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    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Annex III Research Center CYCLE III 2021/2022 Publishing Artistic Research
      01 February 2023
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Gosie Vervloessem, João Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Simon Asencio, Vijai Maia Patchineelam,Vladimir Miller
    • book
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Annex III

      Annex III is a collaboratively written book by researchers of Cycle 3. It discusses an annotated library of shared references and recommendations which have accumulated during their research year. This publication is a collective retracing of these  connections, and as such a reweaving of a complex understructure of speculative relationships between the questions and concerns of this Cycle.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Block 2019/II Troubled Gardens ecologies of artistic research
      23 April 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 29 April 2019
    • 28 July 2019
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Block 2019/II  Troubled Gardens

      The earth faces troubles of kind humanity never experienced before: climatic changes induced by humankind are dramatically destructive and - meanwhile unavoidable. Therefore we can register a shift in the environmental movement from an understanding of trying to prevent the planet from a catastrophe to mere dealing with life within the consequences of climate changes. This perspective fundamentally shifts our culturally abstracted understanding of nature - and therefore it poses big questions to the arts as a source of cultural knowledge for that great deal of life. The catastrophe might mirror the impossibility of hierarchical understandings of the relation between nature and culture, but it also forces us to the obvious insight that all vital cycles - whether social, ecological, technological, cultural, mental, emotional, economic etc.- are inseparably connected ecosystems.

      Knowing about their sensitivity and complexity, I’m asking myself, how does my artistic practice and research act within the disturbedness of these ecosystems? How can I understand myself and my research as transformative part of their troubles - knowing, that I’m a troubled and troubling ecosystem myself?

      After having curated two blocks at a.pass with regards to the conditions which, and in which we create - the block 2017/II about the commons, as an alternative economy, and the block 2018/I about the making of conditions and Institutional Critique - I see the need to look beyond our cultural boundaries and understand the meshwork of diverse conditions we are living in together with other species, elements and time zones.

      The aim of this block is to challenge our individual research aims as living creatures and companions in and as ecosystems. Hyper related, affecting, and never singular, our researches are - however - in resonance with their surrounding. We can not ignore the influence of these aspects, but we are also hardly aware of the performance of these influences on our practice.

      Taking this ‚ecosystem-perspective‘ as the main tool for our investigations, this block shall give you the possibility to reflect your research as a relational field within a ‚terrestrial‘ landscape. On the other side, it will unavoidably put our researches in relation to the ecological crisis and catastrophes surrounding us and will help us to develop tools and understanding for a post-anthropocentric, post-atopocenic, probably post-artropocentric relational practice with your research.

      Therefore, this block IN-vites you OUT. Where to investigate and experience a behaviour as ecosystem better then in the outside - an outside, that immediately takes us in, makes us being a part of it! ‚Outdoor‘ - at places with-out-doors - might be the right term. Where weather and biosphere meet industrial (side-)performance, migrant activities, walls, traffic, sun - and state power, written and unwritten laws etc. interact with each other.
      This block takes you out into the systemically ‚wild‘. What allows structure? I don’t know - at the moment, before having taken up theses c/glasses any curated structure feels violent towards the tenderness of the ecosystems. Handling the idea ‚ecosystem as research as ecosystem‘ with care is as crucial as to care with the greatest sensitivity for the ecosystems we are about to enter by stepping out of the door.

      This in mind, I throw out my tentacles to propose a path to step into our ‚worlding‘ experience and to trace the stories we will tell on that way.

       
    • 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
    • SETTLEMENT (11)


      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.

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

       

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

       

      Editor: Philippine Hoegen

      Editorial support: Lilia Mestre

      Contributing authors: Adrijana Gvozdenović, Amy Pickles, Ana Hoffner, Anouk Llaurens, Aubrey Birch, caterina daniela mora jara, Chloë Janssens, Elke Van Campenhout, Femke Snelting, Guy Gypens, Isabel Burr Raty, Kate Rich, Kristien Van den Brande, Krõõt Juurak, Laura Pante, Leo Kay, Lilia Mestre, Livia Andrea Piazza, Loes Jacobs, Mathilde Villeneuve, Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit & Yaen Levi, Nicolas Y. Galeazzi, Peggy Pierrot, Philippine Hoegen, Pia Louwerens, Pierre Rubio, Rui Calvo, Samah Hijawi, Sara Manente, Sina Seifee, Steven Jouwersma, Túlio Rosa, Vanja Smiljanić, Veridiana Zurita, Vladimir Miller

      Text editors: Chloe Chignell, Sarah Cale, Kristien Van den Brande

      Proofreader: Sarah Cale

      Production coordination: Joke Liberge

      Administration: Michèle Meesen, Kristof Van Hoorde

      Graphic design: Miriam Hempel, www.daretoknow.uk

       

      Fonts: SangBleu Kingdom, Swiss Typefaces, Standard, Bryce Wilner

      Paper: Munken Lynx Rough

      Printer: Snel, BE

      Images from the a.pass archive, and on their respective pages by:Leo Kay, Femke Snelting, Vanja Smiljanić, Kate Rich, Rui Calvo, Muslin Brothers, Anouk Llaurens, Vladimir Miller, Samah Hijawi, Sina Seifee, Steven Jouwersma

      Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. If inadvertent infringement has occurred please contact the publisher.

       

      ISBN: 978-94-93148-85-7

       

      Produced by a.pass Posthogeschool voor Podiumkunsten vzw.

      www.apass.be

      First edition, Brussels, 2022

       

      Onomatopee Projects

      www.onomatopee.net

       

      Made with the support of the Flemish Ministry of Education.

       

      This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

    • 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.









       

       

    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • End Communications 07 September 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov
    • a.pass
    • 15 September 2023
    • 16 September 2023
    • End Communications

      In-between researcher and research, one finds:

       

      overlap, interests, themes, fiction, text, reading, body, duet, partner, “doctoring”, object, performance, bodies, relationship, questions, researchers, looking, things, going, us, traces, deposits, authors, architectures, dealing, bed, laying, bleeding, seeping, noticing, noting, narrating, unveiling, something, happening, discovery, methodologies, conditions, agent, asking, producing, responses, lethargy, collapse, training, experience, moment, future, here, now, concept, life, rhythm, goals, worth, cheese, workshop, ancestry, trajectories, senses, intimacy, strength, power, assertion, insistence, compassion, idea, artistic practice, descaling, focus, layers, dislocating, destabilizing, conditions, conditioning, negotiating, ways, humanization, humans, violent category, systems, disability, concrete, reference, ableism, contemporary, dance, thinking, practices, phenomena, embodiment, dancer, vessel, object, bodies, Marley, memory, erasure, obliteration, intangible, incomprehensible, determined, social, aesthetic, queer, sexualized, opening, gendered, human body, crossing, cultures, genders, generations, narrative, storytelling, voice, transmission, conditions, vs, context, decontextualizing, evaluation, affects, pieces, autofiction, mundane, erotically, charged, space, trip, supermarket, cup, coffee, Monday, morning, laying, down, convergence, blind/low vision, rehabilitation, ‘co-habilitation’, patient-therapist, flooring, prosthetic, patient, therapist, audiences, invitations, systems, dance, disability, together, final, transmission, trespassing, somatic, work, curation, drifting, vicinity, quantum physics, OOO, socio-ecological, hopelessness, seemingly, desperate, galactic points, gayness, history, AIDS, transgenerational, speculative fiction,  spoken word, theoretical, dramaturgical,  methodological, suggestions, Black Holes, celestial, entities, writer, producer, sexuality, vehicle, political ideology, drafts, prosaic, nature, political, administration, structure, Brazil, urban planning, Netherlands, 2019, masters, Moving Images, Belgium, 2022, interdisciplinary, Brussels, Rīga, New York City, orientation, mobility specialist, ‘the clinic’, ‘the studio’, western, lineages, contact improvisation, medical, models, disability, therapeutics, interabled, collaborations, experimental prosthetics, development, form, theatrical performances, electronic, sound, composition, 1:1, instruction, multimedia, installation, MFA, choreography, intermedia, 2021, 2022, adjunct, faculty, department, blindness, visual impairment, living, working, Zagreb, shaping, sensory materials, intimate, social processes, digital, palpable objects, animated, choreographed, sung, non-orientable, forms, different media, processes, translation, queer science fiction, speculative technology, mutual transformation, MA, animated, film, new media, rest, caves, shape, language, performativity, self, scores, ...

       

      If one makes a list of things, a list of all the things, if one were to try an embracive list of things that arise between being and doing, let’s say a dog and barking, and if one were to apply this question to artistic research, and aim at listing all the things that emerge between researcher and research, if one were to aim for the bottom of this list, what would emerge would be immeasurable distance, a very long line of things. At the end of the exercise, the question of what it intended, if not length, if not depth, if not stretch, perhaps could be: what is at stake between researcher and research?

       

      For the four artist-researchers Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov, it is the conflation of research and researcher via the subject. Letting go of notions of distance in relation to their research subject, they opt for a generative entanglement between the subject of research, researching and the researcher.

       

      Understood as a sharing practice, artistic research involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to care about other people and to suspend oneself, over and over, every day, and at times in unflattering ways. For about a year this day-in-day-out practice positioned Marian, Andrea, Alyssa, Marko, as well as their other peers, towards each other as collaborators, witnesses, peers, co-conspirators, role-players, workshop facilitators and guinea pigs. Now, at the end of a joint trajectory, it involves making public, i.e. curating an event together, setting overlaps into printed matter, and extending their research intentions and questions to others.

       

      End Communications, invites the audience to attune to the specific intensities produced by these research entanglements as they are shared and made public.

       


       

       

      Marian Rosa van Bodegraven

      The Final Exam: this research considers how an artistic practice affects and is affected by the body of the researcher through pieces of autofiction that contemplate the mundane as an erotically charged space: a trip to the supermarket, a cup of coffee, a Monday morning spent laying down. The research will be presented through a reading of three texts: Clementine, Monday Blues (written by H.de S. and researched in the context of the Am I Evil? Workshop, by Alice Ciresola and Simone Basani), and the eponymous The Final Exam.

       

      Alyssa Gersony

      co-habilitation: at the convergence of choreography and blind/low vision rehabilitation, this research proposes ‘co-habilitation’ as a way to reconfigure the patient-therapist relationship. Dance flooring (Marley) is taken as a duet partner, as a prosthetic, as a patient and a therapist, while audiences are invited into a deconstructed studio-clinic where bodies directly implicated in the systems of dance and disability perform together.

       

      Marko Gutić Mižimakov

      Less Than the Sum of Its Parts — Final Transmission is drifting in the vicinity of quantum physics, OOO, socio-ecological hopelessness and the seemingly desperate galactic points of gayness, the history of AIDS and its transgenerational affects. Trespassing performance, somatic work and curation, comes a spoken word duet speculating on the theoretical, dramaturgical, and methodological suggestions emerging from the idea of Black Holes as celestial bodies in proximity to touch and memory.

       

      Andrea Brandão

      first continue, then start (primeiro continuar, depois começar): Andrea’s research* lies within spaces of drifting, where rest, sleep, and the in-between start to carve out an embodied language that shapes the score of a performativity of the self. Through dislocating these transitory spaces into active, participatory experiences, Andrea aims to bring about the seemingly still nature of a state of consciousness that is informed by a rhythm that productively moves us through dark and liquid subterranean strata.

      ** At this moment, Andrea’s research will only be presented at a private scale, with a public moment at a later stage.

       

      End Communications is co-curated by Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov, together with artist-researcher Vijai Maia Patchineelam. 

       


       

      Programme

       

      7pm, 3rd Floor The Final Exam, a reading by Marian Rosa van Bodegraven

       

      -break- food & drinks available*, 4th Floor

       

      8:15pm, 4th Floor co-habilitation, a performance by Alyssa Gersony

       

      -break- drinks available, 4th Floor

       

      9:15pm, 4th Floor Less Than the Sum Of Its Parts — Final Transmission
      a performance by Marko Gutić Mižimakov in collaboration with Petar Sarjanović 

       

      Friday till 11:00 pm post-performance mingle, food & drinks available* 

      Saturday till 1:00 am post-performance party, drinks available 

       

      *On both days, a.pass alumni and culinary artist Aslı Hatipoğlu will prepare vegetarian bibimbap and sweet bites for sale over the course of the evening (gluten free, vegan option available).

       


       

       

      Marian Rosa van Bodegraven is a Brazilian-Dutch researcher, writer and producer. Marian’s body of research moves around sexuality as a vehicle for political ideology. Through writing and readings, she drafts on the prosaic nature of sexuality, and the seemingly en passant layers of a political administration of desire that structure it. Born and raised in Brazil, where she studied Architecture and Urban Planning at Escola da Cidade, she moved to the Netherlands in 2019, where she did her MA in Moving Images at the Sandberg Institute. 

       

      Alyssa Gersony is a Jewish-American interdisciplinary artist currently working in Brussels, Rīga and New York City. Trained as a contemporary dancer and orientation and mobility specialist, Alyssa regularly traverses ‘the clinic’ and ‘the studio.’ Across these spaces, Alyssa practices within western lineages of contact improvisation, medical models of disability therapeutics, interabled performance collaborations, and experimental prosthetics development. Her work takes the form of theatrical performances, electronic sound composition, artistic development workshops, 1:1 individual instruction, and multimedia installation. Alyssa holds an MFA in choreography and intermedia performance, is a 2021-2022 Fulbright awardee in dance research, and is currently an adjunct faculty in the City University of New York, Hunter College department of blindness and visual impairment. 

       

      Marko Gutić Mižimakov is a visual, performance and text based artist and researcher living/working between Brussels and Zagreb. He is interested in shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. In his work bodies as well as digital and palpable objects, are animated, choreographed and sung into non-orientable forms via different media and processes of translation. Often borrowing from queer science fiction he sees his work as a speculative technology of mutual transformation. He has an MA in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Paris College of Art in the department of Transdisciplinary New Media.

       

      Andrea Brandão is a visual and undisciplinary artist living and working between Brussels and Lisbon. Working in the expanded fields of visual arts, performance, cinema, and more, Andrea’s research explores notions of sleep, rest, and drifting in relation to participatory experiences facilitated by scores and assisted at times by audio-visual elements. She is interested in interweaving writing, camera-ing, meditating, and dreaming. She was born in Portugal and started traveling at a very young age. She holds a B.A. in Industrial Design from University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Architecture (2000) and has completed the Advanced Course in Visual Arts of Ar.Co - Centro de Arte e Comunicaçāo Visual and attended Studies of body and movement at c.e.m. - Centro em movimento, in Lisbon.

       

      Collaborators:

       

      Gabi Vanek (co-habilitation, lighting design and audio engineer) is a musician and lighting technician based in Iowa City, USA. As a technician she has worked on projects ranging from HBO to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, to touring artists including Arooj Aftab, Son Lux, and Jenny Lewis.

       

      Petar Sarjanović (Final Transmission, performer collaborator) is a dramaturg from Zagreb, now living in Brussels, also active as writer, performer and theater maker. In 2020 Petar premiered ‘Everything I don’t know, I’ve stolen’, a solo work that deals with the processes of mis- and dis-identification and the folklorization of western canon. 

       

      Co-curator:

       

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institution. 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. Vijai is a former associate researcher at the Research Center, and has since come back on different occasions as a mentor for the Post-Graduate Program at a.pass.

       

    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Printer's Devils
    • MAGAZINES 13 June 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Sara Manente and Jaime Llopis
    • a.pass
    • 26 June 2023
    • 27 June 2023
    • MAGAZINES

      The 2 days workshop starts from looking into the possibilities given by the magazine as a format for artistic publications. 

      If any publication implies a multiplicity of relations and functions, depending on different expertise in the editing and printing process, a magazine entails as well a variety of authors and sources, a diversity of literary genres, and a large spectrum of relationships between the writer/performer and the reader/spectator. A magazine can also alter and play with the tensions and the hierarchies between the serious and the banal. All these features would overflow the centralized and isolated role of the editor.

      How can the format of the magazine be a template or a tool to rethink and project new distributions in the architecture of our artistic research? How would this editing speculation affect the internal distribution of our work? How would the performative specificities of this format trigger the publication of one's artistic processes? How would it map an ecosystem of accomplice practices as well as trace genealogies?

      We will take as example the magazine ROT Issue Zero/SKIN (2020) and ROT #1/IMMUNITY (still in the making). 

      Working times: 10:30am- 1pm & 2-4pm

      Reach out if you want to participate in the workshop! Send an email to Hans @ apass.be, before June 23. 

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

       


       

      Sara Manente studied dance and semiotics before moving to Brussels, where she works as artist, mentor and researcher. In 2008, she graduated from a.pass postmaster program and later participated in the Research Center Cycle 1. More recently, her work reflects on the possibility of contamination between pedagogy, research, performance and publication resulting in a variety of formats: from the choreographic and sculptural work of MOLD, to the editorial and curatorial practice of ROT magazine and Gardens. The situations she promotes are highly collaborative.

      Jaime Llopis graduated in Drama at ESAD (Valencia) and studied dance and Choreography in EDDC (Arnhem). He has lived in Brussels since 2003, where he graduated in a.pass postmaster program. He is currently studying philosophy at UNED. His artistic research focuses on the body as a hinge between praxis (ways of doing) and perceptive patterns. 

    • The table is set. 

      What is here is there. What is not here is somewhere, someone is doing something. 

       

      Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrović, Aslı Hatipoğlu and Nada Gambier invite you on a guided tour of wandering, exploring time, invisible structures, in-betweens, tastes of intimacy, heritage, abrasion, fermentation and reparation that ripple through space to mark the end of their research trajectory at a.pass. 

       

      There will be food, performances, boredom and a spa. 


      DAY PROGRAM

      2nd of June

      9h30 welcome

      10h-17h working shift 1 (with Nada Gambier)

       

      3rd of June

      12h30 welcome

      13h-17h working shift 2 (with Nada Gambier)

       

      EVENING PROGRAM (2 & 3 June: same program)

      17h30  doors open

       

      18h  sign up activities: green room (Nada Gambier) 

                                          6 slots for 2 persons every 10 min

       

                                          time item - publication (Martin Sieweke)    

                                         

                                          foot massage (Aslı Hatipoğlu)

                                          1 slot for 20 persons

       

                                          where: sign up on the 4th floor                                    

       

      19h  entrée (Martina Petrović)

              where: dining table 4th floor

              

              cirrendering - performance / sound installation ( Martin Sieweke & Josephine Stamer)

              where: 4th floor

       

      20h  dinner (Martina Petrović & Aslı Hatipoğlu)

              where: dining table 4th floor

       

             yeast invasion - lecture performance/ installation (Aslı Hatipoğlu) 

             where: 4th floor

       

      21h  dessert (Martina Petrović)

             where: dining table 4th floor

       

             sign up activities: green room (Nada Gambier) 

                                          6 slots for 2 persons every 10 min

       

                                          time item publication (Martin Sieweke)    

                                         

                                          beer spa - walk-in installation (Aslı Hatipoğlu)

                                          max. 8 persons at a time

                                         

                                          foot massage (Aslı Hatipoğlu)

                                          2 slots for 20 persons every 20 min

       

                                          where: sign up on the 4th floor 

       

       


       

      Aslı Hatipoğlu (TH/TR) 

      Aslı Hatipoğlu is an interdisciplinary artist and a self-taught chef who uses food as a focal point to investigate interwoven themes of psychology, science, political ecology, ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and mental health. Her work is influenced by her background growing up with a migrant Thai mother in Turkey where her father had a tourism agency. Asli curates participatory dinners that shed light on food history as well as question how climate change, agricultural politics and current technological developments are changing our contact with food. Through lecture performances with a pinch of satire, Asli brings a critical perspective on the definition of words such as ‘locality’ as a means to re-define them in the complexity of systems. As an antidote to nationalism, she proposes fermentation practices to raise questions around cultural history, locality, tourism and the dogma of economic necessity. Asli believes in the power of psycho-somatic relation to food. She creates interactive installations that bring a layer of humor around self, perception and deception. 

      Through physical engagement with her work, Asli tries to find the boundaries of one’s self with the ‘other’ in a visually appealing setting where questions around disgust are raised. She is interested in how architecture and ecology play a role in her fermentation experiments and how (or if) the space for making/cultivating/brewing influences the way people experience consumption. In addition, her questions around community-building around shared bacterias and yeasts set the tone around social structures, like dining together. Where are the boundaries of the mouth as an organ that lets other living organisms from another person in? Is there a common language that speaks to a consumer in order to convince them into consumption? Taking inspiration from commercial advertising techniques,  Asli pushes the audience to re-question what, how and why we eat what we eat. She likes to engage the audience in food production systems to challenge a technological advancement that erases human presence in food production. 

      Asli’s research presentation consists of lecture performance yeast invasion, combined with a guided installation where her bacterial and yeast collaborators will invite people into a massage parlour that mixes receiving and giving touch, with the brewing of a collective fermented drink. A beer making demonstration takes people along the history of the special Senne valley which hosts the famous “Brettanomyces bruxellensis”, in the past 20 years also known as a wine maker’s worst nightmare. A spa invites people to relax into leftovers of the beer making and think about the outer body experience while sipping the special Belgian lambic brewed by the artist in a conversational set-up.

       

      Bio

      Aslı Hatipoğlu (TR/TH, 1990) is a textile culinary artist based in Brussels and Amsterdam. Her work often relates to topics such as ecology and sustainability and the challenges it imposes on our daily lives in complex systems of consumption. She is interested in science and what it can offer as well as the dangers it imposes (such as domination over nature and genetic modifications) that bring ethical questions towards our future as species. Through investigating ancestral knowledge with a community building approach, Asli is also interested in fusing diversity of her knowledge among her experiments in different environments. She often creates interactive installations, video work or uses performative storytelling through conceptual dinners as a way to bring topics of her interest forward.

      After working several years as a self-taught chef, Asli deepened her knowledge with fermentation during her residency at the Food Lab Jan van Eyck Academie 2020-2021, along participating in several festivals such as Food Art Film Festival JVE (NL), Foodculture Days Vevey (CH), Oerol Terschelling (NL), Japanese Knotweed Festival at Mediamatic (NL) and Zamus Theaterhaus Cologne (DE) . Her works were exhibited in places such as Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen, Framer Framed in Amsterdam, Fanfare Amsterdam, Perdu Amsterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht.

       


      Special thanks to: Martina Petrović, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Martin Flugelman Olmeda, Elli Vassalou and many others for thinking, listening and advising me through this a.pass trajectory.

       


       

      Martin Sieweke (DE) 

      Martin Sieweke researches how the use of materials and objects can be prolonged, extended and reformulated in different ways. He proposes a multi-layered relationality, in which the given (the context, the conditions, already existing materials and familiar objects) influences and contributes as a dispositive.


      It’s about searching for affections, altering the use context, exchanging components: to not only consume materials away but to stay and remain close to them. It’s about acknowledging the multiple while reaching for the specific. It’s about structuring a process as a relational response. To follow Erin Manning’s thought in her book The Minor Gesture (Thought in the Act), it’s about implementing the context and its very specific configuration, which influences processes not yet condensed into a form:, “(...) it begins with the in-act and embraces the force of the what-else at the heart of all speculative pragmatisms”.

       

      In the evening, Martin presents cirrendering (working title), a sound installation in collaboration with Josephine Stamer. It consists of a former vinyl player reduced to its basic operation. Amplified structures, alterations and repetitive textures will dissolve over time, as emerging traces are finding their multidirectional and conversational negotiation in a circular and sonic form.

      TIME ITEM is a research publication by Martin Sieweke that gathers text, images and soft proposals around bag making, reuse and repairment. 

       

      Bio

      Martin Sieweke works as an accessory maker and scenographer/costume designer between Brussels, Berlin and Stockholm. He often works with found objects and materials by detaching them from their intentional use context. He is interested in engaging with materials in a way that differs from a close link between artistic production and consumption, to structure creative processes more as a relational response.

      www.martinsieweke.com

       

      performance: Martin Sieweke, Josephine Stamer

      Special thanks to: Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrović , Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Hannah Krebs, Mary Szydlowska, Tatsuya Inuikawa, May Abnet




       

      Martina Petrović (SER)

      Martina Petrović’s research focuses on how we, Western and Eastern European society, deal with complex socially generated emotions such as grief and love. How do we face the inevitable loss of parts of our culture and humanity, due to the crisis and disappearance of species and environments, abandonment and fast replacement of technologies and ways of living. And how do we find joy and moments in these circumstances?

      Her sense of misplacement and need to have a strong connection with her culture is amplified with her residing in Belgium for the past 5.5 years. She gravitates towards connecting her artistic interests with traditions and rituals stemming from her Balkan roots. She investigates women’s sacred rituals, handwork, symbols and creativity and their legacy in modern culture and common everyday practices.

      Martina proposes looking deep into our roots, finding strength in the past and support in our surroundings as a way to move forward, to create new rituals and new ways of being. They might enable us to transition from fearing the future and present, and move us towards reconnecting and exploring different ways of forming bonds and relating to each other.

      In the evening Martina proposes gathering around the table, there will be food for the stomach and for the thoughts, shared energy and hopefully sparks of magic. The dinner table has its own politics, how one sets it influences the conversation around it. It can generate questions, introduce different ways of composing a menu, and explore the tools we use. It can unveil the social structures that make the table possible, sometimes unexpected flavors appear on one’s plate and many other delicious subjects can surface on it.

      It will be an evening of celebration, with welcomings, conversation starters, and a format to practice openings and goodbyes. Come as a friend - excited to share our a.pass trajectory. Come as a wanderer - craving to have a taste of each of our practices. Come as a fellow researcher - curious to engage with questioning, rethinking and transforming art research. Come light, with an empty stomach, with an open heart. Come unprepared but ready to engage with different flavors that work together producing unexpected combinations. Come willing to leave some time for digesting processes. 

      We will gather 3 times around the table. Please join on time, celebration waits for no one, it has its own rhythm. The entrée will be served at 19h. The main course is prepared in collaboration with masterful food explorer Asli Hatipoglu and will be shared at 20h. At 21h we will meet for the final gathering before we disperse into our separate celebrative trajectories.

       

      Bio 

      Martina is currently the art coordinator of art space Hectolitre, Brussels. She is a part of two active collectives, School of love (Brussels) and Garden of Delights(Gent). Her recent artistic projects are: Where do we go from here? (2023), Brussels, Gent, The Last Straw (2020-2022),Gent, Antwerp, Brussels, Belgrade, Moerdijk sculpture project (2022), Belgium, EcoSuites residency (2022), Greece, Terrestrial Odditties II, Belgrade (2021), BUZZ project on Ostavinska gallery, Belgrade (2019); Terrestrial Oddities, HBKsaar, Saarbrucken, Germany (2019).

      https://cargocollective.com/TheLastStraw

       

      Special thanks to: Asli Hatipoglu, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Jana Vasiljevic, Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Irena Radmanovic, Petar Sarjanovic, Hijene, Mladen Bundalo, Lucia Palladino, Adva Zakai, Renata Turkes, Gorana Bacevac, Hectolitre community, SOL, GOD, BOSCH, Common Wallet, Emptor/Caveat, Kunsthal and many others for thinking, feeling and being with me through this a.pass trajectory.

       


       

       

      Nada Gambier (FIN / FR)

      At the heart of Nada Gambier’s current artistic research practice is the concept of gentle trespassing. For Nada this is a tool for relationality. Gentle trespassing rests on the premise that crossing separations between people, things and contexts is both a necessity and a pleasure. It stems from a belief that the walls we erect around ourselves and our work should be un-hygienically permeable, implying that trouble and mess are part of the process. Practicing gentle trespassing requires collaboration, listening, flirting with gray zones and instability, revealing confinement, enclosure and accepting disagreement and structured cacophony as grounds for progress. To frame durational proposals Nada works with the idea of working shifts. 

       

      Working shift 1

      In this shift gentle trespassing is practiced between ideas, practices and questions. To begin, questions will be questioned and answered by new questions until eventually what remains cannot be attributed any longer to an “original” or ”an other”. Instead, what remains embodies the structured cacophony that coming together in (mis)understandings, assumptions, interpretations and imaginations may result in. From there we move into hands-on work, exchanging materials and engaging in a process of estrangement and reinvention.

      This shift is for artists, of any discipline, with a work in progress or research they wish to bring into the room. You must be willing to hand your work over, momentarily, to another person. It does not matter how far into a process you are. What matters is your curiosity to see another person trespassing into your territory. At the end of this process we will do a round of performative presentations, sharing the outcome of the session.

       The shift ends with an informal drink and some light snacks.

       Please register by sending a mail to nadakatinka@gmail.com by the 26th of May latest! If you have a spot in the shift we will confirm it by email together with more details of what to bring and how to prepare.

       

      Working shift 2

      In this shift, we explore the potential of fiction in relation to gentle trespassing. Through a conversational game in which we engage as “another” version of ourselves we practice strategies of interpretation, exaggeration and collage. The aim here is to experience the simultaneous negotiation between who we are (or think we are) and who ‘we’ might be with a little interference from others.  

      The shift ends with an informal drink and some light snacks.

       Please register by sending a mail to nadakatinka@gmail.com by the 26th of May latest! 

       

      Evening shift

      In a confined space, anonymous characters live their lives in a loop. Stuck in an endless repetition of mundane events and unable to escape they busy themselves with work-like tasks and sleep, waiting for time to pass. In this work, Nada explores the confinement of spaces, identities, institutions and ideas. Surveillance camera feeds, anonymity and invisibility suits (chroma key green suits used in film when wanting to disappear the body behind an action) come together in this installation in three spaces. On the 4th floor of a.pass you can watch an ongoing video feed.

      On the 3rd floor you are invited into a waiting room area followed by the green room (sign up on site). 

        

      Bio

      Nada Gambier roams around in what she calls a crash-disciplinary world where performance, video, writing, curatorial approaches and languages and social concerns merge and collide. Her work often flirts with the borders between theatricality and abstraction and she is drawn to things that she doesn’t understand or cannot grasp. The non-spectacular and the absurd belong to her most known trademarks as an artist. Her work is experimental in nature and very often performative, with some form of live element in it. Since 2014 Nada has been focusing on long-term projects in which the separation between research, creation process and public event can be confused and/or abandoned. In 2020, she began monthly collective research sessions in Brussels, further establishing herself as an advocate for experimentation and research within the (performing) arts. Nada also regularly collaborates on other artists’ projects as a performer and artistic advisor. She has worked a.o. with Kate MacIntosh (NZ/DE/BE), Edit Kaldor (HU/NL), Forced Entertainment (UK), Simone Aughterlony (NZ/DE/CH), Jorge Léon (ES/BE), Maria Jerez (ES), Diederik Peeters (BE), Charlotte Vanden Eynde (BE) and Phil Hayes (UK/CH).

      www.nadagambier.be

       

      The evening shift is performed by Nada Gambier, Mark Etchells and Vic Grevendonck and includes writing by Nada and music by Klaus Wunderlich. The research is supported by a.pass, Nada & Co., WpZimmer, Workspacebrussels, Buda Arts Centre and the Flemish Ministry of Culture (research project subsidies). 

      Special thanks to: Martina Petrović, Martin Sieweke, Aslı Hatipoğlu and all the a.passers, Jen Rosenblit and many others for their input in my reflections and experimentations during the past year. 

       


       

       

      A big thank you to everyone who supported us during our a.pass time:

      A.pass team: Lilia Mestre, Kristien Van den Brande, Kristof Van Hoorde, Hans Van Wambeke, Steven Jouwersma, Vladimir Miller

      Block mentors: Jaime Llopis, Anna Rispoli, Samah Hijawi, Goda Palekaite, Sina Seifee, Pia Louwerens, Simone Basani, Vijai Maia Patchineelam.

      Fellow researchers: Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Amy Pickles, Gary Farely, Chloe Janssens, Inga Gerner Nielsen, Vera Sofia Mota, Jimena Pérez Salerno, Sarah Pletcher, Anna Lugmeier, Aleksandra Borys, Carina Erdmann, Amari, Lore, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Mlondi Dubazane and Merle Vorwald.

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • vessels End Presentations of Anna Lugmeier & Sarah Pletcher
      11 January 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • The Green Corridor
    • 27 January 2023
    • 28 January 2023
    • vessels

      What do you get when a female visual storyteller and a non-binary performance artist walk into a postgrad artistic research program?

      -vessels🥚🦪

       

      vessels brings the two practices of Anna Lugmeier and Sarah Pletcher together in live performance, process sharing, and ephemeral objects that are either a catalyst to or a product of these research practices. Two objects are being investigated specifically in this sharing of research; Anna’s oyster shells and Sarah’s slip-casted porcelain eggs. These objects serve as a vessel for their separate practices but also as objects to collectively work and question with, through, because of, despite of, and in collectivity with. 

       

      Friday, 27th & Saturday, 28th of January 2023

      GREEN CORRIDOR, Rue de Bosnie Straat 102 in Brussels, Saint-Gilles

      The researchers will be present in the space from 16 pm on, the presentations start at 19:00 pm (2 hour duration), so come earlier to have a drink with them and also because the space has limited capacities.

      There will also be a publication available in limited quantities... ✍(◔◡◔)

       

      further information

      vessels is a public presentation of Anna Lugmeier and Sarah Pletcher that marks the end of their research trajectory at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). vessels is a container for sharing methodology, motivation, and questions proposed by these two makers over their time at a.pass’ year-long postgraduate artistic research program.

      Having related questions, processes, and concerns, the two researchers interweave their individual approaches towards the labour of “women’s work” and femme bodies picture making processes by addressing and engaging critically with individually developed methods and ways of coming together in art making.

      Both of them have researched in specific performative ways how to establish and weave different dimensions of female reality, that have outgrown the framework of patriarchal structures. In their practices, they intertwine several subjects and materialities such as porcelain eggs, oyster shells, felt, fragments of film, sound recordings, conversations, motherhood, storytelling, collaborative thinking, human and more than human knowledges, all present in the space.

      The presentations will connect these dimensions in multiple ways, each of them calling for the gathered sources and resources intra-action in the moment of the public presentations with the intention to repair what has been forgotten, dismissed, or remains unseen.

       

      Anna Lugmeier (she/her)

      Anna's research oscillates between seemingly naïve or bluntly formulated narratives and a critical feminist approach towards storytelling in film making, while seeking to examine how collaborators can grow together/with each other through moments of crisis or speechlessness. She elaborates the complexity of the non-visible/not yet visible in collaboration, through a filming and editing process.

       

      Sarah Pletcher (they/them)

      Sarah is a conceptual performance artist with a background in ceramics, fiber and material studies. Their research investigates the unpaid and unacknowledged labour of “women’s work” particularly pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing, and its role within contemporary capitalism. Their practice speaks to body and economic politics of being a femme maker both in artistic and domestic spaces. 

       

       

       

    • NEW: Every second Monday 19-21h 

       

      NEXT MEETINGS

      22.05.2023 19h

      "Narrate, Speculate, Fabulate: Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni in Conversation with Isabelle Doucet"

      proposed by Gosie Vervloessem

       

      05.06.2023 19h

      Marie Bardet: "Making a Front With Our Backs" Translated by: Ellen Heaghney

      Jara Rocha: "testing texting South: a political fiction"

      proposed by caterina daniela mora jara

       

      19.06.2023 20h

      Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization"

      proposed by Tulio Rosa

      03.07.2023 19h

      Tjalie Robinson: "Vivere Pericolosamente"

      proposed by Paoletta Holst

       

      17.07.2023 19h

      W.J.T. Mitch: "Art And Public life: A Conversation Theaster Gates"

      proposed by Maurice Meewisse and Vladimir Miller

       

      The Research Center Open Reading Group follows the research trajectories of the Associate Researchers with text proposals from the collective library of the current  Research Center and new texts written by the researchers themselves. The reading group is public and open to join in person and online. 

       

      ZOOM

      Join Zoom Meeting
      https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7654748465?pwd=VjhFMFVkSUxRUjlkakRuTFBSSndldz09

      Meeting ID: 765 474 8465
      Passcode: apass

       

       

      PAST MEETINGS

       

      28.09.22 @ Radical House

      caterina daniela mora jara, AR

       

      12.10.22 @ Radical House and online

      Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma, What is wrong with the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research?

      https://www.onlineopen.org/what-is-wrong-with-the-vienna-declaration-on-artistic-research

       

      26.10.22 at apass and online

      A House in the Dutch East Indies by Paoletta Holst

       

      09.11.22 online

      Maurice Meewisse proposes: Mark Cousins "On Support", from: Celine Condorelli "Support Structures"

       

      23.11.22 online

      Tulio Rosa proposes: a chapter from "Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism" by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

       

      07.12.22 online

      Vladimir Miller proposes: introductory chapter from "Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization." S. Shukatis, D. Graeber & E. Biddle (Eds.),

       

      Wednesday 4.01.23 17h online

      Paoletta Holst proposes: Ann Laura Stoler, "Interior Frontiers" in: Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, And Jacques Lezra, [Ed]. Thinking with Balibar A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice. Fordham University Press: New York, 2020, pp. 99-115 (pdf)

       

      Wednesday 18.01.23 17h online

      Maurice Meewisse proposes: texts from 
      Manifesta Journal #8- collective curating (2009): "The crux of polyphonic language, or the thing as gathering" by Katharine Schieben and other texts

       

      Wednesday 01.02.23 online

      caterina daniela mora jara proposes: "inflation, debt, budget" – her own text in progress; and the chapter "Naming Material" by Jeroens Peters from "And then it got legs’"

       

      Wednesday 22.02.23

      Tulio Rosa proposes: "YWY, Searching for a Character between Future Worlds: Gender, Ecology, Science Fiction" 
      Edited by Pedro Neves Marques.

       

      Wednesday 01.03.23 17h at a.pass and online

      Vladimir Miller proposes: Eve Tuck 'Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable', (2010)

       

      Wednesday 08.03.23 17h at a.pass and online

      Túlio Rosa proposes: "Self Defense: a philosophy of violence", by Elsa Dorli. Introduction and first chapter.

       

      Wednesday 22.03.23 17h online

      Maurice Meewisse proposes: Chantal Mouffe: "For an Agonistic Model of Democracy", chapter 4 from "The Democratic Paradox", Verso 2009

      zoom link below

       

    •  

      UNPRODUCTIVE WILL a choreographic practice installation 

      a.pass postgraduate program 2021-2022

       

      SEPTEMBER 2022

      research portfolios 

      PORTFOLIO block I Unproductive will click me!

      PORTFOLIO block II Unproductive will click me!

      PORTFOLIO block III Unproductive will click me!

       

      project's abstract

      How can we create a different relation to time than the one the western worldview imposes on us? How can we produce market-wise non-productive things? 

      Unproductive will is a choreographic practice installation that is part of a larger research. It suggests revisiting our relationship with the hegemonic notion of linear time and productive behavior. It proposes thinking of them as collective colonial wounds and impositions that run through our practices, affective bonds, and lives wherever we are. 

      I am developing exploratory collective practices such as Kung Fu tuning (a counter-normative body practice using simple martial arts warm-up), Collective readings (Payada: a popular folk music genre involving poetic recitations), and Technologies of attention (peeling vegetables following a choreographic score) to name some of them. I work with the idea of a never-ending warm-up to re-think the idea of practice and to engage with everyone who participates as a collaborator. This process does not seek an end but wants to remain in the continuity of the search. 

      I started my trajectory in a.pass exploring the normative notion of linear-productive time and how it is embodied in our behavior because I am interested in its political dimension. I observed how much thinking in a forward direction brings associations that build a certain life perspective. For example, forward-better-future-progress or backward-worst-past-degrowth. This reinforces a system of values creating a sense supported by binary thoughts. 

      In an attempt against this logic, I followed a contradictory path. I stepped forward to my past. During the presentation, in a playful way, I will share practices and connections to my sentimental and cultural education, aiming to create an experience of political awareness. 

      I am interested in observing the transformations the project traverses in each place it is presented. To change its language and perspective, that is to say, the thickness that its affective, geographical, and political implications take both for me and those who participate in the experience. This research challenges the definitions of audience-participant, performance-practice, and encounter-training affecting the presentation dynamic that sets all of them in motion.

      This research takes the notion of Dispersion* as a method and the use of strategies such as inversion, interruption, bifurcation, turning back, or non-direct associations as its main tools. These words-actions served as an entry point to explore time logic as well. To work with the idea of Dispersion requires postponing the need to define a use for the research materials. It implies waiting until a dialogue emerges from the situation of being with the materials that are, in part, intuitively arranged. That enables a reciprocal path to relate the experiences and elements that set up the research. 

      With the desire to articulate strategies that go in another direction than the notions of accumulation, linear time, and progression, I propose to look into the vibration between dispersion and attention strategies, enabling a mode of relation that seeks other possible ways of organization.

       

      *Note: For an accurate translation we should have used the English word Scatter. The decision to use the word, Dispersion, follows the Spanish meaning and its resonances. Dispersion must be understood both on the level of the spatial distribution of things and on how the focus fluctuates.

       

      Bio 

      Jimena Pérez Salerno is an Argentinian artist, based in Brussels (BE). She works and researches between Brussels and Buenos Aires. She experiments in the performing arts, artistic research, and teaching fields. As a dancer and choreographer, she collaborates and engages continuously with other artists as a fundamental part of her exploration of collective work. She considers choreographic practice like an expanded relations system that enables modes of imagination, attention, and coexistence. It leans towards performative practices that contemplate the activation of an unexpected context to think together through the experience of an implicated body. In her last project, she has been researching on the concept of expanded choreography as a critical modality for political awareness, reflecting on linear time and productive behavior.

      + info: https://cargocollective.com/jimenaps IG: @sashimishimi

       

       

      Special thanks 

      a.pass team: Lilia Mestre, Kristof Van Hoorde, Joke Liberge, Kristien Van den Brande, Steven Jouwersma, Sina Seifee, Hans. 

      End communication researchers: Gary Farrelly, Amy Pickles, Inga Gerner Nielsen.

      a.pass researchers during my trajectory: Carolina Mendoça, Chloe Janssens, Vera Sofía Mota, Ana Paula Camargo, Federico Protto, Nathaniel Moore, Tulio Rosa, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Aleksandra Borys, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Anna Lugmeier, Asli Hatipoglu, Lore, Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrovic, Nada Gambier, Sarah Pletcher.

      Collaborator in residency at a.pass and in Buenos Aires (skipping block): María Sábato
       
      Persons who were with me during this process: María Sábato, Diego Echegoyen, Amparo González Solá.
       
      Dedicated a.pass mentors: Sara Manente, Adriana Gvozdenovic, Isabel Burr Raty, Kobe Matthys, Gosie Vervloessem, Simon Asencio, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Goda Palekaité, Kristien van den Brande.
       
      External mentors: Sofía Caesar, Caterina Mora, Gustavo Ciriaco, Eleonora Fabião.
       
       

       

       

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Demolition, Damage, Deviation, Desire a.pass End Presentations of Gary Farrelly, Inga Gerner Nielsen, amy pickles and Jimena Pérez Salerno
      11 September 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • MEYBOOM artists-run spaces
    • 29 September 2022
    • 30 September 2022
    • Demolition, Damage, Deviation, Desire

      The a.pass End Presentations of Gary Farrelly, Inga Gerner Nielsen, amy pickles and Jimena Pérez Salerno will take place on the 29 and 30 September 2022 at artist run space Meyboom, Boulevard Pacheco 34, downtown Brussels, from 18:00 to 22:30.


      This public presentation marks the end of their trajectory at a.pass and invites the researchers to share their modes of doing, seeing and making artist research public after following the year-long postgraduate program. amy pickles (UK) is an artist and educator working on colonial infrastructures embedded within everyday technologies. She curated and organised, with Chloë Janssens and Túlio Rosa, a gathering titled On Coloniality [https://apass.be/on-coloniality/]. Gary Farrelly (IE) is a visual artist researching on infrastructure, bureaucracy and the architectures of power. A big part of his work is in collaboration with German artist Chris Dreier with the ongoing project Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. Jimena Pérez Salerno (AR) is a choreographer and dancer researching on the concept of expanded choreography as a critical modality for political awareness reflecting on linear time and productive behavior. Inga Gerner Nielsen (DK) is a performing artist with a background in sociology, researching immersive performance as an interstice of poetry and institutional critique.


      With singular questions, processes and approaches, the four researches intersect and expand concerns in Demolition, Damage, Deviation, Desire by bridging intimacy and politics in very different ways. Their practices extend from the lecture performance to performative installation, drawing, crossing ritual making and never ending warmups, to research, share and exchange - together with the audience - questions that are embedded in our everyday lives.


      The research of these four artists addresse architecture and administration with their conditionings and protocols; the perpetuation of colonial governance through digital infrastructures and our dependency on them; immersive institutional rational authority and the amazing potential of time to inherit, transform, conduct change and resilience.


      The End-Presentations at a.pass are on themselves a study on curatorial practice, performativity and making public. By being together, these performative situations will shine attention to the context and environment they are in, their relationship with audiences, the materialities that are involved being them visible or invisible and what matters in these circumstances.


      For this occasion they worked with Frédéric Van De Velde on a collective sound publication with vinyls that will be performed and spinned by Frédéric during the event. 


      *


      Gary Farrelly / It is official policy to appear unmoved

      Gary Farrelly's research at a.pass departs from the work of deceased conservative conspiracy theorist William Milton Cooper. Coopers work, through his polemical Hour Of The Time radio show synthesised economic and political ‘research’, occult knowledge, personal grievance, and manic episodes into a paranoid tsunami deployed to undermine confidence in public institutions.


      Cooper's transmissions were characterised by a highly affective voice, at once disdainful, concealed, intimate, furious and hyperbolic, inducing a hypnotic state of susceptibility and acquiescence to the content. A precursor to the corrosive ‘post truth’ ideation that contaminates our current public discourse, Farrelly takes Coopers work as a departing point towards a generative reimagining of the paranoid researcher/ coercive performer.


      His trajectory at a.pass has explored various performative versions of himself, including: the bureaucrat, the crossdresser, the charlatan, the guide, the joker, the devils advocate, the instructor and the Cassandra. The core mission of Farrelly’s research is the affective deployment of body and voice as transmitters of anxiety, desire, disinformation and critical questioning in relation to invasive infrastructure and monumental architecture. Much of the content and material he has brought into play at a.pass was gathered in collaboration with Chris Dreier in the context of Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. O.J.A.I.'s ongoing mission proposes a reading of the built environment through lenses of coercive power, mind control, transcendence and magic.


      Bio

      Gary is an Irish artist and educator based in Brussels. His work encompasses drawing, performance, publishing, installation and experimental radio. Exhibitions and performances have been presented by Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art (London), Marres Centre for Contemporary culture (Maastricht), Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris) and Salzburger Kunstverein. He is a lecturer at La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels and his work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. A significant part of the work takes place in collaboration with Chris Dreier, through their shared practice the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence.


      *


      Inga Gerner Nielsen / THiS INSTiTUTE

      At a.pass Inga’s artistic research came to be conjured through THiS INSTiTUTE; a structure by which to constitute the sensual mode of her thinking. The past year she has been looking intensely into ահąէ it is a spacious feeling – where an imaginary world of analysis starts appearing through the objects and textures at hand, հօա it opens as a kind of summoning and closes when she is called into presence by matters of everyday life  and  ահվ it feels so urgent for her to institutionalize her artistic research as affect, as symptom, as dream.

      Moving to Brussels from Denmark Inga lost the sociological overview of her environment. Normally, her artistic work unfolds as sitespecifc intervention in a concrete place, in the academic field or in an institutional setting, which she has carefully sensed in order to know how to highlight its features and make the invisible visible, often through an aesthetic and ideological juxtaposition. Her performance series My Protestant Origins and Catholic Fantasies combines her background in Sociology with her artistic work by making performance installations which open up a maximalist, celestial relation to space and objects in the otherwise secular rule of minimalist Danish design. Now, in the myriad of styles and institutions that make up Brussels, she didn't know what to juxtapose and how to intervene. And after quite some confusion, this lack of clarity started to feel good. It granted her permission to just gaze at her own gaze. In many of her previous works she had been exploring with performers how the gaze affects or choreographs the body, and now, with half-closed eyes she started to practice an intense mode of subjectivation. 


      Inside THiS INSTiTUTE she researches how to fall into a medieval perception of space/time; a mode of being in and knowing the world, she fantasizes to be a remaining counterweight to the renaissance's linear perspective once invented by the architect. She practices a bodily felt sense of her close surroundings as an emotional imaginary landscape, where the distinction between the inner and outer world falls away. At the End Presentation Inga will try to open up THiS INSTiTUTE to her community of artistic researchers and people interested in the question of how to build portals for other modes of thinking? And why might we need the institution to uphold and preserve them? 

       


      Bio

      Inga comes from a group of performers in Scandinavia, who work with immersive performance installations. Since 2007 she co-founded collectives and focused on developing their work as an activist strategy to give structure to sensuous modes of social interaction in different spheres of society. Today she collaborates with a nursing school in Denmark to introduce performance installations as a way to look into the mise-en-scène of care work. A relation, which the project mirrors with the interaction between performer and audience in one-to-one performance art installations. Inga's art explores how new modes of subjectivity or imaginaries come into existence or are transformed through interactions and refigured institutional settings.


      *


      amy pickles / Chantal and Timothy 

      These two works take their name from human inscription on other than human entities.


      Timothy

      made with George Chinnery and many others

      Timothy is a multi-authored scene comprised of assembled debris from amy's experiments in a.pass. These experiments reconsidered formats for collective learning. The topic in question, colonial infrastructures and how they perpetuate modes of extraction and exploitation in a progressive western narrative, inherent within our communication technologies. Phew. Timothy is carrying a lot. Serendipitously, Timothy's name is taken from a tortoise, so it can accommodate a lot within its shell. Timothy the tortoise was taken by the british navy from a portuguese merchant in 1854, who in turn took her from the shores of turkey. She was kept in different colonising ships till she was moved to an aristocratic home in england, where they etched the family motto into her belly; "Where have I fallen? What have I done"?[1] If you're wondering, a tortoises underside is very sensitive. Timothy, as scene, resonates with the scar tissue of Timothy the tortoise. The scene is a prompt for us to think about ourselves as an accumulation of colonial narratives - these processes involve us all in some way - and to reconsider the "uncontested notion of information technology as freedom"[2].


      Chantal

      made with Max Franklin, Chloë Janssens, Anna Lugmeier & Marko Gutić Mižimakov

      Chantal is a digitized Super8 film, that documents 'relational hood group call', a collective exercise made for a presentation in a.pass. The participants are bound together through a group video call on Signal - an internet based communication app - that is connected to their bodies through headphones, screens, and selfie sticks. They collaborate to form an experience for a primary vessel. This primary vessel is the participant whose head is engulfed inside a hood. 'relational hood group call' was a re-imagining and re-assembling of brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s relational objects, objetos relacionais[3]. The name of the film is from the tree in which the participants move around, Chantal being inscribed upon its trunk.


      References

      1. "Timothy (tortoise)" Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_(tortoise). Accessed 7 September 2022.
      2. Aouragh, Miriyam & Chakravartty, Paula. Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies. Media, Culture & Society. 2016;38(4):559–575.
      3. Butler, Cornelia H. & Pérez-Oramas, Luis. Lygia Clark, The Abandonment of Art, 1948 - 1988. The Museum of Modern Art. 2014. p281


      Bio

      amy pickles is an artist, organiser and loosely institutionalised educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution – of knowledge, tools, finances – and collaboration are ways to refuse individual ownership. She is a member of Varia, Rotterdam NL, an organisation working on everyday technology.


      *


      Jimena Pérez Salerno / Unproductive will

      How can we create a different relation to time than the one the western worldview imposes on us? How can we produce market-wise non-productive things? 


      Unproductive will is a choreographic practice installation that is part of a larger research. It suggests revisiting our relationship with the hegemonic notion of linear time and productive behavior. It proposes thinking of them as collective colonial wounds and impositions that run through our practices, affective bonds, and lives, wherever we are. I am developing exploratory collective practices such as Kung Fu tuning (a counter-normative body practice using simple martial arts warm-up), Collective readings (Payada: a popular folk music genre involving poetic recitations), and Technologies of attention (peeling vegetables following a choreographic score) to name some of them. I work with the idea of a never-ending warm-up to re- think the idea of practice and to engage with everyone who participates as a collaborator. This process does not seek an end but wants to remain in the continuity of the search. 


      I started my trajectory in a.pass exploring the normative notion of linear-productive time and how it is embodied in our behavior because I am interested in its political dimension. I observed how much thinking in a forward direction brings associations that build a certain life perspective. For example, forward-better-future-progress or backward-worst-past-degrowth. This reinforces a system of values creating a sense supported by binary thoughts. In an attempt against this logic, I followed a contradictory path. I will step forward to the past, I said, and I started to investigate, trying to detect how bringing practices from my sentimental and cultural education in Argentina to my current research, could speak of my relationship with a twisted time. I am interested in observing the transformations the project traverses in each place it is presented. To change its language and perspective, that is to say, the thickness that its affective, geographical, and political implications take both for me and those who participate in the experience. This research challenges the definitions of audience-participant, performance-practice, and encounter-training affecting the presentation dynamic that sets all of them in motion.


      Bio

      Jimena Pérez Salerno is an Argentinian artist, based in Brussels (BE). She works and researches between Brussels and Buenos Aires. She experiments in the performing arts, artistic research, and teaching fields. As a dancer and choreographer, she collaborates and engages continuously with other artists as a fundamental part of her exploration of collective work. She considers choreographic practice like an expanded relations system that enables modes of imagination, attention, and coexistence. It leans towards performative practices that contemplate the activation of an unexpected context to think together through the experience of an implicated body. + info: https://cargocollective.com/jimenaps IG: @sashimishimi


      *


      Frédéric Van de Velde

      Bio

      Frédéric Van de Velde's artistic practice oscillates between publishing, producing and organising exhibitions and concerts. He worked for WORM and DE PLAYER in Rotterdam and used to run a bedroom-sized music venue called Antenne. In 2019 he founded the record label Futura Resistenza, which operates somewhere on the edges of performance, music and the visual arts.

       

    • Performative Publications at Kunstencentrum BUDA  in Kortrijk, Belgium bring the individual and collaborative research trajectories of the researchers of the third Cycle of the a.pass Research Center into focus. This day-long performative event is conceived by Gosie Vervloessem, João Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Simon Asencio, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and the Research Center Curator Vladimir Miller.

       

      FROM 13:00 to 20:30 (detailed schedule below)

      Kunstencentrum BUDA
      Tower
      Budatoren, Kortrijk  
      Korte Kapucijnenstraat z/n, 8500 Kortrijk
       

      The Publications are accompanied by a collaboratively written Annex. In the Annex the researchers of Cycle 3 bring together and discuss an annotated library of shared references and recommendations which have accumulated during their research year. This publication is a collective retracing of these  connections, and as such a reweaving of a complex understructure of speculative relationships between the questions and concerns of this Cycle.

      The Performative Publications will start at 13h and end approximately around 20h. There is a opportunity in between the presentations to enjoy food and drink.

       

       

      Performative Publications

       

      Research Center Cycle 3

      Introduction to the Performative Publications and Annex Reading

      Studio 4

      13h

      duration 1h

       

       

      Simon Asencio

      Ballades Infidèles

      open recording session and conversation

      Studio 3

      14h

      approx 3h, durational, free to join at any moment

       

      Ballades Infidèles is an online and offline research group working around the Ballades en jargon – eleven poems composed by 15th century poet Françoys Villon and written in the secret tongue of the Coquillard·es, a posse of French rogues. These ballads repurpose medieval language to narrate social underworlds in code. They invite to a reflection on the possibility of otherness and estrangement within a ’same’ language. Using the ballads as a map and a method for research, the working group has gathered since February 2022 to develop different forms of study of these ballads in perspective of their re-writing. At BUDA the group will gather to activate these re-writings through the situation of an open recording session and conversation. The recording of the event will later serve for the publication of a vinyl record.

      With Francoys Villon, Diana Duta, Chloe Chignell, Cee Fülleman, Loucka Fiagan, camille gerenton, Anouchka Oler, etaïnn zwer, Christophe Albertijn Simon Asencio et al.

       

       

      João Fiadeiro

      Intra-views

      Studio 5

      at 14h, 15h, 16h

      Durational performance, resets at every full hour. 

       

      In 2021, during a workshop given by João Fiadeiro at a.pass the artist and a.pass researcher Jimena Pérez Salerno composed a list of questions and tensions as a feedback for João Fiadeiro's practice of Real Time Composition. Instead of “answering” these questions directly João Fiadeiro felt that in order to be properly addressed in their complexity they needed a different type of response and a different type of context alltogether. On the occasion of his research presentation at BUDA João Fiadeiro decided to come back to this list and invited Jimena Pérez Salerno to collaborate with him on a dispositive for a performance where both of them will engage in a real time composition intra-view around the questions she initially raised.

       

       

      Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ

      CofetARia

      cake selling point

      Third floor

      14h, ongoing

       

      Born in socialist Rumania, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin has for the past 10 years been working with food  as a complex collaborator in his performative practice.  He has been exploring methods of mixing food studies with artistic research by setting up, creating and producing food performances and food education projects.

      One of the resulting projects is CofetARia: an durational performance at the intersection of performance art and pastry backing. CofetARia is a functioning  pastry and cakes store, that recreates and offers for consumption the pastries that were made in Romania in the last decades of the waning socialist regime.

      A live performance with alimentary matter, CofetARia is exploring the food's agency in the animation of memory while at the same time confronting post-communist nostalgia.

       

       

      Gosie Vervloessem

      Editorial Meeting - The Horror Garden

      workshop / performance

      Studio 4

      15h

      ca 1,5 h

       

      Gosie Vervloessem's research is focused on the ways plants are depicted in pop culture narratives. The scope of her work encompasses an assemblage of diverse allies and engagements: The Swamp Thing comic books, the plants that grow in the city of Brussels, activists who try to eradicate so called "invasive species" in different biological landscapes, her alter ego of the Sick Detective, and so on. Over the years this sprawling research has produced performative, written and drawn publications, which have never been assembled or shown in one place. Faced with the overwhelming output of her research Gosie Vervloessem will ask her audience to form the editorial board of a forthcoming book on her research. What should be part of this book, what should be excluded, what are the topics and strands that can come together and be published in this format?

       

       

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam

      Descriptions Change

      Book presentation for: The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution together with artists who have contributed to the Research Seminar Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description that is within the book.

      Studio 4

      17h

      Duration 1,5h

       

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on 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.

      For this book presentation artists Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens, Evi Olde Rikkert and Julia Dahee Hong, alongside RC Associate Researcher Vijai Maia Patchineelam will present their contribution to the book The Artist Job Description – a publication of Patchineelam’s doctoral research of same title. During the presentation the artists will engage in a conversation regarding the relationship between artists and art institutions by bringing their personal experiences where they have renegotiated other ways of coming into and developing their art practices within art institutions.

      The artist’s experience of being inside art institutions, starting from the effort made to be accepted in order to develop one’s art practice, then the experience of going through them, and while in them, the many ways of having to learn how to be inside. This will in several ways inform the development of an artist’s practice, for the good or for the bad. Making this publication has been an attempt at recognizing and dealing with, rather than avoiding, the tensions that exist in the relationship between artists and art institutions at a time when most art institutions themselves are under the pressure of the looming threat of austerity-politics.

      Excerpt from the book, The Artist Job Description

       

       

       

      Gosie Vervloessem & Simon Asencio

      Area X

      Participatory Performance and Audio

      Studio 5

      19h

      to join the performance, please leave your phone number on the sign up sheet on location. The audio track will be send to your number via whatsapp or telegram

      Duration 1,5h (train to Brussels can be reached)

       

      Area X refers to a mysterious zone in the Southern Reach Trilogy books – a sci-fi, eco-horror and eerie fiction written by Jeff VanderMeer. In the Southern Reach Trilogy a research unit studies a mysterious substance/agent/force/landscape that takes over and re-writes whatever and whomever engages with it. In the narrative of the trilogy the researchers sent into Area X end up blending with it and becoming the subject of their research.

      In their collaboration during the Research Center Cycle 3, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio have been looking into methodologies for studying the agencies of text through collective reading practices, role play and infused hallucinations. They have based their performative readings of the Southern Reach Trilogy on the methodologies that the books itself proposes: "This text, however, has an agency all of its own: its message is not disseminated through interpretation and relay, but inhalation." This research stimulates a particular relation between reader and text: a point of contact where the desire to make sense coexists with the experience of being fundamentally changed by what one reads.

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • project
    • block 2022/III
    • Where do we go from here - Block 2022 III a proposal by Martina Petrovic
      30 July 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 05 September 2022
    • 30 November 2022
    • Is a series of dinner encounters which aims to map and introduce four collectives from the Brussels scene to a.pass participants from the September block 2022. Collectives: Common Wallet, Helectolitre, BOSCH and JUBILEE/EMPTOR, are self-organized, or which have alternative approaches on commons, organization, finances and ways of living and working as artists.

      Through a format of dinner we will explore how these collectives operate, what are the politics behind the modes of being and working together, where are the difficulties and what are exciting new possibilities of working with different structures. Participants of a.pass will come to the dinners of these four collectives, after these four encounters for the final dinner a.pass will take the role of the host.

       

      Sept 20th, 7pm: Dinner with Hectolitre

      Oct 7th, 7pm: Dinner with Common Wallet

      Oct 27th, 4pm: Reading Room and dinner with Jubilee/Emptor

       

      The dinner table has its own politics, how one sets it influences the conversation around it, it can generate questions, introduce different ways of composing a menu, question the tools we use, it can unveil the social structures that make the table possible, sometimes unexpected surprising flavors appear on one’s plate and many other delicious subject can surface on it.

      These encounters would allow us to collect tools, inspiration and to learn from existing experience and structures on how to collectivize. Further to question what are the challenges, where to search for help, or what is the strength of working in these alternative ways. It would be amazing if this encounter would spark connections and give opportunity to new, unexpected ways of thinking. Maybe some of these conversations encourage propositions where to begin, which steps to take, what traps to avoid, etc. Maybe they provide inspiration to come together and merge projects or initiate art communities and support systems for each other.

       

      -----------------------------------------------------------PLANNED DINNERS

       

      DINNER with HECTOLITRE- 20th of September -  Rue de L'Hectolitre 3.

      HECTOLITRE is a space dedicated to artists who wish to delve deeper into their projects, experiment with transdisciplinarity and connect their art form/research to the neighborhood. The artists living and working at HECTOLITRE are co-joining interconnected community rings, together with involved neighbors, socio-cultural activists, local and international artists/curators. It is also a place where I have been living for 8 months now, which has opened for me a door to an amazing artist community, given me the time and space for research and implemented the seed from which the idea for dinners with collectives blossomed.

      HECTOLITRE is also an unusual building in the heart of the Marolles neighborhood undergoing a radical change of identity. Former swingers club, then storage for antiques, the space is filled with peculiar Art Brut interventions, resembling a kind of «memory forest».Thus, visually and symbolically complex, the surrounding is no obstacle, but rather is perceived as a living system to accept, associate, question, and experience, providing a shared atelier, hosting exhibitions, performances, musical encounters, film projections, debates and other initiatives. The complementarity among artists, curators, creatives and neighbors inhabit the place and catalyze exchange.

      The project’s device is based on open, curious and benevolent exchange. Innovation, perseverance, the desire to undertake guide the approach, all in an atmosphere that is joyful, lively and harmonious. The methodology of co-creation and collective intelligence governs the organization of the life of the place and the design and implementation of projects.

      http://www.hectolitre.space/project.html

      Meeting of the hectolitre community would take place through a neighborly Balkan traditional activity of roasting papers for preparation of traditional autumn dish Ajvar. Ajvar is a spread made from paprika, oil and spaces which is not only delicious but always takes more than 1 person to make. It invites people to come together, make a summary of the summer experiences, and start preparations for winter. This collective activity also has its economical side, it takes care of rationing the resources,by using one grill and stove for multiple households. Which brings us also to an unavoidable discussion in these times about the advantages of cohousing, living in the collectivity, and sharing working and living spaces. Where and how to search for them and how to start commonizing? Further questioning:  the organic organization of the community, what does it mean, and how does it function?  

       

       

      DINNER with COMMON WALLET - 7 October, 7pm @ Rue de L'Hectolitre 3

       

      Common Wallet is a shared bank account and an experiment of radical trust created by a small community of eight people mainly based in Brussels. The members are artists and cultural producers with different lifestyles, levels of wealth and family conditions. Every income generated by the participants is shared in one common bank account. Any member of the Common Wallet can take money from this account based on their needs and with responsibility towards the group and life’s projects. This means that all everyday and regular expenses such as rent / mortgage, food, clothing, energy, transport are paid for by this common pot of resources. The experiment started in January 2018 without fixed rules but with a shared set of values and the idea to practice a polyamorous relationship with money.

      https://vimeo.com/295537042

      Common Wallet's polyamorous relationship with money is a provocative experiment in trust. They invite us to have a conversation around our relation to money. How does one deal with income, resources and outgoing costs - how do we tackle the taboo around these issues? When the current capitalistic structures are not very welcoming, where and how could we reach for alternative solutions? The dinner with Common Wallet will tackle these questions through an open conversation around the table and by introducing us to a game made by three common walleters, named Commonopoly. How did the idea come about? How is a common wallet structured? What are its positive sides, opportunities and pitfalls.  

      The dinner is curated by Amy Pickles and Martina Petrovic, in collaboration with  Adva Zakai and Anna Rispoli (from Common Wallet).

       

      *

       

      DINNER with JUBILEE/EMPTOR - 27th of October, 4-9pm @ Radical House (Luikenaarsstraat 2 Rue des Liégeois, 1050 Elsene/Ixelles)

       

      Jubilee is an artist-run organisation that functions as a platform for artistic research. Jubilee is a polyphonic and transdisciplinary structure that supports the work and research of its founding artists, as well as the projects of associated artists within collective reflection trajectories. Jubilee initiates collaborations as a basis for long-term and reciprocal relationships.

      Jubilee is concerned with sustainability of artist practices and pursues viable conditions for an ecology of artistic practices. Jubilee wants to raise awareness among artists and have a positive impact on organisations and policies. It does so both by disseminating critical perspectives on the existing precarization in the arts field through individual artistic projects and collective reflections, and by participating in educational contexts, debates, lectures and working groups on an (inter)national level. Jubilee aims to propose practice-based solutions to reconceptualize solidarity systems.

      Jubilee's most comprehensive collective research trajectories are Caveat and Emptor.

       

      Caveat and Emptor

      The project title Caveat alludes to the expression caveat emptor (buyer beware) – signaling the research's ambition to raise awareness around financial transfers in the arts and around how money is constitutive for work relationships, on a socio-economic, legal and cultural-institutinial level. 

      Caveat's primal focus is on contracts as a tool for reconfiguring relationships in the field of visual arts. The research project Emptor focuses on property relationships. In the wake of collaborative, performative, internet-based, audiovisual, and immaterial turns in the arts, it is ever more delicate and complex to define what is the artwork, and how it can be exhibited, conserved and sold. Ownership of material objects remains crucial within the visual arts economy, regardless of the challenges that new art practices pose to materialisation and acquisition. How to dislodge the focus on property to ensure the ‘life’ of artworks within collaborative set-ups?

      Emptor proceeds by alternating a series of preparatory Reading Rooms with public-facing Assemblies of Practice, for in-depth presentation and study of practices of associated researchers.

       

      Reading Room #25, towards the Assembly of Practice ‘Whose institution?’

      Working towards Emptor's third assembly of practice 'Whose institution?', Jubilee invites a.pass to Reading Room #25. We gather around texts from the Handbook that accompanies Documenta 15/Lumbung, an artist-run and collectively structured edition of Documenta which has implied a significant shift in the possibilities of institutional practice. Lumbung is the name for a storage in rural areas for surplus rice that is collectively managed.

      The Reading Room will proceed with a dinner conceptualized by Martina Petrovic.

    • 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.

       

       

       

       

       

       

    •  

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

       

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

       

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

      INSTRUCTIONS

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

      -We bring food and drinks to share.

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

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

      -Participants of the score attend to minimum 5 sessions.

      The score is simple. It works as follows:

      To start:

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

      The questions

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

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

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

      The responses

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

      Conversation

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

       

      Documentation

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

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

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

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

      18h general welcome, drinks and food

       

       

      Vera Sofia Mota (PT)

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

      Imprints

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

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

       

      Chloë Janssens Janssens (BE)

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

      To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen 

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

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

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

    • postgraduate program
    • Scoring intimacy with discursive others Block II 2022 (May - July)
      14 April 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • a.pass
    • 02 May 2022
    • 31 July 2022
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Scoring intimacy with discursive others

       

      The Block II 2022 proposes to exercise a personal, immediate and performative relation with discourse – through autotheory, speculative history, conversation and collectivity – embodied in a weekly Score. It feeds upon the tension between one’s practice and the other, often absent other who is yet unescapable like one’s ancestor, lover, kin or friend. In other words, we are interested in how discursive beings – those that we encounter only through language – can guide us through our practices?

      The Score, facilitated by Lilia Mestre, will be practised every Thursday at a.pass. There will be 9  sessions in total throughout the block and participants are recommended to engage for a minimum of 5 sessions. The Score practice is an intersubjective and collective setup that facilitates the dialogue between discourse and artistic practice by engaging in writing to each other and performing for the collective. It  addresses and knits relations between the  research of the participants and aims to experience and empower  what “difference without separability” might be.* To start up we will read and discuss the text by Denise Ferreira da Silva as a basis for studying how co-learning and collectivity relate to us and the world we are living in.

      In the beginning of the block Goda Palekaitė will propose a workshop on artistic research through intimate relations with historical characters. Roland Barthes described his associative dictionary of love and longing A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978) as “the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.”** In the case of this workshop, the loved one who does not speak is a forgotten historical character, the inaccessible discursive other whose silence both challenges and excites. How can we accompany the displaced characters in their metaleptic movement – in their mesmerising exercise of shapeshifting from one reality to another (e.g., from historical absence and denial to presence and recognition)?***

      A two week residency (June 27 – July 10) will take place in ZSenne ArtLab, downtown Brussels. The focus of the residency is on autotheory and its relation to alternative writing and performative practices in artistic research. The program includes a workshop, a reading group, and a programme of performances; it is curated by Goda and Lilia. A two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library of the ground theoretical materials and methodological tools to be explored during the two weeks. It will focus on highlighting how autotheoretical narrators weave an intellectual and intimate network of relations; and consequently it will make time to read, think, and share as a collective. We invited a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice to present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen.

      In response to the actual distressful situation of the war in Ukraine that hits after the pandemic and tops upon the a.pass loss of subsidies due to the practical implementation of right-wing politics in Belgium, we would like to open the ZSenne ArtLab for two days to voices that need to be heard. This is an open proposition to discuss with all a.pass participants.

      *On difference without separability by Denise Ferreira da Silva - In 32nd Bienal de São Paulo - Incerteza Viva. Catalogue. Edited by Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças. São Paulo: Fundação de São Paulo, pp 57-65, 2016.

      ** Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 3.

      ***Metalepsis, in contemporary narratology refers to a phrase or a situation from a literary text, which is used in a new, logically distinct context from its original one; a transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels.

    • 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

    • end presentation
    • re:source End Presentations January 27,28 and 29, 2022
      15 January 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Gemeenschapscentrum De Kriekelaar
    • 27 January 2022
    • 29 January 2022
    • re:source
       
      The a.pass End Presentations of Ana Paula Camargo, Nathaniel Moore, Federico Protto and Túlio Rosa will take place the 27, 28 and 29 January 2022 at Gemeenschapscentrum De Kriekelaar in Schaarbeek from 18:00 to 22:30. This public presentation marks the end of their trajectory at a.pass and invites the researchers to share their modes of doing, seeing and making artist research public after following the year-long program.
       
      Having singular questions, processes and approaches, the four researches cross concerns in addressing critically the available sources and resources of colonial histories and ghostly societal matters and how they form our relation to the present.

       
      All of them study in specific performative ways how to translate and weave different dimensions of reality. In their practices, they intertwine several materialities such as colonial archival materials, earth materials, death rituals, diaries, interviews, sonic memories, other people writings and thoughts, human and more than human knowledges and all present in the room.
       
      The presentations will bridge these dimensions in multiple ways, each of them calling for the gathered sources and resources intra-action in the moment of the public presentations with the intention to repair what has been forgotten, dismissed or remains unseen. 
       
      Ana Paula Camargo comes from Mexico and is enrolled in a PhD in Madrid. Her research has ground on new materialism and it engages with bridging choreography with climate crisis and indigenous cultures through creating performative contexts where they inform each other. Nathanial Moore is a choreographer and dancer coming from the US, his research is on cultural ghosts, how they are embodied and the way they produce current subjectivities with specific focus on mass shooters. Federico Protto (Uruguay/ Germany) is working with expanded fashion. His background is fashion design and he engages in sonic performative situations to challenge and enlarge the implications of fashion as a discipline and as a product. As much as its potential to bring world resources and cultural heritage to the fore. Túlio Rosa’s research is centred on making perceptible colonial infrastructures through interviews, film editing and analyses of data that produces the colonised subject. Coming from Brazil his focus in on what he calls the Atlantic Archive.
       
      This event will be on itself a study on performativity and its agency. By being together, these performative situations will shine attention to ways of creating relation with the audience, the materialities at stake and what matters in very particular ways. They extend from the lecture performance into installation work or ritual practice to potentialize the possibility of change towards an equitable way to relate with each other and the world. 
       
       
      RESEARCH TEXTS AND BIOS 
       
      Ana Paula Camargo | 0.3 lecture performances series
       
      This research is about the digestion of the world—and the worlds inside the world—, and also the acknowledgement of our earthliness and our humble position within the cosmic scale.It goes around a personal process and the unexpected intimacy that arises in our relationships with both known and unknown beings, things and natural forces.
      I started this project from a hunch, a starting point that I could barely understand, half intuition, half a blind spot. The hunch was a feeling of alienation in the relationship between humans-things-environment, which led me to wonder if these entanglements could be otherwise. I could feel this as a lack of desire, Eros, deep connection, lack of mattering, lack of ‘fleshness’; a ubiquitous feeling of nonsense. All this awakened in me a deep anxiety of devouring the world, colliding with it, setting off everything, burning down and dismantling structures as a way to resist this zombie mode. 
      At those times I was being very affected by the increasing dematerialization of many relations in the world. I was sure that the alienation in our relationships was the product of this. It is indeed part of the problem, but now it is clear the root of the question started much earlier with Modernity and the big shift in the mindset that came with it, since the transition from the Middle Ages to Capitalism, and the world spread of Capitalism since the conquest and colonization of the Americas.
      With the wish of building reshaped relationships with things and beings that surrounded me, I approach the 'thing' as an ecology to comprehend. Instead of focusing on one specific phenomenon, I opted to work in a wide spectrum: not to focus on the seed but covering the whole field. As in permaculture—or earlier—as in ancient milpas[1] in Mesoamerica. I am searching in two fields mainly: both sociological and personal. What I realized is the complexity of the question: I am facing a dense weave of interrelations that could not allow me to know one thing without knowing all the cluster in which that one is involved. That’s how the sociological calls for the historical, and the historical to the political, and so on. Or the personal calls for the biological and the biological for the cultural, and the cultural to the sociological and so on. And at the end everything is interrelated again.
      I arrived at the lecture performance as I would arrive at a milpa, a place to grow things in, all together. This is a space-time where every little part is bleeding over into the other, no matter how similar or different they are. A space to make kin, to make entanglements explicit, to mattering, to be a failure, to mess up, to discern, to remember what is forgotten, to rest, and hopefully to finally find your way.
      Welcome.
       
      [1] Agricultural system from Mesoamerica, focused on the coexistence of diverse seeds and on the caring of the soil. This approach is completely opposite to Monoculture.
       
      Ana Paula Camargo (Mexico) is a performing artist, choreographer and researcher.
      Throughout the past years she has expanded her practice towards a transdisciplinary field of research. Focusing on the process and the (re)search and not on producing a predetermined outcome, she likes to navigate across the boundaries of disciplines. She is engaged in the relationship between life and art, and how art can change the way we experience the world and hopefully transform it. She usually works within contexts where care, collaboration, self-organization and communal work matter. She has shared her work in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Spain, U.S.A, France, Belgium and México. http://cargocollective.com/anapaulacamargonateras
       
      *
       
      Nathaniel Moore | Death Zine
      Nathaniel Moore, in collaboration with Julia Rubies and Stijn Smeets
       
       “The problem is that the repressed and the disavowed never go away; it is precisely the fact that they always come back that lies at the heart of haunting,” Stephen Frosh.
       
      Death Zine, is a performance ritual, death practice, created to meet that which is socially repressed; in this case, incel and white nationalist mass shooters. The desire to meet comes as a proposal to disrupt the shooter’s expressed isolation and pain, a fundamental condition which leads them to violence.
       
      Death Zine is a research practice of being with the wounds which make connection impossible.
       
      With this performance we evoke these shooters to join us, back from the dead or from their prison cells, to spend time together and learn from each other. We want to see them. We want to give them value. We believe we must in order to find balance. 
       
      And in the process of meeting them we are faced with ourselves. Through this search for connection with the shooter we attempt to come into contact with our own personal wounds, judgements, and patterns disrupting our own possibilities to connect with the world. 
       
      We attempt to move through these identifications that isolate us.
       
      Identities which fix us into positions from which we are played against each other.
       
      Meet the other, trouble isolation, conditions can shift.
       
      Nathaniel Moore is a choreographer/dancer based in Brussels.
      He enjoys dancing naked, eye contact, and telling tall tales (aka storytellin').
      Nat’s artistic practice uses movement and the symbolic to address systemic erasure and generations of alienation operating inside and through bodies. They explore relationships with ghosts to construct infrastructures of queer imaginaries inside of the fragmented, existential emptiness of post-modern consumerist identity. Through their research, Nat’s makes their body the material for a dance with ghosts in order to understand and unearth the crypts of a particular US-american 21st century ontology.
       
      Nat’s work has been presented in the US, Belgium, and Germany. He has worked as a dancer and collaborator with Keith Hennessy, Sara Shelton Mann, Hope Mohr, Dance Theater of San Francisco, Alex Ketley, Alexander Ekman, Kinetech Arts, Ainsley Tharp, Jonah Kagan, and Menlowe Ballet among many others. He’s originally from Athens, Georgia, and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas.
       
       
      *
       
      Frederico Protto | Dress-Rehearsals
       
      Inter-Materiality Mode is an artistic research trajectory moving through the interstices of fashion and sound. Crafting methods to address these spaces, the work considers the phenomenon of fashion and the world of sounds in their broader contexts. 
      Fabrics, clothing, sounds, texts, voices, and the body become tools for somatic and performative practices to diffuse, and recollect knowledge. In constellation of a South American background, sonic and textile artefacts (CD’s, tapes cassettes, garments, instruments, etc.) and multiple research materials are activated in a presentation format titled Dress-Rehearsal. This proto-esoteric format evokes the researches inherent questions: What are other forms of translation and how do they relate to the world and our (re)sources within it? Collectively the notions of authorship are reimagined, and forms of relationality and knowledge common to the global-north are challenged. 
       
      Inter-Materiality Mode is a radiating broadcast from and for the senses.
       
      Federico Prottos’s artistic practice unfolds along and between performance, music, costume and fashion, and artistic research. Spanning a hybrid network of collaborators, disciplines, and materialities, his projects question conventions in order to configure new forms of shared knowledge production and kinship. After having worked as fashion and costume designer showing his collections at several international fashion weeks and festivals, Federico Protto turned toward performative practices, sonic experiments, textile investigations, publication formats, and public workshops.
      He holds degrees in fashion design from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and is currently part of the postgraduate programme in artistic research at a.pass in Brussels, Belgium.
      He was born 1991 in Montevideo, Uruguay, and is presently based in Brussels, Belgium.
       
      *
       
      Túlio Rosa | Arquivo Atlântico
       
      Túlio Rosa | Arquivo Atlântico
       
      For many years now, my work has been focused on the relationship between images, especially images of violence, and the body. My practice has been carried out in the intersection between performing arts, film and visual practices, borrowing ideas, techniques and forms that are linked to different disciplines while maintaining a strong connection with the field of choreography. I have been exploring how different practices of engagement (physical, visual and discursive) might be able to operate meaningful articulations between archive materials and their legacies in order to produce speculative narratives, counter hegemonic practices and critical discourse.
       
      For the end presentation, I’ll be sharing some materials developed within the frame of Arquivo Atlântico [Atlantic Archive], a multi-chapter research project that I’ve been developing in collaboration Beatriz Cantinho since 2020. The presentation will be composed by an small sound installation, acompanied by a publication, and a performative experiment that combines imagemaking, writing and sound exploration.
       
      Arquivo Atlântico emerged from the desire to look back at the history of the various territories bordered by the Atlantic Ocean in order to understand the forms of occupation, extraction, hierarchization, exclusion and extermination that mark, still today, the relationship between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. For us, the archive is not only evidence of a past, but a generative matter. Working with a wide range of sources – films, official documents, literature, sonic registers, oral narratives – we have been exploring how creative and compositional practices can rescue the affective capacity of these materials and allow us to deconstruct narratives and visualities that characterize a political imaginary of colonial matrix. 
      More than about history, Arquivo Atlântico is an investigation on the notion of memory, on the possibility of re-membering differently places, peoples and knowledges. It is an attempt to weave personal stories with official history; to understand how, by positioning ourselves within larger narratives, we can draw connections, inaugurate dialogues, foster imaginaries and open space for other readings of the present.
       
       
    • contemplative activism is my artistic research.

      contemplative activism is revolution and sub-version.

      contemplative activism is in transition.

      it questions the boundaries of identity and property.

      it is a form of resistance to institutions (body/language) and a tool for institutional critique.

      it develops decolonizing and anti-capitalistic practices for the bodies in relation to the landscape

      they are immersed and transitioning in. 

      it aims to undo pre-existing knowledge and expectations and to make space to the encounter.

      it reflects on the non-neutral role of the observer/perceiver as reality generator:

      the way we position our-selves in the complex landscape of relationships that surround us and we are part of changes the landscape itself.

      my positions within otherness is part of the reality I’m generating and being part of.

      the contemplation is then active as other-realities/other-bodies/other-languages generator.

      In order to meet the other I have to enter the temple (templum), I have to step-in the position from where is possible to perceive the other as alterity.

      I have to displace my self to the place where it’s not about me and not about you but something we don’t know yet how to name.

      therefore the practices of contemplative activism are based on displacement (nomadic, wandering, walking, filming and writing practices).

      the displacement allows a suspension from identification with the present.

      in this suspension, while no-meaning, no-sens-direction, is attributed, I can question and move the realities com-posed-with what is there and embrace new

      possible futures.

      through the setting of scores, protocols and devices I rewrite the present through the encounter with otherness. the other appears, into a wound.

      the contemplative activism is an active state of not doing.

      the templum (cum+templum) is a time-space cut.

      the contemplative activism operates during the cut, while the wound is still open.

    • This day is organised around a para-legal document, 'Collective Conditions for Re-Use' (cc4r). Cc4r is an authorship license in-the-making, a reluctant contract that tries to make space for collective care around authorial practice.

      https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html


       



      Intellectual property law binds authors and their hybrid contemporary practices to a framework of assumed ownership, authenticity and individualism. It conceives creations by default as original works, negating the inevitable bleed of cultural production. Within that legal and ideological framework, Copyleft, Open Content Licenses or Free Culture Licensing introduced a different view of authorship, opening up the possibility for re-imagining authorship as a collective, trans*feminist, webbed practice. But over time, some of the initial spark and potentiality of Free Culture licensing has been normalized and its problems and omissions became increasingly apparent.

      How to create conditions for creative practices to flourish beyond individual control? How could attribution be a form of situated genealogy, rather than accounting for heritage through listing names of contributing individuals? In what way can we limit predatory practices without blocking the generative potential of Free Culture? What would a decolonial and trans*feminist license look like, and in what way could we propose entangled notions of authorship? Or perhaps we should think of very different strategies?

      CC4r is an attempt to articulate conditions for re-using authored materials. It is inspired by the principles of Free Culture but tries to respond to a growing discomfort with licenses that remain bound to the idea of authorship as ownership and stay with an universalist approach to openness. The CC4r considers authorship instead to be already part of a collective cultural effort and wants to remind current and future authors of the social and historical conditions that may be reasons for refraining from release and re-use of a work.





      Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software in various constellations. With Seda Guerses, Miriyam Aouragh, and Helen Pritchard, she runs the emerging Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha) she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations and with Jara Rocha, Femke activates the collective research project Possible Bodies. Between 2003 and 2021, she was co-responsible for the artistic program of Constant, association for art and media based in Brussels. Femke supports artistic research at PhdArts (Leiden), MERIAN (Maastricht) and at a.pass (Brussels). She teaches at XPUB (Master programme for experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

    • postgraduate program
    • bleed is inevitable
    • block 2021/III
    • Role Play Intensive
    • bleed is inevitable curatorial assemblage facilitated by Kristien Van den Brande
      20 September 2021
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • 06 September 2021
    • 30 November 2021
    • bleed is inevitable

      The block “Bleed is inevitable” starts from the premise that we are inhabited by several voices - be them spiritual, psychological, political, juridical, institutional, identitarian, non-human, culture-historical, assigned or acquired, short or long term,… - and that we are subject to environments that bring these voices into dialogue or conflict, or muffle them. During the block, the a.pass researchers are invited to think their interactions from the perspective of role play, and to create artificial environments in which to experiment with and dis-equilibrate an individual or collective constitution of voices. It is a guided exercise in letting go of what one knows or thinks to know and a prodding for delineated and contrived spaces to speculate on different modes of being together in the world.

      History will always be in the room though. In LARP (Live Action Role Play)-vocabulary ‘bleed’ refers to the experience of transferral between real-life and game-world. In-game experience inevitably spills back into life, and vice versa, one’s game character and world is inevitably inspired by real-life experiences and self-perception. LARPers have developed techniques to halt or hold this zone of oscillation, between what is and what could be. While closure of play might be a necessary tool to keep up with ‘real-life’, we could also question the ‘right to a proper end’ as particular to Western storytelling tradition, with consequences for what we think a proper life or story is. ’Bleed is inevitable’ invites the a.pass participants to question and reinvent assigned roles, investigate the ideological space of ‘bleed’, as well as experiment with techniques of game-design within artistic research.

      “Bleed is inevitable” is an assemblage of different curatorial proposals that have been in conversation for a longer period of time. Not seamless, but definitely more than tangentially connected, therefore with the ongoing challenge to superimpose and retrace how they spill into each other.

       


       

      First, Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir take us for two walks in SPA in the context of their research ‘7 WALKS (resolution)’. The context of SPA offers the unique opportunity for a series of itinerant reflections on water and art. Drawing inspiration from the intangible legacy of historical walkers — kings and czars, political refugees, artists and philosophers — and, strongly anchored in a local context, Heiremans and Vermeir propose us to explore a balance between private property of and access to resources that we hold in common as a society. Can SPA inspire to unbundle the proprietary rights that have been stacked around authorship and (land) ownership, i.e. two paramount features of Western subjectivity?

      Guests: David Aubin, Scott Raby, Steyn Bergs, Jens Van Lathem, Tobias Van Royen.

      September 16-17

       


       

      Second, block curator Kristien Van den Brande organizes a two week Role Play Intensive. The Intensive combines immersive experiences, showcases, reading, film, discussion with invited guests, and this input is alternated with open slots where we translate and experiment for ourselves what role-play can bring to our work. Discussions around consent, boundaries, co-authorship and a willingness to suspend the self into play will be key. We will take role-play as a space for investigation, confrontation and speculation rather than escapism. What conversational, contractual and/or architectural techniques have LARPers, BDSMer or therapists developed to mark the transition between real-time&space and play-time&space? What are ethical limits of engaging in role-play, regarding the politics of appropriation and trauma? What are the conditions for role-play to offer a safe/brave space to practice critical empathy (Ed Fornieles), un-recognizing (Elvia Wilk), disidentification (Jose Esteban Muñoz), or for suspending the cops in the head (Augusto Boal)?

      Guests: Amélie Orsel with the LARP Identities; Olivier Stein with an introduction to different Role-Play cultures and techniques; Carolien Stikker with a demonstration of Voice Dialogue Therapy; Femke Snelting with an attempt at a new authorship license; Sarah Vanhee’s film The Making of Justice; Wouter De Raeve and Lietje Bauwens with the film WTC A Love Story; Kobe Matthys / Agency with an assembly about a copyright controversy around reality-tv.

      September 27 - October 8

       


       

      Third, a.pass participants Chloë Janssens, Amy Pickles and Túlio Rosa are organizing a temporary context for collective study: ‘On Coloniality: a public gathering’. Through different artistic and theoretical speculations they invite us to study coloniality and its manifold dimensions. The term ‘coloniality' differentiates colonialism, as a historical process, from its legacies. It refers to the modes of organisation of power in colonized territories, and how this extends out into supposedly post-colonial states. How is the colonial rationale at the basis of current modes of social and political organisation? How have these supposed histories collapsed into, resonate with, and form our present? Departing from critical reflection on the countries where they were born — Belgium, Brazil, UK — they invite us to draw connections between different times and locations by closely following methods of appropriation and extraction of land, resources, labour and data. Through different artistic practices we will 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: a public gathering' will be hosted inside and outside of a.pass, a porous programme open to the public. There will be an exhibition that hosts artist work, reading and listening sessions, screenings, public conversations and discussions.

      Guests are announced shortly.

      November 10-13

       
    • 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

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

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

      price 15 euro

       

       

       

       
    • Initiated out of a desire to be a shared platform of exchange, support and publication for the a.pass Associate Researchers, this year-long initiative will continue to support and publish advanced research and investigate its trajectories within a.pass.

      The Associate Researchers 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. The Research Center supports and facilitates individual and collective forms of performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions, gatherings, etc), experimental research set ups, workshops and collaborations.

       

      For the period of May 2021 to April 2022 a.pass is happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center Cycle III:

      Joāo Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Gosie Vervloessem, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Simon Asencio.

      The Associate Researchers will be hosted and supported during Cycle III by Vladimir Miller.

      Research practices of the Associated Researchers of Cycle 3:

      Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin

      CofetARia is an eating performance at the confluence of two durational practices: performance art and pastry backing, where cakes are generally more performative than other dishes, and allow better for the agencies/affordances of food to come through. Working with alimentary matter and showing/doing/behaving, CofetARia is about animating memory and confronting the problems raised by post-communist empathic nostalgia, outside of the "crimes of the past regime" approaches.

       

      Joāo Fiadeiro

      Real Time Composition is a concept-tool that studies and practices a contra-intuitive skill: the ability to look at ourselves looking at (ourselves looking at) things. This is done using the fields of improvisation and composition in contemporary dance as a privileged territory of research. “Real Time” and “Composition” are two notions that cancel each other. “Composition” suggests that one must refer to the existence of previous knowledge while actively projecting the future. “Real time” implies that whatever is happening, is happening here and now, in the present. The resulting tension (and attention) generated by the collision of those two opposing forces allows an alternative way to perceive and experience time. Real Time Composition suggests a perceptual paradigm shift: instead of reacting based on previous knowledge one should suspend knowledge. Instead of fighting the unknown (or surrendering to it) one should welcome it. As a result, the linear experience of time is interrupted, a gap in the sensation of continuity is produced and an interval “emerges”. Inside this interval, time is not linear (or even circular) but “twisted” (like the topological surface of a Mobius Strip), governed by laws that don’t follow conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside. Inside this interval, space has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Transforming fixed, rigid and closed compositions into mobile, flexible and open relations is what characterises the research within and around Real Time.

       

      Gosie Vervloessem

      If a damaged heart were photosynthetIc is an ongoing in-situ project that starts from a squatted ticket booth in the Botanical Garden in Brussels, from where I, as a sick detective*, commit a slow and silent coup on the site through a two-folded strategy: by haunting the garden, identifying and unveiling the ghosts that linger on the gardens’ grounds, ghosts of various exploitations through different times. And secondly, by pushing plant science in a radical and speculative directions. Plants have long been identified with the feminine body and have been as regularly exploited and subjected to biopolitical control. But bodies of women and plants also hold a magic that might counter the ghosts of capitalism. For making the coup on the Botanical Garden really successful I need the help of women and plants.

      • An alter ego that i use to carry out my artistic research. The main trait of the sick Detective is her ongoing struggle with notions of immersion, osmosis, co-penetration, infection, etc. The character of the sick Detective is based on plant-human hybrids depicted in popular culture and draws inspiration from works of Stacy Alaimo, Nicole Seymour, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Heather Houser and others.

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam

      As an associated researcher at a.pass, I’m looking to focus on the preparation for the potential conclusion and the aftermath of my Ph.D. in the Arts titled The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution. With the Associated Researcher position I look to outlast a premeditated institutional conclusion of the current research project that I lead by overlapping host institutions. In doing so, further committing to the complete turnaround of my artistic practice that the current PhD position has afforded. One of the primary interest at a.pass is being for the first time, inside an institution that is not solely focused on visual art. And what that entails in how artistic practice is understood, as well as artistic research — ways of communicating the decision-making process mixed with the desire for a more engaged collective research environment. In overlapping institutions, I look at a.pass not only as a place of coaching for the defense but also as an institution that participates during the final evaluation process, by inviting a core member of a.pass to be part of the jury. Looking for a difference in perspective for the feedback from an artist organised educational and research platform.

      Simon Asencio

      The research investigates the position of invisibility and anonymity in text in order to reassess practices of authorship and readership. The notion of invisibility in this case, is a matter of illegibility, either chosen as a ruse for safety or forced upon to undermine the ‘inadequate’. The notion of anonymity points to the set of protocols by which a person or a group appears as non-identifiable, unreachable or untraceable; or whose identity is rendered incomplete or never 'one'. If anonymity is usually seen as a way to avoid responsibility (to hide the doer behind the deed), the research focuses on how the performance of the namelessness (the doings of anonymity) could instead invite us to engage a collective responsibility towards history, community, political action and art making. At the cross between literature and performance, the research looks at practices and precedents across spoken tongues, written tongues and sung tongues (in particular in vernacular forms, music and poetry) to define poetical, ethical and political tools to think a more inclusive practice of anonymity and invisibility.

    •  

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

      18-22h

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

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

      will read, perform, discuss:

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

      *

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

      Publishing is rarely something that concludes a confined process of solitary thought. It is a social process that — abstractly and manifestly — involves collaboration along the way. Rather than a book or printed matter as a finite goal, the researchers took publishing as a pretext to build ongoing social gestures, a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance.

       


       

      Programme:

       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

      And last but not least:

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

       
    • Embracing the fact that artistic research is an emerging category of production in the cultural field, a.pass does not claim it as it’s goal or premise to be able delineate the borders of this particular methodology. a.pass affirms this apparent lack of definition as a chance. Operating without a predefined notion of what „artistic research“ is, it creates and brings together a pluralistic overview of the existing notions of this practice.

      An affirmative survey towards the question „what is artist research?“ has therefore become one of a.pass' defining methodologies: a.pass strives to host a multitude of practices in the arts which self-define themselves as research. Their definitions of what a research praxis in the arts is are at times complementing and at times contradicting each other. This dis/agreement creates a polivocal platform of definitions and is a statement towards a different conception of institutions: away from essentialist claims and towards a more politicised platform of engagement with a certain discipline.

      Some of the methods of this survey methodology are:
      -a.pass frequently invites research practitioners in the arts to work with the participants of the institute.
      -a.pass invests in creating occasions for public discussions of what artistic research is and in presenting the researches work to the general public.
      -a.pass is producing a library of research methodologies by publishing the individual research cases.
      -a.pass is presenting itself as a platform for the exchange, implementations and experimentation of research methodologies.


      Beyond its defined curriculum and methods a.pass has in general become an informal meeting point of professionals in the arts on many levels of professionalization Many contacts and collaborations that have been initiated at a.pass continue well beyond the one-year timeframe. It is a productive hub for the Brussels art scene.


      a.pass is a platform which educates and sets an agenda of learning for its participants. It is building its curriculum by inviting advanced practitioners in the arts to actively engage the participants into their research within a framework of a workshop. This work is not framed as a teaching as such, but as a process of collective
      exploration. Experimental formats of collective and collaborative research are frequently proposed and developed in such a framework. The traditional professor- student relationship is put into question here and has to be re-negotiated as a dialogue while a diverse group of practices is admitted as „teaching“.
      a.pass develops teaching practices which engage with the question of how the process of knowledge production and transfer can be framed outside the persistent hierarchies within the processes of learning and education.

       

    • 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/

       

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

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

      Join Zoom Meeting
      is finished.... 

      Check out :  https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      *

       

      BIOS ad extra content

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


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

      *

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

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

      *

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

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

      *

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

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

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

       

      *

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

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

       

      *

       

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

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

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


       

      Website: dismantle.space

       


       

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      *

      Dismantle

      Space


      *

       

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

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

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

       

      *

       

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

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

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

       

      *

       

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

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

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

       

      *

       

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

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

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

       

      *


      BIOGRAPHIES

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

      *

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

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

      *

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

       

    •  

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

      Introduction

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

      Background

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

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

       

       

      Day 1, July 8th

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

      ► expand

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

      Artistic research

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

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

       

      Individuality and collaboration

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

       

      Selection of candidates

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

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

       

      Archiving, documenting, publishing and dissemination

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

       

      Evaluation, sustainability and sustainable management

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

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

       

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

      The subsequent discussion revolved among others around questions like:

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

       

       

      Day 2, July 9th

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

      ► expand

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

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

       

      TABLE 1: Institutional Autonomy within Larger Systems

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

      Reporter: Kristien Van Den Brande

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

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

       

      TABLE 2: Internal Relations

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

      Reporter: Philippine Hoegen

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

       

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

      Reporter: Sébastien Hendrickx

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

       

      TABLE 4: Instituting Transformation

      How to institute transformation and what resists instituting?

      Reporter: Sina Seifee

      Context:

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

      Questions raised:

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

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

       

       

       

      Day 3, July 10th

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

      ► expand

       

      Introduction to Day 3

       

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

       

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

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

       

      Reports by the Reporters

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

       

      Table 1 Report

      Kristien Van Den Brande

      ► Practice Presentation

      INSTITUTIONAL AUTONOMY WITHIN LARGER SYSTEMS

      Tackled through a role playing game.

      Roles:

      teacher

      dreamer (instagram influencer with a fashion line)

      uber-socialist (young artist)

      rebel (black-block activist seen as vandal)

      archivist (big data manager)

      Context:

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

      2 problems:

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

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

      1. Larger systems

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

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

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

      What were the features of the world:

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

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

      1. Wrong horizon of the word ‘autonomy’

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

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

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

      Strategies

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

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

      1. ANNIHILATION

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

      Threat comes from

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

      Strategies?

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Table 2 Report

      Philippine Hoegen

      ► Practice Presentation

      Internal Institutional Structures for Instituting Artistic Research

      Introduction

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

      Discussion Thursday 9th

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

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

       

       

      Several subjects surfaced of which three stood out:

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

      Discussion Friday 10th

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

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

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

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

      Debated Questions

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

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

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

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

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

      > What is slow, what is fast?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Table 3 Report

      Sébastien Hendricks

      ► Practice Presentation

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

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

      The practice consisted of the following elements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Table 4 Report

      Sina Seifee

      ► Practice Presentation

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

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

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

      Two distinct positions were articulated in the session:

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

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

       

       

       

       

      Open discussion after the presentation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Summary of Day 3

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

       

      Delphine Hesters

       

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

      Practices to give up:

      Institutions as service provider

      inequality

      hiding behind slowness

      quick fixes

      being in the position in which we have to legitimate ourselves

      constant measuring of time in order to remunerate

       

      Practices to nurture:

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

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

      administration as care

      having principles of self-evaluation

      (formal) structures to make informality happen

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

      tweaking of the bureaucratic requirements, pirate versions of existing models

      ask yourself - who has to move where at what cost

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

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

      map your entanglements, know your dependencies and autonomies

      weaving with the public

       

      Values:

      trust

      vulnerability

      transparency

      trans(nationality)

      radicality

      Think what could annihilate your institution

      Balance self care & being ready for change

      'being public' as acting upon the world

      Think in terms of currencies instead of positions and hierarchies

      approach to AR as both open and specific

       

      General Discussion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      >> ’(digital) commons' :)

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

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

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

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

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

      Delphine Hesters than asked into the round:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

       

      Conclusion

      A much needed conversation

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

      ► expand

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

       

      Community

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

       

      Administration as Care

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

       

      Access

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

       

      Visibility

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

       

      Practice, Discipline, Methodology, Field

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

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

       

      Outcomes

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

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

      Thank you!

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

       

       

      Post Conclusion

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

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

      To work with the patterns that research creates in artistic practice

      To be in dialogue with other researchers and colleagues.

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

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

      To practice clairvoyance

      To question the performance of authorship

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

      To engage in and share failures

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

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

      To understand the agency of a cut.

       

       

       

       

       

      Comments

      Please leave your comments and feedback in this collective pad

       

       

       

    •  

      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

       

    • 2020 has so far been a turbulent year: of course, the global background we are all aware of, but also for a.pass and all involved, as a community, as a group of colleagues and as a place of politics and organisation. We need time to meet despite all difficulties, and we need time to think together. We think of this block primarily as a meeting of ideas and practices of the researchers and the block contributors, in order to make space for an emergent support structure shared between all involved. Our desire is to ground the support structure of a.pass in a close relationship with the necessities and practices of the researchers. Curating here refers again more to care, than to an overarching trajectory. The core of what we do, practice artistic research, is what needs input and support. Starting from the question of what we need and how to organise it we want to create transitory and sustainable modes of organising and sharing research. The block practice, starting with the Settlement gathering, is focused on organisational and structural awareness and feedback: which spatial and temporal structures do we propose, how is it working with us and our research, and is it something we should keep for the future?

    •  

      Contemplative Activism is my artistic research.

      Contemplative Activism is revolution and sub-version.

      Contemplative Activism is in transition.

      It questions the boundaries of identity and property.

      It is a form of resistance to institutions (body/language) and a tool for institutional critique.

      It develops decolonizing and anti-capitalistic practices for the bodies in relation to the landscape

      they are immersed and transitioning in. 

      It aims to undo pre-existing knowledge and expectations and to make space to the encounter.

      It reflects on the non-neutral role of the observer/perceiver as reality generator:

      the way we position our-selves in the complex landscape of relationships that surround us and we are part of changes the landscape itself.

      My positions within otherness is part of the reality I'm generating and being part of.

      The contemplation is then active as other-realities/other-bodies/other-languages generator.

      In order to meet the other I have to enter the temple (templum), I have to step-in the position from where is possible to perceive the other as alterity.

      I have to displace my self to the place where it's not about me and not about you but something we don't know yet how to name.

      Therefore the practices of Contemplative Activism are based on displacement (nomadic, wandering, walking, filming and writing practices).

      The displacement allows a suspension from identification with the present.

      In this suspension, while no-meaning, no-sens-direction, is attributed, I can question and move the realities com-posed-with what is there and embrace new

      possible futures.

      Through the setting of scores, protocols and devices I rewrite the present through the encounter with otherness. The other appears, into a wound.

      The Contemplative Activism is an active state of not doing.

      The Templum (cum+templum) is a time-space cut.

      The Contemplative Activism operates during the cut, while the wound is still open.

    • July 10th 2020, 14h-18h, online

      a.pass cordially invites you to join the workshop presentations and public debate of the conference Research Futures on the 10th of July at 14h (online )

      The three day conference will take the form of a gradually expanding meeting of practitioners in the fields of art, education and artistic research. On Friday the 10th, the result of the previous day's workgroups will be presented and the conference will open up to a public Q&A and debate. The link for online attendance will be posted on the a.pass website on the 10th of July.

      The link for online participation will be placed here:

      https://bbb.apass.be/b/nic-h9a-kdr

      Welcome!

      Note:
      you will be prompted if you want to use your microphone by the BBB software.
      You can click yes. if you wish so.

      Please mute your microphone when you enter the room. (bottom of the screen)

      please find the full conference announcement here

       
    • conference
    • information
    • research center
    • defining a.pass
    • RESEARCH FUTURES Conference
      27 June 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass
    • 08 July 2020
    • 10 July 2020
    • yes
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • RESEARCH FUTURES

       

       

      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 - DAI - Dutch Art Institute, NL; Jan Van Eyck Academy, NL; Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerpen, BE and Uniarts Helsinki, FI in the field of artistic research. This process is 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 aim to understand, compare and strengthen our differences, in order to create greater specificity and add complexity to the developing field of artistic research.

      The upcoming conference "Research Futures" will bring representatives from five institutions of artistic research together with professionals working in the field of education, arts, culture, artistic research, curation and activism to engage with a series of questions emerging from this comparative (self)-study. We want to understand better 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. And finally we would like to compare ourselves to the future: what are possible scenarios for artistic research to continue its contribution to the field of artistic production, and how can these contributions respond to the changing social realities of a challenging future?

      The conference will proceed in three steps, growing from a meeting to a debate.

      On day one the representatives of the contributing institutions will meet to review the process of self evaluation. Moderated by Delphine Hesters, we will look for commonalities and differences between our institutions and how they operate and address the challenges we outlined together in our shared reports. This meeting will develop areas of concern to pass on to the next round of discussions the following day.

      For step two 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 topics proposed on day one. Gathered around the topics in groups, the main objective will be for each group to critically develop relationships between present conditions and implications and future scenarios. Which relevance will this particular concern have in the future, how will it change in response to the developments of its social, economical and political context, what will be possible responses, adaptations and strategies to address those changes? Each group will be accompanied by a "reporter", someone who will take notes and compile an ad hoc report for the debate the next day.

      At step three we will open the content developed in the groups to a collective process. With the help of the "reporters", the groups will present their findings to all present. The subsequent discussion, will be open to questions, comments, critique and contributions from all sides. This part will also be documented in audio and writing, and, together with the reports from preceding steps, contribute to a joined workshop conference report, that will be published and made available later in the year.

      List of participants (tbc):

      KASK - Heike Langsdorf, Frederique Le Roy; Adva Zakai; RITS - Geert Opsomer, Klaas Tindemans, Action Plan Europe - Tere Badia; PARTS - Bojana Cveijc, Charlotte Vandevyver; ROYAL ACADEMY FINE ARTS ANTWERP - Els De Bruyn, ERG - Laurence Rassel; CAVEAT - Ronny Heiremans, Kathleen Vermeir; KAAITHEATRE - Agnes Quackles; KANAL - Centre Pompidou - Guy Gypens; BUDA Kortrijk - Mathilde Villeneuve; LA LOGE- Laura Herman; WIELS Eva Gorsse; INDEPENDANT RESEARCHERS: Philippine Hoegen , Sébastien Hendrickx, Kristien Van den Brande, Sina Seifee and the Post-Graduate and Associated Researchers of a.pass; Benchmark participating institutions: Hicham Khalidi (Jan Van Eyck Academy), Elo Mika (Uniarts Helsinki), Gabriëlle Schleijpen (DAI), Nico Docks and Els De Bruyn (Royal Academy Fine Arts Antwerp); Moderator - Delphine Hesters

      Curated by Lilia Mestre and Vladimir Miller

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

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

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

      price 12 Euro

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

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

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

       

      PDF of the ANNEX you can read HERE

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

       


       

       

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

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

      Price 14 Euro

      ORDER HERE


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

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

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

      price 12 Euro

      ORDER HERE

       

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


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

      Price 5 Euro

      ORDER HERE

       


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


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

      https://aguenth.de/

      Price: 155 Euro

      ORDER HERE

       

       

       

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


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

       

       

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

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

       

      Price: 10 Euro

      ORDER HERE


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

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

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

       


      THE ANNEX

      Collective publication

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

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

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

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

      madewitholga.be or in print.

      PDF OF ANNEX II here > a.pass_annex_2021

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


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

      SITING DISCOURSE
      Diary excerpt from Live Archive,

      by Breg Horemans

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

      PDF FREE DOWNLOAD  > archive 10-6-2021_final

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

       


       

       

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

      by Pia Louwerens

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

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

      price 15 euro

      ORDER HERE + preview PDF (coming soon)

       


       

       

      POP-FI POSTER
      A game,

      by Lili M. Rampre

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

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


      Price 3 Euro

      ORDER HERE (coming)

       


       

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

      by Davide Tidoni

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

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

      price: 15 Euro

      ORDER HERE + preview PDF (soon)


       
       
       
       
    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • Zones of disobedience Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma
      29 January 2020
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Close Encounters series
    • ISELP & a.pass
    • 06 February 2020
    • 06 February 2020
    • Zones of disobedience

       

       

      a.pass Close Encounters

      Zones of disobedience

      Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma

      06/02/2020 - 15h00  at  ISELP / 18h00  at  a.pass

       

      Close Encounters are light and irregular events to take time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in an artistic -research- trajectory. The events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by their protagonists, but the format is always a dialog with one or more guests; all are invited to expand on their research or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. The Close Encounters series holds a double intention of getting a closer look at things and of approaching somebody closely and tries to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research and its current nature, function and conditions of possibility: What to study? What to research? What to practice? 

       

      For Zone Public, the current seminar of the postgraduate program in a.pass, the Close Encounters series invites guests that have relevant practices with regards to (infrastructures of) publishing and/or making-public and/or art and research publicness.

       

      On Thursday 6th, for this special edition, a new monumental work Elen Ou Hubris by Elen Braga will be on display for the first time at ISELP from 15h00 to 17h00 This will be followed by Zones of Disobedience, a three hour long discussion with Elen Braga, Eve Kalyva and Steven Jouwersma that will unfold from 18h00 onwards at a.pass.

       
       

      Thursday February 6, 15h00-17h00

       

      Elen Ou Hubris

       
      Elen Braga
       
      a monumental tapestry on display for the first time
       
      @ ISELP, Boulevard de Waterloo 31, 1000 Bruxelles
       
       
       
      Thursday February 6, 18h00
       
      Close Encounters Series @ Zone Public
       
      Zones of disobedience
       
      Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma
       
      a three hours public presentation and discussion hosted by Pierre Rubio 
       

      @ a.pass, 60 Delaunoystraat, 1080 Brussels

       

       
       
       
      When institutions have come to embody their own institutional critique, when participatory art becomes the new weapon of the established normalising order, and when attempts to further develop forms of artistic resistance are almost instantly liquefied in the commodifying reason of the market, a series of questions arise: Is it still possible to disobey? What could the forms of disobedient work be today? What new strategies should be invented in this context? How can one give the public the incentive to transgress its fears, inhibitions and limitations?
       
       
      Having these questions as a starting point, “Zones of Disobedience” opens up a space for discussion, reflection and debate. It presents examples from the past and the present and from across the spheres of the artistic and the political in order to problematise sets of relationships, conceptual frameworks and behaviours. These have to do with ideas about monuments, myths and experiences of the city as space but also as a site of memory, of belonging and of envisioning a future.
       
       
      The protagonists of “Zones of Disobedience” are equally interested in the relationships across the public, the artist, one’s environment and discourse, with particular attention on self-imaging in public spaces. Public self-imaging –and the different techniques of the self– are understood here in relation to a place and its image as this is perceived from different perspectives and for different audiences. Likewise, public self-imaging refers to the stories one tells about oneself and about the “other” (the artist, the audience, the immigrant, the policymaker, the army, the police), as well as to the mirroring of power, its ideologies and hierarchies. With this in mind, the performative conception of the self-image and its associated “hubris” enable to conceptualise strategies one can deploy in order to expose and destabilise the tenure of authority.
      If this can be achieved –for example in the works of Elen Braga and Steven Jouwersma through absurd, futile, uncomfortable or humorous encounters– how can such moments of critique be sustained or resurface in new forms? Which other public spaces can they generate? As such, “Zones of Disobedience” offers an evening of contestation, blurred limits, shifts and negotiations.
       
       
       

      Elen Braga

      Elen Braga is a Brazilian artist based in Brussels. Her practice involves self-imposed tasks that border on the absurd. She investigates how one creates narratives of the self, and is particularly interested in how myths function in relation to an individual’s strength, ambition, futility and resilience.
      Elen's new project, Elen Ou Hubris, is an entirely hand-tufted 120 square metres carpet/tapestry reproducing the image of a 24-metre tall woman standing on a pedestal. Created in the form of a giant idealised self-portrait of the artist, this monumental object will be installed in front of the triumphal arch of King Leopold II in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels in 2020. By its size and location, Elen Ou Hubris addresses the notion of hubris, exposes an entangled multiplicity of self-images, seeks to open a debate on monumentality, pride and determined futures –and boldly claims the central place to question the very place of women in t-his-her-stor-y-ies.
      In 2014 Elen was selected in “Situações Brasília” Contemporary Art Award of DF –National Museum of the Republic, in Brazil. In 2016 she participated in AIR ANTWERPEN residency where she worked on the performance series named 'Os 12 trabalhos' (the twelve labors), inspired by the Greek myth of Odysseus.  In 2017 she was selected for the residency at Central Saint Martins in London in partnership with SESC São Paulo. In 2018 she completed a postgraduate in advanced performance in a.pass, Brussels.
      Elen is currently in residence at ISELP – Institut supérieur pour l’étude du langage plastique (Brussels) and has exhibited and developed projects at SOKL (Antwerp, 2019) Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo, 2015), 17th Bienal of Cerveira  (Portugal, 2013), MUVIM – Valencian Museum of Enlightenment and Modernity  (Valencia, 2015), Samples - MULF – Museo Universitario Leopoldo Flores ( Mexico, 2015), SESC Belenzinho (Sao Paulo, 2017) amongst others.
       
       
       
       

      Eve Kalyva

      Eve Kalyva works on the relationships between images and texts in cultural production and visual culture. Her recent monograph, Image and Text in Conceptual Art: Critical Operations in Context (Palgrave/ Macmillan 2016), offers interdisciplinary perspectives on art from Europe, North and South America, and evaluates the different ways in which artworks advance their institutional and socio-political critique. Eve also works on the relation between art and politics, visual activism and social semiotics. She has developed the idea of “rhetoric of disobedience” to refer to the different ways in which art engages the associations one makes beyond what one sees, and is particularly interested in meaning making and communication as social and shared processes.
      Prior to moving to Amsterdam, Eve taught at universities in the UK and Argentina, and collaborated with international art institutions such as the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds) and the Museum of Modern Art Chiloé (Chile) as curator and artist in residence. Her creative practice explores the intersections of the real with the fantastic through texts, images, objects and bodily experiences; and her interdisciplinary research spans art, exhibition design, pedagogies of play, intermediality, discourse analysis and visual culture. Eve also develops museum workshops and cultural games. She is co-coordinator of the research group Global Trajectories of Thought and Memory: Art from the Global South at the University of Amsterdam, and will co-chair the panel ‘Radical women: the construction of Latin American women artists through exhibitions’ at the forthcoming 2020 annual conference of the College Art Association.
       
       
       
       
       

      Steven Jouwersma

      Steven Jouwersma is a Dutch artist. His work develops always in relation to contexts and combines performance with film making and installations.  
      Within specific contexts where socio-political tensions intersect, Steven Jouwersma invents performative situations that enable critical relations between him-as-artist and the expectations of the public. Steven (self) induces “crises” in the apparent status quo and engages in performing the inherent contradictions present within, often highly, unsettled spaces of cultural difference. Art in public space and in countries that are foreign to the artist always assert political dimensions. By defining antagonistic elements that provoke debates, Steven functions as a catalyst for these political dimensions to be exposed. Without being “classically” political, Steven’s works aim to challenge his own political and social position as well as his audience’s by acting “like an icebreaker in a congealed situation”. These singular forms of interaction in public spaces have unexpected outcomes. In some cases, in place of the predicted problems that might have occurred, the project is accepted and achieved. On the other hand, occasionally, the artist’s contribution is considered too controversial, straying too far away from conventions, and leads to its cancellation. Steven works with these missed expectations and miscommunications and sees them as potentials from which he operates, continually adjusting his own expectations.
      Steven studied at the Frank Mohr Institute and has a Master in Interactive Media and Environments. His most recent residencies and public events of the last three years are: dinA (Brussels), IBB (Curacao, Mondriaan Fonds), Buratinas (Nadine, Brussels) Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Mondriaan Fonds), Het Resort E03S01 (Het Resort, group show –with Alban Karsten and Feiko Beckers, Groningen), Common sweat sauna #2 and #3 (Zsenne Artlab, Brussel) Spectacle of the Sweet…  (Nodine, Brussel), Wandering Arts Biennale (Nadine, Brussel), Power and Ancestors (WM Gallery, Amsterdam), Casa Moderna (Willemstad), Grand Marcha (Carnaval parade, Willemstad)
       
    •  

       

       

      DIALOGUE

       

       

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

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

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

       

       

       

      I Block//School of Love

      curated by Adva Zakai

      (September-December 2018)

       



      What do you remember about the beginning?

       

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

       

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

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

      Do you remember what was the question when we started?

       

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

       

       

      What is there?

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

      What is such a translation?

      What is noise?

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

      How can the center remain open?

      What is sacred?

       

       

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

       

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

      What is sacred?

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

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

       

      The distance is what allows being together.

      The distance is the space/time in between things.

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

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

      The distance is what determines the relationship.

      Walking is a measure maybe.

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

      Not knowing is an obstacle between me and the other.

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

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

      I can run across this distance thanks to its opacity.

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

      Not knowing is a distance.

      A distance is opaque.

      Opacity allows me to meet the other.

       

      “Space was holy to

      the pilgrims of old, till plane

      stopped all that nonsense”

      (W. H. Auden)

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

      A is not equal to A.

       

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

       

       

      The world will exist in the interrogative form.

      The end will be close to us

      and we might be friends.

       

      We will learn from flowers:

      the truth about every man is that 

      he/she is about to die.

       

      Nothing will be equal to nothing.

      Everything will be 

      incommensurable

      irreplaceable

      incontrovertible

      irrecoverable

      irreparable

      irredeemable.

      -Money will be the principle of irreality-

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Every road will be a cemetery

      and, in the crackles of the asphalt,

      there will be our little fallen flowers

      our masters

      our dead.

       

      There will be a desire hidden in every thing.

       

      We will become small

       - small, in order not to lose each other.

      ---

      Revolution is going on.

      It will walk in the forest. 

      It will breath, smell, look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It will be stumbling, transforming judgement into motion.

       

       

       

      II Block//Troubled Gardens

      curated by Nicolas Galeazzi

      (May-August 2019)

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      1. Observe and interact

      2. Catch and store energy

      3. Obtain a yield

      4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

      5. Use and value renewable resources and services

      6. Produce no waste

      7. Design from patterns to details

      8. Integrate rather than segregate

      9. Use small and slow solutions

      10. Use and value diversity

      11. Use edges and value the marginal

      12. Creatively use and respond to change

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

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

      I love your stories.

       

      Which story? 

       

      The one about distance.

       

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

       

      Now we are far enough to read it.

       

      You are right.

       

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

      You are particularly concerned by the future...

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

       

      A: Adopting is a big challenge.

      B: To receive back the material we left.

      A: To give up expectation of realization.

      B: Can the documentation be originated by a script?

      A: We wanted to avoid narration.

      B: Why?

      A: The narration tends to identification, often.

      B: “This” is “this”.

      A: To put things in one line.

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

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

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

      A: We didn't finish it, yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      B: I have a strong tendency in reacting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      A: I like this a lot.

      B: To show the responsibility in the adoption.




       

      III Block//A looming score_sharing politics of damage;

      curated by Lilia Mestre and Sina Seifee

      (September-December 2019)

       

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Memory embodies distance and opacity.

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

       

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

       

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

      a game is a map

      a frame

      a self-critical institution

       

      you can put the game there, in the middle

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

      and I need the others to be different

      and see the difference

      which is the distance that allows us being together

       

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



      NAME IT/Writing Score

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      I AM HERE. 

      ARE THOSE VOICES, THAT I AM HEARING?

      I AM READING. 

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

      I REMEMBER STANDING FOR SOMETHING. 

      CAN I STAND FOR SOMETHING NOW? NOW SITTING? 

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

      HOW MANY METERS OF AIR OVER MY HEAD? 

      I'M FLOATING, THE HEAD IN THE AIR. 

      I'M MOVING MY HANDS.

      I BREATH. THE HEART IS BEATING. 

      ONCE I SAW MY HEART IN THE ECOGRAPHY SCREEN. 

      BEATING. OPENING AND CLOSING. 

      LIFE IS STRANGE THROUGH A SCREEN.

      I'M WRITING. 

      MY GAZE WANDERS ACROSS THE DETAILS

      IS IT GOING TO END SOON?

       

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      WE ARE IDIOTS - MANIFESTO FOR NOW/Editing Score

       

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

       

      I AM HERE NOW

      I TAKE A POSITION

      I REVEAL MY POSITION

      I AM AT THE ENTRANCE THE DOOR IS OPEN I ENTER

      I CAN RUN FROM HERE TO THERE FOLLOWING  STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW

      I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      I AM HERE

      I LOOK THROUGH THIS FRAME

      I AM IN THE FRAME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I FRAME INSTITUTIONS

      I MOVE BORDERS AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE

      I AM MANIFOLD

      I AM MULTIPLE

      I AM FOCUSED

      I AM PERIPHERAL

      I TAKE TIME IF NECESSARY

      I TAKE TIME

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

      I TAKE THE TIME IT TAKES

      I AM AN IDIOT

      I AM A PIONEER

      I  DO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      I NEED NOISE

      I TRUST OPACITY

      I TRUST YOU

      I TRUST

      I BELIEVE IN THE PRESENT AS A PROMISE

      I BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE AS A LEGACY

      I BELIEVE IN COMPLEXITY

      I BELIEVE IN MAGIC

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



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

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

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

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

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


      [21st November 2019, Bruxelles]

       

      I AM NOW 

      POSITIVE THE DOOR THERE FOLLOWING A STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW, I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      HERE

      THROUGH THIS FRAME

      ME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I BODER AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE OLD PERIPHERY

      I TAKE TIME

      DU TEMPS POUR FAIRE LES CHOSES

      IT TAKES AN IDIOT

      I AM WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      NOISOPACITY

      US

      THE PRESENT AS THE FUTURE MAGIC

      FORSE L'AMORE E' CONTINUARE    

       

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

      This is not the end.

       

       

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

       

      Precious indirection*

      24-25 January 2020 @ MILL / Needcompany

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

      “Precious indirection”*

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

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

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

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

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

       

      This event is hosted by MILL.

      With the support of Needcompany.

       

      24 & 25 January,

      Doors Open 18:00

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

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

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

      Deborah Birch (1 hour)

       

      Pilgrimage / Lucia Palladino & Piero Ramella

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

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

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

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

       

      To be someone implies to be somewhere /Diego Echegoyen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Microcosm, macrocosm.

      Tears, Trust, she says.

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

      The cave is not

      Home

      It is a pocket

      A chamber

      A cavity

      A shell

      Home is on the

      Surface and

      The surface is

      Burning.

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

       

    • 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

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/I
    • Zone Public
    • BLOCK 2020/I 20 December 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Brussels
    • 06 January 2020
    • 30 April 2020
    • BLOCK 2020/I

       

       

       

       

      a.pass post-graduate program for winter-spring 2020 follows the habitual form of three collective gatherings: at the beginning: the ‘Opening Week’, in the middle: the ‘Half Way Days’ and at the end: the ‘End Week’. These are collective workdays where, at large, all the artists and researchers both present their work and feedback on everybody’s research. The three distinct gatherings propose different protocols of presentations and modes of feedback. All protocols are discussed during the block. 

      The block includes as well Zone Public, a curated seminar-like series of working sessions dedicated specifically to this block and happening mainly on Thursdays and Fridays. This ensemble of proposals is designed by Femke Snelting, Peggy Pierrot and Pierre Rubio.


      January
      6-14 : Opening Week Days
      16-17 : Zone Public sessions #1
      23-24 : Zone Public sessions #2
      30-31 : Zone Public sessions #3

      February
      6-7 : Zone Public sessions #4
      13-14 : Zone Public sessions #5
      17-21 : Halfway Days
      27-28 :  Zone Public sessions #6

      March
      5-6 Zone Public sessions #7
      12-13 Zone Public sessions #8
      14-15 Zone Public sessions #9
      22-23 Zone Public sessions #10
      30-April 5 End Week at Perfomance Arts Forum (France)

       


      The artists and researchers participating in this block with their projects are:

      Chloe Chignell
      Signe Frederiksen
      Quinsy Gario
      Stefan Govaart
      Adriano Wilfert Jensen
      Mathilde Maillard
      Muslin Brothers
      Flavio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira
      Magda Ptasznik
      Christina Stadlbauer
      Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
      Kasia Tórz
      Katrine Turner
      Andrea Zavala Folache

       

       

       

       

       


      The dedicated mentors, curators, and artistic coordinator are:

       

                 Dedicated Mentoring

      Kristien Van Den Brande
      Kristien Van den Brande is a Brussels-based writer, editor, dramaturge and researcher. An ongoing interest in the (im)materiality, image and performativity of writing has characterized her work, which engages with a range of disciplines including literature, performance, expanded publishing, urbanism and sexuality. Inspired by ‘minor literatures’, she does ongoing research about 'Support de Fortune’, a notion that refers to forms of writing that take place in the margin of print or on throw-away paper. She is a living book and co-editor in Mette Edvardsen’s project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. Together with Myriam Van Imschoot she set up oralsite.be, an online platform for expanded publishing. Lately, she is gaining interest in role-play as dramaturgic, artistic, therapeutic, sexual tool "to undo the creature in us”. That latter was Anne Carson speaking.

       

      Vladimir Miller
      Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturge. His practice aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of spatial production by using fragility as a building principle. He uses collective construction- and building processes to investigate ideologies of labour and territory within ad-hoc groups and institutional environments. In his latest projects he works with the materiality of fluids to challenge ideas of stability embedded within the design of spaces of cultural production. Vladimir Miller has been a frequent collaborator with the choreographers Philipp Gehmacher and Meg Stuart. As scenographer, co-author, dramaturge and performer he took part or co-created a number of performances and video installations with the two artists. In 2018-19 he is dramaturge in residence at Decoratelier/Jozef Wouters. Vladimir Miller is co-curator of the postgraduate artistic research institute a.pass, Brussels and a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 2013 Miller was Fellow at Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin and in 2015 Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Vladimir Miller has been guest lecturer at the University of Hamburg and at KASK, Gent.

       

      Femke Snelting
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminisms 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. With Jara Rocha she currently 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. Apart from mentoring at a.pass, Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

       


                Zone Public Co-curating

      Peggy Pierrot
      Peggy Pierrot lives and works in Brussels. She works mainly with different associations and educational or research structures. Her most favourite tools are human sciences and free softwares. Since there are "profound links between gesture and speech, between expressible thought and the creative activity of the hand ", she is currently working at the Ecole of Recherche Graphique (ERG) both as a technical and logistical assistant and as a teacher in Media and Communication Theory. She is also involved in the master's program Récits et expérimentation - Narration spéculative. (Storytelling and experimentation - Speculative Fabulation) She gives lectures and workshops on Afro-Atlantic cultures and literatures, science fiction, media and technology and has an active practice in radio.

       

      Pierre Rubio
      Pierre Rubio works as artist, independent researcher and dramaturge. At large and through different forms, his work questions modes of individuation to explore contemporary production of subjectivity in/through the arts. What is real for an artist? is his main research question. Pierre was a dancer and choreographer for a long time, holds a master's degree in the arts combining theatre & communication at the campus of Aix-Marseille University (France) and dance & choreography at the campus of Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers (France). Pierre is currently a core member, co-curator and mentor in a.pass - a platform for artistic research practices.

       

      Femke Snelting
      (see above)

       


                Artistic coordination

      Lilia Mestre
      Lilia Mestre (Lisboa 1968) is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels. She interested in art practice as a medial tool between several domains of semiotical existence. Mestre works with assemblages, scores and inter-subjective setups as an artist, curator, dramaturge and teacher. She’s currently co-curator and artistic coordinator of a.pass where she develops a research on scores - Scorescapes - as a possible radical pedagogical tool. In 2019 - 2021 she’s collaborating with Prof. Jill Halstead and Prof. Brandon LaBelle in Social Acoustic - 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, AU. 

       

       

      More information about Zone Public here

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/I
    • Zone Public 20 December 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • curated by Femke Snelting & Peggy Pierrot & Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Brussels
    • 16 January 2020
    • 27 March 2020
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • Zone Public

       

       

      Zone Public contributes to an ongoing conversation on the dynamics of publishing generated by technologies of artistic research. From January 2020 onwards, within the a.pass platform for artistic research practices -where its agents continuously re-examine and re-imagine this special form of knowledge production, specifying over and over again its generative nature and deploying its potential-  a three month series of readings, mediations and compilations is oriented by the postgraduate program and its participants to (re)consider the forms and conditions for disseminating artistic research.

       

      In the context of a.pass, the field of artistic research is one to be embodied but also to be explored, discussed and ultimately transversally invented. Instead of a discipline, a.pass considers artistic research as an inclusive library of heterogeneous, impermanent, precarious yet rigorous constructions and affirms that only as a non-discipline, un-discipline or de-discipline can artistic research create the conditions for multiple sites of intersection between society, academia and art. Methodological conflicts, critical discursive inventiveness and continuous experimentation with tentative sub-categories, all are generatively interconnected through hybrid artistic and research practices. Thus, Zone Public wants to closely observe and document the sources, contexts, dynamics, compositions and especially the modes of publicness of the multiple and diverse art and research projects conducted in the post graduate program. The different participatory dispositifs initiated by Zone Public are situated in this specific context, where artistic research is modulated as a topological object to articulate the ways in which artistic practice, theory, history and other disciplines intersect and combine in unique ways in each artistic research projects and trajects. 

       

      Nevertheless, to consider these diverse artistic researches as singular assemblages, as effects but also as proposals for new combinations implies navigating a space where the separation between what is discrete and continuous is reduced. Thinking/doing, writing/publishing, researching/performing, speculating/archiving, containing/executing, exploring/presenting, disagreeing/collaborating, emancipating/determining… Zone Public wants to question these polarities and tries to articulate a relational material that supports, binds and maintains both the discrete and the continuous scales of a non-uniform zone of artistic research in tension with its publicness.

       

      Especially, Zone Public invites to (re)consider the conditions for dissemination of the specific forms of knowledge that artistic research does produce/process/practice. It activates the interrelation between research-as-process versus the crystallisation that publishing requires, and wants to open up the exhibitionary regimes which seem to articulate current artistic research practices and the infrastructures of knowledge production that its agents are both using and possibly used by.

       

      What happens to research when it is made public? How to deal with the apparent dichotomy between research and publicness? What are the ways to manage the (im)possible task of (re)presenting something as hybrid and liquid as a research process? How to produce legible forms out of unformed research matters? How to understand publishing beyond legitimisation and validation? What relations emerge from the determining norms of institutional or academic forms of publication? What to expect from the transfer of research to audiences and what would be, for both agents, useful to know? What could be the definitions and practices of spectatorship for artistic research? What could a public for artistic research be?

       

      Tuned through an ensemble of co-curated proposals designed and coordinated by Femke Snelting, Peggy Pierrot and Pierre Rubio in discussion with the a.pass actors, Zone Public is set up as a collective situation to reflect upon the conditions for making research public, as a space, and time, for together reconsidering academic and/or artistic (internalised) standards of communication and to get to terms with their implications. Therefore, Zone Public is also an occasion to share, invent and consider experimental, performative and/or speculative forms of publishing and exhibiting.

       

      Zone Public is co-curated by three cultural workers. Each of them arrive with distinct but related practices and approaches to the problems of publishing and they assume each of the participants will arrive with theirs. Pierre is interested in modes of knowing, forms of culture and processes of collective individuation specific to artistic research; Femke brings tools from new-materialist feminisms to the tensions between publicness and ongoingness; Peggy questions how publishing can be defined in other ways than by utilitarianism or fetishisation of the legitimacy ideology and dominant modes of (re)presentation and recognition.

       

       

      Zone Public is organised around four dispositifs. Each of them allows another entry into 'the problems of publishing' and is proposed as an invitation to be appropriated and developed.

       

      1. Multipolar Book Club (Researching / Reading / Discussing)
      Every Thursday morning, a time to read and discuss together. The texts to work with are reflecting upon questions of concretisation and individuation, around intersectional relations between cybernetic control systems and structures of knowledge oppression, on the problems of the public, on entanglements and how to cut, and on usefulness and anti-utilitarianism. 
      When: Thursdays 10h00-14h00

       

      2. A Becoming Library (Researching / Contributing / Compiling)
      On Friday afternoon, time to work on concrete experiments of research-publishing. On the program: making on-line publications, editing photocopied fanzines, reprinting materials and programing small radio-capsules. What knowledge would be really useful to publish, and for whom? This collection of publishing experiments will form a growing 'library' of content and forms that matter. The group will contextualise and reflect upon this 'becoming library' through the practice of 'compilation'. Compiling is a term borrowed from collective software-development and it is used to describe a practice of iteratively and temporarily bringing together of resources and references to form a running program. Rather than formatting itself according to preformatted templates of art-publishing, artist books, or academic publishing, can one think the infrastructure of referencing and distribution in ways that work performatively with and not against the intricacies of artistic research? 
      When: Fridays 14h00-18h00

       

      3. The Bermuda Radio Show (Researching / Questioning / Positioning)
      The Bermuda Radio Show is a series of triangular audio recorded conversations. They are occasions to reflect on the issues with ‘making-public’ in relation to artistic research projects conducted at the moment in a.pass. Each project producing possibly its specific form of and matter for interviews.
      When: flexible between Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings or at other possible times.

       

      4. Close Encounters (Researching / Curating / Hosting)
      On some Thursday evenings, a series of presentations and public conversations that was proposed in the context of the a.pass research center in 2018. (See: https:///www.apass.be/close-encounters/ ). Close Encounters are light and irregular events to take time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. The events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, but the format is always a dialog with one or more guests; all are invited to expand on their research or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. For Zone Public, the Close Encounters series will invite guests that have relevant practices with regards to (infrastructures of) publishing and/or making-public and/or art and research publicness. 
      When: most of the time on Thursdays 18h00-21h00

       

       

      here more information about the block of which "Zone Public" is a part

       


      Femke Snelting - Zone Public co-curator
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminisms 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. With Jara Rocha she currently 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. Apart from mentoring at a.pass, Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

       

       

      Peggy Pierrot - Zone Public co-curator
      Peggy Pierrot lives and works in Brussels. She works mainly with different associations and educational or research structures. Her most favourite tools are human sciences and free softwares. Since there are "profound links between gesture and speech, between expressible thought and the creative activity of the hand ", she is currently working at the Ecole of Recherche Graphique (ERG) both as a technical and logistical assistant and as a teacher in Media and Communication Theory. She is also involved in the master's program Récits et expérimentation - Narration spéculative. (Storytelling and experimentation - Speculative Fabulation) She gives lectures and workshops on Afro-Atlantic cultures and literatures, science fiction, media and technology and has an active practice in radio.

       

       

      Pierre Rubio - Zone Public co-curator
      Pierre Rubio works as artist, independent researcher and dramaturge. At large and through different forms, his work questions modes of individuation to explore contemporary production of subjectivity in/through the arts. What is real for an artist? is his main research question. Pierre was a dancer and choreographer for a long time, holds a master degree in the arts combining theatre & communication at the campus of Aix-Marseille University (France) and dance & choreography at the campus of Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers (France). Pierre is currently a core member, co-curator and mentor in a.pass - a platform for artistic research practices.

    • REMINDER january 2019 21 November 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

      newscaption

      line650

       

      REMINDER!!!
      This Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 

      end communications of a.pass

      Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens
      and Eleanor Ivory Weber

      @ Hectolitre (MAROLLEN - Brussels) 

      Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019
      from 18:00 to 22:00
      Hectolitre - Rue de Hectolitre 3 - 1000 Brussels


      Schedule: 

      18:00 food & drinks 

      18:30 Subtracted Seduction

      19:00 Subverses I: Play 

      Break

      20:00 7 anxieties and the world

      20:30 Subverses II

      Break

      21:15 Subverses III

      21:30 The big gesture is many small gestures dispersed
      (doors close before the last performance starts) 

      Performances by Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens

      With contributions by
      Subtracted Seduction: sound editing and mixing Teresa Cos
      Subverses I & III: performers Lydia McGlinchey, Marcus Bergner
      7 anxieties and the world: sound mixing Marko Radišić

      LISTEN TO THE TRAILER

      On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      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

       
       
    • newscaption

       

       

      REMINDER
      This Friday 1 & Saturday 2 February 

      a.pass end communications

      Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens
      and Eleanor Ivory Weber

      @ Hectolitre (MAROLLEN - Brussels) 

      Friday 1 & Saturday 2 February 2019
      from 18:00 to 22:00
      @Hectolitre - Rue de Hectolitre 3, 1000 Brussels
      www.hectolitre.space


      LISTEN TO THE AUDIO TRAILER

      Schedule: 

      18:00 food & drinks 

      18:30 Subtracted Seduction

      19:00 Subverses I: Play 

      Break

      20:00 7 anxieties and the world

      20:30 Subverses II : Glossolalien missive

      Break

      21:15 Subverses III

      21:30 The big gesture is many small gestures dispersed

      Performances by Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens

      With contributions by
      Subtracted Seduction: sound editing and mixing Teresa Cos
      Subverses I & III: performers Lydia McGlinchey, Marcus Bergner
      7 anxieties and the world: sound mixing Marko Radišić

      On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      Read more...

       


       a.pass

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

       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       

       

    • 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.

       

       

       
    •  

       

      For my End presentation at PAF I was busy with: 

      - how to present/show/explain the translation --> WHAT is that doing?

      - how to agradecer / dire "merci" and explicit my feeling of RIQUEZA (wealth, riches, richness) at apass

      - how to empower all my grammar mistake in English

      - how to "critic" the device of Artistic Research

      - how to deal with a lot of techniques and popular dance

      - how to empower the bastard, the cheap, the non-complet, the non-perfect.

      Here some pictures of my presentation

      Maybe if you feel like, you can identify which kind of dances are here. 

      [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="9162,9163,9164,9165,9166,9167,9168,9169,9170"]

       

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • PEACH BASKETS - THREE ANGLES ON BALANCING 05 September 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Caterina Mora / Laura Pante / Maurice Meewisse
    • a.pass
    • 27 September 2019
    • 28 September 2019
    • PEACH BASKETS - THREE ANGLES ON BALANCING

      a.pass is happy to invite you to the End-Communications of Caterina Mora, Laura Pante and Maurice Meewisse

      18:30 > Door opens

      19:00 - 21:00 > Ongoing Installation / performances
      >Double Spiral with rain makers - Maurice Meewisse
      >After Affect Clinique - Laura Pante

      21:00 > Pa-küru: 47 minutes of a bastard cheap lecture performance

      23:00 > Party with DJ Bicha Boo Collective -> 27th September ONLY!!!!

      *

       

      Peach Baskets - What the hell!

       

      “Maria Spelterini is walking across a tightrope across the Niagara Gorge, from the United States side to Canada, with her feet in peach baskets. In the background is the Niagara Suspension Bridge, which is full of spectators. In the distant background is the Niagara Falls.” (wikipedia)

      Funambulism is a "staying with the trouble" concept (in Donna Haraway´s words), that intertwines the a.pass End-Communications of Caterina Mora, Laura Pante and Maurice Meewisse, the 27 and 28 September at a.pass studio.

      It all started with the idea of balancing oppositions, no matter which: theory and practice, high and low cultures, language and body, feminism and heteronormativity, bad and  good, horizontal and vertical, north and south, truth and fake, here and there, real and virtual, peach baskets and shoes - What the hell?!

      The projects of Cate, Laura and Maurice, embody the crossings between antonymous positionalities and work with strategies that include negotiations, side effects, mistakes, shadows, confusion, plural views and overlapings as co-inhabitors of a research context attempting to think complex phenomena.

      To walk the tightrope one needs to be precisely at the moment. In the Merriam Webster dictionary, the second definition of funambulist says: “a show especially of mental agility”. Stay, stay, progress, walk…It is interesting to assess the complexity of such acts that involve several physical skills to portray exception and risk; that are then associated to freakishness, populism, entertainment, intense experience. Walking on the edge, for the good, the bad, the useless, the expectation, the market, for nothing, for life. Self-induced trouble in order to expose complex phenomena.

      The tightrope delineates the space, creates sides and indicates the demarcation of territories. It is a geometrical form, a fictional separation that enables position, that asks to be crossed as a heroic act. A symbolic gesture linking (or separating) two end points. Reinforcing nature, in this case - the Niagara Falls as like if they would need support. What kind of visibility is at stake? What was that woman doing in 1876? Why did she have peach baskets on her feet? Why did she sometimes tie her ankles? 

      The scenographies of these End-Communications are differentiated by three geometric shapes: the spiral, the triangle and the rectangle. They are reference points that reflect dwellings within real and artificial realities, they deploy perceptions. They are imperatives to read topologies: the arena, the tent and the stage. They all have a centre, they all are crossed by lines, they all follow patterns, they all create spaces, folds. 

      Imagine that all these lines and curves crossing the scenographic spaces are folds proposing potential, temporary and situated forms of critical enquiry between seemingly disconnected or distanced realities.

      At this point, the Deleuzian concept of the fold opens a range of actions, movements and transformations for what seems to be static and impenetrable perceptions of reality.  The fold changes place, re-forms elsewhere, multiplies, turns things inside out and outside in. The fold is extreme and intense and unlimited, it's baroque. It might be a form of connection that facilitates open-ended and inexhaustible unfoldings of  worlds.

      Caterina Mora uses what she named Transversal Research Training as a way to politicise the relations between ones’ own biography, western culture, global economy, institutional demand & heteronormativity. Cate works with show business as a form, to research relationalities in a non binary manner. Laura Pante creates conditions that trouble the relation between the private and the public perception of the body. Provoking awareness of the degree to which language and visual culture shape the body and our relation to it. Laura approaches technology and spirituality as culturally formative constructs that are constitutive parts of the self. Maurice Meewisse crafts situations as mimicries of institutional frameworks. Maurice's research questions the discrepancy between theoretical and ideological standpoints and the conditions that enable artistic work. The idea of the artist researcher as a self - instituted figure brings focus to both the agency of the artist and the dominance of power structures.

      "That is why the unfolded surface is never the opposite of the fold, but rather the movement that goes from some to the others. Unfolding sometimes means that I am developing—that I am undoing—infinite tiny folds that are forever agitating in the background, with the goal of drawing a great fold on the side whence forms appear. . . . At other times, on the contrary, I undo the folds of consciousness that pass through every one of my thresholds . . . in order to unveil in a single movement this unfathomable depth of tiny and moving folds that waft me along at excessive speeds in the operation of vertigo." Gilles Deleuze in 'The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque'

      Maria Spelterini disappeared shortly after the crossing of the Niagara Falls. No one knows why, how or where to. 

       

      *
      Caterina Mora, a patagonian doer (1988) from Fiske Menuco (Río Negro, Argentina) determined by the wind. She has incorrect English and she always asks for help for text revision. She had several titles and roles in Argentinian territory which become innocuous in other countries.

      Although she can give specifications on her traditional artistic roles in the Performing Arts (as a dancer, performer, ballet/contemporary dance/tango professor, director assistant, writer, modèle vivant), she is interested in transcending them. The ‘doer’ participates in academic groups and loves to create pieces with fiction and glitter.

      In a.pass she develops Transversal Research Training, a device for Artistic Research practice which is busy with the creation of political entertainment as affirmative critique. She makes, writes, embodies, questions and even refuses translations. She has become obsessed with Aprha Behn, a female spy for King Charles II in XVII century Belgium. She was a "translatress".

      Her End-Communications is a show called Pa-küru: 47 minutes of a bastard cheap lecture performance.
      It is based on translating ballet to reggaeton. a.pass provides bright paper, a 2x10 metre platform, a microphone like Madonna, cables, speakers, lights and a ballet barre. She provides 47 minutes of her embodied research, a 0,34 euro broken plastic crown that she bought in Buenos Aires (the crown ́s value then was of 1,21 euro) and music from her cell phone that she bought for 67 euros.

      She's trying to dance critically: from l'obsession après une audition to the pleasure of mostrar los dientes.


      *
      Laura Pante is a dancemaker based between Brussels and Venice. She combines the practices of drawing, architecture and graphic design with movement, dance and choreography.

      She crossed a.pass artistic research environment with a focus on body performativity, apparatus of spectatorship and the agency of images questioning in which way there is still a projection of fascist ideologies on the bi-dimensional screens which walk with us and prescribe our movement into the world. In other words how visual propaganda contributes to the production of body’s shapes. In her practice she researches how to create conditions for the possibility of a movement inquiry driven by a loss of corporal references and spatial coordinates challenging the expansion or the disappearance of body as a cultural phenomena.

      For her End-Communication, THE CLINIQUE will welcome you into the green corner, the remains of an ancient and spreading red volcano or the living room of a grandmother’s dream(s), to experience one by one a 360° video and performative installation. Within a precarious co-presence of inside and outside, private and public, personal and collective, we will practice a propaedeutic* research exploring a possible loss of corporal references and a consequential loss of memory - a flickering amnesia of the body’s shape, as if discovering something would mean to forget the dimension you came from, challenging mediated vision and image production. Laura and her assistant will guide you with the help of a dance performed by hands (a touch) informed by osteopathic practices**: the capacity to see into the abyss of flesh.

      * Propaedeutic // from the Ancient Greek προπαιδεύω (propaideúō, “I give preparatory instruction”), from πρό (pró, “before”) + παιδεύω (paideúō, “I teach”) is a historical term for an introductory course into a discipline, that is an art, or science, or movement.
      ** Ostheopatic practices of touch // OMT - osteopathic manipulative therapy // application of manual forces to improve homeostasis which have been altered by somatic dysfunction.

      *
      Maurice Meewise is a visual artist with a curiosity for the politics that construct accepted protocol of action and communication within specific institutionalized contexts. In most situations he finds an inherent conflict that acts as the impulse behind the creation of a new work in which he uses different techniques, from sculpture to performance, to create aesthetic interventions and attempt to provoke the reevaluation of our conditioned patterns of acceptance and behavior.

      The journey he embarked on at a.pass has been primarily focussed on the context provided by the institute, the program as well as the participants, curators, staff and visitors. He explored the limits of the context and the inconsistencies that he sometimes found between theories and the way they were practiced. During his period at a.pass he attempted to challenge the beliefs within the institute by making a series of symbolic interventions that addressed these boundaries and discrepancies.

      But one thing became apparent. Where is he in what he does?
      For the end communication he commissioned himself to look at what context he provides, to look at what he is constituted of, to think about his role as an artist and performer and his relationship with the audience. He uses the same strategy he applied before, but now to explore his own politics. It resulted in Double Spiral with Rainmakers - and he will prepare the dinner.

    • 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
    • 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).

    • postgraduate program
    • project
    • Looming Score
    • A looming score - we share your politics of damage Block 2019/III curators Lilia Mestre and Sina Seiffee
      27 August 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 02 September 2019
    • 01 December 2019
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
      case of: Sina Seifee
    • A looming score - we share your politics of damage
       
      Why loom? We were thinking about the loom’s invocation of the closeness of the textile sense, fabrics that bind our desires and bodies. The loom means also the threatening feeling of an inevitable terrible thing as it approaches. And the possibility of b-looming, from the rest, waste, residue, remainders of the storm. Furthermore, loom echoes a gendered practice of writing textile; in the making of fabric like Arachné, that talented mortal weaver who challenged the god of wisdom, as well as Penelope, who weaved and weaved (a mournful making and unmaking fabrics) to postpone her arranged marriage. The loom is a metaphor that invites us to think of reality as something deeply embedded within context, like “the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves” (Veena Das). That means, modes of knowing constitute the objects of knowing in a manner that profoundly affects how one comes to inhabit a new reality.
       
      That is just the conceptual backdrop for us. In this block we want to focus on a support structure that will help each other research and continue what has been initiated in the past block, ‘Troubled Gardens.’ We transport what has been found out there and elsewhere into looming (transposed into weaving + feeling the darkness of it). That is to sustain being immersed in the subjects of ecology, feminism and their possible political agency in this unpredictable and precarious world we are living in. In the coming block, we’ll take these lines thought while going back “home” (we will land somewhere in a.pass studios hosting three scenographies from Laura, Maurice and Caterina for their End-Communication). We would take the movement of going inside as the one to prepare for winter: gather, digest, tell stories, imagine futures. As a curatorial approach we are not interested in obsessing on these concepts per se, but working in and through the particular challenges of our researches.

      We are structuring the block around three ‘scores’ (i.e. structures for enabling the plural): “what do you eat? what do you think? what do you do?” The score here is seen like the loom (a trope of text and textile): thinking made in the context of its weaving in the criss-crossing of one another's desires. Like patterns of giving and receiving affect, concepts, panics, worries, concerns, literacies, curiosities, play, know-ofs, as-ifs, why-nots, sometimes obvious sometimes cryptic sites that you and your colleagues are caught in long enough. By ‘playing’ one integrates, takes care of things that one might not be interested in, engages in an ongoing pattern of feeding and being fed. This joins the power of the transformative by paying attention to things that one does not notice alone. ‘One is alone together.’ What kind of monsters are we?!
       

       

       

      The score is structured on a weekly basis. We will gather one morning and one afternoon only once a week, as follows:
       
      Mondays from 10:00 till 15:00
      what do you eat? is about bringing your food--we feast, making lunch, not cooking, eating together, extended breakfast, with reading practices. Bring something you want to share: text, problem, theme, practice, concern, old question, new question, film, … in case you have nothing, Sina and Lilia have a bag of goodies. 
      what do you think? has to do with the harvesting fields of interest, readings, questions you have in your work and what has been provoked in the last block. Asking what was the sort of knowledge about the ecological thought that you inhabited in ‘Trouble Gardens’?

       

      Tuesdays from 14:00 till 18:00
      what do you do? has to do with what are the residues of the kinds of knowledge, imagination, relations that you are bringing into your current work. There is a list of existing scores in the a.pass website, if you want to know more go here. Performing Back Score, Medium Score, Bubble or Writing, Fragile Community Score, each with its own different nuances of attention, writing and composing. We will present them during the opening week and work with one score throughout the block.
       
      Participants
      Muslin Brothers, Amélie van Elmbt, Rui Calvo, Ana Paula Camargo, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Deborah Birch, Lucia Palladino, Piero Ramella, Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Quinsy Gario, Kasia Torz, Magda Ptasznik ,
       
      Dedicated mentors
      Sara Manente, works with digestion and fermentation processes and feminist theory. Choreographer and performance artist working on ethics and aesthetics of fermentation in relation to artistic research.
      Jeroen Peeters, writer, dramaturg and performer, part of the artistic team of Sarma, a laboratory for discursive practices and expanded publication. The topics of his work includes: performing arts as a site for social experiments, embodied knowledge, languages of making, visual regimes, and ecologies of attention.
      Nicolas Galeazzi, in the cross over through media, methodologies, materials and theories, he works as an actor, teacher, theater director, concept artist, and performance artist. Galeazzi works with Mise-en-Discourse - performative research frameworks where public can experiment with political and social conditions.

       

      Guests
      Milena Kipfmüller and Klaus Janek, artist duo resident at Q-O2, working on development of theatrical, radio and soundwork that deals with aspects of staging sound in specific situations, the processing of musical material, field recordings and language based sound. They will give a workshop in a format of a practical research about how sound acts by itself in a context of performative dramaturgies. Their contribution to the block coincides with the a.pass engagement in defining its own notion of making public, performative devices and working with sound.

       

      Curators
      Lilia Mestre, is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels. She is interested in art practices as a medial tool between several domains of semiotic existences. Coming from a choreography and dance background, Mestre now researches on Scorescapes, a research she started in a.pass questioning support structures and artificial friendships in artistic research environments.
      Sina Seifee, artist-researcher-storyteller works on the poetics of animal description, the ecological cosmologies of nonhumans-with-history. His artworks illustrate research trajectories that traverse the questions of technology, storytelling, globalism and intercultural mythologies, with an eye on the premodern techno-culture in the Middle East.

       

       

       

       

       

    • 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
    • Victories over the Suns
    • victories over the suns dissolving totalities, usurping orders, inventing new materials
      14 June 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Research Center Associates in residence
    • ZSenne ART Lab / Brussels
    • 24 June 2019
    • 14 July 2019
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • victories over the suns

       

       

      Occidental-Hubris-Apocalypse. Under the modernist and universalist suns everything has burned. Everything looked well organized, bright and transparent, yet everything burned. Nature and culture are melting away. Democracy has shrunk to a gloomy memory of form. All sorts of objects and their categorizations are calcinated. Fragile, they quickly disappear into floating ashes scattered by the wind. From the darkness, on the black powdery toxic deposits of a temporary illusion that believed it was eternal, against all odds, a new life has begun and various species of luminescent critters are crawling around condemned to invent new materials…

      Trying to write a presentation for this artistic research residence project while watching the global game of thrones and painfully figuring out how to take part in a post-capitalist social change ecosystem based on the injunction to live on ruins…, trying to write this text is epic and the text is epic. And yes, we were kind of drunk when we said a big yes to name our residence in relation with Malevich pre-suprematist seminal performance. And yes, titeling our residence “Victories over the Suns”  seems to have everything to do with the feverish and romantic dream of a group of artists soaked in beer and wine. And yes, proclaiming victory before battle will be seen as a horizon of manic hope. Yet, it’s necessary.

       

      Is it not almost impossible to continue to believe in the possibility of creating conditions for imagining alternatives other than through a commitment that inscribes itself in ‘giving up’? Is it possible today to activate change processes other than by creating fictions and ‘alterations’ that suddenly generate more than themselves, other worlds, engaging us in an effort to invent and build another type of (non)luminous scenes of selves, presences, and knowledges? No, the order of this reality is not necessary and a deep doubt has settled that requires to fully reconsider what was presented until recently as being the only possible horizon.  Moreover the system seems to work without anybody in charge. Could it be that we have to self-assign the task, at least momentarily? Could it be a moment to assume the duty to reconsider some things and change the way we look at some things? Important for us to start with: collective geometries, non-modern perspectives, forms, arts, bodies, fortunes, eating, hacking… in addition to the classics : institution, public and politics. Paranoia is our ally and also our condition for defining a possible darkened and contaminated critical position. Our enemies -the suns- are plural and we develop decentralized strategies -our victories- producing plural resistant forms. Norms and values are transformed, constructed and proposed, they are plastic but not relativist. In the dark we see strange lights that darken and we take the risk of proposing ‘establishingly’ experimental.

       

      In our residence, each process is designed individually and in common, in order to share a fiction of sharing. We aim our experimental tools at each other, ourselves and at you. They are directed at a viewer, curious-anxious about modes of reparation who can put together the research trajects that she finds in a process of performing-publishing of difficult-makings of different objects and positions. We are hungry and angry: at our bodies, at assemblages, at more stories for other histories, for different exhibits, for fresh cultures. And, sorry, we are not ashamed, it will be a failure. It is so difficult to present/exhibit/publish our researches. It is hard to maintain the difference between momentary autonomous object-projects and fully open unstable object-trajects. Imagine the combined impossibly difficult of doing both at once, which of course we tragicomically will? It will be an experiment in organizing and presenting what appears to be fundamentally  unorganisable and unpresentable. When all is lost why not go for broke, victorious over the sun?

       

      Our residence will (not) unite Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Isabel Burr Raty, Antye Guenther, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Gijs de Heij, Ludi Loiseau, Sara Manente, Lilia Mestre, OSP, Rob Ritzen, Pierre Rubio, Mathijs van de Sande, Sina Seifee and Femke Snelting.

       

      In an Eco-Erogenous Para-Pharmaceutics Village we will be Living and Eating Together Other Geometries of Parallel Parasite Timeline Repository of Forms of Life of Forms of Politics of Engineering Bestiaries & the Chaotic Order of Existence in Slow Cyanotype Cooking Together Monster Zero of Contingent Weirdness and Wild Fermentations Wicked Technologies in Porous Porcelain Brain Vessels from Japan for a Non Agonistic Self Beauty Abduction Performative Dinner or a RRadio Triton Data Retrieval Interface Card Reading of 7 Anxieties and the World ScoreScape Male Farm Multi Demonic Schizoid Possessed Report as Before there was Nothing there were Monsters.

       


      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 reserachers the a.pass 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.

       


      During the three weeks of the residence, we will work and be present in the space of the gallery with our researches and arts. Some of them will be public, others not and a lot of them in between.

       

      Detailed informations about the projects and agenda here

       

       


      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

    • Newsletter May 2019 21 May 2019
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

      newscaption
      NEWLETTER MAY 2019

       

       

      Troubled Gardens
      Block 2019/II
      29 April-28 July 2019

      curated by Nicolas Y Galeazzi

      After having curated two blocks at a.pass with regards to the conditions which, and in which we create – the block 2017/II about the commons, as an alternative economy, and the block 2018/I about the making of conditions and Institutional Critique –
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi sees the need to look beyond our cultural boundaries and understand the meshwork of diverse conditions we are living in together with other species, elements and time zones.

      Taking this ‚ecosystem-perspective‘ as the main tool for the participants investigations, this block shall give the possibility to reflect their researches as a relational field within a ‚terrestrial‘ landscape. On the other side, it will unavoidably put the works in relation to the ecological crisis and catastrophes surrounding us and will help us to develop tools and understanding for a post-anthropocentric, post-atopocenic, probably post-artropocentric relational practice.

      The workshops of this block will be 'gardens' - and therefore for once of spacial nature. Nicolas Y Galeazzi proposes to ask these gardens to be our teachers, to learn from them, to let them put us at work, to ask them to suggest a practice to us, to make them structure our time and our collective research attempts etc. The gardens are the 'education' framework and the ‘atelier.’

      In this framework he invited several ‘companions’ - Kobe Mathys, Martin Schik, Gosie Vervlossem, Marialena Marouda, Vicent Alexis, Filip Van Dingenen, Einat Tuchman, Philippine Hoegen- to build a network, a web of knowledge, together with us and amongst themselves.

      For more information:
      www.apass.be

      Research Centre

      Cycle 18/19 - Block III
      29 April-28 July 2019

      Co-Curated by Isabel Burr Raty / Antye Guenther / Adrijana Gvozdenović /
      Sara Manente / Rob Ritzen / Pierre Rubio / Sina Seifee

      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 one-year-cycle of the a.pass Research Center 2018/2019. After being initiated as a platform for individual research trajectories, the Research Center shifted to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for an one-year period. This last block of the first cycle 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.

      More information

       


      @ Hacktiris 31 May and June 1, 2019
      Starts at 18h

      Rue Paul Devauxstraat 5
      1000 Brussel
      6th floor

      You are invited to join:

      a.pass End-Communications of
      Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė.

      Virtual Body Institution is the coming together of the 3 concepts that intertwine in the End-Communications of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė.
      Their practices are very distinct from each other, in form as in content though they all engage with forms of sociability that enhance, propose and reveal the relation of the individual with the societal. Tackling this position from discursive, technological or body practices they invite the visitor to engage in thinking and embody modes of construction of the self.

      All researchers work with performance and with the performativity of the event as a field of exploration that deconstructs the world as a given. The making public of these concerns in a transdisciplinary manner, mainly wants to politicise the individual as being an actant in the public sphere enacted by the event itself. The participatory is here seen as the moment of inquiry, experiencing and sharing that crosses through the individual to the communal and vice-versa in enabling the non expertise as potential for critical presence.

      More information

       
       

       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
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Waterways 07 May 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Marialena Marouda
    • 01 July 2019
    • 02 July 2019
    • Waterways
       
       
      As an additional tool of investigation for the troubled gardens, I propose to float on water. By exchanging the usual surface of this block - soil - for water, I would like to explore how this element and it’s set of conditions can leak into artistic researche(r)s - or even flood them? What does it mean to understand water as a workshop? How can this experience influence our practice in the workshops of this block?
       
       
      Asking these questions, we will spend at least 48h at the water and walk along the idea of 'canal'. Will we accompany the water or is the water our companion? How does the current of the rivers enter the streams of our communication? How do we approach this hyper-object that finally floats in the ocean?
    • newnew may2019 01 May 2019
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

      newscaption
      NEWSLETTER MAY 2019

      Troubled Gardens
      Block 2019/II
      29 April-28 July 2019

      curated by Nicolas Y Galeazzi

      After having curated two blocks at a.pass with regards to the conditions in which we create – the block 2017/II about the commons as an alternative economy, and the block 2018/I about the making of conditions and Institutional Critique – Nicolas Y Galeazzi sees the need to look beyond our cultural boundaries and understand the meshwork of diverse conditions we are living in together with other species, elements and time zones.

      Taking this 'ecosystem-perspective‘ as the main tool for the participants investigations, this block shall give the possibility to reflect  on their researches as a relational field within the 'terrestrial‘ landscape. On the other hand, it will unavoidably put the works in relation to the ecological crisis and catastrophes surrounding us and will help to develop tools and understandings for a post-anthropocentric, post-atopocenic, probably post-artropocentric relational practice.

      The workshops of this block will be 'gardens' - and therefore for once of spacial nature. Nicolas Y Galeazzi proposes to ask these gardens to be the teachers, to learn from them, to let them put the works at work, to ask them to suggest a practice, to make them structure the time and the collective research attempts. The gardens will be the 'education' framework and the ‘atelier.’

      In this framework  several ‘companions’  were invited- Kobe Mathys, Martin Schik, Gosie Vervlossem, Marialena Marouda, Vicent Alexis, Filip Van Dingenen, Einat Tuchman, Philippine Hoegen- to build a network, a web of knowledge together with the all involved.

      For more information:
      www.apass.be

      Research CenteR

      Cycle 18/19 - Block III
      29 April-28 July 2019

      Co-Curated by Isabel Burr Raty / Antye Guenther / Adrijana Gvozdenović /
      Sara Manente / Rob Ritzen / Pierre Rubio / Sina Seifee

      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.

      More information

      @ Hacktiris 31 May and June 1, 2019
      Starts at 18h

      Rue Paul Devauxstraat 5
      1000 Brussel
      6th floor

      You are invited to join:

      a.pass End-Communications of
      Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė.

      Virtual Body Institution is the coming together of the 3 concepts that intertwine in the End-Communications of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė.

      Their practices are very distinct from each other, in form as in content though they all engage with forms of sociability that enhance, propose and reveal the relation of the individual with the societal. Tackling this position from discursive, technological or body practices they invite the visitor to engage in thinking and embody modes of construction of the self.

      Through their current practices of research and exposure – that use the personification of historical characters in a public discussion, the entrance into virtual space as a extension of the ‘real’ and the body as a perception machine – we encounter some of the contexts and mechanisms we inhabit in current western society.

      Their proposals are not complementary but do co-habit through this event beyond agreement or disagreement by creating an area (spatial and experiential) of a temporary common.

      The work of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė enacts research modes of activating and empowering the self as active part of larger technological concepts. One becomes aware through their piercing practices of the narratives that surround the institutional, the body and the virtual. They softly enable criticality in the moment of exposure by engineering transdisciplinary processes that fundamentally question what  we are made of and how do we relate to it.

      All researchers work with performance and with the performativity of the event as a field of exploration that deconstructs the world as a given. The making public of these concerns in a transdisciplinary manner, mainly want to politicise the individual as being an actant in the public sphere enacted by the event itself. The participatory is here seen as the moment of inquiry, experiencing and sharing that crosses through the individual to the communal and vice-versa in enabling the non expertise as potential for critical presence.

      Are questions related to the self, isolated from the other? Is the self alienated from the communal, the historical, the technological, from the body?  How do we practice the spilling of our personal concerns into societal concerns? Where and how do we politicise our practices? Where do we meet? Are we here yet?

      More information

       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

    • newscaption

       

      CYCLE I: PUBLISHING ARTISTIC RESEARCH

      7 books launch

       

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

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

       6 publications plus one Annex will be launched 

      27th February 2020 

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

      Doors open at 18:00

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

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


       

       

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

       

       

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

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

       

       

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

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

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

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

       
    • 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)

    • On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      Gvozdenović, Louwerens and Weber all work with writing and performance. They use notions of script and publication as tools to reveal contexts as partners to the doing and thinking of artistic practice. The institutional is key to their approaches, both as a way to understand what predetermines the performativity of the artwork and in how it relates to issues of authorship. The question is often, "who is voicing?"

      Pia Louwerens works with spoken-word performances in which she performs an unreliable subject intra-acting with its institutional framework.
      Eleanor Ivory Weber uses conceptual writing techniques to arrive at multi-vocal recompositions of existing text-sources, combining formal structures with the spontaneity of the body.
      Adrijana Gvozdenović collects and annotates symptomatic artistic practices that recognise their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality. This results in publications of sorts or “exhibiting otherwise”.

      The concept of the anarchive as a way to reactivate meaning through revisiting traces is a common process to the three researches. Through either activating authored texts, institutional conditions and/or artistic practice paraphernalia, new iterations appear that re-actualise and re-situate the event. Each variation is always already allied with new subjectivities.

    • performative publishing
    • RRadio Triton
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • RRadio Triton audio publication
      18 January 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • online: https://rradiotriton.apass.be/
    • 01 July 2019
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • RRadio Triton

       

       

       

      RRadio Triton is an intentionally hybridised dispositive, operating within a grey zone between archiving, documenting, publishing, performing and broadcasting. Different modes of relating to the past events are called for, and these modes determine different definitions of the very nature of present time, future outlook, and of what an archive can be. The diverse audio objects it produces all relate to the politics of imagination and speculation, here envisaged as cultural and ecological instruments operative on the real.

       

      RRadio Triton is supported by a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies - platform for artistic research), a young institute for artistic research based in Brussels, that currently reflects on experimental modes of documenting, archiving, publishing and sharing. These modes try to mirror the institute’s criticality, its singular modes of operation, agonistic environment and ongoing reformulation of tools, practices and research. Moreover, the institute is concerned with a complex equation: how to develop a specific attitude towards archiving and dissemination that combines both a critique of the usual institutional ‘archival reason’ and the production of readable (structured) ‘forms of knowledge’? Or, in other words, how to avoid and/or assume commodification, reification and authority while documenting and publishing polymorph artistic research practices and discourses? Ultimately a.pass engages with documenting, archiving and disseminating independent and experimental artistic research practices to produce an ecology of text critique and to find inventive modes of co-operation and fair technological practices interlacing politically in ways that are non-innocent and the least toxic as possible.

      The project RRadio Triton is one of the many current expressions of this endeavor.

       

      Nourished by its participants, RRadio Triton is an after effect of the artistic research seminar named Trouble on Radio Triton ((((((( changing (the) world (s) )))))) that was held in Brussels between January and April 2017 curated and organised by Pierre Rubio within the institution a.pass. The seminar gathered artists-researchers, lecturers, cultural workers and curators around the thorny problem of the relations between imagination and political agency and was concerned with issues addressing the potential (in)capacity of art in general to produce actual social changes and the (im)possible contribution of art to collective empowerment by means of artistic imagination and fictional speculation. Among other research topics, the seminar at large focused on a few main transversal questions : Do you -as artists- through your research contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if so, what are the cultures generated by your research? Which alternative worlds does your artistic research/practice contain? What is the operative link between your artistic research and the future?

       

      A full list of involved practices and participants in the seminar includes: +++The artists-researchers who participated in the seminar with their projects, ideas and practices as Aela Royer, Luiza Crosman, Sina Seifee, Zoumana Meite, Sana Ghobbeh, Sven Dehens, Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Juan Duque, Esta Matkovic, Sébastien Hendrickx, Pierre Rubio, Eunkyung Jeong, Lili M. Rampre and Esther Rodriguez Barbero. +++ Lectures and reading sessions with Sol Archer, Peggy Pierrot, Edward George, Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova, Sina Seifee, Sébastien Hendrickx, Michiel Vandevelde, Wouter De Raeve, Marialena Marouda and Caroline Godart. +++ Workshops and ateliers with Myriam Van Imschoot, Alice Chauchat, Helena Dietrich and Christian Hansen that intersected sound art, speculative embodiment and worlding. +++ Theoretical references on speculative fiction with Suvin’s Cognitive Estrangement, Goodman and Eshun’s Afrofuturisms, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic identity politics, Le Guin’s feminist and anarchist science fiction, Donna Haraway's notion of the tentacular, situated knowledges and reparative strategies, Accelerationism, and Benjamin’s theory of language as magic. +++ Screenings revisiting SF cinema curated and hosted by Ekaterina Kaplunova and Sven Dehens.+++ Inputs by the seminar mentors Veridiana Zurita, Kristien Van den Brande, Peggy Pierrot and Caroline Godart.

       

      Not merely archiving, rather activating a labor-intensive work of memory elaborated by the notion of radio as an instrument operative on the real, the RRadio Triton project is a compost of all these contributions and their transformation in the present time. The broadcasting agenda of the RRadio Triton to come will be structured around by three kind of shows. Three main programs. Three playlists. The first consists of multiple forms of interviews with the numerous actors of the seminar. The second of more or less fictional experimental sound pieces produced with or by the seminar’s participants. The third being a series of edits of the lectures, reading sessions and workshops that were part of the theoretical/practice based body of the seminar. The radio will be online soon on a digital interface that will assemble in an elegant and complex way all the “pieces” and will perform live in different contexts different kind of broadcasts in collaboration with different institutions/hosts. . Determining fluidly the critical nature of the fictional radio and within its intentionally heterogeneous and plastic landscape, all the RRadio Triton 'pieces' will collectively activate different types of issues engaging the problems of the operativity of speculative fiction and of, at large, political art. But not only.

       

      The audio publication RRadio Triton is the outcome of the voluntary contributions of all the actors of the 2017 seminar and their recomposition in the present time. RRadio Triton is an a.pass production initiated, curated and hosted by Pierre Rubio, and is technically, artistically and dramaturgically supported by Christian Hansen and Sina Seifee.

       

      A beta version of RRadio Triton audio publication here

      A comprehensive presentation of the 2017 seminar here .

       

       

    • performative publishing
    • RRadio Triton
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Broadcasting RRadio Triton 18 January 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • by OFFoff, a.pass and Domes FM
    • Kunsthal, Ghent
    • 25 January 2019
    • 26 January 2019
    • broadcast
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • Broadcasting RRadio Triton

       

       

      Art Cinema OFFoff is a platform for experimental cinema and audiovisual art. OFFoff searches for films from the past and present that enter into cinematographic and narrative experiments, often navigating between cinema and the other arts. During the opening weekend of Kunsthal,Ghent, ArtCinema OFFoff puts up a broadcast on Domes FM around RRadio Triton, a collective and experimental research project produced by a.pass. The broadcast circles around relations between artistic research and speculative fictions. What kinds of futures do artistic research practices imagine? Which fictions are needed? And what voices do we need to bring those fictions up? The program for and the performance of the broadcast is a collaboration between ArtCinema OFFoff (Kunsthal Ghent), RRadio Triton (a.pass, Brussels) and Domes FM (Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, Liverpool). With and by Deborah Birch, Edward Clive, Sven Dehens, Edward George, Christian Hansen, Pierre Rubio and Sina Seifee.

       

      [audio mp3="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/soundcloud_excerpt.mp3"][/audio]

      excerpt from the broadcast.... soon online in full...

       

       

      Interviewer :
      What is RRadio Triton?

       

       

      RRadio Triton :
      A seminar, 'Trouble on Radio Triton ((((((( changing (the) world (s) ))))))' was held in a.pass between January and April 2017 curated and organised by Pierre Rubio, gathering it forces and resources around the question of artistic imagination and political agency. Among other enquiries, some of the main questions that were raised during the seminar were: Do you--as artists--through your research contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if so, what are the cultures generated by your research? Which alternative worlds does your artistic research/practice contain? What is the operative link between your artistic research and the future? Following that initiative, now the project RRadio Triton sets out to dream of operating like a time machine carrying its protagonists through time back to the 2017’s events and returning them as new narrators. By adopting the identity of an ad hoc fictional radio station, it records, edits, samples, remixes and releases pieces of audiowork and soundscapes that originated at the 2017 seminar. RRadio Triton is becoming a hybridised dispositive about the politics of imagination and speculation, not merely archiving, rather activating a labor-intensive work of memory elaborated by the notion of radio as an instrument operative on the real. This way of approaching archive and dissemination mirrors the current expressions of a.pass’s criticality as an institution that is committed to the ecologies of critique and the reformulation of its research-tools and practices.

      The audio publication RRadio Triton is the outcome of the voluntary contributions of all the actors of the 2017 seminar and their recomposition in the present time.

       

       

      Interviewer :
      In response to the invitation of ArtCinema OFFoff to interact within the (re)opening event of the Kunsthal Gent in January 2019, RRadio Triton collaborates with curator Sven Dehens and will structure its first broadcast with two selected pieces that both perform complex critical dispositives around ideas of memory, reparation and worlding.
      Through OFFoff webpage we can access to a lot of informations about the event, but how a radio station -even fictional like RRadio Triton became involved with a cinematic event?

       

       

      RRadio Triton :
      Some shared views on reparative fiction for sure… And a lot of the audio objects/pieces constituting RRadio Triton relating more or less directly to cinema. Thematically first with a strong relation with science-fiction cinema genres and subgenres and critical questions around utopia/dystopia -central nodes in S-F cinema. There is also a more practice based link with film and more specifically with film soundtracking as some pieces are made after sound research ateliers called “Foley your Research” that were performed around the question “how does/could your research sound like?”. As well, some pieces relate directly to existing films, whether because of the central thematic of one of the recorded live lectures, or because of a structuring cinematographic reference/quote/appropriation. And last, some pieces engage with convoking cinematographic images/bodies through sound. They channel bodies, affects, voices and presences through different use of sound and they ‘produce’ images without any actual camera.

       

       

      Interviewer:
      Could this be seen as a different form of worlding? One of RRadio Triton’s main endeavours?

       

       

      RRadio Triton:
      One of the justifications for worlding -imagining and situating the world otherwise- is that the stories of this world are getting toxic as they are mere instruments for social reproduction. Re-imagining the erased stories -erased by economical, colonial, patriarchal, ideological or cultural instrumental power orders and determining modes of governance- and speculating other stories can produce (and not only reproduce) other social orders and thus other worlds. The two pieces we are proposing in dialogue with Cinemas OFFoff both try to tackle the very possibility of imagining differently and thus create the necessary conditions for re-invention and speculation. They world.

       

       

      Interviewer:
      Can you present the pieces shortly?

       

       

      RRadio Triton:
      The first piece is a montage of a live lecture given by Sina Seiffe during Trouble on Radio Triton ((((((( changing (the) world (s) )))))) -a seminar held by a.pass in 2017, it focuses on a ‘problematic’ social media video and puts it back in motion critically, rebroadcasting it in a way. The second piece is an edit of a rare live communication -part of the same seminar- by Edward George revisiting his research work developed for the iconic film Last Angel of History.

       

      Interviewer:
      The radio will be hosted by Domes FM, an online radio station set up in the basements of the Bidston Observatoy Artistic Research Centre (BOARC).
      What is BOARC?

       

       

      RRadio Triton:
      Located in the outskirts of Liverpool, BOARC is a not-for-profit study centre, focused on providing artists, writers, academics, performers etc with a cheap, temporary place to dictate their own methods of work, allowing them to come together and stay, to develop projects that require time and space, in a non-pressured environment.

       

       

      Interviewer:
      On Saturday the 26th of January, between 12h and 18h, one can follow and attend the live broadcast from Kunsthal Gent. There will be space for participation in diverse conversation formats held between the recorded audio pieces. In addition, on Friday the 25th of January, between 20h and 22h, there will be a Domes FM broadcast from the basements of the Bidston Observatory by Edward Clive, one of the hosts of the space. What will Edward Clive do?

       

       

      RRadio Triton:
      In reaction to RRadio Triton, he will bring a mix of soundtracks and queer experimental foley from the depths of science fiction cinema.

       

       

      Interviewer:
      Is it possible to listen to the broadcast online?

       

       

      RRadio Triton:
      Yes! One can follow the broadcast online during the announced hours. The URL for the broadcast will be announced in time.

       

       

      Interviewer:
      Can I get the credits of RRadio Triton’s pieces?

       

       

      RRadio Triton:
      Of course, here you go...

      RRadio Triton is an a.pass production initiated, curated and hosted by Pierre Rubio, and is technically, artistically and dramaturgically supported by Christian Hansen and Sina Seifee. The pieces we will broadcast on the 26th of January from Kunsthal Ghent on Domes FM Liverpool are:

       

          ‘An Animal Escape Case’
      an audio editing of a live essay-performance, 70’, 2019
      Author and Performer/Lecturer Sina Seiffe
      Editor Pierre Rubio / Sound Christian Hansen / Production a.pass
      The lecture was performed in March 2017 in Brussels within the lectures series “Book Club/Trouble on Radio Triton” at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies - a platform for artistic research)

       

      In his essay-performance ‘An Animal Escape Case’, Sina Seifee opens one object. He unpacks the destiny of a social media video file about a feral cat, that, in anthropomorphic terms, adopted a kitten, and the reactions of Sina’s family in Tehran towards these shared social-media digital images. This object and relational event is transformed into a landscape of observations, philosophical concerns, sociological anthropological and historical analyses. The complex arrangement relates diverse notions as, greeting, encounter, understanding, friendship, technology and most importantly, a destabilizing reality for humans, that of wildness. Sina performs as the narrator of a kind of film in which he is both the witness and the main actor. The edited audio piece tries to bring back his (intense) presence and incarnated storytelling, as well as the many references and borrowings to popular and not popular culture both from Iran and the West.

      The essay/performance investigates the fragile intersections of friendship between digital avatars and trans-animals in the social media in Tehran’s landscape. Through personal animal-findings and fairy-tale associations the An Animal Escape Case interprets the epistemological openings and closings in cross-species sociality, exemplified by the everyday use of mobile phones where images of pets circulate and different species meet in mediated formats. By analyzing everything that anthropomorphism can perform and contain, and seen through the animality in the situated conditions of contemporary domestic life, the essay/performance addresses the relationships between people, animals and their surroundings in a socio-technological milieu as complex as Tehran’s urban environment. (Sina Seifee)

      Sina Seifee is an artist-researcher-storyteller working on poetics of animal description (ecological cosmologies of nonhumans-with-history). Born in Tehran (1982), he studied Applied Mathematics in Beheshti University and Visual Arts in Charsoo Institute of Art in Tehran. After moving to Germany in 2011, he graduated in Cologne with master diploma in Media Arts from Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln (2014) and received his postmaster in Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies from a.pass in Brussels (2017).
      His work, realized in different forms of lecture-performances, reading group, workshops, image making, video and writing- is centered around the questions of technology, storytelling, globalism and intercultural mythologies in the heterogeneous knowledge-worlds of art and sciences, with attention to the premodern era.

       

       

          ‘Last angel of history’
      an audio editing of a live lecture, 3 episodes of 30',  2019
      Author and Performer/Lecturer Dr. Edward George
      Editor Pierre Rubio / Sound Christian Hansen / Production a.pass
      The lecture was performed in March 2017 in Brussels within the lectures series “Book Club/Trouble on Radio Triton” at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies - a platform for artistic research)

      Dr. Edward George is the writer, researcher, and narrator of the seminal fiction-documentary film The Last Angel of History. In a rare live communication he shares the research processes and thinking that supported the creation of the film. The audio piece revisits George revisiting his work of revisiting the lineage of Afrofuturism.
      The Last Angel of History is one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s influencing filmmakers and inspiring 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 (un)popular culture, outer space and the limits of the human condition. The influential Black Audio Film Collective crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. 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.

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

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

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

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

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

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

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

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

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

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

      a.pass end-communications of: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      Scorescapes

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

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

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

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

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

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


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

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

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

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

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

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

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

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

       

       

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

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

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

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

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

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

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

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

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

      a.pass end-communications of: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      Scorescapes

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

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

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

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

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

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


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

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

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

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

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

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

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

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

       

       

    •  

      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.

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Subtracted Seduction 07 January 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Adrijana Gvozdenović / Pia Louwerens / Eleanor Ivory Weber
    • Hectolitre
    • 01 February 2019
    • 02 February 2019
    • Subtracted Seduction

      On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      Gvozdenović, Louwerens and Weber all work with writing and performance. They use notions of script and publication as tools to reveal contexts as partners to the doing and thinking of artistic practice. The institutional is key to their approaches, both as a way to understand what predetermines the performativity of the artwork and in how it relates to issues of authorship. The question is often, "who is voicing?"

      Pia Louwerens works with spoken-word performances in which she performs an unreliable subject intra-acting with its institutional framework.
      Eleanor Ivory Weber uses conceptual writing techniques to arrive at multi-vocal recompositions of existing text-sources, combining formal structures with the spontaneity of the body.
      Adrijana Gvozdenović collects and annotates symptomatic artistic practices that recognise their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality. This results in publications of sorts or “exhibiting otherwise”.

      The concept of the anarchive as a way to reactivate meaning through revisiting traces is a common process to the three researches. Through either activating authored texts, institutional conditions and/or artistic practice paraphernalia, new iterations appear that re-actualise and re-situate the event. Each variation is always already allied with new subjectivities.

      To access the Research Portfolios follow the links:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović
      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=97

      Pia Louwerens
      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=99

      Eleanor Ivory Weber
      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=98

       

      Schedule of the event:

      18:00 food & drinks (€)

      18:30 Subtracted Seduction
      19:00 Subverses I: Play
      (break)
      20:00 7 anxieties and the world
      20:30 Subverses II: Glossolalien missive
      (break)
      21:15 Subverses III
      21:30 The big gesture is many small gestures dispersed

      Performances by:
      Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens, Eleanor Ivory Weber

      With contributions by:
      *Subtracted Seduction: sound editing and mixing Teresa Cos
      *Subverses I & III: performers Lydia McGlinchey, Marcus Bergner
      *7 anxieties and the world: sound mixing Marko Radišić

      Thanks:
      Henry Andersen, Simon Asencio, Marcus Bergner, Deborah Birch, Elen Braga, Kate Briggs, Mladen Bundalo, Teresa Cos, Sven Dehens, Nico Dockx, Diego Echegoyen, Paolo Favero, Luisa Fillitz, Nassia Fourtouni, Anastasia Freygang, Nicolas Galeazzi, Camille Gérenton, Caroline Godart, Katinka van Gorkum, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Philippine Hoegen, Eunkyung Jeong, Steven Jouwersma, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Leo Kay, Shervin Kianersi Haghighi, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Heike Langsdorf, Joke Liberge, Bart Lescreve, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Lydia McGlinchey, Michèle Meesen, Maurice Meewisse, Zoumana Méïté, Lilia Mestre, Wesley Meuris, Vladimir Miller, Caterina Mora, Eszter Némethi, Elizabeth Newman, Anouchka Oler, Goda Palekaitė, Lucia Palladino, Laura Pante, Vijai Patchineelam, Peggy Pierrot, Piero Ramella, Marcelo Rezende, Kate Rich, Esther Rodríguez Barbero, Pierre Rubio, Margaux Schwarz, Hoda Siahtiri, Vanja Smiljanić, Femke Snelting, Geert Vaes, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Roberto Winter, Aurore Zachayus, Adva Zakai.

       

       

       

       
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • UNSETTLED STUDY AT PERFORMATIK '19 performative research environment
      03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • KANAL
    • 22 March 2019
    • 23 March 2019
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • UNSETTLED STUDY AT PERFORMATIK '19
       
      Unsettled Study will invite the audience to witness and join the multitude of research processes currently hosted by the a.pass platform for artistic research.  
       
      For several years a.pass platform fo artistic research has periodically engaged with a research environment called Settlement proposed and facilitated by Vladimir Miller. This project continues to ask on which spatial, performative and institutional conditions is it possible to step into and share an artist's research process as it is happening.  

      During Performatik 2019 "Unsettled Study" will attempt to develop the idea of the Settlement into a performative installation at KANAL which will invite the audience into the multitude of research and work processes currently hosted by a.pass. Starting from the Settlement project in January at a.pass, the researchers, curators and facilitators will embark on a process of developing architectural structures to support, represent and host their research processes. Through a series of workshops and inputs from invited guest artists the researchers will develop short performance lectures in relation to their practice. As a culmination of this three months long process this emergent collective space of study will move from apass to KANAL and open its research environment in an evening of overlapping performances and installations.

       

       

      Within the frame of Performatik19, the Brussels biennial of performance art

       

      Unsettled Study Open Studio

      Wednesday 20th – Saturday 23rd of March during opening hours at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels

      tickets are available as a special 10-day pass for Kanal Centre Pompidou

       

      Unsettled Study Performative Research Environment

      Friday 22nd of March 16h

      Saturday 23rd of March 18h 

      at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels

      duration ca 3h

      tickets are available as a special 10-day pass for Kanal Centre Pompidou

       

      Produced and performed by a.pass researchers, curators and facilitators: Alex Arteaga, Deborah Birch, Elen Braga, Isabel Burr Raty, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Amélie van Elmbt, Nassia Fourtouni, Katinka van Gorkum, Antye Guenther,Steven Jouwersma, Leo Kay, Joke Liberge, Mathilde Maillard, Sara Manente, Michele Meesen, Maurice Meewisse, Lilia Mestre, Caterina Mora, Muslin Brothers (Yaen Levi & Tamar Levit), Eszter Némethi, Goda Palekaite, Laura Pante, Peggy Pierrot, Rob Ritzen, Flavio Rodrigo, RRadio Triton, Femke Snelting, Christina Stadlbauer,   
      Lecture performance mentoring: Philipp Gehmacher
      Process curator: Vladimir Miller

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • The Choreography of Objects: Logistics vs. Entanglement 03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Moritz Frischkorn
    • 25 February 2019
    • 28 February 2019
    • The Choreography of Objects: Logistics vs. Entanglement
       
      In recent years, theoreticians both from political sciences and cultural studies have become more and more interested in the business field of logistics. Besides finance (and new logics of extraction, some authors claim), logistics seems to be one of the key notions to understand global capitalism today.
       
      Today logistics considers itself the totalized management and governance of all flows of capital, labour and commodities. And more than ever, logistics is administered and steered by algorithms – auto-managed and automated, implementing a computational governance that subjects labour as much as all material resources of the globe to its regime. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in their essay 'Fantasy in the Hold', thus write: 'The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere.

      Logistics as choreography describes the faculty of being able to transport 'mountains of goods' (Maersk) just in time. The use of 'choreography' as marketing metaphor is then mirrored also in expert papers speaking about Supply Chain Choreographies as ways to interface diverse informational systems.
       

       

      Reading about the confluence and interrelation of logistics and choreography together, we will try to unfold some of the historic as much as contemporary political problematics related to this totalizing choreography of power operating by extraction, abduction and containerization. At the same time, we can discuss in how far this 'other' choreography of objects, based on efficiency and seamless interfaces, reflects back on recent discourses about an 'expanded choreography' in the field of contemporary performing arts and Performance Studies. How can an understanding of the history and contemporary over-practice of logistics inform our own choices when moving stuff? What are the political dimensions that are at play here – especially if we do not concede to maximizing claims for efficiency, but to an ethics of 'following the materials' or of attending and attuning to manifold entanglements?
       
      In a second step, we will try to play around with logistical concepts in order to re-formulate our own artistic practices. We will draw maps of the diverse material and semiotic resources that go into our work: From where do they enter, and at what point do our practices interface with these resources? Could we imagine ways of working with material or information, where 'value is added at each step'? What would be more efficient ways of thinking about our own 'supply chains', both in terms of research and artistic production? When, on the other hand, are the moments in which we are overwhelmed by materials, where we can only try to follow their itinerant logics of entanglement and proliferation? Presenting these 'total cost analysis' and 'supply chain diagram' to each other, we may find out how our own and others practices rely on a fine balance between logistical efficiency and itinerant, entangled hyper-chaos.
       
      On another, more physical level, we can assess our own work-spaces from a logistical point of view. In Amazon distribution centers, for example, goods are shelved chaotically, according to algorithmic procedures. In the same way, we can think of workspaces as processual logistical choreographies based on the in- and out-flux of materials and information. What if we thought of our workspaces thus as a form of archive of the logistics that made it come to be in its current shape? Does that give us valuable information about our practices? On the horizon, then, we come to articulate an even bigger question: Can we formulate an ethics of how to work with materials, whatever form, coherence, shape or agility they may have?
       
       
      Moritz Frischkorn is a choreographer and researcher working within contemporary performing arts. He is based in Hamburg, where, since 2015, he is part of the artistic-theoretic graduate school 'Performing Citizenship' at HafenCity University. His artistic research deals with ethical and social questions related to choreographies of objects. In his artistic work, he looks for bodily practices of attuning to non-human movement and researches ways of moving beyond self-expression and intentionality. 
       
      In the last years, he is interested, mainly, in the relation of choreography and logistics, a topic that he will deal with in detail within a new performance project entitled 'The Great Report'. His artistic work is regularly presented at Kampnagel, Hamburg. Furthermore, he often collaborates with, among others, Manon Santkin (Brussels, Stockholm), his Hamburg colleagues Heike Bröckerhoff and Jonas Woltemate, and performance collective geheimagentur. Sporadically, he writes for 'Plateau - Performing Arts in Hamburg' and works for Sarma/Oral Site web-journal. 
    • postgraduate program
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • BLOCK 2019/I UNSETTLED STUDY curated by Vladimir Miller
      03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • 07 January 2019
    • 31 March 2019
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • BLOCK 2019/I UNSETTLED STUDY
      Continuing the line of inquiry from Uninvited Research, Block 19/I will again come together around the questions of mobility, logistics and gestures of moving, settling and unsettling. All who research, work and support at apass including the Research Center, the administration, the curators and production support are invited to join the process.
       

      To initiate the building of an institution which can support study a.pass will host Settlement, a practice of being together while building the space for the individual and collective practices of research. Through a series of workshops with Philipp Gehmacher and Moritz Frischkorn and by presenting research to each other during the Half Way Days we will further develop this space into a multitude of individual research situations and scenographies. We aim to be able to move the resulting lecture performance spaces and works to KANAL Centre Pompidou Brussels and open them to the public of the Performatik Festival at the end of the block. We will perform and host this collective Unsettled Study as an intertwined complex space on two consecutive evenings. 
       
      +++
       
      Moten and Harney once described study in an interview in "Undercommons" as the moment of unruly togetherness before the teacher enters the classroom. Etymologically the word can be used for a process of inquiry as well as for the architectural space designated to this process within a building. In Moten and Harney study happens besides, in between, despite the institutional and curricular framework of a university and is deeply related to the unseen connectedness of the undercommons. They establish study as a valuable political tool and process within educational systems, a commoning practice which universities came to actively suppress instead of supporting it. Marginalized by the institution, study becomes the excess, the unseen extra of school. How can we undo this order and bring study back to be the common center of what we do?

       

      As partner of the Performatik Festival 2019 a.pass has been asked to contribute a larger project to the upcoming festival. The invitation of Performatik comes with/from a curatorial proposal to engage with Bauhaus and its implications, therefore the question of what is a school and how does it perform itself is equally interesting to the festival and to us. In response, we would like to continue the line of inquiry that the School of Love by the guest curator Adva Zakai has initiated and position study as unruly undercommons, an inquiry and a space in the center of a contemporary idea of school, which we claim should be an institution in support of study. 
       
      Moten and Harney envision study as a being-together framed by the classroom, even if the classroom is fugitive or imaginary. At a.pass this classroom is a gathering which is based in the mutual and the mutant, and in an engaged not-knowing that is decidedly non-academic, one that includes all the hear-say, weird intuitions and obsessing over a question that we sum up with the „artistic" in „artistic research“. We are taking this block to look again at the spatial manifestation of research in its architectural, material and components and their movement. We look at logistics of thought and material coming together to formulate a particular study, we look at the logistics of settling and unsettling again, of making and taking apart and re-making again with the hope of making a non-academic space to support our non-academic study.
       
    • 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

       

       

    • 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.

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • a.pass meets School of Love
    • block 2018/III
    • STUDY DAYS A curatorial proposal by Adva ZAkai
      11 September 2018
      posted by: Joke Liberge
    • 10 September 2018
    • 30 November 2018
    • STUDY DAYS

      PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

      This block is organized around a series of Study Days. Almost every Monday till the end of November, a.pass hosts artists, thinkers and researchers to contribute to the problematization of various issues that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics.


      ** The texts bellow are written from the perspective of the notions explored at a.pass, and not by the guests, who are invited to respond to them from within their own practices **


      September 10th
      Maybe one day, love will no longer be considered a private endeavor or a slogan of hippies, but rather a public and a political mode of being...

      Guests: Johan Grimonprez & Bleri Lleshi

      Imagine a society that bases its arrangements, institutions and democracy on love itself. Such a society will probably teach and exercise love as a force that contributes to the constitution of communities. Maybe then it will make less sense to say that love is a social construction than to say that love constructs society... What kind of practices can re-appropriate love by allowing it to shift from individual, consumerist and patriarchal inclinations into the political engagement of play and interaction of differences? How can love be romantic but not only? What if love would expend beyond the limits of the couple and the nuclear family and serve as the basis for our political projects in common?
      10h – 13h A session with Johan Grimonprez
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 15h15 presentation of work by Johan Grimonprez
      15h15 – 15h30 Break
      15h30 – 18h A session with Bleri Leshi

       

      September 17th
      To be included your love tool kit
      Or: Tender technologies: how tools shape practice and practice shapes tools

      Guest: Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting: Can we transform our relation to everyday communication technologies? Can we take that risk? Currently, tech giants dominate all forms of digital communication, from cloud-storage to production tools and archiving systems. Infused with modernist ideas of progress, these tools are full of capitalist values and dreams of seamless scaleability. They form intricate webs of human and non-human agencies weaving themselves into and around us, intimately linking our personal and professional practices. Also institutional practice has come to rely on the use of commercial platforms, including places that are dedicated to radical transformation, political love and commoning like a.pass. So how are we being with technology when practicing a School of Love? This study-day is dedicated to experiencing technology differently, of developing a convivial relationship that foregrounds vulnerability, mutual dependency and care-taking. With the help of old and new Free, Libre and Open Source Software tools we will practice a transition from anticipating efficiency to allowing curiosity; from expecting scarcity to demanding multiplicity; from solution to possibility.
      10h – 13h A session with Femke Snelting
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 18h A session with Femke Snelting

       

      September 24th – September 29th
      Inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world.

      a.pass meets SOL participates to The Swamp School at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2018

      "In exploring the imaginary of a swamp—a living organism in which borders defined by social, political and cultural factors are porous and permeable— the Swamp School will investigate an open artistic/architectural form, effective workshop and publication methodologies. The Swamp School will act as a pilot for future learning environments, informed by and informing the architecture and installations of its own space. Research questions will focus on creating public interfaces and manuals that support adaptation and learning to meet the demands of a changing environment.” Swamp Pavillion curated by Nomeda and Gedeminas Urbonas.

      Participating institutions: MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, University of Antwerp, Università Iuav di Venezia, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti - NABA Milan, The Art Institute at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory IAeP, Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, University of Iceland, Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas, a.pass - advanced performance and scenography studies Brussels, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Contour Biennale 9 Mechelen, Design for the Living World Class at HFBK The University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Städelschule Architecture Class – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Frankfurt

      http://swamp.lt/#program


      October 8th
      Blame it on monogamy

      Guests: Eva Berghman, CW/the Common Wallet project, Kathrien De Graeve

      Many of us were indoctrinated to believe that they desire only one way of moving through the course of life, where pairing is the ultimate goal and the preferable mode of being. This probably has not much to do with the belief in the mental and spiritual profoundness of the unit of two, but rather being motivated by the fear of being left out by a society that socially and economically prioritises the couple. How to re-appropriate institutions that re-appropriated love itself by bounding it to laws, contracts, economy and morals? What if being polyamorous would not only mean having many lovers, but many kinds of love? We could chose to stop considering Polyamory as merely a sexual and romantic practice, and think of it as an ethic that potentially destabilizes the normative hierarchies between human relationships. Monogamy is not just a way to love romantically, it also influences our relations to money, time, jobs, passports, artistic/scientific/academic researches etc... If Polyamory would be the dominant way of relation in the political and social sphere, how would this effect the notions of owning (property, identity, ideas) and owing, of secrets and privacy? How can love subvert and de-construct power structures that use monogamy to move us away from caring collectively?

      10h – 11h30 A session with Katrien De Graeve
      11h30 – 13h A Session with Eva Berghmans
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 15h30 A session with CW / the Common Wallet project
      15h30 – 16h Break
      16h – 18h A discussion through relating the themes of the day to our own practices

       

      October 22nd
      Love makes schools make love

      Guests: Jan Masschelein, Laurence Rassel, SRG / school research group

      Maybe one day, schools will no longer be considered as merely a protective incubator that prepares one to life outside of it, but rather an engaged environment that influences the world. Think of a society that bases its schools on experiment, reflection and collectivity, independent from the market's need. Schools that produce ideologies and policies, instead of being instrumentalised by them. Schools that gather strangers and differences under the common wish to study public matters in order to challenge and improve them. If ever such a society will exist, it will probably construct its schools as flexible systems that work in acceptance of potential change and disruption, as a way to embody that which is being studied in them. Can schools embrace love as a strategy to create a place of encounter where both the institution and its part takers grow in relation to each other? How can a school base its structure on the same principals it wishes to teach?

      13h – 16h A session with Jan Masschelein
      16h– 18h A session with Laurence Rassel
      18h – 19h Dinner (provided by a.pass)
      19h – 21h Presentation of school models that were developed by a.pass participants


      October 29th
      By putting that which is between us before that which we think belongs to us.

      Guests: Caroline Godart, Elke Van Campenhout

      School is maybe more of a verb than a noun. Its a state of “attentivnes” to the world that one could chose to enter at any time and any place, in the company of others. Within this logic, wouldn't being a student similar to being an artist? Schools and students could be considered as lovers, who commit to each other, but do not wish to control what the other does with the love that they give. To school could mean to study and care for the same thing that you would also be willing to let go of. To - engage with, and - detach from, at the same time. This could be the love that dares to bound spirituality and politics together. If school becomes a verb, teachers would then teach how to school, and maybe love would not be a feeling, but a mode of studying that generates feelings.

      10h – 13h A reading session with Caroline Godart
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 16h A reading session with Caroline Godart
      16h – 16h30 Break
      16h30 – 18h A reading session with Elke Van Campenhout

       

      October 31st – Nov 5th (Nov 3rd – off)
      Instead of needing to know

      A workshop by Joao Fiadeiro.
      Guests: Elke Van Campenhout, Alex Arteaga

      If in both Love and School an openness to change through encounters with others is practiced, we better develop sensitivities to deal with a change into an unknown path. Perhaps we would be better off improvising through, with and within the unknown instead of needing to know. Maybe improvisation today can be approached as a mode of resistance to tendencies for a life dedicated to an anticipated and defined future. It might seem like stating the obvious, proposing to put improvisation back in the agenda. Life itself is an improvisation, of course, we never stopped improvising. But we can dedicate a special attention to it in order to examine its relevance to nowadays realities. Not the improvisation that aims to emancipate repressed self expressions, neither the one that provides skills and masteries to manoeuvre within individual lives and careers , but an improvisation attitude that may create an actualized set of relations between us and other people, us and other things, us and anything that is not us.

      10h – 18h A workshop with Joao Fiadeiro
      19h – 21h (Nov 2nd, 4th, 5th ) Evening interventions by Joao Fiadeiro, Elke Van Campenhout, Alex Arteaga


      November 12th
      The Love workers

      Guests: An Mertens, Daniela Bershan

      Artistic processes often face the contradiction of critiquing the same protocols they have to comply with, such as deadlines, saleable products, authorship, commissions and competition. Many artists experience frustration by the fact that policy makers, programmers and curators determine the visibility of certain artists/art works instead of others. A Love Worker – could this be a synonym for an Artist? Would this emancipate some practices from having to defend their relevance through the procedures imposed by artistic scenes? Or better than that – could this expand the boundaries of what an artistic work can become?

      10h – 13h A session with An Mertens (in the forest)
      13h – 15h Lunch (+ coming back from the forest)
      15h – 18h A session with Daniela Bershan

       

      BIOGRAPHIES

      Bleri Lleshi is philosopher, writer, lecturer, youth worker and DJ. He studied political sciences and philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. At the moment he is writing a ph.d on the struggle of the excluded. Lleshi is lecturer at UCLL where he teaches various subjects on social sciences. His research focuses on topics such as inequality, neoliberalism, youth, migration, identities, and extremism. Lleshi has participated in conferences, debates and media. In 2014, he was considered as one of the most influential immigrants in Belgium

      Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities. Grimonprez's curatorial projects, films and installations have been exhibited at museums worldwide. He published several books and he lectures widely.

      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she explores 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. http://constantvzw.org/

      Eva Berghmans is a journalist working for 'De Standaard'. As a journalist she has an excuse to step up to people and ask them all kind of weird and intimate questions. She never took 'because this is the way we have always done things' for an answer and tries to see through the presumptions in our everyday lives. Currently she is working on a research project on polyamory, published on http://www.standaard.be/tag/.'

      CW/the Common Wallet project is an initiative of 10 people from the art sector in Belgium who share their individual income in one collective bank account. Through this experiment they collectively explore their psychological and cultural dependencies on money and a possible alternative to the monogamous and often lonely relationship one has with the money one earns. CW part takers are : Luigi Coppola, Eliza Demarre, Anna Rispoli, Adva Zakai, Diederik Peeters, Christophe Meierhans, Luca Mattei, Agnes Quackels, Ingrid Vranken, Irena Ramanovic


      Katrien De Graeve is a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), affiliated to the Department of Languages and Cultures of Ghent University, and member of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. In 2012, she completed her PhD at the Department of Comparative Sciences of Culture at Ghent University with a critical analysis of intensive parenting practices in Belgian-Ethiopian adoptive families. In her current research project (2016-2019), she has shifted focus to the study of sexuality/romantic relationships and discourses of exclusivity and plurality in light of the normative two-parent nuclear family.

      Jan Masschelein is head of the Laboratory for Education and Society, and of the research group Education, Culture and Society. He studied educational sciences and philosophy at the K.U.Leuven and at the Johan Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main and is as well Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung. His research can be situated in the broad domain of the formation of educational theory, critical theory, social philosophy and governmentality studies. More concretely it concerns the public and societal role of education and schooling, the role of the university, the changing experiences of time and space in the age of the network, the educational meaning of cinema and camera, the architecture of schools and architecture of the learning environment, a pedagogy of attention, the notion of 'pedagogy', the pedagogical role of teachers and social workers. A lot of attention is directed towards experimental educational practices and towards new forms of documentary and exploratory research.

      Laurence Rassel is currently the director of art school ERG in Brussels. Educated in visual arts and pedagogy, she pursued an interdisciplinary trajectory from new media to the management of an artistic institution. From 2010 to the end of June 2015, she was director of the Fundacio Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, a foundation created to promote contemporary art and thought, and the study of Antoni Tàpies' work. Previously, from 1998, she was, among others, responsible for Constant, a non-profit organization based in Brussels. Constant connects theoretical thinking, the critical use of new technologies, artistic behavior and political issues in the network. At the same time, she was project coordinator for the Interface3 women's technology training center in Brussels, as part of the European ADA project from 2001 to 2006. 



      SRG/School Research Group is an open group of art practitioners and pedagogues who meet regularly in order to share their interest and experience within school environments in Belgium and study together. 



      Caroline Godart is a writer, professor and dramaturge based in Brussels. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Cinema Studies from Rutgers University (USA), where she studied with Elizabeth Grosz. She is now an Assistant Professor of Communication, Germanic Languages and Cultural Studies at IHECS (Institut des Hautes Études des Communications Sociales, Brussels). Her first book, The Dimensions of Difference, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. It explores the question of difference, and in particular of sexual difference, through three axes (space, time, and embodiment), which are approached both as aesthetic devices and as philosophical concepts in the works of Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson.

      Elke Van Campenhout / ELLE is a tantric practioner and artistic researcher. She developed her work partly at the a.pass research institute where she worked for five years under the umbrella of Bureau d’Espoir, a practice on the import, export and redistribution of hope. For this practice she studied political theory, contemporary philosophy and spiritual body practices. Her work is a transdisciplinary practice, linking contemporary philosophy to spiritual body practice, in the development of an ethics of coming together and rethinking our relation to the world we live in. Since 2 years Elke Van Campenhout and Stijn Smeets started up the experimental living community The Monastery, dedicating all their time and resources on the creation of a spiritual life of devotion, alternative economies, and ritual composition.

      João Fiadeiro belongs to a generation of choreographers who emerged in the late 1980’s and led to the emergence of the Nova Dança Portuguesa. In 1990, he founded the workshop RE.AL Company that supported the creation and dissemination of several choreographers and their works, which were regularly performed in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and South America. Real Time Composition is a project that he has been developing for twenty years. In parallel, he has organized several workshops in various training courses, schools and universities throughout the world. João Fiadeiro is currently completing a PhD in contemporary art at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

      Alex Arteaga’s research integrates aesthetic and philosophical practices relating to aesthetics, the emergence of sense, meaning and knowledge, and the relationships between aurality, architecture and the environment through phenomenological and enactivist approaches. He studied composition, music theory, piano, electroacoustic music, and architecture in Berlin and Barcelona and received a PhD in philosophy from the Humboldt University for his dissertation Sensuous Framing: Fundamentals of a Strategy to Realize Conditions of Perception. From 2008 to 2012 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment at the Humboldt University and visiting professor at the MA Choreography at the Inter- University Centre for Dance Berlin. In 2012 he led the research team at the Berlin.

      An Mertens is artist, writer, and core-member of Constant, an artist run organisation for experimental art and media in Brussels. Next to a practise of literary creation using algorithms, she is also a nature guide in Forêt de Soignes and writing fiction with a particular interest for the non-human presences in woods.
http://constantvzw.org, http://www.algolit.net, http://www.paramoulipist.be/

      Daniela Bershan aka Baba Electronica is a love worker using visual arts, performance, music making and social organization around topics of collective study, care-making and practices of (non-sexual) intimacy. In her work she conceptualizes not just the characteristics of her materials but with and through them the skills and objects they can be read with: the DJ, the remixer, the researcher, the love-worker are dissecting choreographies and scores in order to make tangible how they operate; and enable to organize relations otherwise. They are committed to experiment and circulate with queering tools. Bershan co-founded and directed FATFORM (NL), and is co-organizing ELSEWHERE & OTHERWISE at Performing Arts Forum (FR). Her works, projects and performances have been presented worldwide.

       

       
    • 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

    • postgraduate program
    • a.pass meets School of Love
    • block 2018/III
    • a.pass meets SOL / School Of Love A curatorial proposition by Adva Zakai
      03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • apass
    • apass
    • 03 September 2018
    • 30 November 2018
    • a.pass meets SOL / School Of Love

      From Sep till Nov 2018 a.pass and 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. SOL is basically an invitation to hang out. But to hang out deeply. To practice school as a place of free time – free to study things as they appear, separated from the dependency on the time and space of social order and production. And to practice love – Not the kind of love that is generated through affirmation of who we think we are, but love as an act of giving by allowing it to transform us.

      And 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..

      Alongside the weekly meetings of SOL at a.pass, a program of study days and workshops will look into various aspects that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics. Those sessions will be led by: Johan Grimonprez, Bleri Lleshi, Femke Snelting, Brandon LaBelle, Eva Berghmans, CW/ Common Wallet project, Jan Masschelein, Laurence Rassel, Caroline Godard, Elke Van Campenhout, João Fiadeiro, Alex Arteaga, An Mertens, Daniela Bershan.

      Study Days Program


      Joining in:
      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

      * Adva Zakai is a part of the SOL collective. SOL's protocol can be practiced by anyone and anywhere, be modified and transformed through the encounter with a new context.

       
    •  

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       
       

      REMINDER
      This Friday 1 & Saturday 2 February 

      end communications of a.pass

      Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens
      and Eleanor Ivory Weber

      @ Hectolitre (MAROLLEN - Brussels) 

      Friday 1 & Saturday 2 February 2019
      from 18:00 to 22:00
      @Hectolitre - Rue de Hectolitre 3, 1000 Brussels


      Schedule: 

      18:00 food & drinks 

      18:30 Subtracted Seduction

      19:00 Subverses I: Play 

      Break

      20:00 7 anxieties and the world

      20:30 Subverses II : Glossolalien missive

      Break

      21:15 Subverses III

      21:30 The big gesture is many small gestures dispersed

      Performances by Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens

      With contributions by
      Subtracted Seduction: sound editing and mixing Teresa Cos
      Subverses I & III: performers Lydia McGlinchey, Marcus Bergner
      7 anxieties and the world: sound mixing Marko Radišić

      LISTEN TO THE TRAILER

      On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      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

       
       

       

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

       

       

      This is 1000 liter fuel. So-

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

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

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

       

      SCORESCAPES BOOK LAUNCH

      Medium Score -Tectonic Friendship & End Presentations  Writing Score

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

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

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

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

      Design: Miriam Hempel www.daretoknow.co.uk

       

       

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

      Rue de Liverpool 24, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean

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

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

      1 Rue du Pene, 1000 Brussels

       

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

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

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

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

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

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

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

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

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

      a.pass end-communications of: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      Scorescapes

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

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

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

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

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

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


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

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

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

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

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

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

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

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

       

       

    • Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 


      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
    •  

       

      Milieus, Associations, Sieves and other matters

      some orientation guidelines

       

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

       


      Proposal


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

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

       

       

      Organisation / Trajectory

       

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

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

       


      2. Three theoretical study days

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


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


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

       

       

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

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

       

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

      some documentation of the process here

       

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

       

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

       

       

       

      Milieus, Associations, Sieves and other matters

      some justifications

       

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

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

       

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

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

      -Constructivism, technical mentality and artistic research

      -Simondon and artistic research : a promising diffractive equation

      .

      ... to be continued...

       

       

       

       

       

       

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

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


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

       

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

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

      AND

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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


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

    • 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).
       
    • In analogy  – or response – to the idea of a Pattern Language as Christopher Alexander described it in 1970’s the researchers at a.pass tried to understand how a pattern language could be written for the context of artistic research and especially for the creation of good conditions for the practice of research as an art form.


      The team around Alexander described patterns as following:
      “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to the problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million time over, without ever doing the same thing twice.” Ch. Alexander, 1977.
      In general we were able to imagine the translatability of this approach to our environment, yet the here described problem-solution relationship didn’t feel appropriate for the arts and especially not for the ways research may take – from the unknown into the unknown. For the sake of workability we propose to translate problems in to needs, issues, or question and solution into (good) practice, proposition or even speculation. 
      However we decided to take the experiment to the test and try to apply the protocol Alexander proposes for the writing of a pattern onto our writing in order to discover where this protocol finds its borders.
      The language of those patterns and it’s function Alexander describes as following:
      “[The order of the patterns] is presented as a straight linear sequence, [and] is essential to the way the language works. […]
What is most important about this sequence, is that it is based on the connections between the patterns. Each
pattern is connected to certain “larger” patterns which come above it in the language, and to certain “smaller” patterns which come below it in the language. In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.”  Ch. Alexander, 1977.
      The order of the actual ‘sentence’ that one want to create from this language for her/his concrete case is as much free as it is in a spoken or written language. Words can’t be placed in what ever kind of order, there is always a specific syntax and grammatical structure required by a specific language –  yet quite everything can be said and in most cases language finally allows for a quite a great redundancy. One can say a sentence in a grammatically ‘wrong’ way, yet one understand what you mean.

       

       

       

       

       

       
    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Reclaiming economy - it's art anyway an evening on the self-governing of fairness
      08 March 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Alberto Cossu / Ronny Heiremans / Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass / starting at 19:00
    • 16 March 2018
    • 16 March 2018
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Reclaiming economy - it's art anyway

      In the last couple of months a.pass was investigating the impact of economic and institutional conditions onto artistic research practices and the possibilities to impact those conditions through the very same artistic practices. Institutional critique and alternative economic concepts are strongly related when it comes to the creation of differing conditions.

      SOTA, state of the arts, is engaging since several years in influencing cultural policy in Belgium. Now SOTA proposes a yearly summer camp as a gathering of all workers in the cultural sector to discuss the notion of fair practice and the creation of an Almanac as an evolving political instrument. 

      For the evening of March 16 a.pass has invited together with SOTA Alberto Cossu to meet with Ronny Heiremans, who both engage with their practices in different ways of discussing and changing the conditions for artistic practices.
      In the Project CAVEAT Ronny Herremans and Katleen Vermeir take contracts used in the Belgium art context as a starting point for a reconfiguration of the position of the artist in society. In their investigation they look into the legal, social and artistic consequences of the structuring framework a contract provides and use it as a lens to look at questions of authorship, labour situation, price politics or political solidarity.

      As sociologist and activist, Alberto Cossu in contrast, is situated in the conditions of an occupied space in Italy – the MACAO in Milano that he joined since its inception in 2012. MACAO is an independent center for art, culture and research. Rejecting the creative industry paradigm, and innovating the idea of cultural institutions, MACAO considers art production as a viable process for changing social, political and economic conditions. MACAO developed its own crypto-currency, provides a context for the research on innovative governance and discusses the labour conditions in the cultural sector.

      Ronny Heiremans and Alberto Cossu are meeting each other this evening the first time to discuss principles of self-organisation and the creation of condition under which artistic practice can unfold a reclaimed economy that serves the common livelihood.

    • 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

       

    • Close Encounters is the name of a series of presentations and public conversations produced by the a.pass Research Centre during this block, which takes place when researchers are invited, or feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. These light and irregular 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 the events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, one rule remains for all: the format must be in dialog with a guest who is invited to expand on the presented research, the topic discussed or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. The Close Encounters series holds a double intention of getting a closer look at things and of approaching somebody closely and try to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research and its current nature, function and conditions of possibility: What to study? What to research? What to practice?

    • AAA
       
      The Research Center at a.pass is a platform for advanced research practices in the arts. It invites five to six associated researchers per one year cycle to develop their artistic research practice in a 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 performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions etc) experimental research set ups and collaborations.  The Center cohabits with the self-educational processes of the a.pass post-master program and functions as a resource for reflection on methodologies of collaborative research.

      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, apass is assembling an intense reflection on modes of study, knowledge production and knowledge sharing 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 the ongoing negotiation between its stakeholders, contextual fields and discourses. a.pass interacts with academic, activist, 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.
       
      a.pass offers a collaborative environment for the development of artistic research. Five to six researchers join the Research Center for a one year cycle. They are accompanied by three Research Curators that consecutively take care of the center. The activities of the research center are organised around performative publishing, engagement with external research situations and peer reviewing/collective mentoring. Research is developed, shared and performed in public lectures, workshops, conferences, publications, performances and other experimental set-ups. The Research Center meets on a bi-weekly basis to self-organise and share processes. In addition, research curators are available for individual meetings.
       
      Associated researchers are seen as partners of a.pass. They have access to the collective activities of the post-master program. a.pass provides technical support, workspace and supports performative publishing. Associated researchers do not pay a fee. a.pass can act as an institutional partner in applications for funding or academic research. The specific terms of the association will be formulated in an individual contract between the researcher and a.pass, delineating the research steps that will be developed within the a.pass environment and their possible public outcomes.
    • reading session
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Text processing characters, language and code
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Monday Readings
    • a.pass, 3rd floor
    • 15 January 2018
    • Text processing

      This first Monday Reading will be dedicated to text processing. We will discuss concepts such as What You See Is What You Get (WISYWYG), the virtues of ascii, what the differences are between writing, language, code, formatting and markup, and how our keyboards perform.

      As a way to map the long-term legacies that are implied in each of our keystrokes, we will play with a Teletype Model 33, one of the most widespread computer interfaces in the 1960s.

       

      [caption id="attachment_7199" align="alignleft" width="320"] A.Audsley[/caption][caption id="attachment_7202" align="alignleft" width="150"] vintagecomputer.net[/caption]

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

      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 one or two 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.

    • 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.

    • reading session
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Encoding and compression Monday Readings
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Monday Readings
    • a.pass, 3rd floor
    • 26 February 2018
    • Encoding and compression
      "Codecs perform encoding and decoding on a data stream or signal, usually in the interest of compressing video, speech, or music. [...] Software such as codecs poses several analytical problems. Firstly they are monstrously complicated. [...] Second, at a phenomenological level, they deeply influence the very texture, flow and materiality of sounds and images. [...] Third from the perspective of political economy, codecs structure contemporary media economies and culture in important ways. [...] Despite or perhaps because of their convoluted obscurity, codecs catalyze new relations between people, things, spaces and times in events and forms." Adrian Mckenzie, "Codecs" in: Matthew Fuller (eds), Software Studies, a lexicon (2008)
       
       
      The third Monday Reading starts with poking holes in different image and video-files. From there we will try put the vocabulary of encoding and compression (Codec, Container, Compression, Interpolation, Interlacing, Artifact, Bitstream, Sampling, Conversion, ...) together with some of the key terms in the work of the philosopher Gilbert Simondon (Allagmatics, Transduction, Analogy, Individuation, Cybernetics, ...). How do structures make operations appear, and vice versa?

      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 one or two 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.

    • reading session
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Keycards Movement, security, smartness
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Monday Readings
    • a.pass, 3rd floor
    • 19 March 2018
    • Keycards

      For this Monday Reading we will follow the path of the keycard system that opens the outside doors at a.pass. What does it mean when opening a door becomes part of a data-flow?

      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 one or two 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.

    • reading session
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Databases Stickyness, stopping points, consistency, routines, mnemosyne
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Monday Readings
    • a.pass, 3rd floor
    • 16 April 2018
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • Databases

      This Monday Reading prepared with Sina Seifee will be dedicated to the intricate structures of the ubiquitous database. Browsing the tables and rows of this very website, we will try to graps the affordances and limits of organising the world as a collection of digital data.

      Image: Mark Manders, Two Interconnected Houses (2010)

      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 one or two 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.

    • reading session
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Streaming media on demand, content-delivery, broadcast
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Monday Readings
    • Szenne Artlab, Anneessensstraat 2
    • 16 June 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Streaming media

      This extra edition of the Monday reading actually takes place on a Saturday in Szenne artlab. In the context of Parallel-parasite, a residency of the a.pass Research Center, we will focus on the shape-shifting nature of streaming media. After sessions on text processing, local servers and key cards, we will continue with an exploration of streaming, a coverall term for the dominant way that audio and visual content is being delivered on the Internet today. We will read into the different technical protocols that are regulating those flows, and the diverging economies that software like Torrent trackers and companies like Youtube, Netflix construct. By considering how the continuous experience of streaming relies on various politics of separation, re-ordering discrete elements on delivery, we will observe how the production, sharing and consumption of media is radically changing. Session organised with Martino Morandi.

      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 one or two related texts.

      Reading materials: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/apass.mondayreadings

      Schedule

      11:00-13:00: Reading tools
      13:00-14:00: Lunch
      14:00-16:00: Reading texts

      If possible, bring a laptop.  Participation is free.

    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Boundaries do not sit still Research centre 18/I curated by Femke Snelting
      05 January 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • 01 January 2018
    • 30 April 2018
    • Boundaries do not sit still

      In Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, feminist theorist Karen Barad examines how apparatuses stabilize and destabilize boundaries. “Apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted.” she writes.

      As an ‘external guest’ invited into the research center from January until April 2018, I would like to turn Barad’s parental advisory into an invitation to experiment, speculate and reflect on the intra-actions through which in- and exclusionary boundaries are performed in a.pass itself.

      Boundaries do not sit still follows from a long interest in the interdependent relations between technology and practice, resulting in a series of projects and questions that have been invited into dialogue with a.pass at several occasions.

      How do digital tools and artistic research co-construct each other? How are gestures, discourses and behaviours shaped, oriented, communicated and defined through the (digital) apparatuses at work? How is research articulated and in what way are its boundaries enacted through software, infrastructures and devices?

      These questions will be addressed in mentorings, informal meetings within/around a.pass and in research activities related to The Possible Bodies inventory. In addition, the research centre will host five Monday Readings (with Martino Morandi, Seda Guerses and Sina Seifee).

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • How do we do the things that we do? #2 a rewrite of twelve design principles
      29 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Florian Feigl
    • 26 February 2018
    • 02 March 2018
    • How do we do the things that we do? #2

      In this second period of my visit in the a.pass block „making/conditions“ I want to propose a sequence of practical, object based approaches that allow to broaden perspectives on the individual research projects as well as oon the over arching theme of this block.

      How do the objects, thus the different elements and entities of an individual research perform. How do they interact with us, human agents, and with other elements, what suppoprt do they need, how would this potentially articulate the individual research processes as processes of radical imagination (Katja Rothe).

      Each participants is asked to bring three objects (not more then five if you cannot decide). The practical sessions will be slow approaches towards the objects starting with drawing, associating, moving, writing. These first approaches will be followed by a series of exercises focusing on spatial constellations based on improvisation and movement introducing strategies of composition and sequencing. In a concluding session we elaborate based on these previous experiencies micro sequences of possible performances: performances of the objects, performances for and with the objects.

      The sessions are based on individual and group exercises. Practical exercises will be followed by group evaluation.

      To accompagny this practice based research we will read in depth a text by Katja Rothe „Permaculture Design Praxis“ and discuss basic terms, ideas and visualizations from permaculture design practice (Mollision, Holmgren). Experiences and results from both the practical and more discursive approaches will be related to your ongoing research and developments in the formulation and desgin of patterns and their articulations in the spatial situation in the common studio and work schedules.

      Schedule.

      We will work from Monday to Friday, 10.00 to 17.00. Depending on the days each day will be divided rouhgly into two blocks of three hours with a one hour lunch break. Or three blocks of two hours with a lunch break.

      Day 1:

      Katja Rothe „Permaculture Design Praxis“ – reading and exchanging – part 1

      Introduction of object based, practical work, exchange and clarifications regarding objects

      You don‘t need to have your objects fixed and prepared already – you are welcome though. However, a rough idea would be good. Because on day 2 you will need to have them with you.

      Day 2:

      Katja Rothe „Permaculture Design Praxis“ – reading and exchanging – part 2

      Practical session: First exercises with the objects. Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      Day 3:

      permacultural design practice part 1: the zone model, edge effect – introduction, exchange, discussion

      Practical session: exercises with the objects – spatial constelllation – part 1.

      Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      Day 4:

      permacultural design practice part 2: twelve design principles – introduction, exchange, discussion

      Practical session: exercises with the objects – spatial constelllation – part 2.

      Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      Day 5:

      Practical session: object work – sequencing and micro performances

      Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      revisiting patterns

      revisiting ideas of performance

      revisiting conditions

      Requirements:

      As the days, the discursive inputs and practical exercises build up from day to day full-time commitment is required from the whole group of participants. Individual necessities can be discussed in advance but can be accomodated only as exceptions. Please contact me latest until Wednesday, February 21st und mail@florianfeigl.com

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • How do we do the things that we do? a rewrite of twelve design principles
      29 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Florian Feigl
    • 18 January 2018
    • 19 January 2018
    • How do we do the things that we do?

      Florian Feigl is a practitioner and scholar, maker and facilitator in the broader field of time-based art and more specifically of performance as art. Artistic research, artistic process, making as production of knowledge occupy focal areas of his doing and thinking.

      The proposal for the two work periods in January and February is to analyse, discuss and introduce strategies and methodological approaches as articulated in permaculture desgin practice (Mollison, Holmgren) in relation to the Pattern Theory (Alexander) towards an environ-mental & corpo-real understanding of artistic process and artistic research.

      Florian comes as a visiting researcher. The idea is to support the current research within the „Making / Conditions“ block at a.pass, to engage with the processes under way, to collaborate in designing situations and spaces of making and understand the diverse conditions.

      What he bring:
      - Some basic ideas and principles of permacultural design practice,
      - some related texts and theoretical bodies,
      - practical experimental tools and approaches from the realm of object based performance art & composition.

       

      Some general remarks:

      As practitioner and scholar, maker and facilitator in the broader field of time-based art and more specifically of performance as art terms such as „artistic research“, „artistic process“, „making as production fo knowledge“ occupy focal areas of my doing and thinking. And I couldn‘t miss noticing that these terms gain weight & visibility in the field of contemporary art making, art discourse and also art education. At the same time the very terms – without the prefixed „artistic“ – are used and at times seemingly valued when it comes to descriptions in the fields of science, politics and economics (to name some out of many) and increasingly in the world of contemporary entrepreneurship.

      Now these are developments that are already around for a while: Boltanski/Chiapello‘s „New Spirit of Capitalism“ (1999), Jon McKenzie‘s „Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance“ (2001) could be mentioned as landmarks that articulated, described, and critically reviewed the development beyond the closer field of art a while ago.

      However, there are still some blank spots left. Maybe most importantly: There are still no systematic descriptions or broader agreements on what it actually should be this „artistic process“, „artistic research“. What makes it different from other all kinds of processes and researches? To avoid misunderstandings: I would not propose to aim for a general definition to nail the issue for good. (Most probably the value of the terms lies to a certain extent in the flexible quality.) But my suspicion is that on the one hand the „je ne sais quoi“ and highly individual qualities assigned to individual „artistic processes and researches“ are based on still prevailing 19th century ideas and role models when it comes to art making. And on the other hand makes the terms so highly susceptible to be occupied and taken over by ever hungry economic ideologies, the dictate of economic surplus value and individual improvement. (We all still remember how „the artist“ became a model for „the new worker“– and suffer from the results.) Making artist into better entreprenuers has to stop.

      Instead: let‘s adress and describe how we do the things that we do to make better art and produce new and better environments for a truely contemporary art making,

      My proposal is to apply and further analyse strategies and methodological approaches – as articulated in permaculture desgin practice (Mollison, Holmgren) – to develop a contemporary environ-mental & corpo-real understanding of artistic process and artistic research. Is it possible to develop and describe artistic practice as complexe environment? What if we focus on details and design patterns which include and relate to agents beyond the artist, his/her intuition, imagery and narrations, scarce funding situations and imagined focus groups? Will this allow to understand and design more precise work situations? Will this allow to create a different understanding, describe and apply a relational, environ-mental and corpo-real understanding of choice & decision, image & process?

       

      Further reading:

      ecologies_of_making_florian_feigl

       

    • 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.

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Block 18/I: making / conditions curated by Nicolas Galeazzi
      19 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 08 January 2018
    • 01 April 2018
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Block 18/I: making / conditions

       ''Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and economy have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production.''
      Chantal Mouffe 

       

      What is the position of the arts in a completely economized society? What kind of answers do we find towards the increasing entrepreneurial demands? How to keep a discourse about values apart from finances? How to create conditions and institutions that allow us to continue asking these questions with view to a greater societal picture?

      This block combines institutional critique with a fundamental unravling of Performance in its various interpretations in economy, administration, performing art, and sociology. To put performance as a term into the centre between art and economy, is pointing at the fundamental misunderstandings and simultaneous interdependence between these two fields.

      Performance stands for productivity and efficiency as much as for doing, being present, representation, and the transformative power of speech. In between the different interpretations one question appeares very clearly: What are we doing? Beyond the Leninist version of this proverb (What is to be done?), this question not only points to a future productivity (What are we creating?) or a struggle against/for the institution (Under what conditions are we doing and making?). It points to the creation of the framework in which this question can be posed with regard to the basic values of life (How do we live?). In this way all the different understandings of performance aim at transformation or even change.

      In the last decades economy became more and more the overarching concept that incorporates all aspects of life and channels all living efforts. The Arts contributed to this development in multiple ways and acted - consciously or not - as a role model in the process of this economization in many ways.

      For a big majority of the population the economization and finanzialisation of their life means to loose access to common resources and with that the control over the self-creation of their living conditions. At the same time the neoliberal doctrine turned the full responsibility for these conditions onto the individual and diminishes solidarity and democratic processes.

      Being critical and self-critical of this development, the arts must take the performative power inherent in its role model serious and needs to devise new instruments for concrete change and new institutional formats to respond to this development in order to keep the creation of societally viable living and working conditions in their hands.

      Searching for the relationship between the artistic research practice and the creation of its own legal, economic, administrative condition, we try to detect common working patterns that enable us to create our own conditions. Using the concept of Pattern Language developed by Christopher Alexander in late 1970’s we try to come up with practical building blocks to think a radical artistic research practice within, and in response to, the contemporary economic and political constraints.

       

       
    •  

       

      1 research platform
       
      In its core a.pass is a platform for professionals in the fields of arts and theory who wish to engage in a self assigned research topic. It provides a place and infrastructure to meet other researchers, collaborate on some aspects of the work, get feedback on the project, develop one’s methodology and to widen one’s theoretical and practical scope through critique, mentoring and feedback. 
       
       
      2 educational platform questioning artistic research
       
      A.pass institute defines and activates artistic research by accumulative process and critique.
      Embracing the fact that artistic research is becoming a category of production in the cultural field, a.pass does not claim it as it’s goal or premise to be able delineate the borders of this particular methodology. A.pass affirms this apparent lack of definition as a chance. Operating without a predefined notion of what „artistic research“ is, it creates and brings together a pluralistic overview of the existing notions of this practice.
      An affirmative survey towards the question „what is an artistic research?“ has therefore become one of apass' defining methodologies: apass strives to host a multitude of practices in the arts which self-define themselves as research. Their definitions of what a research praxis in the arts is are at times complementing and at times contradicting each other. This dis/agreement creates a polivocal platform of definitions and is a statement towards a different conception of institutions: away from essentialist claims and towards a more politicised platform of engagement with a certain discipline.
      Some of the methods of this study methodology are:
      -a.pass frequently invites research practitioners in the arts to work with the researchers of the institute.
      -a.pass invests in creating occasions for public discussions of what artistic research is and in presenting the researches work to the general public.
      -a.pass is producing a library of research methodologies by publishing individual and collective research cases.
      -a.pass is presenting itself as a platform for the exchange, implementations and experimentation of research methodologies. 
       
       
      3. questioning teaching
       
      a.pass is a platform which educates and sets an agenda of learning for its participants. It is building its curriculum by inviting advanced practitioners in the arts to actively engage the participants into and around their research within a framework of workshops, ateliers, collective practices or scores. This work is not framed as a teaching as such, but as a process of collective exploration. Experimental formats of collective and collaborative research are frequently proposed and developed in such a framework. The traditional professor-student relationship is put into question here and has to be re-negotiated as a dialogue while a diverse group of practices is admitted as „teaching“.
      a.pass develops teaching practices which engage with the question of how the process of knowledge production and transfer can be framed otherwise outside the persistent hierarchies within the processes of learning and education. 
       
       
      4. meeting point
       
      Beyond its defined curriculum and methods a.pass has in general become an informal meeting point of professionals in the arts on many levels of professionalization. Many contacts and collaborations that have been initiated at a.pass continue well beyond the one-year time-frame of the post-master program. It is a productive hub for the Brussels art scene. 
       
       
      5. experimental institute
       
      A.pass’ work includes research into the formation and politics of educational institutions. By collecting innovative methodologies of research, facilitating educational experimentation and by maintaining an institutional openness, a.pass affirms and continues to be an experimental institute/institution, a place of engaged research of what education in the arts is today. 
    • research center
    • defining a.pass
    • Artistic Research & a.pass : a critical practice by Elke Van Campenhout (2015)
      30 November 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
      Artistic Research & a.pass : a critical practice

       


               1. Questioning artistic research

       

      To clarify what kind of research a.pass sustains, a minimum of conceptual transparency is needed. When we combine the terms ‘research’ and ‘artistic’, most of the time we are dealing with a research ON the arts (art history, musicology, theatre sciences, aspects of cultural sociology, aesthetics etc...) or a research IN the arts (a research that is part of a (regular) artistic practice). What we in a.pass consider as artistic research – a term that is often understood in reference to the Anglo-Saxon models for practice-based research – often is the result of a research in the arts, but cannot be reduced to it. A.pass doesn’t want to limit its range of research to the ‘artist research’ full stop: the necessarily research-oriented attitude that accompanies any kind of serious artistic endeavour, which does not necessarily have any link to the communication and valorization of research results as it is demanded in an academic context. ‘Research’, as it is understood in the artistic practice, is an evident part of this practice which allows for a result-oriented reflection on the work, or in other words: a research oriented towards the production of the art work as a product, as a repertory and/or as an oeuvre. In the a.pass environment, and in a playful questioning of the ‘academic’ research mind-set, this individual artist is not the sole focus of attention, or at least not in the sense that we perceive our researchers as artists tout court. An artist research has an inherent logic and validity, but does not necessarily have a need to be communicative to an outside community in any other form than through the production of art works. A.pass reflects on a research in the arts that is more than a report – in the art work itself or in the accompanying dissertation – of the individual research of an artist. What we consider an artistic research project is rather: ‘a new practice in the arts, which differs from the individual artist practice, as well as from the art historical or scientific research practice. One researches not only the art through the art works, but the functioning of art and the breadth of the art practice by way of interdisciplinary interventions in the (semi-)public, societal domain. Artistic research is an interdisciplinary concentration around a ‘binding’ problem that catches the attention of a pluriform group of participants.’ (Jouke Kleerebeezem, De Witte Raaf) This means that a question in the research of a.pass is always situated in a broader context than that of the sole artist: a lot of the questions that are posed in a.pass generate collective discussions and critique, find their way (partly) into other researches or attempt temporary coalitions in the defining and/or broadening up of a certain problematics. Important in this environment is the shared reflection concerning ways of working, diverse understandings of artistic research, the development of (post-disciplinary) perspectives and the experimentation with methodologies and strategies. The work of the artistic researcher does not coincide with the work of the artist in the sense that it is self-conscious, and explicitly communicates and circulates this self-reflection within a wider group of stakeholders. In other words, the emphasis in this kind of research is not so much on the conception and production of an art work – although this undeniably and unavoidably is part of the whole of the research – but rather on a questioning that puts the individual art practice and even the recognizable mono-discipline in a wider perspective. This kind of research originates from and builds on the demands and problematics of a shared debate, and can be approached by different specialist researchers, each addressing the question out of his own domain. The length, the quality criteria, the form, the communication strategies and the required ‘relevance’ of the research – and thus also the understanding of the requirements of the PhD -project that might eventually result out from it- are thus in principle dependent on the context and have to be negotiated on a project base between the researcher and the institution(s) involved. It is in this case very important to recognize a wider ‘public’, the potential users of this research, as a partner in this trajectory, and to develop the appropriate communication channels to make this participation possible.   

             

                   2. Constructing a general intellect

       

      Other than the ‘artist’s research’, artistic research overwrites the isolation and the hermetics of art production in the classical sense, in addressing in one way or another a socially relevant problematics. This kind of artistic research opens up new ways for the creation of a ‘generous cultural memory’. But at the same time the societal relevance of this research cannot coincide with its utilitarian value, since the direct impact of the research practice and reflection necessarily develops through artistic, affective gestures of experimentation and communication that resonate with, but never answer to, the concrete questions posed within the societal fabric. This kind of research thus will only influence the daily social, political, economic or scientific reality by a detour, through the unsettling of its self-reflection and imagination(s). This independent position, free from any preconditioned political preconceptions, economic value or socially determined relevance is a necessary and undeniable characteristic of this research practice. More than a pragmatic laboratory for the production of answers on societal questions, the research platform that is a.pass offers the possibility to construct a ‘general intellect’: a way of working wherein researchers collectively give form to diverse practices to produce and articulate knowledge in an open, shared research environment.          

       

                  3. Investigating divergent forms of knowledge

       

      In a.pass the relevance of the research is measured by the degree in which researchers, out of their different backgrounds and knowledge horizons, manage to formulate innovative perspectives on potential knowledge production, as well as on the development of tools to share and experiment this knowledge on the public scene. It is clear that the development of this kind of research environment also resonates with other institutions for art education on an (inter)national scale. Artistic research in a.pass can be seen as a third way, wedged in between the artistic practice as such and the more academic understanding of knowledge production. Different from the artistic practice the research is not limited to the individual trajectory, the personal questioning and aesthetics of the artist. But at the same time the art practice does take a central role in the development of new perspectives and methodologies, a way of working that relates to, but doesn’t coincide with, and even explicitly questions an academic AND an artistic framework. Artistic research in a.pass is not limited to the development of arts-practice-related knowledge, but also involves the creation and testing of formats, methodologies, communication strategies and shared practices, ‘tools for collaboration and communication’, that broaden up the understanding of artistic research from an art work with paper validation form to a more critical investigation into the statute, the circulation and the valuation of divergent forms of knowledge. 

       

               4. contextualising a singularity

       

      The a.pass Post-master Program and Research Centre are positioned within a larger context of the arts and education, and develops its working out of a questioning of the current organization of artistic and educational (institutional) practices. In its trajectory, a.pass has on all levels of its organization critically reflected upon the economy of knowledge as it is being employed today in higher education and the media, the logics of the arts market, the recuperation of institutional critique by the institutions themselves, the capitalist drive for the new, the seductive and the quickly consumable, and the role and responsibility of the artist researcher in all of this.
      In a.pass the relevance of the research is measured by the degree in which researchers, out of their different backgrounds and knowledge horizons, manage to formulate innovative perspectives on potential knowledge production, as well as on the development of tools to share and experiment this knowledge on the public scene. It is clear that this kind of research environment also resonates with other institutions for art education on an (inter)national scale. Artistic research in a.pass can be seen as a third way, wedged in between the artistic practice as such and the more academic understanding of knowledge production. Different from the artistic practice the research is not limited to the individual trajectory, the personal questioning and aesthetics of the artist. But at the same time the artistic practice does take on a central role in the development of new perspectives and methodologies, a way of working that relates to, but doesn’t coincide with, and even explicitly questions an academic AND an artistic framework. Artistic research in a.pass is not limited to the development of arts-practice-related knowledge, but also involves the creation and testing of formats, methodologies, communication strategies and shared practices, ‘tools for collaboration and communication’, that broaden up the understanding of artistic research from an art work with paper validation form to a more critical investigation into the statute, the circulation and the valuation of divergent forms of knowledge.
      This means that a.pass is an environment that reflects and practices knowledge and artistic strategies with the windows open to an outside reality. In that sense a.pass is not so much a preparation for the ‘professional life’, as it is a putting-into-question of what these professional sectors (both the artistic and educational organizations of institutes, values and work) are symptoms of. Throughout the years, a.pass has used its own institutional status – and the opportunities offered by being an artistic educational program embedded in a larger network of schools, art centres, research places, workspaces, etc… – to seriously reconsider its role, and the role of the artist researchers within the current ethical, political, economic and social context of knowledge production and sharing.
      On the level of ethics this means that we consider both the institute as the institute’s participants to be part of a larger network of relations, that give them their value and meaning. In a.pass the relation between the ‘I’ of the researcher and the provisional construction of the ‘We’ of the research practice within the institute, is a recurring, and politically charged, topic. The institute here is considered as an experimental field to try out strategies for the now and the future within a larger society. A.pass gives a lot of attention to the transindividual character of practice and knowledge, and how the collective environment can be both a source of frustration and feedback, as of nourishment and challenge to the individual researcher’s trajectory. Also, a.pass in that sense always takes the ‘ethical’ concreteness, the situational reality of research seriously: artistic research is always already embedded in the relations that produce it, and these relations encompass elements of discourse, social and economic factors and spatial settings, as well as institutional givens, societal demands and resources at hand. Therefore an artistic research strategy or outcome is not transparently reproducible without changing in the process. The ethical (here understood as relational and situational) character of the research, makes it resistant to commodification on a larger scale. But this doesn’t mean that the research can not be communicated or shared, using strategies that differ from the promise of serial reproduction.
      This interest in the transindividual character of learning and research, however, does not exclude a strong focus and interest in the development of the individual’s trajectories. Since the institute can not function without the invested interest and contributions to the common environment of the researchers, a.pass strives towards creating an environment in which the aesthetic and artistic idiosyncratic qualities of each practice can be challenged into being. A.pass considers the artist researcher not so much as an artist-producer of work, but as an artist-researcher, reflecting self-critically on the trajectory already accomplished, and reconsidering the notions of work, value, the market, responsiveness and responsibility through the practicing of the research. A.pass encourages the exploration of ‘risky’ practices that do not directly correspond to the current demands of the arts market or academic understandings of research, in order to create an experimental environment in which certainties can be subverted, undermined, or simply reappraised from another point of view.

       

       

    • 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

       

       

    • 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 dialogue on Active Archives Nicolas Malevé / Femke Snelting
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Close Encounters series
    • Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080
    • 27 January 2018
    • A dialogue on Active Archives

       

       

      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.

       

       

      Saturday January 27th, 15:00-18:00 @ Manchesterstraat, 17 - 1080 Brussels

       

      A DIALOGUE ON ACTIVE ARCHIVES WITH NICOLAS MALEVE AND FEMKE SNELTING

       

       

      “Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.”

      (Manifesto for an Active Archive, 2006)

       

      As a young institute for artistic research, a.pass currently reflects on modes of documenting, archiving, publishing and sharing. These modes should mirror its criticality, singular modes of operation, agonistic environment and ongoing reformulation of tools, practices and research. Moreover, the institute is concerned with a complex equation: how to develop an attitude towards archiving and dissemination that combine a critique of the usual institutional ‘archival reason’, while producing and sharing readable (structured) 'forms of knowledge'? Or, how to avoid and/or assume commodification, reification and authority while documenting and archiving polymorph artistic research practices and discourses? Ultimately a.pass wants to engage with documenting, archiving and disseminating -independent and experimental artistic research practices- to produce an ecology of text critique and to find inventive modes of co-operation and fair technological practices interlacing politically in non-innocent and least toxic ways. In the context of these current reflections and within the series Close Encounters, Nicolas Malevé and Femke Snelting both invited by a.pass researcher Pierre Rubio will discuss the long history of Active Archive, as a case study and exemplary project/practice.

      Active Archives started in 2006 as a Constant project, out of concern with the digital archiving and publishing practices within, and between cultural institutions. The project functions as a context for the development of tools and practices that provide a real possibility for sharing. It creates environments where ‘letting go’ is acknowledged as a necessary and desirable gesture. Active Archives has evolved through different projects/forms, and is currently activated by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé in the context of the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism .

      What can the different iterations of Active Archives tell us about the condition of engaged artists-researchers-archivists? What were the historical conditions that stimulated its genesis? And after all these years -punctuated by profound technological, cultural and institutional changes- how is its evolution, topicality and relevance today?

       

       

       

      Nicolas Malevé
      Visual artist, computer programmer and data activist, who lives and works between Brussels and London. Nicolas Malevé is currently working on a Phd thesis on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University. He is a member of Constant and the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism. In the Active Archives project, with Michael Murtaugh, he is experimenting with techniques to engage with large collections of visual materials and explore different ways to navigate and question them. Nicolas studies the mutation of the archive in a digital context. How the evolution of machine learning influences computer vision when these techniques are applied on large collections of images. And in this context, how it affects the relationship between training data and the design of algorithms. Nicolas researches how these elements question the supremacy of the human eye in the visual field and how the redefinition of the archive implies to take into account a larger amount of agents, human and non-human for the circulation of visual content. These last five years, Nicolas contributed to exhibitions (documenta12, Kassel; Kiasma, Helsinki), research events (“Archive in Motion”, University of Oslo; Document, Fiction et Droit, Fine Arts Academy, Brussels), and has published in publications by MIT Press and Presses Universitaires de Provence.

       

      Femke Snelting
      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.

       

       

    • [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

       

       

       

    • 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

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

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

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

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


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

      This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone - Brussels

      To inscribe to the master-classes please send an email to production@apass.be


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

      Detailed program:

      Thursday June 22nd

      10:00 > 13:00        Masterclass Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices? Intellectual property seems to be mostly reserved for “fixated” things. Although the European copyright law doesn't exclude variability, during jurisprudences judges consider movements that are “recordable” in some way or another. Agency calls forth different controversies from recorded movements in dance and performance and sport. By paying attention to the consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property right for the protocols inherent to practices, the fragility of the mode of existence of singular art practices is made explicit.

       

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai)

      This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains one of the most commonly used file-formats for transposing movement captured in physical space, to a computational environment. Around this relatively legible format, a rich ecology of software tools developed. The file-format functions as a boundary object between practices and bodies, as it is used by animators, game developers, interface researchers, medical professionals, dance-historians, sports-analysts and engineers.

      Together we will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      The reading of the .bvh file format is developed with Adva Zakai in the context of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, and the matter-cultural conditions of possibility that render them present.

       

      Friday June 23rd

      10:00 >13:00        Exhibition visit (Bozar) and discussion with Vincent Meessen
      Starts at Bozar Main entrance

      In this afternoon, artist Vincent Meessen will take us through his Bozar show, that comes from his recent practice that involves research, historicization, and speculation about congolese works of art that have been commissioned and (re-)contextualized in the early 30’s. Starting from there, we can raise some issues about what a work of art is expected to be and how it can shift meaning with context and neighbouring artefacts.

      More about the show Patterns for (Re)cognition by Tshela Tendu & Vincent Meessen, Opening 16th June at BOZAR: http://www.bozar.be/nl/activities/124891-tshela-tendu-vincent-meessen

       

      14:00 >17:00       Masterclass Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share her research project that has Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table (1932) as a starting point. She will display the process, methods, research protocols and strategies that she has developed over time, and through which she addresses the question of reconstruction, re-enactment and revival from the perspective of the trace, both material and immaterial, in order to analyse the several charges the work contain (social, political, dramatic, emotional...).

      She will share with us how she approached Jooss' work through the archive, the trace and the document, proposing to circumvent the traditional modalities of transmission in dance, in order to probe the archive’s "capabilities" to say the work, as well to examine the archive's "becoming-work".

      We will observe how the project and its process unfolded simultaneously into two levels: on a documentary research level and on a creation level. With the help of several documents, we will observe how the documentary research was developed, dedicated in part to researching and documenting the perception and transmission of The Green Table, seeking out iconographic material (through the gathering of numerous documents of different kinds), analysing the choreographic characteristics of the work and looking for witnesses – dancers and audience members from different origins and generations, in order to study the perception of the work through the prism of the viewer’s gaze (using the interview as a tool to collect memories, focusing on the importance of the testimony and oral sources).

       

      Saturday June 24th 12:00 > 18:00

      In this afternoon of presentations, screenings, and performances, the four invited practitioners will take us to dive deeper into different case studies.

       

      12:30   Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk

      13:00  Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting will present a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. Together they will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      14:00 Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share some excerpts of Débords, work presented at Les Halles in 2012, as well as some excerpts of the installation she is currently working on, and that was partially presented this Spring at Museum für Neue Kunst, in Freiburg. The presentation will be punctuated with a discussion on the work.

       

      PAUSE

       

      15:30  Vincent Meessen

      Vincent Meessen will screen “One. Two. Three.”, piece presented in Wiels in 2016, followed by a talk about his strategies of re-composition and counter-narratives.

      16:30 Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices?” Thing 001678 (Le Jeune Homme et la Mort) concerns a conflict between on the one hand Roger Eudes, Théâtre Champs-Elysées, and on the other hand Jean Guttmann (Babilée) and Jean Cocteau about the performance Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. On June 8, 1960, the court case Eudes c. Gutmann, Cocteau et autres took place at the Cour d’appel de Paris. Judge Rousselet had to decide who owned the rights over the movements of the performance, Eudes who hired Jean Gutmann to “translate” Jean Cocteau his drama into ballet movements or Cocteau who wrote the script of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.

      17:30 Book launch with Juan Dominguez and Victoria Perez Rojo

      The book Dirty Room is the fourth and last phase of Juan Dominguez’s research, developed during 2015-16 as a.pass associate researcher. Dirty Room is a collection of outlines, notes, ideas, reflections, photographic materials, maps, manifestos, fragments from diaries, transcriptions of conversations, interviews, email exchanges, memoirs, memories and scripts, among other documents from the working and research process that led to Clean Room. Clean Room was a project based on the concept of seriality with a pilot and 3 more seasons of 6 episodes each that took place from 2010 to 2016.

      Dirty Room offers the readers an immersion in the process of the project Clean Room. It is a book in which there are no critical essays, or texts speaking only from the external position of the spectator. All of the contributions are part of the ongoing research and working process of Clean Room, either continually accompanying it over long periods or as one-off contributions at a specific moments. This decision highlights the great potential of the process in its fragmentary, undefined and open nature not only for the transmission of knowledge and ideas, but above all for stimulating imaginative processes to connect with the concerns that set the series in motion.

      Dirty Room

      Edited by: Juan Domínguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

      Editorial: Continta me tienes

      Executive Production: manyone

      Madrid, May 2017

      Translations by Ana Buitrago, Simon Malone and Catherine Phelps

      This is a publication by the a.pass research centre.

       

      About the participants

      Vincent Meessen

      "Transform documents into experiences and vice versa". This phrase by Aby Warburg could definitely be used to introduce Vincent Meessen's speculative realism, or as he calls it: 'documents d'expérience'. His archival investigations always lead to loose associations and appropriative gestures that are rewritten into critical narratives.

      In his latest modular installations he combines films with printed matter and sculptures. Meessen produces narratives that question our ability to deal with the colonial ghosts of modernity. In his recent Vita Nova, he makes use of the filmic essay to re-read Roland Barthes in various postcolonial African situations, applying Barthes's deconstruction tools to some of his famous texts. Vincent Meessen likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives and of conceptual characters. He is a founding member of the artist collective Potential Estate and of the platform for artistic research and production Jubilee (jubilee-art.org).  

      Recent shows include KIOSK (Ghent), ARS 11, Kiasma Museum (Helsinki), Stedelijk Museum Bureau (Amsterdam) and Contour Biennial for Moving Images (Mechelen). He worked together with the collective Potential Estate for the Brussels Biennial and M HKA (Antwerp). His filmworks were screened at Jeu de Paume, at Cinémathèque française (Paris), at Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), at the Swiss Institute (NY) and at international festivals such as IDFA (Amsterdam), IFFR (Rotterdam), Cinéma du Réel (Paris) and Transmediale (Berlin). His films are distributed by Argos center for art & media (Brussels) (see also section on Art Organisations). Meessen has curated several film programs and exhibitions for various institutions including Extra City (Antwerp), Argos (Brussels), C.E.A.C (Xiamen, CH), E.R.B.A (Valence, F).

       

      Agency

      Agency is a Brussels-based initiative founded in 1992, which constitutes a growing list of 'things' that resist the radical split between the classifications of "nature" and "culture" and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and common, mind and body, etc.

       

      Femke Snelting (Possible Bodies)

      Artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, the Brussels-based association for arts and media, and co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP). With delegates Jara Rocha, Seda Guerses and Miriyam Aouragh she takes part in the Darmstadt Delegation, assigned to explore techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist practice and tools. She formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring and recently co-ordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a European partnership investigating inter-relations between free software tools and artistic practice. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (Master Media Design and Communication).

      Possible Bodies is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in contact with the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices. The research is concerned with genealogies of how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted. It interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modelling. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments. Collectors: Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting.

      Her collaborator Adva Zakai is a choreographer, performer and curator who explores how body and language are perceived through each other.

       

      Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto Olga de Soto is choreographer and dance researcher, born in Valencia, she lives in Brussels. She graduates from CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, after having studied classical ballet, contemporary dance and music theory in Valencia and in Madrid. Her creation work begins in 1992, and includes the creation of numerous works of different formats. Since the end of the ’90, her work focuses on the study of memory, and it questions the impact of live art, its usefulness its lasting quality, deploying itself along two axes. The first centres on the study of the body's memory through the creation of works, aiming at a pluralistic approach to dance and the body, in works creations such as anarborescences (Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris, 1999), Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004-2009). The second axis explores works from the history of dance as part of an approach governed by the study of perceptual memory, that of spectators and dancers. The resulting projects emphasize the importance of the processes and pay particular attention to documents, to the process of documentation, to testimony, to archives and oral sources, narrative and storytelling, particularly in works such as histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), An Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010) or Débords (Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2012). These projects are interested in the experience of the viewer and in the anthropology of the spectacle, while developing through an approach that studies the aesthetic experience based on the oral history of works from the past. Her last projects genuinely mix the languages of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts and installation, playing with the porousness of these disciplines. The work of the choreographer also reveals the strong links between art history, social and political history, and personal paths. Olga de Soto’s work has been shown in some twenty countries, an she is regularly invited to teach and to lead workshops and classes in various universities, as well as to collaborate in conferences where she shares her research methodology and her documentation work. She was awarded the SACD Prize 2013 in the category of Performing Arts for both her trajectory and her research work on Dance History, and specially for her research and creation work on The Green Table.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2017/II
    • Medium Score
    • The Problem of the Score
    • The Medium Score Thinking making together apart
      07 May 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Lilia Mestre
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The Medium Score

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

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

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

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

      GENERAL FRAME : MMM - Medium, Methodology, Model

      Medium

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

      Methodology

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

      Model

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


      INSTRUCTIONS

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

      The score is simple. It works as follows:

      Proposition > (X 8 question > reply ) > model

      To start:

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

      The questions

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

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

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

      The replies

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

      Change

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


      PUBLICATION

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


    • [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.

       

       

       

    • 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

       

       

    • 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
    • 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

    •  

       

      Perform Back Score
      Conditions for the emergence of poetics
      A way of life



      Perform Back Score was a proposal for the block Jan/April 2015 of the post masters a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Brussels. The program is based on 4 months blocks throughout the year, each of them concentrating on specific curatorial proposals concerned with contemporary art practices, the present socioeconomic paradigm and the role of education.

      As associate program curator for the first four months of 2014, 2015 and 2016 my focus was and is on how systems of interaction in the arts contribute to the production (process? creation?) of knowledge, first of all in the educational context and consequently, in my belief, in other social environments. I take these systems as scores that, when followed rigorously, demand the implication of individual engagement and resources in a much needed share-ability within a system of production and observation.
      In the act of giving attention to one’s own work, to the other’s work but also to the group and its context, the ecological and social aspects of art making are reflected and expanded. The inter-subjective bound takes place beyond the art works and practices themselves but in the act of paying attention, of observing and being observed.

      In 2014 I proposed in this same context a score for dialogue through writing titled “Writing Scores” where the participants were invited to meet weekly for a Q&A format practice where writing was the tool to deepen the observation of one’s own work methodologies and interests as well as the development of writing itself. This score allowed for valuable understanding of the individual and collective practices and stressed writing as a working tool for collaboration. For this time the focus was on performance as a discursive practice.

      PBScore

      PBScore is a score based on performance as a form of dialogue. For each session each participant presented a maximum 5 minutes long performance  that were showed one after the other without interruption in our weekly meetings. While assisting in each other’s performances, participants took notes and from those notes key words were pronounced to start a discussion about our impressions. At the end of each session participants selected to whom they wanted to reply to the week after and
      in between sessions, a report was written based on the keywords and the conversation that followed. The 9 sessions took place once a week between January and March 2015.
       
      The score participant in each performance exposed his /her own semantics, by constructing a response to another participant, activating a critical standpoint that in its turn become the object of critical observation. The players, by accepting the pre-established rules agreed to play the game that excluded them from daily routine and brought them to a concrete situation limited in time and space. This specific score was dealing simultaneously with the exclusion from daily life or personal  practice and the inclusion in a situation of dialogue through singular aesthetics. The participants instead of relating to material that they select through their interests and methodology had instead to relate to material that came from the other participants, bringing them to relate in ways that were not their usual approach.  The overall format of presentation was also not a familiar one, even though it had the condition of a stage.  A small area formed by mobile walls created a room in a room, a video camera was standing outside the space in the centre, the other participants stood behind the camera unless it was assigned other wise by the performer.
      The same situation re-started the following week at point zero again. The number and the mood of the players changed each time we re-started allowing for radical exposure and deep critic. The week after, the players could have been others, the response to ones previous performance could have not been present ... By playing the score there was the acceptance of inconsistency, of moving in blurry waters, of taking care of the space in between.What kind of attention is given when one spends some time reflecting and trying to respond carefully to another's aesthetic proposal?

      There is a strong political stand point on the giving of time, of taking the other seriously, on paying attention to someone or something that might and most probably will not give you anything concrete back, apart from the sustainability of dialogue indispensable for practicing being alive, being human.


      The score as partner that speaks back /
      Performance as feedback study

      The first impulse to make such a proposal came from my desire to make  art speak through its own practice. I wanted to confront discourse to other forms of language, in this case performance and its discursive potential. Not in a linear, brick by brick, way of constructing meaning, but in an assemblage of atemporal experiences. The performances replied the previous performance creating another time space relationship with the questions that were originated. The meaning was build by bubbles that had affinities between them and these bubbles created a rhyzomatic structure of thought and experience.

      I’m very interested in the idea of emphasising method as a collaborator that makes visible and foregrounds the dialogue between several elements and layers of the art works. When we take the structure of a project as an active collaborator by making its conditions operational and visible, we engage in the observation of those conditions on the work itself, revealing their intrinsic potential for communication, sharing and learning. PBScore intention is to invite the structure to be a partner of reflection, encapsulating the work in restrictions (like time, spacial area, technical tools where all limited) but forcing it to spill over when manipulated, crafted and exposed to others. The score as a structure allowed to set up the rules of the game and generate a dynamic of encounters that were the container for the performance experiences.

      In other words, by proposing an observation standpoint, a frame to look through, the score reflects at the same time the event itself and our individual and collective relation towards it.
      In the case of PBScore, the co-habitation of the performances, the observation lens (score), the subjects and the time we shared, were all partakers in the action of learning and constituted the conditions for the emergence of meaning and its share-ability.

      For example some of the participants decided to work with a same material during the 9 sessions making the material work on its flexibility, adaptability to the other and therefor discovering situations that would not have come by themselves. In these cases the score worked as a lens, amplifying the potential of the material itself and shifting our attention as witnesses into the potential inherent to the material. Others worked more intuitively, choosing on element of the performance they had to reply to, and transforming it, giving it another meaning, deviating it from it’s first sense, discovering in this case what catches the eye. Others functioned was translators of performances and in other cases a subject as the ‘hand’ became topic for a long sequence of proposals and responses.

      Obviously not all these  responses worked as we wanted. Many questions appeared towards the sense one could make out of it. In some cases they worked critically, other times as negations, or as empathy.


      Laboratory/observatory

      As an  laboratory/observatory  this process raised some questions: What do we do when we are responding to each other? What criteria do we use to select what to respond to? Critical thought? The affect towards another? Philosophical stand points? Political correctness? Desire?

      PBScore wanted to isolate responses in time and space in order to observe and reflect on dialogical mechanisms between the object of observation and the observer, between the one who answers and the one who listens. The process of this observation was individual and private  in a first instance to then became  individual and collective in the moment of sharing with the other members of the group. The weekly meetings and the time for reflection and constructing responses had quite different qualities in the process of the score. On the one hand the in-between periods in which each participant had the other in mind, living together in a way, with the proposal s/he had to reply to, and on the other hand the exposure of each participant in the collective weekly moments. These two divergent poles of activity combined the subjective agency of the participants with the social agencies  created by the context of a.pass.

      These intimacy and ‘extimacy’ moments elaborated on the process of learning not just as an individual practice depending on each person’s singular perception, but extending it to social and collective environment. In this case the environment of the post-master participants in performance and scenography studies with a focus on self-education and collaboration. My interest at this point was to practice the construction of art (knowledge) through exposure, share-ability and critical endeavour in a context of plural aesthetics.
      What happens when one has to engage with the work of another when at first instance there is no affinity?  What happens if there is a void, an incapacity of response? Or the other way around, what happens when the work of another seems to speak a very close language?

      The interest was not in creating a common standpoint for our different perceptual conditions and reflections on the performance objects that  we were part of,  but in creating an environment where those conditions and reflections could co-exist and be exchanged, allowing for critical observation, empathy, accidental correspondences, nothing, etc.
      More than in a place for common understanding, we created an experimental surface for communication in artistic research where one could observe one’s own strategies but also the ones of others, all of them contributing in a singular engagement within a group of obviously heterogeneous beings forming a plurality.
      I mean by this that the multi focal lens of this  score / tool is an apparatus for the co-habitation of different aspects of the being together, becoming a mirror of the situation itself. A mirror for the sociability implied in art making.

      These aspect was also enhanced by some performances that asked for the participation of all people present, breaking the separation  between the performance and the audience and engaging in another form of socialisation. But big contrasts happened when the next performance was a dance solo exposing the fact of being traversed by vital forces or a video piece with historical concerns on the notion of display, having in both cases a classical relation between the performance and the audience.

      PBScore comes from my desire to use performance practice in the service of dialogical contexts such as schools, art laboratories, performative encounters or any other environment in which the study of art, perception and knowledge processes is at stake. It's a learning-by-doing tool that pays attention to attention, that wants to go beyond the production of art and wants to engage in the production of life through artistic practice. Is that possible?
      I’m interested in a ‘practice the practice’ tool that sustains the learning by experience and supports the development of our relations towards the world through our concerns about the practice itself. A way to get closer, to look deeper, and at the end a way to experience present and presence. A way to re-actualise ourselves through the politics inherent in such systems of awareness, collaboration and responsibility.

      Theatre

      I would like to make an analogy to the theatre apparatus where the performers and the audience use the physical, social and political conditions of that environment as indicators of a way of looking and that frame the aesthetic experience.
      The theatre is an observatory per excellence but maybe one that is a bit too well-known. I don't think the audience presupposes anymore that everyone that sees a performance at the same time would have the same kind of interaction with it. But I want to insist exactly in that point, and to try to not pre-suppose but to be there, regardless of a strong drive in actual politics for standardisation. I’m looking here at the physical theatre and at performance (in all its forms) as places/spaces of diversity and difference which propose a way of thinking the arts as a perceptual apparatus provoking singular relations between the individual, the collective and the political.
      And with this is mind my attention at this point goes to the question: What happens when the theatre also allows for forms of non-representation, for states of presence that enhance our sociability, our criticality, our life processing capacities? There is a lot to say about this and many works lately have been developed under this question from the academic realm to the social field. In the case of PBScore the art maker and the spectator were part of the same group, alternating positions and being knowledgeable of both sides, augmenting exactly the capacity of the feedback machine that art can be but also making from each of the participants a producer and dissolving the idea of audience.
      The PBScore is an individual learning tool in a collective environment not searching for a conclusion but for a way of working together as neighbours, as important feedbackers, as engaged partners, as critical colleagues, as potential opponents in a process of orientation towards something, towards the communication of perceptual knowledge, towards the political in art making.


      Score as ecosystem

      As an interface for communication the score allows for the emergence of different voices like ghosts haunting the sensible acknowledgement of knowledge, process and concepts of art. Each participant had the same conditions to draw intentions, design orientations, make statements, have fun, take a piss, etc…, through performance practice. The scored created a force surface for the exposure of multiple existences. But what maintained the desire to come back next week? Was it the responsibility towards the other? The curiosity for the next response? The will to belong to a group? The drive of performing?

      PBScore as a horizontal structure brought about the responsibility of the ones involved as far as they wanted to be involved. It’s a structure that sustained and renewed itself on the basis of the participants and their presence. Like in any ecosystem, the species that constitute it, are the creators and instigators of the development of the ecosystem itself, their interaction constitutes its sustainability. Interestingly enough, the positions of each participant were not stable and none of them represented a fixed part of the ecosystem, but rather all of them were mutating pieces of a puzzle that constructed itself on the go. Mutual opportunism and  generosity are two sides of the same coin, like a parasitic system without aim, living for the sake of living while deepening the understanding of that specific life.
      This experience brings to the fore a complex number of elements that are inherent to a way of feeling/thinking. It reveals a universe  of interrelations between the chosen elements, forming forces of speech and the sensible that contain political perspectives and ideological concerns. Both aesthetics and ethics are intertwined  in a concise moment of exposure and attention. Justification is out of the game and rather observation and the 'being with it' are the rules through which feeling and opinion appear. Every participant is a centre with a culture, a history, a socioeconomic reality, a philosophical attitude creating therefor a poli-centered temporary community. In my opinion PBScore enhanced being plural and different as fundamentals of an ecosystem where each of the participants has a voice, where there's no obligation, where the ecosystem can't exist beyond the presence and engagement of who is part of it but exists on the tension of the plural.

      It makes me want to write down some formats that were at stake with this group of people. From dream oracles exposed through dance,  an historical fiction figure revealed through lecture performance format, trans-gender being re-actualised through documentary and live transformation, pornography in internet as a result of internet research, self becoming though the extreme use of theatre apparatus (lights, costumes, seduction, etc),  the concept of the angel creating the availability to receive/ become and much more.

      Empathetic, disruptive, enthusiastic, doubtful or convinced forces were 'performing' each time without dominating in an absolute fashion the ecosystem. This experimental format functioned as a study about aesthetics and co-existence in the performing arts, it developed special awareness about ways of thinking,  composing, sharing and engaging with a group. It gave focus to the performer, the performance space and the context where it takes place as a micro environment where the language is performance, image, text, sound, action, painting or dance…


      Flexible community without aim

      This horizontal structure implied a flexible community. A temporary, always different group of people, formed  and unformed around the weekly meetings. This score allowed for the building of a temporary community that established relations between its members and developed the sense of the doing. Performance became the time we spent together, a language spoken within this community. The system built means for communication and created the conditions for the emergence of poetics like vessels, bones, particles, all in movement. The ‘messages’ circulated through those vessels, inciting exchange and therefor producing change as a ‘natural’ consequence.

      The temporality aspect of the event and therefor of the community are very important. The score is performed in time, when it’s happening, allowing everyone to work with the present conditions and not aim for ideal circumstances,  a idealised future, or for the definition of a stale identity. Following this thought, the system can’t be understood as a goal but as a medium taking care that the  ephemeral quality of this particular process produces a vulnerable attitude towards the experience of art. It’s enhancing the desire to exchange and share worlds through practice and is not aiming to get to conclusions. If the system becomes an aim itself , it will just reproduce what we already know incapacitating the playing as revelatory practice. It is a process and it exists in the process of just doing it. But why just do it?

      Here, I would like to make a parallel between a practice like yoga or dance or a reading group for example, happening in a collective environment, and the need for sociability that brings together the individual and the collective. These gatherings set ups are learning together tools based in attention and observation. The knowledge acquired doesn’t serve anything else the vitality of knowledge itself, allowing all participants to learn through the other. These social environments are like battery  centres that inform forms of life sustained by sociability itself.  The process of socialisation  (spending time together) is endless and is pregnant, as there is the potential for the dissolution of duality between me and the other as fixed territories, the desire to become many /one. Like in a house of mirrors, PBScore was a device to the reflection and refracting of one’s one image, opening up ways of seeing, feeling and thinking the self though the other.

      The contamination of the one by the other was one of the ‘technics’ that appeared through out the score in different fashions. I remember one day someone we didn’t know presenting himself as someone that was already part of the score group and playing her role. Or the physical transformation someone into another, becoming then 2 participants which we never knew who would come to play.


      On the presence of the body

      One of the strongest rules of the PBScore is that one can not participate remotely. The presence of the body was absolutely necessary to play and witness the process of dialogue through performance in this score. As I could observe in the Writing Score proposed in 2014 the fact of gathering weekly to read the individual writings and continue the 'game' always in the presence and gaze of the others, created a specific dynamics through the rhythm of the encounters.
      The collective agreement to meet weekly created a ritualised social time/ space where alliances were built. This way a group of people created an extra - everyday rhythm where we could question and celebrate our practices.

      One of the conditions of the performing arts relies on the presence of the performers and of the audience, on the act of exchange between both parties which dissolves once the performance is over. But also on the act of memory that is activated at the precise same moment the performance disappeared and which is followed by the action of re-telling or re-processing what has happened. The intimate experience of witnessing resonates in parallel with the distance it requires to process it afterwards, both these factors are indeed of major importance in the study of performance as a critical tool. Digesting the other is of major importance for a becoming of the social body, for the possibility of a future not yet known.

      The continuous necessity of presence and distance, of the communal and the individual spaces are the necessary conditions to unravel sense(s), the relation(s) that take place, the conditions for the emergence of directions, orientations or inclinations towards what is to come. Considering these thoughts PBScore was proposing performance as rumour, as the re-telling of what has happened in one’s own gestures and gesticulations in order to re-actualise the dialogue constantly.
      To be able to participate one needs the public and the private, the institution (the score in this case in the frame of a.pass) and the intimate. PBScore was an invitation to all participants to come back to the place of the crime. An invitation to re-read and re-write presences, to unfold the stories created by the gatherings, to reformulate what remains and transforms in memory and sets the ground for the present to be.

      Every moment is unique, this time is not like the next time, what I think and feel now in this situation will not be the same in another situation. I am here and I am processing and contributing consciously and unconsciously, together and alone, deliberately or not, to what is happening, etc. Performing arts create a ritual of  presences, create a contract of attention and response between all parties. Something is unfolding and we all are part of it, we all think it, feel it, share it, though no one owns it and no one is the same. What a beautiful state to be in!

      Documentation

      This publication contains reflections about what happened in those three months. The film documentation that was used through out the score will not be used in a public realm. All the videos were data to come back to one’s own performance or the performance of another in order to reply. The use of the video camera delimitated a space of action that also functioned as another rule of the score. I remember someone performing in darkness, or doing nothing or bringing the other participants to the camera field as ways to deal with the paradoxical situation of being filmed in this context.  I don’t think the camera was at the end of much use, even though for some people the concrete material became material to construct upon.
      Another insert in this publication are the 9 reports, 8 written by myself and 1 by Philippine Hoegen that follow up the content that came about after each session.
      What is more striking to me is the fact that there is rather an afterthought built in linear language, creating an history in contrast to an absence of poetics that were all there was to experience. Maybe there’s exactly where lays the potential of performance.
      Something to think about!


      Lilia Mestre

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • worlding from this world this is not wishful thinking, it is speculating utopia from what is already there
      27 December 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Alice Chauchat
    • a.pass
    • 27 February 2017
    • 03 March 2017
    • worlding from this world

       

       

      When inviting me to host this workshop, Pierre Rubio spoke about my piece Togethering, a group solo as a case of worlding: building a present-tense, experiential fiction from gathered (past) moments of collaboration, uprooting situated moments to turn them into speculative propositions for a common future.

       

      Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines speculate (transitive verb) as "to take to be true on the basis of insufficient evidence”. But what constitutes (in)sufficient evidence?

      (Social, political or sensational) reality jumbles together structural and punctual catastrophes, studded with gems: local endeavours, micro-events allowing glimpses of "something better”. Rather than lamenting the scarcity of agreeable situations in our present, we will wilfully engage in expanding through the force of our imagination these maybe fragile, uncertain, easily disposable snippets of communal life which are also part of the world as we know it. Taking these as sufficient evidence for the existence of a world we want to inhabit, we will turn the logic of exception into a logic of rule, and run the risk of building monstrous worlds. At least these might be differently interesting monstrosities.

       

      Our work will be one of observation, sifting and narration. Unravelling the consequences of chosen proofs, we will abstract principles from these concrete events in order to build systems; fleshing out structure, structuring affects and learning from each other - riffing off misunderstood proposals in order to speculate alternative worlds. Affirming the circumstantial as a law, generalising circumstances, pushing naivety to a point of boldness, our main responsibility rests in our choice of evidence.

       

      Language is a powerful tool, and your own practices are so many other tools which we will put to use.

       

      To start the days I will introduce some speculative dance practices in which imagination and collectivity reconfigure standard anatomical knowledge, and where paranormal or subterranean relationships between individuals and communal selves are embodied. The rest of the day is ours and we will fabricate worlds from the small stuff we find at the bottom of our pockets.

       

      Dance knowledge is always an advantage (always!) but none of what I will propose here depends on it.

       

       

      Alice Chauchat

      Alice Chauchat lives in Berlin and works as a choreographer, performer, teacher, editor and other activities related to choreography. She created performances in collaboration with a.o. Louise Trueheart, Anne Juren, Frédéric Gies, Alix Eynaudi and performed/collaborated in projects by a.o. Jennifer Lacey, Xavier le Roy, Marten Spangberg and Juan Dominguez. She has been working extensively in collaborative set-ups, developing numerous choreographic projects and platforms for knowledge production and exchange in the performing arts (everybodystoolbox.net, teachback vienna, praticable etc.). In 2010-2012 she was in the artistic direction for Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, a centre for artistic research in the Parisian suburbs. After completing a master degree in choreography in the Amsterdam Theaterschool with a “group solo” and a publication of dance scores and poems, she is currently preparing a PhD on the practice of relational subjectivities in dance.

      http://www.alicechauchat.net

       

      Dates : February Monday 27th , Tuesday 28th and March Wednesday 1st and Friday 3rd

      Schedule : 11am-6pm everyday

      Address : https://www.google.be/maps/place/Rue+Delaunoy+60,+1080+Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/@50.8530792,4.3300367,20z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c3c3f46c54e4c7:0x4e61e376c2f6b53a

       

    • 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

       

       

       

    • The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

      price: 10 euro

      The book documents the process in three parts of different formats: a chronological and a reflective part as well as unfolding, visual interpretation of the dialogue.

      This publication by the a.pass research centre was created from the Perform Back Score practice proposed by associate program curator Lilia Mestre during the a.pass block January – April 2015. a.pass, is a post-master artistic research environment based in Brussels, Belgium.

      The book is designed by Miriam Hempel http://www.daretoknow.co.uk/

      A PDF of the REFLECTIONS you can find HERE
      A PDF of the SESSIONS you can find HERE
      PBS_insert_a3 and PBS_insert_a4

       

       

      pbs2pbs_insert21 pbs4

    • performative publishing
    • Volver
    • Volver 20 November 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Cecilia Molano, Sara Santos, Gosie Vervloessem and Veridiana Zurita
    • 29 May 2015
    • 30 May 2015
    • Volver

      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. Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Cecilia Molano, Sara Santos, Gosie Vervloessem and Veridiana Zurita were 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.

      This brochure contains texts and interviews by the presenting participants and the other contributors of the VOLVER conference that took place on the  29th and 30th of May 2015. Performances, film screenings, installations workshops were presented to share in the artistic research processes that participans followed during their year at a.pass, alongside with  lectures and presentations by the guests of the researchers: Patricia Reed, Gonçalo Pena and Petra van Brabant.

      You can read the PDF of the full publication HERE

      More information here.

      volver_2 volver_4

    • Newsletter November 2016 13 November 2016
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

      newscaption

      line650

       

      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!)

      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.

      line650

       a.pass

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

       

       

       

    • 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

      end communications of a.pass

      Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens
      and Eleanor Ivory Weber

      @ Hectolitre (MAROLLEN - Brussels) 
      Rue de Hectolitre 3 - 1000 Brussels

      Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019
      from 18:00 to 22:00

      Schedule: 

      18:00 food & drinks 

      18:30 Subtracted Seduction

      19:00 Subverses I: Play 

      Break

      20:00 7 anxieties and the world

      20:30 Subverses II

      Break

      21:15 Subverses III

      21:30 The big gesture is many small gestures dispersed
      (doors close before the last performance starts) 

      Performances by Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens

      With contributions by
      Subtracted Seduction: sound editing and mixing Teresa Cos
      Subverses I & III: performers Lydia McGlinchey, Marcus Bergner
      7 anxieties and the world: sound mixing Marko Radišić

      LISTEN TO THE TRAILER


      On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      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

       

       

    • 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

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • COMMUNAL GARDENS 18 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Einat Tuchman & VK
    • VK (Vaarkapoen, Molenbeek)
    • 31 October 2016
    • 03 November 2016
    • COMMUNAL GARDENS

      Vaarkapoen is a community center in the heart of Molenbeek, quite near a.pass. It’s an institution engaged in the community and community building of this problematic commune. Since November 2015 Molenbeek is recurrently in the world news as a nest for ’islamic’ terrorists. The commune has been blamed for neglecting integration policy and for not taking serious the existing social and economic problems. The political community as well as the population are therefore alert and know they – we – have to do something. In this situation, many claims are coming towards the arts, towards education and social work. The team of VK is one of those actors who are assigned to address this social situation in the commune and to bring artists in relation to the community.

      One of their projects is to develop a communal garden as open space for a general public to use. Connected to it they want to build an artistic residency place for projects that deal with the community.  The situation is structurally complex. To create this garden a currently squatted building has to be destroyed. For the rather poor population the renovation cost are fairly high. The questions of who will decide about the dedication of the garden, about activities and use, is still open.

      During the workshop we will examine the existing garden and the future one, departing from our personal artistic researches. How can we as artists with our researches take position in, or towards this project? What would we do with this space, in this situation, at this location? How would our research react to, or in it? In what kind of garden would you place your project? What would you need in this garden to be able to realize your ideas and how could your research reach others through this garden?

      These are questions addressed together with Einat Tuchman. Through her artistic practice Tuchman addresses since several years the question how art can engage in community building without compromising itself. Together with Tuchman we will relate our researches to this garden/residency project and will develop positions and actions towards it.

    • [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

       

       

       

    • [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

       

    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • block 2016/I
    • research publication 15 January 2016
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • veridiana zurita
    • 15 January 2016
    • 15 January 2016
    • research publication

       

       

      The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts.


      Between 2014 and 2015 Veridiana Zurita initiated three ongoing artistic research projects; ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of the riverside community Santa Isabel in the Amazon (BR) and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between herself and her parents.

      www.veridianazurita.com

       

      Here you find the publication that was made for the presentation of the research of associate researcher Veridiana Zurita

       

    • [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
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Denuding 02 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Anne Juren
    • 14 March 2016
    • 18 March 2016
    • Denuding

      The workshop will explore different topics present in my research. Dealing with different writings and languages, I developed choreographic sessions to look upon the relation between body function, written words, spoken texts, sexuality and choreography. The workshop is a continuation of the research in engaging the body in different states of physical, sensorial, kinaesthesic and mental experiences. It inspects the thin line between private and public, and attempts to balance inner desires and outer realities by entering the limbic system of the body. It triggers the idea that no one is a coherent, self-sustaining element; we are all internally divided and made up of many dissimilar characteristics.

      Following the notion of the division and the multiplicity of the subject, the workshops will deal with different choreographic strategies and body practices related to text present in the method Feldenkrais and will experiment within the relation between poetry and writing in examining the text of authors from the Ecriture Féminine.
      The workshop is an experimental and process-related event. The participants will be able to bring their own questions and practices and find a way to engage the body in different states of physical, sensorial and written expressions.
       
      Anne Juren born in Grenoble/ France is a choreographer, dancer and performer based in Vienna. In 2003, she co-founded together with the visual artist Roland Rauschmeier the association Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung in Vienna. Her choreographic works and artistic researches have been extensively presented in international theatres, festivals, and different art spaces and venues. In her work, Juren tries to expand  the term choreography in engaging the body in different states of physical, sensorial, kinaesthesic and mental experiences, questioning the boundaries between private and public spheres. Since 2013, Anne Juren is a Feldenkrais® practitioner and aslo graduated of the JFK Approach to child development and Special Needs Children. She is currently part of the artistic committee for the Master in Choreography at DOCH and doing a PhD at UNIARTS Stockholm University of the Arts. www.wtkb.org

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • block 2015/III
    • don't eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me  invitation research sharing
      13 October 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Veridiana Zurita
    • 24 October 2015
    • 24 October 2015
    • don't eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me 

       

      24/10/2015, 7-10pm, a.pass studio, de bottelarij

      In 2014 I started working as an artistic researcher in a.pass. Since then I developed three different projects. ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of a river community in the Amazon and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between me and my parents. Through these experimental set-ups I gathered a lot of materials of various kinds. Now I would like to share these video’s, texts, experiences and set-ups with you. I would be happy to host you during an evening-long sharing of materials from the research, and offer an idea of the contexts and imaginations that brought these ongoing projects to life.

      More information here

    • 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
    • The Bridge 11 September 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Adriana La Selva / Mika Juusela
    • 05 October 2015
    • 09 October 2015
    • The Bridge

      This workshop is part of Adriana La Selva’s research on contemporary training methodologies for theatre. The beginning of the project concentrates on a deep understanding of physical practices which draw from the Theatre Anthropology vocabulary developed by Eugenio Barba, in order to question and push forward training principles devised by his group.

      During this week of physical work at the a.pass, we will be looking at the principle of repetition from many different angles, in order to understand the creative possibilities of this tool and test philosophical and neurological notions developed around the theme. The main physical work concentrates on the training for the actor used and developed by the international ensemble The Bridge of Winds, a theatre group created by Odin’s actress Iben Nagel Rasmussen.

      During its 25 years of existence, the group has developed a series of exercises to work with the actors scenic presence. These energy exercises may be simple on the outside but difficult to master. Exercises have common form, they are done in contact to the others, but at the same time the work is highly individual. It develops and demands a great amount of alertness, sensitivity and willingness to overcome ones physical comfort.

      As a way of having a common theoretical ground (and developing practice-based research methodologies), the participants will receive previously to the workshop a paper Adriana has just developed on the theme, to be questioned in the practice.

      Mika Juusela is an actor/director/pedagogue from Finland. He has been a member of the Bridge of Winds from 1999 and since then he has been teaching and performing with the group. In his own country Juusela is working in various projects (from performance and scripwriting to artistic research). He is also a founding member of Laboratorytheatre Fennica and  publishes and translates theatre literature.

       

      Practical: 05 to 09/10/15, from 10.30 to 16.00 (to be confirmed) @ a.pass, 4th floor Maximun 15 participants Bring your training clothes, a sense of discipline and a will for physical engagement.

    • [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.

    • Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here 

      apass_logo_sm

      volver_logoPerformative Conference and Presentations

       
      29/5 - 17.00 to 22.00h
      30/5 - 12.30 to 22.00h

      For the full program click here

      Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen,
      Cecilia Molano, Sara Santos,
      Gosie Vervloesem & Veridiana Zurita


      @ Aleppo

      laboratory of experiments in performance and politics, in residency at Acadeémie Royale des Beaux Arts Bruxelles (ARBA-ESA)

      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

       

       

    • 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

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Audrey Cottin
      Esteban Donoso
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Jeremiah Runnels
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Mavi Veloso
      Thiago Antunes
      Tinna Ottesen
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz
      Yaari Shalem


      Research End Presentations

      Gosie Vervlosem
      Philippine Hoegen
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos


      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Cecilia Molano
      Juan Dominguez
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana
      Ruth S. Noyes

       


      Partner

      PAF Performance Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Abu Ali * Toni Serra
      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Elke van Campenhout
      Esteban Donoso
      Geert Opsomer
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Luanda Casella
      Marcos Simoes
      Medicine Man Oscar Parada
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Joachim
      Pierre Rubio
      Sara Manente
      Thiago Antunes
      Veridiana Zurita

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

      Nicolas Galeazzi

      Pierre Rubio

       

      Mentors

      Adva Zakai
      Femke Snelting

       

       

       


      'UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE'
      about the imaginative aesthetics of change

      Curated by Elke Van Campenhout (Research Coordinator), Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator), and Pierre Rubio (Associate Program Curator)


      In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies.

      The unacceptable reveals the limitations of the acceptable.
      The untouchable foreshadows the adventurous discovery of difference.
      The intangible offers a speculative sense towards the radically other.

       


      01/05 - 31/07 / 2015

      Ongoing workshops

       

      House of Spirits
      Throughout the whole period, the House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the ‘shamans/conservators’ of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another ‘shaman’ practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the ‘shaman’ include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.
      Every shaman puts the individual case traces in another context, allowing them to resonate and breed new meanings and connections. The shamans together develop the Book, which documents the changing protocols regulating the workings of the House.
      At the end, the House of Spirits opens its doors to the public. In the form of a weeklong celebration, a curated exhibition, a mini-festival, a performative conference, or whatever at that point seems to be the most relevant to the group, the House functions in that week as a kind of temporal 3D publications that offers guests an insight in the works developed throughout the block.

       

      Reading Circle
      As a red thread throughout the block the participants engage in a weekly communal reading practice of the book ‘Realist Magic - Object, Ontology, Causality’ by Timothy Morton.
      Reading and discussing in-depth this one central text allows for the development of a common ground of reference and connection that functions as a backdrop to the workshops and practices that shape the block.

       

      Self-interviews
      Throughout the block each participant can develop a self-interviewing practice, which is supported by one or more mentors. The self-interview develops through the case practices, and is embedded in the mentoring process. During opening week we will introduce possible strategies for self-interviewing and start up the process.

       

      04 / 05 - 06 / 05 / 2015

      ‘BRICOLAGE’
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi


      Diving into the concept of bricolage, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects - objects of personal importance and desire, objects of daily or precious use, objects of thought and discourse - we will try to get a hold on the actual qualities of each one's research model and methodology. The bricolage technique may be very close to many of our practices. The artist researchers are commonly acknowledged as the bricoleur-scientists. They craft the object of knowledge.
      In the course of this week we will present the current state of our research case from various perspectives. ‘Bricolaging’ the 'objects' of your research, turning them upside down, looking at them through the other's eyes and assembling the elements in play, we want to understand the complex horizon of your research target.

       

       


      25 / 05 - 29 / 05 / 2015


      ‘ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Joachim, Geert Opsomer and Pierre Rubio

      Can we associate sadness with the outcomes of our capitalist world? Are we affected so much by capitalism that we can only sadly survive in what seems to have become its ‘nature’? Can we still affect the world? What could a joyful passion mean today? Is a joyful passion subversive? How can we create the conditions for joy to be possible? Is it by re-allocating desire that new joys can emerge? Can artistic researches produce a change Can agency be generated with aesthetic means? Could we critically re-combine ethics and aesthetics to reclaim the transformative power of our researches? What could be the nature of an ecology of affects with the potential to produce a change?
      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘a.pass Basics workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment.
      This B-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s concepts of Desire, Joy, Sadness and Affect in the ‘Ethics’ and Guattari’s concepts of Mental Ecology and Collective Assemblages of Enunciation by reading closely a series of texts from the 17th up to the 21st century. With the help of two guests, Pierre Joachim and Geert Opsomer, we will study these philosophical key notions but also discover how Pierre and Geert put them into practice and consequently how we can do so as well.

       

       

      01 / 06 - 05 / 06 / 2015


      ‘PLACE THIS’
      Workshop by Sara Manente and Marcos Simoes


      The workshop unfolds a series of extra-sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The tools, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is ‘a self’, an entity other than us, with its own qualities and ability to perform in an attempt to include chance and other contingencies in the work, to destabilize power relations based on linear logics and to questions the effect of belief and make-belief in a performative environment. Can we create magic by creating the rules for magic to happen? Like an ‘experimental magic’ without magicians? Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation and prediction?
      The workshop will start with a daily practice of writing questions for a tarot reader. Then, we will offer three different performative tools to be explored and then appropriated into your own project. The workshop “Place this” wants to discover the transformational powers of this knowledge in different constellations: individually, with objects, in couples, trios, groups. With the stubbornness of ‘the idiot’, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the material and the immaterial.

       

       

      08 / 06 - 12 / 06 / 2015


      ‘UNSEEN WORKSHOP’
      Workshop by Abu Ali * Toni Serra


      Abu Ali * Toni Serra is a researcher through video. He hosts and programs the Observatori de Video No Identificat based in Barcelona - an observatory archive, that is structured around particular themes, which does encourage a critique of contemporary culture and society,
      His videos explore different visions between the essay and the poetry, with an evocation of trance and the realities of dream. His videos immerse into the relationship with the visionary, into the inner experience, the no man’s land between real and unreal, dream and awakeness, poetry and prophecy... as ways to deepen the criticism of reality.
      Normally we associate image with vision. But in a society of the spectacle images have become a form of blindness - an increasing veil, that prevents us from viewing. Our vision remains a prisoner of the images constructed by the entertainment, media and network apparatus, which not only tries to shape our vision but to colonize our dreams.
      For the workshop, he offers a selection of footage, which directly deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections he will experiment with us on practicing the not-seen. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.

       

       


      22 / 06 - 26 / 06 / 2015


      ‘TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL’
      Workshop by Medicine Man Oscar Parada


      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, and what can it do?
      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.
      This workshop has as objective to engage and reproduce the sacred in connection with a performative ritual space. Which is: to operate a transformation. And that is what we can call medicine. Medicine is everything that transforms us.
      Firstly, the workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal tool. 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.

       

       


      29 / 06 - 03 / 07 / 2015


      ‘SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION’
      Workshop by Peter Stamer and Luanda Casella


      We are dealing with what is known as „The Small World Problem“, a popular research method, especially in times of immaterial communication or social networks like Facebook, trying to merge mathematical parameters of statistics with marketing tools to improve accessibility to one’s consumer behaviour. And yet, the thought is fascinating: that everyone of us is connected with anyone on this planet of now 7.5 billion inhabitants, regardless of race, cultural background, continent, religion, age. Next to the political implication of such a thought this idea provides us with a resourceful generator for stories, narratives, fictions about human beings and their lives.
      Six Degrees of Separation is based upon the desire to create contemporary storytelling formats in which we explore fiction in shared narrative practices - narratives without a centre plot, but composed of biographical fragments, travel experiences, random encounters, figments of imagination - and maybe very little resolution. We believe that the world is full of stories, told ones and concealed ones, voiced ones and mute ones. Stories that we fantasize are not less true; digging them out and rendering them audible creates a multiplicity of narratives which form a large tapestry of events, a patchwork of textures, interwoven in such a fashion that they somehow may exist on the verge of being. Using a mixed media apparatus (Google Earth; Skype; Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, etc), we will go through different storytelling exercises focusing on the construction of evasive, critical, imaginative narratives in order to create a common imaginary in the end. So what is it that holds the world(s) together?

    • Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here www.apass.be

      apass_logo_sm

      A.PASS HAS A NEW WEBSITE!

      apass_web2

      Click and visit our new site for info about our workshops and events, an insight in the philosophy of a.pass, a leisurely stroll though the abcdaire, information on our application procedures, etcetera…

      Miriam Hempel (design) and Guido Lucassen (programming) developed a creative multi-functional work platform that allows participants to develop their cases and collaborate in or outside of the public eye that offers the possibility to produce ever-changing pages with a user-friendly click or two (or three). And that allows a.pass to (little by little) open up its archives to the public.

      Please take a look, and let us know what you think!

      BLOCK FOCUS SUMMER 2015: UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE

      optical illusion

      What is the possible relationship between art and social change? When forced into the corner of economic demands on the one hand and the need for aesthetic subversion on the other, a lot of artist workers feel the need to defend their ‘right to be’ through critical strategies and political transparency. In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies. ...read more

      upcoming workshops 

      ABU ALI * TONI SERRA THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

      8th - 12th June 2015

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

      NICOLAS GALEAZZI BRICOLAGE

      4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology. ... read more

      A.PASS RESEARCH CENTRE THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS

      10 May-24 July 2015

      The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation ... read more

      PIERRE JOACHIM / PIERRE RUBIO / GEERT OPSOMER ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

      25-29 May 2015

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s theory of affects and Guattari’s concept of mental ecology by reading closely a series of texts from 17th to 21st century. ... 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

       

    • newscaption

       

      Dear Subscribers to our Newsletter

      We would like to inform you about the program of workshops and common research practices of the upcoming four month. For signing up to the workshops, please find the link 'Sign up to this event' in every event description.  

      Hope seeing you in one of the next workshops or events!

      All the best! 

      your a.pass team


      block information

      4 May-2 August 2015

      PIERRE RUBIO
      BLOCK FOCUS SUMMER 2015: UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE

      optical illusion

      ABOUT THE IMAGINATIVE AESTHETICS OF CHANGE

      What is the possible relationship between art and social change? When forced into the corner of economic demands on the one hand and the need for aesthetic subversion on the other, a lot of artist workers feel the need to defend their ‘right to be’ through critical strategies and political transparency. In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies.Read more..


      workshop

      4-8 May 2015

      Location a.pass

      NICOLAS GALEAZZI
      BRICOLAGE

      Bildschirmfoto 2015-04-03 um 21.49.02

      A TOOL FOR OPENING THE BLOCK

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology.Read more


      workshop

      10 May-24 July 2015

      A.PASS RESEARCH CENTRE
      THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS

      dome

      The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.Read more.

      workshop

      11 May-30 July 2015

      Location a.pass

      READING CIRCLE

      Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu
      As a red thread throughout the block the participants engage in a weekly communal reading practice of the book ‘Realist Magic – Object, Ontology, Causality’ by Timothy Morton.Reading and discussing in-depth this one central text allows for the development of a common ground of reference and connection that functions as a backdrop to the workshops and practices that shape the block. The Reading Circle happens on Monday evenings.Read more.

      workshop

      25-29 May 2015

      PIERRE JOACHIM / GEERT OPSOMER / PIERRE RUBIO
      ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s theory of affects and Guattari’s concept of mental ecology by reading closely a series of texts from 17th to 21st century.Read more

      workshop

      1-5 June 2015

      Location a.pass

      SARA MANENTE / MARCOS SIMOES
      THIS PLACE

      this place, Sara Manente & Marcos Simoes - photograph Marcello Mardones
      The workshop unfold a series of extra sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The dispositives used, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is “a self”, “an entity” other than us, with own quality and ability to perform. Like an “experimental magic”: there will be magic without magicians. Can we create the magic by creating the situation for the magic to happen? We create the rules therefore we create the magic. Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation? With the stubbornness of “the idiot”, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the immaterial and the immaterial.Read more

      workshop

      8-12 June 2015

      ABU ALI * TONI SERRA
      THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

      Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008
      For this workshop Abu Ali offers a selection of footage from the video archive O.V.N.I (observatori de video no idenitficat) based in Barcelona, which deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections Abu Ali will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.Read more

      workshop

      22-26 June 2015

      Location a.pass

      OSCAR PARADA
      TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
      The objective of re-knowing and re-producing the sacred in connection with a performative ritual space is to operate a transformation and that is what we can call medicine. Medicine is everything that transforms us. The workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal tool. We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean. Hence, the workshop will also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways.Read more

      workshop

      29 June-3 July 2015

      PETER STAMER / LUANDA CASELLA
      SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

      Bildschirmfoto 2015-03-28 um 13.59.09
      In 1969, the American psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a study to explore if two randomly selected individuals, strangers to each other coming from different American states, are nevertheless connected by acquaintances in between. Starting the test in Kansas/Nebraska, linking people to one individual in Massachusetts, the experiment suggested that an individual knows of any target person only by six degrees of connecting steps: Mr X from Kansas knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Mrs Z, living in Massachusetts.Read more.

       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

       

       

    • Program Block 2015/II 09 April 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

      newscaption

       

      Dear ex-a.pass-participants and current-a.pass-interested

      With this new type of newsletter we would like to introduce you at the same time to the upcoming program of workshops and events, and to our new website!!

      For signing up to the workshops, please find the link 'Sign up to this event' in every event description.  

      Hope seeing you in one of the next workshops or events!

      All the best! 

      the a.pass team


      block information

      4 May-2 August 2015

      PIERRE RUBIO
      BLOCK FOCUS SUMMER 2015: UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE

      optical illusion

      ABOUT THE IMAGINATIVE AESTHETICS OF CHANGE

      What is the possible relationship between art and social change? When forced into the corner of economic demands on the one hand and the need for aesthetic subversion on the other, a lot of artist workers feel the need to defend their ‘right to be’ through critical strategies and political transparency. In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies.Read more..


      workshop

      4-8 May 2015

      Location a.pass

      NICOLAS GALEAZZI
      BRICOLAGE

      Bildschirmfoto 2015-04-03 um 21.49.02

      A TOOL FOR OPENING THE BLOCK

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology.Read more


      workshop

      10 May-24 July 2015

      A.PASS RESEARCH CENTRE
      THE HOUSE OF SPIRITS

      dome

      The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.Read more.

      workshop

      11 May-30 July 2015

      Location a.pass

      READING CIRCLE

      Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu
      As a red thread throughout the block the participants engage in a weekly communal reading practice of the book ‘Realist Magic – Object, Ontology, Causality’ by Timothy Morton.Reading and discussing in-depth this one central text allows for the development of a common ground of reference and connection that functions as a backdrop to the workshops and practices that shape the block. The Reading Circle happens on Monday evenings.Read more.

      workshop

      25-29 May 2015

      PIERRE JOACHIM / GEERT OPSOMER / PIERRE RUBIO
      ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s theory of affects and Guattari’s concept of mental ecology by reading closely a series of texts from 17th to 21st century.Read more

      workshop

      1-5 June 2015

      Location a.pass

      SARA MANENTE / MARCOS SIMOES
      THIS PLACE

      this place, Sara Manente & Marcos Simoes - photograph Marcello Mardones
      The workshop unfold a series of extra sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The dispositives used, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is “a self”, “an entity” other than us, with own quality and ability to perform. Like an “experimental magic”: there will be magic without magicians. Can we create the magic by creating the situation for the magic to happen? We create the rules therefore we create the magic. Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation? With the stubbornness of “the idiot”, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the immaterial and the immaterial.Read more

      workshop

      8-12 June 2015

      ABU ALI * TONI SERRA
      THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

      Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008
      For this workshop Abu Ali offers a selection of footage from the video archive O.V.N.I (observatori de video no idenitficat) based in Barcelona, which deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections Abu Ali will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.Read more

      workshop

      22-26 June 2015

      Location a.pass

      OSCAR PARADA
      TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
      The objective of re-knowing and re-producing the sacred in connection with a performative ritual space is to operate a transformation and that is what we can call medicine. Medicine is everything that transforms us. The workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal tool. We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean. Hence, the workshop will also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways.Read more

      workshop

      29 June-3 July 2015

      PETER STAMER / LUANDA CASELLA
      SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

      Bildschirmfoto 2015-03-28 um 13.59.09
      In 1969, the American psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a study to explore if two randomly selected individuals, strangers to each other coming from different American states, are nevertheless connected by acquaintances in between. Starting the test in Kansas/Nebraska, linking people to one individual in Massachusetts, the experiment suggested that an individual knows of any target person only by six degrees of connecting steps: Mr X from Kansas knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Mrs Z, living in Massachusetts.Read more.

       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] 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

       

       

       

    • apass_logo_sm

      a.pass has a new website!

       

      Click and visit our new site for info about our  workshops and events, an insight in the philosophy of a.pass, a leisurely stroll though the abecedaire, information on our  application procedures, etcetera…

      Miriam Hempel (design) and Guido Lucassen (programming) developed a creative multi-functional work platform that allows participants to develop their cases and collaborate in our outside of the public eye.

      That offers the possibility to produce ever-changing pages with a user-friendly click or two (or three). And that allows a.pass to (little by little) open up its archives to the public.

      Please take a look, and let us know what you think!

       

       

       

      BLOCK FOCUS SUMMER 2015: UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson

      What is the possible relationship between art and social change? When forced into the corner of economic demands on the one hand and the need for aesthetic subversion on the other, a lot of artist workers feel the need to defend their ‘right to be’ through critical strategies and political transparency. In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies.

       

       

       

      upcoming workshops

      Abu ali * Toni Serra The Unseen Workshop

      8th - 12th June 2015

      Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008

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

      ...read more

       

       Nicolas Galeazzi Bricolage

      4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology. ... read more


      a.pass research centre The House of Spirits

      10 May-24 July 2015

      dome

      The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation

      ... read more 

       


      Pierre Joachim / Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer Ecology of affects

      25-29 May 2015

      optical_illEvery block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s theory of affects and Guattari’s concept of mental ecology by reading closely a series of texts from 17th to 21st century.  ... read more 

       

       

      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

       
    • newsletter one column 02 April 2015
      posted by: Guido Lucassen
       apass_logo_sm

       Newsletter
      Spring 2015
       
       

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
      PIERRE JOACHIM / GEERT OPSOMER / PIERRE RUBIO 
      ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment.

      This B-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s concepts of Desire, Joy, Sadness and Affect in the ‘Ethics’ and Guattari’s concepts of Mental Ecology and Collective Assemblages of Enunciation  by reading closely a series of texts from the 17th up to the 21st century. With the help of two guests, Pierre Joachim and Geert Opsomer, we will study these philosophical key notions but also discover how Pierre and Geert put them into practice and consequently how we can do so as well.

      Can we associate sadness with the outcomes of our capitalist world?

       

       

      NICOLAS GALEAZZI BRICOLAGE

      4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

      A TOOL FOR OPENING THE BLOCK

       To open this block we start with bricolage. The bricoleur never starts – he is continuously working on ‘whatever is at hand’.

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Savage Mind’, we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one’s research model and methodology.   

       
      OUR New website

      apass_web

       
       
       
      The unseen workshop
      Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008
      For this workshop Abu Ali * Toni Serra offers a selection of footage from the video archive O.V.N.I (observatori de video no idenitficat) based in Barcelona, which deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections Abu Ali * Toni Serra will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.
       

       

       sthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.

      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

       

       

       

    •  apass_logo_sm


      Reclaiming economy

      - it's art

      on self-governing of fairness

      in collaboration with the State of the Arts

      16/03/2018 start 19:00 

      a.pass / Rue Delaunoyestraat 58-60 / 1080 Brussel

       
       
      [caption id="attachment_7469" align="aligncenter" width="620"] live drawing at a forum on critical administration with Kate Rich, 2018[/caption]


      Alberto Cossu / Ronny Heiremans /
      invited by a.pass, Sota and Nicolas Galeazzi

      In the last couple of months a.pass was investigating the impact of economic and institutional conditions onto artistic research practices and the possibilities to impact those conditions through the very same artistic practices. Institutional critique and alternative economic concepts are strongly related when it comes to the creation of differing conditions.

      SOTA, state of the arts, is engaging since several years in influencing cultural policy in Belgium. Now SOTA proposes a yearly summer camp as a gathering of all workers in the cultural sector to discuss the notion of fair practice and the creation of an Almanac as an evolving political instrument. 

      For the evening of March 16 a.pass has invited together with SOTA Alberto Cossu to meet with Ronny Heiremans, who both engage with their practices in different ways of discussing and changing the conditions for artistic practices.

      In the Project CAVEAT Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir take contracts used in the Belgium art context as a starting point for a reconfiguration of the position of the artist in society. In their investigation they look into the legal, social and artistic consequences of the structuring framework a contract provides and use it as a lens to look at questions of authorship, labour situation, price politics or political solidarity.

      As sociologist and activist, Alberto Cossu in contrast, is situated in the conditions of an occupied space in Italy – the MACAO in Milano that he joined since its inception in 2012. MACAO is an independent center for art, culture and research. Rejecting the creative industry paradigm, and innovating the idea of cultural institutions, MACAO considers art production as a viable process for changing social, political and economic conditions. MACAO developed its own crypto-currency, provides a context for the research on innovative governance and discusses the labour conditions in the cultural sector.

      Ronny Heiremans and Alberto Cossu are meeting each other this evening the first time to discuss principles of self-organisation and the creation of condition under which artistic practice can unfold a reclaimed economy that serves the common livelihood.


        

       sthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.

      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

       

       

       

    • the new structure for dedicated mentorings (3x2 or 2x3)

      The dedicated mentors for this block are Abu Ali * Toni Serra, Bart Van den Eynde, Lilia Mestre and Elke Van Campenhout. Since some participants preferred to have a more in-depth contact with their mentors, we changed the set-up of the sessions as follows: out of the four mentors each participant chooses

      -3 mentors and has 2 sessions with each of them (regular)

      OR

      -2 mentors and has 3 sessions with each of them (intense)

      Since the dedicated mentors each are responsible for one day during the first Workshop on Artistic Research, we will be able to decide on who, what and how at the end of the first week.

       

      On top of these mentors you will also be mentored a peer participant of your choice who will follow you throughout the whole block, and with whom you meet also at least twice. For this block we would like you to experiment with the mentoring format, and to contribute to our Toolkit for Mentoring, by adding alternative formats for mentoring through practice, movement, double self-interviews, through intermediary pets, objects or cooking sessions, ... Whatever you think might get the juices flowing. 

       

      the INTERVIEW SESSIONS

      Throughout the block each participant also develops an interview practice, in 3 sessions, based on questions that appeared in their own cases. The three stages of the interview throughout the block can take on different forms: through language, audio or image, addressing one person at the the time, or conducting (small) group interviews. Written or spoken or walked. In the end the three stages of the interview will serve as a starting point for the sessions during End Week in PAF. 

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS 28 March 2015
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Joachim
    • 25 May 2015
    • 29 May 2015
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

       

       

      “The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”
      Spinoza, ‘Tractatus Theologicopoliticus’, 1670

       

      “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds”
      Gregory Bateson, ‘Steps to an ecology of mind’, 1972

       

      “There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.”
      Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, ‘Anti-Oedipus’, 1972

       

      “The question of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotiv. It’s not a natural given any more than air or water. How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and permanently reinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with universes of mutant value? How do we work for its liberation that is for its resingularization?
      Felix Guattari, ‘Chaosmosis’, 1992

       

      “A revolution is as much a reorientation of our affective relations as it is of social relations and cannot be one without the other.“
      Jason Read, ‘Economies of Affect / Affective Economies’, 2013

       

       

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment.

      This B-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ wants to address critically the production of subjectivity. We will put into discussion Spinoza’s theory of Affect in the ‘Ethics’ and Guattari’s critique of Capitalism's exploitation of Desire by reading closely a series of texts from the 17th up to the 21st century. With the help of two guests, Pierre Joachim and Geert Opsomer, we will study these philosophical and critical key notions but also discover how Pierre and Geert put them into practice and consequently how we can do so as well.

      Can we associate sadness with the outcomes of our capitalist world?
      Are we affected so much by capitalism that we can only sadly survive in what seems to have become its ‘nature’?
      Can we still affect the world?
      What could a joyful passion mean today?
      Is a joyful passion subversive?
      How can we create the conditions for joy to be possible?
      Is it by re-allocating desire that new joys can emerge?
      Can artistic researches produce a change?
      How can agency be created with aesthetic means?
      Could we critically re-combine ethics and aesthetics to reclaim the transformative power of our researches?
      What could be the nature of an ecology of affects that has the potential to produce a change?

      The workshop will make use of an elaborate reader that will be shared with the participants well in time for the workshop.

       

      The workshop is curated by Pierre Rubio

       

       

      Biographies

      Geert Opsomer

      Geert Opsomer is a German philologist, theatre scientist and dramaturg, teacher at the director’s department of the RITS and artistic collaborator of the arts centre CAMPO. Between 2001 and 2007 he was the artistic director of Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent, which in 2008 fused with the theatre company Victoria to become CAMPO. Within CAMPO Geert Opsomer organizes the Plateau/Platform for Artistic Nomads, which is the artistic research department of CAMPO.

      An extension of this research platform turned into the celebrated CAMPO production ‘A l’attente du Livre d’Or’, selected for the Dutch Theaterfestival in 2010. Together with Johan Dehollander and a strong Belgian-Congolese cast, Opsomer made a joyful-anarchistic assemblage piece about Congolese comedy and Western tragedy. The jury praised the piece as a pioneer in the construction of connections between local and international practices, allowing them to strengthen one another.

       

      Pierre Joachim

      Pierre Joachim studied architecture (la Cambre, Belgium) and philosophy (ULB, Belgium). He has been exploring interactions between ‘theory’ and various practices, from architecture to pedagogy, social work, or dramaturgy. Rather driven by collaborations born from joyful encounters than any specific field of expertise, his main recent activities are writing and research collaborations with psychoanalyst Kathleen Rochlenko, performance and installation creation with Alexandre Le Petit (Verso Natura) and architectural conception. He is actually working on a blog and inquiry project. Spinoza’s Ethics have often offered him a precious tool for thought and collaboration.

    • [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

       

       

       

    •  
      a.pass offers a collaborative environment for the development of artistic research. Five to six researchers join the Research Center for a one year cycle. They are accompanied by three Research Curators that consecutively take care of the center. The activities of the research center are organised around performative publishing, engagement with external research situations and peer reviewing/collective mentoring. Research is developed, shared and performed in public lectures, workshops, conferences, publications, performances and other experimental set-ups. The Research Center meets on a bi-weekly basis to self-organise and share processes. In addition, research curators are available for individual meetings.
       
      Associated researchers are seen as partners of a.pass. They have access to the collective activities of the post-master program. a.pass provides technical support, workspace and supports performative publishing. Associated researchers do not pay a fee. a.pass can act as an institutional partner in applications for funding or academic research. The specific terms of the association will be formulated in an individual contract between the researcher and a.pass, delineating the research steps that will be developed within the a.pass environment and their possible public outcomes.
    •  
      Associated researchers can apply three times per year for the upcoming cycle, ideally after an initial conversation with one of the a.pass curators. The next cycle begins in May 2021.
       
      The research center invites associated researchers who:
      - are involved in ongoing advanced artistic research
      - have a practice-based understanding of artistic research
      - are associated to multiple platforms of support
      - have the ability to formulate and follow their own study trajectory
      - are able to self-organise and contribute to collective processes
      - have experience with making their research public, and are interested in contributing it to the public program of a.pass
       
      An associated researcher involved in a PhD program can propose to develop their PhD research as a part of their trajectory within the a.pass environment. This can happen at any time during the PhD trajectory. Since a.pass can not formally grant or evaluate PhD certificates, the researcher has to be already associated with a university and a university supervisor.
       
      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.
       
       
       
    • newsletter one column 13 March 2015
      posted by: Guido Lucassen
       apass_logo_sm

       Newsletter
      Spring 2015
       
       

      Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
      PIERRE JOACHIM / GEERT OPSOMER / PIERRE RUBIO 
      ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment.

      This B-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s concepts of Desire, Joy, Sadness and Affect in the ‘Ethics’ and Guattari’s concepts of Mental Ecology and Collective Assemblages of Enunciation  by reading closely a series of texts from the 17th up to the 21st century. With the help of two guests, Pierre Joachim and Geert Opsomer, we will study these philosophical key notions but also discover how Pierre and Geert put them into practice and consequently how we can do so as well.

      Can we associate sadness with the outcomes of our capitalist world?

       

       

       

      NICOLAS GALEAZZI BRICOLAGE

      4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

      A TOOL FOR OPENING THE BLOCK

       To open this block we start with bricolage. The bricoleur never starts – he is continuously working on ‘whatever is at hand’.

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Savage Mind’, we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one’s research model and methodology.   

       
      OUR New website

      apass_web

       

       

       

       

      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

       

       

       

    • conference
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • block 2014/III
    • PHARMAKON Pharmakon: whitch culture?
      13 January 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • 01 October 2014
    • 30 November 2014
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • PHARMAKON

      This Thematics project builds on the notion of ‘pharmakon’ as coined by the contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler. In ancient Greece, ‘pharmakon’ was understood both as ‘poison’ and ‘medicine’, and in some cases also as ‘scapegoat’.

       

      The word might mean either the one or the other depending on the context, which implies a certain knowledge, or ‘knowledge-ability’. A skill of dosage and use, witchcraft involving insight and imaginative contextualization.

      At the ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference, a group of artists and theorists will investigate the notion of ‘pharmakon’ in our society. As Stiegler suggests in his analysis of the need for a ‘pharmacology’ to counter the poisonous fumes of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment, it is clear that the fabrication of our culture(s) has urgently to be (re)questioned. What are the categories we use to produce and develop the culture in which we ‘individuate’ ourselves? What is the change in ‘technics’ that is needed to re-imagine our desires, stepping out of ourselves, as ex-isting in the public sphere? What sort of witchcraft is demanded from us, as artists, citizens and thinkers, to come up with the right spells and potions, and to dose our practices to transform poison into medicine.

      The ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture’ conference is part of the Thematics two-month research residency project, organized by Bains Connective, which brings together artists and theorists to work on, share and perform their concerns on this matter. They experiment on developing artistic remedies and toxic fumes, in search of a reformulation of the agency of the artist in contemporary society. In this way the Pharmakon project inserts itself into a growing movement of artistic initiatives that engage more directly in the political sphere, that want to make the public, the other, the citizen, part of their researches, that question how the artistic relates to the world we live in. These artistic interests speak of the willingness to restate desire in its fullness as a societal driving force. A desire that is not reduced to economic drives, but that is structured and transformed in accordance with the practices and thoughts of its members. Or more simply: we speak about set-ups that could inform and produce knowledge, and which could question the drives and urgencies that produce our social agencies.

      Participants in the Thematics residency: Alexandre Le Petit, Flora Pilet, Sophie Quénon, Lilia Mestre, Elke Van Campenhout, Joséphine de Weck, Michiel Vandevelde, Michiel Reynaert, Veridiana Zurita, et al.

      Guests invited to the conference: Bernard Stiegler, Pieter de Buysser, Maria Lucia Cruz Correia, Maika Lond , ... 

      ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’, was a Thematics artistic research residency project, taking place in Brussels from the 15th of October until the 15th of December 2014. This residency is one of the stages in the development of the broader, transnational ‘Pharmakon’ research project undertaken by Institut Nomade. The ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference will last three days and will explore the theoretical and artistic approaches to dealing with an increasingly toxic economic, ethical and cultural environment, in search of other techniques by which to connect, share and imagine the fabric of our togetherness. As a ‘performative conference’, this meeting involves artists as well as theorists, dissolves the boundaries between ‘specialists’ and ‘public’, and between ‘performers’ and ‘theorists’, and opens up a space for desire and reflection.

      Thematics was organized by Bains Connective, in collaboration with Institut Nomade, the a.pass research center and Kaaitheater.

       

      Partners of the project :

       

      (1) Bains Connective

      Thematics is a two-month residency program for artists and theoreticians, curated by Lilia Mestre within the framework of Bains Connective. Every time the residency addressed another topic, deemed to be urgent or relevant for the current state of (artistic) affairs. During this period, different artists and thinkers share their works, strategies and ideas. The work space Bains Connective creates the initial context and set-up, and offers work spaces and a communal starting point by inviting artists, theoreticians, academics, politicians and activists to add and contribute to the research. As a basis for the exchange, we organize weekly meetings as well as two public encounters, where the participating artists can share their work in a format of their choice. Starting from these basic principles, we work closely together on developing ways to share interests and processes of work.

      Thematics develops for each residency project a strategy of questioning and interviews that follow up and register the artistic processes so as to create a written publication that reflects every Thematics residency. These publications are also a working tool that expresses to necessity to communicate, to speak out, to share the practices, methodologies and artistic trajectories with each other and a larger public.

       

      (2) Institut Nomade

      The activities of the Institut Nomade are fundamentally trans-disciplinary in nature. Concerned with how the notion of "performativity" resonates in both artistic practices and cultural constructions, the Institut conducts research into the ontology of performative language, the relationship between the performer/author and the stage, and the stage itself as a scene of collective individuation and thus a form of micro-politics. The global project of the Institut could be described as an inquiry into "modern culture", that mobilizes the conceptual tools provided by the performative arts, the heritage of J.L Austin's concept of performativity, and Bernard Stiegler's contemporary elaboration of the idea of the "pharmakon". The Institut is concerned with all forms of writing that compose our public voice– forms that we create by and for ourselves. This research takes on a variety of formats including interviews, performances, texts, images, videos, installations, soundscapes, etc. The interaction between these media is organized by rhizomatic systems of writing and by experimental loops of representation that participants are invited to appropriate and reconstruct.

       

      (3) a.pass research center

      a.pass  is an artistic research environment that develops research on performativity and scenography, in an international artistic and educational context. a.pass offers a one-year artistic research training program at post-master level for artists and theoreticians, based on the principles of self-organization, collaboration and transdisciplinarity. a.pass participants develop an independent artistic research project, with a personalized curriculum in a shared and collectively created research environment.

      The a.pass research center develops, documents and archives tools for qualitative and relevant artistic research practices. The research center uses this growing archive to communicate and interact with the artistic and educational field and functions as a forum for the development of a critical approach on
      artistic research. a.pass emphasizes the relation between the research practices and a broader societal field, and encourages engaged transdisciplinary practices.

      In the context of its artistic research center, a.pass offers a tailor-made PhD trajectory for doctoral students that gives the possibility to develop the practice-based part of their PhD research in collective research environment.

       

      (4) Kaaitheater

      The Kaaitheater is a Brussels and international arts centre which has been a leader in theatre, dance, music and performance for over thirty five years.

      A number of artists and companies have been closely associated with the Kaaitheater for many years: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Rosas, Jan Decorte, Jan Lauwers & Needcompany, Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods, Ictus, tg STAN and Tristero, and from abroad Jérôme Bel, Raimund Hoghe, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Jonathan Burrows, The Wooster Group and others. From 2013 to 2016 Eleanor Bauer, Kris Verdonck, Mette Ingvartsen and Ivo Dimchev are our artists in residence.

      Social and ecological topics are a prominent element in Kaaitheater’s work. The Kaaitheater is part of two European networks: Imagine 2020, that focuses on art and climate change, and House on Fire, supporting productions that are intended to contribute to a critical debate on political and social issues.

      The Kaaitheater presents about 75 productions each season and welcomes its visitors to two locations in the canal zone in Brussels: the Kaaitheater itself (the large theatre, on Sainctelettesquare) and the Kaaistudio’s (small theatre and rehearsal studios, near Dansaertstraat).

    • Bureau d’Espoir is a long-term research project on hope, initiated by Elke Van Campenhout. Bureau d’Espoir researches the possibility for a new engagement with the concept of hope, both on a political, social, physical and spiritual level.

      Bureau d’Espoir is a research practice that starts out from the question: why do something rather than nothing? The last ten years the artistic sector seems to be burdened by a nagging form of debilitating self-critique that blocks artists (and other artistic workers) from assuming an affirmative position on the scene. Not only does it feel like any kind of performative gesture has become over-identified by decennia of critical theory, but an all-encompassing economic system has rendered any kind of emancipatory or critical gesture close to impossible.

      In this period of time some artists have developed strong strategies to deal with this catch 22: the embrace of radical cynicism, the strong emphasis on the no-manifesto of the arts, utopian projects, the over-identification with commercial strategies, the development of ‘tender’ practices, the deconstruction of the author position through collaborative practices etc. But on the other hand we also see a choreographic agoraphobic gesture that forced dancers to a standstill, that turned out the lights on the big stages for fear of over-exposure and virtuosity, the crippling insecurity of being misunderstood, misplaced, recuperated by ‘the system’. A malaise that forced whole generations of artists into experimental modes of working that lost their power to communicate outside a group of privileged partakers.

      But, if we turn this artistic deadlock around, it might be that exactly in this despair, this reluctance from taking the stage, this vulnerability from a lack of a clear position, the artistic sector finally fundamentally challenges its (post-)modernist claim of autonomy, of steering clear from the political, ethical and economic apparatuses that keep the individual and the citizen in line. It is in this indolent despair that the artistic field once again becomes permeable, ‘tender’ to the influences of an outside reality. The non-productive modes of working that question the economic common sense of a neo-liberal arts world and the impossibility of the artist to undo himself from his responsibilities, insecurities and desires as an individual and a citizen, open up messy zones for misunderstanding that might be an affective tool in rethinking and (temporarily) reorganizing the social sphere, or what Rancière calls, ‘le partage du sensible’. (see text: ‘Het kapitaal van de kunsten’ in posts, translation soon to come)

      In looking at the societal machinery that forms and molds our individual motives and drives, it is one thing to look away and try to avoid its influence, but it is another to look ‘awry’, to produce by turning towards the machinery that shapes our realities, and try, through a performative over-embrace to turn their effectivity around: to make affective what is effective. In a series of performance practices, developed under the working title ‘The Poverty Projects’ I would like to import some of these ‘machines’ into a performance context, and use them as tools for emancipation, the redefinition of the social body of artists and non-artists, and the embrace of a different sense of beauty and temporal recognition of the situation at hand.

      Working on machines like ‘the Institute’ (in the Tender Institute), apparati for global food production (in the performance machine ‘Battery’), importing global poverty (the Poverty Projects), and other initiatives, Bureau d’Espoir wants to work on the gaps in a system that is overdefined by its own functionality. The Poverty Practices want to lay bare the absurd qualities and affective nonsensical by-products of a global economic and institutionalized bureaucratic system. Through these practices the Bureau also wants to redefine the highly moralized and capitalized categories of value, as they are employed in the evaluation of (artistic) knowledge today. By questioning the academic frameworks of knowledge production in the much more vulnerable modes of performance practice, the Bureau will develop a critical language for artistic research that questions the individual maker/writer, the language(s) of research, the possible strategies for communicating research, and the economic value of knowledge production.

      www.bureaudespoir.org

    • 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

    • "Other than the ‘artist’s research’, artistic research overwrites the isolation and the hermetics of art production in the classical sense, in addressing in one way or another a socially relevant problematics. This kind of artistic research opens up new ways for the creation of a ‘generous cultural memory’."

       

      1. 'artistic research’ 

      To clarify what kind of research a.pass sustains, a minimum of conceptual transparency is needed. When we combine the terms ‘research’ and ‘artistic’, most of the time we are dealing with a research ON the arts (art history, musicology, theatre sciences, aspects of cultural sociology, esthetics etc...) or a research IN the arts (a research that is part of a (regular) artistic practice). What we in a.pass consider as artistic research - a term that is often understood in reference to the Anglo-saxon models for practice-based research - often is the result of a research In the arts, but cannot be reduced to it. a.pass doesn’t want to limit its range of research to the ‘artist research’ full stop: the necessarily research-oriented attitude that accompanies any kind of serious artistic endeavour, which does not necessarily have any link to the communication and valorization of research results as it is demanded in an academic context. ‘Research’, as it is understood in the artistic practice, is an evident part of this practice which allows for a result-oriented reflection on the work, or in other words: a research oriented towards the production of the art work as a product, as a repertory and/or as an oeuvre.

      In the a.pass environment, and in a playful questioning of the ‘academic’ research mind-set, this individual artist is not the sole focus of attention, or at least not in the sense that we perceive our researchers as artists tout court. An artist research has an inherent logic and validity, but does not necessarily have a need to be communicative to an outside community in any other form than through the production of art works. a.pass reflects on a research in the arts that is more than a report - in the art work itself or in the accompanying dissertation - of the individual research of an artist. What we consider an artistic research project is rather:

      ‘a new practice in the arts, which differs from the individual artist practice, as well as from the art historical or scientific research practice. One researches not only the art through the art works, but the functioning of art and the breadth of the art practice by way of interdisciplinary interventions in the (semi-)public, societal domain. Artistic research is an interdisciplinary concentration around a ‘binding’ problem that catches the attention of a pluriform group of participants.’ (Jouke Kleerebeezem, De Witte Raaf)

      This means that a question in the research of a.pass is always situated in a broader context than that of the sole artist: a lot of the questions that are posed in a.pass generate collective discussions and critique, find their way (partly) into other researches or attempt temporary coalitions in the defining and/or broadening up of a certain problematics. Important in this environment is the shared reflection concerning ways of working, diverse understandings of artistic research, the development of (post-disciplinary) perspectives and the experimentation with methodologies and strategies. The work of the artistic researcher does not coincide with the work of the artist in the sense that it is self-conscious, and explicitly communicates and circulates this self-reflection within a wider group of stakeholders.

      In other words, the emphasis in this kind of research is not so much on the conception and production of an art work - although this undeniably and unavoidably is part of the whole of the research - but rather on a questioning that puts the individual art practice and even the recognizable mono-discipline in a wider perspective. This kind of research originates from and builds on the demands and problematics of a shared debate, and can be approached by different specialist researchers, each addressing the question out of his own domain. The length, the quality criteria, the form, the communication strategies and the required ‘relevance’ of the research - and thus also the understanding of the requirements of the PhD-project that might eventually result out from it - are thus in principle dependent on the context and have to be negotiated on a project base between the researcher and the institution(s) involved. It is in this case very important to recognize a wider ‘public’, the potential users of this research, as a partner in this trajectory, and to develop the appropriate communication channels to make this participation possible.

       

      2. “A new art terrain escapes in the best case scenario the doom of splendid isolation, WITHOUT losing the special and meaningful privilege of unusefulness that characterizes the symbolic practice.” (Jouke Kleerebeezem) 

      Other than the ‘artist’s research’, artistic research overwrites the isolation and the hermetics of art production in the classical sense, in addressing in one way or another a socially relevant problematics. This kind of artistic research opens up new ways for the creation of a ‘generous cultural memory’. But at the same time the societal relevance of this research cannot coincide with its utilitarian value, since the direct impact of the research practice and reflection necessarily develops through artistic, affective gestures of experimentation and communication that resonate with, but never answer to, the concrete questions posed within the societal fabric. This kind of research thus will only influence the daily social, political, economic or scientific reality by a detour, through the unsettling of its self-reflection and imagination(s). This independent position, free from any preconditioned political preconceptions, economic value or socially determined relevance is a necessary and undeniable characteristic of this research practice.

      More than a pragmatic laboratory for the production of answers on societal questions, the research lab that is a.pass offers the possibility to construct an ‘general intellect’: a way of working wherein researchers collectively give form to diverse practices to produce and articulate knowledge in an open, shared research environment.

       

      3. ‘Old cultural dichotomies have come to collapse: those of knowledge and imagination, thinking and doing, language and image, truth and illusion, theory and practice, object and process.” (Camiel Van Winkel)

      In a.pass the relevance of the research is measured by the degree in which researchers, out of their different backgrounds and knowledge horizons, manage to formulate innovative perspectives on potential knowledge production, as well as on the development of tools to share and experiment this knowledge on the public scene. It is clear that the development of this kind of research environment also resonates with other institutions for art education on an (inter)national scale. Artistic research in a.pass can be seen as a third way, wedged in between the artistic practice as such and the more academic understanding of knowledge production. Different from the artistic practice the research is not limited to the individual trajectory, the personal questioning and aesthetics of the artist. But at the same time the art practice does take a central role in the development of new perspectives and methodologies, a way of working that relates to, but doesn’t coincide with, and even explicitly questions an academic AND an artistic framework. Artistic research in a.pass is not limited to the development of arts-practice-related knowledge, but also involves the creation and testing of formats, methodologies, communication strategies and shared practices, ‘tools for collaboration and communication’, that broaden up the understanding of artistic research from an art work with paper validation form to a more critical investigation into the statute, the circulation and the valuation of divergent forms of knowledge.

    • 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?

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Audrey Cottin
      Danny Neyman
      Hektor Mamet
      JeremiahRunnels
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Mavi Veloso
      Philippine Hoegen
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Tinna Ottesen
      Yaari Shalem

       


      Research End Presentations

      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Stef Meul 

       

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Cecilia Molano
      Mala Kline
      Ruth S. Noyes,
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Partners

      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Ana Hoffner
      Antonia Baehr
      Daniel Blanga-Gubbay
      Elke van Campenhout
      Emma Cocker
      Eric Thielemans
      Lilia Mestre
      Mariella Greil
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Pierre Rubio

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Geert Opsomer
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

       

      ‘CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS’
      curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

      The proposal is to plunge into the conditions for the emergence of poetics. Poetics used here as acts that transform our ways of perceiving, situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

       

       

      14 / 01 -19 / 03 / 2015


      ‘PERFORM BACK SCORE’
      Weekly Practice by Lilia Mestre


      This score is a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?
      The aim is to develop systems to practice the staging of philosophy, critical exposure and the rhetorics inherent to any body, object, word, situation. It is a working score. Taking as a principle that the artwork raises questions and doesn’t give answers I would like to propose a Q&A in 9 sessions where we can just perform. The series of performances will function as replies that raise (an)other(s) question(s) or problematic (s). This score will also be a documentation practice that questions performance as a document.

       

       

      05 / 01 - 09 / 01 / 2015


      ‘REPERTOIRE’
      Workshop by Eric Thielemans


      For the last couple of years my artistic practice became more research based and reflective, and my work was touched by that evolution. The workshop deals with the notion(s) of repertoire. Of what stuff are they made? How did they come about? It will be a first time for me to adapt the questions and reflections to a wider and multidisciplinary field of expertise and practices.
      Repertoire(s) is a research and reflective workshop in which I see us all, like a bunch of passionate amateur entomologists , observe, index, taxonomize, and share the constitutive phenomenons of our life with our craft and the repertory of skills, tools, techniques, practices that we use to build that life. Furthermore we will investigate various strategies and ways to weave the sensibilities, disciplines and practices of each participant together into meaningful wholes or collective spaces and cosmologies.
      First the focus will lie on each of us individually. After that we will dive into group related observations. How do we behave as a group? What’s the repertoire of the group? Off course this separation individual-group is artificial and not always easy to keep but I think it will give us a strategy, plan, focus and ground during the work.
      At the end of the workweek, we will propose a showing of the work in which there will be place for each individual to share and propose some of his/her findings and reflections in whatever way suitable as well as there will be group propositions.

       

       

      19 / 01 - 23 / 01 / 2015


      ‘PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY / SUBJECTS / OBJECTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout


      ‘Performance / Performativity / Subject / Object’ is a b-workshop: it covers some of the basic knowledges we share on an (almost) daily basis in a.pass, and that need some in-depth attention. In this block we will read texts and discuss the problematics from the point of view of objects and subjects: how does an object perform its objectness and how does it perform us. In other words: how does the object perform our subject-ness? And how does the subject perform the object? Or: how can we replace our subjectness by objectness and what does that entail?
      In other words, although the basic performativity texts like the ones of Judith Butler and the speech act theory of Austin will certainly play a role in the backseat, in these reading sessions we will concentrate more specifically on object oriented philosophies like the ones of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, the ‘queer phenomenology’ of Sara Ahmed, go deeper into the concept of ‘compositionism’ as coined by Bruno Latour, and study the continuity between materiality and immateriality by reading some from ‘Action and Agency in Dialogue’ by François Cooren.

       

       


      02 / 02 - 06 / 02 / 2015


      ‘TOOLS FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH - BECKETT’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Ana Hoffner


      The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text. The challenge of the workshop will be to make those categories mentioned above appear as twofold: as artistic concepts from the past but also as embodied experiences and potential tools for our own artistic research. Each day we will focus on a different category from Beckett’s work in order to transform it, translate it and develop a better understanding of the way we as artist, performers and choreographers can use them in the present.

       

       

       

      23 / 02 - 27 / 02 / 2015


      ‘CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES - DEVIATIONS FROM THE LINE’
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Emma Cocker


      How might one devise a system of notation alert to the real-time circumstances of the practicing within practice, foregrounding process, and emphasizing the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live)? What forms of notation could be developed for articulating that which resists articulation, for that which is pre-articulation, or a form of representation for the non-representational? How can a form of notation communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within practice, without rendering them still or static, without fixing that which is contingent as a clearly readable or literal sign?
      To explore the performative character of notation, we practice kinetic as well as graphic modes of inscription, expanded tactics beyond apparent physical limitations (of the mind, the hand, pencil, and paper), attending to the integration of time, sound, movement, and narration. We propose the concept of the choreo-graphic figure, for investigating how the embodied practice of choreographic performance (in an expanded sense) might become a tool of inscription and notation in itself. The choreo-graphic figure is conceived as a notational event, incorporating the potential of both movement and materiality, a sense of both temporality and spatiality. Our shared quest is both for a system of notation for honoring the process of figuring (as a live investigative event) and for “choreo-graphic” figures for making tangible and communicating these significant moments within the unfolding journey of collaborative practice. We seek modes of notation between the lines, interested in the interval or gap between the choreo + graphic, sign + non-sign, visual + textual, extensive + intensive, embodiment + disembodiment, movement + materiality, being + becoming.

       


      02 / 03 - 06 / 03 / 2015


      ‘CONDITIONS FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN (LATENT PERFORMANCES)’
      workshop by Daniel Blanga-Gubbay

      Instead of thinking of the possible as an empty space, we should maybe see it as a space designed with conditions. Latency names the state of something ready to happen, ready to emerge. Within this space, something will happen: can we still be responsible for creating this space, without taking care of its result?
      This workshop puts first into question what does mean an act of transformation. Well beyond the notion of performing arts, performance can perhaps simply be thought of as any act that can modify the coordinates of the given. If we imagine reality to be a surface made of endless inclinations that determine movements and trajectories within it, then the proper task of performance is perhaps that of constructing the gesture that can refigure the surface for a while, releasing unimagined lines, opening up gaps between the permitted and the possible.
      How is it possible to go beyond the idea of creating something to suddenly create a space ready for the emergence of something unspecific to happen? By merging theory and practice, working both through interventions in given and constructed space – and through the categories of space of accident, risk, love – these days investigate not only the question "what is the condition for the emergence of an action", but eventually "what does it mean to create (and abandon) a space filled with unforeseen possible actions?"

       

       

      09 / 03 - 14 / 03 / 2015


      ‘WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME’
      workshop by Antonia Baehr


      In this workshop, we will investigate how scores can function as a constitutive factor for kinship relations. We will write scores as gifts to each other, and I will share some of the “make-up productions” working methods with you.
      We will make ourselves familiar on a practical level with the use of scores for performance. We will read and execute a number of found scores: historical ones (from John Cage’s Songbooks for ex.) and contemporary ones (from the projects Laugh, and Abecedarium Bestiarium, among others), some infamous and others entirely unheard of. We will write, interpret and perform scores for each other, pass them on, turn them literally upside down while swapping roles and places.
      Between the hierarchical pyramidal structure to the collective, there is an endless plurality of forms of collaboration possible. This workshop examines the boundaries between score/interpretation, rehearsal/performance, director/performer, and audience/presentation. This workshop’s focus is an investigation through praxis.

    •  
      In the apass co-learning environment and within most of the program activities some space is systematically dedicated to discussing, sharing and feed-backing formats. These formats  are being created and revisited as part of the a.pass self-educating trajectory and they continuously inform the program development. Feedback, critique and discussion within a.pass are living tools of research that organically emerge out of the practices of the researchers, curators and mentors.
       
      The a.pass institute aims to build a culture of discussion in which we ‘agree to disagree, rather than one of argumentative oppositions or of convenient politeness. Resisting the reproduction of established research culture, the feedback and exchange sessions develop a space for ‘agonistic debate’: an open field for supporting, complementing, challenging and even re-routing each others’ positions.
       
      The collective co-learning environment of a.pass opens a platform for the development of stronger, more grounded and more critical positions for artistic researchers, which in turn contribute to the common practices and knowledge processings. Discussion and feedback formats simultaneously strengthen, sharpen and delineate what can be said. . Experimental  formats for communication and sharing  create hospitable conditions for the emergence of different logics, procedures and discourses. 
       
      A.pass often borrows techniques from different environments (critical theory, therapy, activism, political organization, technology,  and so on...) to create critical discursive dispositives as such as ritual practices, object constellations, tarot cards readings, concept mapping, walking discussions, silent communication, speed dating, cooking sessions, family constellation discussions, mind-mapping, dragon dreaming, score writing, fanzine-ing, radio programing, etc….  
       
       

       

    • performative publishing
    • project
    • research center
    • seminar
    • block 2015/III
    • PHARMAKON 11 December 2014
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • 15 October 2015
    • 15 December 2015
    • PHARMAKON

      Pharmakon : whitch culture ?

       

      ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’, is a Thematics artistic research residency project, taking place in Brussels from the 15th of October until the 15th of December 2014. This residency is one of the stages in the development of the broader, transnational ‘Pharmakon’ research project undertaken by Institut Nomade. The ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference will last three days and will explore the theoretical and artistic approaches to dealing with an increasingly toxic economic, ethical and cultural environment, in search of other techniques by which to connect, share and imagine the fabric of our togetherness. As a ‘performative conference’, this meeting involves artists as well as theorists, dissolves the boundaries between ‘specialists’ and ‘public’, and between ‘performers’ and ‘theorists’, and opens up a space for desire and reflection.

      Thematics is organized by Bains Connective, in collaboration with Institut Nomade, the a.pass research center and Kaaitheater.

       

      Pharmakon: whitch culture?

      This Thematics project builds on the notion of ‘pharmakon’ as coined by the contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler. In ancient Greece, ‘pharmakon’ was understood both as ‘poison’ and ‘medicine’, and in some cases also as ‘scapegoat’. The word might mean either the one or the other depending on the context, which implies a certain knowledge, or ‘knowledge-ability’. A skill of dosage and use, witchcraft involving insight and imaginative contextualization.

      At the ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference, a group of artists and theorists will investigate the notion of ‘pharmakon’ in our society. As Stiegler suggests in his analysis of the need for a ‘pharmacology’ to counter the poisonous fumes of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment, it is clear that the fabrication of our culture(s) has urgently to be (re)questioned. What are the categories we use to produce and develop the culture in which we ‘individuate’ ourselves? What is the change in ‘technics’ that is needed to re-imagine our desires, stepping out of ourselves, as ex-isting in the public sphere? What sort of witchcraft is demanded from us, as artists, citizens and thinkers, to come up with the right spells and potions, and to dose our practices to transform poison into medicine.

       

      The ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture’ conference is part of the Thematics two-month research residency project, organized by Bains Connective, which brings together artists and theorists to work on, share and perform their concerns on this matter. They experiment on developing artistic remedies and toxic fumes, in search of a reformulation of the agency of the artist in contemporary society. In this way the Pharmakon project inserts itself into a growing movement of artistic initiatives that engage more directly in the political sphere, that want to make the public, the other, the citizen, part of their researches, that question how the artistic relates to the world we live in. These artistic interests speak of the willingness to restate desire in its fullness as a societal driving force. A desire that is not reduced to economic drives, but that is structured and transformed in accordance with the practices and thoughts of its members. Or more simply: we speak about set-ups that could inform and produce knowledge, and which could question the drives and urgencies that produce our social agencies.

       

      Participants in the Thematics residency:

      Alexandre Le Petit, Flora Pilet, Sophie Quénon, Lilia Mestre, Elke Van Campenhout, Joséphine de Weck, Michiel Vandevelde, Michiel Reynaert, Veridiana Zurita, et al.

       

      Guests invited to the conference:

      Bernard Stiegler, Pieter de Buysser, Maria Lucia Cruz Correia, Maika Lond , ...

       

      Partners of the project :

       

      (1) Bains Connective

      Thematics is a two-month residency program for artists and theoreticians, curated by Lilia Mestre within the framework of Bains Connective. Every time the residency addressed another topic, deemed to be urgent or relevant for the current state of (artistic) affairs. During this period, different artists and thinkers share their works, strategies and ideas. The work space Bains Connective creates the initial context and set-up, and offers work spaces and a communal starting point by inviting artists, theoreticians, academics, politicians and activists to add and contribute to the research. As a basis for the exchange, we organize weekly meetings as well as two public encounters, where the participating artists can share their work in a format of their choice. Starting from these basic principles, we work closely together on developing ways to share interests and processes of work.

      Thematics develops for each residency project a strategy of questioning and interviews that follow up and register the artistic processes so as to create a written publication that reflects every Thematics residency. These publications are also a working tool that expresses to necessity to communicate, to speak out, to share the practices, methodologies and artistic trajectories with each other and a larger public.

       

      (2) Institut Nomade

      The activities of the Institut Nomade are fundamentally trans-disciplinary in nature. Concerned with how the notion of "performativity" resonates in both artistic practices and cultural constructions, the Institut conducts research into the ontology of performative language, the relationship between the performer/author and the stage, and the stage itself as a scene of collective individuation and thus a form of micro-politics. The global project of the Institut could be described as an inquiry into "modern culture", that mobilizes the conceptual tools provided by the performative arts, the heritage of J.L Austin's concept of performativity, and Bernard Stiegler's contemporary elaboration of the idea of the "pharmakon". The Institut is concerned with all forms of writing that compose our public voice– forms that we create by and for ourselves. This research takes on a variety of formats including interviews, performances, texts, images, videos, installations, soundscapes, etc. The interaction between these media is organized by rhizomatic systems of writing and by experimental loops of representation that participants are invited to appropriate and reconstruct.

       

       

      (3) a.pass research center

      a.pass  is an artistic research environment that develops research on performativity and scenography, in an international artistic and educational context. a.pass offers a one-year artistic research training program at post-master level for artists and theoreticians, based on the principles of self-organization, collaboration and transdisciplinarity. a.pass participants develop an independent artistic research project, with a personalized curriculum in a shared and collectively created research environment.

       

      The a.pass research center develops, documents and archives tools for qualitative and relevant artistic research practices. The research center uses this growing archive to communicate and interact with the artistic and educational field and functions as a forum for the development of a critical approach on
      artistic research. a.pass emphasizes the relation between the research practices and a broader societal field, and encourages engaged transdisciplinary practices.

       

      In the context of its artistic research center, a.pass offers a tailor-made PhD trajectory for doctoral students that gives the possibility to develop the practice-based part of their PhD research in collective research environment.

       

      (4) Kaaitheater

      The Kaaitheater is a Brussels and international arts centre which has been a leader in theatre, dance, music and performance for over thirty five years.

      A number of artists and companies have been closely associated with the Kaaitheater for many years: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Rosas, Jan Decorte, Jan Lauwers & Needcompany, Meg Stuart & Damaged Goods, Ictus, tg STAN and Tristero, and from abroad Jérôme Bel, Raimund Hoghe, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, Jonathan Burrows, The Wooster Group and others. From 2013 to 2016 Eleanor Bauer, Kris Verdonck, Mette Ingvartsen and Ivo Dimchev are our artists in residence.

      Social and ecological topics are a prominent element in Kaaitheater’s work. The Kaaitheater is part of two European networks: Imagine 2020, that focuses on art and climate change, and House on Fire, supporting productions that are intended to contribute to a critical debate on political and social issues.

      The Kaaitheater presents about 75 productions each season and welcomes its visitors to two locations in the canal zone in Brussels: the Kaaitheater itself (the large theatre, on Sainctelettesquare) and the Kaaistudio’s (small theatre and rehearsal studios, near Dansaertstraat).

       

    • old information
    • NOT_index
    • old info
    • a.pass in context Position of a.pass in the educational and artistic field
      10 December 2014
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
      a.pass in context

       

      The a.pass program and research centre are positioned within a larger context of the arts and education, and develops its working out of a questioning of the current organization of artistic and educational (institutional) practices. In its trajectory, a.pass has on all levels of its organization critically reflected upon the economy of knowledge as it is being employed today in higher education and the media, the logics of the arts market, the recuperation of institutional critique by the institutions themselves, the capitalist drive for the new, the seductive and the quickly consumable, and the role and responsibility of the artist researcher in all of this.

      In a.pass the relevance of the research is measured by the degree in which researchers, out of their different backgrounds and knowledge horizons, manage to formulate innovative perspectives on potential knowledge production, as well as on the development of tools to share and experiment this knowledge on the public scene. It is clear that this kind of research environment also resonates with other institutions for art education on an (inter)national scale. Artistic research in a.pass can be seen as a third way, wedged in between the artistic practice as such and the more academic understanding of knowledge production. Different from the artistic practice the research is not limited to the individual trajectory, the personal questioning and aesthetics of the artist. But at the same time the artistic practice does take on a central role in the development of new perspectives and methodologies, a way of working that relates to, but doesn’t coincide with, and even explicitly questions an academic AND an artistic framework. Artistic research in a.pass is not limited to the development of arts-practice-related knowledge, but also involves the creation and testing of formats, methodologies, communication strategies and shared practices, ‘tools for collaboration and communication’, that broaden up the understanding of artistic research from an art work with paper validation form to a more critical investigation into the statute, the circulation and the valuation of divergent forms of knowledge.

      This means that a.pass is an environment that reflects and practices knowledge and artistic strategies with the windows open to an outside reality. In that sense a.pass is not so much a preparation for the ‘professional life’, as it is a putting-into-question of what these professional sectors (both the artistic and educational organizations of institutes, values and work) are symptoms of. Throughout the years, a.pass has used its own institutional status - and the opportunities offered by being an artistic educational program embedded in a larger network of schools, art centres, research places, workspaces, etc… - to seriously reconsider its role, and the role of the artist researchers within the current ethical, political, economic and social context of knowledge production and sharing.

      On the level of ethics this means that we consider both the institute as the institute’s participants to be part of a larger network of relations, that give them their value and meaning. In a.pass the relation between the ‘I’ of the researcher and the provisional construction of the ‘We’ of the research practice within the institute, is a recurring, and politically charged, topic. The institute here is considered as an experimental playground to try out strategies for the now and the future within a larger society. a.pass gives a lot of attention to the transindividual character of practice and knowledge, and how the collective environment can be both a source of frustration and feedback, as of nourishment and challenge to the individual researcher’s trajectory. Also, a.pass in that sense always takes the ‘ethical’ concreteness, the situational reality of research seriously: artistic research is always already embedded in the relations that produce it, and these relations encompass elements of discourse, social and economic factors and spatial settings, as well as institutional givens, societal demands and resources at hand. Therefore an artistic research strategy or outcome is not transparently reproducible without changing in the process. The ethical (here understood as relational and situational) character of the research, makes it resistant to commodification on a larger scale. But this doesn’t mean that the research can not be communicated or shared, using strategies that differ from the promise of serial reproduction.

      This interest in the transindividual character of learning and research, however, does not exclude a strong focus and interest in the development of the individual’s trajectories. Since the institute can not function without the invested interest and contributions to the common environment of the researchers, a.pass strives towards creating an environment in which the aesthetic and artistic idiosyncratic qualities of each practice can be challenged into being. a.pass considers the artist researcher in the year of participation not so much as an artist-producer of work, but as an artist-researcher, reflecting self-critically on the trajectory already accomplished, and reconsidering the notions of work, value, the market, responsiveness and responsibility through the practicing of the research. a.pass encourages the exploration of ‘risky’ practices that do not directly correspond to the current demands of the arts market or academic understandings of research, in order to create an experimental environment in which certainties can be subverted, undermined, or simply reappraised from another point of view.

    • old information
    • NOT_index
    • old info
    • researchers 10 December 2014
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • 01 January 2015
    • The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts. The associate researcher is financially part-time supported for one year, and gets production  support for the development of the public phases of the research, as well as mentoring support.
      Between 2014 and 2015 Veridiana Zurita initiated three ongoing artistic research projects; ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of the river side community Santa Isabel in the Amazon (BR) and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between herself and her parents. www.veridianazurita.com

      The independent researchers are only loosely connected to the research center, and are selected on the level of the interest of their already existing research trajectory. Current independent researchers are for example visual artist Alexis Destoop and his research into ‘landscape scenographies’ in the framework of the Anthropocene, and musician Eric Thielemans and his research on the ‘ensemble’ as instrument for the development of shared cosmologies and artistic instrumentarium. These researchers are only minimally and punctually supported at the moment of the publication (live or in writing) of their research results.

      The research coordinator (Elke Van Campenhout) also develops her research within the research centre, which partly consists in analyzing, publishing, and making accessible a.pass research results and methodologies (through publications, outside workshops and lectures, conferences, etc…) and partly also consists of her own collaborative research trajectory Bureau d’Espoir, that looks into a contemporary and performative redefinition of ‘hope’ through the lenses of political philosophy, choreography and spiritual body practices.

       

      webpics_apass16

    • In the selection of PhD candidates a.pass uses largely the same criteria as for the post-master researchers. In the PhD environment however more emphasis is put on the willingness to open up the research, both to fellow researchers and to a wider audience outside of the limits of the a.pass environment. If we deal with researchers with an academic background we strongly encourage them to develop a practice-based artistic research during their participation in a.pass and to profit as much as possible from the opportunities to commonly share and exchange knowledge practices.

      We also expect from the PhD researchers a solid grip on both the theoretical and artistic frameworks and discourses they relate to, and a thorough self-critical and sector-critical attitude in developing their research boldly and radically within the framework of their university setting, and in relation to a larger societal reality.

    • a.pass is an artistic and educational research environment that welcomes research practitioners in an international 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.

      Artistic Research platform

      a.pass is a platform for professionals in the fields of art and theory who wish to engage in a self assigned research trajectory. It provides a place and infrastructure to meet other researchers, to collaborate, to get feedback, to develop one’s methodology and to widen one’s theoretical and practical scope through input, critique, mentoring and feedback.

      a.pass activates the practice of artistic research by accumulating its processes and critique. Embracing the fact that artistic research is becoming a category of production in the cultural field, a.pass does not claim to delineate its borders but affirms this apparent lack of definition as a opportunity for its development. Operating without a predefined notion of what „artistic research“ is, a.pass brings together a pluralistic encounter of the existing notions of this practice.

      An affirmative inquiry of „what is artistic research?“ has therefore become one of a.pass’ defining methodologies: a.pass strives to host a multitude of practices in the arts which self-define themselves as research. Their definitions (or refusals thereof) of what a research praxis in the arts context could be are at times complementing and at times contradicting each other. This dis/agreement creates a poli-vocal platform of definitions and is a statement towards a different conception of institutions: away from essentialist claims and towards a more politicised platform of engagement with a certain discipline.

      The Postgraduate Program

      The a.pass Postgraduate Program offers a one-year artistic research program for artists / researchers from all professional backgrounds based on the principles of self-organization, collaboration and transdisciplinarity.

      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.

      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.

      The Research Center

      The a.pass Research Center is a platform for advanced research practices in the arts. It 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. 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.

      The Research Center welcomes researchers with non-academic and academic research affiliations and support structures. Associate 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.

      Artistic Research at a.pass

      a.pass has been conceived as a meta-research on community, self-education and institutional permeability. An important part of this conceptual framework is a commitment to an open definition of artistic research and to exploring the paradoxical task of shaping an open space. a.pass sees itself as a accumulative platform where different and sometimes conflicting self-conceptions of artistic research can meet and engage in a productive exchange with each other. By embracing these negotiations as its core practice, a.pass welcomes diverse trajectories of research. The accumulating positions of artistic research unfold a complex and changing discourse on the practices of knowledge production within the arts.

      An open view on Artistic Research urges a.pass to continue a rigorous questioning of what makes Artistic Research distinct from other practices and disciplines. The discursive attempt to establish a fragile understanding of Artistic Research is the shared methodology of the institution. Although the ultimate definition cannot and should not be found(ed), the critical process of negotiating this question is ingrained within a.pass' politics and drives the discourse within the institution. For a.pass "open" means "open-ended".

      Artistic research is not oriented towards the production of single solution or an artwork, but towards generating a setting for engagement with a particular topic or challenge. The artistic research process aims at adding complexity to instead of simplifying a question, and brings conflicting viewpoints, theories and ontologies in proximity to one another. Expanding the project nature of artistic work towards a production of generative sets incorporates process and knowledge across multiple disciplines. Artistic research is nourished by speculation and suspension of disbelief and its results are often transitory rather than conclusive.

      For a.pass the temporality and aims of an artistic research trajectory differs from the temporality of an art project. The development of a sustainable research trajectory is the primary focus of work. Artistic projects and other modes of experimental practice are seen as performative publishing of transitory results. Their validity is not determined by the question if they are in themselves "successful" art works, but primarily by asking what they contribute to the expanding research process.

      Collaborative research at a.pass is centered around a variety of practices of methodology transfer. A practice enters a multitude of critical relationships with other practices, transforming them, and being transformed through this exposure. The aim is not necessarily collaborative co-authorship, but development of artistic and research practices through proximity and exposure to different methodologies and contexts.

      Pedagogy Research

      a.pass is building its curriculum by bringing together practitioners in the arts within a curated framework of workshops, ateliers, collective practices and scores. This collective exploration is the space where experimental research formats are proposed and developed. The process of learning, development and critique engages all parts of the institute.

      a.pass sees itself as an ongoing research into the formation and politics of educational institutions. By collecting innovative methodologies of research, facilitating educational experimentation and by maintaining an institutional openness, a.pass affirms and continues to be an experimental institution, a place of engaged research of what education in the arts can be today.

      Performative Publishing

      a.pass continuously develops and supports different and specific modes of presentation which are emerging from the research practiced at the institution. A large part of the program is based on modes of making-public of research within the program and towards the larger public. These moments are organized systematically within the program and reach a larger audience with the End-Presentations, Research Center publications, seminars, website publications and the archive. The aim of this work is to allow for performative publishing to present research as a work in the making and to develop modes of presentation that shift from the product paradigm towards a modality of witnessing a process in its unfinished and searching vulnerability.

      a.pass develops publications which don't treat knowledge, art making, aesthetics, context and politics as separate channels of communication. a.pass works on research publications under the hybrid term of „performative publishing“: a concept coined to contain the multiplicity of transdisciplinary publishing practices. It sharpens the question of the publications' purpose: what does the publication do? What are its aims within a specific context? Performative publishing is a witnessed process of simultaneous artistic creation, contextualization and doubt. It is a turn away from book- and article based formats of publishing artistic research towards cross-disciplinary formats. "Performative" shifts the attention to the necessity of a certain publicness of process in a collaborative environment: a contribution to a collective discourse. It also frames publishing as part of a research methodology: what experimental presentation does for the research trajectory, how can the moment of publishing perform a change on the research itself?

    • The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text. The challenge of the workshop will be to make those categories mentioned above appear as twofold: as artistic concepts from the past but also as embodied experiences and potential tools for our own artistic research.

       

      Biography:

      Ana Hoffner is an artist and theoretician working  in the fields of queer and postcolonial/migratory politics. Her interest lies in creating conditions for recognizability of non-normative forms of life through a performative practice consisting of reenactment and lecture performance. Ana Hoffner researches currently as a candidate of the PhD in Practice program and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

      Artistic research projects: Reenacting Intervention – Intervening in Reenactment/PhD in Practice; Queer Perspectives in and on Europe/Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.

      Last publication: “Was ist Kunst - a Product of Circumstances?” in: Private Investigations, Ed.: Andrei Siclodi, Büchs’n’Books, Volume 3, Innsbruck.

      Upcoming performance: „Wissensdramatisierung – Sprechstück“, Critical Voices, Platform3/Munich, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

    • The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts. Since this function has only recently been developed we are still in the middle of the first year, working with ex-apass participant Veridiana Zurita, who develops her research project TVTV, in the context of the Guislain psychiatric institute, as well as in collaboration with an Amazon river tribe in Brazil (full project description in Annexe). The associate researcher is financially supported by a 0,4 FTE employment for one year, and the production support for the development of the public phases of the research, as well as through mentoring support.

      The independent researchers are only loosely connected to the research center, and are selected on the level of the interest of their already existing research trajectory. Current independent researchers are for example visual artist Alexis Destoop and his research into ‘landscape scenographies’ in the framework of the Anthropocene, and musician Eric Thielemans and his research on the ‘ensemble’ as instrument for the development of shared cosmologies and artistic instrumentarium. These researchers are only minimally and punctually supported at the moment of the publication (live or in writing) of their research results.

      The research coordinator (0,7 FTE) also develops her research within the research centre, which partly consists in analyzing, publishing, and making accessible a.pass research results and methodologies (through publications, outside workshops and lectures, conferences, etc…) and partly also consists of her own collaborative research trajectory Bureau d’Espoir, that looks into a contemporary and performative redefinition of ‘hope’ through the lenses of political philosophy, choreography and spiritual body practices. (see full overview of Bureau d’Espoir in Appendix).

    • information
    • Curriculum 07 November 2014
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
       
      During its one-year course the program is sequenced into three blocks of four months, each block organised by a different curator towards a specific mode of research and collaboration. In general the blocks  assemble in different proportions the following elements:
      Development of artistic research practices, theoretical studies, workshops with guest practicioners, dispositives of feedback and exchange, modes of research presentation, attendance to public events related with current concerns (conferences, seminars, performances, festivals, etc), series of individual and collective mentoring sessions with invited mentors. 
      Within this curated framework the researchers are encouraged to contribute to the conceptualisation, organisation and performance of self-organized activities and practices.
       
       
      Timing & Organisation of the PROGRAM
       
      The one-year program is organised in three 'blocks' of four months, each of them divided in three months of curated curiculum in group and one month focused on self-organised individual work. 
      After the twelve months program an extra month is fully dedicated  to the preparation and performance of a form of communication of the individual research.projects within a collective public event.
      Exceptionally - when participants want to interrupt their studies for professional activities or to intensifie their personal studies - it is possible to skip one block and to extend the duration of the program to a maximum of 17 months.
       
       
      Timing & Organisation of the BLOCKS
       
      A block is structured by three collective moments: Opening Week (first week of the block), Half-Way-Days (middle of the block) and End Week (last week of the block). 
      These three mandatory collective moments are dedicated to the individual research presentations. Each of them has a particular objective and question towards the research: Opening week focuses on information (what?), Half-Way-Days on method (how?) and End-Week on contextualisation (why?)
      In addition to these three weeks the researchers  (in dialogue with the curator and coordinator) design their trajectory with a minimum of three weeks of presence and engagement in the block program.
       
      Laureate
       
      After concluding the postgraduate program with a public End Presentation, the participant will receive the title of Laureate of the higher institute for fine arts Posthogeschool voor Podiumkunsten (the program equals 60 credits).

       

    •  
      To apply for the position of a researcher at the post-graduate program you are asked to submit an artistic research proposal. Your application should provide a clear insight in what you aim to achieve in the one-year working period at a.pass and the relevance of your proposal in a collective research environment.
       
      The application dossier should include:
       
      -your research proposal, including your larger research trajectory, the specific project or part of it you would like to engage in at a.pass, possible public formats of presentation, possible interactions with the a.pass the post-graduate and the kind of support that these proposals would need at a.pass.
      -Portfolio (relevant works in relation to the research proposal)
      -CV
      -Diploma or equivalent proof of a master-level qualification.
       
      Candidates should be holders of a master’s diploma (artistic or theoretical) and deliver a copy of it upon registration.  In certain cases application without a master's diploma can be considered, if the practice-based experience of the applicant is equivalent to the masters level. 
       
      Please upload your dossier as a PDF file via the online form.
       
    •  

      The selection of research proposals will be made based on the following criteria:
      1. value of the proposal for the researcher’s trajectory
      2. problematisation of content and methodologies that underline the practice
      3. development of experimental and critical forms of performance and spatial practice
      4. contribution to the a.pass collective research environment
      5. relation to the current international development of artistic research
       
       
    •  

       

      Researchers following the a.pass program  develop a practice-based research, take an investigative look at their artistic trajectories and engage in a particular discursive approach.
      Focusing on individual work, researchers are working in a largely self-organized and collaborative environment where they take up an active role in the development of the a.pass research environment and act as responsive agents in (re)thinking artistic research methodologies, collective feedback strategies and practical organization.
       
      In order to create this context of self-organization, collaboration and participation a.pass is established as a full time program  requiring following minimum presence and participation.
       
      For each block of 4 months researchers:
      • attend three collective moments (Opening Week, Half-Way-Days Week, and End Week)
      • and follow at least  three weeks of curated program per block
      • attend four mentoring sessions with two dedicated mentors
      • attend one meetings with the artistic coordinator per block

       

      To successfully conclude the a.pass program researchers are required to communicate their research in the frame of a public event.
       
       
    • a.pass offers a one-year program for the development of artistic research projects on a post-graduate level in a critical and collaborative environment.
      The program invites artists, performers, researchers, writers, curators, theoreticians to challenge the limits of their practice through developing and applying research methodologies which bring to the forefront its performative, spatial and collaborative aspects.  
      The program opens a space for speculative and experimental modes of practice and critical thinking. Researchers are invited to follow their research as a trajectory within an environment of self-organisation, collaboration and transdiciplinarity. They engage in presentation and feedback, collective workshops, individual and group mentoring, and modular interactions with the curators and the other researchers. The content and the practical apparatus of the program are shaped by the a.pass curators and the collaborative and public aspects of the participant's research.

       

       

       
    • PhD 01 July 2014
      posted by: Guido Lucassen
      The PhD program is organized on a tailor-made basis with each individual researcher. The program is organized within the a.pass research center, that facilitates the research of the research coordinator, the associate researchers, and the independent researchers (see below), but also communicates closely with the post-master program. Concretely this means that a PhD researcher applies to develop (part of) her trajectory within the a.pass environment. This can happen in the pre-PhD phase, or at any time during the PhD trajectory. Since a.pass can only support PhD trajectories, but not grant or evaluate the PhD certificate, the researcher has to find, or be already associated with a university and a university supervisor. When starting a PhD project in a.pass, the researcher and the research coordinator together make up a work contract that stipulates the temporal structure (how long will the researcher be working in a.pass? how many times does she plan to come back?), the foreseen research steps that will be developed within the a.pass environment and the public outcome of the research within that period of time. This contract then will be signed by the researcher, the a.pass research coordinator, the supervisor at the university, and the head of the department of the university.   Researchers can join a.pass in the preparation phase of the research, to strengthen, precise, delineate and develop the research proposal for being admitted into a PhD program at a university. In this phase a.pass offers mainly feedback in the process of the dossier making, and if possible also assists in networking, contacting possible supervisors, and organizing meetings. When the PhD has already started, a.pass offers a collaborative environment for the development of the research, leaving the researcher the option to participate in the workshops of the post-master program, organize workshops or work groups themselves, choosing mentors etc… PhD researchers are strongly encouraged to open up their research trajectory to a larger audience in any form they find useful. Next to the program, a.pass also offers feedback through the meetings of the research center group activities.   In that sense every PhD-trajectory is quite different, but what is appreciated the most in the feedback from the Phd participants is the opportunity to work in a collective environment, test out their research hypotheses with a larger group of participants, get real-time feedback on their work, and be part of a critical and supportive team of researchers that freely exchange, critique and acknowledge each other’s work.   PhD researchers profile In the selection of PhD candidates a.pass uses largely the same criteria as for the post-master researchers. In the PhD environment however more emphasis is put on the willingness to open up the research, both to fellow researchers and to a wider audience outside of the limits of the a.pass environment. If we deal with researchers with an academic background we strongly encourage them to develop a practice-based artistic research during their participation in a.pass and to profit as much as possible from the opportunities to commonly share and exchange knowledge practices. We also expect from the PhD researchers a solid grip on both the theoretical and artistic frameworks and discourses they relate to, and a thorough self-critical and sector-critical attitude in developing their research boldly and radically within the framework of their university setting, and in relation to a larger societal reality.   Goals of the a.pass PhD program   -a.pass wants to offer a critical and collective practice-based environment for the development of the understanding of the Phd in the Arts.   -a.pass wants to develop tools for the evaluation and assessment of the knowledge that is not developed on the basis of academic or scientific criteria, but that takes seriously the qualities and values of knowledge as developed throughout artistic methodologies, attitudes and frameworks of research.   -since often the end result in this case is not necessarily the most eloquent part of the research, a.pass wants to stimulate the exchange of methodologies, practices and work sessions in-between researchers and with a larger group of interested ‘outsiders’ as a fundamental part of the PhD communication and assessment process.   -a.pass wants to support radical and experimental PhD-trajectories that critically challenge the status quo of the knowledge production within other environments, and value the transindividual richness of a shared knowledge processing environment.   -a.pass wants to develop PhD trajectories that are self-critical and relating the research to larger economic, political, academic, social, or other realities. a.pass wants to stimulate researchers to step out of their self-referential framework of discourse, professional ambitions and specialization and take on a more challenging position towards the construction of the PhD as a tool in a greater societal reality.   -a.pass wants to support researchers in their ambition to become engaged mentors in the development of tools for sharing of knowledge, and the facilitation of critical research for others, out of a spirit of generosity, interest, experimentality, criticality and artistic sensitivity.   End Qualifications and Competences of the PhD researchers   Also on this level, we assume the same kinds of qualifications and competences in the PhD researchers as in the post-master researchers, but with some added qualities.   End Qualifications for the Phd researchers: The PhD program aims to support researchers to become emancipated independent researchers in the fields of performance and scenography, or beyond. We support our researchers to think and work ‘out of the box’, or forget about the box altogether, and to become innovative practitioners and thinkers, that develop their work out of a (self-)critical ability to assess and relate their urgencies to a wider environment (the artistic and educational sector, society, the world). We encourage our researchers to think beyond the current value definitions of knowledge and to reappraise their own practices as precious contributions to society. We help our researchers to connect to the world, by supporting them to network, collaborate with external partners, and communicate their work to an outside audience of artists, public and professionals. We expect our PhD researchers to have developed a thorough knowledge of the theoretical as well as artistic practice fields they address in their research, and to be capable of sharing the knowledge that has been developed throughout the research within the public realm throughout lectures, conferences, publications, performances or other experimental set-ups. a.pass also expects its PhD researchers to have developed the social skills, broad societal interests, and pedagogical capacities to pass on the experimental spirit of research to upcoming researchers and interested groups, and to offer the research a public context in which to nourish itself and the world around it.  As such, we count it among the end qualifications of the PhD students, that they will be capable to use their research competences later on in their professional life as a lever for change and reappraisal of the status quo of shared knowledge in any given circumstances.
    • research center 01 July 2014
      posted by: Guido Lucassen

      The a.pass research center works on different levels. On a first level the centre brings together long-time researchers in a context of collaboration and sharing. On this level currently we have in the research center three kinds of workers: the PhD researchers, the associate researcher, the research coordinator and the independent researchers.   The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts. Since this function has only recently been developed we are still in the middle of the first year, working with ex-apass participant Veridiana Zurita, who develops her research project TVTV, in the context of the Guislain psychiatric institute, as well as in collaboration with an Amazon river tribe in Brazil (full project description in Annexe). The associate researcher is financially supported by a 0,4 FTE employment for one year, and the production support for the development of the public phases of the research, as well as through mentoring support. The independent researchers are only loosely connected to the research center, and are selected on the level of the interest of their already existing research trajectory. Current independent researchers are for example visual artist Alexis Destoop and his research into ‘landscape scenographies’ in the framework of the Anthropocene, and musician Eric Thielemans and his research on the ‘ensemble’ as instrument for the development of shared cosmologies and artistic instrumentarium. These researchers are only minimally and punctually supported at the moment of the publication (live or in writing) of their research results. The research coordinator (0,7 FTE) also develops her research within the research centre, which partly consists in analyzing, publishing, and making accessible a.pass research results and methodologies (through publications, outside workshops and lectures, conferences, etc…) and partly also consists of her own collaborative research trajectory Bureau d’Espoir, that looks into a contemporary and performative redefinition of ‘hope’ through the lenses of political philosophy, choreography and spiritual body practices. (see full overview of Bureau d’Espoir in Appendix). On a second level, the research centre also documents, archives and opens up research results and methodologies on a larger scale. Through the creation of a larger context for the end communications of the participants, through the publications, conferences, workshops and lectures, experimental collaborations etcetera. A lot of these activities will be mentioned again throughout the development of this report, but a full list of activities of the research centre, and its collaborations can also be consulted in the overview pages in the Appendix. Goals of the a.pass research center The main goals of the research center are to develop a ‘sustainable ground’ to analyze, document and share the knowledge that is being developed in the a.pass environment, opening it up to public sharing, discussion and debate. The research centre also aims at feeding the a.pass programs through the development of experimental, challenging, nomadic research set-ups that question, disseminate and test the a.pass principles within a larger context. The research center also tries to relate the individual interests of the researchers to a larger commonal context of knowledge processing and dissemination, and make the movements of knowledge processed in the a.pass research projects visible on a larger, shared and transindividual level. The researches developed at the research center experiment the notions of research and artistic methodologies of research to their limits, so as to come to a clear understanding of the potential subversive qualities for change that are specific to the artistic research field. On the level of documentation and communication the a.pass research centre aims at: -developing tools for the development of artistic research on an advanced level (PhD and others) by -developing methodologies, strategies and critical criteria for knowledge development within artistic research contexts -archiving and making accessible interesting research results and methodologies through publication of these results in a written or live form -developing tools for the international communication of the results of the advanced researches

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • it's not me, is it? 23 May 2014
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Maite Liébana Vena, Julia Clever, Daniel Kok, Gaja Karolczak, Carolina Goradesky
    • 23 May 2014
    • case of: Miriam Hempel
    • it's not me, is it?

      What is the relation between the researcher and his research, between the artist and the world, between the body and the body of work? Today’s ideology of contemporary arts condemns the narcissism of the artist-genius as as an old-fashioned marketing strategy that affirms rather than critiques the status quo.

      price: 2 euro

      But nobody probably doubts that the quality of an artistic research is largely dependent on the individual desire of the researcher, on the spark of necessity that turn mere research data into a work of genuine reflection. In an invitation that has the power to instigate interest and a dialogue that extends beyond the safe limits of the research environment.

      In this booklet we look into the work of five artist researchers: Daniel Kok, Gaja Karolczak, Julia Clever, Carolina Goradesky and Maité Liébana Vena. In their (very diverse) cases, each of them explores a possible strategy to deal with the ‘I’ of the researcher: as a ‘problem’ to address the needs of the European community and rethink the public as a simultaneous singular and plural body (Daniel Kok). As a constantly shape-shifting ground for the experience of the phantom body (Gaja Karolczak). As a foreigner in search for spatial re-cognition (Carolina Goradesky). As a performer healing the self through dialoguing with a plant, inviting the spectator to share in the experience (Maité Liébana Vena). Or as a discrete witness to the playing out of History in WWII reenactments (Julia Clever).

      All of them put their bodies and self-constructions at risk, expose themselves as historically, geographically, racially or otherwise bent relational territories on which the larger narratives of aesthetics and politics cross and intertwine. Their stories in all their small-scale intensity are mirroring fragments of larger forces that can not so easily be grasped or experienced: the violent manipulations of commerce, migration, politics and global economics. But especially also the artificial - because always mediated, manipulated and accidental - coming-into-being of the self. 

      This booklet contains artistic statements of all of the artists, as well as individual interviews on their relation to the topic

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2014/II
    • Milieus
    • NOT_index
    • MILIEUS 01 May 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • BLOCK 14/II
    • 01 May 2014
    • 31 July 2014
    • CURATED BY PIERRE RUBIO
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • MILIEUS

       

       

      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.

       

    • 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.

    • postgraduate program
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    • "general intellect ? - it's not about you, stupid !" 03 March 2014
      posted by: Guido Lucassen
    • Pierre Rubio / Elke van campenhout
    • 03 March 2014
    • 07 March 2014
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ‘General Intellect? - it's not about you, stupid !’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the apass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective. What is this relation, how does it function? Is it the individual that creates the collective? Or is the collective the base structure on which individuals can work and organize themselves? Specifically within an artistic research environment where the institution is constantly reformulating itself out of a multitude of individual inputs and where the individuals, in a state of crisis, are constantly self-constructing, confronted and challenged by a collective project.

      Can there be a mutual constitutive relation? A relational machine we can call ‘General Intellect’ or ‘Transindividual Space’ operating between and through the individuals, creating an 'ensemble' through their practice?

      From reading sessions to diverse practice formats, we will come up possibly with refreshed perspectives on what collective working and thinking can do.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Scores
    • 2014 BLOCK I 01 January 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2014
    • 31 March 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Carolina Goradesky
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Julia Clever
      Philippine Charlotte Hoegen
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Ramos Pereira

       


      Research End Presentations

      Chris Dupuis
      Karl Philips

       


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Partners

      Les Bains
      PAF Performance Arts Forum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre
      Lisa Nelson
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Pierre Rubio
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      ‘SCORES’
      curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

       


      13-17 / 01 / 2014


      ‘SCORES GENERATOR’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre


      In this workshop, I’ll introduce a writing score, which was tested already in the research residency Thematics: Author/Authority that I curated in Les Bains last year. This score is based on question&answer dialogues between the participants and will be continued in a regular basis, after this one week workshop, in open weekly meetings during the block. With this writing score, we’ll produce a documentation booklet at the end of the block. As an example, you can find here the booklet that was made for Author / Authority.
      The aim is to discuss and write as a regular practice and to use encounter, dialogue, each others knowledge in the elaboration of the discourse about one’s own researches.
      I will introduce two performance scores I worked with: one on sounding objects /affective spaces from performance ‘ Moving You’; and another: from gesture to utterance to language that comes from my latest performance with Marcos Simões: ‘Ai! a choreographic project’.

       

       


      27 / 01 - 07 / 02 / 2014


      ‘LABORATORY: TUNING SCORES’
      (composition, communication, and the sense of imagination)
      workshop by Lisa Nelson


      The Tuning Score -a performance research format- asks what do we see when we're looking at dance. How does composition arise in the body and its environment? The research focuses on the physical base of the imagination. By altering the way we use our senses while moving and watching movement, we can begin to tease apart the genetic and acquired patterns our senses use to construct our experience. We will look at ways these patterns influence how and why we move, shape our interaction with our inner and outer environments, and inform both our desire for action and what we "see" when we are attending to anything.
      Two aspects of practice are described by the name Tuning Scores: a solo warm up, and interpersonal composition games. The solo practices are a kind of pre-technique––a physical-attentional warm up to one's inner composition, and provide an inner score for the ensemble games. Focusing on vision, touch, and hearing, the scores provoke spontaneous compositions that make evident our opinions about who/where we are, how each of us senses and makes sense of movement, initiating a dialogue between inner and outer organization, about space, time, movement, and the desire to compose (a satisfying) experience.
      The Tuning Score is an improvisational composition practice that is a performance in itself. It offers tools and a framework for communication and model of collaboration that is constructed by the players in the act of doing. As a practice of real-time editing and instant replay, Tuning is an aesthetic game and a self-balancing system that uncovers its intention each time anew.

       

       

       

      17 - 21 / 02 / 2014


      ‘ARTISTIC RESEARCH’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi, Lilia Mestre, Veridiana Zurita, Elke van Campenhout


      It comes in waves, sometimes it’s a fever, sometimes a dispute and sometimes energy boost: the discussion around artistic research is a core issue at a.pass. Its notions go in various directions, follow diverse protocols and curl around manifold practices. In order to keep this controversy discussion alive we would like to design a workshop with four different approaches and definitions of artistic research provided by four people in the a.pass surrounding : Elke Van Campenhout, Veridiana Zurita, Lilia Mestre and Nicolas Galeazzi. Following a score, all four try to communicate their thought lines of artistic research practices. The score not only asks for their proper view, but also for supportive foreign material and for its antonyms.

       

       


      3 - 7 / 03 / 2014


      ‘GENERAL INTELLECT ?’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout


      ‘General Intellect?’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the a.pass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective. What is this relation, how does it function? Is it the individual that creates the collective? Or is the collective the base structure on which individuals can work and organize themselves? Specifically within an artistic research environment where the institution is constantly reformulating itself out of a multitude of individual inputs and where the individuals, in a state of ‘crisis’, are constantly self-constructing, confronted and challenged by a collective project.
      Can there be a mutual constitutive relation? A relational machine we can call ‘General Intellect’ or ‘Transindividual Space’ operating between and through the individuals, creating an 'ensemble' through their practice?
      From reading sessions to diverse practice formats, we will come up with refreshed perspectives on what collective working and thinking can do.

       

       


      10 - 14 / 03 / 2014


      ‘NOTATIONS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND MATTER”
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer


      Scores are translations. They transform one thought into another. They are also invitations to understand and interpret one reality through another. In a five day workshop led by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer, we will collaboratively explore the complex relationship between drawing, writing and movement.
      What is exactly happening when a thought and/or movement becomes a score? What
      kind of translation process is taking place between thought and matter? And again what is happening when a notation is being read, interpreted and performed by others? What kind of movements, transcriptions and acts of inscribing take place when we project a cartography of the body? What kind of tool set can we develop to map this intertextual language? What else can become a score?
      Within the workshop, drawing scores is to be extended along the categories of time, space and movement. So to speak a line of thought becomes a line on the paper, can turn into a line in space, a line verbalized, a line drawn with the whole body.
      The workshop will interrogate these interstitial processes, practices and knowledges produced by scores, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.

    • postgraduate program
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    • block 2013/II
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    • HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS? 24 June 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • PIERRE RUBIO / PETER STAMER
    • 24 June 2013
    • 28 June 2013
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?

       

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. ‘How about Critique, Criticality, Crisis?’ ties in on a field already explored by ‘Feedback and Critique’ in July 2012. Whereas the previous workshop focused on several feedback techniques to clarify the nature(s) and function(s) of feedback within a collaborative and self-organized artistic research environment, this one will focus on the challenging issue of ‘critique’.

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

      From critical readings of several texts on critique and criticality to film and performance analysis, from case studies to role-playing, we will come up with refreshed definitions of critique and renewed objectives of uncompromising aesthetic.

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • 2013 BLOCK II 01 May 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2013
    • 31 July 2013
    • 2013 BLOCK II

       

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Helena Dietrich
      Luanda Casella
      Lucia Rainer
      Maité Liébana Vena
      Maja Hammaren
      Mala Kline
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais
      Victoria Myronyuk


      Research End Presentations

      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Ive J.K. Leemans
      Jaime Llopis

       

      Partners

      PAF Performing Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Anette Baldauf
      Anna Rispoli
      Chantal Mouffe
      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio
      Various Artists


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Geert Opsomer
      Peter Stamer
      Robert Stijn

       

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout (Research Coordinator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

      20 - 24 / 05 / 2013


      ‘PERFORMING RESISTANCE IN POLITICS’
      workshop around/with Chantal Mouffe by Anette Baldauf and Elke van Campenhout


      This Workshop looks into Chantal Mouffe's ideas on the political concepts of hegemony and antagonism as well as their relationship to the arts. Anette Baldauf and Elke van Campenhout will put Mouffe's political theory under the microscope, by reading an anthology of her texts and discussing their relevancy for artistic research practices today. Finally, on the last day, Chantal Mouffe will offer her input, discuss with us the central trajectories of her work and elaborate on her special interest in the arts.
      day 1. Introduction on Post-Marxism
      day 2: Politics Today
      day 3: Politics and Public Space
      day 4: Art
      day 5: discussion with Chantal Mouffe

       


      27 - 31 / 05 / 2013


      ‘THE END OF PERSONALITY’
      workshop by \/arious Artists


      ‘The end of personality’ is a series of actions, interventions and artistic research methods developed and guided by Various Artists. During five days, a program will be presented to the participants that deals with themes like authorship, default identity, straitjacket-creation.
      Different Various Artists will guide the participants through research and interactive activities on several locations. The workshop is site-specific, the local context, and a few restrictions will be defining the content.
      Various Artists is a collective of 24 'imaginary' artists who for the last four years opened themselves up to be embodied by different physical persons. The artistic content that each artist creates belongs to the Various Artist, but the physical work can differ from owner. The complex and fragmented nature of Various Artists’ work deals with identity, artistic practice, and Gesamtkunst.
      The workshop aims to question in different ways artistic identity.
      Working methods, group sessions, and co-artistic concepts are examples of activities where personality, identity, and methodology will be tackled.

       


      03 - 07 / 06 / 2013


      ‘BETWEEN TOOL AND MATTER - THE ART OF INTERVIEW’
      workshop by Anna Rispoli and Adva Zakai


      The practice of interview is living a golden age in visual arts and live art contexts. Often a series of interviews supports the creation of video-documentaries as a research tool, frame site-specific performances, or create the first bonding for community-based projects. At the same time it is not rare to experience works of art that take interviews as their conceptual object of artistic reflection. The difference between those two approaches often appears blurry. More so, it produces challenging ethical and aesthetic questions concerning the power relation between the interviewer as an author and the interviewee as an authority - or inverse.
      Methodologies and perspectives from various fields will be reflected upon in relation to each other during the workshop: Artists who make use of the interview in their artistic trajectory will discuss their works with each other and the participants. Sociologists and phd researchers will introduce interview protocols and share their exploration of ethical implications linked to the relationship interviewee/interviewer. Specifically, we will exercise sensitive listening, watch and analyze case studies of interviews, and focus on the creation of subjective tales within the urban experience. Along the workshop days, participants will share and feedback the content produced during the workshop from the perspective of their own practice.

       


      10 - 14 / 06 / 2013


      ‘CHINESE WHISPERS & ORIGINAL COPIES’
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer


      Nikolaus Gansterer works on a series of projects studying strategies of translation and forms of reproduction and appropriation. Here his attention is directed towards differences, misinterpretations and errors committed in the process of communication circles. What happens when an image, an object or movement is read, used, interpreted, understood without knowing its initial personal and/or cultural context? By regarding these gaps with their potential shifts of meaning as a vital source of artistic inspiration, Nikolaus proposes for the workshop setting up several circuits of interpretations exploring multiple and shared authorships to reflect on diverse cultural practices, identities and authenticities.

       


      24-28 / 06 / 2013


      ‘HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Peter Stamer


      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. ‘How about Critique, Criticality, Crisis?’ ties in on a field already explored by ‘Feedback and Critique’ in July 2012. Whereas the previous workshop focused on several feedback techniques to clarify the nature(s) and function(s) of feedback within a collaborative and self-organized artistic research environment, this one will focus on the challenging issue of ‘critique’. What does critique aim at, and how does it epistemologically operate? How can we deal with its problematic relation to judgment and truth? What’s the relevance of critique within a system of criticality to overcome the vicious circle of belief and denunciation? What’s the role of discourse and theory in one’s research and practice in order to go beyond backing up one’s work but rather challenging it, eroding it, posing problems to it? Is discourse solving the crisis of practice or should it rather impose a crisis on practice?
      From critical readings of several texts on critique and criticality to film and performance analysis, from case studies to role-playing, we will come up with refreshed definitions of critique and renewed objectives of uncompromising aesthetic.

       


      15-19 / 07 / 2013


      ‘SCENOGRAPHIC FUNDAMENT’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Elke van Campenhout


      Let's stress the 's' in a.pass and study its 'scenography' aspects. In this B-workshop we want to discover the base of what scenography stands for in our acronym. This will not be a work to understand scenography in general, rather, we want to detect, where each of us sets her/his focus in the artistically formed relationship between performance and space.
      Starting point for this enquiry will be 'the public' - the public, for which a spatial condition is provided - incidentally, accidentally, explicitly or as an emerging construct. The public is taken here as sphere, where the social body meets it's self-created structures. In this sense a scenography is a form of an organization of the performance of this social body - an aesthetic organization, which unavoidably presents and reveals it's own politics.
      Whether the scenography happens in the inside space of a theatre or a gallery, a flat, a foyer, or a dance floor, or if it happens in the outside space of a park, a parliament or the pavement, the crucial question is, to whom does this 'scenario' communicates itself and who is designing it for what? Then, what is the difference between a performative space and a scenography? Where do we break the fine line between them? And how to dance on it, without falling into the featureless?

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • 2013 BLOCK I 01 January 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2013
    • 31 March 2013
    • 2013 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Carolina Goradeszky
      Chris Dupuis
      Daniel Kok
      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Ive Leemans
      Jaime Llopis
      Julia Clever
      Karl Philips
      Lucia Rainer
      Maité Liébana Vena
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais

       

      Research End Presentation

      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure

       

      Partners

      Buda Kortrijk
      PAF Performing Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Alessandra Coppola
      Ana Hoffner
      Claudia Bosse
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Juan Dominguez
      Michael Kliën
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

      21-25 / 01 / 2013


      ‘NOT QUITE, NOT RIGHT’
      (Bodies within Postcoloniality)
      a.pass Basics workshop by Ana Hoffner


      How is a body transformed into an image and how does an image of the body emerge as representation? How are images of the body constructed through differences which are emphasized or hidden? We will start the workshop by having a closer look at stereotypes and visual vocabularies for representing difference by reading basic texts on representational critique by Stuart Hall. Then we will discuss basic concepts of Postcolonial Theory such as Orientalism, Subalternity, Ambivalence, Hybridity and Mimicry by Said, Spivak and Bhabha. The aim of the workshop is to enter these notions through the visual field, therefore we will use the method of Close Reading in order to connect them with the knowledge production within the works of Isaac Julien, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Angela Melitopoulos, Tanja Ostojic and others. In the last part of the workshop we will try to relate the questions raised in the workshop to contemporary societies of global migration and our own artistic research especially the image production within it.

       

       

      26 - 27 / 01 / 2013 & 29 / 01 - 02 / 02 / 2013


      ‘UNFOLDING SENSIBILITIES’
      workshop by Juan Dominguez


      This workshop takes place in two parts, first in Buda Kortrijk to the curated performance program of Juan Dominguez : ‘Somewhere Between Fiction and Reality’ and then, the workshop ‘Unfolding Sensitivities’ at a.pass in Brussels.
      Usually we, human beings, share interests, share situations, share work, spaces, leisure, love. We do it defining our interests, our identities and our territories. We are used to be effective, to not waste time, to feel uncomfortable if we don’t get what we want, we like to be safe.
      In this lab we are going to contaminate each other, we are going to lose ourselves, we are going to find and not to seek for, we are going to laugh a lot, we are going to decide, to create our own work conditions, to auto generate our resources, to work together. Clearly, we will fail miserably. But only if you want, if you don’t want, don’t come!
      In case you need a bit more info about what we will do:
      We will work through situations and practices
      We will discuss about the need of doing what we do
      We will reflect about the concerns of each other
      We will accumulate and document experience
      We will unfold perceptions aspects of space and time
      We will in a way make a trip towards the nearest unknown

       

       

      04-08 / 02 / 2013


      ‘RE-IMAGINEERING THE MACHINE’
      workshop by Vladimir Miller and Elke Van Campenhout


      In this five day workshop we work hands-on on the creation of performance 'machines', inspired by the everyday disciplinary machines that regulate our lives. In our practice we try to re-connect to an environment that is largely manifested and mediated through technological, capitalist, moral and security apparatuses that shape our sense of belonging, of mobility, and our innermost desires. Through a series of case studies we try to reinterpret the machines we know very well, but normally try to overcome by ignoring or looking awry. In this workshop we try to do the opposite: we embrace the machine and its disciplinary rigour but try to turn around its functionality: no longer producing the self-evident affirmation of the social norm, but twisting its capability for change in perception and experience.

       

       

      11-15 / 02 / 2013


      ‘CHOREOGRAPHING AS AN AESTHETIC OF CHANGE’
      workshop by Michael Kliën


      Michael Kliën outlines a fundamentally rethought understanding of ‘choreography’ as a practice vitally relevant to current social and political processes. Choreography as an ‘Aesthetics of Change’ is concerned with the workings and governance of patterns, dynamics and ecologies: the choreography of the living. If the world is perceived choreographically, namely as a moving matrix of relations, interactions, constellations and proportionalities, the creative practice of choreography aims to engage these relations or set specific conditions for relations to emerge.
      The workshop outlines choreography as a deeply political practice, unfathomably entwined with ways in which we perceive the world. Seen through a connecting framework to other fields of human knowledge (such as philosophy, physics, formal composition, sociology, anthropology, etc) participants are encouraged to recognize and challenge epistemological assumptions inscribed in the act of creation. Discussing and demonstrating a series of methodologies, the workshop explores structures and dynamics to be found in and between humans, in and between ideas as well as within the overall fabric of contemporary reality.
      The workshop will also include with an introduction to ‘Social Dreaming’, an experimental psychoanalytical practice designed by Gordon Lawrence at the Tavistock Institute in London during the 70’s.

       


      25 / 02 - 01 / 03 / 2013


      ‘SOUND GARDENING’
      workshop curated by Alessandra Coppola


      The choices the gardener makes to shape the garden result from the knowledge of how different soils accommodate different forms of life, in which ways these species develop, grow, expand above and under the ground as well as how they interact with each other and the environment. Sounds, unlike plants, do not possess such developed taxonomy; nevertheless we expect to identify various forms of sounds' "biotopes": where, when, and how do sounds do appear in the city.
      We will propose a work of observation and analysis of the urban sonic territories in order to "draw" acoustic maps of particular locations. As we won’t be relying on scientific measurements, but rather on perception and senses, our maps will differ from the noise pollution’s maps; we will try to define various given soundscapes in terms of the atmosphere they create, rather than formal units of measurement.
      Our practices aim to observe, analyze and understand the relationships between soundscape and atmosphere in an urban contexts, and eventually propose actions to alter a given situations with a sound-designing ethos. We expect this approach to be highly informative on the action agency and function sound has in shaping atmospheres;
      It will also be a study of urban soundscape from multiple viewpoints: phenomenological, poetic, physic, architectural, social, musical…. We will try not to impose any aesthetics or practice of creation, but be open to as many perspectives as possible with the reception of soundscapes.

       


      04 / 03 - 16 / 03 / 2013


      ‘THEATER OF MEMORY - POLITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE SELF’
      workshop by Claudia Bosse


      I am interested in the structure of our memory according to spatial structures which are the conditions of daily routines of our organisation of knowledge, practice, emotions, thoughts. The grammar of the spaces we are producing are structuring our thoughts and imaginations. I would like to work on try-outs and analysis of space, and spatial production between the concepts of theatre, city and parliament, the relations between political, social and individual space and its particular organisations. The memory, is in a way the archive of consciousness of our experiences. Following Guilio Camillos concept of ‘theatre of memory’ (teatro del mundo) as a conceptual arena of thoughts and an encyclopaedic ritual for one spectator, I would like to develop try outs of this concept according to individual concepts of the participants. I would be interested to co-relate this concept of theatre of memory to the concept of the cartography of the self. Cartography of the self as a didactic machine for self construction, as a space related creation of cartographies inhabited with embodiments and speech acts. The aim would be to work on tools to transfer interests and methods into a spatial appearance, to make them understandable and possible for collective discourse. This discourse should relate a combined body - thought - space - voice practice. Thinking in spaces, unfolding thoughts in space. Embody ideas. The try outs should be transferred in different spatial contexts and simultaneous settings as well as transferred into the public space.
      Its all about the production of space. production of thought. production of practice. production of self. production of art. production of analysis. production of aesthetics, production of politics. production of relations. production of memory. production of desires, production of ethics...

       


      18 - 22 / 03 / 2013


      ‘THE ADOPTION PROJECT’
      workshop by Peter Stamer & Nicolas Galeazzi


      How do you position yourself to your art? 
How tight is the bond between you and the issues or ideas you are working with?
What if you would release this bond and lend out parts of your research temporarily to someone else?
      The Adoption Project deals with the ties and habits between you and your artistic practice. It challenges the perspectives and positions you engage with in your artistic process and separates them from your personal involvement by handing them over to a different outlook, practice, or routine for a certain period of time. A clearly defined section of your project will be packed in a 'box' and given up for adoption, while you will take a part of someone else's research temporarily under your 'protection'.
In this sense the Adoption Project aims to facilitate you with tools to put your work in a public context long before it is 'completed'. We understand this process as an effective instrument of research.


    • conference
    • research center
    • block 2012/III
    • Tender Institute
    • Tender Institute 08 September 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • international conference
    • 07 September 2012
    • 08 September 2012
    • Tender Institute

       


      ‘TENDER INSTITUTE’
      international conference by a.pass


      After finishing the artistic research post-graduate program at a.pass, 8 participants open up their researches in a performative and multi-layered setting.
      Sharing their insights into questions that are on the table for contemporary artists every day: what is the notion of work? How to deal with intuition today? What is the performative power of the object? How can the city be the witness of time?
      8 cases open up as many different strategies, diverse invitations to engage and experience artistic research from 8 wholly different perspectives.
      During a residency period of 3 weeks, a space is constructed that invites you into all these different cases, constructing crossing points and welcoming the visitors into the research trajectories.
      At the same time, a.pass organizes the conference 'The Tender Institute': an active meeting around the notion of the 'institute' in artistic practices today.
      In the last ten years, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the institute once again as a point of address: a 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. Compared to the more established Institutes these initiatives seem less concerned with classical knowledge conservation than with a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. Opening up the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic space of engaged interest.
      In these two days, a.pass invites speakers, artists, and administrators to construct new imaginations of what the institute today might look like: how to think of an institute with flexible walls, how to administer an organic institute that grows out of the interests of the people working in it? What is the place of this kind of institute in today's society? In other words: how can an institute still stay an institute when it is embracing its 'tenderness': when it recognizes its dependency on the interest of its users? The risk to become obsolete in the whirlwind of heterotopic interests? The challenge to re-invent its administration to shift from a politics of categorization to one of attention and engagement?

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Tender Institute
    • 2012 BLOCK III 01 September 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2012
    • 30 November 2012
    • 2012 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Chris Dupuis
      Helena Dietrich
      Karl Philips
      Lisa Charlotte Baudouin
      Luanda Casella
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais
      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure

       


      Research End Presentations

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Elise Goldstein
      Oshin Albrecht
      Simon Loeffler
      Veridiana Zurita
      Vicente Arlandis

       

       

      Partners

      RITS
      Campo
      Les Bains / Thematics
      Playground Festival
      M-Museum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Brandon LaBelle
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Einat Tuchman
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Geert Opsomer
      Heike Langsdorf
      Johan Dehollander
      Jovial Mbenga
      Jozef Wouters
      Lynda Gaudreau

      Lilia Mestre

      Peter Pal Pelbart
      Robert Steijn
      Stefanie Claes
      Toto Kisaku
      Vera Mantero

       

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Lynda Gaudreau
      Pierre Rubio
      Robert Steijn

       

       

       

      07 - 08 / 09 / 2012


      ‘TENDER INSTITUTE’
      international conference by a.pass


      After finishing the artistic research post-graduate program at a.pass, 8 participants open up their researches in a performative and multi-layered setting.
      Sharing their insights into questions that are on the table for contemporary artists every day: what is the notion of work? How to deal with intuition today? What is the performative power of the object? How can the city be the witness of time?
      8 cases open up as many different strategies, diverse invitations to engage and experience artistic research from 8 wholly different perspectives.
      During a residency period of 3 weeks, a space is constructed that invites you into all these different cases, constructing crossing points and welcoming the visitors into the research trajectories.
      At the same time, a.pass organizes the conference 'The Tender Institute': an active meeting around the notion of the 'institute' in artistic practices today.
      In the last ten years, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the institute once again as a point of address: a 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. Compared to the more established Institutes these initiatives seem less concerned with classical knowledge conservation than with a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. Opening up the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic space of engaged interest.
      In these two days, a.pass invites speakers, artists, and administrators to construct new imaginations of what the institute today might look like: how to think of an institute with flexible walls, how to administer an organic institute that grows out of the interests of the people working in it? What is the place of this kind of institute in today's society? In other words: how can an institute still stay an institute when it is embracing its 'tenderness': when it recognizes its dependency on the interest of its users? The risk to become obsolete in the whirlwind of heterotopic interests? The challenge to re-invent its administration to shift from a politics of categorization to one of attention and engagement?

       

       

      Fall 2012

      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES’
      series of workshops organised by a.pass in collaboration with Bains Connective (Thematics ‘Come Together (Lilia Mestre) /Schizophrenic Bodies’), RITS, and Campo / Summer School


      Schizophrenic Bodies test the limits of the economy of our belonging and coming together. Interpreting a Schizophrenic Body as a body that simultaneously belongs to different time and space zones, different fields of experience or history, or a body in a synaesthetic space, we'll explore during two months very different schizophrenic models. Our desire is to be working with the input of the BwO of Deleuze, with Peter Pal Pelbart the 'ghostly' bodies as put into perspective in the practice of Robert Steijn, the postcolonial monsters of Vera Mantero, the ways to rethink the hybridity of our history with the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance and the 'orally disoriented body' of Brandon LaBelle. In each of the stadia we try to come to an overlapping and exchange between practice and theory, placing both participants and mentors into an unknown field of references that produce unexpected exchange and reasoning.

       

      17-21 / 09 / 2012


      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES / 1’
      Peter Pal Pelbart & Robert Steijn


      This first workshop around the theme of Schizophrenic Bodies, will explore the notion of the ‘Body without Organs’, both from a theoretical and a physical perspective. In the morning the sessions with Peter Pal Pelbart are organized around texts from his book ‘The Cartography of Exhaustion’ and in the afternoons/evenings Robert Stijn works on creating these bodies through various physical practices that question, stretch or undermine an immediate i-dentification with our body and mind. The practices induce a certain kind of alienation, working out of unmediated desires, splitting up the I into different entities, in dialogue with totem animals, ghosts, out-of-body experiences. All on an experimental scale of rediscovery.

       

       

      01 - 05 / 10 / 2012


      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES / 2’

      VERA MANTERO / The thinking body
      Vera Mantero is one of the leading Portuguese dancers and choreographers. She started in the Ballet Gulbenkian, studied contemporary dance technique and started creating her own choreographies in 1987. Since then, her work has been shown in theatres and festivals in Europe, Brazil, USA, Canada and Singapore.
      One of her shorter pieces was based on the hybrid post-colonial body of Josephine Baker, a ‘not-too-black’ American dancer making a career in colonialist France by manipulating the French stereotypes about blackness: blacks as wild animals coming straight from the jungle.
      Relaxation, the use of voice, writing, breathing and free association are some means to be used in her workshop entitled ‘The thinking body’. In this way, we will explore the movements and actions going on inside us, some of them separately first in order to incorporate them later in longer and more complex improvisational processes. The idea of getting inside a particular state of consciousness will be very important. Awareness and use of space, and the exploration of objects and materials will not be forgotten. Irony and empty hands will take us further. The workshop is not only open for trained dancers.

      PAN / The Belgo-Congolese Third Space
      (Toto Kisaku / Johan Dehollander / Jovial Mbenga / Stefanie Claes / Geert Opsomer)
      The workshop develops a research context around a contemporary Congolese performance subculture calling itself SAPE (La Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes or, in English: the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance). They consider themselves members of a sort of science and religion which “escalates into real fashion contests and potlatches in which youngsters would display their European fashion designer clothes, in an attempt to outdo each other”.
      The workshop aims at creating a temporary community of artistic nomads focusing on new ways to relate to the hybridity of our history, our imagination, our collective consciousness, our multiple media, our fashion and above all our of potential of resistance.

       


      08 - 12 / 10 / 2012


      ‘PERMEABLE CITY / 1’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Carlotta Scioldo & Bart Van den Eynde with Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman and Jozef Wouters.


      The urban context has become the working field for many artists over the last decades. This movement outside the established art spaces can be seen as means to make a direct connection with and to have a direct impact on a larger (urban) audience and/or to (re)connect with the social, economical and political realities of the city.
      What are the economies involved in this ‘fieldwork’ and what are the possibilities and difficulties of the artist’s position in this relation? How do these artistic interventions relate to the very different temporalities of the urbanist and architectural timelines involved in the continuous making of the city?
      The concrete case of Brussels and the very different practices in the city of three ex a.pass participants, Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman and Jozef Wouters, are the starting point of a first workshop where their work will be presented and contextualized. Together with the artists we will explore the neighbourhood and places they work in and the theoretical framework they have built.

       

       

      15-19 / 10 / 2012


      ‘OUT OF FRAME’
      workshop by Lynda Gaudreau


      For the next Playground Festival Lynda Gaudreau has been invited to adapt her choreographical exhibition ‘Out of Grace’ for the permanent collection of the M-Museum in Leuven. Elementary devices such as sound, lighting and the presence of the body will draw the visitor in and activate modes of display and perception, addressed here according to a performative and compositional logic. What is entailed by these modes when a collection coexist with the body, the light and the sound? André Malraux’ essay, ‘The Imaginary Museum’, (1947) will serve as a starting point to reflect on history, contemporaneity and the idea of reproduction with copies, photocopies, photos and drawings. This hybrid and experimental project, at the borders of choreography and exhibition questions the nature and relationship of these practices.

       


      25 - 29 / 10 / 2012


      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES / 3’
      Brandon LaBelle


      The workshop will explore notions of masquerade, impersonation, clowning and multiple personalities. Through a series of exercises and experiments with voice, masks, and puppets, participants will construct their own double. The double will function as a second body, or an echo of oneself. By using various static materials, the workshop will support a "distribution of agency" away from the human subject and toward an interaction with static materials, audio recordings, and space. How might objects and things come to life, as animate forms? And what consequences might this have for methods of performance and choreography?

       

       

      12-16 / 11 / 2012


      “PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      In this workshop we attack texts and practices that deal with the notion of performance and performativity. We dive into the historical context of the birth of performance as an emancipatory and authenticating gesture, put critical questions towards its aura of ‘authenticity’ and ‘unrepeatability’ (Peggy Phelan), its documentary status, etc... We also go into the philosophical meaning of ‘performativity’ as developed by Austin and Butler. And take in some of the technological and economic uses of the word ‘performance’ to see if this can enlighten a contemporary notion of ‘performance’ today: how this could reflect a changed reality, and societal organization. Is there anything to be emancipated from? And are performative strategies the tools we need to wriggle ourselves out of the restrictions and limitations of an artistic, economic, and institutional field?

       


      19 - 24 / 11 / 2012


      ‘PERMEABLE CITY / 2’
      workshop and conference by Carlotta Scioldo & Bart Van den Eynde with Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman, Jozef Wouters & guests


      Second practical part of the workshop ‘Permeable City’ on artistic interventions in the urban context where the participants of the workshop are invited to explore their own artistic practice in relation to the city and the working spaces created by Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman & Jozef Wouters.
      This second workshop week will be rounded up in a conference, a public presentation and discussion forum, with participants and guests where the two weeks experience of ‘The Permeable City’ will be shared with a larger audience.

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

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

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

       

      Partners

      PAF Performance Art Forum
      Nadine
      De Singel

       

      Contributors for workshops

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

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

       

       

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


      ‘HIGHER PERFORMANCE’
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi & Elizabeth Ward


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

       


      21-25 / 05 / 2012


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


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

       


      28 / 05 - 01 / 06 / 2012


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


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

       

       

      25 - 29 / 06 / 2012


      “WHATEVER MOVING LIKE THIS”
      workshop by Paz Rojo


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

       


      02 - 06 / 07 / 2012


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


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

       

       

      13 - 22 / 07 / 2012


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


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

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2012 BLOCK I 01 January 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2012
    • 13 April 2012
    • 2012 BLOCK I

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Elise Goldstein
      Elizabeth Ward
      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Frank Pay
      Ive Leemans
      Jaime Llopis
      Oshin Albrecht
      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
      Sara Dandois
      Simon Loeffler
      Vicente Arlandis

       

      Research End Presentations

      Caroline Daish
      Doris Stelzer
      Margareth Kaserer
      Marilyne Grimmer

       

      Partners

      Thematics/Les Bains
      Triennal Hasselt
      PAF Performance Art Forum

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Akira Hino Sensei
      Alexander Schellow
      Annu Pennanen
      David Bergé
      Deufert & Plischke
      Einat Tuchman
      Eleanora Sovrani
      Kobe Matthys
      Lilia Mestre
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Stephane Querrec
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre


      Mentors

      Marie de Brugerolle
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Robert Steijn
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

       

      17 - 20 / 01 / 2012


      ‘WHAT’S THE CASE ?’
      (methodological warm-up)
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Lilia Mestre


      This workshop is questioning the basic gestures of your artistic research.
      In the search for descriptions of their methodologies, artistic researchers are developing an infinite spectrum of phrases, idioms and other grammatical constructs, to filter out the basic gesture of their own practice.
      Understanding individual research as “cases” possibly enfolding fan of possibilities, and the artistic choices taken within the case as the specific politics of your research, in these four research days, we try to get an overview of this spectrum and discuss this range of approaches to artistic research in relation to your own ‘case'.

       


      01-04 / 02 / 2012


      ‘DIGITAL CRIMINAL’
      workshop by David Bergé


      What is an analogue experience in relation to a digital one?
      In this workshop we will explore together notions as the possible, the virtual and the potential in relation to the analogue versus the digital. How to define the choice for a digital or analogue process and what are its consequences towards an outcome and audience experience?
      On the table will be 'On the Superiority of the Analogue' by Brian Massumi and videoworks by Michael Snow, Derek Jarman, Holis Frampton, as well as 70’s land art projects and their documentation, such as 'seven winter midday shadows' by Hamish Fulton and the documentary of 'spiral jetty', made by Robert Smithson himself,… as well as photographic projects by Edmund Engelman, Mike Mandel, Larry sultan and Jon Rafman.
      Goal of the workshop is to define our own practice through what is on the table.

       


      23-27 / 01 / 2012


      ‘AKIRA HINO SENSEI’
      master class


      Akira Hino Sensei is a master of budo, an ancient Japanese martial art, who worked -between others- with the Forsythe Company, where he has regularly given workshops since 2005. His lessons have greatly influenced both their own work and that of the Forsythe Company. For a week Akira Hino Sensei will focus on feeling the body with the aim of connecting up to movement, both one's own and that of the other. Budo is therefore a way of exploring the body and developing physical communication skills.

       


      28 - 31 / 01 / 2012


      ‘EMERGENCE ROOM’
      workshop by Deufert&Plischke in Hasselt


      Emergence Room is a live-workspace, where all participants (performers and spectators) join to work in silence on pre-set themes. The workspace is built temporarily into an existing environment like a museum, a festival center, an academy, a retail store. The work-process is based on a circular structure of passing on containers of material. Its procedures are proliferation and reformulation in order to create topologies and maps that are related to the underlying theme. These topologies and maps serve as a common denominator for projects that will be individually developed, not by an individuum (a singular author), but individually as a project in the co-authorship of reformulation. The theme of the Emergence Room in Hasselt will be the myth of Arachne. It focuses on the difference between art and craft, symbolism and realism, doing as if and doing in the here and now. Athene weaves carpets that show the glorious deeds of the gods, Arachne weaves the everydayness of the relationship of humans and gods and its brutality. The figure of Arachne bares and exposes lots of topics and questions still relevant and unanswered in our time. What is the responsibility of the artist? What do we risk with art? How do we judge art works? How can artists and critiques coexist and collaborate?
      During the four days workshop all participants will work together on these topics and questions and formulate and proliferate material, create story boards together, that will later be exposed in the Emergence Room Hasselt in the frame of the exhibition SuperBodies (Hasselt Triennale).

       

       

      06 - 28 / 02 / 2012


      ‘THE SETTLEMENT: ALIEN LOGIC’
      working space by Vladimir Miller


      The settlement is a model to engender and structure work, knowledge, events and encounters. In a shared space, the participants function as an open group where questions of territory, negotiation and hospitality in art production surface. Settlers build a station suitable for their own artistic research and, by doing so, enter in a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas and events. The settlement allows negotiating many gradations of participation and influence; it also provides different modes of engagement between inside and outside. A settler can leave, a visitor becomes a tourist, a frequent visitor can eventually settle in the space. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement praxis actively searches for a spatialized production of dis-agreement. This Settlement is the 5th in a series of Settlements, developed within or outside of the a.pass context. The guiding principle of the Settlement this time is ‘Alien Logic’.

       


      27 / 02 - 2 / 03 / 2012


      ‘MICRO HISTORIES / 1 / OPENING WEEK’
      workshop by Thematics/Les Bains


      Curated by Lilia Mestre/Les Bains with invited artists Eleanora Sovrani (it/be), Einat Tuchman (is/be), Annu Pennanen (fi) and Stephane Querrec (fr) and Kobe Matthys (be), Micro Histories researches the processes of documentation and presentation of the ‘Micro Histories’ collected in four different Brussels areas: Vilvoorde, St Joost, Brussels Center (EEC quarter) and Forest. We aim to investigate, challenge and discuss cultural phenomena and their construction through field research. During the opening week the participants of the Thematics and the participants of a.pass meet to lay out the themes that are driving this research: what is the sense of history? what kind of methodologies do we use to register ‘what has happened’? How do we create our own histories, or make history appear where it is not considered likely to be found? What is field research and how do we set up a valid research environment on location? This workshop is the introduction to the His/Herstory workshop, during which these strategies are put to the test in individual research field trajectories.

       


      05 - 09 / 03 / 2012


      ‘MICRO HISTORIES / 2 / HIS/HER STORY’
      workshop by Alexander Schellow


      The second week of the Micro Histories workshop offers the opportunity to all participants to develop an individual history project, choosing their own location in Brussels, working on practice based field research, together with artist Alexander Schellow. In his work, which is located between artistic and scientific research-practice, he follows different strategies to translate fictions and questions into concrete narrations – as films, interventions, installations, drawing-series or spatial performance concepts. Narrations that one literally finds on the street.
      One keyword here is: practice. Not seen in the constructed and fairly imprecise dualism of practical versus theoretical, this becomes a very relevant term as well as concept. How can a practice (of observation, recording) be framed methodologically in different ways, in order to make it (and not just: combine it with) a tool of reflection? The workshop aims to trigger your own concepts and practices to react in their specific way on the above-mentioned questions/problematics. We will develop individual starting points for projects and follow them at least for a few first steps. In central group discussions those experiences and case studies will be shared and questioned with regard to methodology as well as content.

       

       

      19-23 / 03 / 2012


      ‘THE WALK - PREPARATION’
      preparation for a walking workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      In preparation of a month long walking workshop on mobile archiving/narrativizing the landscape, interested participants share for one week the development of possible walking scores, the fabrication and reconstruction of traces, and the possibilities of urban/non-urban routes. Every day we test out another walking score, and try to get further into the philosophy and reality of a walking workshop.

       


      10 - 13 / 04 / 2012


      ‘SPECIAL EFFECT MANUAL’
      workshop by Lynda Gaudreau


      This workshop is above all a research space around scores and working themes such as, speed, accidents and precision. Lynda Gaudreau's partitions constitute environments, "maps " integrating scenography, light, sound and relevant activities. The partitions include activities totally unrealistic, impossible to accomplish but that must be resolved at very precise moments. These scores open to a multitude of strategies to execute the tasks and generate what so called "side effects”. The workshop will be divided in two parts : conceptual and practical and participants will elaborate scores in a collaborative process. Open to choreographers, composers, visual artists interested in producing "special effects" in their works.

    • postgraduate program
    • 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 II 01 April 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 April 2011
    • 31 July 2011
    • 2011 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Caroline Daish
      Iris Bouche
      Leonie Kuipers
      Marilyne Grimmer
      Philippe Severyns
      Rodolphe Coster
      Timothy Segers
      Veridiana Zurita
      Vicente Arlandis

       

      Research End Presentations

      Alessandra Coppola
      David Zagari
      Michiel Reynaert

       

      Partners

      Sarma
      Nadine
      De Singel


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Dries Verhoeven
      Elke van Campenhout
      Koen Tachelet
      Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio
      Vladimir Miller


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

      01 - 30 / 04 / 2011


      ‘CURATING AS ENVIRONMENTALISM’

      salon about curating in the performing arts curated by Adva Zakai and Elke Van Campenhout


      How is the notion of curating transformed from its visual arts context into a more collaborative and performative gesture? Are there projects in the contemporary performance scene that are exemplary for a re-thinking of curating as environmentalism? From this starting point, the one month salon on curating in the performing arts was developed. On the basis of the online article “Curating as Environmentalism”, people were invited to gloss the text, highlight fragments, and add other texts, images, links and thoughts. The original text faded out day by day, until what was left were the parts readers chose to highlight and the references they attached to them. The added material then was the inspiration for the live salon in the workspace Nadine in Brussels.
      Contributors to the event were Deufert & Plischke, Nicolas Galeazzi, Elke van Campenhout, Adva Zakai, Raimundas Malasaukas and Jeroen Peeters.
      The event was produced by Sarma, Nadine and a.pass Research Centre.
      “Curating as Environmentalism” as a paper publication is available.

       

       

      09 - 13 / 05 / 2011


      ‘SPECULATIVE WORKSHOP’
      workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi


      Research always is performative; not many performances, though, are researchive. More so, seeing performance as means of research is inverting the common notion of a performance: as a tool for research it is not interested in sending, but in receiving and processing information. The Speculative Workshop is aiming to develop concrete tools and practices based on the above thought. We will look critically at the current debate about artistic research and try to develop personalised theories and practices around the performative aspect of research. The workshop provides the possibility to elaborate your performative research-attitude based on your own research practice. By that we will try to understand what kind of politics of knowledge production these attitudes stand for. The double bind between the affirmed openness of research and the underlying 'politics' of its approach is the most important twist to be taken in an artistic research project. Therefore I tend to see this workshop as an experiment in knowledge production. Its structure will have to emerge through the practices you are bringing in. But I will provide (and experiment myself with) some frameworks of reading, discussing and practicing as well as some expeditions in the 'field'. To start with I would like to experiment on two general approaches, which deal with the constant unknown territory our researches are stumbling into: Speculation as the risky investment into the unknown, and Serendipity as the finding of the un-searched. By copying and abusing scientific research methodologies and confronting them with performative and artistic means, it is my aim to throw another light on the spectrum of what happens if research and performance are thought the same. This workshop is a preparation for the a.pass research conference in September.

       

       

      16 - 20 / 05 / 2011


      ‘DUNKELKAMMER’
      workshop by Dries Verhoeven & Koen Tachelet


      We live in a visual consumption society where our eyes are brutally manipulated. Producers of images force us to attach a economic value to everything visible. They want us to classify the images that haunt us according to that economic parameters. Our self-image is assigned a place in this economy of visual valuation. As we look into the mirror of the other, we judge and adjust ourselves to the image of ourselves produced by the other. The more we make ourselves dependent upon this visual-economic labeling, the more our desires and needs are subjected to the logic of marketing and pornography: both try to penetrate as deep as possible our self-image, in order to order and re-order it, along the mechanism of ‘narcissistic differentiation’: the necessity to differentiate oneself from the others, to be more, better and more competitive. And here is a paradox. People have a deep-rooted need of intimacy, which can only be realised within a non-judging mutual space. A situation of intimacy implies that my gaze is directed towards the other, that the other is not seen as the mirror of myself, as an opportunity to market myself. From the moment that being desirable becomes a goal in itself, intimacy is impossible. Dries Verhoeven & Koen tachelet are preparing the installation Dunkelkammer for the Münchner Kammerspiele. Dunkelkammer questions the world of seeing. What does it mean to see? How does seeing and being seen influence our self-observation and our connection to the other? What happens when this sense is turned off? Those questions will be dealt with in a two-month rehearsal process with 7 blind performers. Dunkelkammer is meant to be an experience for the spectators; the thoughts, feelings, questions and (bodily) sensations of the spectator will be activated and steered by the performers’ actions and words. Crucial element is the space, the varying parameters of distance and intimacy, presence and absence. In the workshop texts by Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, Houellebecq, Beckett, Oliver Sacks and others will be read and discussed. A more practical part of the workshop will deal with exploration of the corporeality of vision and blindness.

       


      30 / 05 - 03 / 06 / 2011


      ‘ARTIFICIAL REALITIES’
      (episode 1 – Displacements and Attachments)
      workshop by Pierre Rubio


      Often artists and researchers still hold on to the illusory idea of their material having a ‘natural’ ‘essence’. Let us for a moment take some distance from this essentialist and naturalistic approach, let us consider our research projects as artificial constructions, which thus can be problematized and turned into stimulating and productive networks. Artificial Realities aims at a rediscovery of our projects by an (momentary) over-artificialization: first by re-mapping our projects and by doing so understand/capture the strategies of ‘assemblage’ and thus the theories of knowledge which they formulate; and secondly by opening up horizons of possibilities for further developments and speculations. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by ‘moving’ it in unexpected contexts or by ‘translating’ it in non familiar languages, this allows the discovery of new components and new ‘attachments’ that will enrich and stimulate the ‘original’ project. Or in other words: developing an otherness by experiencing and exploring “as if's” to get out of the over-territorial and locked perception of “our” projects. Let's re-construct, re-imagine, re-invent “our” substrata. Let's science-fictionalize “our” “problems” and speculate ... cartoons... models for societies... newspapers... fictions... messages for eventual extraterrestrial forms of life... social practices... TV programs... religions... and more. Artificial Realities will develop through different steps: from identification of central issues in the practice, problematization, to several experiences of transfers, translations, displacements, parallax shifts, etc. The workshop includes reading sessions (Bruno Latour's On the modern cult of the factish gods and Factures/Fractures), individual work, group presentations and discussions.

       


      06 - 17 / 06 / 2011


      ‘SOUND AS SPACE’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene


      Sound as Space proposes to investigate sound as a vehicle to create spaces in spaces. Sound depending on the way it is recorded and diffused, can enable the auditor to immerse in parallel realities. Audio pieces can invite the listeners to combine the view (of the physical space they find themselves in) and sound (constructed audio space) to re-create - depending on their own personal history - a new place or a series of places. Brian Massumi calls the constant becoming or transformation of space by the projections of its users the ‘virtual space’, a place of endless potential. Performing artist Lilia Mestre sound artist Els Viaene propose to think and create alternative spaces by the use of sound compositions. In this workshop we will practice recording, editing and diffusion of audio pieces produced by the participants in collaboration with us. For Mestre and Viaene this workshop is part of their ongoing research on audio spaces that create direct relations between their different users and between these users and the environment they find themselves in.

       


      01 - 23 / 07 / 2011


      ‘SETTLEMENT’
      workspace by Vladimir Miller


      The settlement as a proposal is asking its participants to come and practice their work in a shared environment. The method is to build everything from scratch on location that is required to work and communicate a practice to other participants. This can be anything from an improvised table to hold a laptop to an elaborate, secluded structure; from temporal impromptu arrangements to specific spaces that last for the whole work period. Settlement allows for a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. As it manifests itself in the workspace, a loop of condition and production is created in that shared space: in the course of the two weeks the settlement lets a particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the sets of rules and behaviours usually provided by ready-made spaces such as ‘table’, ‘studio’, ‘meeting’, ‘gallery’, ‘venue’, ‘library’, etc. By finding a spatial manifestation and localization for their work the settlers enter a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas, events and encounters in the shared space. As the emphasis of the work-process and the activity of the individual and of the group change from day to day, the settlement stays a dynamic structure, ready to be reformed according to the present requirements for production and presentation. 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 structures inherent in the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement practice actively searches for a spatialized production of a contributive dis-agreement and gives space to a literal heterotopia of work processes.

       

       

       

       

       

    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 2008 BLOCK III 01 September 2008
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2008
    • 31 December 2008
    • 2008 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Ariane Loze
      Bruno Stappaerts
      Christophe Engels
      Constanze Schellow
      Gable Roelofsen
      Hanne Jacobs
      Karolien De Schepper
      Kim Lien Desault
      Klaas Devos
      Lieselot Jansen
      Lore Rabaut
      Luk Sips
      Marcos Simoes
      Michel Yang
      Sara Manente
      Sungmin Hong
      Vick Verachtert

       

      Partners

      LOPITAL, Antwerpen
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       

      Collaborators for workshops

      Alessandra Bergmaschi (Brazil)

      Sandra Noeth (Germany)

      Tristan Honsinger (Germany)

       

      Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout and the researchers participants

       

      24-25 / 09/ 2008

      ‘(RE)CHANNELLING THE SINGULAR’

      (The solo in contemporary dance and performance)

      self-organised seminar by Kim Lien Desault and Sandra Noeth, University of Hamburg, Research Department, Performance Studies

      Two days of theory following the doctoral research of Sandra Noeth about the philosophical and historical significance of the solo in dance.

      Sandra Noeth and Kim Lien Desault invite the participants to ‘think’ the dance solo as an object of knowledge production.

       

       

      01-08 / 10 / 2008

      ‘PEACE PROJECT’

      self-organised project by Gable Roelofsen.

      The participants take part in the Peace Conference "Utopia or Distopia', organized by the philosophy department of the “Technische Universiteit” in Berlin. While they develop their own artistic researches to open  perspectives on the ‘question of peace' and ‘what peace can mean in a contemporary society today’, the projects are archived and exhibited at the gallery Arttransponder.

      The PEACE Project stands for the development of personal projects and of multiple collaborations between participants.

      'Mount Berlin', the 'Peace Walk’ through Berlin and the 'Sleep Inn' (a sleep-in initiative for the exchange of narrative) constitute the core of the research.

       

       

       

      09-10 / 10 / 2008

      ‘AROUND ALESSANDRA BERGMASCHI’

      meeting and working with Alessandra Bergmaschi

      self-organised and curated by Sara Manente

      Alessandra Bergmaschi, a Brazilian photographer, and artist-researcher Sara Manente develop the project "Democratic Forest”.

      who uses the camera?

      who do you want to bring into the picture?

      in what way?

      what do you communicate?

      Sessions alternate between presentation of Alessandra Bergmaschi’s work, documentary films screenings and texts readings.

       

       

       

      03-07 / 11 / 2008

      ‘TRANSDISCIPLINARY IMPROVISATION’

      self-organised workshop by Tristan Honsinger

      curated by Kim Lien Desault

      A group including dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists will work together on free jazz improvisation techniques to come to a common understanding of impro-building and group balance in transdisciplinary improvisation situations.





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