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    • 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.

    • 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

      *

       

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2022/I
    • BLOCK 2022 I 15 January 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • a.pass
    • 06 January 2022
    • 30 April 2022
    • BLOCK 2022 I

       

      The first block of 2022 will focus on politics of space and on care practices. It is build around the framework of 'Poliset' facilitated by Vladimir Miller with focus on collective building processes within institutional environments to shift the relationship between practice, space and authorship towards commoning and self-organization. The framework of the Participants Assembly will bring curatorial input on CARE on the second part of the block.

      2022 I - BLOCK PLANNING + Opening week detailed program

      6 -14 January Opening Week (obligatory)

      Each Opening Week is the start of a 4 months block. It consists of the welcoming of new researchers; the presentation of the participants and their research, program, curators, dedicated mentors and a.pass team; and the re-setting of the collective working structure of a.pass for the next 4 months.

      The presentations on the Opening Week focus on [WHAT] are the research questions and their planning.

      → 6 January

      12:00- 17:00 Brunch + Welcome / a.pass introduction and round table / Spaces, codes, keys, badges  and digital tools

      → 7 January

      10:00 - 17:00 -  Block presentation (Poliset and CARE) / Speed dating around Research Community / preparation for participants presentations - explanation and planning

      → 10, 11, 12 January

      10:00 - 17:00 - participants presentations + mentors presentations

      13 January

      10:00 - 17:00 -  Lexicon + participants Assembly

      → 14 January

      10:00 - 17:00 - Code of Conduct, contracts and budgets

      24 January - 11 February a.pass Poliset 2022W4-6

      Study framework facilitated by Vladimir Miller

      27 -29 January End Presentations
       
      Ana Paula Camargo, Federico Protto, Nathaniel Moore and Túlio Rosa will finish the postgraduate program with End Presentations. 
       

      17 - 25 February Half Way Days (obligatory)

      Participants research presentations (HOW) focus on methodology.

      (Preparation days 17 and 18)

      7 - 11 March CARE practices

      Curatorial input proposed by the participants Assembly

      28 March - 3 April End Week (PAF) (obligatory)

      Participants research presentations (WHY) focus on content, context and criticality. This week we go to PAF - Performing Arts Forum in Reims, France

       

      People involved in block 2022 I

       

      Postgraduate Participants

      Aleksandra Boris, Carolina Mendonça, Amy Pickles, Chloë Janssens, Sarah Pletcher, Anna- Sophie Lugmeier, Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier, Vera Sofia Mota

      Associate Researchers

      Gosie Vervlossem, Simon Asencio, Rares Craiut, João Fiadeiro, Vijai Patchineelam

      Dedicated mentors

      Every block has three dedicated mentors that support the participants research, the presentations and feedback moments. For block 2022 I the dedicated mentors are Anna Rispoli (artist, activist), Samah Hijawi (artist, researcher) and Jaime Llopis (dancer, choreographer)

      Study facilitator and guests

      The study facilitator for this block is Vladimir Miller (artist, researcher and a.pass research centre curator)>

      The Polist guest are: choreographers Christine de Smedt, Liza Baliasnaja and Theo Livesey, architect and CIVE publications responsible Tania Garduño Israde, artist Jozef Wouters and Decoratelier, activist David Vercauteren (tbc).

      Other guests will be hosted during Poliset in collaboration with all involved.
    • 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

       
    • 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/

       

       
    •  

      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?

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

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

      (this gift is made with images of the block)

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

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

      Abstract

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

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

      Description 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Openning week

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

       

      Half way days  --> LONGER CRI and POCKET CRI

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

       

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

      4 min to propose / choose / set up               

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

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

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

      THOSE PHOTOS are only public for documentation. 

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

       

       

      Longer CRI
      Session II

      Invitation à The only proposition was bring Latin clothes.

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

       

      People were at the garden of where I live.

      It was a sunny day. 

      They marked in maps different places related to latin culture. 

      Here some pics

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

      In my room: 

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

      Here you can follow the lyrics

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

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

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

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

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

      short skirts skin shortsshort skirts skin shorts flat belly the motorcycle

      subjects objects x5

      or you just don't care

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

      Sexy ultimate sexy sexy ultimatelatino/latina
      gasoline spreads

      i find your spanish difficult to understand x2

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

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

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

       

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

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

       

      --

      End presentation - PAF

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

      Lyrics of Reggaeton 2 

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

      Fly movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

      Somehow, I fell into my own trap.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        

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

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

       

    • 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 .

       

       

    •  

      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

       

       

       
    • 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
    • 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
    • block 2017/III
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • UNINVITED RESEARCH II BLOCK III, SEPT-NOV 2017
      21 April 2017
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • 01 September 2017
    • 30 November 2017
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • UNINVITED RESEARCH II
      This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. We will use the methodologies of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk to reconsider the building blocks of our research and discover new ones.
       
      As a collective practice for this block each a.pass participant will propose a trip or an excursion to a place that resonates with the topics of their research. The excursions will be maximum one day or night long and  be attended by the a.pass participants (and will be in most cases be open to the general public on a sign-up basis). Some of them will be collaborative experiments, some will address a specific question from a current research of the a.pass participant. All proposals will work with a specific practice of being on the move together, of doing research on site and of documenting and publishing.
        
      In collaboration with the Research Center we will explore the process of zine-ing (or making a zine) as a collective and nomadic publishing machine throughout the block and specifically towards it end. 
       
      On the theoretical and critical side of things we will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses. 
       
      To work on these themes the excursion practice will be supported by several external inputs from the areas of de-colonial theory, urbanism and feminist critique. More detailed information about those events you will find on our webpage soon.
      The preparation of, the excursions and the documentation will be done in three collective periods throughout the block. 


      Part one: Reading, Inspiration and Preparation 
      Sept 4th-30th

       
      OPENING WEEK : Sept 4-8th
      We will take this week to welcome the new researchers to apass and to meet the mentors. During the opening week we will present our researches to each other and get to know each others work in its current state. We will frame the presentations through a collective mis-reading of the zine of the previous excursions block and the themes and problems established there. 
       
      WORKSHOP Making Public Domain : 11th - 15th September  - Middelheim Museum - Antwerp 
       (free of charge for apass researchers)
       
      Summer School #2 ‘MAKING PUBLIC DOMAIN’ will examine how public domain can be made and what role art can play in this. The starting point is that public space does not actually exist, but must constantly be created and activated. Which strategies then - artistic, civil, activist, social, political, legal, etc - are able to generate public space?
       
      Artists, experts, policy-makers and academics (art academics, jurists, urbanists, media specialists and so on) will tackle a different theme every day. By means of workshops, lectures, artistic interventions and case studies, summer school participants will be actively involved in a 5-day exchange between artists and experts unravelling the concepts and practice of ‘making public domain’.
       
      The 5-day Summer School opens up an interdisciplinary network of professionals, knowledge and expertise, creating a shared scenario allowing for a collective and individual learning process. During the day an inspiring selection of relevant cases connected to the theme of the day will be introduced, allowing anyone to participate and contribute to the discussion from their own perspective. In the evening the Summer School offers insights on the topic to a wider public of stakeholders.
       
      PREPARATION : Sept 18-30th
      We will spend those two weeks reading, discussing and preparing our respective excursions with each other.  We will read on decolonial perspectives on research, ethnography and geography.  In addition to that several artists will join us for one-day inputs on research ontology, brussels lore, and spatial practice. The artist researchers Pierre Rubio (apass Research Center block 3 2017), Peggy Pierrot, David Helbig, the architect Miriam Rohde and the writer Luanda Casella have been asked to inform our preparation process. during those two weeks. 
       
      Part two: Excursions and Feedback
       
      EXCURSIONS: 23rd Okt - Nov 4th
      This will be the second big collective moment of the block. We will join each-others proposals. Each researcher will be responsible for organising one  (max one day) excursion for the others. We are planning for mentors to join some of the excursions, and we will facilitate two collective moments with the apass artistic team to start the week off and to engage in a collective feedback moment towards the end. 
       
      Part three: Documentation, Collective Zine-ing, PAF
       
      WRITING WORKSHOP Forged Theory
      with Peter Stamer and Vladimir Miller
      This workshop will engage in playful methods of writing theory by using methods of dialogue, stream of consciousness and combining them with a structural/analytical approach to reading theoretical texts: how are they made? Which rhetoric figures and structures of support of an argument are used? Can we use them as playful toolkit to make up our own theories in fragile support of our practice?
       
      COLLECTIVE ZINE-ING: 20-24th Nov
      As a documentation, reflection and review process we will engage in a collective process of making a zine or several zines together. We will tackle the Zine-ing in relation with and supported by a.pass Research Center to nurture a general concern around methodologies of documentation.  How will the documentation process of Zine-ing the excursions will affect our practices and experiences? And how the Zine-ing can constitute a model for experimental documentation? At large a.pass Research Center will focus on problematising the Zine-ing process as well as the Zine-ing will problematise some of the key concerns of a.pass around the nature and operativity of forms of documentation.
       
      ENDWEEK: 26th Nov-2nd Dec
      Performing Arts Forum - St Erme - France. 
      only for apass participants. 
       
       
      Mentors 
      Caroline Godart 
      Heike Langsdorf
      Pierre Rubio
      Peggy Pierrot



      More information about the block soon!

    • Vladimir Miller block proposal.

      This block was concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. We were use the methodologies of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk to reconsider the building blocks of our research and discover new ones.

      As a collective practice for this block each a.pass participant will propose a trip or an excursion to a place that resonates with the topics of her research. We understand these trips as mini workshops. They will be attended by the a.pass participants and in most cases be open to the general public on a sign-up basis. Some of them will be collaborative experiments, some will address a specific question from a current research of the a.pass participant. The already proposed places and practices range from a club all-nighter to camping in the city, from a visit to market to a silent trip to a fathers house. All proposals will work with a specific practice of being on the move together, of doing research on site, of coming back and of documenting and publishing.

      Where do we practice our research, and how does changing that affect what can be talked about and experimented with? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move?

      We will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses. 

      To work on these themes the excursion practice will be supported by several external inputs from the areas of de-colonial theory, urbanism and feminist critique. More detailed information about those events you will find on our webpage soon.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • Modifying the universal 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Peggy Pierrot / Femke Snelting
    • a.pass
    • 30 June 2016
    • 30 June 2016
    • case of: Femke Snelting
    • Modifying the universal

      In 2015, after a public outcry against the perceived lack of diversity in emoji characters available on smartphones, the Unicode Consortium added five “Skin tone modifiers” to the set and considered the issue resolved.

      As an input to MOVING RESEARCH Femke will host a one day workshop, starting from the emoji modifiers case. We will discuss how and why mainstream communication infrastructures promote universalist values and at the same time provide means for separating users along fault lines of race, gender and age. While the “modifiers” function within the universalist belief-system of Unicode, they start to function as encoded means for segregation instead of a response to the increasing complexity of cross-device and cross-cultural computing, a situation that demands a re-imagination of compatibility in terms of difference.

      The workshop will be an occasion to discuss more generally what infrastructures of participation we can imagine that not only represent multiplicity but allow us to materialise it, beyond the Modern regime of universality. What universal(izing) assumptions creep into our own research and how could they be challenged? What tactics can we imagine for developing systems that are politically, aesthetically and ethically truly generative?

      Modifying the Universal is developed in the context of Possible Bodies, an ongoing collaboration between artists, programmers, performers and activists that are concerned with the specific entanglements of technology, representation and normativity that (re)-appear through renderings of the virtual.

       



      Biographies

      Peggy Pierrot works on projects linking information, media, activism, radio art and technology. She runs a publishing house, Venus Negra, publishing on popular cultures, Black Atlantic, music and science fiction. A sociologist by training, she holds a postgraduate degree in multimedia engineering. Peggy worked as a journalist (Transfert.net, Le Monde diplomatique, Minorités.org) and as editorial/technical webmaster in media and non-profit projects. She lectures on African-American and Caribbean literature and culture, science-fiction or related topics.

      Femke Snelting investigates interrelations between digital tools and creative practice, and develops projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, an association for arts and media active in Brussels since 1997. The collective work of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine daily life. Femke co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and coordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit.

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Block 2016/II: Uninvited Research 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Brussels and beyond
    • 02 May 2016
    • 28 August 2016
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Block 2016/II: Uninvited Research

      Vladimir Miller BLOCK PROPOSAL

      This block is concerned with the processes and questions of a mobile, displaced, untethered research practice. We will use the methodologies of moving out, taking a trip, going for a walk to reconsider the building blocks of our research and discover new ones.

      As a collective practice for this block each a.pass participant will propose a trip or an excursion to a place that resonates with the topics of her research. We understand these trips as mini workshops. They will be attended by the a.pass participants and in most cases be open to the general public on a sign-up basis. Some of them will be collaborative experiments, some will address a specific question from a current research of the a.pass participant. The already proposed places and practices range from a club all-nighter to camping in the city, from a visit to market to a silent trip to a fathers house. All proposals will work with a specific practice of being on the move together, of doing research on site, of coming back and of documenting and publishing.

      Where do we practice our research, and how does changing that affect what can be talked about and experimented with? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move?

      We will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses. 

      To work on these themes the excursion practice will be supported by several external inputs from the areas of de-colonial theory, urbanism and feminist critique. More detailed information about those events you will find on our webpage soon.

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2009/I
    • CONSEQUENCES 02 March 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert
    • 02 March 2009
    • 06 March 2009
    • CONSEQUENCES

       

      The most important element of our working process is writing and transference. It allows all participants to work in silence and not to be bothered by producibility. The constant passing on of written material and the permanent reformulating, contextualizing, expanding, and reflecting of the written material serve as a basis for the creation and composition of movements, texts, sounds, or images. But within this procedure all realizations are based on  temporary decisions depending from the material that is handed over from the other and not because the medium of realization is chosen beforehand. Our working procedure could best fit into the motto: ‘Give me your material and I show you what you're not doing with it’.

      Sourcing the creation-act out and rendering oneself into the pendency of writing instead permits a disciplined work in silence, in which each participant and partner can raise her/his voice on the paper independently from its volume or the amount and position of knowledge. Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (Re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. The place of the individual argument, the singular voice is taken by an instance of polyphony, similar to the Cadavre Exquis, which is a game that was invented by Surrealists in 1925. It is quite similar to an old english parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Unlike the surrealists, we don't hide what has been written previously. For us it is a downright challenge to deal with the input of the others and to come into thinking with it, to expand ideas and suggestions, to combine sketches, to suggest a possible proceeding. It is only very late in the working procedure that we ask about the medium in which this material is to be realized. In this sense, the medium becomes a part in the decision-making, in the claim of form (or format). It is not set a priori and thus has to be in reference, translation, transference to the material: it has to be a decision and not a choice.
 Because of this it is fundamental in this principle of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one's decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (Re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. Just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

       

       

       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #3 11 January 2016
      posted by: Luiza Crosman
    • 27 January 2016
    • 27 January 2016
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #3

      PARTICIPANTS:

      Nicolas, Sofia, Brendan, Nicolas, Christian, Sana, Arianna, Esteban, Thiago, Agnes, Juan, Seba, Anouk, Luiza, Pierre, Robin, Yaari, Aela, Lili, Lilia

       

      P > Q > R

      1) Sofia > Nicolas > Christian

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      3) Nicolas > Luiza > Juan

      4) Christian > Varinia > Sofia

      5) Sana > Lili > Lilia

      6) Arianna > Brendan > Varinia

      7) Esteban > Yaari > Aela

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

      9) Agnes > Lilia > Luiza

      10) Juan > Arianna > Lili

      11) Seba > Sana > Nicolas

      12) Anouk > Christian > Pierre

      13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

      14) Pierre > Esteban > Seba

      15) Robin > Anouk > Thiago

      16) Yaari > Thiago > Sana

      17) Aela > Sofia > Yaari

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

      19) Lilia > Seba > Esteban

      20) Varinia > Robin > Brendan

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1) Sofia > Nicolas > Christian

      Dear Sofia

      following the advise of Juan, I’ll keep myself short this time.
       
      Your teeth - and what they were reacting on - reminded me of these sentences of a Danish guy: 
       
      ... What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
      how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
      express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
      in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
      world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
      what is this quintessence of dust? ...
       
      best
      Nicolas
       

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      Those black dots made me think about the blind point of our vision: the point located at the exact center of our iris ! Paradoxically, without this blind point we could not see: it is the void of the wheel's hub that makes it roll !!!

      "At the extremes, there is freedom" sounds like the peaceful promise, the quiet answer to an unresolvable question...what is behind?...what is after ?...nothing...something else ?

      Here is my question: are we breathing ?

       

      3) Nicolas > Luiza > Juan

      Nicolas,
       
      During you performance I kept thinking on mobility. First, because it regulated the order of our presentations, since you could not move. Then, because later you could move, and did so the entire night with that boxed-hand, and, finally, because of the short exchange we had where you said that it was funny because you could actually move your index finger around - even if we could not see, or if you couldn't move any other part of your hand.
       
      And then, this image came to my mind, in a maybe oppose process of thinking...
       
      Captura de Tela 2015-03-26 às 14.17.20
       
      And then I thought on the polyp. growing and taking space and on the confetti spreading and taking space, but both in very different manners, specially in relation to the air around them and, thus, my question is: How do you feel is your way of taking space as you move?
       
      Juan, I really liked you idea of using image, and so feel free to respond directly to it as well :))
       
       
       
      4) Christian > Varinia > Sofia
       

       

      Christian, in your proposition i saw that the silence generated by the impossibility to talk in a fight between 2 people, has a soothing effect on bodies, as if making them somehow docile and devoted to their condition. I was not sure if this condition bind the bodies closer together or just kept them at an unchangeable distance to each other. But i believe to see that this condition doesn't distance the bodies further away from each other. Do you think that this proximity of bodies is created by silence alone or by the impossibility to talk? For instance, how close do you feel to the other bodies while reading a book in a library? 

       

       5) Sana > Lili > Lilia
      *a cut and a stitch* - both operating on a membrane, both using similar instruments, the act is distinguishing them however from each other;
      both small, but insistent
      after a while I lose track of which one is destructive and which one is mending in its intention
      disruption, destruction turns into a call for change, while the caring sewing becomes the imprisonment
      I find it interesting that a stitch can also mean a twinge, a spasm, a sharp pain in the body

      my question:
      How is/can care be an act of violence?

       
      6) Arianna > Brendan > Varinia
       
      Before becoming the careful breathing pile:
      There was a circle drawn on the ground. Where was it that we went when we crossed over the divide from the outside of the circle to the inside. Where did we go ? (And maybe, are there things we could or should do to prepare ourselves for the journey across this divide?)
       
       

      7) Esteban > Yaari > Aela

      ok: the night before the session i was reading Ovid's Metamorphosis (!), in Hebrew, and copied to myself the exact same sentence(!#2) that begins it all:
      “I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities".
      the Hebrew translation though, says something like: "my soul (/psyche) is forcing me to speak of bodies that changed into new forms".
      the differences are a great land of thinking: first in the intention - it shifts the "i" to a place which is a channel, a body or a vessel - a medium which forced by an inner movement to an action, then comes the shift from body->new form, in compere to form->new entity.
      in relates to readiness, or to metamorphosis , which thought these differences enable?

       

       

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

       

       

      Dear Thiago,

      You introduced in your text a highly interesting matter for me : the octopus intelligence.

      I'll let you know asap the content of my research on the subject but I will focus today on your desire and practice of imitating animals.

      Gabriel Tarde offers two concepts to explain social movements: imitation and invention. Everyone imitates what s-he admires, what s-he sees as good and able to serve as a model, but arranges by mixing, in an original way, the selected imitations to their plural sources. Thus, history is as a succession of different imitative flows, a succession of models able to give rise to imitations by a large number of individuals. Why imitation? Because Tarde conceives individuals as a large ensemble of reflections; that is to say that everyone sees her/his fellows and in them finds her/himself. It is a game of mirrors that stands at the heart of living-in-society. Constantly, we judge and we are judged, ourselves facing the others and the others facing us. Each one of us comes naturally to doing-like-the-other, so that she/he will recognize her/himself in us and vice versa, for that life-in-society, after all, substantialises consistently and possibly becomes shared common points and not opposed dissimilarities – a set of relationships where even the tendency to opposition becomes common: ‘Two opposite, inverse, contrary things, have, as their singular character, to actualise a difference in their similarity which consists in its very difference, or, if one prefers, to present a resemblance which is to differ as much as possible’ (in L'opposition universelle : essai d'une théorie des contraires, 1897). One can understand Bruno Latour when he identifies Tarde as a precursor of actor-network-theory: one link in an unbroken social chain, the individual finds its place in society through the influential relationships she/he weaves with her/his peers. The basis of imitation and invention, which is a series of acts and processes, is identified by Tarde as belief and desire, which are individual psychological characteristics. "Belief and desire: so this is the substance and the strength, these are the two psychological quantities that analysis found underneath all the sensational qualities with which they combine; and when invention and then imitation, seize them to organize and use them, these are the real social quantities "(in Les lois de l'imitation  (1890).

      Thus my question is :  who do you think you will become by regularly imitating animals and which kind of effect this desire can have on society?

      my best,

      Pierre

       


      9) Agnes > Lilia > Luiza

      When I was reading your text I kept thinking about multiplying, adding, subtracting the numbers 1 and 2… So that one could become two or three or zero, or… So that choice is not binary but a multiple or a fraction, a derivate, of the given… I think that was maybe what was happening in the way you performed the text with the lines crossing each other, creating cross road options … maybe this is the desire for freedom, which at the end does not depend on the choice you take but how you deal with the future of those choices. Sometimes I think choice does not exist.

      I was looking for a poem because some poetry is a relief… I wanted to connect to notions of ambiguity and uncertainty and the number three. I found this one by Wislawa Szymborska, which I didn’t know before.

      The Three Oddest Words

      When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.



      When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.



      When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

       

      The question is: what happens when I pronounce the word escape?

       

      10) Juan > Arianna > Lili

      It's funny to see the links between all this.

      I'm very much inspired by the text that you proposed right before your action, Juan.

      It talks about a space that it is not accountable through reason.

      This resistance of space to reason (and reasonability) is not an act of antiphaty of the former towards the latter.

      It's just the gentle and wise refusal to hastily follow the seemengly crystalline, transparent, univocal path of logic.

       

      Space: "No, thank you. I need to take my time".

       

      The labyrinth (the Sensory Space, the Hole) is what requires more than one sense to be used when traversing it.

      More than one intention when entered, more than one quality of strength when confronted.

      It is a space of the multiple and ambiguous – a space of the resonance more than one of the echo.

      It needs intuition, generosity, and a bit of blindness when approached.

       

      The word labyrinth itself resonated in me when I read the text again, because of the name I carry.

      Ariadne is the one who knows how to handle the threads, and she knows not by intellect, but by intuition. She doesn't hold on her knowledge, but offers it almost blindly because she fell in love.

      This generous act leads her, varying according to the different accounts, either to a solitary death on an isle or to the marriage with the god of Disorder, Ambiguity, Ecstasy and Madness – Dyonisus. Which I personally find two very similar outcomes of the story.

       

      Coming back to the text.. and connecting it to the action you did.

      I wonder if my name spoke trough me. If the potential that a word can carry expressed itself through the vessel of the body – through the fleshy materiality of it. Like a sound can pass through and resonate differently according to the material that traverses.

       

      So, I am not speaking language. Language speaks me.

      It's not (or not only) an act of the intellect anymore. It is an event of the entire flesh we are made of.

       

      It makes me move, and articulate my full(s) and my void(s).

      The mouth, with its full and empty spaces, is the cavity-cave of language; the Hole, the Sensory Space.

       

      The jaw is its instrument and rudder, which then transmits its inputs to and through the passages of the body.

       

      What if we were beings fully conducted by the mouth and the jaw?

      What if the apparatus mouth/jaw would be our leading organ?

       11) Seba -Sana -Nicolas

      I really enjoyed reading the lines , they were silent lines on the black background like the waving breaths in the darkness( as you described).
      It was joyful to dive into images you created by those pictorial, imaginary and alive fragments.
      I am impressed how you gradually turn detachment to connection, alienation to relation and factuality to fluidity through the rhythm of breaths.  When we try to synchronize our breaths we become more aware of our presence. Thus the breaths speak and the skins understand.
      At the same time the notion of location is inserted. Therefore, we are invited to a traversal spatiality.
      The body could become an in-between space when it’s location is wrapped in it’s imagination. What is the actual location then transformed to?

       

      12) Anouk > Christian > Pierre
       
      Dear Anouk,
      one of the sentences you quoted from your (unnamed) friend was this: "The skin is an extended layer of the brain and the brain is an extended layer of the skin". Do you think that means that discourse and material are inseparable because our bodies contains, and can not exist without, both? If yes it's just yes, but if no; does material without any form of discourse exist?
      You continued to explain, as you moved around to sense the space towards the ceiling and the floor, what it means to your practice to pay attention to your own self and the materials you were touching. It is important for you (and us, I think) to actively seek out physical knowledge and not take materials for granted just because they happen to all around us.
      What are you made of, and where does the energy that makes you move come from?
       
       

      13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

      Dears 

      So Luiza coincidentally your drawing session with Arianna was base on my poetic text !

      Stroke me a lot how accurate are the dynamics of the drawings related to the word ABYSMAL, they are so near to my images when I wrote the text.

      My question will try to dig in Arianna’s question about ABYSMAL seen through the vector - dot drawings of Luiza.

      My question is a photograph I took couple of years ago at the Museum of anthropology in Mexico City; the image depicts a terracotta Aztec warrior wearing as a mask the face of a defeater warrior at war which is been totally peel off.

      Key words…

      - Personification of the soul of the other

      - Appropriation of the image of the other

      - Cultural anthropophage

      IMG_0221

      14) Pierre > Esteban > Seba

      Dear Pierre
      Thinking about the journey that you proposed to us on Wednesday, I am surrounded by questions about temporality and subjectivity.
      Since we are functioning as mediums, we are called to become a vessel for the presence of the ghost. However, we are not only transmitting the ghost’s ‘message’, but actually, our recollection-impregnation-imagination of its presence.
      Furthermore, we are asked to substantiate its presence in the objects, and to
      create a new collective presence through their relationality. This new life of the ghost will be solidified in a photograph.

      How do you see our function of vessels and at the same time translators of
      a fleeting presence? How do we impregnate and singularize our transmissions with ourselves while maintaining our collective function of opening up the past-future? Do we also become ghosts in the sense of loosing our regular contours?

      15) Robin > Anouk > Thiago

       

      Dear Robin,

      I remember/ imagine, the cracks, the space between the ice blocks, the sharp interruption of the film by some kind of lightning. Is the short-circuit (court-circuit) an important tool in your work and why ?

      16) Yaari > Thiago > Sana 

      Yaari, your language reminds me a lot of Manoel de Barros, one of the greatest Brazilian poets. Not only because of his interest in forests and nature, but because he used to subvert the usual logics of written language, as you do. I see in both of you the interest of finding in nature the metaphors for the exhaustion of language. To write becomes to meet nature.

      The Rock

      Being a rock
      I have the pleasure of lying on the ground.
      I only deprive lizards and butterflies.
      Certain shells take shelter in me.
      Mosses grow from my interstices.
      Birds use me to sharpen their beaks.
      Sometimes a heron occupies me all day.
      I feel praised.
      There are other privileges to being a rock:
      a—I irritate the silence of insects,
      b—I am the beat of moonlight in solitude,
      c—In the mornings I bathe in dew.
      d—And the sun compliments me first.

      my questions:

      how to practice the forest in the city ? would it be possible without writing?

       

      17) Aela > Sofia > Yaari

      Dear Aela,

      Your intergalactic waltz reminded me of this scene:  http://youtu.be/_d5X2t_s9g8 (Bela Tar, Werkmister Harmonies)
       
      In the end of the scene, the main protagonist, who runs the village and in this scene takes up the role of a sort of choreographer/director (who performs a similar role to the one you did) says something like: "but It's not over" as indicating that we are still moving according to that eternal and immortal choreography. To him, that dance is a model that represents the movements of the solar system but it also has a metaphorical function in the film: it's an element of transmutation that allows the character's bodies to connect to immortality and to the universe. In your waltz you made references to what I understand as eroticism when describing the movements between our bodies, our relationship to space and music. The dance was a way for us to connect with the cosmos and the erotic connection between us. You made us to dance alone, holding our arms in mid air as if someone was there, but all at the same time and rhythm. What is the importance of the distance you made us keep between us? 
       

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

      When I recall the image of your performance it has a strong physical impact on me. I have to think about poetic sadism or sadistic poetry……and wonder: what is a long-distance touch and what could it stimulate?

      19) Lilia > Sébastien > Esteban

       

      Dear Esteban, 

      I have two questions about love, inspired by Lilia's triple-couple-performance. You can pick the one you like best!

      1. Metaphor, George Lakof and Mark Johnson explain in Metaphors We Live By, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. Of all the metaphors for love you can find via the following link (or anywhere), very few refer to long term, complex but fruitful relationships. What would be a good metaphor to describe those kinds of relationships, and why? http://grammar.about.com/od/rhetoricstyle/a/lovemetaphors_3.htm

      2. What is the relation between love and mourning? I am not referring to the mourning process following the death of a loved one, but to the role of mourning within a love relationship. 

      Sébastien

       

       

      20) Varinia>Robin>Brendan

      Dear Varinia

      What touched me most in your performance was the way, at the end, you came towards us and made this kind of hesitant ambiguous gesture to the right and left - It felt like a mix between a potential indication of direction or a receiving of something, but it was the vulnerability of the gesture which I found interesting.. (unlike the one below which I include as a visual reference but not a very exact one, sorry)

      varinia

      So the Question is “What’s the importance of vulnerability in your research?

      Definition of vulnerability from the Red Cross:
      Vulnerability can be defined as the diminished capacity of an individual or group to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural or man-made hazard. The concept is relative and dynamic. Vulnerability is most often associated with poverty, but it can also arise when people are isolated, insecure and defenceless in the face of risk, shock or stress.
      People differ in their exposure to risk as a result of their social group, gender, ethnic or other identity, age and other factors. Vulnerability may also vary in its forms: poverty, for example, may mean that housing is unable to withstand an earthquake or a hurricane, or lack of preparedness may result in a slower response to a disaster, leading to greater loss of life or prolonged suffering.
      The reverse side of the coin is capacity, which can be described as the resources available to individuals, households and communities to cope with a threat or to resist the impact of a hazard. Such resources can be physical or material, but they can also be found in the way a community is organized or in the skills or attributes of individuals and/or organizations in the community.
      To determine people’s vulnerability, two questions need to be asked:
      • to what threat or hazard are they vulnerable?
      • what makes them vulnerable to that threat or hazard?
      Counteracting vulnerability requires:
      • reducing the impact of the hazard itself where possible (through mitigation, prediction and warning, preparedness);
      • building capacities to withstand and cope with hazards;
      • tackling the root causes of vulnerability, such as poverty, poor governance, discrimination, inequality and inadequate access to resources and livelihoods.

       


       

      REPLIES:

       

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      revitalise your personal blind spot

      1. find your blind spot
      2. when your blind spot dissappeared give him new life with a color of your choice
      3. whisper something nice to your blind spot
      4. place your blind spot somewhere in the space

      blind spot

      7) esteban > Yaahri > Aela

      I I I I.... inteeeeeeennnnnd to sp...sp...speak of fffff...forms cccchhhhh...changed intoooooo neeeeeew entities” / "myyyyy sooooooul is ffff...ff...forciiiing meeeee to sp...sp...sp...speak offff bo...o..dies that ch...ch...changed intoooo neeeeew ffff...f...fforms”

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

       

      A & B_FITNESS

       

      Hoarding
      or
      caching
      in animal behavior
      is the storage of food in locations hidden from the sight of both
      conspecifics (animals of the same or closely related species) and
      members of other species.
      Most commonly,
      the function of hoarding or caching is to store food in times of
      surplus for times when food is less plentiful.
      However,
      there is evidence that some amount of caching or hoarding is done
      in order to ripen the food, called
      ripening caching.
      The term hoarding is most typically used for rodents,
      whereas caching is more commonly used in reference to birds,
      but the behaviors in both animal groups are quite similar.
      Hoarding is done either on
      a long-term basis
      or on a short term basis,
      in which case the food will be consumed over a period of one
      or several days.
      There are two types of caching behavior:
      larder-hoarding, where a species creates a few large caches which
      it often defends,
      and scatter-hoarding, where a species will create multiple caches,
      often with
      each individual food item
      stored in a unique place.
      Both types of caching have
      their advantage.
      Most species are particularly wary of onlooking individuals during
      caching and ensure
      that the cache locations
      are secret.
      Not all caches are
      concealed however,
      for example shrikes store
      prey items on thorns on branches in the open.
      Although a small handful of species share food stores,
      food hoarding is a solo
      endeavor for most species, including almost all rodents
      and birds.
      They hoard their food supply selfishly, caching and retrieving the
      supply in secret.

       

      (from the definition of "Hoarding (animal behavior)", Wikipedia)

       

       13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

       

      IMG_0221

      I am using a score from Anna Halprin, an American dance artist   to describe this image to answer Juan’s question. The score is: I see,I feel, I imagine. I like the use of I, the subjective point of view and that the verbs, to see, to feel and to imagine are touching three layers of awareness: the body layer, the emotional layer and the mental layer that is imagination.

       

      I see a sculpture made of terra cotta. I see a head, a terra cotta head, a bold head. I see the head of a baby. I see only one ear, a broken ear. I imagine that the ear lobe was very long before it broke. I imagine that it can break. I see that it is fragile. I imagine it is fragile. I see some shadows. I see holes. I see that the holes have different shapes. I see a big open hole; two small ones next to each other and two other almonds shape ones that are not placed symmetrically. I see a mouth, two nostrils, two orbits. I see there is no eye in the orbits. I see that the holes are not deep. I see another mouth in the mouse and one other orbit in the right orbit. I see a mask covering a face. I imagine someone else face behind the mask. I feel intrigued. I feel that I want to see that face behind. I feel that I want to uncover that face. I feel that I will find another layer behind this layer and another one and another, an infinity of layers. I imagine layers and layers and layers of faces on top of each other. I imagine myself falling into the hole, falling through the mouth. I imagine myself shouting while I fall. I imagine diving into layers of generation. I see that the mouth of that face that I imagine behind the mask is slightly open. I see the teeth of this person. I imagine it is a man. I imagine he is cruel. I imagine he is older. I imagine he is tense. I imagine that he want to appear younger by wearing this mask. I imagine plastic surgery. I see an expression that has been frozen. I imagine death. I imagine that the mask is shouting. I imagine he is shouting because he is in pain. I imagine it is the moment of his death. I imagine it is the moment of its birth. I imagine a rebirth. I imagine his first shout. I imagine the sound of it. I feel mesmerized and terrified. I feel goose bump on my skin. I feel tension in my guts. I imagine this child is my child. I remember his two eyes looking at me from below in the water.

      I see the irregularity of the terra cotta. I imagine myself making this mask with my hand. I imagine myself touching the surface. I feel touched by this material. I feel inclined to touch it. I imagine myself making this mask. I imagine the sound of the humid clay while I mold it. I imagine the dance of my hand adapting to the material. I imagine that the clay is molding me. I imagine wearing the mask. I imagine I would be someone else then. I imagine the mask as some power. I imagine that if I wear this mask, I will make a trip back in time. I imagine I will revisit ancient memories. I imagine myself diving into the abyss of my memories. I imagine reliving my ancestors, my previous incarnation. I feel scares of becoming the cruel man if I wear it. I feel the sensation of the mask on my face. I feel it is cold. I feel that it does not fit. I imagine myself moving the sculpture to see it from another angle. I see the point of view of the photographer that took the picture. I see blue grey background. I imagine that the camera is Iike a mask. I imagine it is another layer in front of the face of the photographer. I imagine the photography as a mask, as a layer that covers something else. I imagine the photography of the photography of the photography. I imagine a “ mise en abyme”. I feel myself looking for what is behind. I feel myself wandering if there is anything behind. I feel myself wandering if there is anything at all.

       

      20) Varinia>Robin>Brendan

       

      So what I would say is that, in a way, there is nothing to see,

      nothing really, there’s nothing to really see, if you are looking at it, as you do.

       

      L'Origine Du Monde

       

       

      “Look there’s nothing to see. Look what you see is so real.

      Look, if you don’t look you’ll make your own expectations,

      you’ll make your own desire.”

       

      “It is as if I opened my shirt, my shirt at the door of my bedroom, saying leave me alone,”

       

      (silence accompanied by time)

      (taking position in the recline)

       

      “You bastard looking at me crying. I won’t give you a tear.”

      “I won’t give you a single tear.”

       

      “you watch the painting”

      “and I don’t believe you, you mock- this illusion”.

      Illusion.

       

      “There is nothing to see, pass your way,”

       

      “ l’indécence du regard, est de plus en plus morne.

      Tout cela, à beaucoup entre vous donne les cornes”

       

      The indecent look becomes increasingly more and more bleak.

      All this gives you a lot between the horns-

      “and you will never say hi to puberty the same way again.”

       

       

      “L’ indecence a voir avec la mort des larmes”

      Indecency even with the death of tears.

       

      (sounding and speaking more gentle)

      “And I tried, I tried, I tried-

      to say that things can be hidden. Not for the good but for the highest level.

      I know that I didn’t do so many things at the end. But I still think I did too much.

      I have the time to think, I have the time to discover, I have the time to touch, I have the time to untouch, I have the time to detach, I have the time to”-

       

      “where as polite or not-

      and grey in the silk ground

      of flower bond

      b-o-n-d.

       

      for thinkers shouldn’t be so much. (so many)

      they are confusing the whole(hole)-

      structure."

       

       

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

       

      what is a long-distance touch and what could it stimulate?

      Light-Touch

      “It is possible that we are rare, fleeting specks of awareness in an unfeeling cosmic desert, the only witnesses to its wonder.

      It is also possible that we are living in a universal sea of sentience, surrounded by ecstasy and strife that is open to our influence.

      Timo Hannay, publisher

      the term light sometimes refers to electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength, whether visible or not.[4][5] In this sense, gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves and radio waves are also light.

      Like all types of light, visible light is emitted and absorbed in tiny "packets" called photons and exhibits properties of both waves and particles. This property is referred to as the wave–particle duality.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

      We are dead stars looking back up at the sky, the Iron in our blood and all the elements that make up our bodies were created in a Supernova explosion.

      As Humans we tend to think of the stars as eternal, but the stars will all burn out someday, there's only a certain amount of stellar fuel- Hydrogen, and the Stars are burning through it, and the stars, as we know them will all eventually die out, (in some trillions of years), and the universe will be dark for the rest of time.

      We're actually living in a potential Eden right now, in a time when this 10 billion year live thing 'the sun' is pouring down free energy, we are using it , we are evolving, we are becoming sentient beings who are able to look back out at the universe from where they came.

      Starlight will only be there for the shortest span of the universe's history and then everything else will be dark, someday I wonder if people will have myths about the days when stars rained down free energy and sunlight on the planet."

      Nasa Astronomer Dr. Michelle Thaller.

      http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=40047#.Vq-PNUtnGDU

      Hang on this connection is breaking up
      You are only coming through in waves
      Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying

      When I was a child
      I caught a fleeting glimpse
      Out of the corner of my eye
      I turned to look, but it was gone
      I cannot put my finger on it now

      David Bowie/comfortably numb

      physicists brought light to a "complete standstill" by passing it through a Bose–Einstein condensate of the element rubidium.

      The popular description of light being "stopped" in experiments refers only to light being stored in the excited states of atoms. During the time it had "stopped" it had ceased to be light.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

      Touch: embrace, lick, palpation, stroke, feel,

      Touch:pat, fondle, hit, tactility, touching,

      Touch: petting, push, caress, taste, kiss, rub, taction,

      Touch: stroking, scratching, hug, blow, grope, feel , peck

      Touch: to put the hand, finger, etc., on or into contact with (something) to feel it:

      nce.com/browse/touch

      Touch: one of the five senses along with taste, smell, hearing and seeing, is defined as the act you do when you hold, caress, feel or otherwise encounter something with your hand.

      Touch: to lay the hand on (a person with scrofula), as some kings once did, to effect a cure

      Touch: to arouse an emotion in, esp. one of sympathy, gratitude, etc

      http://www.yourdictionary.com/touch#JSV8WyareZKbTFwD.99

      Touch/ Somatosensory System: Pain receptors: nocireceptor. "Noci-" in Latin means "injurious" or "hurt”. these receptors detect pain or stimuli that can or does cause damage to the skin and other tissues of the body, tissues of the body.

      Touch: There are over three million pain receptors throughout the body, found in skin, muscles, bones, blood vessels, and some organs.

      Touch: Pain receptors can detect pain that is caused by mechanical stimuli, like cutting into the surface of the skin with a knife, thermal stimuli, like burning the layers of your body with a blow torch, chemical stimuli - like swallowing a poison and emotional stimuli, like having your heart pierced by another.

      RobinAmanda 

      Touch: When you were born, oxytocin helped expel you from your mother’s womb and made it possible for her to nurse you..As a small child, you enjoyed your mother’s and father’s loving touch because it released oxytocin in your body

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-mind-body-connection/201309/why-we-all-need-touch-and-be-touched

      Touch: sensory neurons are triggered by specific stimulus such as pain, for instance. This signal then passes to the part of the brain attributed to that area on the body—this allows the stimulus to be felt at the correct location.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatosensory_system

       

      Sound bed for text: Soy el punto negro que anda.m4a.download


       

       

       

      KEYWORDS: goo, internal communication, sensible mass, timing, two, materiality, skin, Imagination, flux, fusion, bite, 

       

       

      REPORT: It's exiting, we are getting somewhere different from where we had started. Starting next Wednesday we will be cooking for each other. We are asking questions to each other that we would never be asking otherwise, pulling potentialities out of each others proposals. We are stepping out of what we knew, of what we felt was our own interest. Isn't it exiting when suddenly we find ourselves liking things we would never have expected to like before? Isn't it surprising to be all of the sudden disliking things you would've thought you already loved? Yes, I feel it changing, it's coming, we're are stepping into something beautifully complex! Oh, it's exiting, we are stepping into strange fields! Oh, so exiting, these dangerous fields that soon we might call common ground!

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • “An image says more than a thousand words, so why writing?” 01 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Lilia Mestre & Bruno De Wachter
    • a.pass
    • 01 February 2016
    • 05 February 2016
    • “An image says more than a thousand words, so why writing?”

      “An image says more than a thousand words, so why writing?” There are a thousand objections possible to that cliché. “Tell that to the blind man” is the one we would like to pick. What words start to echo in your mind when you close the visual input? And which words would you choose to replace an image being taken away? Ah, you might object, ah, but writing is not about describing images, it is all about sharing thoughts. If somebody is making movements, the spectator will make the same movements but without moving. If someone has written down a line of thoughts, the reader will walk the same line of thoughts but without writing. “Writing is what you do to share your inner self with the outside world” is the romantic version of that vision. This can be a good reason indeed, but you can only write about your inner world through the detour of the outside, otherwise nobody would understand a word. Otherwise, you would not even have a word. And can the opposite not be just as good a motivation? Writing to assimilate the outside world – the unknown, the impersonal – and make it your own?


       

       

      Biography

      Lilia Mestre (1968) is a Portuguese performing artist living and working in Brussels. In her work she uses choreographic tools to research the social body. She gives special attention to the agency of all things and has been working in assemblages, scores and inter-subjective set ups.
      Actually she’s involved in two research projects: ‘And what about Virtuosity?’ with Edurne Rubio, Shila Anaraki and Frederik Croene supported by the Flemish government which developed in the art project “The container” 2016/17 in the Academy Kunstbrug in Gent. And ‘Choreographic figures -deviation from the line’ initiated by Nikolaus Gansterer and supported by the University of Vienna and Peek.
      Since 2006 she is dramaturge and/or curator for projects in Bains Connective Art Laboratory in Brussels. Currently she is program co-curator at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels).

      Bruno De Wachter (° Antwerp, 1972)  Lives in Brussels. Works half-time as a technical copywriter and half-time on his own writing and walking projects. Published essays, translation and prose in the Flemish literature magazine Yang and its successor nY. Started to write prose inspired by long distance walking and is gradually evolving towards fiction. Has a special interest in the combinations of text and photography, in the crossroad between fiction writing at science, and in writing as a way to relate to the landscape.

    • information
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Block Focus: Sub -(e)ject The relation between writing and performance
      01 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Lilia Mestre
    • a.pass
    • 04 January 2016
    • 31 March 2016
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Block Focus: Sub -(e)ject

      The proposal for this block follows up on scores as a tool to organize dialogical or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic practice and research. In the past two years I developed in the frame of a.pass a score for writing practice, ‘Writing Scores’ and a score for performance ‘Perform Back Score’, both as discursive tools. Both scores created a platform for the different researches to co-habitate and to reflect back the methods and strategies each of us use in the making and thinking of our practices. The main questions are: 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 in a collaborative environment? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?

      I like to think that the becoming of the subject takes place in the experiences s/he partakes in the interiorisation and exteriorisation of the world. The subject as an agent of change that through its own transformation in the collective terrain participates activelly in the collective. I see the arts as a manifestation of that transformation and that transformation as a form of political engagement .

      For 2016 I would like to mix both scores and propose to focus on the gestures of performance and writing as gestures of inscription both containing the desire to create surfaces of reflection that beam our experiences out into the world and give tools for reading that same world.

      We can think performance as writing as well as writing as performance and the multiple relations the practice of arts have with writing. Language is the common denominator in our super capitalized society, it’s the place of communication/ transmission by excellence, where knowledge (experience and thought) gets legitimized and for the same reasons a place where we cross or establish borders. We all have a deep relation with language from daily life existence to the writing of academic papers, theatre programs, grants applications passing by fiction or poetry. And in a moment or another we have to answer the questions: What are you doing? What is is about? Why?

      Through our the block we’ll search for the connection between the word and the event, the resonance of the work into words, also if the work is writing itself, and vice versa. The confrontation between the place of experience and the place of re-telling, the dialogue that runs in between them and makes both evolve. How each of us does it? Which kind of tone, format, lenght, do we use to manifest the experience into words or the words into experience? How do the two practices feed each other? Can a writing about art be art itself?

      The score is called “ Bubble Score for multiple languages” and will take place once a week from January till March. We’ll alternate weekly between writing and performing and a publication will be produced afterwards. The score will have several observation stand points: as practice of both, performing and writing, and their relation, as a way to publish events and reflections and as a social environment of authors without territories developing subjectivies/ collectivities. The five workshops will support the individual researches by contributing with tools and strategies coming from different artistic approaches.

       

      OVERVIEW

      Here we give a short overview on the workshops spread over the block, which shall bring a
      mixture of inputs into the discourses raised through the focus of this block.

      The first workshop about is about subjectivity and will be given by Elke Van Campenhout as a start up to the philosophical environment of the block. We’ll reed authors such as: ...

      After this we will dive into blindness and writing with Lilia Mestre (performance) and Bruno De Wachter (writer). The idea of the workshop is to start a relation between the personal throught working on blindness and writing as a pratice bringing that inside in relation to the outside, the world. The work will take form throught the researches of the participants.

      Jack Hauser and Sabina Holzer will give a workshop on scores where each participant will practice scoring in relation to her/his research as much as the collective construction of a score where the different practices can ‘play’ with each other.

      Myriam Van Imschoot will use various forms of voicing and singing to co-write thoughts, ideas and presence in the multiple spaces of social interaction, communication and their architectural and acoustic envelopes.

      And to end, the choreographer Anne Juren will work with body technics as Feldenkrais to approch different states of the body and write from that perspective taking support on Ecriture Feminine.

       

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

    • 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?

    • 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
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • NOT_index
    • Scores
    • "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
    • 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
    • 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
    • workshop
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2010/I
    • NOT_index
    • CONSEQUENCES II 01 March 2010
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert
    • 01 March 2010
    • 06 March 2010
    • CONSEQUENCES II

       

       

      The most important element of our working process is writing and transference. It allows all participants to work in silence and not to be bothered by producibility. The constant passing on of written material and the permanent reformulating, contextualizing, expanding, and reflecting of the written material serve as a basis for the creation and composition of movements, texts, sounds, or images. But within this procedure all realizations are based on  temporary decisions depending from the material that is handed over from the other and not because the medium of realization is chosen beforehand. Our working procedure could best fit into the motto: ‘Give me your material and I show you what you're not doing with it’.

      Sourcing the creation-act out and rendering oneself into the pendency of writing instead permits a disciplined work in silence, in which each participant and partner can raise her/his voice on the paper independently from its volume or the amount and position of knowledge. Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (Re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. The place of the individual argument, the singular voice is taken by an instance of polyphony, similar to the Cadavre Exquis, which is a game that was invented by Surrealists in 1925. It is quite similar to an old english parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Unlike the surrealists, we don't hide what has been written previously. For us it is a downright challenge to deal with the input of the others and to come into thinking with it, to expand ideas and suggestions, to combine sketches, to suggest a possible proceeding. It is only very late in the working procedure that we ask about the medium in which this material is to be realized. In this sense, the medium becomes a part in the decision-making, in the claim of form (or format). It is not set a priori and thus has to be in reference, translation, transference to the material: it has to be a decision and not a choice.
 Because of this it is fundamental in this principle of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one's decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (Re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. Just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK I 01 January 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2009
    • 31 March 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK I

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program
                       
      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow
      Fien Wauters
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Marcos Simoes
      Michel Yang
      Sungmin Hong


      Partners

      Buda Kortrijk
      University of Ghent
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)


                        
      Contributors for workshops

      Dora Garcia
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Jan Maertens
      Kris Verdonck
      Marianne Van Kerckhove
      Miguel Clara Vasconcelos
      Peter Stamer
      Stefan Heinrich
      Tine Van Aerschot
      Tom Plischke-Kattrin Deufert
      Yosi Wanunu

       


      Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout (a.pass coordinator)

      26 / 01 – 06 / 02  / 2009

      ‘VIDEO STORYTELLING AND EDITING’

      workshop by Miguel Clara Vasconcelos

      The workshop aims at setting up a film shooting and editing process out of the personal stories of the participants. Every participant constructs a personal story (out of objects, memories and scars) and throughout the first week re-constructs this story into a workable film script. During this first week Miguel Clara Vasconcelos will also provide film excerpts and examples and will go deeper into the theoretical approach of script writing and editing.

      In the second week, the participants will work on a collaborative shooting and editing of one collective script, assembled out of the different stories. 

       

       

      02  / 2009

      ‘LIGHT & DESIGN’

      workshop by Jan Maertens

      In his workshop on light design Jan Maertens will sketch out the light designer’s tools, reviewing the technical light equipment of a theatre. He tackles the ‘functionality’ of light design as part of the scenic environment and then focuses on light design as an independent co-actor in the artistic process. The workshop consists of three sections : a general introduction, from the principles of visual perception and light as a medium to the toolbox the theatre provides for the light designer, and a reflection on the position of the light designer as an artistic player in the multimedia performance field. Secondly, the participants have a close view on the development of a light design with all possible practicalities and artistic discussions in the concrete context of the working process for Meg Stuart’s creation 2009. Third, there will be a photo shoot of the light design for ‘Maybe Forever’ with photographer David Berger : a try-out on the documentation and archiving of light design.

       

       

      02  / 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 01’

      coaching by Stefan Heinrich

      Scenographer Stefan Heinrich coaches the program participants in the development of a scenography based on a personal fascination, for Fien Wauters ‘Hercules 2 or the Hydra’ (a text by Heiner Muller) and for Jozef Wouters ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ (a documentary by Werner Herzog). The idea is to take this personal relation as a motor for a scenography without interference of a director's concept, dramaturgy, historical context,... For Heinrich the translation of a first fascination into a coherent story and concept and the technical development of the stage design (for a concrete theatre space) are the axes of the workshop. 

       

       

       

      16-20 / 02 / 2009  

      ‘LOW TECH PERFORMANCE / COLLABORATION AT A DISTANCE’

      workshop by Dora Garcia

      The workshop proposes to research strategies and contents that need nothing but a performer to create the work. Specific attention is given to keywords such as audience, duration, visibility, infiltration, subversion and commitment.

      The workshop starts out of mutual interest, discussion, and information. In the first days, Dora Garcia gives a short presentation of her work and adds some "affinities" with other artists that she feels close to. Then the group discusses the concept of the workshop, "LOW TECH performances". The title, ‘LOW TECH’ refers to a type of performance stressing the content over the appearance, disliking complicated scenographies and props, rethinking conventions such as audience, stage, backstage, duration, character-playing, and using the technology that is available to everybody. 

       

       

      02-06 / 03 / 2009

      ‘CONSEQUENCES’

      workshop by Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

      The most important element of our working process is writing and transference. It allows all participants to work in silence and not to be bothered by producibility. The constant passing on of written material and the permanent reformulating, contextualizing, expanding, and reflecting of the written material serve as a basis for the creation and composition of movements, texts, sounds, or images. But within this procedure all realizations are based on  temporary decisions depending from the material that is handed over from the other and not because the medium of realization is chosen beforehand. Our working procedure could best fit into the motto: ‘Give me your material and I show you what you're not doing with it’.

      Sourcing the creation-act out and rendering oneself into the pendency of writing instead permits a disciplined work in silence, in which each participant and partner can raise her/his voice on the paper independently from its volume or the amount and position of knowledge. Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (Re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. The place of the individual argument, the singular voice is taken by an instance of polyphony, similar to the Cadavre Exquis, which is a game that was invented by Surrealists in 1925. It is quite similar to an old english parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Unlike the surrealists, we don't hide what has been written previously. For us it is a downright challenge to deal with the input of the others and to come into thinking with it, to expand ideas and suggestions, to combine sketches, to suggest a possible proceeding. It is only very late in the working procedure that we ask about the medium in which this material is to be realized. In this sense, the medium becomes a part in the decision-making, in the claim of form (or format). It is not set a priori and thus has to be in reference, translation, transference to the material: it has to be a decision and not a choice.
 Because of this it is fundamental in this principle of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one's decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (Re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. Just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

       

       

      01-30 / 04 / 2009

      ‘TOOLS FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARITY : DRAMATURGY IN REAL-TIME’

      workshop by a.pass

      This workshop is open for three different groups of participants:

      -aspiring dramaturges from the Theatre Sciences department of the university of Ghent and Antwerp


      -scenographers/sound designers/light designers

      
-'professional' dramaturges with the artists they regularly work with.

       

      The mentors of the project are:

      theatre maker Kris Verdonck

      dramaturg Marianne Van Kerckhove

      theatre maker Tine Van Aerschot

      dramaturg Elke Van Campenhout

      theatre maker: Yosi Wanunu (Toxic Dreams)

      dramaturg: Peter Stamer

       

      In de Buda Tacktoren, we form sub-groups of one artist/dramaturg, one scenographer/../.., and one aspiring dramaturge, each one occupying one studio of the Tacktoren.

      In preparation every one of the participants will receive the initial idea, or starting point (a text, a choreographic phrase, a political issue, a question), from the prof. team. Starting from this basic material they will already come to the workshop weaponed with some initial ideas, images, related texts etcetera,... (which we can call 'mood boards), to start the discussion. During the first week, the participants will discuss and work out ideas with the artist in question, and get feedback from the prof. dramaturge in the evening. Scenographers work on scenographic proposals, but work also closely together with the aspirant dramaturges, and the other way around.
 Every day they share their results with the rest of the group. At the end of the week, we will decide where every project is going to lead to: a short performance, an exhibition of drawings, ideas, concepts, a discussion...
In the second week, the results will be shared with the public. a.pass will provide the necessary contextualization of the project to communicate its status to the public.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2008 BLOCK I 01 January 2008
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2008
    • 31 March 2008
    • 2008 BLOCK I

       

      -Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Bruno Stappaerts
      Christophe Engels
      Gable Roelofsen
      Hanne Jacobs
      Karolien De Schepper
      Kim Lien Desault
      Klaas Devos
      Lieselot Jansen
      Lore Rabaut
      Luk Sips
      Sara Manente
      Vick Verachtert

       

       

      -Partners

      Beursschouwburg / Bettina Knaup - festival ‘Performing Proximities’
      UA University of Antwerpen
      Troubleyn
      PAF (Performing Arts Forum, Reims)
      TkH (Walking Theory, Belgrade)
      TQW (TanzQuartier Wien)

       


      -Contributors for workshops

      Constant vzw ( Rogerio Liro / Simon Yuill / Kirstie Stansfield / Laurence Rassel / Peter Westenberg / Wendy Van Wynsberghe)

      Heather Kravas / Antonija Livingstone

      Peter Stamer / Philippe Riera

       


      -Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campengout (Coordinator a.pass)

       

       

      Program #1 in collaboration with Constant vzw

       

      http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/mutual/?article377

      http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/mutual/spip.php?mot150

       

      21-15 / 01 / 2008

      ‘PERFORMATIVE RECORDINGS, BROWSING THE CITY’

      workshop by Constant vzw (Brussels)

      Day 1: We will walk the city of Antwerp. Attached to our feet will be low tech recording devices. Through them, we observe us making contact with the surfaces of the city. The regions of impact beneath the soles of our shoes, touching the sleeves of our coat, entering our field of vision produce an image of our physical presence. In a group we will explore different surroundings (busy street, shopping mall, open space... ) and make collective audio-visual collages. The devices we carry will function as our ears and eyes, they act as audio-visual mediators. At the end of the day we will use this material to make a festive audio-visual mix.

      Day 2: We will publish the video and audio we will have collected online. This involves selecting fragments, make a simple montage, install and dress up a weblog, upload the audio and video, describe the material. We will use free software and operating systems and think about alternatives for copyright by applying permissive licenses.

       

       

      28-31 / 01 / 2008

      ‘MODULATING SENSORY INPUT: OBJECTS AND SPACES STRATEGIES’

      workshop by Rogerio Liro

      In today's society we face in increasing degree of technological tools for communication: phone, email, text messaging, internet data generated oriented person. These instruments gain influence and determine already greatly our personal lives. The growth of these media seems endless. But our reserves of energy and attention is finite although we tend to test its limits. These technological opportunities for interaction show as well their own borders.

      How these instruments affect our perception of space and of our social needs? How do they redefine the boundary between ourselves and the world that surrounds us? What is the nature of this limit and how liquid is that? Do we always know when the saturation point is reached?

      In practice, particular attention will be paid to the work of Lygia Clark as therapeutic art practice, and the workshop will result in the construction of a new model for the use of a.pass workspaces.

      http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/mutual/spip.php?article353

       

       

      29-31 / 01 / 2008

      ‘PERFORMING PROXIMITIES : SWEETNESS AND FEAR AMONG FRIENDS AND STRANGERS’

      (SWAP MEAT AND MALE BREAST FEEDING)

      workshop by Heather Kravas (U.S.) and Antonija Livingstone (SE / CA)

      Choreographers Antonija Livingstone and Heather Kravas already worked a long time together, and will try to share their choreographic practices. In particular, they will work with the participants on two motion systems that simultaneously construct and deconstruct an image. The workshop revolves around the development of intimacy in a performance situation.

      The workshop takes place during the ‘Performing Proximities' festival, curated by Bettina Knaup at the Beursschouwburg in Brussels. This festival focuses on notions of hospitality, intimacy and confrontation, both in terms of programming formats and in relation to artistic work and research.

      http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/mutual/spip.php?article368

       

       

      11-17 / 02 / 2008

      ‘OBJECT SCORE NOTATION’

      workshop by Simon Yuill (software developer) and Kirstie Stansfield (artist)

      This workshop looks for the potentiality of softwares as tools to create notation of performance.

      The starting point is the development of a notation system for everyday objects, movements, and gestures capture. For this, the physical space (the dance floor) is used as notation canvas shared by/in a collective authorship.

      http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/mutual/spip.php?article369

       

       

       

      Program #2 by a.pass in collaboration with the Antwerpen Master in Theater Studies

       

      18  / 02 - 20 / 03 / 2008

      ‘DRAMA QUEENS’

      workshop by Peter Stamer and Philippe Riera

      This long-term project will develop in several phases, including the development of a performance with the master students Theatre Studies of the University of Antwerp.

      Peter Stamer initially will work with the participants around the basic principles of the therapeutic practice 'family constellations', where participants act as representatives of characters involved in the therapeutic needs of the client. The theatrical aspect of family constellations (volunteers take the 'role' of the father, mother, daughter or lover of the client, and are placed in the room to promote in this way the relationship between these key players), is the starting point for testing out this methodology as a tool in performance creation. The participants will work around these principles in the creation of improvisational moments of singing, wordless, dramatic or choreographic constellations.

      Secondarily Peter Stamer will work with about 20 students of the master Theatre Studies at UA and apass participants will become their coaches.

      One of the working week will focus on the contribution of choreographer Philippe Riera. He will work, inspired by his experience with the collective Superamas, with students around notions of fake / real and film editing esthetics principles in performance.

       

       

      Research laboratory

       

      28-29 / 03 / 2008

      ‘PRINCIPLES AND METHODOLOGIES OF AUTO-EDUCATION’

      research laboratory curated by a.pass, PAF (Performing Arts Forum, Reims), TkH (Walking Theory, Belgrade) and TQW (Tanz Quartier Wien).

       





APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

Unfortunately we no longer have applications. Both programs: the Postgraduate as well as Research Center have come to an end due to the decision of the ministry of education to stop financing a.pass. At the moment we look into new plans for the future. More news soon on our website.

Alternativly you can upload your Research proposal, Portfolio, CV and other documents here.

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