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Kristien Van den Brande /39


    • 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

       
    • research center
    • associate researchers Cycle 2
    • block 2021/I
    • Printer's Devils
    • Printer's devils Research Center Cycle 2 Block III
      17 January 2021
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre, Pia Louwerens, Kristien Van den Brande
    • 04 January 2021
    • 04 April 2021
    • Printer's devils

      One publishes to find comrades! So says André Breton. The researchers in the current cycle of the research centre — Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens — are ending their trajectories at a.pass with a block focused on publishing, and the myriad of relations implied in committing something to print. Publishing is rarely something that concludes a confined process of solitary thought. It is a social process that — abstractly and manifestly — involves collaboration along the way: sometimes with fellow interlocutors, sometimes with an editor or designer at the other end of the table, sometimes with abstract ideas of what readership might entail. Rather than aiming for a book or for printed matter as a finite goal, we will take publishing as a pretext to build relationships that last over time. How can a publication be set up as an ongoing social gesture, a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance?

      This block has a weekly organization, whereby Tuesdays alternate between a technical-dramaturgical help-desk, and editorial-curatorial approaches. Help-desk Tuesdays are more loosely structured around practical needs of the collective and individual publications. How did you do this? Why would you do that? During the editorial-curatorial Tuesdays we work on a collective publication, addressing a breadth of concerns in publishing (commonplace books, performative publishing, the interplay between analogue and digital publishing, orality and transcription, co-writing, the power of address, self-writing, ventriloquism, reading as writing, distribution).

      The researchers' collective publication process is hosted by madewitholga.be, a virtual residency space, designed for research and experimentation. It is the sister-space of oralsite.be, a platform for digital artist publications, initiated by Sarma. The collective publication commences as a collective commonplace book, an inventory of what was found noteworthy during the shared research time at a.pass. How did epiphanic thoughts, ideas or observations materialize in notebooks, notepads, post-its, letters, etc; what kind of publicness is enacted at the outset of noting them down; and what operations or translations can we perform to enhance readability?

      Throughout the previous blocks the researchers have been assisted, respectively by Vladimir Miller and Nicolas Galeazzi. The upcoming three months are organized by Kristien Van den Brande, in collaboration with the researchers.

    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Collective Channeling Exploration through research, play and art
      21 September 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Amari, Carina Erdmann, Mlondiwethu Dubazane, Lore D Selys
    • a.pass
    • 29 September 2023
    • 30 September 2023
    • Collective Channeling

      September 29-30
      Doors open at 5.30. Delaunoystraat 58.** There will be food and drinks.
      6pm-12pm: welcome at a.pass for music, film, conversation, spoken word and a dream dungeon.
      Closing party on the 30th!



      mlondiwethu, Carina, Amari and Lore conspire a presentation to conclude the end of a year spent together at a program for advanced performance and scenography studies. They decide to play a game and while they take a walk through the building that hosted them, they slip into character, speaking in the tongue of their research. Through this game they look at the implicit support structures and restrictions in place. They address and sound  the different languages and methods they need to adapt to move on an uneven playing field, comparing their different needs, skills, and energy levels, discussing how they can share time and space, the rules they would like themselves and others to play by. This also becomes a metaphor for the spoken and unspoken rules of institutions, of group-making, of ongoing or not yet inscribed forms of collectivities.


       

      Welcome. We'll begin with a character introduction. Who are you? Why are you here? What is your quest? Starting to my right.

      mlondiwethu: Hi, my name is mauve. I am a sound. I exist as a sound. I sound as a sound. As you hear me now you hear me in my essence, sound. I communicate with sound. Only sound, just sound. Sound, sound, sound, sound. But if you look into my eyes, if you look into my sound, I'm probably telling you a truth about myself. I came here to be heard. I hope you listening. I came here to be heard. I came here for love to be loved. I came here for me. I want to burn everything to the ground, but I need everything to stay up. My motto is to sound what I believe in or what other great masters believed in. I sound. I pop off. I smile frown. I'm shy loud, big small, pretentious, lover. Big eyes no see. I'm angry-soft. I am flow. I am muddy. The name is mauve.

      Carina: I am Olga Terre. It's kind of an old name. It's an anagram of Alter Ego, which is a bit lame, but somehow it got stuck, got stuck in my own webs. I often appear as a game designer, but actually I'm a spider, spinning webs to catch you, but catch you feeling carried. The threads are thin and fragile. They're spun from your own thoughts. If you get tied up, your quest is to question the rules of the game. See that your struggles are not your own. Recognize the patterns and that you will not solve them alone. My tone is playful. Sometimes a bit grave. Language is a game to me and I make games as a language to speak to these elephants that are marching through the rooms. Catch them on the web. My refrain is a slogan because I want to sell you your own body as technology, for free. 

      Amari: My name is Anti Hero. I blurred the line between good and bad. I created bridges between what should and what shouldn't. Now, my question is, how to learn from the shadows? How does light exist in darkness? Where is dark? Where is light? I know lawful skills and unlawful tools, I know plays and games for thoughts, I have ways to care or don't care. My attitude is true to myself. My tone is love. A love that doesn't bend. A love that is bold. I face the fears that make your body shake. That make your demons awake. Those that make your mom and dad regret they make you live in such a place. With deepest fear comes deepest desire. I'm full of paradoxes. Ghosts and prayers support me. I'm limitless.

      Lore: I'm superb SP(UB). I am spongy and Kuti (cutty). Sponging to others, sponging in the supposed outside. Cut T often through speech, gaze, movement, silence, anxiety, distraction and agitation. I cut the crap by maybe creating some more crap. I move the crap. I can be bratty as refrains, mucho mantra. Well, scrubbing scrubbing with two Bs I superb use pub. She he they spoke, we spoke spaces the place as with every process, I kind of follow and cut, Follow. Follow. Follow Follow matrix. I encasement and clothes meant I like to perceive beyond certain types of presence. I touch myself and the room a lot. You will be iceberg only a few things about us. I cross subjects and spaces. I know no grammar.

       

      Full script/game to be listened : https://collectivechanneling.cargo.site/ 

      On September 29 and 30, mlondiwethu, Carina, Amari and Lore open the a.pass doors one last time, channeling voices, rhythms, and refrains – collapsing worlds that have been into worlds that might come.

      Collective Channeling is co-curated with Simone Basani.

       


       

      ** Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site ‘de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience. The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.






    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Enter the DreamDungeon Call for participants
      18 September 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Carina Erdmann
    • a.pass
    • 20 September 2023
    • Enter the DreamDungeon

      For Carina Erdmann’s end-presentation, you will be invited to enter the DreamDungeon, a role-play game set in a subliminal architecture built from the merged dreams and associations of players and attending public. Train your mind in dream recall and submit your dream to become part of the collective memory space and soundscape. Submission will be anonymous.

      Want to dive in deeper? We are looking for a small group of core players that attend the dungeon building on September 26/27 and proceed to play the game with the public present on September 29/30. No prior knowledge needed, small compensation, places are limited. Write to Carina (before September 20) if you are interested or have questions: ca.erdmann@web.de.

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

       
      Nada Gambier
      They write you out of the narrative. You leave them out of the story. We create new scripts.
      27.9 + 29.9 + 2.10 @ 10h00-17h00
      A 3-day working shift around creative writing based on gentle trespassing and structured cacophony. We will use interference as a tool for widening our individual writing styles and skills. Minimum attendance day 1 and 2. Bring your own writing to start working from (lists, essays, paragraphs, loose sentences...).
      For more info please contact nadakatinka@gmail.com
       
      Federico Protto
      Fashion Hypnosis
      28.9 @ 14h00-18h00
      Can you locate the space between the clothes you are wearing and your skin? Fashion Hypnosis is a soft guided meditation exploring what, how, when, where, and why we carry, wear, fit, attire, button up, button down, buckle, fasten, drape, dress, and undress. Based on a practice developed in a.pass in 2020, we will collectively experiment the 'soft' hypnosis further into a somatic-movement score relating to garments, textiles, and costumes provided and activated in space.
      For more info please contact federico.prottoscutti@gmail.com
       
      Sarah Pletcher
      collaboration from here and there
      28.9 @ 18h30-20h30
      A talk/open discussion about how artists can collaborate with one another when living or working in different locals. How can we carry the collective with us when we relocate?
      For more info please contact spletcher123@gmail.com
       
      Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst
      crossreadings
      3 + 4.10 @ 18h-21h30
      A curatorial exercise that brings together a selection of films and books that approach the legacies of colonialism across different geographies and socio-political contexts. Departing from materials that have been a reference to the artists’ research, these two evening sessions explore how the cross reading of works produced in different times and continents might be able to create a space of reflection sustained by the frictions and similarities that might emerge between them. The programme will be also accompanied by the presentation of Hunting Song, a publication produced by Túlio as conclusion of his journey at a.pass Research Center Cicle IV in which he crosses historical accounts of violence with the music scores of the opera Il Guarany.
      For more info please contact Paoletta mail@paolettaholst.info or Túlio rosa.tulio@hotmail.com
       
      Lucia Palladino
      correspondances_I discovered loving is like going harvesting wild herbs in the forest
      4.10 @ 15h30-17h30
      A participative reading, writing and listening score producing content from neurological atypical patterns that questions language, hierarchies of knowledge and modes of learning.
      For more info please contact info.luciapalladino@gmail.com
       
      Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens
      getting into character/s
      5.10 + 6.10 +7.10 @ 18h-20h
      Three evenings of rituals and writing to work through difficulties, embarrassments and discomfort of composing words as someone else. The evenings are for individual work, but undertaken in a collective setting. For more info please contact amymaypickles@gmail.com
       
      Sara Vilardo
      map of displacement
      6.10 + 7.10 @ 13h30-17h30
      8.10 @ 10-13h
      Map of a displacement invites you for a shared practice, individually or in a group, of mapping a life journey in relation to personal and universal events that have interfered in your life line. Limited spots -
      recommended reservation and further information from saravilardo@gmail.com
       
      Day by day schedule:
      * Wednesday 27.9 : Nada Gambier - writing lab - 10h-17h00
      * Thursday 28.9 : Federico Protto -fashion hypnosis- 14h-18h00
      Sarah Pletcher - talk- 18h30-20h30
      * Friday 29.9 : Nada Gambier -writing lab- 10h-17h00
      * Monday 2.10 : Nada Gambier - writing lab- 10h-17h00
      * Tuesday 3.10 : Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst - reading/screening-
      18h-21h30
      * Wednesday 4.10 : Lucia Palladino - listening, reading and writing
      score- 15h30
      Tulio Rosa & Paoletta Holst -reading/screening
      - 18-21h30
      * Thursday 5.10 : Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens -rituals and
      writing- 18h-20h00
      * Friday 6.10 : Sara Vilardo -mapping- 13h30-17h30
      Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens -rituals and writing-
      18h-20h00
      * Saturday 7.10 : Sara Vilardo -mapping- 13h30-17h30
      Amy Pickles & Chloe Janssens -rituals and
      writing- 18h-20h00
      * Sunday 8.10 : Sara Vilardo -mapping- 10h-13h00
    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • End Communications 07 September 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov
    • a.pass
    • 15 September 2023
    • 16 September 2023
    • End Communications

      In-between researcher and research, one finds:

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

      Marian Rosa van Bodegraven

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

       

      Alyssa Gersony

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

       

      Marko Gutić Mižimakov

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

       

      Andrea Brandão

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

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

       

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

       


       

      Programme

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      -break- drinks available, 4th Floor

       

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

       

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

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Collaborators:

       

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

       

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

       

      Co-curator:

       

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institution. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists — one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. Vijai is a former associate researcher at the Research Center, and has since come back on different occasions as a mentor for the Post-Graduate Program at a.pass.

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Printer's Devils
    • Stage so near so far 13 June 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi
    • a.pass
    • 29 June 2023
    • 30 June 2023
    • Stage so near so far

      Stage so near so far is a two-day workshop following the newly published issue of Pages and explores forms of reading based on the printed texts in the magazine.

      The new issue consists entirely of plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer's body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. 

      Plays or performance texts are by nature anticipatory. They are oriented toward the stage on which they may be performed. One could say that the performance text carries with it the anticipation of a stage but one that is radically outside given condition of staging: as writing it conveys the idea of a performance and an audience that is yet to come. 

      Reading plays and performance texts to an audience perhaps comes closest to invoking this anticipatory nature. Play reading is a particular form of delivery: we listen to the written performance rather than watch it being performed. It highlights the pre-performed status of the text, nonetheless placing us the audience in a contingent relation to the performance of that play. In a sense, the reading calls forth an audience before a stage that is there and not there. 

      During the workshop the participants will experiment with forms of reading a pre-selected number of the published texts to the group. They will read, reinterpret and expand on them through other means, including other texts and voices and material they see fit. The intention is to explore the limits of delivery, its auditory space and the notion of stage that may emerge from that.

       

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Dreaming Reality 09 June 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Anna Nowicka
    • a.pass
    • 24 June 2023
    • 25 June 2023
    • Dreaming Reality

      In the workshop we will explore our unique languages of imagination. We will notice how images move us, and how our actions transform inner landscapes. We will shift perspectives, switch between giving and receiving, doing and observing, dancing and being still. With the help of shifting the eye within and without the body, we will build realities and let go of them, draw inner landscapes and quest into their mysteries. We will speak worlds into being and listen to how they resonate in the body. From this receptive place, we will form our unique dances.

       

       

      → DATES&TIMES

      Saturday 24th 16h-21h
      Sunday 25th 10.00-15h*

      *Please mind that the workshop has different planned time on both days. A brake for lunchtime is considered.

      →HOW TO JOIN

      The number of participants that can join the workshop is small, non a.pass participants are welcome but registration is required. Do you want to participate in this workshop? Send an email to mizimakov@gmail.com with [DREAMING] as subject before Tuesday, JUNE 22, 2023.

       

      ANNA NOWICKA ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

      "The practice I propose is rooted in the work with dreams I studied at The School of Images and with dr. Bonnie Buckner. We will apply this particular method to choreographic work, plunging into “opening” any image, situation, and form, responding to it from a place of rested, attentive awareness. We will explore night dreams, and dreams that arise in waking reality. We will embody singular images, develop their specific qualities, states they induce and dances they jolt. We will follow the way in which they expand into narratives, using storylines as prompts to flow between qualities and shape shift with ease. We will go deeper into working with patterns, acknowledging the role of time and space in bringing materials to forms. Questions will prompt poetic ways of composing, weaving movements in an associative manner, fostering connections between seemingly unfamiliar materials. Questions will take us beyond the surface level understanding of a dream to reveal its deeper meaning.

      The aim of this work is to become present, dancing with reality with curiosity and ease. With this experiential, deeply embodied perspective one becomes a response-able agent of creation, dreaming the world into being."

       

       

      ABOUT ANNA NOWICKA

      Anna Nowicka (Berlin) is choreographer and performer, plunging into the lush reality of dreaming. She researches the potential of images to expand the body into a state of a continuous becoming. Graduate of the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD), MA Choreography at the HfS Ernst-Busch / HZT in Berlin and MA Psychology at the Warsaw University, she wrote her practice based PhD on embodied awareness as the foundation for being present. She has completed a basic training in Systemic Therapy. Anna is a certified Saphire® teacher of dr. Catherine Shainberg’s “The School of Images”. She is unfolding dreamwork through an intensive exchange with dr. Bonnie Buckner.

      more: https://annanowicka.com/


      ABOUT THE CONTEXT/INVITATION 

      Dreaming Reality with Anna Nowicka is part of the Participant Assembly Curatorial by invitation of Andrea Brandao and Marko Gutić Mižimakov. 

       

      ACESSIBILITY

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

       

    • 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.

    • workshop
    • Participants Assembly
    • TATI(L)/ TATI(S) an encounter behind closed doors
      03 May 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Eva Maes
    • a.pass 4th floor
    • 12 May 2023
    • 13 May 2023
    • Body-Mind Centering sessions, followed by reading Towards a Transindividual Self: a study in social dramaturgy

      In Tati(l)/Tati(s), we dedicate the morning to Body-Mind Centering-anchored practices of exploring the environment of self and other. While introducing some general principles activated through BMC, we dedicate specific attention to the exploration of embryological development of the heart. How do notions about ´listening´, ´conscious and unconscious dialogue´, a ´collective realm´ and/or ´repetition´ inform an explorative dance, as well as move concepts of research in various directions?

      After an open time of dancing, warming up, voicing, jumping rope, singing, drawing, reading, daydreaming, doing yoga, listening to music, experimenting with BMC,.. we will not do this: rehearse for a new piece. We expand on a desire for non-duality between language and body-mind, and explore the action of reading. We share, through a circle, musings raised upon the lecture of Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejic´s Towards a Transindividual Self

       

      practical information:

      location frame: apass 4th floor within Polyset

      Friday, 12th of May: START at 10h30 until 17:30h-ish

      Saturday, 13th of May: START at 10h30 until 17:30h-ish

       

      Bio

      https://evamaes.wordpress.com/

       

      Invited by

      Eva Maes and TATI(L)/ TATI(S) are invited by Andrea Brandão (Participant Assembly curation)

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

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

      Prep for participants

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

       

      Content and accessibility

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

       

      Timetable

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

      public talk 15.05, 18.00

       

      Participants 

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

       

      Bio

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

       

      Invited by

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

    • workshop
    • block 2023/II
    • Printer's Devils
    • Printer's devils 27 April 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Sara Manente, Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, Kate Briggs
    • a.pass & rile*
    • 26 June 2023
    • 07 July 2023
    • Printer's devils

      One publishes to find comrades! So says André Breton. The last block of a.pass ends with a focus on publishing, and the myriad of relations implied in committing something to print. Publishing is rarely something that concludes a confined process of solitary thought. It is a social process that — abstractly and manifestly — involves collaboration along the way: sometimes with fellow interlocutors, sometimes with an editor or designer at the other end of the table, sometimes with abstract ideas of what readership might entail, sometimes in dialogue with ordinary processes of living with, sometimes as a script with future enactment in mind, and most probably a bit of all of those at once. Rather than aiming for a book or for printed matter as a finite goal, we will take publishing as a pretext to build relationships that last over time. How can a publication be set up as an ongoing social gesture, a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance?

      With guest workshops: Sara Manente & ROT magazine (June 26-27), Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai & Pages magazine (June 29 - June 30), and Kate Briggs (July 5 - 6). More info will follow!

    • performative publishing
    • workshop
    • Social dissonance workshop and book presentation
      15 March 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Mattin, curated by Carina Erdmann and Lore D Selys
    • Au jus
    • 24 March 2023
    • Social dissonance

      Mattin’s work in the field of noise and improvisation seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Social Dissonance is the discrepancy between what we do (buying and selling commodities) and what we believe about ourselves as non-commodified entities. In shifting the emphasis from the sonic to the social, we discover that social dissonance is the territory within which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit. In order to deal practically with this, Mattin scored social dissonance as part of documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. For 180 days, four players used members of the audience as instruments, who then hear themselves and reflect on their own conception and self-presentation. The score Social Dissonance claims that, by amplifying alienation in performance and participation, can enable us a new understanding of structural alienation.

       

      Friday 24th March 8pm: book presentation @ Au jus. (Avenue Jean Volders 24, 1060 Saint-Gilles)

      Lore D Selys & Mattin in conversation about his new book Social Dissonance, published by Urbanomic.

      The conversation will be followed by a performative interaction with the audience.

      https://www.urbanomic.com/product/social-dissonance/. PDF available here.

       


       

      Social Dissonance Workshop: Friday 24th March 3-7pm @ Au jus (Avenue Jean Volders 24, 1060 Saint-Gilles)

      RSVP via contact_aujus@proton.me

      This workshop will explore noise and improvisation in relation to subjectivity in an expanded form. In the last few years, Mattin developed the concept of social dissonance taking as a starting point the idea of cognitive dissonance. If cognitive dissonance is the contradiction between two conflicting values or cognitions, then social dissonance is a structural form of cognitive dissonance emerging from the discrepancy that exists between the idea that we are free individuals in a democratic society and the way that we reproduce a system based on inequality, exploitation, unfreedom and environmental destruction. 

      The idea of having a stable self and being an individual autonomous subject is often promoted as an ideal to strive towards in this neoliberal society, but the reality is that this is no longer be possible or even desirable. Social dissonance is increasing: the disappearance of work through AI, precarisation, digital overdose, and social media, all this lead to growing fragmentation and a sense of meaninglessness. It is not surprising that the societal expectation of success can often lead to burnout, depression, loneliness, and other mental health issues that are prevalent in our current culture.

      To address these challenges, we need to understand our fragmented character, to decenter ourselves from individualistic thinking to collective thinking. By doing so, we can make sense of an incoherent and broken society and try to find the seeds of another society that can lead us to a more inclusive future. Through listening exercises, discussions, and collective experiments such as making and performing techniques, scores, and diagrams, we will investigate this social dissonance. By bringing all possible material for improvisation, such as instruments, ideas, fears, concerns, fragility, projections, and expectations we will attempt to better understand the commodification of both our experience and our subjectivity. Through this workshop will try to practically answer these questions: How can we decenter selfhood? Is free improvisation possible in these conditions? How to engage with this mental state of noise?

       

       

       


       

      Bio:

      Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice and writing he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow) and lectured and taught in institutions such as Dutch Art Institute, Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VIII, Princeton University and Goldsmiths College. In 2017 he completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier. Along with Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009). In 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing plus interviews and reviews from performances. Anthony Iles and Mattin are currently in the final stages of editing the volume Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Archive Books). Urbanomic has just published this year his book Social Dissonance. Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao and Regler and has over 100 releases in different labels worldwide. Mattin is and currently co-hosting with Miguel Prado the podcast Social Discipline, and he is also part of Noise Research Union with Cecile Malaspine, Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado and Inigo Wilkins. Mattin took part in 2017 in documenta14 in Athens and Kassel.

    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • block 2023/I
    • Whose collection?   Assembly of Practice
      20 February 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Jubilee/Emptor
    • 03 March 2023
    • Whose collection?  
       
       
       
      In the next Assembly of Practice, Emptor proposes the a.pass participants to examine collections as potential places of shared interest, zooming in on questions that come to the surface with the complexity of collecting contemporary art practices, which are increasingly immaterial, performative, situated, ongoing and collaborative in natureThe integration of such contemporary art practices in collections by means of documentation, reactivation protocols and complex contractual relationships may satisfy desires of collection(er)s but don't seem to create change in terms of care attributed to the needs of a practice, its ecology and sustainability. Conservation and reactivation often stay disconnected from the driving forces, methodologies and contexts of the collected material elements, thus allowing the pieces nothing more than exposure in a curated frame.
       

       
       
      During a day of closed collective reflection we will go into different practices, researching and/or implementing strategies to own, activate and conserve differently. The group opens up to the public at 17h with the intention to share concerns, questions, insights and ideas collected.
       
      10am-4pm: closed collective reflection. With (tbc): Teresa Calonje, Agency, Jennifer Beauloye, Raphaël Pirenne, Heide Hinrichs
      5pm-8pm: public programme. With: Eline De Clercq, Stijn Van Dorpe
      @ a.pass 4th floor
       
      More about Emptor
       
       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Participants Assembly
    • Two-Day Shift Workshop
      20 February 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Nada Gambier & Jen Rosenblit
    • a.pass
    • 15 March 2023
    • 16 March 2023
    • case of: Nada Gambier
    • Two-Day Shift

      Building on from a previous proposal (Night Shift) Nada Gambier in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit now invite you for the Two-Day Shift. 

      In this working shift, we will dive into the problematics that arise from coming together, engage in improvisational games and strategies, have fun with speculation and bathe in inconvenience as a way to look anew at our practices and get to know our researches from another angle. Once again, our attention goes to what it means to be of service to each other and the works and how by attending to parasites we come to another understanding of what we are doing. The question of desire and learning from what we don’t know will also linger as a larger drive and disorganizing method for the group and researches. 

      Through collective mentoring strategies, conversation and experimentation we will exchange ideas, desires, thoughts, materials and reflections. 

      The first day will largely be built around conversation. The second day we roll up our sleeves and get into action. At the end of the first day we will have dinner together. 

       


       

      Practical information:

      Location: apass 4th floor 

      Dates and times: 

      15.3 2023 @ 10h (check-in) - 17h30 + dinner at 18h30-20h30 

      16.3 2023 @ 10h (check-in) -17h 

      There are a few places left. In case interested please contact Nada by mail at the latest by 10th of March. 

      For non-apassers we ask a 30 € contribution for the 2 days. Please email Nada Gambier if you're interested to participate.

       


       

      Jen Rosenblit (1983. USA) is based in Berlin after many years in New York City. She makes performances inspired by architectures, bodies, text, and ideas stemming from problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny and maintenance of care, locating ways of being together amidst (un)familiar and impossible contradictions. Rosenblit’s writing practice spans from the paper to the stage, supporting an expanse of meaning as it emerges between things and toward an unwinding or the inevitably possible collapse. Desire and sexuality have offered reoccurring points of departure without demanding a singular aesthetic or representation. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 NewYork Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque (Vevey, CH) artist in residence and has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns and Philipp Gehmacher. Rosenblit’s newest work,<ElseWhereRhapsody> is a 2023 co-production of Tanzfabrik Berlin and Tanzquartier Wien, offering distraction as a guide to speak toward the illegibility of desire and forgetfulness as a way to shift toward something else, away from the damaging repetition.

      www.jenrosenblit.net

      Nada Gambier (1980. Finland) roams around in what she calls a crash-disciplinary world where theater, dance, 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. Since 2014 she 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, Edit Kaldor, Forced Entertainment, Simone Aughterlony, Jorge Léon, Maria Jerez, Diederik Peeters, Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Phil Hayes. Nada is currently doing the postgraduate course in a.pass. 

      www.nadagambier.be 

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Participants Assembly
    • About MILK! Cheese-making workshop with Robin Bantigny
      20 February 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 01 March 2023
    • 02 March 2023
    • About MILK!
      For this cheese-making workshop, a.pass post-graduate researcher Marian Rosa van Bodegraven invites artist and cheese maker Robin Bantigny to host a cheese-making workshop at Radical House.
       

       
      Robin will introduce you to the transformation of milk into fermented dairy products with a focus on cheese. The workshop will first consist of an errand to a typical Belgian cattle farm to buy milk and get a glimpse of the dairy industry in Belgium. Later in the morning, we will initiate the milk transformation at Radical House with an introduction to the mesmerizing biological reactions behind milk coagulation. The next morning will be dedicated to the feel and touch of curds obtained overnight. Robin will also tell you about the art experiments that led him to cheese-making and Marian will introduce her research on milk. In the afternoon, every participant will bring a container that can be used as a mould; as well as spices, herbs, grains or jams they wish to add to the cheeses. The workshop’s conclusion will be the dinner where we will share food and homemade cheeses.

      Robin is a member of the former art and research collective named The Soft Protest Digest, founded with Nickie Sigurdsson and Jérémie Rentien Lando. The collective worked with different narratives to test how food culture is created and altered. They used fictional traditions, multi-species storytelling, publishing and local knowledge to create kinship, much needed in a time of irreversible environmental breakdown.
      Largely confined to the Jan van Eyck Academie during their 2020 residency, the collective adopted an introspective approach about transition and self-sustenance. Each member took its own path, Robin’s one being cheese-making, with the aim to settle in a matter of 1-2 years.

      Marian’s research focuses on breast, condensed, and powdered milk, considering narratives around the containers that hold these kinds of milk, and how their production shapes the biopolitics embedded in motherhood, sex work, childhood, and forms of governance. Through storytelling, Marian combines methods of investigative journalism and biographic accounts to allow for the liquidity of the subject to form different ways of understanding it.


      The workshop will last two days:  March 1st, from 7 am to 12 am (we will travel together to the farm to observe the milking process at 8am, following their schedules); March 2nd, from 10 am to 8 pm . 5 spots are open for alumni and non-a.pass participants. For the latter, a contribution cost of € 50 is requested, dinner included. If interested, please fill in this form by February 26th.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Participants Assembly
    • Non-conventional Lighting Laboratory PA-curation proposed by Asli Hatipoglu
      01 February 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Martin Flugelman
    • a.pass
    • 09 February 2023
    • 10 February 2023
    • Non-conventional Lighting Laboratory

      Martin Flugelman, from FLUXLIAN - a collaborative platform focused on light applied in arts, design, performance, and activism - introduces a two-day laboratory. The workshop consists of experiences and activities using the phenomena of light. We will collectively appropriate lighting technologies, hack and improvise devices to shift the appearance of bodies and space. How to integrate lighting to the artistic practice, staging, cyborging, and researching on light as a narrative element. This is a place to drift into alternative lighting aesthetics by using what is around us. How can we translate ideas in lighting terms? How can a light choreography produce an image-experience? What can we illuminate collectively?

      The laboratory is oriented to all kinds of people willing to explore, play and intervene with light: photographers, filmmakers, architects, designers, technicians, educators, researchers, musicians, dancers, artists, performers, and light enthusiasts.
       
      Thursday 9 February - 12:30 - 16:30
      Friday 10 February - 15:00 - 19:00 + possible bonus track
       
      The workshop is open to participants not enrolled in the a.pass program. Please send an email if you are interested. Contribution: 30€
       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2023/I
    • Fantasmical Anatomy lesson Workshop
      11 January 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Anne Juren
    • 06 March 2023
    • 10 March 2023
    • With Anne Juren and her lessons on fantasmical anatomy (March 6-10), we turn to the body as a familiar and unfamiliar site of experience, epistemology and eventually altered potentiality. If the body is a biological product, conditioned by medico-social practices and generational transmissions that precede our experience, how can we simultaneously approach our closest friend and/or foe as ‘a body project’, i.e. as a poetic, fantastical, speculative, imaginative and even monstrous site of investigation that settles and unsettles the conceptions we might have of ourselves, the world and the relations between us? In which way are metaphors influencing the imagination of the body? How is the speculative addressing of somatic practice disfiguring concepts of anatomy? Can horror imaginaries offer a mood to investigate and release our corporeal disorder and vulnerability?

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

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

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

       


       

      BOOK LAUNCH, 9th of March @ rile*

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

      More about the performance.

      More about the book

       

       


       

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

      More about Studies on Fantasmical Anatomy

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

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

      -vessels🥚🦪

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

       

      further information

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

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

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

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

       

      Anna Lugmeier (she/her)

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

       

      Sarah Pletcher (they/them)

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

       

       

       

    • workshop
    • block 2023/I
    • disseminated escapes Workshop in the library
      11 January 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Heide Hinrichs and Vijai Maia Patchineelam
    • 31 January 2023
    • 01 February 2023
    • disseminated escapes

       

      10am - 5pm @ a.pass, 3rd floor

      The workshop disseminated escapes focuses on the intertwining between art practice, publishing and library keeping, as means to ensure a suitable knowledge context for research-based art practices to exist. With the imminent future of the post-graduate program in doubt, we take a.pass library as a contextual framework, in order to reflect on questions regarding the responsibility of maintaining spaces and networks that foster a more diverse, queer, feminist, and non-hegemonic set of references and knowledge. We will deal with issues such as collectivity, connection, knowledge production, maintenance, responsibility, generosity, boundaries, funding cuts, continuation, letting go, and deaccession, and how they could be considered and dealt with as part of one’s practice.

       

       

      Part of the workshop will be dedicated to the slow work of accessing the current state of a.pass library, meaning the gathering, sorting, checking against the catalog and placing the collection of books back in their bookshelves. While handling the books and through the repetitive task that is maintaining a library we search for pencil marks, underlined sentences and paragraphs, notes, doodles, as well as folded page corners left by previous participants over the years. The search for traces becomes then an exercise in reflecting on the effort and work that has taken place by others and for others. But also speculation on the potential messages these traces communicate as the library faces an unknown future with its potential relocation and/or dissolution.

      Aside from the work with the collection of books, we start the two days with an introduction to the library’s history by artist and a.pass technical support Steven Jouwersma, and his experience while administering different systems for lending books, building shelves, cataloging books and maintaining the library for years. On the morning of the second day, we will be joined by the artist duo Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi for a presentation on their project Pages (https://www.pagesmagazine.net), a bilingual, Farsi and English, artist magazine initiated in 2004, concerned with rethinking the politics and practice of archiving and publishing. Pages approach publishing as a collective practice of generating an open, permeable archive.

      Heide Hinrichs and Vijai Maia Patchineelam met while working and researching at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Heide was leading the two-year research project second shelf (2018-19) which explored the influence of the culture of the art world dominated by the concept of the lone genius, autonomous, white male creator on the library of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp by asking how alternative canons can be generated in the library. The core of the project was the formation of a new collection of books in the library of the Royal Academy that document the work of female, non-white and non-heterosexual artists and related theoretical texts. Back then Vijai had just started his doctoral research project The Artist Job Description, a practice led research for the employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution (2016-22), which looked at the relationship between artists and art institutions. With the overlap of interests both artists entered into an ongoing dialogue that has led to moments of research and teaching collaborations.

      Heide Hinrichs is an artist based in Brussels, who works with found and existing materials. She responds to situations and continues to draw lines. She was awarded the Villa Romana Fellowship for 2013. In 2014, she was a fellow at the MMCA Seoul International Residency Program, where she continued to work on her long-term project Silent Sisters / Stille Schwestern, an unauthorized translation in text and art works in conversation with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book, DICTEE, brought to completion in 2018. For the first Kathmandu Triennial, 2017 (curated by Philippe Van Cauteren) Hinrichs developed the project On Some of the Birds of Nepal (Parting the Animal Kingdom of the East). Between 2018 and 2020 Hinrichs worked on the collaborative project second shelf ( https://second-shelf.org/shelf/) located at the library of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The project concluded with the publication shelf documents: art library as practice, Track Report, Antwerp and b_books, Berlin, 2021, which Hinrichs co-edited with Jo-ey Tang and Elizabeth Haines. posture editions, Ghent published at the end of 2019 Morning Change, a book on movement, location and nomadism within the artist’s intuitive conceptual oeuvre. Since 2015 she has been teaching and researching at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institution. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists — one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. This displacement of roles is part of a larger trajectory of his recently concluded Ph.D. research titled, The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, the University of Antwerp and a.pass, advanced performance and scenography studies, Brussels. As a final outcome of his doctoral thesis, Vijai has published the book The Artist Job Description: for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution with Track Report (Antwerp), in collaboration with OAZA (Zagreb) and a.pass (Brussels).

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

      11am - 5pm @ a.pass

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

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

    • Happy Endings On horror and/in collections

       

      Wintertime in the Northern hemisphere, night falls early, huddled around one stove, a dog starts barking, birds flutter, an invisible presence, maybe, a figment of our imagination. The penultimate block of a.pass’ current lifecycle is dedicated to ‘horror and/in collections’, to familiar stories yet untold, or unknown tales needing to be retold. 

       

       

      During the workshop Contingent Weirdness (Jan 10-13), Adrijana Gvozdenovic and Sina Seifee invite us to present our research practices through the filter of horror. With the help of the genre-specific conventions of horror, they challenge us to look over our shoulders into what lurks in the shadow of our own art practices, and eventually to give form - however blurry or murky - to what might be hiding in plain sight. “A particular interest of the workshop is in those scales that are not necessarily correct and of good intention. How can we train ourselves in different kinds of reasoning? We propose to exaggerate consciously how great art practices are also awful, how the things we do are also often laden with damage and death, to trace our works in the matrix of rage, lure, and desire (and not necessarily in the matrix of truth, urgency, and achievements).”

      Peggy Pierrot extends the horror-proposal with additional reflections on genre tropes and modes of attention. Under the rubric The ingredients of fear (Jan 27), she addresses questions of horror stories, anxiety, otherness, cognition and emotions. What do we look for in these genre stories? When do they press upon us as potent receptacles? What themes and situations activate and titillate our anxieties? What is staged in a good horror story? Why have these genres been the outcast recipient of unspeakable but very human sensations?

      Ghosts abide particularly well in ruins and nascent decay. In the workshop disseminated escapes (Jan 31-Feb 1), Heide Hinrichs and Vijai Maia Patchineemam propose to spend time in the library and to thumb through the history of a.pass by browsing its book shelves. How did this collection come into being? What has been its modes of growth, administration, caretaking and accessibility? What stories have been lost, and which entries have been neglected all together? The impending closure of the library, haunted by a battlefield or specters - those of unattainable specificity and totality, unlimited repair and loss, illusory control and contingency, imminent enlightenment and opaqueness, interminable product and process - becomes a meeting place, if not for conquest or resolution, then at least for coexistence, deferral, and even an embrace of the anxieties of critical theory and knowledge production. The artist duo Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (Pages) join the workshop for a conversation around publishing as a collective practice of generating an open and permeable archive. 

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

      The scenography of the block is provided by Steven Jouwersma, infused by material and immaterial remnants of the past: light, smoke, shadows, reflections and other translucencies.

       * From ‘A glossary of haunting, by Eve Tuck and C.Ree (in Handbook of Autoethnography, 2013)

    • postgraduate program
    • Participants Assembly
    • Nightshift PA-proposal
      07 October 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Nada Gambier
    • 11 October 2022
    • 12 October 2022
    • case of: Nada Gambier
    • Nightshift

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

       

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

      2am: night walk around the block

      5.30-6.30am: breakfast and conclusion of nightshift

       

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

       

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

    • postgraduate program
    • Dramaturgies of Care (and other intimacies) A salon and mentoring cycle with jaamil olawale kosoko. PA-guest, invited by Alyssa Gersony.
      07 October 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 12 October 2022
    • 17 October 2022
    • Dramaturgies of Care (and other intimacies)

      We are all in need of more care and care is an often invoked concept to cope with today’s global crises. But how do we practice care within performance? In their week at a.pass, artist, author, and curator jaamil olawale kosoko will consider dramaturgy as an act of care within contemporary performance practice. During mentoring sessions, a Friday-evening salon and a rist of other activities, participants and other cultural workers are encouraged to bring examples of care strategies they find useful in creating socially engaged performance actions that stretch textually and discursively across various genres of liveness and time based art forms. jaamil olawale Kosoko’s approach draws on research methods used in the fields of experimental dance/theater making and dance studies to see what the body can tell us about pressing social issues. From the stage, to the living room, to the nightclub, to the screen, to fantasy, to the privacy of one’s own room, we will explore how care rituals animate the physical art of living and creating in an ever changing world.

       

      +

       

      Wednesday 12th October, 2022

      7pm: a.pass mentoring dinner @ Radical House

       

      Thursday 13th

      1-5pm: a.pass mentoring slots @ a.pass

      5-7.30: drinks and dinner @ a.pass 4th floor kitchen

      8.30: Outwalkers @ KVS

       

      Friday 14th

      1-4pm: a.pass mentoring slots @ Radical House

      7-9.30: public salon @ Radical House

       

      Saturday 15th

      10pm-6am: visit to Unlimited Strip Club, in Antwerp

       

      Sunday 16th

      3pm: reading of Black Body Amnesia @ Rile*

       

      PA-guest during Block III 2022. Invited and organized by Alyssa Gersony. Production support by Sarah Pletcher.

       

      +

       

      jaamil olawale kosoko (they/he) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s practice is conceptual and process based, fluidly moving within the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. Through rooted ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.

      Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book ‘Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts’, was released Spring 2022.
      More: https://www.jaamil.com 

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

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

       

      Sept 20th, 7pm: Dinner with Hectolitre

      Oct 7th, 7pm: Dinner with Common Wallet

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

       

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

       

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

      https://vimeo.com/295537042

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

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

       

      *

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

      Caveat and Emptor

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

      From 10:00 to 18:00 hrs.

      Tuesday 15

      Morning: readings & fabulations

      Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen

      Wednesday 16

      Morning: readings & fabulations

      Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen

      Thursday 17

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

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

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

      Friday 18

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

       

      BIOS

       

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

       

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

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

       

       

      BIOs of Simone, Heike and radical_house

      Simone Basani

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

      Heike Langsdorf

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

      radical_house

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

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

      Some impressions

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

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

       

    • IS THIS THE END? 27 January 2022
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
      IS THIS THE END?

      Friday 21st of January 2022, a.pass received news from the Ministry of Education that their subsidy will come to an end by the end of 2023 the latest. From one day to the other a.pass is left with two years to find other means of survival or close the institution.

      Three days later, January 24th, the Ministry of Education states in the newspaper that this decision is based on negative advice from the evaluation committee. According to the Ministry the a.pass-program wouldn’t add any extra value to the field.

      This news is misleading, short and reductive.

      For the last two years and half, a.pass fulfilled all requirements of evaluation set by the Ministry. We organized a benchmark evaluation with 4 other international art academies of similar standing; we went through a thorough internal evaluation; we submitted our structure to an external evaluation led by the government; and we presented a meticulous 5-year plan. These are costly, time-consuming and laborious procedures on top of the daily activities of a small organisation. The results of all these evaluations were GOOD to VERY GOOD. The commission gave concrete suggestions to grow or improve, all of which directed towards perpetuating the work of a.pass along the visionary principles of the institution. It is not correct to portray the institution in these terms.

      With regards to discrediting a.pass’ unique value, we must stress the uncontested importance of a.pass in the field of art and education, and specifically in its contribution to the performing arts. A vast number of a.pass alumni and educators take prominent positions in academia and the professional art field, in Belgium and abroad. a.pass is widely acknowledged as a breeding space where artists and researchers of all kinds come together to raise critical questions and experiment with imaginative resolutions. It is beyond dispute that the merits of a.pass are invaluable rather than ‘of no added value’.

      As an educational institute that is strongly embedded in the ways of working of a self-organized art scene, prosperous in Belgium since the 90s, we are concerned for the pervasive restructuring of the art field, following sequences of budget cuts and enticements towards merging into bigger institutions.

      We are in a fragile situation and exhausted by demands that precarise art practice and art education.

      This is for now. We are working on a response to this decision. We are consulting our various partners. And we will update this post with further action.

    • postgraduate program
    • bleed is inevitable
    • block 2021/III
    • 7 WALKS (resolution) Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason
      26 September 2021
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 16 September 2021
    • 17 September 2021
    • 7 WALKS (resolution)

      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 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?

       


       

      7 WALKS (resolution) consists of a series of public walks in the therapeutical landscape around the city of SPA. Spa became renowned for its medicinal water as early as the 16th century. Its ferruginous springs not only attracted many visitors, it was also exported internationally. Gradually the city became the so-called 'Café de l'Europe'. Visited by kings and czars, political refugees, artists and philosophers, it was a peaceful haven where a wide range of philosophies, social questions and artistic visions could interact. The 'bobelins', as the locals used to call these international visitors, walked through the surrounding forests, along landscaped paths on their way to the springs. They came to see and be seen, for diplomacy or espionage, and even for the arts. The local painter Antoine Fontaine depicted these illustrious visitors in Le Livre d'Or (1894), a 9 metres wide group portrait spanning four centuries of visitors.

      7 WALKS (resolution) draws inspiration from the intangible legacy of historical walkers and, strongly anchored in a local context, invites its participants to explore a balance between private property of and access to resources that we hold in common as a society. Spa offers the project the unique opportunity for a series of itinerant reflections on water and art.

      7 WALKS (resolution) responds to current and recently intensified debates about the necessity and position of art in today's society. Like water, art can be considered a basic necessity of life, a proposal that many international resolutions have promoted. The project questions how basic human rights enter into dialogue with individual private property- and exclusive use rights. To discuss these questions Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason will be joined by participants and guest walkers David Aubin, Steyn Bergs, Marie-Sophie de Clippele, Françoise Jurion, Ulrich Kriese, Anne Pirard, Scott Raby, Christoph Rausch, Marie-Christine Schils, Julie Van Elslande, Jens Van Lathem, Tobias Van Royen,...

       


       

      CAPTURING WATER FROM THE ARTISTS’ SOURCE

      Walk#07_Promenade des Artistes, Pouhon Delcor to Promenade Cherville to Waux-Hall

      Thursday 16 September 2021, 2 to 6pm

      Dedicated to the many artists active in Spa in the 19th century the Promenade d'Artistes was inaugurated in 1849. The trail follows the valley of the Picherotte, a small stream that runs down from the wooded hills. At the beginning of the trail we come across one of the many capture points of Spa Monopole, the enterprise that has been bottling and exporting the communal mineral water sources since 1921. A discussion on common property and use rights of the waters extends to one on immaterial goods and services, like the arts.

       

      A CONSPIRACY OF EQUALS IN SPA?
      Walk#08_To Promenade Deschanel and Frahinfaz, further to Balmoral, back via Promenade Arago.

      Friday 17 September 2021, 11 to 5pm

      Mid 19th century Belgium was hospitable to many French political refugees. Among them we find Emile Deschanel, Etienne Arago, P.J.Proudhon, Victor Hugo, Jules Hetzel, Henri Rochefort, Edgar Quinet and others. They found a friend in journalist Felix Delhasse who hosted many of them in Spa. Delhasse was part of the secret society La Charbonnerie and was a disciple of its founder Filippo Buonarotti. Buonorotti’s text ‘The History of the Conspiracy of Equals’ related the failed coup of Grachus Babeuf in 1796. Babeuf rejected the notion that equality before the law itself was sufficient to define societal equality, and thus placed a strong emphasis on the abolition of private property and on equal access to food. Walking the Promenades dedicated to Arago, Deschanel and Hetzel, we end our walk in Rue Delhasse.

       

      More about the other walks.

       


       

      The videos and installations of the artist duo Vermeir & Heiremans investigate the complex relationship between art, economy and the built environment in today’s highly globalized world. The artists define their own house as an artwork. The 'house as artwork' functions as a framing device that allows the artists to zoom in on the role the arts play within the ever-growing entanglement between finance, urban development and governing. Their practice employs financial tools, historical references, technology, and cinematic language to reflect on social codes as well as on the production of value in today’s artistic and non-artistic realms.

       

    • During Bleed is inevitable, Agency invokes Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable)), a copyright controversy related to a pedagogical program in prison and the oscar nominated documentary Scared Straight!. During the court case, the judge had to decide if the pedagogical program was a dramatization of prison life and whether it could qualify for the protection of copyright as a work of performance art. At a.pass we will revisit the moment of hesitation during the court case and dwell on the problem discussed in the case as a way to fabulate different outcomes. What happens if 'facts' become included in a reciprocal way within artistic practices? 

      7pm @ a.pass!

       


       

      Agency is the name of an initiative that was founded within art practices in 1992 and is based in Brussels. Agency makes varying "assemblies". Agency’s assemblies look at the operative consequences of the apparatus of (intellectual) property for an ecology of diverse art practices. The aim is to take care of practices and their singular modes of existence. Each assembly calls forth one or a series of "boundary things" from its cooperative List of Boundary Things. The assemblies speculate around possible inclusions of what has been put in the background by of the enclosures of the commons.

      For Assembly (Bleed is Inevitable) Agency proposes to speculate around the question: “What if 'facts' become included in a reciprocal way within artistic practices?” For this occasion Agency will invoke one controversy Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable). It concerns a conflict in the U.S. between on the one hand Rick Rowe, a prisoner at Rahway State Prison in New Jersey and organizer of The Juvenile Awareness Program and the film maker Arnold Schapiro about the Oscar nominated documentary Scared Straight!. Rowe brought suit against Schapiro claiming copyright infringement of his pedagogical program within his documentary. During the case, Rowe v. Schapiro the court had to decide if the pedagogical program was a dramatization of prison life and could qualify for the protection of copyright as a work of performance art.

      Thing 000923 (Bleed is Inevitable) convenes an assembly at a-pass. This assembly will exist of three parts. First, we will introduce the conflict of this controversy and take a look at fragments of the documentary which was part of this controversy. Second we will read collectively through certain fragments of the U.S. court case report by the judge. And third we will discuss together with invited concerned guests about possible other speculative outcomes. The purpose of this assembly is to revisit the moment of hesitation during the court case and to dwell on the problem discussed in the case as a way to fabulate.

      Guests:

      Sari Depreeuw (intellectual property and media law at Université Saint Louis)

      Sebastien Hendickxs (dramaturg)

      Luk Vervaet (pedagogue in prisons)

      Dries Martin (television director at 100.000Volts)

       

      More about Agency.

    • postgraduate program
    • bleed is inevitable
    • block 2021/III
    • Role Play Intensive
    • LARP "Identities" by Amélie Orsel
      26 September 2021
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 27 September 2021
    • 28 September 2021
    • LARP

      Identities is a science-fiction LARP in which aliens of humanoid appearance from various planets are gathered for a very special experiment.

      If you could become the person you dreamt to be, or at least someone who would function in harmony with the world around you instead of bumping into it, would you be tempted?

      Whether it's a dream or a necessity for you, the people of Cori, a type IV planet in the Omega 9 galaxy, can help you. Indeed, the Coriphes have psychic powers that allow them to durably modify one’s spirit and personality.

       


       

      Identities is a science-fiction LARP in which aliens of humanoid appearance from various planets are gathered for a very special experiment. It is in this context that characters will integrate a session of the mysterious and expensive Cure. How does this Cure work? The characters know almost nothing. They arrived in the center the previous evening and briefly introduced themselves before getting some rest. The LARP itself begins in the morning, during the first activity related to the Cure. These activities will be repeated in a rather monotonous way, the goal being to transform the personalities of the characters in small increments, gradually modifying their reactions to a limited number of exercises. Alien artifacts will also be used. During the individual final scenes, each character will play the conclusion of their own story, happening elsewhere and in a near future.

      Repetitive activities do not mean you'll be bored. This LARP offers strong roles, emotions and questionings. One does not intend to give up a part of their personality without reason.

      Friendship, fidelity, idealism, love, duty, revenge, despair .... What is the price of your identity? Is it ethical to sacrifice who you are if you do it by your own free will? Is it better to be modified with insidious softness or pain, whether physical or psychological? Since we are asking some questions, how do you define identity? Would a personality remodeled according to your wishes make you less real, less free?

      More about the LARP.

       


       

      Amélie, aka Saki Jones, great consumer of narrations of all kinds, and a weakness for science fiction and strictly no scientific training. What interests her in the future is the freedom to reinvent social frameworks, thus raising new questions, or very old ones that can be considered in a new light. She wrote, co-wrote and organized a dozen LARP of various formats, ranging from the multi-month campaign (Bloody Old Town) to very short formats (Oracle, Aymard's Shortbread ...). Her obsessions: creating group dynamics and keep LARPing accessible, while sipping a good chamomile with a pressed lemon juice.

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

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


       



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

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

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





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

    •  

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

      18-22h

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

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

      will read, perform, discuss:

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

      *

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

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

       


       

      Programme:

       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       


       

      And last but not least:

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

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

      newscaption

       

       

       

      a.pass proudly invites you to its homebase

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

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

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

       


       

      SCREENING & PRESENTATION BY Dr EDWARD GEORGE

      THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

      Wednesday March 8th (7.00pm-10.00pm)

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

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

      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      TALK BY LAURENCE RASSEL

      STITCHED & SPLIT HOSPITALITY

      #6 in Book Club Series

      Thursday March 9th (10am-1.30pm)

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

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


      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      TALK BY FABRIZIO TERRANOVA

      POLITICS OF SPECULATIVE FABULATION

      #7 in Book Club Series

      Friday March 10th  (10.00am-1.30pm)

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

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


      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      PERFORMANCE-ESSAY BY SINA SEIFEE

      AN ANIMAL ESCAPE CASE

      #7 in Book Club Series “Special event”

      Friday March 10th (2.30am-3.30pm)

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

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


      More information and subscription: here

       


       

      The Book Club Series during 'Trouble on Radio Triton'

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

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

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

       


       

       Save upcoming dates:

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

       



       a.pass

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

       

       

    • [call] 2017/I 30 July 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
      newscaption
       
       
       
       

      if you
      are working in the performing arts and want to start an artistic research in a professional research environment, free from production constraints,

      or if
      the concepts of performativity or/and scenography are (relatively) new to you and you want to explore them in-depth, in relation to your own practice

      then
      a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) can offer you a one year
      post master program in which you develop your research project. In a context of self-organization and collaboration you create a personal trajectory through workshops, individual mentorings and interactions with the other participants. At the end of this period, you present and communicate your research.

      beside
      the post master programs a.pass invites artists and theoreticians engaged in a PhD in the Arts to develop independent artistic and transdisciplinary projects producing knowledge and tools relating to the key issues of the a.pass program.

      The a.pass context is designed to give the possibility to develop your skills as an independent and critical researcher and provides you with the context and instruments that answer to your specific questions and needs. Participants of a.pass manage their own research in continuous interaction with the other participants and, by doing so, engage in the organization of the shared curriculum.

       

       

      practical: 

      The a.pass program is a 12-month program consisting of three blocks of four months. The first three months of each block take place within the organized collective research environment. Participants develop their personal trajectory in a constant communication with the other participants and co-ordinators, through participation in workshops, with feed-back from dedicated mentors and through the choice of personal mentors. The last month of each block is open for the further individual development of the research project.

       

      More information on the application procedure for the post-master and (pre-)PhD-programme.

       

       

      take a look!
      If you would like to take a closer look into our practices, we kindly invite you to join one of our public workshops which are regularly announced on our website.

       

      a.pass

      a.pass - Posthogeschool voor podiumkunsten vzw.
      p/a de Bottelarij / Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: info@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

       

    • Trouble seeing this email? Online version here.

      newscaption

       

       

       

      You are warmly Invited to 

      ____

      The
      Document

      Trans-
      formed

      ____

       Masterclasses and Seminar
      +
      Book launch 'Dirty room' Juan Dominguez
      a.pass research centre publication

      JUNE 22-23-24 @ LA BELLONE
      Rue de Flandre 46
      Brussels

       

       


      Curated by Sofia Caesar and Lilia Mestre, the public program “The Document Transformed” invites four practitioners that offer very distinct questions, methods, and proposals to problems related to documentation. Join Femke Snelting, Olga de Soto, Vincent Meessen, and Agency (Kobe Matthys), and others, for three days of presentations, screenings, performances and conversations. How does the document affect practices, bodies, histories, and experiences? The event brings together practices that not only give sight to the power relations engendered by apparatuses of documentation, but also move towards the transformation of the systems in which we produce history, law, art, and the body. Held in the context of The Problem of the Score, block curated by Lilia Mestre in the a.pass post-master research program and supported by a.pass. 

      In the frame of the seminar the book Dirty Room will be presented. It is the fourth and last phase of Juan Dominguez’s research, developed during 2015-16 as a.pass associate researcher.

       

      This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone

      PROGRAM 

      Thursday 22 June 

      10:00 > 13:00    Masterclass Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai)

      Friday 23 June

      10:00 >13:00     Exhibition visit ( Bozar ) and discussion with Vincent Meessen

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Olga de Soto

      To inscribe to the master-classes please send an email to production@apass.be
      1 Masterclass: 15 Euro, 2 Masterclasses: 20 Euro, 2 days: 30 Euro.
      Free for (ex) participants of a.pass

      Saturday June 24th 12:00 > 18:00 
      FREE, reservation appreciated 

      In this afternoon of presentations, screenings, and performances, the four invited practitioners will take us to dive deeper into different case studies.

      12:30    Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk
      13:00    Femke Snelting
      14:00    Olga de Soto
      PAUSE
      15:30    Vincent Meessen
      16:30    Agency (Kobe Matthys)
      17:30    Book launch with Juan Dominguez and Victoria Perez Rojo


      Don't forget to reserve for your Masterclass by sending an email to : production@apass.be

      DETAILED PROGRAM DOWN BELOW

       

       

      Detailed program:


       

      Thursday June 22nd

      10:00 > 13:00        Masterclass Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices? Intellectual property seems to be mostly reserved for “fixated” things. Although the European copyright law doesn’t exclude variability, during jurisprudences judges consider movements that are “recordable” in some way or another. Agency calls forth different controversies from recorded movements in dance and performance and sport. By paying attention to the consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property right for the protocols inherent to practices, the fragility of the mode of existence of singular art practices is made explicit.

       

      14:00 >17:00     Masterclass Possible Bodies (Femke Snelting and Adva Zakai)

      This edition will be dedicated to a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. It was developed in the mid-nineties and remains one of the most commonly used file-formats for transposing movement captured in physical space, to a computational environment. Around this relatively legible format, a rich ecology of software tools developed. The file-format functions as a boundary object between practices and bodies, as it is used by animators, game developers, interface researchers, medical professionals, dance-historians, sports-analysts and engineers.

      Together we will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      The reading of the .bvh file format is developed with Adva Zakai in the context of Possible Bodies, a collaborative research initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, and the matter-cultural conditions of possibility that render them present.

       

      Friday June 23rd

      10:00 >13:00        Exhibition visit (Bozar) and discussion with Vincent Meessen
                                       
      Starts at Main entrance of Bozar.

      In this afternoon, artist Vincent Meessen will take us through his Bozar show, that comes from his recent practice that involves research, historicization, and speculation about congolese works of art that have been commissioned and (re-)contextualized in the early 30’s. Starting from there, we can raise some issues about what a work of art is expected to be and how it can shift meaning with context and neighbouring artefacts.

      More about the show Patterns for (Re)cognition by Tshela Tendu & Vincent Meessen, Opening 16th June at BOZAR: http://www.bozar.be/nl/activities/124891-tshela-tendu-vincent-meessen

       

      14:00 >17:00       Masterclass Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share her research project that has Kurt Jooss’ The Green Table (1932) as a starting point. She will display the process, methods, research protocols and strategies that she has developed over time, and through which she addresses the question of reconstruction, re-enactment and revival from the perspective of the trace, both material and immaterial, in order to analyse the several charges the work contain (social, political, dramatic, emotional…).

      She will share with us how she approached Jooss’ work through the archive, the trace and the document, proposing to circumvent the traditional modalities of transmission in dance, in order to probe the archive’s “capabilities” to say the work, as well to examine the archive’s “becoming-work”.

      We will observe how the project and its process unfolded simultaneously into two levels: on a documentary research level and on a creation level. With the help of several documents, we will observe how the documentary research was developed, dedicated in part to researching and documenting the perception and transmission of The Green Table, seeking out iconographic material (through the gathering of numerous documents of different kinds), analysing the choreographic characteristics of the work and looking for witnesses – dancers and audience members from different origins and generations, in order to study the perception of the work through the prism of the viewer’s gaze (using the interview as a tool to collect memories, focusing on the importance of the testimony and oral sources).

       

      Saturday June 24th 12:30 > 19:00

      In this afternoon of presentations, screenings, and performances, the four invited practitioners will take us to dive deeper into different case studies.
       
      12:30   Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk

      13:00  Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting will present a collaborative dissection of the BioVision Hierarchy file format. BioVision Hierarchy (.bvh) is an ASCII file format used to import data from various motion capture systems into 3D-animation software. Together they will analyse the .bvh specifications and samples of the file format in order to understand what imaginaries of the body are encoded into it, what a bipedal skeleton hierarchy consists of, and how rotational data for rigid bodies might constitute a movement in itself.

      14:00 Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto will share some excerpts of Débords, work presented at Les Halles in 2012, as well as some excerpts of the installation she is currently working on, and that was partially presented this Spring at Museum für Neue Kunst, in Freiburg. The presentation will be punctuated with a discussion on the work.

      PAUSE

      15:30  Vincent Meessen

      Vincent Meessen will screen “One. Two. Three.”, piece presented in Wiels in 2016, followed by a talk about his strategies of re-composition and counter-narratives.

      16:30 Agency (Kobe Matthys)

      What if ephemeral things become included within art practices?” Thing 001678 (Le Jeune Homme et la Mort) concerns a conflict between on the one hand Roger Eudes, Théâtre Champs-Elysées, and on the other hand Jean Guttmann (Babilée) and Jean Cocteau about the performance Le Jeune Homme et la Mort. On June 8, 1960, the court case Eudes c. Gutmann, Cocteau et autres took place at the Cour d’appel de Paris. Judge Rousselet had to decide who owned the rights over the movements of the performance, Eudes who hired Jean Gutmann to “translate” Jean Cocteau his drama into ballet movements or Cocteau who wrote the script of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.

      17:30 Book launch with Juan Dominguez and Victoria Perez Rojo

      The book Dirty Room is the fourth and last phase of Juan Dominguez’s research, developed during 2015-16 as a.pass associate researcher. Dirty Room is a collection of outlines, notes, ideas, reflections, photographic materials, maps, manifestos, fragments from diaries, transcriptions of conversations, interviews, email exchanges, memoirs, memories and scripts, among other documents from the working and research process that led to Clean RoomClean Room was a project based on the concept of seriality with a pilot and 3 more seasons of 6 episodes each that took place from 2010 to 2016.

      Dirty Room offers the readers an immersion in the process of the project Clean Room. It is a book in which there are no critical essays, or texts speaking only from the external position of the spectator. All of the contributions are part of the ongoing research and working process of Clean Room, either continually accompanying it over long periods or as one-off contributions at a specific moments. This decision highlights the great potential of the process in its fragmentary, undefined and open nature not only for the transmission of knowledge and ideas, but above all for stimulating imaginative processes to connect with the concerns that set the series in motion.

      Dirty Room

      Edited by: Juan Domínguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

      Editorial: Continta me tienes

      Executive Production: manyone

      Madrid, May 2017

      Translations by Ana Buitrago, Simon Malone and Catherine Phelps

      This is a publication by the a.pass research centre.

       


       

      About the participants:

      Vincent Meessen

      Through the use of various media, Meessen aims to ‘experience the document and document the experience’. His investigations lead to associations and appropriative gestures that are rewritten into critical narratives, pointing to the colonial matrix of western modernity. Meessen reactivates hidden traces of the colonial in the present and opens up new speculative scenarios.

      Both in his work as an artist and in his para-curatorial activities, Meessen likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives. With ten guests artists, Meessen represented Belgium at the 56th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include: OK/KO in the frame of Dans la pluralité des mondes / Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse (F), 2016; Sire je suis de l’ôtre pays in WIELS, Brussels 2016 and Patterns for (Re)cognition at the Kunsthalle Basel, 2015. Recent group presentations include Gestures and archives of the present, genealogies of the future, Taipei Biennale, Taiwan and The Family of the Invisible at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA).
       

      Agency

      Agency is a Brussels-based initiative founded in 1992, which constitutes a growing list of ‘things’ that resist the radical split between the classifications of “nature” and “culture” and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and common, mind and body, etc.

       

      Femke Snelting (Possible Bodies)

      Artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is a core member of Constant, the Brussels-based association for arts and media, and co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP). With delegates Jara Rocha, Seda Guerses and Miriyam Aouragh she takes part in the Darmstadt Delegation, assigned to explore techno-political and socio-emotional relationships between activist practice and tools. She formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring and recently co-ordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a European partnership investigating inter-relations between free software tools and artistic practice. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (Master Media Design and Communication).

      Possible Bodies is a collaborative research on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in contact with the technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices. The research is concerned with genealogies of how bodies and technologies have been mutually constituted. It interrogates corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modelling. It invites the generation of concepts and experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments. Collectors: Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting.

      Her collaborator Adva Zakai is a choreographer, performer and curator who explores how body and language are perceived through each other.
       

      Olga de Soto

      Olga de Soto Olga de Soto is choreographer and dance researcher, born in Valencia, she lives in Brussels. She graduates from CNDC / Centre National de Danse Contemporaine d’Angers, after having studied classical ballet, contemporary dance and music theory in Valencia and in Madrid. Her creation work begins in 1992, and includes the creation of numerous works of different formats. Since the end of the ’90, her work focuses on the study of memory, and it questions the impact of live art, its usefulness its lasting quality, deploying itself along two axes. The first centres on the study of the body’s memory through the creation of works, aiming at a pluralistic approach to dance and the body, in works creations such as anarborescences (Théâtre de la Cité internationale, Paris, 1999), Éclats mats (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2001), INCORPORER ce qui reste ici au dans mon cœur (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004-2009). The second axis explores works from the history of dance as part of an approach governed by the study of perceptual memory, that of spectators and dancers. The resulting projects emphasize the importance of the processes and pay particular attention to documents, to the process of documentation, to testimony, to archives and oral sources, narrative and storytelling, particularly in works such as histoire(s) (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2004), An Introduction (Tanz Im August, Berlin, 2010) or Débords (Festival d’Automne, Paris, 2012). These projects are interested in the experience of the viewer and in the anthropology of the spectacle, while developing through an approach that studies the aesthetic experience based on the oral history of works from the past. Her last projects genuinely mix the languages of choreography with those of documentary, performance, visual arts and installation, playing with the porousness of these disciplines. The work of the choreographer also reveals the strong links between art history, social and political history, and personal paths. Olga de Soto’s work has been shown in some twenty countries, an she is regularly invited to teach and to lead workshops and classes in various universities, as well as to collaborate in conferences where she shares her research methodology and her documentation work. She was awarded the SACD Prize 2013 in the category of Performing Arts for both her trajectory and her research work on Dance History, and specially for her research and creation work on The Green Table.

       
       

      THE
      DOCUMENT

      TRANS-
      FORMED


      JUNE 22-23-24
      @ LA BELLONE
      Rue de Flandre 46
      Brussels

       
       


       a.pass

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

       

       





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