. Collaborators to this projects were artists like Marten Spangberg, Hygiene Heute, Alice Chauchat, Davis Freeman, Lilia Mestre. There was a theoretical programme with workshops organized by Jeroen Peeters and Steven De Belder with contributions from Gerald Siegmund, Jan Ritsema, Stefanie Wenner, Kattrin Deufert etc... The project ran for 10 days, 24 hours a day, and invited both artists and audience members to share the space not only for the performances and workshops, but also to spend the time in-between together, even spending the night at the venue, maximalizing the potential of the unexpected, of the informal encounter, of experiencing the changing atmosphere of the space-at-work/at-leisure. An important factor in this project was the fact that it was set up initially without a definite space in mind: the regular Beursschouwburg was at that time in reconstruction, and the working of the theatre had not yet found another location, nor was it clear if another theatre space was exactly what the artistic team needed at that point. In that sense the project that was being developed in an important degree also changed the thinking about the institution-in-transition, and the project location BSBbis (in a relatively un heimlich part of Brussels)also became the temporary location for the adventurous working of the Beursschouwburg in the years before their move back to the renovated theatre in the centre. Two timings in this sense were developing simultaneously: the creation of the project, and the search for a location, and both logics became intertwined on the crossroads of the need for mobility and flexibility of the programme and its realization. What was important in the realization of this project was the coming together of different social bodies: the first 24h group of 60 artists, opening up to a wider group of participants for the workshops and discourse sessions and folding open to the 'regular' public around performance time. Interesting in the thinking about the role of the curator in this case was the fact that Tom Plischke himself spent a lot of the most 'public' moments together with Kattrin Deufert in a reenactment of Andy Warhol's Sleep in bed in the café, preferring the nightly hours for experiencing the 'other' space of the BSB bis, another kind of performativity only visible to the night watcher or another sleepless soul. The traditional 'visibility' of the curator (as we know it from the classical view on curatorship in the visual arts, where the curation, in itself an artistic gesture, is signed and recognized) was broken up in the working of the project, by the curator giving up his central function, only shaping the timing and the situation of the event, but not the content frame that had to be filled. In other words: the curation was not so much about creating an agenda for discussion but in negotiating the format of the agenda in the first place. What these 10 days also produced were the blurry boundaries between 'performance' and 'daily life', between social rituals and performative work, between production time and performance time, reevaluating the value of the moment, of the difference between 'full' and 'empty' time. As Tom Plische said himself: 'I think that every collaboration has its time and that you learn throughout the collaboration to discover its mechanics.'(1) He was talking about BDC in this quote and not specifically about the BDC-event, but as a reference point in understanding the mechanics of the kind of curatorship that would be developed more intensely in the years to come it is an important one. The curatorship not only being about bringing together works of art, creating different resonances and echoes, rethinking one work through the other, thinking about differences and repetitions, but also about creating openings and weaknesses in the curating, allowing vulnerability and 'empty moments' to be fully part of the experience. The importance of this stance on curatorship is that it takes a clear distance from the power and control strategies of the regular performing arts field, allowing risk to enter into the project set-up, and putting into question not only the authorship of the artist/curator, but also the market value of the artistic product. Again Tom Plischke: 'The utopia probably doesn't consist of creating a temporary community or communitas. Rather it shows that if we gather for a performance, every momentary created element is part of the social or communicative system that we set up together. If you look at it from the point of view of Luhmann's system theory you know that there are only these momentary elements and not also something like an overall system. The possibility of failure, vulnerability, is there when you no longer know when you will lose your ground. That is what is important to me: to introduce the conviction that the system for which the public pays and that in fact is created by the performers and the public together, at the same time is not there at all.'(1) The BSB bis event had a follow-up in the arts centre Vooruit in Ghent in 2002: b-visible, a 72 hours event, curated by Tom Plischke, Kattrin Deufert and Jeroen Peeters. This time the project had the theoretical content-focus of queerness and visibility, and also in this case the project inspired a different kind of working and curating within the institution: the 'intensification' of performance events, transdisciplinary programming and parcours work, folding open the building and showing it in different states of living and working, became one of the driving forces of the artistic programming team of Vooruit in the years to come. 2. Curating as institutional prosthesis and critique To understand this kind of curating and even the 'institutionalization' of these forms of curatorship, we have to take a look at the scene as it was at that point. As you could read in the interviews with Hilde Teuchies and Hannah Hurtzig elsewhere in this issue, the 1980's had produced arts centres and later on as well subsidized work spaces for artistic production and research, but with a new gulf of artists entering the scene, with the need of rethinking the disciplinary boundaries, and the cry for a more 'holistic' thinking about arts practice and discourse development, these institutions proved not always to be the ideal spaces for rethinking production parameters and disciplinary boundaries. A lot of these spaces by the beginning of the new millennium had found their specific ways of cyclic programmation, working with yearly program books and subscriptions. For the new generations of artists that no longer (wanted to ) fit the institutional agenda's, it was important to find new formats of working. On the other hand, also another generation of programmers wanted to find a way of breaking open the institutional formatting to once again free the space for the artists. It is in that middle field, in this open space, that the programmer and the artist/curator found each other: in the want of the programmer to challenge the ways of the system, and in the need of the artist to escape the programming logic of the subsidiary system (first you get a residency in a workspace, then you get (not) picked up by one of the bigger arts centers, etc...). The need to break out of this production logic produced a kind of solidarity movement within the artist community to translated itself into different artist initiatives, that all in their own ways, tried to break open the logic of the arts scene market. An example of this is 'Praticable', an initiative created in 2005 by Alice Chauchat, Frédéric de Carlo, Frédéric Gies, Isabelle Schad and Odile Seitz, as an answer to programmer's demands. The 'open collective' share no more than body practices, out of which each member can create his/her own work, in collaboration or not with other Praticable (2) members. But the interesting part is that whenever one of them is programmed, they program one of their colleagues as a 20 minute opening programme to their own show. The curatorial aspect here has nothing to do with content, nor with a specific kind of esthetics, but everything with reclaiming the fundaments of the production mechanisms of the performance scene. In Belgium, these curatorial initiatives rarely thrive outside of the institutional framework. More often than not we could speak about a curatorial redistribution of the institutional: the artist/curator claims his/her position within an (or more) arts house(s), and than re-distributes the means his position produces with a larger number of networked artists and thinkers. It is a way of working that is sustained by for example a workspace like nadine(3) in Brussels, who 'lends' its house and (part of its)budget for six months to an artist/curator that will in these months open up his working to other artists, opening up for public moments every now and then and to varying groups of interested, participating or involved 'spectactors'. Talking to artists these last years, the remark that always comes back is that they want to 'escape' the institutional logic that renders them passive, that makes them wait in the row to be 'picked up', be 'chosen', to go through all the predescribed steps to become a recognized artist. Not only do a lot of them no longer aspire to this notion of 'the artist', since they are involved in rewriting the rules for artistic authorship in complex ways of collaborative and/or communal practice that defy the programming system, but they also want to get rid of the frustrating passivity they find themselves in when confronted with the ways of the subsidiary system. Not in the least since this system seems to be crumbling down a bit more every year. In that sense the curatorial position regains its good old etymology of hospitality, of 'taking care' of the networked community. But on the other hand it also creates a new paradigm for the re-distributer, the artist/curator who is at the same time claiming his vulnerability by offering an empty frame for working by sending out an (open) invitation to the scene, and defending his position as the creator of this frame as an art work in itself. It would bring us too far to analyze all the different possible models of re-distribution here, or to define the criteria for 'good' or 'bad' positioning between the institution and the independent field. But it is certain that in every one of these projects the boundaries are put into question again, in the best cases producing a sense of renewal within the institution, as well as in the artistic and curatorial practices of all the participants. 3. What we see happening in the performance scene is thus a transition from curating the artists, over curating the art works (as it happened in the two Klapstuk festivals for contemporary dance, curated by Jerôme Bel in 2003 and 2005, and claimed by him as his 'art work' in a newspaper interview)to the curation of a space, of a social body, shared by artists, audience members, and 'art objects'. A space in negotiation and transition, under constant threat of on the one hand folding into itself or on the other opening up to the spectacular, the easy-to-consume festivalitis of the arts. It is a space that demands time and attention for a sense of belonging (beit critical or engaged, active or passive) to grow, that bridges the all-too-easily claimed positions of the artist, programmer, spectator or critic. An extraordinary example of this kind of curating was achieved by André Lepecki in his two In-Transit festivals in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Although in this case his curatorship had a clear discourse stamp - colored by (neo)post-colonial performance themes, and in that sense certainly was more than an empty box for gathering and exchange - his creation within the quite heavily institutional frame of the peculiar architecture of the Haus of an open house for discussion ( opening up out of the Lab sessions (the first year assisted by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, the second year self-organized), interacting through the public discussions, entering into the fabric of the bar discussions) was a beautiful example of how even within the institution the rules can be bent in such a way as to produce a subtly different common ground to work on. Artists and theoreticians, lab students and critics sharing the same space for a prolonged period of time, for discussions, concerts, parties, eating in the garden, and working, broke the frame of the 'festival' as consumerist high-point of the cultural year, and produced a quite different, vulnerable working space that didn't fall into the trap of easily created critical oppositions. Instead what appeared was a generous atmosphere for engaged thinking and working, always bumping into the prickly theme of the festival's programmation: the resistance of the object. Understood out of the postcolonial context the festival referred to and the distinctly non-Western attendance of the artist and theoreticians, this thinking frame was in itself challenging enough not to have to refrain to the well-known strategies of 'interesting' discussion, which are mainly quoting and opposition. In-Transit was an example of an 'environmentalist' approach to curation, a careful ecological balancing exercise between given elements, the creation of a frame for the formation of a social body in constant transformation, and the channels for the inspiration and flow of knowledge to find its way to the different sub-groups of interests participating in the festival. What made that this festival didn't get trapped in the festivalitis context, (unlike for example the Trance festival organized by HAU a couple of years ago), was its attitude, its openness instituted by the curatorial organization of space and time, by the distribution of proximity and accessibility of the different participants groups, by the care for the food, the library, the focusses of attention. In that way the difference between working and watching, between practicing theory and performance, between participants and audience members was minimalized, without giving up on the challenge, the invitation for positioning yourself within the given parameters. Here, as in the BDC example, the space for the arts was stretched out into the surrounding park, the cafetaria, the hall ways and the metro back to the hotel. 4.In short, if I speak in this text about an understanding of curatorship in the performing arts, I speak about a very specific understanding of curatorship: a shared curatorship, putting into question the authorial roles and introducing new potentials for exchange and sharing of (artistic) material, a curatorship that extends the invitation to rethink the ecology of the arts system from within, without introducing definite new ideological standpoints or stubborn critical certainties. A curatorship not so much as a statement but as a redistribution of power that makes us rethink the fabric of our social bodies and belonging. A curating of the now, in the moment of its unfolding. I like the definition Nigel Thrift gives of a rethinking of a political attitude in his 'Non-Representational Theory': 'a potentiality that is brought into being only as it acts or exists in the interstices of interaction'. If this is so, the whole idea of curating is no longer based on fixed points in space, performances in venues. The real curating is the non-curated part of the interstices, of the places in-between, of the potential of the situation for changing one's attitude, one's mind or one's sense of belonging. The curatorial practice in that sense opens up cracks in the system in the space, where things can happen that were not programmed nor foreseeable. Encounters between people, between people and objects, architecture, history, thoughts and ideas roaming the space that can be picked up by anyone, rephrased and relaunched in another conversation, left as a trace for someone else to pick up, etcetera. The environmentalism is about allowing for that to happen. In a space like that, the role of the curator and the artist become interchangeable, as does the role of the spectator. Since the curatorial attitude is one of creating a space in which anyone could feel empowered to start creating or changing it by their input, the spectator is confronted with a serious challenge here, albeit possibly in the guise of a somewhat obscure invitation. It is an invitation to allows them to get affected by the circumstances, to actively open up to this potential change, not necessarily by actively getting out there, but by opening up their perspectives on what might happen. It is this oscillating promise that creates the space and the social body within it. This kind of unspoken promise that something is going on, connecting all elements within the given parameters, rendering palpable the intuition that any kind of change happening within it also creates a change in the whole of the constellation. The radical change in the position of the spectator, is one of attitude, is precisely that he leaves behind his position and starts looking for a connection, that he inscribes himself in the bigger story that is being written, not so much for him, but with him. Although this might sound as a bit of an ideal situation, with the right set-up of time and space, allowing for gaps and interstices, and (very importantly) including the whole organizational team in adapting and communicating this attitude, it has proven itself to be possible. At that point the curatorial politics are no longer superficially provoking an (un)wanted interactive dynamic between spectators and performers, but about allowing them to rethink their role in the whole. Whatever is being said or done in that space is no longer an abstract message sent out to an abstract receiver, but becomes a piece of constantly changing information, that passes through every individual present in a personal, although non-autobiographical, way. It is for him to pick it up or leave it stranding, to make a choice or give over to the flow, to be critical, enthusiastic, a glitch in the circulation, or a conductor or the environmental energy. But he will know that whatever position he chooses to take on will in some way change the outlook of the constellation. (1) Translation of fragment out of 'De belofte van 'het'' (The promise of 'it'): Tom Plischke in interview with Rudi Laermans , Carine Meulders and Kattrin Deufert, in relation to the performance BDC/Tom Plischke and Friends in BSB bis, 2001. Complete text can be found in the anthology of Rudi Laermans on www.sarma.be (2) www.praticable.info (3) www.nadine.be Elke Van Campenhout

    • 1. Food and Hunger

      Knowing about food and where our foods come from, or even knowing what exactly it is we are eating, has been the leveller for a new movement of engaged and interested citizens-artists who want to come to an understanding of the different factors that are running the all-encompassing trade of our alimentary products.

      Talking about global food production, we must come to the conclusion that making ‘healthy’ decisions is an almost impossible task. Faced with the everyday realities of food miles, (the lack of) farmer’s organization or union support, the huge gap in economic power between the industrialized mega-states and the (often poor) production regions, the carbon footprint of global distribution, the non-ecological industrialized farming methods and the subsequent constant production of toxins, the limited range of possibilities of the ‘fair trade’ label etc, we come to the conclusion that eating healthily and taking care of your body does not necessarily mean you are taking care of the community nor the environment. Taking into account the situation of the workers that are producing your food for less than the money they put into their work, as a direct result of the so-called ‘free trade’ (but heavily subsidized) food policies promoted by the strong industrial food powers, it is hard to find your way around the shopping isles of your supermarket. But even the neighborhood shop or farmer’s market is not above suspicion. In the food industry nothing is what it seems. 

      In answer to this seemingly insurmountable problem, artists and citizens alike have taken up the challenge in very different ways. Collectives concentrating on city gardening, gathering food in public parks, working on solar energy, devising alternative economies, are all interesting and locally invested initiatives that somehow try to grasp some of the left-overs of the individual agency in matters that seem largely to surpass its level. Because there are few characteristics that shape our current food production that are not so easily airbrushed by good intentions and local initiative.

      The first, and probably most important fact is that Food is Class-Conscious: the way food production and distribution is organized today has created, aggrandized and sustained major inequalities in our society: on the city level as well as on the global level, not to forget the discrepancy between the attention dedicated to city (consumers) and the rural community. In the cities American studies have shown that it is hard to find any decent supermarket in predominantly black neighborhoods. The ‘good’, but also often the cheapest food, is to be found on the outskirts of the city, impossible to reach by foot or public transport. Local, inner-city shops often offer lower quality products at a higher price. Which offers the have-nots only a limited choice: since no fresh produce is available they depend on nightshops, local, relatively expensive small-scale super markets, or just don’t bother and go to the Mc Donald’s, which in these neighborhoods is always just behind the corner. Although this study was performed in the megapolis areas of the USA, which structure does not exactly mirror similar sizes cities’ organization in other countries, it is safe to say that the equal access to fresh, healthy and nutritious food is limited to those who are living on limited means. This glaring inequality does no more than reflect the same kind of imbalance produced by the global food market system: over-subsidized food industries in nations like the USA and China dominate the market by artificially bringing down the prices for the goods produced in other parts of world. Since they are not forced to sell, they can sit back and wait until the market turns out more profit, which is something most other regions cannot afford to do. On top of that the USA has been consciously overproducing (especially corn and grain), and dumping their excess produce on the world market at prices that often are below the cost of production. Which is a sure way of cutting down all concurrency, forcing whole countries into the subservient state of mono-culture produce for mega-companies that are putting even more pressure on the farmers, and rendering them in that way completely dependent on the often capricious swifts and turns of the market and the weather.

      What concerned artists-citizens are concentrating on, is to find ways out of this globalized and subsidized inequality system that is fed into us every day when we go shopping ourselves, and come to the understanding that there is no locally grown produce to be found, since it seems cheaper to transport apples over a 3000km distance to the supermarket than to eat the ones the soon-to-go-out-of-business local farmers are producing. What they reclaim as human beings is their right to food sovereignty: the right to be able to make the right choice. Or as the activist group Via Campesina formulates it in mock-answer to the WTO demand for the elimination of trade barriers between the nations: ‘Access to markets? Yes, we want access to our own markets.’ Food sovereignty in the first place has to do with accessibility, as said before, and with the communally constructed rethinking of sustainable food architectures in our communities. But there are also more radical ways to put into question the hierarchies and dependencies of the food market, as the hunger artist exemplifies.

       

      2) Hunger as artistic attitude

      Working as a hunger artist means you take a distance from the world. Food is what greatly shapes our social relations, our daily schedules, our meetings and our professional environments. Try to imagine not being able to go out for dinner anymore, have a beer with a friend until late in the night, go to a business lunch meeting, have a glorious Sunday brunch with the family. What does it produce if you break off all these easy and light engagements that somehow keep your network, your links with the world outside of you, intact. The hunger artist will always be the one that introduces a kind of friction in the social setting, the one that doesn’t play the game anymore, the one that sits soberly watching the other ones. It is an awkwardness that creates distance, provokes questions, and -more often than not- a certain degree of scepticism or even hostility. For the hunger artist the body turns into a completely different vessel: slowly hollowing itself out it becomes little by little a pure exterior, a testimony of the practice that carries itself outwards into the world, the inner core emptying itself out every day a little bit more. The hunger artist is, to speak in Deleuzian terms, the ultimate Body without Organs. Deleuze speaks about different types of BwO’s: the masochist, the anorexic, the addict, etc… Each of them developing a ‘micro-politics’ that will leave the body undone, stripped of all it organs, of its most essential machinistic sense of functioning. The body seen as a machine that has to be filled up every so many hours is dependent on the food architecture he/she lives in to do so, has formatted his/her social environments to fit into these pigeon holes of meeting and exchanging. In contrast, the Body without Organs opens up the possibility of a body that is no longer mechanic, that frees itself from its dependencies, only to reconstruct them from a new perspective. A BwO is assembled out of a desire for experiment, for the potential breaking through. It pushes the organizational lines of time and space that regulate our ordinary social encounters. ‘If the machine is not a mechanism, and if the body is not an organism, it is always then that desire assembles.’

      The hunger artist, much like the anorexic as Deleuze sees him, reorganizes the social space. When distanced from the initial desire to consume, prompting us into obeisance and consumerism, food items start to tell a completely different story. Walking through the aisles of the super market, the long rows of repetitive food items take on an almost alien characteristic. The absurdity of the abundance of food, of this constant movement of goods from the other side of the world, from the rural areas, into the city, keeping the heart of our community pumping takes on an almost grotesque character. Taking a distance from the food object is a first step into questioning our dependencies. Not only to eating, but to how these food items shape our lives and relations. The reason the hunger artist is often looked at wearily is because he questions our sense of pleasure and the social bonds that create it. Food has off course more than a nutritional value: food marks the important moments in our lives, food is an indicator of good taste, of worldliness, and of – not unimportant – class. Food places us fixedly on the social map of belonging. We buy certain products because our parents did so, because the advertiser sold me his body image, because of the comfort of its proximity, because of our craving to be ‘filled up’. ‘Comfort food’ as preached on so many TV channels and in countless cook books, is not by coincidence often fatty and ‘nostalgic’: referring to a previous age, childhood recipes which remind us of home, of the clear safe boundaries of a house in proper order. Comfort foods are our vessels of consolation, not by coincidence mostly targeted to single consumers. They are the consolation for not fitting the social pattern (yet). Comfort food is what creates food addicts and a dependency on food as a social and/or professional readjuster. No wonder then, that from this perspective the hunger artist is seen as a loco, and the anorexic as diseased. In reaction to the full plate of richess offered to him, he declines politely, as Bartleby did before him: ‘I would prefer not to’. (It is no coincidence that Melville’s Bartleby dies of starvation at the end of the book). But if we look at the hunger artist with a bit more distance, we could argue that he is probably the true ‘relational aesthetics’ manager. Having become a pure exterior, he rearranges the borders of social conduct. If we go back to the anorexic, we see that the ‘I’ of the anorexic undeniably rearranges the fabric of the family constellation. In the same way, if we see the hunger artist practice as a public, artistic practice (which it would have to be to overcome the limits of the narcissistic experience), the ‘I’ of the artist is restructuring the relations among the bodies he is closest to. His collaborators, curators, programmers, public, providers, care-takers and so on. By refusing the imposed organ-ized ways of dealing, by making them impossible to apply through a pure passivity of food denial, he rewrites the potential outcome of the situation introducing this simple moment of openness for what might be there on the other side. As Deleuze notes the anorexic is not the one that refuses his/her own body, but the one that refuses a particular ideology of the body. It is not the one falling victim to his/her own body, but the one emancipating it from the all-encompassing demands of its environment. It is a twisted logic of the current food system that on the one hand produces more and more fatty and unhealthy food items, and on the other hand glorifies a perfect, trained, ‘normal’ body, shunning the rest of us out of vision. Out-of-size bodies are the ones that launch a counter-attack against these hypocritical and often obtuse moral hygiene of the food market. Why anorexics as well as overweight people are regarded suspiciously is because they trespass the norm, the middle space, the common ground we all agree on. But if we make a more militant reading of this ab-normalcy we could say that ‘The anorexic void has nothing to do with a lack, it is on the contrary a way of escaping the organic constraint of lack and hunger at the mechanical mealtime.’ The psychiatric reading of anorexic practices or the undue fear of the hunger artist ignore other traditional ways in which these practices were considered spiritually liberating and ascetic practices experimented with for thousands of years. As echoed through the witnessing of these traditions the hunger practice is an emancipatory gesture taking a temporary distance from being subjected to the body’s incessant and dictatorial demands. During le Château Marcella.B picked up on these intuitions and sent out a call for hunger artists all over the world (in response to the score of Morice Deslisle), to strive for an artistic practice that is built on social transformation, fair-trade and the rethinking of the relation between our and other bodies out there in the world. In a second phase she works on the development of her ‘Pratiques Anorexiques’ in different, public residency settings. In her practice she point out the parallel between the ways we deal with food and the ways we deal with our arts practices. Using the body as a transformative tool in the exploration of current societal questions off course places the artist right back into a tradition of long-durational body arts. But also, and more importantly in this context, in the middle of a societal debate that is larger and more accessible to a larger group of stakeholders than the restriction to the usual suspects of the arts scene. The hunger and anorexic practices open up a field of debate that can be shared by anyone, offers an opportunity to digest various concerns, and incorporate them into the empty body of the artistic work. Off course the Hunger Artist is only one way to deal with the questions raised by global food production. Overall the strategies that deal with these questions are based on creating a ‘state of attention’: which can be achieved through creating zones of attentive cooking, building sustainable food architectures, inventing new foods, etc… What the Hunger Artist in this whole debate is a moment of standstill, a period of tranquility in the middle of the roaring velocity of movement and speed that directs our existence. A moment of suspension in the eye of the storm.

       

      3) Fair trade in the arts: take out the middle men

      If we talk about fair-trade in the food industry we talk about returning to the farmers the right to be paid fairly for what they grow. We talk about the unfairness of the middle men, the refiners and distributors of the food, the supermarket chains that push the prices up for the customers and down for the growers. We talk about a clear policy on what exactly it means to deal within ‘free trade’, when the big industrialized nations are paying massive amounts of money to over-produce bulk food which destroys the (potentially) healthy price concurrency regulating the markets. We talk about over-subsidizing governments that don’t take into account the needs of the farmers nor of the consumers. But most of all we talk about the right to decide how and what to grow (from the farmer’s side) and to be able to make healthy and informed decisions on the part of the consumer. If we talk about the arts market, we seem to have entered into that same state of deadlock. Policy makers and commissions, curators and programmers, everyone is trying to make sense of something that should be fairly simple. There are artists producing a multicultural (in opposition to the monocultural agricultural practices) range of practices and art works, and there is an equally multi-oriented public, looking in the arts for a satisfactory reply to questions or cravings as diverse as critical awareness, aesthetic pleasure, soothing reassurance, political insights, historical framing, and lots and lots more. What is been happening in the last ten years though is a subsidizing policy that grew out of a more or less sane self-organizing artists field, and that now has become regulative to an almost absurd height. (We write here from our background as a respectively Dutch and Belgian artistic researcher). In his State of the Union at the performance festival in Belgium, a few days after the Dutch cultural subsidy system all but collapsed under the weight of populist demands and managerial efficiency, cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen rightly remarked: ‘The arts field follows a ‘neutral politics’ strategy. One doesn’t utter politically tinged statements, one speaks with just about all democratic parties, one provides evenly divided political distribution in the boards and even sometimes in the governmental commissions. At the same time one incorporates the efficiency and management rhetorics that please today’s policy makers: the arts sector as well wants to prove its ‘good management’, while research ought to legitimate the arts sector economically.’. As a direct result of this managerial approach though, Gielen claims, the arts sector opened up the possibility for its most interesting, experimental, ‘non-efficient’ practices to be cut from one day to the other. Because this kind of understanding of ‘good policy’ ‘has a politically colored history, stemming from the UK politics of Margaret Thatcher, and is certainly not politically neutral since it joins forces with the neo-liberal rhetorics of the free market as the fundament of our society. And does that with all semblance of political neutrality’ As pointed out before, the cultural scene in the Netherlands was crushed by its own embrace of neo-liberal Newspeak. In Belgium, the sector is crushed by the slowly suffocating motherly hug of the subsidiary system. Mom says what we should wear, where we have go to school, how we should behave and present ourselves in public. Mom tells us which words to use in our dossiers, and who to speak to to ‘step up’ the social and professional ladder. The problem is that also in this sector the cards are being dealt by the middle men, by the producers, and subsidizers. Although of course most of the programmers and curators also are stressed into defending their ‘niche format’, their ‘name’ and their ‘brand’. Just as the many commission members and cabinet members and other advisers and decision takers probably have the sector’s best interest in mind. The problem is not situated with the individuals, trying to grasp the reality of what is happening, and responding accordingly. The problem is that the system little by little has made itself indispensable, has become the (half)hidden ruler of the arts. A system that has produced format after format for production, creation, research, distribution and sales is now desperately trying to fill in the holes of the raster, but cannot see over its little devising walls what is happening outside. What people are processing outside of these well-prepared holes in the wall. Which is no wonder, since nobody will ever be able to see what these artists are doing since they didn’t fit the profile of the venues they were supposed to be shown in, or meet the people that might have appreciated what they do. If we talk about a fair-trade in the arts therefore I think we talk about a fair chance, not only for artists, but also for experimental programmers and curators that don’t tick all the salonfähigkeit’s boxes of what is hot today. We talk about the public as well, that often is confronted with a made-to-custom program that is supposed to serve all tastes. And we are evidently also talking about policy makers that should not be burdened with the power to decide on who has and who has not. If we talk about a fair-trade we’re talking about giving the power (and the money) back to the artists: let them decide what to do with all these heaps of bricks supposingly built to host the artist’s and the public’s interest. Let them meet with these publics directly, uncensored, and let them find out what it means to take position. What it means if art again starts to mean that you stand for something, and that we can disagree. Violently or not. And that we can do this directly. Where free trade meets fair-trade. What would the sector look like then?

    • «I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accident. I am very clear about the rules of the game, but once it's launched, I don't intervene at all».

      Francis Alÿs

      Instead of thinking 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 it 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 are 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?"

       

      Biography:

      Daniel Blanga-Gubbay is a researcher in political philosophy and performance based in Brussels and Düsseldorf. After graduating in philosophy from the Venice University of Architecture with Giorgio Agamben he got a European Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, jointly run by the University of Palermo, Valencia and Freie Unversität Berlin. He currently teaches Political Philosophy for the Arts at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels, and he has a research position at the Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, on the use of the concept of possible in art and politics. He is the founder of the Brussels-based project Aleppo, creating spaces of reflection in performance and political theory (www.aleppo.eu)

    • As a consequence of the the act to translate 650€ at the National Bank in to 1€-Cent pieces by one participant of the Occupy Democracy workshop, a financial justification of a receipt had to be handed out to the revisor of the a.pass accounting and finally to the ministry of education of the Flaamse Gemeenschapt Commissie:

      nationale bank exchange-receipt

      This is a receipt that doesn't document the purchase of a commodity or a service, but the transformation of one form of money, in to an other - one form of money, which generally enables purchase into an other form, where exactly this basic function of money is impeded.

      This receipt deserves a special explanation.

      In the course of a workshop called Occupying Democracy / Occupation Précaire one participant translated 650€ reserved for material expenses of the Workshop into 1 €Cent coins - an amount of copper which weights about 350kg. The monetary value is kept - just its applicable value is abrogated!

      While this act points to the overarching problematic in the relation between the performance of art and the performance of money, it was of high educational and research value in the course this workshop, and in consequence it caused a social intervention in public sphere. The combination of this clearly lifts this act into the state of an a

      rt work in itself with conceptual and genuine artistic value.

      Through the simple act of translating the materiality of money in to an other consistency without chaining its monetary value but to discard with this it’s functional usability, the sum of 650€ becomes an artifact - a sculpture in it self. The provided receipt is in so far the proof not only of an act of ‘buying’ the essential artifact of this act, but is part of it’s social plastic. Money is used here to create art in the most possible direct way.

      History

      In the frame of the a.pass trimestrial Block 2014/III reflecting on the relation between ‘Space and Contract’ Co-curated by the Associate Program Curator Vladimir Miller and the Program Coordinator Nicolas Galeazzi, we asked Christoph Meierhans and Luigi Coppola to come up with a workshop proposal based on their individual artistic practice on democratic forms.

      This is what they proposed:

      Original Workshop proposal

      OCCUPYING DEMOCRACY / Occupation Precaire
      WORKSHOP; 29th September - 3rd October
      (10am - 5pm group work; 24/7 singular occupation of the space with hourly rotations)
      Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans

      Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans are working in different contexts and with different means about common decision taking procedures - or let’s say, alternative democracies.

      While Christophe proposes in a lecture performance series a new democratic system based on disqualifying people in charge, rather than electing them, Luigi is developing social choreographies as democratic models and is currently involved in a communal project of reorganizing the political, agricultural and economic system of a whole village in south Italy.

      Together they propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are determined: The workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day. Starting with one square meter of occupation, the territory of artistic occupations should be expanded for minimum one square meter with every occupant. The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.
      The discussions and decision taking procedures already started last block and created some new questions and tendencies. But an entrance into the process is possible at anytime.

       

      Process of the Workshop

      Eight a.pass participants engaged in the workshop and managed the

      1m2-24h/7-occupation-1-at-the-time

      concept together in shifts of 2h per person. The occupation was held on Place Saint-Jeans in Brussels.

      A Budget of 800€ was on spot and available to the current occupant in order to increase the tension between the decisions of the individual towards the decisions of the Workshop collective.

      Beside the occupation, the group held daily plenum gatherings at an other place in town, discussing the development of the occupation and its ethical, artistic and political implications.

      The fact that one person is in charge for the budget of a group for only 2h at the time reviles obvious conflicts of interests between the ‘society’ of this workshop and the individual occupant and was therefore the most concrete challenge of the idea of rethinking democratic systems through this workshop.

      At the beginning this challenge wasn’t faced much. The occupants only moderately bought things for their own use and bigger sums were only spent on objects that had a value for the whole group.

      The group fully accepted, that someone buys a beer for his midnight shift, or a morning juice, some chips, or batteries for his/her camera etc. Someone bought a Kalimba as the lullaby music instrument of the whole group. Someone else Gloomy Sticks - a scenographic element, which structured the space the whole week after.
      Occupants contributed even more private material and made this way the available money partially obsolete. This surely very interesting attitude suspended therefore, we might say paradoxically, the challenging discourse of the workshop. The tension embedded in the experimental concept of the workshop wasn’t fully embraced and experienced.

      The sum of those small expenses didn’t exceed 125€ and didn’t contribute much to the curtail discussions. The receipts for this sum are available and can be justified.

       

      Turning the coin

      One occupant interpreted the responsibility of the budget available in the explained transformative way. He went with the at the point remaining 650€ to the National Bank and was allowed to translate the bills into coins without any concern. The restriction related to these cases is, that one can change an infinite sum into smaller coins, but one is only allowed to bring 1€-cent coins back to the bank in portions of 5kg a week! In our case, this would take us almost one and a have year of weekly engagement to walk coins back to the bank.

      This conceptual act changed the situation in the workshop drastically. The collective was confronted with a radical individual move, which challenged everyones responsibility.

      The unpracticality of the available money in this form occurred when other occupants wanted to buy just a little chewing gum at a night shop in their shift - none was willing to take these coins. No night shop, no café, even giving them away for free was impossible.

      The only ones who saw the value of this conns being transferred in something real, practical and useful were a bunch of homeless people. Their time and economy allows to spend hours for picking up the coins, carrying them to around, negotiating with potential takers only to get the sum for example of a weekend ticket to the Ardennes together. A holiday dream some of them were waiting for since ages!

      With this aspect, the precariousness of this occupation entered other dimensions.
      It sets our abstract discussion on a slippery yet concrete and practical experience.
      The Workshop givers and the program coordinator who are finally responsible the workshop were suddenly under totally different the pressure of justification.
      The reviled presence and unavoidable openness of the money - we hardly could hide the 350kg coins in the public space - was constantly under thread of being stolen.
      It opened a communication to the most precarious living participants of this society.

      The group had to find new and concrete solutions for the technical and ethnical handling of the money and was confronted with an urgent decision finding process and it’s mechanisms.

       

      Continuation

      At the end of the week long occupation we left the space with about the half of the transferred 1 €-cent coins - ca. 170kg - in a suitcase together with a protocol for further operations.

      An Open Call shall be launched for competitive proposals to perform the coins.

      The selection procedure will follow principles that were discussed and tested in the workshop.

      The proposals will all be read on one evening to the public. 

      Only after the reading one member of the audience will randomly be chosen to act as a one-man-jury select a winning proposal.

      Another person has to be chosen randomly for as a performer of the proposal.

      The social plastic has to go on!

      Responsible for this report:

       

      Nicolas Galeazzi
      a.pass Program Coordinator

      Brussels 10/02/2015

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

      Yet, business is going as usual - but besides that many crucial social pillars are being washed away. The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, but it is also the outbreak of the constant crisis inherent to the system. Since many years a precarious and dangerous economic climate has been created through the exploitation of the society and the environment in the belief in constant growth and a policy relying on the infinite creation of money for some through the creation of infinite debt for the majority.

      The current cuts of public funding and the absence of interesting jobs are just some visible signs of the consequences of governmental reaction towards the 2008 crisis. Arts all over Europe are now more concretely targeted for cuts than ever in the last 40 years.

      In this climate artist are forced to rethink our relationship to the economics - a situation to be cached!
      We have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system, and rethink our relation to the protection through governmental funding. This can not be done by making art in a more 'economic' way.

      This workshop rather launches a discussion about the repositioning of the economic field towards the arts.
      We have to occupy and appropriate the "economics" and its terminology and fill it with new practices and new meaning. We have to occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a wider spectrum of life than just financial success.  

      For that we have to ask, what do we expect from future live? What is it what we really are 'dealing', 'trading' with? What is our currency? What is/was our real contribution to the crisis and how do we fictionalise the changes to come? What kind of traps are we constantly taping as artists? What kind of an economy could we establish out of an artistic (researching) practice which will make a real difference?

      Thinking over economy! Rethinking economy, or thinking economy is over!

      These questions can be attacked by analysing the different notions of 'performance' in the economy and in the arts. 
      The understanding of "performance" differs in general in their aims, aesthetics and actions in both fields. Performance on stage has to do with appearance, or transformation, performance on 'stock' with accomplishment, growth and power (thrust).  
      A mixup of this different understandings happens in a very complex way when it comes to the commodification and dissemination of knowledge - and even more when this happens through artistic practices. 

      We would like to propose a two-week workshop in two parts. The first week should concentrate on performing the reality of the economic crisis and the crisis of art-making in relation to financial policies. By inviting theorist and artist Georgios Papadopoulos, ("Notes towards a Critique of Money") we would undertake an extended analyse of the relation between art and currency. What is our currency? What is the premise behind this currency? But also what are we actually dealing with by dealing with currencies? 

      While in the second week we would like to go more into alternative economic systems. For that, we will collaborate with the behavioural economist Marieke Huysentruyt and will appropriate and translate economic ideas such as the 'Gemeinwohlökonomie' and Parecon. How are alternatives possible? How can art-making develop economic alternatives? How can the economy of art-making be reclaimed and recoined with other meanings and values?

      The workshops are based on a similar lab structure. In order to compare and relate the differing understandings of 'performance' in a practical a discursive way, we will set up a lab where artistic performances and economic performances should coexist, contradict and corrupt each other.

      The lab is a simple square furnished with some material and positions for artistic and economic activities. It will be constantly filmed form the sealing above. This should allow to understand the procedures on the square as scores or choreographies - the choreographies of relinking and rethinking art and economy. In other words - the workshop is a lab for the performance of the reality of art-making. 

       
    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2012 BLOCK II 01 May 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2012
    • 31 July 2012
    • 2012 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Elise Goldstein
      Elizabeth Ward
      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Helena Dietrich
      Ive Leemans
      Jaime Llopis
      Luanda Casella
      Lucie Eidenbenz
      Oshin Albrecht
      Simon Loeffler
      Veridiana Zurita

       

      Partners

      PAF Performance Art Forum
      Nadine
      De Singel

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Anja Steglich
      Ant Hampton
      Caroline Daish
      Elizabeth Ward
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Paz Rojo
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

       

       

      07 - 11 / 05 & 14 - 18 / 05 / 2012


      ‘HIGHER PERFORMANCE’
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi & Elizabeth Ward


      The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, it is the outbreak of the constant crisis inherent to the system. Since many years a precarious and dangerous economic climate has been created through the exploitation of the society and the environment in the believe in constant growth and a policy relying on the infinite creation of money for some through the creation of infinite debt for the majority.
      The current cuts of public funding and the absence of interesting jobs are just some visible signs of the consequences of governmental reaction towards the 2008 crisis. Arts all over Europe are now more concretely targeted for cuts then ever in the last 40 years.
      In this climate, artists are forced to rethink their relationship to economics. We have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system, and rethink our relation to the protection through governmental funding. This can not be done by making art in a more 'economic' way.
      This workshop rather launches a discussion about the repositioning of the economic field towards the arts by “occupying” and appropriating the "economics" and its terminology and fill it with new practices and new meaning. We will occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a wider spectrum of life than just a financial success. For that we have to ask, what do we expect from future life? What is it what we really are 'dealing', 'trading' with? What is our currency? What kind of an economy could we establish out of an artistic (researching) practice which will make a real difference?
      In order to compare and relate the differing understandings of 'performance' in a practical and discursive way, we will setup a lab where artistic performances and economic performances should coexist, contradict and corrupt each other.

       


      21-25 / 05 / 2012


      ‘SEEING SOUND’
      two workshops by Julie Pfleiderer and Ant Hampton


      ‘Soundwalk’
      German director Julie Pfleiderer and performance artist Caroline Daish have invited guest artists, including David Helbich, Joanna Baillie & Paul Craenen for the May Soundlab "Seeing Sound". The idea is to create 10 days around Sound and Performance in the context of Soundwalks and inviting an expansive interpretation of the form 'Soundwalk'.
      ‘Fantasy Intervention’
      "Fantasy Intervention" is a workshop by Ant Hampton on imagination and writing for site-specific theatre and live urban interventions. With a focus on observation imagination and writing and involving walks in the city, discussion, film and photography the workshop culminates with a series of presentations.

       


      28 / 05 - 01 / 06 / 2012


      ‘COLLABORATION AND COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      Every block, a.pass organizes some ‘B-workshops’: workshops that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. Every B-workshop is accompanied by a reader of texts and information that will be the starting point for discussion and a platform for (re)-thinking the a.pass working environment. In the upcoming blocks we will gather around topics like ‘collaboration’, ‘self-organization’, ‘tools, cases and other methodologies for artistic research’, ‘feedback and critique’, ‘collaborative work spaces’, ‘transdisciplinary research practices’, ‘What is political about research?’, ‘Who’s afraid of the Institute?’, etc...
      This first B-workshop on ‘collaboration and collaborative learning’ opens up the field of collaborative practices as ‘open collectives’, as it grew in the artistic practices of the last 10-15 years. We try to get a grip on the social, political, economic and aesthetic context that has produced this proclivity for communal working, and look at some interesting examples of collaborative research projects.

       

       

      25 - 29 / 06 / 2012


      “WHATEVER MOVING LIKE THIS”
      workshop by Paz Rojo


      How could we experience the question "what, why, who, where, what for, how we live the tension between individuation and the necessity of collectivity?” What are the conditions that make WE a problem to sustain rather than a problem to solve? How can we address such a question assuming that the sites where the sensible, the corporeal and unspeakable are the battlefield where to challenge our existence? How could we do so without addressing pre-existent models and protocols? Could we experience (the) body as the very battlefield where the "somatic" prime on the "cognitive" where "creation" prime on the "creative" where “tacit experience” primes over “negotiation and responsibility” and where softness, empathy and dispersion prime over self-representation, self-management and self-control? What does being “democratically in contact means today" as a performative and experienciable gesture?
      This workshop takes place within the framework "C O R E O G R A F X S", an investigation that departs from a series of choreographic cultures that emerged over the 70´s in NY, which sought to incorporate the collective daily life through the body. From this context "C O R E O G R A F X S” studies some of the concepts that defined these cultures and, in turn, questions what they mean in the current market democracies and in relation to the triangle brand-body-work.

       


      02 - 06 / 07 / 2012


      ‘FEEDBACK AND CRITIQUE‘
      a.pass Basics workshop by Vladimir Miller & Elke Van Campenhout


      We want to address the topic of feedback. Since a.pass is a shared environment, we depend a lot on each other as sparring partners in our researches. Often the work is presented within a group and the quality of the feedback is lacking in precision, understanding or communicative strength. What is important in giving or receiving feedback is that both positions are clarified: what position do I speak out of? what kind of feedback would be useful for my research?
      In this workshop we try to construct very diverse feedback techniques: spoken critique, non-negotiated critique, direct feedback, indirect feedback, written, walking, one-on-one or transformative feedback.
      We refer also back to some basic texts on art critique and feedback systems.

       

       

      13 - 22 / 07 / 2012


      ‘THE WALK’
      workshop on location by dr. Anja Steglich & Elke Van Campenhout


      The Walk is a ten day workshop on location, focussing on two main questions:
      How to turn walking into a qualitative tool for artistic research? and How to create a shared landscape through the individual investigation of connecting territories?
      During the Walk we will address these questions out of the proposals of the individual researchers, that will investigate a limited domain and devise a walk that can later be picked by others. Important in this construction is the decisions made on the level of parameters: what do I consider (out of my research) to be important ‘markers’ of the walking experience: fe. sound, shapes, roads, attitude of walking, … Throughout the ten days we try to come back to the PAF ‘headquarters’ with enough information to turn our proposals and experiences into a shared map of the environment, and add the instructions, tasks and guidelines into a useable walking guide for others.
      What is important here that these guidelines are both addressing the walk as a method for artistic research and the walk as an investigative tool to discover the landscape as a ‘narrative’.
      The main guest on this journey is dr. Anja Steglich, who is currently working on two linked themes: the `telling landscapes´ and the ‘landscape choreography’.

    • 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.





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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