index

Sina Seifee

a.pass 4th floor

24 July 2017

25 July 2017

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

Committed to staying with linguistic differences in each of our stories we open a praxiography, a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language that we are using to describe what we do. The participants are asked to bring their "found-objects" (objects, categories, metaphors, concepts, words, terms, and figures that one cannot stop following) and put them under telling: stories about the lives of your found-objects in a practice of writing. In telling-practices we engage in a contingent (re)materializing of our empirical objects and we question the essential stories that hold each of our practices together. With the aim of keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation, through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) ecology of key concepts we will learn a relational empiricism that helps decomposing one's solid objects of knowledge.

Where? a.pass 4th floor from 14:00 till 18:00

postgraduate program

workshop

block 2017/II

The Problem of the Score

Dance Workshop 07 June 2017
posted by: Lilia Mestre

Jennifer Lacey

10 July 2017

14 June 2017

It seems obvious that the conditions for making something (anything) will influence the thing made . Other "I " words are maybe more specific than influence: infuse, impregnate, infiltrate, interrupt, incinerate, incarcerate, inveigle, imbue, illuminate. The larger axis of conditions, as I see them, are largely related to money, time, health and the political situation of the land and/or institution surrounding the workplace. The more intimate and malleable aspects are ideas and process. The qualities and hazards of the large-axis conditions in relation to the ones deemed "creative" produce what we could call a form.

The base line of dance is perhaps understood as the body but mostly it is bodies ( minds implied) together someplace, deciding to work in a certain way . The how of the work, the process, is something that is always to be reinvented and renegotiated. Each dispositif of dance making already contains a nascent content, one that will inevitably be more influential than any idea or concept in the production of the form. So, in imagining how to design the making of a dance, the translation of the concept or content into a thing-which-can-be-done is a crucial, poetic and political task.

In this workshop we will practice dancing and make the making of dances, or otherwise said, processes.
Within the workplace/studio our first and most important gesture is to decide how shall we spend our time and how we shall be with each other and then be alert to the dances that are produced and what they might need to continue. My primary proposition is to cultivate processes derived from your own work, translating their conditions and content into practices that produce some dances (we will simply call all that we produce "dance"). There is no necessity to have had any experience dancing.

As an artist who has worked under a myriad of different large-axis conditions, I have found the greatest necessity and source for me is to render transparent these larger conditions and mix them into the content or desires that preoccupy me, to consciously make a process that can only exist within this specific alchemy. This is my way but there are many varied conventions of contemporary choreographic practice that hold with in them poetic, social and political forces that become be the dominant aspect of the work, even if by accident. We will play with a few of these to observe their forces in action but most of our energy will be devoted to your own work,devising ways to share their doing that retain the integrity of your vision and perhaps reveal the influences of the specific conditions of your work. Or more truthfully, we will start to do this, as 5 days is rather short for such an ambition! I like to refer to working processes as punctual social contracts. Ones that might be extreme in certain ways but that are agreed upon and that we know will end and so we can commit without anxiety.

INSCRIPTIONS ; production@apass.be LIMITED CAPACITY (price 50 euro)

Everyday from 10:00 till 17:00 a.pass 4th floor

postgraduate program

reading session

block 2017/II

The Problem of the Score

Feminist Benjamin Reading Group 01 June 2017
posted by: Lilia Mestre

Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda

Walter Benjamin's work could be described as an extremely precise and sensible/sensitive analysis of modernity. Or, more precisely, of the procedures through which modernity is affecting modes of life and of communication and, essentially, of relating to the world. In his "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" for example, Benjamin describes a practice of an intense “listening”, a mode of extreme attentiveness and generosity towards every-thing that surrounded him, as the precondition for any form of language. And in "The Storyteller", he views storytelling as a way of voicing such experiences of listening to and of experiencing the world. Yet storytelling makes use of almost everything that the modern individual is not or has not, most notably time and the ability to listen. In this mode of communication, the story resonates on multiple levels of meaning without ever assuming the position of an objective truth. In other words, storytelling creates personal narratives where truth and fiction are as much intertwined as the subject of the narration with its object.

Guided by a desire to take a closer look into Benjamin's work, we propose the feminist reading group.

What does it mean to read as a feminist? The question may seem odd, or even trivial, but it engages the very ground of our work as artists and thinkers. Indeed, how is our reflection oriented, if not by the very way in which we turn to the text? And yet, when we think about methodologies and epistemologies, we rarely interrogate the practice of reading itself. This is all the more surprising that feminists tend to engage with texts by seeking to counter and denounce what phallocentrism wishes to leave unseen. These oppositional readings are crucial: without them, the insidious fallacies and the fatal acts of bad faith cannot be undone and proliferate unhampered. Yet they also run the risk of turning feminism into a mode of thinking that does nothing but to say “no,” one that destroys but rarely creates, and one that produces its own form of alienation. We want to propose another form of feminist reading: instead of the critical, distrustful distance, we suggest that closeness and intimacy may form an equally powerful approach. In this reading group, we examine what feminist thinking can become when it takes the shape of a lover’s response to a text’s seduction, and when refutation and penetration are replaced by a mode of reading that is founded in an ethics of proximity.

The structure of the reading group is open. There are no experts. We choose, read and unfold the texts together and according to the interest and individual focus of the participants.

Meetings from 17:00-20:00 at a.pass studio, 4th floor

Next meetings & readings: 20.06 / 04.07 / 18.07 / 08.08

For further information about the texts please contact: marialena.pouskouri@gmail.com

The Problem of the Score

Settlement 11 Collective Schedule 24 May 2017
posted by: Vladimir Miller

a.pass

22 May 2017

03 June 2017

The Schedule will be updated daily

for more information visit https:///www.apass.be/settlement-11/

MON 22.05

14:00 Introduction and Clearing out the Space

18:00 Improvised Dinner

TUE 23.05

10:00 Warm Up Practice

Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

14:00 Peer Critique Leo

Leo Kay

15:00 Spaces of Commoning

Zeljko Blace, Time Lab (Ghent), Vladimir Miiller

17:00 1 Minute Festival

WED 24.05

10:00 Warm Up Practice

Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

14:00 Peer Critique Eszer

Leo Kay

13:30 Collaboration Interview

Eszter and Esther

14:00 Marie Van Leeuwen (ArtEZ)

Conversation with Lilia Mestre

15:00 Session #1 Planning nothing

Where we collectively work out the rules surrounding session #2

Leo Kay

THU 25.05

09:30 Sensation as Score (Movement Practice)

Anouk Llaurens

11:00 Reading Group

Lilia Mestre and Score participants

13:00 2 Minute Festival

17:00 Medium Score 2

| Lilia Mestre

21:00

FR 26.05

10:00 Warm Up Practice

Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

10:30 Cleaning

11:30 Peer Critique slot

Leo Kay

13:00 Making Space For

Collective practice of framing and naming spaces

Esther Rodriguez-Barbero and Leo Kay

14:30 Session #2 Doing Nothing

We gather, head out to a chosen spot and using the ground rules from session #1, do nothing.

Leo Kay

15:30 Session #3 Planning Something

We spend half an hour as a group planning what we will do the following week.

We aim to be prescriptive and impose structures that allow us to fulfil our aims.

Leo Kay

SAT 27.05

MO 29.05

11:00 Architecture and Movement

Creating and experimenting with space by moving simple forms /structures.
Duration 45min

Luisa Fillitz

15:00 Playground

Eszter Némethi

TUE 30.05

11:00 Play-ground

During a short and playful workshop, we will explore the materials and existing geographies of the Settlement to create instructions and scores; while also exploring how dynamics, forms and narratives are conjured through this process.

Eszter Nemethi

13:00 Planning a.pass block III/2017

Vladimir Miller

15:00 Dialogue with Alex Arteaga

What does it mean to think? What does research mean? What can be the cognitive function of aesthetic practices? How should be these practices organized and performed in order to “do research”? And on this basis, what can be the contribution of artistic research to the epistemic field? These, an other related, are the questions that will be addressed in an open dialogue framed by Alex Arteaga.

17:00 Feminist Benjamin Reading Group

What does it mean to read as a feminist? The question may seem odd, or even trivial, but it engages the very ground of our work as artists and thinkers. Indeed, how is our reflection oriented, if not by the very way in which we turn to the text? And yet, when we think about methodologies and epistemologies, we rarely interrogate the practice of reading itself.

Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda

WED 31.05

11:30 Session #4 Doing Something

We gather to do whatever we, as a group, decided that we wanted to do in the previous session.

We will have decided all the parameters of the experience (or lack of them) in the 3rd session. In this last session we just do them.

Leo Kay

THU 01.06

9:30 Sensation as Score (Movement Practice)

Anouk Llaurens

11:00 Reading Group

Lilia Mestre and Score participants

17:00 Medium Score 2

| Lilia Mestre

21:00

FR 02.06

SAT 03.06

12:00 Settlement Review

14:00 Build Down

postgraduate program

workshop

block 2017/II

The Problem of the Score

Sensation as score Movement Practice
09 May 2017
posted by: Lilia Mestre

Anouk Llaurens

09 May 2017

31 July 2017

your sensation...aurens.pdf

Every Thursday we'll meet for movement practice and reflection practice will follow.

The Problem of the Score

The Medium Score Thinking making together apart
07 May 2017
posted by: Lilia Mestre

Lilia Mestre

case of: Lilia Mestre

The proposal for this block follows on previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing.

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

This time the practice of The Medium Score will focus on how different formats of communication intertwine in the making and the analyses of each others researches. Each time every participant will contribute with a 5 minutes template of his/her research as a module of knowledge processing within the common environment of a.pass post master.

The score brings about the importance of art practice and research as a discursive tool. The score pushes for an assemblage of layers - philosophical, emotional, aesthetic, economic, critical, social- that form a reflection of the world and the role of art within it. Every art work has a relation with multiple layers and constructs itself upon that basis. The context of each artistic research is variable and is therefor a contribution for a plural approach of relations.

GENERAL FRAME : MMM - Medium, Methodology, Model

Medium

Use the medium you wish. Answer the questions that will be addressed to you always with the same medium. Be aware you can change medium just once and when you do so you’ll have to explain why.

Methodology

Through the practice of the score the methodological approach of the singular researches will emerge by the way participants will compose their replies. The score allows for the cognition of the individual methodological approaches.

Model

By the end of the score practice each of us will make a model of each of our researches. A model is a visualisation of the connections that the researches propose and the links they have with modes of production, the societal environment, the philosophical, architectural, political, etc, fields that the singular researches entail.

INSTRUCTIONS

-We meet every week on Thursdays from 17:00 till 21:00 on a.pass 4th floor studio.
-We bring food to share.
-We work with the people present. It’s not possible to participate remotely by email or other telematic means.
-There is no audience.If you don’t have work to present you skip a session.

The score is simple. It works as follows:

Proposition > (X 8 question > reply ) > model

To start:

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

The questions

After we assist to each others presentations we assign by chance procedure who is asking questions to whom.

Each of us has two days to formulate a question to one of the researchers that has presented her/his work. Questions are sent by email.

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

The replies

After receiving your questions you have 5 days to develop an answer with the medium you’ve chosen. You present your reply the week after in a 5 minutes template. And so forth till the end of the block.

Change

If you want to change medium during the score practice it is possible to do it once. You have to argument your choice when you decide to do so.

PUBLICATION

We think together how we will publish the practice of the score. How do we make public our processes? The question of documentation and archive is a collective process. The result will be decided by all of us and the materials we generate. A publication will be issued after the block finishes.

postgraduate program

workshop

block 2017/II

The Problem of the Score

SETTLEMENT (11) artistic research environment
07 May 2017
posted by: Lilia Mestre

Vladimir Miller

a.pass 4th floor

case of: Vladimir Miller

During the days of May 22nd - June 4th 2017 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called SETTLEMENT. In the course of these 14 days we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass SETTLEMENT and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at a.pass will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process. The schedule for these two week will be developed on site by its participants and shared online here:

Settlement 11 Collective Schedule

Here are some key ideas which have informed similar spaces before:

encountering processes
The potential of this setup is that it allows us to encounter each others processes instead of products of our artistic work. Processes are much more difficult to make visible and to see as they require a different mode of attention and participation. The attempt to witness a process requires a change in the temporal mode and in the mode of being-together in the collective space.

no spectators
The space we are trying to facilitate is open, but it is not an exhibition. There is no „spectator mode“, and no institutionalized responsibility for hosting. However any participant (including possible newcomers) is welcome to invite and host anybody according to the logic of her/his work process. Anybody is welcome to joint the collective space for any time span, respectful of the fact that Settlement is a predominately a workspace. The (growing/changing) group will try to provide enough information at the entrance, so that everyone feels welcome and knows how to join and share. Although the time frame is short, we hope to create a space that would be engaging to the students, faculty and visitors of the Academy.

gifts
Everyone is welcome to visit or join the space. If someone wants to stay and work (this includes us) s/he should bring a "gift" to the space in terms of sharing a work process, presenting a work, or facilitating a discussion or any other imaginable contribution to the shared space.

productive instability
We will collect most of the materials for the space from the academy’s storage and re-accommodate them towards our purposes. This strategy produces a space that is fragile, self-made, and constantly changing. We believe that such a space influences the sociability within it towards similar qualities – towards a more fluid social contract. In asking for a hands-on construction and deconstruction of its makeshift set-ups, such a space allows for a quicker change of settings and a decentralized mode of (self)organization. For this reason, we suggest to refrain from using usual furniture (tables and chairs) and improvise new set ups for „work-stations“ and collective moments out of what we can scavenge from around the academy.

SETTLEMENT

Settlement is spatial proposal that tries to sustain its architectural fragility hoping in this way to initiate a temporary social, organizational and ideological one. Simply put it is a collective workspace, a camp and a hangout, open to all who stop by and would like to contribute to it. Like many other such meetings it is a place of informal exchange and presentation. It is a space for practices instead of products, a place where our individual ideas and processes have not yet achieved a solid state and can flow into each other.

Settlement starts with a haphazard collection of materials in an otherwise empty space Everything one might need for one’s work has be be built and (re)invented there. There are no tables, no chairs, and the materials and objects resist easy categorization and usability. They have to be mis-used, adapted, they have a will on their own. The built environment has to be negotiated (with) on the level of the object. There is potential in a thing being one thing one day, and a totally different thing the day after. There is also potential in that thing changing hands. (You will be surprised how quickly ownership is established from communal beginnings: you just have to take one thing and put is somewhere.)

Settlement is a space that tries very hard not to settle. Its instability works against the establishing of clear boundaries between „your space“ and „my space“, what hopefully follows from that is that it is very difficult to establish boundaries between „your work“ and "my work". Miller believes that practice is bound by space, and if space gets shaky, unstable, shareable, so does the practice.

By starting from scratch Settlement invites a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. In the course of the three weeks Settlement lets your particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the encoded behaviors of ready-made spaces such as “table”, “studio”, “meeting”, “gallery”, “venue”, “library”, etc.

The politics of practice in terms of co-habitation and co-working, of claiming one’s own space, inviting or excluding the outside, communication of ideas, inviting change and influence are all there to be questioned within this setup. As a practice is (in some ways) „re-built“ during Settlement, one can come to question its very construction.

Settlement is a collective project Vladimir Miller facilitated over several years on different occasions. The project takes the form of a workshop and creates and inhabits a space full of fragile and precarious structures. Since Settlement starts from a space devoid of habitual work setups, with all materials present considered a common resource,all the structures are built from the necessities of the individual and collective practices of its participants. A kind of a re-start on the physical level and an attempted re-start on the level of the habitual and institutional structures governing our spaces of production. The title is used as a provocation, as Settlement is a space which, over the course of several weeks, tries very hard not to settle.
Settlement puts a spatial perspective on practice, identifying modes of institutionalization and habit which keep the spaces of artistic production and education from becoming spaces of commoning. These modes of ‘settling’ are embedded in many things: they are there in the ways the spaces are designed and organized towards stability (supporting habit and the given hierarchy of organization), they are there in the institutionalized processes of access and exclusion, and they are there in our social habits (which structure the most empty and open space imaginable). Looking at how the spaces of our practice prioritize the habitual, Settlement introduces architectural fragility as a mode of destabilizing practice and the social agreements between the participants. The spaces created within Settlement are make-shift and precarious and therefore never suited to support a certain social constellation or a process indefinitely. That introduces another timing into the space, rendering all structures inherently temporary and unreliable. The habit of regarding products of work as property becomes destabilized, as all structures in the space are short-lived and can become ‘material’ again very quickly. These and other changes occur through fragility of the built environment and work effectively against the habitual ‘settling down’. The transition of a structure back to the common resource through collapse or re-appropriation is always a possibility, producing the common as a constant perspective onto the emerging territories, constellations and rules in the Settlement space.

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

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!

index

Open Call