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    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/III
    • Participants Assembly
    • On the Soul Video recording - online talk
      27 November 2020
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • Oxana Timofeeva
    • 19 November 2020
    • yes
    • [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Oxana-Timofeeva-On-The-Soul.mp4"][/video]
       
      Oxana Timofeeva
      On the Soul
       
      A talk and a conversation on the soul. This talk took place on November 19th.
      The talk was proposed by Adriano Wilfert Jensen and supported by the a.pass participants assembly as part of a new modality of participants curated content at a.pass. 
       

       
      The talk addresses to some episodes in the history of philosophy from antiquity to the present, where the soul is considered, fist, in its corporeal aspects, i.e. in its immediate or mediated connection to the body, and second, in the context of the question of the passages between the human and the nonhuman, as well as between individual and collective experiences.
       

      Oxana Timofeeva is a Professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, member of the artistic collective "Chto Delat?" ("What is to be done?"), deputy editor of the journal "Stasis", and the author of books History of Animals(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012; trans. into Russian, Turkish, Slovenian, and Persian), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), How to Love a Homeland (Cairo: Kayfa ta, 2020; trans. into Arabic), and other writings.

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Research Publications + Annex Research Center Cycle IV
      17 September 2023
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa
    • a.pass
    • 23 September 2023
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Research Publications + Annex

      Saturday, September 23rd 2023

      18-22h

      a.pass, Brussels

       

      The a.pass Research Center* cordially invites you to an evening of research publications by Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa that will conclude the year they spent together as Associate Researchers of Cycle IV. 

       

      During the timespan of Cycle IV the artists and researchers individually and collaboratively worked on hospitality as a curatorial practice, on conflicted embodiment of dance practices, on archives of colonial architecture, on the fiction of nature and on a historic opera as a foundational myth for the State of Brazil. In a series of collective practice meetings a shared discourse began to emerge that connected these works through an engagement with the responsibilities of redesign and reenactment, the tension of fiction and history in speculative practices and the embodiment of non-solutions. These intertwined processes and questions radiated into the practices of Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa as they hosted each other in their research and developed the idea of a research center as a prolonged group conversation with materials, practices, ideas and affects. 

       

      On Saturday, September 23rd, the researchers will present their individual publications and research trajectories as well as the Annex – a shared collection of essays and interviews. For their Publications the researchers aim to provide an account of their process and to develop public formats of research-doing and research-sharing to accompany the more established format of an essay. In a scenography that will be a result of a communal atelier process the Publications of Cycle IV will engage the audience in a dialogue with texts, objects, conversations, installations and performances that can be reflected back into the research process. As Cycle IV concludes, the research itself is far from finished: Publications and Annex contextualize its collaborative, intense phase and give some insight into where it came from and where it is heading next. 

       

      The evening will start at 18h with a reading of the Annex and proceed to the individual presentations by the Associate Researchers. Publications will conclude with a cooking hangout hosted by Paoletta Holst and later on, a party.

       

      Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site 'de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience.

      The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.

       

      a.pass Research Center 

      Cycle IV

      Research Publications + Annex

       

      Saturday, September 23rd 2023

      18-22h

      a.pass, Brussels

       

       

      PUBLICATIONS

       

       

      MAURICE MEEWISSE

      Curating Waterwerken

      Essay

      Hosting the Research Center

      Scenography

       

      To prepare his contribution for the final evening with RC Cycle IV, Maurice Meewisse will move into the a.pass space where everything is about to happen. He did this before: he lived for two weeks in the collective space of a.pass Polyset in May ‘23 to explore how a habitation practice transforms his relationship to a workspace. For the final evening with RC Cycle IV, his question will be about habitation and hosting.

      Meewisse has taken an interest in how his collaborators' imaginations, thoughts, writing and other practices influence and contribute to his own and how his practice can in turn host imaginations, thoughts, handwriting and other practices. He is exploring the limits of this position to the point where the question arises if he is still the practitioner, is it a practice at all, can hosting be part of his artistic practice? Maurice Meewisse takes his last moments with the researchers from the RC Cycle IV to explore that a bit further. At the same time he will try to be useful and help to prepare the scenography for the evening. Something will happen, just by being there the whole time. At the moment of writing this text it is just a bit too early to say what.

       

       

      CATERINA DANIELA MORA JARA

      Conflicted Embodiment. Notes from Dancing on Both Sides of the Atlantic

      Essay

      The Second Promise of Another Bastard-cheap Lecture-performance (and the last one in a.pass)

      Lecture-Performance

       

      “I am a migrant who has the possibility to be a legal migrant. My body produces conflicted embodiment as a device to expose the violent confrontation determined by territory, patriarchal art systems, colonial silenced trauma, and resistant feminist hope. Combining different dance traditions, I seek the contamination generated by mashing up ways of representing academic dance and “world dance”...”

      caterina daniela mora jara will present her essay “Conflicted Embodiment. Notes from Dancing on Both Sides of the Atlantic” in conversation with Fabián Barba. The writing of this text departs from the experiences of dancing within her processes of migration that put different "folkloric", "popular" and "academic" dance traditions from the souths and the norths into friction with each other. caterina daniela mora jara explores the potential of translation of dances into each other and what a mother tongue could be in dancing and performing. Embracing the complexity of the untranslatable, she unfolds the idea of a conflicted embodiment as a research device to address the question of how does a body navigate migration, colonialism and dancing?

       

       

      PAOLETTA HOLST

      Re-designing the Colonial House

      Installation, Projection and Open Kitchen

       

      Paoletta Holst researches colonial architectures and domestic cultures of the former Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia). In her installation “Re-designing the Colonial House” she uses the klamboe, or mosquito net, as a metaphor to visualize the cultural and spatial forms of separation that the colonizers created in order to mitigate their fears and vulnerabilities of being in a foreign environment. As both content and material form, as klamboe and house, the scenography created for this presentation functions as an intermediate space and support structure to talk about how the colonial house was imagined and how the process of its re-design can articulate today's questions and struggles.

       

       

      TÚLIO ROSA

      H(a)unting Stories

      Print

       

      In the last year, Tùlio Rosa's research has been centered around the opera Il Guarany, composed by Carlos Gomes in the 19th century, and its influence in the Brazilian representations of its history, peoples and landscape. Set in the beginning of the 16th century and depicting a love story between an indigenous man and the daughter of a Portuguese hidalgo, Il Guarany is considered to be an attempt to fabricate a foundational myth of the Brazilian nation. Within its biased narrative, Il Guarany also describes the conflict between the indigenous groups of the Aimorés and the Guaranis, and the attempts of Spanish adventurers to take hold of their lands in order to exploit their natural resources. These intertwined narratives allow for a broader reflection on fundamental aspects of the formation of Brazil. For his presentation Túlio Rosa will share some of the materials of his research in which factual history and fiction are woven together into new readings of Brazilian history that challenge and reveal their embedded colonial imaginaries.

      A second part of Tulio Rosa’s presentation will happen at Szenne Lab on the 3rd and 4th of October during two evening sessions curated in collaboration with Paoletta Holst, in which he will present “Hunting Song” – a publication that crosses historical accounts of violence with the original music scores of the opera Il Guarany.



       

      GOSIE VERVLOESSEM 

      Pleasure Garden Reading Group

      Reader and Bookmarks

       

      Over the past year, Gosie Vervloessem’s research was situated in the Middelheim Museum, a sculpture park in Antwerpen that invited her into a research residency within the ‘Reading the Landscape’- project. During this year of research, under the title ‘The Pleasure Garden’ Gosie Vervloessem explored the museum as a platform for encounters between different agents inhabiting the park, such as birds, animals, plants, visitors, the institute of the Middelheim Museum and its sculptures and infrastructure.

      The project took on different forms and spread its tentacles deep into the park. One of these tentacles were reading sessions. Gosie Vervloessem dived deep into thinking about the relation between words and the worlds they convey. She explored, very literally, the question of what it means to read a landscape with focus on the materiality and agency of words and language. The texts and books that Gosie Vervloessem compiled for the reading group were “reading the landscape” outside of binary thinking and classification. These reflections found a final outcome in the creation of bookmarks, that she presents alongside a facsimile edition of the reader. The bookmarks invite the audience to buy the corresponding book and visit the Middelheim Museum as a setting for a reading of the selected texts.

       

       

      Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa; Vladimir Miller (ed.)

      The Annex

      Publication

      The Annex to the research Publications of a.pass Research Cycle IV is a space where the researchers offer some context to their presentations and explore shared themes within their research processes in the form of essays, text collaborations and group interviews. 




      *About the Research Center 

      The a.pass Research Center is a collaborative space of practice, materialization, tryout, critique and feedback of artistic research. Although it is a program in an educational institution, it does not start from a curriculum or a curatorial agenda, but operates as a series of research practice meetings. At the Research Center, the artist researchers are invited to develop the individual threads of their research practice into a shared space of study while "mutually becoming each others' guest" (Beatrice von Bismark). The Research Center is a space where hosting others in one's research is a tool of research development.









       

       

    • COLLECTIVE LEARNING PROPOSALS 17 September 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • a.pass alumni
    • Zsenne Art Lab
    • 27 September 2023
    • 08 October 2023
    • COLLECTIVE LEARNING PROPOSALS
      For two weeks a.pass alumni have concocted an exciting and eclectic program of COLLECTIVE LEARNING PROPOSALS through which they challenge, inquire, explore and digest different ways of learning from and with each other.
       
      Everybody is welcome to join! Participation is free.
      Location: Zsenne Art Lab, Rue Anneessens 2, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
      For more detailed information please contact the individuals behind each proposal!
       
      With: Nada Gambier, Federico Protto, Sarah Pletcher, Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst, Lucia Palladino, Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens, Sara Vilardo.
       
       

       
      Nada Gambier
      They write you out of the narrative. You leave them out of the story. We create new scripts.
      27.9 + 29.9 + 2.10 @ 10h00-17h00
      A 3-day working shift around creative writing based on gentle trespassing and structured cacophony. We will use interference as a tool for widening our individual writing styles and skills. Minimum attendance day 1 and 2. Bring your own writing to start working from (lists, essays, paragraphs, loose sentences...).
      For more info please contact nadakatinka@gmail.com
       
      Federico Protto
      Fashion Hypnosis
      28.9 @ 14h00-18h00
      Can you locate the space between the clothes you are wearing and your skin? Fashion Hypnosis is a soft guided meditation exploring what, how, when, where, and why we carry, wear, fit, attire, button up, button down, buckle, fasten, drape, dress, and undress. Based on a practice developed in a.pass in 2020, we will collectively experiment the 'soft' hypnosis further into a somatic-movement score relating to garments, textiles, and costumes provided and activated in space.
      For more info please contact federico.prottoscutti@gmail.com
       
      Sarah Pletcher
      collaboration from here and there
      28.9 @ 18h30-20h30
      A talk/open discussion about how artists can collaborate with one another when living or working in different locals. How can we carry the collective with us when we relocate?
      For more info please contact spletcher123@gmail.com
       
      Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst
      crossreadings
      3 + 4.10 @ 18h-21h30
      A curatorial exercise that brings together a selection of films and books that approach the legacies of colonialism across different geographies and socio-political contexts. Departing from materials that have been a reference to the artists’ research, these two evening sessions explore how the cross reading of works produced in different times and continents might be able to create a space of reflection sustained by the frictions and similarities that might emerge between them. The programme will be also accompanied by the presentation of Hunting Song, a publication produced by Túlio as conclusion of his journey at a.pass Research Center Cicle IV in which he crosses historical accounts of violence with the music scores of the opera Il Guarany.
      For more info please contact Paoletta mail@paolettaholst.info or Túlio rosa.tulio@hotmail.com
       
      Lucia Palladino
      correspondances_I discovered loving is like going harvesting wild herbs in the forest
      4.10 @ 15h30-17h30
      A participative reading, writing and listening score producing content from neurological atypical patterns that questions language, hierarchies of knowledge and modes of learning.
      For more info please contact info.luciapalladino@gmail.com
       
      Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens
      getting into character/s
      5.10 + 6.10 +7.10 @ 18h-20h
      Three evenings of rituals and writing to work through difficulties, embarrassments and discomfort of composing words as someone else. The evenings are for individual work, but undertaken in a collective setting. For more info please contact amymaypickles@gmail.com
       
      Sara Vilardo
      map of displacement
      6.10 + 7.10 @ 13h30-17h30
      8.10 @ 10-13h
      Map of a displacement invites you for a shared practice, individually or in a group, of mapping a life journey in relation to personal and universal events that have interfered in your life line. Limited spots -
      recommended reservation and further information from saravilardo@gmail.com
       
      Day by day schedule:
      * Wednesday 27.9 : Nada Gambier - writing lab - 10h-17h00
      * Thursday 28.9 : Federico Protto -fashion hypnosis- 14h-18h00
      Sarah Pletcher - talk- 18h30-20h30
      * Friday 29.9 : Nada Gambier -writing lab- 10h-17h00
      * Monday 2.10 : Nada Gambier - writing lab- 10h-17h00
      * Tuesday 3.10 : Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst - reading/screening-
      18h-21h30
      * Wednesday 4.10 : Lucia Palladino - listening, reading and writing
      score- 15h30
      Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst -reading/screening
      - 18-21h30
      * Thursday 5.10 : Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens -rituals and
      writing- 18h-20h00
      * Friday 6.10 : Sara Vilardo -mapping- 13h30-17h30
      Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens -rituals and writing-
      18h-20h00
      * Saturday 7.10 : Sara Vilardo -mapping- 13h30-17h30
      Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens -rituals and
      writing- 18h-20h00
      * Sunday 8.10 : Sara Vilardo -mapping- 10h-13h00
    • 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.

    • lecture
    • workshop
    • Participants Assembly
    • Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies 03 May 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Áron Birtalan
    • a.pass 4th floor
    • 15 May 2023
    • 16 May 2023
    • Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies
      Inspired by devotional practices from the Late Middle Ages, this workshop explores mystical languages as somatic and performative technologies. Focusing on spoken language and tactile ways of engaging with text and images, we will create affective relationships between bodies and matter. Contaminating the lines between a within and a without, mystical languages become an interface for intimate bonds with the unknowable and unreliable. Topics include: image as induction, reading as annihilation, text as embodiment and touch as giving birth. We will familiarize ourselves with the historical contexts and theologies of the body in Christian mysticism of the Late Middle Ages, using it a lens through which we can re-encounter the now. 
       

       
      Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, engaging in simple exercises that challenge perception and sensation. At large, the workshop invites us to be with language and touch as a place of possibility for encounters, relationships and becomings between active-passive and living-dead bodies. We will draw attention to how these possibilities can influence our own practices, showings, publications - and their embodied afterlife as a post-mortem artwork.
       

      Prep for participants

      • Please bring 2-3 pieces of printed texts or images you can imagine playing with in the workshop based on what you read in the description. This can be something you yourself made, but also from someone or somewhere else. As formats, you can choose to bring a printed publication (book, zine, brochure, sign, etc) or loose pieces of paper. We will use these as playful starting points, so don't think too much about what you bring!
      • For the first day, please bring a modern computing device that connects to the internet: smartphone, tablet or laptop. Please contact me with any questions about this.
      • Clothes you feel nice and comfortable in.

       

      Content and accessibility

      Activities are made to accomodate for different kinds of bodies and needs. Every activity will be introduced in advance and you are encouraged to take a step back if something is not working for you. In its themes, the workshop touches upon religion, mysticism, sex, ideas about the afterlife, grief, death and wounds.

       

      Timetable

      workshop sessions: 15 & 16.05, 10-16.00 each day including a break for lunch

      public talk 15.05, 18.00

       

      Participants 

      max ~16 participants for workshop. Please contact Hans if you're interested to participate in the workshop.

       

      Bio

      Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician and a student of theology, whose work explores languages of pleasure and anguish between angel, creature and computer. Working together with participants and their imagination as an artistic medium, Áron creates guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts and publications. They are interested in a practice that acts as an interface through which intimate relationships with the unknowable may unfold. They received their education at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam and are currently a PhD candidate in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts with their research project 'Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come'.

       

      Invited by

      Áron Birtalan and 'Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies' are invited by Carina Erdmann (Participant Assembly curation).

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2023/I
    • The ingredients of fear Day of study
      11 January 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Peggy Pierrot
    • 27 January 2023
    • 27 January 2023
    • Horror stories tell us a lot about our embodied cognition, our ways of seeing, thinking and feeling the world. Without being too functionalist, these literary, comic or cinematographic stories and kids tales are staging fundamental needs linked to our survival: to be able to anticipate danger, to remain on the lookout, to defend oneself, to find resources, to eat, to protect one's own - in short, to find adequate responses to the conditions of existence that have been ours since the dawn of humanity. At the root of anxiety and fear: is there someone following me? Is the Other a friend or a foe ? Can I trust this person? Will I recover from this unknown weird diseases? Can i trust new sciences ? Is there such thing as pure evil ? Will I be able to survive in inhuman or violent conditions? Have I chosen my home well? What is this shadow that follows me? 

      11am - 5pm @ a.pass

      We will talk about otherness, cognition, emotions. Our dichotomous view of our bodies has made us relegate the question of fear and disgust for the unknown to unloved genres that titillate our deepest human physical side. What are we looking for in genre stories? What themes and situations activate and titillate our anxieties? What is staged in a good horror story? 

      Peggy Pierrot teaches media theory and narration at ERG in Brussels. At fifty years old she decided to assume what she has always been: a fan. Of literature, comics and film sub-genres (thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romcom…), strategy and role playing games, technical devices of all kinds, and music. She talks about it, writes about it and thinks about it, a lot. 

    • drag UP - DRAG down LAB 11 November 2022
      posted by: Marko Gutić Mižimakov
    • 22 July 2022
    • 22 July 2022
    • drag UP - DRAG down LAB
      date: 21.7.2022. Thursday
      time: 11:00 - 14.00 
       
      Bring a straw, you will eat lunch in drag, yes.

       
      Before we meet for our drag up/drag down I would like to ask you to consider drag not as plain crossdressing or masking, but as a way of exaggerating and translating gender.
       
      Drag is a visual medium. Drag is a practice in (unlearning) visual pleasure. Drag is an embodied practice. 
       
       
      I see the workshop as a blabbering  crash course in make-up and dragging workflow: types of makeup, layering, covering your eyebrows, drawing new eyebrows, cutting the crease (of an eyelid), contour, lips, eyelashes, taping, wigs, padding, stockings etc.
       
      Therefore this 3 preparatory hours before the score start will be in huge part concerned with makeup as finding your 'face' is a huge part of what drag is, however some people might not be keen on putting their life in danger with 5kg of full coverage makeup, I propose that if you find yourself in this group, see if you can imagine making your drag out of other materials - go wild or go mild. I also have a surprise solution, but I encourage you to find your own. 
       
      The makeup thing won't be a tutorial, you needn't follow it, I will just use it to talk about certain aspects of dragginging.
       
       
      PLEASE CONSIDER BRINGING
      whatever drag outfit -- however big or however humble,
      nylon stockings if extra are lying around and I'm sure they are.   
      if you have spare false eyelashes or false nails, combs,
      whatever spare makeup you have,
      hand or portable mirrors. 

         every item could make or break somebody's drag!  
       
       
    • postgraduate program
    • Participants Assembly
    • Nightshift PA-proposal
      07 October 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Nada Gambier
    • 11 October 2022
    • 12 October 2022
    • case of: Nada Gambier
    • Nightshift

      A multilingual space for working together differently, in the unusual context of the night’s darkness. A shift of in-betweens where space is given to that oscillation between one thing and another, between being awake and sleeping, between doing and imagining doing, between one world and another. 

       

      10pm: co-mentoring discussion in duo’s around our respective researches. Bring 3 things from your research as a conversation starter: a book, an object, a text, an image that either reveals your research overall or a specific element within it, a question.

      2am: night walk around the block

      5.30-6.30am: breakfast and conclusion of nightshift

       

      Aside from three collective moments, the time of the nightshift can be used for whatever one needs to do, alone or together: sleeping, writing, painting, meditating, reading, cooking, setting up for HWD, talking, or anything else that sounds like fun.

       

      (c) Image: copyright simon verschelde - model sylvie declercq - night walks 2022, Nada & Co in collaboration with buda kunstencentrum kortrijk and LieveZusjeStoereBroers

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2022/III
    • EARTH - a gathering workshop - BLOCK 2022 III proposed by Isabel Burr Raty
      30 July 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 15 November 2022
    • 18 November 2022
    • For the topic Earth of this block, Isabel Burr Raty invites to collectively think - Earth - by diving into polarities surrounding the fourth most abundant element in the observable universe and the 15th most common in the Earth’s crust: Carbon. Carbon, which originates in the core of stars, has the power to form life, yet to dissolve life as we know it on this Planet. Carbon is the chemical skeleton, required to shape complex molecules like DNA, needed for the development, functioning and uniqueness of humans and almost all other organisms. However, carbon-based fuels dominate global energy use and in the context of climate change, carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas released by human societies. Challenging transnational green efforts to establish post-carbon economies and cementing trans-human Directed Evolution.

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

      On one side of the spectrum we will encounter María Quiñelén, Mapuche medicine woman and Isabel’s close collaborator. The Mapuche is the originary nation in Chile. Self-identified as – the people of the Earth -, they live in a state of resistance fighting for their autonomy. Via a series of ceremonial practices, María will share with us how her cosmovision envisions the human body as an Earth body. A body populated by carbon entities, functioning as connective tissue to establish non-biological kinship with the micro and macro cosmic. And as such, the human is an active, entangled and trans-dependent constituent in galactical systems.

      On another side of the spectrum, Isabel will open up technological and artistic perspectives about xenobiology, a scientific discipline that engineers chromosomes different from carbon based DNA, to create useful artificial sustainable biodiversity. In other words, to design new forms of life on Earth that are not hard ware, but wet ware based. Such as synthetic breathing forests that would be ready to populate post-nature landscapes. A project that began as a bio-engineering experiment financed by the European Commission and today it's supported by first world power states.

      Orbiting around these spectrums, our readings will open up chapters from Geontologies, A requiem to late liberalism by Elizabeth Povinelli, The Relative Native, Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Xenofeminism by Helen Hester. Where we collectively reflect on: What makes life be in opposition to and in difference from Nonlife? Can the human embody an integrative meta-physics by welcoming multiplicity through affinity? What makes the concept of nature subservient to essentialism?, etc.

       

      Tentative Itinerary of EARTH Tuesday 15 to Friday 18 of November 2022 

      From 10:00 to 18:00 hrs.

      Tuesday 15

      Morning: readings & fabulations

      Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen

      Wednesday 16

      Morning: readings & fabulations

      Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen

      Thursday 17

      Day trip visit to the Garzweiler mine in Germany with María Quiñelen.

      The  Garzweiler hole is one of the biggest surface coal mine in Europe.

      The mine currently has a size of 48 km² and got its name from the village of Garzweiler, which previously existed at this location. The community was relocated in the nearby surroundings, as well as other villages that followed after.

      Friday 18

      Morning and afternoon: About xenobiology, post carbon imaginaries & fabulations

       

      BIOS

       

      María Quiñelén is a Mapuche activist medicine woman born in Nueva Imperial, Chile. At the age of 7 her grandmother started training her in the arts of herbs by teaching her, amongst others, how to talk to them in her dreams. Since then, for over 40 years she has been working as a social educator, imparting the Mapuche Cosmovision knowledge and the arts of medicinal herbs through her mobile school. Maria is also expert in natural and humanized birth and a ceremonial facilitator. Actively involved in social media, she has been invited by numerous TV and radio programs and lectured in diverse Indigenous Nations knowledge Congresses in Latin America.

       

      Isabel Burr Raty (BE/CL) is an artist, lecturer, sporadic curator and sexual Kung Fu coach. With an activist background as a filmmaker working with the Rapa Nui and the Mapuche people in Chile, her artistic research is based in ecological, queer, post-human and de-colonial perspectives, where the sources of inspiration range from Indigenous knowledge to techno-scientific ideas of matter and bodies. For the past years her experiments have focused on creating conditions for embodied Sci-Fiction, where the role of the human is de-centered in commodification processes, opening discussions about “value understandings”, such as the Beauty Kit Farm. In 2018 Amsterdam Arts Fund partnered her to Waag and Mediamatic. She is member of the EU project Staying in Touch, curatorial practices of the Future and teaches New and Post Media Art history at ERG (BE). Her works and collaborations have been shown internationally.

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

    • 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.

       

    • Research Portfolio Chloë Janssens

      Download here: Portfolio_mobile_CJ

       

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

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

       

      To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen 

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

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

       

      Toolkit of the research

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

      — Sieves

      — Facilitation

      — Semi-fiction

      — Sensuous strategies

      — Graphic Design

       

      Sieves

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

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

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

       

      Interpretation, meaning-making

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

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

       

      Sifting paper

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

       

      Facilitation

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

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

       

      Chelsea Meijer

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

       

      Role play

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

       

      On Coloniality

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Semi-fiction

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

       

      Brochure Hades

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

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

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

       

      Semi-fictional surroundings

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

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

       

      Sensuous strategies

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

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

       

      Paper making

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

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

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

       

      Intoxication

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

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

       

      Audioguide Down Dwars Dela

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Graphic design 

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

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

       

      On Coloniality, mentoring and publication with Nontsikelelo Mutiti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • seminar
    • workshop
    • Autotheory Gathering at ZSenne ArtLab: Public Program In the context of Block II 2022: Scoring Intimacy of Discursive Others
      30 May 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • ZSenne ArtLab
    • 27 June 2022
    • 09 July 2022
    • gathering, seminar, performance
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Autotheory Gathering at ZSenne ArtLab: Public Program

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

      SCHEDULE

      28 and 29 June: Workshop Maria Gil Ulldemolins [10:00-17:00]

      30 June: and 1 July: How to say my name Rareş Crăiuţ [June 30 at 11:00 & July 1 at 19:00 - duration 1h]

      2 July: Performance Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen [17:00-19:00]

      6 July:  Online talk Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker [cancelled]

      6 July: Working session  Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio [14:00-18:00]

      7 July: Working session Kin(s)Score a.pass program https://apass.be/kinship-score/ [14:00-19:00]

      8 July: Performances and book presentation Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Charlie Usher and  Vijai Maia Pachineelam [19:00-21:30]

      9 July: Performances Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber [18:00-21:00]

       

      DETAILED PROGRAM

      28 and 29 June [10:00-17:00]

      Maria Gil Ulldemolins: The Autotheory Library

      For this two day workshop, MariaI puts together a library of samples of autotheoretical (or autotheory-adjacent) texts. The group will read them and discuss them collectively, without rush, meandering wherever it is of interest for the participants’ and their practices. The aim is triple: to understand the very basics of what autotheory is understood to be up to now; to tentatively look at other hybrid works that might compliment it; and, last but not least, to make time for each participant to reflect on if and how autotheory might inform or challenge their own work. Participants will be able to permanently “borrow” from the library excerpts of the works, so they can take home a collected reader for their reference. The whole experience intends to highlight how autotheoretical narrators weave an intellectual and intimate network of relations; and consequently make time to read, think, and share as a collective, too.

      *

      30 June and 1 July [June 30 at 11:00 & July 1 at 19:00 - duration 1h]

      Rareș Crăiuț and others: How to say my name?

      For this gathering, Rareș will talk about the combination of art, research, narrative and food. First through his artistic research practice but also through 'CofetARia', a  project hosted at a.pass, where he is also Associate Researcher. In his practice, Rareș works with cakes, and pastries as non-human collaborators in artistic contexts. He will address the topics of science and narrative, as well as the accessibility to research.

      Cakes are generally more performative than other types of food and make it easier for humans to understand and feel the agency of food. Working with alimentary matter and live performance, CofetARia is an eating performance, at the confluence of durational practices like performance and baking.  

      2 July [17:00-19:00]

      Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen: On Versions/ NÓS 

      Flávio and Philippine will present a performance and conversation created collaboratively for this occasion. They take this encounter as an opportunity to relate their practices to each other('s body) in the importance they give to recognising that they exist as different selves. This performance takes the shape of a working session in which the performers and researchers borrow and lend each other’s dispositives of autotheory, putting them at each other’s disposal in a negotiated time and space.

      David is a person(a) and practice of versioning, who first came into being as a version of Philippine, an exploration of who Philippine could be as a man with a beard, how they could move and be in the world and how the world would respond. David consists of different aspects and objects, one of them being a voice. In this working session David's voice seeks residence in a new body, an experience that confuses and excites him, and that recreates him in an uncertain game of determining and being determined.

      Flavio, by incorporating this other voice, finds himself inhabiting his own body from a new perspective. The cohabitation leads to a different understanding and positioning of his body, with new layers of perception and performative gestures. David becomes a zone in between, where their bodies and practices cross and inhabit the same territory for a while, leading and being led, proposing and being proposed to, acting and reacting to David's mediation. 

      The organic devices that our bodies are, and the sound and motion they create, as well as the synthetic devices such as speakers, sound processors and projectors, and the ephemeral devices such as concepts and protocols - will enable this exchange. They will allow mirroring, resonance, vibrations and echoes that constitute the necessary elements for the research process to begin. This performance proposes to see mirrors, recordings and reproductions as ideas and gestures that function in both practices as forms of interlocution with oneself, in order to actualise or confirm the perception of the self as a multitude of selves. Such interlocution produces autotheoretical reflection and becomes a methodology for artistic research.

      *

      6  July [cancelled]

      Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker: Online talk about language practices in artistic research

      Both Emma and Alex are part of Research Groups concerned with language practices in Artistic Research.  They will speak from their perspectives and practices within several academic contexts. How do language-based artistic research practices relate to other research practices? What are the motivations, needs, desires, and aims that lead to establish these correspondences? How are the practices in mutual touch affected, modified, influenced, transformed? How do these connections, entanglements and intertwinements contribute to achieve the research goals? How do they affect the unfolding of research processes?

      *

      6th July [14:00-18:00]

      Gosie Vervlossem and Simon Asencio: Autheority

      The notion of textual agency refers to the capacity displayed by texts to do things in various circumstances. In other words, text might be doing something else then simply conveying meaning. Text is equally reading you. Text performs you. Ultimately text might suggest methodologies for its own study: a study from which you might not be able to return without losing a feather.
       
      As part of the Research Center Cycle 3, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio, have been looking into methodologies for studying the agents of text through collective reading practice, role play and infused hallucination to examine the performances they enable. They have based their research on the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandemeer, a sci-fi, eco-horror and eerie fiction and engaged in a process of reading the book by the means it proposes. Southern Reach Trilogy plots the story of a research unit studying a mysterious substance/agent/force/landscape that takes over and re-writes whatever and whoever engages with it: the researchers of Area X end up becoming the subject of their research. There is no objectivity whatsoever left.
       
      Authority is the title of the second book in the Area X trilogy. The book takes place in the research unit Southern Reach, exploring aspects of institutional paranoia, infrastructural and architectural labyrinths, secrecy and bureaucratic anxiety. Authority follows the main protagonist Control, the new director of Southern Reach while he leads interrogations of staff and former expeditions researchers. Conspiracy and paranoia are rampant. To access Authority they will use the method of lecture par arpentage* and the format of the interrogatory. Chapters will interrogate each other on the plots and holes of the book. The interrogatories will take place during four hours on June 6 during a public event situation. The interrogatories will be transcribed live by a transcriber.
       
      The interrogatories:
      Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Adrijana Gvozdenović as Incantations (Chapter 1)
      Simon Asencio, Gosie Vervloessem and Gary Farrelly as Rites (Chapter 2) 
      Pia Louwerens as Hauntings (Chapter 3)
      Vladimir Miller as Afterlife (Chapter 4)
       
      * Lecture par arpentage is a method in which participants read one part of a book each and gather to report and reconstruct the book together.
       

      *

      8 July [19:00-21:30]

      Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Charlie Usher and Vijai Maia Patchineelam: On Artist as Institution  

      This evening brings together artists working with the practices of instituting and within institutions. It will comprise Pia’s work as ‘embedded researcher’ in institutional frameworks; Vijai’s Ph.D. research regarding the employment of the artist, as an artist, inside the art institution; and Marialena’s and Charlie’s practice of summoning, hosting and appropriating utterances with the Ocean through establishing The Oceanographies Institute.

      The Oceanographies Institute (TOI) studies human-ocean kinships. It gives particular attention to affectual and sensual encounters between those two bodies of water. The Institute therefore explores the relations of hands to mud, ears to the breaking waves, feet to the feeling of sinking, rather than the ocean 'in itself', as if devoid of human presence. It collects, analyzes and reenacts people's personal stories about their encounters with the ocean. TOI is interested in the relations to the ocean of the institutions that it is invited into -and of the people that are part of those institutions. In the case of a.pass and the people that make it up, they have been formative in TOI's coming to be. In their presentation, Marialena and Charlie will revisit some of those early Ocean Conversations and through them trace the parcours of the institute so far. TOI presentations often function as rituals of summoning: the ocean and fellow a.pass researchers and mentors will become characters coming to life in TOI's stories and songs.

      For this gathering, Pia will tell a story about a piece that she wrote to be published in a journal on autotheory, but never survived the editing process. She will alternate this with readings from her self-published book I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad: an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. The blurb reads: "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 insitution's curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Pia dresses her protagonist in the different professional guises of artistic labour. Her experiences as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begin to overlap and blend under the name of 'performance'.  The result is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability."

      For his presentation, Vijai will present the book, The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institutiopublished recently by Track Report, Antwerp, in collaboration with OAZA, Zagreb, and a.pass, Brussels. During the presentation, Vijai will read passages from the book in which artist colleagues are referenced as key influences that have helped shape and direct the practice-led research, The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution. 

      *

      9 July [18:00-21:00]

      Aubrey Birch, Chloe Chignell and Eleanor Ivory Weber: On Writing Practices 

      The Autotheory Gathering will close with performative presentations of three writers and artists working with and on language. Reflecting upon the conventions of Western news media and the practice of reporting, Eleanor will perform a new piece of writing. Choreographically engaging with the space of ZSenne ArtLab, Chloe will present an extract of her Poems and Other Emergencies. Thinking through mineral erotics and linking our bodies with the bodies of more-than-human, Aubrey will propose a cocktail of spiritual calories.

      9 July 2022
      Eleanor will draw our attention towards reportage, which, in the same movement, bears witness to the world and consumes it. It is also a technique for making equivalences out of what is irreconcilable. In her practice, Eleanor keeps track of the dates when important things happen as a way to remember how the past shows up today. All the while she is trying to understand how repetitions, forgetting and suspended apprehension are equally part of personal and public events, places and products.
       
      Poems and Other Emergencies*

      Poems and Other Emergencies by Chloe sits at the intersection of poetry and choreography. Centered on a fictional character The Girl-with-her-tongue-out, the performance questions if it is through language that we find ourselves a body, or through the body that we find language? Embodied voices and voiced bodies weave and echo throughout the space. Where does the word end and her body begin?

      Aubrey's Material & Spiritual Calories is a practice that bridges the art of gathering around the table with the geological origins of what we consume. The body’s chemistry is altered both by the material calories of what we eat and the spiritual calories of how we eat, where pleasure and sociality nourish us as much as the proteins, sugars, and amino acids that we need to survive - that we need in order to wake up in the morning, to act, to hope, to protect. Between the immediacy of the meal and the endurance of our mineral origins, the body becomes a site where the ephemeral and the primordial meet in sensory experience.

      * performance credits:

      Performance and Choreography: Chloe Chignell
      Conversation partner: Adriano Wilfert Jensen
      Technical Support: Sven Dehens
      Thanks: Sven Dehens, Bojana Cvejic, Stefa Goovart, Sabine Cmelinski and a.pass. 

      Supported By: BUDA Kortrijk, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Workspacebrussels, La Balsamine Theatre, GC kriekelaar, Lucy Guerin Inc, Dancehouse Melbourne, Batard Festival Brussels, QL2 dance ACT, Kanuti Gildi Saal, Tallinn, RIMI IMIR (NO), Littérature Etc. and Rencontres Chorégraphique.

      *

       

      BIOS

      Aubrey Birch is a transdisciplinary artist and academic living between Australia & Europe. Working in various mediums, shecreates immersive states that link our bodies in the here-and-now to the deep time of those bodies. Thinking through a mineral erotics and social sensuality, she brings the politics of immersion into contact with the more-than-human. She lives part-time in remote Australia, where she cultivates native and medicinal plants. In Europe, she is a member of a collective taking care of Performing Arts Forum (FR), where she also co-organises the queer feminist event Elsewhere & Otherwise. Her works and collaborations have been presented by institutions like KANAL–Centre Pompidou (BE), MaerzMusik (DE), Shedhalle (CH), rotor Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst (AT), Kunsthal Ghent (BE), Theater Neumarkt (CH).

      Chloe Chignell is an artist based in Brussels working across text, choreography and publishing. Her work focuses on language within a choreographic and performative frame; she invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up. Chloe graduated from a.pass (BE, 2020) and from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2018). Since 2019 Chloe co-runs rile* a bookshop and project space for publication and performance with Sven Dehens. Her work has been presented by: Batard Festival (BE, 2019) Saal Biennale (ES 2021), Moving Words Festival (NO 2021), QL2 (AU 2022), KAAP (BE 2022), Littérature etc. (FR 2022), Dancehouse (AU 2016-8), The Kier Choreographic Award (AU 2018) Kottinspektionen (SE 2019) and Venice Biennale of Dance (IT 2017). She currently teaches at ISAC and P.A.R.T.S. 

      Eleanor Ivory Weber is a writer and artist based in Brussels. Her works expropriate the conventions and styles of Western news media to register and materialise a subjectivity that appears latent in the source. Recently her work has been shown at Kunstverein München (Munich), Maison Pelgrims (Brussels) and Kunsthal Gent (Ghent). In 2021 her essay ‘Australian Others: Penal Logic and the Pandemic’ was published in the literary journal Meanjin (Melbourne). Eleanor holds a Masters in Political Philosophy and Theory from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and graduated from the Post-Master program at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). She teaches art theory and critical practice at Erg since 2018 and is co-director of Divided Publishing.

      Flavio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira, 39, gay, brazilian, artist, lives in Brussels. He is a performer and psychopedagogue. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Scenic Arts from State University of Campinas – UNICAMP (2004), a Master Specialization Degree in Psychopedagogy from FHO – UNIARARAS (2012), a Master Specialization Degree from UCB (2013) and a post-master degree in Performing Arts in A.PASS (Advenced Performing and Scenography Studies – 2020). Master's degree in speculative narration and videography at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) - Instituts Saint Luc in Brussels. His latest works as a performer and dramaturg are the solo The Ghost Scar (2019-2022), and the short film Fantasma Pédé (2022). He has worked for over 15 years as an art educator at both public and private Elementary and Secondary Schools. He currently works as a psychopedagogue coordinating a program to help students improve their learning processes at the ERG École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels.

      Goda Palekaitė is an artist working in the intersection of contemporary art, performance, artistic research, literature, and anthropology. Her practice evolves around long-term projects exploring the politics of historical narratives, agency of dreams and imagination, social conditions of creativity, and intimacy with historical characters. Some of Goda’s recent projects were titled Anthropomorphic Trouble (in collaboration with Adrijana Gvozdenović), The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue, Architecture of Heaven, Liminal Minds, and Legal Implications of a Dream. They were presented, respectively, at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunsthal Gent in Ghent, Centre Tour à Plomb in Brussels, Konstepidemin in Gothenburg and RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 2020 she published her first book of fictional biographies Schismatics. Goda participated in a.pass’ postgraduate program in 2018-19 and currently is a Ph.D. candidate at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts.

      Gosie Vervloessems artistic research focuses on the position of the researcher in times of multiple crises. Her work faces the challenges that arise within this role, and looks for new ways of producing knowledge. Her practice is an ongoing quest on finding  tools to relate to a world that is messy and chaotic. Therefore she juggles with and re-interprets the practices of cooking, digesting, co-digesting, immersion or osmosis, as tools to literally embody that relation. In scrutinizing this relationship she focuses mainly on the concept of nature and tries to unravel the ideas that underpin this concept. In doing that, she identifies herself as a Sick Detective, a character that involves the vegetal kingdom as a possible ally in her research. Her work is highly inspired by plant biology, comic books, horror movies. It is mainly presented as lecture-performance, in the form of workshops or publications.

      Lilia Mestre is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working mainly in collaborative formats. She has been involved in a.pass since 2008 as Associate Program Curator and Core member (2014-17) and since 2017 as artistic coordinator. Mestre works with scores: inter-subjective set-ups and other chance-induced processes as emancipatory artistic and pedagogical tools, which have been documented in various publications. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social political reflection. She was co-founder and latest coordinator of Art Laboratory Bains Connective in Brussels (1997-2017). Mestre lives and works in Brussels.

      Maria Gil Ulldemolins is a postdoc artistic researcher at Hasselt University working on personal and artistic heritage, and interiority and interior architecture. Her doctoral work was a multidisciplinary autotheory on collapsing figures, sparked by the trope of the swooning Virgin in crucifixion imagery; and constructed as a writerly Warburgian atlas. Her practice is mostly hybrid writing that combines scholarly essays with more experimental approaches. She is one of the co-founders of Project Passage, a research line and academic journal that seeks to learn more and promote precisely these autotheoretical and performative writerly practices.

      Marialena Marouda works in the intersections between performance, sound art and oral poetry. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York, USA and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. In May 2018 she initiated The Oceanographies Institute (TOI), as part of her research at the Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies Program (a.pass) in Brussels. TOI focuses essentially on the relation between two bodies of water: the human body and the world ocean(s). It gives particular attention to affectual and sensual encounters between the two bodies. The Institute therefore explores the relations of hands to mud, ears to the breaking waves, feet to the feeling of sinking, rather than the ocean “in itself”, as if devoid of human presence. It collects, analyzes and reenacts people's personal stories about their encounters with the ocean. In 2019, composer Charlie Usher  joined TOI, letting his practice of song-making flow into the institute‘s work.

      Philippine Hoegen is a visual artist living in Brussels. In her multi-stranded, predominantly performative practice, she explores the ways in which we continuously create versions of ourselves, the apparatuses and processes we use for this and what their existence means for our understanding of 'self'. In the past 2 years she has focussed specifically on how this functions in contexts of work. Hoegen approaches performance explicitly as a research strategy: a way of thinking in which the physical is involved. Currently she is a researcher at the HKU Professorship Performative Creative Processes, and CARADT (Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology) Avans University, with a research project titled Performing Working.

      Pia Louwerens is an artistic researcher, artist and writer exploring the performance of artistic production. Through  performances and performative texts Louwerens researches how art institutions and the artistic subject — the I who writes, speaks and makes — co-constitute each other. The speculation on what an institutional script would look like, and who are co-authoring, serves as a tool to materialize the mutual reading and writing that occurs. For her performances, Louwerens appropriates performative (para-)artistic frames such as the guided tour, the artist talk, the novel and the workshop. Her practice constitutes a rich intertextual netwerk of anecdotes, events, jokes, theories and citations, which summon and frame each other. Pia has completed a post-master and fellowship programme at a.pass. Next to her artistic practice Louwerens has written texts for De Witte Raaf, Metropolis M, Tubelight and Het Parool. Pia Louwerens lives and works in Brussels.

      Since 2012 Rareş Augustin Craiut has been caring out « practice a as research » project (Performing food). The main themes of his artistic research practice are centred around the agency of food and eating and creating conditions to collaborate with Food. He is particularly interested in devices of meaning and affect (Bain-Marie Brunch food performance re-enactment cycle, various locations, ongoing; or Anximentara, Ecole de Rechrche Graphique, Brussels, 2018), and food in artistic and convivial collaborations (Comfort food continuum 2016, Baia-Mare, Romania; or The Terni – Paradisi-Neighborhood- Cookbook, Centro per le Arti Opificio Siri, Terni, 2017). Bread or baked goods are of particular interest with several performance art pieces dedicated to bread (The Transitions, Banis Connective, Brussels, 2017, or Anatomic bread bodies Matera European Capital of culture, Italy, 2019). 

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institutions. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists—one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. This displacement of roles is part of a larger trajectory that he has followed in his Ph.D. research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the University of Antwerp, “The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution.” Vijai is currently an associate researcher in a.pass’ Research Center.

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • CARE at a.pass A proposition of the Participants Assembly
      04 March 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 07 March 2022
    • 11 March 2022
    • CARE at a.pass

      CARE at a.pass

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

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

      Every day the table serves brunch, and different exchanges and aspects of care. We will collect and exchange individual, collective and institutional voices and expertise.

      Initiated by Márcio Kerber Canabarro in 2019, CARE took place twice in physical gatherings in Budapest, Hungary, and in Almada, Portugal. After the Pandemic started CARE transformed into an online gathering of contributions in form of a digital Zine with approximately 8 editions and contributions reflecting on the notion of care from all over the world. 

      As the Participant Assembly’s curatorial contribution to the 2022 I. block, CARE at a.pass experiments with another alternative format of organised gathering and provides a set of methods that form a lush base to research in togetherness. These operating methods mainly touch upon basic needs of time structure, food, space, and participation. Thus CARE shapes a space to digest and process the generated knowledge and the experience, a space to breath and rest, a space to hold together. 

      Schedule:

      March, 7th-11th 2022

      5 days/ 5 brunches/ 5 aspects of care/ 5 discussions/ 5 gatherings

       

      Day 1 - 11am-3pm - opening to CARE + invitation

      Day 2 - 11am-3pm - individual care 

      • fixing things with Martin

      • fashion hypnosis with Federico

      Day 3 - 11am-3pm - collective care 

      • weaving storytelling by Sarah         

      Day 4 - 11am-3pm - the caring relationship between individual and institution 

      • day lead by Inga

      Day 5 - 5pm- 9pm - closing to CARE + soft party

      • choreography of imagining the future by Aleks

      • Open Salon hosted by Nathaniel

       

      Extra program: 

      • Every day at 7pm, - online audio reading of “Oneness vs.the 1%” by Vandana Shiva” ( link send on Monday)

      • Screening of Myriam Van Imschoot's & The Youyou Group's film 'Le Cadeau'

      •  

      CARE at a.pass holds contributions amongst others by Sarah Pletcher, Martin Sieweke, Inga Gerner Nielsens, Nathaniel Moore, Aleksandra Borys, Federico Protto.

      Sarah Pletcher is a performance-based artist that works with ceramics and fibres. She has a background in traditional and alternative weaving practices. For CARE Sarah will be preparing a loom and weaving in the space to open a conversation about care for skills of making, the people who taught us our craft, and the stories embedded and woven into the history of our and others' ways of making.

      Martin Sieweke works as a material researcher in Brussels.  

      Deconstructing and collaging given shapes and researching on the overall ambiguity of materials contexts and use relations has been a main focus ever since.

      The material’s basic features such as texture, weight or colour have a strong impact on his practice.

      He is working collectively on set and costume projects in the field of performance and dance.

      Inga Gerner Nielsens makes performance installations which often includes one-to-one interactions and speculative interviews as immersive dramaturgy. With her current project, The Mise-en-Scène of Care Work, she is researching the social skills required for these interactions by mirroring them with the work performed by nurses. 

      Her dialogues with performers and nurses had led her to recognise a need to care for the caregiver. How can we as an artistic community help care workers? How can we support each other in the kind of care we perform in our artistic work?

      In the post performance care circles artists, curators, and people working within the institution of a.pass will each be viewed as a caretaker (of objects, processes, collaborators, participants, space). The starting point for a circle will be an interview about how the period right after a production manifests in your life. Inspired by the Poliset we will then build a scenography around you  and offer a mode of interaction which might potentially accommodate, reduce or perhaps alter the intensity of your fall into the post-performance void.

      Aleksandra Borys

      Choreography for Dreaming the Future is an experimental series of audio recordings which invite the listener to dream and fantasies of the desired future. They offer guidance for imagination and for body activity. My dream was to imagine how a dance gathering can happen beyond shared space and time, connected by the intention.

      Federico Protto’s artistic practice unfolds along performance, music, costume and fashion, and artistic research. Spanning a hybrid network of collaborators and materialities, his projects question conventions in order to configure new forms of shared knowledge production and decolonized kinship.

      Fashion Hypnosis is a guided somatic and collective moment in which we expand but also intensify our bodies and our imagination around them to sharpen or smoothen our understanding of the world surrounding us. 

      Nathaniel Moore: 

       

      Open Salon is a performance format with the theme of uninhibited spectatorship. 3 performances are presented as pillars supporting the evening, around which happenings, expressions, and queer modes of connecting might occur. 

      In this salon I hope to trouble the ways in which we practise listening and attending performance. Consider it a gentle nudge out of one's comfortably distanced seat, and a raucous invitation to make a response in real time. A permission granted to open up the floodgates of an uninhibited spectatorship which reacts to what's happening in the space immediately, even, conversationally formulating additions, disruptions, contextualization, harmonies, utterances, angers, praises, perversities, angels, etc etc.

      You are invited to witness, be touched, and return the favour. 

      A mantra might be, “we do not yet know what this performance(moment) needs to be,” or is, and, we will find out together. This is desired as a brave space; a space where there are no mistakes. Where the information which emerges is valued regardless of the message it carries; valued simply because it offers the possibility to learn.

      Informing this evening is thought around care and provocation, listening and critique, love and healing.

      More information on CARE and the 2020 online zines can be found here:

      https://www.carewherezine.com

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

      Luanda Casella. Schrijver en theatermaker. Artist in residence NTGent

      *

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

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

      *

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

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

      *

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

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

      *

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

      Eszter Nemethi, artist, curator
       
      *

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

      Philippine Hoegen, artist, educator

      *

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

      Dries Douibi, artistiek directeur KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 

      *

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

      Barbara Van Lindt, algemeen en artistiek coördinator KAAITHEATER

      *

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

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

      An Vandermeulen & Mira Sanders (evaluatiecommissie) 

      *

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

      Hicham Khalidi - directeur Jan Van Eyck Academie 

      *

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

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

      *

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

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

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

      Adrijana Gvozdenović, artist

      *

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

      Elizabeth Ward, choreographer, performer, dancer

      *

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

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

      *

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

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

      *

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

      Sébastien Hendrickx, performing artist, dramaturge, art critic

      *

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

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

      *

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

      Maurice Meewisse, artist, curator

      *

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

      Isabel Burr Raty, artist

      *

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

      Antye Guenther, visual artist

      *

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

      Piero Ramella, visual artist and performer

      *

      "Small is Beautiful.

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

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

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

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

      Samah Hijawi, artist and phd researcher 

      *

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

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

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

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

      Sofia Caesar, visual artist 

      *

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

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

      *

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

      Agnes Schneidewind, artist

      *

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

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

      Sara Manente, artist

      *

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

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

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

      Varinia Canto Vila, artist, dancer, choreographer

      *

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

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

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

      Caterina Mora, artist, dancer

      *

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

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

      *

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

      Flavio Rodrigo, artist

      *

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

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

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

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

      Leo Kay, artistic director: Unfinished Business

      *

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

      Kasia Tórz, writer & dramaturg

      *

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

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

      *

      Beste Minister Ben Weyts,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Met vriendelijke groeten,
      Petra Van Brabandt

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

      *

       

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

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

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


      www.federicoprotto.com


      (file: 29.08.2020)

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

      ich konnte meine Models nie zahlen

      ich wollte meine Models nie zahlen

      ich habe meine Models nie bezahlt

       -> Beichten in verschiedenen Sprachen, 

      bis sich die Sprachen vermischen in Klänge 

      bis sich die Klänge auflösen in einen klaren Ton

      Ton verwandelt sich in (chorale?) Melodie

      sound Pan fängt an

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

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

       



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

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

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

      durational

      eine Chor situation sollte hier stattfinden (?).

      -

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



      (Monday, November 9th, 2020)

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



      Steinzeit Now:

      Kleidung et Banana, Post-Post-Patchwork

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

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

      […]

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

      The proclaimed prophecy includes a manifesto of four pillars:

      1 fun (recreate)

      2 fuck the system (rebel)

      3 cheap-ass (reflect)

      4 free booze (re-conquer)

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

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

      […]

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

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

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

       

       



      Esoterikosmos


      Letter for K.6
      30.09.2020

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

      that’s it!!!!
      […] TBC.

      BXL 8/8/2021

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


       

      Audio Guide:
      Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?

      (Email to humans, end of November 2020)7

      Dear fellow Humans!

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

      ‘audio guide attempt to inter-material fashion research‘ 

      ****

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

      1 Pan & the Dystopian Tendencies

      2 Vessel of Knowledge 1

      3 Excerpts from ‘Notes on the Indios Charrúas’ Translation

      4 Augmented Reality

      ****

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

      AUDIOGUIDELINK1
      Original-arachne



      1 Pan & The Dystopian Tendencies

      […]

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

      [PAN MUSIC VIDEO LINK]


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

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

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

      […]

      I welcome you on my journey.

      ****

       

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

       



      Fashion Hypnosis

      […]

      [SOUND ON machine forest] 

      (maybe twice, je nachdem)

      you are at the place of embarkment now.

      the weather,

      the temperature is the one you love most. 

      you are embarking now.

      you focus on your favorite body part. 

      you focus on its contact with the outside world.

      it is wrapped in the material, the fabric, 

      you love most. 

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

      you chose.

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

      you are wearing this color at this moment.

      you may have smelled the wind today.

      you may have sensed it, you have heard it.

      you are now wearing the wind. 

      all around you.

      the wind embraces your skin.

      embraces you.

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

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

      you jump right into it. 

      mini-you jumps right 

      into it.

      you try this for a moment 

      […]

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

      you are embarking now

      approach the magical object you are wearing today. 

      it is a ring

      it is a bracelet

      a necklace

      it is the wind

      it is a building

      it is a feeling

      it is a memory

      it is something hiding somewhere.

      you think about its meaning.

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

      […]

      You sense the material:

      cold, hard, heavy, smooth, 

      -

      strange

      […]

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

      U expand or become small.

      What is the right size?

      What is your right size?

       

      How does this size fit?


      You find the right size.

      You define the right fit.

      You decide to carry this field along for a while.

      What is inside of this field?

      You fine-tune the fitting of the field

      when you found a comfortable fit, 

      you spend time in that field.

      […]

      [GONG]11

       


       

      Braids

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

      […] 

       



      Montevideo, Italy

      (file name: HWD TEXT)

      [INSERT SCREENSHOTS]

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

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

      […]

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

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

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

      Dear Human, [this is an ANGRY letter]

      […]

      I want to show you the first source

      [CONTACT MIC  EXPLORATION 1]


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


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

      JUST

      SIMPLY 

      WANTS 

      THE 

      LOLLIPOP (!)

      the motherfathering lollipop is not gonna come. 

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

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

      State of  MAXIMIZED CONNECTIVITY.

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

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

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

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




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

      […]


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


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

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


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

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



       

      Audio Guide:  À Mon Seul Désir15


      AUDIOGUIDELINK

      welcome2large

       

       

       



      (filename: google search designer name_deisre)

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

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

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

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

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

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



      Various notes on the Indios Charrúas

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


      […]

      Sheet C

      […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]16



      I AM


      I am, I am, erm… I am a-, I am a…


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

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

      *CLAP*
      LIEBER GOTT IM HIMMEL,

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


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





      EP LINK17



      Auris-Them

      Dear Myriam

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

      I got into my head spiraling, thinking about how 

      absolutely different our entire world would be 

      if humans would have developed without 

      the eyes, without the sense of the optic 

      and visual. 

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

      but oh, that's not true. 

      From the beginning, everything would be so different, 

      how we perceived each other, 

      what would be the idea of beauty, 

      how we would talk and communicate, 

      how we would dress, 

      what we would move, 

      technology, knowledge, wisdom, gender, art! 

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

      There is something very bizarre about the eyes,

      They create distance. 

      I sense a huge circle of humans, 

      who managed to encircle the whole world, 

      because it is a ritual of proximity and love, 

      like a huge festivity, and they all hold hands, 

      almost

      but not really, they have their arms stretched out and 

      enough distance between each other fingertips to feel the next persons 

      warmth and scent and small sounds of movement, 

      and they are wearing light bright robes, 

      out of some material unimaginable to us

      which is thin and warm and origins 

      from a completely different technological approach to production. 

      And we hummmm,   and zummmm. 

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

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

      not humans but Auris-Them.

      ****18


       

      Playlist

      (End of November 2020)

      Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?

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

      2 okay kaya - mother natures bitch

      3 jessie ware - save a kiss

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

      5 abdu Ali - did dat

      6 tami ti - single right now (ft juck)

      7 thool - tepeu 

      8 Gwen stefnai - cool (dj taunts edit)

      9 MC dricka - foi bate bate

      10 deli girls  - peg

      11 Villa Elvin - Ettiquete Stomp

      12 Pelada - Asegura

      13 Madonna - Frozen (Hardtechno Bootleg)

      14 Vessel - Paplu (love that moves the sun)

      15 eurythmics - sweet dreams (medieval version by samusoridicus)

      16 amar - tuhaimerasaman (federico luz edit)

      17 Fleetwood Mac - dreams

      18 nils bech - foolish heart 2019

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

      [PLAYLIST LINK]




      1 https://earthsky.org/human-world/discovery-massive-prehistoric-circle-trenches-near-stonehenge/

      2 ???
      3 Lyric from the song ‘1988 Earthbound” by Federico Luz, written on9th of August 2020 in Paris, France, cites Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, John Hunt Publishing, 2015, p.10
      Donna Haraway, 1991, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books. Quote sent to me by my dear friend Franziska Schneeberger
      These post-post-patchworks finally becoming the base for the special edition release of my Federico 2021 Luz EP ‘Formulas’ in November 2021.
      6 name changed
      Wed, 25 Nov 2020, 00:59
      8 Dolar Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuits, 2006, p.45-46
      9 ibid
      10 Excerpt from press text written by Anna Lugmeier & Federico Protto for the release of music video ‘Pan’ on PW-Magazine https://www.pw-magazine.com/2021/video-premiere-federico-luz-pan/
      Pan by Federico Luz, Camera: Anna Lugmeier, Bo Vloors, Viktoria Bayer, Federico Protto, Edit/Concept: Anna Lugmeier, Costumes: Federico Protto, Additional Design: W&LT, bichofeo, Setdesign: Artemyi Shokin & Anna Lugmeier, Performers: Diana Barbosa Gil, Stefan Cantante, Anna Lugmeier, Federico Protto, Franziska Schneeberger, sound mastering: Witch Studios ?
      Thanks to RENDEZVOUS3000 (Evamaria Müller, Anna Lugmeier)
      11 Gong-Sound from Amanda Lear, Follow Me,1978, released on Ariola Records
      12 Björk, Medúlla, released on 30 August 2004 on One Little Independent Records. Cover image photographed by Inez + Vinoodh
      13 Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters, 1993, released on Warner Bros. Words, Declan MacManus & Marina Thomas, Music written by Michael Thomas
      14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5stjYUK-yg

      15 This title is a reference to the series of six tapestries, today called 'The Lady and the Unicorn' created in the style of millefleurs woven in Flanders around 1500
      16 ‘apuntes varios sobre los indios charrúas’ by the Brigadier General don ANTONIO DIAZ (1861-1869?) published in a modernized version by Jose Joaquin Figueira for ‘estado mayor del ejercito, departamento de estudios historicos ‘divison historia’ in 1977, p.7-8
      17 Open Source Font used is called Kareu Kareu designed by Isabel Motz (Velvetyne Foundry & No Foundry) and layout for Federico Luz' EP Formulas by Chloë Janssens

      18 part of an email written to my friend Myriam in June 2021

       

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

    • This Schedule will be updated on a daily basis as Poliset 2022W4-7 and the proposals within it develop. 

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

       

      Monday Jan. 24th

      14-19h Poliset Introduction by Vladimir Miller

      Moving into the space, introduction to the available materials, the technicals space aspects (with Steven Jouwersma), the common budget and schedule. Vladimir will facilitate a process of connecting over shared and unshared topics and ideas of everyone's research. We will try to finish the day with setting up a place to have a dinner together. Food can not be as easily shared as we like, due to covid safety, but we can try to have a shared dinner and welcome drink.

       
       

      Tue Jan 25th 

      Steven Jouwerstma technical assistance day

       

      10h Poliset talk: Politecture.

      Vladimir

       

      13h Scheduling / Check in

       

      15h Research Mapping

       

      Wed, Jan 26th

      10-13h Steven Jouwerstma technical assistance 

       

      13h Scheduling / Check in

       

      14h Low Intensity Violence Research Group

      Research Introduction

       

      Thu, Jan 27th

      11h Wet Floor Cleaning

       

      13h Scheduling / Check in

       

      15h Abrasive Strategies introduction Martin

       

      Fri, Jan 28th

       

      10h Poliset Talk

      Christine de Smedt (LIV)+Vladimir

      we will pick two space related terms from our research and introduce and discuss them together

       

      13h Scheduling / Check in

       

      13h-15h one on one Interviews on plant care as part of Ingas research practice

       

      Mon, Jan 31st

      17h Film Screening "Cyborg Europe" by Anna Lugmeier

       

      Tue Feb 1st

      Steven Jouwerstma technical assistance day

      10h Brushing Teeth, Martin Sieweke

      11h Walking Practice, Vera Sofia Mota

       

       

      Wed, Feb 2nd

      11h Open Conversation on "Organising Randomness" with Nada Gambier and Vladimir Miller (also happening on zoom)

       

      Thu, Feb 3rd

      10h LIV Group + Vladimir Miller, open conversation on notions from their practice.

      14h What can be a contemporary scenography curriculum? Public writing session (etherpad) in the poliset. Vladimir

      14h Building a space of reading, and reading Chantal Mouffe on agonism (Lisa)

      16h-18h Toast to the Future, gathering in front of the Flemish Parliament in support of a.pass

      17h Film Screening: "La Rabbia"  (Gastone Ferranti, Giovannino Guareschi, Pier Paolo Pasolini)

      19h Drinks

       

      Mon Feb 7th

      Jozef Wouters at poliset

      "I will open and share my research as part of The Unbuilt School of Architecture. Part of Decoratelier, The Unbuilt School of Architecture is a platform for research about scenography and ephemeral space. For the Poliset days, I will share my research on spaces that are made of care and words more than of space and square meters. The ways of sharing are twofold; from 4pm I will open for a reading group and at 6pm it will be a film or a talk."

      16h  Reading group with Jozef Wouters

      18h Jozef Wouters' public presentation

       

      Tue Feb 8th 

      16h Five Minute Festival

       

      Wed Feb 9th

      Tania Garduño (CIVA) day at poliset

      10:30 Open Conversation: “Periphery”, Nada Gambier

       

      Thu, Feb 10th

      14h Conversation on how we research. Focus away from “what” and “why” towards “how” with specific attention to art practice as a tool for research.  

       

      Fri, Feb 11th

      12:00 Reading Group, “What”s the Use” bySara Ahmed, with Martin Sieweke

       

      Wed, Feb 16th

      Tania Garduño (CIVA) – contribution on Proxemics:

      In the Turkish Empire, the shade of a tree you planted determined the amount of land you owned. Tree shades defined villages’ sprawls. You could also calculate how old was a city, not necessarily by its buildings but by looking at the height of the trees.

      Architecture can be seen as the practice situated between the built space, human beings and actions. It can become the container of politics, history and civilizations. However, no single discipline nor research technique can help us understand how we perceive and associate with space. The science of Proxemics acknowledges this impasse; it addresses basic human situations in a subconscious area of society. It studies the many sensory inputs and emotions related to culture and its environment. Through scientific research, combined with “learning-by-doing” and the starting point that we are all experts in “being”, Proxemics creates a broad field of experimentation that gives us a hidden take on our relationship to the world.”

      18h Presentation and Talk

       

      Fri, Feb 18th

      10h Cleaning and Sorting

      13h check in

      13:30 In-process presentations for the HWD participants

    • project
    • workshop
    • Settlements
    • Polyset 2022W4-7 a.pass, Brussels 14 January 2022
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass
    • 24 January 2022
    • 11 February 2022
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Polyset 2022W4-7 a.pass, Brussels

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

      SCHEDULE

       

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

       

      a poliset is:

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

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

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

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

      Poliset was developed as a workshop at a.pass about 10 years ago when a.pass was still situated at DeSingel in Antwerp. When I was invited to teach there, I was looking for a practice which would allow the researchers to produce a study environment that was structured around a polycentric approach to community and practice. The main question in coming up with this workshop was for me: How to design a (self)educational environment which can be appropriated by others through re-design? I wanted to pass on the role of the workshop facilitator to the space itself, hoping that interactions and presentations would organically emerge from the engagement of the researchers with their work and with each other. But for this to happen our spatial arrangement had to dissolve the default model of “always gathering in a circle around a table” which would privilege me as a teacher no matter what I did and said. We all needed an opportunity to stay together but to orient ourselves away from the center and towards our tasks and questions as researchers. Not to simply fall apart into individual processes, but to disorganise in order to reorganise in multiple peer-to-peer occasions of sharing and presentation. I took the idea of a city as a spatial metaphor (or on a smaller scale: village, town), with its distributed centers of production, politics and self-organisation, as the main model for such a space. The initial proposal was therefore called “Settlement” to point to a mode of dwelling which is never one structure and desire, but a multitude of interacting formations. The word “settlement” was also pointing to the key practice of negotiation (a “settlement” marks its end in legal terms) between the social, individual, material and organisational formations which would be emergent in the space. As the practice continued to develop at a.pass and elsewhere over the past ten years, then Settlement and now Poliset went through different iterations, becoming a larger research project on the politics of commoning and the relationship between practice and its material/spatial conditions within institutions.”

      Vladimir Miller

       

      a.pass Poliset 2022W4-6 will bring together research practices, contributions and participation by:

      apass participants, mentors, curators and team (tbc):

      Aleksandra Boris, Amy Pickles, Chloë Janssens, Sarah Pletcher, Anna- Sophie Lugmeier, Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier, Vera Sofia Mota, Gosie Vervlossem, Simon Asencio, Rares Craiut, João Fiadeiro, Vijai Patchineelam, Anna Rispoli, Samah Hijawi, Jaime Llopis, Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Steven Jouwersma, Joke Liberge, Kristof Van Hoorde.

       

      with research contributions by:

       

      artists choreographers Christine de Smedt, Liza Baliasnaja and Theo Livesey:

      L'Inconnu is a collaborative research project between Liza Baliasnaja, Theo Livesey and Christine De Smedt, around the notion of Low Intensity Violence (LIV). For this work, we consider LIV to be made up of the violences we experience and produce which are not immediately evident or visible. The violence that works in disguise. The research currently takes a specific look at LIV through the lens of language, and how language operates as a medium and vehicle for violences.”

       

      Tania Garduño (CIVA) - contribution on Proxemics:

      In the Turkish Empire, the shade of a tree you planted determined the amount of land you owned. Tree shades defined villages' sprawls. You could also calculate how old was a city, not necessarily by its buildings but by looking at the height of the trees.

      Architecture can be seen as the practice situated between the built space, human beings and actions. It can become the container of politics, history and civilizations. However, no single discipline nor research technique can help us understand how we perceive and associate with space. The science of Proxemics acknowledges this impasse; it addresses basic human situations in a subconscious area of society. It studies the many sensory inputs and emotions related to culture and its environment. Through scientific research, combined with "learning-by-doing" and the starting point that we are all experts in "being", Proxemics creates a broad field of experimentation that gives us a hidden take on our relationship to the world.”

       

      Jozef Wouters 

      "I will open and share my research as part of The Unbuilt School of Architecture. Part of Decoratelier, The Unbuilt School of Architecture is a platform for research about scenography and ephemeral space. For the Poliset days, I will share my research on spaces that are made of care and words more than of space and square meters. The ways of sharing are twofold; on Mon Feb 7th from 4pm I will open for a reading group and at 6pm it will be a film or a talk."

       

      Conversation with David Vercauteren on his book “Micropolitiques des Groupes” (tbc)

       

      To be expanded by the participating researchers

      an updated agenda of presentations, sharings, workshops and screenings will be posted here as it develops

      This text is not only an announcement, but also an invitation to come and spend time in the space and to usedesign it on your own terms. please use the link below to sign up and coordinate so that we can welcome you in.

      covid safety protocols will be followed in the collective space.

       

    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Research In Absence 14 September 2021
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • 20 September 2021
    • 24 September 2021
    • yes
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Research In Absence
      The a.pass Research Center invites you to join its public programme Research in Absence
      September 20th-24th in Brussels
       
      Together with the Research Center participant researchers from the a.pass postgraduate program and the public will form a group that will engage in research proposals of  Associate Researchers of Cycle 3. For each of the proposals, the researcher who proposes it, will be absent for the duration of the process. The rest of the group – together with the public – will engage in the research question collaboratively, contributing their knowledge and practices to the shared process.
      The program invites all interested participants for an introductory dinner on Monday, September 20th. The group will work with the proposals in the afternoons and evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The program will conclude with a communal breakfast and feedback session on Friday morning, Sept. 24th.
      The five proposals can be joined separately or for the duration of the entire process. A detailed program will be published shortly, with information of how to book a slot and the location of the program.
       

      Please sign up for the program at the bottom of the page and indicate if you join for the whole program or a specific proposal, we recommend that you join the public dinner and introduction on Monday evening. 
       
      LOCATION 
      Centre Tour à Plombe
      Rue de l'Abattoir 24
      1000 Brussels
       
      TIMETABLE
       
      Monday, September 20th 
      18h Introduction and Dinner
       
      Tuesday, September 21st
      14h Proposal Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin
      18h Proposal Elke van Campenhout 
       
      Wednesday, September 22nd
      14h Proposal Vijai Maia Patchineelam
      18h Proposal Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio
       
      Thursday, September 23rd
      14h Proposal Joāo Fiadeiro
      18h Proposal Benny Nemer
       
      Friday, September 24th
      10h-13h Breakfast, Discussion and Feedback
       
       
      RESEARCH PROPOSALS
       
      Elke Van Campenhout

      Bloom Sessions

      The research 'Sex Asylum' works around notions of desire, when stripped from consumerist notions like instant gratification, the pornographic gaze, and subject/object divisions. In this research moment, together we create desire lines through voice, touch, and objects. An interspecies game of deferral and detournement.

       

      Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin

      Making each other ^

      This is an invitation into my current research titled “CofetARia”, specifically on the part relating to the agencies of food and the role we grant food, beyond the usual symbolic projections we have about it/assign to it. I will borrow some tools and findings so we can discover more on how to account for the performative ability of cakes and pastries, that can, and that do, modify current situations like individual BMI’s or emotional states, macro events related to the climate crisis, or political power struggles. How could we best work with cakes in artistic or other types of research? What strategies are there to either decenter the human actor (like Tuija Kokkonen’s “weak actions”) or to recentre the non-human actor that is cake (like Bruno Latour’s “specific tricks that make them talk”).
       
      Vijai Maia Patchineelam
      Over the course of his research "The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution" Vijai Maia Patchineelam was hosted by, employed and welcomed to a variety of institutions: from artist-run spaces to art academies and museums. One of them was Plano B, Lapa, a long since closed vinyl-shop-turned-informal-art-space in Rio de Janeiro. For the last four years Vijai and Plano B's founder Fernando Torres have collaborated in archiving hundreds of live performances that span a decade (2004-2013). In 2019 they published an annotated LP as the first outcome of this collaboration. For this proposal, the research group will be invited to engage in listening to and reading this document and to contribute to a discussion on temporary institutions and their survival strategies.
       
       
      Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio

      The World is full of Monsters

      The notion of textual agency refers to the capacity displayed by texts to do things in various circumstances. In other words, text might be doing something else than simply conveying meaning. Text is equally reading you. Text performs you. Ultimately text might suggest methodologies for its own study: a study from which you might not be able to return without losing a feather. The research will look into methodologies for studying the agents of text through collective practice and examination of the performances they enable.

       

      Joāo Fiadeiro

      Real Time Composition Game

      Real Time Composition "object of study" is the interval that emerges when linear time is interrupted and the sensation of continuity is suspended (by an accident, incident or “just because”). The resulted gap is where Real Time Composition research takes place. Inside this space, time has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Inside this space, time is not linear (or even circular) but "twisted" (like a "Möbius strip" topological surface), governed by laws that don't respect conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside, present or absent.

       

      Benny Nemer

      Several Favorable Bodies

      My contribution to Research in Absence emerges from an error I made during my artistic research into the private library of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert's library. I misunderstood information transmitted to me by Guibert’s executor, and began a path of inquiry from this misunderstanding. The recent revelation that my artistic research is now deeply anchored by this mistake — essentially a historical detail of my own invention — has presented me with many questions, some of which I hope will be processed and transformed in my absence. 

       

       

      For more information on Associate Researcher's work please see: https://apass.be/research-center-cycle-3/

      The event is free of charge

    • postgraduate program
    • Not in the Mood
    • A talk with Gary Farrelly 14 June 2021
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Sina Seifee
    • Gary Farrelly
    • interview
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykp04eGXoIM[/embed]

      This video is part of a series of conversations by Sina Seifee with the current artists in a.pass postgraduate program Summer of 2021. The series takes a tangential and heuristic approach to getting to know the participants of the program. The interviews are mutilated as a substitute for questioning, getting, guessing, and imagining what we are doing and in which mood.

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • workshop
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • Not in the Mood
    • Not in the Mood Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee
      05 April 2021
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • 03 May 2021
    • 31 July 2021
    • yes
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • Not in the Mood

      a.pass Block 2021 II curated by Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee -

      participants: Inga Nielsen, Anantha Krishnan, Jimena Perez Salerno, Carolina Mendonça Ferreira, Gary Farrelly, Aleksandra Borys, Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens, Ana Paula Camargo, and Vera Sofia Mota.

      Having completed a cycle of a.pass Research Center in 2019, the six of us proposed to co-curate the block of 2021/II as a group. We aim to collectively curate an a.pass block where we redistribute and redefine the roles of curator, mentor, guest and workshop facilitator. This implies putting our knowledges, our differences and kinships into (re)productive promiscuous interactions. Each of us thinks of a.pass as an ecology of sensitivities, sentiments, rhythms and styles of knowing, but also as apparatuses, technologies and infrastructures. We do a block curation that pays specific attention to the affective and emotional dimensions of research and knowledge production, which we call here “mood”. Not only do humans have their moods and mood swings, but more-than-human, eco-synth-tech systems, and also climates and markets have it, too. By thinking and proposing practices with and about mood, we are navigating with and within affective interactions, imperfections, subjectivities and sensations of making oneself orient in the research environment and the world.

       

      Block Scenario

      The block unfolds from the 3rd of May to the 31st of July 2021. 

      The fourth floor of a.pass will host two installations, Unrest and The Depository Cat, inhabiting the common space, before the block starts. 

      Unrest, an artwork by Sofia Caesar, is a kinetic space that can move and stretch with our interactions, triggered by the workshops and reading sessions throughout the block. The Depository Cat, by Isabel Burr Raty, is a tentacular inflatable that proposes an ongoing practice based on research-treatments sharing, oriented to harvest living testimonies of the block’s processes and moods.

      During the Opening Week, Sara Manente leads the first collective practice called the Washing Machine. It is a fast-paced associative game and a way to use the filter of mood to look into our research. 

      In the first part of the block, Antye Guenther facilitates a hybrid workshop practice, titled Oh So Serious, around moodiness for de-professionalization.

      Throughout the block, Sina Seifee takes the role of PR by interviewing the participants and publishing regularly online.

      Multiple reading sessions will be conducted on Thursdays during the block.

      In the first part of the block, we will read selected essays associated with or drawn from Affect Theory, namely Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Silvia Federici, under the working title Nail Art Affects Reading Sessions, facilitated by Sara Manente and Adrijana Gvozdenović.

      In the second part of the block, Thursdays are reserved for The Labour of Laziness reading sessions, proposed by Rob Ritzen.

       

      OPENING WEEK

       

      During the Opening Week, Sara Manente leads the first collective practice called the Washing Machine. It is a fast-paced associative game and a way to use the filter of mood to look into our research. Every participant is asked to prepare in advance 10 heterogeneous items from their practice under the filter of “obsessions”: bring something that you cannot stop thinking about, or that keeps coming back to you. It can be an unreasonable idea or feeling, a fragment of your own or somebody else’s work. Items can be of any format: a quote, a research question, a scrapbook, a dance move, a thought, a video extract, an object, a dream, or a short practice.

       

       

      ONGOING PRACTICES

       

      THE DEPOSITORY CAT - Isabel Burr Raty
      activated by a workshop at the beginning of the block on Wednesday 12th of May

      The Depository Cat is an ongoing practice throughout the block, which proposes the installation of an interactive space that invites participants to share their research in the form of self treatment/s or treatment/s for others. The idea is to open the possibility for the treatment’s giver/s and/or receiver/s to remain in a constant state of alteration, envisioning flux as one of the foundational resources in the processes of artistic research.

      The “treatment” implies the sharing or design of “healing” tools that give the opportunity to translate personal artistic concepts into physical or imaginary forms. These are put into motion by being with the - self - or with the - other/Cat, to trigger inner and outer mutations that can particularize, de-particularize or meta-morph affects underlying in the creative process of research. 

      The Cat takes the form of a “first aid cavity” that creates a visual space composed of i.e: non-standard animisms technologies, syncretic beliefs and statements, that can be freely inhabited. This cavity is at the same time a tentacular organism, as its limits can be stretched throughout the block, populating the common a.pass room. Participants are invited to deposit the or various “remainants” of the treatment/s offered in order to imprint the memory of the “healing” that took place. The remainants can be ornamental, devotional, cathartic - human and more than human objects and/or non-objects - that can infect, disinfect, contaminate, or not the common a.pass space. The depository process is archived with photographs and shared in the form of an album at the end of the Block.

       

      PR - Sina Seifee
      ongoing interviews, public relation

      Sina will make interviews with the participants throughout the whole block one by one on a weekly basis. The interviews are immediately edited into a short videographic piece with a collage style and animated elements from the imagination, the project, or the environment where the talk takes place. The pieces are published every week on multiple social platforms. The main host for the talks will be a subdomain of the a.pass website, which will be designed as a “collector” of the interviews for future access. The interviews in the format of video will be posted and prompted on both a.pass and non-a.pass platforms, where a wider audience has immediate exposure to it as it gets produced during the block.

      The interviews are informal and playful, with a heuristic approach to getting to know the participants' work and their personalities. The interview will be a substitute for mentoring (around), questioning (at), guessing (what), inventing (off), entangling (with) and imagining (on) what they are doing, what they are up to, and which mood they are in. The aim is less about understanding, and more about engaging and guessing fabulously what their matters of care are, with a perspectival (i.e. a reaction that is particular to me) and speculative (the “what if”) force that I embody in my own practice. The talks might take a maximum of two hours of recording and the final edited piece will not be more than 30 minutes long. The publication of the content will be based on the agreement with the participants, how and to which extent each likes to be exposed on social media. The interviews might take place in a.pass or elsewhere.

       

       

      WORKSHOPS / READING SESSIONS

       

      NAIL ART AFFECTS READING SESSIONS - Sara Manente and Adrijana Gvozdenović
      Thursdays, the first half of the block, before the HWD
      13th, 20th, 27th May

      We propose a formalized but relaxed situation, a hybrid form between mentoring and a reading group. We will do each other's nails while reading essays on affect theory. 

      “In ancient Egypt and Rome, military commanders also painted their nails to match their lips before they went off to battle.” Similarly, we will take care of each other, talk about what makes us happy and why do we feel like we feel (Sara Ahmed) to prepare for the “age of anxiety” (Lauren Berlant), to learn how we can repair (Eve Sedgwick) and to “re-enchant the world” (Silvia Federici).

      Doing manicure is a self-care or a professional service that can be considered a beautification process: removing the dead cuticles, massaging and moisturizing the skin, filing, polishing and decorating the nails. It is an intimate, private process and a ritual of preparation that serves the appearance in public. Could this be also a definition of what mentoring is? Can this situation create a space where different reading and discussing of the text can happen? 

       

      OH SO SERIOUS - Antye Guenther
      two days practice, 31st May and 1st June

      Antye is proposing a hybrid workshop practice around seriousness - approached as a state of non-moodiness - as questionable traits of professionalism in the arts. The aim is to propose and test, in conjunction with the participants, various strategies to insert moodiness,  non-seriousness and silliness (back) into artistic (research) practices as a way to de-professionalize. Where are our desires to be serious/ to be taken seriously in professional artistic contexts coming from? In what ways is this an attempt to champion objectivity and rational thinking in strong opposition to affects, moods and feelings, referring hereby as well to suspicious, idealized concepts of scientific practices in the 19th century? And what kind of strategies could help us to evoke processes of the-seriousness-ization for de-professionalization?

      This two-day practice will consist of a (performative) input lecture to shed light on the complex intertwinement of academisation and professionalization in the Arts, which seem to have been fundamentally boosted by neoliberal demands of constant self-advertising and promoting. This lecture will try to trace back specific tropes of professionalism to the 19th century ideal of the scientist as an ‘objective’ data recording device. After this lecture a short reading session will be proposed, to start and stir a conversation around (problematic) seriousness and professional attitudes. This will be followed by the invitation to the participants to share and to reflect on their own seriousness in their practices, what seriousness might mean for them as artists/practitioners in the arts. At the end of the first day, the participants will be asked to think of strategies to oppose rational-objective thinking and to practice hyper-seriousness or non-seriousness as a way to ‘de-professionalize’, which we want to share and test out together the next day.

      In preparation, Antye will collaborate with Sara and Isabel to invent and test specific ‘body practice’ to be added to the toolbox of de-professionalization on the 2nd day.

       

      THE LABOUR OF LAZINESS - Rob & Steyn Bergs
      reading sessions, Thursdays, the second half of the block, after the HWD and one moment in PAF
      24th June, 8th and 15th July

      The Labour of Laziness is dedicated to exploring the ambiguous, complex, and contradictory valences of laziness, and to examine its potentially subversive or invigorating political effects.

      In neoliberalism, tirelessly working on and investing in the self becomes an exigency. Because of their relative economic precarity, but also because of the nature of their work, artists and art workers often find themselves at the forefront (or rather, at one forefront) of exploitation and, perhaps especially, self-exploitation. We are less interested in laziness as a mode of resistance to this neoliberal regime than we are in laziness as a lateral form of political agency. In other words, we are not necessarily after laziness as a straightforward opposition to work—as passivity, as a simple refusal of work, as ‘doing nothing.’

      Instead, in discussing laziness, we want to raise questions about work and productivity in the arts. We will do so through collective reading sessions, taking place in an installation by Sofia Caesar.

      Furthermore, for the duration of the block, participants will be invited to keep a ‘lazy journal’ as a means of reflecting on their own relation to work and (self-)discipline, as well as on their understanding of productivity and how it informs their practice. These journals will be used as a common ground for a final group discussion/workshop. Importantly, the journals need not take the written form; other formats—video, drawing, or other media—can of course also be explored.

       

       

      PARTICIPANTS

      Inga Nielsen, Anantha Krishnan, Jimena Perez Salerno, Carolina Mendonça Ferreira, Gary Farrelly, Aleksandra Borys, Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens, Ana Paula Camargo, and Vera Sofia Mota.

       

      CURATORS

      Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, and Sina Seifee

       

      Isabel Burr Raty is an artist, filmmaker, teacher and sexual Kung Fu coach exploring the interstices between the biotic and the virtual. She is currently researching on the human body as a territory for sustainable agri-culture and intertwining performance, installation and film to queer labor understandings, offer SF in real-time and play with geo-synthetic magic.
      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist interested in artists’ motivation and ways of resisting (self)institutionalized structures. In the last three years, she has been developing methods of collecting and annotating symptomatic artistic practices that recognize their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality, which led to developing formats of publicness that push the borders between research, mediation, and production. These will be tested as needed during the block.
      www.gadi.me

      Antye Guenther is a visual artist, born and raised in East Germany. Drawing from her backgrounds in medicine, photography, and in the military, her art practices orbit around themes like ((non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, computer-brain-analogies and mind control, think tank ideologies and self-optimization, neuroimagery and fictionality of science, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and science fiction. Her work comes then in hybrid forms: performances, performative ceramic objects, fictionalized video tutorials, photo-text works, speculative scripts, artist publications, and narrative installations in various collaborations.
      www.aguenth.de

      Choreographer, dancer and researcher based in Brussels, Sara Manente, is interested in the dynamic relation between performer, work and spectator. Her projects are developed throughout hybrid research and become public in different formats. Currently, she works with aesthetics and ethics at the intersection between live arts and live cultures: namely, fermentation technology, noise, chimerization and (auto)immunity.
      www.saramanente.weebly.com

      Rob Ritzen is co-initiator of THAT MIGHT BE RIGHT, a founding member of LEVEL FIVE and coordinator of PERMANENT. My curatorial practice is focused on self-organized and collaborative formats in close association with cultural practitioners. In my research, I am concerned with social and political constellations that have a hold on everyday life. Cultural practices are a way to dislodge the hold the present has on us.
      www.robritzen.info

      Sina Seifee is an artist based in Brussels, Tehran and Cologne. Using storytelling, video, and performance, he explores and teases with the heritage of zoology in West Asia. His work picks up on how epistemologies, jokes and knowledges get shaped in the old and new intersections of techno-media and globalism.
      www.sinaseifee.com/

       

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

      +

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

       

       

      ---

      Self-interview

       

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

       

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

       

      Second, I will tell you a story:

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

       

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

       

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

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

       

      What is your current research? 

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      What would be the next step for this research?

       

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

       

      ---

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Selected references:

       

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

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

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

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

      Philippine Hoegen ANOTHER VERSIONThinking through performance’; Onomantopee; Brussels 20202

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

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

      Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects; University of Minnesota Press; 2013

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

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

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

       

      Anne Juren, Fantasmical Anatomy research

      Ligia Clark Relational objects

      Ilana Halperin, Geologic Intimacy

       

      Blocks in which I participated:

       

      2 September-1 December 2019

      BLOCK 2019/III 

      A LOOMING SCORE – WE SHARE YOUR POLITICS OF DAMAGE

      CURATORS LILIA MESTRE AND SINA SEIFEE

       

      16 January-27 March 2020 (block closed)

      BLOCK 20/I ZONE PUBLIC

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

       

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

      IN CONFINEMENT

      THE IN-BETWEEN BLOCK 2020 II

       

      14 September-3 October 2020 

      SETTLEMENT 16/ THE UNCONDITIONAL INSTITUTION

      VLADIMIR MILLER

       

      Thanks for...

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



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

    • research portfolio
    • PORTFOLIO Rui Calvo
      17 January 2021
      posted by: Rui Calvo
    • case of: Rui Calvo
    •  

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

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

       


       

      FIRST BLOCK: TROUBLED GARDENS

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

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

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

       

      FIRST VIDEO (june 2019)

       

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/501681981/b76441f773[/embed]

       

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

       

       

      Shooting part II: Caterina’s face.

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

      Instructions to Caterina:

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

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

       

       

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

      Instructions to Flávio:

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

       

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

       

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

       

      SECOND VIDEO (july 2019)

       

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/500775699/6089a324a8[/embed]

       

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

      Instructions to the performers:

      Flávio

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

      . you don’t want Diego in bed

      Lilia

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

      . attentively observe Flávio and his body

      . invite Diego to bed

      . “Do you wanna go back to Brazil?”

      Diego

      . make questions about the couple Lilia and Flávio

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      SECOND BLOCK: A LOOMING SCORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/496829852/95cb3f8106[/embed]

      Instructions for the visitors:

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

      Instructions for the performers:

       

       

       

       

       

      first part

       

       

       

       

       

      everyone but Lilia

      • you cannot be the first to say something.

      Lilia

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

      Caterina

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

      Flávio

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

      Lucia

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

       

       

       

       

       

      second part

       

       

       

       

       

      Lilia

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

      Caterina

      • say to Flávio “Listen to her”

      Flávio

      • always start each sentence saying “I...”

       

       

       

       

       

      third part

       

       

       

       

       

      Flávio

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

      Diego

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

       

       

       

       

       

      forth part

       

       

       

       

       

      Lucia

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

      Flávio

      • describe the gestures and behavior of Lucia and imitate them

      Diego

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

       

       

       

       

       

      fifth part

       

       

       

       

       

       

      Caterina

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

      Lilia

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      THE IN-BETWEEN (BLOCK) 

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

       

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/502113573/783aa7dbda[/embed]

       

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/499227081/7b346852c7[/embed]

       

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/499345273/0150a29bd1[/embed]


       

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

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

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

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

       


       

      FOURTH BLOCK: SETTLEMENT

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

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

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

       

      [embed]https://vimeo.com/501671946/2d2e19e6f1[/embed]

       

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

      RC: How would you define the agency you had? 

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      RC: And the role of the camera?

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

      KT: Did you enjoy it also?

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

      [Andrea is the one in the lower left]

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

      RC: But it’s less voyeur?

      LM: Yes. I think it’s less voyeur.


       

    • research center
    • No Mountains, Rivers or Trees A Conversation with Elke van Campenhout
      13 January 2021
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • 13 January 2021
    • 13 January 2021
    • No Mountains, Rivers or Trees
      A recorded and written conversation
       

      Vladimir:
      So, this is a third draft of our conversation, previously we have tried to talk about your workshop and spent a lot of time happily discussing our (I think we share it, right?) frustration with what you would describe as the "discourse harness" in the arts. Indeed, if I summarize it, it seems like an attitude of self-policing in the arts is augmenting and so is the pressure to adhere to an idealized conception of the critical artist. 
       
      Elke:
      Yes, the artists 'discourse harness' I am referring too, is indeed the cloud of critical theory and identity politics that envelop all institutional and self-reflective artist communications today. In my experience of life outside of the arts as a monk I see that there is still life outside of the critical discourse. And I see that this outside seems to have become a bit of a blind spot in the research discussions and environments today. The critical move, which was historically aimed at opening up new spaces for knowledge to blossom, and for other experiences to be recognized, is at this point often doing the opposite: closing down diverse ways of thinking by becoming the sole denominator of value, visibility and recognition. 
      This development results in a shaming politics on the working floor: as artists we get shamed by a policy that tells us that we are not engaged enough in contemporary realities, by peers that shame us for any kind of political incorrectness, by mentors and teachers who unknowingly pass on the harness from generation to generation, without recognizing the limits of their own opinions. 

       

      Vladimir:
      Yes this passing-on of critical anxiety is something I encounter a lot in myself as an educator.  I find myself on both sides of this "passing on", I also feel it sometimes is passed on to me. The latter is actually more active on my part: I often actively take the work of others to feel "not quite there" in terms of discourse. 
      There is an inner voice in my head that speaks like the Discourse. In response to your proposal to create a temporary space out of discourse the voice would for example say: "but, critical discourse permeates all areas of life". I think I lost the ability to use critical discourse as a helpful tool, because I have been taught  to apply it to all areas of life. For example if you talk about life outside of the arts, I think you are talking about the tantric monastery you founded... Do the critical positions on gender and sexuality and probably labor not apply there? I am asking this in an exemplary way, to get a sense of how reactive and in a way total/itarian this way of seeing the world has become for me...
      So how do we progress in this situation? Because I actually don't want to keep having these kinds of caricatural conversations, they do neither life nor critique justice. 
          
      Elke:
      Indeed it is not a question of falling into caricature, or denouncing critical discourse, or creating dichotomy. To pick up on your remark on the monastery, for example, I would say that, no, I am not talking only about the monastic life – although in that environment the critical discourse notions do get put into perspective, and lose their overarching power. I am also talking about daily politics, about the daily lives of people that do not consider the critical framework to be the sole denominator of what matters. In our previous discussions we discussed the inability of the left to communicate issues of solidarity and engagement in such a way that they could appeal to a wider audience. Critical analysis does not necessarily bring about this sense of togetherness, since it differentiates with an increasingly fine mesh between diverse identitary positions,  as if the only possible way to understand and react to the world would be to divide it .
      In The Monastery we do try to experiment a flexibility in dealing with diverse perspectives. From a non-dual point of view a lot of identitary issues disappear from view. But it is obvious our daily lives do not play out in that non-dual field, necessarily. So yes, issues of sexism, racism, segregation and privilege do play a major role in the monastic work. The experiment in the monastic practice is to start from a sense of unity rather than a sense of critical segregation. Much like the concept of 'agonism' as Chantal Mouffe uses it: the acceptance of a common playing field on which to act out difference. And again, it is not either/or. It is both: to be able to see clearly the problems of power and identity without excluding the underlying thread of connection. To be able to change perspective and move more fluidly from one register of experience to the other. Without the need to denounce or undermine the experiences that bloom on another plane. The flexibility to move from being a critical citizen, to becoming a sensitive plant, a sensuous animal, or spirit, or lose all form and dissolve into space. 
      Often this flexibility gets denounced, as being 'uncritical'. Much like the move in the feminist second wave to judge anything that was not formulated in the prescripted patriarchal analysis form as 'backlash': betrayal and intellectual rubbish. Which presupposes that 1: there is only one way of verbalizing criticality and one framework to express it in and 2: 'critical' is the hierarchical top dog for evaluating our life's choices, thoughts and actions. Really? Is that so?
       
      Vladimir:
          In your workshop "Debunking the Myth", which you recently hosted at a.pass, you are trying to see and maybe undo some of these presuppositions.
          
      Elke:
      Not so much undoing, as making palpable. When I talk about 'the harness of discourse' I try to open up zones for the 'suspension of belief': the belief that the critical analysis of the world through identity politics and leftist critique is the only way to 'properly' engage in the world. The invitation is to undress, to take off this harness temporarily, to experience life and work through other parameters. And to nourish and vitalise the artistic work in the process. In my practice, also in the a.pass block that is called 'the asylum (for desiring bodies) I want to provide space for 'the work'  to play beyond or outside the discursive field we think we already know - and as such affirming the status quo of the critical standoff - and meet on different grounds. 
      I talk about "nakedness" as the moment we admit to our inappropriate desires, our non PC tendencies, our unchecked and adopted beliefs. Nakedness as a form of contemplation – not to destroy, but to unfold all the colours hidden under the surface. The rumbling bowels, the anxious contractions, the beating sex. And let these inform the research. 
       
      Vladimir:
      If I can sum it up in a sort of a sketch, we said in a previous discussion that the neo-liberal educational institution has made critique a matter of bureaucracy. It has quantified evaluation and made pre-approval of research trajectories more important than a detailed public critique of the research results. Could you describe this development and how it affected your perception of education and funding structures? 
       
      Elke
      To be more precise, I would rather say that critical theory has become the content for the boxes to be ticked in a bureaucratic system of evaluation. So in itself it is not the critical gesture that is the problem, but rather the prescriptive form that this critique is forced into. No longer fueled by a living, writhing state of discontent, it becomes a discursive framework that needs to be applied in order to 'pass'.  And that excludes a lot of other forms of knowledge production that do not fit into the prescriptive frame.
       
      So yes, the 'emperor's new clothes' stand for the bureaucratised forms of critique, the normative harness of self-evaluation that is doing the opposite of what it promises to do. And my point is, that this might not be the most inspiring field of ideas when we are talking about the arts. I question what might be there if we wandered out into the open, naked, not protected by the institutionalized markers of worthiness, relevance and contemporariness. Fueled by a more personal urgency, whatever that means. Maybe to address the same issues, but in another way. Or, in the same way, but breathed to life by a renewed sense of feeling connected to the issue.
       
      Vladimir:
      How would you describe this process of wandering off? 
       
      Elke:
      As a work of contemplation. A moment of reflection on the tools we are using. Allowing in influences that do not score so high on the standardized score maps. Or at least not taking those as the initial impulse to move into work. And in order to get there, I propose some 'meditations': some cleansing tools to question the beliefs we hold so dear, and to see if we can create space to broaden up the field of thought, but mostly of practice and experience. By working on non-dual philosophical frames for example, or by reconnecting to body work as another source of knowledge, or by digging into the unconscious, or slightly repressed sources of our desire to work. In my workshop I borrowed some methodology from Buddhist psychology, non-dual practice, and self-help work. And tried to bridge the divide between the person and the worker. Following my intuition that a lot of researchers have been alienated from their desire by being policed into the bureaucratic frameworks of relevance and contemporary concerns. 
       
      Vladimir:
      This reminds me again of this state of "passing on" of the harness: Do you think we should also apply this process to institutions themselves? Otherwise the risk of "going naked" is only carried by the artist, and not really supported. 
       
      Elke
      Yes of course. In the past I did argument for the coming into being of the Tender Institute, that would be much more vulnerable than its presumed political agenda. That would recognize its dependence on individual flights of desire and engagement, and on the communal coming-into-shape of an ever-changing vessel for coming together around the topics that incite our curiosity and connection. A naked institute runs the risk of being left behind in the cold, though. And has to accept its mortality.
       
      Vladimir:
      I think it is interesting that your work is inspired by tantra, and that you are using body and intimacy metaphors to describe how critique and discourse affect us. They point to a psychological, affective and embodied reality of our well-being. Can we talk more about this nakedness that we feel when our ideas are unsupported, unvalidated, un-aligned, when they are "private" desires and motivations? Are we ashamed of ourselves and our motives for for artistic `work`? And as educators do we pass on shame, are we shaming each other?
       
      Elke:
      For sure! As social beings our self-worth is to a large degree dependant on the opinion of others. And as performers, artists and people that make their life in the eye of the other, such concerns run even more deep. In Buddhism there is a particular attachment, that is considered one of the most difficult to overcome, and this is the attachment to reputation: what people think of what I do, what others think about what I think. In the artist context there are quite a lot of markers that are off-limits: I want to come across as critically aware, politically engaged, formally post-post-modern, post-conceptual, or at least socially relevant. As in any other attachment, this clinging to markers of approval produces fear. Which can symptomise in the stagnation of the creative process, or in the alienation to the work talked about before. 
       
      Vladimir
      Since it is such difficult and risky work, I keep wondering what would we give the attachment to reputation up for? In Buddhism the ultimate goal is detachment and thus the breaking of the circle of incarnation. And yet, art is of this world, its aims are rarely transcendent. Without undermining the temporary detachment you are proposing, I ask myself: are not art and spirituality sort of metaphysically mismatched as patient and method? 
       
      Elke
      In Tantra we work with the practice of overcoming obstacles (fear, anger, anxiety,...) by diving deeply into it, letting it manifest to such a degree that it implodes and turns into its opposite. That is a strategy that works very well for unleashing the suppressed energy in the body and for allowing a more vital flow to pick up momentum. In the work. I do I try to use the same principal on the mindbody of the research.
      This might sound therapeutic, but it is rather a counter-therapy. Whereas therapy is aiming at restoring your relation to the social grid, Tantra is supporting you in letting go off the approval of the social. To open up to other possibilities of being and thinking and acting in the world. Which seems a good place for an artist to be. To be naked. A naked state of working is to look more honestly at what is there. To stop censoring our impulses before they got the chance to unfold. To hold off from opinions that are passed on unrevised and, often, uninformed. 
      In the unfolding of the artistic work, there are moments of doubt, of anxiety that get translated into bodily states of discomfort, immobility. What often follows is a turning away from the material and the physical and a withdrawal into our headspace, where things are more clearly delineated as safe or not safe. The body does not have these clear markers. It produces its energetic and desiring flows in accordance to a multitude of influences: hormonal, vascular, unconscious, ancestral, cultural, ... You could say the body colours outside the boxes of the academically acceptable. Of the semiotic gridlines of interpretation. 
       
       
      Vladimir:
      You might be pointing to an important component of what the labour of the artist is. As much as it pains us, it seems less about intuitive creativity, and more about introspection, contemplation, sorting out voices, working with one's own not-so-amazing impulses. There is a potential to support this labour in following someone's research process in a structure like a.pass. I think we could embrace this often invisible work as the thing that is actually happening, the actual process. I think it is often invisible because we still concentrate on results, manifestable changes in methodology and approach, changes in discourse, new ideas. All the while this current of listening to oneself and processing is running underneath it all. 
       
      Elke
      Writing this, I am thinking about this well-known Zen phrase, which I can not rephrase verbatim, but goes something like this: First there are mountains and rivers and trees. Then you start on your path and there are no longer mountains, rivers and trees. And then you progress on your path and once again there are mountains, rivers and trees. In parallel with what we have been talking about, I would say that first there is the 'contemporary artist' caught up in its own struggle to fit into a predefined definition of what that is. Then there is the work, the research done, in which this artist loses shape, becomes formless, no longer sees the worker as clearly delineated from the person, or from the society around. And then again, the subject of the research and the individual subject separate in the coming-into-being of the art work, that then is free to roam the world, without being seamlessly linked to the author, the maker, the person behind. This gives the artist the freedom to use 'dirty strategies' in this third phase: to play roles, to play tricks, to not become identified with the work. This is where the challenge lies of most art that captures the attention: the impossibility of identifying the clear outline of the maker. The dirty politics that irritate, make you react, make you think. It is not the artist's work to confirm to their personal beliefs on a one-to-one basis. Because then the work is done, the ideas formed, and simply passed on to a passive viewer to receive or not. It is the work of the artist, to let the work do the work of passing on the process of thinking and experiencing to the viewer/participant... Or not....
       
      Vladimir:
      At what stage do you connect your work/shop in this process you are describing
       
      Elke:
      As a monk, as a person, as a researcher and artist, I situate my work mainly in the second phase. In the moment I share work, in performances, workshops or texts, this work is trying to break through evidences. Dissolving beliefs and habits. The desire to undo for no reason whatsoever. But to allow some air to enter.
       
      Vladimir:
      How could we integrate this disidentification between the artist and the work for the process of artistic research? Maybe it is already on its way there... I don't see artistic research as clearly separated into the three stages you describe. In my understanding of it I often use the idea of a set: a constellation of processes, artworks, concerns which is constantly worked and working. This set is always already separated from the artist, like a garden would be separated from the gardener. It would be interesting to imagine a discourse culture of research where what grows in the garden is allowed to be wild, unruly, but also cared for.. 
       
      Elke:
      For me research is also always situated in the second phase, which is the place where the unruly weeds roam freely. Only the weeds for me are not the works, but the different streams of association, physical and mental, material and immaterial, rational and irrational, that criss-cross the garden, get entangled into one another, into other's vines, changing shape. The poisonous and the beautiful, the healing and the critical no longer clearly identifiable. Research for me is very much a pharmakon, both clearing and  obscuring the question hidden deep in the roots. At that point there is no longer a clear demarcation between the personal and the work. Although we most of the time act as if there is, and then get tangled up in the unforeseen consequences and vulnerabilities this  lack of clarity produces. 
       
      Vladimir:
      If I go back to critique and discourse, there is something about the wild garden image that I find very productive. Maybe there are some images here that change attitude and purpose with which critique comes into that garden. At what point it critique useful and for what? What would be the role of a mentor or an educator or a colleague entering this garden? I think in those roles we often function as biologists and farmers to each other: we identify poisonous plants, the wrong kind of soil, we weed out, we collect the pretty apples... is there another way? 
       
      Elke:
      Permaculture? As mentors and educators we often come in with a benevolent bottle of Weedkill. I think my dream of a supportive learning environment has always been to let the community figure out what is relevant in any given constellation. Not to water some plants more than others, but let them take care of each other. And to provide compost: the debris of digested and undigested history, feeding the weeds to flower more bountifully. Not necessarily to produce more fruits, but to find their grounding, rooting into a mutually challenging symbiosis. In which the concerns of the one become a matter of concern to the other by sheer proximity. 
       
      Vladimir
      Dear Elke, thank you for this talk!
       
       
       
       
       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • A Good Workshop Conversation with Krõõt Juurak
      07 December 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • A Good Workshop
      Vladimir
      Hey Krõõt!
      At the end of the every block the curator writes a documentation of what happened in the block. The reason to do it, is to pass on pass on some information to the other curators and also to develop on and add to the archive of methodologies at work at a.pass. 
       
      I will be writing this report as I am the designated block curator. It would be great to have a conversation about the work(shop) that you proposed. I suggested this interview format so that you don't have to write a report. I have the Intuition that reporting would be strange in connection with your workshop and your work in general. 
       

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

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

      Introduction

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

      Background

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

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

       

       

      Day 1, July 8th

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

      ► expand

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

      Artistic research

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

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

       

      Individuality and collaboration

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

       

      Selection of candidates

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

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

       

      Archiving, documenting, publishing and dissemination

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

       

      Evaluation, sustainability and sustainable management

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

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

       

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

      The subsequent discussion revolved among others around questions like:

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

       

       

      Day 2, July 9th

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

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

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

       

      TABLE 1: Institutional Autonomy within Larger Systems

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

      Reporter: Kristien Van Den Brande

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

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

       

      TABLE 2: Internal Relations

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

      Reporter: Philippine Hoegen

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

       

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

      Reporter: Sébastien Hendrickx

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

       

      TABLE 4: Instituting Transformation

      How to institute transformation and what resists instituting?

      Reporter: Sina Seifee

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

       

       

       

      Day 3, July 10th

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

      ► expand

       

      Introduction to Day 3

       

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

       

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

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

       

      Reports by the Reporters

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

       

      Table 1 Report

      Kristien Van Den Brande

      ► Practice Presentation

      INSTITUTIONAL AUTONOMY WITHIN LARGER SYSTEMS

      Tackled through a role playing game.

      Roles:

      teacher

      dreamer (instagram influencer with a fashion line)

      uber-socialist (young artist)

      rebel (black-block activist seen as vandal)

      archivist (big data manager)

      Context:

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

      2 problems:

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

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

      1. Larger systems

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

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

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

      What were the features of the world:

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

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

      1. Wrong horizon of the word ‘autonomy’

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

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

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

      Strategies

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

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

      1. ANNIHILATION

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

      Threat comes from

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

      Strategies?

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Table 2 Report

      Philippine Hoegen

      ► Practice Presentation

      Internal Institutional Structures for Instituting Artistic Research

      Introduction

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

      Discussion Thursday 9th

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

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

       

       

      Several subjects surfaced of which three stood out:

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

      Discussion Friday 10th

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

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

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

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

      Debated Questions

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

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

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

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

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

      > What is slow, what is fast?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Table 3 Report

      Sébastien Hendricks

      ► Practice Presentation

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

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

      The practice consisted of the following elements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Table 4 Report

      Sina Seifee

      ► Practice Presentation

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

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

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

      Two distinct positions were articulated in the session:

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

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

       

       

       

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Summary of Day 3

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

       

      Delphine Hesters

       

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

      Practices to give up:

      Institutions as service provider

      inequality

      hiding behind slowness

      quick fixes

      being in the position in which we have to legitimate ourselves

      constant measuring of time in order to remunerate

       

      Practices to nurture:

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

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

      administration as care

      having principles of self-evaluation

      (formal) structures to make informality happen

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

      tweaking of the bureaucratic requirements, pirate versions of existing models

      ask yourself - who has to move where at what cost

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

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

      map your entanglements, know your dependencies and autonomies

      weaving with the public

       

      Values:

      trust

      vulnerability

      transparency

      trans(nationality)

      radicality

      Think what could annihilate your institution

      Balance self care & being ready for change

      'being public' as acting upon the world

      Think in terms of currencies instead of positions and hierarchies

      approach to AR as both open and specific

       

      General Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      >> ’(digital) commons' :)

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

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

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

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

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

      Delphine Hesters than asked into the round:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

       

      Conclusion

      A much needed conversation

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

      ► expand

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

       

      Community

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

       

      Administration as Care

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

       

      Access

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

       

      Visibility

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

       

      Practice, Discipline, Methodology, Field

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

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

       

      Outcomes

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

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

      Thank you!

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

       

       

      Post Conclusion

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

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

      To work with the patterns that research creates in artistic practice

      To be in dialogue with other researchers and colleagues.

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

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

      To practice clairvoyance

      To question the performance of authorship

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

      To engage in and share failures

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

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

      To understand the agency of a cut.

       

       

       

       

       

      Comments

      Please leave your comments and feedback in this collective pad

       

       

       

    •  

      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

       

    •  

       

       

      DIALOGUE

       

       

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

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

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

       

       

       

      I Block//School of Love

      curated by Adva Zakai

      (September-December 2018)

       



      What do you remember about the beginning?

       

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

       

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

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

      Do you remember what was the question when we started?

       

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

       

       

      What is there?

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

      What is such a translation?

      What is noise?

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

      How can the center remain open?

      What is sacred?

       

       

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

       

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

      What is sacred?

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

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

       

      The distance is what allows being together.

      The distance is the space/time in between things.

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

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

      The distance is what determines the relationship.

      Walking is a measure maybe.

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

      Not knowing is an obstacle between me and the other.

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

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

      I can run across this distance thanks to its opacity.

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

      Not knowing is a distance.

      A distance is opaque.

      Opacity allows me to meet the other.

       

      “Space was holy to

      the pilgrims of old, till plane

      stopped all that nonsense”

      (W. H. Auden)

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

      A is not equal to A.

       

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

       

       

      The world will exist in the interrogative form.

      The end will be close to us

      and we might be friends.

       

      We will learn from flowers:

      the truth about every man is that 

      he/she is about to die.

       

      Nothing will be equal to nothing.

      Everything will be 

      incommensurable

      irreplaceable

      incontrovertible

      irrecoverable

      irreparable

      irredeemable.

      -Money will be the principle of irreality-

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Every road will be a cemetery

      and, in the crackles of the asphalt,

      there will be our little fallen flowers

      our masters

      our dead.

       

      There will be a desire hidden in every thing.

       

      We will become small

       - small, in order not to lose each other.

      ---

      Revolution is going on.

      It will walk in the forest. 

      It will breath, smell, look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It will be stumbling, transforming judgement into motion.

       

       

       

      II Block//Troubled Gardens

      curated by Nicolas Galeazzi

      (May-August 2019)

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      1. Observe and interact

      2. Catch and store energy

      3. Obtain a yield

      4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

      5. Use and value renewable resources and services

      6. Produce no waste

      7. Design from patterns to details

      8. Integrate rather than segregate

      9. Use small and slow solutions

      10. Use and value diversity

      11. Use edges and value the marginal

      12. Creatively use and respond to change

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

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

      I love your stories.

       

      Which story? 

       

      The one about distance.

       

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

       

      Now we are far enough to read it.

       

      You are right.

       

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

      You are particularly concerned by the future...

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

       

      A: Adopting is a big challenge.

      B: To receive back the material we left.

      A: To give up expectation of realization.

      B: Can the documentation be originated by a script?

      A: We wanted to avoid narration.

      B: Why?

      A: The narration tends to identification, often.

      B: “This” is “this”.

      A: To put things in one line.

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

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

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

      A: We didn't finish it, yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      B: I have a strong tendency in reacting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      A: I like this a lot.

      B: To show the responsibility in the adoption.




       

      III Block//A looming score_sharing politics of damage;

      curated by Lilia Mestre and Sina Seifee

      (September-December 2019)

       

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Memory embodies distance and opacity.

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

       

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

       

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

      a game is a map

      a frame

      a self-critical institution

       

      you can put the game there, in the middle

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

      and I need the others to be different

      and see the difference

      which is the distance that allows us being together

       

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



      NAME IT/Writing Score

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      I AM HERE. 

      ARE THOSE VOICES, THAT I AM HEARING?

      I AM READING. 

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

      I REMEMBER STANDING FOR SOMETHING. 

      CAN I STAND FOR SOMETHING NOW? NOW SITTING? 

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

      HOW MANY METERS OF AIR OVER MY HEAD? 

      I'M FLOATING, THE HEAD IN THE AIR. 

      I'M MOVING MY HANDS.

      I BREATH. THE HEART IS BEATING. 

      ONCE I SAW MY HEART IN THE ECOGRAPHY SCREEN. 

      BEATING. OPENING AND CLOSING. 

      LIFE IS STRANGE THROUGH A SCREEN.

      I'M WRITING. 

      MY GAZE WANDERS ACROSS THE DETAILS

      IS IT GOING TO END SOON?

       

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      WE ARE IDIOTS - MANIFESTO FOR NOW/Editing Score

       

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

       

      I AM HERE NOW

      I TAKE A POSITION

      I REVEAL MY POSITION

      I AM AT THE ENTRANCE THE DOOR IS OPEN I ENTER

      I CAN RUN FROM HERE TO THERE FOLLOWING  STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW

      I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      I AM HERE

      I LOOK THROUGH THIS FRAME

      I AM IN THE FRAME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I FRAME INSTITUTIONS

      I MOVE BORDERS AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE

      I AM MANIFOLD

      I AM MULTIPLE

      I AM FOCUSED

      I AM PERIPHERAL

      I TAKE TIME IF NECESSARY

      I TAKE TIME

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

      I TAKE THE TIME IT TAKES

      I AM AN IDIOT

      I AM A PIONEER

      I  DO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      I NEED NOISE

      I TRUST OPACITY

      I TRUST YOU

      I TRUST

      I BELIEVE IN THE PRESENT AS A PROMISE

      I BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE AS A LEGACY

      I BELIEVE IN COMPLEXITY

      I BELIEVE IN MAGIC

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



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

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

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

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

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


      [21st November 2019, Bruxelles]

       

      I AM NOW 

      POSITIVE THE DOOR THERE FOLLOWING A STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW, I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      HERE

      THROUGH THIS FRAME

      ME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I BODER AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE OLD PERIPHERY

      I TAKE TIME

      DU TEMPS POUR FAIRE LES CHOSES

      IT TAKES AN IDIOT

      I AM WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      NOISOPACITY

      US

      THE PRESENT AS THE FUTURE MAGIC

      FORSE L'AMORE E' CONTINUARE    

       

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

      This is not the end.

       

       

    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Parallel Parasite
    • Parallel Parasite Timeline Repository - Web Publication Research Center Document
      21 December 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • online: https://parallelparasite.apass.be/
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
      case of: Sina Seifee
    • Parallel Parasite Timeline Repository - Web Publication

      LINK: https://parallelparasite.apass.be/

      As a way to register our process during the Parallel Parasite, three weeks residency of the a.pass Research Center at SZenne ArtLab, we filmed and recorded all the public encounters. These encounters had different formats and subjects, from socratic dialogue to classic lecture, recorded interview, and mediated discussion passing through a drumming concert with after talk. The audio-visual recordings of all these moments were collected in timeline of 23 hours. No editing was added. Sina Seifee created an interface on top of the video that allows to complement it with other collected materials and to add continuously a-posteriori reflections. Viewers can scroll through and find points of interest. We followed the anarchive* guidelines of SensLab to proceed with our investigation. For more information about the website's design visit this link.

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what is learned and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, the proposition of Parallel Parasite Residency was to dislocate the Research Center to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporarily in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question that was driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) was: can the a.pass RC in dis-location generate an open hub for the study of some of its practices? Can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability, publishing and access, which are informal and porous? We wanted to address the agency of such publicness and to give focus to critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and to which forms of sociability it generates.

      Parallel Parasite was a three week residency of the a.pass Research Center curated by Lilia Mestre with Adva Zakai and Erin Manning as special guests. 

      The a.pass Research Center is mainly working with alumni and associated researchers.
       
      For Parallel Parasite we were:
      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, 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.

       

      More info about the residency: https:///www.apass.be/projects/parallel-parasite/
      or https://parallelparasite.apass.be/#about

       

       

       

    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • Research Center Cycle 1 Block IIII Reviewing emergence Cared by Nicolas Y Galeazzi
      16 September 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 01 September 2019
    • 30 November 2019
    • Research Center Cycle 1 Block IIII Reviewing emergence

      How is not keen about ‚dynamics '. Mechanics describes it as a concern for the "effects of forces on the motion of a body or system of bodies, especially of forces that do not originate within the system itself". I'm wondering how mechanics define borders of a "system" - what belongs to its inside, and what does not. I imagine it as a possibly unavoidable but finally arbitrary process of deciding. However, I myself, I consider dynamics connected to vitality - or let's call it breathing.

      One year, six associates, three curators, several events and residencies, lots of contexts and thoughts, etc. - I think we can say, the research center was never as extensive as this new cycle. It was time for a.pass to come up to the promise of generating more publicly available content. The five associate researchers accompanied by three different curators have processed their contexts and brought them to a ripe state for publishing. Holding in, taking a breath, smelling the taste, enjoying the fill of the lungs, holding in again and softly pushing the are out - and so, the cycle can start again. What was here? What was nourished by the oxygen? What did come up by breathing the same air as five other researchers?

      This block we take a breath. We are looking at what emerged. We are cleaning up, select what felt useful, archive and document, think about publishing, and try to evaluate the insights for the next cycle.
      Of course, while wrapping up, the question comes, is this not what research anyway requires from us at any time? Isn't wrapping up just another word for going on? Or is wrapping up possible anyhow in a research that is at the end never ending? Sure, close looking, reflecting, evaluating and sharing are intrinsic to research. It just takes place in a different light than pondering, discovering, curiosity, surprise etc.

      Nothing against ‚Research '- but 'search' comes first!
      This summer I was standing in a forest, next to my child. We listened, imagined, looked in the search for bears and libels, mushrooms and orchids. There was no direction, just forest, we entered where it was possible, and continued where that forest opens vision. The structures are given but inscrutable. We learn, we wonder, we wish, we compare, and things fall into our memory to be linked to other memories. Search is big. Search is following the order of the woods - not the trees.
      Research feels a bit like hide-and-seek. Everything takes place within a certain convention - the rules of the game. That's what the fun is about it. I exactly know what I'm searching for and what I have to do, I just don't know how it will happen, and when. We collect, we document, we reorganise, we create an overview, we create vision. Research is messing up the order. Research is taking perspective, so we don't see the whole woods for the trees.

      ***

      The a.pass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced research and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at a.pass.  After being initiated as a platform for individual research trajectories, the Research Center shifted to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for a period of one year.

      This winter block marks the closure and thinking back of the first cycle of the a.pass Research Center through publishing.

       

      Cycle I - Associated Researchers

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.

      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 master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      Rob Ritzen 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.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.

      Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.
      Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.
      At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aesthetics.

      Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practice dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, post-humanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.

       

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Some small gestures during

      I made and served jam made from Japanese Knotweed

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

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

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

      the cloths are adapted by the Muslin Brothers

       

    • NOT_index
    • filter --> body practise Caterina Mora
      04 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    •  

      Filtration is the process of separating, grouping, identifying things from things

      The filter "body practise" is a fake filter. 

      It´s fake because it does not intend to regroup or separate anything.
      This is the statement:

      The only way to think about this research is

      by the body,

      is through the body, 

      and going towards the body.

       

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

       

       

       

      A body that drew specific gesture vocabulary

       

       

      A body in front of the camera

       

      A body behind or below the camera

       

       

      A body busy with techniques of breathing, talking and dancing (a body trying )

       

       

      Some bodies resting

       

       

      A body questioning what is doing and tryng to not give responses

       

       

      A body repeating and repeating (ENSAYOS)

       

       

       

      A body starting and smiling

       

       

      A body in a important museum being photographed

       

       

      A body doing wrokshops  (Phillipe G.)

       

       

      A body giving things for adoption  (capitalism, inflation, verticality, elitism and "missing")

       

       

      A body lending its body for other research (yes, that's me) - (Geert´s project)

       

       

      More than one body trying to make sense

       

       

      Some bodies travelling with others bodies

      [gallery columns="4" ids="9265,9266,9267,9264"]

       

      Some bodies sharing a.pass space 

       

      Some bodies living in a.pass and using scenography as coat rack

       

      A body reclaiming silence

       

       

      A body quoting other body

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

                                             (in the dynamics of going through)

      props: mate / madera / creepy virgen / brillante paper

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

                                                                                                                TRT or Trans-Re-Training 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It electrifies transience (transitoriedad) and transgress

      It develops transferable skill between readingwritingmoving

      It is aware about non-transparent power structures

      It exercises the magnetization of transimagination

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

      Descansa para desacatar                                                  IT IS TRANSDUCCIÓN

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

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

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

                                                                                                 

                                                     

      This is its desing: 

                              TRT

                                    t t t ttttttttttttttttttt

    • NOT_index
    • the oficial 3rd block "les belles infidèles"
      03 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    • Block curated by Nicolas Galleazzi called   here the link 

       

      Openning week

      I didn´t prepare this presentation, I was exhauted. The day of my presentation I did the interview for the Pdh. The jury made me a very good question: "which Translation theory are you busy with?" 

      I started to look into that.

      In parallel, I was convinced about continue working on transtalion, but I asked myself: what I am producing with translation? Another "system"? What is doing the repetition of ballet history telling? And the genealogy of reggaeton? 

       

      [gallery columns="1" size="medium" link="none" ids="9215,9216,9217"]

       

       

      The 13th I had a  mentoring session with one of the person who changed my life/practise. The same person which whom I realised that translation were more important for me than just something temporary. She transforms me. 

      The 13 th May 2019 emerged TRT                                Transversal Research Training 

       

       

      Half Way Days

      A first essay focus on methodology.

      Transoceanic reading --> the aim of this practise question how do we access to reality, how do we inform each other.

                                              Is looking for transunderstanding of transrelationships.

      The exercise --> (by two) : read at news from your context // share it // try to find relationship (or imagine it)

       

       

      Another residence

      Unlearning Center // Friburg

      Three experiences:     

      -1-  Practising change of roles (I use to be a "follower") and here I am guiding Nicolas.

       

      -2- Training TRT

      Two dance courses focus on these pairs: touch and be touched // look at and being looked // resist and rest

      -3- The adoptee --> How can the one being seen influence how to be seen?

       

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

      In parallel, I was living in a.pass, practising, repeating, enjoying apass time, 

       

       

      End presentation - PAF (in the church)

      Sharing/exposing/defending/confronting TRT       

      [gallery columns="1" size="medium" ids="9240,9241,9242,9243,9244,9245"]

       

      Here you can find excerpt of the script

      For the newcommers. We can´t find PAF in Wikipedia.               (Diego, querés cebar mate?)

      This presentation is my End presentation in PAF. It symbolizes many finals. Because study in apass was a dream. It was a dream change completely of context. It was a dream built discourse and practice in relation to another context and again comeback to my home context. So this final of the APass times is for me also the final as student in Europ, the final of use Apass technology,  apass spaces, apass budget, apass mentors, apass travels, apass cooking together, apass talking together, apass openning half and end week, apass cleaning together. And I was very anguished or sad because this end. And then Nicolas told me that maybe I could see that as a start. Immediately I could remember my psychoanalyst saying me the same thing when I was preparing my travel to come here. He used to tell me: 
      • Acabar para empezar.    // Projection: if I cry please cry with me or just wait. I will stop-    Comme dans toute relation sexuelle
      • End. Final. Finish to start. Para empezar, commencer.
      • apass changed me. apass modifies me, apass transform me (I am reapiting this from my second block).            Grand écart 
      • TRANSVERSAL RESEARCH TRAINING is a device that serves to conceive my artistic practice. It is an umbrella with transversal tools.
      • Transversal à  is busy with issues that go through or cross different practices.
      • The transversal things are linked to problematize power structures, conditions of production (entertainment, shift north-south),                     questioning authorship, problematizing the way of relate to reality. Those concepts intersect in the training.
      • Training à is looking at endurance process engaging art/life. As any training, is linked to a way of face knowledge in process education. As any training, is looking for preparing and contextualizing practice focus on elasticity, concentration, balance and  coordination of different task.
      • Research à this word is so full of meaning. It seems like the word “research” gives to the frame of “Artistic Research” another status. More powerful, more legitimated, as the word “art” wasn´t enough or wasn’t already legitimated. So, that´s why TRT is also busy with the critic of the device called Artistic Research. I am here in front of a paradox: I am engaging with TRT as a device to do Artistic Research that is also criticizing the device of Artistic Research. Esto acarrea un gran peligro, this brings me to another problem, that I will address later.
      • Inspired by migration for privileges, TRT is a fiction in which I believe. And that is why we are in a church, because religions are fictions in which we believe. Somehow, TRT is my religion and it preaches confrontation between high and low culture thought translation. 
      • TRT has an Ecosystem of methodologies à  "more diversity more stable", interdependence, respect symbiosis practise (or plant) -territory, non-hierarchy, is bringing the ghost, or at least, it is inviting others. This methodology is based on transactivity practise: transoceanic reading  / Training transession / Trust in nothing (rest) / Translation addressing gender (exchange of role) in dance / Transdocument
      • Let´s say that TRT is looking at the FUTURE, is looking for the future, is looking through the future. It is trying to prepare better conditions for my work. What are the RESEARCH needs?
      • It offers services in the “transtructure". Services as the thinks that provides utility (satisfaction) to the consumer. In the literal understanding of intangible services offered by people. TRT offers the following services: method / piece / body practise/ a way of engage information.                                   And transtructure in Marxist terms. All of us are aware of difference between superstructure and infrastructure? Ok sorry Marx I don´t want to simplify you. Superstructure and infrastructure  - Just in order to simplify this, let´s imagine that infrastructure is the base of a house and superstructure is the roof. I am using now the same schema that we use to study Marxism.                Projection: the marxism house for explanaition (..........................)   infrastructure and structure (...)
      • But how did I arrive to this? So for the ones who don´t know too much what I did, I prepare this resume that summarizes all the key words or the important things and concept which I was busy with. - La gran pregunta es: qué persiste?   Trough those key words we can see some persistence --> Presentation of THE Artistic Research by Google Translator VOICE please listen HERE
      • Artistic research -->   You (-.............................) white and pretentious, wealthy middle class, coffee adict, MAC consumer, residences dependient, travelling all the time in the same little continent. This is for you, even tough is incomplete, bastard, super cheap. Because I think you need perreo: enterteiment mamita. Si necesitas reggaeton dale, sigue bailando mami no pares, acercate a mi pantalón dale, vamos a pegarnos como animales. Muevete a mi ritmo siente el magnetism. Feel the magnetism. You, symptom of artist going to legitimation in academia. I am so busy with you. I am so in love with you. I love you x4. Why? Because you gives us power. And power is so fantastic. Power makes thinks beauty. And beauty leads violence. And all of you, artistic research, you are so incredible amazing.   
      • I am so stuck in this obsession  / Everything is dark now - Everything is dark now - its blank its blank -You can comment This is the think - Responder sexy body Sexy body RESPONDER x 2  - This is from another old good song. YOU. Slippery, elitist, contradictory, indefinable. Why I am so addict to you? / You are afraid to travel because it contaminates. You are creating phd and a lot of position for what? You have the challenge of modify academia and what are you doing for that? Nothing, you are doing nothing. You are reproducing the same patriarchal standard of virility. Orden y progreso. Order insubordination submission.   subject object subject object  subject object subject object
      • I want to catch you, I want to get you, I want to be as you. I bless you here with a new name --> I will call you: ortgasmic research
      • Seductive, I must admit that I am so scared. Scared of not being heard by you, of not enter your circuit. Ortgasmic research: what happens if you don´t love me? 
      • And why this is so untranslable?                                Projection: the untranslable are motors, not obstacles     Temps de flèche
      • Affects of TRT --> (..............................................) Feed back is coming / Gracias

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

      A  FEED-BACK "emu", conmovido, casi sin palabras.

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

       

       

      End communication note:

      I choose to re-used the performance that I did at Kanal. That ´s why the presentation is called:

      "Pa-küru: 47 minutes of a bastard cheap lecture performance". 

       

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

      Interesting references: Donna Haraway last book / Marie Bardet about translation / Katie Briggs: This little art / The new code of conduct by Feminist Movement of Tango in Argentina / Sarah Amed (video) On complaint / Karen Barad: Transmaterialities / Sherry Simon again. 

    • NOT_index
    • Skip block aprovechando que no DEBO ir
      03 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    •  Block curated by Vladimir Miller. Settlement 14

      In apass we can "skyp a block". That´s mean that we can dispose more time for our research. I choose that. 

      In this block I will not talk about my presentations, because in fact I only made the first one. The second and third I did not present, because I was a skipping person. 

      However, three important things happened in this block: 

                                      -------> presentation at Kanal (click HERE) Centre Pompidou in the frame of Performatik 2019

                                        --------> a submission for a Phd that I didn´t get in. But it was fantastic to do it  (CLICK here)

                                            -------------> resting FROM a.pass (here CHICK please)

                                                    -----------> resting/training/enjoying IN a.pass, as you can in the video

       

       

    • NOT_index
    • 2nd block ... emboding translation
      03 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    •  

      HWD presentation - Photo from the "heaven"

       

      2nd Block, curated by Adva Zakai called MILIEUS, A.PASS MEETS SOL / SCHOOL OF LOVE     here the link

       

      Openning week

      The presentation focused on what I did in the 1st Block, my problems and how to open up the discussion around stereotype.

      I asked myself:  who I am and what is my position in this research? What is the relation between researcher and research? (because Yaguareté didn´t convinced me).

                       Methodological traps: am I becoming the thing that I am criticizing? // how to resist? // How to deal with the distance of context?

      Where I want to go?

      What can I add to the critical discussion?
      And how to bring Latin-american authors?  

      Is this Artistic Research? // Do I have a (THE) question of my research?

       

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

      Travel to Venice and what I want to remember from the Swamp School: I always expect to much of neoliberal events. The “gondoleros” have been using the same t-shirt (striped, a rayas, style "breton" T-shirt) since when? There are Madonnas everywhere in Italy.  I saw a italian misa. 

      I visited for first time the Biennal of Architecture. It was horrible. I saw in the Biennal an event about students in the Turkish Pavillion. I saw the presentation of a girl. She was the only women with velo talking between men. Her presentation it was about a refugee campus. She presented how refugees people build their houses in this campus: in vertical sense. Because there is no space to the side, there is a delimited territory. That´s why they built to up in generations.

      Also I saw belgium humour in it pavillion. It was important. 

      And "the common"? This travel was about that. I didn´t see too much "the common". Who relates to apass? Why are we here? What is doing "School of love" here? 

      I had a great time, I went to the beach and drank several aperol spritz.

      If the common is the one of Swamp School, I don´t want to be part of it. 

       

       

       

       

      Half way days

       

      The first time that I presented my obsession with translation HERE

       

      Why?

      How did I arrive to do translation?

      Because in my daily life I needed all the time Google Translator

      In order to bring this need for communication, I started to translate.

      Since then I have tried several forms of translation.
      - I became obsessed - 

      La necesidad y dependencia de usar un interlocutor para mi comunicación determinó mi práctica artística. 

      I started to trying it from BALLET to REGGAETON 

      How? 
      The firt thing that I did it was I look at ballet vocabulary, and how one WORD has a meanniing IN - FOR a gesture or movement.

       

      End presentation - PAF

      I tried the same structure of HWD. Here are excert of the script:

       

      Zero moment - Soft hanging out → ejercicio del eje/ warming up. 15 min

      Voice recorded with Google Translator: Hello everybody. hello, this is a Zero moment - Soft hanging out x 3 -          Please rest. lie down. Use the blankets in space. Could you like to warming up with me? Please inhale and exhale let the blood fall. You can follow me. Rebounds a bit, jump, move a bit the space. Shake out the wrists, each leg. Flexion in your knees and please not change of position. changing fingers. Give a punch with weight change and translate in the space. you can exhale and release your voice with a sound. You can be violent.

       

      Un première momento de explanation/transmission of what I am doing

      This is a translation of what I am doing at apass in this moment. And what is apass for me.

      First. When I got to apass I got excited because I saw in the university with two Macs. There are microphones that work, projectors, cameras. There is one person who helps us with the technique, another with residence papers, another who explains many times about the reimbursements. There is, above all, a general coordinator that contains the situation and who checks the ball. There is also a person who, through his artistic practice, heals the block, and this person will be criticized.

      Instead, I come from a university where projectors do not run, that does not consider cables, that does not provide space for rehearsal, that does not provide printers with endless paper.

      I feel rich in this context. I realized that it's a choice to work with concepts like trash bastards, simultaneity residue.

      Here we spend a lot of paper, it is printed in simple, a lot. We have an open library.

      Apass, is for me, even with ugly smell and smell of rat, a paradise that support our work.

      We even have a key and alarm to enter when we want,

      We have Mohamed who is the celebrant and sings when he cleans. With Mohamed I practice my French. We can buy books, we can pay mentors, we can travel with money from the university for what our project needs. People in apass, rotten food left in the refrigerator or in the closet.

      All this for what? To criticize you, me. BUT: what is critically? And who am I to criticize?  

      So that we focus on Artistic Research, which is a kind of legitimizing process that we are running after. These are our beautiful production conditions. Fuck Artistic Research. YOU. European, white and pretentious. Synthon of artist going to legitimation in academia. YOU. Slippery, elitist, contradictory, indefinable. We love you. Why? Because it gives us power. Why I came here to legitimate my practise? 

      Sometimes, really, I don’t know and I am thinking in become electrician.

      This place, Performing Arts Forum es muy emocionante. Xavier Le Roy went through here and it makes me very nervous to know that I am writing a thesis around the author's figure and that here he created part of the Product of Other Circumstances, nine years ago.

      About this work. This about translations. In effect, this text originally written in Spanish and translated by Google translator into English.

      I've become better using the translator, because you have to be specific and most of the time google is not that smart. Above all, you have to write short sentences.

      This deuxième moment of exposition / transpose of what I am doing tries to explain that I arrived to translation because it became a necessity of my daily life and artistic production. I must admit it was a little difficult to be engage with the translations. I feel scared for sharing this material with you, because are not complete, not virtuous, and quite arbitrary. As I already said, this translations are defined as cheap, bastard, slut or trash translations.

      And this way of production is recurrent in all my work. And when you realise your logic production, what is supporting your practise, why are you taking your aesthetic, ethic and political decision, your influences, your history, your interest, you become powerful.

      And now I understand why I'm here and I want that legitimation.

      Lilia told me at our first coordination session that people leave fortalecida. strengthened

      With the help of my mentors, I develop this format that above all, brings me closer to my background. In fact, the study of dance techniques, the reflection on performativity, the considerations around the relation movement and word and the pedagogical questioning about what the experience of a work of art implies, constitute a fundamental part of me. work before apass.

      I'm trying to not have the performance pressure, as Vladimir recommended, and to work with the fact that translations are not perfect, in Femke's words. With their help, and also Adva, Lilia and Kristien from he first block.

      Thanks all this people and of course you that are supporting my practise. And supporting me, you are changing me.

      Finally and as you already know, derniene moment, or troisieme partie, of mediation, transformation that is feed-back integrated into practice. I'll introduce it better later.

       

      At this moment I did the translations

      From Reggaeton to Cunningham Technique.

      From Graham Technique to Reaggaeton.

      And from Contemporary dance (Arenal) to Argentine folklore (Escondido and gato).

      3 - Este es el troisième momento experiencing/mediation/transformation of what I am doing.

       I invite you to take the same position of support, do 1 or to rotations and then change of partner. For HWD we did this but related to the untranslatable. For this occasion, I invite you to talk about what are the conditions of production that you can recognize are supporting you, that affects your work. in order to produce motivation or limitations or more. Or even, if you can recognize how and why are you busy with the things you're busy with.

      Please take the position. DO IT.

      Before to talk [ALWAYS] change of role. Last thing, also you can change of partner, of way of support each other, or even change of level, but not go to the floor.  Yes?

      Again if you need paper or write, there is here.

      I start but then I will try to keep silence. I am busy with privileges, pleasure and violence. So, as you see, privileges related to conditions of production, interiorization of violence through the techniques of dance. and pleasure as a source or force with potential disruptive.

       

      Here you can see some photos 

       

      In December 2018 I visited Argentina . I went to Buenos Aires, Fiske Menuco, Villarrica, and Santiago de Chile. 

       

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

      Important reading: Shery Simon (Gender in translation) / the matherials writen by me in Spanish about dance and text / phD Tesis by Eugenia Cadus about Dance History in Argentina / Bleshi Lleri / Poliamory / Decolonial approach (Mignolo).

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

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

      (this gift is made with images of the block)

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

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

      Abstract

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

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

      Description 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Openning week

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

       

      Half way days  --> LONGER CRI and POCKET CRI

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

       

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

      4 min to propose / choose / set up               

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

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

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

      THOSE PHOTOS are only public for documentation. 

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

       

       

      Longer CRI
      Session II

      Invitation à The only proposition was bring Latin clothes.

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

       

      People were at the garden of where I live.

      It was a sunny day. 

      They marked in maps different places related to latin culture. 

      Here some pics

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

      In my room: 

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

      Here you can follow the lyrics

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

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

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

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

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

      short skirts skin shortsshort skirts skin shorts flat belly the motorcycle

      subjects objects x5

      or you just don't care

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

      Sexy ultimate sexy sexy ultimatelatino/latina
      gasoline spreads

      i find your spanish difficult to understand x2

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

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

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

       

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

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

       

      --

      End presentation - PAF

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

      Lyrics of Reggaeton 2 

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

      Fly movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

      Somehow, I fell into my own trap.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        

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

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

       

    •  

      I like to think that objects decide the place where they want to be or with who they want to be. 

      That they could move until they find the good place or the good person to leave close by. 

      As an adoptee, I gave a yellow hamac that I get in Brazil last October. There were two main reasons for me to borrow this hamac to someone else : * I tried to find a place for it at home but (also because I don’t have any outside place) I never took the use of it. Was it because this place represents the laziness ? the place where I could rest and read ? (In relation to that, I share the link of this article called A woman's greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself » in the Guardian) 

      This laziness to me is connected to my research with club travail but also to the fantasy of the research which make me come to a.pass (a place where I could dream, read, think, share and…  have time) . And because the block would happen outside I thought it would be nice to have it there in the garden. * the second reason is that I had this hamac in Brazil and that this travel there was really important to me and open a field of questions about the places I (feel) am privileged or not. So I thought in this international context of a.pass it would be a nice object to give in term of many subjects. I gave my adoptee with only one demand : that the object will come back to me at the end in one piece. 

      And then the hamac moved to Rui’s place. 

      But I don’t think he hang once the hamac at his place. He used the hamac in a presentation where he would film Tamar Lilia and Maurice as a group inside the garden, with Tamar trying to hang it somewhere. He told me that he wanted to hang the hamac because we wouldn't have any place to be confortable in the garden. But Rui explained me that the main thing for him was to think about this laziness. In the other movie that Rui did with Caterina in a.pass building, the first indications were about create empty space in an empty space, so in a way laziness related to the non-indications/ improvisations / non-rules that Rui. 

      Together with Cate and Rui, we talked about how laziness is connected to a bad behavior. And how from a country to another it doesn’t contain the same kind of guiltiness.  To the clishé of the South American people who are very lazy  rest a lot : clishé/ Disney character who is Brazilian is very slow and lazy  (ze carioca) 

      Like we are  «  Lost in time » (expression in Brazilian) 

      And then the hamac became a vidéo 

      That Rui send to Caterina.  The video of the improvisation in the garden. 

      (cf Pictures of Rui movie)  Caterina said :  « I was the only one looking at this movie ». 

      Actually Caterina received two videos:

      * the one she was inside (in a.pass building) 

      * the one of the hamac with Tamar 

      Caterina explained us that hamac as an object didn’t catch her so much / it was a bit abandoned 

      More the editing process / how the edition build focus, narrative, story-telling

      How much is this value of the edition by contrast with the laziness of the action

      You don’t do so much but you get a lot because of the framing

      I did a video for the presentation

      I was a bit guilty of not taking attention at the hamac

      I looked at the history of the hamac / images of the slavers using the hamac / symbol of power / it has a political symbol : who has the privileged to be carry in the hamac /// 

      There is hamac inside in our body ! the organes of the stomach are protected by thousand of little hamacs inside our body who car pour body / the transversal abdominal 

      To support the organs, the peritoneal folds that surround the viscera form not only a hammock, but a multitude of small hammocks, so that each organ is solidly attached to its neighbors and to the different walls. The transverse mesocolon envelops the subdiaphragmatic organs. This “hammock structure” supports the static of the viscera while allowing variations in volume, weight and displacement. This is how this “viscera” system adapts to significant variations in volume during pregnancy. This type of anatomical organization is possible thanks to the tissue continuity of the peritoneum.The peritoneum confers to the organs surrounding deformability qualities while maintaining its shape thanks to the collagen fibers it contains.The role of the mesos can be compared to that of a belt , which, while holding the organ, provides a range of measured movements around its reference position.

      Our conversation about the symbolic of the hamac : 

      Hamac not just as a lazy place but also used by poor people in Brazil 

      J’ai acheté ce hamac 50 euros / 50 hamac / 15 dollars / 18 euros 

      70 % de la population de la campagne dort en hamac, 30 % en ville. 

      Quand il y a un hamac et un lit dans la maison, dans 9 cas sur 10, à la saison chaude c'est uniquement l'homme qui l'utilise pour y dormir la nuit ; le hamac procure un couchage plus frais qu'un matelas.

      Les Européens découvrent le hamac au xve siècle grâce aux voyages de Christophe Colomb.

      Quelques dessins expliquent la manière de se coucher dans un hamac ; Raymond Breton, un missionnaire français aux carabes, un dans un dictionnaire caraïbe-français rapporte : « Keyeyecoua tiem larangon callinago, tichati balanagle », ce qui signifie « Le sauvage se couche en rond et en travers, le Français étendu et en longueur ». Là est la principale raison pour laquelle le hamac fut modifié en occident avec l'ajout de barres en bois à chaque extrémité.Les Latinos américains n'utilisent jamais de barres en bois sur leur hamacs.

      And the hamac came back to my place and I found a place for me. 

      Now I would like to invite Rui and Cate to my place and we continue this discussion about laziness, emptiness and what does it mean to make places for things. May be the next movie of Rui can happen in the hamac. 

       

       

      Mathilde > Rui > Caterina

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

      Readings  : 

      Jonathan Crary  24/7 

      The radical plan to save the planet by working less, Robert Pollin, Vice 

      Le droit à la paresse, Lafargue 

      Une apologie des oisifs, Robert Louis Stevenson 

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Writing into becoming water an instant conversation
      16 July 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Marialena Marouda, Christina Stadlbauer and Nicolas Geleazzi
    • Writing into becoming water

      Imagining a two-day boat trip on the Dilje-Leuven Canal:

      M.M.: A brief introduction into my practice: I see performance as a practice of inhabiting a specific ecosystem. Currently, I am focusing on the oceanic ecosystem, one that can only in part be inhabited by human beings.
      Concerning the ocean, the question that interests me most is: What is my relation to the ocean, and how can this relation be described? What are the affects or elements that make it up? And how can those affects be performed and thus communicated? My focus lies on creating affective (an)archives. i.e. archives that communicate relational experiences and knowledges of the ocean.

      NG: What makes the ocean for you to the ideal ecosystem to be performatively inhabited?

      M.M.: Well, I feel very attracted to it physically and mentally. And it also proposes a different way of thinking and being than land proposes. So I want to explore those. But it is not an "ideal" ecosystem because it is actually quite difficult to inhabit it physically. Very little is known of the ocean compared to ecosystems on land.

      C.S.: For me, it is less the ocean than the water that triggers the idea of inhabiting it in a performative sense. Water is everywhere, in us, around us, we are made up of water - and the element is so common that we don't think about it much, as we live our lives. To give it a moment of special attention and to engage with it as a practice is like a process of becoming aware of something that we deal with every day, and that is so at the basis of our existence.
      The ocean was extremely attractive to me when I was a child. I used to spend my entire summer holidays at the Mediterranean Sea, and I spent most of these months inside of the water. It was the experience of being submersed, totally enveloped by the salty moving body that intrigued me. The smell, the temperature, the consistency (compared with the bathtub water or the swimming pool water) of the Mediterranean became like a place where I would feel at home for me.
      Today, much older, I don't have this urge anymore to submerse in the sea. I'm much more respectful of the gigantic body of water and enjoy more contemplating it by staying at its side, and not going in.

      N.G.: Probably, I could see the ocean in any water. Looking deep into the glass before I take a sip of delicious spring water - e.g. at Schwarzsee in the Alps - I see the sea, I see into the history of these molecules and can follow them through my body into my pee, into the ground into the flower, into the sunray into the rain into the river into the stream into the whole flow that cyclically generates life. Of course, on these waves, we perform our lives and are performed by them. In the case of water, the conditions it creates, the landscape it carves, I'm not sure if I inhabit and perform within or if it's not the other way, the water inhabits me and performs through me.

      M.M.: I think different bodies of water work differently, affect the human body in a different way. So for me, the ocean as I recently encountered it Portugal, for example, the force that it has, is very different from my own experience of the sea in the Mediterranean in Greece.

      C.S.: Can you tell more about the performative aspect that intrigues you with water or the ocean?

      M.M.: Performance is for me the way we choose to enter into relation with the body of water that we encounter. So for example, if you say that you want to be engulfed by the sea, the salty and continuously moving water, I am interested to know more about this sensation that you have and how it could be performed now, for example, in the conditions in this room.

      C.S.: The most intriguing part that comes to mind at once is the aspect of being carried. And of course, we have this much more on the earth. The earth is solid and carries us all the time - something that we also take for granted, and forget about it, as we sit on this chair.
      In the water, especially the salty - thick - water, the buoyancy is a fantastic characteristic that gives me a sense of trust inside this ever-moving deep sea.

      M.M.: Yes, I recognize this feeling! What I would propose now on the trip is to explore how this sensation could be reconstructed through performance or how this sensation could influence what you are researching artistically.

      C.S.: First association is STAGE DIVING!! But that is not very serious, of course!

      M.M.: What is stage diving?

      N.G.: The tricky thing might be, that the sensation is part of the ecosystem which should be performed. But probably that's exactly the chance. To perform WITHIN something not ON something (like a stage). If we take performance as a 'doing' not as a 'representing' it becomes very interesting, I think. Performance in an economic sense is an act of domination. To 'perform' witing a system, in respons-able relation to it, is something very different. The notion of being performed while performing is there very applicable.

      C.S.: Stage diving is to let yourself be carried by the masses of listeners /audience standing in front of the stage when you dive onto their uplifted hands. It is a big test of trust!

      M.M.: Aaaaahh yes, the rockstar thing. We could try it.

      CS: Now, I have to think of VariousArtists - whose performance often has to do with experimenting with what he eats, drinks, how much he sleeps, or exercises. So a 40-day water fast could be a very embodied experience of what water does. And very cleansing, as well. Another important aspect of water, of course - the CLEANING!
      In that sense, Trudo makes his body the ecosystem and the stage at the same time.

      M.M.: We can make a list of those aspects here, during this conversation? I was planning to do this also on the boat trip. Now we can imagine the ocean and that we are travelling on it. What sensation does it give us?

      1. Being engulfed/ buoyancy
      2. Sense of cleansing
      3. ...

      C.S.: There is something that happens to the sinuses, also. And to the sense of smell that I find very interesting. In the ocean, of course, you smell the salt and the "sea" - like algae and dead fish and live fish and all the rest of it. But there is also something happening to the nose, in my case. It gets full of water and clogged, and at the same time, it cleans itself.
      What aspect of sensation is that?!

      M.M.: How would you name it? If you had to use one word? Smell? Or salt-smell?

      N.G.: For this, it would have been perfect to be on the boat. I'm sure we would find another answer than here!

      C.S.: There is something that is inside and outside at the same time. It is as if the ocean gets INSIDE of my body through the nose. It is the one opening that lets the water in. So, it is not the smell, I think - it is more the permeability of my body to the body of water.
      Of course, also the skin gets wrinkled and like a prune, that it keeps the water out. On the contrary, it may even lose a bit of my body water instead of letting the ocean in, because I always get very thirsty when I spend a long time in the water.

      M.M.: Permeability is a wonderful word for it! There is this concept of the Hypersea, that was put forth by two biologists, Mark and Dianna McMenamin. They understand all living organisms on land as "lakes" that communicate with each other by on the one hand keeping the water in and on the other being permeable and passing water from one organism to the other. It's as if all organisms on land form a deterritorialized sea that they carry in their bodies.

      N.G.: The inside/outside is actually rather a human perspective. Nothing wrong with this, but from the water perspective we are simply a tunnel! A place of passage, and probably of transformation. Perhaps that's the most real performance we do. Being a catalyst for waters. WE ARE THE CANAL!!

      C.S.: Now, I have to think of homoeopathic medicine, somehow. The transformation of the water inside our body tunnel.
      A tangent.

      N.G.: btw. What do you think is the boat a stage ? or rather an ecosystem within an ecosystem?

      C.S.: the boat is a very artificial object for me that allows us to traverse the body of water, to be on it without getting wet, to not engage with the water but only with the surface of the water, and there is an aspect of dominance in boats also. You are always (unless you are going under) on top of the water and you don't get wet. It is an object that divides you from the water. You feel it but indirectly only. The most stringent aspect of water - that it is WET - is lost. You don't get wet.

      M.M.: You can get very wet on a boat! Have you ever been on a boat when there are strong wind and big waves? You get soaked.
      For me, the boat is a machine that allows us to enter into relation with the vastness of the sea, that otherwise, we would not be able to approach. But yes, it also has an aspect of domination. Without boats, no "discoveries", no colonization, but also no communication, no fishing, no trade. It's a complex place to be, the boat. It also makes for a very specific surface on which to move and urges a particular behaviour regarding the human bodies that inhabit it.

      N.G.: We have this image of the sailors, that try to master the waters with their boat, fighting against the waves and storms, overcoming the overwhelming forces of nature. Like Ishmael fighting Moby-Dick the wale.

      C.S.: I have an aunt who cannot swim. She would go on a boat, though. But she would not go directly into the water. Only where it is very shallow.
      And Jonas who found himself inside the whale. How did he end up there again? That was an ecosystem inside of the water, and then he was inside the belly, and that was a bit like land again. Like a membrane that allowed him to be inside the water for a long time, but without touching the water. Was it so?

      M.M: So you would prefer a whale belly to a boat?

      C.S.: that is difficult to answer. I don't have a clear image of a whale belly...

      N.G.: Of course! Even in this nutshell, I dream of the big monsters.

      M.M.: So we add 3. permeability, 4. whale-belly...

      N.G.: Or let's say permea-belly.

      C.S.: And now, the ice. What about ice. Is this ocean? But solid, you can walk on it. And it totally changes the experience of being in/on the water.
      Or under it...?

      M.M.: Yes definitely, ice is also ocean. Just in a different form. With a whole different set of conditions. I talked to a glaciologist recently, and he said there is the category of sea ice and the ice shelf, that are both ice formations on the sea, which differ from the big glaciers that are usually land formations.

      N.G.: For an ice bear it might be something different than for a penguin, or for the wind. For the ice bear it is (more and more ) a boat!

      C.S.: With ice I find it confusing. Do I remember right that for a long time it was not known if the North Pole is solid or if the South Pole is solid - land or sea. Ice confuses things a bit, I find...

      M.M.: Then lets end in this confusion? I think its quite appropriate.

      NG: True!

       
    • performative publishing
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Salad Christina Stadlbauer
      03 July 2019
      posted by: Christina Stadlbauer
    • case of: Christina Stadlbauer
    • Salad

      Une salade, c’est pas comme une tomate

      We went on an excursion to Fribourg in Switzerland. I took my little purse where I keep Swiss Francs from my last visit, but noticed that it contained only a few coins. In the train we were speculating how much we would have to pitch in for food and that we should eat rather rice and beans to keep the budget under control. Switzerland is expensive, for Europeans.

      The experience at the Unlearning Centre, however, was totally unexpected. We had just arrived, when a car came, with crates of food – freegan. Martin Schick had organized a delivery for us and we found ourselves with more than we could handle. All for free and all (almost) expired.

      We tried to fit everything into the two large fridges at the NeighborHub, but did not manage.

      Meat, sausages, vegetables, herbs, juices, ice tea, yoghurt and loads of green salad. That first day we got 2 crates of salad – maybe 20 heads of lettuce. Great! Fresh food!

      We ate a lot of salad. We ate salad at lunch and for dinner, snacked on it in between. But the salad did not end. Some days later, the car delivered another load to us. There was again salad, new salad. This time, some heads of lettuce, but also some that was already washed and torn into pieces, wrapped in plastic. And some salad hearts, wrapped in plastic film. We were still trying to deal with the 2 crates from the first day. Nicolas made salad soup. We had it warm and iced, with salad on the side. At every meal, there was a salad bowl that could never be finished. One evening, we were high on salad. We could not talk about anything else anymore, could not stop laughing. Mathilde composed a song about salad. “Une salade, c’est pas comme une tomate”.

       

      There was also more meat than we could eat, there were bags and bags of herbs that slowly started to rot in the fridge, there were litres of bottled liquid whole egg and many packkages of rice pudding, different flavours. There was an opening of a new atelier – a big space with machinery – and it was rented for free There was a dinner perfomance at the Belluard festival and the wine bottles kept on being opened and poured into glasses at no extra cost. Generosity came upon us from all sides. It was amazing.

      All our lives, we have been hearing about scarcity. At home, we learned how to shut the doors to keep the heat in, we used second hand clothes and we were instructed how to not waste food. At school, we learned the scarcity of natural resources. We all know about the scarcity of money on our bank accounts. But what happened there in Switzerland in June 2019, was abundance. Suddenly, we were confronted with abundance and we had to deal with it. We had to unlearn how we are used to handle scarcity. And this allowed me to observe many interesting things.

      I became obsessed. It went automatically. I could not allow myself to throw food away and invented dishes that consumed lots of parsley. I also ate more than I needed, just because I could not see the food being trashed. My attempt was not successful. Lots of stuff that had gotten a second life – saved from the trash of the supermarket could not be saved by us and went on the compost pile.

      The Fribourg trip and unlearning for me meant to look into abundance as a concept and the salad became my fulcrum.

       

    • 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.

    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • RESEARCH CENTER Cycle 1 Block III Co-Curated by Pierre Rubio
      29 April 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Adrijana Gvozdenović, Sina Seifee, Isabel Burr Raty, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Antye Guenther
    • a.pass/ ZSenne ArtLab
    • 29 April 2019
    • 28 July 2019
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • RESEARCH CENTER Cycle 1 Block III

       

      The a.pass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced research and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at a.pass.

      This summer block marks the end of the first cycle of the a.pass Research Center. After being initiated as a platform for individual research trajectories, the Research Center shifted to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for a period of one year. The last block of the cycle 2018/2019  is co-curated by the group of Associated Researchers. For a three week period - June 24 / July 14 - the work will be developed at Zsenne ArtLab.

      We are happy to work with the following Associate Researchers:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.

      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 master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      Rob Ritzen 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.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.

      Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.
      Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.
      At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aesthetics.

      Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practice dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, post-humanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.

      For this co-curated current block the Associate Researchers will be supported by Pierre Rubio as the Research Center curator.

      Pierre Rubio (France, 1962) works as an artist, dramaturge, and independent researcher. His practice at large aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of individuation by using displacement and speculation as a methodological principle. He often uses ‘as if’s’ processes -alone or in collaboration- to investigate technologies, cosmologies and ideologies of artistic and research practices in relation to the production of subjectivity. Rubio is currently co-curator of the postgraduate artistic research institute a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies_a platform for artistic research)

    •  

      MON 7th

      14:00 meeting

      17:00 cleaning, emptying the collective space

      19:00 dinner

       

      TUE 8th

      10:00 Materials and Tools

      WED 9th

      10:30 Scheduling

      11:00 Katinka van Grokum, a.pass opening week presentation: SketchUp as an Interior

      12:00 Caterina Mora: Translating Ballet to Regaton

      13:00 Living Together: organising cooking cleaning up

      14:00 Research and Space (conversation with new a.pass researchers and LM and VM)

      16:00 Ezster Nemethi TBC

       

      THU 10th

      9:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      10:30 Scheduling

      11:00 Deborah Birch, a.pass opening week presentation: Caves II. Re-entry

      14:00 Katinka van Grokum: Trash Talk, recycling in Belgium 

      16:00 Chloe Chignell, a.pass opening week presentation: Choreographic Strategies for Writing

      17:00 Christina Stadlbauer, a.pass opening week presentation: Sharpening the Narrative

       

      FRI 11th

      12:00 Signe Frederiksen,  a.pass opening week presentation

      Cooking: Amelie van Elmst

      15:30 Maurice Meewisse, a.pass opening week presentation

      17:00 Meri Ekola, Light Observations

      18:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton) with  a guest dancer

       

      SAT 12th

      SUN 13th

       

      MON 14th

      9:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      11:30 Diego Echegoyen, a.pass opening week presentation

      12:30 Goda Palekaitė,  a.pass opening week presentation: Legal Implications of a Dream

       "Legal Implications of a Dream" is the title of Goda's research and her solo exhibition which just opened in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Let us think of settlement as an occupied space which materializes as a consequence of a collective dream.

      14:00 Scaffolding Introduction (how to and safety instructions)

      16:00 Human Condition Reading Club part I

       

      TUE 15th

      10:00 Scheduling

      10:30 Outside Walk (Mathilde Maillard) 1h

      12:00 Alex Arteaga, Input: Architecture of Embodiment and destabilizing an architectural object

      Disclosing an Architectural Object is an artistic research framework that allows an approach to a twofold object of inquiry: the architectural organization of material and the cognitive agency of aesthetic media, practices and artifacts.

      14:00 Meeting with Michele Meesen and Joke Liberge: organisational, budget, etc for first block researchers (end 16:00)

      16:00 Laura Pante, apass opening week presentation: On Metaphorology

      18:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

       

      WED 16th

      10:00 Mathilde Maillard:  a.pass opening week presentation: Work Club / Club Travail

      11:00 Peggy Pierrot, Do You Belong ?

      Artistic activities are shaped by continuous trips, international workshops and residencies abroad. In this context, each work session operates like a colonization of some people space, means and life by the artistic presence and vision. The artist settles in different environments, whether his work aim to relate directly or not at all to the different creation contexts. In this international scene of seesaw motion, how can one’s cultivate his sense of belonging, of beeing from, of being rooted, without a nationalist content, but without being a post modern nomad of emptiness?  How do YOU, settler, react to this constraints (langage, food, bodies, papers...).  What do you take or leave ? What do you gain from this artistic nomadism ? Do you belong somewhere ? We’ll question these assumptions through an insight on the work of  the artist Pierre Creton.

      14:00 Flavio Rodrigo, a.pass opening week presentation: Sensations, Paths and Rituals of Work with the Creative Imagination (establishing the initial relations of my research). Please bring you mobile phone and headphones, you will need them during the presentation.

      18:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

       

      THU 17th

      9:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      11:00 Elen Braga: The World to Come

      If we have a history-line, what are the most important events of the last 30 years of human life that come to our mind? Is there a connection between those events and the context of our artistic research? What are the symptoms of those events and how to prophesize the world to come? We will start the exercise using the allegory of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. And by creating symbolic images, we will try to transform those events into an allegory of apocalypse. "And in the days of these people shall we set up a world, which will never be destroyed?"

      12:00 Nassia Fourtouni, a.pass opening week presentation: Neither Distance nor Empathy

       

      FRI 18th

      9:30 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      13:00 Philipp Gehmacher, mentor's presentation (skype) 

      14:00 Amelie van Elmbt, a.pass opening week presentation: Dreaming Walls

      15:00 Scheduling next week

      15:05 Space and Scenography review and preview w. Vladimir

       

      SAT 19th

      SUN 20th

       

      MON 21st

      13:00 Experimental Film Scratching Workshop

      14:30 Muslin Brothers, a.pass opening week presentatio

      16:00 Human Condition Reading Club part II

       

      TUE 22nd

      9:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      12:00 Engaging the Spectacle: Aspects of Contemporary Ideology, a Brazilian Case Study.

      Roberto Winter shares his thoughts and artistic practice - with an introduction and lunch prepared by Adrijana Gvozdenovic.

      "Our time is critical, we seem to be finishing the transition to a new era (and maybe we already have), call it the "New Dark Ages", "Hypernormal", "Semiocapitalist", or "Capitalist realist", under the empire of total spectacle, we are ruled by images. [...]  Art’s potential role in untangling the situation is privileged and fragile: if it can resort to fiction, it must also deal with fake news; if it can resort to a long tradition of making and understanding images, it must also deal with the emptiness of memes and social networks; if it can resort to aesthetics, it must understand the new role of images and the obligation to (self-)design. The question remains: how to engage in the production of things that could make the current state of affairs graspable, explicit, unbearable and, eventually, help lead to their overcoming?"

       

      14:30 Mathilde Maillard and Flavio Rodrigo, Lets Talk about Brasil

       

      WED 23rd

      10:00 We meet at KANAL Centre Pompidou to have a look at the space for the upcoming Unsettled Study. Afterwards we will talk about the space and the process of the block

      14:00 Bauhaus and School, Input from Moritz Frischkorn + Heike Bröckerhoff

      Based on their own research for an artistic project, Heike and Moritz will give a short introduction about the Bauhaus as an art-academy. It seems as if the very idea of an art-school as a "total work of art", based on principles of performance, inter-disciplinarity and process-orientation, where one invests oneself fully, combines technology and art, and thus manufactures a new subject for a democratic society was invented at the Bauhaus. We would like to discuss how to relate to those ideas and concepts from a contemporary point of view. 

       

      THU 24th

      10:00 Lilia Mestre: On Scoring, To Forge Temporary Communities

      11:30 Alex Arteaga: On my Intervention in/with the Settlemen

      20:00 Cine Club: Time Indefinite

       

      FRI 25th

      11:00 Settlement review and block organisation (whats next?) w. Vladimir

       

       

       
    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • RESEARCH CENTER CYCLE 1 BLOCK II CURATED BY ALEX ARTEAGA
      08 January 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Adrijana Gvozdenović, Sina Seifee, Isabel Burr Raty, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Antye Guenther
    • a.pass
    • 07 January 2019
    • 31 March 2019
    • RESEARCH CENTER CYCLE 1 BLOCK II

      The a.pass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced artistic research and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at a.pass. 

      The block II in the cycle 18/19 is focused on two intertwined fields of inquiry: aesthetic research practices in the medium of written language and architecture understood as intervention in the emergence of environments through construction and related practices.

      For the period of September ‘18 to August ‘19 we are happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.

      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 master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      Rob Ritzen 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.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.

      Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.

      Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.

      At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aesthetics.

      Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practice dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, post-humanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.

      For the current block the Associate Researchers will be supported by Alex Arteaga as the Research Center curator and further on by Pierre Rubio for cycle 18/19 block 3.

      Alex Arteaga’s research integrates aesthetic and philosophical practices relating to aesthetics, the emergence of sense, meaning and knowledge, and the relationships between architecture and the environment through phenomenological and enactivist approaches.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • the Lecture, the Performance workshop with philipp gehmacher
      03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • 04 February 2019
    • 08 February 2019
    • the Lecture, the Performance

       

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

      All in all the lecture performance combines notions of speaking with notions of showing, doing, and demonstrating, side by side or all at once. It seems to be a format where something needs to be told, literally. All of the above however in relationship to physical actions or the presentations of any kind of materials. As much as at the lecture, the doing, mapping out, constructing and building with materials or any medial visualizations will also be looked at. What does the performance allow as a time based procedure to present and make available besides verbal utterance? The performative seems to lie as much in the words as in the objects and thoughts. We’ll find out.

       

       

      Philipp Gehmacher
      Choreographer, dancer and visual artist, lives and works in Vienna. Gehmacher’s artistic works implement the body and language as forms of expression, erected and institutional space, as well as object and sculpture. Philipp Gehmacher has presented these works between black box and white cube internationally at theatre festivals and in exhibition spaces. Recently, among others at Museum der Moderne Salzburg, steirischer herbst (Graz), the Biennale of Sydney, Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival (Helsinki), Leopold Museum and mumok in Vienna, and Griffith University Art Museum in Brisbane and Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. Philipp Gehmacher is a mentor and teacher at P.A.R.T.S and ISAC in Brussels, HZT in Berlin, DOCH in Stockholm, Impulstanz Vienna and the University of Salzburg.

       

      philippgehmacher.net

      more on the lecture performance series Walk+Talk:

      http://sarma.be/pages/Anthology_walk+talk

    • Newsletter Setemberr 2018 13 November 2018
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

        
       

       

       

      READ MORE 


      A.PASS MEETS SOL / SCHOOL OF LOVE

      From September till November 2018

      A curatorial proposition by Adva Zakai 

      School Of Love will start a flirt with each other, develop a relationship and hopefully make (produce) love.

      SOL is a collective platform that was initiated some years ago*, inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world. SOL is practiced through regular meetings, but follows no curriculum. Instead, it develops a spontaneous program through the presence and interest of its participants.

      Now SOL is here, at a.pass, with a call to the participants to engage with their artistic researches through love itself. a.pass and SOL will get together, without knowing ahead what is going to happen, but with the trust that everything we live outside of SOL – artistic researches, experiences and desires – will manifest themselves inside SOL in a way we could not imagine elsewhere. And once this happens, maybe the difference between art and love will not be so obvious anymore..

      SOL will meet every Tuesday at a.pass and is open to anyone interested to take part. All welcome! A special introduction day into SOL: Tuesday 3rd september 10h – 18h.

      STUDY DAYS and WORKSHOPS – Non-a.pass participants who are interested to join – please contact a.pass lilia@apass.be or Adva advazakai@gmail.com

      READ MORE  


      a.pass Research Center

       

      This September marks the beginning of the first one-year-cycle of the apass Research Center. After being initiated as a plattform for the individual reasearch trajectories of the apass Associate Researchers, starting this year the Research Center is shifting to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for a shared one-year period.

      The apass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced reseach and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at apass.

      For the period of September ‘18 to August ‘19 we are happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the apass Research Center:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.

      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 master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      Rob Ritzen 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.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.

      Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.

      Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.

      At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aestetics.

      Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practise dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, posthumanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.

      For the current block the Associate Researchers will be supported by Vladimir Miller as the Research Center curator and further on by Alex Arteaga for block I/19 and Pierre Rubio for Block II/19.

      Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturge. His practice aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of spatial production within ad-hoc groups and institutional environments by using fragility as a building principle.

       

       
       
       
       
       

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

       

       

    • 1. TEXT FROM THE PUBLICATION OF THE END COMMUNICATIONS OF SEPTEMBER 2018

      The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show / Geert Vaes

      Kiosk @ Elizabeth Park

      14/09/18 and 15/09/18 at 18:00 and 22:00, 16/09 at 18:00 and 20:00

       

      'You are invited to be a guest and/or audience member at The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show.

      A talk show where we all will try to playfully disappear and grow closer. So who will you be? And who will you be talking to?'

       

      'U bent uitgenodigd als gast en/of publiek van The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show. Een talkshow waar we zullen proberen om spelenderwijs te verdwijnen en elkaar beter te leren kennen. Dus, wie zal je zijn? En met wie zal je praten?'

       

      أنت مدعو لتكون ضيفًا و / أو عضوًا في جمهور برنامج "من هو الذي تتحدث إليه”.

      برنامج حواري سنحاول من خلاله جميعاً أن نختفي بشكل هزلي. فمن ستكون؟ ومن هو الذي سوف تتحدث إليه؟

       

      'Vous êtes invités à participer et/ou à assister au talk show :'Avec qui parlez-vous?'. Une conversation-performance où nous essaierons tous de nous amuser à disparaître. Alors, quel rôle jouerez-vous? Et avec qui allez-vous parler vraiment?'

       

      THE WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO TALK SHOW

      ‘Everything is Fiction.’

      It was 1980-something. I was a kid and I used the meadow at the back of our house as a playground. We kept chickens, goats, sometimes a sheep or two and Fik, the donkey.

      These pictures are taken after the rooster got stuck in a bread bag. After I saw him doing it for the first time, I made sure to always bring empty bread bags for him. I knew he would put his head in them, peck away at the remaining crumbs and eventually become so eager for more that he would get stuck until I would come to his rescue.

      The rooster didn’t know he was putting on a mask. Disappearing. Changing form. Shapeshifting into a creature that is half white bag, half a rooster’s bum and legs. By wearing the bag he draws attention, becomes something out of the ordinary. By showing less of his rooster-ness, he became more interesting to me. My aim as a performer has always been disappearing, going beyond the ‘I’, stepping into the unknown without knowing what will be the result of the exercise. The mask is a supreme way of vanishing and coming out the other end as more than I could possibly imagine.

      Putting on a bag is also a way of surrendering to the unknown. The rooster gets lured in by the promise of more crumbs. I get lured in by the promise of a heightened state of play. The rooster’s eagerness for food is my eagerness for play. The mask becomes the stage. The mask doesn’t need the physical space called theatre. The mask is the theatre. The false face is the battlefield and the playground where sense, nonsense and no sense fight for attention. Inside and outside the mask a sense of excitement and freedom reigns. The mask destabilizes the wearer and the observer. The rooster on the picture is obviously lost and doesn’t know up from down (he always needed to be rescued), and I, the observer, would always be mesmerized by the absurdity of the situation.

       

      I use the mask to disappear. And I invite you, the public, to also disappear. To become part of the process and to flow with whatever is being presented, to let ‘something else, something unspoken and unspeakable’ take over. I feel the need to explore the space between you and I. This space is the meeting point, the place where sharing occurs.

       

      I thrive on improvisation. This doesn’t mean that anything goes, though. It’s all about adopting a mindset that wants to shed the walls of the practice, make visible the mechanics and lay bare the inner and outer workings of the process.

       

      Wittgenstein once wrote an allegory where he describes mankind as living under a red glass bell. There are three ways of dealing with this, he says. One way is represented by people who are oblivious to the fact that they are living under a red glass bell, they see everything is red and go about their lives without thinking about it. Then there are people who realize that something is not completely right, they investigate and get close to the glass where they can touch the bell, but instead of doing something with this new knowledge they return to the middle and go about their lives. According to Wittgenstein, these people tend to become humorous or melancholic. Finally, there’s a third kind: the ones who try to break through the glass bell and aspire to see the actual light without the interference of the red glass.

       

      I ‘d like to invite you to take a stroll outside the glass bell with me. Hoping you might start to notice that what we call ‘I’ is a story. What we call ‘history’ is a story. What we call the world, a country, who we are, where we are,... are collections of stories.

       

      Note to self: These words I am writing (the same ones you are reading) are similarly building blocks of yet another story I tell myself (and you).

       

      I want to be your tour guide, to unmask the collection of narratives we surround yourselves with. What you do next, is up to you. You are free to ignore everything, to build a house at the edge, to try to break through or to go back to the middle and become a melancholic.

       

      In stating that everything is fiction, I also state that everything we are constantly doing is staging our own drama’s, comedies, thrillers… The notable mister Shakespeare observed it quite strikingly: ‘The world’s a stage, and each must play a part’.

       

      Using theatrical tools in non-theatrical situations alongside deconstructing or extrapolating ‘the theatrical’ has always fascinated me. Using performance as a tool to try to create awareness about our personal and societal conditioning (the grabbag of narratives) is very important to me. The theatrical is the place where I can investigate and work with the narratives, those given to us and the ones we create ourselves through an unending process of copy-pasting. I discovered that the theatre has the potential to show me my dependence on these narratives. That’s why I love to inject the fictional into the real without saying what is real and what isn’t. It is disrupting the logic of the stories we tell ourselves. Taking the character out of the play stirs something essential in people: their obsession with believing and disbelieving and their fears around sanity and insanity.

      There’s a story I once heard where a man visits his friend in the insane asylum. When the friend asks how are you, the man says: ‘Great! You see these walls here? They protect me from the crazy people outside. You should try to get in too, so you’ll be protected from the madness on the outside.’ Inside the mask, it feels more easy to see the fiction on the outside. I am very inspired by what the Situationists, the Dadaists or comedy genius Andy Kaufman did. They were all busy trying to make cracks in the ruling narrative. I think Andy Kaufman put it very, very well:

       

      What’s real? What’s not? That’s what I do in my act. Test how other people deal with reality.

      Yes, theatre is magic. For when I walk into a room as a character, the room changes. My reality changes but yours is also changing because you have only two options: you are playing along or you aren’t.

       

      It all comes down to giving and taking. And this only becomes possible when there’s a willingness from both parties (you and me) to engage and discover together. What’s required is openness, an attitude of trust and the willingness to spend some time together in order to be inspired, entertained, taught, surprised,...

       

      Participation is all about one pair of eyes looking straight into another pair of eyes sharing that moment of recognition. After all is said and done, the most important thing is other people (you!). And the closest I can get to you is by looking into your eyes. Especially when I look through the eyes of the mask. And this can be scary.

       

      When I put on a mask I take a risk, when I ask you to wear a mask I ask you to take a risk. The risk is to tread unknown ground. Inside the mask I may feel like an impostor, I may feel like other people know something’s wrong, I may feel like I’m losing control. When I put on a mask my senses heighten. It is impossible to sleepwalk because everything is different. This may cause excitement or fear. I am seen differently by others. The people I know don’t recognize me. My dog barks at me. I start to interact very differently with my surroundings but also with myself. When I wore my old man mask for the first time I noticed young people didn’t see me. The only eye contact I could make was with other old people. The world changed, people bumped into me. I became invisible for most and all of a sudden of interest to others. It changed my perspective on my surroundings but also on myself. I became another so to speak. When I change physically, the world and my place in it changes, and the way I participate in it too. I suddenly find myself venturing into a liberating state of play. And I believe playing together is one of the highest forms of contact we can achieve.

       

      So, could I ask you now to pretend to be a rooster?

       

      References

       

      Swami Premodaya (Satsang, ‘You experience what you expect to experience.’, ‘Your perceptions are your limitations.’), Swami Prem Prasad (‘Freedom through De-Conditioning’), OSHO (‘The Path of the Mystic’), Meher Baba, Adrian Piper (‘Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness’), Stuart Price (‘I’m lost in the space between the concept and the execution’, ‘I’m stuck in the void between the instinct and the institution’), Ludwig Wittgenstein (‘Licht en schaduw: een droom en een brief over religie.’), Martin Buber (‘I and Thou’), Caroline Astell-Burt (‘I am the story’), Robert J. Landy (‘Persona and Performance’), Luigi Pirandello, Hannah Arendt (‘Lying in Politics’), Sören Kierkegaard (‘...the jump into the absurd...’), Codrescu (The Posthuman Dada Guide), Robert Crichton (‘The Great Impostor’), Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Eli Jaxon-Bear (‘Sudden Awakening’), Andy Kaufman, Bourdieu (‘Identity is given, not created’), Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, one man continuously calling me ‘Christophe’ in Morocco and my irritation with that, Rabia of Basra, Artaud, Frantz Fanon (‘Black Skin, White Masks’), Reni Eddo-Lodge (‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’), Nassim Taleb (‘Antifragile’), James Baldwin (‘The Fire Next Time’), John Cage (‘Silence’), Lou Reed’s rendition of ‘This Magic Moment’, Tommy Maitland, Mike Myers, The Gong Show, Sarah Paulson, Kokoroko, Fanna-Fi-Allah, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Anandamayi Ma, Gangaji (‘Hidden Treasure’), RuPaul’s Drag Race, Tony Clifton, Charles Aznavour, Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen, Peggy Pierrot, Kate Rich, Geert Opsomer, Sara Manente, Heike Langsdorf, Sina Seifee, Michael Sugich (‘Signs on the Horizons’), Abdelwahab Meddeb (‘Instants soufis’), Ranchor Prime (‘The Birth of Kirtan’), Shomari Dev, Loka Dev, Jai Dev

       

      2. TEXT OF THE PORTFOLIO

       

      EVERYTHING IS FICTION



      12 MUSINGS ABOUT MY RESEARCH


      Geert Vaes

      a.pass end communications

      (September 2017 - September 2018)




      “You, I and It walk into the World. I love to get close to You, I love to know You. You love to get close to I. You love to know I.

       

      I see You. I recognize You. I approach You. You don’t recognize I. Because I am wearing It. You tell It You are waiting for I. It starts a conversation with You. You show I another side of You because You are not talking to I but to It.

       

      It shows I You. I tell You I was using It to learn to know You. I lend You It to let me know You more too. We use It to get closer. It makes I love You and You love I. It creates US.”



      From the writing workshop with Peter Stamer in Block I (Vladimir Miller): ‘Your research told as a joke’

       

      1. The Rooster and the Bread Bag

      It was 1980-something. I was a kid and used the meadow at the back of our house as a playground. We kept chickens, goats, sometimes a sheep or two and Fik, the donkey.

      This picture is taken after the rooster got stuck in a bread bag. After seeing him doing it once I made sure to bring the empty bread bags for him. I knew he would get his head in, peck away at the remaining crumbs and eventually become so eager for more that he would get stuck until I would come to his rescue.

      The rooster didn’t know he was putting on a mask. Disappearing. Changing form. Shapeshifting into a creature that is half white bag, half a rooster’s bum and legs. By having the bag on he draws attention, becomes something out of the ordinary. By showing less of his rooster-ness, he becomes of more interest to the observer, in this case, me. My aim as a performer has always been disappearing, going beyond the ‘I’, stepping into the unknown without knowing what will be the result of this exercise. The mask is a supreme way of vanishing and coming out the other end as more than I can possibly imagine.

      Putting on a bag is also a way of surrendering to the unknown. The rooster gets lured in by the promise of more crumbs. I get lured in by the promise of a heightened state of play. The rooster’s eagerness for food is my eagerness for play. The mask becomes the stage. The mask doesn’t need the physical space called theatre. The mask is the theatre. The false face is the battlefield and playground where sense, nonsense and no sense fight for attention. Inside and outside the mask a sense of excitement and freedom reigns. The mask destabilizes the wearer and the observer, as is the case with the rooster. He is obviously lost and doesn’t know up from down (he always needed to be rescued), and I the observer would always be mesmerized by the absurdity of the situation. My interest in masking and disappearing awakened.

      ‘The mask as a tool of awareness. The proposed research aims to investigate how hyper-realistic silicone spfx-masks can be used as tools of awareness to shed more light on race, gender and class issues in an experiential, sensual and non-mental way. How to help performers and non-performers create another persona and let them experience how it feels to literally be in somebody else’s skin, wearing another one’s face in non-theatrical daily situations. How does this change their perspectives? Or doesn’t it change anything? How does this, in a broader sense, affect the notions of ‚I’ and ‚You’? How does it affect one’s outlook on one’s own community, conditioning, and beliefs?’

      This is the first paragraph of the research proposal I sent to a.pass in May 2017.

      Some of the questions I had, deepened and became richer, others faded into the background.

      What seems to be at the heart of the research is that I invite you to look through a different lens. And while looking through this lens, maybe you will see that everything is a construction of stories. What we call ‘I’ is a story. What we call ‘history’ is a story. What we call the world, a country, who we are, where we are,... It’s all a collection of stories. Our lives are collections of stories we build upon. These stories crystalize into the more or less cohesive narrative called ‘I’.

      So, we are surrounded by narratives, constructions, stories. We create them ourselves, they are created for us, we copy paste, add personal touches. We are inevitably moving through a narrative minefield: history, science, religion, countries, economics, politics, philosophy, love, you’s and I’s,...  Narratives are given to us but we actively rearrange them through an unending process of copy-pasting. We are all very creative in writing our own scripts, fitting our scripts into the bigger narrative, creating a dazzling array of storylines upon storylines.

      As a child, like many children, I was often busy dressing up as someone else, to the delight of my mother who would always be ready to take pictures. In creating other personas I found a way out of the narrative I was inhabiting. Later came my calling to study theatre and I became an actor and performer. Revisiting these pictures I realized: ‘I have been doing this since forever...’. What initially was just a very naive reflex: putting on clothes that were not mine and playacting and believing I was someone else, turned into a profession. I found the safe haven for transformation in the theatre. Later I started to take this urge to transform to the street, and in doing this I noticed the street transformed as well. By bringing the theatrical reflex into the street, the street becomes another character. In using this theatrical tool I hope to pierce through the veils knit together by the narratives surrounding us, and in doing so create more awareness.

       

      Wittgenstein once wrote an allegory where he describes mankind as living under a red glass bell. There are three ways of dealing with this, he says. One way is represented by people who are oblivious to the fact that they are living under a red glass bell, they see everything is red and go about their lives without thinking about it. Then there are people who realize that something is not completely right, they investigate and get close to the glass where they can touch the bell, but instead of doing something with this new knowledge they return to the middle and go about their lives. According to Wittgenstein, these people tend to become humorous or melancholic. Finally, there’s a third kind: the ones who try to break through the glass bell and aspire to see the actual light without the interference of the red glass.

      Wittgenstein’s allegory is related to Plato’s Cave. Plenty of similar allegorical examples can be found in mystical texts throughout the ages. What these metaphors and allegories all point at is that there is the possibility to look through the story, the mold, the mask. Using masks gives us the potential to become more aware of the multitude of masks and stories we surround ourselves with. Becoming aware of this we can generate more choices for ourselves. By using masks as tools we can address our biases and judgments and are able to reveal society's. With masks, we perform in the unconscious field of signs. We briefly are able to lose control and to step beyond our ideas of limitation.

      We all are master storytellers and interpreters. As long as we are all believers in all the narrative constructions surrounding us, we are doomed to live as characters in the fairytales we construct for ourselves and others. ‘The world’s a stage, each must play its part’ is a very striking observation of how we live.



      1. The Seemingly Empty Stage

      It’s 1980-something and this was my first ever performance. I am not visible. But I know I was there. The picture shows some audience member’s arms moving at the music. I am singing ‘We Are The World’ and attempting to do all the different voices (Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dion Warwick, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Al Jarreau, Huey Lewis, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles,...). I am very shy and I feel I’m turning completely red, but the fun of using different voices somehow pulls me through. It makes perfect sense I am not in the picture. It was another exercise in disappearing. The stage is the place for the performer to disappear and step out of her/his skin and turn into something more real than he or she could ever be. The audience is also not visible. The audience’s role is similar to that of the performer. Each member of the audience sheds its bag of flesh and bones and becomes part of The Play.

      My medium is theatre. I literally see everything as theatre. I think in terms of actors and audience, on stage and off stage, playing, rehearsing, improvising,... In stating that everything is fiction, I also state that everything we are constantly doing is staging our own drama’s, comedies, thrillers, musicals,... Everything is theatre. Therefore I like to infuse ‘reality’ with even more theatrical elements. Introducing a fictional character into the world but not telling he/she is fictional opens up lots of potentials to show the theatricality of the real. The theatre is a safe place when it does its work in the theatre space, but whenever theatre breaks out of the walls, then its potential becomes more dangerous, more subversive, more disruptive.

      Using theatrical tools in non-theatrical situations alongside deconstructing or extrapolating ‘the theatrical’ has always fascinated me. Using performance as a tool to try to create awareness about our personal and societal conditioning (the grabbag of narratives) is very important to me. The theatrical is the place where I can investigate and work with the narratives, those given to us and the ones we create ourselves through an unending process of copy-pasting. I discovered that the theatre has the potential to show me my dependence on these narratives. That’s why I love to inject the fictional into the real without saying what is real and what isn’t. It is disrupting the logic of the stories we tell ourselves. Taking the character out of the play stirs something essential in people: their obsession with believing and disbelieving and their fears around sanity and insanity.

      There’s a story I once heard where a man visits his friend in the insane asylum. When the friend asks how are you, the man says: ‘Great! You see these walls here? They protect me from the crazy people outside. You should try to get in too, so you’ll be protected from the madness on the outside.’ Inside the mask, it feels more easy to see the fiction on the outside. I am very inspired by what the Situationists, the Dadaists or comedy genius Andy Kaufman did. They were all busy trying to make cracks in the ruling narrative. I think Andy Kaufman put it very, very well:

      What’s real? What’s not? That’s what I do in my act, test how other people deal with reality.

      1. My beloved grandmother Marie, the playground and a little clown.

      It’s 1980 something and it’s the day to celebrate carnival. Mimi (Marie) is posing with me. I am dressed like a Native American although the hat and nose are confusing the image a bit. I am pretty sure this picture was taken before or after the yearly school kids’ parade through the village. When talking about masking and disappearing and reappearing it is impossible not to talk about Carnival, the time of the year where it is allowed to change at will, to put down the burden called ‘you’ or ‘I’. We are all fools playing the fool’s games. And carnival makes us aware of this. The parade is an outside stage in the street. Streets are generally not safe havens for performance or theatre but the group aspect of a parade turns it again into a safe space allowing the inner playfulness to come out.

      During my year in a.pass I held my experiments back and forth between the safe (inside the building of a.pass, the ‘4th Floor’, and with fellow a.passees) and the riskful (outside a.pass, in the street, with the people occupying the street at that particular moment in time). It became an important part of my research in a.pass. I learned to understand more the difference between IN and OUT. Inside the mask, outside the mask. Inside the safe haven (‘theatre space’), outside in the great wide open (no literal ‘theatre space’). Me inside my propositions, out of them or in and out of them. The dynamics change radically when I allow myself to be a player in my own frame, or when I am instigating and holding space for others to play. I am always searching for ways to let people participate. So when I started working with masks, besides the joy of me putting them on and playing with them, I also felt the urge to share the mask. To let the audience also experience the inside of the mask, to let them look through the eyes of the mask. The first time I realized this could work was with a presentation I held during the Halfway Days in my second block (curated by Nicolas Galeazzi). I created a small TV studio with a score. Two persons: one puts on a mask and different clothes, and in doing so turns into the character called Johannes Bouma, the other person asks questions to Johannes about the research of the actual person wearing the mask of Johannes. Everything is recorded by a camera placed in front. Here, for the first time, the mask started to work as a tool of awareness. People who normally weren’t very good at talking about their own work, were very clear talking about themselves and their work (as Johannes). Others started to realize things about their work in relation to the public. They started to relate differently to themselves and to the person questioning them. The mask mirrored, mimicked and magnified the person and his/her research.

      1. The Farmer and the Widow

      .

      It was 1980-something and I probably wanted to feel the rush of disguising again… These pictures are all about a Flanders and its rural identity. Rural Flanders where my ancestors all come from. I am only the 2nd generation non-farmer. In these pictures, there’s clear evidence of remnants of ‘peasantry’. The traditional stove, the ‘fermette’ (a type of house that became in fashion again in the 80’s when people started to build new houses to look like old farms). These ‘fermettes’ are masks of what once was. The figures I portray are also molds from the past catapulted into that present moment when the picture was taken. I embodied my ancestors. The widow is my great-grandmother who I only know through pictures. The farmer could represent either of my grandfathers.

      During Block I (Vladimir Miller), when we were asked to prepare an excursion for the Halfway Days, I focused on my own personal flemish identity by visiting an amateur company rehearsing ‘Het Gezin Van Paemel’. This is the invitation I sent:

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

      I made a detour from literal masking to the metaphorical mask, in this case: a theatre piece. The piece was first written and produced in 1903. Since then it has become a standard in Flemish theatre, and mainly in amateur theatre. It has been performed continuously since the first performance up until now. The piece is a Flemish classic. It portrays peasant life in 19th century Flanders and still now the piece is revered as a flemish icon. It is a naturalistic piece narrating the misery and heroism of a peasant family: the poor ‘pater familias’ and his obedient wife, one son got crippled because the baron’s son accidentally shot him, one daughter is more Catholic than the pope, another one is made pregnant by the baron’s son, another son has to join the army and shoot at the socialists, yet another son is a socialist,... My excursion took us to Tielen, a small village in the province of Antwerp, in the region called ‘De Kempen’, a provincial, rural area. The local company ‘Tejater De Orchidee’ was rehearsing their version of the piece and I was interested in how and why they made this flemish classic. We were allowed to come and watch the rehearsals and talk with the cast and the director.

      The piece was significant to me because of its resonance. I remembered as a kid watching the movie they made after the theatre piece. There’s one iconic scene at the end of the movie when the oldest son goes to visit his father and says: ‘Father, I’m going to America.’ He invites his parents to go with him, to go for a better life. But the father is stubborn and tells the son he will not leave the ground his ancestors are buried in. This piece is all about identity and roots and therefore it has been performed again and again to flemish audiences. It holds up a mirror of heroism, and ‘we always overcome hardship because us, Flemish, we work and work and work’. I was wondering how much this piece still influences the ‘flemish identity’. I never really understood what that meant. ‘Het Gezin Van Paemel’ has helped and is helping to construct this narrative.

      Looking at the mask, through the mask of the piece helped me to understand better the myth of identity. It was very revealing for me to talk with the local actors and to hear their answers to some of the questions I had. I remember one of the young men talking about staying in the village because it felt safe.

      The local company’ made one significant change to the piece. In the final scene of the written piece, the old father and mother stay behind while all the children have moved or are about to move to America. In the piece as rehearsed by ‘Tejater De Orchidee’, the old father stays behind alone while his wife also moves to America. The last scene became a heroic monologue of the aging man who gets left behind. ‘I will not move from the land my ancestors are buried in. I will stay and work, work, work.’ It wasn’t meant to be a commentary on migration, but it became a quite dubious one. Heroism masking the true reasons behind migration.

      Theatre as a mask, a mirror, a lens, a prism… This excursion rekindled my thinking about and interest in theatre. It made me realize how -I talked about it on the first pages- theatre still is the medium I work with. The excursion made me also think about history (personal and national) as a mask.

      1. Black Lola from the Striptease Bar

       

      It was 1980-something and in this picture, I personify Zwarte Lola (Black Lola), a Dutch singer infamous in the 1970’s and 1980’s in the Low Countries because of her -according to that era’s norms- raunchy lyrics and stage presence.  

      Dressing up as a girl -and especially this one!- was exciting, mainly because of the reactions of my mother, sister, and niece. I also remember my dad not being sure about what was going on. It was interesting to my young mind to see the effect of changing gender roles. It unconsciously released some tensions for me around the male and female stories we tell ourselves. And it showed me once again the impact of play and dress.

      In my initial research proposal, I wanted to focus on race, gender, and class. During the research, I started to focus on more basic questions: What do these masks do? What does changing your appearance actually mean?

      To work with these more basic questions I tried out ‘Moustache’ at ‘Don’t eat The Microphone’ in Gent with Pierre Rubio (curator Block III). Inspired by Adrian Piper’s essay ‘Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness’ (see p.22-24), we went to the garden the hosts of DETM inhabited and invited participants to create mustaches and by doing so alter their face and outlook and reflect on identity and the stories we create.

      In my third block  I made 4 sketches (short experiments): ‘Moustache’, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are You?’, ‘Stories, Stories’. This block was all about trying out different ways in how to use my new masks because the 5 of them had finally arrived in June after waiting almost 6 months (they had a delay of 4 months). This meant I had 7 masks in total now. So I wanted to see how they worked. More about ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are You?’, ‘Stories, Stories’ later on in this text.

       

      1. My Second Holy Communion as a girl.

      It was 1980-something and I’m at Mimi’s. She showed me my sister’s old Second Holy Communion dress with bag and gloves. I put it on. This was the first time I didn’t put in extra effort to have a wig, make-up, or anything. No, it was me in my sister’s dress. Here I realized the comical potential of it. I was a bit older and more self-aware. I knew that I was a boy and that boys aren’t supposed to wear dresses. This was a seminal moment for the joy is also a joy of knowing I can be subversive by willing to break through conditioning. This is the first time I became conscious about that. The smirk on my face is a very self-aware smirk. ‘Look at me, ain’t I just hilarious and foolish? Don’t you just love my daring silliness?’

      It’s like I discovered fire. Before it all was just a lot of fun. Now my innocence got infused with a sense of danger and seemingly unlimited possibilities.

      One of the 4 earlier mentioned sketches in my third block was ‘Who am I?’.

      ‘Who Am I?’ was performed at Zsenne Gallery in the center. Outside the gallery is a small square which our group of researchers inhabited for our Halfway Days that Block. I was sitting on a chair, next to a mirror, at the edge of the square, facing the gallery. I had a sign reading ‘Who Am I’. I had a suitcase next to me with masks, clothes, and objects. In front of me, I’d put a small table with two chairs. On the table were pens, questionnaires to be filled in by visitors and objects changing per character. I was sitting on a chair facing the people at the table, changing every 45 minutes mask and clothing and objects on the table. The visitors were asked to fill out the questionnaire which had questions about who they saw in front of them: ‘What’s my name? Where am I from? Am I married? What do you and I have in common? …’. I was being watched but I was also the watcher, looking at people thinking hard about what to write. Both parties (the people at the table and me) were sniffing each other and trying to make sense. The written responses were revealing. They showed biases but also a willingness to understand. This exercise showed me the necessity of good and meaningful questions. The better the question, the more meaningful the response becomes.

       

      1. The Real Cowboy from Begijnendijk

      It was 1980-something and I am posing on a horse in Bobbejaanland. It’s a theme park built by Bobbejaan Schoepen, a flemish cowboy who made a career first as a singer, then as a theme park owner. The park was all about the Wild West (it still exists to this day). Bobbejaan died, but when he was still around he would drive through the theme park in his big American convertible dressed up as a cowboy. As a kid, I thought Bobbejaan was awesome. Here’s an adult man, in Belgium, Flanders, who pulls it off to be a cowboy. My dream was not necessarily to become Bobbejaan or a cowboy, I think I was intrigued by the sense of freedom he represented. He was free from the flemish mold, he recreated himself. He was Bobbejaan. How easy it could be to get out... This picture is important because whenever I was on a horse (although most of the time I was riding a donkey or a ram because we didn’t own a horse) I disappeared and became a cowboy on the prairie. I completely identified with the mask I chose and by doing so stepped out of the mask I was expected to wear in daily life.

      I love to give people the opportunity to become someone else, to step out of the mold. This is one of the core themes of my research. Becoming...

      Another sketch I made in Block III was called ‘Who Are You?’. Here I invited my a.pass colleagues to work in groups of two. One person was the shapeshifter (put on a mask and disguise, create a new character) and the other one was her/his chaperone. Then they had the possibility to spend the afternoon in the city at a location of their choosing. The role of the chaperone became very important. The chaperone is the link between the masked one and the unmasked ones. He/She is not only a safety guard but also part of the narrative. She/He plays along. The duos automatically created backstories between each other (‘She was my girlfriend and assistant’, ‘I was his caretaker.’).  Becoming another with an accomplice adds to the experience, for in dialogue you are more aware of what you project and what others project on you. The accomplice became the mirror.

      Ideally, this experiment should’ve been held over a couple of days. My initial plan was to start with basic acting exercises, then to extensively create a character, then to go to a well-pondered place in the city, everything is done with the possibility for the duo’s to switch roles.

      I have been trying out this format in the past and would like to continue working with it in the future. Taking time is a very important factor I learned. Two examples (1. from the past, 2. in the future):

      1. Some years ago I gave a workshop in Helsinki called ‘Pretend To Be Old’. I was playing the character of Walter Bourdin (with one of my highly realistic silicone masks). Walter helped the people to create wrinkles with liquid latex and chalk powder. The persons attending the workshop attached weights to their joints and on their backs in order to move more like an aged person, they changed their voices, and eventually, we walked through Helsinki in a parade of fake old people. After the workshop, we sat together to talk about our experiences. People were very positive: they had had very new and unexpected experiences in pretending to be old.

       

      1. In my second block, I had the artist and economist Kate Rich as a mentor. One idea I briefly developed with her was to use Airbnb for my work. Airbnb started to offer the possibility to advertise Experiences. The experience I want to create is giving tourists the opportunity to visit Brussels as somebody else. I would venture into the field of micro-tourism. I invite tourists to travel into someone else’s skin. I want to offer a two-day experience:

       

      Day 1: performance workshop ‘Find your other you’ (4 hours)

      Day 2: Explore Brussels as the other you. At the end of the day, I cook for you and we chat about the experience. (4 hours)

       

       

      1. The hippie and the punk

       

      It’s 1980-something and I’m a punk and a hippie. These roles I chose myself, knowing they were roles to play, not roles to be identified with completely (as I did with the cowboy). Here I was semi-consciously trying out subversive roles. Roles that wouldn’t have been tolerated within my family or village. Not that I really knew what these roles were about but I had enough sense from watching television that these stereotypes were considered to be highly problematic: ‘They don’t want to work.’ ‘They let everything go to waste.’, ‘They destroy stuff.’ ‘They don’t follow the rules.’ Not following the rules was something that interested me very much, but I wasn’t very good at it. I was a very law-abiding child and was horrified about getting punished.

      At a.pass I started to become aware of the fact that my masking game was potentially problematic. Mainly because I also wanted to experiment with gender and race. I wasn’t fully aware of the minefield I was stepping into.

      Another sketch I did in my third block  was ‘Stories, Stories’:

      I asked people who visited me if they were interested in trying on some of my masks. I took a picture and interviewed the masked person, asking very basic questions: ‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What are your hobbies?...’. I recorded the Q&A and put the answers (without the questions) into a text file, leaving me in the end with a picture and a written piece of information (A4) imagined by the wearer of the mask. I also went out into the park and asked strangers whether they’d be interested in trying on a mask, get a picture taken and interview. This resulted in 11 pictures and 11 texts which I presented to my fellow researchers on a table: matching the pictures with text (2 A4’s placed next to each other). It looked like a possible book (the talk show as a book?), in which I created a kaleidoscope of ideas and biases of people in Koekelberg (the 11 pictures and texts were all taken in Koekelberg).

      My questions could’ve been better, but I still think there’s a lot of revealing potential in this exercise. What happens when I take my masks to another place in the world? What does it mean there to pretend to be white for instance? What are the ideas we carry around? Like the ideas, I had about hippies and punks. These clichés are fertile ground to explore further.

      Also, what could we learn from putting the biases (imagined stories) from people in Koekelberg, next to those of Matonge, next to those of Ukkel,... Or how about the biases of people in Senegal, next to the ones of people in Canada, in Sweden, in India,...?












      1. Miss Piggy

      It is 1980-something and I’m relaxing on the couch as Miss Piggy. One of my first actual maskings. I remember the thrill of sitting on that couch and consciously playing with the proposed sexuality of the image. The mask helped me not to worry about ‘me’. I wasn’t ‘me’, I was Miss Piggy all the way. Even my mother taking the picture was a bit disturbed, she felt I was exaggerating. This was probably the last picture taken of me dressing up. Maybe we reached a point where we didn’t feel in control anymore. After this, I stopped play-dressing for quite a while. I had become a teenager, I was around 12 years old when this picture was taken. Only at the end of my teens, I would taste the sweetness of confusing other people again…

      This brings me back to Andy Kaufman. An important moment as a ‘player’,  ‘performer’, ‘artist’ was to learn to know Andy Kaufman. He brought playing to a whole new level. He turned it into more than just entertainment, he turned it into art, raising questions just for the sake of raising questions. Disturbing the status quo. Rocking the boat. Who are you? What do you believe? Is this really true? As in the quote I already put: ‘I am testing how other people deal with reality.’ Kaufman was not interested in making people laugh, although he was considered to be a comedian. He said: ‘I never told a joke in my life’. He just wanted to stir something in his audience. Anything. I also think this confusion is a good thing. It has the potential to wake you up. I have very vivid memories (not only because of the pictures) of all the disguising I did as a kid. Those were very alive moments, heightened states. And I have been chasing them ever since the first time I tasted the joy of pretending to be someone else. My research turned into an ode to play and rekindled my love for the theatre.

       

      10. Sharing with Tommie

      It was 1980-something and I’m sharing with Tommie. She was my pet poodle and my best friend from when I was 6 until 12. On the picture, I am sharing an ice cream with her. The ice cream reminds me of a microphone. I love microphones. That’s one of the reasons why I love the format of the Talk Show so much.

      For the last six months, I have been working with this format. Extrapolating its elements and abstracting them. One example was the first presentation of my third block:

      I created a literal Talk Show setting. Three chairs for the guest and one chair for the host separated by a big plant. There was a microphone. Mirrors, and an audience space. I was playing Walter Bourdin (old man mask) and I invited 3 fellow researchers to come up and take a seat. They could each choose one cut out picture of my face (Geert). Each picture-mask had a different facial expression: Angry Geert, Happy Geert, Confused Geert,... I gave two other picture-masks to researchers in the audience. Walter Bourdin (old man mask) asked questions about Geert and his research. ‘Angry Geert, what would you say your research is about?’ This experiment revealed a lot about my research and how I communicate it.

      The Talk Show set-up is also used in teaching and therapy. Anywhere where people talk with guests when other people are around to listen to the talking. I will continue to experiment with this format.

       

      1. Tommie Has Milk

      It was 1980-something and Tommie had puppies. They feed on her milk. As I fed on these references:

       

      Swami Premodaya (Satsang, ‘You experience what you expect to experience.’, ‘Your perceptions are your limitations.’), Swami Prem Prasad (‘Freedom through De-Conditioning’), OSHO (‘The Path of the Mystic’), Meher Baba, Adrian Piper (‘Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness’), Stuart Price (‘I’m lost in the space between the concept and the execution’, ‘I’m stuck in the void between the instinct and the institution’), Ludwig Wittgenstein (‘Licht en schaduw: een droom en een brief over religie.’), Martin Buber (‘I and Thou’), Caroline Astell-Burt (‘I am the story’), Robert J. Landy (‘Persona and Performance’), Luigi Pirandello, Hannah Arendt (‘Lying in Politics’), Sören Kierkegaard (‘...the jump into the absurd...’), Codrescu (The Posthuman Dada Guide), Robert Crichton (‘The Great Impostor’), Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Eli Jaxon-Bear (‘Sudden Awakening’), Andy Kaufman, Bourdieu (‘Identity is given, not created’), Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, one man continuously calling me ‘Christophe’ in Morocco and my irritation with that, Rabia of Basra, Artaud, Frantz Fanon (‘Black Skin, White Masks’), Reni Eddo-Lodge (‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’), Nassim Taleb (‘Antifragile’), James Baldwin (‘The Fire Next Time’), John Cage (‘Silence’), Lou Reed’s rendition of ‘This Magic Moment’, Tommy Maitland, Mike Myers, The Gong Show, Sarah Paulson, Kokoroko, Fanna-Fi-Allah, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Anandamayi Ma, Gangaji (‘Hidden Treasure’), RuPaul’s Drag Race, Tony Clifton, Charles Aznavour, Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen, Peggy Pierrot, Kate Rich, Pol Pauwels, Geert Opsomer, Sara Manente, Heike Langsdorf, Sina Seifee, Michael Sugich (‘Signs on the Horizons’), Abdelwahab Meddeb (‘Instants soufis’), Ranchor Prime (‘The Birth of Kirtan’), Shomari Dev, Loka Dev, Jai Dev

      I add this essay by Adrian Piper in its totality because it perfectly fits with what I’ve been researching, and she explains it far more eloquently than I ever could:

      ‘Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness’

      Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist with a background in sculpture and philosophy. Her performance work and writing during this period asked the observer to consider the construction of his/her own beliefs and their relation to action in the world. Art historian Moira Roth has written that Piper's work of this period "deals with confrontations of self to self and self to others, exposing the distances between people and the alienation that exists in our lives—personally, politically, emotionally." Here she puts forth some basic considerations about ideology. —Eds.

      We started out with beliefs about the world and our place in it that we didn't ask for and didn't question. Only later, when those beliefs were attacked by new experiences that didn't conform to them, did we begin to doubt: e.g., do we and our friends really understand each other? Do we really have nothing in common with blacks/whites/ gays/workers/the middle class/other women/other men/etc.?

      Doubt entails self-examination because a check on the plausibility of your beliefs and attitudes is a check on all the constituents of the self. Explanations of why your falsely supposed "X" includes your motives for believing "X" (your desire to maintain a relationship, your impulse to be charitable, your goal of becoming a better person); the causes of your believing "X" (your early training, your having drunk too much, your innate disposition to optimism); and your objective reasons for believing "X" (it's consistent with your other beliefs, it explains the most data, it's inductively confirmed, people you respect believe it). These reveal the traits and dispositions that individuate oneself from another.

      So self-examination entails self-awareness, i.e., awareness of the components of the self. But self-awareness is largely a matter of degree. If you've only had a few discordant experiences or relatively superficial discordant experiences, you don't need to examine yourself very deeply in order to revise your false beliefs. For instance, you happen to have met a considerate, sensitive, nonexploitative person who's into sadism in bed. You think to yourself, "This doesn't show that my beliefs about sadists, in general, are wrong; after all, think what Krafft-Ebing says! This particular person is merely an exception to the general rule that sexual sadists are demented." Or you think, "My desire to build a friendship with this person is based on the possibility of reforming her/him (and has nothing to do with any curiosity to learn more about my own sexual tastes)." Such purely cosmetic repairs in your belief structure sometimes suffice to maintain your sense of self-consistency. Unless you are confronted with a genuine personal crisis or freely choose to push deeper and ask yourself more comprehensive and disturbing questions about the genesis and justification of your own beliefs, your actual degree of self-awareness may remain relatively thin.

      Usually, the beliefs that remain most unexposed to examination are the ones we need to hold in order to maintain a certain conception of ourselves and our relation to the world. These are the ones in which we have the deepest personal investment. Hence these are the ones that are most resistant to revision; e.g., we have to believe that other people are capable of understanding and sympathy, of honorable and responsible behavior, in order not to feel completely alienated and suspicious of those around us. Or: Some people have to believe that the world of political and social catastrophe is completely outside their control in order to justify their indifference to it.

      Some of these beliefs may be true, some may be false. This is difficult to ascertain because we can only confirm or disconfirm the beliefs under examination with reference to other beliefs, which themselves require examination. In any event, the set of false beliefs that a person has a personal investment in maintaining is what I will refer to (following Marx) as a person's ideology.

      Ideology is pernicious for many reasons. The obvious one is that it makes people behave in stupid, insensitive, self-serving ways, usually at the expense of other individuals or groups. But it is also pernicious because of the mechanisms it uses to protect itself, and its consequent capacity for self-regeneration in the face of the most obvious counterevidence. Some of these mechanisms are:

      (1) The False-Identity Mechanism

      In order to preserve your ideological beliefs against attack, you identify them as objective facts and not as beliefs at all. For example, you insist that it is just a fact that black people are less intelligent than whites, or that those on the sexual fringes are in fact sick, violent or asocial. By maintaining that these are statements of fact rather than statements of belief compiled from the experiences you personally happen to have had, you avoid having to examine and perhaps revise those beliefs. This denial may be crucial to maintaining your self-conception against attack. If you're white and suspect that you may not be all that smart, to suppose that at least there's a whole race of people you're smarter than may be an important source of self-esteem. Or if you're not entirely successful in coping with your own nonstandard sexual impulses, isolating and identifying the sexual fringe as sick, violent or asocial may serve the very important function of reinforcing your sense of yourself as "normal."

      The fallacy of the false-identity mechanism as a defense of one's ideology consists in supposing that there exist objective social facts that are not constructs of beliefs people have about each other.

      (2) The Illusion of Perfectibility

      Here you defend your ideology by convincing yourself that the hard work of self-scrutiny has an end and a final product, i.e., a set of true, central and uniquely defensible beliefs about some issue; and that you have in fact achieved this end, hence needn't subject your beliefs to further examination. Since there is no such final product, all of the inferences that supposedly follow from this belief are false. Example: You're a veteran of the anti-war movement and have developed a successful and much-lauded system of draft-avoidance counseling, on which your entire sense of self-worth is erected. When it is made clear to you that such services primarily benefit the middle class—that this consequently forces much larger proportions of the poor, the uneducated and blacks to serve and be killed in its place—you resist revising your views in light of this information on the grounds that you've worked on and thought hard about these issues, have developed a sophisticated critique of them, and therefore have no reason to reconsider your opinions or efforts. You thus treat the prior experience of having reflected deeply on some issue as a defense against the self-reflection appropriate now, that might uncover your personal investment in your anti-draft role.

      The illusion of perfectibility is really the sin of arrogance, for it supposes that dogmatism can be justified by having "paid one's dues."

      (3) The One-Way Communication Mechanism

      You deflect dissents, criticisms or attacks on your cherished beliefs by treating all of your own pronouncements as imparting genuine information but treating those of other people as mere symptoms of some moral or psychological defect. Say you're committed to feminism, but have difficulty making genuine contact with other women. You dismiss all arguments advocating greater attention to lesbian and separatist issues within the women's movement on the grounds that they are maintained by frustrated man-haters who just want to get their names in the footlights. By reducing questions concerning the relations of women to each other to pathology or symptoms of excessive self-interest, you avoid confronting the conflict between your intellectual convictions and your actual alienation from other women, and therefore the motives that might explain this conflict. If these motives should include such things as deep-seated feelings of rivalry with other women, or a desire for attention from men, then avoiding recognition of this conflict is crucial to maintaining your self-respect.

      The one-way communication mechanism is a form of elitism that ascribes pure, healthy, altruistic political motives only to oneself (or group), while reducing all dissenters to the status of moral defectives or egocentric and self-seeking subhumans, whom it is entirely justified to manipulate or disregard, but with whom the possibility of rational dialogue is not to be taken seriously.

      There are many other mechanisms for defending one's personal ideology. These are merely a representative sampling. Together, they all add up to what I will call the illusion of omniscience. This illusion consists in being so convinced of the infallibility of your own beliefs about everyone else that you forget that you are perceiving and experiencing other people from a perspective that is, in its own ways, just as subjective and limited as theirs. Thus you confuse your personal experiences with objective reality and forget that you have a subjective and limited self that is selecting, processing and interpreting your experiences in accordance with its own limited capacities. You suppose that your perceptions of someone are truths about her or him; that your understanding of someone is comprehensive and complete. Thus your self-conception is not demarcated by the existence of other people. Rather, you appropriate them into your self-conception as psychologically and metaphysically transparent objects of your consciousness. You ignore their ontological independence, their psychological opacity, and thereby their essential personhood. The illusion of omniscience resolves into the fallacy of solipsism.

      The result is blindness to the genuine needs of other people, coupled with the arrogant and dangerous conviction that you understand those needs better than they do; and a consequent inability to respond to those needs politically in genuinely effective ways.

      The antidote, I suggest, is confrontation of the sinner with the evidence of the sin: the rationalizations; the subconscious defense mechanisms; the strategies of avoidance, denial, dismissal and withdrawal that signal, on the one hand, the retreat of the self to the protective enclave of ideology, on the other hand, precisely the proof of subjectivity and fallibility that the ideologue is so anxious to ignore. This is the concern of my recent work of the past three years.

      The success of the antidote increases with the specificity of the confrontation. And because I don't know you I can't be as specific as I would like. I can only indicate general issues that have specific references in my own experience. But if this discussion has made you in the least degree self-conscious about your political beliefs or about your strategies for preserving them; or even faintly uncomfortable or annoyed at my having discussed them; or has raised just the slightest glimmerings of doubt about the veracity of your opinions, then I will consider this piece a roaring success. If not, then I will just have to try again, for my own sake. For of course I am talking not just about you, but about us.

      This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring 1981.

      Above copied from http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/ideology_confro.php

       

      12. What’s next?



      It’s 2000-something and what’s next?

      I end with a text I wrote in my first block. This text also serves as the conclusion of everything you’ve just read. I end where I started and I will continue from there:

      I=U

      „MIMESIS AS AN ACT OF ULTIMATE LOVE”

      - A SCIENTIFIC LOVE RESEARCH -

      I want to gain and produce awareness about „otherness” in a direct, experiential way, using a „scientific” method: the mask. Inward and outward ‚signifiers’ (of race, gender, and class) produce and influence relations and positions. We are constantly building (constructing) interpersonal images and meanings. Which signals provoke/produce meaning in another? In other words: how is your body perceived and how do you perceive bodies? What is your position? Using masks or roles is to gain insight in ourselves and in humanity, the collective of others. We are not moving in contact zones, we are the contact zones (being ‚othered’ by other contact zones). Essentially I’m looking for a way out of exclusive thinking into inclusive thinking, out of ‘impathy’ towards empathy, out of mind into heart. This research is about going beyond the mind (I) into and eventually also beyond the other (You). To put it bluntly, it is about LOVE …

       

    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • RESEARCH CENTER Cycle 1 Block I Curated by Vladimir Miller
      11 September 2018
      posted by: Joke Liberge
    • Adrijana Gvozdenović, Sina Seifee, Isabel Burr Raty, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Antye Guenther
    • 03 September 2018
    • 30 November 2018
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • RESEARCH CENTER Cycle 1 Block I

      This September marks the beginning of the first one-year-cycle of the a.pass Research Center. After being initiated as a platform for the individual research trajectories of the a.pass Associate Researchers, starting this year the Research Center is shifting to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for a shared one-year period.

      The a.pass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced research and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at a.pass.

      For the period of September ‘18 to August ‘19 we are happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.

      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 master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

      Rob Ritzen 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.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.

      Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.
      Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.
      At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aesthetics.

      Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practice dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, post-humanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.


      For the current block the Associate Researchers will be supported by Vladimir Miller as the Research Center curator and further on by Alex Arteaga for block I/19 and Pierre Rubio for Block II/19.

      Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturge. His practice aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of spatial production within ad-hoc groups and institutional environments by using fragility as a building principle.

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

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


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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

      AND

      The SenseLab is a laboratory for thought in motion.

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

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

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

      Anarchive 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • PIECE ME BACK TOGETHER (AGAIN) 03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Leo Kay / Elen Braga / Eszter Némethi / Geert Vaes / Hoda Siahtiri
    • 14 September 2018
    • 16 September 2018
    • PIECE ME BACK TOGETHER (AGAIN)

      On September 14­, 15 and 16 Leo Kay, Elen Braga, Eszter Némethi, Geert Vaes and Hoda Siahtiri come together in concepts of identity, narratives of possible futures, liquidity and participation. The five artist researchers take over Elizabeth Park for the weekend presenting an undercover carnival of experiences. All of which welcome audience into tangible relationship with the material.

      The presentations include: Eszter Némethi’s Border Stories a conference-­machine weaving together magic, the uncertainty of definitions and war; Hoda Siahtiri’s intimate expanded film experience concerning pain and healing; Elen Braga’s site­ responsive, interactive exhibition exploring identity, gender roles and image construction through multi­-threaded visual and sonic narratives; Geert Vaes's Live Talk Show: an awareness experiment at the crossroads of Therapy Street and Tourism Avenue where the public wear hyper real masks & explore the possibility of nurturing empathy for others; & Leo Kay’s Bakery Of Slow Ideas exploring sourdough and vegetable fermentation as an action; a ritual & a space for dialogue, critiquing the collateral damage caused by the continual drive towards hyper productivity and self presentation.

      a.pass -advanced performance and scenography studies - is an artistic research environment that develops research on performativity and the creation of space, in an international artistic and educational context. The environment encourages diverse understandings of artistic research, the development of (post-­disciplinary or undisciplined) perspectives and experimentation with methodologies and strategies. a.pass is concerned with reflections on the role and responsibility of the artist researcher within the vital and precarious economic, political and global context of the here and now.

      Opening hours:
      From 12am to ­11pm. With formal presentation from 16:00

      12:00 > 21:00 Bakery of Slow Ideas process- Leo Kay
      14:00 > 21:00 Vroom - Elen Braga
      16:00 + 18:00 Border Stories - Eszter Némethi
      20:00 > Singing the Silences - Hoda Siahtiri
      21:00 > Bakery of Slow Ideas Breaking Bread Presentation- Leo Kay
      18:30 + 22:00 > The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show- Geert Vaes
      (Sunday at 17:00 + 19:00)


      Address:
      Elizabeth park / De Platoo
      1081 Koekelberg Brussels, Belgium

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

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


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

       

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

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

      AND

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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


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

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Close Encounters
    • Conditions for the work Sofia Caesar / Femke Snelting
      23 April 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Close Encounters series
    • a.pass, 4th floor
    • 05 May 2018
    • 05 May 2018
    • Conditions for the work

      Image: detail of Spaghetti plot, vinyl on wall, Sofia Caesar, 2018. Photo: Gilles Ribero

      Saturday May 5 2018, 15h-18h @ a.pass , 4th floor

       

      For this episode of Close encounters, Sofia Caesar and Femke Snelting have invited each other for an afternoon of conversation about contracts as propositions and elements as conditions. Both are involved in related but very different practices that they will present and bring into discussion with each other and the public.
       
      Sofia shares two recent works, Worker leaves the factory (Conditions for the work) a permanent installation at PAV, Turin (IT), and the video Excess Lines to talk about her artistic methods that involve re-enacting found footage produced by car manufacturer FIAT in the last 100 years, appropriating techniques of motion analysis, and creating open structures for the re-writing of contracts.
       
      Femke discusses her work with the Codes of conduct in the context of Free/Libre and Open Source software communities. Codes of Conduct address on- and off-line behaviour of community members, acknowledge the possibility of harassment explicitly or euphemistically and provide guidelines in case something happens. These self-regulating practice function in an environment that is particularly sensitive to the ways words can be made flesh, both as code and as law.
       

      Close Encounters is a series of presentations and public conversations organized by the a.pass Research Centre. They take place whenever (associated) researchers feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. These informal events are designed to take the time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. Even if free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, the format is a dialog that expands the presented research. The Close Encounters get a closer look at things while trying to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research: What to study? What to research? What to practice?
       
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and is currently curator of the Research Centre at a.pass.
       
      Sofia Caesar is an artist and choreographer. Her works rearrange the power relations present in structures that act on the body, such as architecture, language, surveillance, or the camera. Her propositions, performances, installations, videos, and sculptures take us to the surreal, impossible, and complex layers of our relation to the language that surround us. Her oeuvre is developed in search of moments in which the body exceeds the forces that attempt to control it. Caesar's poetic and political strength lies in how she reveals that structures can be both controlling and generative, on the one hand tools of violence and power, and on the other the very means for the creation of new structures for the body. Caesar has participated in exhibitions and residencies in institutions such as A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam (NL), Parco d'Arte Vivente, Turin (IT); La Maudite, Paris (FR); SFMOMA, San Francisco (USA); Casamata, Parque Lage, Capacete, Oi Futuro RJ, Galeria A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro (BR); CCBNB-BR, Fortaleza (BR); Tomie Othake, São Paulo (BR), and others. She holds an MFA from the School of Missing Studies, Sandberg Instituut, in Amsterdam (NL).
       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • If a question could lie 25 January 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • SVEN DEHENS & ZOUMANA MEÏTÉ
    • Manchesterstraat 17
    • 25 January 2018
    • 27 January 2018
    • If a question could lie

      a.pass end-communications is a public event for the sharing of the one year trajectories of the a.pass researchers. It’s a moment to bring to a larger public the questions and methods that their practice of artistic research at a.pass entailed. The event focuses on the sharing of their processes and on the invitation to reflect on the emerging topics and concerns of their research question(s) in the context of artist practice today.

      'If a question could lie' brings forth or wants to insist on the agency of the question. It aims to raise the issue of the appearance of criticality and its location. It's as much claiming the right to pose a question as opening its ability to gather around a multitude, a poly. It could be read as a dating strategy. Saying, I wouldn't be here if I weren't interested. The I being the issue and the subject, at the same time. The set up for this End-Communications addresses the agencies of ‘performing’, ‘publishing’, ‘curating’ and ‘soft architecture’ as strategies for artistic research. It focuses and exposes text, performance, installation, technological apparatus as chapters, editorial parameters, contexts for the reader-audience. It wants to bring together a ‘collection’ or ‘assemblage’ of performative materials that are autonomous on themselves but brought together in relation to one another in a permeable physical space. These materials are the indicators of processes of thinking and doing which are not conclusive on themselves but that are on the edge of making emerge or unfold questions, meanings, feelings.

      Over two days Zoumana Meïté and Sven Dehens invite you to come, see, listen and share. They will present their means for changed ways of reading, pointing and publishing.

      Zoumana Meïté 
      Practiced Dramatic Arts in different context (street, contest, Studies, social, laboratory, company, outside look, postmaster...). He is working as staging dramaturgist in Brussel.

      Sven Dehens (°1990, BE) www.svendehens.org

      These evenings on 25th and 27th January start at 19h till about 22h
      We recommend you come for the full evening.

      ++

      In addition to the end-communications two episodes of the Close Encounters series will take place in the afternoons on the same location. 

      25 January – Marcelo Rezende in conversation with Adrijana Gvozdenović – – 15h to 18h  – public talk – more info

      27 January – Femke Snelting, Nicolas Malevé & Pierre Rubio – Close Encounters – 15h to 18h  – public talk -  more info

       

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • BLOCK DIARY / SLOW, RANDOM & LINKED WRITING & THINKING Nicolas Galeazzi
      24 January 2018
      posted by: Geert Vaes
    • 01 January 2018
    • 29 April 2018
    • case of: Geert Vaes
    • BLOCK DIARY / SLOW, RANDOM & LINKED WRITING & THINKING

      24 JANUARY 2018 at the TOPOS, close to my INTAMISILLY ROOM

      The space is being formed. Slowly it's taking shape. Slowly the condition emerges by itself. Where did it come from? Hard to say. It's a collection of memories, past actions and future musings and possibilities. It's at the crossroad of then and then. Maybe it's even now. But to be able to say that, to make such a statement, more time should be spent in and with the actual space/room/condition. I am creating a condition for myself. But it's a very liquid one, in the sense that nothing is being set in stone. Two walls have wheels, one wall is a curtain, the door is aluminium spaghetti,... But the mental space is quite set... This condition. I create. I am that condition. Why am I creating this condition? Out of habit. That's true... It's an habitual environment. It's the kind of place that brings me to results. BUT! Results I know / like. Is that helping my research? It's a way. A tool. Let's stay open for other options, possibilities, methodologies...

      So. The space I am forming. My plan for this block is action. Action in my case leads to form. Shaping. I need the material to gain insight. I need to use my body. Put it in shapes, forms, molds. Shapes that are not me. Performing. Acting. Shapeshifting is my 'métier'. That's the backpack I am carrying. The words I was shaping in the previous block seem to be lost. Somewhere. In the new space I'm building? I know my research had something to do with You and I, with 'using masks as tools of awareness'. That sounds so good. 'A tool of awareness...'. But I lost what it means or even meant. I don't know anymore what I'm doing. But I'm not worried. I'm in the dark building a space. And I'm confident working and doing will bring clarity. At times my thinking and theorizing in the last block seemed so clear, especially talking to Peggy and sometimes to Heike too. The words and theoretical understanding went on a holiday. I hope they will send me a postcard soon...

      All is set. Almost. The coming days I will become others. They will interact with other researchers at a.pass. Maybe my colleagues will shine bright or bring their flashlights.

       

      25 JANUARY 2018 at the TOPOS, at the dining table next to the kitchen

       

      Today I wanted to bring a record player. There's one in my basement. I wanted, but I didn't. I was looking at it and thought: why? It's an extra tool, an extra asset, an extra thing to toy around with, to help me find meaning. But I'm often using the same tools. I guess that's not such a problem since a painter tends to use paint and a canvas, and a carpenter uses wood. But what do I use? Tools to create something I can show. But I'm doing research. I'm searching for ways to eliminate the distance between Me and You. Well... Eliminating sounds drastic, let's call it: make the space between you and me as tiny as performatively possible. That's another piece of information I'll have to chew on. I'm writing for writing, I'm practicing automatic writing, so what comes out, comes out...

      Instead of the record player I brought an old newspaper. 'La Nation Belge' from 17 December 1931. Inhabiting another skin through masks may feel similar as inhabiting another time, the thirties! It's always striking to see how little has actually and effectively changed. I have lots of these newspapers. I found them under the linoleum on the second floor of the house I'm living in. During renovations I stumbled on them and just started reading...

      Now there's one in the Topos. Feel free to read.

      I plan interviews. On the Intamissily stage and TV-Studio. Next week. Have to think about that. About the how. How to get closer to the other's researches...

      I'm reminded of 'Swimming' by Martha and the Muffins. Especially the phrase: 'We're afraid to call it love, let's call it swimming'. Hmmm. Sounds usefull. Listen here:

      https://youtu.be/LnUDRtPAWsE

       

      AND I re-read the first lines of my research proposal. It helps (!):

      The proposed research aims to investigate how hyper-realistic silicone spfx-masks can be used as tools of awareness to shed more light on race, gender and class issues in an experiential, sensual and non-mental way. How to help performers and non-performers create another persona and let them experience how it feels to literally be in somebody else’s skin, wearing another one’s face in non-theatrical daily situations. How does this change their perspectives? Or doesn’t it change anything? How does this, in a broader sense, affect the notions of ‚I’ and ‚You’? How does it affect one’s outlook on one’s own community, conditionings and beliefs?

    • reading session
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Local server Servers and hosts
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Monday Readings
    • a.pass, 3rd floor
    • 05 February 2018
    • Local server

      In the lexicon of networks, any computer connected to the Internet is called a host. This means that all computers have the ability to host content. But in the current paradigm of the Internet, some hosts are designated to be serving (servers), and other hosts are to be served (clients). For most activities on the Internet (email, web pages, social media applications and so on ...) users act as clients to servers, delegating more and more of their content to the "cloud". To understand the implications of this "delegation of hosting", we will look together at different computers that act as servers, talk about where they are located, who maintains them, and why this all matters. Followed by a collective reading of texts by Muriel Combes and Invisible Committee.

      The Monday Readings are five one day sessions that bring habitual tool-situations in conversation with theoretical and political thinking. They are intimate collective situations on the articulation of technique and the performance of boundaries, reading across technical tools and theoretical devices. The Mondays attempt to develop further connections between artistic research and techno-political practices such as software-as-a-critique, active archives and techno-galactic software observation.

      Each session starts with an exploration of day-to-day tools and technologies: text processing, file compression, on-line communication, security or digital archiving. This tool-reading is followed by a discussion and collective reading of related texts.

      Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

      Schedule

      10:00-13:00: Reading tools
      14:00-17:00: Reading texts

      If possible, bring a laptop. Sessions take place in a.pass on the 3rd floor. Participation is free.

    • 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

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • pattern language for conditioning practices weekly meetings
      19 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 19 January 2018
    • 23 March 2018
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • pattern language for conditioning practices

      PATTERNS
      The block MAKING/CONDITIONS is made of patterns. Here is the first pattern of an unfolding language of patterns that shall be created during the next three months.  In a weekly meeting we will look at the emergence of common patterns in or between our investigations of possible conditions for our researches.

      A pattern is a description of a specific practice, thought or approach that can help to develop a shared understanding of a certain field of knowledge. In this case the field of institutional critique and performance as an economic, sozial and artistic category. It discusses the relationship between an artistic research practice and its supporting conditional structures – the institutional in its broadest sense.

      Inspired by the Pattern Theory of Christopher Alexander we will develop a language that shall emerge from practicing our individual researches be shareable with a larger audience.

      According to Alexander, patterns are building blocks for transformation and follow an evolutionary structure: a pattern is repeatable, connective to other patterns and changes according to the needs of a situation.

      Patterns can take shape in any material or immaterial form, but should, if possible, be accompanied by a descriptive. The patterns will be gathered in a library and should be presented in a way that anyone can interpret and appropriate them in a actual situation.

       

      LANGUAGE
      Building a pattern language means to create a common context of a specific set of patterns. The singular patterns can be composed to syntax-like structures. Like in a spoken language, design patterns follow certain grammatical structures and can be combined in different orders  – but most likely not in any orders. The Language we create will evolve out of the context of our artistic research practices and will have to comply to it in its very specific way.


      LIBRARY
      The patterns shall be assembled and discussed in a library. This library shall be hosted in a shelter that shall be build in the big space of a.pass during Plenum I. It shall act as a center of the pattern language practice. The library of patterns shall be a living archive of practical thought, methods, acts, performances, approaches etc.
      Users of the library can experiment with the growing variety of patterns, can patch them together to sentences that make sense to their situation, can alter and amend patterns and add new ones. This is how the language fill find its form.

       

      CONDITIONING
      Every artistic practice is contained in a context and relates at the same time to a multitude of contexts. Yet, it is an intrinsic character of artistic practice to act beyond boundaries and in the grey-zones between contexts. For that the arts often needs to think and go beyond their conditions and rather start creating and intervening their own. This however might be difficult in situations where the overall structure is too big to leave. This might or might not be the case if we think of todays capitalist economy.

      However it seems that institutional critique enters a new phase where systems are changed not only from within, but by experimentally exploiting their structures. Authors like Gerhard Raunig talk in this context of new instituting practices. Through the construction of a pattern language we explore these practices and try to understand what they could mean in relation to our own researches.

    • 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

       

       

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

      14h to 18h (approximately) Meeting place: 14h apass 4th floor

      Bring Warm clothes, a smartphone with WhatsApp, Headphones
      [if you do not have a smartphone/whatsApp/headphones please inform me prior to the day of the excursion and I will supply an alternative]

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

       

      26. Okt

      Eleanor Ivory Weber

      The World Today / All In The Mind

      "“…a 100% probability of nothing happening, and that’s often when it’s more interesting…”
      – Peter Ryan, ABC Senior Business Correspondent, 2 October 2017
      On Monday 23 October 2017, several todays, today. An instruction-based, public yet solo, listening & reading exercise, derived from radiowaves. Thinking about the public mind and testing what is produced from chance and structure. How language functions on different registers, at once, in time, and beyond us.
      //// Please bring ID for library registration, a smartphone/laptop (with charger) and head/earphones. "

       

      24. Okt

      Pia Louwerens

      From I to we - Excavating reality together, at home

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

      25. Okt 

      Hoda Siahtiri

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

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

       

      26.Okt 

      Geert Vaes

      La Flandre Profonde/Into The Heart Of Flanders

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

       

      27. Okt

      Sven Dehens

      Untitled Excursion 

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

       

      30. Okt

      Shervin Kianersi

      For to Know Nothing Is Nothing

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

       

      31.Okt

      Elen Braga

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

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

       

      1.Nov 

      Leo Kay

      The time it takes to think

      How can we think together? How can we make Space for deep reflection on complex issues? How can we come close enough without intruding? How can we engage in group dialogue and take the time that is needed to think before producing more, contributing more to the system we are locked within?

      A day of observing, listening, walking, kneading, thinking, talking and baking, as we navigate a critical socio/political issue that effects us all and will continue to affect us in the forceable future. 

       

      2. Nov

      Luisa Filiitz

      A collection of Impressions

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

       

      3.Nov

      Eszter Némethi

      War-/-Lace and Vertigo

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

       

      17. Nov

      Marialena Marouda

      Flemish Marine Institue: Marine Station Ostend (MSO)

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

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • Semiotics of the Uncanny Dr. Dalila Honorato / Isabel Burr Raty
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Close Encounters series
    • a.pass 4th floor studio
    • 21 October 2017
    • Semiotics of the Uncanny

       

       

      a.pass Research Center and Isabel Burr Raty invite special guest Dr. Dalila Honorato.

      The talk will be followed by a discussion.

      Saturday October 21st 2017, 16h-19h @ a.pass , 4th floor

       

       

      'Semiotics of the Uncanny'

       

      'Semiotics of the Uncanny' will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior, touching on subjects such as: phobia, paraphilia, teratology, prosthetics and acrotomophilia.

      If the body is defined as the sum of all physical parts then individuality is composed by the uniqueness of this structure and the qualities of its elements. In a time when plastic surgery is considered a commodity within the cosmetic industry and the hype for symmetry has reached post-standardized levels, the borders between mass production and eccentricity, in what beauty is concerned, become more obvious. But it is when health issues occur that the equation changes. How can a body be defined if a physical part is missing or if it is supernumerary in the sum? Unlike some types of lizards, starfish, sea cucumbers, earthworms and salamanders, humans have a very limited capacity of self-healing. What happens to a physical part that is removed from a body separated either due to an accident or due to its dysfunction? And how does one cope with this separation as an individual and as a social being?

       

      After Dalila’s talk, Isabel Burr Raty, performance artist, independent filmmaker and associated researcher in a.pass Research Center, will offer some tea and will support a co-learning conversation.

       

      At first, the focus of the conversation will be on the Hybrid Art contemporary positioning, a phenomenon that mixes multiple art forms crossing borders between art, science and technology, contributing to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creating new alternative technological materials and objects aimed to serve as empowering tools for resisting the high-tech capitalist imperialism. Then, Isabel and the public will prolong the discussion with Dalila to bring her approach to a broader artistic research context.

       

      Dr. Dalila Honorato’s research focuses on embodiment at the intersection of performing arts and new media and, as a curator, she is interested in exploring the outlines of art and biology. Dalila is currently Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She is one of the founding members of the Interactive Arts Lab where she coordinates the Art & Science Research Group. She is the head of the organizing committee of the conference "Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science" and conceptor-developer of the Corfu Summer School in Hybrid Arts. She is a guest faculty at the PhD studies program of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, and a guest member of the Center of Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

      ionio.academia.edu/DalilaHonorato

       

      Isabel Burr Raty explores the ontological crack between the engineered and the native, between the official facts and the unlicensed knowledge of the resettled, the relocated; in order to think about the memory of the future and dig out chapters left out of scientific and history books. Her artistic research  is design based and semiotic, interweaving live/body art, participatory performance, biology and DIY technologies, and is based on the question of how to write in situ Sci-Fi narratives that remain alive, alive as they rely on the participative audience’s faculty to propose dispositives of liberation from a commodified life/body.

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

      When: Saturday October 21st  from 16:00 h to 19:00 h

      Where: a.pass fourth floor studio.

      Free entrance

      Directions: https:///www.apass.be/contact/

      Please confirm your participation by sending an email to <isabelburr.raty@sacrofilms.com> !

       
    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • A conversation-on-exhibition Marcelo Rezende / Adrijana Gvozdenović
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Close Encounters series
    • Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080
    • 25 January 2018
    • A conversation-on-exhibition

       

       

      Close Encounters @ a.pass End-Communications

      This month, two Close Encounters take place during the a.pass End-Communication event, an event dedicated to a.pass researchers presenting their research at the end of the post-masters program.

       

       

      Thursday January 25th, 15:00-18:00 @ Manchesterstraat, 17 - 1080

       

      A CONVERSATION-ON-EXHIBITION WITH MARCELO REZENDE AND ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ

       

      In this episode of Close encounters your host is the artist Adrijana Gvozdenović, who has invited the exhibition-maker with great experience Marcelo Rezende for a late afternoon conversation about the practice of exhibition making. From the different positions they occupy, within the art system mainly powered through the conventions of exhibition making, they will share their stories and experiences, while inviting a live audience to interact generously. The talk is programmed to place an emphasis on the controversial and sensationalistic questions: How can you produce meaning and experience that matters? Why do we still believe in reality?

       

      Marcelo Rezende

      Marcelo Rezende (Brazil, 1968) is a researcher, critic and exhibition-maker. He was director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2012-2015), artistic director of the 3rd Bahia Biennial (2014) and was part of the curatorial group of the 28th São Paulo Biennial (2008), amongst other projects and occupations. He is the author of the novel “Arno Schmidt” (2005), associate curator of the Museu do Mato (Scrubland Museum) in Bahia, and he prepared for the Johann Jacobs Museum (Zurich) the exhibition “Utopischer Beigeschmack” (summer, 2017). He is currently the director of the Archiv der Avantgarden (ADA) in Dresden, Germany.

       

      Adrijana Gvozdenović

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist living and working in Brussels, and is currently a researcher in a.pass – advanced performance and scenography studies and a member of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Montenegro. She is interested in the anecdotal and peripheral in art, in the performative aspects in the conventions of exhibition making, as well as artists’ motivations and their responsibility in the general context of art and art related politics. Her focus is on writing and collecting that often result in artist publications. She performed and presented her publication in Alexander Rodchenko's "Worker’s Club" in 2015. She holds a Master of Free Arts (Luca-University College for Sciences & Arts, Brussels, 2014) and a Master of Research in Art and Design (St-Lucas Antwerp, 2015)

       

    • [call] 2017/I 30 July 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
      newscaption
       
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

       

      More information on the application procedure for the post-master and (pre-)PhD-programme.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@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

       

       

    •  

      There has been a shift in humanities scholarship:

      (feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether

      --> redistribution of agencies

      political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

      (the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)

      • descriptive practices of poetics and natural history

       

      situated perspective ==> storytelling

      my interest in your work is to become skillful at reading with you our situated perspectives --> Zoumana’s, Hoda’s, Sina’s, ajayeb’s, apass’, etc.

       

      http://ajayeb.net/bibli

      • women in my life: Avital, Haraway, Ahmed, Scher, Barad, Despret, teaching me science and art, attentive modes of differential reading and writing, practices of noninnocent care and concern
      • men in my life: Serres, Sennet, Delanda, Levinas, Anand, teaching me a non-guilt-driven knowledge of history and past, a different mode of remembrance which provokes a different mode of response and responsibility

      #i am learning from Kohn that the survival is complicated, from Haraway that world works by excess and therefore filled with hope, with Sennett and Delanda a better account of socio-material history, from Ahmed a different understanding of psychoanalysis, from Barad poetry and argumentation, from Scher the effort needed to become interested, from Kenney that there is no need for a “standard language” to describe your interventions or to produce a body of knowledge about your matters of concern,

       

      http://ajayeb.net/?q=hypertext

       

      stories that collect stories [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]

      (kinda mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > made found object by Sina)

       

      stories that collect other stories:

      1- archive ~--> sortability

      2- translation ~--> linearity

      3- dictionary ~-->

      ==> universality (that both these stories claim)

      (my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storing/storying. i wasn’t interested in this some time ago: a shift in my interest)

       

      http://ajayeb.net/?q=excess

       

      excess : there is always more that we don't know, what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--X--> accelerationist manifesto, apocalyptic narratives, technophobic narcissistic stories, etc.)

      (i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic.)

       

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12j9COM_uN9zlWhs9FQiFVdAoc_jMo0AMesYGCFfUPNY/edit?usp=drive_web

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QYJHc3uoDwucLAMp4oPBe19CETNk2Pa27ZhK51bAngk/edit?usp=drive_web

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_sl0QNWI-Iedg48Ao7-aXxW9wnnife0xUTpnCzgrfQU/edit?usp=drive_web

       

      (as you have already noticed, my:)

      Routines:

      • interrupting stories with stories
      • partial connection (and its performance)
      • moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
      • mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
      • mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al-makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات, Sa'di, Attar, Sadra, Sohrevardi, etc.
      • remembering what one knows (=/= owes) (and organizing, performing, reworking it, sustaining a state of generative transformation = my ajayeb.net)
      • having stakes in rationality (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
      •  
      •  

       

      Practices:

       

      Trajectory:

      • Bibliography
      • Wonder
      • Ongoingness
      • Ontology
      •  

       

      Productions:

      • study as artwork
      • reading as artwork
      • bottom-top approach to writing
      •  

       

      Findings:

      • every research practice:
        • must include "the image of body"
        • must employ ontological attention to differential productions
        • must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors
        • must give extensive equipment list
        • must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices
        •  

       

      citation apparatus

      to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آورده‌اند که)

       

      citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories

       

      absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajaybe's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).

       

      اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...

       

      • Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...) (--> wonderful to relate… / Virgil’s citation making) (=/= sad to say…, unfortunately...)

       

      (with Despret's talking parrots)

      parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation

      (parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language

      [?am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also a profound interest in misunderstanding (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control? (Despret asks)

       

      exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continuous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning” ==> understanding itself is compromised

       

      “we”: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well

       

      ***

      (one thing i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community

      [asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling?

      (the question i asked Sven: to tell others 'which language one is using.')

       

      in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about:

      • histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions
      • the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural potential memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}

      -artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)

      -(out of) control standards

      -there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext http://ajayeb.net/bibli

      -international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?

       

      (it is about) organizing my memory

      (it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to mind(s) (of the people around me, and before me)

      (it is about) the things I am told

      __(these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,)

      __in our shared space where we let each other in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training

       

      also in apass i want to catch you in your acts

      it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)

       

      asking:

      1- what do I know?

      2- what am I told?

       

      1. the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is an always compound relation between matters, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology, semiotics, ajayeb theory, Sadrian imaginal ontology, etc.)
      2. the response to the second question is also not clear, i can never be sure of what i am told, i don't remember or even hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know

       

      (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity, panicking into a meaning i don't actually want to mean, or plotting an answer, plotting relevances)

       

      is all about loving to tell you about what i am reading

       

      to become a skilled listener : listening ~= response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend

      -these have nothing to do with “common understanding,” “make something work,”

       

      cooperation is about getting deeper into something

       

      (i am more interested in) conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)

       

      (digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?

       

      #on hypertext note:

       

      i am becoming skilled at looking at my own notes:

       

      {(1) what are the skills necessary [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface”--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...

      skills --> to become literate in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)

      --> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?

       

      (Sennett’s) varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

       

      ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:

      1. --> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
      2. --> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
      3. --> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?

       

      as you can see almost all my crafts and tropes are related to social order, communities of concern and research, practices of response, interactions in collective life, etc. the meanings of community and knowledge

       

      because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming sort of a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)

      a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particular niche of space and time, even when accessed in my hypertext (--> wht Sven’s music sounds different when he plays it in the group?)

       

      (committed to the imperative of the Rig,) things not to do in the pop-up book:

      • use as ironic: incongruity (عدم تجانس) in expectations of what is meant and what it will mean in advance
      • use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with transference and sujet supposé savoir
      • use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
      • use of palindromic model --> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherent in the pop-up book Blickmaschin

       

      *a non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic work

       

       

      my Rigs diagrams are swarms? -a multitude of different creative agents

      ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”

      • am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how? To equip a being with “ego”.

       

      topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing

      topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)

      -in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?

       

      • in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget;
        how did i come to use “?q=”: rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
        • selection pressure of ?q= : a (abstract) probe head:  explores a space of possible forms (of writing), is blind or shortsighted, nevertheless effective in certain circumstances ==> double articulation http://ajayeb.net/?q=double%2Barticulation
          • producing highlights: embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others
        • ?q= is an abstract machine that differentiates the process of sedimentary-sentence formation from the process that yields textual species
      • google webmasters tools is my first readership, it communicates its reading with me; (did i have a desire to make the hypertext for a machine?)
      • url passed in facebook post, results into a link to فلزیاب ، مطالب علمی و آموزشی / مدار فلزیاب و دستگاه فلزیاب تضمینی, a series of websites for selling treasure finders, finding metal under the ground, ganj, and so on...

       

      the English (since World War II) --> (1) international lingua franca of high technology, (2) the language of computers

      -in ajayeb.net the enforcement of standard spelling and grammar is weak or nonexistent

      -the amount of linguistic replicators that circulate through my ajayeb hypertext are bound to a colloquial English, they are nevertheless “English”. but this English is being changed and adapted by my foreign use in multiple ways. Is this language really “English”?

      -(towards) a flourishing of a neo-English + Farsi miniaturization of Eng

       

       

      ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i want to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.

      aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour,Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs

      **aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**

       

      novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories --> these genres of composition gather together and stage their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.

       

       

      bottom-up writing

       

      my ajayeb hypertext, what is there the specific law of putting together letters ([and atoms?] to produce a text)? That means the question of Greekness and syntax technology, and my reworking articulated

      • alphabetical proto cloud (Serres) --?--> without law, random
      • what are the laws of good combination that i am reworking or resisting or acquiring or answering to, in my ajayeb hypertext? (how composition is reproduced?)

      --> (the law enunciates [تلفظ کردن ,مژده دادن] the federated,) the law repeats the fact =/= the things of ajayeb are (still) in the process of being formed (--> the morality of reading that i am working on)

      (in the facts of the law there is no space between things and language, is reduced to zero)

      -language and things are born together with the very same process (Serres - Hermes.) --> stable gathering of elements

      • ajayeb's version of the network of primordial elements in communication with each other

       

      my interest in the devil is in the details of my makings (and others)

       

      *please take in mind that these names are my guess at my own rabbit chasings, (they are not “wants” or purposefully organized tracings or mobilized intentions)

       

      (do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation

      --> transformational grammar

      --> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level

      -->

      in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language (that computers could understand)?

       

      common language ~= standard language

      (we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)

       

      (my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of atomic-level data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)

        • is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set

       

      • a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency

       

       

      #in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with an idea of “Iranian scientist” (?)

       

      authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very “natural” at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy

       

      questions for my ajayeb's Rigs and pop-up book:

      my rigs and pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation

      • pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
      • Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning

      --> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)

      exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive

      objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundary articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)

      • my Rigs and books are basically about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena

       

      reading: “text” is the interface between the materialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb

      (“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)

       

      ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

       

      عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality

       

      ajayeb's stories of historically nonhuman people

       

      in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world (= phenomena)

      (with Barad)

       

      we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus ends, and this poses serious questions about the ontology of our practices

       

      • (but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embedded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, my sayings, etc.)
      • (resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries (of my objectives)?
      • (if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics?

       


    • 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.

    • [call] 2017/II 30 April 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
      newscaption
       
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

       

      More information on the application procedure for the post-master and (pre-)PhD-programme.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

       

       

    • 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/

       

       

       

    • Newsletter Feb 2017 13 February 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande

      newscaption

      line650

       

       TALK BY PEGGY PIERROT

      Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound

      #5 in Book Club Series, curated by Pierre Rubio

      February 16 (9.30am-1.30pm) @ a.pass 4th floor (Rue Delaunoystraat 58-60 Brussels)

       

      In the next Book Club a.pass welcomes Peggy Pierrot for an animated reading and listening to echoes of submarine writing. She steers the slave/space/ship for a time travel into modern cultures and music. Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digtised compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rhythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes?

      Peggy Pierrot is a Brussels based sociologe, journalist and lecturer connected to erg (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels) and les Ateliers des Horizons (Grenoble - France). Influenced by science-fiction and African-American and Caribbean literature and culture, she engages in projects that link information, media, activism, radio art and technology.

      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 a.pass’ artist-researchers. For the most part Book Clubs are 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:

       

      February 16: You call this progress!? #2 (sci-fi films curated by Ekaterina Kaplunova & Sven Dehens)
      February 27 - March 3: Wordling from this World (workshop with Alice Chauchat)
      March 8: Edward George presents The Last Angel of History (film screening and talk)
      March 9-10: Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova, Edward George (book club #7 and #8)
      March 14-15: The Tea Party (workshop by Helena Dietrich)

      Subscribe to workshops, book clubs and screenings via our website & come!

       



       a.pass

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

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge Book Club Series / Sina Seifee
      29 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 02 February 2017
    • 09 February 2017
    • Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

       

      Which version of "realism" are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a 'point of view' is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading sessions we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'.

      This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations.

      We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.

      From 9.30am to 1pm both days.

    • information
    • NOT_index
    • newsletter1 12 January 2017
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • 21 September 2017
    • 23 September 2017



    • a.pass newsletter september
      *Five a.pass researches 21-22-23 september
      *Block III 2017 introduction
      * Call for application 06/10/2017


       

      No Communication without noise
      five a.pass researches
      curated by Laura Herman 

      “Mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity are part of knowledge; noise is part of communication, part of the house.” 
      (Michel Serres)

      No Communication Without Noise is a three-day insight in five ongoing a.pass researches that share an affinity with the ambivalences of writing and reading. Interested in communication, or the lack thereof, Esta Matkovic, Lili M. Rampre, Sina Seifee, Xiri Tara Noir and Maarten Van den Bussche address the limitations and untapped potentials of text in proposing new modes of attention.

      MORE information

       
      Save the Date:
      21-22-23 September
      17:00 to 22:00 

      a.pass 
      Bottelarij 
      Rue Delaunoye 58 - 60 
      1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean 


       ***More information on the full programme soon.***



      BLOCK III 2017
      4 SEPTEMBER TILL 2 DECEMBER
      CURATED BY VLADIMIR MILLER,

      This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile,
      displaced, untethered research practice. We will use the methodologies
      of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk  to reconsider the
      building blocks of our research and discover new ones.

      MORE information

       


       

       call

      FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH PROJECTS
      POST-MASTER AND PHD LEVEL


      DEADLINE: 06/10/2017
      TO START IN MAY 2018

      SELECTION TALKS : 19&20/10/2017
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)


      MORE information

       


       

       

       

    • information
    • NOT_index
    • newsletter2 september 2017 12 January 2017
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • 21 September 2017
    • 23 September 2017



    • a.pass newsletter september

      *Block III 2017 introduction
      *Five a.pass researches 21-22-23 september
      * Call for application 06/10/2017



      BLOCK III 2017
      4 SEPTEMBER TILL 2 DECEMBER
      CURATED BY VLADIMIR MILLER,

      This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile,
      displaced, untethered research practice. We will use the methodologies
      of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk  to reconsider the
      building blocks of our research and discover new ones.

      MORE information

       


       

      No Communication without noise
      five a.pass researches
      curated by Laura Herman 

      “Mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity are part of knowledge;
      noise is part of communication, part of the house.” 

      (Michel Serres)

      No Communication Without Noise is a three-day insight in five ongoing a.pass researches
      that share an affinity with the ambivalences of writing and reading.
      Interested in communication, or the lack thereof,

      Esta Matkovic, Lili M. Rampre, Sina Seifee, Xiri Tara Noir and Maarten Van den Bussche
      address the limitations and untapped potentials of text in proposing new modes of attention.

      MORE information

       
      Save the Date:
      21-22-23 September
      17:00 to 22:00 

      a.pass 
      Bottelarij 
      Rue Delaunoye 58 - 60 
      1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean 


       ***More information on the full programme soon.***


       

       call

      FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH PROJECTS
      POST-MASTER AND PHD LEVEL


      DEADLINE: 06/10/2017
      TO START IN MAY 2018

      SELECTION TALKS : 19&20/10/2017
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)


      MORE information

       


       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • TELESCOPING THE INTERVIEW three day intensive
      12 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Myriam Van Imschoot
    • 07 February 2017
    • 10 February 2017
    • TELESCOPING THE INTERVIEW

       

      'Telescoping the interview' follows in three days the route from interview-based art to vocal performance and bruitism. That was anyway the passage once taken by sound and performance artist Myriam Van Imschoot when she discovered within her interest in the interview several doors that led over time to appreciating speech for what it offers beyond meaning: significant aberrations, iterations, flux and rupture, modulation, and not in the least, different alterations of subjectivity away from the knowledge-centered ego to idiotic, pluriphonic and even nonhuman alternatives. It became the backbone of a body of works that persistently investigates the various agencies and colours of voicing.

      The three day workshop wants to act as an insert into Trouble on Radio Triton by interacting with the radiophonic and speculative concerns of this block.

      Rather than developing a full-on extensive practice-based workshop, this is a three day intensive that will combine artist talk, screenings, voice improvisations, score explorations, and other tele-scopic incursions into artistic practice and research.

      Have a look at the schedule below.

       

      Myriam Van Imschoot (1969) is a Brussels-based sound and performance artist who works in different media - with the voice as the recurrent motive -, often engaging large groups of performers/practitioners that bring their own sonic cultures, techniques and histories, on the edge of folklore and popular practice with extended uses. Her latest performance pieces, What Nature Says (2015) and HELfel (2016), evoke sensations of landscape in trouble, with the call as an emergent act of insistence and resistance. She is the founder of various initiatives, like Sarma, Voicelabs, Oral Site, and recently the sound poetic series Volume SP. In 2017 her new film Yodel Portrait Phil Minton will come out in Stuttgart, Akademie Schloss Solitude, followed by the première of the theater production IN KOOR! (with Willem Dewolf) at Campo.

      http://oralsite.be/pages/Myriam_Van_Imschoot_Digital_Portfolio

      http://oralsite.be/pages/WNS

      www.oralsite.be

      http://oralsite.be/pages/VolumeSP

       

       

      Schedule of the workshop

      Tuesday 7th from 3pm to 10pm

      Wednesday 8th from 10am to 5pm

      Friday 10th from 10am to 5pm

       

      Location of the workshop

      a pass / Studio 4th floor

      rue Delaunoystraat, 58-60

      1080 Brussels

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book Club #1 COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT BOOK CLUB SERIES / Sol Archer
      06 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 19 January 2017
    • Book Club #1 COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT

       

      a.pass welcomes Sol Archer on Thursday January 19th from 9.30 to 13h00 as part of the Book Club Series.

       

      “SF’s specific modality of existence is a feedback oscillation that moves now from the author's and implied reader’s norm of reality to the normatively actualised novum… and now back from these novelties to the author's reality, in order to see it afresh from the new perspective gained.”

      Darko Suvin

       

      Science Fiction has enjoyed a massive surge in popularity over the past few years, Utopian, Dystopian, and futuristic worlds abound in the cinema, on TV, in books, and cartoons.  I want to look at what drives this surge, and how imagining difference may be a reflection on the political reduction of possibility, following 2008?

      Starting with Darko Suvin's ideas of Cognitive Estrangement, we will look at some of the mechanisms and functions of science fiction, and consider how the imagining of alternative realities operates is a critical gesture with which to view consensus reality -Suvin's “Zero World”.

      We will read into Ursula LeGuin's “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, consider some classic examples of critical Sci-Fi, and talk briefly about the position of theatre within Science Fiction.

       

      Sol Archer is an artist, primarily working with the moving image to research the layering of narratives within location. Sol’s work has been exhibited internationally, at, among other places, the Sydney Biennial, the MuKHA Antwerp, Action Field Kodra, and the University of California. Currently he is an artistic researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie where he is developing a film workshop, based on an improvisational game of science fiction and alternative futures.

      http://www.solarcher.co.uk

      https://youtu.be/vd4pM5-d3yU

       

       

       on Thursday January 19th from 9.30 to 13h00 !! @ https://goo.gl/maps/n1xo77pA9es

    • 14449020_251669665234609_1836486306565858688_n

       
       

      This resource is offering online correspondence with few of my friends.
      However decides to use it, will contact my friends under my own name - LILI.

      This will be supported by FB page "LILIth", impliying that another resource is an online identity many LILIs will construct - Lili1st, Lili2nd, and so on, therefore Lili-th. Whoever wants will become an administrator of the page.

      Instead of reaching my friends through their individual email addresses or facebook profiles, they will, just like we, be gathered under one FB page "Plötzlich hab' ich Freunde" (translates "Suddenly I have friends"), having same possibilities on that page. This is due to their own decision whether they also want to engage in constructing a single voice talking to LILIth and therefore use the correspondence from the mentioned page, or converse with you, LILIth from their private profiles.

      It may sound complicated to understand who is "granted" what access where - the point is that a communication begins between the two sides LILIth and LILIth's friends with no distinction in who is on which side - constructing a new voice and transforming the relation between the two;  I also take part and will actually commence with the very first contact!

      A lot more interests, curiosities, experiments and expectations to be mentioned, but let's see how it goes, correspondence and profile construction is welcomed to be used for whatever LILIth would have used it for - personal, research-related, ..anything...or everything that you will find out LILIth's friends respond to!

    • postgraduate program
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON- ((((((( changing (the) world (s) )))))) 10 December 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 09 January 2017
    • 30 April 2017
    • CURATED BY PIERRE RUBIO
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON_ ((((((( changing (the) world (s) ))))))

       

       

       

      TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON

      ((((((( changing (the) world(s) ))))))

       

       

      ‘ The struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons. Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.'

      Judith Butler

      Undoing Gender, 2004

       

       

      For the coming months, a.pass will adopt a ‘Sci-Fi terraforming mode of attention’ to challenge the current assembly of artist-researchers with the task of creating some conditions to critically questioning our abilities to ‘render our world habitable again’.

      In fact, far from proposing an innocuous escapism in the false paradise of disembodied utopias, the next a.pass block is concerned with questions addressing the possible (in)capacity of art in general to produce a change and aims to understand the (im)possible contribution of art to collective empowerment by means of artistic researching.

      The hybrid dispositive of the block is designed to research, reveal, activate and share the political inventive potentialities of our artistic researches through, paradoxically,  an immersion into and practice of different types of (speculative) fiction.

      Which alternative worlds do our researches/practices contain and can immanently produce? How do we relate to the future via artistic-research? As artists, do we through our researches contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if yes, then which cultures do our researches produce?

      Trouble on Radio Triton is a metaphoric multipolar dispositive. A discursive and practice-based ‘lure for feeling’ and thinking. An operative alibi strategically using ‘if’s’, ‘what if’s’, ‘as if’s’ to exercise critique and imagine alternatives.

      Through a permanent dialogue between practice-based research, reflection on a variety of discourses and different modes of speculation we will explore multiple but simultaneous realities induced by a proliferation of free-form  'fictionalisations' of every participants’ research in parallel with the individual development of these very researches.

      What can we discover in our research by listening to it from another space – the one of fiction? Who will talk?  What will talk? But also: how to listen? Where to listen from? What to listen for? And whom to listen with? How to get to more than one point of listening? What/Who will become deaf? What/Who will be silenced? What/Who will be heard?

       

       

      We will present our researches three times during the block, using different forms: at first a networked portrait then a master class and finally a performative artistic-research presentation.

      On Thursday mornings we will welcome several engaged practitioners in a series of reading sessions, talks and discussions curated by Pierre Rubio in collaboration with some of the artists-researchers involved in the program.  They will share with us their efforts at creating conditions for imagining otherwise.

      With e.g. : Sol Archer, Peggy Pierrot, Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova...

      We will follow three different practice-based workshops:  Alice Chauchat's Wordling from this World , Helena Dietrich's The Tea Party  and a taylor-made proposal by Myriam Van Imschoot.

      We will attend a series of conferences by Edward George, Paul Gilroy, Lizzie Borden and Donna Haraway.

      We will collectively curate the Night Sessions: a series of evenings proposing lines of flight and unexpected connections with the program.

      We will finally collaborate together at creating a true/false/real/fictional radio station: Radio Triton.

       

       

      Radio Triton is the collective experimental dispositive of the block – a pedagogical and metaphorical tool. The proposal invites the participants to imagine and produce a series of audio pieces developed out of their researches and their contributions to the block. They can be produced individually or in collaboration within the ‘machine’ Radio Triton, which nature and identity we will collectively invent.

      The Radio Triton ‘'program’ will follow two main trajectories. The first consisting of the recording of different forms of interviews between the artists researchers and the block-guests and second being the creation of fictional audio and sonic pieces through the application of various translation processes to the participants’ researches.

      These translations/speculations will be supported by a series of sound research ateliers. Starting with ”Foley your Research” with Christian Hansen -a queer interpretation of Foley art- around the question "how does/could your research sound like?" and followed by a series of  Thursday afternoon sessions curated by Pierre Rubio in collaboration with the artists-researchers. The aim of the sessions will be in finding the appropriate 'displacing questions': the futures we need to produce the audio fictions we need.

      Radio Triton will simultaneously engage in the tasks of performing, documenting, archiving and broadcasting alternative -both disturbing and reassuring- ways of becoming-with-each-other otherwise.

       

       

      The block and the radio dispositive are named in reference to Donna Haraway’s “invitation to stay with the trouble” and the anarchist and hedonistic science-fiction masterpiece novel by Samuel R. Delany ‘Trouble on Triton - an ambiguous heterotopia’ from 1976. The novel was partly written in a dialogue with Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist and feminist science fiction novel ‘The Dispossessed’, whose subtitle is ‘an ambiguous utopia’. As the subtitles imply, the two novels offer conflicting perspectives on utopia and imagine the concrete possibilities and consequences of anarchist and queer societies.

      Both books inviting us to see through the trouble.

       

      Pierre Rubio, December 2016

       

       

      “The first cultural device was probably a recipient .... Many theorisers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier”. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely foetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.”

      Ursula K. LeGuin in ’The Carrier bag Theory of Fiction’,

      In Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1986

       

       

       

    • Newsletter November 2016 13 November 2016
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

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      INVITATION

      The Artist-Commoner.
      (Self) Education
      of New Subjectivities

      Two days of presentations, performances,
      exchanges and commoning practices @ Kaaistudio

      November 25 (10am-2am) & November 26 (3:30 pm-2am)

      Commong sa na pas de valure_apass_Colour

      A public meeting organised by a.pass.

      With: Daniel Blanga-GubbayKristien Van den Brande, Bojana Cvejić, Juan Dominguez, Nicolas Galeazzi, Guy Gypens, Miriam Hempel, Philippine Hoegen, Steven Jouwersma, Rudi Laermans, Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Cecilia Molano,  Kate Rich, Pierre Rubio, Femke SneltingSPIN, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, and a.pass-researchers.




      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.

      November 25 (10am-2am) & November 26 (3:30 pm-2am)
      @ Kaaistudio - Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81. Brussels 1000.

      Free admission.

      read more and program

      Between what is no longer and what is not yet

      Performance by Juan Dominguez @ Kaaistudio

      November 26, 20:30

      Performance in the context of a.pass’ public meeting The Artist Commoner.
      (Self) Education of New Subjectivities

      retrato johnny

      Dominguez wants to suspend events and create an interval of time in which he can try to integrate his past into his future. He will translate his visions and his desire to encounter the unknown through language. Dominguez is working alone for the first time in 14 years. Back then, he choreographed his work with labeled cards. Now, he’ll speak himself and give rise to a self-portrait that cites himself and some of his friends.

      Concept and Performance: Juan Dominguez
      Production Management: Manyone
      A production by Juan Dominguez. Supported by Tanznacht Berlin and Tanzfabrik Berlin/ apap-advancing performing arts project – Performing Europe 2020 / EU – Creative Europe Programme
      Photo: Cuqui Jerez
      Duration: +- 2 hours. 

      Limited capacity! 8/10/12€.

      Tickets via Kaaitheater: website

       

      New Call for applications 
      for artistic research projects post-master and phd level

       

      mess_and_research

      if you are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice,

      then a.pass might have a place for you. READ MORE

       

      DEADLINE: 09/01/2017
      TO START IN MAY 2017
      SELECTION TALKS : 23&24/01/2017
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)

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      a.pass’ curatorial team: new constellation

      From January 2017 onward!

      In 2007 Elke Van Campenhout started a.pass; almost 10 years later the time has come to pass on what she called her ‘tender institute’ to a new constellation of people. New or not so new. Mentor Kristien Van den Brande and programme coordinator Nicolas Galeazzi are asked to join the curatorial team of a.pass, which currently consists of Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio and Vladimir Miller. From 2017 on Lilia and Kristien will share the artistic coordination previously done by Elke and Nicolas. The extended curatorial team stays responsible for the post-master programme, and is preparing for a more intensive collaboration with the a.pass research centre.

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       a.pass

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    •  

      Observation: for each scores, observing changes that occure at a body, psychical, emotional and imaginary level. Weight, tension, focus, gaze, scale, feeling of enlarging/shortening, solid/fluid, unique/multiple, colours, emotions, image, association,...

      Heart:

      • feeling the heart beat through inner focus: fingers, hands, feet, temples,...

      • start laid down, try to feel/hear your heart beat where it reveals itself clearly, look for less obvious place where you can feel it, change position and do it again.

      • Start sitting cross-legged, relax your upper body and let your neck and more of your body oscillating according to your heart beat.

      • place your hand under your jaw to feel your heart beat with your fingers.

      • Reproduce the heart beat in live with your voice

      • move another part of your body on the rhythm of your heart beat

      • bend your knees on your heart beat

      • jump on your heart beat

      • by two: place your hand under the jaw of the partner, and do the same scores as above

      • move/dance on the rhythm of your heart beat, with or without helping technology (stethoscope,...)

      Vibrations :

      • alone: produce sounds with your voice (changing the tone and volume) and try to localise them, by feeling/following their vibrations, in your body.

      • By two : one partner is producing the sound and the other is localising it helping him/herself with hands or other body parts

      • By two : back to back, together or one at a time, the partners produce sounds and localise them within their bodies.

      • move/dance following the body parts that naturally resonate with the produced sound

      • move/dance resisting to follow the body parts that naturally resonate with the produced sound.

      Narration :

      • declare out loud a specific statement and feel what this declaration is doing to your body, physically, emotionally.

      • declare out loud a specific statement and repeat it while moving. Feel what that does to your body and how the movements are created through this declaration.

      • declare out loud a specific statement and repeat it while changing its shape, tone, speed, volume, emotion with which it is declared.

      • authentic speech : talk without caring about the meaning of your speak, just follow your mood

      Time:

      • stay in one position for a long period of time (to be determined) till you start noticing subtle changes in your body, tension of the muscles, pain, focus,...then change position and do t again or just start moving slowly.

      • Gaze at an object in the space and observe how your perception is changing with time, how your awareness of your look change and your acknowledgement of the object itself start changing too.

      Listening:

      • multidirectional listening: listen to all sounds of your surrounding environment (down, up, right, left, front, back, far, close) with the same intensity. Don't focus on any of them, but try to hear them, to let them enter your hear equally.

      • Intimate listening: turn your gaze on the inside and listen to the sound produced by your body (heart, breath, digestive system,...)

      • in/out: mix the two previous scores and listen to the inside and the outside with the same intensity of presence in your mind

      • group listening: picture that you connect your ear, your listening to the one of the other in the group and try to hear what and how they hear.

      Blind:

      • blind your eyes or keep them closed for several hours and act normally, move, walk, eat, sit, talk,... and notice how your other senses get increased.

      • By two: both blind their eyes and then connect to each other through one body part and start moving, trying to tune within the partner and to reproduce the same movement. One will be leading and the other one following. Change role without opening eyes.

      • Deaf dance: move/dance, trying to make as less noise as possible.

      Grimaces :

      • make grimace in front of a mirror. Change the speed and the intensity going from one grimace to another. Notice the emotional change within you.

      • Make grimaces in front of a mirror and expand them to your entire body. Be attentive to the different tension, emotional changes,...

      Breath/tone :

      • start breathing normally then go for producing a tone but keep it there. Don't go for it entirely, just stay on the threshold between breath and tone.

      • Start producing a sound and then go for changing it. The same way, don't go entirely for the change, stay on the threshold.

      • Tone/grimace: in front of a mirror, produce a sound (tone or breath or whatever) and expand the physical consequence of it in a grimace and then expand it to the body. Then change tone, or change grimace or tension in the body and see how the three of them are relating to each other.

      • Choose a point in the space. Breath in and scream at it with a specific emotional aim that you've chosen before: love scream, rage scream, hate scream, melancholic one, sad one,...

      • produce a sound and repeat it; Try to hear it and to produce it the same way again and again. See how your perception of it is changing and how you get used and unused to it.

      07/10/2016

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      By two : back to back, together or one at a time, the partners produce sounds and localise them within their bodies”.

      We started from this “back to back” score and then we implemented it following our body and the divers discoveries we made. We choose to tune, to produce the same tone, which allowed us tu feel more clearly the vibrations produced by our own voices. The low frequencies were easier to feel because of their location in the chest when the higher pitch, resonating only in the skull can't really be transmitted from one body to another. Although the higher pitch vibrations are easier to sense if producing through humming...the closed mouth and then your skull itself works as an inner sound box.

      The next step of this experience was to come up with a score that could help us to extend in our bodies the vibrations produced by our voices. To do so, we decided that one of us would lay down on its back and produce a tone out loud, and would try to keep this tone unchanged while the other would manipulate its body : lifting up, pushing, pulling, displacing it.

      • Sum up of one partner's experience : subtle changes of the tone according to the manipulation of the body. To push or pull on member changed the tension of the entire body, affecting the position and the tension of the diaphragm, that is then affecting the production of the tone by making it louder, lower or affecting the pitch. Notice that after this subtle change, it is always possible to come back to the original tone (the chosen one) although it is sometimes uncomfortable, a feeling of having to force myself to produce a less natural tone. After a while, it seems that the body and the mind starts to understand the inner process of those slight changes and starts to anticipate the change, by producing a different tone when the body manipulation didn't happen yet. The movement of pulling the lower part of the body (the legs) spread down the vibrations (almost reaching the pelvis area and modifies the basic tone towards a lower one. I assume it does so because of pulling down and relaxing the diaphragm. The more we are relaxed, the more the vibrations can spread and extend to the entire body.

      • Sum up of the other partner's experience : to manipulate the body produces variations in my feeling of gravity and according to the intensity of those changes of gravity, the initial tone fluctuates. It happened that some tiny manipulations cause a sensation of dizziness and this very sensation also affects the tone itself. It seems that the emotional state of the person also affects the tone that is being produced (when one anticipates the dizziness that is to come or anticipate the touch, or the manipulation to come). When the neck and so the throat are manipulated, the voice casts off and is followed by a strong feeling of dizziness. It seems that this specific area is a physical as emotional knot that can be unfolded through voice mixed with specific manipulation.

    • Hi, look through me. See how it looks like to be seeing yourself doing it.

      Use me as a camera to view the commons. See how time slows down and reverses when you take the time to stop doing and start observing.

      Use me to see time in reverse: clean dishes gotten dirty reverse into cleanness, cups spread out on the table gather again in one container, dishes pile up inside the sink. 

      Use me to catch the making of coffee and tee, the arranging and cleaning of the commons, the taking care and the maintenance.

      The economic mind-set and mode of production sets in motion a cycle that needs re-production work to sustain it. Care-work is a space-time making which often has the traits of being repetitive and cyclical itself. It often consists of laying the grounds for, of preparing for something, and in so doing it takes place before, after or around the `main` event. 

      For the economic mode of production, care-work is both marginal and necessary. 

      It is by shifting the camera to the margins that something starts to vibrate. 

      By embodying the camera and taking the position of the observation, the body-camera also becomes a focus of attention, teasing the violence embedded in the acts of `capturing` and `releasing`.

      The spaces of production and re-production, of activity and receptivity,  get expanded and welcome other modes of work and existence.

       

       

      14.01.2016

      The tool has got company. 

      Based on a discussion between Zoumana and Nicolas about the mode of existence of a radicaly Open Space we developed an other frame that shuts light on a specific action or set. 

      Report from the discussion:

      What is the mode of existence of an open space?

      How concrete can the Open be? Open to what? Open from where? Open to whom? How is it possible to understand a mode of existence if you you can not / don’t want to answer these parameters?

      Can we talk about a 'mode' in the open space or is that already too closing? What kind of specifications does an open space need in order to be openly accessible?

      Entering the open space you always will bring an other habitat with you. That habitat will be in communication with the habitat of the open space. Potential, or unavoidable misunderstandings will appear.

      If you don’t feel what the habitat is you become careful. A habitat can be exclusive if you don’t understand it. If you then don’t feel the ground it will be difficult to develop a practice. It always will feel alien to practice within your old habitat.

      In the open, the open you do not understand yet, everything appears magic!

      Magic is improvisation and speculation,

      Improvisation as a corporal speculation.

      How to let the “angle pass”?

      What is the potential of that magic? The stage has a lot of this magic! It is a speculative alteration of the habitat ...

      What are the conditions that I allow myself to enter the open?

      The stage gives those conditions.

       

      Transformation of the tool:

      In the discussion it appeared, that we need a simple framing stage for magic alterations of the proposed habitat. 

      Haitat - 1

    • 16.09.2016

      common thing - 1

      openly concrete / generically specific:

      Is it about balancing or confronting?

      Is it paradoxical or integrative?

      Never found the right track, yet.

       

      30 September 2016

      WP_20160930_002

      All words that signified a 'being' (you, I, him, demon, God, spider etc) were removed from the text, and used to talk, first to the theremin and later to talk to Fred.

       

    • common thing - 2

      The world created by thought, the world of words, language, and concepts, is the world of opposites: ‘Up and down’, ‘this or that’, ‘inside and outside’, ‘right and wrong’, ‘black and white’, ‘true and false’, ‘positive and negative’, ‘me and you’ and so on. The world of words, language, thoughts, concepts, is a dualistic world of apparent opposites. But, in reality, do opposites exist? What we are really pointing to when we use the word ‘non-duality’ is something that goes beyond all of these mind-made opposites. But how can we talk about something that goes beyond opposites, when even our attempt to talk about non-duality is dualistic? So, what the word non-duality actually means is really very difficult to describe or put into words. In fact, you could say it’s impossible. For we are not talking about non-duality as opposed to something called duality, we are not talking about pro-duality as opposed to anti-duality. In fact the non-duality we speak of is not the opposite of anything. This is impossible to understand logically or rationally. To see what is being spoken of, we must go beyond our ordinary way of thinking and seeing.

      ‘Non-duality’ is actually a translation of the Sanskrit word ‘Advaita’, which simply means ‘not two’ and points to the essential oneness (wholeness, completeness, unity) of life, a wholeness which exists here and now, prior to any apparent separation. It’s a word that points to an intimacy, a love beyond words, right at the heart of present moment experience. It’s a word that points us back Home. And despite the compelling appearance of separation and diversity there is only one universal essence, one reality. Oneness is all there is – and we are included. What we are really trying to do when we say ‘non-duality’ is point to life as it is right now, before the appearance of concepts and labels; before thought creates a world of things: table, chair, hand, foot, fear, me, you, past, future. What is life before thought? Can we even talk about that? Is it possible to capture non-duality into words?”

      Jeff foster

      http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/.


      16 September 2016: Added set cards from the Declaration tool: 
      All togetherness / illusion ?
      The speech act: / Declaring something as a tool / as resource / The act: / translate something into a tool or a resource

    • common thing - 18

      16----09----2016

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      23-09-2016

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      23 -09 -2016

      The typewriter revolution

      Richard F. H. Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University. He has written about and translated works by Martin Heidegger. Polt is a typewriter enthusiast active on the Typosphere[1] and former editor of the quarterly ETCetera publication about manual typewriters.

       

      Richard Polt, the author of The Typewriter Revolution, talks about the growing interest in typewriters, what they are doing with them and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TcKYEnA-PU

      intzrview of Richard Polt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTe6d23zBjg

       

      I transcribed the beginning of  the audio recording of my  first mentoring session with Femke .

      I want to add it to "the breathing archive".

      I usually transcribe audio recordings with my computer.

      It took the whole session to transcribe few minutes of the conversation.

      There where a lot of obstacle on the way.

      I like mistakes and obstacles on the way.

       

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      30/09/2016

      Type writting performance score:

      The typewritter is placed on a  heavy table.

      The performer drags the table in the room, consciously making a lot of noise.

      She looks for a "good place to start".

      The "good place to start" is an usual place to typewrite.

      The performer types standing.

      She transcribes a conversation that is recorded on her phone.

      She mesures her action with the cicada candle.

      She smells the cicada candle burning as she listen to the sound of her action.

      Sometimes she stops typing and listen to the room.

      When she feels it's a "good moment", she resituates the table.

      She drags it again to another unusual place, for example, too close to someone. 

      She can leave the table to check what other poeple are doing around, grab a coffee or go to the toilet.

      She sometimes engages with the practice of others.

      She sometimes stays behind the table as a spectator.

      As she does not want to destroy the plastic dance floor that she secretely hates,  she places the table on a wool blanket.

      She drags the blanket  and pay attention to re situate the table in between the plastic dance floor and the wodden floor.

      She wants to make sure that dance can happen anywhere in the space, especially in the margin.

      She wants to make sure that her actions can be seen as dance.

      She lays on the blanket half under the table and listen to the recording with the eyes closed.

      She leaves the blanket and let the audio play alone.

       

       

       

       

       

    • common thing - 29

      15 september 2016

      This resource is Text. This Text was inspired/produced by my love life during the summer of 2016.
      It is not all and every piece of text that originated because of love this summer, it's a first selection.
      More might be added during the course of the block, or not. I can be asked for clarification about the Text;
      But I'm not obliged to answer. The Text as they are here, can be used in any way you see fit.
      There are no digital versions available. Exit strategies for transformed (parts of) Text must be talked through with me.

       


      16 September 2016: Added set cards from the Declaration tool: 
      What kind of tradition do we need today? / What kind of ceremony do we need today? / what kind f representation of togetherness do we need today? / What kind of common intimacy do we need today?
      Re-thinking the made dominated institution / economy as a masculine practice
      Love as institutional practice?
      Emotional attachment / belonging, possessing, owning, appropriating, claiming, responding, adding, developing, ...


       

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      common thing - 9

       

      common thing - 3

       

    • information
    • a.pass: The Uncanny 14 September 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here 

      apass_logo_sm

       
      SEMIOTICS OF THE UNCANNY

      DR. DALILA HONORATO

       

      a.pass Research Center and Isabel Burr Raty

      invite special guest Dr. Dalila Honorato.

      The talk will be followed by a discussion.

      Saturday October 21st 2017, 16h-19h

      @ a.pass , 4th floor 

       

      ‘Semiotics of the Uncanny’ will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior, touching on subjects such as: phobia, paraphilia, teratology, prosthetics and acrotomophilia.

      If the body is defined as the sum of all physical parts then individuality is composed by the uniqueness of this structure and the qualities of its elements. In a time when plastic surgery is considered a commodity within the cosmetic industry and the hype for symmetry has reached post-standardized levels, the borders between mass production and eccentricity, in what beauty is concerned, become more obvious. But it is when health issues occur that the equation changes. How can a body be defined if a physical part is missing or if it is supernumerary in the sum? Unlike some types of lizards, starfish, sea cucumbers, earthworms and salamanders, humans have a very limited capacity of self-healing. What happens to a physical part that is removed from a body separated either due to an accident or due to its dysfunction? And how does one cope with this separation as an individual and as a social being?

       

      After Dalila’s talk, Isabel Burr Raty, performance artist, independent filmmaker and associated researcher in a.pass Research Center, will offer some tea and will support a co-learning conversation. 

      At first, the focus of the conversation will be on the Hybrid Art contemporary positioning, a phenomenon that mixes multiple art forms crossing borders between art, science and technology, contributing to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creating new alternative technological materials and objects aimed to serve as empowering tools for resisting the high-tech capitalist imperialism. Then, Isabel and the public will prolong the discussion with Dalila to bring her approach to a broader artistic research context.

      Dr. Dalila Honorato’s research focuses on embodiment at the intersection of performing arts and new media and, as a curator, she is interested in exploring the outlines of art and biology. Dalila is currently Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She is one of the founding members of the Interactive Arts Lab where she coordinates the Art & Science Research Group. She is the head of the organizing committee of the conference “Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science” and conceptor-developer of the Corfu Summer School in Hybrid Arts. She is a guest faculty at the PhD studies program of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, and a guest member of the Center of Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

      ionio.academia.edu/DalilaHonorato 

      Isabel Burr Raty explores the ontological crack between the engineered and the native, between the official facts and the unlicensed knowledge of the resettled, the relocated; in order to think about the memory of the future and dig out chapters left out of scientific and history books. Her artistic research  is design based and semiotic, interweaving live/body art, participatory performance, biology and DIY technologies, and is based on the question of how to write in situ Sci-Fi narratives that remain alive, alive as they rely on the participative audience’s faculty to propose dispositives of liberation from a commodified life/body.

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

      When: Saturday October 21st  from 16:00 h to 19:00 h

      Where: a.pass fourth floor studio.

      Free entrance

      Directions: https:///www.apass.be/contact/

      Please confirm your participation by sending an email to <isabelburr.raty@sacrofilms.com> !

       


       

      a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij

      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here 

      apass_logo_sm

      three vivariums by Tinna Ottesen 
       
       a.pass research presentation 

      vernissage 26/5 at 18.00 - 20.00
      vivariums open 26/5 - 28/5  11.00 - 20.00h
       artist talk 27/5 at 18.00 
       
      in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

       


       
      vi·var·i·ums or vi·var·i·a: 

      A place, such as an enclosure or facility, used for keeping live animals for observation or research.

       


       

      latex_test

       

      Three Vivariums: Enter, Surrender, Play 

      I invite you to contemplate on a reality without you being the central perspective.

      When entering a.pass, my initial question was, how to combine site specific and portable scenography.  How to make spaces, that correspond to a particular site, but can also move between locations and respond to the next site with equal value, using the same materials. 

      This research has led me to the scenography of a manmade space. My contemplation is not only its interaction with its surroundings and context but furthermore, how the human body interacts directly with space - how is he influenced and transformed by it? 

      If a place has a memory, will it sense your absence? How do we respond to materials, and to the sensations, the memories they evoke? And how can inorganic, industrial materials like latex & nylon, respond to elementary things in us? What are the transformative effects of space and beauty? Is it possible that spatial experience can change ones perspective and interaction with the world?

      Each vivarium explores a material, spatial positioning and proportions. I'm exploring the generous violence of beauty by creating small cells that evoke the sensations of wide landscapes.   

      Get close, find the playfulness through engagement and intimacy, and use your senses as a compass!

       


       

      fallhlif_test

       

      Lets talk about the Weather.

      Artist talk with light snacks and heavier drinks. 

      Friday 27/5 at 18:00 

      Chatting about weather is not only Iceland’s most indulged past time behaviour. The pleasure of sharing perceptions of this ever changing landscape connects us to the basics of this world, and shapes our relation to matter. 

      Tinna Ottesen’s vivariums position the border between matter and us into a moving climate. She is subtly reconsidering the environment as a partner in crime - a responsive field, that 'talks’ back to us. 

      We would like to invite you to talk about these ‘talking’ qualities of material in relation to the spaces and landscapes we are living in. Based on a text by Tim Ingold, “The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather" Tinna Ottesen will be interviewed by Nicolas Galeazzi about her perception of space, the performance of the weather, touch and other feelings. 

       


       
      Tinna Ottesen has been working with space and scenography for stage, for sites & for screens over the last 10 years exploring the suggestions of behaviour space provides and the affects the medium is capable of.

      She is a prominent presence in the Icelandic art scene and has a trail of projects spanning from site specific performances, production design for Films, TV & documentaries, theatre scenography, art direction for festivals, and immersive installations like the underwater concert series and food event installations.  

       


      Address: in the cellars of tour&taxis sheds

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

      Tinna map-Seite001

      a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij

      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • Vladimir Miller block proposal.

      This block was concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. We were use the methodologies of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk to reconsider the building blocks of our research and discover new ones.

      As a collective practice for this block each a.pass participant will propose a trip or an excursion to a place that resonates with the topics of her research. We understand these trips as mini workshops. They will be attended by the a.pass participants and in most cases be open to the general public on a sign-up basis. Some of them will be collaborative experiments, some will address a specific question from a current research of the a.pass participant. The already proposed places and practices range from a club all-nighter to camping in the city, from a visit to market to a silent trip to a fathers house. All proposals will work with a specific practice of being on the move together, of doing research on site, of coming back and of documenting and publishing.

      Where do we practice our research, and how does changing that affect what can be talked about and experimented with? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move?

      We will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses. 

      To work on these themes the excursion practice will be supported by several external inputs from the areas of de-colonial theory, urbanism and feminist critique. More detailed information about those events you will find on our webpage soon.

    • 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

       

       

       

    • [call] 2016/III 30 July 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      newscaption
       
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

      Please find information on the application procedure here.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/II
    • Generously forceful / The doubtful wild THREE VIVARIUMS /  a.pass research presentation 
      21 May 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • TINNA OTTESEN 
    • in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds
    • 26 May 2016
    • 28 May 2016
    • Generously forceful / The doubtful wild

      Program 

      vernissage 26/5 at 18.00 – 20.00
       
      vivariums open 26/5 – 28/5  11.00 – 20.00h
       
      artist talk 27/5 at 18.00 

       
      in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

       


       
      vi·var·i·ums or vi·var·i·a: 

      A place, such as an enclosure or facility, used for keeping live animals for observation or research.

       


       

      latex_test

      make animated gifs like this at MakeaGif

      >

       

      THREE VIVARIUMS: ENTER, SURRENDER, PLAY 

      I invite you to contemplate on a reality without you being the central perspective.

      When entering a.pass, my initial question was, how to combine site specific and portable scenography.  How to make spaces, that correspond to a particular site, but can also move between locations and respond to the next site with equal value, using the same materials. 

      This research has led me to the scenography of a manmade space. My contemplation is not only its interaction with its surroundings and context but furthermore, how the human body interacts directly with space – how is he influenced and transformed by it? 

      If a place has a memory, will it sense your absence? How do we respond to materials, and to the sensations, the memories they evoke? And how can inorganic, industrial materials like latex & nylon, respond to elementary things in us? What are the transformative effects of space and beauty? Is it possible that spatial experience can change ones perspective and interaction with the world?

      Each vivarium explores a material, spatial positioning and proportions. I’m exploring the generous violence of beauty by creating small cells that evoke the sensations of wide landscapes.   

      Get close, find the playfulness through engagement and intimacy, and use your senses as a compass!

       


       

       

      fallhlif_test

      make animated gifs like this at MakeaGif

       

      LETS TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER.

      Artist talk with light snacks and heavier drinks. 

      Friday 27/5 at 18:00 

      Chatting about weather is not only Iceland’s most indulged past time behaviour. The pleasure of sharing perceptions of this ever changing landscape connects us to the basics of this world, and shapes our relation to matter. 

      Tinna Ottesen’s vivariums position the border between matter and us into a moving climate. She is subtly reconsidering the environment as a partner in crime – a responsive field, that ‘talks’ back to us. 

      We would like to invite you to talk about these ‘talking’ qualities of material in relation to the spaces and landscapes we are living in. Based on a text by Tim Ingold, “The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather” Tinna Ottesen will be interviewed by Nicolas Galeazzi about her perception of space, the performance of the weather, touch and other feelings. 

       


       
      Tinna Ottesen has been working with space and scenography for stage, for sites & for screens over the last 10 years exploring the suggestions of behaviour space provides and the affects the medium is capable of.

      She is a prominent presence in the Icelandic art scene and has a trail of projects spanning from site specific performances, production design for Films, TV & documentaries, theatre scenography, art direction for festivals, and immersive installations like the underwater concert series and food event installations.  

       


       

      How to find the vivariums: 

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

      Tinna map-Seite001

       

    • Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here 

      apass_logo_sm

      three vivariums by Tinna Ottesen 
       
       a.pass research presentation 

      vernissage 26/5 at 18.00 - 20.00
      vivariums open 26/5 - 28/5  11.00 - 20.00h
       artist talk 27/5 at 18.00 
       
      in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

       


       
      vi·var·i·ums or vi·var·i·a: 

      A place, such as an enclosure or facility, used for keeping live animals for observation or research.

       


       

      latex_test

       

      Three Vivariums: Enter, Surrender, Play 

      I invite you to contemplate on a reality without you being the central perspective.

      When entering a.pass, my initial question was, how to combine site specific and portable scenography.  How to make spaces, that correspond to a particular site, but can also move between locations and respond to the next site with equal value, using the same materials. 

      This research has led me to the scenography of a manmade space. My contemplation is not only its interaction with its surroundings and context but furthermore, how the human body interacts directly with space - how is he influenced and transformed by it? 

      If a place has a memory, will it sense your absence? How do we respond to materials, and to the sensations, the memories they evoke? And how can inorganic, industrial materials like latex & nylon, respond to elementary things in us? What are the transformative effects of space and beauty? Is it possible that spatial experience can change ones perspective and interaction with the world?

      Each vivarium explores a material, spatial positioning and proportions. I'm exploring the generous violence of beauty by creating small cells that evoke the sensations of wide landscapes.   

      Get close, find the playfulness through engagement and intimacy, and use your senses as a compass!

       


       

      fallhlif_test

       

      Lets talk about the Weather.

      Artist talk with light snacks and heavier drinks. 

      Friday 27/5 at 18:00 

      Chatting about weather is not only Iceland’s most indulged past time behaviour. The pleasure of sharing perceptions of this ever changing landscape connects us to the basics of this world, and shapes our relation to matter. 

      Tinna Ottesen’s vivariums position the border between matter and us into a moving climate. She is subtly reconsidering the environment as a partner in crime - a responsive field, that 'talks’ back to us. 

      We would like to invite you to talk about these ‘talking’ qualities of material in relation to the spaces and landscapes we are living in. Based on a text by Tim Ingold, “The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather" Tinna Ottesen will be interviewed by Nicolas Galeazzi about her perception of space, the performance of the weather, touch and other feelings. 

       


       
      Tinna Ottesen has been working with space and scenography for stage, for sites & for screens over the last 10 years exploring the suggestions of behaviour space provides and the affects the medium is capable of.

      She is a prominent presence in the Icelandic art scene and has a trail of projects spanning from site specific performances, production design for Films, TV & documentaries, theatre scenography, art direction for festivals, and immersive installations like the underwater concert series and food event installations.  

       


      Address: in the cellars of tour&taxis sheds

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

      Tinna map-Seite001

      a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij

      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Mr. Ecuador 22 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Esteban Donoso
    • meeting at a.pass
    • 29 June 2016
    • Mr. Ecuador

      The trip I propose has two parts, the first day we will visit the swimming pool at Jeu de Bal in Brussels. While swimming we will record sounds from the site, our conversations, and sounds sprout from talking practices I have been working on. When we are back in the apass studio, we will perform our swiming pool sound documentary. We will perform it live, in swiming gear, some sounds will be broadcasted, some will be produced at the moment, some texts read live. Along with our performing, there will be a video footage of an abandoned swimming pool in Quito-Ecuador, a former military post from the XIXth century, turned into a sports complex, then abandoned from the 1970s on, this swimming pool was the site for the first Mr Ecuador contest.

    • I propose a visit to Grimbergen Thermae, a spa in the village of Grimbergen, next to Brussels. I want to invite the participants to imagine this SPA as an official civic integration machinery. A fictional government would oblige newcomers to undergo a program of integration that consists in sharing saunas, swimming pools, and scrubbing sessions with locals, in a silent and relaxing environment. As to increase a familiar taste for most of the migrants, there are different thematic saunas – such as the “African Lodge”, the “Mediterranean sauna”, and the “Turkish bath” – incorporating visual and sensorial elements of different cultures.

      Departing from this fictional frame, the participants will receive scores to be performed/experimented in this spa. These scores will challenge the ordinary way that we deal with physical proximity, politeness, and nudity.

      What kind of choreography appears from that situation? And how does it interact with our beliefs around private and public?

      Time schedule:

      11:00 am - gathering at Ribaucourt bus stop (direction cathedral) close to metro station Ribauccourt.

      11:25 am - departure by bus DeLijn 231

      12:06 pm - arrival at Grimbergen. Talk with snacks. Walking around the village. Maybe a warm up in the Church.

      13:48 pm - Entry in the spa.

      16: 07 pm - Return to Brussels. (yes, you can leave before if you pay the fine ;-)

       

      Please bring:

      - towel(s) - otherwise you must rent them for 5 euros

      - snacks

      - (fancy) slippers - optional

      - (fancy) swimming suit(s) - optional

    • In order to simulate our ideas for specific and challenging trips we would like to gather some Brussels ‘cracks’ - people who know Brussels form one or the other perspective by heart, know the hidden places and weird stories of this city - and invite them for a dinner at a.pass.

      This dinner will take place on Monday 9th May in  our Opening Week, will start at 19:00 and takes place in our space on the 4th floor of the Bottelarij, Delaunoystraat 58-60 b17, 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek (Brussel)

       

      We would like to create an informal situation with food and chats to let people engage in each other’s practices and brainstorm about Brussels as a place for an excursion. The a.pass researchers will have a lot of questions about this but a lot of things to tell about their research practice.  We will ask Brussels experts to be there with their knowledge and to be open to talking about spatial settings in relation to the research practices of the a.pass participants.

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Block 2016/II: Uninvited Research 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Brussels and beyond
    • 02 May 2016
    • 28 August 2016
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Block 2016/II: Uninvited Research

      Vladimir Miller BLOCK PROPOSAL

      This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. We will use the methodologies of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk to reconsider the building blocks of our research and discover new ones.

      As a collective practice for this block each a.pass participant will propose a trip or an excursion to a place that resonates with the topics of her research. We understand these trips as mini workshops. They will be attended by the a.pass participants and in most cases be open to the general public on a sign-up basis. Some of them will be collaborative experiments, some will address a specific question from a current research of the a.pass participant. The already proposed places and practices range from a club all-nighter to camping in the city, from a visit to market to a silent trip to a fathers house. All proposals will work with a specific practice of being on the move together, of doing research on site, of coming back and of documenting and publishing.

      Where do we practice our research, and how does changing that affect what can be talked about and experimented with? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move?

      We will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses. 

      To work on these themes the excursion practice will be supported by several external inputs from the areas of de-colonial theory, urbanism and feminist critique. More detailed information about those events you will find on our webpage soon.

       

       

       

    • [call] 2016/II 08 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      newscaption
       
       

      call

      FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH PROJECTS
      POST-MASTER AND PHD LEVEL


      DEADLINE: 09/05/2016
      TO START IN SEPTEMBER 201
      6

      SELECTION TALKS : 30&31/05/2016
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)

       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year 
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

      Please find information on the application procedure here.

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #6 21 January 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 12 February 2016
    • 12 February 2016
    • SESSION #6

      PARTICIPANTS
      Luiza, Robin, Bredan, Lilia, Mala, Juan, Christian, Sofia, Arianna, Sana

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > REPLY

      Luiza > Robin > Brendan

      Lilia > Brendan > Robin

      Mala > Arianna > Luiza

      Juan > Lilia > Sanna

      Robin > Sana > Lilia

      Christian >  Christian > Sofia

      Brendan > Juan > Arianna

      Sofia > Luiza > Christian

      Arianna > Mala > Mala

      Sanna > Sofia > Juan

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1. Luiza>Robin>Brendan

      “I had a dream of you. I talked and you listened, very attentive. And the way you listened made whatever I was saying very personal to you. And it made us become more intimate. I hope you can think what it was that I said”.

      I had to re-read this text as I had forgotten the exact wording so I was glad to have it in my phone. I also sent it to myself by email and then cut and paste it into  a document. So what started in a dream was sent out into the world in the form of a text, was read, became a mail, was cut, became a document, is going to be cut and paste and mailed again and posted in a google doc. Does any of this change it, make it less intimate, less personal. Originally in the text you address me personally. Did you dream of us as a group and send it to us all as a group text. Did you dream about us all individually then ponder each person’s role in the dream and send different texts. These questions come up as a response to the word personal and intimate and the apparent contradiction between the content and the medium. This contradiction sets up an interesting tension and triggers the question:  ‘what is the conversation going on between technology and the content it carries in your work’?

      Louiza if you're reading this, these are the words I heard you saying in the dream, “ when you hear my voice, you hear or see or feel the sound of my mind collaborating with the medium within which its embedded when it meets your ear, your eyes, your skin”

       

      2)  Lilia > Brendan > Robin

      Dear Lilia and Robin

      Eating the flowers, of following your text from the inside,  closing my eyes, concentrating, focusing, listening, etc, I then took a step out and watched or read the reading of it. And from here i found my question, now,  i became interested in seeing how you experienced the reading of your personal letter, the letter, a conversational tone, that enters a deep monologue.

      Writing to another in the process of discovering what's contained in you, listening to another speak your words, touched by yourself through the two others, the reader and the dear receiver.  Touching yourself in a conceptual threesome. I watch.

      Imagine a house that contains no windows.

      Long did i build you, oh house! With each memory i carried stones.

      Outside of the walls of this house without windows, are windows.

      These windows look in at us through the walls.

      my question is, how can we see the windows?

      How do we know they are there?

       

      3) Mala > Arianna > Luiza

      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?

      4) Juan > Lilia > Sana

      Dear Juan and dear Sana,

      The performance of Juan made me think about your background in architecture. In the sense that there is the desire to transform landscape. In this case a temporary architecture that doesn’t add another piece of material to the environment but works as the creation of a story in that environment. The mountains made of clothes on the window horizon changed the view, the place, the dream. An autonomous entity passed by and left a trace in the viewers eye creating the possibility of change but also of an utopic change, or ephemeral change. I had to think about the work of Francis Alys, more specifically the one where a group of people try to move a mountain of some centimeters. Alys was also an architect.

      Can you develop on Juan concepts of immediacy and trace in relation to the environment and the possibility of change?


      5) Robin/ Sana/ Lilia

      Dear Robin

      I felt a space was oscillating between the voice describing a flower and your action constantly challenging the forms, frames and limits. This space inherits a lot from the violence hidden in both actions. Since the violence in your action is more constructive in the sense of transformation and suggestion, I find it as an active response to the idea of confinement.

      On the other hand, in a very prototypical view wooden board reminds me of housewives working in the kitchen. I started thinking about ‘domestic confinement’.

      My question is how the confinement ( as a general notion, nothing to do with feminism or domestic confinement or any subject in that field ) can be questioned and interpreted ? How the body can encounter confinement through it’s desires?

      Dear Lilia  

      I have noticed that you talk about politic, love and touch ( even in the text that you read in last bubble score). I am curious if you see any connection between my question and that in a performative way.

       

      7)Brendan > Juan > Arianna

      To contribute to Brendan's questioning about parallel realities, here there is a link to a recent news... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html

       

      8) Sofia > Luiza > Christian

      Hi Sofi, Hi X-tian

      Here goes my question, sorry for the delay!!!!!!!

      The chain of dance that we made in your performance felt really good. It was fun and up lifting. I enjoyed appropriating your body moves with body, and seeing Brendan moves behind me. And as we danced I thought on how everyone else in the chain would be dancing and that with all these different nuances we were creating this dancing landscape.

      And so, my question is: what happens to the landscape when my feet touches the ground?

      9) Arianna > Mala > Mala

      dear Arianna,

      i guess this is my question to me about yr proposition?!

      i'm interested in the language machine u are building and its potential.

      so, there is a text to be performed, about the common, about the response-ability. this text is "voiced" as "sounds of letters" but also as "movements of the body". in yr case the body and the voice are saying the same. same text. in a way it is a literal translation or say, transcription of the text into another medium. but there is a feeling, as if u are trying to build something like a new language that can potentially serve as a "new common" through a new "common use", as u explicitly address us with offering it to be tried out and used by us. for now we still stay with 26 letters as yr translation is a translation of the 26 letters of the english alphabet. i begin to wander, if the language is to truly be response-able, able of response-iveness, through the act of use, what kind of language, would that be, would it still be a a fixed language, a language fixed as an (endlessly) permutable series of 26 units? could language as a "new" common used be more "responsive" to "life", to the emergent reality singular situations? what kind of language would that be? still a fixed set? or would there be gaps? yes, u are right, the question I'm asking is, how to create the space in language, where the contingency directs the course of an emergent structure and the subjectivity does not direct but participates in the course of events. and then there is a space for the movement of "response". perhaps the question is not about the invention of a "new (common) language" but rather about the creation of "space-s" within language, held open, for the impossible, unpredictable, provisional "movement's" of life, its intentionality and its logic wanting to be brought about. how then the machine "cracks open" to be permeable for the forever singular unfolding interventions of immanence?

      thank u! xm

      Dear Arianna how do you integrate resonance in your practice?

       

      10) Sanna > Sofia > Juan

      Dear Sana,

      http://we.tl/69ljBJEAn9

      ?

      KEYWORDS

      Slippery; Elsewhere; Magic; multitask; re-religion; ambiguous staging; dream sequence; dimensions; layers; empathy/sympathy.

       

      REPLY:

       

      1) Luiza > Robin > Brendan

      conversation between content and technology

      there are two people

      one delivering a message and the other receiving.

      there is a simple remark, greeting, question, etc, that is delivered via text message.

      there is a blind fold.

      when the message arrives, the receiver puts on the blindfold and then begins to (try to) read the message and discover and respond to the content.

      they discuss the message for 4 minutes

      in the 5th minute the blindfold can be removed and the written content can be read, shared and briefly discussed.

      end

      references:

      Garou Garou le passe muraille 1951 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruab_pF-qh0

       

       

    • Session 1

      A prologue for the text:

       

      tinna bubble score

      Illustrated text:

      On a table a cutting board, a knife an apple and an orange.  
      I cut the orange open and reveal the white inside the bark
      "An orange is white"

      I cut an apple open and find a seed
      " An apple is black"

       

      SESSION 2

      Question :

      Do you think "reality" is something that can be shared ?

       

      >Text from Liana, a facebook medium< :  

      The first one coming through is a young boy that passed away in a tractor accident a couple of years ago.  I think he was dark haired.

      He says that it was an accident, I was not careful and I like to tease. 

      And now he smiles.

      He says that what no one knows is that he is still exists.

      The next one coming through died from lung cancer, she was and is a light bearer. She lacked energy for many years.

      I left behind something that I wanted to be able to finish myself.

      I always liked decorations.

      My colours were bright and we often had conversations, and especially when I realised were things were heading.

      The next one is a small boy that died at birth. The grief was great and the mother still blames herself, I think this happened 2 or 3 years ago.

      My mother was bright and beautiful and very young, but she was ready for me.

      He just wants to let it known that it is worth it to try again, because he is determined to arrive.

      I continue, I have a lovely boy here, bright and beautiful, he says that he died of heart failure when he was just a teenager, I feel in the years 2003-2005

      He says that he has a sister and an aunt that favour him, mom and dad and all the others do too, but the two of them remember me the most.

      He says that he was so pleased to get a new baby sister.

      We used to travel a lot.

      Mom was always there but I suppose dad was there too, but now I have an uncle that is with me now and takes care of me.

      I have the next one here with me and he needs to come through.

      I died not long ago from cancer, it went fast, I had a wonderful wife and two daughters.

      We lived a healthy life, and we were expecting a new life when this disaster happened.

      We talked a lot about that live was not always as we thought it was, and why us.

      The next one coming through, says, I died from cancer and had many children, it was very unfair.  I died many years ago and I was always full of light and happy. 

      I have two babies here with me that I am related to.

      Bring my regards to everyone.  I know you didn’t always get your way and had siblings that wanted to control you.

      I have a little boy that drowned a couple of years ago.

      He says that he was mixed, not fully icelandic, but I was on a trip with my parents that I had looked forward to.

      Continue with the next one, I have a fun loving woman here, who says  we had some good times together in the past. 

      I liked the sip, the alcohol killed me.

      I drowned in my own pot.

      When I  was  young, I was full of light and beauty but as the years went by I became more visible.

      And now she laughs.

      I continue,I have a young woman that took her own life, she says I had a difficult time for a long time. 

      She says that she took her own life in a car,

      I wrote a poem that you have, and a letter

      I come from a dark haired family, and dad is here with me.

      The next one says that he came to me and communicated in the last session, but my wife didn´t get the message. 

      Im from the westfjords and was a politician, and she was always my backbone.  I thought I was strong but my heart wouldn’t

      I could talk the big talk, but you often helped me down from the pedestal and to understand the emotions of others.

      The last one coming through, this is quite special, she says that I and my parents were travelling and I disappeared, and now this is many years ago.

      You looked for me for a long time, but I was dead, you didn´t know that, and I was watching you.

      I was a child, but not quite.  I could be with you in restaurants and at bars, and I could dance with strangers.

    • project
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #1 13 January 2016
      posted by: Gerald Kurdian
    • 13 January 2016
    • 13 January 2016
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #1

      PARTICIPANTS : Arianna, Tinna, Isabel, Juan, Ricardo, Esteban , Lilia, Yaari, Juan, Anouk, Brendan, Gerald, varinia, Sana, Agnes, Pierre, Luiza, Sofia, Aela, Christian, Lili.

       

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > ANSWER

      1) P) Arianna >  Q )Sana >  A)Pierre

      2) Yaari > Christian > Gerald

      3) Christian > Isabel > Arianna

      4) Sofia > Lilia > Yaari

      5) Ricardo > Varinia > Esteban

      6) Esteban > Ricardo > Christian

      7) Anouk > Esteban > Luiza

      8) Gerald > Tinna > Sebastian

      9) Lili > Yaari > Varinia

      10) Luiza > Brendan > Sana

      11) Agnes > Anouk > Tinna

      12) Brendan > Luiza > Anouk

      13) Sebastian > Juan > Lili

      14) Tinna > Gerald > Aela

      15) Juan > Sofia > Juan

      16) Aela > Aela > Sofia

      17) Sana > Arianna > Brendan

      18) Isabel > Pierre > Agnes

      19) Pierre > Sebastian  > Lilia

      20) Lilia > Lili > Ricardo

      21) Varinia > Agnes >  Isabel

       

      QUESTIONS: 

      1) Sana asks Arianna (reply Pierre)

      Is the disfigured, anonymous body approachable through its spontaneous reactions to it's surroundings?

      If yes, to what extent?
      If no, what is the alternative?

       

      2) Yaari > Christian > Gerald

      Your text is beautifully hovering at a mental state where situation has merged into timelesness, an energy that could last for a split second or 80 years. 
      I am in this connection curious to know if it would be possible to tie the situation to an ideal geographical location (city, desert...) one that would include year, space ( i.e. mountain top, café, bus), tools for writing?
      (Of course this question assumes that you're willing to feed in to a parallel fictional universe, if you're not already there.)

       

      3) Isabel asks Christian (reply Arianna)

       

      The maori people have amazing techniques for dialoguing with the sea. In fact in Easter Island elder women teach their grandchildren how to make the waves get smaller. Thus, they avoid being taken away by the gigantic waves when they go collecting shells and exotic seafood on turbulent rocky seashores. I imagine there must be a symbiosis between hypnosis and molecular water cells in the human body interacting with the molecular water cells of the sea. When we were talking about the performance you presented in bubble score # 1, you mentioned the paradox between hypnosis and property, as hypnotizing the landscape as a property means (I hope to have understood well?). My question is: Could the notion and practice of private property be a result of hypnosis and why?

       

       

      4) Lilia To Sofia (reply Yaari)

       

      The first thing that came to my mind was the idea of  falling in love. And mostly the Falling in the Love. The vertigo towards the other, the ecstasy of becoming blurred with the other, indeed like a suicidal flirt that creates a third space for fictional reality, that constructs reality itself.  I think I have question in two folds. They concern the romantic idea of love and the fictional aspect of it anchored in the falling. How do you relate the idea of love with the idea of life? And how do you think the the idea of love builds community? This can be seen in a literary way, philosophical or...

       

       

      5) Varinia to Ricardo (Reply Esteban)

       

      And if all the various body operations would halt in a single and inoperative - but nontheless expressive - act, or if all variations would manifest as sameness, how could we then still call the body the body?

       

       

      6) Ricardo to Esteban (Reply: Christian)

       

      Something that I got out of your proposal is that the element of sound blurs or obscures meaning. You have been working on the idea of the subject narrating itself through language and through cultural practices such as cooking or weaving. I understand that the text that you chose is of interest to you since it works through the relationship Lucrecia Martel has found between her sensory, affective and biographical memory, and the tool she articulates through her filmic work. In this case, the tool is sound and its power to pierce the body. This short narration that you are appropriating is of relevance since it evidences the poetic power of Lucrecia's films, which is your point of interest.

      In which way do you think the action you presented creates a link between your interest in the subject narrating itself, its displacement in a series of cultural, collective practices, the idea of artistic tool and poetic efficacy and finally, the concept of appropriation in the construction of the subject?

       

       

      7) Esteban to Anouk (Reply Luiza)

       

      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?

       

       

      9) Yaari question to Lili (reply Varinia)
       
       
       About stretching or attracting the physical capacities of your body because of an immediate contact with an-other body. About a moment of endurance vis-a-vis intimacy. About a necessary need which can not be fulfilled unless repeated, and even then. How breathing can obey the effort and produce a signifcant change in the procedure? 
       
       
       
      10) Brendan question to Luiza (reply Sana)
       
       
      Luiza
       
      I was mostly swept away by your scenography. Which was dictated by the text and achieved quite simply by killing the lights. First leaving just the 4 or 5 glowing apples in the room, then later beautiful silhouettes accompanying only one's self and the voice of the page, backdropped, for me, by the glass wall and the brussels skyline. Feeling at ease and carried away. 
       
      Recalling my experience and re-reading the text, I conceived and noticed many change of planes, shifting points of view, view points, from the horizontal to the vertical, to and fro, internal/external, etc. It occurred to me, after thinking about this changing of planes for awhile, that it could have been nice to have a glass ceiling for the prophecy of the glass ceiling, but how!! In the end, I admit to being very pleasantly distracted from the text by what I was experiencing as caused by the windows that I faced (and am now also considering how those whom I faced, those silhouettes I looked upon experienced things in a different darkness), and worked to not feel guilty by my failure to studiously follow the complex text. Now i realize this was not the fault of me being a poor student !!  But it was my body being hypnotized by the text and the glass ceiling! Which here, was experiencing vertically as a window, a glass wall !! Oh the twisting embodiment that escapes my frontal consciousness !!   My body working to join the fold of the changing planes, the shift of view points anchored by my eyes stuck in a head. Body seeking the horizontal, mind in the vertical. I need to lay down before the glass, and make it my ceiling !!! 
      But! 
      There is a part of the text that is a bit more unclear for me, how does all this, the presentations and suppositions made by the poet (as well as mine) amount to the conclusive line "To remember will become a thing of the past ... i can imagine that light effects negatively the capacity to remember, but this is not the realm of the text i believe.  So, i guess my question is, how does the author reach this conclusion that results from what he/she proposes, "to remember will become a thing of the past"? Or maybe more broadly what do you feel contained in this poem, is consequential on memory/remembering/forgetting?
       
      eeeeek! i think i just figured it out! But am very interested to hear the correct answer from Sana. 
       
       
       

      11) Anouk  question to Agnes (reply Tinna)

       
      Dear Agnes, the world "reality" is appearing one or several times in each the text fragments.
      Do you think "reality" is something that can be shared ?

       

       

      12) Luiza to Brendan (Reply Anouk)

       

      Hey! So I remember the sound of the can of coke being opened before your reading. It was for me a very well known sound that could set up a space. The way you positioned it made me think of sacred and profane symbols. Also, that speech sacralized america as a way of apologizing for misconduct, for profaning america and its figure of power, the president. So, I would like to know what is for you (the) sacred and what is (the) profane and how is, if there is any, your relationship to both?

       

       

      13) Juan To Sebastian (Reply Lili)

       

      How accurately can one transfer verbally the intrinsic physical characteristics of an object ?

       

       

      14) Tinna to Gerald (Reply Aela)

       

      In the frame of your bubble performance, we collectively agreed on a partially wrong information.
      Why do you need our trust to language to be hijacked?

       

       

      15) Sofia To Juan (Reply Juan)

       

      When you brought the material from Youtube it felt to me as an act of quoting. So then I wondered how do you use quoting and citing in your practice? How do you quote?

       

      16) Aela to Aela (Reply Sofia)

       

      Languages and artistic, political and media representations model, determine, freeze, valuate, judge, catalogue the body using subjective parameters dictated by society.

      Is it then possible to de-determine the body ? To think the body as a moving and liquide entity, able to metamorphose endlessly without deteriorate what is considered as individuality ?

      Or do we have to give up on individuality as a fixed and safe marker and to reconsider it as something alterable and altering ?

      In this case what is individuality ?

       

      17) Arianna to Sana (Reply Brendan)

       

      At the beginning of your writing, you create the almost cinematic atmosphere of an ancient tale.
      It's a tale of growth and change, and I think it is telling us about roots.
      I could feel the wind - or, more precisely, I could imagine this wind of history: a wind whose strength comes not only from its physical force but also from the distance it has to pass through to come to my face, and to face my body.
       
      Is resistance something that we grow with time, like a plant grows roots that go deeper and deeper into the ground?
      Is resistance something superficial - that acts and is effective at and from the level of the skin?
      How deep resistance grows into the body?
      These are more general questions I have - they do the groundwork for what I'd like to ask: 
      Imagine the strongest wind you can think about. It is so strong that blowing against your body, it keeps it suspended in the air, preventing it from moving. Not a step is possible.
      What would you do with your body (physical strategy) in order to be able to keep moving in spite of this wind?
       
       
       

      18) Pierre to Isabel  (Reply Agnes)

       

      Dear Isabel,

      What you offered last Wednesday to the Bubble Score community was a text, precisely the beginning of a chapter entitled "Goddess of the Witches" from a book called "The Great Cosmic Mother".
      The text is about the multiple prehistoric and historic cults around the figure of Diana/Artemis/Ishtar/Hecate that produced knowledges in the past associated with feminine power and later on were condemned, banned, erased by, first, the greek patriarchal turn, then by Christianity, culminating  with hunts and burnings of witches in the 16th and 17th century. The text ends with the following line "The witch persecutions were not simply aimed at 'Devil-worshipers', but at ancient human knowledge of the world".
      Later on in a discussion with me  you said "but what have women done to men to deserve that ?"
       
      If I share with you the idea that today's situation can be enlightened by studying the past, that we must practice an archeology of the occidental way of thinking and that a decolonisation of the mind is necessary to prevent more shit to happen in the future, my reaction to the text's positioning was more doubtful, concerning the way the text is written and the assertive tone of some of your remarks.
       
      In fact, I do think that the text is over dichotomising the issue, reducing its complexity and is using the same tools that authoritarian knowledge : the "there is no alternative" leading to an injunction to think in a dichromatic way : black or white. Period.
      Concerning women, I do not think that women did anything to men, but that the power shift happened for political and economic reasons in societies growing in scale and in need of a general order, a pre-globalised order disqualifying the local more and more. A "general way of thinking", a way to generalise everything, to universalise, leading to the interchangeability of the humans where, under the ancient localised order, the communities were more singular, particular and not replaceable.
      I do not want to continue today as I have to ask you a question, but would like to continue discussing with you about this book statements and your relation with it. (you know that I like witches as you do, but may be differently?...)
       
      My question is inspired by your text in relation with another text.
      It's a text written by Isabelle Stengers called "The Cosmopolitical Proposal" where she proposes ways to actualise and produce real changes. 
      She, and I agree with her, shows that denunciating is not enough to shift, to dismantle the authority associated with knowledge.
      I attach the text to this mail. I glossed some lines. hope we can find a moment to read and discuss them together.
       
      My question now.
      In fact I have two. Couldn't choose.
      "What "taking magic seriously" can do for you today?" or "What do you hope for by "taking magic seriously" today?
      You pick.
       
      Hear from you,
      see you next week
      amicalement,
      Pierre

       

       

       

      19) Sebastian to Pierre (Reply by Lilia)

       

      Which artistic experience changed your way of thinking? And how?

       

       

      19) Tinna to Gerald  (Reply Sebastian)

       

      In your performance you made a live remix of the past, with recordings of us talking and the song Lithium with Nirvana.  What connection is there between these 2 sound-sources?

       

       

      20) Lili to Lilia (Reply Ricardo)

       

      If internalizing camera functions in how we think is mostly stemming from „manipulating time“ (jumps, cuts, continuity, fast forwards etc.), which other notion is being manipulated/influenced by haptic information? Or is it simply subordinate to visual/audio neural processes?
      Can you imagine whole room with all the people moving around you, running underneath your fingertips instead of you moving in the space?
      How would that inform you differently?
      (receptivity in relation to various body positions - e.g. "gallery with beds")

       

       

       21) Agnes to Varinia (Reply Isabel)

       

      I remember the walk of two black gloves, strong like ants that can sustain a weight five thousand times greater than their own body weight. thinking about ants I guess the ability to support a multitude of the own heaviness does not mean that it is also a pleasure to do so. I imagine it could be quite annoying, which reminds me of a question that was posed to you already last week. I will reformulate the question and ask what makes you more angry, cold or dirty hands?

       

       


       

      REPLIES:

      2) Brendan > Luiza > Anouk

      Preparation: I write a draft of text on my computer then I finish it writing it on a positive visual field, on the materialized form of my visual filed at a certain moment. I write SACRED on one side and PROFANE on the other. I finish writing my text by passing from one side of the “page” to the other. I have the object/page in my hands, I am manipulating it. My manual activity (writing, holding, turning) supports my intellectual activity and the process of articulating my thought. I have to put numbers and arrows to help me find the next sentence when I turn to the other side of the page. I read the text in front of the group, kneeling on the cardboard floor, holding the object in my hand in front of my eyes (face). I am turning the object/page to read one side and the other.

       

      IMG_6666 IMG_6668

      Performance of the text

      1 - PROFANE: The root of profane is the Latin profanes which means “ what is in front of” which means “out of the temple”, non-initiated, ignorant.

      2 - SACRED: The word "sacred" descends from the Latin sacrum, which referred to the gods or anything in their power, and to sacerdos and sanctum set apart. It was generally conceived spatially, as referring to the area around a temple. The English word "holy" dates back to at least the 11th century with the Old English word halig an adjective derived from hāl meaning "whole" and used to mean "uninjured, sound, healthy, entire, complete".

      3 – PROFANE: What I keep from profane is non-initiated, ignorant.

      4- SACRED: What I keep from sacred is and from sacred entire and complete.The shift from the profane space to the sacred space happens when I PAY ATTENTION. Then I see the sacred in the profane.

      5 – PROFANE: For me sacred and profane are the two sides of the same coin. They are not intrinsically different. The sacred is when I listen and the profane is when I don’t. There is nothing to change, nothing is better. As Cage would suggest…

      6 – SACRED: “ CHANGE YOUR MIND!”

      7 – PROFANE: I AM OSCILLATING BETWEEN THE TWO. It is an OSCILLATION. I put the sacred is the realm of sensoriality and the profane the realm of words. For me the sacred cannot be expressed with words.

      8 – SACRED: The sacred is a matter of ATTENTION. It is in the realm of EXPERIENCE. The sacred ineffable, it is beyond discourse. The sacred is for me a NON-time/space, NON-time/space of no escape. I am rarely there, though I love when it happens.

      9 – ROFANE: I made a mistake while typing, SACRED became SCARED. Did we made this separation because we where scared? Scared of what? Is the profane the realm of fears?

      10 – SACRED: The dictionary says that that one can pass from the profane dimension to the sacred dimension through RITUALS. I am a bit scared of the word ritual. I find it too heavy, too serious. Still I am looking for the sacred through my work.

      11 – PROFANE: but for me the sacred is very much connected to SIMPLICITY and to the concrete and daily world, the “ NOTHING SPECIAL”, the “ PLAIN”, some could say the “BORRING”.

      12 – SACRED: I find duration useful, duration and repetition. I practice observing myself, jugging and labeling. I practice observing my internal WAR.

       

      3) Christian > Isabel > Arianna

       

      dizzy spells

       

      Climbing the scaffold and laying down on the platform on top, face downwards.

      Reading

       

      CHAPTER 1

      (Present. Remembering)

       

      My mother suffers from dizzy spells.

      She prefers not to go climbing mountains. She stays on plain horizontal surfaces, where she can see everything at the same level.

      When I was a kid and we went visiting a city, we would go up the highest tower of that city.

      She would come with the rest of us, but would stay far from the view of the terrace. If we moved towards the edge, she would scream and grab the tip of our sweater, or the skin of our elbow if she had the chance, and prevent us from the risk of approaching the risk of falling.

       

      Pause.

      Reading

       

      CHAPTER 2

      (The remembering materializes, coming back into the present in a specific form)

       

      stream of consciousness

       

      Opening a bottle of water previously placed on top of the scaffold. Leaving the stream of water going down by the force of gravity through a hole in the platform.

      Water falls on the ground from the height.

       

      Pause.

      Reading

       

      CHAPTER 3

      (It's night. The sky is clear, of an opaque dense black colour. I can see the full moon and the stars.

      I am laying down on the top of something of uncertain nature. I am very close to the Moon. I can see it even with my eyes closed. I can almost touch it.

      I think about the ones who are still on the ground)

       

      What do you do when the tide rises

       

      1 - When it comes up, it takes your elbows and brings them more and more towards your ears.

      Be careful then - protect them using a thick sweater, or wearing water wings.

       

      2 - Climb somewhere high and stay there for a while.

      Tides are caused by gravity.

      They can occur as two high waters and two low waters each day.

      However, these periods do not happen at the same time. This is because the Moon takes its time to line up again exactly with the same point on the Earth.

      Check it out with the Moon for more info.

       

      3 - If the swirl is right above you, you cannot do anything more than waiting for it to come down. You can also try to bring it down yourself through the use of your hands.

      Singing might help. Hypnosis is the last resort, for hypnotizing a tide requires you not to be afraid of the risk of approaching the risk of falling.

       

       

       10) Brendan asks Luiza, Sana replies

       
      Borders are frigid
      Distances wrapped in a time, lost
      Borders are frigid
      Distances covered in colors, pale
       
      Feeling confused
      We dream out of synch
      Light bounces off your skin
      Reminds me of distorted past
      Shattering into pieces
      Memories remain less of debris

      I turn ubiquitous
       
       
      Conquering the time
      Let’s play a game
      When I am the hours
      You play days or years
       
       
      Borders are frigid
      Distances fill in you and me
      marching on our flesh
      Hear ‘em breath
      Feel ‘em float
      Like a sorrow
       
      Now turning thicker
      Like a forest
      Vast meadow covers the distances
      Ah,
      Such a wonder!
       
      14) Tinna to Gerald (Reply Aela)
       

      From an english and objective frame of reference, putting aside any daltonic possibilities... well we could argue on an objective way to describe the wrong colour with the good name or a subjective way to be objective ??? That sounds already messy...

      SO... from an english and objective and human-being frame of reference, I am eating a green apple. Considered lonely, in a completely abstract context, an apple is a thing. But in an objective context, THIS apple is an object constituted by many different objects, its colour, its pips, its core, etc.

      Objectively eating this apple I'll find its pips and its pips are black. Everyone is following ?

      So from now on it appears that the green apple is also constituted by black pips. From here it is a very easy abstract jump to say that at some point the green of the apple is made by the black of the pips contained by this very apple and an even easier one to say that green is black ! Probably as much as green is blue and yellow !!!

      And even easier !!! Green equal black !

      Let's study a bit this affirmation. When I say green equal black, I am doing what is called an abstraction ! The process of abstraction is used in many domaine and specially in mathematics to make easier operation ! The system of abstraction works by simplifying a complicated reality to be able to deal with ! Same process with objectivity ! Every time we assign a name to a thing we reduce every possibilities of different subjectivities in favour of a common objectivity !

      So it is very important to notice that objectivity is only a collective agreement on how to reduce individual subjectivity, A=B under a certain frame of reference but under another one, A is absolutely not equal to B !!!!

      Let's go a bit further :)
      An apple is as black as an orange !
      In terms of blackity an apple is actually equal to an orange even if not a single one of them is black (once again from a non-daltonic point of view) !
      I could have also said an apple is as NOT black as an orange ! But what happens when we use the negativity ! If I say an apple is NOT black, the mind will picture first the apple and then the black colour: result = an apple is black ! Why, because the mind can't picture negativity but only what is viewable and negativity is not a viewable object but a substraction of viewable object from viewable object !

      Let's go on the funny side of this discovery !!!
      The delay created by the mind trying to remove the black colour from the apple it pictured is the origin of irony and the one of laugh !!!!
      Demonstration: joke + delay or time of understanding = laugh hahaa...
      Irony and laugh come from a very short misunderstanding or a little awkwardness

      and uncomfortable situation, that is a tiny excess of subjectivity in an objective discourse ! A tiny excess which is fortunately possible due to the process of abstraction I described earlier !
      If there was no common objective reduction of subjective reality there will be no surplus of subjectivity to use and then no laugh and so a very sad society !!! In which one everyone would be able to communicate entirely with anyone else, boring....

      Now... how to make a black apple revolution !!!?
      Working with abstraction once again, I am gonna make an equality between the Foucault's relations of power and the objectivity I described earlier. Relations of power as objectivity exist in any domaine, political, institutional, relationship and so on, this objectivity appears when one tries to direct someone else's behaviour. But this objectivity is only possible among a certain amount of liberty corresponding here to subjectivity ! If there was no possibility of expressing subjectivity, there will be no objectivity at all.
      The practice of liberty or the practice of subjectivity is an individual way one has to play with objectivity, to play among the rules of common objectivity !
      Most of the time, as we saw it, the game of subjectivity among objectivity leads to irony or laugh !
      A black apple revolution is a revolution everyone can practice on its own, discovering its own subjectivity, applying it to many domaine and sharing it ! That is knowing oneself or to use the words of Foucault: taking care of the self !

      A black apple revolution is a ironic revolution a revolution that shows the limits of objectivity and power through laugh, through a tiny delay of misunderstanding !

      One is not free from its own definition as soon as one remains understandable ! A peri-understanding is the most powerful tool of a funny revolution and a black apple is already in itself a revolution ! A displacement of the domination of objectivity upon subjectivity !

      This is a revolution !!!

       

      17) Arianna to Sana (Reply Brendan)

       

      Text For Vacuuming

      This force gives you body, your face, eyes, voice, and skin.

      and now it wants it back

      this is how you will live and how you will die

       

      But, even in the strongest, most paralyzing wind possible

      there is always a way to move.

       

      Resistance is a space between the giving and the taking, it is you.

      every possible move is contained by you, and amongst the you's that approximate.

       

      freedom of movement is always accomplished through shifts of the body into the potentials of force.

      with this we can open doors in the wind and fly

       

       

      19) Pierre > Sebastian  > Lilia

      Hmmm I think all artistic experiences have changed my way of thinking. Or as Willem James puts it, (if I understand well) the nature or substance of experience is not different from the consciousness of that same experience. The two realms of experience and thought are separated in a pure functional way in order to process the continuity of experiences in our memory. So if I follow this thought it would be impossible to not change my way of thinking constantly.

      I often asked my self if is the experience of the arts that opened my mind, or if my mind open up the art experience? If one is not ready for change can change happen? Either way through out the years my experience of the arts has changed a lot. My deep love for the performing arts has maybe a say in this (my addictive behavior as well). 

      The temporality of the performing arts connects both the realms of experience and thought in a one to one relation, in the back and forth between the now and the immediate memory of it, together with the memory of other experiences and thoughts about it, in a very direct very fast way. The processes are mingled and refer to the complex act of perceiving and maybe in that exact moment of the present the ‘fake’ dichotomy between experience and thought collides. There is just the moment of the moment. At a first instance I don’t remove myself from the moment, I don’t create a distance that allows me to categorize my experience, or do I? 

      This makes me think now of a text of Bojana Kunst about the temporality of performance, which speaks about the political: http://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/the-troubles-with-temporality/

      I quote:

      Performance can be thought of namely as an antagonistic knot of various temporal practices, a conglomerate of contradictory forces (human, non-human, spatial, natural, etc.) that constitute the moment of the present and the invention of its political potential. Performance is not a liminal practice because it is an act of the individual subject being subversive of its own context (that is to say, the figure of a militant artist), but because it is a sum of contradictory, complementary, or causally related micro-actions and events that must invent the form for the temporal condensation of actions, moves, energies, materials, and things, and in that way open the creation of performance to the intensity of life.

      If change occurs and I think it does, definitely due to its inherent political conditions I would like to mention a performance that came first to my mind: Jerome Bel by Gerome Bel. Many questions emerged from that performance I saw in 1995 in Gent in a rather small theatre. I think I connected strongly to the questioning of dance and to the stripping down of the performance tools to their strict minimum: bodies, light, music and space. There was a sort of back to the basics strategy that enhanced very complex questions of authorship, agency and capitalism. What are we seing when we are seing performance? What kind of mechanisms hide behind the protocols of theatre as a place for the production of entertainment? 

      I’ve never seen consciously something like this before, poetical and critical simultaneously. Those bodies, light, music and space were not naked in the bareness but filled with codes, intentions, manipulations and emotions part of our collective consciousness. We were not looking at alienated bodies deprived feeling and meaning but to bodies relating in their sensuality and knowledge to the apparatus where they were performing.

       


       

      GIFTS:

      YAARI
      And your Eye – where does your Eye dwell?
      down onto you,
      in you
      will you believe my
      Mouth
      I speak of love
      How did we live until here?
      the body of each of us were
      your body
      It gleamed
      I open your leaves, forever
      only there did  you enter wholly the name
      that is yours
      the Listened-for reached you
      It cast an image into our eyes
      and the Dew of your thought 
      (not in the eye for the tear
      but seven nights higher
      when I attended the orchids
      when I was audible)
      it shivered 
      We 
      have drunk
      The blood and the image that was in the blood
      we drink it and we drink it
      as if I were this:
      your Whiteness,
      as if you were
      mine,
      as if without us we could be we
      The place of angels
      was written there too
      How
      did we touch
      each other - each other with
      these hands?
      we could not let go, and it came at us
      came through us at the last membrane and
      your eyes
      they dwell and dwell
      they speak
      they sing 
      an acoustic thought  
      speak 
      the Prayer:
      Come, come.
      Come a word, come,
      and something believed the eyes and the mouths
      and obeyed

       

      KEYWORDS :

      fiction; embodiment; memory; disappearance; disturbance; transparency; liminal body; tentacle; noise; threshold; come; crocky; microwave; time (now just passed); universal knowledge; fairytale; estrangement; inhabiting the ruins of the body; unidentifiable; hybrid nature; unnamed.

      REPORT : the shot gun (coming soon)

      Every person contributed a key word after seeing all the presentations. We did a collective constellation practice to relate and organize the key words. The image formed by the squared papers on floor was a shot gun. Aside of that image, there were floating  three papers with the key words: unidentifiable; hybrid nature; unnamed.

      I remember three main focus:  Memory, (fiction, embodiment, disapearence, disturbance,) System ( crocky, microwave, come = universal knowledge, fairy tale, estrangement ) and Body ( inhabiting the ruins of the body). Out of the shot gun a free floating constellation contained the keywords:  unidentifiable; hybrid nature; unnamed.

    • PARTICIPANTS:

      Sofia, Christian, Aela, Gerald, Lilia, Lili, Sana, Nicolas, Luiza, Varínia, Robin, Brendan, Mala

       

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > REPLY

      1)Varínia > Sofia > Lili

      2) Robin > Nicolas > Sana

      3) Nicolas > Sana > Luiza

      4) Lili > Lili > Varínia

      5) Luiza > Varinia > Aela

      6) Lilia > Robin >Brendan

      7) Sana > Luiza > Mala

      8) Gerald > Brendan > Lilia

      9) Christian > Mala > Sofia

      10) Brendan > Lilia > Nicolas

      11) Sofia > Christian > Gerald

      12) Aela > Aela > Christian

      13) Mala > Gerald > Robin

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1)Varínia > Sofia > Lili

      Let’s act as if this was what happened last Wednesday. Let’s take one thing for another:

      X was asked to locate and touch parts of Y's body, as if it was someone else’s. X chose the neck when The Scientist asked to act as if it was a loved one, but X also chose the neck when The Scientist asked to act as if it was X's own body being touched after sex. Easy to come to the conclusion that, after sex, X wants to be treated as if X’s loved ones. In this experiment, the method of taking one thing for another leads to elucidating conclusions. Let’s elaborate on this methodology. Maybe it works like a mathematical equation, where The Scientist substitutes Y for different values in order to discover more about the nature of X’s conducts and desires.

      What does it do: to take one thing for another?

       

      2) Robin > Nicolas > Sana

      Dear Robin

      I found the solution to your riddle. You are a snail in outer space (probably on the way towards a black hole.)

      Still my thoughts couldn’t stop speculating, and I was wondering if it would be possible to exchange some words in your poem. For example: “House” with “Freedom” and “staircase” with “happiness”, “windows” with “Self”. Or more concrete:  “my House” with “public space” and “my staircase” with “urbane planing” and “my windows” with “responsibility” etc.

      This would give sentences like:
      My freedom is circular with no beginning or end…

      or

      My happiness lead both up and down; my Self is looking both in and out…
      or Public space turns on its own axis in a state of perpetual movement..
      and As Urbain planning lead both up and down, responsibility look both in and out..

      I don’t know how to interpret such sentences, but somehow they sound more promising then looking actually out of my actual “window".

      Or how about this:
      Our conflicts are circular
      with no beginning or end, no sides, no up, no down.
      Our conflicts turn on their own axis in a state of a perpetual movement.
      Fear infiltrates both up and down suspiciousness observes both in and out.

      Your last line is:
      There is an occasional flicker, a slit, a slip, of light a path both in and out.

      What is “light” for you?

      Best, Nicolas

       

      3) Nicolas > Sana > Luiza

      Dear Nicolas

      Your script and specially the way you presented that make me think about black comedy. In black comedy there is the possibility of talking about serious issues and facts in a humorous way. The characters you created and their confusion were in contrast with the sequences you invited us to imagine as the background. I enjoyed this contradiction,

      Dear Luiza

      My question is what happens when paradoxes come together?

       

      4) Lili > Lili > Varinia


      As the question goes to my own bubble score, I am tempted again to resort to yet another performance artist - Pipilotti Rist and her video-piece, Mutaflor. Question for me to consider again is how do I assimilate influences (consciously and recognizing the unconscious absorption over time). Which artists´ hair would I keep in a little locket? How do I hold them dear, what have they passed on to me?
      But in the light of Mutaflor´s perpetual exchange of the inside and outside here is my question to you: how can performance create without excavating? Creation (of new) seems to happen in the pauses we make (for the audience, which are for the performer one of  the densest moments, being pressed against the arrow of time, progression and the eye of the audience).
      Or the other way around - imagining creation only happens by digging out bones of the bodies once existing, we re-flesh them into the zombies and then how far into the future are we following our creations?

      5) Luiza > Varinia > Aela

      in your bubble action, you turned off the lights of the room to then use a torch. With the torch in hand, you rolled on the big sheets of paper bringing to light drawings, words and symbols. Your body action, the torch and the action of bringing to the light some drawings made me imagine as if you were an explorer looking to discover some ancient hieroglyphs in a dark cave. My question doesn't concern a possible fiction but more of a technical matter. If in my view a small source of light -the torch- helped you to highlight what maybe the room light would have not, in what other ways could the body become a frame for us to look into the reality in its detail and complexity ?

       

      7) Sana > Luiza > Mala

      Dear Sana,

      and Mala,

      Here is my question, sorry for the little delay :)

      In your proposal we were seeing our surroundings with our eyes and through each other. We were seeing through our ears and through language. We were also seeing through our location throughout the stairs and the architecture of the building. That way of seeing was full of flaws, but also of possibilities of reaching things that otherwise we wouldnt be able to reach.

      But, to be honest, I felt a bit disconnect of what I was seeing (for myself), as I was immersed in this "seeing through other...", and so I wondered, what is this disconexion ? Is it an openess? Or an omission? How much do we have to disconnect from ourselves in order to connect with another (person, body, structure, time...)?

      Hope you have a great weekend!

      x

      Luiza

       

      8) Gerald > Brendan > Lilia

      Remember when we all had VCR's ?

      Remember ?

      Remember that little clock,

      the one on your VCR,

      that was always blinking twelve noon,

      because you never bothered or figured out how to get in there and change it ?

      So it’s always the same time,

      just the way it came from the factory.

      Good morning. Good night.

      Same time tomorrow. We're in record

       

      So here are the questions: Is time long or is it wide?

      And the answers? Sometimes the answers

      just come in the mail. And one day you get the letter

      you've been waiting for forever. And everything it says,

      is true. and then the last line says:

       

      ________________________________

       

      And what I really want to know is: Are things getting better,

      or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again?

      Stop. Pause. We're in record. Good morning. Goodnight.

      Now I in you without a body move.

      And in our hearts we fly. Standby.

      Good morning. Good night.

       

      9) Christian > Mala > Sofia

      dear Christian,

      i am strangely moved by the watering cans, i could watch them being discovered forever, like in a loop, as a repetitive dream, only the colour changes. and then the sound is so evocative, slightly displacing, it frames my perception of the image i see. it is the sound that makes me travel and discover the world with u, as if for the first time, and as if through the lens of "an alien" from the wild blue yonder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BE&v=N5Lh5mD_JJ4). i wonder how do u make the sound, the recorded sound, how u transform it, how does the relation of the sound to the image work for u, what does it do to the image, how it shifts the image or my perception of the image? the sound keeps moving my sense of a fictional "where": it’s hypnotising, then i'm in Hitchcock, then again i'm here now... but constantly moving through different spaces while looking at the multi-coloured watering cans.

      thank u! xm

      10) Brendan > Lilia > Nicolas

      "Close your eyes and tell me which message I'm sending you."

      Projections (as in the mind), dreams, imaginations, reflections (as in a mirror), illusions, hallucinations, building the world as we go .....  what do we want to know that hides behind the surface?

      Have a nice week end,

      Lilia

       

      11) Sofia > Christian > Gerald

      Dear Sofia,

      I perceived your projected texts as being synchronized, your voice telling a story about water that sounded very allegorical, and then there was the projected text that spoke directly to us and directed our situation as listeners in a (dry) space.

      Your spoken text was a reply to, or inspired by, David Foster Wallaces text "This Is Water" that begins with two young fish meeting an old fish and the old fish says “Morning, boys, how's the water?” and one of the young fish exclaims “What the hell is water?”

      So I would like to ask you this: How can water be digital, is there any digital effects/incidents/functions that you normally would compare to water? What effects would it have if your computer was flooded by digital water, leaking in to all your folders and open online accounts like gmail, paypal and facebook?

       

      13) Gerald to Mala

      Dear Mala,

      In your recent bubble score proposal, you invited us to travel mentally through some of our very human depths. In these dimensions, space and time gain seem to gain elasticity.

      In the same movement, emotions feel different, get maybe less personal.

      Something universal is going on.

      How much are these possible bridges between dimensions, important keystones in your practice, and on broader level, in human collective practices in general?

       

       

      KEYWORDS: Moon~time~insights, as if, here and there,  

       

    • PARTICIPANTS:

      Robin, Arianna, Isabel, Juan, Ricardo, Esteban , Lilia, Yaari, Juan, Anouk, Brendan, Gerald, Varinia, Sana, Agnes, Luiza, Sofia, Aela, Christian, Lili, Nicolas, Thiago

       

       P> Q >R

      1)Varinia > Gerald> Isabel 

      2)Isabel >Yaari > Sebastian

      3)Agnes >Esteban > Christian

      4)Ricardo > Lili > Anouk

      5)Yaari > Robin > Lilia

      6)Seba > Ricardo >Nicolas

      7)Arianna > Sana > Lili

      8)Luiza > Lilia > Thiago

      9)Anouk > Sebastian > Agnes

      10)Christian > Aela > Aela

      11)Esteban > Agnes > Yaari

      12)Nicolas > Brendan > Gerald

      13)Brendan > Thiago > Juan

      14)Sofia > Luiza > Ricardo

      15)Lili > Christian >  Arianna

      16)Aela > Varinia > Robin

      17)Gerald > Juan > Varinia

      18)Robin > Sofia > Brendan

      19)Sana > Nicolas > Sana

      20)Lilia > Anouk > Esteban

      21)Juan > Arianna > Luiza

      22)Thiago > Isabel > Sofia

       

      QUESTIONS:

       

      1)Varinia > Gerald> Isabel

      Varinia, in your bubble performance of the second session, you used absurd while very simple verbal and body languages to describe casual physical phenomenons.

      If you ever had to depart from there to invent a practice, would that practice be a pretext to use humour as a collective cement or absurdity as a way to challenge our relationship.s to truth? Or a critical practice of truth via humor?

       

      2) Yaari on Isabel (reply Sebastian)
       
      The density you've put our bodies in was a moment of tension between suffering and pleasure. a cis-archaeological-corporeal-structure.
      (I liked to feel I trust you, your proposal, and the others present)
      since you defined the task as an act which will help you to articulate a question…I would be interested to know why did you feel our bodies need to attain this physical contact of tightness and compression in order to 'accept' the material you offered? what was there is the two-layers-landscape that created the best state of receiving?

       

      3) Esteban's question to Agnes (Christian replies)

      Dear Agnes
      Watching your performance, I was very amused by how it was working; the deliberate choice of objects and the design of tasks developed a ‘lets not take this seriously’ kind of atmosphere that became at the same time an expectation of what the setup could engender. My questions are:

      What do you think discovering the potentiality of absurdity can generate? What do mishaps as a tool reveal about the actions and the people that perform them?

      I also thought this article of the aesthetics of failure might be of your interest 

      http://www.bussigel.com/systemsforplay/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Cascone_Aesthetics.pdf


      4) Lili question to the performance of Ricardo (replied by Anouk)

      Remembering your „solo“ on the table yesterday, I have many questions. Two most prominent ones are as follows:
      1) were you part of the audience, so us, during the „table dance“?
       
      (I found it a nice setting you chose - a bit elevated, in the midst of us, where a strip tease could take place, but instead of luring us into the escalating excitement and anticipation of the end, you have seduced us/me into cycles that kept bringing me back to the same spot. That enabled me to see you doing as well as performing)
       
      2) through what other practical ways could you immerse yourself into the audience, while still performing something - I don´t want to say observe yourself performing, because I´d say the two are different - (a performer becoming part of the audience but still available as a performer, or performing the split I am mentioning)

       

      Anouk's reply with a performance. Here is the text written after the performance

      What stays of my performance for the Bubbles score #3

       I stand up and ask people to follow me to the space behind the mobile wall/ corner. I keep the general light shut. There is some light setting from the past, some yellow light from Pierre’s proposal and a blue light coming from the projector on the white wall. I like the coldness of the blue and the warmth of the yellow. I invite everybody to walk in the space for 30 seconds. Then, I ask us to stop and stand on place with the eyes closed. I invite peoples to experience my performance from where they are, from this random point of view. I start to move with my eyes closed and my attention on my skin. What is touching me? I say to people that they can open their eyes whenever they want. I keep my eyes closed. I move in order to give sensation to my skin. I am touched by my clothe, by the air. I am gliding into space, I am not disturbing it, I am air, I am light. Am I visible? Can I feel myself? Can I sustain the lightness, the almost non-perceivable sensation? Do I still exist? I continue moving with my attention on my skin. I open my mouse to say : “ A friend of mine told me that the skin is the most external layer of the brain and the brain the most internal layer of the skin.” Depth is surface, surface is the depth. While travelling, I encounter a body, a person. The back of this person is caressing my hand. Soon after, another person. I wonder what they feel. Do they like the caress? Now, I know that some people are standing close to each other. It is darker here. I imagine that I am close to a wall. I say another thing. Why do I want to speak? Isn’t my physical presence enough? I want to share my subjective experience. Do I want to talk about subjectivity? Is my tactile experience communicative? Can we share a tactile experience? I say: “ in Chinese medicine the skin is associated to the function of the lungs, so to the respiratory system. Lungs and skin are similarly porous.” I am interested in porosity. Sometimes I am not porous enough, sometimes it’s too much. Too much porosity can arm. Can I close my skin? Can something that does not exist be armed? I am somewhere else now. I melt down to the ground. The light is yellow behind my eyes lids. The floor touches me. I think: “ there you are again. “ It is difficult to sustain verticality when my eyes are shut. I encounter a vertical object covered with thick fabric. It is a leg. I let it touch my arm. My whole arm adapts to its form, its texture, its temperature. It let the leg anchor itself; it penetrates the first layer of my skin. Now, I am an outgrowth, a parasite, a mushroom on a tree trunk. My left leg is a bit bent and floats in the air, parallel to the arm on the tree trunk. I say ‘ lets’ see if I can maintain my attention of my skin with my eyes open”. I open my eyes. I see. I let the image touch my retina. I turn my head and see the face of someone looking at me with a really soft open face. I am happy to see that my dance is affecting her. I am glad to see that to be affected by the environment can affect it in return. Receptivity is an action. A revolution? Presence. I maintain my position and talks again:” the gazes are touching me”. I only move my head and see where I am. I say “ The light ….”, the alarm rings. END.

       5) Robin asking Questions to the performance of Yari (to be replied by Lilia)

      Sorry can't believe I'm doing one of these long questions but I am:

      Yari I found your performance kind of fascinating in that the position you took was so ambiguous. By assigning someone else to find you a lover you abdicated responsibility but at the same time were very clear about what you didn’t want - so there was a move towards community, or transindividuality but a constant reclaiming of the position of decision maker- if this was intended to illustrate the ambiguity or impossibility of the question ‘how to realise the idea of Love and life and building a community” then it was effective.

      Less clear to me was the talk of falling in love not as an outward act but more as an an internal movement of falling back into the self. I think the ‘falling’ in ‘falling in love’ is unspecified in its direction, neither in nor out or rather potentially either, but I do think it does refer to the fact of doing it with, you ‘fall in love with’ so there is an action that’s an attempt to share, which you again did in your search for a lover. But I feel by treating your search for a lover with such a pragmatic and ’throw-away’ attitude you were attempting to question the desperation and commodification of a contemporary attitude towards ‘falling in love’ but this didn’t quite come off because of the lack of investment (even a momentary one) took the desperation out of the act. For me it became too blasé and what could have been desperate (even with a coating of indifference) became Irony, and Irony, for me, only succeeds in detaching us from the question. I think we may be consuming fast and without much thought but I think we certainly are ‘desperate’ in our search, driven by the the idea of somehow becoming whole , completing ourselves through the other. For me this desperation brings up the Lacanian idea of a desire that has no object …”simply the wish to perpetuate itself ad infinitum, in the dialectical movement from one signifier to the next signifier, between things but also the movement itself, the metronymic slippage from one object to the next. The desire in the gaze of the other, the pure desirousness, the looking itself. The lost object, the thing that was once conceived as part of the self becomes the other, the ghost of the original which never was”.

      This refers back to another point you bought up which was the idea of time, the arrow of time, and whether it produces language or the other way around. I lost the connection a bit here but I thought it well illustrated in the Tinder apps arrow system, though I didn’t quite get the connection between language and ecstasy. Here I I thought of Terence McKenna’s book ‘Food of the Gods’ where he talks about language coming out of the experience of ecstasy induced by our historically symbiotic relationship to Psychedelics, and how our quest for reproducing this experience of ecstasy is the driving force behind our addictions to ‘Love’, ‘materiality’ and any substance or object of desire.

      Finally about the performance at the end when you didn’t seem to want to illustrate or answer further, a sort of refusal. I found this very intriguing and wondered whether it related to this pre-self consciousness, pre-history moment, when we didn’t have language.

      So my question for you is twofold:

      What do you think the relationship between language, love and addiction is?

      How can the refusal to speak be an act of radical change?

       

      6) Sebastian > Ricardo > Nicolás

      Through substances containing certain subjects, we witness the emptying and deformation of being. How would you fill an empty body? What will you put inside of an empty body?

       

      7) Sana Asks Arriana , Lili replies

      I should say that I really like your performance and the text. They fully work together and complete each other. 
      You text amazingly takes me back and forth in time. From memory to contingency, from nostalgia to the uncertainty of future, from childhood to maturity...
      What impressed me a lot was that in chapter three which abstractly  illustrates future in front of my eyes, you create a poetic world wrapped in fantasy. The world you are waiting for is a mysterious one in which magic is possible. Thus, you beautifully transform the fear to hope and desire by passing through consciousness. 
      I doubt if I have any question around the text but as a clue for Lili ' reply I want to discuss this: if the body can make a bridge between memory and future!

       

      8)Luiza > Lilia > Thiago

      The body is a bridge
       
      We were mingled and at the end of our individual arms each of us held a cray. Underneath the cray there was a paper, a black paper. We couldn`t see well. We functioned as a blind octopus, gesticulating our tentacles on the flat surface, engaged in discovering the possibilities of that moment. 
      What kind of imaginary that situation brought to you? And what kind of politics you think it generates?

       

      9)Anouk > Sebastian > Agnes

      Considering the depth of the ecological crisis, what does our world need more: sacralization or profanation*? Or none of both? And why?

      * According to Roman law, objects that belonged in some way to the gods were considered sacred or religious. As such, these things were removed from free use and trade among humans: they could neither be sold nor given as security, neither relinquished for the enjoyment of others nor subjected to servitude. Sacrilegious were the acts that violated or transgressed the special unavailability of these objects, which were reserved either for celestial beings (and so they were properly called "sacred") or for the beings of the netherworld (in this case, they were simply called "religious"). And if "to consecrate (sacrare) was the term that designated the exit of things from the sphere of human law, then "to profane" signified, on the contrary, restoring the thing to the free use of men. "Profane," the great jurist Trebatius was therefore able to write, "is, in the truest sense of the word, that which was sacred or religious, but was then restored to the use and property of human beings." (Giorgio Agamben, What is an apparatus?)

       

      10) Christian > Aela > Aela

      Give an exemple on how sound plays in the process of letting the subject narrates itself !!!

       

      11) Esteban > Agnes > Yaari

      dear esteban,

      one day after your proposal I read this lines which made me think of the interaction of chairs and the relation between them and the sound:

      “… in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement – that is, in a world of life – knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence. It is the way forms are held together and kept in place within what would otherwise be a formless and inchoate flux”  (Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines)

      how do relate to making and unraveling knots?

       

      12) Brendan questions the performance of Nicolas (replied by Gerald)

      Nicolas

      I liked your performance with your machines. or perhaps rather,  your machines performance with you.

      Frankensteining  " This is not what i programmed! "

      I felt like you created a back door vortex into a neo-world, somewhere between a human dimension (a reality governed by humans) and a computer dimension (one governed by machines), with both exerting their desire for expression and autonomy. This shifting of dimensions illustrated by the time sequence that slowly twists into a distortion as it counts down and out … A humorous space where languages miscommunicate and everything is caught in a loop of failure and sense/nonsence. To quote my first filmmaking professor, "The only thing you can count on with technology is that it will fail".

      This makes me question, in regards to working with technology:

      Imagine,  everything is done properly, everything should be working just fine, it has operated smoothly this same way 99 previous times, there can be no possible accounting for any possible error, but yet - the unforeseeable happens - meltdown. Can this fouling up, this failure actually be a sign of artificial life? A sign of these objects, these machines exerting a kind of free will?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvLgvychb18

      Rather than answer this deeply speculative question for me, I was hoping to ask you if you could, with all your tools, take us even deeper into this neo-world that I described and was performed for us, so that as a group we could consider its implications as we embody the in-between dimension.  Can you create the conditions for the allowance of this A.I. to surface in our laboratory ?

       

      13) Brendan > Thiago > Juan

      I liked very much the presence of the mundane in your mythical
      discourse: your god is a cleaner, not so comfortable with his
      equipment.

      But you also present us a world where the creator wants back
      everything he once gave/offered/created. The cruelty of this figure
      reminded me of Kronos and Shiva, gods of the destruction. Shiva, as
      far as I know, is also responsible for creating new worlds while
      destroying everything, through this dance called Tandava.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJnfPLAMTmw&list=PL90E1CE7180CB8874&index=2&spfreload=10

      What is the importance of destruction in your practice? What are you
      currently digesting?

       

      14) Luiza to Sofia (reply Ricardo)

       

      In your performance not only gesture but also sound was very important. When we sounded our book's names (in both cases) there was an intersection and we created something new: noise. But in the first part noise was a cumulative fragmented information - we couldn't get and weren't supposed to get each other's book's names - and in the second part it was the thing, our thing - the book.
       
      noise, in music, uses "non-musical" sounds as well as mechanisms of distortions, feedback, manipulation, duration, residues... What could you say is the role of noise in your work, and even, more specific, in the creation of a character?
       
       15)Lili > Christian >  Arianna
      While experiencing you performance this question came to mind: How is it ever possible be intimate when you constantly have to (reach the surface to) breath?
       

      16) Varinia asks Aela and Robin replies

      In an exercise of trying to think in a science fiction mode, i.e in regard to what the future has in store for us, concerning the question of subjectivity v.s objectivity: if the notion of accessing ourselves - as specific and particular human beings that are aware of an interiority - is still a possible one, how would that be after the engineering of a brain that matches sense and form in such a way in which subjectivity is completely aligned with objectivity, giving end to subjectivity ? 

      Robin Replies with the movie Transnistria

      https://youtu.be/IrqCsMiS8VE

       

       
       
       
      17) Juan about Gerald reply Varinia
      My question is an image....
       
      b895637971bb2372b63d50e00e37e429
       

       18) Sofia's question to Robin (reply Brendan)

       
      Dear Robin,

      I really appreciated the sound-experience I had with your proposition. After a while I was really affected by the task you gave us. It was as if the space and the cup had become one, making me doubt if reality had shifted... I checked and it hadn't. :) Then, the voice of my partner became focused on the back of my head, and I could hear the position of the source of the voice (the mouth) quite clearly because of the cup. Usually sound is more spread out... but this time it seemed to stay in one point. I could hear the sentence: "Soy el punto negro que anda/A las orillas de la suerte" (I am the black point that walks the shores of chance). Esteban's voice was focused in one point in space and talked about a black point... coincidence... ?... I felt like reality had shifted. I was left with an enigma: What is the black point that walks the shores of chance?

      Hugs,

      Sofia

       

      19) Sana > Nicolas > Sana

      Dear Sana

      Thank you for sending me the text again! Listening at it once was definitively not enough. It’s nothing linear. I needed to listen it in layers, line by line, dive vertically into it and open the cracks in personal labyrinth this text. Each sentence seems to sediment over the next and covers it’s meaning with a new world. There is - in fact - a confusing distance between each sentence and I’m due to find my world to bridge between them. 
       
      In your text, territories belong to a time - or timeless - dimension. Somewhere out of time and time in itself. But not only this, territories seem - by being wrapped in a time - to belong to an emotional dimension - a dimension of which I’m filled. And not only that, territories are moving elements, they march on our flesh, as if in a parallel universe our spacial consciousness would be obsolete.
      And not only that, time seems to be a multiplicity of unsynchronized parallel universes (desires). 
       
      When I am the hour 
      you play days or years
       
      When you said that I was starting to doubt, wether you ever were interested at all in bridging over the borders? It seems, that you accept the border as a game - cold as it is. You’r hours, I’m years, no need for synching. 
      Yet, there is a horizon of every territory: somewhere on the line something changes. The question of ‘touch’ is coming up: is touch ‘connection', or 'revelation of difference'? Is there something like an absolute zero point of the border’s frigidity? An absolute one way? What happens when you cross that line? And when would you know, you see the border form the other side? 
       
      I don’t know if it is possible to spatialize this question or if it remains in dimensions we don’t know.
       
      20)Lilia > Anouk > Esteban
       

      Dear Lilia, you are asking this question in your text: “If one is not ready for change can change happen?”. Then what is it for you to be ready?

       
      21) Arianna on Juan (reply Luiza)
       
      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?
       
      22) Isabel asks Thiago to be responded by Sophia:
      Thinking on irony again… on the irony that appears in the bubble that you proposed and the position of vulnerability, an “un-apparently presence” a “non-acknowledged little thing” yet so strong at the same time... A human-animal rhythmically gatecrashing through the restricting laws of “civilization”… that still speaks of a witty quality of human beings. My question to you is: What is more anima-Listic, to know or not to know?
       

       

      REPLIES:

      10) Christian > Aela > Aela

      Capture d’écran 2016-01-29 à 22.05.47

       

      Hello, Ladies, gentlemen and others...

      Tonight I am gonna give you an inter-galactic waltz lesson !!!

      Waltz was born in germany, in the late eighteens century ! It was first considered as the most sexual dance ever in opposition with group dance practice such das menuet... A dance in which one partners are allowed to touch each others and even more to enter in rotation together !!!

      Waltz is a three times tempo dance ! Giving this specific rhythm of each beat waiting for the next one...and in between : the void, the intergalactic void !!! Every beat resonates and exhausts its sound waves into that void till the next beat and so on !!! Here it is about gravity, relativity or if you prefer Attraction !

      Every beat creates a circular deformation of space-time exactly like the sun does ! This geometrical deformation of space-time is what makes the earth and other planets turning around it : our galaxy and the universe itself are a gigantic inter-galactic waltz !

      Every beat enter in vibration with your inner body, activating your deepest organs... causing your deepest orgasm...

      In every waltz there is this little breath... the beat goes down..it is disturbed by the apparition of an asteroid coming closer to the attraction field...it is called a balade, a walk... or if you prefer a little flirt... It is just a breath...soon, the rhythm starts increasing again and the movement of love goes back again to its rotation !!!

      To love is to dance waltz and to dance waltz is to be individually universal !!!

       

       11) Esteban > Agnes > Yaari

       
      I was "reading" Esteban's performance as an encounter: sound that piercing a specific changeable landscape. 
      in light of  & in response to that, through Agnes's question i did a training in my materials 
       
      *
       
      a dance
       
      when we attend the forest as an entity which is constantly coming into being, the forest becomes a poem-body. 
       
      the forest, as an entity, is a whole, that is larger then the sum of its parts. 
      through processes of growth and movement, it is Alive. every Possible of its Potential is in its practice. 
      the forest is a structure while it is an essence.  
       
      a poem, is a whole, greater then the sum of its parts, a Thing that practices Life due to its formation. 
      its nature is a function but also an Experience. 
      the poem, is a vessel, for life to dwell. 
       
      language is finite and endless at the same time.
       
      there, is a forest. it has a form. but since it practices itself as a body, it articulates as language. 
      a network of visible and invisible organs, frequencies, intervals, that manifests itself through exercising communication between its performances and the latent. 
      the forest is an oral teaching, of the movement of final towards infinity. 
      it is a place of divinity, where singularity succeeds to participate in intimacy, due to its becoming in contact.
      this, operates as a system of encounters, where every intension is already a working. every encounter is an event of knotting and unraveling. singularities penetrating each other, permeable for each other, while also, at the same time, remaining different from, and 'other' then, themselves. 
      like the poem, the forest passes through its own borders while Art-iculating. like the poem, it declare itself, on its edges. in order to be, it reads itself and recalls itself continuously. 
      it is a membrane, reacting to the events, that registered in, and making of, its flesh.  
       
      to think the forest in that sense, is to think the light piercing the thicket and meets itself on a trunk. the bush's ravel as space of cavities for the wind to transfigure. it is to think the earth absorbing dead-vegetal-bodies to feed the live ones. it is to understand the mushrooms as a speech conductor. the animals, as a touch transmuting a limit into energy.
      the forest IS. 
      in its own time.
       
      the poem-body is a coherent order of becoming. by coming into being-in-contact it accedes and resists to inner and outer data while simultaneously produces it. as an operative structure, it calls, in its own time, to itself, and speaks, maybe strAngely its events.  
       
      the forest as a poem-body is an oracle. 
       
      *
       
      15) Lili > Christian >  Arianna
       
       
      huddle IMG_6919
       
       
      1) We step inside the outline of a circle placed on the floor.
      We form a huddle.

       

      2) We can lay on each other's bodies. Try to find a comfortable position, where you can close your eyes.
      Ease down your head, your arms.. your body parts onto the ones of the others close to you.

       

      3) Feel your breath
      and try to feel the breath of the person who's closer to you.

       

      4) Now, reach with one of your hands the surface of another body.
      Keep your hand there. Try to feel the quality of the body material that your hand is touching.
      How would you take care of that material?

       

      5) With your hand - the hand that is touching another body - make one gesture to take care of that body material.

       
       
       
      18)Robin > Sofia > Brendan
       
       
       
      At the Extremes
       
      Old Spit
       
      Ooh Desolution
       
      Wow Endurance God Endurance
       
       
       
       
       
       

       
       

      KEYWORDS: exchange, protocols, stacking, Landscape, fear, sharing, blackapple, gemini, trance, Ambience, locomotion, circle, subterraneous, strict minimum, brainwashing session

       

      REPORT:

      The key words remind me of ‘ The Return’. I have watched this film several times and it is still discovering for me.

      Andrey and his younger brother meet their father after many years of his absence. They set off for a fishing trip and end up on a remote Island. The father who is essentially a stranger becomes more mysterious when he starts looking for a box buried somewhere on the Island.

      As the movie opens, the brothers are testing their fears jumping in the river from height. This is a threshold to what we see later.

      Arianna’s performance made me remember this film. Gerald was also talking about discovering the landscape and the body which is one of the main concepts in the same film. Thus, I think watching this film could be a report from my point of view.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BMve_sq-o4

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBEL SCORE SESSION # 9 11 January 2016
      posted by: Juan Duque
    • 09 March 2016
    • BUBBEL SCORE SESSION # 9

      PARTICIPANTS

      Sofia, Sana, Chris, Agnes, Mala, Aela, Varinia, Arianna, Isabel, Lili, Robin, Lilia

      PERFORMANCES > QUESTIONS > ANSWERS

      1. Sofia > Sana > Lilia
      2. Sana > Lili > Mala
      3. Chris > Aela > Isabel
      4. Agnes > Sofia > Varinia
      5. Mala > Isabel > Chris
      6. Aela > Arianna > Agnes
      7. Varinia > Lilia > Sofia
      8. Arianna > Agnes > Aela
      9. Isabel > Mala > Robin
      10. Lili > Robin > Sana
      11. Robin > Cris > Arianna
      12. Lilia > Varinia > Lili

       

      1. Sofia > Sana > Lilia

      Dear Sofia

      I read your performance as an attempt to link the urban spaces to the surrounding environment, to where ever we are, to the air we breathe in, to what we feel, to the seen and the unseen, to the heard and the unheard.

      It was a game with words to create vague images while the new perceptions require new words.

      My question was about hope in a city. You shattered the city into pieces and installed each piece somewhere around. You created a new city which could exist anywhere: In our mind, in our heart, in our voice, in our memories...

      Dear Lilia

      Is there any possibility to create a new city through memories?

       

      2) Sana > Lili > Mala

      The pure image in your video, Sana, makes me feel I should get over or beyond it quickly to „see“ more, to see what´s behind it.

      Instead I imagined being you on the other side. In one of the last week´s sessions I was moving around with a pullover over half of my face to replicate your framing in the video. As an audience I am constantly left to imagine the covered part of the image in your video, attempting to be you in my little experiment however doesn´t require from me to imagine any part of my environment except the environments´ own imaginations perhaps.

      The „framing“ element, or the veil in between is different from the two perspectives -

      which veils do you use that would be hard or impossible to remove because they are essential to your work?

      A direction of the upper question that interests me even more is  using a lack or absence of a certain veil/interface/disturbance…

       3 Chris > Aela > Isabel

      Hey Christian, Isabel,

      sorry for my late question, I completely forgot the bubble score !

      So this question will be an extract from a book I just read : Chaos-phonies, from jazz to noise, the coronation of Chaos. It is in French, so I'll try to translate it.

      “Divorce between singing and talking.

      [] the archaic cousin of Sapiens and Neanderthal, Homo Heildelbergensis (500 000 years ago...) was already physiologically able to sing (its anterior condylar canal was as large as the one of Homo-Sapiens allowing then a production and a control of the sound produced by the vocal cords. It was as sophisticated as what we do now, while talking). Some scientists developed a these from this discovery: an original musilanguage. A long way ago, we were singing-talking. According to this theory, we can see some remains of this musilanguage in tonal languages (such as Vietnamese), in which the note and the accent are as meaningful as the phoneme itself. Meaning that this divorce is posterior, it comes from separation of the singing task from the talking one. This separation would have appeared in a larger context of civilisation (to be civilised), and of controlling the body and its drives”

      Do you think art is a way to find back what civilisation took away from us, from our animal instinct ? Could art be a way of rediscovering and so connecting to a more visceral being ?

      Cheers,

      Aela

      4) Agnes > Sofia > Varinia

      Each proposal has a life time, which in our times often goes from idea to realization, to than reverberation. Some proposals do not need long periods for their realization, staying more focused in the idea and reverberation parts (one example of this are the propositions of Ono in her book grapefruit and other American conceptual artists from that period). This is a particular mode of art production, nowadays questioned for its capacity of recuperation by late capitalism. How would you describe your most common mode of production? My question is a proposal: to reverse or change radically the order in which you usually produce for the bubble score. For example, if you go from idea to realization try to go the other way around.

       

      5) Mala >Isabel > Christian

      Hello dear Mala:

      The practice that you proposed made me think of the Mapuche indigenous people, the original inhabitants of the south of Chile that have survived colonialism and now struggle transnational dictatorship. They conceive imagining and dreaming to go hand in hand. They believe that both are tools to reach the magic held in symbols and archetypes, or rather power tools in our ontological configuration that enable us to transform and transmute our 3d reality. They are also places of communication, of travelling, of reaching. The Mapuche Cosmo vision is mostly based in messages transmitted by the dead through a dream. For example: a medicine woman heals and also makes political decisions in a tribe (or community). This role is passed on through female blood lineage. If the last medicine woman alive dies leaving no descent behind, the community waits until an ancestor manifests in the dream of the matriarch. Usually a girl is pointed to be the next doctor but she needs overcoming a challenge. If she is able to eat a coin and through digestion transform it in a silver egg (that she shits), then she is the next medicine woman in her community and a celebration follows.

      I read some words by Jeremy Taylor, Doctor in sacred Theology, that I would like to share with you:

      "If I can convince you that the products of your imagination are worthless or trivial, then I can make you my slave. If I fail to persuade you that your imaginative life is substandard, and then no matter how much economic, social, or political oppression I put you under, you will never be entirely enslaved".

      My question to you is: Do you conceive dream as a tool for resistance?

      Much love to you Mala from Isabella.

      6) Aela > Arianna > Agnes

       

      hi Aela and Agnes.

       

      we were standing in a circle. we were part of something.

      Then, something anomalous starts to happen.

      heavy breathing, rooted movements coming from deep down the belly. A change in the facial expression.

      Or, better: face stops existing. The face becomes just a part of the body as any other one.

      We are not in the social anymore.

      Words are spoken but it is their sound and their origin that matters. Not the meaning.

      They are breaths and movements more than acts of communication.

       

      It is perhaps when language stops making sense, because there is no need for sense anymore.

      We assist to a phenomenon.

      Among the definitions of this word, we have:

      an extra-ordinary event

      a freak

      a wonder

       

      when I was there, I stopped being part and I started witnessing.

      It was a shift in perception as well as in position.

      I could barely look anymore..

      it made me feel as being present to a transformation..

      A monster.

       

      Then, going back to that feeling of being/becoming/witnessing the presence of a monster, my mind went to the figure of the bearded lady.

      I remembered this picture:

       

      I have always been fascinated by the social stigma on women having hairs, most notably facial hairs. To be socially accepted as being women means not to have a beard or mustache, for example.

       

      But how comes?

      ..I would really like to have a beard.

      what is it to be a monster?

       

      7) Varinia > Lilia > Sofia

       

      And, and - also also - and -what else what else -instead of the uni -only only -seems to me to be a fundamental entry into thinking and perceiving the world. It's very evident that we are loosing the capacity of engaging with the other out of fear..

      And then came the stillness that  allows us to just be there, close to what is around one's own body revealed or hidden experiences. The making of non-linear history, a history of invisibilities where the several collides. Take time!

      The being there implies the expansion of empathy or the awareness of the complexity of things. We are social beings, no worries we are not made to be only or lonely. Attention is maybe the biggest capacity we have to listen to what is there to be able to communicate with what / whom we don't know yet. And also what else? My wish is: could you design a travel we could follow to feel the space between us? A sort of contagion awareness that could just make that inherent empathy smile.



      8) Arianna > Agnes > Aela

       

      In my memory you are playing this card game called Concentration or Match Match. In your game the pair was not to be found on another card but in Varinia’s mind. The game slowly turned into a riddle. It seemed there was right answer, a goal, an expectation? I will pose my question together with a song

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9XQw9iAl_Q

      Tell us oh how do we

      Catch a ghost in the

      Dark

      ?

      11 Isabel mala robin

      Dear Isabel, dear Robin
      Thank u for yr proposition. I didn't become sun powder, but I did become stardust. Or rather: I remembered I already am stardust, we already are stardust. Made in the matter of stars. When I am, we are a matter of stars everything is different. The universe breathes much slower, so slow, that a breath measures the almost of eternity. I wonder how such a collective rite like one u propose makes us remember how to dwell in the almost forever of the stars while trading the earth in time. For a moment I sink into cosmic memory to reemerge as stardust. Is such an imprint, an experience outside of time and lasts forever?
      Thank u! Xm

       

       

       

       

      12) Lilia > Varinia > Lili

      Hi Lilia,

      i read somewhere that the main reason why western culture appears as an oppressive force in the middle east, is because the notion of time in the middle east is circular,  and that the notion of progress is not measured in terms of before and after as in the West. In the middle East progress means reinterpreting, reconsidering and being in a constant dialogue with the past. But also i read that even within Europe the meaning of time changes from country to country. For instance the south of Europe a date at 4 pm means that it is then that we start thinking to go to the meeting, while for a German that would mean that you are late. According to that article this because in the south of Europe time is measured not by the clock but by moments, so i wont think of the next moment until this one is over, so if i am having a really exiting conversation, the moment will be over when the exiting conversation is over, not before.

      So we have minutes, circular time (maybe based on the rise and sunset), moments....if they give you the possibility of setting up your own measure of time, based on what would that be?



       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #5 11 January 2016
      posted by: Sana Ghobbeh
    • 12 February 2016
    • 12 February 2016
    • PARTICIPANTS

      Isabel, Arianna, Lilia, Agnes, Sebastian, Sofia, Aela, Mala, Esteban, Robin

      QUESTIONS BY

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > REPLY

       

      1 Sofia > Lilia > Arianna

      2 Isabel > Arianna > Robin

      3 Arianna > Isabel > Esteban

      4 Agnes > Esteban > Isabel

      5 Aela > Agnes > Lilia

      6 Lilia > Sofia > Seba

      7 Seba > Robin > Mala

      8 Robin >  Aela > Sofia

      9 Esteban > Mala > Aela

      10 Mala > Seba > Agnes

       

      BINGO!

       

      QUESTIONS

       

      1)Sofia > Lilia > Arianna

       

      In Sofia's score the words became the real and the real became the words. It was a mise-en-abime that caught the moment of the moment. An enhancer of what is there and not perceived at first instance, or too known and ordinary that it gets lost. An invitation to pay attention and re-imagine the 'we' we are in that moment. The text, the reader, the group, the room, the other. Certain scores are tuning devices, they create reading parameters for the moment. One writes and reads simultaneously the moment. I find them fascinating, time openers. Was thinking about art strategies that bring us to the present time, to the self and the group, and what do they do terms of responsibility for both the one and the group. I would like to invite you to develop on this issue. Looking forwards to read you!

       

      2) Isabel > Arianna > Robin

       

      Dear Isabel,

      it is always a pleasant surprise for me to attend to your proposals. They bring a burst of fresh air, creating the space for both disruption and intimacy.

      It is this combination that interests me the most. A strong frontal approach on themes that we most likely wouldn't talk about otherwise in a group, and the simultaneous capacity to create a space for sharing a certain kind of intimacy.

       

      I see the approach to this intimacy that your propositions bring about as characterized by an activist and militant spirit.

      You (one) DIY, you (one) can take things into your (her/his) hands and experiment with them, without forgetting about the material they are made of, and the special care each material requires to be handled with.

      In other words: the opening of a space where intimacy is possible in a public way. Even, it is directly born in a public way, and shared, without losing its specificity.

       

      My focus is then in this possibility for activism to be intimate, and for intimacy to be absolutely disruptive, poweful and re-generative, in the sense of the possibility for it to be a tool and a performative situation where to create change not only for the one, but also for many.

       

      2 connected questions:

      How to combine activism and self-care?

      How to be a wrecker and a flower at the same time?

       

      3) Arianna > Isabel > Esteban

       

      Visibility and invisibility... presence and shadow, light and darkness, a quest of the opposites and in the middle permeable receptors: body and mind mutually observing each other, evidencing a certain spectral condition that binds them together but, that also tears them apart. Is the quality of being spectral inherent to humans and why?

       

      4)Agnes>Esteban>Isabel

       

      Dear Agnes

       

      As I look back on your text/performance I think of gaps... and grammar, my question comes again in the form of a quote:

       

      There will be a writing of the unwritten.

      Someday this will happen.

      A brief writing without grammar

      A writing made solely out of words.

      Words without a grammar to support them. Lost

      There, written. and inmediately abandoned.

       

      Marguerite Duras, C’est Tout

       

      5) Aela > Agnes > Lilia

       

      Talking upside down about erection has something beautifully desperate and hopeful at the same time. The never giving up attitude affronts the paradox and exhaustion in its quest for the impossible. My question comes along with a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjW_I-2fARA and I’m curious: what do you think about eroticism in impotency?

       

      I can just think about eating flowers. Old bouquets from valentine’s day. Today is the day! The celebration of impotency I wish it was the one of eroticism.  This though made me laugh! I’m referring to the consumerism of love. Also yesterday someone posted on Facebook an article about the origine of St. Valentine day. It says: “Those Wild And Crazy Romans From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain. The Roman romantics "were drunk. They were naked. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them. They believed this would make them fertile.” I don’t know… this is possibly both eroticism and impotency in a dance macabre.

      Eroticism is potency. Eroticism needs response I believe. Impotency is no response. And there we start.

      I would like to respond with a letter I wrote to my best friend based on a text by Jean-Luc Nancy : “Stirring stirring up, uprising.”

       

      Brussels, 4 February, 2016

       

      Dear S,

       

      I've been wanting to write this letter for some time. We are so apart. Many kilometers separate our physical bodies and though I always feel you are so close. Friendship is an opening to the outside.

       

      Thinking about my work and wanting to be in touch with you about it. In relation to life, work and love, I feel I am propelled in between motion, agitation, desire and rebellion.  Restless. A being alive that doesn't want to stay still but persists in touching and being touched by the world, that wants to alter it, not with the intension that it becomes something fixed but as a challenge my physical and moral senses. Almost as a paradox this state of mind implies a strong responsible relation to the other (being the other also the non-human other), so somehow it enters the domain of ecology. I feel weak sometimes because too driven, too hopeful engaging in the believe that movement is the only condition of all. Too much expectation I guess.

      The movement that there is, is the movement of (e)motion, the one that mobilizes one towards the other and brings along excitement and exaggeration, brings on the transgression. When I write this I feel the drama queen I can be.

       

      On the other hand I also feel that that restlessness is a state of mind, something I can't get rid off and that wants to join the movement around me. I want to touch! Be in touch! Be touched! It's like a drug, an addiction, a disease…

       

      Touching shakes up and sets in motion, I think. As soon as I move my body closer to another body (even an inert body made of wood, stone or metal), it feels like I displace it, I move it even if just a tiny little bit, and the other sets me apart, holding me up in a way, I loose myself. Touching acts and reacts at the same time !!!!!. There is no mercy.  . Touching propels and repels — impulsion and repulsion, rhythm of the outside and the inside, of ingestion and indigestion, of the clean and the unclean. It's strong! Am I going crazy? Did I fall in love?

       

      I'm thinking now in the case of a new born baby.  When K was born, after being contained inside my body,  she reached for me in a survival motion, searching my breast to suck nutrition. . It was one of the most amazing experiences I had. How could she know that I had a breast, that she could suck and that there was milk? She approximates and distances, penetrates and escapes at the same time my body with her body. You know as well as me about this. We both have children, we both bared in our wombs an alien body, feeding from our own blood for later being contained by it. Sucked and pushed away on a motion of relation. An interdependent autonomous symbiosis. An intimacy that is carnal knowledge. The beginning of it all!

       

      The small bodies of our daughters were immersed in our resonating amniotic liquid, that surrounded them inside our bellies. The sounds of our bodies, our heart and our guts, and the sounds of the outside world touched their ears, their closed eyes, their nostrils and their whole infused skin at the same time. The beginning of eroticism. Yet inside there, each possible sensation was still diluted in a dim way, they were too close, in a kind of permanent, quasi-permeable exchange between the outside and the inside.

      At birth it all changes, they separated from us, we separated from our mothers. But we still remain this potential thing, floating now not in the amniotic liquid but in the world where everything relates to everything .  Yes, everything strains towards everything and pulls away from everything — but now we are separated there is a gulf between one and another. Crisis!!!! The cruel and exciting reality that only a separated body on its own is able to touch. No contact possible without being apart. Out of reason or passion, striving to connect, to exist. This letter is a getting in touch of the reason. I miss you. Miss talking to you!

       

      Thinking about the sense of pleasure in love and sex, the rhythmic movement and overflow, of the bodies spilling against and into one another, and one setting itself off from the other only to take it up and move in again together in succeeding waves. The separation is the opening of the intercourse. Poetic intimacy. The intercourse isn’t seeking to restore a lack of distinction: it celebrates the distinction! Together, apart, in , out.  It announces a meeting, which precisely is contact. Contact doesn't cancel the separation -  it makes is apparent on the contrary. Maybe here is where it resides the capacity to receive and the capacity to be affected. In that vulnerability. And affection is first of all passion and the movement of passion, a passion whose very nature is to touch. This is all about mutual action, I think, one can't receive passively, one is an active receiving mode per se. I like this idea that receptivity is active and not passive, and that when you touch your are being touched and both parties are receivers. It's an act of generosity, vulnerability and courage. My whole being is contact. My whole being is touch/touching. This is amazing!!

       

      If I say touching is stroking; the caress is the desire and the pleasure to come as close as one can to a skin — be it human, animal, textile or mineral, and so on — and to engage this proximity to play off two skins grappling with each other. This is again a play between the inside and the outside, perhaps the only game there is. Listen, if all playing consists in taking and leaving an area, in opening breaches, filling and voiding places, boxes and schedules, the only game there is is an act of intercourse. Indeed, is there even a desire that hasn’t a desire to touch? Ah, now the world becomes an erotic entity! This is a funny thought!

       

      This means we are open to the outside, open with all our orifices — my ears, eyes, mouth and nostrils, not to mention all the channels of ingestion and digestion, like those of my moods, sweats, thoughts, gaze and much more.  As for the skin, it's the envelope around these openings, these entries­ and­ exits, which locates and specifies them while at the same time developing for itself this ability to be affected and to have a desire for that. I love the skin. Maybe the skin is the loving organ with all its permeability. It makes us be-come what we are not yet and un-come who we just were.

       

      Now you’d say but what's the relation between body, politics and touch relate?

      Well, at the end, it is always a matter of sensible reality, thus material and vibratory. When the self quivers, it really is quivering, just as one may speak of water about to boil. What we commonly call the self is in fact nothing other than the waking and welcoming — both mixed — of motion/emotion. The self is the touched body — vibrating, receptive and responsive. Its response is the sharing out of the touch, its rise towards it. The body rises up! Maybe in here there is a pre-disposition of the body to be political? Indeed, there is some insurrection (and sometimes some erection) in the motions of touching. A body rises up against its own enclosure, against being locked up within itself, and against its own entropy. It rebels against its death. Whether it is about the coming of another (him or her), or the absolute alteration of death, it is the body that opens up and extends outside. It is its pure act!!!

      When i am touched, I have nothing to expect: the touch is all act, in its mobile, vibratory and sudden action. And as for Aristotle’s god, this act is accompanied by its own excess, which is its pleasure, the climax that is the flower or spark of the act — sun or dark- ness, always an abyss.

       

      Would these thoughts make the world a better place? Would the sense of love instigate a relational care beyond personal narcissistic achievement?

       

      Hope you like the reading and looking forward to hear back your thoughts,

       

      Love,

      Lilia

       

      The song says:

      The rings of Saturn are so sexy and Jupiter's got that rad spot! Pluto and Eris are just dwarfs but they get me twice as hot Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is all over me! I'd spread my legs for Venus and I'd like to live on Mars I'd take Neptune or Uranus or any of the galaxy stars... Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is all over me! Mercury is the hottest being closest to the sun and if that gets you hot you know you are not the only one! Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is all over me! Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is ah ah AH AH!

       

      6) Lilia > Sofia > Seba

       

      Maybe a mask allows a body to become other. It's such an impressive thing, such a game changer, and it does it so fast. You put the mask on and -damn! who the fuck?-, it works every time. But at the same time that it works, it's still a mask, and not a human body. If you don't wear it and leave it hanging on a nail it is clear, it's just a mask, just the other and not a body. But if you put it on again - damn again, what the fuck?! it's a body again!-. Maybe a mask allows a body to become two: both a body and not a body. It's a splitter. It gives you a super-power, and extra-non-body... I don't know, it's for you to say: What is a mask? And what is the superpower this mask gives you that you think is most interesting for you to have?

       

      1. Seba > Robin > Mala

       

      Nitrazepam is a hypnotic drug of the benzodiazepine class, indicated for the short-term relief of severe, disabling anxiety and insomnia.[1] It also has sedative and motor-impairing properties,[2] as well as amnestic, anticonvulsant, and skeletal muscle relaxant effects.

       

      Nimetazepam (marketed under brand name Erimin) is an intermediate-acting hypnotic drug which is a benzodiazepine derivative. It was first synthesized by a team at Hoffmann-La Roche in 1962.[1] It possesses hypnotic, anxiolytic, sedative, and skeletal muscle relaxant properties. Nimetazepam is also an anticonvulsant.[2] It is sold in 5 mg tablets known as Erimin. It is generally prescribed for the short-term treatment of severe insomnia in patients who have difficulty falling asleep or maintaining sleep.

      Lithium compounds, also known as lithium salts are primarily used as a psychiatric medication. This includes in the treatment of major depressive disorder that does not improve following other antidepressants and bipolar disorder.[1] In these disorders it reduces the risk of suicide.[2] Lithium is taken by mouth.[1]

       

      Dear Seba, I have to admit to not really consciously understanding your performance but there is something so clinical or maybe neutral about the way you list these drugs, And then there is the really representational side of what you did with the drawings.  They serve somehow to set up a narrative, which allows me to tell myself a story:

       

      There was a man who was blocked from his memories by a wall

      Part of him was stuck in the past

      He recited a list of magical ingredients

      This became an incantation, the incantation of the dead head

      These were supposed to be the keys to a memory that was blocked

      The memory was blocked by a failure to be assimilated

      This failure was related to lack of sleep

      1st he used a potion in a bottle to sleep

      Half of the people in the world used this potion to forget

      Ultimately It didn't work,

      The magical ingredients in his incantation were kept in a red box

      The magical ingredients gave him temporary sleep

      But this sleep was the sleep of the dead

      They allowed him to function but he became a zombie

      His head was split in 2 and cut off from the rest of himself

      He was a basket case

       

      Please consider this story the question

       

      8) Robin >  aela > sofia

       

      Hey Robin,

      as I know you would like more feedback, I am gonna try to give as much observation as I can :)

      I liked the decalage between what I could describe as an intimate lecture dispositive and the very text which was read. A nice mix between telling a story, a tale and doing it in a formal way...meaning giving awareness of the philosophical side of the tale and challenging imagination in the same way.

       

      Same decalage I could felt by the situation of both characters: being next to each other, responding (in term of tempo) to each other but not really seeing, touching, communicating...just knowing the other is somewhere near you while in the same time, keeping a private and comfortable space.

       

      It was also about interpretation...how each character interprets the silence of the other, the void in between them two...while one thinks it is necessary and peaceful to maintain this quiet void the second wonders if something might be wrong with it...non verbal communication lets space for possibilities of interpretation. The void as the space of the possible...

       

      This issue of interpretation can be found in science...here...meteorology or science fiction...how to rationalise what is seen, observed and how those observations are related to one specific way of perceiving... the limits of perception (here human and something-else-than-human) are also the limits of scientific interpretation of events...

       

      Here comes the issue of point of view...very present in your performance...zooming in...out...at least two different interpretations of the same void, the same non-presence...two different ways of feeling, living and recognising one event (human being perception and observer perception)...plus the song in behind...like a lightly colourful wind that guides imagination of the viewer a bit at side of the lecture dispositive...I felt brought away...in between two possible realities because of that song...

       

      here is my question: Does reality depends necessarily on a common interpretation or the so called reality is never else than a very useful concept we use to hide the fear of not sharing enough, the fear of being alone (in one mind, one body, one universe) ?

       

      Extra question: do you think human being can manage to live with a multitude of different realities (generated by a multitude of different point of view) happening in the same time ?

       

      9) Esteban > Mala > Aela

      Dear Esteban,

      thank u for yr proposition. i find very interesting the relation between what is represented and what remains invisible (behind the white screen), yet in a way tangible, which affects what we see, what is being performed and what is represented. I am interested in this subtle logic of confluences btw the two (voices, bodies, or states of mind, layers of "text") and how they affect or destabilise each other. It is as if the two phantasmatic frameworks within one person clash. or perhaps it is the friction between ones own fantasy and the invisible other within ones self that always already invades, tackles, influences one's own fantasy from behind the white screen. It makes me think of Zizek in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTcCjNTpecc) where he talks about voice as an "alien intruder" into one's psychic reality, which in psychoanalytic terms is always displaced, cracked open. thinking, about yr performance, i wander what is then this logic of continuous and perpetual displacement and how it generates yr "cinematic" narratives on stage.

      xmala  

       

      10)Mala > Seba > Agnes

       

      Dear Mala,

       

      I was intrigued by the way you used the technique of visualization. The experiences I had up until now were individual ones, even though they happened in a group context. Your session made us verbalize in front of the group the specificity of the impressions, thoughts and affects that were produced by the interaction between your words and our imagination. By sharing all of this with each other, we could see the many individual differences. You also asked some of us to delve a bit deeper into our imagination, in order for us to be more precise when communicating our impressions. Sometimes it also seemed as if you as the interrogator were looking for something yourself, through the imagination of someone else. I wondered what it was, and if you eventually found it!

      But this is not a question Agnes could do a lot with… So, here it is: Considering the importance of knowledge production, creativity and innovation for our contemporary economies, shouldn’t we as artists take a more critical stance in regards to the productive and transformative potential of the imagination (‘elsewhere & otherwise’), a capacity often associated with our practices? Should we redefine imagination as something which is not in opposition with continuity, tradition, situated-ness,… Or define a force which can balance its constructive-destructive agency?

       

      Seba

       

      KEYWORDS

      fish, displacement, sex, excitable, particles

       

       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #3 11 January 2016
      posted by: Luiza Crosman
    • 27 January 2016
    • 27 January 2016
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #3

      PARTICIPANTS:

      Nicolas, Sofia, Brendan, Nicolas, Christian, Sana, Arianna, Esteban, Thiago, Agnes, Juan, Seba, Anouk, Luiza, Pierre, Robin, Yaari, Aela, Lili, Lilia

       

      P > Q > R

      1) Sofia > Nicolas > Christian

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      3) Nicolas > Luiza > Juan

      4) Christian > Varinia > Sofia

      5) Sana > Lili > Lilia

      6) Arianna > Brendan > Varinia

      7) Esteban > Yaari > Aela

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

      9) Agnes > Lilia > Luiza

      10) Juan > Arianna > Lili

      11) Seba > Sana > Nicolas

      12) Anouk > Christian > Pierre

      13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

      14) Pierre > Esteban > Seba

      15) Robin > Anouk > Thiago

      16) Yaari > Thiago > Sana

      17) Aela > Sofia > Yaari

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

      19) Lilia > Seba > Esteban

      20) Varinia > Robin > Brendan

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1) Sofia > Nicolas > Christian

      Dear Sofia

      following the advise of Juan, I’ll keep myself short this time.
       
      Your teeth - and what they were reacting on - reminded me of these sentences of a Danish guy: 
       
      ... What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
      how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
      express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
      in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
      world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
      what is this quintessence of dust? ...
       
      best
      Nicolas
       

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      Those black dots made me think about the blind point of our vision: the point located at the exact center of our iris ! Paradoxically, without this blind point we could not see: it is the void of the wheel's hub that makes it roll !!!

      "At the extremes, there is freedom" sounds like the peaceful promise, the quiet answer to an unresolvable question...what is behind?...what is after ?...nothing...something else ?

      Here is my question: are we breathing ?

       

      3) Nicolas > Luiza > Juan

      Nicolas,
       
      During you performance I kept thinking on mobility. First, because it regulated the order of our presentations, since you could not move. Then, because later you could move, and did so the entire night with that boxed-hand, and, finally, because of the short exchange we had where you said that it was funny because you could actually move your index finger around - even if we could not see, or if you couldn't move any other part of your hand.
       
      And then, this image came to my mind, in a maybe oppose process of thinking...
       
      Captura de Tela 2015-03-26 às 14.17.20
       
      And then I thought on the polyp. growing and taking space and on the confetti spreading and taking space, but both in very different manners, specially in relation to the air around them and, thus, my question is: How do you feel is your way of taking space as you move?
       
      Juan, I really liked you idea of using image, and so feel free to respond directly to it as well :))
       
       
       
      4) Christian > Varinia > Sofia
       

       

      Christian, in your proposition i saw that the silence generated by the impossibility to talk in a fight between 2 people, has a soothing effect on bodies, as if making them somehow docile and devoted to their condition. I was not sure if this condition bind the bodies closer together or just kept them at an unchangeable distance to each other. But i believe to see that this condition doesn't distance the bodies further away from each other. Do you think that this proximity of bodies is created by silence alone or by the impossibility to talk? For instance, how close do you feel to the other bodies while reading a book in a library? 

       

       5) Sana > Lili > Lilia
      *a cut and a stitch* - both operating on a membrane, both using similar instruments, the act is distinguishing them however from each other;
      both small, but insistent
      after a while I lose track of which one is destructive and which one is mending in its intention
      disruption, destruction turns into a call for change, while the caring sewing becomes the imprisonment
      I find it interesting that a stitch can also mean a twinge, a spasm, a sharp pain in the body

      my question:
      How is/can care be an act of violence?

       
      6) Arianna > Brendan > Varinia
       
      Before becoming the careful breathing pile:
      There was a circle drawn on the ground. Where was it that we went when we crossed over the divide from the outside of the circle to the inside. Where did we go ? (And maybe, are there things we could or should do to prepare ourselves for the journey across this divide?)
       
       

      7) Esteban > Yaari > Aela

      ok: the night before the session i was reading Ovid's Metamorphosis (!), in Hebrew, and copied to myself the exact same sentence(!#2) that begins it all:
      “I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities".
      the Hebrew translation though, says something like: "my soul (/psyche) is forcing me to speak of bodies that changed into new forms".
      the differences are a great land of thinking: first in the intention - it shifts the "i" to a place which is a channel, a body or a vessel - a medium which forced by an inner movement to an action, then comes the shift from body->new form, in compere to form->new entity.
      in relates to readiness, or to metamorphosis , which thought these differences enable?

       

       

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

       

       

      Dear Thiago,

      You introduced in your text a highly interesting matter for me : the octopus intelligence.

      I'll let you know asap the content of my research on the subject but I will focus today on your desire and practice of imitating animals.

      Gabriel Tarde offers two concepts to explain social movements: imitation and invention. Everyone imitates what s-he admires, what s-he sees as good and able to serve as a model, but arranges by mixing, in an original way, the selected imitations to their plural sources. Thus, history is as a succession of different imitative flows, a succession of models able to give rise to imitations by a large number of individuals. Why imitation? Because Tarde conceives individuals as a large ensemble of reflections; that is to say that everyone sees her/his fellows and in them finds her/himself. It is a game of mirrors that stands at the heart of living-in-society. Constantly, we judge and we are judged, ourselves facing the others and the others facing us. Each one of us comes naturally to doing-like-the-other, so that she/he will recognize her/himself in us and vice versa, for that life-in-society, after all, substantialises consistently and possibly becomes shared common points and not opposed dissimilarities – a set of relationships where even the tendency to opposition becomes common: ‘Two opposite, inverse, contrary things, have, as their singular character, to actualise a difference in their similarity which consists in its very difference, or, if one prefers, to present a resemblance which is to differ as much as possible’ (in L'opposition universelle : essai d'une théorie des contraires, 1897). One can understand Bruno Latour when he identifies Tarde as a precursor of actor-network-theory: one link in an unbroken social chain, the individual finds its place in society through the influential relationships she/he weaves with her/his peers. The basis of imitation and invention, which is a series of acts and processes, is identified by Tarde as belief and desire, which are individual psychological characteristics. "Belief and desire: so this is the substance and the strength, these are the two psychological quantities that analysis found underneath all the sensational qualities with which they combine; and when invention and then imitation, seize them to organize and use them, these are the real social quantities "(in Les lois de l'imitation  (1890).

      Thus my question is :  who do you think you will become by regularly imitating animals and which kind of effect this desire can have on society?

      my best,

      Pierre

       


      9) Agnes > Lilia > Luiza

      When I was reading your text I kept thinking about multiplying, adding, subtracting the numbers 1 and 2… So that one could become two or three or zero, or… So that choice is not binary but a multiple or a fraction, a derivate, of the given… I think that was maybe what was happening in the way you performed the text with the lines crossing each other, creating cross road options … maybe this is the desire for freedom, which at the end does not depend on the choice you take but how you deal with the future of those choices. Sometimes I think choice does not exist.

      I was looking for a poem because some poetry is a relief… I wanted to connect to notions of ambiguity and uncertainty and the number three. I found this one by Wislawa Szymborska, which I didn’t know before.

      The Three Oddest Words

      When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.



      When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.



      When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

       

      The question is: what happens when I pronounce the word escape?

       

      10) Juan > Arianna > Lili

      It's funny to see the links between all this.

      I'm very much inspired by the text that you proposed right before your action, Juan.

      It talks about a space that it is not accountable through reason.

      This resistance of space to reason (and reasonability) is not an act of antiphaty of the former towards the latter.

      It's just the gentle and wise refusal to hastily follow the seemengly crystalline, transparent, univocal path of logic.

       

      Space: "No, thank you. I need to take my time".

       

      The labyrinth (the Sensory Space, the Hole) is what requires more than one sense to be used when traversing it.

      More than one intention when entered, more than one quality of strength when confronted.

      It is a space of the multiple and ambiguous – a space of the resonance more than one of the echo.

      It needs intuition, generosity, and a bit of blindness when approached.

       

      The word labyrinth itself resonated in me when I read the text again, because of the name I carry.

      Ariadne is the one who knows how to handle the threads, and she knows not by intellect, but by intuition. She doesn't hold on her knowledge, but offers it almost blindly because she fell in love.

      This generous act leads her, varying according to the different accounts, either to a solitary death on an isle or to the marriage with the god of Disorder, Ambiguity, Ecstasy and Madness – Dyonisus. Which I personally find two very similar outcomes of the story.

       

      Coming back to the text.. and connecting it to the action you did.

      I wonder if my name spoke trough me. If the potential that a word can carry expressed itself through the vessel of the body – through the fleshy materiality of it. Like a sound can pass through and resonate differently according to the material that traverses.

       

      So, I am not speaking language. Language speaks me.

      It's not (or not only) an act of the intellect anymore. It is an event of the entire flesh we are made of.

       

      It makes me move, and articulate my full(s) and my void(s).

      The mouth, with its full and empty spaces, is the cavity-cave of language; the Hole, the Sensory Space.

       

      The jaw is its instrument and rudder, which then transmits its inputs to and through the passages of the body.

       

      What if we were beings fully conducted by the mouth and the jaw?

      What if the apparatus mouth/jaw would be our leading organ?

       11) Seba -Sana -Nicolas

      I really enjoyed reading the lines , they were silent lines on the black background like the waving breaths in the darkness( as you described).
      It was joyful to dive into images you created by those pictorial, imaginary and alive fragments.
      I am impressed how you gradually turn detachment to connection, alienation to relation and factuality to fluidity through the rhythm of breaths.  When we try to synchronize our breaths we become more aware of our presence. Thus the breaths speak and the skins understand.
      At the same time the notion of location is inserted. Therefore, we are invited to a traversal spatiality.
      The body could become an in-between space when it’s location is wrapped in it’s imagination. What is the actual location then transformed to?

       

      12) Anouk > Christian > Pierre
       
      Dear Anouk,
      one of the sentences you quoted from your (unnamed) friend was this: "The skin is an extended layer of the brain and the brain is an extended layer of the skin". Do you think that means that discourse and material are inseparable because our bodies contains, and can not exist without, both? If yes it's just yes, but if no; does material without any form of discourse exist?
      You continued to explain, as you moved around to sense the space towards the ceiling and the floor, what it means to your practice to pay attention to your own self and the materials you were touching. It is important for you (and us, I think) to actively seek out physical knowledge and not take materials for granted just because they happen to all around us.
      What are you made of, and where does the energy that makes you move come from?
       
       

      13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

      Dears 

      So Luiza coincidentally your drawing session with Arianna was base on my poetic text !

      Stroke me a lot how accurate are the dynamics of the drawings related to the word ABYSMAL, they are so near to my images when I wrote the text.

      My question will try to dig in Arianna’s question about ABYSMAL seen through the vector - dot drawings of Luiza.

      My question is a photograph I took couple of years ago at the Museum of anthropology in Mexico City; the image depicts a terracotta Aztec warrior wearing as a mask the face of a defeater warrior at war which is been totally peel off.

      Key words…

      - Personification of the soul of the other

      - Appropriation of the image of the other

      - Cultural anthropophage

      IMG_0221

      14) Pierre > Esteban > Seba

      Dear Pierre
      Thinking about the journey that you proposed to us on Wednesday, I am surrounded by questions about temporality and subjectivity.
      Since we are functioning as mediums, we are called to become a vessel for the presence of the ghost. However, we are not only transmitting the ghost’s ‘message’, but actually, our recollection-impregnation-imagination of its presence.
      Furthermore, we are asked to substantiate its presence in the objects, and to
      create a new collective presence through their relationality. This new life of the ghost will be solidified in a photograph.

      How do you see our function of vessels and at the same time translators of
      a fleeting presence? How do we impregnate and singularize our transmissions with ourselves while maintaining our collective function of opening up the past-future? Do we also become ghosts in the sense of loosing our regular contours?

      15) Robin > Anouk > Thiago

       

      Dear Robin,

      I remember/ imagine, the cracks, the space between the ice blocks, the sharp interruption of the film by some kind of lightning. Is the short-circuit (court-circuit) an important tool in your work and why ?

      16) Yaari > Thiago > Sana 

      Yaari, your language reminds me a lot of Manoel de Barros, one of the greatest Brazilian poets. Not only because of his interest in forests and nature, but because he used to subvert the usual logics of written language, as you do. I see in both of you the interest of finding in nature the metaphors for the exhaustion of language. To write becomes to meet nature.

      The Rock

      Being a rock
      I have the pleasure of lying on the ground.
      I only deprive lizards and butterflies.
      Certain shells take shelter in me.
      Mosses grow from my interstices.
      Birds use me to sharpen their beaks.
      Sometimes a heron occupies me all day.
      I feel praised.
      There are other privileges to being a rock:
      a—I irritate the silence of insects,
      b—I am the beat of moonlight in solitude,
      c—In the mornings I bathe in dew.
      d—And the sun compliments me first.

      my questions:

      how to practice the forest in the city ? would it be possible without writing?

       

      17) Aela > Sofia > Yaari

      Dear Aela,

      Your intergalactic waltz reminded me of this scene:  http://youtu.be/_d5X2t_s9g8 (Bela Tar, Werkmister Harmonies)
       
      In the end of the scene, the main protagonist, who runs the village and in this scene takes up the role of a sort of choreographer/director (who performs a similar role to the one you did) says something like: "but It's not over" as indicating that we are still moving according to that eternal and immortal choreography. To him, that dance is a model that represents the movements of the solar system but it also has a metaphorical function in the film: it's an element of transmutation that allows the character's bodies to connect to immortality and to the universe. In your waltz you made references to what I understand as eroticism when describing the movements between our bodies, our relationship to space and music. The dance was a way for us to connect with the cosmos and the erotic connection between us. You made us to dance alone, holding our arms in mid air as if someone was there, but all at the same time and rhythm. What is the importance of the distance you made us keep between us? 
       

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

      When I recall the image of your performance it has a strong physical impact on me. I have to think about poetic sadism or sadistic poetry……and wonder: what is a long-distance touch and what could it stimulate?

      19) Lilia > Sébastien > Esteban

       

      Dear Esteban, 

      I have two questions about love, inspired by Lilia's triple-couple-performance. You can pick the one you like best!

      1. Metaphor, George Lakof and Mark Johnson explain in Metaphors We Live By, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. Of all the metaphors for love you can find via the following link (or anywhere), very few refer to long term, complex but fruitful relationships. What would be a good metaphor to describe those kinds of relationships, and why? http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/lovemetaphors_3.htm

      2. What is the relation between love and mourning? I am not referring to the mourning process following the death of a loved one, but to the role of mourning within a love relationship. 

      Sébastien

       

       

      20) Varinia>Robin>Brendan

      Dear Varinia

      What touched me most in your performance was the way, at the end, you came towards us and made this kind of hesitant ambiguous gesture to the right and left - It felt like a mix between a potential indication of direction or a receiving of something, but it was the vulnerability of the gesture which I found interesting.. (unlike the one below which I include as a visual reference but not a very exact one, sorry)

      varinia

      So the Question is “What’s the importance of vulnerability in your research?

      Definition of vulnerability from the Red Cross:
      Vulnerability can be defined as the diminished capacity of an individual or group to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural or man-made hazard. The concept is relative and dynamic. Vulnerability is most often associated with poverty, but it can also arise when people are isolated, insecure and defenceless in the face of risk, shock or stress.
      People differ in their exposure to risk as a result of their social group, gender, ethnic or other identity, age and other factors. Vulnerability may also vary in its forms: poverty, for example, may mean that housing is unable to withstand an earthquake or a hurricane, or lack of preparedness may result in a slower response to a disaster, leading to greater loss of life or prolonged suffering.
      The reverse side of the coin is capacity, which can be described as the resources available to individuals, households and communities to cope with a threat or to resist the impact of a hazard. Such resources can be physical or material, but they can also be found in the way a community is organized or in the skills or attributes of individuals and/or organizations in the community.
      To determine people’s vulnerability, two questions need to be asked:
      • to what threat or hazard are they vulnerable?
      • what makes them vulnerable to that threat or hazard?
      Counteracting vulnerability requires:
      • reducing the impact of the hazard itself where possible (through mitigation, prediction and warning, preparedness);
      • building capacities to withstand and cope with hazards;
      • tackling the root causes of vulnerability, such as poverty, poor governance, discrimination, inequality and inadequate access to resources and livelihoods.

       


       

      REPLIES:

       

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      revitalise your personal blind spot

      1. find your blind spot
      2. when your blind spot dissappeared give him new life with a color of your choice
      3. whisper something nice to your blind spot
      4. place your blind spot somewhere in the space

      blind spot

      7) esteban > Yaahri > Aela

      I I I I.... inteeeeeeennnnnd to sp...sp...speak of fffff...forms cccchhhhh...changed intoooooo neeeeeew entities” / "myyyyy sooooooul is ffff...ff...forciiiing meeeee to sp...sp...sp...speak offff bo...o..dies that ch...ch...changed intoooo neeeeew ffff...f...fforms”

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

       

      A & B_FITNESS

       

      Hoarding
      or
      caching
      in animal behavior
      is the storage of food in locations hidden from the sight of both
      conspecifics (animals of the same or closely related species) and
      members of other species.
      Most commonly,
      the function of hoarding or caching is to store food in times of
      surplus for times when food is less plentiful.
      However,
      there is evidence that some amount of caching or hoarding is done
      in order to ripen the food, called
      ripening caching.
      The term hoarding is most typically used for rodents,
      whereas caching is more commonly used in reference to birds,
      but the behaviors in both animal groups are quite similar.
      Hoarding is done either on
      a long-term basis
      or on a short term basis,
      in which case the food will be consumed over a period of one
      or several days.
      There are two types of caching behavior:
      larder-hoarding, where a species creates a few large caches which
      it often defends,
      and scatter-hoarding, where a species will create multiple caches,
      often with
      each individual food item
      stored in a unique place.
      Both types of caching have
      their advantage.
      Most species are particularly wary of onlooking individuals during
      caching and ensure
      that the cache locations
      are secret.
      Not all caches are
      concealed however,
      for example shrikes store
      prey items on thorns on branches in the open.
      Although a small handful of species share food stores,
      food hoarding is a solo
      endeavor for most species, including almost all rodents
      and birds.
      They hoard their food supply selfishly, caching and retrieving the
      supply in secret.

       

      (from the definition of "Hoarding (animal behavior)", Wikipedia)

       

       13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

       

      IMG_0221

      I am using a score from Anna Halprin, an American dance artist   to describe this image to answer Juan’s question. The score is: I see,I feel, I imagine. I like the use of I, the subjective point of view and that the verbs, to see, to feel and to imagine are touching three layers of awareness: the body layer, the emotional layer and the mental layer that is imagination.

       

      I see a sculpture made of terra cotta. I see a head, a terra cotta head, a bold head. I see the head of a baby. I see only one ear, a broken ear. I imagine that the ear lobe was very long before it broke. I imagine that it can break. I see that it is fragile. I imagine it is fragile. I see some shadows. I see holes. I see that the holes have different shapes. I see a big open hole; two small ones next to each other and two other almonds shape ones that are not placed symmetrically. I see a mouth, two nostrils, two orbits. I see there is no eye in the orbits. I see that the holes are not deep. I see another mouth in the mouse and one other orbit in the right orbit. I see a mask covering a face. I imagine someone else face behind the mask. I feel intrigued. I feel that I want to see that face behind. I feel that I want to uncover that face. I feel that I will find another layer behind this layer and another one and another, an infinity of layers. I imagine layers and layers and layers of faces on top of each other. I imagine myself falling into the hole, falling through the mouth. I imagine myself shouting while I fall. I imagine diving into layers of generation. I see that the mouth of that face that I imagine behind the mask is slightly open. I see the teeth of this person. I imagine it is a man. I imagine he is cruel. I imagine he is older. I imagine he is tense. I imagine that he want to appear younger by wearing this mask. I imagine plastic surgery. I see an expression that has been frozen. I imagine death. I imagine that the mask is shouting. I imagine he is shouting because he is in pain. I imagine it is the moment of his death. I imagine it is the moment of its birth. I imagine a rebirth. I imagine his first shout. I imagine the sound of it. I feel mesmerized and terrified. I feel goose bump on my skin. I feel tension in my guts. I imagine this child is my child. I remember his two eyes looking at me from below in the water.

      I see the irregularity of the terra cotta. I imagine myself making this mask with my hand. I imagine myself touching the surface. I feel touched by this material. I feel inclined to touch it. I imagine myself making this mask. I imagine the sound of the humid clay while I mold it. I imagine the dance of my hand adapting to the material. I imagine that the clay is molding me. I imagine wearing the mask. I imagine I would be someone else then. I imagine the mask as some power. I imagine that if I wear this mask, I will make a trip back in time. I imagine I will revisit ancient memories. I imagine myself diving into the abyss of my memories. I imagine reliving my ancestors, my previous incarnation. I feel scares of becoming the cruel man if I wear it. I feel the sensation of the mask on my face. I feel it is cold. I feel that it does not fit. I imagine myself moving the sculpture to see it from another angle. I see the point of view of the photographer that took the picture. I see blue grey background. I imagine that the camera is Iike a mask. I imagine it is another layer in front of the face of the photographer. I imagine the photography as a mask, as a layer that covers something else. I imagine the photography of the photography of the photography. I imagine a “ mise en abyme”. I feel myself looking for what is behind. I feel myself wandering if there is anything behind. I feel myself wandering if there is anything at all.

       

      20) Varinia>Robin>Brendan

       

      So what I would say is that, in a way, there is nothing to see,

      nothing really, there’s nothing to really see, if you are looking at it, as you do.

       

      L'Origine Du Monde

       

       

      “Look there’s nothing to see. Look what you see is so real.

      Look, if you don’t look you’ll make your own expectations,

      you’ll make your own desire.”

       

      “It is as if I opened my shirt, my shirt at the door of my bedroom, saying leave me alone,”

       

      (silence accompanied by time)

      (taking position in the recline)

       

      “You bastard looking at me crying. I won’t give you a tear.”

      “I won’t give you a single tear.”

       

      “you watch the painting”

      “and I don’t believe you, you mock- this illusion”.

      Illusion.

       

      “There is nothing to see, pass your way,”

       

      “ l’indécence du regard, est de plus en plus morne.

      Tout cela, à beaucoup entre vous donne les cornes”

       

      The indecent look becomes increasingly more and more bleak.

      All this gives you a lot between the horns-

      “and you will never say hi to puberty the same way again.”

       

       

      “L’ indecence a voir avec la mort des larmes”

      Indecency even with the death of tears.

       

      (sounding and speaking more gentle)

      “And I tried, I tried, I tried-

      to say that things can be hidden. Not for the good but for the highest level.

      I know that I didn’t do so many things at the end. But I still think I did too much.

      I have the time to think, I have the time to discover, I have the time to touch, I have the time to untouch, I have the time to detach, I have the time to”-

       

      “where as polite or not-

      and grey in the silk ground

      of flower bond

      b-o-n-d.

       

      for thinkers shouldn’t be so much. (so many)

      they are confusing the whole(hole)-

      structure."

       

       

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

       

      what is a long-distance touch and what could it stimulate?

      Light-Touch

      “It is possible that we are rare, fleeting specks of awareness in an unfeeling cosmic desert, the only witnesses to its wonder.

      It is also possible that we are living in a universal sea of sentience, surrounded by ecstasy and strife that is open to our influence.

      Timo Hannay, publisher

      the term light sometimes refers to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, whether visible or not.[4][5] In this sense, gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves and radio waves are also light.

      Like all types of light, visible light is emitted and absorbed in tiny "packets" called photons and exhibits properties of both waves and particles. This property is referred to as the wave–particle duality.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

      We are dead stars looking back up at the sky, the Iron in our blood and all the elements that make up our bodies were created in a Supernova explosion.

      As Humans we tend to think of the stars as eternal, but the stars will all burn out someday, there's only a certain amount of stellar fuel- Hydrogen, and the Stars are burning through it, and the stars, as we know them will all eventually die out, (in some trillions of years), and the universe will be dark for the rest of time.

      We're actually living in a potential Eden right now, in a time when this 10 billion year live thing 'the sun' is pouring down free energy, we are using it , we are evolving, we are becoming sentient beings who are able to look back out at the universe from where they came.

      Starlight will only be there for the shortest span of the universe's history and then everything else will be dark, someday I wonder if people will have myths about the days when stars rained down free energy and sunlight on the planet."

      Nasa Astronomer Dr. Michelle Thaller.

      http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=40047#.Vq-PNUtnGDU

      Hang on this connection is breaking up
      You are only coming through in waves
      Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying

      When I was a child
      I caught a fleeting glimpse
      Out of the corner of my eye
      I turned to look, but it was gone
      I cannot put my finger on it now

      David Bowie/comfortably numb

      physicists brought light to a "complete standstill" by passing it through a Bose–Einstein condensate of the element rubidium.

      The popular description of light being "stopped" in experiments refers only to light being stored in the excited states of atoms. During the time it had "stopped" it had ceased to be light.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

      Touch: embrace, lick, palpation, stroke, feel,

      Touch:pat, fondle, hit, tactility, touching,

      Touch: petting, push, caress, taste, kiss, rub, taction,

      Touch: stroking, scratching, hug, blow, grope, feel , peck

      Touch: to put the hand, finger, etc., on or into contact with (something) to feel it:

      nce.com/browse/touch

      Touch: one of the five senses along with taste, smell, hearing and seeing, is defined as the act you do when you hold, caress, feel or otherwise encounter something with your hand.

      Touch: to lay the hand on (a person with scrofula), as some kings once did, to effect a cure

      Touch: to arouse an emotion in, esp. one of sympathy, gratitude, etc

      http://www.yourdictionary.com/touch#JSV8WyareZKbTFwD.99

      Touch/ Somatosensory System: Pain receptors: nocireceptor. "Noci-" in Latin means "injurious" or "hurt”. these receptors detect pain or stimuli that can or does cause damage to the skin and other tissues of the body, tissues of the body.

      Touch: There are over three million pain receptors throughout the body, found in skin, muscles, bones, blood vessels, and some organs.

      Touch: Pain receptors can detect pain that is caused by mechanical stimuli, like cutting into the surface of the skin with a knife, thermal stimuli, like burning the layers of your body with a blow torch, chemical stimuli - like swallowing a poison and emotional stimuli, like having your heart pierced by another.

      RobinAmanda 

      Touch: When you were born, oxytocin helped expel you from your mother’s womb and made it possible for her to nurse you..As a small child, you enjoyed your mother’s and father’s loving touch because it released oxytocin in your body

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mind-body-connection/201309/why-we-all-need-touch-and-be-touched

      Touch: sensory neurons are triggered by specific stimulus such as pain, for instance. This signal then passes to the part of the brain attributed to that area on the body—this allows the stimulus to be felt at the correct location.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system

       

      Sound bed for text: Soy el punto negro que anda.m4a.download


       

       

       

      KEYWORDS: goo, internal communication, sensible mass, timing, two, materiality, skin, Imagination, flux, fusion, bite, 

       

       

      REPORT: It's exiting, we are getting somewhere different from where we had started. Starting next Wednesday we will be cooking for each other. We are asking questions to each other that we would never be asking otherwise, pulling potentialities out of each others proposals. We are stepping out of what we knew, of what we felt was our own interest. Isn't it exiting when suddenly we find ourselves liking things we would never have expected to like before? Isn't it surprising to be all of the sudden disliking things you would've thought you already loved? Yes, I feel it changing, it's coming, we're are stepping into something beautifully complex! Oh, it's exiting, we are stepping into strange fields! Oh, so exiting, these dangerous fields that soon we might call common ground!

       

       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #4 11 January 2016
      posted by: Agnes Schneidewind
    • 03 February 2016
    • 03 February 2016
    • dark bubbles

       

      PARTICIPANTS

      Isabel, Agnes, Esteban, Christian, Lili, Anouk, Robin, Lilia, Arianna, Aela, Brendan, Juan, Luiza, Sana, Tinna

       

       P> Q >R

       

      1) Isabel > Aela > Juan

      2) Esteban > Sana >Tinna

      3) Arianna > Christtian > Esteban

      4) Sana > Luiza > Lilia

      5) Luiza > Anouk > Sana

      6) Christian > Brendan > Christian

      7) Anouk > Lili > Luiza

      8) Brendan > Juan > Agnes

      9) Lili > Isabel > Aela

      10) Agnes > Esteban > Arianna

      11) Juan > Tinna > Lili

      12) Aela > Lilia > Isabel

      13) Tinna > Robin > Brendan

      14) Robin > Agnes >Anouk

      15) Lilia > Arianna > Robin

       

      QUESTIONS:

       

      1) Isabel > Aela > Juan

      Isabel, in your performance, you set up a space with a candle and a pendulum while reading a text that sound very precise in a scientific way. I then wonder how do you relate science and mystic in your work...

      Here an extract of one of my former text : ‘ d’une étrange manière il me semble que la science - dans l’impossible dépassement de ses limites - finisse par regarder en. / ' in a strange way, science – ceaseless facing its inability to reach boundaries – ends up looking toward '

      This sentence is for me the metaphor of the endless research of knowledge, the endless will to know... And at some point when this anxious infinity reveals itself to the researcher, the only peaceful answer he/she can draw, takes the aesthetic of the mystic.

      Here is my question: in regard of emotional truth, is there, at the end, any difference between scientific and mystical knowledge ?

       

       2) Esteban > Sana >Tinna

      dear Esteban

      What you created as a stage for love, loss and time, is infinity.

      A circulation with no beginning and no end, a loop, an endless abyss, a lifetime process of gaining and losing, birth and death.

      You insert colors to this infinity, yellow, blue, green, purple....

      Also the words are there and the silence, the hesitation and certainty, the memory and desire,

      What covers the distances?

       3) Arianna > Christtian > Esteban

      Dear Arianna,
      part of the question you were answering was:
      “Who do you become by imitating animals and what effect does it have on society?”

      Your slide show told a story about gathering food, catching behaviour and solo endeavours of rodents and birds. These creatures are so small that they can live inside a regular human meal.
      Considering taste, texture and durability; what kind of meal would you like to live in?

      Cake House

       

      4) Sana > Luiza > Lilia

      Dear Sana,

      Your works always take me somewhere else, I always feel in an ancient something, even when you use the latest geo technology, there is something about the way you propose things, your connection to your language, memory, that triggers me into a nostalgic sadness, not really sadness, but I always fell kind of blue afterwards. During your performance I kept remembering myself of the places in Rio which have nature related names, and a few of them the same names you read us, and thought it funny that if I was to tell you about them, of course we would meet each other in the English language. And so, different streets, in very different places, meet each other within language.

      I’m not sure what I want to ask, if it is “what do you think is the story behind displacement”? Or, if it is “are we always wanting to be in two places at the same time"? But I guess that maybe these two questions can meet somewhere, so I'll let Lilia take us forward here :)

      x

      Luiza

       5) Luiza > Anouk > Sana

      Dear Luiza ,  when I saw your proposal, I immediately thought of an old french movie 'Le passe muraille'  from Marcel Aymé. My question is an extract of this movie. It's in french. I like that you don't speak the langage and can only get information from the images, body langage, expression and sounds . Enjoy, Anouk

      [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sir3rG5AW5Q[/embed]

       

      6) Christian > Brendan > Christian

       

      Kronborg_Braun-Hogenberg

       

      It worked. Q and Captain Picard's answer to Hamlet. During the bubble feast, i asked you a bit about the ShakesTrek text that you presented and read. And you let me know that your father lives very near the castle wear Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's play was said to have lived and the great tragedy takes place. In fact you can see Kronborg Castle from your father's window, placed strategically on the extreme northeastern tip, at the narrowest sound between Denmark and Sweden. I can picture it easily, simultaneously sinking and rising in the mist and taking its forms in the changing sun and moon lights. 

       

      P992_320706

       
      The castle has been immortalized by fiction.
       
      Christoffer_Wilhelm_Eckersberg_-_View_north_of_Kronborg_Castle_-_Google_Art_Project
       
      I wonder if when you look out your father's window if you are even interested in this castle? Or if you find elements of this view, this landscape, that are richer and more interesting, and maybe hidden by its presence? 
       
       
      With your interest in landscape and sound.  I wonder what this place could sound like, given your tools for video and music. Perhaps a score. 
      I return to the geographical description of this setting for the specificity of my question: it exists "at the narrowest sound between Denmark and Sweden". What is this narrowest of sounds, that makes up the common ground between your Father, Hamlet, Sweden, Denmark, marked and protected by the castle.

       

      7) Anouk > Lili > Luiza

      Inspired by the following few lines from Nigel Thrift´s writing on affect and thinking of the filling aspect of your score - filling that head and mask with your projections through observations, perceptions, imagination:
       
      „Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions
      fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and
      closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression
      of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped.
      Something remains unactualised, inseparable from but unassimilable to
      any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is
      more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside
      of oneself, at the very point at which one is most intimately and unshareably
      in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. . . . Actually existing, structured
      things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the
      autonomy of affect.
      The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that
      are its capture."
       
      this is my question: 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?
       
       

      8) Brendan > Juan > Agnes

       

      The question develops as a code - contribution to Brendan’s Image by adding more images and words…

      A.Etant Donné by Marcel Duchamp

      etant-donnes-inside1

      B. A random image that Google gives when you type “Histoire de l'œil” by Georges Bataille

      story-of-the-eye

       

      1. The word Acéphale

      Departing from a fragment of the text presented by Brendan…

      “Where as polite or not

      and grey in the silk ground of flower bond

      b-o-n-d.

      for thinkers shouldn’t be so much.

      (so many) they are confusing the whole(hole)- structure”.

      I would like to ask you also with an iconic Image

      What dust means in your practice?

      imgres

      Dust Breeding, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920

       

      9) Lili > Isabel > Aela

      Dear Lili:

      Itchy sensations arouse in my theets. My tung was reading invisible stuffed letters. Yet, my voice was fenced, replaced by visceral sounds, feeling congested. How much are congestion and viscerality intertwinged in your practices?

       

      10) Agnes>Esteban>Arianna

       

      Dear Agnes,

      After your text/performance, I have a somewhat enigmatic quote and an image as questions:

      "You never look at me from the place from which I see you" J, Lacan

       anglig_10313766667

      11) Juan > Tinna > Lili

      Dear Juan. In your video you showed us  a dung beetle rolling its dung, without ever seeing a result in its work, or seeing the end to the story of that beetle with its task.   It was fascinating and hypnotizing to watch this machine at work without getting the satisfaction of seeing it succeed. To study its techniques and persistence when it was basically a status quo operation.   
      It reminded me of the fascination of kids ( and some grown ups) watching machines and people at work, at e.g. building sites, or trashmen collecting garbage etc.  Why is that a common universal fascination - is it trying to understand a procedure, or to admire individual craftmanship ?

      Question -  Why do you keep on watching ? 

      12) Aela > Lilia > Isabel

       

      Aela, on your answer to Yaari last week you stumbled up on the words: "my soul (/psyche) is forcing me to speak of bodies that changed into new forms".
      It made me think about speech capacity as an autonomous entity. With not much knowledge about speech I remembered a book by Judith Buttler titled “Excitable speech, a politics of the performative” and stumbled myself on a notion of Austin that distinguishes “illocutionary” from “perlocutionary” speech acts. I think what you did was an illocutionary speech act. You were doing what you were saying. Changing your body and the language simultaneously while seemingly acting under a force or drive that governed you, trying to embody speech. The impossible task of coherence and union. I’m thinking of embodiment as the condition of the performative and performative being exactly what escapes. I’m interested to know Isabel what do you think about this and if this is a concern you have in your practice.

       

      13) Tinna > Robin > Brendan

      Tinna, It seemed to me that you embodied the narration of a medium who was acting as a channel between the dead and their relatives and friends in a seance-type situation. What interested me most about the text was the position of 1st person that you took, first as the medium describing how the person died , then becoming the dead person and speaking their words. By embodying their voices it seemed to me that they and you shared multiple realities- The reality of the context created by the medium, the reality of the voice that was being embodied, and the reality of your narration of these voices. It seems that the boundaries of our bodies are permeable and we can be possessed by a voice or voices. But this leads me to question the solidity of everything and what is the territory of a person or thing and their boundaries and is there a common space where all these things are stored. This all reminded me of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance and the idea of a common pool of memories and knowledge. This theory sees the body and the mind not as centres (which can be possessed) but more as decoders, descrambler, receivers of information, information which is held in a common pool/cloud/sphere.

      So my question here is: What is the importance of the role of the voice in your performance?

       

      14) Robin > Agnes >Anouk

      Dear Robin, I remember the word touch, repeating and commanding a horde of distorted words to pass through the world wide web in order to do what they are talking about: not to be understood but to touch. A long-distance touch that actually not only stretched the spatial distance. Echo and technology also caused a delay, a time displacement that doubled our five minutes effectively, very impressive! What do you think could be the potential of  distortion in relation to time?

       

      15) Lilia > Arianna > Robin

       

      The way Focault describes the dynamics of the relationships of power in the excerpts quoted by Lilia made me think about weather forecast.

       

      Immagine incorporata 1    

       

      "These relations of power are then changeable, reversible and unstable.", says F.

      To me, this means that they are a matter of time - as much as the relationships of care and taking care are.

      (taking) care  \approx  (taking) time  \approx  power relations

      Time is the variable that allows us to think about power and care as entire complex multidimensional and changeable systems of forces.
      They are processes. How do they transform? How to capture, even if momentarily, their movements and changes?
      I am thinking about the weather forecast as a model to analyse them.
      What scheme/function to use in order to process them?
      How to register/record their patterns?

       

       

       


       

       

      KEYWORDS: voice, resilience, "this is strange", flower-bond, death, out of reach, seeking the limits, animal, provocation, childhood

       

      REPORT

       

    • [call] 2016/I 09 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      newscaption
       
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

      Please find information on the application procedure here.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Who's Afraid of the Subject? 07 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Elke Van Campenhout
    • a.pass
    • 18 January 2016
    • 22 January 2016
    • case of: Elke van Campenhout
    • Who's Afraid of the Subject?

      In this theoretical and discussion workshop, we reconsider the notion of the subject today:

      why, after all the turn-arounds of becomings, vibrant objects and a decentralisation of the human perspective, do we need to reconsider the subject as an important player in our discourses and practice?

      well, to start with, because there is no personal agency or ethics without it. and also because there is a need for a consciousness of what it is that subjects us, what it is that turns us into speaking, experiencing and affecting human beings. but even more so, when and why these powers are denied to us, and why? if we consider the subject as being constructed by what it is subjected to, it is important to see 'reality' for what it is. in the sense of: what it is doing to us. if we consider, on the other hand, the subject as the basis position out of which an action-on-the world, or with-the-world, takes off, it is the basic premisse to be able to (re)think the public as a place of togetherness, the construction of a 'we', and the starting point for our commonal ethics.

      we talk our way through these thoughts, focussing more specifically on the artist subject, and diving into foucault's 'care of the self', developing through the week into the theories of agamben and judith butler.

    • Newsletter November 2017 12 October 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout

      newscaption

      line650

       

      INVITATION

      The Artist-Commoner.
      (Self) Education
      of New Subjectivities

      Two days of presentations, performances,
      exchanges and commoning practices.

      November 25 (10am-2am) & November 26 (4pm-2am)

      line650

      Commong sa na pas de valure_apass_Colour

      A public meeting organised by a.pass.

      With: Bojana Cvejić, Rudi Laermans, Juan Dominguez, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting, Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver, Nicolas Galeazzi, Steven Jouwersma, Pierre Rubio, Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Kristien Van den Brande, Cecilia Molano, Guy Gypens, SPIN, Philippine Hoegen, Miriam Hempel, and a.pass-researchers.




      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.

      Read more -https:///www.apass.be/common-conference/

      With every day from 18h on a real sauna on the terrace. bring your slippers. 

      25 November (10am - 2am) 26 November (4pm - 2am) @  Kaaistudio

      Free admission.

       
       

      Between what is no longer

      and what is not yet

      Performance by Juan Dominguez @ Kaaistudio

      November 26, 20:30

      Performance in the context of a.pass’ public meeting The Artist Commoner.
      (Self) Education of New Subjectivities

      retrato johnny

      Dominguez wants to suspend events and create an interval of time in which he can try to integrate his past into his future. He will translate his visions and his desire to encounter the unknown through language. Dominguez is working alone for the first time in 14 years. Back then, he choreographed his work with labeled cards. Now, he’ll speak himself and give rise to a self-portrait that cites himself and some of his friends.

      Concept and Performance: Juan Dominguez

      Production Management: manyone

      A production by Juan Dominguez. Supported by Tanznacht Berlin and Tanzfabrik Berlin/ apap-advancing performing arts project – Performing Europe 2020 / EU – Creative Europe Programme

      Photo: Cuqui Jerez

      Duration: +- 2 hours. 

      Limited capacity! 8/10/12€. Tickets via Kaaitheater:

      https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/between-what-is-no-longer-and-what-is-not-yet

       

       

      New Call for applications 
      for artistic research projects post-master and phd level

       

      mess_and_research

      if you are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice,

      then a.pass might have a place for you.  Read more --> OPEN CALL INFO

       

      DEADLINE: 09/01/2017
      TO START IN MAY 2017
      SELECTION TALKS : 23&24/01/2017
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)

      line650

      a.pass’ curatorial team:

      new constellation

      From January 2017 onward!

      In 2007 Elke Van Campenhout started a.pass; almost 10 years later the time has come to pass on what she called her ‘tender institute’ to a new constellation of people. New or not so new. Mentor Kristien Van den Brande and programme coordinator Nicolas Galeazzi are asked to join the curatorial team of a.pass, which currently consists of Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio and Vladimir Miller. From 2017 on Lilia and Kristien will share the artistic coordination previously done by Elke and Nicolas. The extended curatorial team stays responsible for the post-master programme, and is preparing for a more intensive collaboration with the a.pass research centre.

      Read more in who is who https:///www.apass.be/who-is-a-pass/

      line650

       a.pass

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       
    • research center
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • OR SHALL WE USE THE STAIRS? 09 September 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Adva Zakai / Raphaële Jeune
    • 18 September 2015
    • 20 September 2015
    • OR SHALL WE USE THE STAIRS?

      Brussels-based choreographer Adva Zakai and French curator Raphaële Jeune propose 3 days of lectures and exercises to collectively explore different aspects of the relationship between humans and machines. Together with special guests and anyone interested, we aim to share thoughts on the digitalization of our world, through introduction into concepts that developed in response to it: The challenging dialogue with algorithms, the splendor and misery of Transhumanism, recent developments in Donna Haraway’s thinking (author of 1985’s Cyborg Manifesto) and the theory of Accelerationism.

       

      This working session is intended for people who consider a reflection about the relation between body and technology inspiring for their own investigations. We wish to explore links between ideas and concepts through perspectives of various (artistic) researches, rather than to look for merely ready-made knowledge.

       

      Sessions will be guided by: An Mertens, Aline Wiame, Lendl Barcelos, Raphaele Jeune and Adva Zakai.

       

      Inscription:

      In order to develop a collective process, we prefer that participation will include all three days. If not possible to be fully present, you are welcome to join partly. Please send an email to Adva (advazakai@gmail.com) before Sep 15th, to inscribe and mention dates of participation. Max 15 participants, first inscribed first served!

       

       

       

      Schedule

      Friday, 18th September

       10h - 10h45               

      Introduction by Raphaele and Adva

      11h - 17h                    

      A session with An Mertens about algorithms, including a lecture, meditation and (possibly) exercises.

      18h - 21h                    

      Technocalyps - a documentary film about Transhumanism by Frank Theys (2006)

       

      Saturday, 19th September

       12h - 14h                    

      A critical discussion about Transhumanism, guided by Raphaele and Adva

      15h - 18h                    

      A talk by Aline Wiame about developments in Donna Harraway's thinking from the Cyborg manifesto till today.

       

      Sunday, 20th September

      12h - 15h                    

      A talk by Lendl Barcelos including an introduction into CCRU  (Cyber Culture Research Unit), Accelerationism & left/right  inclinations within the exploration of technologically alienated perception  

      15h30 - 17h30           

      A discussion and work session, looking for further ways to explore the themes addressed during the three days, through artistic practices (projecting towards possible future work sessions)

       

       

    • #1
      16th June 2015

      Hello Esteban
      Hello
      I would like to ask some questions to you, because of the last conversation that we had drinking a beer in… what is this bar called?
      Fontainas
      Yes, after this conversation I have been working on some questions about the subject of your research, and I would like to ask them to you and see what you do with them
      Aha Do you want to say something or do you want me to go straight away with the interview?
      No, Im also interested in what I can be able to say around this questions
      I hope they will not take you by surprise, or that they are not too conflictive, or too new, or anything like this, ok?
      No… don’t worry about it
      If you cannot reply just make a sign and I go to the next ok?
      Ok
      My first question would be: what is the relationship between the authentic movement practice, which is in fact an appropriation that you do of this practice with your research interest
      It is a very good question, the first thing I would say is
      Can you speak a little bit louder?
      Yes…the first thing I would say is, I don't know…yet
      I think it came about because I was interested in researching within a logic that was closer to the body
      Closer to the body…
      A logic coming from the body, because I wanted not to start from a logic that comes from language and since I had in mind the idea of interviewing, I said to myself perhaps I can ask questions to the body. But this implies that the body is beyond language and that i can go like this (does the gesture of peeling off or opening a curtain) and there is the body. So now it is different, I think it is more about the interaction of many layers of bodyliness and many layers of language that I feel interact in this particular practice. So now I might step into a different question….
      Yes, its interesting this idea of layers of body and language, how did it appear or come into your mind?
      The practice of authentic movement came about in a couple of ways, one is: I started with Jennifer Monson when I lived in the U.S. and she is actually connected to Jennifer Lacey and DD Dorvillier, they worked together in New York
      Ah ok
      This is how it started, and then when I went to Impulstanz in 2007, it was a lot of what we were doing in a workshop there. Later on I started experimenting with this tool because I was interested in how much you can gather in terms of information about yourself, about the body and about the world, through this practice.
      With time this became a “safe place” for me, a place where I could go if I needed to be with myself. Now, it might be good to wonder: safe from what? (long pause) I think it made me safe from dance training (?)
      And i think it kept me safe from dance training, because it was a way for me to take a distance from “actual training” and wonder about my own particular way of understanding….
      But is it because you don’t feel authentic movement is a way of dance training?
      Yes, or maybe at the moment it felt like it was not entirely a dance training, perhaps because it comes form a dance-movement therapy context. Although the way I came about it was through dance and choreography practitioners, now I can see that it actually is a way of dance training. I think maybe I did this separation at the moment - a separation between dance training and authentic movement - because it became a way of assimilating technical aspects, morphological qualities about my body, or about how I relate to people….and so it really is a place that I created in order to articulate and ponder about my own dancing body.
      And …..your interest or intuition about developing this practice? or do you have a goal in mind?
      I do… its more like an intuition, really, at this point
      Yes, because you have talked about the origin of it, but do you have a goal?
      Actually I think in order to have a goal I need to go over the questions in this interview first….
      Ok, but then at least can you present this practice to me? are you going to present it? what are you going to do with it?
      I think I actually need to talk about the idea of neutral, because it seems that I some point I came to see it that way. I wonder in which way I came to understand it as ‘neutral’, and whatever I mean by that…
      Because now that we’ve been talking about this many layers of body and language, how would you then define what is neutral? is it possible to find something without layers?
      Exactly, no
      Authentic Movement is an actual technique and it comes from a Jungian school of Movement Therapy and it aims - among other things - to find connections between body and mind.
      I am going to step out of my interviewing role for a moment, since we have been discussing about these topics for several occasions. Don’t you think that the questions that you have about your project have been imposed already? Is the idea of a colonized body that is trying to break free from boundaries not an already colonized idea?
      Maybe I will say it in spanish, que si no consideras que muchas de las preguntas que tienes no son ya una propia herencia, por lo tanto una especie de colonización, una imposición, están impuestas de alguna forma?
      I think I know what you mean… but I would like you to elaborate more
      Ok, we can have a beer later and discuss about this, but i Would like continue with the interview
      Do you think you can apply it to every context?
      No I don't, I think it always depends, but I think Im insisting in this idea of neutral because I would like to trace my train of thought in respect to this. I think I got to understand it as neutral because it gave me a place that was out of the constraints of ‘having to do something’ and started to finally wonder how it is that I was approaching any doing.
      How do you think it was helping you?
      It mostly has to do with creating my own body, when I went back to Ecuador I continued to work on this practice and developed it further. At that moment it was a tool for reconstructing and re-membering things together (as a group of dancers). Also I had the chance to do it as a Movement Therapy, which in conjunction with my own going to psychoanalysis. I think it enabled me to find more freedom in my own representation of my body. I was working in my own layers of bodyliness and the materiality of it, and the possibility to talk about it, this became my own creative project, or my own bricolage. This process was very informative abut my own way of thinking and experiencing.
      What limitations do you see in this practice
      I think my questions about coloniality and geography are very specific, and the tool could turn out to be vague in relation to them. This would be the limitation.
      In the case that this practice was not there, what do you envision could be another practice that addresses what we have been talking about?
      I may need to get closer to language and use a tool like anamnesis, or use a regular interviewing device.
      wow, but you are using language!
      yes, but it is a different kind of language, I think I am talking about a more chronological account of events.
      but what I am interested in is the constitution or configuration of a body, that happens around the trajectory of doings that each body has. So I am more interested in trajectories and perhaps this tool is dealing more specifically with the present moment: in this space, in this environment, with these sensations.
      Ok, we can go on while having a beer later, Thank you
      Thank you

      #2
      15th July 2015

      Can you describe your practices?
      Yes, I have two practices going on at the moment, one I have called dissolving the other. It is a series of relays, a person does something for an amount of time with eyes closed, the next person is going to re-do what the first person did. I suppose there is an idea of continuation, along with the idea of re-doing, that may be involuntary and also an idea of reviewing, which happens at the same time as re-doing.
      For the next time I do it I have a lot of questions, the first one is if there should be a more specific score, because right now what they do is open. Although the open score is also nice because each person can do whatever they need and listen to their own body
      Why do you think it would be good to have a more precise score?
      Because it seems very open and a lot depends on the first person who is doing it. The whole set of re-doings is very connected to what the first person does. This is good because it starts as something very close to the person’s body and experience and listening to that moment, but I am wondering if I set it up as a question (and of course then i have the issue of how to come up with the question, and where the question comes from) So maybe we start with a question (that could be more or less arbitrary for the group) and it is not that they have to think about the question consciously, but we will see if with the many doings something of the question gets answered.
      I also want to do it for an extended period of time, it could be 2 hours a day each day.
      What kind of experience do you want to give to the participants in this current format?
      This is a very good question because it is related to what I want to get from the practice. mentoring with Pierre, at some point he said that I seems what I want is the other people to experience what I have experienced. In relation to many layers of bodyliness and many layers of language, but i think it does have to do with my own experience of reviewing these layers and seeing how they have come about and maybe opening up spaces in them or re- ordering them. I want the participants to have an experience of their “many layers” of their own bodyliness and also of how they give an account of them.
      Where do you envision it happening in the future? What kind of space?
      In the immediate future, I would like to do it outside
      In which kind of space?
      In a garden, there is something ecological about this project - although not in the sense of a search of the ‘natural’-, but about looking at a person’s mental ecology, or bodily ecology, and I think it will be interesting to see how this happens in a more ‘natural setting’, a setting that has a different arrangement than inside a building.
      Otherwise Im thinking it could happen inside a ‘set’ in which there are many types of objects (I still need to work on this). I could have cushions, something that feels comfortable, but I would like a plant to be in there, and a piece of furniture.
      So you are thinking not only about the person’s intention but about the relationship to the environment?
      Yes, something may appear in the relationship to the objects that may be worthwhile to explore, for example, in Half Way Days, in one of the groups, it became very much about the body, but in another group, it became very much about the objects in the room.
      The cushions you had
      Yes
      So it would be interesting to set it up in a way that i can be about the environment, can also become very internal, I like this space for the person to choose.
      The other practice that I would like to describe is Weaving Talking
      The Weaving Talking Singing (laughs)
      Its an ‘invented’ tradition, of course many cultures have weaving as a very important part of their tradition; particularly in the Andes it is an important element for memory, religious practices, agriculture…
      And for identity
      Yes, even the gender is codified in the weaving of the clothing, for example. Also, what they wear has has a practicality for planting and harvesting.
      In Spain they have this practice for weaving with “boleros”, to weave lace.
      So it appears in many contexts, but since I haven’t had a direct relationship with any of these traditions, I am sort of making it up. I am looking at youtube tutorials and doing this teenager bracelet kind of weaving and using a loom that is designed for children.
      Because it is not goal oriented, we are wondering about the act of weaving, more than actually weaving something like a tapestry or a sweater.
      More than the result, the process?
      Yes
      I am also interested in the conversation that happens while weaving, there is kind of concentration that provokes language to appear in a different way. There are a lot of possibilities here also, its could be a conversation, or it could be an interview. It could be a way of talking about things that are hard to talk about.
      But you don’t know if it is?
      If it was therapy I would have to be sustained for a long period of time, They would have to come regularly and weave. I think it would allow for many elaborations with objects and materials.
      Both of the practices are at this initial state.
      Apparently I am interested in language
      Apparently? (laughs)
      Yes, I should look carefully into the ways that I set the scores, the way I give the tasks, etc etc.
      And for the weaving do you think a change in the space could also be interesting?
      Yes! If I do it in the street it could be an interesting social/relational practice, like in the middle of a square and people can come weave and talk. Its a relational object.
      What kind of experience do you want to give to the participants in the Weaving Talking?
      There is a collective doing that i would like them to get engaged in. There is also a transformative element since their words are going into the weaving, and here there are many possibilities. There is instead of a crystallisation of words, a woolization of words.
      Since it doesn’t require too much skills, someone who has more of an expertise can do it as much as someone who has never done it.
      Do you always see it as a collective practice?
      Yes I see around 3 people doing it at the time
      Ok
      Ok

      #3
      21st July 2015

      What place do you give to the idea of race in your own experience?
      This is complicated, because it has been a very important element in my own construction as a person, and there is an element of racism and discrimination that has been ever present in my own history growing up in Ecuador and living there.
      In my family, my grandmother on my father’s side was an indigenous person, she was an worker in a Hacienda and my grandfather was the owner of the hacienda. There is a great deal of this story that I don’t know, even though I have been reconstructing it for a long time; but I do have my grandfather’s last name, my father got it through a legal procedure that used to be done at the time.
      To go back to the idea of race, one of the things that I don’t know about my grandmother is if she spoke quichua (the native language) besides speaking spanish, that would be important for me to know. The way the issue of race has worked is that there is a clear hierarchy between indigenous people and white-looking people in which traditionally the indigenous people are the servants, as in the case of the Hacienda where my grandmother worked.
      My father was moved to a different city when he was a little kid
      WIth his mother?
      No, by himself, to go to school. My grandmother stayed working in the Hacienda, for free, because the new owners sent him to school, although my father would have been the heir of the Hacienda, being the only son of the owner. And of course if that would have been the case, it would have been even more terrible, to be a manager in this unjust system, you know? there would have been too much karma to that
      (laughs)
      Afterwards, when my father married my mother and they had their own house, we also had maids, which were of course indigenous people who came from the countryside to the city and worked in households.
      So your father went away to study and met your mother there?
      No, he studied until high school, went back to the Hacienda and left to the city with my grandmother. He met my mother in the city.
      My mother’s family was from the city, but this was in the 50s - 60s and the city didn't really become modernized until the 70s with the Oil Boom. She said that when she was a kid it was usual for people to have guinea pigs in the kitchen, running around, just like in the countryside, because they kept the kitchen warm. Its crazy to have had this mix of modern city and indigenous tradition at the same time.
      So it was a heating system?
      Yes
      (laughs)
      But its interesting how the ideas of class and of race come together in Ecuador. My great grandfather on my mother’s side was the son of a Minister, and he never had to work, since he had a status, although he kept loosing his fortune and selling estate to maintain his status and still not work, ever. My great grandmother had to work sewing to feed the fifteen children they had. There is a very patriarchal sexist hierarchy in which the hard work goes to the female indigenous person, although also for the indigenous males jobs like construction were left.
      So your father and your mother got married and….
      Yes they got married they lived in the city, they had seven kids, which is quite a lot and this is why they always needed help, and there were a lot of people who came form the countryside and needed a job
      So you always had an indigenous nana
      Yes, and even now she is still around, she works for one of my older brothers, though she is about to retire. Now they have a retirement fund and social security, but it is a rather new thing in the system. Before, the working relationships were ambiguous and there was the idea that hiring them was ‘doing them a favour’.
      When I was growing up, relatives of the house keepers would come to work in the house for periods of time as a way of taking them ‘out’ of the extreme poverty they lived in. One time a young boy (who had exactly my age) came and stayed for a few weeks until something valuable disappeared in the house and they kicked him out. It happened many times that people came and left for some reason.
      So I feel I have been exposed to this racialization of people; although my family has a mixed background there is this very ‘white’ rhetoric of making a difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
      Who are the whites in Ecuador?
      Spanish descendants, criollos, they are called
      Same as in Mexico
      Yes, I think Ecuador is very similar to Mexico in that there are still indigenous populations, but what I saw in Mexico is that you have a lot of work about indigenous cultures, like in the Anthropology Museum the work of periodization and historization of indigenous cultures is quite amazing. In Ecuador it seems a bit underdone, this kind of work.
      Do you think Ecuadorian indigenous are racist to themselves?
      I do, many times I have heard indigenous people saying self deprecating things about themselves, and also talking as if race was an essence. There is also a lot of alcoholism, and sadness, it is a diminished culture….
      The reason why I am interested in constructions of otherness has to do with the racial other, I have lived in a context that clearly distinguishes between indians and non-indians - thought they are not so clearly distinguishable in actuality, are they? -
      They are even antagonists, in this system
      Yes, exactly, completely antagonist, and hierarchized through many modes of violence that has been internalized.
      When I was working as a teacher there, I had a student who worked teaching at an intercultural school in which they spoke quichua and spanish, a lot of the kids’ parents had migrated to the city from the country side. She said that a lot of times the parents came to the school and explicitly told her not to talk to their kids in quichua, but in spanish; and a lot of times when they spoke to the kids in quichua the kids responded saying ‘I don’t know this language’. In this case language is a way of marking oppression.
      Interestingly, a lot of our spanish uses structures from quichua, and a lot of words we normally use too, but it seems we don't acknowledge this fact often.
      There is a merging of languages
      Yes but Im really interested in looking at how this merging comes about
      I see that this influences you personally, but why do you think you transpose this into your practices? And what for?
      For me there is something about layering there, and how this many layers coexist within your personal ecology
      What is personal ecology for you?
      I am in the process of defining it and understanding it, looking at The T hree Ecologies, by Guattari. It has to do with how you have built your own terrain, based on your life experiences and the collective memory that inhabits you - and you inhabit-. Somehow this elements in your terrain have become solid and part of it, like the idea that you have of yourself and your identity, but If you can build and create your own terrain you can start to see what elements are good for your soil and how it can be more fertile. It is important also to decide what you want to grow. This is how I am understanding it at the moment.
      Do you think your practices are directed to finding an ecology?
      Yes, they really have to do with working with each person’s own ecology. I am assuming that experiences of ‘othering’ of being under oppressive systems work in different ways in different contexts but they still operate, you know? So a lot of the work for me has to do with looking at this formations, and maybe doing something to the soil.
      In the practice of dissolving the other, when you see the result in the end, What does it give to you?
      I think what it does is that it enables mobility and a certain transformation that i think is quite important. It builds a temporary community and a material that is always changing.

      Yes, but what do YOU get out of this practice?
      For me the observation of how it works with other people really gives me a lot right now. On the other hand, it helps me dissolve my own others; I think I have been constructed with very fixed idea of others, under very tyrannical systems, even Europe is a tyranizing other for me
      Tell me about your residency card (laughs)
      Exactly, this helps to soften this constructions, and that is a precious thing for me. I don't like solid worlds
      Excluding worlds
      Yes
      So who is this other and how would you describe it?
      Well at the moment I am thinking of the other as the cultural other. I don't want to go into the psychoanalytic distinction between the Other and the other…. But the Other in general terms is a place where language and culture come from, and it is different form the other which is a mirrored reflection of the person - we are constructed within this Other. I suppose in the end it is all very related, the cultural other as a mirroring fantasy of difference, and the Other, the system that encompasses and frames that mirror dynamic.
      However, making another person different is a particular way of ‘othering’ and since the construction of the racial other is so violent, I would like to research more into this.
      Perhaps this is why in dissolving the other I have gone away form doing it in couples, and want to introduce many third parties in the mix, to get out of the mirroring thing.
      Franz Fanon says that the concern with self and other constructions is already a colonizer privilege, since if you are in a position of colonized you are in a zone of non-being, you are not human. Entering the self- other dynamic is already a step ahead.
      In Latin America the indians are seen as essentially inferior, and a lesser kind of human, this is what ratializing does, it colours the other as inferior.
      I would like to continue to think about other elements about my own ecology, but this has become a bit intense, and I need a break, could we continue in two weeks?
      Yes, ok
      I will see you then?
      Yes, thank you!
      Thank you!

    •  

      Ricardo Santana

      I have agreed to do this interview but I have a request and I would like it to be accepted. I do not want this interview to be an exercise in style.

      What do you mean by an exercise in style?

      I can think for example that we could make a backwards interview.

      We could start at the end. Then we would have two options, the first would be to use the backwards as a tool to access the content, the second to present the interview as a backwards interview, which means that the interview would be read in the reverse order, beginning at the end. But I would like the interview to let me clarify certain terms of the content or at least point them out to leave me some space for reflection and further development. I think I prefer to focus on unveiling the thought, that's why I would like the thought to remain visible. I am very interested in the point of view of the reader and the feedback that they can provide me.

      Do you know that you are raising many problems? I think you're claiming that the style is not content itself and I find that very un-artistic. Also you put me in a compromising situation, right now I do not know what kind of questions you would want to be asked.

      Well maybe you could start by asking about my methodology.

      Okay. What is your working methodology?

      There are different channels that articulate my creative process, on the one hand is the theoretical issue or conceptual approach.

      It mainly consists on reading texts that will provide me a context, an appropriate context. Then I try to understand the structural thinking of the writer and extract certain concepts that later will become practices in relation to my experience, my needs, my desires ... This proceses of translation it is in itself a way of understanding, we can call it an educational tool but nevertheless there is not a didactic intention what underlies the practices. It is not easy to transform a concept into a practice, the practice should contain the concept more than represent it, and it has stand on its own. For example, if we talk about "Thought and Language" by Lev S. Vygotsky, I developed a practice out of organizing objects based on the categories that Vygotsky creates around the formation of concepts in animals and men. In this way objects were creating narratives through their organization. Something that interested me was to integrate my own body in the landscape of objects. This work, “La emocionante economía de los objetos en red" I never got to develop. I think I could make a fairly extensive list of works I ever did.

      Another thing that helps me to deal with the references is developing grids that on one side summarize and organize the author's thinking and secondly give a certain structure to the work, or at least to the process. These grids function as tools from which to develop practices. Using objects or other kind of technology are also recurrent principles in my work.

      Maybe another step is the observation of the practice. Sometimes I record things but it is not the principal method of analysis. If I'm working alone, I am guided largely by what I feel when I run practices and these practices are giving me feedback, or in turn, informing me of the need of other guidelines to enrich them. When I work with others and I stand as an observer, strangeness is a concept that interests me, amuses me. I think that humor is essential in my work but I do not specifically do comedy, if I want to find humor I rather avoid it.

      Usually when I'm working on something it becomes obsessive, so that times of daydreaming and sometimes insomnia produce a certain state of clairvoyance. Sometimes I wake up at night thinking of a project and I have a revelation, sometimes it develops and sometimes not. Sometimes I write things down and they make no sense when I read them again. Any time of the day can be a discovery; a conversation, an image, an occurrence. At this moments time functions in a circular manner. Casual becomes causal.

      I always try to find my own production conditions, but these conditions are usually inserted in the course of what we call professional life. I deeply envy the ability of many friends to build their lives from their own desire. I guess it is a matter of choice but I also think it is a capacity that not everyone has, and of course I’m not talking about success. This is also part of my methodology, I would not call it a tool but certainly it is functional.

      As you can see, and as it is usual in the work of many artists, work is endless and quite impossible to separate from all other areas of life, if we can still believe that life is made up of plots.

      Why this interest in tools?

      Basically because working with tools will divert you from working with the idea of ​​technique.

      And what problems do you have with technique? Don't you consider that “technique” works with tools? That each technique has its own tools?

      Firstly, technique means to take for granted the principles upon which this technique is established and omits both the context in which this technique is developed and the operation of those principles in such contexts. So we face the problem of the universality of the term. does it operate under any circumstances? Can it be articulated by anyone? Where is its operativity and where is its agency? I think this problem leads us to the regimes of identification proposed by Ranciere in “Le Partage du Sensible". Ranciere attributed to the images three regimes of different identification in Western history; the ethical, the poetic and the aesthetic. I think technique initially starts as part of the first and third regime but usually ends up inhabiting the second, with the disadvantage that it ends up losing the referent. From this point of view the work with techniques seems to be an alienation. I’m not disavowing educational processes or information processes that  are incorporated by almost all art schools, based on technical work, but I do consider that a reification is necessary each time that the technique is embodied, we need to take technique out of the flesh.

      Regarding the second question the answer is yes. During the Carlos III Masters Program, I appropriated a definition of tool by Fernando Broncano, which would make a distinction between two types of tools: Tools for living, which would be the group of objects around us and without which we could not live as such as glasses, a bicycle, bottle, a notebook or an iPad ... and on the other hand, tools for learning; which would another group that serves to develop skills such as the small wheels that we put on the bike when we begin to use it. In either of these two categories it becomes visible what is utilitarian or functional on tools and consequently a reference to a specific context on which they are operating. In my opinion the technical work would contain both types of tools. Actually the idea of ​​tool can be extrapolated and viewed from many perspectives and in different cases. The fact is, if the tool is intended and used as a tool. I think it's important to bring it at the conscious level, but also we run the risk of alienating the tool.

      Could you tell us about the work that you are developing now?

      Right now I'm working on a project called "Reproduction" that is about producing a conversation between a group of people, at some point stops and he task is is to repeat  the conversation as originally happened. Once the tool is installed it can become more complex. There is a delay in time that produces new possibilities of meaning in that repetition. I am interested in these new circular and concentric meanings and how subjects appear within those micro-contexts. There are two other issues that I would emphasize. How much structure does a structure need? and how does a structure become inhabitable. These two still embryonic ideas, I think stem from the reading of Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno.

      Would you like to add something to finish?

      I would continue but the truth is that time is short I hope we can meet again from August 4th when our schedules are more relaxed.

    • [call] 2015/III 01 August 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      newscaption
       
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

      Please find information on the application procedure here.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    • INTRO:

      Elle sings:

      i am free to give

      what anyway isn’t mine

      the energy i suck from the earth

      and breathe back into the other,

      i am free to embody the powers of this city

      oscillating with ideas

      that enter my bloodstream and exit my body

      amplified, ordered, and displaced,

      i am free to vibrate with the desire of the other

      that lets me discover my soul, my knowledge and my being

      i am free to let go of fear of losing

      what anyway wasn’t mine:

      the identities i share with so many others

      the security blankets of opinion, belief and good taste.

      i am free not to be bound

      by my dependence on respect, affirmation and flattery

      i am free to be what i anyway always was:

      a wave, a thought, a vessel or a tree.

       

      Elke (a.pass researcher):

      Elle, with the new project ‘Mobile MNSTRY’ you again tackle some of the issues you have been dealing with in your extended project Bureau d’Espoir already for some years: the recuperation and embrace of practices and terms that have been categorized, marginalized and recuperated by capital strategies.

      For example: you worked on the mobilization of the concept of ‘anorexia’ in the Hunger and Anorexic practices as tools for rethinking our relation to the consumption of food, and our own place in the ‘food chain’ of capitalism. You worked in ‘Battery’ on the embrace of circumstances that are considered detrimental to the ‘healthy’ development of the individual: 21 days of imprisonment, hunger and lack of private space as a spiritual-aesthetic machine for the production of hope and change.

      Now you propose the Mobile Monastery: a practice that is based on rethinking the monastic rule, the disciplining and deep experience of the everyday, introducing ‘poverty’ and social service (karma yoga) into the practice. Your proposals all seem to verge on the extreme, uncomfortable, and frankly, possibly moralistic. How do you plan to make this collective practice seem inviting to collaborators.

       

      Elle:

      Although it is often perceived as such, my practice is not one of asceticism. It is rather a practice of finding pleasure, or even liberation, in reducing the overall demand for entertainment and ‘keeping busy’ that order our daily realities. If I introduce the ‘poverty’ demand to the temporary monks in the MNSTRY, this is not so much an act of moralistic self-deprivation, as it is an invitation for an active and vitalizing rethinking of our relationship and dependence on money: on subsidies, a steady income, a minimum requirement of comforts and ‘good circumstances’ to work and produce in.

      A lot of our thinking as artists and citizens is based on a conscious or unconscious fear to fall out of the grid of organized society, to become invisible to the powers that matter. What the Mobile MNSTRY proposes is to do exactly that. To live without everything we think we need to be able to ‘live’, work, enjoy life, stay connected. By giving up on these things, we are able to install other connections to the city, the environment, our practice and other people. By taking away the markers of our social position (identity card, money, private space), we enter into another reality. A reality marked by a collective discipline, a shared purpose, an outward orientation. Together we rethink what it means to be alive: what kind of practices can keep us not only alive, but also charged, and aware of each other and the outside world.

      The Mobile MNSTRY (which you can read as Monastery, but also as Ministry, or Monster-y), is an exercise in pragmatic ritualism: it opens up a space and time to reorganize our attachments and preconceptions to capital values. To make space for other ways to mobilize time, space and artistic practice, away from the confinement of the studio, the artistic workspace. To test our knowledges on another playground of society: to see what it is we can do with what we think we believe in.

      Elke:

      You could say that you try to rethink the economies of desire that rule our everyday lives. Making use of very diverse practices borrowed from spiritual body work, inventive object design, philosophical reconceptualization and artistic practice experience. But at the same time this ‘economic liberation’ is presented as quite a disciplining practice: proposing collective day rhythms, the denial of private space, limited resources to work with. In that sense, your practices might also seem old-fashioned, frugal, and out of tune with the individual freedom of the artist/collaborator/citizen to fill in their lives in a flexible, creative and singular way.

      Your collective practice environments seem to stand in stark contrast to the contemporary ideology of flexibility, choice, individual creativity. In the arts field, in particular, any sense of pre-set rules or limitations to the practice are often labeled as ‘power games’ or even as ‘fascist’, a word that seems to fit any kind of disciplined practice these days.

      Elle:

      Yes, but this term has also been hollowed out by its frequent, uncritical use. Funnily enough, it lost its meaning exactly through the banalization of the term in so-called critical discursive environments that, by seeing fascism everywhere, actually disempowered the term completely. If fascism is everywhere, then actually it becomes life itself. If fascism is but a strategic stab in an intellectual debate to disarm the opposition, there is no serious consideration for the all-too-real context in which fascism took form as a societal transformational power. Such a ‘metaphorization’ of the term, which makes is applicable to all circumstances in which a play of hierarchical oppositions of power are at stake, is nearsighted, and cynical.

      Elke:

      Let’s say that by ‘fascism’ I mean a specific coming together of Beauty, Order and the practice of what I would call the Physical Sublime, that is often created by suffering, or disciplined bodies. Or maybe rather, the dual mechanical and massively reproduced political aesthetic organization that bases itself on Beauty and Order, and produces the violence of exclusion and exhaustion in its wake. Off course this term can not be interpreted separate from its historical contexts, and the often violent mass effects it produced. But whole generations of leftist critical thinkers have grown up in the shadow of the stormy historical heritage of the 20th Century, and their historical awareness of the traps of combined ideology, idealism and organization have made them hyper-sensitive to the telltale signs of power abuse or disbalance, but also of the uncritical embrace of Beauty as a bourgeois pacifier of unrest, revolt or social struggle.

      In the wake of the 20th century, modernisms, fascist and communist critical strategies, a lot of aesthetic strategies have become suspect. Loaded with historical weight: be it romantic escapism, political incorrectness, social exclusion, uncritical acceptance of the bourgeois order, the crash and recuperation of the ideals of the 1960’s, and what more. What has been constructed however, out of the rubble of broken ideals, is a discourse police that has made a significant part of the aesthetic vocabulary off-limits, and brandished as naïve at best, hypocritical or ‘f...t’ in the worst cases.

      My question is now if maybe it is not a time to dive back into that long-forgotten dictionary of terms and see if it is not high time to rescue some of them, reactivate their power, and make them speak out another reality, another world view, than the ones they have been associated with. It is my impression that we have gone through an every-expanding exclusion of possible terms to think our realities, a progressive retreat into the trenches of a politically correct aesthetic-political discourse that is now keeping us hostage to ideas that are no longer capable of creating worlds that we actually would wholeheartedly consider to live in. What critical discourse, or at least, the particular critical discourse I’m addressing now has come to establish (which, to be clear, was not always the case) is a state of feeling constantly under siege, beleaguered and in mortal danger of recuperation of any of our bright ideas by the corporations that be.

      Instead of this kind of Repressive Criticality, or the Discourse Police, I would like to see a new wave of criticism come to be that is mainly creative: a creativity produced through a clarity of practiced conceptualization and experienced practice, that would create realities in its wake. A criticality that would not be afraid of being labeled as naïve, old-fashioned or uncritical. Since, frankly, the Discourse Police has produced a toxic reactionary environment for practicing art and politics, that is blind for the potential of other ways of doing, speaking and creating the worlds we live in.

      Elle:

      Aho. (smiles)

      It is time to reconceptualize our concepts. Not by fleeing from them in horror, but by accepting them in all their confusing associations, radical unsuitedness, and therefore irritating potential. Beauty for me is not about Order, but about Orgasm. Beauty appears at the confluence of the experience of the interior and exterior, the experience of the self expanding into that what seems separate to it. Unlike the fearful trepidation in front of the Sublime, this beauty is nothing if not powerful, energizing, and emancipatory. To know you are connected, you are part of the whole, dissolves the fear of exclusion. Orgasmic Beauty, in that sense, is a tool to overcome alienation THROUGH alienation, a kind of homeopathic medicine. It is overcoming the doctrine of individuality that has captured and narrowed our desires to the handkerchief-size of a self-realization wellness project. I think we can do more with the energy of our desires than this empty craving for self-fulfillment.

      I was just reading this rather interesting paragraph about sexuality, which might clarify what I mean with this orgasmic quality:

      ‘Sex, for its part, likes nothing so much as mixtures. Mixtures of skins, salivas, humors, organs, words to the point of delirium, images, as well; sex makes do with anything, can put everything to use. (...) Sex is not the body. It is even the forgetting of the body. It is what makes us, in jouissance, feel desire, or sadness, excitement, fear, longing - everything about the body that is not ‘the body’, that is, flesh. When the body becomes world, landscape, moor, sand, language, collage, collapse, memory, the entire body is convoked as other than flesh. Other indeed, for it is a matter of otherness, for philosophy as well as for sex. Their history is the same, like two sides of a single coin stamped with the seal of that recognition.’

      Just like Criticality, indeed can be rethought as Creative Clarity, a courageous step into the unknown potential of concepts that are constantly redefined and tested through practice. And this goes for all terms that have been derided, labeled as unfashionable, and banned out of our life practices. ...

      There is a big confusion in my practices indeed, especially around notions of self-organization, freedom and discipline. Off course this is due to the superposition of two different practice ‘myths’: the one of artistic research and creation, and the one of transformational ‘spiritual’ body practices which i started to use as ammunition, as weapons in my struggle to overcome the inertia that was keeping a lot of artists hostage in regard to the workings of contemporary capitalism: they felt their tools, their creativity, their imaginative powers had been largely recuperated by marketing, advertising, and the overall economy of affects that produces desires through the production of ever-more empty containers for the construction of ever-more ‘individualized’ selves. The artist-individual therefore has become wary of his/her ‘individual’ power, since individuality in itself has become suspect as a commercial construction of Capital. And rightfully so.

      What I try to do in my practices is to liberate, to unveil, to come to a nude understanding again of what is the non-produced power of the self. And this can, paradoxically, only be done through the stripping away of the presumed ‘personal’, or ‘hyper-individual’ layers of comportment, habits, and convictions. Temporarily! To make other potentials visible. And as such, to rephrase freedom not as a freedom from, but a freedom FOR. FOR a collective project, for a shared dream, for a collectively supported change.

      BUT, and this is very important to understand: this change is not a collective ideology as the ones that supported the communes and collective of the 1960’s and 1970’s. We do NOT have to agree on the world-supporting myths of political affiliation, religious normativization or economic regularization. At least not in Bureau d’Espoir. We only temporarily agree on a scored practice of time and action. And on linking this practice to an outside world. In this sense the Mobile MNSTRY is not built on stable grounds of conviction. While starting out with a proposed score, throughout the project, this score is bit-by-bit transformed by the collaborators, based on their individual myths and dreams, which we then begin to share through our bodies, and ending up with a monastic score that is probably far detached from the original proposal.

      Elke:

      Do you consider Bureau d’Espoir to be an activist cell? Do you see yourselves as producing instruments, weapons to fight affect capitalization. Are you a Warrior of Desire?

      Elle:

      Why do you ask me things you already know the answer to? Why do you need me as an excuse to say what you can not accept yourself saying? Why is Elle so much alluring, sexy and attractive as figure of flight for you? Why do you distrust your own desire so much you can not allow it to carry your name?

      Elke:

      Last night I spoke my name and there was no one there. The sound echoed in the long corridors but I could feel the house was uninhabited.

      Elle:

      Don’t get mystical on me. Don’t pose fake questions. Don’t play the ignorant. Practice what you know.

      Elke:

      (silent)

      Elle

      (drunk):

      to the gathering of all people that can toast to the liberty that appears out of nowhere.

      to the liberation that doesn’t need anything

      that doesn’t need to be acquired

      but that just appears in the middle of a conversation

      a touch

      a cup of coffee.

      to the enchantment of getting lost in the situation and finding

      there is no place like this place.

      to the flight of folly that connects you to my projections

      to the me i can only be through you

      to the you that is here without expectations

      to the we that will never be formed

      to the air that keeps us from being glued together

      as one big blob sharing everyone’s smells, headaches and anxieties

      to the air that allows me to keep my distance

      to the floor that supports my position

      to the gravity that keeps me down to earth

      to the sky that still hasn’t fallen on my head

      and keeps on not doing so day after day

      to the microbes that keep on digesting my food

      to the hairs on my arms that allow me to feel the wind moving on my skin

      to the hairs everywhere on my body for reminding me i’m an animal

      a rabbit, a deer or a worm. well, maybe not a worm.

      to your unhappiness that reminds me of my own good luck

      to your ravings that tell me i should slow down

      to your madness that tells me i haven’t seen nothing yet

      to the streets that keep cars from crashing into houses, or people, or trees

      to houses that keep people from crushing into each other

      to walls for protecting our privacy

      to carpets for muffling our sounds

      to tables for keeping things from falling on the ground and messing other things up

      and creating chaos

      to clothes for giving me something to imagine

      to no clothes for giving me something to imagine

      to touch for allowing me to live in my imagination … … ...

       

      24 HOURS LATER

      Elke:

      The Mobile MNSTRY is part of a bigger social-artistic neighborhood project, called Re-Commerce, in the commune of Forest. In what way do you consider the MNSTRY to fulfill a social engagement?

       

      Elle:

      The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.

      During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original ‘monastic’ score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.

      The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d’Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Bains Connective) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community starts to grow.

      The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged, etcetera.

      We also give short-term ritual training workshops: how to develop your own rituals, how to gather material for your rituals, based on the Psychomagic methodology of Jodorowsky, or the artistic methodologies of the temporary monks. The silent café in the Cité d’Espoir offers free tea and something, and would become the starting point for all projects. The monks would sleep on the premises and be available most of the time for a talk or a ritual ‘guidance’. On Sundays there is also a kind of ‘service’, which is not religious but only aims at developing an alternative ‘common’ event for the neighbourhood in the margins of the market.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • Bureau d'Espoir
    • Mobile Mnstry
    • Mobile MNSTRY 01 August 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Bureau d'Espoir
    • Abbeye of Forest
    • 09 November 2015
    • 22 November 2015
    • Mobile MNSTRY

      The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.

      During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original 'monastic' score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.

      The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d'Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Bains Connective) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community starts to grow.

      The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged, etcetera.

      We also give short-term ritual training workshops: how to develop your own rituals, how to gather material for your rituals, based on the Psychomagic methodology of Jodorowsky, or the artistic methodologies of the temporary monks. The silent café in the Cité d’Espoir offers free tea and something, and would become the starting point for all projects. The monks would sleep on the premises and be available most of the time for a talk or a ritual ‘guidance’. On Sundays there is also a kind of ‘service’, which is not religious but only aims at developing an alternative ‘common’ event for the neighbourhood in the margins of the market.

      For more information: read the self-interview of Elke Van Campenhout with Elle (Bureau d'Espoir) here.

    •  

      (excerpts July 31st 2015)

      -good morning

      -good morning

      -this morning you wrote :

      “On the black and icy waters of the Styx, in the infernal meanders of his arms, Charon's boat progresses about the kingdom of Hades. Aboard the vessel, you, me and a bunch of thinkers and activists, necessarily part of this globalised miserable journey. Of the nature of the swamps, of the depths of the mud in which we sink, of the once renowned magical properties of the river, we have lost track and memory. Sondes throwers more than prophets, advancing in the midst of experiments, we clumsily try to offer a tentative guidance...”

      very nice introduction text, very promising…

      you seem to work well in the morning, are you a “morning person”?

      -yes, I always understand better, even difficult texts if I read them, study them, in the early morning.

      I wake up, drink a coffee or two and immediately open a book and read and… understand it most of the time. And it’s the same concerning writing… words come more clearly… sentences, ideas, articulations… yes I am definitivly a morning person…

      -why do you think it is like this?

      -I am less afraid and stuck by the blank page in the morning because I feel like a blank page myself.

      -like a virgin…

      -yes like a virgin… touched for the very first time… you made me feel shiny and new...

      It’s a precious feeling and the very appropriate moment for me to work before the world imprints itself on me.

      -”imprinted”, what do you mean?

      -I am very quickly and deeply affected by things, things that appear in front of me, things that happen, objects, events, news, conversations, all problematics that the people I work with are busy with… all sort of things that want to enter into dialogue with me, populate me, occupy me and affect me so much…

      -why?

      -because they cry to be taken seriously, they insist for being articulated... sometimes they hate each other and ask me to become the referee, sometimes I have to get them around a negotiation table and perform the role of a diplomat, they… it’s like I catch any kind of information and try to make sense with everything...

      I am everyday in a titanic effort to articulate all kind of singular heterogeneities…

      -you speak about things like you would speak about persons…

      -yes, the all-kind-of-things are part of a fabric, a stuff that is in the making all along my day. This stuff is kind of alive, like a coral colony formed by organisms forming a hyper organism.

      -do the things talk to you? do you hear voices?

      -oh yeh… a lot of voices… they occupy me… I feel occupied by several entities

      -do you consider yourself as schizophrenic?

      -oh yeh… very much… sometimes I don’t feel possessed anymore, I AM possessed

      -is it a good thing?

      -oh yeh… I do believe that’s one of the best way to make sense!

      -you often use the that expression “make sense” or “making sense”, why and what do you really mean by that?

      … … … … … … ...

      what do you want to begin with, then?

      polishing lenses?

      objects as machines to be mapped out, deconstructed and rebuilt?

      objects as machines whose gravitational organisations should be read and then changed to free movement?

      objects as machines to be assembled differently to create new ecologies?

      are you a machine?

      why our magic should spellbind people?

      critical dark moments?

      which concrete outcomes after these “magic” months?

      was it all about magic?

      how to queer but avoiding 'system building', 'moral injunctions' and 'political correctness'?

      is magic putting an end to any discussion or criticism?

      what do you mean by beautiful?

      what do you mean by magic?

      what do you mean by affect?

      what do you mean by desire,

      what do you mean by care?

      what do you mean by being changed?

      what do you mean by risks taken?

      what do you mean by magic powers?

      what do you mean by powers of magic?

      what do you really want?

      do you do what you want?

      do you want what you do?

      you seem quite focussed on the Bermuda triangle Spinoza,Deleuze,Guattari, why them again? why them now? 

      putting into practice the concepts of “Sadness decomposing relations” and “Joy composing more relations”?

      is it really necessary to feel this fear to learn how to defeat capitalism and its obscene trade with death?

      evil spell? curse? aren’t you performing the anti-capitalist drama queen?

      remove the fingers out of our nose to smell the real shit?

      do you think that, like at the end of the sixties, we have to “set fire on reality itself”? is it still possible?, imaginable?

      what do they mean by “reconnecting desire and reality”?

      considering seriously our works as medicines?

      what do you mean by “the only thing to do is to construct apparatuses that will stimulate self-healing”?

      why is it necessary to affirm again that 'another world is possible'?

      what do you mean by “new affects” and “new joys”?

      doing whatever but methodically?

      why do we need to produce new joys?

      producing new lives, really?

      today, it seems not possible anymore NOT to see the coexistence of a plurality of worlds, how to practically deal with that idea?

    • Thiago’s Self-interview I write in Italic. I make the questions. Sometimes I explain things for you, the one who reads. I am a bit smarter than the others, but I don’t have a color. I am… I am a recorded voice transcripted. I am another voice, written. I have this yellow light behind me, as you can see. So, what is your research about? My project is about a creation of a game that discuss and is inspired by… the bureaucracies that migrants have to undergo when they try to live regularly in Europe. I am not certain if it is a research about something. Or instead a research through something. The fact is that this research is interested both in the performative language of games and in the migration policies that sometimes look like games. The games are not only a mean to address something, they are also object of the research. When you say game, do you mean video-game? No it’s a game that happens in a space. In the real space with people. And, it could be like a role playing game (RPG). Actually it is a RPG, because each player has a specific role in the game. And… It’s a game based on acting. It’s strategic and also theatrical. So, people have to choose to what places they go, and how they perform in each one of these places, and then afterwards they conquer or they lose… the possibilities to get the document. No, it’s a live game, and it is a role playing game. It’s both strategical and performative. Each player has to choose, in each round, which actions they will perform in order to get the documents to stay in the game as much as they they can. Is it a game to train people in how to get documents? Initially it was a game… I had the idea to have this game… I planned to build it on the very exact… Initially, yes. But now, I think it would be interesting to create a game that somehow. It has no end. Or it demolishes itself, or it collapses. I think there is a way to use games to train people, based on the thinking that games are an effective way to teach. My opinion is that games can also be a platform for people to think by themselves, specially if the game offers the possibilities to see a situation from different points of view. For me it is more interesting to create a game like that than only use this language to train people. A poetic game, or a game that comments itself could be an interesting way to provoke the players to find solutions by themselves, to complexify their points of view about a situation that is believed to be completely understood. Or to create interest about a situation that some people would find only boring or distant from their realities. Why do you want to build a game that collapses? Because with this I’d like to… to… to reinforce the non-sense of the system. Otherwise it would be… I think it would be considered like a training for getting documents, and I don’t think it is. Yes, it is useful somehow, it’s still a way to believe that game… That the system is a game that you have to learn how to play. But for me it’s also important to say that the game itself must be criticized. A think we are “gamified” enough. We are educated to follow paths that most of the times are designed to maintain capitalism working, with the promise of self-realisation. This mismatch between the promise and the means to obtain it are how games are structured. The seduction created by a fictionalised reality in order to maintain the functioning of a machine. The political importance of exposing the “game-like” structure of certain political issues can be useful to open spaces between us the and games in which we are involved. So, in this sense, I am more interested in create a game that disempowers the game. An anti-game, or a “game that collapses”. Are you inspired conspiration theories? I don’t understand why are you asking that. But maybe you are trying to insinuate that I see a discrepancy between discourse and practice in the political level, which is obvious, and also that I have some interest by Sci-Fi, which is true. But I don’t identify migration policies with conspiration. I don’t know why I asked that. Ok, no problem. So, what benefit migrants will have in playing your game? I don’t think this game is for making migrants happier or wiser, but to create other possibilities of integration between migrants and non-migrants. Which in a deeper level would take to a discussion about what is nationalism, nationality, what is… what is race. Because underneath this discussion there is a very conservative discussion which defends the autonomy of the countries and the legitimacy of nationals to have access to basic services and to. No, more precisely, there is an instinct of defense of many of the states that avoid integration. This game is against this belief. So it relativizes the… the needs or… the expression… or the assumptions that migrants have to be integrated. Not a shared integration program. I think I am repeating myself. In which way you think a game is the best platform for this project instead of a theatre play? Well, I think a theatre play reinforces… Well, I think there is in my project a desire to create a theatre play a bit more porous. A theatre play that could be played by non-actors. A theatre play that could involve more the audience inside itself. And not just an interactive play but something that people could engage even more, like in a game. And… I have. I have this experiences in playing games with groups that are non-actors, I I could understand with them how things operate in order to train them in very theatrical skills. Even though no one of them were actors or performers. These games were creating a common language for this group of friends. It was important for the creation of specific kind of spirit of community. I think this game could create more integration than a theatre play. But why aren’t ping-pong or football as much or more effective for integration than this game you have in mind? (two weeks later) Maybe yes. But there is something empowering in jocking about a situation that is frustrating or annoying for you. Maybe this hypothetic game could help to create a new understanding about what integration is, or at least, what is not integration. If this game can be hypothetically empowering for migrants, what would be the interest for natives or people who have no initial interest about the discussion about migration? I hope the game can be fun and an opportunity to gather also people interested in theatre, in games, and in arts. But I am prepared to understand that some people can be completely not interested. Which are your beliefs around the migrant? I have read something about that. Octavio Paz was the first, I studied one of his texts during the School, about his experience as an ambassador. It was a course on anthropology and the techer related Octavio Paz and this situation of the migrant with this movie Lost in Translation. I think it was this. It was 1996. More recently I studied Beckett and learned how important was for him to shift his writing from English to French, and to move himself from Ireland to France. Without that he wouldn’t have produced his masterpieces. It was capital for him to express in a foreigner language and to be himself a foreigner. It is deeply present in his texts this condition. All his characters are displaced, they do not belong to the place where they are. And for this reason, they are completely part of the landscape, although, this landscape is completely strange for him. Being human is being foreigner. What is the importance of being funny for you? Isn’t it tragic? Is it ethical to laugh on a subject that is related with death, violence, and exploitation? Would it be more ethical to not talk about it at all?

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      Self interview

      Blue & Black <span
      style='color:#3366FF'>March 2015

      Green & Pink July 2015

       

       

      Why art?

      I like the different ways that art can
      touch someone, it can appeal to the logic, to the body, to something
      untouchable, to that which cannot be explained rationally, it can undress things.
      It can use metaphors or very literal and logical statements and it can do both at
      the same time.

       

      Art is for me the ideal way of accessing
      and creating mythology, something I am very interested in.

      Why? I like very much Joseph <span
      class=SpellE>Campel’s
      explanation on the importance of mythology,
      mythology being that which transcends the individual to the universal, to the
      unseen, to its ultimate potential or vice versa convince him of his superiority
      over nature, of his twisted nature etc., depends on the belief system it
      supports.

      It is a very powerful tool to shape
      reality, according to the mythology people believe in, you shape society and
      vice versa of course.

      In addition to that I am interested in
      mythology because it makes the whole universe alive, the personification of the
      world is not something to be dismissed lightly, by understanding that the river
      has a spirit, a vibration, that it is alive our relationship with it changes
      and it cannot be a commodity anymore.

      It is easier to sell a pair of shoes
      than your friend in a way,

      So there, art is a way to access
      mythology, invent or awaken myths and thus challenge society.

       

      What are you currently working on?

       

      I am trying to create ceremonies. I am
      interested in mythology and particularly fertility and the way mythology is
      changing in our society with the assistance of science.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      These days I am thinking about the bees
      as the pollinators and also as the creatures that are getting affected through
      the use of pesticides, the development of gmo
      agriculture and the increase of monoculture agronomy, our current commercial
      way of dealing with fertility in farming.

       

      Well in terms of appearance, I have a
      video that I shot in Brazil, that is a form of prayer, I have a pair of new age
      paintings that I hope to continue, there is a barely started macramé piece, and
      a few performances/ rituals that took place the last few months, sliding
      between artistic documentary and ceremonial collective moments.

      In terms of thematic, fertility and
      mythology are weaving the connections.

      Fertility from the physical point of
      view, the earth’s and humans fertile ability, but also fertility in thought and
      in action.  Fertility
      as a way to celebrate life, and the interconnection of the human and the earth.

       

      What do you mean?

       

      Well, with the use of science we can
      control fertility in ways that we were never able to do so before. That I
      believe is changing the way we view life and I am interested in that change.

       

      Well, for example I find that the
      violence that vibrates at this point on earth is a very unfertile <span
      class=GramE>field,
      it stimulates pain, depression, blind anger,
      alienation, death (death not only on the physical realm but also in the
      vibrational realm, like a living dead social body). So I am interested in
      finding ways to reclaim that space and make it fertile.

       

      How?

      Well this is what I am trying to find
      out. By creating collective moments of prayer, by bringing awareness to certain
      acts, by creating a new cosmology, and by understanding what are our needs from
      science.

       

      How did it start about?

       

      Of course there is not one moment, but
      let say my first proposals had to do with Theogony,
      the birth of the Earth from the god Eros (the creative, passionate, sexual and
      sensual force of nature).  Then I
      continued my inquiring on mythology and on contemporary mythologies (<span
      class=SpellE>gmo
      , eugenics, authoritative systems on life), the questioning
      of archetypal memory. For example one of my questions was and somehow still is
      that if we forming our memory and our connection to the primal archaic
      existence through food (among other things) how is this lineage to our ancestry
      affected if our seed loose that memory (with the invention of <span
      class=SpellE>gmo seeds for example).<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  How is our own fertility affected when <span
      class=GramE>our the food that we nourish ourselves is sterile? And then
      these questions expanded to the fact that technology is used very much to
      create commodities and a social body that views life as a commodity.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  For example we are creating coral reefs
      that can withstand the climate change, gmo is
      proposed as a way to fight the famine of the planet and the overpopulation,
      eugenics as a way to create a species that is more intelligent and can conquer
      the universe, but the real issues on human greed, the distraction of the environment,
      the insanity of colonization are bypassed, because it is too hard to address
      them.

      Etc<span
      style='font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:Times;color:green;mso-bidi-font-weight:
      bold'> etc etc

       

      And now where do you find yourself?

       

      I am in place that I am wondering how
      the different elements of my work can come together, I am not so much interested
      in that which I find poisonous, (like gmo, eugenics,
      authoritative systems on life) but of what on the beautiful in the potential of
      the human being.

      I have picked up some words that I have
      found interesting,

      Like city shamanism, Joy and Desire, I
      have felt my creative castle falling on the ground, and I am trying to see how
      and what this work means for me, what are the perfomative
      aspects of this act. What is moving forward, and I feel I need a pose for a
      bit.

      I crave spending time in Greece.

       

      Why is Greece important?

       

      It is very important, it is the <span
      class=GramE>mother land
      .

      The smell of my bones.<span
      style='font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:Times;color:green;mso-bidi-font-weight:
      bold'>

      My interest on the human and mythology
      that I always come back in my work comes from there, the love and the beauty of
      the human being.

      Also I think that Greece at this point
      played the role of unveiling the matrix, this of course we can talk for a
      while…

       

      And what is your trouble?

       

      Well I feel I need to make a leap and I
      am not sure in what direction. Last cycle/block/ season I was saying I do not
      have enough tools in terms of spiritual knowledge and techniques, this time I
      feel the same but in an artistic way.

       

      Why?

      I see this change of genetic control
      as a continuation of our need to control life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      And I also think that it calls for
      further authoritative power in our lives. 
      I do not want to live in such a society.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">   Maybe our need to controlled
      engineering is another blindfold, without dismissing the amazing advances that
      technology is doing, there is a world that treats life as an object, as a
      commodity and the human as the creature that holds authorship in this. If that
      does not change in its base then controlled engineering will become just a way
      to reinforce this attitude.

       

       

      That sounds very confusing

       

      Well the idea that we can choose
      the genetic traits that we desire is a way to control and create
      uniformity.  Remember the 80’s
      haircuts, great but who wants an 80’s hairdo today. It is like the tomatoes,
      there had been a law in the EU until recently that all vegetables need to look
      in a certain way, that created a market that only wanted a specific look in the
      vegetables and everything that did not meet that standard was thrown out of the
      selling basket, without necessary being worse, as a result people prefer to buy
      a tomato that is wrapped in a plastic case and looks “perfect” than a tomato
      that smells like a tomato but has a few marks on it and maybe a hole from a
      warm.

       

      The same can
      happen with gene control. 

       

      It is the way of thinking that
      this selection creates that I want to put into attention.

       

      Is it about Morals then?

       

      I hope that it is not about <span
      class=GramE>morals,
      morals create a hierarchy which is also problematic.

       

      And ceremonies?

       

      I believe shamanism is a
      powerful tool to accessing archaic ways of viewing life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      There has been a strong rejection in the
      west of the magical but I think that it is important to be re
      –introduced.

      Shamanism as a science creates a
      different balance in life, that is why I think it is a
      very important tool.

       

      I saw a show recently about the
      Lascaux paintings and there was a 3-D video that illustrated how the cave
      paintings were viewed then.  It was
      this representation were the paintings, which are huge by the way, were lit up
      with fire and the trembling of the fire made them look alive.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      It made me feel that the way the animals
      were represented made the “visitor” feel in awe towards them. <span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> The paintings, huge over the head of the
      visitors in combination with the darkness of the cave, illuminated only by
      trembling fire, created a mystical environment that glorified these creatures. <span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> I think this point of view creates a
      different balance to life.

      The same way Greek theater was
      used as a tool for democracy.  It
      was presenting the viewer with questions and moral/ethical values,
      it was creating and supporting the society. (sometimes
      in support of the state some times as a critic to it, democratic Greece had its
      flows also)

      This is the value that I am trying
      to find in art I think.

       

      So you want to pass your values
      and ethics?

       

      I do not like the way this sounds,
      but probably yes, you could say that.

      Of course the
      work is created by me
      so it is made by my way of thinking, but instead of
      me passing my values I want to think of it as me creating platforms for a
      collective experience. A place for people to discover and
      bring forth their own ethics.

       

      Why collective?

       

      Well, I find it strange that we go
      to a museum to see a painting and we do not talk to each other.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      I have had an experience many times of
      being in the museum trying to listen to what the guide is saying, and being
      told off.  I do not understand how
      we can look at art and at the same time be so separate to each other.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  This does not hold life in it for me.

       

      What is life?

       

      The highest
      vibration.
      Our
      highest potential.

      Maybe it is not a very clear
      definition but I do not have a better one at the moment.

       

      So you want people to take part in shamanic experiences?

       

      Yes or even better create them.

       

      Do you still believe this?

      Yes and no, I am starting to feel
      the need to even revisit or re-evaluate the word shamanism.

       

      You talked about city shamanism?

       

      Yes, the way I understand this
      term, it is about finding ways in the rural environment, in the industrial
      world, in the cities to connect with the elements of nature. To practice with
      them, to get information from them, to have a conversation in these ecosystems
      that have forgotten about the complexity and the mystery of life and that they
      tent to exclude nature in its wild form.

       

      The relationship to ritual and
      shamanism seems to be very attractive in art these days,
      Do you feel part of it?

       

      J<span
      style='color:green'>
      Maybe this is why I do not like the word shamanism so much.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  It is already
      appropriated by the matrix
      . 
      Like anything that could possibly shake the matrix the <span
      class=GramE>idea of shamanism has been quickly adapted by the matrix.

      There is fashion that is inspired
      by shamanism from Zara clothing to high couture tribalism, but it is not very
      interesting in the way that it affects someone’s life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  
      My interest in shamanism, magic
      and ritual is to find tools, relationships, ways of living and creating that
      can be used to connect to the vibrancy of life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  Ways to make reality escape The Given
      structure and bring awareness on the distraction of nature in its raw
      form.  How many people today, how
      many kids have drunk water that comes from the mountain and how often?

      How can we respect our resources
      when we do not know where they are coming from?

      So yes,

      I am interested in bringing those
      values and practicing them within a performance or even more important bring
      those practices in our contemporary life.

       

      Don’t you
      think that this “shamanism” can be a constraint for some people?

       

      It is very possible.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      But I want my “viewer” to have to take a
      personal risk.

      There is no change happening
      otherwise.

       

      And I would also like to add, I
      find this restriction very very interesting, it is a
      point to be very present!! What is it exactly that makes us feel uncomfortable
      with shamanism, and magic?

       

      So it is about change?

       

      For sure

       

      How do you create these ceremonies then?

       

      Well this is what I am in the
      process of understanding.  I think
      the best way I have found until now is to be open to information to come to me,
      this happens either by using shamanic journeying (accessing other realities
      through the sound of the drum) or signals or random moment of inspiration and
      also by scientific research, which is very difficult to come around maybe the
      most difficult.  I hope soon to open
      that process also to others and try to find collective ways that we can create
      a ceremony.

       

      Well this is what I am in the
      process of understanding.  I have
      been trying different things and now I am at the moment of realizing how it can
      tight up.

      I am interested in leaving enough
      space I think for people to wonder in diverse worlds, I am interested in the
      elements that people can bring in and add to the work.

       

      And your paintings what is
      happening in and with them?

      I started by drawing my shamanic
      journeys, (travelling with the power of your imagination accompanied by the
      shamanic drum to access your reality and find tools to bring to your reality).
      So I would travel and then make a drawing that was somehow inspired by my
      journey.

      The last two are <span
      class=GramE>different,
      they are very much influenced by my recent trip
      to Brazil.

      The rising bird is a calling that
      I think is happening at the moment for a new generation of people that walk on
      the Earth with love and respect.

      This generation is not only our
      kids, it is our selves and our ancestors that still walk through us.

      So the bird is making the calling,
      a calling to the earth. It has elements of different mythologies, some
      conscious some unconscious.

      The second painting with the
      snakes came after, as a way to tame the unbalance or to call for balance.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      The last weeks I felt that the hunger of
      the monster has been so big that all inhibitions were dropped. <span
      class=GramE>From the Greek crisis, to the public rapes in Africa, to the
      extreme weather conditions and the destruction of the rainforest, to name a
      few.  Sacredness is becoming
      a taboo word, and this is where shamanism, magic, ritual etc
      become important again. As a way to acknowledge the sacredness of life to the
      present to art, to challenge the “rational” thinking, and to affect the emotion

       

      Sacredness?

       

      Yes! Life is sacred. I like a
      definition from Starhawk on sacredness, respecting
      something or someone for its own being.

      The Cycladic phases <span
      class=GramE>that are
      looking at the sun.

       

      So this year you went to Brazil,
      how did it work on you?

       

      Brazil was very playful and my
      time there taught me even deeper the necessity of joy.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      So in a way it liberated the place from
      which I create.  The idea of
      suffering, of being an artist martyr in order to create left me and creating is
      coming from a place of joy and pleasure. 
      It also brought me back to video art, which I haven’t touched for a
      while!!!  And somehow it’s the first
      time that I am painting just for the sake of painting.

       

       

      Why is scientific research so difficult?

       

      Because it is a very sensitive
      subject and one that is connected with a multi billion dollar industry, so on
      one hand there are business issues that tend to obstruct real information
      coming through, and on the other you have very passionate activism against,
      which also is not very accurate most of the time.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      So for example it is very hard to find
      information on gmo technology that is detached from
      the companies that are associated with it. 
      On the part of humans there is a strong sentimental part that is also
      hard to overcome, why not make sure that your kid will not will not develop a
      lethal disease and why not overcome sterility, on the other hand there is a
      strong claim that we are overpopulated and that this is causing huge imbalance
      etc.  So it is not an issue that is
      easy to tackle scientifically either.

       

       

      And the city
      life?
      How you see those values stand
      in the city life?

       

      Here I have a conflict.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      There are important choices to make in
      the city from the way we shop, to the way we behave, the way we look at each
      other, our capacity to share love and joy, to keep our vibration high by the
      means that each of us finds appropriate. 
      I see the fight in the city more important or as important as anywhere
      else.  On the other hand I remember
      when I was living in New York, I had a friend that was making fun of my
      vegetarianism, he was asking how living in a city like New York could be an
      ethical choice.  Just the existence
      and sustenance of this city means the death to other life forms.

      It is complicated but urgent. A
      very difficult task

       

       

    • 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.

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      29/5 - 17.00 to 22.00h
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      Dexia Art Centre -Schildknaapstraat/Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussel 

       

      >>><<<<

      In the frame of Aleppo's research project ‘Back to the Order’, six artistic researchers of a.pass will discuss, perform, exhibit and share their different takes on notions of ‘order’ and its simultaneous resonances of ease and discomfort, of political rigidity and potential, of aesthetic boredom and political reconsideration. Exploring the shifting territories of an order to be reconstructed, a.pass proposes ‘volver’ as an incentive to become involved, to revolve around recurring and shared interests, to recompose history in the aftermaths of an imploded revolution.

      Departing from the individual projects, concepts such as the domestic, evolving identities, (the act of) display(ing) and artistic production will be approached as the shifting ground on which the idea of order and its consequences can be explored and activated. 

      On Friday the 29th and Saturday the 30th of May, we invite you for performances, film screenings and installations, to share in the artistic research processes, participate in workshops and attend lectures and presentations by the guests of the researchers: Patricia Reed, Gonçalo Pena and Petra van Brabant.

      program:

       

      Samah Hijawi
      The Wandering Singer of Tales

      lecture performance

      samah

      This work is an exploration of the aesthetics of loss, and the images recreated - by the looser - of a place and a time that perpetuates through fragile narratives, utopic images, and nostalgic songs - tokens and emblems for preserving memory. Located in political and artistic histories around Palestine, 'The Wandering Singer of Tales' questions the temporality of images reproduced of lost places, and how these function in the present following a ruptured historical trajectory of dislocation, trauma and exile in the last century.

       

      line650

      Cecilia Molano
      Story Lines

      one-to-one performative installation

      cecilia

      Writing becomes trace. An unthinkable process of alchemy. Each word is, again, what it was before becoming a word: an image, a hesitation, a movement.

      Narrative melts into drawings. Life remains there, in the paper, as a footprint. The diary is an invented document: the fiction of oneself.

      In this work we turn back to the place of words before being articulated. 

      This installation is an experiment in co-writing, reading and (re)creating.

       

      line650

      Philippine Hoegen
      Versions and Displays 

      video installation, performative interventions

      philipine

      Versioning - as in: regarding objects in the way they appear to us as versions of themselves - means that other versions are possible, probable. Different versions are present simultaneously and may become perceptible through a slight shift of perspective or a change in the gaze. The point of this exercise is a rearrangement of relations between things. Traits, qualities and characteristics that were assumed to be constitutive for ‘our’ of ‘their’ selves, are questioned and relativized; they may in fact simply be a consequence, an outcome, of the angle at which you are looking. This implies fluidity in the nature of relations, it destabilises presumptions and assumptions. It is a way to understand the constant flux in the order of relations between things.

      Undergoing (Another Version, 2015), or trying to embody (Regarding David and Dividing David, 2 performances, 2015) are ways in which I attempt to see or experience things –objects, situations, myself- from more or other sides than the given frame allows. Unraveling through history different narratives about an object constructed and deconstructed through display (The Borneo Trophy, performance, 2015) or re-ordering the display (Arena, video installation, 2015) are strategies to shift or look beyond the frame, producing different objects, or more precisely different versions: the object as a different version of itself. 

       

      line650

      Sara Santos
      Excavate

      films 

      sara

      deuses vadios (stray gods)
      16mm, approx. 8', color, sound

      BORGES' poems
      (mirrors),
      S8, approx. 3', b&w, silent

      Borges' poems
      (heaven and hell),
      S8, approx. 4', b&w/color, silent 

      Excavate (‘ekska, veit) vb excavates, excavating, excavated. 1 to remove (soil, earth etc.) by digging; dig out. 2 to make (hole or tunnel) in (solid matter) by hollowing. 3 to unearth (buried objects) methodically to discover information about the past. (C16: from L. cavãre to make hollow, from cavus hollow).

      The dead heroes are closer to a ruin-state than to glorious, tragic death. Putting aside the epic patina, ruin is a romantic process of decay. The hero itself is the embodiment of a zombie ideology, a living-dead, a transition. By ideology, I mean immaterial constructions (symbolic ‘texts’) that impact and condition our experience of the world, and ultimately become materialized in it. 

      Coming back to ‘an order’ unfolds a discussion about how the common experience of a crisis (war, uprising, revolution, disaster..) becomes inscribed, or eventually, cultural. My research focusses on the left-over materials of a given crisis, on the symbolic objects of those experiences, and their trajectory towards an eventual stabilization into oblivion.

      How do they change into something else, or stay resilient? Resonating for decades, they appear as distortions of contexts long gone.

       

      line650

      Gosie Vervloesem
      Tupperware

      performance workshop 

      gosie

      The answer on how to cope with the chaos in our daily lives lies at the bottom of a Tupperware box. 'Recipes for Disaster / The Magazine/Tupperware Party’ cooks up crucial questions: how to argue for messy and less sterile life in times of Ebola? And, how to free ourselves from the quarantine of our own bathroom?

      Everybody knows Tupperware, the handy plastic boxes to store and conserve food, for eternity. 'Recipes for Disaster” uses the format of the Tupperware Party (women getting together around the kitchen table to attend demonstrations of shiny plastic boxes.) And at  the same time disrupts the idea that everything can be nicely stored away. 

       

      line650

      Veridiana Zurita
      Televizinho #1 

      talk  

      veri

      For 3 months I have been working together with a riverside community in the Amazon on re-enactments of Brazilian soap operas. I spent 3 days with each family and used their house as the studio for filming. Eating what they eat, sleeping as they do, watching what we watch: soaps. Every night we looked at the soap and picked a scene to re-enact the next day. While re-enacting different logics of appropriation were inaugurated. The way soaps seem to order language and physicality were disturbed by those re-enacting it. 

      During a talk I will share some of the footage, the working methodologies, the context and ideas around the first edition of this ongoing project. 

      image

      workshops & lectures

      >>><<<<

      Petra Van Brabandt
      Disruption is still to come

      table talk - Fri 7pm

      The disruptive movements of the last years were hardly a threat to the state of order. They might be the first signals of a disruption to come; therefore to entertain the idea of 'back to an order' is far too precocious, even pernicious to the imaginative process of unworking the order. I want to focus in this table-conversation on the order of Fort Europe, which hasn't been radically contested. Our obsessions with order and stability seem to warrant the mass grave outside our safety gates. This is the horror of order showing its face, again. Inspired by the work of Gosie Vervloessem, I want to compare Fort Europa to the dynamics of fear of the kitchen, and question its order, hygiene, productivity and purpose.

      >>><<<<

      Patricia Reed

      Mobile Orders

      lecture - Sat 4.45pm

      ‘Order’ in and of itself, is a structural proposition in which sets of functions, behaviours, relations and norms can play out (while making other operations impossible or extremely difficult to carry out). Within the ‘social’, order is largely cultural, meaning productively artificial, subject to infinite mutability. So to demand ‘order’ is not (necessarily) to seek to submit oneself to relations of authoritarian dominance, but to seize upon structural possibilities as a project for construction. ‘Order’, in this way, is mobilised as an affirmative project - a freedom to construct new systems of cohabitation (rather than simply a freedom from something).  read more

      >>><<<<

      Gonçalo Pena
      Drawing Askew

      Master Class - Sat 12.30 to 3.30pm

      Within a conscious danger of falling back into romanticist politics and trying to avoid this trap, I would take this idea of an ethical or even several ethical lines to think drawing as one of the tools we have to challenge politics of smoothing and soothing the collective body onto mindless consumerism. It is important to state that this collective body has still a human multitudinous and restless soul, from which the annoying and frequent twitches call for permanent police vigilance. Moreover this body comes from the box including with it technology and complete ecosystems. So it comes the time where this soul struggles and seem itself forced to draw her painful lines of choice, discovery, recovery of concepts and criticism. read more

      a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij

      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • FRIDAY 17.00-22.00

      17.00-end: Video installations: ‘Excavate’ by Sara Santos, ‘Arena’ by Philippine Hoegen

      17.30-19.00: ‘Story Lines’ one-to-one performative installation by Cecilia Molano

      18.00-18.30: Welcoming

      18.30-19.00: ‘Tupperware’ performance workshop by Gosie Vervloesem, food introduction

      19.00-19.45: ‘Disruption is still to come’, table discussion with Petra Van Brabandt

      19.45-20.00: Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods) 16mm film by Sara Santos

      20.00-20.30: Break

      20.30-21.30: ‘Televizinho #1’ talk by Veridiana Zurita

      21.30-21.45: ‘Another Version’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

      after: Bar Talks

       

      SATURDAY 12.30-23.00

      12.30-15.30: ‘Drawing Askew’ Master class/workshop by Gonçalo Pena

      14.00-end: Ongoing video installations ‘Excavate’ by Sara Santos, ‘Arena’ by Philippine Hoegen. Documentation installations by Gosie Vervloessem and Cecilia Molano

      16.00- 16.15: Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods) 16mm film by Sara Santos

      16.15-16.45: ‘Borneo Trophy’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

      16.45-17.30: ‘Mobile Orders’ lecture by Patricia Reed

      17.30-18.00: Break

      18.00-18.30: ‘Regarding David’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

      18.30-19.30: 'The Wandering Singer of Tales’ lecture performance by Samah Hijawi

      19.30-20.00: Break 

      20.00-20.15: Screening ‘Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods)’ 16mm film by Sara Santos

      20.15-20.30: ‘Dividing David’ performance and participative installation by Philippine Hoegen, with Kristien Van Den Brande

      20.45-21.45: Discussion with guests and participants

      22.00 END

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Volver
    • VOLVER 06 May 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Cecilia Molano, Sara Santos, Gosie Vervloessem and Veridiana Zurita
    • aleppo.eu
    • 29 May 2015
    • 30 May 2015
    • VOLVER

      performative conference and presentations by 

      SAMAH HIJAWI, PHILIPPINE HOEGEN,
      CECILIA MOLANO, SARA SANTOS, 
      GOSIE VERVLOESEM & VERIDIANA ZURITA

      29 (5-10pm) - 30/5 (12.30-11pm)

      (click here for detailed program)

      Aleppo - Dexia Art Centre - Schildknaapstraat/Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussel

      For Volver, a.pass is a guest at Aleppo, a laboratory of experiments in performance and politics, in residency at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts Bruxelles

      In the frame of Aleppo's research project ‘Back to the Order’, six artistic researchers of a.pass will discuss, perform, exhibit and share their different takes on notions of ‘order’ and its simultaneous resonances of ease and discomfort, of political rigidity and potential, of aesthetic boredom and political reconsideration. Exploring the shifting territories of an order to be reconstructed, a.pass proposes ‘volver’ as an incentive to become involved, to revolve around recurring and shared interests, to recompose history in the aftermaths of an imploded revolution.

      Departing from our individual projects we will dive into our researches, and approach concepts such as the domestic, evolving identities, (the act of) display(ing) and artistic production as the shifting ground on which the idea of order and its consequences can be explored and activated.

      On Friday the 29th and Saturday the 30th of May, we invite you for performances, film screenings and installations, to share in the artistic research processes, participate in workshops and attend lectures and presentations by the guests of the researchers: Patricia Reed, Gonçalo Pena and Petra van Brabant.

       

       

      program:

      SAMAH HIJAWI
      THE WANDERING SINGER OF TALES

      performance lecture

      This work is an exploration of the aesthetics of loss, and the images recreated - by the looser - of a place and a time that perpetuates through fragile narratives, utopic images, and nostalgic songs - tokens and emblems for preserving memory. Located in political and artistic histories around Palestine, 'The Wandering Singer of Tales' questions the temporality of images reproduced of lost places, and how these function in the present following a ruptured historical trajectory of dislocation, trauma and exile in the last century.

      >>><<<<

      CECILIA MOLANO
      STORY LINES

      one-to-one performative installation

      Writing becomes trace. An unthinkable process of alchemy. Each word is, again, what it was before becoming a word: an image, a hesitation, a movement.

      Narrative melts into drawings. Life remains there, in the paper, as a footprint. The diary is an invented document: the fiction of oneself.

      In this work we turn back to the place of words before being articulated.

      This installation is an experiment in co-writing, reading and (re)creating.

      >>><<<<

      PHILIPPINE HOEGEN
      VERSIONS AND DISPLAYS 

      Video Installation, Performative Interventions

      Versioning - as in: regarding objects in the way they appear to us as versions of themselves - means that other versions are possible, probable. Different versions are present simultaneously and may become perceptible through a slight shift of perspective or a change in the gaze. The point of this exercise is a rearrangement of relations between things. Traits, qualities and characteristics that were assumed to be constitutive for ‘our’ of ‘their’ selves, are questioned and relativized; they may in fact simply be a consequence, an outcome, of the angle at which you are looking. This implies fluidity in the nature of relations, it destabilises presumptions and assumptions. It is a way to understand the constant flux in the order of relations between things.

      Undergoing (Another Version, 2015), or trying to embody (Regarding David and Dividing David, 2 performances, 2015) are ways in which I attempt to see or experience things –objects, situations, myself- from more or other sides than the given frame allows. Unraveling through history different narratives about an object constructed and deconstructed through display (The Borneo Trophy, performance, 2015) or re-ordering the display (Arena, video installation, 2015) are strategies to shift or look beyond the frame, producing different objects, or more precisely different versions: the object as a different version of itself.

      >>><<<<

      SARA SANTOS
      EXCAVATE

      films

      Excavate (‘ekska, veit) vb excavates, excavating, excavated. 1 to remove (soil, earth etc.) by digging; dig out. 2 to make (hole or tunnel) in (solid matter) by hollowing. 3 to unearth (buried objects) methodically to discover information about the past. (C16: from L. cavãre to make hollow, from cavus hollow).

      The dead heroes are closer to a ruin-state than to glorious, tragic death. Putting aside the epic patina, ruin is a romantic process of decay. The hero itself is the embodiment of a zombie ideology, a living-dead, a transition. By ideology, I mean immaterial constructions (symbolic ‘texts’) that impact and condition our experience of the world, and ultimately become materialized in it.

      Coming back to ‘an order’ unfolds a discussion about how the common experience of a crisis (war, uprising, revolution, disaster..) becomes inscribed, or eventually, cultural. My research focusses on the left-over materials of a given crisis, on the symbolic objects of those experiences, and their trajectory towards an eventual stabilization into oblivion.

      How do they change into something else, or stay resilient? Resonating for decades, they appear as distortions of contexts long gone.

      >>><<<<

      GOSIE VERVLOESEM
      TUPPERWARE

      performance workshop

      The answer on how to cope with the chaos in our daily lives lies at the bottom of a Tupperware box. 'Recipes for Disaster / The Magazine/Tupperware Party’ cooks up crucial questions: how to argue for messy and less sterile life in times of Ebola? And, how to free ourselves from the quarantine of our own bathroom?

      Everybody knows Tupperware, the handy plastic boxes to store and conserve food, for eternity. 'Recipes for Disaster” uses the format of the Tupperware Party (women getting together around the kitchen table to attend demonstrations of shiny plastic boxes.) And at  the same time disrupts the idea that everything can be nicely stored away.

      >>><<<<

      VERIDIANA ZURITA 
      TELEVIZINHO #1 

      Talk 

      For 3 months I have been working together with a riverside community in the Amazon on re-enactments of Brazilian soap operas. I spent 3 days with each family and used their house as the studio for filming. Eating what they eat, sleeping as they do, watching what we watch: soaps. Every night we looked at the soap and picked a scene to re-enact the next day. While re-enacting different logics of appropriation were inaugurated. The way soaps seem to order language and physicality were disturbed by those re-enacting it.

      During a talk I will share some of the footage, the working methodologies, the context and ideas around the first edition of this ongoing project.

      workshops & lectures

      >>><<<<

      PATRICIA REED
      MOBILE ORDERS

      lecture - Sat 4.45pm

      ‘Order’ in and of itself, is a structural proposition in which sets of functions, behaviours, relations and norms can play out (while making other operations impossible or extremely difficult to carry out). Within the ‘social’, order is largely cultural, meaning productively artificial, subject to infinite mutability. So to demand ‘order’ is not (necessarily) to seek to submit oneself to relations of authoritarian dominance, but to seize upon structural possibilities as a project for construction. ‘Order’, in this way, is mobilised as an affirmative project - a freedom to construct new systems of cohabitation (rather than simply a freedom from something).  read more

      >>><<<<

      GONÇALO PENA
      DRAWING ASKEW

      Master Class - Sat 12.30 to 3.30pm

      Within a conscious danger of falling back into romanticist politics and trying to avoid this trap, I would take this idea of an ethical or even several ethical lines to think drawing as one of the tools we have to challenge politics of smoothing and soothing the collective body onto mindless consumerism. It is important to state that this collective body has still a human multitudinous and restless soul, from which the annoying and frequent twitches call for permanent police vigilance. Moreover this body comes from the box including with it technology and complete ecosystems. So it comes the time where this soul struggles and seem itself forced to draw her painful lines of choice, discovery, recovery of concepts and criticism. read more

      >>><<<<

      PETRA VAN BRABANDT
      DISRUPTION IS STILL TO COME.

      table talk - Fri 7pm

      The disruptive movements of the last years were hardly a threat to the state of order. They might be the first signals of a disruption to come; therefore to entertain the idea of 'back to an order' is far too precocious, even pernicious to the imaginative process of unworking the order. I want to focus in this table-conversation on the order of Fort Europe, which hasn't been radically contested. Our obsessions with order and stability seem to warrant the mass grave outside our safety gates. This is the horror of order showing its face, again. Inspired by the work of Gosie Vervloessem, I want to compare Fort Europa to the dynamics of fear of the kitchen, and question its order, hygiene, productivity and purpose

    • [call] 2015/II 09 April 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      newscaption
       
      emailer_call_header
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

      Please find information on the application procedure here.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to come to the next public presentations our currently ending a.pass participants on 29th and 30th May 2014. More information will be available on our website from beginning of May.

       

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    • call

      for artistic research PROPOSALS

      Due to the Ministry's decision we have to put the Intakes on hold until further notice. 

      Thanks for your interest in a.pass!


      post Graduate PROGRAM


      DEADLINE: 00/00/0000
      TO START IN ....

      SELECTION TALKS :   00 and 00/ 00/0000
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)

       

      call for Associate Researchers

      DEADLINE: 00/00/0000
      TO START IN ....

      SELECTION TALKS :   00 and 00/ 00/0000
      (PLEASE KEEP THESE DAYS FREE!)

       

       


       

       

       

      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) is an artistic and educational research environment that welcomes research practitioners, from all professional backgrounds in an international self-organized, collaborative and trans-disciplinary program. a.pass includes two complementary structures that operate in parallel and in dialogue: the Postgraduate Program and the Research Center.

      This call for applications is inviting researchers who would like to start or continue a research trajectory within an experimental and professional artistic research environment. a.pass offers a one-year post-graduate program or a one-year Associate Researcher affiliation where researchers can develop research proposals in a collective, supportive environment independent from production constraints.

      a.pass welcomes proposals which are directly situated and working within existing communities. We strive to develop a greater network between existing communities and become a hub for research methodologies that are grounded and productive in existing contemporary struggles.

       

      Post-graduate program

      The a.pass Postgraduate Program organizes a one-year artistic research curriculum for artists / researchers from all professional backgrounds. a.pass researchers develop an independent artistic research trajectory in a shared and collectively created research environment. They engage in presentations and feedback, collective workshops, individual and group mentoring and modular interactions with the curators and other researchers.

      As an educational environment, a.pass opens a space for speculative and experimental modes of practice and critical thinking. The content and the practical apparatus of the program are shaped by the proposals of the a.pass curators, the artistic coordinator and the a.pass researchers.

       

      or

       

      Associate Researcher in the Research Center

      The a.pass Research Center as a platform for advanced research practices in the arts, invites five to six Associate Researchers for a one-year cycle. They follow a part of their research trajectory in an environment of mutual criticality and institutional support. The Research Center welcomes radical and inventive research methodologies in order to contribute them to the larger a.pass environment and beyond. The Research Center interacts with the a.pass Post-Graduate Program and functions as a resource for methodologies of collaborative research. The Research Center supports and facilitates forms of performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions, etc), experimental research set ups, workshops and collaborations.

      a.pass welcomes researchers with non-academic and academic research affiliations and support structures. Researchers with an existing academic research trajectory (for example PhD in the Arts) have the opportunity to develop the practice-based part of their research within the educational environment of a.pass.

       

      MORE INFORMATION AND LINKS TO THE APPLICATION:

      post-graduate selection criteria

      associate researcher affiliation

       

       


      a.pass
      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: program@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL 29 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Oscar Parada
    • a.pass
    • 22 June 2015
    • 26 June 2015
    • TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

      In this workshop Medicine Man Oscar Parada proposes hologenic breathing techniques, re-birthing, sound evocation, Zen Buddhism and ritualistic elements from the Amerindian cosmogony as ways to explore the sacred. The workshop has as objective to engage and reproduce the sacred in connection to the performative ritual space. Which means: to perform a transformation. It is this transformation we can call 'medicine'.  Medicine is understood here as everything that transforms us.  

      In the first place this workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal one. Secondly, the workshop is also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways. We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean. We will open different space dimensions to find in ourselves ways to discover, recreate and relearn our personal ritualistic spaces connected to our memory. The different sessions will produce a possible catharsis for the participants to create a collective healing ceremony.

      The last day of the workshop will be directed at questioning and clarifying the individual and collective experiences. We will take time to hear Oscar Parada talking about his concerns, the way his practices make sense to him and how he perceives their possible consequences.

      Some questions that will be addressed throughout the workshop:

      What is a ritual and how can we use our bodies as tools to access a ritualistic space? Could rituals be keys to enter the invisible world and render it perceptible to us? Are ritualistic practices ways to open a specific space inside us but connecting us as well with the outside? How to navigate the body for it to become an instrument that can reveal those spaces?

      What is the epistemology supporting the ritualistic practices? What are the tools and symbols at work to create a healing ceremony? How to realise that a mere procedure can escape the mechanical, become a ritual and perform power?

      What is a sacred space? What could be a pre-religious sacred space? Why would we need rituals, ceremonies and sacred spaces? What can they do?

       

      Subscription for this workshop is unfortunately no longer possible. All available places are taken. 

       

       


      Biography

      Medicine Man Oscar Parada

      Master in Traditional Chinese Medicine

      Healer master in Reiki, Acupressure, Jin Shin Do, Shiatsu and Do In


      Taoist Yoga instructor: Chi Kung, Dao jin and Ba Dua Jing

      Received his ordination as a Bodhisattva Monk in Zen Buddhism more than 20 years ago, receiving the name of Do Sei.


      Zen- Za-Zen meditation instructor

      Martial artist: Aikido, Wing Chun, Tai sword and Katana

      Music therapist

      Professional Rebirther and healer in the art of the breath



      Coordinates a self-healing school in Bogota, Colombia: El Centro de la Respiración Conciente


      Director of the Tierra Humana Foundation.



       

      He has been training actors for more than 15 years, from a perspective that defines the actor as a social healer and the origins of theater as collective cathartic rituals.

      Medical anthropologist and researcher of different healing systems from different cultures, he has specialized in the Tibetan Buddhist system, the Greek catharsis techniques and the Sotai from Japan.


      In order to integrate his knowledge as a Medicine Man he has embraced the ways of the Native American Wisdom and works and learns with other medicine men of North and South America.
 He has been walking and learning with traditional indian medicine for more than 15 years.
 At the moment he prays and prepares the medicine with the master Don Segundo Navia Mutbajoy of the Inga tribe of the Putumayo jungle. He also works and learns with Hilario Chiriap, Shaman of the Shuar tribe of the Ecuador Amazon, participating in the cutting, preparation and praying for the ancestral ceremony of the initiation of the NateMamo. In the year 2000 he began his formation as a Spiritual Leader and Medicine Man in the Native American Tradition of the Sacred Fire of Itzachilatlan. He received the blessing as Fire Man, the water blessing of the Temascal and the Sun Dance Drum blessing, 13 days Vision Searcher, Carrier of the Channupa (sacred pipe), Carrier of the Moon Prayer. He has guided for the last 4 years vision quest processes in Colombia and since last year in Greece.


      Walker of the Medicine Circle of the Hicuri grandfather, he is initiated in this way with Emerson Jackson, medicine man and spiritual leader of the Navajo People. For several years he accompanies Uncle Fred Vasquez, Medicine Man of the Teocalli Tlanezi branch of Mexico, of whom he receives the instruction of the ceremony of the the 4 tobaccos. He presently collaborates and learns with Tomas Adriano Perez, carrier of the Medicine of the Huichol tradition of North Mexico, with whom he opened the ceremony of the 4 Inipis to support the Sun Dance prayer in Colombia.

    • [Call] Block 15/I 23 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      apass_logo_sm

      emailer_call_header

       

       call

      FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH PROJECTS
      POST-MASTER AND PHD LEVEL

       


       

      Deadline: 04/05/2015

      to start in September 2015

      Selection talks : 18&19/05/2015

      (please keep these days free!)

       
       

      if you are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

       

       

       

      or if the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

       

       
      take a look! If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to come to the next public presentations our currently ending a.pass participants on 29th and 30th May 2014. More information will be available on our website from beginning of May.

       

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    • information
    • How to find a.pass 25 February 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

      a.pass 
      advanced performance and scenography studies
      Posthogeschool voor Podiumkunsten vzw
      Delaunoystraat 58-60 bus 17
      1080 Brussels (Sint-Jans-Molenbeek)
      Belgium

      email us: office@apass.be

      talk to us: +32 (0) 486 57 61 01

      The office and meeting space are situated at GC Nekkersdal: Emile Bockstaellaan 107, 1020 Laken

      The library and workspace can be found at Manchesterstraat 17, 1080 Molenbeek

       

       

       

    • Thinking about tools in the research environment of a.pass is a tricky 'thing'. When we think about tools in everyday language, we think about 'things that do something'. But not whatever. Tools are things that have their function inscribed in them, that are optimized for achieving a certain goal, like the radically specified instruments IKEA offers you in its DIY packages. In an artistic research environment the question thus to ask in the first place is: what kind of tools do we need to do what we do?

      In a recent conference a.pass organized under the title 'Don't Know', this question took central stage. Is a platform for artistic research supposed to 'produce knowledge', as the current politics in arts and education seem to suggest. Is artistic research actually a veiled normative restriction to the messiness of the arts practices in general? A field within the arts where the outcome is supposed to be communicable, replicable, usable in other domains? For me this question of demanded outcomes and, accordingly, of fitting tools is a complicated one. Very often the categorizations used in the arts reveal their own limitations rather than open up clearly defined fields of knowledge.

      In that sense we might argue that art (and artistic research) does not in the first instance produce knowledge, but that the arts keep on opening up the cracks in our systems of understanding: mislaying the knowledge that in the gridlocked pre-defined contexts that define our society can only be understood according to the conventions of the discourses (be they political, aesthetic, psychological, ...) the knowledge 'belongs' to. When speaking about artistic research, would it then not seem more appropriate to talk about 'knowledge processing' instead of 'knowledge production'? Art as a game of misplacing informations rather than creating 'new' ones? Research as a process assembling and reassembling bits and pieces of knowledge, opening up perspectives, rather than formerly uncharted territories? And does this in a lot of ways not echo a contemporary understanding of knowledge in a wider context than the arts? If we embrace this hypothesis, this move from understanding artistic research as a field for 'knowledge production' to that of 'knowledge processing, mislaying, misunderstanding', we have to rethink our tools accordingly.

      For one, I don't feel artistic research should be meddled up with any kind of naïve laboratory metaphor borrowed from the applied sciences: artistic research is rarely full-proof, and often the results obtained are hard to transpose to any other situation without a significant loss of contextual relevance or performative power. The same goes for the tools used in the research. Rather than the surefire tools of industry or certain branches of science, artistic research mostly makes use of 'broken tools', in the quasi-Heideggerian sense of the words: tools that point to themselves as much as they fulfill a specific task. If we were to set up a manual for recognizing useful tools for artistic research, I would say that rule of thumb number one could be:

      IF IT TALKS BACK IT'S PROBABLY A GOOD TOOL

      A tool in artistic research is never smooth and flexible. It is an artefact, a concept, a thing that resists any kind of suave usefulness. In its being-put-into-practice it never stops talking, demanding, negotiating with the researchers and demanding to be taken into account as an equal partner in the discussion. In the past years I have used mostly 'prickly objects': tools that when put on the table, produce irritation, a slight weariness, an uncomfortable unwillingness of the research partners to engage with it. 'The Symptomatic Body' for example exasperated the psycho-analytically inclined and was a constant source of misunderstanding for the performers involved. Just as my ongoing practice-based research project around 'Critical Hope' transformed the gallery space of my Natural History Museum of Hope unexpectedely in a bureau for social and psychological first-aid. In the last case this side-effect was not foreseen nor desired, which resulted in the tool and me saying our goodbyes at the end of the project. Which brings us to rule of thumb number two:

      IF THE TOOL IS YOUR PARTNER PREPARE FOR A DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATION

      The tool is never yours for the use. It comes with a logic and a performativity of its own. A tool does what it does within certain circumstances, but cannot be projected upon without a loss of its functionality. I therefore advise to take tools seriously, to listen to their concerns. A particular brand of dangerously instable tools are the metaphorical ones. Using a metaphorical tool runs the risk of your relationship running amok very quickly. A metaphor comes with so many associations, with such a complete pack of previous engagements, it doesn't allow you a lot of projection or intimacy. Personally I can only relate to the MT by taking it literally, by 'doing the metaphor', and see where this brings me. Often the metaphor turns out to be inappropriate when living it, but again here the side-effects can produce unexpected, possibly valuable results.

      The project tool I'm working on right now is one of these half-breeds (half-metaphor, half performative frame). 'The Walk' takes the idea of the mobile archive and the nomadic quality of research (as independent of a specific discipline) at heart, and takes the form of a one month walk with the researchers, walking a specific score in which every one of them develops their own research narrative, leaving traces on the way for others to pick up and reconstruct throughout the journey. The traces and the interpretations assemble and reassemble the surrounding landscape, adding a fictional layer to the territory, rendering at the same time familiar (through framing/narrativizing) and unfamiliar (through the sheer incompatibility of the traces left) the journey you are going through. In this case the tool is particularly resistent to any kind of different use. The physical demands of being on the road, sleeping outside, the limited budget, ask for a certain discipline and attitude that will influence the research results greatly. In other words: we deal here with an imposing and demanding partner with its own set of instruments (the walking score, the time restrictions, the financial limits, ...) that possibly will result in pointing almost solely to itself, turning the research into the tool. An accidental transfer that for example marked a lot of the new media research projects in the 1990's.

      In other words, the tool is what makes things visible, and hides others. Taking this into account we could say that:

       

      AN INTERESTING TOOL IS ALWAYS (PARTLY) APOPHATIC

      In dealing with tools one of the most interesting things is the realization of what they do NOT produce or process: the information they cannot bring to the fore, the things they make invisible or impossible to achieve. In that sense working with different tools is also a powerful critique on what can be said where and when (as in Rancià ¨re's partage du sensible). In an 'advanced research project' this critique then in turn can become part of the experimental set-up. In the after-days of the conference, for example, the a.pass researchers tried to map out the results of the talks, laying out hypotheses and conclusions, and trying to devise the appropriate tools to do so. Since a bonafide research environment always aims for an enlarged visibility and partnership, we started up a wikipedia page under the title 'Don't Know' and from there on enlarged our ambition to continue with a working period constructing the (strangely enough non-existing) wikipedia page around 'Artistic Research'. Since the limitations of the wikipedia format are what they are, though, the working process is sure to unveil more and more hiatuses in its potential to deal with the archiving question. The tool is limited and shows its limits quite quickly in this case. The work for us is thus to keep on addressing this impossible task, producing on the way more and more by-products, left-overs that cannot be dealt with (we use as instruments workshops, invite guests, case-studies of individual researches, bologna rules cc artistic research, etc...). And these materials will be used to make a publication that, for us, addresses exactly what interests us in the topic: the multi-layered, the illogical bends and turns, the disagreement in terms, the non-acceptance of some practices that the negotiated process of wikipedia's peer-to-peer process excludes. We use the wikipedia-tool in other words to come to a better understanding of the particular field we move in, the field that as yet cannot be recuperated in a clearly informational format, that needs its temporary exclusivity to thrive.

      A tool in this case works as a vehicle, an impossible destination, a black hole around which to gather, to speak, to think, to process. A tool is only a tool as long as it 'does' that. Its power lies in its mutuality, in its potential to create change, if allowed by its partner to do so. When falling out of grace, it loses its power to speak, it can only work when given all of our attention. When passed on its behavior is unpredictable, but then again, this instability, this demand to be heard in the specificty of the new situation, is what makes the tool a thing to reckon with.

      a.pass is an artistic research environment at post-master level, open to artists and theoreticians. a.pass offers an experimental space and instruments to develop research skills in a shared and collaboratively created knowledge environment. Every researcher can translate his personal project into a tailor-made curriculum.

      a.pass = a.pt + a.s + a.rc

      a.pt (advanced performance training) is mainly aimed at artists and theoreticians with experience in developing work in or on the field of performance that don(t fit into a standard institutional framework.
      a.s (advanced scenography) welcomes artists and theoreticians who would like to investigate the notion of scenography on and off the stage. The program offers practice-based to professionals who want to expand their thinking about scenography.
      a.rc (a.pass research centre) is the place the workings of a.pass are analyzed, documented and opened up to critical debate. a.rc also functions as the platform for the development of long-term or PhD-level research within the arts.

      www.apass.be

    • This text was written for the magazine of the Steirischer Herbst Festival (Austria). Although the text addresses the specific spatial situation of PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in Reims (a place where a.pass goes at least once per block for a week during End Week), the thinking and writing process around this text was largely constructed around the notions of space as developed in the series of Settlement workshops that were created by current APC Vladimir Miller, and that greatly influenced the notions of ‘performative space’ and scenography as they are developed in a.pass.

      SPACES AS TOOLS
      One lonely dancer lies meditating on the grass, a challenging philosophical treatise opened on page 213 next to him. From the open windows of the nearby room the sound of a theatre rehearsal, eerily repetitive, its harshness clashing with the idyllic surroundings. The peacocks look through the window of the corner studio at a yoga session. A group of American runaway brides (with fitting gowns) returns from a work session in the nearby woods, their conversations incomprehensible to the uninitiated onlooker. And in every corridor, every time you enter the kitchen, two or more people are discussing politics, the arts, food, practicalities, planning parties, the evening film program, or inviting the others to their showings or work. Not the most typical PAF-day maybe, but surely a possible one.

      PAF stands for Performing Arts Forum: a former convent reoriented towards artists, actionists and thinkers in the French Champagne. The 6400 sq feet building was bought by the Dutch theatre maker Jan Ritsema in 2007 (2008?), and has since then functioned as an open space for artists and theoreticians from over the whole world. On its website, the place introduces itself as:
      - a forum for producing knowledge in critical exchange and ongoing discursive practice
      - a place for temporary autonomy and full concentration on work
      - a tool-machine where one can work on developing methods, tools and procedures, not necessarily driven toward a product
      - a place for experimenting with other than known modes of production and organization of work, e.g. open source production.

      1. The malaise of a generation

      In a way this description echoes the concerns of artists in the performing and other scenes of the last ten years and more. The artistic scene has little by little found itself squeezed between governmental compartmentation (through often ill-fitting and politically motivated subsidy systems) and the seductive call of the enterprise-funded 'creative industries', paving the way for an understanding of the artist as either a well-prepared and policy-aware dossier-writer, or a self-proclaimed entrepreneur totally in line with the neo-liberal ethics of self-realization, mobility and economic common sense.

      Trying to go against the grain of the times, countless artists have expressed the need and the urgency to escape these corsets of survival by pointing out their toxic by-products: the subsidy system in the well-founded European scene has started to create a way of working and an aesthetics that is not primarily based on artistic choice and necessity, but on the possibilities of touring (and reaching your minimum quota of presentations), networking (getting as much prominent arts centres to back up your project), and formatting (ideally a performance should fit as many venues as possible, not be too costly, and be adaptable to the regular programming strategies of the field). The kind of work that escapes these constraints is often overlooked or doesn't find its way into the regular programmation.

      In that sense the self-organized artist model, which depends largely on grants , sponsoring or cooperation with commercial institutions and enterprises might seem a less hypocritical choice for some. And it is true that some company grant systems (Cartier, Siemens, …) have in the last decades built themselves a reputation on supporting often experimental and challenging artists, without posing banal economic constraints on their output. But even in these 'ideal' circumstances, for a lot of artists this kind of recuperation of the artist's position, equalling it to the position of any middle-of-the-road creative worker for any progressive neo-liberal company, does seem to deprive him of any credible critical bite.

      Now, it is not the case that in the time span of the last twenty years nothing has been done to accommodate this malaise in the arts. The (European) subsidiary system for example, has invested a lot of resources in the creation of residency spaces, laboratory situations, exchange programs and learning environments that should fill the gap between the artist's needs and the governmental policies. On a large scale, networking and exchange between artists from different countries has been promoted, festivals have echoed the concerns of the neo-liberalisation of the arts, economy and ecology have entered the arts debates, etc… But in the end, the last word was and is still given to the subsidizer: the one who pays decides. And however close the bureaucratized commissions, jury's, cabinets and programmers might come to an understanding of the arts, their strategies and ideologies will always be primarily oriented towards the survival and sustainability of the institution, on the uni-formization of the field (to make it more efficient and manageable), and on the transparent and seductive promo-talk demanded by the communication departments.

      And, even more importantly, the artistic sector these last years has been cringing under the hot breath of the increasingly right-oriented politics. Recently, in the Netherlands, the funding for the experimental performance sector got all but eliminated. Portugal since one year no longer has a Minister of Culture. France is giving reign to a neo-conservative arts ideology and so forth. Not even speaking about the countless countries in the East that have no budget for the experimental arts scene whatsoever.

      2. Artistic self-organization as a way out of the impasse

      In answer to the above-mentioned reserves, artists everywhere in the world have been working on creating alternative models and frames for the development of their own work. An endeavor that has been tinged by the pull from both the comfort of the subsidized scene, and the self-promoting grandeur of the self-made artist.
      On the one hand for a lot of artists it is hard to survive out of the subsidiary system. Moreover, their dependent statute is often even structurally enhanced by the dole regulation, favoring the artist's special needs by equalling his practice to a gilded form of unemployment. Artists in the well-to-do-countries of today have grown up with the promise of employment, however badly paid. In Belgium, whole weeks are organized under the title First Aid for artist, in which the statute of the beginning artist on the market is discussed. The concern is how to get all these aspiring young creatives working in a field that seems to be overproducing already. Much like the Swiss cows whose milk production largely surpasses the European needs, artists seem to be kept (barely) alive for the wrong reasons. Where the cows are necessary props in the creation of the 'typical' Swiss mountain landscape, the artists kind of function as a band aid for the total lack of political resistance and discussion that rules the current political era.

      So artists have been residency-hopping and networking and realizing themselves like the projects they are, no longer only to sell their goods, but to attain the necessary visibility that will get them invited in think tanks, experimental set-ups and laboratories all over, the one even more critical than the other. However productive these environments might have proved to be, most of these projects come with a price: the working spaces are institutionally tagged, have a limit of validation, have to answer to certain expectations and norms. Just like any other sector in society, the arts have to prove their in- and outcomes, their future visions, their unique selling position, and the originality of their discourse. Not unreasonably, if you follow the logic of the subsidizer. From an artist's point of view, however, these discussion groups and projects often don't reach their goal: for economic reasons the time of working is often too short, or not completely answering the needs of those present. Nor do they feel the need to comply to the desire for the clear profile marketing of the institution inviting them.

      Also, as makers, artists have expressed the need to think of other production systems than the 'typical' career model proposed to the artists in the 1980's. The model of the sole author-artist, inventing his or her own esthetics, has been replaced by a much more critical and historically anchored view on how these artists themselves very quickly become commodities in a system that is in constant search for the 'new'. Artists have started to look for other ways of being together, of producing 'symbolic capital', of developing discourse, that can not so easily be recuperated and branded by the artistic economy. Mixing up recognizable solo identities, artists have been working under collective names, often changing the belonging to the 'group' underway, or working on ongoing researches involving very different participants at every stage. What they put into question is not so much the value of the artistic gesture, but the ownership over the material, the ideas, the producing and creation of the artistic material. Whereas in the practice of the Artist (I represent the model of the sole self-created artist from here on simply by adding the capital A) was largely concerned with the unicity of his production, creating his value on the artist market on the basis of scarcity, newness and shock-value, the artists we talk about in this text are rather concerned with the practices of sharing, of questioning themselves as the centre of gravity, of relating to other (historical, political, economic, discourse) realities. In these contexts, the practice becomes as important as the outcome, the way of organizing the work as important as the work itself, the way of dealing with collaborators a significant part of the trajectory leading up (or not) to a public moment.
      But for this to become a viable artistic practice, another kind of spaces has to be created: spaces that are no longer governed by subsidy policies or economic (un)common sense, but by artists themselves. Places that are not under the reign of profiling and networking, not dubbed as subsidiary placeholders for artistic merit, but simply places to work, that take into account the simple but pressing needs of the artists and thinkers concerned.

      3. Spaces as tools

      It is important at this point to focus a bit more closely on this need for sharing, for flexible collaboration, that seems to encompass a lot of artist's projects in the last decades. In a lot of the PAF discussions over the years, these notions have been put into question: what is the common ground explored here? What is to be shared and in what form? What is the underlying logic of the space? etc…
      Since I just spent three weeks in a space called 'The Settlement', created by artist Vladimir Miller, let us just elaborate a little bit on these notions. As mentioned in the website description of PAF describing itself as a tool, The Settlement as well functioned not so much as a metaphoric space mirroring society, nor as an artistic project to be realized through collaboration, but simply as a 'protospace': an open space filled with non-functional materials, used as a workspace by an unlimited group of people during three weeks time. The participants of this group could rearrange the materials to their own content, and adapt the space every day to the needs of their personal projects. What resulted out of this way of working was a space in constant transition. Momentary moments of clarity, of crystallization of function or meaning (a heap of wooden crates and metal rectangles becoming a recognizable 'desk', three isolation sheets used repeatedly as 'cinema') dissolved into new constructions over the days, charging the space with ever-changing points of focus of attention and activity. What was shared in this settlement was thus not an idea of a theme or a goal, nor a drive for the creation of spaces for 'sociality', but simply the need to work and be of everyone of the participants. In other words, instead of a group of people gathering around a project and a shared belief about what this project could be or lead to, their only stronghod was an idea of 'commonality': a 'mentality of being together', always on the verge of crystallizing into a temporary self-understood community, but always as well dissolving before this point of a shared understanding and identity was achieved.
      If we try to distinguish the community from the communality, I would propose for this text to talk about 'community' as a group that is bounded to a shared value system on the grounds of a recognizable ideology or idea system on which the members of the community agree (or choose to disagree). A community in that sense is based on an initial agreement, however flimsy, and with that agreement comes the appropriation of the individual's contributions, placing them under the banner of a shared territory. In that sense the community is settled, no longer in motion, but as any closed system, in constant dialogue with the outside world.

      (Now, we are talking about an abstract understanding of 'community', since on an individual level, we know we nowadays live under the banner of (often a lot) of very different communities, often in flagrant contradiction to each other on the level of ethics, esthetics and politics. This is exactly what makes agency and decision-making, in and out of the artistic sector, such a difficult endeavor today. But this is another discussion).

      In contrast and in accordance to this understanding of 'community' I would like to place the sense of 'commonality'. Not based on territory (1), commonality has to be understood as a process, as the forming-of-temporary-localities, as a movement on the way to another one. In this context value is not created on the basis of a common belief, but can only be relative to the situation and what is happening in it. Value in this sense can not be recuperated in this temporary zone, it can only be negotiated through the handling of the objects, through the creation of fleeting situations, through the (unspoken) communal debate. Value is, in other words, not dependent on ideological agreement, but can only be understood as 'practice value': whatever enhances the practice and makes it move is valuable for the commonality. Therefore the politics of The Settlement is a politics of circulation, of knowledge and ideas moving from locality to locality, often separated from their original creators, picked up by someone else and left behind again for someone else to find, interpret and restart with.

      In relating this experience to PAF, I think the rephrasing of a space as a tool, as a temporary locality for people to move through, work with and reinterpret, is a valid one. Although radically different in scale and scope, The Settlement and PAF have this in common that they undo the strings attached to artist workspaces as they are mostly understood. The building is both an instrument and a project in itself: whatever you get out of it, you somehow give back to the space, charging it with renewed perspectives and ideas. PAF only has three rules that have to be followed by all residents:
      1. Don't leave traces
      2. Make it possible for others
      3. The do-er decides

      In other words: all residents somehow share a common understanding of the building as an instrument for the development of their personal practice, but every one of them can develop another perspective on what that means. But at the same time, the building is not a silent partner: it is a resistant object, that carries a lot of traces of former use, not always literally materialized, but certainly abundant in the atmosphere, the kind of discussions that prevail, the working attitude, the library, the books sold etcetera… As a privately owned initiative, PAF does carry the stamp of its owner, the critical attitude induced by his presence and legacy. But its sheer size (50 rooms, 15 working spaces) makes any kind of controlled discourse or practice impossible. The uniqueness of PAF probably lies exactly there: that the size and the potential of it gets picked up simultaneously by very different groups of people, which makes it at the same time ungovernable and inspiring. The diverse uses of time (long-time residents mixing with hazardous weekend hoppers), space (the same studio used for performing, midnight dinners, exorcisms and political discussions), and exchange (everything from the lone wolf to the societal preacher), keep the space from closing up, from becoming a territory with a recognizable and forbidding identity. Although three times a year PAF organizes communal activities (the SummerUniversity, WinterUpdateMeeting and SpringMeeting) for more or less restricted participants, even those gatherings are proposed rather as a space for re-thinking and re-arranging than as moments of 'passing on the candle' to the next generation. Also at these moments, the different temporalities become clear within the unlimited body of potential residents: some struggling with questions that were circulating since years already, others looking for a way forward, thus stretching up the current moment towards past and future. Digging up the remains of former discussions for redigestion while planting new seeds at the dinner table.

      (1) The thoughts on territory and locality and the rest of this paragraph are largely based on a conversation with Vladimir Miller in The Settlement

    • 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

    • THE TENDER INSTITUTE

      In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute's extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution."

       

      Who's afraid of the Institute?

      In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. Paraphrasing Dorothy Parker you could say that the Institute in most contemporary engaged art practices is 'not one to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.' What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute's extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution.

      In the last ten years however, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the Institute's mandate. Taking the term up on its potential, rather than its historical accomplishments, the Institute once again has become a point of address: a specific place where people share their concerns and interests, where you can find topical information and engage with it, where knowledge is archived and opened up to public interest and scrutiny. Although it is a bit of a stretch to compare all these particular initiatives, I will venture to formulate some comments on these practices that place them within a larger field of enquiry in today's art field.

      Compared with the more established Institute's the arts' initiatives seem less embedded in a universal idea of knowledge conservation than in a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. In that sense we could use the term 'environmental' for these newly constructed spaces for encounter. The environment here is constructed by the relations and the interests of the people participating in the particular context (of the Bureau, the performance, the work table, etc..). In other words: the institute (without capital I) has lost its clear horizon of social valorization and functionality. It is not transparently embedded in a supra-structure of similar houses of power. Instead it has a nomadic feature that is permeable, a qualitative openness that connects it directly to a context of particular participants, diverse spaces and a larger politico-social context.

      Another important feature of this institute is that it allows for a differential approach of interests. Although the institute clearly functions as a point of address of a certain problematics, as an environmental space, the processing of this information can be shared by anyone participating. Turning the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic openness to different interests. What we see here is a constantly shifting maze of connections and reconnections, allowing for a constant and simultaneous shrinking and aggrandizing of the issues addressed. Connecting now only with a group of 4 participants, and at the same time addressing a global or political question that overrides by far the mandate of the artistic initiative at hand.

      The institute's boundaries in that sense are highly flexible, but not in the way they’d adapt to whatever kind of interpretation. Like in any other institute - and especially in the Tender Institute - the practices and the encounters are prescribed. There is an etiquette ruling the space that makes it possible to engage. There is an invitation that opens up the potential of the encounter. But at the same time the level and focus of engagement stays open for interpretation. For the mutual recognition of a common interest. Based on the smallest of details, or on the largest of analytical frameworks. The institute in that way questions our 'sense of belonging', of being part of the event unfolding: do I engage in the practice as an artist, a citizen, a woman, an agnostic or a believer? What does this engagement then produce in the event? How do I relate to the information that is swirling around? How do I add (or not) to the particular context unfolding?

       

      Infolding the Institute

      The institute (I make the distinction between the Institute as the power house and the institute as the environmental settlement) is a particular space, situated not outside of the logics of classification and order, but standing at its limits, 'at the edge of the void that lies beyond every order of recognition or normalization' (professor Peter Hallward on Foucault's use of the specific). It is this de-normalization process that is of interest to the artist community rethinking its own complicities. All too often the engagement with 'what lies outside' of the arts is taken up on the level of the reinstallment of an oppositional logic of understanding. In the embrace of a politics of trying to understand the other (the precarious worker, the poor, the immigrant, …) the artistic practices process and produce again and again this dichotomic sense of 'normalcy' in contrast to the 'exotic' feature of the have-nots, not taking into account the complicity in the construction of exactly these knowledge divisions, these 'states of exceptions' that sustain an unequal access to the declaration of 'what is important', today as well as in history or in the near future.

      What the institute can do is exactly to redefine the grid that limits our entitlements of knowing and taking action. Turning the strictness of the dividing horizontals and verticals in an interesting plane of 'wholes and holes', for every individual to navigate through. What the institute archives in these circumstances, is then not a universal, nor even a particular kind of knowledge. Rather it archives the processes that keep these different knowledge field connecting and communicating. The institute expresses a desire to address, to weave a grounding but fragmentary mythology for the becoming of the social fabric. No longer a clear road map to navigate our relations in past, present and future, the institute infolds the very diverse ways to deal with the 'situation', with what we think is at stake in this slice of time and space.

       

      Methods and tools

      If we said earlier on that it is a precarious endeavor to put all recent artistic institute's projects on the same line of interpretation, that is largely because all these initiatives claim a particular and concrete point of departure and an other methodological logic. In all their quirky singularity they break the demand for seamless reproduction that governs still a big part of the arts scene. The development of work here is drawn out of its mold of quantifiable recognition (through number of performances, partners, spectators and critiques) and into a much murkier field of the development of 'qualities' of working and sharing a space for exchange. As we know every method of work is somehow reproductive of a certain world view, of a particular way of relating to your collaborators, of a certain way to understand what 'work' today can still mean. Aesthetics are in that sense always prescriptive, or even – in some cases – normative, in the explicit demand that the situation should be recognized, and the division of roles that this implies. The art work here could be seen as an interface of social relations to unfold in the encounter. A relationality that can reach far beyond the limits of the arts factory.

      If we understand the institute as a possible tool to deal with these relations, this is not a tool that is to be judged by its efficiency, by the results that it provides. Rather, the tools used by the institute are at the same time highly specialized and highly dysfunctional. You might say that a good tool in this context is not a tool that hides itself behind its own surefire functionality, but rather one that talks back. A tool as an obstacle, as something that has to be reckoned with. Undermining as much as opening up the process of relating and dealing with the situation. As Isabelle Stengers mentions in her 'Ecology of Practices': “This is how I produced what I would call my first step towards an ecology of practice, the demand that no practice would be defined "like any other", just as no living species is like any other. Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is feeling its borders, experimenting the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, not insulting ones leading them to mobilize and transform the border into a defence against their outside.”

      In that context the tool functions rather as a 'symptom' of the way we perceive our being together. Of the ways we consider an object, a situation, a relation, as a piece of knowledge to be dealt with. Every environment constructs its own value system. Not on the basis of a mutual agreement, but on the practical basis of 'what works' or 'what doesn't work'. In other words: what creates a situation is a change in the status quo, a performance. Opening up the method to the participants (both the 'users' of the institute as the creators) makes it possible for anyone to rethink its metabolism, its inner working, its outer organizing affect. Instead of the ideological reinforcement of the hierarchic status quo proposed by the Institute, the institute reappraises the circulating mythologies that cross the space, the specificity of the current proposal, the value of what is to be kept alive for the future (performances). The institute is what turns a 'state of exception' into a 'state of attention' for everyone to appraise.

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Tender Institute
    • the tender institute 12 January 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Elke van campenhout
    • 12 January 2013
    • the tender institute

      "In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute's extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution."

      Who's afraid of the Institute?

      In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. Paraphrasing Dorothy Parker you could say that the Institute in most contemporary engaged art practices is 'not one to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.' What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute's extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution.

      In the last ten years however, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the Institute's mandate. Taking the term up on its potential, rather than its historical accomplishments, the Institute once again has become a point of address: a specific place where people share their concerns and interests, where you can find topical information and engage with it, where knowledge is archived and opened up to public interest and scrutiny. Although it is a bit of a stretch to compare all these particular initiatives, I will venture to formulate some comments on these practices that place them within a larger field of enquiry in today's art field.

      Compared with the more established Institute's the arts' initiatives seem less embedded in a universal idea of knowledge conservation than in a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. In that sense we could use the term 'environmental' for these newly constructed spaces for encounter. The environment here is constructed by the relations and the interests of the people participating in the particular context (of the Bureau, the performance, the work table, etc..). In other words: the institute (without capital I) has lost its clear horizon of social valorization and functionality. It is not transparently embedded in a supra-structure of similar houses of power. Instead it has a nomadic feature that is permeable, a qualitative openness that connects it directly to a context of particular participants, diverse spaces and a larger politico-social context.

      Another important feature of this institute is that it allows for a differential approach of interests. Although the institute clearly functions as a point of address of a certain problematics, as an environmental space, the processing of this information can be shared by anyone participating. Turning the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic openness to different interests. What we see here is a constantly shifting maze of connections and reconnections, allowing for a constant and simultaneous shrinking and aggrandizing of the issues addressed. Connecting now only with a group of 4 participants, and at the same time addressing a global or political question that overrides by far the mandate of the artistic initiative at hand.

      The institute's boundaries in that sense are highly flexible, but not in the way they’d adapt to whatever kind of interpretation. Like in any other institute - and especially in the Tender Institute - the practices and the encounters are prescribed. There is an etiquette ruling the space that makes it possible to engage. There is an invitation that opens up the potential of the encounter. But at the same time the level and focus of engagement stays open for interpretation. For the mutual recognition of a common interest. Based on the smallest of details, or on the largest of analytical frameworks. The institute in that way questions our 'sense of belonging', of being part of the event unfolding: do I engage in the practice as an artist, a citizen, a woman, an agnostic or a believer? What does this engagement then produce in the event? How do I relate to the information that is swirling around? How do I add (or not) to the particular context unfolding?

      Infolding the Institute

      The institute (I make the distinction between the Institute as the power house and the institute as the environmental settlement) is a particular space, situated not outside of the logics of classification and order, but standing at its limits, 'at the edge of the void that lies beyond every order of recognition or normalization' (professor Peter Hallward on Foucault's use of the specific). It is this de-normalization process that is of interest to the artist community rethinking its own complicities. All too often the engagement with 'what lies outside' of the arts is taken up on the level of the reinstallment of an oppositional logic of understanding. In the embrace of a politics of trying to understand the other (the precarious worker, the poor, the immigrant, …) the artistic practices process and produce again and again this dichotomic sense of 'normalcy' in contrast to the 'exotic' feature of the have-nots, not taking into account the complicity in the construction of exactly these knowledge divisions, these 'states of exceptions' that sustain an unequal access to the declaration of 'what is important', today as well as in history or in the near future.

      What the institute can do is exactly to redefine the grid that limits our entitlements of knowing and taking action. Turning the strictness of the dividing horizontals and verticals in an interesting plane of 'wholes and holes', for every individual to navigate through. What the institute archives in these circumstances, is then not a universal, nor even a particular kind of knowledge. Rather it archives the processes that keep these different knowledge field connecting and communicating. The institute expresses a desire to address, to weave a grounding but fragmentary mythology for the becoming of the social fabric. No longer a clear road map to navigate our relations in past, present and future, the institute infolds the very diverse ways to deal with the 'situation', with what we think is at stake in this slice of time and space.

      Methods and tools

      If we said earlier on that it is a precarious endeavor to put all recent artistic institute's projects on the same line of interpretation, that is largely because all these initiatives claim a particular and concrete point of departure and an other methodological logic. In all their quirky singularity they break the demand for seamless reproduction that governs still a big part of the arts scene. The development of work here is drawn out of its mold of quantifiable recognition (through number of performances, partners, spectators and critiques) and into a much murkier field of the development of 'qualities' of working and sharing a space for exchange. As we know every method of work is somehow reproductive of a certain world view, of a particular way of relating to your collaborators, of a certain way to understand what 'work' today can still mean. Aesthetics are in that sense always prescriptive, or even – in some cases – normative, in the explicit demand that the situation should be recognized, and the division of roles that this implies. The art work here could be seen as an interface of social relations to unfold in the encounter. A relationality that can reach far beyond the limits of the arts factory.

      If we understand the institute as a possible tool to deal with these relations, this is not a tool that is to be judged by its efficiency, by the results that it provides. Rather, the tools used by the institute are at the same time highly specialized and highly dysfunctional. You might say that a good tool in this context is not a tool that hides itself behind its own surefire functionality, but rather one that talks back. A tool as an obstacle, as something that has to be reckoned with. Undermining as much as opening up the process of relating and dealing with the situation. As Isabelle Stengers mentions in her 'Ecology of Practices': “This is how I produced what I would call my first step towards an ecology of practice, the demand that no practice would be defined "like any other", just as no living species is like any other. Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is feeling its borders, experimenting the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, not insulting ones leading them to mobilize and transform the border into a defence against their outside.”

      In that context the tool functions rather as a 'symptom' of the way we perceive our being together. Of the ways we consider an object, a situation, a relation, as a piece of knowledge to be dealt with. Every environment constructs its own value system. Not on the basis of a mutual agreement, but on the practical basis of 'what works' or 'what doesn't work'. In other words: what creates a situation is a change in the status quo, a performance. Opening up the method to the participants (both the 'users' of the institute as the creators) makes it possible for anyone to rethink its metabolism, its inner working, its outer organizing affect. Instead of the ideological reinforcement of the hierarchic status quo proposed by the Institute, the institute reappraises the circulating mythologies that cross the space, the specificity of the current proposal, the value of what is to be kept alive for the future (performances). The institute is what turns a 'state of exception' into a 'state of attention' for everyone to appraise.

    • 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?

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Milieus
    • 2014 BLOCK II 01 May 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2014
    • 31 July 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson
      Audrey Cottin
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Danny Neyman
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Philippine Hoegen
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Ramos Pereira
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz

       


      Research End Presentations

      Carolina Goradesky
      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Julia Clever
      Maité Liébana Vena

       


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita

       

       

      Partners

      FabLab IMAL
      KU Leuven
      PAF Performance Arts Forum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Alma Soderberg
      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Restrepo
      Christophe Maierhans
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Danny Neyman
      Elke van Campenhout
      Femke Snelting
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Hendrik Willekens
      Julien Maire
      Kristien van den Brande
      Luigi Coppola
      Michael Klien
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Philippine Hoegen
      Pierre Rubio
      Pr Jan Masschelein
      Rares Crauit
      Samah HIjawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Pereira / Omniadversus
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Veronica Cruz

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Femke Snelting
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer

       

       

       

      ‘MILIEUS’
      curated by Pierre Rubio (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

      Milieus is a collective artistic research environment for the participants, mentors and other workers of the a.pass program. In a shared workspace we develop our practices in a collaborative context, on the basis of self-organisation and self-rule. Through individual actions, Milieus generates a dynamic territory for exchange, cooperation and (tacit) negotiation. A mutual creation of the individual and the common.
      We invite different guests to enter into this environment with us, to participate, open up the proposals and issues addressed in the collective work and/or to problematize the situation, fueling the ecology of ideas and practices in Milieus.
      The whole curriculum content was curated by the researchers-participants themselves through the proposition of their ‘Collective Practices’ and the collective curating of the ‘Guest House series’.

       

       


      27 / 05 / 2014


      ‘A COLLECTIVE PRACTICE OF COLLECTIVE PRACTICE’
      collective practice by Pierre Rubio


      This practice aims at sharing/developing our knowledges and skills in workshop design.
      How is it possible to translate an individual practice into a collective practice?
      How can we support each others’ effort to imagine and invent collective practices out of our individual problematics?
      From identifying central research questions in each one’s researches to transformations of these questions into shareable practices up to appropriating collectively personal singularities and nourishing a possible ‘general intellect’.

       

       

      30 / 05 / 2014


      ‘GETTING A TASTE FOR FOOD’
      collective practice by Rares Crauit


      Food is highly charged with meaning and affect; it is performative and theatrical and, as a live art, it is fleeting and sensorial. Today, in a world where one in eight people are suffering from chronic undernourishment, cooking methods, consumption protocols and gastronomic speeches are lengthily elaborated on. So what is there left for artists? Looking carefully at food particularities we may witness the ordinary and extraordinary about food as an event, catching the interest of chefs as well as artists and social campaigners.

       

       

      02 / 06 / 2014


      ‘love and other matters’
      ritual for charging the space by Elke Van Campenhout / Tara


      Monday at 10am (sharp, since a ritual can not begin twice…) we meet for a social choreography, a scored ritual, a love event, a political redistribution of desire.
We work together to transform the space of Milieus into a tableau vivant of ritual practices, using objects, the body and the voice. The ritual re-charge will go through different stages, but all require your full state of attention, comfortable clothing, and a powerful energetic level. Please don’t eat before coming, and bring:
-one object that will mark your ritual space, and that is connected to the positive energy, the love you want to dedicate to Milieus
-one ritual uniform that marks your role in the ritual

       

       


      04 / 06 / 2014


      ‘THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE WIFE AND THE LOVER’
      collective practice by Philippine Hoegen


      The aim of the workshop is to play a homemade card game and to ameliorate its rules collectively.
      Some cards have 2 images, some 2 words, some an image and a word. Some have an image and a blank space, some a word and a blank space, one card has 2 blank spaces.
      Players are invited to create connections (of similarity, opposition or otherwise) as the cards are laid.
      Each participant at the table has a role: The Cook, The Thief, The Wife or The Lover.

       

       


      11 / 06 / 2014


      ‘NEW CONTINENT OF THOUGHT, DO YOU READ ME?’
      collective practice by Vanja Smiljanic


      Invitation to gather the concepts/fetish objects/questions/ideas/ghosts that obsess and possess the participants. Translation and materialisation of these thoughts to build up a space for their habitat.
      The proposal is to see and experience this space as a momentary virtual temple.
      Discovering the path to ones own virtual temple, building up the temple, guiding a tour through it, then leaving it.
      The journey to/through/out of the temple is conceived as a virtual pilgrimage.
      Following the structure of the pilgrimage, the virtual temple represents a liminal phase of one own’s research, a space of transgression, a threshold between previous way of structuring and understanding everybody own’s identity, time, space or community and the new way of doing so.

       

       


      17 / 06 / 2014


      ‘BAD T.V. SEMINAR’
      collective practice by Anna Sörenson and Stef Meul


      'Head of Bad TV Department' Anna Sörenson and 'Bureau of Censorship President of Operation' Stef Meul invite participants in a Bad TV classification evening. They step by step take the participants through the ground pillars of Bad TV, and invite them to a public voting to help the Bad TV Department classify the very core of Bad TV. The Bad TV Department uses a system of indexing, classification and creation of categories. To inform and improve the system it is needed to gather the public opinion annually. The public voting is an important input to understand what Bad TV is in 2014 and to keep the research team informed in the many genres of Bad TV, the research in depth and the categories. The public voting is giving the statistic input the Department needs to continue the work and prepare for the coming year.
      The feeling of watching something you like, but voting for it’s “bad-ness” is a conflicting feeling and a confusing thought. The nature of the Bad TV-video clips is quite entertaining but the group can feel confused by the voting system.

       

       

       

      26 / 06 / 2014


      ‘SENSORY / SENSORIAL TRANSLATION’
      collective practice by Veronica Cruz


      A collective practice working with the sensorial way with which we engage with the world and create our understanding of it. Subjectively translating stimulus from sensation to information and vice-versa.
      The body is always the receptacle of the interrelationships’ alchemy from which we build the capacity for understanding and apprehending individuals, as well as emotions and sensations. The body’s ability to invoke the past to produce new actions and behaviours most often improvised (without previewed plans) comes from a ‘practical intelligence’.
      How to propose a different sensorial approach to performative experiences? Which mediums of transmission are favoured in your research project? Which sensations are the triggers of your research? What feeling/perception would provoke your research in its receptors/audience/spectators? How could you translate the emotions of cognitive statements of your research core into a physical stimulus?

       

       


      27 / 06 / 2014


      ‘TAKE A GOOD LOOK BACK’
      collective practice by Peter Stamer


      Visualize the past as present. Close your eyes, take a good look at what happened during the Milieus program so far. Re-imagine the events that left a mark in you, that were decisive for you, major ones, minor ones. Reveal your observations by revisiting the spots that appear in front of your inner eye. You do what you say. You tell what you see.

       

       

      27 / 06 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : JAN MASSCHELEIN’

      one day seminar around the work of Pr. Jan Masschelein curated by Philippine Hoegen and Gosie Vervloessem


      We propose an experimental seminar on horizontal learning environments/structures.
      Can one create a school for oneself? What is the role of the school as an institute?
      What does self-education mean? How can we think of different ways of creating school?
      How to counter the production oriented machine (knowledge production, instrumentalisation of terms like research in education, in art? What could be a de-capitalised labour? How could this affect knowledge production in an artistic research environment? How to keep the ‘school’ as a place of ‘free time’.

      In relation to current education and knowledge production, Jan Masschelein talks about consumerism (students as consumers of education, the entrepreneurial student), he is critical of the demand for everything to be made productive (productive time, time as a commodity, and also knowledge production) making the ‘school’ a place of formation, he calls this the taming of the school. He describes different learning environments such as the seminar, the workshop and the lecture hall: “In this sense, the lecture hall can be described as a heterotopia; a ‘place without place’ or ‘location’ with its own order, its own technologies, rituals, ways of speaking and discipline. According to Michel Foucault, it is a space where we are exposed, that is to say ‘drawn out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs’. It is a place where we are exposed to a thing-in-common and are engaged in public thinking.”

       

       


      30 / 06 / 2014


      ‘ARCHIVE FEVER’
      reading session by Camila Restrepo


      Camila Restrepo will guide the participant into an exhaustive reading of an iconic essay by Jacques Derrida: “Archive Fever”. Some key points and notions will be discussed in order to embrace the (complex) sense of the text.

       

       

      02 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : FEMKE SNELTING’

      one day seminar by Femke Snelting around the project ‘Fathers of the Internet’ curated by Pierre Rubio


      Throughout World War I and II, Belgium internationalist, universalist and documentalist Paul Otlet imagined The Mundaneum: a city that would bring together all knowledge of the world in one flexible relational classification system. His work was largely forgotten until recently, when Otlet resurfaced as ’a founding father of the Internet’. Simultaneously, corporate titan Google adopted the remains of his archive preserved at The Mundaneum in Mons. The museum is not only located in the home town of Belgium current prime minister Elio Di Rupo, but also conveniently close to Google’s largest European datacenter in St. Ghislain. Since then, The Mundaneum proudly advertises itself as ‘Google on paper’ and ‘The great ancestor of Google’.
      ‘Fathers of the Internet’ is an ongoing exploration of a wandering archive and the entanglements of artificial intelligence, patronage and political intrigue.

       

       


      08 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : ALMA SODERBERG & HENDRIK WILLEKENS’
      one day practice around Alma Soderberg and Hendrik Willekens’s work curated by Danny Neyman


      Alma Soderberg and Hendrik Willekens are offering one day of happy experimentation with music making. We will play with the idea of starting a band and explore what this collaborative improvisatory way of working with and around sound could mean. Playing instruments together, exploring our voices and bodies as instruments of sound, singing and otherwise. We will learn how to make beats, and how to use microphones and friendly machinery to make voice and sound into a material to be moulded, sculpted, messed around with.

       

       


      09 - 11 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : JULIEN MAIRE’
      ‘FIELD OF WORK, DEPTH OF FIELD’
      workshop by Julien Maire curated by Hans Van Wambeke and Camila Aschner Restrepo


      There are many definitions and uses for the term “fuzzy” but they all involve some reference to a state of instability. The fuzzy logic, for example, is a programming method used in artificial intelligence: the program sets doubts that are not exclusive and that are constantly negotiable. While the Boolean logic is limited to the use of disjunctions, conjunctions and negations, the fuzzy logic reaches a state of sharpness gradually, but the focus is made with hesitation and by approximation.
      By analyzing the various definitions of what could be “the fuzzy,” the workshop will question the positioning of the actor, the performer and the spectator inside the “depth of field.” The purpose is to experiment with fuzzyness and sharpness under various angles: working in a space with a fixed lens, with a single point of focus; moving through a space with a variable focus (autofocus); reducing the depth of field (macro, micro photography); and overall to devise alternative principles for “focus control,” the intermediate stages that precede a sound, a gesture, a concept or an image.

       

       


      14 / 07 / 2014


      ‘SPEAKING BODIES’
      collective practice by Danny Neyman


      A collective practice about our bodies and our relation to our bodies through language.
      I want to gather together around the "poor material" of our own bodies, selves, memories, speaking mouths, and guide a series of exercises which will generate a verbalization of body-selves, exploring our bodies in fragments, looking at how our bodies are charged with meaning, stories, experience, memory, signification, seeing what can and can't be said about bodies, where words cling onto a body and how and when do they slip off.

       

       


      15-16 / 07 / 2014


      ‘MAKING HI-S-TORIES’
      collective practice by Samah HIjawi and Sara Santos


      The workshop will weave together several ideas around contesting historical narratives, and the power of images, their fetishization, and their potential of/for resistance through methodologies of collage and montage.
      In two separate groups, using texts, images, photographs and video each group will work for a couple of hours in creating two separate narratives of this underground collective and their manifesto, a timeline mapping the trajectory of their activities, and we try to imagine the flag they might have made to represent themselves and present themselves to the world with. Using materials provided, as well as materials we bring with us from our own practice we create an historical document of this precious moment in history.
      Then, the groups switch stations. Using collage and montage sensibilities, the groups reconsider each others historiography to intercept each others narratives.

       

       

      16 / 07 / 2014


      ‘THE GROOM OF THE STOOL’
      collective practice by Gosie Vervloessem


      A diary of digested and not digested practices.
      How does your practice digested by a foreign body looks like?
      The Groom of the Stool (formally styled: “Groom of the King’s Close Stool“) was the most intimate of an English sovereigns’ courtiers. The Groom of the Stool, in the very earliest times was responsible for assisting the King in the performance of the bodily functions of excretion and ablution, whilst maintaining an aura of royal decorum over the proceedings.This physical intimacy naturally led the Groom to become a man in whom much confidence was placed by his royal master and with whom many royal secrets were shared.
      Recipe for a workshop :
      A. Warm up – playing around with maizena
      B. The recipe
      Cook your work/your practice/your life and write down the recipe and present your meal
      C. Grooming
      Sharing practices by eating and digesting, devouring and digesting each others’ dishes.
      Choose and eat the meal of somebody else – the cook assists the digestion and interviews the eater (the actual grooming) – record the interview on paper/take notes.
      D. Stool
      The eater reports on the excrement, using whatever means that seem suitable. How does your practice digested/processed by a foreign body looks like, smells like, …?

       

      18 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : LUIGI COPPOLA & CHRISTOPH MAIERHANS’
      one day practice and discussion around ‘Alternative Democracy’ by Luigi Coppola and Christophe Maierhans curated by Nicolas Galeazzi


      Whenever people come together, decisions will be taken - explicit or implicit, legal or legitimate, in conflict, consensus or as a compromise, spontaneously or according to a strict protocol. The dominant ‘democratic’ protocols of taking such communal decisions, are put in question from many sides: from Rancière’s concept of equality, to Putin’s rhetorics, threatening western libertarianism.
      However, in the age of flat hierarchies and the emphasised individualism, artistic group decision taking mechanisms are - willingly or not - strongly influenced by the biases, falls promises and suspiciousness against the democratic way of live. Many projects and methods try to avoid, alter or oppose democratic structures.
      a.pass, for example, and specifically Milieus, are in many sense rooted in practising agonistic structures of negotiation and try to find alternative ways.

       


      21-22 / 07 / 2014


      ‘TRANSNATIONAL ART COMMONS’
      collaborative workshop-project by Nicolas Galeazzi


      I would like to invite you all to a collaborative practice around the Transnational Arts Commons, which we are developing in relation with the Dampfzentrale in Bern.
      The aim of the project is, to temporarily run the Dampfzentrale during the Bern Biennale as a Commons, and to use this opportunity as a case study in order to develop a sustainable artistic economies based on the idea of the commons.
      In order to create a legal and recognised status for this commons, we aim to found a european co-operative, which will run its business as a commons. The exact model for this co-op is still very controversial and has to developed through many stages and with the input and interest of many people. You are kindly invited to take part in this procedure.
      Beside this gathering, we are organising a “State of the Arts” meeting. The focus of this meeting is to bring different interests and ideas in relation to each other. We invite some people engaging in alternative currencies, some active in the basic income debate, and others interested in a european network of alliances between the arts and other fields. All these approaches have their problematic points and have things in common.

       

       

      23 / 07 / 2014


      ‘MONOPOLY OF I’s / MONOPOLY OF ID's’
      collective practice by Silvia Pereira / Omniadversus


      It is a Monopoly game, with us as participants.
      We will be the piétons (pedestrians), playing at being and buying artistic identities. Identities that we will create ourselves for ourselves to the purpose of the game. The way the game will be organized will lead the group to movement very similar to the one in dynamics of creating identities as by-products of the subjecthood in relation to the conditionings of the industries of the arts.
      During the game the subject as an art piece will pass through several passes in a spiral of ascension which represents the glorification of the subject as an attributed value constructed in a narrative, a chronology and history.
      While playing we will experience through the practice the process of subjectivation of identity while enquiring about it accordingly to the positions/roles being played in the game, subject/object/art collector.

       


      24-25 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : MICHAEL KLIEN’
      two days of practice and discussion around the project ‘Parliament’ by Michael Klien curated by Damla Ekin Tokel and Stef Meul


      Michael Klien proposes a 'closed' Parliament for participants. 4 hours long to experience the setup. After that we can discuss how to take this into the city. All day is spent tuning perception to the underlying dynamics of the individual and collective mind, sensing, and interacting with nature’s self-organising dynamics. These choreographies are rehearsals of utopia, nevertheless real social relations. Rather than just commenting on it or deconstructing it, but using that aspect that those are rehearsals for our emerging social relations.

    • The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, but the outbreak of a constant crisis inherent to the system. Exploitation of the society and the environment through a reliance on constant growth, the possibility of infinite creation of money for some through the creation of debt for the majority, and the binding of most life-procedures to procedures of money are creating a precarious and dangerous economic climate.

      Starting a glossary on Economics

      Working on THE SQUARE : a delimited area in the workshop space, where we can experiment and model thoughts around interactions related with art and economy.
      It is supervised by a camera which films the situation from above. It looks like a surveillance system ;) but it is not only that.

      Jorgos Papadopoulos, Greek Economist, is intervening to clarify notions and concepts.
      We spent time defining what means UTILITY and the notion of enjoyment linked to it.
      The notion of Apparatus was introduced through a text by Lepecki.

      We also mentioned different existing types of economies :
      general economy
      gift economy
      economy of the body
      blood economy
      etc.
      and how they work respectively.

      In the arts field, can we talk about a gift economy?

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • NOT_index
    • ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #2 Magical Materialism
      10 October 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Pierre Rubio
    • 10 October 2011
    • 23 October 2011
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #2

       

       

      Let’s sit in a circle to talk about magic.

      And then, let’s practice alchemy…

      This workshop is the continuation of a series. A “first episode” happened during last spring, a new one happens this fall. They both seek to detach our research projects from an essentialist and naturalistic approach. Their common aim is at (re)problematising for (re)capturing the strategies of construction and thus the theories of knowledge which our singular researches investigate and produce. If the Spring workshop’s keyword was ‘attachments’, the second step will be entirely contaminated by the notion of ‘magic’. We will take a trip into the wonderland of in-differentiation between cultural and natural, object and subject, figure and background, and more important, theory and practice.

      At first, during three days, we will re-consider our research projects under the influence of two singular analysis of magic : respectively Gilbert Simondon’s and Isabelle Stengers’.

      Far from considering magic as an obsolete historical object, Simondon’s notion of the magical is that of a world structured by a network of privileged places and privileged moments. Let’s compare this magical structure of the world to our projects, as if they were worlds in themselves.

      With the help of Stengers, our ‘favourite witch’, we will track the evil spells of capitalism as well as “the thoughtlessness encouraged by the theme of progress” and any kind of prescriptive power discourses. Logically we will then question the potential of politics’ re-invention through our artistic researches, the level of “empowerment” they produce and the possibility of “reclaim” they generate.

      During a second period of an entire week, we will turn a former shop (turned recently into an art gallery) into an alchemy laboratory to transmute our projects into something other. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by moving it into unexpected contexts, this allows the discovery of ‘attachments’ and “othernesses” to enrich the ‘original’ project. Taking seriously what practice means and is capable of, let’s engage in a risky path from familiar individuals to unfamiliar singularities, from experiments to experiences, from “matter of facts to matter of concerns”.

      The magical world is not a fascinating ethnographic object but “a mode of existence” to which individuals, as well as collectives, (and also artistic research projects...) can come back, if they endure the ordeal of disindividuation. “Disindividuation is a lack in structure” that happens when organisations that make us see, think and act break up, making us paradoxically available to invent other ways of seeing, thinking and acting. Welcome to the post-rational shamanistic academia!

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2011 BLOCK III 01 September 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2011
    • 30 November 2011
    • 2011 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Caroline Daish
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Doris Stelzer
      Elise Goldstein
      Leonie Kuipers
      Margareth Kaserer
      Marilyne Grimmer
      Oshin Albrecht
      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
      Simon Loeffler
      Veridiana Zurita
      Vicente Arlandis

       


      Research End Presentations

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Philippe Severyns
      Timothy Segers

       


      Partners

      RITS
      Zsenne artlab
      NU Performance Festival IV (Tallinn)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Angelo Vermeulen
      Antonio Araújo
      Bart Verschaffel
      Bojana Cvejic
      David Bade
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Geert Opsomer
      Guillermo Gómez-Peña
      Jacob Wren
      Juan Dominguez
      Koen Van Singhel
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Ong Keng Sen
      Pierre Rubio
      Robert Steijn
      Silke Bake-Peter Stamer
      Stef Stessels
      Terenja Van Dijk
      Wesley Meuris

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Bart Van den Eynde


      Mentors

      Anette Baldauf
      Pierre Rubio
      Vincent Dunoyer
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

       

      15 - 17 / 09 / 2011


      ‘DON’T KNOW!’
      Conference on Artistic Research

      Don’t Know! is not a gathering with the sole aim of exchanging knowledge on artistic research practices. In the course of three days we rather aim to create a frame in which research is put into practice and shared with the audience. In other words: we propose a conference which provides different working situations, allowing an in-depth experience of research formats, relations and situations, and the specific ‘knowledges’ these produce. Following the suggested attitude in our conference-title - Don’t Know! - we would like to frame these formats through four fields of questions:

      Don’t Know! the politics of knowledge production
      In which way the artistic understanding of knowledge differs from the one in other fields? What are the political implications of such a difference (if any at all)? How could we redistribute the power of knowledge production throughout the arts? And finally: is this at all a valid question? Should the arts avoid the political recuperation of its terrain and abstain from the tight link to knowledge production practices? Or: is it possible to maintain an alternative position for the arts in their way of dealing with knowledge (production)? Or if not, can the arts still claim their (political) capacity for change?

      Don’t Know! knowing today
      Within a society that has turned the commodification of knowledge into one of its main economic drives, the critical discourse on these production formats the arts create has been the basis for a lot of (historical) research practices. Therefore we would like to ask ourselves how artistic practices today can be a viable motor for thinking about our economic, technical and political realities. How can the arts reflect upon, but maybe even more, how can they influence future developments?

      Don’t Know! from knowledge production to knowledge processing
      We might argue that art (and artistic research) does not in the first instance produce knowledge, but that the arts keep on opening up the cracks in our systems of understanding: mislaying the knowledge, escaping the gridlocked pre-defined contexts that can be understood only according to the conventions of the discourses (be they political, aesthetical, psychological, …) that define knowledge. Would it then not seem more appropriate to talk about ‘knowledge processing’ than about the production of knowledge? Art as a game of misplacing information rather than one that tries to reinforce meaning on the world? And does this in a lot of ways not echo a contemporary understanding of research in general?

      Don’t Know! the environment
      Artistic research - and specific modes of dealing with knowledge (production) - is nowadays placed before the challenge that it has to operate within certain disciplinary frameworks and protocols. The actual combat in the arts now is to see where the disciplining and institutionalisation of its intrinsic researching gesture can be turned productive again.The question is: what kind of environments and institutions does art need today in order to react on the changing ontologies of knowledge and to develop different approaches of working and thinking?

       


      19 - 23 / 09 / 2011


      SUMMERSCHOOL
      series of two workshops in collaboration with RITS

       

      How to Stage Discussions about Arts and Politics?
      workshop by Jacob Wren


      Jacob’s workshop is based on the technique of the relay-interview, a simple game for having unexpected conversations. It involves asking and answering spontaneous questions that are loosely based around several themes chosen before the game starts. It is an attempt to have genuine, surprising exchanges within a performance situation. And to find out what we think about it and what we most want to know.

       

      How to Artistically Intervene in the Urban Space of the City of Ghent?
      workshop by Antonio Araújo


      The idea of Antonio’s workshop is to experience different points of departure in working with site and urban interventions. While working in a collaborative way in the city of Ghent, we will experiment the power of mobilization that theatre provides. Through intervening in the urban space, theatre recovers its public art dimension - which has always been there, but was sometimes blurry or forgotten.

       


      26 - 30 / 09 / 2011


      ‘DON’T KNOW’
      Workshop / Congress on Artistic Research by Nicolas y Galeazzi


      Nicolas Y Galeazzi focuses on developing and questioning social discourses through artistic research, which is materialised in concepts, installations, performances as well as printed matter. Galeazzi sets up performative research frameworks for experiments with political and social conditions and is working thereby on a concept of 'Mise-en-Discourses'.
      Nicolas will work further on the principles that have been developed during the conference more thoroughly with the researchers/participants of the post-graduate program. Central are the 4 questions that have been guiding the preparation of the conference.

       


      03 - 07 / 10 / 2011


      ‘DIRECTING THE GAZE’
      Reading sessions on Architecture with Koen Van Singhel, Terenja Van Dijk, Wesley Meuris and Bart Verschaffel.


      The development in the 16th century of the controlled space of the theatre isolated within the urban context made it possible to manipulate the gaze in an absolute way. The development of the theatre building reflects societal organization in a crystallized form where watching and being watched is organized following strict rules. In the second half of 20th century the theatre is brought back as a reference in the critical reflection on and discussion of the visual organization of the public space.
      In these reading sessions we invite architects, theorists and artists who work and reflect on the gaze in architecture. Texts (or other influences) that have been essential in their development as an artist or theoretician are the starting point of a discussion on the organization of the gaze in an architectural context.

       


      10 - 12 / 10 / 2011 & 17 -23 /10 / 2011


      ‘ARTIFICIAL REALITIES’
      (episode 2 - Magical Materialism)
      workshop by Pierre Rubio


      This workshop is the last iteration of a series of two. They both seek to detach our research projects from an essentialist and naturalistic approach. Their common aim is at (re)problematising for (re)capturing the strategies of construction and thus the theories of knowledge which our singular researches investigate and produce. If the Spring workshop’s keyword was ‘attachments’, the second step will be entirely contaminated by the notion of ‘magic’. We will take a trip into the wonderland of in-differentiation between human and natural, object and subject, figure and background, and more important, theory and practice.
      At first, during three days, we will re-consider our research projects under the influence of two singular analysis of magic : respectively Gilbert Simondon’s and Isabelle Stengers’.
      During a second period of an entire week, we will turn a former shop (turned recently into an art gallery) into an alchemy laboratory to transmute our projects into something other. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by moving it into unexpected contexts, this allows the discovery of ‘attachments’ and “othernesses” to enrich the ‘original’ project. Taking seriously what practice means and is capable of, let’s engage in a risky path from familiar individuals to unfamiliar singularities, from experiments to experiences, from “matter of facts to matter of concerns”.

       

       

      24 - 28 / 10 / 2011


      ‘PHOTOGRAPHY * LIGHT * SCENOGRAPHY’
      workshop by Stef Stessels


      Stef Stessels always has used the camera as a tool to create his personal database and archive. Recently he has begun to integrate his interest of photography directly into his scenographic work and light design. First of all he started to document the performances of de Roovers- and his sets - and the company uses his photos for its communication. More fundamentally his camera became an instrument in his research for light & set design where he integrated the photos from this research process in the actual performances. In this artistic workshop he will investigate with the participants the possible relations between photography, scenography and lightdesign integrating more technical aspects in concrete artistic exercises.

       


      31 / 10 - 02 / 11 / 2011


      ‘OBJECTNESS & THINGLINESS’
      reading sessions workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      Picking up on the many forms in which objects have appeared in the participant’s projects in the last months, we take a quick tour down memory lane, presenting different theories on the object in a 3-day crash course for beginners: Kant, Michael Fried, Paul Gillroy, Jane Bennett etc. We work around the ‘resisting object’ and ‘thingliness’ as political qualities of the object, around the object/subject dichotomy as driving force in (late)modernism, about objects charged by desire that turn violent, etc. This workshop mainly circles around close reading of texts.

       


      03 - 13 / 11 / 2011


      ‘ON HOSPITALITY AND ESTRANGEMENT’
      ( The Tallin Project / The Viru Hotel )
      workshop by Ong Keng Sen and Elke Van Campenhout


      This workshop is part of a festival organized in a gigantic old Russian hotel in Tallinn. During ten days we will be working on two levels:
      Together with curator and theatre maker Ong Keng Sen we work around ‘the stranger’: the one that doesn’t belong, the one that disturbs the ‘common space’, the one that by his presence changes the perception of the space etc. Both on a theoretical and a practical level, we will interfere in the hotel life, working around hospitality (Derrida), extimacy / intimacy (Zizek), invisible theatre, etc.
      On a second level, you are invited to come with a project of your own, placed in one of the hotel rooms, and work further on these themes out of your personal interest. There is also the possibility to work in the corridors (as a scenographic concept), elevators, … Ong Keng Sen will also mentor these projects.
      The festival will open its doors at certain times for visitors.

       


      14 - 18 / 11 / 2011


      ‘GHOSTS AND HOSTS’
      workshop by Robert Steijn


      In this workshop Robert Steijn will work with the participants on principles like presence and absence, ghosts, energetic transformations, schizophrenic bodies belonging to different times and spaces at the same time.
      Robert Steijn worked as a dance critic for seven years, and then also as a curator for dance and experimental theatre in Amsterdam for seven years. Now he tries to bring the magic back in life and in the theatre. In that sense he considers himself more and more a magician. His helper is a deer, who appears in a lot of his texts and dances. His belief is that everyone can become a homemade contemporary shaman. His path towards becoming such a magician has been described in his three solo’s: the first solo was his call in guiding the death of his father, the second one, his ego death in the loss of everything by the breaking of the heart and now in his third solo: the birth of a person who can cross the thin line between reality and imagination, between life and death.

       


      21 - 25 / 11 / 2011


      ‘WINTERSCHOOL’
      (Baroque bodies)
      series of three workshops in collaboration with RITS


      Can we understand our times of postmodern confusion as a genuinely baroque period? How does this idea of baroque challenge pre-conceived notions such as corporality, performance and (post-)colonial hybridization? How would a baroque body look like and what is its performative potential? Are we approaching a true baroque era of crisis as the distinctions between man and machine, between human and non-human life are slowly dissolving and man is entering a new phase in the history of colonization, conquering space?
      The RITS Winter School consists of two periods. In November 2011 the Brussels-based arts centre Beursschouwburg will host three workshops for artists, activists, art students and academics. During a second period, in January 2012, you will get the opportunity to develop your own artistic response to your experience in one of the three workshops in Brussels. This individual research phase will be hosted by De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. You will collaborate with other artists and with students from different art schools and you will be coached by different teachers from the participating art schools. The results of this workshop will be included in the program on a festival on baroque theatricality (February 1-3, De Brakke Grond)

      Workshop 1: Guillermo Gómez-Peña (USA/Mexico)
      This workshop aims at creating a temporary community of rebel artists from different disciplines, ages, ethnic backgrounds, gender persuasions, and nationalities, in which difference and experimentation are not only accepted but encouraged. Participants are given the opportunity to develop new modes of relationships between artists and communities, mentor and apprentice, which are neither colonial nor condescending and to discover new ways of relating to their own bodies. By decolonizing and then re-politicizing bodies, they can become sites for activism and embodied theory, for memory and reinvention, for pleasure and penance. Why do we do what we do? Which borders do we wish to cross and why? What is the relationship between performance, activism, pedagogy and our everyday lives? What about the relationship between the physical body and the social body?

      Workshop 2: Angelo Vermeulen (Belgium)
      In Vermeulen's workshop, entitled 'BODYREACTOR - Human monstrification in outer space', the participants will explore the notion of potential monstrification of the human body in outer space. This workshop reroutes the theme of the ‘space alien’ to man himself. How to work with an ongoing mutating and modifying body? How to physically deal with an unknown and ultimately body-transforming environment? How to relate to a space where biological evolution never took us in the first place? ‘REACTOR’ refers to the experimental, open format of the workshop, to the condition of man in outer space (living in a craft or vessel), and to the fact that the group is locked up in one single space for one week. It also refers to the concept of monstrification in a more 'Gothic' sense.

      Workshop David Bade (Curaçao)
      During this workshop, Bade and the participants will create a site-specific environment taking the shifting world of early modern baroque as a starting point. Instability, excess, changeability will function is key concepts. The workshop will also investigate different modes of collaboration. “More is more” seems to be the motto of David Bade.

    • 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.

    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • tools for research 01 January 2011
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Elke van campenhout
    • 01 January 2011
    • tools for research

       

       

      Thinking about tools in the research environment of a.pass is a tricky 'thing'. When we think about tools in everyday language, we think about 'things that do something'. But not whatever. Tools are things that have their function inscribed in them, that are optimized for achieving a certain goal, like the radically specified instruments IKEA offers you in its DIY packages. In an artistic research environment the question thus to ask in the first place is: what kind of tools do we need to do what we do?

      In a recent conference a.pass organized under the title 'Don't Know', this question took central stage. Is a platform for artistic research supposed to 'produce knowledge', as the current politics in arts and education seem to suggest. Is artistic research actually a veiled normative restriction to the messiness of the arts practices in general? A field within the arts where the outcome is supposed to be communicable, replicable, usable in other domains? For me this question of demanded outcomes and, accordingly, of fitting tools is a complicated one. Very often the categorizations used in the arts reveal their own limitations rather than open up clearly defined fields of knowledge.

      In that sense we might argue that art (and artistic research) does not in the first instance produce knowledge, but that the arts keep on opening up the cracks in our systems of understanding: mislaying the knowledge that in the gridlocked pre-defined contexts that define our society can only be understood according to the conventions of the discourses (be they political, aesthetic, psychological, ...) the knowledge 'belongs' to. When speaking about artistic research, would it then not seem more appropriate to talk about 'knowledge processing' instead of 'knowledge production'? Art as a game of misplacing informations rather than creating 'new' ones? Research as a process assembling and reassembling bits and pieces of knowledge, opening up perspectives, rather than formerly uncharted territories? And does this in a lot of ways not echo a contemporary understanding of knowledge in a wider context than the arts? If we embrace this hypothesis, this move from understanding artistic research as a field for 'knowledge production' to that of 'knowledge processing, mislaying, misunderstanding', we have to rethink our tools accordingly.

      For one, I don't feel artistic research should be meddled up with any kind of naïve laboratory metaphor borrowed from the applied sciences: artistic research is rarely full-proof, and often the results obtained are hard to transpose to any other situation without a significant loss of contextual relevance or performative power. The same goes for the tools used in the research. Rather than the surefire tools of industry or certain branches of science, artistic research mostly makes use of 'broken tools', in the quasi-Heideggerian sense of the words: tools that point to themselves as much as they fulfill a specific task. If we were to set up a manual for recognizing useful tools for artistic research, I would say that rule of thumb number one could be:

      IF IT TALKS BACK IT'S PROBABLY A GOOD TOOL

      A tool in artistic research is never smooth and flexible. It is an artefact, a concept, a thing that resists any kind of suave usefulness. In its being-put-into-practice it never stops talking, demanding, negotiating with the researchers and demanding to be taken into account as an equal partner in the discussion. In the past years I have used mostly 'prickly objects': tools that when put on the table, produce irritation, a slight weariness, an uncomfortable unwillingness of the research partners to engage with it. 'The Symptomatic Body' for example exasperated the psycho-analytically inclined and was a constant source of misunderstanding for the performers involved. Just as my ongoing practice-based research project around 'Critical Hope' transformed the gallery space of my Natural History Museum of Hope unexpectedely in a bureau for social and psychological first-aid. In the last case this side-effect was not foreseen nor desired, which resulted in the tool and me saying our goodbyes at the end of the project. Which brings us to rule of thumb number two:

      IF THE TOOL IS YOUR PARTNER PREPARE FOR A DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATION

      The tool is never yours for the use. It comes with a logic and a performativity of its own. A tool does what it does within certain circumstances, but cannot be projected upon without a loss of its functionality. I therefore advise to take tools seriously, to listen to their concerns. A particular brand of dangerously instable tools are the metaphorical ones. Using a metaphorical tool runs the risk of your relationship running amok very quickly. A metaphor comes with so many associations, with such a complete pack of previous engagements, it doesn't allow you a lot of projection or intimacy. Personally I can only relate to the MT by taking it literally, by 'doing the metaphor', and see where this brings me. Often the metaphor turns out to be inappropriate when living it, but again here the side-effects can produce unexpected, possibly valuable results.

      The project tool I'm working on right now is one of these half-breeds (half-metaphor, half performative frame). 'The Walk' takes the idea of the mobile archive and the nomadic quality of research (as independent of a specific discipline) at heart, and takes the form of a one month walk with the researchers, walking a specific score in which every one of them develops their own research narrative, leaving traces on the way for others to pick up and reconstruct throughout the journey. The traces and the interpretations assemble and reassemble the surrounding landscape, adding a fictional layer to the territory, rendering at the same time familiar (through framing/narrativizing) and unfamiliar (through the sheer incompatibility of the traces left) the journey you are going through. In this case the tool is particularly resistent to any kind of different use. The physical demands of being on the road, sleeping outside, the limited budget, ask for a certain discipline and attitude that will influence the research results greatly. In other words: we deal here with an imposing and demanding partner with its own set of instruments (the walking score, the time restrictions, the financial limits, ...) that possibly will result in pointing almost solely to itself, turning the research into the tool. An accidental transfer that for example marked a lot of the new media research projects in the 1990's.

      In other words, the tool is what makes things visible, and hides others. Taking this into account we could say that:

       

      AN INTERESTING TOOL IS ALWAYS (PARTLY) APOPHATIC

      In dealing with tools one of the most interesting things is the realization of what they do NOT produce or process: the information they cannot bring to the fore, the things they make invisible or impossible to achieve. In that sense working with different tools is also a powerful critique on what can be said where and when (as in Rancià ¨re's partage du sensible). In an 'advanced research project' this critique then in turn can become part of the experimental set-up. In the after-days of the conference, for example, the a.pass researchers tried to map out the results of the talks, laying out hypotheses and conclusions, and trying to devise the appropriate tools to do so. Since a bonafide research environment always aims for an enlarged visibility and partnership, we started up a wikipedia page under the title 'Don't Know' and from there on enlarged our ambition to continue with a working period constructing the (strangely enough non-existing) wikipedia page around 'Artistic Research'. Since the limitations of the wikipedia format are what they are, though, the working process is sure to unveil more and more hiatuses in its potential to deal with the archiving question. The tool is limited and shows its limits quite quickly in this case. The work for us is thus to keep on addressing this impossible task, producing on the way more and more by-products, left-overs that cannot be dealt with (we use as instruments workshops, invite guests, case-studies of individual researches, bologna rules cc artistic research, etc...). And these materials will be used to make a publication that, for us, addresses exactly what interests us in the topic: the multi-layered, the illogical bends and turns, the disagreement in terms, the non-acceptance of some practices that the negotiated process of wikipedia's peer-to-peer process excludes. We use the wikipedia-tool in other words to come to a better understanding of the particular field we move in, the field that as yet cannot be recuperated in a clearly informational format, that needs its temporary exclusivity to thrive.

      A tool in this case works as a vehicle, an impossible destination, a black hole around which to gather, to speak, to think, to process. A tool is only a tool as long as it 'does' that. Its power lies in its mutuality, in its potential to create change, if allowed by its partner to do so. When falling out of grace, it loses its power to speak, it can only work when given all of our attention. When passed on its behavior is unpredictable, but then again, this instability, this demand to be heard in the specificty of the new situation, is what makes the tool a thing to reckon with.

      a.pass is an artistic research environment at post-master level, open to artists and theoreticians. a.pass offers an experimental space and instruments to develop research skills in a shared and collaboratively created knowledge environment. Every researcher can translate his personal project into a tailor-made curriculum.

      a.pass = a.pt + a.s + a.rc

      a.pt (advanced performance training) is mainly aimed at artists and theoreticians with experience in developing work in or on the field of performance that don(t fit into a standard institutional framework.
      a.s (advanced scenography) welcomes artists and theoreticians who would like to investigate the notion of scenography on and off the stage. The program offers practice-based to professionals who want to expand their thinking about scenography.
      a.rc (a.pass research centre) is the place the workings of a.pass are analyzed, documented and opened up to critical debate. a.rc also functions as the platform for the development of long-term or PhD-level research within the arts.

      www.apass.be

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2010 BLOCK III 01 September 2010
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2010
    • 30 November 2010
    • 2010 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Adva Zakai
      Alessandra Coppola
      David Zagari
      Doris Stelzer
      Einat Tuchman
      Esther Francis
      Iris Bouche
      Katrin Lohmann
      Manne Granqvist
      Manon Avermaete
      Margareth Kaserer
      Michiel Reynaert
      Philip Janssens
      Philippe Severyns
      Rodolphe Coster
      Stephen Bain
      Sven Goyvaerts
      Timothy Segers

       


      Research End Presentations

      Agnese Cornelio
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia

       

       

      Partners

      Theaterfestival 2010
      Thematics (Les Bains, Brussels)
      Master in Choreography (Amsterdam)
      Campo
      RITS
      De Singel

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Anette Baldauf
      Bart Van den Eynde
      Christian Rizzo
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Epifania Amoo-Adare
      Guillermo Gómez-Peña
      Janez Janša
      Jeremy Wade
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lilia Mestre
      Sara Manente
      Sven Goyvaerts

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout


      Mentors

      Anette Baldauf
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      30 / 08 - 03 / 09 / 2010


      ‘DISCUSSION & REFLECTION’
      workshop of shared critique by a.pass in collaboration with Theaterfestival 2010


      During the Theaterfestival, a.pass-participants work together with a group of outsiders on a workshop of shared critique: we go and see a series of performances at the Theaterfestival (a yearly festival that selects performances that have been of particular importance to the development of the performance arts in Flandres/Belgium in the past year).
      Next to this we selected some texts to feed the discussion, that work out some of the themes/aesthetic principles/dramaturgical choices made in these specific performances to feed the discussion.

       


      04-09 / 09 / 2010


      ‘LaZone BRUSSELS’
      project by apass Research Center, Thematics (Bains, Brussels) and Master of Choreography (Amsterdam)


      LaZone is both the second stage in the Critical Hope research by Elke van Campenhout within a.rc (a.pass research centre) and the topic for the 2 month residency Thematics at workspace Bains Connective in Brussels. For the opening week of the projects we share our space with the students of the Master of Choreography in Amsterdam to work on defining the boundaries of LaZone: this in-between place that falls out of our understanding of the different ‘regimes of the sensible/experientiable’ (Jacques Rancière) that define our daily life. In other words: we lead our lives within different zones of understanding, speaking and behaving. What I can see and experience, what I can say and express, is dependent on the particular zone I am moving in at that particular moment (the political zone, the personal, the juridical, the virtual etc...).
      LaZone is trying to construct a space-in-between these zones: the place where behavior, speech and movement have not been negotiated yet, the place where misunderstanding is the leading principle of communication, the environment that drives our hospitality principles to their breaking point, showing us simultaneously the impotence and the potential of our cosmopolitan/transcultural hopes and desires.
      LaZone is a workshop in which three groups (Thematics artists, a.pass participants, MA Choreography) share the same space for one week. During that week LaZone will be created on different levels: the interpersonal level of hospitality and the sharing of theory and practice, and the larger level of the society at large, critically examining the boundaries of our democratic pretentions and preconceptions. Everyone can bring a ‘gift’ to LaZone: a practice, a piece of knowledge, an insight or an invitation you want to extend to the rest of the group. The workshop will create itself out of the proposals of everyone, on the basis of equality and interest, with three or four activities running at the same time, allowing every participant to develop a personal trajectory throughout the week.

       

       

      13-18 / 09 / 2010


      ‘WORKSHOPS WITH GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA AND JANESZ JANSA’
      Two parallel workshops by a.pt in collaboration with Campo and RITS


      Guillermo Gómez-Peña
      In this specific physical workshop, Guillermo Gómez-Peña will attempt to create a temporary community of rebel artists, aiming to find new modes of being and discover other ways of relating to their own body. During the workshop the following questions will prove to be crucial: which borders do we wish to cross? Why? Which borders are harder to cross, both in the workshop and in our personal lives?


      Janez Janša
      In this workshop, intellectual challenge and debate will be actively encouraged, triggering an entire series of questions: What is real? What is mediated? How do identity and politics relate to the status of an object of art?
      Each day of the Summer School will be concluded by an evening programme consisting of meetings, lectures, screenings, debates and artistic interventions. The evening guest artists have all collaborated on the research topic 'the performance as document - the document as performance' and include, among others, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Sarah Vanagt and Carina Molier.

       


      19-26 / 09 / 2010


      ‘LaZone BERLIN’
      project by apass Research Center and Thematics (Les Bains, Brussels)


      A group of artistic field researchers find themselves on unknown territory: LaZone is a place where the spatial rules of behavior have stopped to make sense. It is an environment that has no function, no meaning, no recognizable orientation points. It is a transit area, a stretch of land that falls out of our rule-giving grid of common sense, of law-giving, of understanding and of commonly accepted behavior. LaZone is the space of immigrants, of avatars and aliens, of dislocated complex identities, of lost cases and derailed causes. It is a place that has to define itself through the practice, through the use, through the re-negotiation of the rules of encounter and hospitality.
      During one week a group of immigrants from a.pt (advanced performance training) and Thematics (research project of the workspace Bains Connective in Brussels) will settle down at Fabrikationen, and try to make sense of their role and interaction with the locals. The results of their work will be presented on the 24th. Their Political Party might also infiltrate at the 25th's end party.

       


      20-24 / 09 / 2010


      ‘STORYBOARDING’
      workshop by Jeremy Wade


      In many ways performance is one big performed story board, an invisible text set of directions and nothing more. At the other hand story boarding it self is an art form. So how to use a story board to construct a performance and how to make a story board performative, how to blur the boundaries between story board and piece. Starting from a a written proposal minimum of three pages of each of the participants, story boards will be made, including an application for a grant with a budget of the project.
      During the course of this exploration/composition workshop we will strive to facilitate the great blur through the investigation of numerous storyboarding techniques. We will also research a wide array of taboos, techniques and theories that help us get closer to an essential concern of composition and aesthetics which is the age-old question of… “What is a thing”? We look at a vast index of queer scores that shed some light on the circularity of aesthetics. We can make monsters out of these stagnant aesthetics and gain perspective on how to compose, obliterate, blur and layer our lovely things for an audience. We will find modes to clarify our concepts for the pre production and production phases of creation. We will work towards structuring and deconstructing our ideas, both material and ethereal.
      Jeremy Wade is an American choreographer living and working in Berlin.

       

       


      04-10 / 10 / 2010


      ‘THE GAZE 2.0’
      workshop by Sven Goyvaerts


      Theoretical & practical workshop where the social media and our desktops create the format for communication and knowledge exchange and are being used as tools for artistic creation. Central focus in the workshop is the capture / transformation / (re)routing of the gaze through social media. Featuring crash course in and experiments with social media and other software : Ustream.tv, Snapz Pro, Flickr, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Everytrail and Chatroulette.
      The following topics will be discussed : MEDIA MIRROR (on identity), CYBER EYE CONTACT (on the look and the gaze), WELIVEINPUBLIC.COM (on narcissism), SECOND SKIN (on the avatar), THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA (on obscenity).

       


      11-15 / 10 / 2010


      ‘PERFORMATIVE SPACE’
      workshop by Laurent Liefooghe


      Being interested in the negative & constrictive aspects of architecture (obstruction, representation, order) and the idea of ‘active’ architecture (defined by what it does instead of what it shows), Laurent Liefooghe takes an analogy between architecture and contemporary art performance as a departure to try to liberate architecture from its obsession with emblematic objects. For this workshop he wants to investigate the idea of the ‘performative space’. Departing from case studies, he wants to develop possible concepts of a ‘performative space’.

       


      18-22 / 10 / 2010


      ‘BROODTHAERS & KAUFMAN’
      workshop by Sara Manente


      Starting point of this workshop by Sara Manente, former a.pass participant, are the is the investigation of the possible relation between Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Kaufman, two artists that broke rules in their fields, both provocative because acting on the limits of their roles and their positions in society, playing with meaning and expectations. A speculative game to see if a hint is to be found, as if by putting two things close to each other we can find similarities, intriguing associations that we couldn't see before. The overall question is one of sameness and otherness. The research on "similarity" from the two points of view of perception (outside) and interpretation (inside).

       

       

      25-30 / 10 / 2010


      ‘INTERFACE FICTIONS’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre & Elke Van Campenhout


      In this workshop we occupy for one week the gallery/shopping window of a new alternative performance gallery in Brussels. Working together within this space we try to develop working practices that project the gallery space on the outside world: gestures that communicate with the commuters, the neighbours, the occasional passers-by. By blurring the boundaries between living and working in the space, and by not retreating to recognizable artistic strategies, we try to break the rules of expectation, of recuperation and of communication of the arts. Every participants will try, in constant negotiation with the others, to develop practices that open up the activities from within to the viewer/participant outside. This can happen imagining the space to be what it is not: a shop, a restaurant, a library, a TV studio, a social centre, an immigrant office, etc...
      As important as the inside/outside dialogue, will be the negotiation inside of the space: the overlayering of practices and imaginations of the space, the monsterly spaces that grow out of inbreeding, etc... Not only negotiating space, but also behavior, time, attitude, convictions and necessities.

       


      01-12 / 11 / 2010


      “THE 5 SENSES”
      workshop by Bart Van den Eynde and Elke Van Campenhout


      In this workshop we develop on the basis of texts and specialist talks a mapping of the 5 senses as a starting point for artistic thinking and practices. We include artistic practices like the ones of Lygia Clarke, Enrique Vargas, Peter Verhelst, Dries Verhoeven, f0am, Charo Calvo, etcetera... Each of the senses is the topic of 2 days.

       

      15-19 / 11 : 2010


      ‘SPATIAL LITERACY’
      workshop by Anette Baldauf & Epifania Amoo-Adare


      What is space, what is the relationship between spatial conditions and power? How can we envision the transformation of space and the making of different spaces? The premise of this workshop is that a critical pedagogy on space, on the forces involved in the production and reproduction of space, is a necessary condition for any intervention in space. We propose to challenge widespread understandings of space as a structure that is given and fixed, in other words: a structure that is developed for and not a context that is developed by society. We contrast this convention with an understanding of space as both, a manifestation as well as a vehicle of the productive relations of power. Following the equation “space = (social) product” we investigate spatial relations, the making of inclusion and exclusion, centrality versus marginality, legibility, difference and conflict. Framed as an exercise in “spatial literacy”, we discuss techniques of making sense of spatial relations, of making use and appropriating them.



      22 / 11 / 2010


      “LECTURE BY CHRISTIAN RIZZO”
      presented by a.pass & De Singel


      Choreographer Christian Rizzo will be working for a year with and in the buildings of deSingel. In the next block he will also create a workshop for a.pass. This is a first meeting with the artist where he reads texts with us that have been essential in his development as an artist. This lecture is a starting point to speak about different influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work.
      Christian Rizzo has been fashion designer, rock musician, then dancer and choreographer. In 1996 he created his own company L'Association Fragile. From 2003 he became artist in residence of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Toulouse. Also in 2003 he received Le Grand Prix de la Critique.

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2010 BLOCK II 01 May 2010
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2010
    • 31 July 2010
    • 2010 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Adva Zakai
      Agnese Cornelio
      Alessandra Coppola
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      David Zagari
      Einat Tuchman
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Katrin Lohmann
      Manne Granqvist
      Manon Avermaete
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Michiel Reynaert
      Philip Janssens
      Stephen Bain
      Sven Goyvaerts

       


      Research End Presentations

      Alejandro Petrasso
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Sara Vilardo

       

       

      Partners

      Les Bains
      MicroMarché
      Sarma
      Workspace Brussels
      Nadine
      SoundImageCulture

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Agnese Cornelio
      Anette Baldauf
      Charlotte Brouckaert
      Dries Verhoeven
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Erik Devries
      Jeremy Wade
      Joao Fiadeiro
      Joël Verwimp
      Katrin Lohmann
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Laurent van Lancker
      Luk Lambrecht
      Manne Granqvist
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Sven Goyvaerts

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Anette Baldauf
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi

       

       

       

       

       

      10-14 / 05 / 2010


      ‘HP OFFICEJET 9130 ± ERRORS’
      workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi & Joël Verwimp


      Developments in technology and changes in society regularly render things obsolete; think of professions like blacksmithing, technology like oil lamps, and rules about handling horses. Copyright law might well become such an obsolete instrument. In fact, it never really worked outside the US/European borders and open source software already moves beyond copyright restrictions worldwide. This shows that making and meaning in the current cultural environment requires a response to existing institutional and organisation structures, identifying differences and engaging art as an open ongoing process. With COYOTL, we produce or try to produce a vivid impression of knowledge products: of these, software is unique, as it is said to have behaviour. More specifically, it instills behavior in computers when it is executed by them, causing tangible effects in the real world. Just like software, we believe that performative publishing is such a situation allowing a reflexive way of working by engaging with relationships.
      In the framework of the Bains Connective DIY residency lab at MicroMarché, we edited previous COYOTL material into the printed workbook The leakers which will build the basic discourse for the workshop. Together with your project material (on paper, in form of quotations, or as live or memorised events) we will create a pool of content, which will be copied, scratched, hacked, nod rearranged as a resource for each other’s project. Departing from these thoughts and the mutating discussion around copyright/copyleft/open source COYOTL will play as usual, with the copy-machine (HP Officejet 9130 is currently our main tool) in order to
      - develop models of cooperation for any kind of art and knowledge production
      - facilitate an environment for independent and NOT-NEGOTIATED exchange and development of other artist's practice
      - perform on paper, nurtured by and leading to performance in OTHER spaces/logic
      - question not only new work models, but also what kind of space and organisational structure art production needs today

       

      17-21 / 05 / 2010


      ‘REVOLUTION’
      no-workshop workshop by Katrin Lohmann & Manne Granqvist,
      with guests: Nicolas Y Galeazzi, Bavo, Dieter Lesage


      The no-workshop organizers believe that the concept of revolution is a relevant and urgent one for our times. What does a revolution imply for society, and for the individual? Is the total collapse near, is it necessary, is it desirable? What are the possible positions in relation to revolution for the artist and for the activist?
      The organizers of the REVOLUTION no-workshop do not pretend to be experts on the subject. Rather they regard the workshop as an opportunity to research a cluster of topics that they regard alarmingly pertinent, for themselves and for the present times, with others who share the same sentiment. It is the experience of the no-work-no-shop organizers that the matters at hand are of a kind that strike a natural chord with not so few people in the present times.

       

       


      19-21 / 05 / 2010

      ‘DOCUMENTARY’
      workshop by Laurent van Lancker in collaboration with SIC


      SoundImageCulture is a group of artist-anthropologists committed to artful storytelling through real human encounters that challenge documentary conventions, and opens up to sound and image installations. Informed by developments in cultural theory, social sciences, and the visual art. SIC questions the relation between artist, subject and viewer. How can you represent somebody in sound and image when you don’t know his or her background? The answer is not to eschew representation; rather, SIC proposes an ethical reflection on how ‘the other’ is presented in contemporary media, believing this to be an urgency of the multicultural society we live in.

       


      24-28 / 05 / 2010


      ‘QUEER IN THE CITY’
      workshop by Anette Baldauf


      I am not a Queer Studies expert, but I have worked, and taught, on questions of gender, sexuality and the city. I would love to connect that knowledge with theories on performativity, maybe starting off from Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, both of which we addressed during the City of Illusion workshop. I have been teaching a lot on the so-called Girl Movement - Riot Girls, Dyke Bands... - which tried to challenge concepts of femininity through pop music and performance in the mid 90s, and the following backlash of Britney Spears etc.- which was a performance of femininity as special effect. We could e.g. read, and then analyze artistic as well as popular culture strategies of the gender confusion.

       

       

      31/05 - 11/06 2010

      ‘STORYBOARDING’
      workshop by Jeremy Wade


      In many ways performance is one big performed storyboard, an invisible text set of directions and nothing more. At the other hand storyboarding itself is an art form. So how to use a storyboard to construct a performance and how to make a storyboard performative, how to blur the boundaries between storyboard and piece. Starting from a written proposal minimum of three pages of each of the participants, storyboards will be made, including an application for a grant with a budget of the project.
      As Contemporary Performers, Choreographers, Directors, and Scenographers we work toward events that have the potential to rewrite and dislocate an audience from stratified senses of meaning. During the course of this exploration/composition workshop we will strive to facilitate the great blur through the investigation of numerous storyboarding techniques. We will also research a wide array of taboos, techniques and theories that help us get closer to an essential concern of composition and aesthetics which is the age-old question of… “What is a thing”? We look at a vast index of queer scores that shed some light on the circularity of aesthetics. We can make monsters out of these stagnant aesthetics and gain perspective on how to compose, obliterate, blur and layer our lovely things for an audience. We will find modes to clarify our concepts for the pre production and production phases of creation. We will work towards structuring and deconstructing our ideas, both material and ethereal.

       

      07-11 / 06 / 2010


      ‘EXHAUSTING DANCE’
      reading sessions


      After having wrestled ourselves through the introduction of this book on contemporary dance (edited by André Lepecki), we decided to take a second look at the book in a full reading-session week.
      The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, ‘Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement’ examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US.
      Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies.
      This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.
      We will combine the reading sessions with fragments out of the work of contemporary choreographers and bring the practice to the theory.

       


      14-18 / 06 / 2010


      ‘PERSPECTIVES ON SPACE’
      reading sessions


      In this reading sessions we invite several scenographers and artists in whose work the use & organization of space is essential, to read with us texts that have been essential in their development as artists. A starting point to speak about other influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work. Erki Devries, Luk Lambrecht, Dries Verhoeven & Laurent Liefooghe are our guests.

       

      21 - 24 / 06 / 2010


      ‘PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR BEGINNERS’
      workshop by Elke Van Campenhout under mentoring of Mladen Dolar in collaboration with Sarma and Workspace Brussels


      The workshop on psychoanalysis will open up the field of thinking of Lacan and related thinkers to a group of beginners in the theory. In the arts psychoanalysis has taken up a central position in the interpretation and thinking about the arts. Although a lot of the time implicit, the frame of thinking about the Real, objet petit a, etc... is part of our cultural and esthetic heritage. In this workshop we look the first two days at Slavoj Zizek’s film 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' in which he explores the psycho-analytical subconscious of Hollywood film-making. Afterwards we read Zizek's book 'Welcome to the desert of the Real' for a contemporary and highly political performativization of what the psycho-analytical framework can still teach us today.

       


      25 / 06 / 2010


      ‘SOCIAL MEDIA & THE AVATAR’
      workshop by researcher/participant Sven Goyvaerts


      One day around the basics of the social media and the role of the avatar in our thinking about (alternative or virtual) identities.



      28 / 06 - 2 / 07 / 2010


      ‘THE GAZE’
      workshop by  researchers/participants Agnese Cornelio, Marcelo Mardones, Charlotte Brouckaert & Sven Goyvaerts


      How do we construct our identity through the look of others? How do we look at others an read them? How are we judged by others or do we feel judged by them? And how does the gaze function in the social media, how do we control the gaze of the others and how do we read others by their virtual presentation?
      Partly reading session, partly practical research using social media and the camera as a tool to catch the gaze.

       


      5-11 / 07 / 2010


      ‘FIND YOUR INNER IDIOT’
      camping group practice by a.pass


      Loosely based on the Dogma movie 'The Idiots' by Lars Von Trier, we work for one week on the principles of idiocy as a potential artistic, political or actionist strategy. During the workshop we try to define different methodologies to discover our 'inner idiots', both on a physical practice level as on a theoretical level. We combine reading and viewing sessions of material relating to 'idiocy' (out of philosophy and art history) with physical sessions, aiming at the development of a personal and a communal idiot body. Each of the participants can devise his/her own perspective on the mindset and context out of which to work, trying to discover within a small group of dedicated participants their personal 'inner idiots', and constructing a group practice out of this confrontation. We might bring the practice to public space when we feel ready for that. Only for true idiots!

       


      12 - 16 / 07 / 2010


      ‘TERROR’
      film analysis workshop by a.pass


      An exercise in concrete and detailed analysis, argumentative construction and critical discussion. In this workshop we analyze horror movies. How does the mechanism of terror functions in these movies and which are its disguises? How do we deal with our instant emotional (moral) reaction in our discussion? Where does art starts and exploitation ends? What is the place of horror in our lives? One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of film, photography, the net) horrors taking place in the real or in fantasized worlds. Images of atrocities have become, via the screens of the television and the computer, a commonplace. What is this fascination with the depiction of cruelty? Is ours perception of reality eroded by the barrage of such images or do they just make us happy that we are alive?
      This workshop is in the first place aimed at analyzing the formal principles of movie making: the creation of 'horror' through camera perspectives, montage, use of (off-)voice, etcetera. But next to that we also try to come to a deeper understanding of the parameters of horror, by reading texts (Sontag, Zizek, Cronenberg,...) to feed the discussion.

       

      17-23 / 07 / 2010


      ‘HARD WORKING IDLES’
      workshop by researcher/participant Adva Zakai with Joao Fiadeiro and guests


      Each day will be divided into two sessions: Mornings to the practice of Real Time Composition*, a method developed by Joao Fiadeiro, and afternoons to a talk with an invited guest.
      Why ‘hard working idlers’? Because I find myself confronted by this contradiction: On the one hand, being critical towards the ethics of artistic practice that are increasingly product-oriented - generating practices which are exclusive rather than inclusive, imposing a position on the artist’s plan rather than enabling an ‘emergence’ of a situation. On the other hand, appreciating a personal examination of ideas or
      forms, and intrigued by a detailed, skillful and directed proposition from the artist to the public.
      Can these two approaches complement rather than oppose each other: Where does the artist’s control over a performance stop and the event generate itself through the contributions of all its participants? How much (or rather what kind of) ‘work’ is needed in order to trigger a situation?
      The same inquiries are perhaps relevant with regards to the way one relates to one’s surroundings. Can changes in society emerge through individual or self-organized mechanisms rather than be dictated by overarching norms, ideologies and preconceptions? If we consider an experience as complete even though its in a constant state of becoming itself – would it allow more dynamic and liberation from dogmas in our day, work, life, art?

       

       

      19-23 / 07 / 2010


      ‘THE REALITY, THE GIANT SCENARIO III’
      workshop by researcher/participant Maria Lucia Correia


      The City appears as a breathing entity that contains the concept of future reflections and artistic interventions. The reality, the Giant Scenario is a workshop that approaches the city space as a living body that seeks for our attention. As working methodology we will address the city space, with a critical vision on sensorial and visual awareness. In order to map our environment we will draw and recompose the elements of the urban space, collecting lost details and objects on our city walks (derives). Moments where we will get lost into a world of colors, shapes, ornaments, sounds, rhythms… and relate to places that are damaged, abandoned, dead or ill... The workshop will then resource the urbanist and emotional mapping of the space and its graphical potentialities within a new scenario, a new life, a new narrative of forgotten details. The city will not be the set of public interventions but a living body that incorporates us, an extended form of connections, reconstructions, treatment, placement and intersections.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK III 01 September 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2009
    • 30 November 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Agnese Cornelio
      Alejandro Petrasso
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Fien Wauters
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Sara Vilardo
       

       


      Research End Presentations

      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow

       


      Partners

      Theaterfestival
      De Singel
      CIFAS
      Bourla Theater
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Arco Renz
      Benjamin Verdonck
      Hans Op de Beeck
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lotte van den Berg
      Meg Stuart
      Moritz Kuhn
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi
      Rabih Mrouéh
      Renée Copraij
      Stefan Heinric
      Stijn Bussels
      Timothy De Paepe

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde   

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THEATERFESTIVAL’

      ‘Performance in public Space’ : reading sessions & artist talks by de Singel and a.pass

      The Theaterfestival offers a perfect occasion to make the a.pass training more visible. Three participants show their researches in the context of the festival ( Ariane Loze, Michel Yang and Jozef Wauters) and the reading sessions are open to outsiders. Several artists will be invited to discuss the theme of ‘performance in public space’ with the participants (Benjamin Verdonck, Moritz Kuhn and Lotte van den Berg), combined with a close reading of theoretical texts.  

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN III’

      workshop by Arco Renz  and Stefan Heinrich

      A scenography workshop with a choreographer seems a necessity for a.s. Working on a new project, Arco Renz works with the participants on the development of a - hypothetical - stage design for his choreography. Without the help of a 'performance text' the participants will enter his world and find connections with their own interests, measure up the artistic and practical limitations of the project and find a scenographic vision which inscribes itself in Arco Renz' universe.  

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THE ART OF MISUNDERSTANDING’

      workshop by Nicholas Y Galeazzi

      Nicolas Y Galeazzi’s workshop 'The art of misunderstanding' explores the different ways in which artistic research is or can be organized. In a very practical setting, the participants will develop one (room-sized) 'paper' on artistic research, using their own attitudes and methodologies for a more thorough mapping out of the field. The workshop both challenges the imagination of the field of knowledge production, as offering a lot of theoretical texts explorations, introducing artistic examples and opening up a lot of discussions.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘VENICE BIENNALE’

      journey to art biennale by a.pass 

      The visit of the Venice Biennale is a possibility for a focussed confrontation with the referential current visual arts context. Hybridity and the confrontation of cultures, identities and art languages are at the heart of the festival and the context of a cultural event of that proportion, exposure and 'fame' is in itself an important issue of discussion. Parallel with the Biennale there will be also other major exhibitions in Venice: the opening of  Punta della Dogana Art Museum and In-Finitum in the Palazzo Fortuny. There will be no organized workshop and there will be no fixed itinerary, participants will be free to completely self organize through the four days in Venice.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ART AS DOCUMENT / DOCUMENT AS ART - RABIH MROUÉ’

      Two weeks workshop with artist Rabih Mrouéh, in the framework of the RITS research project Art as a document/The document as art. Participants will join in first instance in day-long discussions on central topics within the working field of Mrouéh: what is history, what is fiction? can you create your own history? what is latency? when does your personal history become shared? how to create documents? how do documents function? how can you be your own actor?

      In a second phase, the participants will work with the material in a performative way.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / MEG STUART’

      Choreographer Meg Stuart discusses her development as an artist, the evolution of her work and how she relates to other art forms than dance. Being very aware of the artistic research context of a.pass, she will elaborated on working processes and tools for collaboration as well as the dramaturgy of her performances. 

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘RADICAL HOPE’

      An hybrid program of reading sessions, discussions with guests and practical interpretation of the concept of Hope, ending by the preparation of a 'hope dinner' in a.pass kitchen.

      'Radical Hope, Ethics in the face of Cultural Devastation', Jonathan Lear

      'Hope, New Philosophies for Change', Mary Zournazi: interview with Brian Massumi and Isabelle Stengers

      Guests : Renée Copraij: choreographer, dancer and curator of Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht and Laurent Liefooghe: architect, performance maker

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / HANS OP DE BEECK’

      Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck discusses his development as an artist, the evolution in his work and how he relates to other arts. Using a lot of visual material from his installations and models and fragments of his videoworks, he will sketch an artistic process and an evolution through trial and error. Also elaborating on the practical circumstances of his life as an artist: economics, reception, education, the relation with critics and galleries and museums, etc..

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘CONTAMINATE THE CITY’

      artistic practices in public space

      For this workshop we will join the workshop program of CIFAS in Brussels. ‘Contaminate the city’ is a workshop on artistic practices in public space, trying out different practices and actions, and gradually developing individual projects within the city.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘AN HISTORY OF DANCE’

      reading sessions by Katie Verstockt

      Starting with a minimal historical introduction from dance as a ritual to the dance history in Europe (focusing on the act of seeing and the scenographic performativity), dance theoretician Katie Verstockt will discuss mainly the important 20th century movements (Modern Dance, Ausdruckstanz, Ballet Russes, Ballets Suédois, Post Modern Dance, Butoh, Contemporary dance, ...) in their more general cultural context. 

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘BAROKTHEATERS’

      lecture by Timothy De Paepe at Bourla Theater

      Scenography researcher Timothy De Paepe will give a lecture on theatre architecture, stage machinery & scenography in the baroque era 1600-1750 based on his research and reconstruction of theatre buildings and stages out of the area of Antwerp. With an historical introduction on the evolution and social context of theatre and illustrated with an impressive visual documentation, this presentation will a perfect introduction to a visit of the Bourla Theater.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THEATRICALITY’

      lecture-workshop by art historian Stijn Bussels around the term ‘theatricality'. 

      Following Collins Dictionary it means ‘of or related to the theatre or dramatic performance’, but also ‘exaggerated and affected in manner or behaviour’. How the theatre is related to society? How the theatre is used as a concept that explains conduct outside the norm? However, this negative connotation is historically determined. In the Renaissance, the metaphor of theatrum mundi became a dominant model to show that society is fashioned by role play and scenario’s. This view, however, was not primarily put in a negative context. There is a clear shift in eighteenth-century thought. In this period, our contemporary use of the term ‘theatrical’ comes into being.

      The lecture will focus on the early modern era. By doing so, it will try to make clear how the theatre is divergently appraised in its representational aspect. The theatre is evaluated as reprehensible deception, but also as revealing deeper truth. This evaluation can be linked with views on historical societies where artificiality is not always predominantly coupled with dishonesty, but with skill and learning. 

       

      Fall 2009

      (IN) VISIBLE 

      workshop-research by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and Bart Van den Eynde

      "The reality: “The Giant Scenario”? Are we participants in a scenario created by humans? Is our reality a scenario built in real scale? Does the space feel that we are there? Does our existence depend on the space, or is it the space that depends on us?" Starting from the distinction between what is "visible" and what is not the participants are invited to join a research of the city in the city. Together with coordinator Bart Van den Eynde a syllabus is proposed (Simmel on ‘Metropolis’, Debord on ‘Derive’ and Marc Augé on ‘non-places’) and the creation of a context for city walks and consequent mapping and reporting. 

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK II 01 May 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2009
    • 31 July 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Alejandro Petrasso
      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Fien Wauters
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Sara Vilardo
      Sungmin Hong                


      Partners

      DeSingel                 
      KunstenFestivaldesArts
      Les Bains
      In Transit festival, Berlin
      WP Zimmer
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)


                        
      Contributors for workshops

      André Lepecki
      Lars Frers & Alexander Schellow
      Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene
      Luc Van den Dries
      Niek Kortekaas
      Romeo Castellucci
      Thomas Crombez
      Vladimir Miller
      Wouter Hillaert


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

      04-08 / 05 / 2009

      ‘AROUND ROMEO CASTELLUCCI’

      workshop by De Singel

      In this week we work around the video material of the Tragedia Endogonidia-cycle of Romeo Castellucci. During the first two days we watch the eleven performance and discuss the esthetic choices, and the semiotics of the work. On wednesday we try to build up a 'wunderkammer' on the principles of Castellucci's 'ars combinatoria'. As guests we have that day academic Thomas Crombez and journalist/critic Wouter Hillaert. After that we work two days with Romeo Castellucci and some of his performers on the new trilogy 'The Divine Comedy'. On Sunday the working week results in a colloquium in de Singel with international experts and collaborators of the Rafaello Sanzio-company. 

       

       

      Springtime 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 02’

      coaching by Niek Kortekaas

      Scenographer Niek Kortekaas will coach the a.s participants in the development of a scenography based on King Lear / William Shakespeare. The idea is to take a major work from the world repertoire and develop with a dramaturgical coaching by the coordinator (Bart Van den Eynde) and the scenographic (artistic and technical) guidance of Kortekaas a scenographic design for the big stage.

       

       

      05 / 2009

      ‘RES&REF’ (Residence and Reflection)

      research project by a.pt, KunstenFestivaldesArts and Les Bains

      Res&Ref (Residence and Reflection) is a research project, organized during the international Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. Three groups of artists reside together in the art center Les Bains (an old bathing house/swimming pool in Brussels): the res&ref-group itself is an international group of (non)-western artists, chosen by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. The working group 'Art&Humour' is an international group of researchers, working on the theme of the subversitity of humour as an artistic strategy of resistance. The a.pass-group joins in the groups, preparing reading sessions on art and humour, but they can also join the discussions and toolkit sessions. In the evening all participants go and see the same performances at the festival, and after ten days the workshop ends with an informal public showing of the results.

       

       

      Springtime 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / VALENTINE KEMPINCK’

      Costume and set designer and visual artist Valentine Kempinck discusses her carrier, development as an artist, the evolution in her work and how she wanders from medium to medium. She discusses her onorthodox vision on theatre costumes and how she sees costume design in relation to the other performance components. Later she will go in details about her latest work: scenographic interventions in the public sphere which reproduce themselves, taking on different meanings through this process of reproduction.

       

       

       

      Springtime 2009

      ‘THEORY SESSIONS / HISTORY OF THEATRE AND SCENOGRAPHY’

      lecture/course by Luc Van den Dries

      In this lecture course Luc Van den Dries discusses the relation between space and theatricality. First he explores historical answers to the tension between theatre and reality. He deals with four prototypical dimensions:

      -theatre as an imitation of reality

      -theatre as a utopian project to reality

      -theatre as playful counterpart to reality

      -theatre as a metaphysical dimension within reality. 

      After scanning (20th century) theatre history related to the questions above, he discusses space-related tendencies in contemporary performing art.  

       

       

      11-21 / 06 / 2009

      ‘IN TRANSIT - BERLIN / SESSIONS WITH ANDRE LEPECKI’

      In preparation for the a.pass Berlin LAB, we read a selection of texts, proposed to us by curator André Lepecki:

      -Fred Moten, The Resistance of the Object (chapter 2 of 'In the Break')

      -Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood

      -Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

      This first week we will discuss the texts and the post-colonial themes of the festival, and will try to build up a solid base for the upcoming discussions and confrontations. Out of these discussions every one of the participants will develop a personal research project to be fulfilled during the festival.

      Always a central element of ‘In Transit’ festival since its first edition in 2002, the LAB has gone through many formats throughout the years. For this edition, we decided to concentrate the LAB around the offering of a space for all who are interested in gathering, talking, meeting, exchanging, experimenting, asking, provoking, dancing, writing, showing, displaying, performing, teaching, learning, sharing. And more. The LAB’s life and its events will be determined by you.

      The LAB hosts a day meeting, and all LAB participants are expected to attend this day-long gathering (closed to the general public) which specifically addresses projects presented in the festival as points of departure for further and concrete debates on art and politics, as these relate to performance and its effects on creating and thinking today. 

       

       

      29 / 06 – 04 / 07 & 13-27 / 07 / 2009

      ‘WAYS OF SEEING AND FORCED PERSPECTIVES’

      workshop by Vladimir Miller

      Vladimir's workshop is structured in two parts and is aimed at researching the city as a model for spectator involvement in a performance space. Connecting spectatorship and questions of teaching and learning to the city is also a model for the workshop structure itself as a space for knowledge production.

      The first part is centred around of the political aspects of space design and a phenomenological understanding of the spectators experience of space.

      Vladimir Miller uses three key texts (among others): ‘The practice of everyday life’ by de Certeau, Charles Curtis' essay on ‘Incomprehensible space’ and Jacques Rancière ‘The emancipated spectator’.

      To establish an alternative small system of knowledge production for our workshop, the participants build a space of learning and research where everyone is able to produce on her/his own terms. The idea of the city gives a model for this kind of space, which the participants can equally enter and explore.

      The research theme for the city is listening and sound. The question is how to shape space for listening, having in mind a moving listener and spectator. 

      A violinist is invited to create a continuing presence of sound in this city of listening. The space research concentrates around question of shaping the performative space (from a scenographic point of view) around that continuum of sound.

       

       

      07 / 2009 

      ‘SPATIAL RESEARCH & PERFORMANCE ART’

      workshop by Lars Frers & Alexander Schellow

      The workshop of the sociologist Lars Frers and the visual artist Alexander Schellow focuses on strategies and practices of spatial research. The starting point is that any space we can perceive and engage with is already a complex and in itself relational constellation of several aspects. It is a concrete context of a very specific materiality and an embodied spectator. Both are depending on each other. Together they both realise the conditions, that govern the way the/a world is constructed, for instance by directing attention. Or: They draw the borderlines may that be in public space with its everyday-life interactions or in the art-world frame of a theatre which guide, influence and limit our actual abilities to perceive and to act. Because of this impact  on perception and action the question of analysis and intervention is always at the same time a political and aesthetic question both in field research in public space as well as in the use of any artistically framed space like a black box or a white cube. 

       First, we want to discuss some terms and tools of our own research- and intervention-practice in and with spaces/places. We will then question, develop and adapt these terms and tools in the context of the examination, analysis, and shaping of spaces in performance practices. How to question, understand, use and not neglect or cover up spatial structures? Together with the participants of the workshop we want to choose a concrete spatial context (a building, a street, a theatre) and then concentrate on possible frames for practical research. This research should be related to the specific interests and wishes of the participants’ own projects and from their individual practices. The main part of the workshop will focus on doing concrete spatial analyses within a frame and using formats we select together. We will prescribe as little as possible, instead relying on our own perception looking for places of surprises, for modifications of movement patterns, for boredom, excitement and anxiety. Coming together at the end, we will share the singular results and research-experiences.

      Additionally and in parallel, we will offer one-to-one or one-to-two talks about specific spatial ideas and setups of projects and works, where single participants can discuss questions related to their work together with us.

       

       

      07 / 2009 

      ‘SENSE RADIO’

      workshop by Lilia Mestre and Els Viaene

      Sense Radio is a first step in a research project initiated by Lilia Mestre in a.pass research center on the ‘Social-Emotional Body’, (project that would result in the performance ‘Live-In Room’, shown at the WorkSpaceBrussels festival in Brussels in December 2009).

      This workshop is a practical try-out for the participants to set up emotional audio-spaces in the room, using the spatialisation of sound as their main material. 
Each of them is taught how to use audio recording material, how to edit sound, and how to set the sound out on the space, combine it, arrange it.

       

       





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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