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    • research center
    • workshop
    • a.pass meets School of Love
    • Parallel Parasite
    • Instead of Needing to Know School Of Love @ Parallel-Parasite
      11 May 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • School of Love
    • 04 June 2018
    • 09 May 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Instead of Needing to Know

      Out of the many definitions of love, SOL was always attracted to the one that describes love as the willingness to let go of what you thought you were before meeting the other. This kind of love can exist among strangers, not only within romantic couples. Schools should teach how to love this way. Schools should facilitate this mode of being.

      If both Love and School engaged in the practice of being open to change through encounters with others, we might develop sensitivities to deal with unknown paths better. Maybe we would be better off improvising through, with and within the unknown, instead of needing to know. Maybe improvisation today can be approached as a mode of resistance to a life dedicated to an anticipated and defined future.

      Proposing to put improvisation back in the agenda might seem like stating the obvious. Life itself is an improvisation, of course, we never stopped improvising. But as we already did with love and school, SOL would like to dedicate a special attention to improvisation in order to examine its relevance to contemporary realities. Not the improvisation that aims to emancipate repressed self-expression, nor the one that provides skills and the mastery to manouver within individual lives and careers, but an attitude of improvisation that may create an actualized set of relations between us and other people, us and other things, us and anything that is not us.



      Lets call it a pre-research. The week we'll spend in Szenne gallery is mainly a theoretical exploration, aiming at beginning to understand what these thoughts might mean. Perhaps by the end of the residency we will prefer not to use the word improvisation anymore/at all, and will name things differently. For now, we will share our first thoughts on it, read texts together, practice and reflect on the directions that this process can grow into

      www.schooloflove.info

       

      * * *
      * Members of SOL develop projects collectively, or invite SOL to join a process they initiated individually. This process was initiated by Adva Zakai and will be practiced in collaboration with SOL members and whoever is interested in joining.

      ** Participation conditions: Preferably follow the whole week, so that we share a process. If a whole week not possible, come for a full day. If planning ahead is too difficult, pop in and we'll see what this does to our and your process.


      Please inscribe here : https://bimestriel.framapad.org/p/VoV7C6HGQX

      Weekly plan

      Monday June 4th
      11h – 12h Settle in, introduction of participants and their interests.
      12h – 13h Listen to lecture On not knowing and paying attention / Tim Ingold + discussion
      13h – 14h30 Lunch break
      14h30 – 17h Read fragments from Speaking and Sensing the Self in Authentic
      Movement: The Search for Authenticity in a 21st Century / Seran E. Schug
      17h30 - 19h Socratic discussion on the term Authentic
      19h - 20h Introduction of the School Of Love

      Tuesday June 5th
      11h – 13h Read Improvisational Necessity and its After Affects / Sher Doruff
      13h – 14h30 Lunch break
      14h30 - 17h Read Improvisational Necessity and its After Affects / Sher Doruff
      17h30 – 19h Socratic discussion on the term Improvisation

      Wednesday June 6th
      SOL OFF

      Thursday June 7th
      11h – 13h Authentic movement guided by Julien Bruneau, (ONLY for those who follow other days in the process)
      13h – 14h30 Lunch break
      14h30 – 17h Authentic movement practice guided by Julien Bruneau (ONLY for those who follow other days in the process)
      17h30 -19h TTTell (Time-Term-Tell discussion)
      19h30 SOL interview by Lauren Grusenmeyer for the WORKOUT publication http://bureaugrusenmeyer.com/projects/WORKOUT

      Friday June 8th
      11h – 13h Read Towards a Politics of Immediation / Erin Manning
      13h – 14h30 Lunch break
      14h30 - 17h Read Towards a Politics of Immediation / Erin Manning
      17h30 – 19h Roumor Machine (discussion)

      Saturday June 9th
      11h – 13h Read Towards a Politics of Immediation / Erin Manning
      13h – 13h30 Break and lunch preparation
      13h30 – 15h Final discussion, plans for the future, feedback on the week and goodbye.

      Additionally:
      Tuesday June 26th
      SOL will meet with Erin Manning and the Sense Lab at ZSenne Gallery at 19h, in an open public discussion about the text of Manning that was read during SOL's residency.

    • THE FOREST MANIFESTO 13 October 2023
      posted by: Lucia Palladino

      ABOUT WHAT YOU DO

      or neurologycal atypical patterns

      or how to practice anticapitalism

       

       

      if you want to tell one thing you tell another one

      if you want to do something you get distracted by something else

      you look at the frame

      you never know anything about the content

      you ask yourself if the content is the structure

      is the structure the content?

      you always need a context

      you always recognise a context

      you are always out of context

      you always go out

      you are out

      you always go somewhere else

      walking

      dreaming

      remembering

      you go further away

      you get completely lost

      in the forest

      in the room

      in the streets

      you keep on forgetting what it is about

      you keep on doing what you are doing

      you keep on repeating what you are doing

      you copy

      you repeat

      you copy

      you repeat with differences

      you have faith

      lost in the forest you find things you would never imagine

      you always learn something you don't know 

      you are an idiot

      a pioneer

      you never know what you are doing

      you difract attention

      continuosly

      you do hundred things at the same time

      or just one for  an immeasurable amount of time

      when you want to write you go reading in the library

      when you want to focus you go walking in silence

      when you go to the cafe reading philosphy you write looking at people dealing drugs or getting out of the toilets after wild and short sex

      you never went to school

      you have kids and an extended family spread around

      you weave impossible things together

      you always do something else

      you climb

      you poledance

      you do everything obsessively

      you do nothing obsessively

      you stay still in your room per hours

      you wander all the time

      you translate into words

      you try to grasp what it is about with words

      you take notes

      you don't

      you write millions of letters

      you always need an interlocutor 

      a distance between you and the other

      you practice metamorphosis

      you become the tree

      you become the bramble

      you become the wild pork

      you always come back

      but you are never the same

      you keep on doing always the same by doing always something else

      you always move away from you and you always end up with another you

      you listen to a song that brings you to that place

      you listen to that song again and again

      you listen to echoes from the pink floyd

      you are half bear and very sexy

      but not

      you are with lots of people

      while being somewhere else

      you prepare the conditions

      you offer whisky

      and home baked bread if you had time

      you share the structure with the interlocutors

      you share the scores with the participants

      you are the participants

      you never manage to grasp the whole

      you are always missing an important part

      you practice losing an important information

      you practice losing the other

      you practice losing

      a view

      the sense

      the direction

      but you are always taking responsability

      you lead 

      you are not original

      you are always in relationship with something

      you are alone

      you are with the others

      you are obvious

      you do operations

      like + or -

      you love mathematics 

      and you don't want to know too much about it

      you don't know mathematics 

      that's why you love it

      because you can wonder about it

      you do mathematical operations though

      you know it is about the operation and not the esthetic of it

      you are baroc

      you are minimalistic

      you are punk

      you are pop

      you pop up possibilities, reveries, dreams

      you do with what is there

      you are very slow

      and you change your life in an eye blinck

      you trust not understanding

      you practice non productivity

      you practice not

      you don't practice

      you are lazy on the sofa

      you are a mother

      you always shift perspective

      you practice one millimeters shifts

      you trust non agreement

      you struggle

      you fucking enjoy

      you open the box inside the box

      the reference inside the reference

      the bone inside the muscle

      the organ inside the bone

      the philosophy inside the organ

      the flash inside the philosophy

      you follow the rules

      you don't

      dear N.

      you are my favourite writer, which is like telling warrior.

      I enter with you, I open the window and a myriad of animals enter the room. 

      since a while I am no longer surprised, they are part of the extended family, or of this dislocated way in which my neurons practice alliances in bumpy paths. I feel the greasy warmth and pungent smell of proximity now that these beasts are here. but they are still gentle enough to avoid the piles of books as if they were trees in my room and, to my amazement, they do not eat them. perhaps the books are trees even in this transformed version and retain a sufficient degree of roughness to ensure their survival in the encounter with the other, and somehow they resist. 

      roughness is a quality of the fractal indeed... perhaps the book is the pattern of the fractal tree seen much much closer. a millimetric proximity.

      the crates of the latest publication arrived at home, I pulled out all the books because I wanted them to physically occupy space and in the scattered stacks they actually occupy a much more chaotic and cluttered order of ideas, in which, needless to say, I obviously get lost.

      I manage, however, to make my way confusedly to the closed fireplace and pull out the chessboard. I place your letter A in B7, a peripheral position of presence that I like, hoping that even though you have it before your eyes you will not recognise it as insidious. 

      it isn't. it brings the mystery of all those things we don't see even though we are standing next to them, or we are immersed into them, thinking we have understood.

      we didn't.

      this letter A in our game, in B7, is a metal spinning top like the one in the film inception, whirling around the four walls of the game box because there is nothing to disprove between us. 

      there it is, now the cow has risen from the quadruple bed in which I chose to sleep and sniffs at my game puffing curiously between my childhood and my white hair, and while breathing in its whirling whirlwind distractedly, it doesn't notice the spinning top dancing. 

      the weight of her presence is a peace of galactic times. as soon as I think of her, I feel like leaning my body against the philosophy contained in her mass. then she moves her head in the direction of the window and I see that the water level is rising. I sit on the windowsill and notice that the whole street is now covered by a layer of water some ten centimetres thick. the cow makes its way through the water with its weighted step and a bird comes to perch between its horns. 

      you and I have been here before. do you remember?

      I thought I didn't have images, but look at this.

      Look how I think through images. 

      Look how I can learn through them. 

      How I can be with the world through them.

      I take the chessboard like a tray and holding the spinning top still balanced inside its square I gently place it on the water and the chessboard begins to sail. 

      apart from you and me, the road is deserted, but to say so seems absurd.

      tomorrow luckily  enough there's the djset with the beautiful trans she-friends.

      I don't remember the address though.

      L.

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

      Saturday, September 23rd 2023

      18-22h

      a.pass, Brussels

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

       

      a.pass Research Center 

      Cycle IV

      Research Publications + Annex

       

      Saturday, September 23rd 2023

      18-22h

      a.pass, Brussels

       

       

      PUBLICATIONS

       

       

      MAURICE MEEWISSE

      Curating Waterwerken

      Essay

      Hosting the Research Center

      Scenography

       

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

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

       

       

      CATERINA DANIELA MORA JARA

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

      Essay

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

      Lecture-Performance

       

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

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

       

       

      PAOLETTA HOLST

      Re-designing the Colonial House

      Installation, Projection and Open Kitchen

       

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

       

       

      TÚLIO ROSA

      H(a)unting Stories

      Print

       

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

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



       

      GOSIE VERVLOESSEM 

      Pleasure Garden Reading Group

      Reader and Bookmarks

       

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

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

       

       

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

      The Annex

      Publication

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




      *About the Research Center 

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









       

       

    • 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.

    • 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. 

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      CARE at a.pass

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

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

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

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

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

      Schedule:

      March, 7th-11th 2022

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

       

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

      Day 2 - 11am-3pm - individual care 

      • fixing things with Martin

      • fashion hypnosis with Federico

      Day 3 - 11am-3pm - collective care 

      • weaving storytelling by Sarah         

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

      • day lead by Inga

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

      • choreography of imagining the future by Aleks

      • Open Salon hosted by Nathaniel

       

      Extra program: 

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

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

      •  

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

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

      Martin Sieweke works as a material researcher in Brussels.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Aleksandra Borys

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

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

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

      Nathaniel Moore: 

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

      https://www.carewherezine.com

       

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

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

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


      www.federicoprotto.com


      (file: 29.08.2020)

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

      ich konnte meine Models nie zahlen

      ich wollte meine Models nie zahlen

      ich habe meine Models nie bezahlt

       -> Beichten in verschiedenen Sprachen, 

      bis sich die Sprachen vermischen in Klänge 

      bis sich die Klänge auflösen in einen klaren Ton

      Ton verwandelt sich in (chorale?) Melodie

      sound Pan fängt an

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

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

       



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

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

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

      durational

      eine Chor situation sollte hier stattfinden (?).

      -

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



      (Monday, November 9th, 2020)

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



      Steinzeit Now:

      Kleidung et Banana, Post-Post-Patchwork

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

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

      […]

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

      The proclaimed prophecy includes a manifesto of four pillars:

      1 fun (recreate)

      2 fuck the system (rebel)

      3 cheap-ass (reflect)

      4 free booze (re-conquer)

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

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

      […]

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

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

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

       

       



      Esoterikosmos


      Letter for K.6
      30.09.2020

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

      that’s it!!!!
      […] TBC.

      BXL 8/8/2021

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


       

      Audio Guide:
      Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?

      (Email to humans, end of November 2020)7

      Dear fellow Humans!

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

      ‘audio guide attempt to inter-material fashion research‘ 

      ****

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

      1 Pan & the Dystopian Tendencies

      2 Vessel of Knowledge 1

      3 Excerpts from ‘Notes on the Indios Charrúas’ Translation

      4 Augmented Reality

      ****

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

      AUDIOGUIDELINK1
      Original-arachne



      1 Pan & The Dystopian Tendencies

      […]

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

      [PAN MUSIC VIDEO LINK]


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

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

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

      […]

      I welcome you on my journey.

      ****

       

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

       



      Fashion Hypnosis

      […]

      [SOUND ON machine forest] 

      (maybe twice, je nachdem)

      you are at the place of embarkment now.

      the weather,

      the temperature is the one you love most. 

      you are embarking now.

      you focus on your favorite body part. 

      you focus on its contact with the outside world.

      it is wrapped in the material, the fabric, 

      you love most. 

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

      you chose.

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

      you are wearing this color at this moment.

      you may have smelled the wind today.

      you may have sensed it, you have heard it.

      you are now wearing the wind. 

      all around you.

      the wind embraces your skin.

      embraces you.

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

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

      you jump right into it. 

      mini-you jumps right 

      into it.

      you try this for a moment 

      […]

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

      you are embarking now

      approach the magical object you are wearing today. 

      it is a ring

      it is a bracelet

      a necklace

      it is the wind

      it is a building

      it is a feeling

      it is a memory

      it is something hiding somewhere.

      you think about its meaning.

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

      […]

      You sense the material:

      cold, hard, heavy, smooth, 

      -

      strange

      […]

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

      U expand or become small.

      What is the right size?

      What is your right size?

       

      How does this size fit?


      You find the right size.

      You define the right fit.

      You decide to carry this field along for a while.

      What is inside of this field?

      You fine-tune the fitting of the field

      when you found a comfortable fit, 

      you spend time in that field.

      […]

      [GONG]11

       


       

      Braids

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

      […] 

       



      Montevideo, Italy

      (file name: HWD TEXT)

      [INSERT SCREENSHOTS]

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

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

      […]

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

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

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

      Dear Human, [this is an ANGRY letter]

      […]

      I want to show you the first source

      [CONTACT MIC  EXPLORATION 1]


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


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

      JUST

      SIMPLY 

      WANTS 

      THE 

      LOLLIPOP (!)

      the motherfathering lollipop is not gonna come. 

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

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

      State of  MAXIMIZED CONNECTIVITY.

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

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

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

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




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

      […]


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


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

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


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

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



       

      Audio Guide:  À Mon Seul Désir15


      AUDIOGUIDELINK

      welcome2large

       

       

       



      (filename: google search designer name_deisre)

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

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

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

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

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

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



      Various notes on the Indios Charrúas

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


      […]

      Sheet C

      […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]16



      I AM


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


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

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

      *CLAP*
      LIEBER GOTT IM HIMMEL,

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


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





      EP LINK17



      Auris-Them

      Dear Myriam

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

      I got into my head spiraling, thinking about how 

      absolutely different our entire world would be 

      if humans would have developed without 

      the eyes, without the sense of the optic 

      and visual. 

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

      but oh, that's not true. 

      From the beginning, everything would be so different, 

      how we perceived each other, 

      what would be the idea of beauty, 

      how we would talk and communicate, 

      how we would dress, 

      what we would move, 

      technology, knowledge, wisdom, gender, art! 

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

      There is something very bizarre about the eyes,

      They create distance. 

      I sense a huge circle of humans, 

      who managed to encircle the whole world, 

      because it is a ritual of proximity and love, 

      like a huge festivity, and they all hold hands, 

      almost

      but not really, they have their arms stretched out and 

      enough distance between each other fingertips to feel the next persons 

      warmth and scent and small sounds of movement, 

      and they are wearing light bright robes, 

      out of some material unimaginable to us

      which is thin and warm and origins 

      from a completely different technological approach to production. 

      And we hummmm,   and zummmm. 

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

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

      not humans but Auris-Them.

      ****18


       

      Playlist

      (End of November 2020)

      Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?

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

      2 okay kaya - mother natures bitch

      3 jessie ware - save a kiss

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

      5 abdu Ali - did dat

      6 tami ti - single right now (ft juck)

      7 thool - tepeu 

      8 Gwen stefnai - cool (dj taunts edit)

      9 MC dricka - foi bate bate

      10 deli girls  - peg

      11 Villa Elvin - Ettiquete Stomp

      12 Pelada - Asegura

      13 Madonna - Frozen (Hardtechno Bootleg)

      14 Vessel - Paplu (love that moves the sun)

      15 eurythmics - sweet dreams (medieval version by samusoridicus)

      16 amar - tuhaimerasaman (federico luz edit)

      17 Fleetwood Mac - dreams

      18 nils bech - foolish heart 2019

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

      [PLAYLIST LINK]




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

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

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

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

       

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

    • 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.

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

      September 16-17

       


       

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

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

      September 27 - October 8

       


       

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

      Guests are announced shortly.

      November 10-13

       
    • performative publishing
    • Lilith, Losing, Lavender Andrea Zavala Folache
      13 July 2021
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • 01 July 2021
    • 12 euro
    • Lilith, Losing, Lavender

      PDF PREVIEW

      Lilith, Losing, Lavender: A love letter to love is a collection of texts written throughout the research trajectory of Andrea Zavala Folache. With different narrative styles as diary, love letters, score instructions, this collection imbricates ideas of love, art and life as an essay about conditions of attachment.
      In the interstice of several practices as dance, writing and drawing and different spaces as the dance studio, the atelier, the classroom, the theatre and the white cube, Andrea’s research focuses on non chronological dramaturgies for the emergence of surprise or unexpectedness.

      price 12 euro

       
    • What your research did to me.
      the (performative) publishing launch of Associate Researchers Cycle II

      Dragon Love (?)
      the a.pass End presentations of postgraduate researchers


      Friday the 11th and
      Saturday the 12th of June

      at: De Markten,
      Rue du Vieux Marché aux Grains 5, Brussels 

      No need to subscribe or reserve
      Only a live program!
      We have a max capacity of 80 people in the space.

      Welcome!

       
      FRIDAY 11th of June : 16h till 22h
      16.00  Doors open
      16.00 - 17:30  Dragonlove (?) preview
      Andrea Zavala Folache and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc

       
      What your research did to me -Associate Researchers Cycle II
      18.00  Welcome 
      18.15  I’m Not Sad, The World Is SadI’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad + Q & A,  Pia Louwerens 
      18.40  Siting Discourse - Breg Horemans
      19.00  Pop-Fi Poster - Lili M. Rampre
      19.15 -break-
      19.30  Mand/inga - Esteban Donoso
      20.30 -break-
      20.45  Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics + interview, Davide Tidoni
      21.15  Presentation common publication / Olga / annex
      21.30  Q & A moderated by Vladimir Miller. 
      22.00  END
       
      Saturday 12th of June: 18h till 22h
      17.45  Doors open
      18.00  Mand/inga - Esteban Donoso
       
      19.00  Dragonlove (?) - exhibition and performances
      Andrea Zavala Folache and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
      22.00  END
       
    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Dragon Love (?) a.pass End Presentations
      19 May 2021
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • De Markten
    • 11 June 2021
    • 12 June 2021
    • yes
    • Dragon Love (?)


      June 11th 16-18h and June 12th 19-22h at De Markten

       

      Dragon Love (?) gathers the research outcomes of Andrea Zavala Folache, performer, choreographer, visual artist and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc, performer, choreographer and film maker. After attending to the one year postgraduate program at a.pass.

      Both artists address and investigate construction paradigms of the self. Their work studies auto-fiction in different ways, with the desire to develop tools to resist predefined categorisations of identity that bind us to expect certain formats of art production and ways of living.

      They invite the audience, the reader or the performer to welcome the alterity we have in us, in order to revisit the fundamental archetypes of love, games, work models and cultural inheritance. They create interstices that can open up to another view of the self and social configurations.

      In both cases, autobiography is used as a ground from which to start playing. As the material that one has at hand to transform, craft, dissolve, rebuild, paint, glitch, narrate personal histories and identity building.

      What happens if the line between the self and other dissolves? Or between art and love?

      Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc created Draconis Lacrimae, an instruction handbook that invites the reader to play a Role Playing Game that is set in the guts of The Dragon where the adventurers meet after being swallowed/eaten/devoured/tele-transported/etc. by their own dragons. The players find themselves in a world they want to escape from, whatever escape might mean. This game is an invitation for the readers to play themselves otherwise and encounter otherness as an accomplice without a game master.

      Lilith, Losing, Lavender: A love letter to love is a collection of texts written throughout the research trajectory of Andrea Zavala Folache. With different narrative styles as diary, love letters, score instructions, this collection imbricates ideas of love, art and life as an essay about conditions of attachment.
      In the interstice of several practices as dance, writing and drawing and different spaces as the dance studio, the atelier, the classroom, the theatre and the white cube, Andrea’s research focuses on non chronological dramaturgies for the emergence of surprise or unexpectedness.

      Both publications encompass the research trajectory of the artists. Due to Covid 19, writing become a research tool for sharing and engaging from isolated environments with the collective. They are accompanied by research portfolios that inform about their methodologies, work companions and ways of thinking art production and research. These portfolios can be consulted at the a.pass website. www.apass.com from the 2nd of June.

      For the End Presentations, a.pass invites two Visitors for a feedback conversation with the participants. The visitors of *Dragon Love* are writer, editor, and dramaturge Caroline Godart, performance curator Agnes Quackles.

      This public event is co-curated by the participants with the support of a.pass.


      *


      
Andrea Zavala Folache

      Andrea entered the program researching on choreographic methodologies, symptoms and resources emerging at the interstice between performance and personal relationships; with an urge to merge alternative modes of producing work with healing techniques.Taking a series of one-to-one appointments about love with different local communities as a starting point, Andrea explores the format of the performance portrait in which the role of performer/lover and audience/lover are ambiguous. For the a.pass End Presentation Andrea is presenting Lilith, Losing, Lavender: A love letter to love, a book publication based on stretching the subjectivities in love from the formulation I love You, as a way of seeing what is under the gaze of western romantic ideas and heteropatriarchal structures that may reveal problems in language about love.

      BIO

      Given birth in Madrid, Spain. Gave away my adult life studying bachelors. Fine Arts in Complutense University of Madrid, Film and Digital Production in AI Miami University of Art and Design, Mixed Media department at AKI School of Art and Design Enschede, Cultural Anthropology at UNED Madrid, School for New Dance Development Amsterdam, Ma Multimedia Xiamen Art School China and now a.pass (advanced performance and scenography research) in Brussels. Recently, sharpening the artistic focus in a research about Love, from the image of I Love You, in order to place community and collaboration as the practice of studying together. From the formulation of love I am looking for tools to un-pack the transferring of experiences and expressions that have to do with modes of seeing, exchanging energy and resources in the production of cultural objects. The work space of live arts, visual arts and teaching has been a great place to test this and wonder, are there tools that love and work can learn from each other and, can we listen to the process of making relationships from those tools?. Since 2016 giving workshops on Concept development, Choreography, Improvisation and Experiments with SNDO, SIS (Sandberg Institute), ISAC Brussels, MovLab Madrid students; recently working in the medium of choreography solo and in collaborations with Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Simon Asencio, Paula Almirón, Jija Sohn, Laura Ramírez, Lucy Wilke, Oneka Von Schrader, Sabine Cmelniski and Julia Reist, with the support of Dansbrabant, BUDA, Vooruit, :ARP, La Casa Encendida, Ca2m, Projection Room, Blue Project Foundation, Brakke Grond, Jacuzzi Amsterdam and a.pass.


      Thanks to: Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Kristien Van den Brande, Lilia Mestre, Julia Reist, Andrea Rodrigo, Sabine Cmelniski, Laura Ramírez, a.pass.

      Mentors: Persis Bekkering, Stefan Govaart, Kristien Van den Brande, Vladimir Miller, Sara Manente, Myriam Van Imschoot, Julien Bruneau, Mijke van den Drift, Maciej Sado, Tom Engels and Krõõt Juurak.

       

      Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc

      Federico entered the program researching on fantasy tabletop role-playing games as tools for creating collective stories and figures. Taking the detailed rules systems from these games as a starting point, he has been exploring how to saturate identity with categories and speculation. Tabletop role-playing games function as textual and pre-digital tools of identity exploration and world-building, as they invite participants to occupy a liminal role located at the boundaries of player, character and performer. For the a.pass End Presentation Federico is presenting Draconis Lacrimae: The Player's Handbook, a publication that contains the rules and instructions of a fantasy role-playing game that he developed alongside Pablo.

       

      BIO
Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc is an Argentinian/Spanish filmmaker and performance artist. He holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and an MA in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Arts in London. Since 2014 he works with his partner, musician and choreographer Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld. Their work uses speculative fiction within dance, performance, film and installation to interrupt normative narratives that have been naturalized by historical discourses. Federico and Pablo are currently working on the Dragon Pieces, a series of works that fluctuate between monstrosity and transindividual fantasy. Through practices as diverse as artistic swimming or role-playing games the Dragon Pieces aim to find playful representations of collectivity that question hegemonic ways of belonging and narrating ourselves. Federico has received the Gas Natural Fenosa Art Grant, the first prize at Auditorio de Galicia Young Artists Award and Creación INJUVE. His work has been shown in museums and festivals such as Cinéma du Réel (France); Santarcangelo Festival (Italy); Festival Salmon (Spain); Kasseler Dokfest (Germany); Queer Lisboa (Portugal); NAVE (Chile); MARCO Vigo (Spain), Kunstraum (London), La Casa Encendida; CA2M (Spain) or Zeimiai Manor House (Lithuania). 

      Thanks to: Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld; Camilo Mejía; Joshua Serafin; Anaël Snoek; Julia Rubies; Nathaniel Moore.

      Mentors: Vladimir Miller; Kristien Van den Brande; Krõõt Juurak; Elke Van Campenhout; Myriam Van Imschoot; Tom Engels; Sara Manente; Sabina Urraca; Olivier Stein; Pedro Pina.

       

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

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

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

       


       

      FIRST BLOCK: TROUBLED GARDENS

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

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

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

       

      FIRST VIDEO (june 2019)

       

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

       

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

       

       

      Shooting part II: Caterina’s face.

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

      Instructions to Caterina:

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

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

       

       

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

      Instructions to Flávio:

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

       

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

       

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

       

      SECOND VIDEO (july 2019)

       

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

       

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

      Instructions to the performers:

      Flávio

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

      . you don’t want Diego in bed

      Lilia

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

      . attentively observe Flávio and his body

      . invite Diego to bed

      . “Do you wanna go back to Brazil?”

      Diego

      . make questions about the couple Lilia and Flávio

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      SECOND BLOCK: A LOOMING SCORE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Instructions for the visitors:

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

      Instructions for the performers:

       

       

       

       

       

      first part

       

       

       

       

       

      everyone but Lilia

      • you cannot be the first to say something.

      Lilia

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

      Caterina

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

      Flávio

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

      Lucia

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

       

       

       

       

       

      second part

       

       

       

       

       

      Lilia

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

      Caterina

      • say to Flávio “Listen to her”

      Flávio

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

       

       

       

       

       

      third part

       

       

       

       

       

      Flávio

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

      Diego

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

       

       

       

       

       

      forth part

       

       

       

       

       

      Lucia

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

      Flávio

      • describe the gestures and behavior of Lucia and imitate them

      Diego

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

       

       

       

       

       

      fifth part

       

       

       

       

       

       

      Caterina

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

      Lilia

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      THE IN-BETWEEN (BLOCK) 

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

       

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

       

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

       

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


       

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

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

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

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

       


       

      FOURTH BLOCK: SETTLEMENT

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

      RC: How would you define the agency you had? 

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

      [...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      RC: And the role of the camera?

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

      KT: Did you enjoy it also?

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

      [Andrea is the one in the lower left]

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

      RC: But it’s less voyeur?

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


       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • A Good Workshop Conversation with Krõõt Juurak
      07 December 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • A Good Workshop
      Vladimir
      Hey Krõõt!
      At the end of the every block the curator writes a documentation of what happened in the block. The reason to do it, is to pass on pass on some information to the other curators and also to develop on and add to the archive of methodologies at work at a.pass. 
       
      I will be writing this report as I am the designated block curator. It would be great to have a conversation about the work(shop) that you proposed. I suggested this interview format so that you don't have to write a report. I have the Intuition that reporting would be strange in connection with your workshop and your work in general. 
       

      The last time we talked it felt to me that the way you propose things and the way the workshop was proposed it cannot be grasped with conventional questions of  "what did you do?" and other questions that point to to productivity. Productivity is so ingrained in the language which we use to describe proposals that it makes it hard to talk about proposals which challenge that concept. 
       
      I am curious how you think about this? Is there a language problem?
       
      Krõõt
      Yes, there is definitely a language problem, I agree. 
      First of all I didn't want to write the report about the workshop for several reasons... I don't want to be the ultimate authority on what we did and what that meant or what anyone learnt or did not learn. The workshop was proposed in such a way that it is not clear what the profits are and what the productivity of it is. I don't want to be the one who has the last word because this is counterproductive to the other participants of the workshop.
      Actually because I wasn't even taking this workshop I have the least idea about what we did or what it was good for. I would say that's the reason why I find it so strange and difficult to write reports. It feels like I'm patronizing the participants' experience. 
       
      Vladimir
      I know the feeling very well. When I propose a collective space in my own work it's also impossible for me to say afterwards what actually happened. I know what happened from my perspective, but then I was just one of the people who occupied that space. Producing environments in which you then yourself enter as a participant doesn't really go well along with conventional concepts of what work is or what education should look like.
       
      Krõõt
      And on the other hand — which is at first glance a little bit contradictory — I love the conventional way of educating, I like the formal structure of a school, where one person is the "teacher" and the others are "students". 
      As a role play, I think it's brilliant. It is not an environment where everything is everything. 
      have a rather difficult educational past. I struggled through primary and highschool, barely making it, but as I am getting older, I am almost 40 now, educational experiences have been getting better and betterAnd perhaps in developing these workshops I have been dealing with those educational "traumas". Most people come with some kind of baggage from their experiences in educational institutions and I am interested in how these experiences are still shaping the way we function whenever faced with a "school-like" structure.
       
      And secondly, since I have always hated school, workshops, any kind of educational experiences (I don't even have a driving license), I tried to do something that a person like myself could handle. I guess that's why this workshop is anti-productivity and anti-information. The proposal could also be: wasting time together and/or separately.
       
      And one fun fact: statistically speaking the main reason people take workshops is to meet other peopleI think that is a fair reason. Often you don't go there to learn a new skill but rather just to see who else is there. It is hard to meet people nowadays. As a workshop leader I try to keep this in mind, and try to make sure it isn't about me.
       
      Vladimir
      I think we have very similar reasons for why we do the work the way we do the work. For me the hardest part is  to navigate the persona of the initiator. I like that you described the teacher/student relationship as a kind of a role play. It's good to try and keep it a role play because this relationship constantly wants to become a reality. It's very hard to get out of the costume. 
       
      Krõõt
      We're so trained in believing these roles, we start to take them seriously. 
       
      I always try to keep in mind that in taking workshops people learn about giving workshops. And when you are giving one you learn about how to take one. I do not have a lot of faith in explanatory learning, we are animals and learn from example, unwittingly. 
       
      Vladimir
      In this workshop at a.pass, did you feel like the participants were aware of that roleplay? Did they get out of their roles? 
       
      Krõõt
      Perhaps the idea was rather to get into their roles, I would think that most of them became aware of the part they played, absolutely. 
       
      For example, I kept postponing this interview with you, and after the second postponement I stated that I have really good excuses. That moment I became aware of my recurring role as the artist-teacher resisting report-writing. It is tricky because we are not in a workshop and this is not as safe as a workshop would be. It is relatively safe because we are friends, but we are in a professional environment. It is more risky to come up with really good (fake) excuses.
      In the workshop I really try to create a ground where excuses and this cliche known as "bad student behavior"becomes a practice. An artist's practice. 
       
      So many of our artist practices are based on the so-called protestant ethic, where you have to be a good person with good wishes and of course good products. It is all based on a moral premise. Obviously turning that around isn't going to change it, but I think at least you can have a break from having to be so damn serious about being good all the time
       
      I struggle with that myself: Trying to keep up the play. I thought it would it would be a good idea to be an artist so I could decide for myself what work was and what life was. And at some point you notice that you take less risks because your income depends on it.  And then what you do doesn't appeal to you anymore and probably it will not be appealing to anyone else either. So it is a closed circle or a downward spiral:  when our livelihood depends on it, we start to fear and fear eats fun. I think workshops are great format to make a space for fun, for boredom and for doing nothing. 
       
       
      Vladimir
      There's a counter-institutional resistance in both of our proposals, a space to fail and miss the institutional brief. 
      And at the same time it is a narrow pathway how to do that properly, an other brief. I keep asking myself how to not to please the institution by critique-ing it in this way. 
       
      It is a matter of constant evaluation for me of what actually makes a good proposal? What am I satisfied with, what is the institution satisfied with, what are the participants satisfied with? Thinking like this I find myself mostly fighting against passing on the institutional pressure and established ideas (which we all have, all who take part in a workshop) of what a "good workshop is" . 
       
      Krõõt
      It is slightly more complex than being anti-institutional. But not very complex. In fact it is just about making a space within the space or using it for your own advantage and finding out the problems as they arise and trying  not to worry about anything else
       
      Vladimir
      A.pass is a special case: we welcome the institutional educational experiment. These are our questions as artists and educators. To a certain degree we are on a similar side of things. We are also bored with the conventional ideas of passing down knowledge. But I'm wondering how much is for you at risk in other institutions? Do you calibrate your proposals depending on where you go, or do you even radicalise them if it is a more conventional context?
       
       
      Krõõt
      I don't know if this is good or bad but I do the same thing every time. Let's say a very similar workshop works for nine-year-olds, tooPerhaps it is a very childish workshop and I wonder if it is more unusual for a.pass, Impulstanz or for real children.
       
       Vladimir
      I think you deploy a Trojan horse. You have a surface layer, structural layer in this workshop which is able to attach itself to the institution. But within that structure it feels to me like there's a space for absurdity and boredom and a collapse of reasoning.
       
      Krōōt
      Right. Let's say, if you ask me what we did, I could tell you exactly: we had a nap every day of 20 minutes, we wrote in our diaries, we sang karaoke, we had a silent meeting... We knew exactly what we were doing at any given moment but for a person randomly walking in, it would not have looked like we were doing anythingFor sure it did not look like we were working. 
       
       
      Vladimir
      There's again something language-related  that makes structural questions invalid here. I appreciate very much how your work can invalidated certain questions by answering them: they can be answered but they don't describe at all what was actually going on in your workshop in terms of .... not necessarily in terms of the process, because the process is easy to describe. But in terms of what it means, or what it actually produces, or what it triggers, or what kind of community it develops, or how practices resonated with each other. 
       
      There's a kind of a failure of of the institutional perspective which you trigger, precisely because you can answer to it. "Yeah, yeah, we did this, we did this". But it doesn't help to understand it.
       
      Krōōt
      Actually it is not quite accurate to say it was all anti-productivity: we had also had a couple of lectures, we discussed political performativity and artist solidarity. I try to combine as wide range of activities as I can. And since I am constantly doubting my own abilities, self-sabotage as a method is an important tool for me. Self-sabotage is a very common method especially in the creative field and  I think we don't cherish it enough. It takes such a large almost elephant-size part of our livesI want to know more about it.
       
      In this workshop I gave the participants the simple task to write a motivation letter, formulated as  "What/why you want to get out of this workshop?" And I formulated the task in such a way that I didn't notice it could be misunderstood. But when I read the letters everybody was writing on why they wanted to get out of the workshop. And I was genuinely confused and worried. Do they really want to get out of the workshop? And then I looked at what I had written and understood that I had unwittingly sabotaged myself.
      And then in one these letter somebody called this workshop a "procrastination conspiracy". 
       
      Vladimir
      I find interesting is that you identify self-sabotage as a useful methodology to pass on. So far I have only applied it to myself. In the collective gathering workshop I talk about "authority suicide": how to fail organize when you are proposing something? My initial response would always be to panic and to solve a situation when people don't know what's the plan is, when there is a feeling that people are lost. I have gradually developed a higher tolerance and now try to fail to do that or to do it badly or to accept not to know how to go on, in order to finally collapse this persona of the "responsible-when-it-fails" as the last piece of institutional structure. 
       
      But I never I never tried passing on this strategy as a skill. I think because there is still the expectation of organising differently, of self-organisation after the collapse. 
       
       
      Krōōt
      So, if I'm imagining what you do: is it a workshop or a project where it is difficult to say who's in charge or when it starts and when it ends?
       
      Vladimir
      Yes, thats the attempt. 
       
      Krõõt
      I admire people who are able to do this kind of free structure. Every time before a workshopI I think I should try that and I kind of coward out and still go with a very strict structure instead. Maybe some day. But I really admire when there is this kind of a situation where you are not sure if it is meant to be that way, is it really planned to be disorganized or has everything gone out of hand. It's risky. 
       
      Vladimir
      It is risky. It is one of those things outside of language. You can't really address it, because the only way to address it is to re-establish some kind of authority over it, to turn it into an institutional method yet again. So what you can do is to go for awkward silences and dance around it hoping that either it is a true failure and something else will come out of it, or that at least there's a kind of a meta-failure and people kind of are in on the joke. That people understand it that it is an unspoken, unspeakable thing that has to happen. 
       
      It's complicated, I don't really know.  I'm talking like it is a whole method but actually I'm always just trying to stretch that space. I try to realise when authority comes in, what are the performances of it and either not do them or wait as long as possible to do them.
       
      Krõõt
      It would be a paradox  if it would become a whole method.
       
      Vladimir 
      Yes, exactly. 
      What we say about a.pass as a structure is that it is engaging in the paradox of creating an open space. I think somehow your work(shop) deals with that as well. We do it from different sides: through over-emphasising structure or through building down structure. But the goals are quite similar.  I think a.pass keeps failing in that, because at the same time there is always the question of "Are we doing our job well?" Is there "progress", etc? There has to be a reason to engage in this communal project/institution, you want to end up somewhere in your work you would not be able to get to by yourself. 
       
      But I'm still wondering, if we take your method seriously,  if there should be some kind of a radical letting go of certain goals in this environment. Sometimes I still feel like we think to "educational".
       
      Krõõt
      Maybe it's because I'm doing psychoanalysis at the moment that I think this is also a psychological method.  You  become aware of your habits and then it's not about changing them, but about playing them. Performing them and enjoying it. Don't struggle. Or struggle but have have a good time struggling!
      We could have keep having this abstract idea of open space, but it's not open and it's not space. It is rather  our filters define how we understand something
       
      Vladimir
      I think the playful perspective helps me. When I'm explaining these thoughts to you, I see myself from the outside getting stuck in language loops. My wish would be to  get out of them. No to just keep explaining and subverting structures,  but to step out of it, to step somewhere else
       
      Here I feel the limits of a specific institutional language or culture to express spaces and proposals which are really beside them. There are some things which a particular language or particular culture of discourse cannot  reach. Maybe as we said, it can only be done in a sort of unspoken way, unspoken  in the sense of not using that language. 
       
      That thought is really fascinating for me because the way I usually proceed is through over-explaining and I  catch myself in this conversation that this might be a trap.  I have been polishing the language of my proposals, trying to subvert them within the proposal for quite some time now. Almost like trying to build a bridge from one language space to another. It's just that sometimes I get so busy building this bridge that I don't have  time for the actual work of inhabiting that space. Or rejecting the space, like the way you reject the idea of educational reporting. 
       
      Thank you for this conversation, dear Krõõt!
       
       
    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/III
    • Participants Assembly
    • On the Soul Video recording - online talk
      27 November 2020
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • Oxana Timofeeva
    • 19 November 2020
    • yes
    • [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Oxana-Timofeeva-On-The-Soul.mp4"][/video]
       
      Oxana Timofeeva
      On the Soul
       
      A talk and a conversation on the soul. This talk took place on November 19th.
      The talk was proposed by Adriano Wilfert Jensen and supported by the a.pass participants assembly as part of a new modality of participants curated content at a.pass. 
       

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

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

    •  

       

       

      DIALOGUE

       

       

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

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

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

       

       

       

      I Block//School of Love

      curated by Adva Zakai

      (September-December 2018)

       



      What do you remember about the beginning?

       

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

       

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

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

      Do you remember what was the question when we started?

       

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

       

       

      What is there?

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

      What is such a translation?

      What is noise?

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

      How can the center remain open?

      What is sacred?

       

       

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

       

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

      What is sacred?

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

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

       

      The distance is what allows being together.

      The distance is the space/time in between things.

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

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

      The distance is what determines the relationship.

      Walking is a measure maybe.

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

      Not knowing is an obstacle between me and the other.

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

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

      I can run across this distance thanks to its opacity.

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

      Not knowing is a distance.

      A distance is opaque.

      Opacity allows me to meet the other.

       

      “Space was holy to

      the pilgrims of old, till plane

      stopped all that nonsense”

      (W. H. Auden)

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

      A is not equal to A.

       

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

       

       

      The world will exist in the interrogative form.

      The end will be close to us

      and we might be friends.

       

      We will learn from flowers:

      the truth about every man is that 

      he/she is about to die.

       

      Nothing will be equal to nothing.

      Everything will be 

      incommensurable

      irreplaceable

      incontrovertible

      irrecoverable

      irreparable

      irredeemable.

      -Money will be the principle of irreality-

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Every road will be a cemetery

      and, in the crackles of the asphalt,

      there will be our little fallen flowers

      our masters

      our dead.

       

      There will be a desire hidden in every thing.

       

      We will become small

       - small, in order not to lose each other.

      ---

      Revolution is going on.

      It will walk in the forest. 

      It will breath, smell, look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      It will be stumbling, transforming judgement into motion.

       

       

       

      II Block//Troubled Gardens

      curated by Nicolas Galeazzi

      (May-August 2019)

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      1. Observe and interact

      2. Catch and store energy

      3. Obtain a yield

      4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

      5. Use and value renewable resources and services

      6. Produce no waste

      7. Design from patterns to details

      8. Integrate rather than segregate

      9. Use small and slow solutions

      10. Use and value diversity

      11. Use edges and value the marginal

      12. Creatively use and respond to change

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

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

      I love your stories.

       

      Which story? 

       

      The one about distance.

       

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

       

      Now we are far enough to read it.

       

      You are right.

       

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

      You are particularly concerned by the future...

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

       

      A: Adopting is a big challenge.

      B: To receive back the material we left.

      A: To give up expectation of realization.

      B: Can the documentation be originated by a script?

      A: We wanted to avoid narration.

      B: Why?

      A: The narration tends to identification, often.

      B: “This” is “this”.

      A: To put things in one line.

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

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

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

      A: We didn't finish it, yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      B: I have a strong tendency in reacting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      A: I like this a lot.

      B: To show the responsibility in the adoption.




       

      III Block//A looming score_sharing politics of damage;

      curated by Lilia Mestre and Sina Seifee

      (September-December 2019)

       

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Memory embodies distance and opacity.

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

       

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

       

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

      a game is a map

      a frame

      a self-critical institution

       

      you can put the game there, in the middle

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

      and I need the others to be different

      and see the difference

      which is the distance that allows us being together

       

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



      NAME IT/Writing Score

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      I AM HERE. 

      ARE THOSE VOICES, THAT I AM HEARING?

      I AM READING. 

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

      I REMEMBER STANDING FOR SOMETHING. 

      CAN I STAND FOR SOMETHING NOW? NOW SITTING? 

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

      HOW MANY METERS OF AIR OVER MY HEAD? 

      I'M FLOATING, THE HEAD IN THE AIR. 

      I'M MOVING MY HANDS.

      I BREATH. THE HEART IS BEATING. 

      ONCE I SAW MY HEART IN THE ECOGRAPHY SCREEN. 

      BEATING. OPENING AND CLOSING. 

      LIFE IS STRANGE THROUGH A SCREEN.

      I'M WRITING. 

      MY GAZE WANDERS ACROSS THE DETAILS

      IS IT GOING TO END SOON?

       

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      WE ARE IDIOTS - MANIFESTO FOR NOW/Editing Score

       

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

       

      I AM HERE NOW

      I TAKE A POSITION

      I REVEAL MY POSITION

      I AM AT THE ENTRANCE THE DOOR IS OPEN I ENTER

      I CAN RUN FROM HERE TO THERE FOLLOWING  STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW

      I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      I AM HERE

      I LOOK THROUGH THIS FRAME

      I AM IN THE FRAME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I FRAME INSTITUTIONS

      I MOVE BORDERS AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE

      I AM MANIFOLD

      I AM MULTIPLE

      I AM FOCUSED

      I AM PERIPHERAL

      I TAKE TIME IF NECESSARY

      I TAKE TIME

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

      I TAKE THE TIME IT TAKES

      I AM AN IDIOT

      I AM A PIONEER

      I  DO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT WHAT IS THERE

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      I NEED NOISE

      I TRUST OPACITY

      I TRUST YOU

      I TRUST

      I BELIEVE IN THE PRESENT AS A PROMISE

      I BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE AS A LEGACY

      I BELIEVE IN COMPLEXITY

      I BELIEVE IN MAGIC

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



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

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

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

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

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


      [21st November 2019, Bruxelles]

       

      I AM NOW 

      POSITIVE THE DOOR THERE FOLLOWING A STRAIGHT LINE

      I AM CLEAR NOW, I AM THE SHADOW I MAKE

      HERE

      THROUGH THIS FRAME

      ME

      I AM THE FRAME

      I MAKE THE FRAME

      I BODER AGAIN AND AGAIN

      I AM ONE OLD PERIPHERY

      I TAKE TIME

      DU TEMPS POUR FAIRE LES CHOSES

      IT TAKES AN IDIOT

      I AM WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I UNDO WITH WHAT IS THERE

      I MANIFEST WHAT

      I ACCEPT NOISE

      NOISOPACITY

      US

      THE PRESENT AS THE FUTURE MAGIC

      FORSE L'AMORE E' CONTINUARE    

       

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

      This is not the end.

       

       

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

       

      Precious indirection*

      24-25 January 2020 @ MILL / Needcompany

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

      “Precious indirection”*

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

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

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

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

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

       

      This event is hosted by MILL.

      With the support of Needcompany.

       

      24 & 25 January,

      Doors Open 18:00

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

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

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

      Deborah Birch (1 hour)

       

      Pilgrimage / Lucia Palladino & Piero Ramella

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

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

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

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

       

      To be someone implies to be somewhere /Diego Echegoyen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Microcosm, macrocosm.

      Tears, Trust, she says.

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

      The cave is not

      Home

      It is a pocket

      A chamber

      A cavity

      A shell

      Home is on the

      Surface and

      The surface is

      Burning.

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

       

    • "SOL is a collective platform that was initiated some years ago, inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world. SOL is practiced through regular meetings, but follows no curriculum. Instead, it develops a spontaneous program through the presence and interest of its participants. SOL is basically an invitation to hang out. But to hang out deeply. To practice school as a place of free time – free to study things as they appear, separated from the dependency on the time and space of social order and production. And to practice love – Not the kind of love that is generated through affirmation of who we think we are, but love as an act of giving by allowing it to transform us." Curated by Adva Zakai, Sept/Dec 2018

      The curatorial proposal seemed from the start interesting but problematic, so I decided to beforehand what my position should be and how I want to relate to the program and a.pass. From the start the claims made by the curator – it is not about love, but about political love, the willingness to let yourself be transformed by other, and that it was not a school, but there is an interest in school – formed the basis of my attitude of constructive opposition. In a not always subtle way I put the thesis of this block to test. The production of actual works was not the main goal of the block, they functioned more as conversation starters within the continuous political game.

      test - the tower

      I decided to start with a small provocation, in the middle of the space I build a tower where it was possible for one person to sit on top of. The tower formed a visualization of the attitude I approached SOL with. Halfway through the block, during some presentations I explained my motives and asked the people there if they thought that they excepted the tower. Everybody but one wanted to keep the tower – no unanimity - so the tower had to go.

      test - the class picture

      During the closing week of this block we traveled together to Performance Art Forum, in northern France. This school trip made me think about our group, what we are, what are status is and how we are related to each other. I decided to do an expiriment, with making a class picture - to see if that could clarify some those questions. I put up a camera on a stand and made every 10 seconds a picture, assuming that at one point everybody would have their eyes open. The actual picture didn't clarify much, but what remained was the act of the making the picture.

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • PEACH BASKETS - THREE ANGLES ON BALANCING 05 September 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Caterina Mora / Laura Pante / Maurice Meewisse
    • a.pass
    • 27 September 2019
    • 28 September 2019
    • PEACH BASKETS - THREE ANGLES ON BALANCING

      a.pass is happy to invite you to the End-Communications of Caterina Mora, Laura Pante and Maurice Meewisse

      18:30 > Door opens

      19:00 - 21:00 > Ongoing Installation / performances
      >Double Spiral with rain makers - Maurice Meewisse
      >After Affect Clinique - Laura Pante

      21:00 > Pa-küru: 47 minutes of a bastard cheap lecture performance

      23:00 > Party with DJ Bicha Boo Collective -> 27th September ONLY!!!!

      *

       

      Peach Baskets - What the hell!

       

      “Maria Spelterini is walking across a tightrope across the Niagara Gorge, from the United States side to Canada, with her feet in peach baskets. In the background is the Niagara Suspension Bridge, which is full of spectators. In the distant background is the Niagara Falls.” (wikipedia)

      Funambulism is a "staying with the trouble" concept (in Donna Haraway´s words), that intertwines the a.pass End-Communications of Caterina Mora, Laura Pante and Maurice Meewisse, the 27 and 28 September at a.pass studio.

      It all started with the idea of balancing oppositions, no matter which: theory and practice, high and low cultures, language and body, feminism and heteronormativity, bad and  good, horizontal and vertical, north and south, truth and fake, here and there, real and virtual, peach baskets and shoes - What the hell?!

      The projects of Cate, Laura and Maurice, embody the crossings between antonymous positionalities and work with strategies that include negotiations, side effects, mistakes, shadows, confusion, plural views and overlapings as co-inhabitors of a research context attempting to think complex phenomena.

      To walk the tightrope one needs to be precisely at the moment. In the Merriam Webster dictionary, the second definition of funambulist says: “a show especially of mental agility”. Stay, stay, progress, walk…It is interesting to assess the complexity of such acts that involve several physical skills to portray exception and risk; that are then associated to freakishness, populism, entertainment, intense experience. Walking on the edge, for the good, the bad, the useless, the expectation, the market, for nothing, for life. Self-induced trouble in order to expose complex phenomena.

      The tightrope delineates the space, creates sides and indicates the demarcation of territories. It is a geometrical form, a fictional separation that enables position, that asks to be crossed as a heroic act. A symbolic gesture linking (or separating) two end points. Reinforcing nature, in this case - the Niagara Falls as like if they would need support. What kind of visibility is at stake? What was that woman doing in 1876? Why did she have peach baskets on her feet? Why did she sometimes tie her ankles? 

      The scenographies of these End-Communications are differentiated by three geometric shapes: the spiral, the triangle and the rectangle. They are reference points that reflect dwellings within real and artificial realities, they deploy perceptions. They are imperatives to read topologies: the arena, the tent and the stage. They all have a centre, they all are crossed by lines, they all follow patterns, they all create spaces, folds. 

      Imagine that all these lines and curves crossing the scenographic spaces are folds proposing potential, temporary and situated forms of critical enquiry between seemingly disconnected or distanced realities.

      At this point, the Deleuzian concept of the fold opens a range of actions, movements and transformations for what seems to be static and impenetrable perceptions of reality.  The fold changes place, re-forms elsewhere, multiplies, turns things inside out and outside in. The fold is extreme and intense and unlimited, it's baroque. It might be a form of connection that facilitates open-ended and inexhaustible unfoldings of  worlds.

      Caterina Mora uses what she named Transversal Research Training as a way to politicise the relations between ones’ own biography, western culture, global economy, institutional demand & heteronormativity. Cate works with show business as a form, to research relationalities in a non binary manner. Laura Pante creates conditions that trouble the relation between the private and the public perception of the body. Provoking awareness of the degree to which language and visual culture shape the body and our relation to it. Laura approaches technology and spirituality as culturally formative constructs that are constitutive parts of the self. Maurice Meewisse crafts situations as mimicries of institutional frameworks. Maurice's research questions the discrepancy between theoretical and ideological standpoints and the conditions that enable artistic work. The idea of the artist researcher as a self - instituted figure brings focus to both the agency of the artist and the dominance of power structures.

      "That is why the unfolded surface is never the opposite of the fold, but rather the movement that goes from some to the others. Unfolding sometimes means that I am developing—that I am undoing—infinite tiny folds that are forever agitating in the background, with the goal of drawing a great fold on the side whence forms appear. . . . At other times, on the contrary, I undo the folds of consciousness that pass through every one of my thresholds . . . in order to unveil in a single movement this unfathomable depth of tiny and moving folds that waft me along at excessive speeds in the operation of vertigo." Gilles Deleuze in 'The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque'

      Maria Spelterini disappeared shortly after the crossing of the Niagara Falls. No one knows why, how or where to. 

       

      *
      Caterina Mora, a patagonian doer (1988) from Fiske Menuco (Río Negro, Argentina) determined by the wind. She has incorrect English and she always asks for help for text revision. She had several titles and roles in Argentinian territory which become innocuous in other countries.

      Although she can give specifications on her traditional artistic roles in the Performing Arts (as a dancer, performer, ballet/contemporary dance/tango professor, director assistant, writer, modèle vivant), she is interested in transcending them. The ‘doer’ participates in academic groups and loves to create pieces with fiction and glitter.

      In a.pass she develops Transversal Research Training, a device for Artistic Research practice which is busy with the creation of political entertainment as affirmative critique. She makes, writes, embodies, questions and even refuses translations. She has become obsessed with Aprha Behn, a female spy for King Charles II in XVII century Belgium. She was a "translatress".

      Her End-Communications is a show called Pa-küru: 47 minutes of a bastard cheap lecture performance.
      It is based on translating ballet to reggaeton. a.pass provides bright paper, a 2x10 metre platform, a microphone like Madonna, cables, speakers, lights and a ballet barre. She provides 47 minutes of her embodied research, a 0,34 euro broken plastic crown that she bought in Buenos Aires (the crown ́s value then was of 1,21 euro) and music from her cell phone that she bought for 67 euros.

      She's trying to dance critically: from l'obsession après une audition to the pleasure of mostrar los dientes.


      *
      Laura Pante is a dancemaker based between Brussels and Venice. She combines the practices of drawing, architecture and graphic design with movement, dance and choreography.

      She crossed a.pass artistic research environment with a focus on body performativity, apparatus of spectatorship and the agency of images questioning in which way there is still a projection of fascist ideologies on the bi-dimensional screens which walk with us and prescribe our movement into the world. In other words how visual propaganda contributes to the production of body’s shapes. In her practice she researches how to create conditions for the possibility of a movement inquiry driven by a loss of corporal references and spatial coordinates challenging the expansion or the disappearance of body as a cultural phenomena.

      For her End-Communication, THE CLINIQUE will welcome you into the green corner, the remains of an ancient and spreading red volcano or the living room of a grandmother’s dream(s), to experience one by one a 360° video and performative installation. Within a precarious co-presence of inside and outside, private and public, personal and collective, we will practice a propaedeutic* research exploring a possible loss of corporal references and a consequential loss of memory - a flickering amnesia of the body’s shape, as if discovering something would mean to forget the dimension you came from, challenging mediated vision and image production. Laura and her assistant will guide you with the help of a dance performed by hands (a touch) informed by osteopathic practices**: the capacity to see into the abyss of flesh.

      * Propaedeutic // from the Ancient Greek προπαιδεύω (propaideúō, “I give preparatory instruction”), from πρό (pró, “before”) + παιδεύω (paideúō, “I teach”) is a historical term for an introductory course into a discipline, that is an art, or science, or movement.
      ** Ostheopatic practices of touch // OMT - osteopathic manipulative therapy // application of manual forces to improve homeostasis which have been altered by somatic dysfunction.

      *
      Maurice Meewise is a visual artist with a curiosity for the politics that construct accepted protocol of action and communication within specific institutionalized contexts. In most situations he finds an inherent conflict that acts as the impulse behind the creation of a new work in which he uses different techniques, from sculpture to performance, to create aesthetic interventions and attempt to provoke the reevaluation of our conditioned patterns of acceptance and behavior.

      The journey he embarked on at a.pass has been primarily focussed on the context provided by the institute, the program as well as the participants, curators, staff and visitors. He explored the limits of the context and the inconsistencies that he sometimes found between theories and the way they were practiced. During his period at a.pass he attempted to challenge the beliefs within the institute by making a series of symbolic interventions that addressed these boundaries and discrepancies.

      But one thing became apparent. Where is he in what he does?
      For the end communication he commissioned himself to look at what context he provides, to look at what he is constituted of, to think about his role as an artist and performer and his relationship with the audience. He uses the same strategy he applied before, but now to explore his own politics. It resulted in Double Spiral with Rainmakers - and he will prepare the dinner.

    • NOT_index
    • the oficial 3rd block "les belles infidèles"
      03 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    • Block curated by Nicolas Galleazzi called   here the link 

       

      Openning week

      I didn´t prepare this presentation, I was exhauted. The day of my presentation I did the interview for the Pdh. The jury made me a very good question: "which Translation theory are you busy with?" 

      I started to look into that.

      In parallel, I was convinced about continue working on transtalion, but I asked myself: what I am producing with translation? Another "system"? What is doing the repetition of ballet history telling? And the genealogy of reggaeton? 

       

      [gallery columns="1" size="medium" link="none" ids="9215,9216,9217"]

       

       

      The 13th I had a  mentoring session with one of the person who changed my life/practise. The same person which whom I realised that translation were more important for me than just something temporary. She transforms me. 

      The 13 th May 2019 emerged TRT                                Transversal Research Training 

       

       

      Half Way Days

      A first essay focus on methodology.

      Transoceanic reading --> the aim of this practise question how do we access to reality, how do we inform each other.

                                              Is looking for transunderstanding of transrelationships.

      The exercise --> (by two) : read at news from your context // share it // try to find relationship (or imagine it)

       

       

      Another residence

      Unlearning Center // Friburg

      Three experiences:     

      -1-  Practising change of roles (I use to be a "follower") and here I am guiding Nicolas.

       

      -2- Training TRT

      Two dance courses focus on these pairs: touch and be touched // look at and being looked // resist and rest

      -3- The adoptee --> How can the one being seen influence how to be seen?

       

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

      In parallel, I was living in a.pass, practising, repeating, enjoying apass time, 

       

       

      End presentation - PAF (in the church)

      Sharing/exposing/defending/confronting TRT       

      [gallery columns="1" size="medium" ids="9240,9241,9242,9243,9244,9245"]

       

      Here you can find excerpt of the script

      For the newcommers. We can´t find PAF in Wikipedia.               (Diego, querés cebar mate?)

      This presentation is my End presentation in PAF. It symbolizes many finals. Because study in apass was a dream. It was a dream change completely of context. It was a dream built discourse and practice in relation to another context and again comeback to my home context. So this final of the APass times is for me also the final as student in Europ, the final of use Apass technology,  apass spaces, apass budget, apass mentors, apass travels, apass cooking together, apass talking together, apass openning half and end week, apass cleaning together. And I was very anguished or sad because this end. And then Nicolas told me that maybe I could see that as a start. Immediately I could remember my psychoanalyst saying me the same thing when I was preparing my travel to come here. He used to tell me: 
      • Acabar para empezar.    // Projection: if I cry please cry with me or just wait. I will stop-    Comme dans toute relation sexuelle
      • End. Final. Finish to start. Para empezar, commencer.
      • apass changed me. apass modifies me, apass transform me (I am reapiting this from my second block).            Grand écart 
      • TRANSVERSAL RESEARCH TRAINING is a device that serves to conceive my artistic practice. It is an umbrella with transversal tools.
      • Transversal à  is busy with issues that go through or cross different practices.
      • The transversal things are linked to problematize power structures, conditions of production (entertainment, shift north-south),                     questioning authorship, problematizing the way of relate to reality. Those concepts intersect in the training.
      • Training à is looking at endurance process engaging art/life. As any training, is linked to a way of face knowledge in process education. As any training, is looking for preparing and contextualizing practice focus on elasticity, concentration, balance and  coordination of different task.
      • Research à this word is so full of meaning. It seems like the word “research” gives to the frame of “Artistic Research” another status. More powerful, more legitimated, as the word “art” wasn´t enough or wasn’t already legitimated. So, that´s why TRT is also busy with the critic of the device called Artistic Research. I am here in front of a paradox: I am engaging with TRT as a device to do Artistic Research that is also criticizing the device of Artistic Research. Esto acarrea un gran peligro, this brings me to another problem, that I will address later.
      • Inspired by migration for privileges, TRT is a fiction in which I believe. And that is why we are in a church, because religions are fictions in which we believe. Somehow, TRT is my religion and it preaches confrontation between high and low culture thought translation. 
      • TRT has an Ecosystem of methodologies à  "more diversity more stable", interdependence, respect symbiosis practise (or plant) -territory, non-hierarchy, is bringing the ghost, or at least, it is inviting others. This methodology is based on transactivity practise: transoceanic reading  / Training transession / Trust in nothing (rest) / Translation addressing gender (exchange of role) in dance / Transdocument
      • Let´s say that TRT is looking at the FUTURE, is looking for the future, is looking through the future. It is trying to prepare better conditions for my work. What are the RESEARCH needs?
      • It offers services in the “transtructure". Services as the thinks that provides utility (satisfaction) to the consumer. In the literal understanding of intangible services offered by people. TRT offers the following services: method / piece / body practise/ a way of engage information.                                   And transtructure in Marxist terms. All of us are aware of difference between superstructure and infrastructure? Ok sorry Marx I don´t want to simplify you. Superstructure and infrastructure  - Just in order to simplify this, let´s imagine that infrastructure is the base of a house and superstructure is the roof. I am using now the same schema that we use to study Marxism.                Projection: the marxism house for explanaition (..........................)   infrastructure and structure (...)
      • But how did I arrive to this? So for the ones who don´t know too much what I did, I prepare this resume that summarizes all the key words or the important things and concept which I was busy with. - La gran pregunta es: qué persiste?   Trough those key words we can see some persistence --> Presentation of THE Artistic Research by Google Translator VOICE please listen HERE
      • Artistic research -->   You (-.............................) white and pretentious, wealthy middle class, coffee adict, MAC consumer, residences dependient, travelling all the time in the same little continent. This is for you, even tough is incomplete, bastard, super cheap. Because I think you need perreo: enterteiment mamita. Si necesitas reggaeton dale, sigue bailando mami no pares, acercate a mi pantalón dale, vamos a pegarnos como animales. Muevete a mi ritmo siente el magnetism. Feel the magnetism. You, symptom of artist going to legitimation in academia. I am so busy with you. I am so in love with you. I love you x4. Why? Because you gives us power. And power is so fantastic. Power makes thinks beauty. And beauty leads violence. And all of you, artistic research, you are so incredible amazing.   
      • I am so stuck in this obsession  / Everything is dark now - Everything is dark now - its blank its blank -You can comment This is the think - Responder sexy body Sexy body RESPONDER x 2  - This is from another old good song. YOU. Slippery, elitist, contradictory, indefinable. Why I am so addict to you? / You are afraid to travel because it contaminates. You are creating phd and a lot of position for what? You have the challenge of modify academia and what are you doing for that? Nothing, you are doing nothing. You are reproducing the same patriarchal standard of virility. Orden y progreso. Order insubordination submission.   subject object subject object  subject object subject object
      • I want to catch you, I want to get you, I want to be as you. I bless you here with a new name --> I will call you: ortgasmic research
      • Seductive, I must admit that I am so scared. Scared of not being heard by you, of not enter your circuit. Ortgasmic research: what happens if you don´t love me? 
      • And why this is so untranslable?                                Projection: the untranslable are motors, not obstacles     Temps de flèche
      • Affects of TRT --> (..............................................) Feed back is coming / Gracias

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

      A  FEED-BACK "emu", conmovido, casi sin palabras.

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

       

       

      End communication note:

      I choose to re-used the performance that I did at Kanal. That ´s why the presentation is called:

      "Pa-küru: 47 minutes of a bastard cheap lecture performance". 

       

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

      Interesting references: Donna Haraway last book / Marie Bardet about translation / Katie Briggs: This little art / The new code of conduct by Feminist Movement of Tango in Argentina / Sarah Amed (video) On complaint / Karen Barad: Transmaterialities / Sherry Simon again. 

    • NOT_index
    • 2nd block ... emboding translation
      03 September 2019
      posted by: Caterina Mora
    • case of: Caterina Mora
    •  

      HWD presentation - Photo from the "heaven"

       

      2nd Block, curated by Adva Zakai called MILIEUS, A.PASS MEETS SOL / SCHOOL OF LOVE     here the link

       

      Openning week

      The presentation focused on what I did in the 1st Block, my problems and how to open up the discussion around stereotype.

      I asked myself:  who I am and what is my position in this research? What is the relation between researcher and research? (because Yaguareté didn´t convinced me).

                       Methodological traps: am I becoming the thing that I am criticizing? // how to resist? // How to deal with the distance of context?

      Where I want to go?

      What can I add to the critical discussion?
      And how to bring Latin-american authors?  

      Is this Artistic Research? // Do I have a (THE) question of my research?

       

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

      Travel to Venice and what I want to remember from the Swamp School: I always expect to much of neoliberal events. The “gondoleros” have been using the same t-shirt (striped, a rayas, style "breton" T-shirt) since when? There are Madonnas everywhere in Italy.  I saw a italian misa. 

      I visited for first time the Biennal of Architecture. It was horrible. I saw in the Biennal an event about students in the Turkish Pavillion. I saw the presentation of a girl. She was the only women with velo talking between men. Her presentation it was about a refugee campus. She presented how refugees people build their houses in this campus: in vertical sense. Because there is no space to the side, there is a delimited territory. That´s why they built to up in generations.

      Also I saw belgium humour in it pavillion. It was important. 

      And "the common"? This travel was about that. I didn´t see too much "the common". Who relates to apass? Why are we here? What is doing "School of love" here? 

      I had a great time, I went to the beach and drank several aperol spritz.

      If the common is the one of Swamp School, I don´t want to be part of it. 

       

       

       

       

      Half way days

       

      The first time that I presented my obsession with translation HERE

       

      Why?

      How did I arrive to do translation?

      Because in my daily life I needed all the time Google Translator

      In order to bring this need for communication, I started to translate.

      Since then I have tried several forms of translation.
      - I became obsessed - 

      La necesidad y dependencia de usar un interlocutor para mi comunicación determinó mi práctica artística. 

      I started to trying it from BALLET to REGGAETON 

      How? 
      The firt thing that I did it was I look at ballet vocabulary, and how one WORD has a meanniing IN - FOR a gesture or movement.

       

      End presentation - PAF

      I tried the same structure of HWD. Here are excert of the script:

       

      Zero moment - Soft hanging out → ejercicio del eje/ warming up. 15 min

      Voice recorded with Google Translator: Hello everybody. hello, this is a Zero moment - Soft hanging out x 3 -          Please rest. lie down. Use the blankets in space. Could you like to warming up with me? Please inhale and exhale let the blood fall. You can follow me. Rebounds a bit, jump, move a bit the space. Shake out the wrists, each leg. Flexion in your knees and please not change of position. changing fingers. Give a punch with weight change and translate in the space. you can exhale and release your voice with a sound. You can be violent.

       

      Un première momento de explanation/transmission of what I am doing

      This is a translation of what I am doing at apass in this moment. And what is apass for me.

      First. When I got to apass I got excited because I saw in the university with two Macs. There are microphones that work, projectors, cameras. There is one person who helps us with the technique, another with residence papers, another who explains many times about the reimbursements. There is, above all, a general coordinator that contains the situation and who checks the ball. There is also a person who, through his artistic practice, heals the block, and this person will be criticized.

      Instead, I come from a university where projectors do not run, that does not consider cables, that does not provide space for rehearsal, that does not provide printers with endless paper.

      I feel rich in this context. I realized that it's a choice to work with concepts like trash bastards, simultaneity residue.

      Here we spend a lot of paper, it is printed in simple, a lot. We have an open library.

      Apass, is for me, even with ugly smell and smell of rat, a paradise that support our work.

      We even have a key and alarm to enter when we want,

      We have Mohamed who is the celebrant and sings when he cleans. With Mohamed I practice my French. We can buy books, we can pay mentors, we can travel with money from the university for what our project needs. People in apass, rotten food left in the refrigerator or in the closet.

      All this for what? To criticize you, me. BUT: what is critically? And who am I to criticize?  

      So that we focus on Artistic Research, which is a kind of legitimizing process that we are running after. These are our beautiful production conditions. Fuck Artistic Research. YOU. European, white and pretentious. Synthon of artist going to legitimation in academia. YOU. Slippery, elitist, contradictory, indefinable. We love you. Why? Because it gives us power. Why I came here to legitimate my practise? 

      Sometimes, really, I don’t know and I am thinking in become electrician.

      This place, Performing Arts Forum es muy emocionante. Xavier Le Roy went through here and it makes me very nervous to know that I am writing a thesis around the author's figure and that here he created part of the Product of Other Circumstances, nine years ago.

      About this work. This about translations. In effect, this text originally written in Spanish and translated by Google translator into English.

      I've become better using the translator, because you have to be specific and most of the time google is not that smart. Above all, you have to write short sentences.

      This deuxième moment of exposition / transpose of what I am doing tries to explain that I arrived to translation because it became a necessity of my daily life and artistic production. I must admit it was a little difficult to be engage with the translations. I feel scared for sharing this material with you, because are not complete, not virtuous, and quite arbitrary. As I already said, this translations are defined as cheap, bastard, slut or trash translations.

      And this way of production is recurrent in all my work. And when you realise your logic production, what is supporting your practise, why are you taking your aesthetic, ethic and political decision, your influences, your history, your interest, you become powerful.

      And now I understand why I'm here and I want that legitimation.

      Lilia told me at our first coordination session that people leave fortalecida. strengthened

      With the help of my mentors, I develop this format that above all, brings me closer to my background. In fact, the study of dance techniques, the reflection on performativity, the considerations around the relation movement and word and the pedagogical questioning about what the experience of a work of art implies, constitute a fundamental part of me. work before apass.

      I'm trying to not have the performance pressure, as Vladimir recommended, and to work with the fact that translations are not perfect, in Femke's words. With their help, and also Adva, Lilia and Kristien from he first block.

      Thanks all this people and of course you that are supporting my practise. And supporting me, you are changing me.

      Finally and as you already know, derniene moment, or troisieme partie, of mediation, transformation that is feed-back integrated into practice. I'll introduce it better later.

       

      At this moment I did the translations

      From Reggaeton to Cunningham Technique.

      From Graham Technique to Reaggaeton.

      And from Contemporary dance (Arenal) to Argentine folklore (Escondido and gato).

      3 - Este es el troisième momento experiencing/mediation/transformation of what I am doing.

       I invite you to take the same position of support, do 1 or to rotations and then change of partner. For HWD we did this but related to the untranslatable. For this occasion, I invite you to talk about what are the conditions of production that you can recognize are supporting you, that affects your work. in order to produce motivation or limitations or more. Or even, if you can recognize how and why are you busy with the things you're busy with.

      Please take the position. DO IT.

      Before to talk [ALWAYS] change of role. Last thing, also you can change of partner, of way of support each other, or even change of level, but not go to the floor.  Yes?

      Again if you need paper or write, there is here.

      I start but then I will try to keep silence. I am busy with privileges, pleasure and violence. So, as you see, privileges related to conditions of production, interiorization of violence through the techniques of dance. and pleasure as a source or force with potential disruptive.

       

      Here you can see some photos 

       

      In December 2018 I visited Argentina . I went to Buenos Aires, Fiske Menuco, Villarrica, and Santiago de Chile. 

       

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

      Important reading: Shery Simon (Gender in translation) / the matherials writen by me in Spanish about dance and text / phD Tesis by Eugenia Cadus about Dance History in Argentina / Bleshi Lleri / Poliamory / Decolonial approach (Mignolo).

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

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

      (this gift is made with images of the block)

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

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

      Abstract

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

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

      Description 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      Openning week

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

       

      Half way days  --> LONGER CRI and POCKET CRI

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

       

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

      4 min to propose / choose / set up               

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

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

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

      THOSE PHOTOS are only public for documentation. 

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

       

       

      Longer CRI
      Session II

      Invitation à The only proposition was bring Latin clothes.

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

       

      People were at the garden of where I live.

      It was a sunny day. 

      They marked in maps different places related to latin culture. 

      Here some pics

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

      In my room: 

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

      Here you can follow the lyrics

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

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

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

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

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

      short skirts skin shortsshort skirts skin shorts flat belly the motorcycle

      subjects objects x5

      or you just don't care

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

      Sexy ultimate sexy sexy ultimatelatino/latina
      gasoline spreads

      i find your spanish difficult to understand x2

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

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

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

       

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

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

       

      --

      End presentation - PAF

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

      Lyrics of Reggaeton 2 

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

      Fly movement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

      Somehow, I fell into my own trap.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        

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

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

       

    • Newsletter January 2019 13 January 2019
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

      24-25 May: THIS IS 1000 LITERS FUEL SO... @ Decoratelier

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

      4 till 30 June : PARALLEL-PARASITE @ Zsenne ArtLab. 

      30 April till 2 September: Block II 2018 - MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND  OTHER MATTERS…

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

      24 and 25 May, @ *Decoratelier. 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels

      Doors: 17:30, first performance 18:30, end: 22:00.

      a.pass end-communications of: 

      Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong,  Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi

      For this End-Communications, the six researches come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?

      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. 

      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. 

      Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. 

      Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. 

      Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist.

      Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

      *Decoratelier is an ongoing and constantly evolving project by autonomous artist in residence, Jozef Wouters.

       


       

      Scorescapes

      26 May @ *BREW, Schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene, 1000 Brussels

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

      Another iteration of the ScoreScapes research by curator Lilia Mestre took place in block 2017/II The problem of the score. The publication Medium Score - Tectonic Friendships is a reflection of that iteration. Together with the six a.pass researchers finishing the post-master program we decided to do a combined publication for the Medium Score and the End- Communications.

      Come to the book launch and have a chocolate cocktail with Shervin Kianersi Haghighi.

      *BREW is a new space in Brussels which organizes and hosts events and activities in the field of contemporary art. Initiators: Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at Zsenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, Lilia Mestre's proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such publicness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass).

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • Newsletter January 2019 13 January 2019
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

      24-25 May: THIS IS 1000 LITERS FUEL SO... @ Decoratelier

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

      4 till 30 June : PARALLEL-PARASITE @ Zsenne ArtLab. 

      30 April till 2 September: Block II 2018 - MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND  OTHER MATTERS…

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

      24 and 25 May, @ *Decoratelier. 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels

      Doors: 17:30, first performance 18:30, end: 22:00.

      a.pass end-communications of: 

      Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong,  Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi

      For this End-Communications, the six researches come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?

      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. 

      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. 

      Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. 

      Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. 

      Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist.

      Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

      *Decoratelier is an ongoing and constantly evolving project by autonomous artist in residence, Jozef Wouters.

       


       

      Scorescapes

      26 May @ *BREW, Schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene, 1000 Brussels

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

      Another iteration of the ScoreScapes research by curator Lilia Mestre took place in block 2017/II The problem of the score. The publication Medium Score - Tectonic Friendships is a reflection of that iteration. Together with the six a.pass researchers finishing the post-master program we decided to do a combined publication for the Medium Score and the End- Communications.

      Come to the book launch and have a chocolate cocktail with Shervin Kianersi Haghighi.

      *BREW is a new space in Brussels which organizes and hosts events and activities in the field of contemporary art. Initiators: Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at Zsenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, Lilia Mestre's proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such publicness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass).

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • BLOCK 2019/I UNSETTLED STUDY curated by Vladimir Miller
      03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • 07 January 2019
    • 31 March 2019
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • BLOCK 2019/I UNSETTLED STUDY
      Continuing the line of inquiry from Uninvited Research, Block 19/I will again come together around the questions of mobility, logistics and gestures of moving, settling and unsettling. All who research, work and support at apass including the Research Center, the administration, the curators and production support are invited to join the process.
       

      To initiate the building of an institution which can support study a.pass will host Settlement, a practice of being together while building the space for the individual and collective practices of research. Through a series of workshops with Philipp Gehmacher and Moritz Frischkorn and by presenting research to each other during the Half Way Days we will further develop this space into a multitude of individual research situations and scenographies. We aim to be able to move the resulting lecture performance spaces and works to KANAL Centre Pompidou Brussels and open them to the public of the Performatik Festival at the end of the block. We will perform and host this collective Unsettled Study as an intertwined complex space on two consecutive evenings. 
       
      +++
       
      Moten and Harney once described study in an interview in "Undercommons" as the moment of unruly togetherness before the teacher enters the classroom. Etymologically the word can be used for a process of inquiry as well as for the architectural space designated to this process within a building. In Moten and Harney study happens besides, in between, despite the institutional and curricular framework of a university and is deeply related to the unseen connectedness of the undercommons. They establish study as a valuable political tool and process within educational systems, a commoning practice which universities came to actively suppress instead of supporting it. Marginalized by the institution, study becomes the excess, the unseen extra of school. How can we undo this order and bring study back to be the common center of what we do?

       

      As partner of the Performatik Festival 2019 a.pass has been asked to contribute a larger project to the upcoming festival. The invitation of Performatik comes with/from a curatorial proposal to engage with Bauhaus and its implications, therefore the question of what is a school and how does it perform itself is equally interesting to the festival and to us. In response, we would like to continue the line of inquiry that the School of Love by the guest curator Adva Zakai has initiated and position study as unruly undercommons, an inquiry and a space in the center of a contemporary idea of school, which we claim should be an institution in support of study. 
       
      Moten and Harney envision study as a being-together framed by the classroom, even if the classroom is fugitive or imaginary. At a.pass this classroom is a gathering which is based in the mutual and the mutant, and in an engaged not-knowing that is decidedly non-academic, one that includes all the hear-say, weird intuitions and obsessing over a question that we sum up with the „artistic" in „artistic research“. We are taking this block to look again at the spatial manifestation of research in its architectural, material and components and their movement. We look at logistics of thought and material coming together to formulate a particular study, we look at the logistics of settling and unsettling again, of making and taking apart and re-making again with the hope of making a non-academic space to support our non-academic study.
       
    • Newsletter Setemberr 2018 13 November 2018
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

        
       

       

       

      READ MORE 


      A.PASS MEETS SOL / SCHOOL OF LOVE

      From September till November 2018

      A curatorial proposition by Adva Zakai 

      School Of Love will start a flirt with each other, develop a relationship and hopefully make (produce) love.

      SOL is a collective platform that was initiated some years ago*, inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world. SOL is practiced through regular meetings, but follows no curriculum. Instead, it develops a spontaneous program through the presence and interest of its participants.

      Now SOL is here, at a.pass, with a call to the participants to engage with their artistic researches through love itself. a.pass and SOL will get together, without knowing ahead what is going to happen, but with the trust that everything we live outside of SOL – artistic researches, experiences and desires – will manifest themselves inside SOL in a way we could not imagine elsewhere. And once this happens, maybe the difference between art and love will not be so obvious anymore..

      SOL will meet every Tuesday at a.pass and is open to anyone interested to take part. All welcome! A special introduction day into SOL: Tuesday 3rd september 10h – 18h.

      STUDY DAYS and WORKSHOPS – Non-a.pass participants who are interested to join – please contact a.pass lilia@apass.be or Adva advazakai@gmail.com

      READ MORE  


      a.pass Research Center

       

      This September marks the beginning of the first one-year-cycle of the apass Research Center. After being initiated as a plattform for the individual reasearch trajectories of the apass Associate Researchers, starting this year the Research Center is shifting to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for a shared one-year period.

      The apass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced reseach and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at apass.

      For the period of September ‘18 to August ‘19 we are happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the apass Research Center:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.

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

      Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy, museum studies, art and architectural history. His curatorial practice is focused on self-organised and co-operative formats in close association with cultural practitioners — consciously positioned on the margin of established institutions and outside of market oriented spaces, but in the middle of communities of cultural practitioners. Most recently he co-initiated That Might Be Right, an attempt to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

      Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.

      Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.

      Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.

      At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aestetics.

      Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practise dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, posthumanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.

      For the current block the Associate Researchers will be supported by Vladimir Miller as the Research Center curator and further on by Alex Arteaga for block I/19 and Pierre Rubio for Block II/19.

      Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturge. His practice aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of spatial production within ad-hoc groups and institutional environments by using fragility as a building principle.

       

       
       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • 1. TEXT FROM THE PUBLICATION OF THE END COMMUNICATIONS OF SEPTEMBER 2018

      The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show / Geert Vaes

      Kiosk @ Elizabeth Park

      14/09/18 and 15/09/18 at 18:00 and 22:00, 16/09 at 18:00 and 20:00

       

      'You are invited to be a guest and/or audience member at The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show.

      A talk show where we all will try to playfully disappear and grow closer. So who will you be? And who will you be talking to?'

       

      'U bent uitgenodigd als gast en/of publiek van The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show. Een talkshow waar we zullen proberen om spelenderwijs te verdwijnen en elkaar beter te leren kennen. Dus, wie zal je zijn? En met wie zal je praten?'

       

      أنت مدعو لتكون ضيفًا و / أو عضوًا في جمهور برنامج "من هو الذي تتحدث إليه”.

      برنامج حواري سنحاول من خلاله جميعاً أن نختفي بشكل هزلي. فمن ستكون؟ ومن هو الذي سوف تتحدث إليه؟

       

      'Vous êtes invités à participer et/ou à assister au talk show :'Avec qui parlez-vous?'. Une conversation-performance où nous essaierons tous de nous amuser à disparaître. Alors, quel rôle jouerez-vous? Et avec qui allez-vous parler vraiment?'

       

      THE WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO TALK SHOW

      ‘Everything is Fiction.’

      It was 1980-something. I was a kid and I used the meadow at the back of our house as a playground. We kept chickens, goats, sometimes a sheep or two and Fik, the donkey.

      These pictures are taken after the rooster got stuck in a bread bag. After I saw him doing it for the first time, I made sure to always bring empty bread bags for him. I knew he would put his head in them, peck away at the remaining crumbs and eventually become so eager for more that he would get stuck until I would come to his rescue.

      The rooster didn’t know he was putting on a mask. Disappearing. Changing form. Shapeshifting into a creature that is half white bag, half a rooster’s bum and legs. By wearing the bag he draws attention, becomes something out of the ordinary. By showing less of his rooster-ness, he became more interesting to me. My aim as a performer has always been disappearing, going beyond the ‘I’, stepping into the unknown without knowing what will be the result of the exercise. The mask is a supreme way of vanishing and coming out the other end as more than I could possibly imagine.

      Putting on a bag is also a way of surrendering to the unknown. The rooster gets lured in by the promise of more crumbs. I get lured in by the promise of a heightened state of play. The rooster’s eagerness for food is my eagerness for play. The mask becomes the stage. The mask doesn’t need the physical space called theatre. The mask is the theatre. The false face is the battlefield and the playground where sense, nonsense and no sense fight for attention. Inside and outside the mask a sense of excitement and freedom reigns. The mask destabilizes the wearer and the observer. The rooster on the picture is obviously lost and doesn’t know up from down (he always needed to be rescued), and I, the observer, would always be mesmerized by the absurdity of the situation.

       

      I use the mask to disappear. And I invite you, the public, to also disappear. To become part of the process and to flow with whatever is being presented, to let ‘something else, something unspoken and unspeakable’ take over. I feel the need to explore the space between you and I. This space is the meeting point, the place where sharing occurs.

       

      I thrive on improvisation. This doesn’t mean that anything goes, though. It’s all about adopting a mindset that wants to shed the walls of the practice, make visible the mechanics and lay bare the inner and outer workings of the process.

       

      Wittgenstein once wrote an allegory where he describes mankind as living under a red glass bell. There are three ways of dealing with this, he says. One way is represented by people who are oblivious to the fact that they are living under a red glass bell, they see everything is red and go about their lives without thinking about it. Then there are people who realize that something is not completely right, they investigate and get close to the glass where they can touch the bell, but instead of doing something with this new knowledge they return to the middle and go about their lives. According to Wittgenstein, these people tend to become humorous or melancholic. Finally, there’s a third kind: the ones who try to break through the glass bell and aspire to see the actual light without the interference of the red glass.

       

      I ‘d like to invite you to take a stroll outside the glass bell with me. Hoping you might start to notice that what we call ‘I’ is a story. What we call ‘history’ is a story. What we call the world, a country, who we are, where we are,... are collections of stories.

       

      Note to self: These words I am writing (the same ones you are reading) are similarly building blocks of yet another story I tell myself (and you).

       

      I want to be your tour guide, to unmask the collection of narratives we surround yourselves with. What you do next, is up to you. You are free to ignore everything, to build a house at the edge, to try to break through or to go back to the middle and become a melancholic.

       

      In stating that everything is fiction, I also state that everything we are constantly doing is staging our own drama’s, comedies, thrillers… The notable mister Shakespeare observed it quite strikingly: ‘The world’s a stage, and each must play a part’.

       

      Using theatrical tools in non-theatrical situations alongside deconstructing or extrapolating ‘the theatrical’ has always fascinated me. Using performance as a tool to try to create awareness about our personal and societal conditioning (the grabbag of narratives) is very important to me. The theatrical is the place where I can investigate and work with the narratives, those given to us and the ones we create ourselves through an unending process of copy-pasting. I discovered that the theatre has the potential to show me my dependence on these narratives. That’s why I love to inject the fictional into the real without saying what is real and what isn’t. It is disrupting the logic of the stories we tell ourselves. Taking the character out of the play stirs something essential in people: their obsession with believing and disbelieving and their fears around sanity and insanity.

      There’s a story I once heard where a man visits his friend in the insane asylum. When the friend asks how are you, the man says: ‘Great! You see these walls here? They protect me from the crazy people outside. You should try to get in too, so you’ll be protected from the madness on the outside.’ Inside the mask, it feels more easy to see the fiction on the outside. I am very inspired by what the Situationists, the Dadaists or comedy genius Andy Kaufman did. They were all busy trying to make cracks in the ruling narrative. I think Andy Kaufman put it very, very well:

       

      What’s real? What’s not? That’s what I do in my act. Test how other people deal with reality.

      Yes, theatre is magic. For when I walk into a room as a character, the room changes. My reality changes but yours is also changing because you have only two options: you are playing along or you aren’t.

       

      It all comes down to giving and taking. And this only becomes possible when there’s a willingness from both parties (you and me) to engage and discover together. What’s required is openness, an attitude of trust and the willingness to spend some time together in order to be inspired, entertained, taught, surprised,...

       

      Participation is all about one pair of eyes looking straight into another pair of eyes sharing that moment of recognition. After all is said and done, the most important thing is other people (you!). And the closest I can get to you is by looking into your eyes. Especially when I look through the eyes of the mask. And this can be scary.

       

      When I put on a mask I take a risk, when I ask you to wear a mask I ask you to take a risk. The risk is to tread unknown ground. Inside the mask I may feel like an impostor, I may feel like other people know something’s wrong, I may feel like I’m losing control. When I put on a mask my senses heighten. It is impossible to sleepwalk because everything is different. This may cause excitement or fear. I am seen differently by others. The people I know don’t recognize me. My dog barks at me. I start to interact very differently with my surroundings but also with myself. When I wore my old man mask for the first time I noticed young people didn’t see me. The only eye contact I could make was with other old people. The world changed, people bumped into me. I became invisible for most and all of a sudden of interest to others. It changed my perspective on my surroundings but also on myself. I became another so to speak. When I change physically, the world and my place in it changes, and the way I participate in it too. I suddenly find myself venturing into a liberating state of play. And I believe playing together is one of the highest forms of contact we can achieve.

       

      So, could I ask you now to pretend to be a rooster?

       

      References

       

      Swami Premodaya (Satsang, ‘You experience what you expect to experience.’, ‘Your perceptions are your limitations.’), Swami Prem Prasad (‘Freedom through De-Conditioning’), OSHO (‘The Path of the Mystic’), Meher Baba, Adrian Piper (‘Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness’), Stuart Price (‘I’m lost in the space between the concept and the execution’, ‘I’m stuck in the void between the instinct and the institution’), Ludwig Wittgenstein (‘Licht en schaduw: een droom en een brief over religie.’), Martin Buber (‘I and Thou’), Caroline Astell-Burt (‘I am the story’), Robert J. Landy (‘Persona and Performance’), Luigi Pirandello, Hannah Arendt (‘Lying in Politics’), Sören Kierkegaard (‘...the jump into the absurd...’), Codrescu (The Posthuman Dada Guide), Robert Crichton (‘The Great Impostor’), Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Eli Jaxon-Bear (‘Sudden Awakening’), Andy Kaufman, Bourdieu (‘Identity is given, not created’), Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, one man continuously calling me ‘Christophe’ in Morocco and my irritation with that, Rabia of Basra, Artaud, Frantz Fanon (‘Black Skin, White Masks’), Reni Eddo-Lodge (‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’), Nassim Taleb (‘Antifragile’), James Baldwin (‘The Fire Next Time’), John Cage (‘Silence’), Lou Reed’s rendition of ‘This Magic Moment’, Tommy Maitland, Mike Myers, The Gong Show, Sarah Paulson, Kokoroko, Fanna-Fi-Allah, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Anandamayi Ma, Gangaji (‘Hidden Treasure’), RuPaul’s Drag Race, Tony Clifton, Charles Aznavour, Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen, Peggy Pierrot, Kate Rich, Geert Opsomer, Sara Manente, Heike Langsdorf, Sina Seifee, Michael Sugich (‘Signs on the Horizons’), Abdelwahab Meddeb (‘Instants soufis’), Ranchor Prime (‘The Birth of Kirtan’), Shomari Dev, Loka Dev, Jai Dev

       

      2. TEXT OF THE PORTFOLIO

       

      EVERYTHING IS FICTION



      12 MUSINGS ABOUT MY RESEARCH


      Geert Vaes

      a.pass end communications

      (September 2017 - September 2018)




      “You, I and It walk into the World. I love to get close to You, I love to know You. You love to get close to I. You love to know I.

       

      I see You. I recognize You. I approach You. You don’t recognize I. Because I am wearing It. You tell It You are waiting for I. It starts a conversation with You. You show I another side of You because You are not talking to I but to It.

       

      It shows I You. I tell You I was using It to learn to know You. I lend You It to let me know You more too. We use It to get closer. It makes I love You and You love I. It creates US.”



      From the writing workshop with Peter Stamer in Block I (Vladimir Miller): ‘Your research told as a joke’

       

      1. The Rooster and the Bread Bag

      It was 1980-something. I was a kid and used the meadow at the back of our house as a playground. We kept chickens, goats, sometimes a sheep or two and Fik, the donkey.

      This picture is taken after the rooster got stuck in a bread bag. After seeing him doing it once I made sure to bring the empty bread bags for him. I knew he would get his head in, peck away at the remaining crumbs and eventually become so eager for more that he would get stuck until I would come to his rescue.

      The rooster didn’t know he was putting on a mask. Disappearing. Changing form. Shapeshifting into a creature that is half white bag, half a rooster’s bum and legs. By having the bag on he draws attention, becomes something out of the ordinary. By showing less of his rooster-ness, he becomes of more interest to the observer, in this case, me. My aim as a performer has always been disappearing, going beyond the ‘I’, stepping into the unknown without knowing what will be the result of this exercise. The mask is a supreme way of vanishing and coming out the other end as more than I can possibly imagine.

      Putting on a bag is also a way of surrendering to the unknown. The rooster gets lured in by the promise of more crumbs. I get lured in by the promise of a heightened state of play. The rooster’s eagerness for food is my eagerness for play. The mask becomes the stage. The mask doesn’t need the physical space called theatre. The mask is the theatre. The false face is the battlefield and playground where sense, nonsense and no sense fight for attention. Inside and outside the mask a sense of excitement and freedom reigns. The mask destabilizes the wearer and the observer, as is the case with the rooster. He is obviously lost and doesn’t know up from down (he always needed to be rescued), and I the observer would always be mesmerized by the absurdity of the situation. My interest in masking and disappearing awakened.

      ‘The mask as a tool of awareness. The proposed research aims to investigate how hyper-realistic silicone spfx-masks can be used as tools of awareness to shed more light on race, gender and class issues in an experiential, sensual and non-mental way. How to help performers and non-performers create another persona and let them experience how it feels to literally be in somebody else’s skin, wearing another one’s face in non-theatrical daily situations. How does this change their perspectives? Or doesn’t it change anything? How does this, in a broader sense, affect the notions of ‚I’ and ‚You’? How does it affect one’s outlook on one’s own community, conditioning, and beliefs?’

      This is the first paragraph of the research proposal I sent to a.pass in May 2017.

      Some of the questions I had, deepened and became richer, others faded into the background.

      What seems to be at the heart of the research is that I invite you to look through a different lens. And while looking through this lens, maybe you will see that everything is a construction of stories. What we call ‘I’ is a story. What we call ‘history’ is a story. What we call the world, a country, who we are, where we are,... It’s all a collection of stories. Our lives are collections of stories we build upon. These stories crystalize into the more or less cohesive narrative called ‘I’.

      So, we are surrounded by narratives, constructions, stories. We create them ourselves, they are created for us, we copy paste, add personal touches. We are inevitably moving through a narrative minefield: history, science, religion, countries, economics, politics, philosophy, love, you’s and I’s,...  Narratives are given to us but we actively rearrange them through an unending process of copy-pasting. We are all very creative in writing our own scripts, fitting our scripts into the bigger narrative, creating a dazzling array of storylines upon storylines.

      As a child, like many children, I was often busy dressing up as someone else, to the delight of my mother who would always be ready to take pictures. In creating other personas I found a way out of the narrative I was inhabiting. Later came my calling to study theatre and I became an actor and performer. Revisiting these pictures I realized: ‘I have been doing this since forever...’. What initially was just a very naive reflex: putting on clothes that were not mine and playacting and believing I was someone else, turned into a profession. I found the safe haven for transformation in the theatre. Later I started to take this urge to transform to the street, and in doing this I noticed the street transformed as well. By bringing the theatrical reflex into the street, the street becomes another character. In using this theatrical tool I hope to pierce through the veils knit together by the narratives surrounding us, and in doing so create more awareness.

       

      Wittgenstein once wrote an allegory where he describes mankind as living under a red glass bell. There are three ways of dealing with this, he says. One way is represented by people who are oblivious to the fact that they are living under a red glass bell, they see everything is red and go about their lives without thinking about it. Then there are people who realize that something is not completely right, they investigate and get close to the glass where they can touch the bell, but instead of doing something with this new knowledge they return to the middle and go about their lives. According to Wittgenstein, these people tend to become humorous or melancholic. Finally, there’s a third kind: the ones who try to break through the glass bell and aspire to see the actual light without the interference of the red glass.

      Wittgenstein’s allegory is related to Plato’s Cave. Plenty of similar allegorical examples can be found in mystical texts throughout the ages. What these metaphors and allegories all point at is that there is the possibility to look through the story, the mold, the mask. Using masks gives us the potential to become more aware of the multitude of masks and stories we surround ourselves with. Becoming aware of this we can generate more choices for ourselves. By using masks as tools we can address our biases and judgments and are able to reveal society's. With masks, we perform in the unconscious field of signs. We briefly are able to lose control and to step beyond our ideas of limitation.

      We all are master storytellers and interpreters. As long as we are all believers in all the narrative constructions surrounding us, we are doomed to live as characters in the fairytales we construct for ourselves and others. ‘The world’s a stage, each must play its part’ is a very striking observation of how we live.



      1. The Seemingly Empty Stage

      It’s 1980-something and this was my first ever performance. I am not visible. But I know I was there. The picture shows some audience member’s arms moving at the music. I am singing ‘We Are The World’ and attempting to do all the different voices (Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dion Warwick, Cyndi Lauper, Diana Ross, Bruce Springsteen, Al Jarreau, Huey Lewis, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles,...). I am very shy and I feel I’m turning completely red, but the fun of using different voices somehow pulls me through. It makes perfect sense I am not in the picture. It was another exercise in disappearing. The stage is the place for the performer to disappear and step out of her/his skin and turn into something more real than he or she could ever be. The audience is also not visible. The audience’s role is similar to that of the performer. Each member of the audience sheds its bag of flesh and bones and becomes part of The Play.

      My medium is theatre. I literally see everything as theatre. I think in terms of actors and audience, on stage and off stage, playing, rehearsing, improvising,... In stating that everything is fiction, I also state that everything we are constantly doing is staging our own drama’s, comedies, thrillers, musicals,... Everything is theatre. Therefore I like to infuse ‘reality’ with even more theatrical elements. Introducing a fictional character into the world but not telling he/she is fictional opens up lots of potentials to show the theatricality of the real. The theatre is a safe place when it does its work in the theatre space, but whenever theatre breaks out of the walls, then its potential becomes more dangerous, more subversive, more disruptive.

      Using theatrical tools in non-theatrical situations alongside deconstructing or extrapolating ‘the theatrical’ has always fascinated me. Using performance as a tool to try to create awareness about our personal and societal conditioning (the grabbag of narratives) is very important to me. The theatrical is the place where I can investigate and work with the narratives, those given to us and the ones we create ourselves through an unending process of copy-pasting. I discovered that the theatre has the potential to show me my dependence on these narratives. That’s why I love to inject the fictional into the real without saying what is real and what isn’t. It is disrupting the logic of the stories we tell ourselves. Taking the character out of the play stirs something essential in people: their obsession with believing and disbelieving and their fears around sanity and insanity.

      There’s a story I once heard where a man visits his friend in the insane asylum. When the friend asks how are you, the man says: ‘Great! You see these walls here? They protect me from the crazy people outside. You should try to get in too, so you’ll be protected from the madness on the outside.’ Inside the mask, it feels more easy to see the fiction on the outside. I am very inspired by what the Situationists, the Dadaists or comedy genius Andy Kaufman did. They were all busy trying to make cracks in the ruling narrative. I think Andy Kaufman put it very, very well:

      What’s real? What’s not? That’s what I do in my act, test how other people deal with reality.

      1. My beloved grandmother Marie, the playground and a little clown.

      It’s 1980 something and it’s the day to celebrate carnival. Mimi (Marie) is posing with me. I am dressed like a Native American although the hat and nose are confusing the image a bit. I am pretty sure this picture was taken before or after the yearly school kids’ parade through the village. When talking about masking and disappearing and reappearing it is impossible not to talk about Carnival, the time of the year where it is allowed to change at will, to put down the burden called ‘you’ or ‘I’. We are all fools playing the fool’s games. And carnival makes us aware of this. The parade is an outside stage in the street. Streets are generally not safe havens for performance or theatre but the group aspect of a parade turns it again into a safe space allowing the inner playfulness to come out.

      During my year in a.pass I held my experiments back and forth between the safe (inside the building of a.pass, the ‘4th Floor’, and with fellow a.passees) and the riskful (outside a.pass, in the street, with the people occupying the street at that particular moment in time). It became an important part of my research in a.pass. I learned to understand more the difference between IN and OUT. Inside the mask, outside the mask. Inside the safe haven (‘theatre space’), outside in the great wide open (no literal ‘theatre space’). Me inside my propositions, out of them or in and out of them. The dynamics change radically when I allow myself to be a player in my own frame, or when I am instigating and holding space for others to play. I am always searching for ways to let people participate. So when I started working with masks, besides the joy of me putting them on and playing with them, I also felt the urge to share the mask. To let the audience also experience the inside of the mask, to let them look through the eyes of the mask. The first time I realized this could work was with a presentation I held during the Halfway Days in my second block (curated by Nicolas Galeazzi). I created a small TV studio with a score. Two persons: one puts on a mask and different clothes, and in doing so turns into the character called Johannes Bouma, the other person asks questions to Johannes about the research of the actual person wearing the mask of Johannes. Everything is recorded by a camera placed in front. Here, for the first time, the mask started to work as a tool of awareness. People who normally weren’t very good at talking about their own work, were very clear talking about themselves and their work (as Johannes). Others started to realize things about their work in relation to the public. They started to relate differently to themselves and to the person questioning them. The mask mirrored, mimicked and magnified the person and his/her research.

      1. The Farmer and the Widow

      .

      It was 1980-something and I probably wanted to feel the rush of disguising again… These pictures are all about a Flanders and its rural identity. Rural Flanders where my ancestors all come from. I am only the 2nd generation non-farmer. In these pictures, there’s clear evidence of remnants of ‘peasantry’. The traditional stove, the ‘fermette’ (a type of house that became in fashion again in the 80’s when people started to build new houses to look like old farms). These ‘fermettes’ are masks of what once was. The figures I portray are also molds from the past catapulted into that present moment when the picture was taken. I embodied my ancestors. The widow is my great-grandmother who I only know through pictures. The farmer could represent either of my grandfathers.

      During Block I (Vladimir Miller), when we were asked to prepare an excursion for the Halfway Days, I focused on my own personal flemish identity by visiting an amateur company rehearsing ‘Het Gezin Van Paemel’. This is the invitation I sent:

      'Het Gezin Van Paemel' (The Family Van Paemel) by Cyriel Buysse is a 114-year old theatre piece that's still showing the flemish what it means to be Flemish. The excursion will bring us to an amateur theatre company rehearsing the piece. Why are they, and with them, lots of other amateur companies, still so interested in this piece? Why am I? My questioning will be mainly about one scene in particular: the son who goes to tell his father he's leaving for America. An America he only knows through stories, an America that personifies a better life. How is this flemish identity created (the I) by the staying and the leaving? And how is America (the other) created? And isn't all emigrating originating in the America of the soul? How is this construction of I a mask/conditioning? How is history as a re-construction keeping in place all these notions? How will I go from here to using masks again? How will I finally get out of Flanders?

      I made a detour from literal masking to the metaphorical mask, in this case: a theatre piece. The piece was first written and produced in 1903. Since then it has become a standard in Flemish theatre, and mainly in amateur theatre. It has been performed continuously since the first performance up until now. The piece is a Flemish classic. It portrays peasant life in 19th century Flanders and still now the piece is revered as a flemish icon. It is a naturalistic piece narrating the misery and heroism of a peasant family: the poor ‘pater familias’ and his obedient wife, one son got crippled because the baron’s son accidentally shot him, one daughter is more Catholic than the pope, another one is made pregnant by the baron’s son, another son has to join the army and shoot at the socialists, yet another son is a socialist,... My excursion took us to Tielen, a small village in the province of Antwerp, in the region called ‘De Kempen’, a provincial, rural area. The local company ‘Tejater De Orchidee’ was rehearsing their version of the piece and I was interested in how and why they made this flemish classic. We were allowed to come and watch the rehearsals and talk with the cast and the director.

      The piece was significant to me because of its resonance. I remembered as a kid watching the movie they made after the theatre piece. There’s one iconic scene at the end of the movie when the oldest son goes to visit his father and says: ‘Father, I’m going to America.’ He invites his parents to go with him, to go for a better life. But the father is stubborn and tells the son he will not leave the ground his ancestors are buried in. This piece is all about identity and roots and therefore it has been performed again and again to flemish audiences. It holds up a mirror of heroism, and ‘we always overcome hardship because us, Flemish, we work and work and work’. I was wondering how much this piece still influences the ‘flemish identity’. I never really understood what that meant. ‘Het Gezin Van Paemel’ has helped and is helping to construct this narrative.

      Looking at the mask, through the mask of the piece helped me to understand better the myth of identity. It was very revealing for me to talk with the local actors and to hear their answers to some of the questions I had. I remember one of the young men talking about staying in the village because it felt safe.

      The local company’ made one significant change to the piece. In the final scene of the written piece, the old father and mother stay behind while all the children have moved or are about to move to America. In the piece as rehearsed by ‘Tejater De Orchidee’, the old father stays behind alone while his wife also moves to America. The last scene became a heroic monologue of the aging man who gets left behind. ‘I will not move from the land my ancestors are buried in. I will stay and work, work, work.’ It wasn’t meant to be a commentary on migration, but it became a quite dubious one. Heroism masking the true reasons behind migration.

      Theatre as a mask, a mirror, a lens, a prism… This excursion rekindled my thinking about and interest in theatre. It made me realize how -I talked about it on the first pages- theatre still is the medium I work with. The excursion made me also think about history (personal and national) as a mask.

      1. Black Lola from the Striptease Bar

       

      It was 1980-something and in this picture, I personify Zwarte Lola (Black Lola), a Dutch singer infamous in the 1970’s and 1980’s in the Low Countries because of her -according to that era’s norms- raunchy lyrics and stage presence.  

      Dressing up as a girl -and especially this one!- was exciting, mainly because of the reactions of my mother, sister, and niece. I also remember my dad not being sure about what was going on. It was interesting to my young mind to see the effect of changing gender roles. It unconsciously released some tensions for me around the male and female stories we tell ourselves. And it showed me once again the impact of play and dress.

      In my initial research proposal, I wanted to focus on race, gender, and class. During the research, I started to focus on more basic questions: What do these masks do? What does changing your appearance actually mean?

      To work with these more basic questions I tried out ‘Moustache’ at ‘Don’t eat The Microphone’ in Gent with Pierre Rubio (curator Block III). Inspired by Adrian Piper’s essay ‘Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness’ (see p.22-24), we went to the garden the hosts of DETM inhabited and invited participants to create mustaches and by doing so alter their face and outlook and reflect on identity and the stories we create.

      In my third block  I made 4 sketches (short experiments): ‘Moustache’, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are You?’, ‘Stories, Stories’. This block was all about trying out different ways in how to use my new masks because the 5 of them had finally arrived in June after waiting almost 6 months (they had a delay of 4 months). This meant I had 7 masks in total now. So I wanted to see how they worked. More about ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are You?’, ‘Stories, Stories’ later on in this text.

       

      1. My Second Holy Communion as a girl.

      It was 1980-something and I’m at Mimi’s. She showed me my sister’s old Second Holy Communion dress with bag and gloves. I put it on. This was the first time I didn’t put in extra effort to have a wig, make-up, or anything. No, it was me in my sister’s dress. Here I realized the comical potential of it. I was a bit older and more self-aware. I knew that I was a boy and that boys aren’t supposed to wear dresses. This was a seminal moment for the joy is also a joy of knowing I can be subversive by willing to break through conditioning. This is the first time I became conscious about that. The smirk on my face is a very self-aware smirk. ‘Look at me, ain’t I just hilarious and foolish? Don’t you just love my daring silliness?’

      It’s like I discovered fire. Before it all was just a lot of fun. Now my innocence got infused with a sense of danger and seemingly unlimited possibilities.

      One of the 4 earlier mentioned sketches in my third block was ‘Who am I?’.

      ‘Who Am I?’ was performed at Zsenne Gallery in the center. Outside the gallery is a small square which our group of researchers inhabited for our Halfway Days that Block. I was sitting on a chair, next to a mirror, at the edge of the square, facing the gallery. I had a sign reading ‘Who Am I’. I had a suitcase next to me with masks, clothes, and objects. In front of me, I’d put a small table with two chairs. On the table were pens, questionnaires to be filled in by visitors and objects changing per character. I was sitting on a chair facing the people at the table, changing every 45 minutes mask and clothing and objects on the table. The visitors were asked to fill out the questionnaire which had questions about who they saw in front of them: ‘What’s my name? Where am I from? Am I married? What do you and I have in common? …’. I was being watched but I was also the watcher, looking at people thinking hard about what to write. Both parties (the people at the table and me) were sniffing each other and trying to make sense. The written responses were revealing. They showed biases but also a willingness to understand. This exercise showed me the necessity of good and meaningful questions. The better the question, the more meaningful the response becomes.

       

      1. The Real Cowboy from Begijnendijk

      It was 1980-something and I am posing on a horse in Bobbejaanland. It’s a theme park built by Bobbejaan Schoepen, a flemish cowboy who made a career first as a singer, then as a theme park owner. The park was all about the Wild West (it still exists to this day). Bobbejaan died, but when he was still around he would drive through the theme park in his big American convertible dressed up as a cowboy. As a kid, I thought Bobbejaan was awesome. Here’s an adult man, in Belgium, Flanders, who pulls it off to be a cowboy. My dream was not necessarily to become Bobbejaan or a cowboy, I think I was intrigued by the sense of freedom he represented. He was free from the flemish mold, he recreated himself. He was Bobbejaan. How easy it could be to get out... This picture is important because whenever I was on a horse (although most of the time I was riding a donkey or a ram because we didn’t own a horse) I disappeared and became a cowboy on the prairie. I completely identified with the mask I chose and by doing so stepped out of the mask I was expected to wear in daily life.

      I love to give people the opportunity to become someone else, to step out of the mold. This is one of the core themes of my research. Becoming...

      Another sketch I made in Block III was called ‘Who Are You?’. Here I invited my a.pass colleagues to work in groups of two. One person was the shapeshifter (put on a mask and disguise, create a new character) and the other one was her/his chaperone. Then they had the possibility to spend the afternoon in the city at a location of their choosing. The role of the chaperone became very important. The chaperone is the link between the masked one and the unmasked ones. He/She is not only a safety guard but also part of the narrative. She/He plays along. The duos automatically created backstories between each other (‘She was my girlfriend and assistant’, ‘I was his caretaker.’).  Becoming another with an accomplice adds to the experience, for in dialogue you are more aware of what you project and what others project on you. The accomplice became the mirror.

      Ideally, this experiment should’ve been held over a couple of days. My initial plan was to start with basic acting exercises, then to extensively create a character, then to go to a well-pondered place in the city, everything is done with the possibility for the duo’s to switch roles.

      I have been trying out this format in the past and would like to continue working with it in the future. Taking time is a very important factor I learned. Two examples (1. from the past, 2. in the future):

      1. Some years ago I gave a workshop in Helsinki called ‘Pretend To Be Old’. I was playing the character of Walter Bourdin (with one of my highly realistic silicone masks). Walter helped the people to create wrinkles with liquid latex and chalk powder. The persons attending the workshop attached weights to their joints and on their backs in order to move more like an aged person, they changed their voices, and eventually, we walked through Helsinki in a parade of fake old people. After the workshop, we sat together to talk about our experiences. People were very positive: they had had very new and unexpected experiences in pretending to be old.

       

      1. In my second block, I had the artist and economist Kate Rich as a mentor. One idea I briefly developed with her was to use Airbnb for my work. Airbnb started to offer the possibility to advertise Experiences. The experience I want to create is giving tourists the opportunity to visit Brussels as somebody else. I would venture into the field of micro-tourism. I invite tourists to travel into someone else’s skin. I want to offer a two-day experience:

       

      Day 1: performance workshop ‘Find your other you’ (4 hours)

      Day 2: Explore Brussels as the other you. At the end of the day, I cook for you and we chat about the experience. (4 hours)

       

       

      1. The hippie and the punk

       

      It’s 1980-something and I’m a punk and a hippie. These roles I chose myself, knowing they were roles to play, not roles to be identified with completely (as I did with the cowboy). Here I was semi-consciously trying out subversive roles. Roles that wouldn’t have been tolerated within my family or village. Not that I really knew what these roles were about but I had enough sense from watching television that these stereotypes were considered to be highly problematic: ‘They don’t want to work.’ ‘They let everything go to waste.’, ‘They destroy stuff.’ ‘They don’t follow the rules.’ Not following the rules was something that interested me very much, but I wasn’t very good at it. I was a very law-abiding child and was horrified about getting punished.

      At a.pass I started to become aware of the fact that my masking game was potentially problematic. Mainly because I also wanted to experiment with gender and race. I wasn’t fully aware of the minefield I was stepping into.

      Another sketch I did in my third block  was ‘Stories, Stories’:

      I asked people who visited me if they were interested in trying on some of my masks. I took a picture and interviewed the masked person, asking very basic questions: ‘What’s your name? Where are you from? What are your hobbies?...’. I recorded the Q&A and put the answers (without the questions) into a text file, leaving me in the end with a picture and a written piece of information (A4) imagined by the wearer of the mask. I also went out into the park and asked strangers whether they’d be interested in trying on a mask, get a picture taken and interview. This resulted in 11 pictures and 11 texts which I presented to my fellow researchers on a table: matching the pictures with text (2 A4’s placed next to each other). It looked like a possible book (the talk show as a book?), in which I created a kaleidoscope of ideas and biases of people in Koekelberg (the 11 pictures and texts were all taken in Koekelberg).

      My questions could’ve been better, but I still think there’s a lot of revealing potential in this exercise. What happens when I take my masks to another place in the world? What does it mean there to pretend to be white for instance? What are the ideas we carry around? Like the ideas, I had about hippies and punks. These clichés are fertile ground to explore further.

      Also, what could we learn from putting the biases (imagined stories) from people in Koekelberg, next to those of Matonge, next to those of Ukkel,... Or how about the biases of people in Senegal, next to the ones of people in Canada, in Sweden, in India,...?












      1. Miss Piggy

      It is 1980-something and I’m relaxing on the couch as Miss Piggy. One of my first actual maskings. I remember the thrill of sitting on that couch and consciously playing with the proposed sexuality of the image. The mask helped me not to worry about ‘me’. I wasn’t ‘me’, I was Miss Piggy all the way. Even my mother taking the picture was a bit disturbed, she felt I was exaggerating. This was probably the last picture taken of me dressing up. Maybe we reached a point where we didn’t feel in control anymore. After this, I stopped play-dressing for quite a while. I had become a teenager, I was around 12 years old when this picture was taken. Only at the end of my teens, I would taste the sweetness of confusing other people again…

      This brings me back to Andy Kaufman. An important moment as a ‘player’,  ‘performer’, ‘artist’ was to learn to know Andy Kaufman. He brought playing to a whole new level. He turned it into more than just entertainment, he turned it into art, raising questions just for the sake of raising questions. Disturbing the status quo. Rocking the boat. Who are you? What do you believe? Is this really true? As in the quote I already put: ‘I am testing how other people deal with reality.’ Kaufman was not interested in making people laugh, although he was considered to be a comedian. He said: ‘I never told a joke in my life’. He just wanted to stir something in his audience. Anything. I also think this confusion is a good thing. It has the potential to wake you up. I have very vivid memories (not only because of the pictures) of all the disguising I did as a kid. Those were very alive moments, heightened states. And I have been chasing them ever since the first time I tasted the joy of pretending to be someone else. My research turned into an ode to play and rekindled my love for the theatre.

       

      10. Sharing with Tommie

      It was 1980-something and I’m sharing with Tommie. She was my pet poodle and my best friend from when I was 6 until 12. On the picture, I am sharing an ice cream with her. The ice cream reminds me of a microphone. I love microphones. That’s one of the reasons why I love the format of the Talk Show so much.

      For the last six months, I have been working with this format. Extrapolating its elements and abstracting them. One example was the first presentation of my third block:

      I created a literal Talk Show setting. Three chairs for the guest and one chair for the host separated by a big plant. There was a microphone. Mirrors, and an audience space. I was playing Walter Bourdin (old man mask) and I invited 3 fellow researchers to come up and take a seat. They could each choose one cut out picture of my face (Geert). Each picture-mask had a different facial expression: Angry Geert, Happy Geert, Confused Geert,... I gave two other picture-masks to researchers in the audience. Walter Bourdin (old man mask) asked questions about Geert and his research. ‘Angry Geert, what would you say your research is about?’ This experiment revealed a lot about my research and how I communicate it.

      The Talk Show set-up is also used in teaching and therapy. Anywhere where people talk with guests when other people are around to listen to the talking. I will continue to experiment with this format.

       

      1. Tommie Has Milk

      It was 1980-something and Tommie had puppies. They feed on her milk. As I fed on these references:

       

      Swami Premodaya (Satsang, ‘You experience what you expect to experience.’, ‘Your perceptions are your limitations.’), Swami Prem Prasad (‘Freedom through De-Conditioning’), OSHO (‘The Path of the Mystic’), Meher Baba, Adrian Piper (‘Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness’), Stuart Price (‘I’m lost in the space between the concept and the execution’, ‘I’m stuck in the void between the instinct and the institution’), Ludwig Wittgenstein (‘Licht en schaduw: een droom en een brief over religie.’), Martin Buber (‘I and Thou’), Caroline Astell-Burt (‘I am the story’), Robert J. Landy (‘Persona and Performance’), Luigi Pirandello, Hannah Arendt (‘Lying in Politics’), Sören Kierkegaard (‘...the jump into the absurd...’), Codrescu (The Posthuman Dada Guide), Robert Crichton (‘The Great Impostor’), Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Eli Jaxon-Bear (‘Sudden Awakening’), Andy Kaufman, Bourdieu (‘Identity is given, not created’), Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, one man continuously calling me ‘Christophe’ in Morocco and my irritation with that, Rabia of Basra, Artaud, Frantz Fanon (‘Black Skin, White Masks’), Reni Eddo-Lodge (‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’), Nassim Taleb (‘Antifragile’), James Baldwin (‘The Fire Next Time’), John Cage (‘Silence’), Lou Reed’s rendition of ‘This Magic Moment’, Tommy Maitland, Mike Myers, The Gong Show, Sarah Paulson, Kokoroko, Fanna-Fi-Allah, The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, Anandamayi Ma, Gangaji (‘Hidden Treasure’), RuPaul’s Drag Race, Tony Clifton, Charles Aznavour, Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen, Peggy Pierrot, Kate Rich, Pol Pauwels, Geert Opsomer, Sara Manente, Heike Langsdorf, Sina Seifee, Michael Sugich (‘Signs on the Horizons’), Abdelwahab Meddeb (‘Instants soufis’), Ranchor Prime (‘The Birth of Kirtan’), Shomari Dev, Loka Dev, Jai Dev

      I add this essay by Adrian Piper in its totality because it perfectly fits with what I’ve been researching, and she explains it far more eloquently than I ever could:

      ‘Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness’

      Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist with a background in sculpture and philosophy. Her performance work and writing during this period asked the observer to consider the construction of his/her own beliefs and their relation to action in the world. Art historian Moira Roth has written that Piper's work of this period "deals with confrontations of self to self and self to others, exposing the distances between people and the alienation that exists in our lives—personally, politically, emotionally." Here she puts forth some basic considerations about ideology. —Eds.

      We started out with beliefs about the world and our place in it that we didn't ask for and didn't question. Only later, when those beliefs were attacked by new experiences that didn't conform to them, did we begin to doubt: e.g., do we and our friends really understand each other? Do we really have nothing in common with blacks/whites/ gays/workers/the middle class/other women/other men/etc.?

      Doubt entails self-examination because a check on the plausibility of your beliefs and attitudes is a check on all the constituents of the self. Explanations of why your falsely supposed "X" includes your motives for believing "X" (your desire to maintain a relationship, your impulse to be charitable, your goal of becoming a better person); the causes of your believing "X" (your early training, your having drunk too much, your innate disposition to optimism); and your objective reasons for believing "X" (it's consistent with your other beliefs, it explains the most data, it's inductively confirmed, people you respect believe it). These reveal the traits and dispositions that individuate oneself from another.

      So self-examination entails self-awareness, i.e., awareness of the components of the self. But self-awareness is largely a matter of degree. If you've only had a few discordant experiences or relatively superficial discordant experiences, you don't need to examine yourself very deeply in order to revise your false beliefs. For instance, you happen to have met a considerate, sensitive, nonexploitative person who's into sadism in bed. You think to yourself, "This doesn't show that my beliefs about sadists, in general, are wrong; after all, think what Krafft-Ebing says! This particular person is merely an exception to the general rule that sexual sadists are demented." Or you think, "My desire to build a friendship with this person is based on the possibility of reforming her/him (and has nothing to do with any curiosity to learn more about my own sexual tastes)." Such purely cosmetic repairs in your belief structure sometimes suffice to maintain your sense of self-consistency. Unless you are confronted with a genuine personal crisis or freely choose to push deeper and ask yourself more comprehensive and disturbing questions about the genesis and justification of your own beliefs, your actual degree of self-awareness may remain relatively thin.

      Usually, the beliefs that remain most unexposed to examination are the ones we need to hold in order to maintain a certain conception of ourselves and our relation to the world. These are the ones in which we have the deepest personal investment. Hence these are the ones that are most resistant to revision; e.g., we have to believe that other people are capable of understanding and sympathy, of honorable and responsible behavior, in order not to feel completely alienated and suspicious of those around us. Or: Some people have to believe that the world of political and social catastrophe is completely outside their control in order to justify their indifference to it.

      Some of these beliefs may be true, some may be false. This is difficult to ascertain because we can only confirm or disconfirm the beliefs under examination with reference to other beliefs, which themselves require examination. In any event, the set of false beliefs that a person has a personal investment in maintaining is what I will refer to (following Marx) as a person's ideology.

      Ideology is pernicious for many reasons. The obvious one is that it makes people behave in stupid, insensitive, self-serving ways, usually at the expense of other individuals or groups. But it is also pernicious because of the mechanisms it uses to protect itself, and its consequent capacity for self-regeneration in the face of the most obvious counterevidence. Some of these mechanisms are:

      (1) The False-Identity Mechanism

      In order to preserve your ideological beliefs against attack, you identify them as objective facts and not as beliefs at all. For example, you insist that it is just a fact that black people are less intelligent than whites, or that those on the sexual fringes are in fact sick, violent or asocial. By maintaining that these are statements of fact rather than statements of belief compiled from the experiences you personally happen to have had, you avoid having to examine and perhaps revise those beliefs. This denial may be crucial to maintaining your self-conception against attack. If you're white and suspect that you may not be all that smart, to suppose that at least there's a whole race of people you're smarter than may be an important source of self-esteem. Or if you're not entirely successful in coping with your own nonstandard sexual impulses, isolating and identifying the sexual fringe as sick, violent or asocial may serve the very important function of reinforcing your sense of yourself as "normal."

      The fallacy of the false-identity mechanism as a defense of one's ideology consists in supposing that there exist objective social facts that are not constructs of beliefs people have about each other.

      (2) The Illusion of Perfectibility

      Here you defend your ideology by convincing yourself that the hard work of self-scrutiny has an end and a final product, i.e., a set of true, central and uniquely defensible beliefs about some issue; and that you have in fact achieved this end, hence needn't subject your beliefs to further examination. Since there is no such final product, all of the inferences that supposedly follow from this belief are false. Example: You're a veteran of the anti-war movement and have developed a successful and much-lauded system of draft-avoidance counseling, on which your entire sense of self-worth is erected. When it is made clear to you that such services primarily benefit the middle class—that this consequently forces much larger proportions of the poor, the uneducated and blacks to serve and be killed in its place—you resist revising your views in light of this information on the grounds that you've worked on and thought hard about these issues, have developed a sophisticated critique of them, and therefore have no reason to reconsider your opinions or efforts. You thus treat the prior experience of having reflected deeply on some issue as a defense against the self-reflection appropriate now, that might uncover your personal investment in your anti-draft role.

      The illusion of perfectibility is really the sin of arrogance, for it supposes that dogmatism can be justified by having "paid one's dues."

      (3) The One-Way Communication Mechanism

      You deflect dissents, criticisms or attacks on your cherished beliefs by treating all of your own pronouncements as imparting genuine information but treating those of other people as mere symptoms of some moral or psychological defect. Say you're committed to feminism, but have difficulty making genuine contact with other women. You dismiss all arguments advocating greater attention to lesbian and separatist issues within the women's movement on the grounds that they are maintained by frustrated man-haters who just want to get their names in the footlights. By reducing questions concerning the relations of women to each other to pathology or symptoms of excessive self-interest, you avoid confronting the conflict between your intellectual convictions and your actual alienation from other women, and therefore the motives that might explain this conflict. If these motives should include such things as deep-seated feelings of rivalry with other women, or a desire for attention from men, then avoiding recognition of this conflict is crucial to maintaining your self-respect.

      The one-way communication mechanism is a form of elitism that ascribes pure, healthy, altruistic political motives only to oneself (or group), while reducing all dissenters to the status of moral defectives or egocentric and self-seeking subhumans, whom it is entirely justified to manipulate or disregard, but with whom the possibility of rational dialogue is not to be taken seriously.

      There are many other mechanisms for defending one's personal ideology. These are merely a representative sampling. Together, they all add up to what I will call the illusion of omniscience. This illusion consists in being so convinced of the infallibility of your own beliefs about everyone else that you forget that you are perceiving and experiencing other people from a perspective that is, in its own ways, just as subjective and limited as theirs. Thus you confuse your personal experiences with objective reality and forget that you have a subjective and limited self that is selecting, processing and interpreting your experiences in accordance with its own limited capacities. You suppose that your perceptions of someone are truths about her or him; that your understanding of someone is comprehensive and complete. Thus your self-conception is not demarcated by the existence of other people. Rather, you appropriate them into your self-conception as psychologically and metaphysically transparent objects of your consciousness. You ignore their ontological independence, their psychological opacity, and thereby their essential personhood. The illusion of omniscience resolves into the fallacy of solipsism.

      The result is blindness to the genuine needs of other people, coupled with the arrogant and dangerous conviction that you understand those needs better than they do; and a consequent inability to respond to those needs politically in genuinely effective ways.

      The antidote, I suggest, is confrontation of the sinner with the evidence of the sin: the rationalizations; the subconscious defense mechanisms; the strategies of avoidance, denial, dismissal and withdrawal that signal, on the one hand, the retreat of the self to the protective enclave of ideology, on the other hand, precisely the proof of subjectivity and fallibility that the ideologue is so anxious to ignore. This is the concern of my recent work of the past three years.

      The success of the antidote increases with the specificity of the confrontation. And because I don't know you I can't be as specific as I would like. I can only indicate general issues that have specific references in my own experience. But if this discussion has made you in the least degree self-conscious about your political beliefs or about your strategies for preserving them; or even faintly uncomfortable or annoyed at my having discussed them; or has raised just the slightest glimmerings of doubt about the veracity of your opinions, then I will consider this piece a roaring success. If not, then I will just have to try again, for my own sake. For of course I am talking not just about you, but about us.

      This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Spring 1981.

      Above copied from http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/ideology_confro.php

       

      12. What’s next?



      It’s 2000-something and what’s next?

      I end with a text I wrote in my first block. This text also serves as the conclusion of everything you’ve just read. I end where I started and I will continue from there:

      I=U

      „MIMESIS AS AN ACT OF ULTIMATE LOVE”

      - A SCIENTIFIC LOVE RESEARCH -

      I want to gain and produce awareness about „otherness” in a direct, experiential way, using a „scientific” method: the mask. Inward and outward ‚signifiers’ (of race, gender, and class) produce and influence relations and positions. We are constantly building (constructing) interpersonal images and meanings. Which signals provoke/produce meaning in another? In other words: how is your body perceived and how do you perceive bodies? What is your position? Using masks or roles is to gain insight in ourselves and in humanity, the collective of others. We are not moving in contact zones, we are the contact zones (being ‚othered’ by other contact zones). Essentially I’m looking for a way out of exclusive thinking into inclusive thinking, out of ‘impathy’ towards empathy, out of mind into heart. This research is about going beyond the mind (I) into and eventually also beyond the other (You). To put it bluntly, it is about LOVE …

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • a.pass meets School of Love
    • block 2018/III
    • STUDY DAYS A curatorial proposal by Adva ZAkai
      11 September 2018
      posted by: Joke Liberge
    • 10 September 2018
    • 30 November 2018
    • STUDY DAYS

      PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

      This block is organized around a series of Study Days. Almost every Monday till the end of November, a.pass hosts artists, thinkers and researchers to contribute to the problematization of various issues that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics.


      ** The texts bellow are written from the perspective of the notions explored at a.pass, and not by the guests, who are invited to respond to them from within their own practices **


      September 10th
      Maybe one day, love will no longer be considered a private endeavor or a slogan of hippies, but rather a public and a political mode of being...

      Guests: Johan Grimonprez & Bleri Lleshi

      Imagine a society that bases its arrangements, institutions and democracy on love itself. Such a society will probably teach and exercise love as a force that contributes to the constitution of communities. Maybe then it will make less sense to say that love is a social construction than to say that love constructs society... What kind of practices can re-appropriate love by allowing it to shift from individual, consumerist and patriarchal inclinations into the political engagement of play and interaction of differences? How can love be romantic but not only? What if love would expend beyond the limits of the couple and the nuclear family and serve as the basis for our political projects in common?
      10h – 13h A session with Johan Grimonprez
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 15h15 presentation of work by Johan Grimonprez
      15h15 – 15h30 Break
      15h30 – 18h A session with Bleri Leshi

       

      September 17th
      To be included your love tool kit
      Or: Tender technologies: how tools shape practice and practice shapes tools

      Guest: Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting: Can we transform our relation to everyday communication technologies? Can we take that risk? Currently, tech giants dominate all forms of digital communication, from cloud-storage to production tools and archiving systems. Infused with modernist ideas of progress, these tools are full of capitalist values and dreams of seamless scaleability. They form intricate webs of human and non-human agencies weaving themselves into and around us, intimately linking our personal and professional practices. Also institutional practice has come to rely on the use of commercial platforms, including places that are dedicated to radical transformation, political love and commoning like a.pass. So how are we being with technology when practicing a School of Love? This study-day is dedicated to experiencing technology differently, of developing a convivial relationship that foregrounds vulnerability, mutual dependency and care-taking. With the help of old and new Free, Libre and Open Source Software tools we will practice a transition from anticipating efficiency to allowing curiosity; from expecting scarcity to demanding multiplicity; from solution to possibility.
      10h – 13h A session with Femke Snelting
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 18h A session with Femke Snelting

       

      September 24th – September 29th
      Inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world.

      a.pass meets SOL participates to The Swamp School at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2018

      "In exploring the imaginary of a swamp—a living organism in which borders defined by social, political and cultural factors are porous and permeable— the Swamp School will investigate an open artistic/architectural form, effective workshop and publication methodologies. The Swamp School will act as a pilot for future learning environments, informed by and informing the architecture and installations of its own space. Research questions will focus on creating public interfaces and manuals that support adaptation and learning to meet the demands of a changing environment.” Swamp Pavillion curated by Nomeda and Gedeminas Urbonas.

      Participating institutions: MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, University of Antwerp, Università Iuav di Venezia, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti - NABA Milan, The Art Institute at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory IAeP, Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, University of Iceland, Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas, a.pass - advanced performance and scenography studies Brussels, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Contour Biennale 9 Mechelen, Design for the Living World Class at HFBK The University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Städelschule Architecture Class – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Frankfurt

      http://swamp.lt/#program


      October 8th
      Blame it on monogamy

      Guests: Eva Berghman, CW/the Common Wallet project, Kathrien De Graeve

      Many of us were indoctrinated to believe that they desire only one way of moving through the course of life, where pairing is the ultimate goal and the preferable mode of being. This probably has not much to do with the belief in the mental and spiritual profoundness of the unit of two, but rather being motivated by the fear of being left out by a society that socially and economically prioritises the couple. How to re-appropriate institutions that re-appropriated love itself by bounding it to laws, contracts, economy and morals? What if being polyamorous would not only mean having many lovers, but many kinds of love? We could chose to stop considering Polyamory as merely a sexual and romantic practice, and think of it as an ethic that potentially destabilizes the normative hierarchies between human relationships. Monogamy is not just a way to love romantically, it also influences our relations to money, time, jobs, passports, artistic/scientific/academic researches etc... If Polyamory would be the dominant way of relation in the political and social sphere, how would this effect the notions of owning (property, identity, ideas) and owing, of secrets and privacy? How can love subvert and de-construct power structures that use monogamy to move us away from caring collectively?

      10h – 11h30 A session with Katrien De Graeve
      11h30 – 13h A Session with Eva Berghmans
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 15h30 A session with CW / the Common Wallet project
      15h30 – 16h Break
      16h – 18h A discussion through relating the themes of the day to our own practices

       

      October 22nd
      Love makes schools make love

      Guests: Jan Masschelein, Laurence Rassel, SRG / school research group

      Maybe one day, schools will no longer be considered as merely a protective incubator that prepares one to life outside of it, but rather an engaged environment that influences the world. Think of a society that bases its schools on experiment, reflection and collectivity, independent from the market's need. Schools that produce ideologies and policies, instead of being instrumentalised by them. Schools that gather strangers and differences under the common wish to study public matters in order to challenge and improve them. If ever such a society will exist, it will probably construct its schools as flexible systems that work in acceptance of potential change and disruption, as a way to embody that which is being studied in them. Can schools embrace love as a strategy to create a place of encounter where both the institution and its part takers grow in relation to each other? How can a school base its structure on the same principals it wishes to teach?

      13h – 16h A session with Jan Masschelein
      16h– 18h A session with Laurence Rassel
      18h – 19h Dinner (provided by a.pass)
      19h – 21h Presentation of school models that were developed by a.pass participants


      October 29th
      By putting that which is between us before that which we think belongs to us.

      Guests: Caroline Godart, Elke Van Campenhout

      School is maybe more of a verb than a noun. Its a state of “attentivnes” to the world that one could chose to enter at any time and any place, in the company of others. Within this logic, wouldn't being a student similar to being an artist? Schools and students could be considered as lovers, who commit to each other, but do not wish to control what the other does with the love that they give. To school could mean to study and care for the same thing that you would also be willing to let go of. To - engage with, and - detach from, at the same time. This could be the love that dares to bound spirituality and politics together. If school becomes a verb, teachers would then teach how to school, and maybe love would not be a feeling, but a mode of studying that generates feelings.

      10h – 13h A reading session with Caroline Godart
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 16h A reading session with Caroline Godart
      16h – 16h30 Break
      16h30 – 18h A reading session with Elke Van Campenhout

       

      October 31st – Nov 5th (Nov 3rd – off)
      Instead of needing to know

      A workshop by Joao Fiadeiro.
      Guests: Elke Van Campenhout, Alex Arteaga

      If in both Love and School an openness to change through encounters with others is practiced, we better develop sensitivities to deal with a change into an unknown path. Perhaps we would be better off improvising through, with and within the unknown instead of needing to know. Maybe improvisation today can be approached as a mode of resistance to tendencies for a life dedicated to an anticipated and defined future. It might seem like stating the obvious, proposing to put improvisation back in the agenda. Life itself is an improvisation, of course, we never stopped improvising. But we can dedicate a special attention to it in order to examine its relevance to nowadays realities. Not the improvisation that aims to emancipate repressed self expressions, neither the one that provides skills and masteries to manoeuvre within individual lives and careers , but an improvisation attitude that may create an actualized set of relations between us and other people, us and other things, us and anything that is not us.

      10h – 18h A workshop with Joao Fiadeiro
      19h – 21h (Nov 2nd, 4th, 5th ) Evening interventions by Joao Fiadeiro, Elke Van Campenhout, Alex Arteaga


      November 12th
      The Love workers

      Guests: An Mertens, Daniela Bershan

      Artistic processes often face the contradiction of critiquing the same protocols they have to comply with, such as deadlines, saleable products, authorship, commissions and competition. Many artists experience frustration by the fact that policy makers, programmers and curators determine the visibility of certain artists/art works instead of others. A Love Worker – could this be a synonym for an Artist? Would this emancipate some practices from having to defend their relevance through the procedures imposed by artistic scenes? Or better than that – could this expand the boundaries of what an artistic work can become?

      10h – 13h A session with An Mertens (in the forest)
      13h – 15h Lunch (+ coming back from the forest)
      15h – 18h A session with Daniela Bershan

       

      BIOGRAPHIES

      Bleri Lleshi is philosopher, writer, lecturer, youth worker and DJ. He studied political sciences and philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. At the moment he is writing a ph.d on the struggle of the excluded. Lleshi is lecturer at UCLL where he teaches various subjects on social sciences. His research focuses on topics such as inequality, neoliberalism, youth, migration, identities, and extremism. Lleshi has participated in conferences, debates and media. In 2014, he was considered as one of the most influential immigrants in Belgium

      Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities. Grimonprez's curatorial projects, films and installations have been exhibited at museums worldwide. He published several books and he lectures widely.

      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she explores how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. http://constantvzw.org/

      Eva Berghmans is a journalist working for 'De Standaard'. As a journalist she has an excuse to step up to people and ask them all kind of weird and intimate questions. She never took 'because this is the way we have always done things' for an answer and tries to see through the presumptions in our everyday lives. Currently she is working on a research project on polyamory, published on http://www.standaard.be/tag/.'

      CW/the Common Wallet project is an initiative of 10 people from the art sector in Belgium who share their individual income in one collective bank account. Through this experiment they collectively explore their psychological and cultural dependencies on money and a possible alternative to the monogamous and often lonely relationship one has with the money one earns. CW part takers are : Luigi Coppola, Eliza Demarre, Anna Rispoli, Adva Zakai, Diederik Peeters, Christophe Meierhans, Luca Mattei, Agnes Quackels, Ingrid Vranken, Irena Ramanovic


      Katrien De Graeve is a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), affiliated to the Department of Languages and Cultures of Ghent University, and member of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. In 2012, she completed her PhD at the Department of Comparative Sciences of Culture at Ghent University with a critical analysis of intensive parenting practices in Belgian-Ethiopian adoptive families. In her current research project (2016-2019), she has shifted focus to the study of sexuality/romantic relationships and discourses of exclusivity and plurality in light of the normative two-parent nuclear family.

      Jan Masschelein is head of the Laboratory for Education and Society, and of the research group Education, Culture and Society. He studied educational sciences and philosophy at the K.U.Leuven and at the Johan Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main and is as well Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung. His research can be situated in the broad domain of the formation of educational theory, critical theory, social philosophy and governmentality studies. More concretely it concerns the public and societal role of education and schooling, the role of the university, the changing experiences of time and space in the age of the network, the educational meaning of cinema and camera, the architecture of schools and architecture of the learning environment, a pedagogy of attention, the notion of 'pedagogy', the pedagogical role of teachers and social workers. A lot of attention is directed towards experimental educational practices and towards new forms of documentary and exploratory research.

      Laurence Rassel is currently the director of art school ERG in Brussels. Educated in visual arts and pedagogy, she pursued an interdisciplinary trajectory from new media to the management of an artistic institution. From 2010 to the end of June 2015, she was director of the Fundacio Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, a foundation created to promote contemporary art and thought, and the study of Antoni Tàpies' work. Previously, from 1998, she was, among others, responsible for Constant, a non-profit organization based in Brussels. Constant connects theoretical thinking, the critical use of new technologies, artistic behavior and political issues in the network. At the same time, she was project coordinator for the Interface3 women's technology training center in Brussels, as part of the European ADA project from 2001 to 2006. 



      SRG/School Research Group is an open group of art practitioners and pedagogues who meet regularly in order to share their interest and experience within school environments in Belgium and study together. 



      Caroline Godart is a writer, professor and dramaturge based in Brussels. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Cinema Studies from Rutgers University (USA), where she studied with Elizabeth Grosz. She is now an Assistant Professor of Communication, Germanic Languages and Cultural Studies at IHECS (Institut des Hautes Études des Communications Sociales, Brussels). Her first book, The Dimensions of Difference, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. It explores the question of difference, and in particular of sexual difference, through three axes (space, time, and embodiment), which are approached both as aesthetic devices and as philosophical concepts in the works of Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson.

      Elke Van Campenhout / ELLE is a tantric practioner and artistic researcher. She developed her work partly at the a.pass research institute where she worked for five years under the umbrella of Bureau d’Espoir, a practice on the import, export and redistribution of hope. For this practice she studied political theory, contemporary philosophy and spiritual body practices. Her work is a transdisciplinary practice, linking contemporary philosophy to spiritual body practice, in the development of an ethics of coming together and rethinking our relation to the world we live in. Since 2 years Elke Van Campenhout and Stijn Smeets started up the experimental living community The Monastery, dedicating all their time and resources on the creation of a spiritual life of devotion, alternative economies, and ritual composition.

      João Fiadeiro belongs to a generation of choreographers who emerged in the late 1980’s and led to the emergence of the Nova Dança Portuguesa. In 1990, he founded the workshop RE.AL Company that supported the creation and dissemination of several choreographers and their works, which were regularly performed in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and South America. Real Time Composition is a project that he has been developing for twenty years. In parallel, he has organized several workshops in various training courses, schools and universities throughout the world. João Fiadeiro is currently completing a PhD in contemporary art at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

      Alex Arteaga’s research integrates aesthetic and philosophical practices relating to aesthetics, the emergence of sense, meaning and knowledge, and the relationships between aurality, architecture and the environment through phenomenological and enactivist approaches. He studied composition, music theory, piano, electroacoustic music, and architecture in Berlin and Barcelona and received a PhD in philosophy from the Humboldt University for his dissertation Sensuous Framing: Fundamentals of a Strategy to Realize Conditions of Perception. From 2008 to 2012 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment at the Humboldt University and visiting professor at the MA Choreography at the Inter- University Centre for Dance Berlin. In 2012 he led the research team at the Berlin.

      An Mertens is artist, writer, and core-member of Constant, an artist run organisation for experimental art and media in Brussels. Next to a practise of literary creation using algorithms, she is also a nature guide in Forêt de Soignes and writing fiction with a particular interest for the non-human presences in woods.
http://constantvzw.org, http://www.algolit.net, http://www.paramoulipist.be/

      Daniela Bershan aka Baba Electronica is a love worker using visual arts, performance, music making and social organization around topics of collective study, care-making and practices of (non-sexual) intimacy. In her work she conceptualizes not just the characteristics of her materials but with and through them the skills and objects they can be read with: the DJ, the remixer, the researcher, the love-worker are dissecting choreographies and scores in order to make tangible how they operate; and enable to organize relations otherwise. They are committed to experiment and circulate with queering tools. Bershan co-founded and directed FATFORM (NL), and is co-organizing ELSEWHERE & OTHERWISE at Performing Arts Forum (FR). Her works, projects and performances have been presented worldwide.

       

       
    • conference
    • project
    • research center
    • seminar
    • workshop
    • Parallel Parasite
    • Parallel Parasite Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre
      03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 04 June 2018
    • 30 September 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Parallel Parasite

      A month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence
      Gatherings of parallel parasite platforms  for practice based research in the arts > If you want to know, come!


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at ZSenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

       

      The propositions start from reading groups, activating thinking/doing practices, score -ing, speculative talks, and registration/documentation formats in order to converge multiple insights that might (and not must) infuse other formats of reflecting/experiencing framed by the quasi public environment of the gallery space. 

      The Research Center in residency invites several guests which are thinking and experiencing ‘gathering’ as a form of knowledge processing bridging theoretical and experiential approaches. These gatherings don’t depart from personal concerns but aim to mine inter-subjective frame works to question artistic research as a learning together practice.

      This point of address for the a.pass RC next block, comes from two main curatorial concerns. The first is about the publicness of a Research Centre for artistic research and its visibility, accessibility and share-ability.  What are the internal and external demands and needs of such environments? The second comes from an observation on what I’m calling parallel-parasite platforms for practice based research in the arts.

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, my proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such public-ness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass). These invited quasi – institutional setups affiliated in one way or another with the academic environment are experimental formats of learning processes that are critically challenging modes of knowledge production in artistic research. All these ‘parallel-parasite platforms’ or ‘ways of doing’ are engaged in thinking-doing practices that converge theoretical and artistic research practice approaches in the arts. 

      SOL / School Of Love is an initiative of students and teachers from the Autonome Vormgeving department at KASK. SOL came to existence spontaneously as a school inside a school, in March 2016, out of a workshop that explored the notions of Love and School as modes of attention. SOL has no predetermined curriculum. It avoids defining itself and its goals in order to allow activities to emerge through the presence and interest of its participants, who come from inside KASK as well from outside of the institution. Anyone can be a part of SOL, anything can become a project in it, and it can take place anywhere, as long as it’s stimulated by the will to re-think both school and love as charged with potential for change and engagement in society. It is what we make it to be. 

      AND

      The SenseLab is a laboratory for thought in motion.

      Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.

      Participants are held together by affinity rather than by any structure of membership or institutional hierarchy. The SenseLab’s event-based projects are collectively self-organizing. Their aim is to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act. The SenseLab’s product is its process, which is meant to disseminate. The measure of success is the creative momentum that spins off into individual and group practices elsewhere, to seed new processes asserting their own autonomy. The SenseLab makes no claim to ownership, operating as much as possible on the principle of a gift economy.

      This block will follow up on the thinking the archival concerns of artistic research at a.pass. The interest crawls out of the virtual into the physical public sphere wanting to add another aspect to it. The Zsenne will be taken as a sensor environment for the working upon collective processes of archive and anarchive. For this precise question we’ll be working with Erin Manning and her knowledge on the Anarchive as part of the Immediations project in SenseLab.

      Anarchive 

      1.The anarchive is best defined for the purposes of the Immediations project as a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.2.Thus the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.

      3.The anarchive needs documentation – the archive – from which to depart and through which to pass. It is an excess energy of the archive: a kind of supplement or surplus-value of the archive.

      In this movement between having to retreat from the world and then go back to the world as both places to make sense (study) of our relation with things,  various questions start to appear: What is the importance and articulation of doing/thinking practices? And what kind of positionality would this create in the semi-academic frame work?What kind of environments and practices can we envisage to share political/ aesthetic concerns? what kind of ‘library’ would we build to address these concerns?

      Each practice will have a specific way of opening to the public and more specific formats will be announced in detail as we go along. For now the basic structure is a daily private practice fora group of invited artistic researchers and an open door practice everyday from 17:30 till 20:00 where public conversations and doings welcome the interested and the passerby.

      The RC is mainly working with alumni and associated researchers linked with the a.pass Research Centre. For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Nico Dockx, Steven Jouwersma, Halbe Kuipers, Pia Louwerens, Sara Manente, Marialena Merouda, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Lilia Mestre, Martino Morandi, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Eric Thielemans, Femke Snelting, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita with Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann .

      and the post-master researchers: Elen Braga, Nasia Fourtouni, Leo Kay, Laura Pante, Geert Vaes, Maurice Meewisse, Caterina Mora, Ezther Nemethi, Hoda Siahtiri, Goda Palekaite, Katinka Van Gorkum.

      Forms of learning together is a central approach in the post-master’s program of a.pass (platform for artistic research practices) and has a background in art run organisations as models of self-organisation and collaboration.  It views art practice and artistic research as situated, critical and autonomous processes contributing for the politisation of modes of gathering and learning together. 

      ScoreScapes is a research on how to create frameworks for bringing together diverse artistic practices to ‘speak’ to each other without having a common constraint in terms of content or form. To find systems of interaction where different aesthetic experiences cohabitate, complement, disagree and motivate thirdness together with the possibility to trace it. Like a maze of potentials hovering over us participants of the score.

      A central concern in the ScoreSacpes research is the development of modes of being together with our individual backgrounds, moods, sensibles, political concerns, theories, … Through a system of questions and answers set in time, the scores propose regular encounters as a mode of intensive exchange about individual experiences that interconnect with others. In this sense the score proposes a form of sociability. To work with scores allows to follow up and evaluate these relationships constantly. The score evolutions are guidelines for the progress of the study and facilitate a chronological trajectory of the research. To make scores is also to produce documents in order to observe the paradigms that are at stake while making art. The unexpected and unforeseen event is always a surprising call to pay attention to the performative aspect of things, to the condition of all existence as experiential events. The score becomes a life art laboratory for multidisciplinary practices and pluri-focus presences. An attempt to shift from an art-to-look-at to an art to experience.

       
    • postgraduate program
    • a.pass meets School of Love
    • block 2018/III
    • a.pass meets SOL / School Of Love A curatorial proposition by Adva Zakai
      03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • apass
    • apass
    • 03 September 2018
    • 30 November 2018
    • a.pass meets SOL / School Of Love

      From Sep till Nov 2018 a.pass and School Of Love will start a flirt with each other, develop a relationship and hopefully make (produce) love.

      SOL is a collective platform that was initiated some years ago*, inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world. SOL is practiced through regular meetings, but follows no curriculum. Instead, it develops a spontaneous program through the presence and interest of its participants. SOL is basically an invitation to hang out. But to hang out deeply. To practice school as a place of free time – free to study things as they appear, separated from the dependency on the time and space of social order and production. And to practice love – Not the kind of love that is generated through affirmation of who we think we are, but love as an act of giving by allowing it to transform us.

      And now SOL is here, at a.pass, with a call to the participants to engage with their artistic researches through love itself. a.pass and SOL will get together, without knowing ahead what is going to happen, but with the trust that everything we live outside of SOL – artistic researches, experiences and desires – will manifest themselves inside SOL in a way we could not imagine elsewhere. And once this happens, maybe the difference between art and love will not be so obvious anymore..

      Alongside the weekly meetings of SOL at a.pass, a program of study days and workshops will look into various aspects that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics. Those sessions will be led by: Johan Grimonprez, Bleri Lleshi, Femke Snelting, Brandon LaBelle, Eva Berghmans, CW/ Common Wallet project, Jan Masschelein, Laurence Rassel, Caroline Godard, Elke Van Campenhout, João Fiadeiro, Alex Arteaga, An Mertens, Daniela Bershan.

      Study Days Program


      Joining in:
      SOL will meet every Tuesday at a.pass and is open to anyone interested to take part. All welcome! A special introduction day into SOL: Tuesday 3rd september 10h – 18h.

      STUDY DAYS and WORKSHOPS – Non a.pass participants who are interested to join – please contact a.pass lilia@apass.be or Adva advazakai@gmail.com

      * Adva Zakai is a part of the SOL collective. SOL's protocol can be practiced by anyone and anywhere, be modified and transformed through the encounter with a new context.

       
    • Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 


      REMINDER:

      Thursday 24th and
      Friday 25th of May 

      THIS IS 1000 LITER FUEL SO…

      a.pass end communications 
      @ Decoratelier 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels
       

      PROGRAM for both days

      17:30 Doors open
      18:00 Introduction
      19:00 Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado (25 people max)
      20:15 
      Marialena Marouda
      21:00 
      Marialena Marouda
      23:00 end. 

      Ongoing: 
      Luisa Fillitz, Eunkyung Jeong,Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi. 

      Catering on the spot by Sara ten Westenend. 

      More info 

      PS:
      Saturday 26th of May 
      book launch "Scorescapes"
      17:30 @ Brew schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene
      with a dialogue facilitated by Philippine Hoegen and chocolate cocktails by Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi! 

       

      PARALLEL PARASITE, a month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence

       

      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at ZSenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices.

      The RC at ZSenne, will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

      These invited quasi – institutional set ups affiliated in one way or another with the academic environment are experimental formats of learning processes that are critically challenging modes of knowledge production in artistic research. All these ‘parallel-parasite platforms’ or ‘ways of doing’ are engaged in thinking-doing practices that converge theoretical and artistic research practices approach in the arts.

      The three main proposals for the a.pass Research Center in dislocation are:

      Week 1 > 4 till 9 June
      SOL - School of Love - Instead of Needing to know

      This working session needs inscription please follow this link https:///www.apass.be/instead-of-needing-to-know/ SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai

      Week 2 > 11 till 15 June
      SCORESCAPES > Fragile Community Score proposed by Lilia Mestre

      This working session needs inscription please follow this link https:///www.apass.be/fragile-community-score-score-for-entering-a-place/

      Week 3 and 4 > 16 till 30 June
      THE WAY OF THE ANARCHIVE proposed by Erin Manning

      This working session is under invitation. For public discussions check schedule. https:///www.apass.be/the-way-of-the-anarchive/

      and

      More info on Parallel Parasite https:///www.apass.be/parallel-parasite-platform-for-practice-based-research-in-the-arts/

      The RC is mainly working with alumni, associated researchers and guests linked with the a.pass Research Centre.

      For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Nico Dockx, Steven Jouwersma, Halbe Kuipers, Pia Louwerens, Sara Manente, Marialena Merouda, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Lilia Mestre, Martino Morandi, Xiri Noir, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Eric Thielemans, Femke Snelting, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita with Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann

      and the post-master researchers:

      Elen Braga, Nasia Fourtouni, Leo Kay, Laura Pante, Geert Vaes, Maurice Meewisse, Caterina Mora, Ezther Nemethi, Hoda Siahtiri, Goda Palekaitė , Katinka Van Gorkum.

      PUBLIC EVENTS:


      WEEK 1 - PUBLIC TALKS:
      Monday 4 > 19h :00 > Introduction of the School Of Love
      Thursday 8 > 19h30 > SOL interview by Lauren Grusenmeyer for the WORKOUT publication

      WEEK 2 - PUBLIC TALKS:
      Monday 11 > 20:30 > Concert with Eric Thielemans “Bata Baba Loka: Extacy and overflow.”
      Saturday 16 > 11:00 till 16:00 > Monday readings > Femke Snelting and Martino Morandi (more information soon)

      WEEK 3 and 4 - PUBLIC TALKS:
      Tuesday 19 > 19:00 > Encounter with Erin Manning on the Anarchive
      Thursday 21 > 19:00 > Encounter with Nico Dockx: Every Archive Hides Another Archive
      Tuesday 26 > 19:00 > Encounter between SenseLab and SOL
      Wednesday 27 > 19:00 > Encounter with Alex Arteaga; Embodied Architecture/ Aesthetic Experience
      Thursday 28 > 19:00 > Encounter Erin Manning and Brian Massumi – Crypto Economy of Affect
      Saturday 30 > AFTERNOON > Nikolaus Gansterer (Translecture)

       

       


       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

        a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 – 1080 – Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be
    • Newsletter May 2018 13 May 2018
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma

       

      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 

       

      Agenda:

      24-25 May: THIS IS 1000 LITERS FUEL SO... @ Decoratelier

      26 May: SCORESCAPES booklaunch @ BREW

      4 till 30 June : PARALLEL-PARASITE @ Zsenne ArtLab. 

      30 April till 2 September: Block II 2018 - MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND  OTHER MATTERS…

       


      THIS IS 1000 liter fuel so...

      24 and 25 May, @ *Decoratelier. 
      Rue de Liverpool 24. 1080 Brussels

      Doors: 17:30, first performance 18:30, end: 22:00.

      a.pass end-communications of: 

      Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong,  Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi

      For this End-Communications, the six researches come together in concepts of absence, invisibility, history and knowledge. They research in various ways to bring what seems to be ungraspable in the construction of subjectivities to the fore. Subjectivity here, not as an individual subjectivity, but one that collectively builds and positions (in transformation) outside of oneself. Subjectivities as constituted by cultural, economical, social and other interactions and seen as complex narratives that mediate our perception(s) of the world. How do we make sense of what is pertained as ‘real’ and how through the generalization of such a standpoint one is unable to connect with the singular, and its inherent complexities? What ethical utterances can appear from this way of addressing the world?

      Following up on the idea of co-making worlds a.pass positions itself as a collaborative environment for the investigation and expression of artistic research. The media of the research are multiple and often combined. The cross disciplines and their interaction forces each specific (or even disciplinary) methodology to break down and instigate the construction of singular ways of doing/ thinking. This approach orients artistic research out of a categorical way of understanding knowledge production in the arts as much as it opens up distinctive and particular forms of addressing relationality, we could call undisciplined.

      The work of the six researchers entails combined forms of research on what can be called transdisciplinary research in order to open up the complexity of the objects of study through combining experiential approaches.

      Luisa Fillitz's research positions itself on the relationship between physical and metaphysical realities and questions the predetermined borders of an effect we take as ‘real’. 

      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado works in the domains of architecture and body as constructors of space. 

      Eunkyung Jeong, through a daily drawing practice, researches the idea of time within diverse forms of existence as the stone and the self. 

      Marialena Marouda’s research on the ocean problematizes scientic knowledge as the single epistemology of nature. 

      Ekaterina Kaplunova develops a systematic approach to family relations and cultural lineage in relation to the multifunctional artist.

      Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

      *Decoratelier is an ongoing and constantly evolving project by autonomous artist in residence, Jozef Wouters.

       


       

      Scorescapes

      26 May @ *BREW, Schoolstraat 1 Rue de Pene, 1000 Brussels

      From 17:30 till 19:00. 

      BOOKLAUNCH

      Another iteration of the ScoreScapes research by curator Lilia Mestre took place in block 2017/II The problem of the score. The publication Medium Score - Tectonic Friendships is a reflection of that iteration. Together with the six a.pass researchers finishing the post-master program we decided to do a combined publication for the Medium Score and the End- Communications.

      Come to the book launch and have a chocolate cocktail with Shervin Kianersi Haghighi.

      *BREW is a new space in Brussels which organizes and hosts events and activities in the field of contemporary art. Initiators: Philippine Hoegen and Carolien Stikker

       


       

      PARALLEL PARRASITES

      4 till 30 of June @ Zsenne ArtLab

      RESEARCH CENTER 18/II CURATED BY LILIA MESTRE


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at Zsenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, Lilia Mestre's proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such publicness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass).

      PROGRAM To Be Announced... 

      More... 

       

      MILIEUS, ASSOCIATIONS, SIEVES AND OTHER MATTERS…

      2 April - 2 September 2018

      BLOCK II 2018 - summer program

      Milieu

      An ensemble of problems as an environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves and changes by shifting to new dimensions out of confrontation to and resolution of problems.

      More...

       

       
       
       
       

       a.pass
      Rue delaunay 58 - 1080 - Brussel, Molenbeek 
      tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16
      email: office@apass.be
      web: www.apass.be

       

       

    • research center
    • seminar
    • Parallel Parasite
    • parallel-parasite Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre
      23 April 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Zsenne ArtLab
    • 04 June 2018
    • 30 June 2018
    • parallel-parasite

      A month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence
      Gatherings of parallel parasite platforms  for practice based research in the arts > If you want to know, come!


      From the 4th till the 30th of June the a.pass Research Centre (RC) will be in residency at ZSenne ArtLab and will constitute itself as people meet, as thematics emerge, as the environment conditions, as the weather manifests, as the bodies form, as toxicity persists, as we drive ourselves towards multiplying perspectives for thinking and experiencing phenomena emerging from artistic research practices. 

       

      The RC will function as a meeting point for the convergence of concerns, interests and the pleasures of learning together. It will research itself and its modus operandi in terms of hospitality, dissensus and criticality through the various research practices proposed.

      The propositions start from reading groups, activating thinking/doing practices, score -ing, speculative talks, and registration/documentation formats in order to converge multiple insights that might (and not must) infuse other formats of reflecting/experiencing framed by the quasi public environment of the gallery space. 

       

      The Research Center in residency invites several guests which are thinking and experiencing ‘gathering’ as a form of knowledge processing bridging theoretical and experiential approaches. These gatherings don’t depart from personal concerns but aim to mine inter-subjective frame works to question artistic research as a learning together practice.

      This point of address for the a.pass RC next block, comes from two main curatorial concerns. The first is about the publicness of a Research Centre for artistic research and its visibility, accessibility and share-ability.  What are the internal and external demands and needs of such environments? The second comes from an observation on what I’m calling parallel-parasite platforms for practice based research in the arts.  

       

      a.pass is constantly questioning the positionality and share-ability of what we learn and interrogating the political implications of the research practices. In response to those problematics, as RC curator, my proposition is the dislocation of the RC to a semi-public environment and to locate it temporary in a gallery space, one of the per-se spaces for the exhibition. The question driving this movement (from the inside to the outside) is: can the a.pass RC  in dis-location generate a hub for the study of some of its practices? can this movement instigate other forms of share-ability and access that are informal and porous? We’ll be addressing the agency of such public-ness and how it will be giving perspective to the critical doing and the critical thinking in artistic research and what forms of sociability will be generated.

       

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass).

       

      These invited quasi - institutional set ups affiliated in one way or another with the academic environment are experimental formats of learning processes that are critically challenging modes of knowledge production in artistic research. All these 'parallel-parasite platforms' or 'ways of doing' are engaged in thinking-doing practices that converge theoretical and artistic research practice approaches in the arts. 

       

      SOL / School Of Love is an initiative of students and teachers from the Autonome Vormgeving department at KASK. SOL came to existence spontaneously as a school inside a school, in March 2016, out of a workshop that explored the notions of Love and School as modes of attention. SOL has no predetermined curriculum. It avoids defining itself and its goals in order to allow activities to emerge through the presence and interest of its participants, who come from inside KASK as well from outside of the institution. Anyone can be a part of SOL, anything can become a project in it, and it can take place anywhere, as long as it's stimulated by the will to re-think both school and love as charged with potential for change and engagement in society. It is what we make it to be. 

      AND

      The SenseLab is a laboratory for thought in motion.
      Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.
      Participants are held together by affinity rather than by any structure of membership or institutional hierarchy. The SenseLab’s event-based projects are collectively self-organizing. Their aim is to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act. The SenseLab’s product is its process, which is meant to disseminate. The measure of success is the creative momentum that spins off into individual and group practices elsewhere, to seed new processes asserting their own autonomy. The SenseLab makes no claim to ownership, operating as much as possible on the principle of a gift economy.

       

      This block will follow up on the thinking the archival concerns of artistic research at a.pass. The interest crawls out of the virtual into the physical public sphere wanting to add another aspect to it. The Zsenne will be taken as a sensor environment for the working upon collective processes of archive and anarchive. For this precise question we’ll be working with Erin Manning and her knowledge on the Anarchive as part of the Immediations project in SenseLab.

       

      Anarchive 1.The anarchive is best defined for the purposes of the Immediations project as a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.
      2.Thus the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.
      3.The anarchive needs documentation – the archive – from which to depart and through which to pass. It is an excess energy of the archive: a kind of supplement or surplus-value of the archive.

       

      In this movement between having to retreat from the world and then go back to the world as both places to make sense (study) of our relation with things,  various questions start to appear: What is the importance and articulation of doing/thinking practices? And what kind of positionality would this create in the semi-academic frame work?
      What kind of environments and practices can we envisage to share political/ aesthetic concerns? what kind of ‘library’ would we build to address these concerns?

       

      Each practice will have a specific way of opening to the public and more specific formats will be announced in detail as we go along. For now the basic structure is a daily private practice fora group of invited artistic researchers and an open door practice everyday from 17:30 till 20:00 where public conversations and doings welcome the interested and the passerby.

       

      The RC is mainly working with alumni and associated researchers linked with the a.pass Research Centre.

      For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Nico Dockx, Steven Jouwersma, Halbe Kuipers, Pia Louwerens, Sara Manente, Marialena Merouda, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Lilia Mestre, Martino Morandi, Xiri Noir, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Eric Thielemans, Femke Snelting, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita with Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann .

      and the post-master researchers:
      Elen Braga, Nasia Fourtouni, Leo Kay, Laura Pante, Geert Vaes, Maurice Meewisse, Caterina Mora, Ezther Nemethi, Hoda Siahtiri, Goda Palekaitė, Katinka Van Gorkum.

      Forms of learning together is a central approach in the post-master’s program of a.pass (platform for artistic research practices) and has a background in art run organisations as models of self-organisation and collaboration.  It views art practice and artistic research as situated, critical and autonomous processes contributing for the politisation of modes of gathering and learning together. 

      ScoreScapes is a research on how to create frameworks for bringing together diverse artistic practices to ‘speak’ to each other without having a common constraint in terms of content or form. To find systems of interaction where different aesthetic experiences cohabitate, complement, disagree and motivate thirdness together with the possibility to trace it. Like a maze of potentials hovering over us participants of the score.


      A central concern in the ScoreSacpes research is the development of modes of being together with our individual backgrounds, moods, sensibles, political concerns, theories, … Through a system of questions and answers set in time, the scores propose regular encounters as a mode of intensive exchange about individual experiences that interconnect with others. In this sense the score proposes a form of sociability. To work with scores allows to follow up and evaluate these relationships constantly. The score evolutions are guidelines for the progress of the study and facilitate a chronological trajectory of the research. To make scores is also to produce documents in order to observe the paradigms that are at stake while making art. The unexpected and unforeseen event is always a surprising call to pay attention to the performative aspect of things, to the condition of all existence as experiential events. The score becomes a life art laboratory for multidisciplinary practices and pluri-focus presences. An attempt to shift from an art-to-look-at to an art to experience.

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • BLOCK DIARY / SLOW, RANDOM & LINKED WRITING & THINKING Nicolas Galeazzi
      24 January 2018
      posted by: Geert Vaes
    • 01 January 2018
    • 29 April 2018
    • case of: Geert Vaes
    • BLOCK DIARY / SLOW, RANDOM & LINKED WRITING & THINKING

      24 JANUARY 2018 at the TOPOS, close to my INTAMISILLY ROOM

      The space is being formed. Slowly it's taking shape. Slowly the condition emerges by itself. Where did it come from? Hard to say. It's a collection of memories, past actions and future musings and possibilities. It's at the crossroad of then and then. Maybe it's even now. But to be able to say that, to make such a statement, more time should be spent in and with the actual space/room/condition. I am creating a condition for myself. But it's a very liquid one, in the sense that nothing is being set in stone. Two walls have wheels, one wall is a curtain, the door is aluminium spaghetti,... But the mental space is quite set... This condition. I create. I am that condition. Why am I creating this condition? Out of habit. That's true... It's an habitual environment. It's the kind of place that brings me to results. BUT! Results I know / like. Is that helping my research? It's a way. A tool. Let's stay open for other options, possibilities, methodologies...

      So. The space I am forming. My plan for this block is action. Action in my case leads to form. Shaping. I need the material to gain insight. I need to use my body. Put it in shapes, forms, molds. Shapes that are not me. Performing. Acting. Shapeshifting is my 'métier'. That's the backpack I am carrying. The words I was shaping in the previous block seem to be lost. Somewhere. In the new space I'm building? I know my research had something to do with You and I, with 'using masks as tools of awareness'. That sounds so good. 'A tool of awareness...'. But I lost what it means or even meant. I don't know anymore what I'm doing. But I'm not worried. I'm in the dark building a space. And I'm confident working and doing will bring clarity. At times my thinking and theorizing in the last block seemed so clear, especially talking to Peggy and sometimes to Heike too. The words and theoretical understanding went on a holiday. I hope they will send me a postcard soon...

      All is set. Almost. The coming days I will become others. They will interact with other researchers at a.pass. Maybe my colleagues will shine bright or bring their flashlights.

       

      25 JANUARY 2018 at the TOPOS, at the dining table next to the kitchen

       

      Today I wanted to bring a record player. There's one in my basement. I wanted, but I didn't. I was looking at it and thought: why? It's an extra tool, an extra asset, an extra thing to toy around with, to help me find meaning. But I'm often using the same tools. I guess that's not such a problem since a painter tends to use paint and a canvas, and a carpenter uses wood. But what do I use? Tools to create something I can show. But I'm doing research. I'm searching for ways to eliminate the distance between Me and You. Well... Eliminating sounds drastic, let's call it: make the space between you and me as tiny as performatively possible. That's another piece of information I'll have to chew on. I'm writing for writing, I'm practicing automatic writing, so what comes out, comes out...

      Instead of the record player I brought an old newspaper. 'La Nation Belge' from 17 December 1931. Inhabiting another skin through masks may feel similar as inhabiting another time, the thirties! It's always striking to see how little has actually and effectively changed. I have lots of these newspapers. I found them under the linoleum on the second floor of the house I'm living in. During renovations I stumbled on them and just started reading...

      Now there's one in the Topos. Feel free to read.

      I plan interviews. On the Intamissily stage and TV-Studio. Next week. Have to think about that. About the how. How to get closer to the other's researches...

      I'm reminded of 'Swimming' by Martha and the Muffins. Especially the phrase: 'We're afraid to call it love, let's call it swimming'. Hmmm. Sounds usefull. Listen here:

      https://youtu.be/LnUDRtPAWsE

       

      AND I re-read the first lines of my research proposal. It helps (!):

      The proposed research aims to investigate how hyper-realistic silicone spfx-masks can be used as tools of awareness to shed more light on race, gender and class issues in an experiential, sensual and non-mental way. How to help performers and non-performers create another persona and let them experience how it feels to literally be in somebody else’s skin, wearing another one’s face in non-theatrical daily situations. How does this change their perspectives? Or doesn’t it change anything? How does this, in a broader sense, affect the notions of ‚I’ and ‚You’? How does it affect one’s outlook on one’s own community, conditionings and beliefs?

    • WHAT? 12 January 2018
      posted by: Geert Vaes
    • 25 January 2018
    • case of: Geert Vaes
    • WHAT?

      I=U

      „MIMESIS AS AN ACT OF ULTIMATE LOVE”

      - A SCIENTIFIC LOVE RESEARCH -

       

      I want to gain and produce awareness about „otherness” in a direct, experiential way, using a „scientific” method: the mask. Inward and outward ‚signifiers’ (of race, gender and class) produce and influence relations and positions. We are constantly building (constructing) interpersonal images and meanings. Which signals provoke/produce meaning in another? In other words: how is your body perceived and how do you perceive bodies? What is your position? Using masks or roles is to gain insight in ourselves and in humanity, the collective of others. We are not moving in contactzones, we are the contactzones (being ‚othered’ by other contactzones). Essentially I’m looking for a way out of exclusive thinking into inclusive thinking, out of impathy towards empathy, out of mind into heart. This research is about going beyond the mind (I) into and eventually also beyond the other (You). To put it bluntly, it is about LOVE …

       

       

      (picture: Miranda July)

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • Semiotics of the Uncanny Dr. Dalila Honorato / Isabel Burr Raty
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Close Encounters series
    • a.pass 4th floor studio
    • 21 October 2017
    • Semiotics of the Uncanny

       

       

      a.pass Research Center and Isabel Burr Raty invite special guest Dr. Dalila Honorato.

      The talk will be followed by a discussion.

      Saturday October 21st 2017, 16h-19h @ a.pass , 4th floor

       

       

      'Semiotics of the Uncanny'

       

      'Semiotics of the Uncanny' will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior, touching on subjects such as: phobia, paraphilia, teratology, prosthetics and acrotomophilia.

      If the body is defined as the sum of all physical parts then individuality is composed by the uniqueness of this structure and the qualities of its elements. In a time when plastic surgery is considered a commodity within the cosmetic industry and the hype for symmetry has reached post-standardized levels, the borders between mass production and eccentricity, in what beauty is concerned, become more obvious. But it is when health issues occur that the equation changes. How can a body be defined if a physical part is missing or if it is supernumerary in the sum? Unlike some types of lizards, starfish, sea cucumbers, earthworms and salamanders, humans have a very limited capacity of self-healing. What happens to a physical part that is removed from a body separated either due to an accident or due to its dysfunction? And how does one cope with this separation as an individual and as a social being?

       

      After Dalila’s talk, Isabel Burr Raty, performance artist, independent filmmaker and associated researcher in a.pass Research Center, will offer some tea and will support a co-learning conversation.

       

      At first, the focus of the conversation will be on the Hybrid Art contemporary positioning, a phenomenon that mixes multiple art forms crossing borders between art, science and technology, contributing to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creating new alternative technological materials and objects aimed to serve as empowering tools for resisting the high-tech capitalist imperialism. Then, Isabel and the public will prolong the discussion with Dalila to bring her approach to a broader artistic research context.

       

      Dr. Dalila Honorato’s research focuses on embodiment at the intersection of performing arts and new media and, as a curator, she is interested in exploring the outlines of art and biology. Dalila is currently Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She is one of the founding members of the Interactive Arts Lab where she coordinates the Art & Science Research Group. She is the head of the organizing committee of the conference "Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science" and conceptor-developer of the Corfu Summer School in Hybrid Arts. She is a guest faculty at the PhD studies program of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, and a guest member of the Center of Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

      ionio.academia.edu/DalilaHonorato

       

      Isabel Burr Raty explores the ontological crack between the engineered and the native, between the official facts and the unlicensed knowledge of the resettled, the relocated; in order to think about the memory of the future and dig out chapters left out of scientific and history books. Her artistic research  is design based and semiotic, interweaving live/body art, participatory performance, biology and DIY technologies, and is based on the question of how to write in situ Sci-Fi narratives that remain alive, alive as they rely on the participative audience’s faculty to propose dispositives of liberation from a commodified life/body.

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

      When: Saturday October 21st  from 16:00 h to 19:00 h

      Where: a.pass fourth floor studio.

      Free entrance

      Directions: https:///www.apass.be/contact/

      Please confirm your participation by sending an email to <isabelburr.raty@sacrofilms.com> !

       
    • Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here 

      apass_logo_sm

      No Communication without Noise

      curated by Laura Herman
       
       “Mistakes, wavy lines, confusion, obscurity are part of knowledge;
      noise is part of communication, part of the house.”
      Michel Serres
       
      No Communication Without Noise is a three-day insight in five ongoing a.pass researches that share
      an affinity with the ambivalences of writing and reading. Interested in communication, or the lack of,
      Esta Matkovic, Lili M. Rampre, Sina Seifee, Xiri Tara Noir and Maarten Van den Bussche
      address the limitations and untapped potentials of text in proposing new modes of attention.


        

      Programme

      Thursday 21st / Friday 22nd / Saturday 23rd 2017

      17:00 doors open
      ongoing installations until 22:00

      performances at
      18:00, 19:30 and 21:00

       

      Thursday 21st & Saturday 23rd

      Ongoing:

      Sina Seifee
      AN AJAYEB'S
      NETWORK MAKING
      &
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      A SENSE OF SELF

      ____________________________

      performances:

      18:00 Lili M. Rampre
      OUT OF THE BLUE

      19:30 Xiri Noir
      LISTENING BY SPEAKING TO ONESELF

      21:00 Esta Matkovic
      THE PROJECT

       

      Friday 22nd

      Ongoing:

      Sina Seifee
      AN AJAYEB'S
      NETWORK MAKING
      &
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      A SENSE OF SELF

      ____________________________

      performances:

      18:00 Xiri Tara Noir
      LISTENING BY SPEAKING TO ONESELF

      19:30 Lili M. Rampre
      OUT OF THE BLUE

      21:00 Esta Matkovic
      THE PROJECT

       

       

      line650

       

      Lili M. Rampre
      OUT OF THE BLUE

       

       

      In “Out of the Blue”, Lili Rampre moves from water to land. Although the transition would seem at first sight to be a safe one, rejoining the shore after swimming in tumultuous waters, it is not: Rampre’s world hails from The Little Mermaid, and much is lost for Ariel when she leaves the ocean waves. What, she asks, would be other ways of constituting ourselves? How can we be made anew? How can we break free from the imperatives of balance, health, and harmony, and still remain subjects? She must find out how movement and voice, the oft-forgotten tools of subjective elaboration, can disrupt the laws of propriety and open the floor for unpredictable selves.

       


       

      Maarten Van den Bussche
      A SENSE OF SELF

      RE-QUEST, RE-SEARCH and POETRY


       

      My research became a thing about how the intimate and the political might fuel and propel each other, onwards into interwoven subjective en social change! Though, when it becomes a fixed thing, I feel compelled; forced even – with the intensity of an addict longing for a hit – to change it into something else.

       


       

      Esta Matkovic
      THE PROJECT
      a project about love and intimacy


       

      I am presenting a book and i would like to think of it as performative act, a substitute for my process, an aesthetic experience. I am working on our everyday performativity, making a format for Intimacy, Care and Love to be observed, a contract as a meeting space of our borders in an agreed space. The assemblage of documented material consists of messages, email exchanges and meetings with my artist Lovers, through my daily reflects upon the ‘project’.   

       


       

      Xiri TAra Noir
      LISTENING BY SPEAKING TO ONESELF
      a relational practice


       

      Departing from an activist purview Xiri’s research centers on how particular gestures are captured and interpreted by different groups of women. Across different groups, however, misunderstandings are likely to emerge due to factors of circumstance and prejudice. Xiri uses transcriptions not as a tool to translate what has been said exactly, but how it has been said by returning what gets lost into the realm of the perceptible through amplification. Through a legend of cues – an emotional map of sorts – a reenactment of conversations becomes possible, reconfiguring the field of relations and enabling the appreciation of value systems that are not ours. 

       

       


       

      Sina Seifee
      AN AJAYEB'S NETWORK MAKING

       

       

      Ajayeb ‌ is a site of heritage and research on histories of standards in knowledge production, stories of the inseparability of affect and episteme, passing of obligations from something ghost-like to something felt-with-certainty, from site to parasite. And work on ajayeb is an infrastructural concern about zones of encounter, about the politics of rememberance: the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities that constitute what is „past.“

       


       

      a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij

      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

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

       

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    •  

       

       

      reading now:

      Wacquant__Loic._2003._Body_and_soul

      "When French sociologist Loïc Wacquant signed up at a boxing gym in a black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, he had never contemplated getting close to a ring, let alone climbing into it. Yet for three years he immersed himself among local fighters, amateur and professional. He learned the Sweet science of bruising, participating in all phases of the pugilist's strenuous preparation, from shadow-boxing drills to sparring to fighting in the Golden Gloves tournament. In this experimental ethnography of incandescent intensity, the scholar-turned-boxer dissects the making of prizefighters and supplies a model for a "carnal sociology" capable of capturing "the taste and ache of action."

      Body & Soul marries the analytic rigor of the sociologist with the stylistic grace of the novelist to offer a compelling portrait of a bodily craft and of life and labor in the black American ghetto at century's end, but also a revealing tale of self transformation and social transcendence. And, by fleshing out Pierre Bourdieu's signal concept of habitus, it deepens our theoretical grasp of human practice."

       

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS ?! 4/4 (revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
      17 March 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 20 March 2017
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS ?! 4/4

       

       


      Screening starts at 16h00
      Entrance free
       
       
      Extended, closing program for Monday 20/03/17
       
       
      Hyperstition
      2016/ 100'
      Christopher Roth with Armen Avanessian

      "Hyper-what?"
      Features Georg Diez, Anke Hennig, Tom Lamberty, Nick Land, Quentin Meillassoux, Reza Negarestani, Björn Quiring, Patricia Reed, Tom Streidl, James Trafford, Jeanne Tremsal, Alex Williams, and Slavoj Žižek.


      Kempinski
      2007/France/14'
      Neil Beloufa

      Shot in Mali, Neil Beloufa’s Kempinski (2007) is a science fiction documentary featuring interviews with local inhabitants as they imagine their visions of the future.
       


      +++ BREAK/ Starts again at 19h30 +++
       
       

      Kin-dza-dza!
      1986 / USSR/ 135'
      Georgiy Daneliya

      Kin-dza-dza! is one of the strangest artefacts in all of Soviet cinema. It’s a science fiction satire in which Vladmir and Gedevan, a gruff Russian construction worker and a Georgian student, find themselves accidentally transported to Pluke, a barren desert-world with a barbaric, bureaucratic society. Gradually realising that they are not in a ‘capitalist country’, the two men begin a long and farcical voyage home that more closely resembles the theatre of the absurd than it does any preconceived notion of cinematic science fiction. The men befriend two locals, Bi and Wef, and are soon busking their way across Pluke and becoming ensnared in various misadventures that stem from the planet’s bizarre and unbendable social rules, and its two-tier social structure of ruling Chatlanians and subservient Patsaks.


      Heart of a Dog 
      1988 / USSR / 113'
      Vladimir Bortko

      An adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s dystopian and comic sci-fi novel Sobache Serdtse about a Soviet experiment of turning a dog into a human, set in Moscow in 1925, not long after the Revolution of 1917.
      Old Prof. Preobrazhensky and his young colleague Dr. Bormental inserted the human's hypophysis into a dog's brain. Couple of weeks later the dog named Sharik became a slovenly and narcissistic incarnation of the New Soviet Man.
    • postgraduate program
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON- ((((((( changing (the) world (s) )))))) 10 December 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 09 January 2017
    • 30 April 2017
    • CURATED BY PIERRE RUBIO
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON_ ((((((( changing (the) world (s) ))))))

       

       

       

      TROUBLE ON RADIO TRITON

      ((((((( changing (the) world(s) ))))))

       

       

      ‘ The struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons. Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.'

      Judith Butler

      Undoing Gender, 2004

       

       

      For the coming months, a.pass will adopt a ‘Sci-Fi terraforming mode of attention’ to challenge the current assembly of artist-researchers with the task of creating some conditions to critically questioning our abilities to ‘render our world habitable again’.

      In fact, far from proposing an innocuous escapism in the false paradise of disembodied utopias, the next a.pass block is concerned with questions addressing the possible (in)capacity of art in general to produce a change and aims to understand the (im)possible contribution of art to collective empowerment by means of artistic researching.

      The hybrid dispositive of the block is designed to research, reveal, activate and share the political inventive potentialities of our artistic researches through, paradoxically,  an immersion into and practice of different types of (speculative) fiction.

      Which alternative worlds do our researches/practices contain and can immanently produce? How do we relate to the future via artistic-research? As artists, do we through our researches contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if yes, then which cultures do our researches produce?

      Trouble on Radio Triton is a metaphoric multipolar dispositive. A discursive and practice-based ‘lure for feeling’ and thinking. An operative alibi strategically using ‘if’s’, ‘what if’s’, ‘as if’s’ to exercise critique and imagine alternatives.

      Through a permanent dialogue between practice-based research, reflection on a variety of discourses and different modes of speculation we will explore multiple but simultaneous realities induced by a proliferation of free-form  'fictionalisations' of every participants’ research in parallel with the individual development of these very researches.

      What can we discover in our research by listening to it from another space – the one of fiction? Who will talk?  What will talk? But also: how to listen? Where to listen from? What to listen for? And whom to listen with? How to get to more than one point of listening? What/Who will become deaf? What/Who will be silenced? What/Who will be heard?

       

       

      We will present our researches three times during the block, using different forms: at first a networked portrait then a master class and finally a performative artistic-research presentation.

      On Thursday mornings we will welcome several engaged practitioners in a series of reading sessions, talks and discussions curated by Pierre Rubio in collaboration with some of the artists-researchers involved in the program.  They will share with us their efforts at creating conditions for imagining otherwise.

      With e.g. : Sol Archer, Peggy Pierrot, Laurence Rassel, Fabrizio Terranova...

      We will follow three different practice-based workshops:  Alice Chauchat's Wordling from this World , Helena Dietrich's The Tea Party  and a taylor-made proposal by Myriam Van Imschoot.

      We will attend a series of conferences by Edward George, Paul Gilroy, Lizzie Borden and Donna Haraway.

      We will collectively curate the Night Sessions: a series of evenings proposing lines of flight and unexpected connections with the program.

      We will finally collaborate together at creating a true/false/real/fictional radio station: Radio Triton.

       

       

      Radio Triton is the collective experimental dispositive of the block – a pedagogical and metaphorical tool. The proposal invites the participants to imagine and produce a series of audio pieces developed out of their researches and their contributions to the block. They can be produced individually or in collaboration within the ‘machine’ Radio Triton, which nature and identity we will collectively invent.

      The Radio Triton ‘'program’ will follow two main trajectories. The first consisting of the recording of different forms of interviews between the artists researchers and the block-guests and second being the creation of fictional audio and sonic pieces through the application of various translation processes to the participants’ researches.

      These translations/speculations will be supported by a series of sound research ateliers. Starting with ”Foley your Research” with Christian Hansen -a queer interpretation of Foley art- around the question "how does/could your research sound like?" and followed by a series of  Thursday afternoon sessions curated by Pierre Rubio in collaboration with the artists-researchers. The aim of the sessions will be in finding the appropriate 'displacing questions': the futures we need to produce the audio fictions we need.

      Radio Triton will simultaneously engage in the tasks of performing, documenting, archiving and broadcasting alternative -both disturbing and reassuring- ways of becoming-with-each-other otherwise.

       

       

      The block and the radio dispositive are named in reference to Donna Haraway’s “invitation to stay with the trouble” and the anarchist and hedonistic science-fiction masterpiece novel by Samuel R. Delany ‘Trouble on Triton - an ambiguous heterotopia’ from 1976. The novel was partly written in a dialogue with Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist and feminist science fiction novel ‘The Dispossessed’, whose subtitle is ‘an ambiguous utopia’. As the subtitles imply, the two novels offer conflicting perspectives on utopia and imagine the concrete possibilities and consequences of anarchist and queer societies.

      Both books inviting us to see through the trouble.

       

      Pierre Rubio, December 2016

       

       

      “The first cultural device was probably a recipient .... Many theorisers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier”. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely foetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.”

      Ursula K. LeGuin in ’The Carrier bag Theory of Fiction’,

      In Dancing at the Edge of the World, 1986

       

       

       

    • I.

      I am the wall - waterfalls. I actually want to be distant from the walls. I don't know where I originate, but I know where I finish. I directly fall onto the ground. I spread a bit, but not too much - not to disturb the center of the space. 

      I am clear, and I don't want to touch the dirty walls. 

      I am the margins. I am hidden, and I need to be so to be able to blossom afterwards. I am there, I am invisible. I am a thin long continuous line - like a snake. I can be dangerous, but I am necessary. 

      I am the nail polish sculpture. I am open enough to receive, but not too much. I am disgusting for the outside. Repulsive. I gather the waters that spill from the ceiling. The unwanted, unwelcome waters come to me, to be contained. They are actually clear waters then. 

      _____________________________________________________

      II.

      (following is best to be read form the back: word by word; 'I'm'  and 'I'll' are to be taken as one word)

      I’m the Dancing:
      I’m nervous but I don’t move. I want to get out here but I’m everywhere. I’m in everything, watching myself from millions of perspectives. I’m the potential. I see myself lying sitting standing. there is things to change! I’m just there, immobile. I’m nervous.

      I’m the black hole:
      I’m the black hole that is still black. I’m in front, I’m dark, I’m the source of curiosity, and I’m entropy. I’m at service of your imagination and I’m all those un-captured memories that got lost in the space. Black hole, whole of stuff that can inspire your imagination. I eat everything.

      I’m the horizon of the possible:
      do you hear me, I’m explosive!
      Do you like me, I’m in love
      do you think of me, I’m never there where you think
      do you want me, you’ll never catch me.
      do you kill me, I’ll dance!

       

      ************************************************************

       

       

    • ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

      ---------------------------------------------- WRITING SERVICE ----------------------------------------------

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

      • Please encircle up to five keywords across all categories, or add new keywords in the space provided, then hand this page to the writer.

      Language:
      ENGLISH / DUTCH / FRENCH

      Method:

      LAPTOP / NAIL-POLISH / PEN & PAPER / TYPEWRITER

      Style and Form:

      ACADEMIC / ADVERTISEMENT / ANGRY RANT / CYNICAL / DIARY ENTRY / FAIRY TALE / FREE ASSOCIATION / FREE VERSE / INSTRUCTION LEAFLET / LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION / MANIFEST / MYSTICAL / MYTH / ODE / OPTIMISTIC / PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE / PESSIMISTIC / POETRY / PRAGMATIC / PROSE / RATIONAL / RHYME / ROMANTIC / THEORETICAL / .................... / ................... / ................ /

      Content:
      209 / ATTENTION / BELL / BOX / CONFLICT / CYBORG / DIARY / DISPOSITIF / DOCUMENTING / CAMBIO DE CERRADURA SIN LLAVE CARE / CLAPPERBOARD / CORRESPONDENCE / DECLARATION / DESK / EMBODIMENT / EXCESS / FRAMING / FRIDAY / GENERICALY SPECIFIC / GOD / HAND-EYE COORDINATION / INVISIBLE / LIGHT / LIGHT THEREMIN / LILITH / LOCATION / LOVE / MD-RECORDER / MIRROR / MOIRRRE / MOVEMENT / NAIL-POLISH / NON-DUALITY / NON-UNDERSTANDABLE / OPENLY CONCRETE / PASSAGE / PERSONAL / POETRY / POLITICS / PRACTICE / RECALL / RECORDING / SCORES / SELF / SPACE / SOUND / TEXT / TEXTING / THE HOLE CAMERA / THEORY / THE SELF / THIS SPACE / TRANCE / TRANCE TEXTING / TYPEWRITER / VERGENCE / VISIBLE / ..................... / ................ / ..................... / ................ /


       

      HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT YOU AND YOUR MIRROR IMAGE HAVE IN COMMON?

      -ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A WAY BEYOND FLATNESS ?-

      TRY OUT OUR NEW FRIDAY SESSION – SEE YOURSELF THROUGH THE CHAOTIC LENS OF A FLUCTUATING SELECTION OF CONTEMPORARY POOR

      RETURN TO YOUR PROJECTED LIVE KNOWING THAT A REVOLUTIONARY SYSTEM OF COMMONING WHAT WAS ONCE PRIVATE IS SO COMPLICATED IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN DURING YOUR LIFETIME. WATCH GROWN UP PEOPLE DO WEIRD THINGS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND AND FEEL HOW LIVE COULD BE WAY MORE COMPLICATED THAN YOU EVER FELT. IT IS EASY!

      FIND PEACE AGAIN WHEN YOU LOOK INTO YOUR MIRROR

      FREE TOOLS AND RESOURCES PROVIDED TO FILL YOUR GAPS

      WARNING: ALL FOOD SERVED WILL BE VEGETARIAN – NO REFUNDS


       

       

      SUBJECT: 01101100 01101001 01101100 01101001 01110100 01101000
      CREATION DATE: 0 – 134064h.

      HUMAN ACCES CODE: L I L I T H

      MANIFESTATION:

      subject breached non-dual protocol by applying nail-polish __subject stated 'I got Friday on my mind / I could be your Fairy / Baby / Let's embody across all categories / your SELFSPACE or mine / let's become invisible / doesn't that sound fine?'
      SOLUTION:

      __recommend increase testosterone dosage during next TRANSE fase __removal of excess SELFSPACE __thorough cleaning of the optic fiber passages __removal of the other


      - APROVAL OF NCH DIVISION REQUIRED -





       

    •  

      Observation: for each scores, observing changes that occure at a body, psychical, emotional and imaginary level. Weight, tension, focus, gaze, scale, feeling of enlarging/shortening, solid/fluid, unique/multiple, colours, emotions, image, association,...

      Heart:

      • feeling the heart beat through inner focus: fingers, hands, feet, temples,...

      • start laid down, try to feel/hear your heart beat where it reveals itself clearly, look for less obvious place where you can feel it, change position and do it again.

      • Start sitting cross-legged, relax your upper body and let your neck and more of your body oscillating according to your heart beat.

      • place your hand under your jaw to feel your heart beat with your fingers.

      • Reproduce the heart beat in live with your voice

      • move another part of your body on the rhythm of your heart beat

      • bend your knees on your heart beat

      • jump on your heart beat

      • by two: place your hand under the jaw of the partner, and do the same scores as above

      • move/dance on the rhythm of your heart beat, with or without helping technology (stethoscope,...)

      Vibrations :

      • alone: produce sounds with your voice (changing the tone and volume) and try to localise them, by feeling/following their vibrations, in your body.

      • By two : one partner is producing the sound and the other is localising it helping him/herself with hands or other body parts

      • By two : back to back, together or one at a time, the partners produce sounds and localise them within their bodies.

      • move/dance following the body parts that naturally resonate with the produced sound

      • move/dance resisting to follow the body parts that naturally resonate with the produced sound.

      Narration :

      • declare out loud a specific statement and feel what this declaration is doing to your body, physically, emotionally.

      • declare out loud a specific statement and repeat it while moving. Feel what that does to your body and how the movements are created through this declaration.

      • declare out loud a specific statement and repeat it while changing its shape, tone, speed, volume, emotion with which it is declared.

      • authentic speech : talk without caring about the meaning of your speak, just follow your mood

      Time:

      • stay in one position for a long period of time (to be determined) till you start noticing subtle changes in your body, tension of the muscles, pain, focus,...then change position and do t again or just start moving slowly.

      • Gaze at an object in the space and observe how your perception is changing with time, how your awareness of your look change and your acknowledgement of the object itself start changing too.

      Listening:

      • multidirectional listening: listen to all sounds of your surrounding environment (down, up, right, left, front, back, far, close) with the same intensity. Don't focus on any of them, but try to hear them, to let them enter your hear equally.

      • Intimate listening: turn your gaze on the inside and listen to the sound produced by your body (heart, breath, digestive system,...)

      • in/out: mix the two previous scores and listen to the inside and the outside with the same intensity of presence in your mind

      • group listening: picture that you connect your ear, your listening to the one of the other in the group and try to hear what and how they hear.

      Blind:

      • blind your eyes or keep them closed for several hours and act normally, move, walk, eat, sit, talk,... and notice how your other senses get increased.

      • By two: both blind their eyes and then connect to each other through one body part and start moving, trying to tune within the partner and to reproduce the same movement. One will be leading and the other one following. Change role without opening eyes.

      • Deaf dance: move/dance, trying to make as less noise as possible.

      Grimaces :

      • make grimace in front of a mirror. Change the speed and the intensity going from one grimace to another. Notice the emotional change within you.

      • Make grimaces in front of a mirror and expand them to your entire body. Be attentive to the different tension, emotional changes,...

      Breath/tone :

      • start breathing normally then go for producing a tone but keep it there. Don't go for it entirely, just stay on the threshold between breath and tone.

      • Start producing a sound and then go for changing it. The same way, don't go entirely for the change, stay on the threshold.

      • Tone/grimace: in front of a mirror, produce a sound (tone or breath or whatever) and expand the physical consequence of it in a grimace and then expand it to the body. Then change tone, or change grimace or tension in the body and see how the three of them are relating to each other.

      • Choose a point in the space. Breath in and scream at it with a specific emotional aim that you've chosen before: love scream, rage scream, hate scream, melancholic one, sad one,...

      • produce a sound and repeat it; Try to hear it and to produce it the same way again and again. See how your perception of it is changing and how you get used and unused to it.

      07/10/2016

      Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000003993 StartFragment:0000000541 EndFragment:0000003977

      By two : back to back, together or one at a time, the partners produce sounds and localise them within their bodies”.

      We started from this “back to back” score and then we implemented it following our body and the divers discoveries we made. We choose to tune, to produce the same tone, which allowed us tu feel more clearly the vibrations produced by our own voices. The low frequencies were easier to feel because of their location in the chest when the higher pitch, resonating only in the skull can't really be transmitted from one body to another. Although the higher pitch vibrations are easier to sense if producing through humming...the closed mouth and then your skull itself works as an inner sound box.

      The next step of this experience was to come up with a score that could help us to extend in our bodies the vibrations produced by our voices. To do so, we decided that one of us would lay down on its back and produce a tone out loud, and would try to keep this tone unchanged while the other would manipulate its body : lifting up, pushing, pulling, displacing it.

      • Sum up of one partner's experience : subtle changes of the tone according to the manipulation of the body. To push or pull on member changed the tension of the entire body, affecting the position and the tension of the diaphragm, that is then affecting the production of the tone by making it louder, lower or affecting the pitch. Notice that after this subtle change, it is always possible to come back to the original tone (the chosen one) although it is sometimes uncomfortable, a feeling of having to force myself to produce a less natural tone. After a while, it seems that the body and the mind starts to understand the inner process of those slight changes and starts to anticipate the change, by producing a different tone when the body manipulation didn't happen yet. The movement of pulling the lower part of the body (the legs) spread down the vibrations (almost reaching the pelvis area and modifies the basic tone towards a lower one. I assume it does so because of pulling down and relaxing the diaphragm. The more we are relaxed, the more the vibrations can spread and extend to the entire body.

      • Sum up of the other partner's experience : to manipulate the body produces variations in my feeling of gravity and according to the intensity of those changes of gravity, the initial tone fluctuates. It happened that some tiny manipulations cause a sensation of dizziness and this very sensation also affects the tone itself. It seems that the emotional state of the person also affects the tone that is being produced (when one anticipates the dizziness that is to come or anticipate the touch, or the manipulation to come). When the neck and so the throat are manipulated, the voice casts off and is followed by a strong feeling of dizziness. It seems that this specific area is a physical as emotional knot that can be unfolded through voice mixed with specific manipulation.

    • common thing - 2

      The world created by thought, the world of words, language, and concepts, is the world of opposites: ‘Up and down’, ‘this or that’, ‘inside and outside’, ‘right and wrong’, ‘black and white’, ‘true and false’, ‘positive and negative’, ‘me and you’ and so on. The world of words, language, thoughts, concepts, is a dualistic world of apparent opposites. But, in reality, do opposites exist? What we are really pointing to when we use the word ‘non-duality’ is something that goes beyond all of these mind-made opposites. But how can we talk about something that goes beyond opposites, when even our attempt to talk about non-duality is dualistic? So, what the word non-duality actually means is really very difficult to describe or put into words. In fact, you could say it’s impossible. For we are not talking about non-duality as opposed to something called duality, we are not talking about pro-duality as opposed to anti-duality. In fact the non-duality we speak of is not the opposite of anything. This is impossible to understand logically or rationally. To see what is being spoken of, we must go beyond our ordinary way of thinking and seeing.

      ‘Non-duality’ is actually a translation of the Sanskrit word ‘Advaita’, which simply means ‘not two’ and points to the essential oneness (wholeness, completeness, unity) of life, a wholeness which exists here and now, prior to any apparent separation. It’s a word that points to an intimacy, a love beyond words, right at the heart of present moment experience. It’s a word that points us back Home. And despite the compelling appearance of separation and diversity there is only one universal essence, one reality. Oneness is all there is – and we are included. What we are really trying to do when we say ‘non-duality’ is point to life as it is right now, before the appearance of concepts and labels; before thought creates a world of things: table, chair, hand, foot, fear, me, you, past, future. What is life before thought? Can we even talk about that? Is it possible to capture non-duality into words?”

      Jeff foster

      http://www.lifewithoutacentre.com/.


      16 September 2016: Added set cards from the Declaration tool: 
      All togetherness / illusion ?
      The speech act: / Declaring something as a tool / as resource / The act: / translate something into a tool or a resource

    • common thing - 28

      I am a dancer, a performer, a teacher, a researcher and a shiatsu practionner. Since I have encountered the work of Lisa Nelson in 1999, my dance practice shifted from exercising the body to exercising the attention. Now, I see the body as a vehicle for the attention and its dance a reflection of its state of awareness.

      I am currently leading a research on poetic, polyphonic and multi modal dance documentation. I am researching on poetic documentation because “Poetic experience” is my core interest, be it in the form of a dance, a text, a film, an object, a situation or a document. I love the definition that Georges Bataille gives to “the poetic” in ‘The inner experience’: “The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.”

      The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange… This kind of shift happens for me in the studio when, for example, I spend some time looking at things and people around me. Suddenly, everything is beauty; the old piece of bread crust that lies under the table becomes the most incredible sculpture and people around me are composing the most exquisite choreography. Nothing has changed but I see it differently. Everything is organized, in order, at the right place. “The poetic” happens when I pay attention to details so for me. Attention is what makes the ordinary extra-ordinary; It is a door to poetic experience.

       

       

      16 September 2016

       

       

      attention in the freezer

       common thing - 61

       

       

      !!!

      note: attention disappeared

      date: unknown

       

       

    • common thing - 29

      15 september 2016

      This resource is Text. This Text was inspired/produced by my love life during the summer of 2016.
      It is not all and every piece of text that originated because of love this summer, it's a first selection.
      More might be added during the course of the block, or not. I can be asked for clarification about the Text;
      But I'm not obliged to answer. The Text as they are here, can be used in any way you see fit.
      There are no digital versions available. Exit strategies for transformed (parts of) Text must be talked through with me.

       


      16 September 2016: Added set cards from the Declaration tool: 
      What kind of tradition do we need today? / What kind of ceremony do we need today? / what kind f representation of togetherness do we need today? / What kind of common intimacy do we need today?
      Re-thinking the made dominated institution / economy as a masculine practice
      Love as institutional practice?
      Emotional attachment / belonging, possessing, owning, appropriating, claiming, responding, adding, developing, ...


       

      ----------16------09-------2016------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

      IMG_1276

      IMG_1270

       

      IMG_1274IMG_1280

       

      IMG_1273

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       


       

       

      common thing - 9

       

      common thing - 3

       

    • information
    • a.pass: The Uncanny 14 September 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
      Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here 

      apass_logo_sm

       
      SEMIOTICS OF THE UNCANNY

      DR. DALILA HONORATO

       

      a.pass Research Center and Isabel Burr Raty

      invite special guest Dr. Dalila Honorato.

      The talk will be followed by a discussion.

      Saturday October 21st 2017, 16h-19h

      @ a.pass , 4th floor 

       

      ‘Semiotics of the Uncanny’ will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior, touching on subjects such as: phobia, paraphilia, teratology, prosthetics and acrotomophilia.

      If the body is defined as the sum of all physical parts then individuality is composed by the uniqueness of this structure and the qualities of its elements. In a time when plastic surgery is considered a commodity within the cosmetic industry and the hype for symmetry has reached post-standardized levels, the borders between mass production and eccentricity, in what beauty is concerned, become more obvious. But it is when health issues occur that the equation changes. How can a body be defined if a physical part is missing or if it is supernumerary in the sum? Unlike some types of lizards, starfish, sea cucumbers, earthworms and salamanders, humans have a very limited capacity of self-healing. What happens to a physical part that is removed from a body separated either due to an accident or due to its dysfunction? And how does one cope with this separation as an individual and as a social being?

       

      After Dalila’s talk, Isabel Burr Raty, performance artist, independent filmmaker and associated researcher in a.pass Research Center, will offer some tea and will support a co-learning conversation. 

      At first, the focus of the conversation will be on the Hybrid Art contemporary positioning, a phenomenon that mixes multiple art forms crossing borders between art, science and technology, contributing to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creating new alternative technological materials and objects aimed to serve as empowering tools for resisting the high-tech capitalist imperialism. Then, Isabel and the public will prolong the discussion with Dalila to bring her approach to a broader artistic research context.

      Dr. Dalila Honorato’s research focuses on embodiment at the intersection of performing arts and new media and, as a curator, she is interested in exploring the outlines of art and biology. Dalila is currently Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She is one of the founding members of the Interactive Arts Lab where she coordinates the Art & Science Research Group. She is the head of the organizing committee of the conference “Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science” and conceptor-developer of the Corfu Summer School in Hybrid Arts. She is a guest faculty at the PhD studies program of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, and a guest member of the Center of Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

      ionio.academia.edu/DalilaHonorato 

      Isabel Burr Raty explores the ontological crack between the engineered and the native, between the official facts and the unlicensed knowledge of the resettled, the relocated; in order to think about the memory of the future and dig out chapters left out of scientific and history books. Her artistic research  is design based and semiotic, interweaving live/body art, participatory performance, biology and DIY technologies, and is based on the question of how to write in situ Sci-Fi narratives that remain alive, alive as they rely on the participative audience’s faculty to propose dispositives of liberation from a commodified life/body.

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

      When: Saturday October 21st  from 16:00 h to 19:00 h

      Where: a.pass fourth floor studio.

      Free entrance

      Directions: https:///www.apass.be/contact/

      Please confirm your participation by sending an email to <isabelburr.raty@sacrofilms.com> !

       


       

      a.pass
      p/a de Bottelarij

      Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17
      1080 Brussels/Belgium

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

       

       

    • BOOH

       

      hanky

       

      1) a girl is sitting on a green sofa. She feels cosy,
      surrounded by a huge woolen blanket and a white one.

      Slowly, the white blanket swallows her.

       

      2) the white blanket is now animated. It crawls from the
      sofa onto the floor. It spreads out.

      The white blanket makes love with the floor.
      "aaaaaaaaah".

       

      3) the white blanket slowly stands up. We can see now that
      it is a body covered in white sheet. The form of a ghost.

      The ghost moves a few steps away from the sofa.

      A little hanky is left on the floor, where the intercourse happened.

       

      Ghost + Floor = Handkerchief

       

       

      GHOST-IN-LOVE

      large

       

       

       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #6 21 January 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 12 February 2016
    • 12 February 2016
    • SESSION #6

      PARTICIPANTS
      Luiza, Robin, Bredan, Lilia, Mala, Juan, Christian, Sofia, Arianna, Sana

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > REPLY

      Luiza > Robin > Brendan

      Lilia > Brendan > Robin

      Mala > Arianna > Luiza

      Juan > Lilia > Sanna

      Robin > Sana > Lilia

      Christian >  Christian > Sofia

      Brendan > Juan > Arianna

      Sofia > Luiza > Christian

      Arianna > Mala > Mala

      Sanna > Sofia > Juan

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1. Luiza>Robin>Brendan

      “I had a dream of you. I talked and you listened, very attentive. And the way you listened made whatever I was saying very personal to you. And it made us become more intimate. I hope you can think what it was that I said”.

      I had to re-read this text as I had forgotten the exact wording so I was glad to have it in my phone. I also sent it to myself by email and then cut and paste it into  a document. So what started in a dream was sent out into the world in the form of a text, was read, became a mail, was cut, became a document, is going to be cut and paste and mailed again and posted in a google doc. Does any of this change it, make it less intimate, less personal. Originally in the text you address me personally. Did you dream of us as a group and send it to us all as a group text. Did you dream about us all individually then ponder each person’s role in the dream and send different texts. These questions come up as a response to the word personal and intimate and the apparent contradiction between the content and the medium. This contradiction sets up an interesting tension and triggers the question:  ‘what is the conversation going on between technology and the content it carries in your work’?

      Louiza if you're reading this, these are the words I heard you saying in the dream, “ when you hear my voice, you hear or see or feel the sound of my mind collaborating with the medium within which its embedded when it meets your ear, your eyes, your skin”

       

      2)  Lilia > Brendan > Robin

      Dear Lilia and Robin

      Eating the flowers, of following your text from the inside,  closing my eyes, concentrating, focusing, listening, etc, I then took a step out and watched or read the reading of it. And from here i found my question, now,  i became interested in seeing how you experienced the reading of your personal letter, the letter, a conversational tone, that enters a deep monologue.

      Writing to another in the process of discovering what's contained in you, listening to another speak your words, touched by yourself through the two others, the reader and the dear receiver.  Touching yourself in a conceptual threesome. I watch.

      Imagine a house that contains no windows.

      Long did i build you, oh house! With each memory i carried stones.

      Outside of the walls of this house without windows, are windows.

      These windows look in at us through the walls.

      my question is, how can we see the windows?

      How do we know they are there?

       

      3) Mala > Arianna > Luiza

      I have just experienced a work situation of this kind:

      The passage between phase A of the work and phase B wasn't regulated by the transformation (distillation) of the concepts formulated in one phase in order to bring this distilled material to the other.

      The passage was a jump. But not one that forgets what has left behind; rather, a jump full of the joy of discovery and of the wonder of surprise. To let yourself be surprised by the unusual, unexpected way a translation can take form.

      This way, leaving things behind keeps a lot of trust in the things themselves: the trust that those things can have their way to arrange themselves without me choosing a direction for them.

      I wonder about dream being the translation machine between one phase of a situation to another.

      I imagine sort of a magic box: what happens when we put our concepts inside and leave them becoming something else through the dream machine?

      4) Juan > Lilia > Sana

      Dear Juan and dear Sana,

      The performance of Juan made me think about your background in architecture. In the sense that there is the desire to transform landscape. In this case a temporary architecture that doesn’t add another piece of material to the environment but works as the creation of a story in that environment. The mountains made of clothes on the window horizon changed the view, the place, the dream. An autonomous entity passed by and left a trace in the viewers eye creating the possibility of change but also of an utopic change, or ephemeral change. I had to think about the work of Francis Alys, more specifically the one where a group of people try to move a mountain of some centimeters. Alys was also an architect.

      Can you develop on Juan concepts of immediacy and trace in relation to the environment and the possibility of change?


      5) Robin/ Sana/ Lilia

      Dear Robin

      I felt a space was oscillating between the voice describing a flower and your action constantly challenging the forms, frames and limits. This space inherits a lot from the violence hidden in both actions. Since the violence in your action is more constructive in the sense of transformation and suggestion, I find it as an active response to the idea of confinement.

      On the other hand, in a very prototypical view wooden board reminds me of housewives working in the kitchen. I started thinking about ‘domestic confinement’.

      My question is how the confinement ( as a general notion, nothing to do with feminism or domestic confinement or any subject in that field ) can be questioned and interpreted ? How the body can encounter confinement through it’s desires?

      Dear Lilia  

      I have noticed that you talk about politic, love and touch ( even in the text that you read in last bubble score). I am curious if you see any connection between my question and that in a performative way.

       

      7)Brendan > Juan > Arianna

      To contribute to Brendan's questioning about parallel realities, here there is a link to a recent news... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html

       

      8) Sofia > Luiza > Christian

      Hi Sofi, Hi X-tian

      Here goes my question, sorry for the delay!!!!!!!

      The chain of dance that we made in your performance felt really good. It was fun and up lifting. I enjoyed appropriating your body moves with body, and seeing Brendan moves behind me. And as we danced I thought on how everyone else in the chain would be dancing and that with all these different nuances we were creating this dancing landscape.

      And so, my question is: what happens to the landscape when my feet touches the ground?

      9) Arianna > Mala > Mala

      dear Arianna,

      i guess this is my question to me about yr proposition?!

      i'm interested in the language machine u are building and its potential.

      so, there is a text to be performed, about the common, about the response-ability. this text is "voiced" as "sounds of letters" but also as "movements of the body". in yr case the body and the voice are saying the same. same text. in a way it is a literal translation or say, transcription of the text into another medium. but there is a feeling, as if u are trying to build something like a new language that can potentially serve as a "new common" through a new "common use", as u explicitly address us with offering it to be tried out and used by us. for now we still stay with 26 letters as yr translation is a translation of the 26 letters of the english alphabet. i begin to wander, if the language is to truly be response-able, able of response-iveness, through the act of use, what kind of language, would that be, would it still be a a fixed language, a language fixed as an (endlessly) permutable series of 26 units? could language as a "new" common used be more "responsive" to "life", to the emergent reality singular situations? what kind of language would that be? still a fixed set? or would there be gaps? yes, u are right, the question I'm asking is, how to create the space in language, where the contingency directs the course of an emergent structure and the subjectivity does not direct but participates in the course of events. and then there is a space for the movement of "response". perhaps the question is not about the invention of a "new (common) language" but rather about the creation of "space-s" within language, held open, for the impossible, unpredictable, provisional "movement's" of life, its intentionality and its logic wanting to be brought about. how then the machine "cracks open" to be permeable for the forever singular unfolding interventions of immanence?

      thank u! xm

      Dear Arianna how do you integrate resonance in your practice?

       

      10) Sanna > Sofia > Juan

      Dear Sana,

      http://we.tl/69ljBJEAn9

      ?

      KEYWORDS

      Slippery; Elsewhere; Magic; multitask; re-religion; ambiguous staging; dream sequence; dimensions; layers; empathy/sympathy.

       

      REPLY:

       

      1) Luiza > Robin > Brendan

      conversation between content and technology

      there are two people

      one delivering a message and the other receiving.

      there is a simple remark, greeting, question, etc, that is delivered via text message.

      there is a blind fold.

      when the message arrives, the receiver puts on the blindfold and then begins to (try to) read the message and discover and respond to the content.

      they discuss the message for 4 minutes

      in the 5th minute the blindfold can be removed and the written content can be read, shared and briefly discussed.

      end

      references:

      Garou Garou le passe muraille 1951 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruab_pF-qh0

       

       

    • Session 1

      A prologue for the text:

       

      tinna bubble score

      Illustrated text:

      On a table a cutting board, a knife an apple and an orange.  
      I cut the orange open and reveal the white inside the bark
      "An orange is white"

      I cut an apple open and find a seed
      " An apple is black"

       

      SESSION 2

      Question :

      Do you think "reality" is something that can be shared ?

       

      >Text from Liana, a facebook medium< :  

      The first one coming through is a young boy that passed away in a tractor accident a couple of years ago.  I think he was dark haired.

      He says that it was an accident, I was not careful and I like to tease. 

      And now he smiles.

      He says that what no one knows is that he is still exists.

      The next one coming through died from lung cancer, she was and is a light bearer. She lacked energy for many years.

      I left behind something that I wanted to be able to finish myself.

      I always liked decorations.

      My colours were bright and we often had conversations, and especially when I realised were things were heading.

      The next one is a small boy that died at birth. The grief was great and the mother still blames herself, I think this happened 2 or 3 years ago.

      My mother was bright and beautiful and very young, but she was ready for me.

      He just wants to let it known that it is worth it to try again, because he is determined to arrive.

      I continue, I have a lovely boy here, bright and beautiful, he says that he died of heart failure when he was just a teenager, I feel in the years 2003-2005

      He says that he has a sister and an aunt that favour him, mom and dad and all the others do too, but the two of them remember me the most.

      He says that he was so pleased to get a new baby sister.

      We used to travel a lot.

      Mom was always there but I suppose dad was there too, but now I have an uncle that is with me now and takes care of me.

      I have the next one here with me and he needs to come through.

      I died not long ago from cancer, it went fast, I had a wonderful wife and two daughters.

      We lived a healthy life, and we were expecting a new life when this disaster happened.

      We talked a lot about that live was not always as we thought it was, and why us.

      The next one coming through, says, I died from cancer and had many children, it was very unfair.  I died many years ago and I was always full of light and happy. 

      I have two babies here with me that I am related to.

      Bring my regards to everyone.  I know you didn’t always get your way and had siblings that wanted to control you.

      I have a little boy that drowned a couple of years ago.

      He says that he was mixed, not fully icelandic, but I was on a trip with my parents that I had looked forward to.

      Continue with the next one, I have a fun loving woman here, who says  we had some good times together in the past. 

      I liked the sip, the alcohol killed me.

      I drowned in my own pot.

      When I  was  young, I was full of light and beauty but as the years went by I became more visible.

      And now she laughs.

      I continue,I have a young woman that took her own life, she says I had a difficult time for a long time. 

      She says that she took her own life in a car,

      I wrote a poem that you have, and a letter

      I come from a dark haired family, and dad is here with me.

      The next one says that he came to me and communicated in the last session, but my wife didn´t get the message. 

      Im from the westfjords and was a politician, and she was always my backbone.  I thought I was strong but my heart wouldn’t

      I could talk the big talk, but you often helped me down from the pedestal and to understand the emotions of others.

      The last one coming through, this is quite special, she says that I and my parents were travelling and I disappeared, and now this is many years ago.

      You looked for me for a long time, but I was dead, you didn´t know that, and I was watching you.

      I was a child, but not quite.  I could be with you in restaurants and at bars, and I could dance with strangers.

    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • block 2016/I
    • research publication 15 January 2016
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • veridiana zurita
    • 15 January 2016
    • 15 January 2016
    • research publication

       

       

      The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts.


      Between 2014 and 2015 Veridiana Zurita initiated three ongoing artistic research projects; ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of the riverside community Santa Isabel in the Amazon (BR) and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between herself and her parents.

      www.veridianazurita.com

       

      Here you find the publication that was made for the presentation of the research of associate researcher Veridiana Zurita

       

    • project
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #1 13 January 2016
      posted by: Gerald Kurdian
    • 13 January 2016
    • 13 January 2016
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #1

      PARTICIPANTS : Arianna, Tinna, Isabel, Juan, Ricardo, Esteban , Lilia, Yaari, Juan, Anouk, Brendan, Gerald, varinia, Sana, Agnes, Pierre, Luiza, Sofia, Aela, Christian, Lili.

       

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > ANSWER

      1) P) Arianna >  Q )Sana >  A)Pierre

      2) Yaari > Christian > Gerald

      3) Christian > Isabel > Arianna

      4) Sofia > Lilia > Yaari

      5) Ricardo > Varinia > Esteban

      6) Esteban > Ricardo > Christian

      7) Anouk > Esteban > Luiza

      8) Gerald > Tinna > Sebastian

      9) Lili > Yaari > Varinia

      10) Luiza > Brendan > Sana

      11) Agnes > Anouk > Tinna

      12) Brendan > Luiza > Anouk

      13) Sebastian > Juan > Lili

      14) Tinna > Gerald > Aela

      15) Juan > Sofia > Juan

      16) Aela > Aela > Sofia

      17) Sana > Arianna > Brendan

      18) Isabel > Pierre > Agnes

      19) Pierre > Sebastian  > Lilia

      20) Lilia > Lili > Ricardo

      21) Varinia > Agnes >  Isabel

       

      QUESTIONS: 

      1) Sana asks Arianna (reply Pierre)

      Is the disfigured, anonymous body approachable through its spontaneous reactions to it's surroundings?

      If yes, to what extent?
      If no, what is the alternative?

       

      2) Yaari > Christian > Gerald

      Your text is beautifully hovering at a mental state where situation has merged into timelesness, an energy that could last for a split second or 80 years. 
      I am in this connection curious to know if it would be possible to tie the situation to an ideal geographical location (city, desert...) one that would include year, space ( i.e. mountain top, café, bus), tools for writing?
      (Of course this question assumes that you're willing to feed in to a parallel fictional universe, if you're not already there.)

       

      3) Isabel asks Christian (reply Arianna)

       

      The maori people have amazing techniques for dialoguing with the sea. In fact in Easter Island elder women teach their grandchildren how to make the waves get smaller. Thus, they avoid being taken away by the gigantic waves when they go collecting shells and exotic seafood on turbulent rocky seashores. I imagine there must be a symbiosis between hypnosis and molecular water cells in the human body interacting with the molecular water cells of the sea. When we were talking about the performance you presented in bubble score # 1, you mentioned the paradox between hypnosis and property, as hypnotizing the landscape as a property means (I hope to have understood well?). My question is: Could the notion and practice of private property be a result of hypnosis and why?

       

       

      4) Lilia To Sofia (reply Yaari)

       

      The first thing that came to my mind was the idea of  falling in love. And mostly the Falling in the Love. The vertigo towards the other, the ecstasy of becoming blurred with the other, indeed like a suicidal flirt that creates a third space for fictional reality, that constructs reality itself.  I think I have question in two folds. They concern the romantic idea of love and the fictional aspect of it anchored in the falling. How do you relate the idea of love with the idea of life? And how do you think the the idea of love builds community? This can be seen in a literary way, philosophical or...

       

       

      5) Varinia to Ricardo (Reply Esteban)

       

      And if all the various body operations would halt in a single and inoperative - but nontheless expressive - act, or if all variations would manifest as sameness, how could we then still call the body the body?

       

       

      6) Ricardo to Esteban (Reply: Christian)

       

      Something that I got out of your proposal is that the element of sound blurs or obscures meaning. You have been working on the idea of the subject narrating itself through language and through cultural practices such as cooking or weaving. I understand that the text that you chose is of interest to you since it works through the relationship Lucrecia Martel has found between her sensory, affective and biographical memory, and the tool she articulates through her filmic work. In this case, the tool is sound and its power to pierce the body. This short narration that you are appropriating is of relevance since it evidences the poetic power of Lucrecia's films, which is your point of interest.

      In which way do you think the action you presented creates a link between your interest in the subject narrating itself, its displacement in a series of cultural, collective practices, the idea of artistic tool and poetic efficacy and finally, the concept of appropriation in the construction of the subject?

       

       

      7) Esteban to Anouk (Reply Luiza)

       

      Dear Anouk
      For me it was clear that we were dealing with traces, material traces and spatial configurations that were having a second life.
      During the performance, however, it became very much about our presence and present time experience, about inhabiting the fragment and the impossibility to see it-all. There was such a calm, open presence in your performance and subsequently we all became performers/onlookers/witnesses at the same time.
      Besides the blurring of time frames and your interest in trace as present experience, and perhaps a preoccupation for preserving something of the experience for future performers/onlookers/witnesses; do you also see a blurring of the subject-other happening? are we regarded as our own sensorial world, or, how do you understand the subject-other interface within this experience of blurred temporality?

       

       

      9) Yaari question to Lili (reply Varinia)
       
       
       About stretching or attracting the physical capacities of your body because of an immediate contact with an-other body. About a moment of endurance vis-a-vis intimacy. About a necessary need which can not be fulfilled unless repeated, and even then. How breathing can obey the effort and produce a signifcant change in the procedure? 
       
       
       
      10) Brendan question to Luiza (reply Sana)
       
       
      Luiza
       
      I was mostly swept away by your scenography. Which was dictated by the text and achieved quite simply by killing the lights. First leaving just the 4 or 5 glowing apples in the room, then later beautiful silhouettes accompanying only one's self and the voice of the page, backdropped, for me, by the glass wall and the brussels skyline. Feeling at ease and carried away. 
       
      Recalling my experience and re-reading the text, I conceived and noticed many change of planes, shifting points of view, view points, from the horizontal to the vertical, to and fro, internal/external, etc. It occurred to me, after thinking about this changing of planes for awhile, that it could have been nice to have a glass ceiling for the prophecy of the glass ceiling, but how!! In the end, I admit to being very pleasantly distracted from the text by what I was experiencing as caused by the windows that I faced (and am now also considering how those whom I faced, those silhouettes I looked upon experienced things in a different darkness), and worked to not feel guilty by my failure to studiously follow the complex text. Now i realize this was not the fault of me being a poor student !!  But it was my body being hypnotized by the text and the glass ceiling! Which here, was experiencing vertically as a window, a glass wall !! Oh the twisting embodiment that escapes my frontal consciousness !!   My body working to join the fold of the changing planes, the shift of view points anchored by my eyes stuck in a head. Body seeking the horizontal, mind in the vertical. I need to lay down before the glass, and make it my ceiling !!! 
      But! 
      There is a part of the text that is a bit more unclear for me, how does all this, the presentations and suppositions made by the poet (as well as mine) amount to the conclusive line "To remember will become a thing of the past ... i can imagine that light effects negatively the capacity to remember, but this is not the realm of the text i believe.  So, i guess my question is, how does the author reach this conclusion that results from what he/she proposes, "to remember will become a thing of the past"? Or maybe more broadly what do you feel contained in this poem, is consequential on memory/remembering/forgetting?
       
      eeeeek! i think i just figured it out! But am very interested to hear the correct answer from Sana. 
       
       
       

      11) Anouk  question to Agnes (reply Tinna)

       
      Dear Agnes, the world "reality" is appearing one or several times in each the text fragments.
      Do you think "reality" is something that can be shared ?

       

       

      12) Luiza to Brendan (Reply Anouk)

       

      Hey! So I remember the sound of the can of coke being opened before your reading. It was for me a very well known sound that could set up a space. The way you positioned it made me think of sacred and profane symbols. Also, that speech sacralized america as a way of apologizing for misconduct, for profaning america and its figure of power, the president. So, I would like to know what is for you (the) sacred and what is (the) profane and how is, if there is any, your relationship to both?

       

       

      13) Juan To Sebastian (Reply Lili)

       

      How accurately can one transfer verbally the intrinsic physical characteristics of an object ?

       

       

      14) Tinna to Gerald (Reply Aela)

       

      In the frame of your bubble performance, we collectively agreed on a partially wrong information.
      Why do you need our trust to language to be hijacked?

       

       

      15) Sofia To Juan (Reply Juan)

       

      When you brought the material from Youtube it felt to me as an act of quoting. So then I wondered how do you use quoting and citing in your practice? How do you quote?

       

      16) Aela to Aela (Reply Sofia)

       

      Languages and artistic, political and media representations model, determine, freeze, valuate, judge, catalogue the body using subjective parameters dictated by society.

      Is it then possible to de-determine the body ? To think the body as a moving and liquide entity, able to metamorphose endlessly without deteriorate what is considered as individuality ?

      Or do we have to give up on individuality as a fixed and safe marker and to reconsider it as something alterable and altering ?

      In this case what is individuality ?

       

      17) Arianna to Sana (Reply Brendan)

       

      At the beginning of your writing, you create the almost cinematic atmosphere of an ancient tale.
      It's a tale of growth and change, and I think it is telling us about roots.
      I could feel the wind - or, more precisely, I could imagine this wind of history: a wind whose strength comes not only from its physical force but also from the distance it has to pass through to come to my face, and to face my body.
       
      Is resistance something that we grow with time, like a plant grows roots that go deeper and deeper into the ground?
      Is resistance something superficial - that acts and is effective at and from the level of the skin?
      How deep resistance grows into the body?
      These are more general questions I have - they do the groundwork for what I'd like to ask: 
      Imagine the strongest wind you can think about. It is so strong that blowing against your body, it keeps it suspended in the air, preventing it from moving. Not a step is possible.
      What would you do with your body (physical strategy) in order to be able to keep moving in spite of this wind?
       
       
       

      18) Pierre to Isabel  (Reply Agnes)

       

      Dear Isabel,

      What you offered last Wednesday to the Bubble Score community was a text, precisely the beginning of a chapter entitled "Goddess of the Witches" from a book called "The Great Cosmic Mother".
      The text is about the multiple prehistoric and historic cults around the figure of Diana/Artemis/Ishtar/Hecate that produced knowledges in the past associated with feminine power and later on were condemned, banned, erased by, first, the greek patriarchal turn, then by Christianity, culminating  with hunts and burnings of witches in the 16th and 17th century. The text ends with the following line "The witch persecutions were not simply aimed at 'Devil-worshipers', but at ancient human knowledge of the world".
      Later on in a discussion with me  you said "but what have women done to men to deserve that ?"
       
      If I share with you the idea that today's situation can be enlightened by studying the past, that we must practice an archeology of the occidental way of thinking and that a decolonisation of the mind is necessary to prevent more shit to happen in the future, my reaction to the text's positioning was more doubtful, concerning the way the text is written and the assertive tone of some of your remarks.
       
      In fact, I do think that the text is over dichotomising the issue, reducing its complexity and is using the same tools that authoritarian knowledge : the "there is no alternative" leading to an injunction to think in a dichromatic way : black or white. Period.
      Concerning women, I do not think that women did anything to men, but that the power shift happened for political and economic reasons in societies growing in scale and in need of a general order, a pre-globalised order disqualifying the local more and more. A "general way of thinking", a way to generalise everything, to universalise, leading to the interchangeability of the humans where, under the ancient localised order, the communities were more singular, particular and not replaceable.
      I do not want to continue today as I have to ask you a question, but would like to continue discussing with you about this book statements and your relation with it. (you know that I like witches as you do, but may be differently?...)
       
      My question is inspired by your text in relation with another text.
      It's a text written by Isabelle Stengers called "The Cosmopolitical Proposal" where she proposes ways to actualise and produce real changes. 
      She, and I agree with her, shows that denunciating is not enough to shift, to dismantle the authority associated with knowledge.
      I attach the text to this mail. I glossed some lines. hope we can find a moment to read and discuss them together.
       
      My question now.
      In fact I have two. Couldn't choose.
      "What "taking magic seriously" can do for you today?" or "What do you hope for by "taking magic seriously" today?
      You pick.
       
      Hear from you,
      see you next week
      amicalement,
      Pierre

       

       

       

      19) Sebastian to Pierre (Reply by Lilia)

       

      Which artistic experience changed your way of thinking? And how?

       

       

      19) Tinna to Gerald  (Reply Sebastian)

       

      In your performance you made a live remix of the past, with recordings of us talking and the song Lithium with Nirvana.  What connection is there between these 2 sound-sources?

       

       

      20) Lili to Lilia (Reply Ricardo)

       

      If internalizing camera functions in how we think is mostly stemming from „manipulating time“ (jumps, cuts, continuity, fast forwards etc.), which other notion is being manipulated/influenced by haptic information? Or is it simply subordinate to visual/audio neural processes?
      Can you imagine whole room with all the people moving around you, running underneath your fingertips instead of you moving in the space?
      How would that inform you differently?
      (receptivity in relation to various body positions - e.g. "gallery with beds")

       

       

       21) Agnes to Varinia (Reply Isabel)

       

      I remember the walk of two black gloves, strong like ants that can sustain a weight five thousand times greater than their own body weight. thinking about ants I guess the ability to support a multitude of the own heaviness does not mean that it is also a pleasure to do so. I imagine it could be quite annoying, which reminds me of a question that was posed to you already last week. I will reformulate the question and ask what makes you more angry, cold or dirty hands?

       

       


       

      REPLIES:

      2) Brendan > Luiza > Anouk

      Preparation: I write a draft of text on my computer then I finish it writing it on a positive visual field, on the materialized form of my visual filed at a certain moment. I write SACRED on one side and PROFANE on the other. I finish writing my text by passing from one side of the “page” to the other. I have the object/page in my hands, I am manipulating it. My manual activity (writing, holding, turning) supports my intellectual activity and the process of articulating my thought. I have to put numbers and arrows to help me find the next sentence when I turn to the other side of the page. I read the text in front of the group, kneeling on the cardboard floor, holding the object in my hand in front of my eyes (face). I am turning the object/page to read one side and the other.

       

      IMG_6666 IMG_6668

      Performance of the text

      1 - PROFANE: The root of profane is the Latin profanes which means “ what is in front of” which means “out of the temple”, non-initiated, ignorant.

      2 - SACRED: The word "sacred" descends from the Latin sacrum, which referred to the gods or anything in their power, and to sacerdos and sanctum set apart. It was generally conceived spatially, as referring to the area around a temple. The English word "holy" dates back to at least the 11th century with the Old English word halig an adjective derived from hāl meaning "whole" and used to mean "uninjured, sound, healthy, entire, complete".

      3 – PROFANE: What I keep from profane is non-initiated, ignorant.

      4- SACRED: What I keep from sacred is and from sacred entire and complete.The shift from the profane space to the sacred space happens when I PAY ATTENTION. Then I see the sacred in the profane.

      5 – PROFANE: For me sacred and profane are the two sides of the same coin. They are not intrinsically different. The sacred is when I listen and the profane is when I don’t. There is nothing to change, nothing is better. As Cage would suggest…

      6 – SACRED: “ CHANGE YOUR MIND!”

      7 – PROFANE: I AM OSCILLATING BETWEEN THE TWO. It is an OSCILLATION. I put the sacred is the realm of sensoriality and the profane the realm of words. For me the sacred cannot be expressed with words.

      8 – SACRED: The sacred is a matter of ATTENTION. It is in the realm of EXPERIENCE. The sacred ineffable, it is beyond discourse. The sacred is for me a NON-time/space, NON-time/space of no escape. I am rarely there, though I love when it happens.

      9 – ROFANE: I made a mistake while typing, SACRED became SCARED. Did we made this separation because we where scared? Scared of what? Is the profane the realm of fears?

      10 – SACRED: The dictionary says that that one can pass from the profane dimension to the sacred dimension through RITUALS. I am a bit scared of the word ritual. I find it too heavy, too serious. Still I am looking for the sacred through my work.

      11 – PROFANE: but for me the sacred is very much connected to SIMPLICITY and to the concrete and daily world, the “ NOTHING SPECIAL”, the “ PLAIN”, some could say the “BORRING”.

      12 – SACRED: I find duration useful, duration and repetition. I practice observing myself, jugging and labeling. I practice observing my internal WAR.

       

      3) Christian > Isabel > Arianna

       

      dizzy spells

       

      Climbing the scaffold and laying down on the platform on top, face downwards.

      Reading

       

      CHAPTER 1

      (Present. Remembering)

       

      My mother suffers from dizzy spells.

      She prefers not to go climbing mountains. She stays on plain horizontal surfaces, where she can see everything at the same level.

      When I was a kid and we went visiting a city, we would go up the highest tower of that city.

      She would come with the rest of us, but would stay far from the view of the terrace. If we moved towards the edge, she would scream and grab the tip of our sweater, or the skin of our elbow if she had the chance, and prevent us from the risk of approaching the risk of falling.

       

      Pause.

      Reading

       

      CHAPTER 2

      (The remembering materializes, coming back into the present in a specific form)

       

      stream of consciousness

       

      Opening a bottle of water previously placed on top of the scaffold. Leaving the stream of water going down by the force of gravity through a hole in the platform.

      Water falls on the ground from the height.

       

      Pause.

      Reading

       

      CHAPTER 3

      (It's night. The sky is clear, of an opaque dense black colour. I can see the full moon and the stars.

      I am laying down on the top of something of uncertain nature. I am very close to the Moon. I can see it even with my eyes closed. I can almost touch it.

      I think about the ones who are still on the ground)

       

      What do you do when the tide rises

       

      1 - When it comes up, it takes your elbows and brings them more and more towards your ears.

      Be careful then - protect them using a thick sweater, or wearing water wings.

       

      2 - Climb somewhere high and stay there for a while.

      Tides are caused by gravity.

      They can occur as two high waters and two low waters each day.

      However, these periods do not happen at the same time. This is because the Moon takes its time to line up again exactly with the same point on the Earth.

      Check it out with the Moon for more info.

       

      3 - If the swirl is right above you, you cannot do anything more than waiting for it to come down. You can also try to bring it down yourself through the use of your hands.

      Singing might help. Hypnosis is the last resort, for hypnotizing a tide requires you not to be afraid of the risk of approaching the risk of falling.

       

       

       10) Brendan asks Luiza, Sana replies

       
      Borders are frigid
      Distances wrapped in a time, lost
      Borders are frigid
      Distances covered in colors, pale
       
      Feeling confused
      We dream out of synch
      Light bounces off your skin
      Reminds me of distorted past
      Shattering into pieces
      Memories remain less of debris

      I turn ubiquitous
       
       
      Conquering the time
      Let’s play a game
      When I am the hours
      You play days or years
       
       
      Borders are frigid
      Distances fill in you and me
      marching on our flesh
      Hear ‘em breath
      Feel ‘em float
      Like a sorrow
       
      Now turning thicker
      Like a forest
      Vast meadow covers the distances
      Ah,
      Such a wonder!
       
      14) Tinna to Gerald (Reply Aela)
       

      From an english and objective frame of reference, putting aside any daltonic possibilities... well we could argue on an objective way to describe the wrong colour with the good name or a subjective way to be objective ??? That sounds already messy...

      SO... from an english and objective and human-being frame of reference, I am eating a green apple. Considered lonely, in a completely abstract context, an apple is a thing. But in an objective context, THIS apple is an object constituted by many different objects, its colour, its pips, its core, etc.

      Objectively eating this apple I'll find its pips and its pips are black. Everyone is following ?

      So from now on it appears that the green apple is also constituted by black pips. From here it is a very easy abstract jump to say that at some point the green of the apple is made by the black of the pips contained by this very apple and an even easier one to say that green is black ! Probably as much as green is blue and yellow !!!

      And even easier !!! Green equal black !

      Let's study a bit this affirmation. When I say green equal black, I am doing what is called an abstraction ! The process of abstraction is used in many domaine and specially in mathematics to make easier operation ! The system of abstraction works by simplifying a complicated reality to be able to deal with ! Same process with objectivity ! Every time we assign a name to a thing we reduce every possibilities of different subjectivities in favour of a common objectivity !

      So it is very important to notice that objectivity is only a collective agreement on how to reduce individual subjectivity, A=B under a certain frame of reference but under another one, A is absolutely not equal to B !!!!

      Let's go a bit further :)
      An apple is as black as an orange !
      In terms of blackity an apple is actually equal to an orange even if not a single one of them is black (once again from a non-daltonic point of view) !
      I could have also said an apple is as NOT black as an orange ! But what happens when we use the negativity ! If I say an apple is NOT black, the mind will picture first the apple and then the black colour: result = an apple is black ! Why, because the mind can't picture negativity but only what is viewable and negativity is not a viewable object but a substraction of viewable object from viewable object !

      Let's go on the funny side of this discovery !!!
      The delay created by the mind trying to remove the black colour from the apple it pictured is the origin of irony and the one of laugh !!!!
      Demonstration: joke + delay or time of understanding = laugh hahaa...
      Irony and laugh come from a very short misunderstanding or a little awkwardness

      and uncomfortable situation, that is a tiny excess of subjectivity in an objective discourse ! A tiny excess which is fortunately possible due to the process of abstraction I described earlier !
      If there was no common objective reduction of subjective reality there will be no surplus of subjectivity to use and then no laugh and so a very sad society !!! In which one everyone would be able to communicate entirely with anyone else, boring....

      Now... how to make a black apple revolution !!!?
      Working with abstraction once again, I am gonna make an equality between the Foucault's relations of power and the objectivity I described earlier. Relations of power as objectivity exist in any domaine, political, institutional, relationship and so on, this objectivity appears when one tries to direct someone else's behaviour. But this objectivity is only possible among a certain amount of liberty corresponding here to subjectivity ! If there was no possibility of expressing subjectivity, there will be no objectivity at all.
      The practice of liberty or the practice of subjectivity is an individual way one has to play with objectivity, to play among the rules of common objectivity !
      Most of the time, as we saw it, the game of subjectivity among objectivity leads to irony or laugh !
      A black apple revolution is a revolution everyone can practice on its own, discovering its own subjectivity, applying it to many domaine and sharing it ! That is knowing oneself or to use the words of Foucault: taking care of the self !

      A black apple revolution is a ironic revolution a revolution that shows the limits of objectivity and power through laugh, through a tiny delay of misunderstanding !

      One is not free from its own definition as soon as one remains understandable ! A peri-understanding is the most powerful tool of a funny revolution and a black apple is already in itself a revolution ! A displacement of the domination of objectivity upon subjectivity !

      This is a revolution !!!

       

      17) Arianna to Sana (Reply Brendan)

       

      Text For Vacuuming

      This force gives you body, your face, eyes, voice, and skin.

      and now it wants it back

      this is how you will live and how you will die

       

      But, even in the strongest, most paralyzing wind possible

      there is always a way to move.

       

      Resistance is a space between the giving and the taking, it is you.

      every possible move is contained by you, and amongst the you's that approximate.

       

      freedom of movement is always accomplished through shifts of the body into the potentials of force.

      with this we can open doors in the wind and fly

       

       

      19) Pierre > Sebastian  > Lilia

      Hmmm I think all artistic experiences have changed my way of thinking. Or as Willem James puts it, (if I understand well) the nature or substance of experience is not different from the consciousness of that same experience. The two realms of experience and thought are separated in a pure functional way in order to process the continuity of experiences in our memory. So if I follow this thought it would be impossible to not change my way of thinking constantly.

      I often asked my self if is the experience of the arts that opened my mind, or if my mind open up the art experience? If one is not ready for change can change happen? Either way through out the years my experience of the arts has changed a lot. My deep love for the performing arts has maybe a say in this (my addictive behavior as well). 

      The temporality of the performing arts connects both the realms of experience and thought in a one to one relation, in the back and forth between the now and the immediate memory of it, together with the memory of other experiences and thoughts about it, in a very direct very fast way. The processes are mingled and refer to the complex act of perceiving and maybe in that exact moment of the present the ‘fake’ dichotomy between experience and thought collides. There is just the moment of the moment. At a first instance I don’t remove myself from the moment, I don’t create a distance that allows me to categorize my experience, or do I? 

      This makes me think now of a text of Bojana Kunst about the temporality of performance, which speaks about the political: http://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/the-troubles-with-temporality/

      I quote:

      Performance can be thought of namely as an antagonistic knot of various temporal practices, a conglomerate of contradictory forces (human, non-human, spatial, natural, etc.) that constitute the moment of the present and the invention of its political potential. Performance is not a liminal practice because it is an act of the individual subject being subversive of its own context (that is to say, the figure of a militant artist), but because it is a sum of contradictory, complementary, or causally related micro-actions and events that must invent the form for the temporal condensation of actions, moves, energies, materials, and things, and in that way open the creation of performance to the intensity of life.

      If change occurs and I think it does, definitely due to its inherent political conditions I would like to mention a performance that came first to my mind: Jerome Bel by Gerome Bel. Many questions emerged from that performance I saw in 1995 in Gent in a rather small theatre. I think I connected strongly to the questioning of dance and to the stripping down of the performance tools to their strict minimum: bodies, light, music and space. There was a sort of back to the basics strategy that enhanced very complex questions of authorship, agency and capitalism. What are we seing when we are seing performance? What kind of mechanisms hide behind the protocols of theatre as a place for the production of entertainment? 

      I’ve never seen consciously something like this before, poetical and critical simultaneously. Those bodies, light, music and space were not naked in the bareness but filled with codes, intentions, manipulations and emotions part of our collective consciousness. We were not looking at alienated bodies deprived feeling and meaning but to bodies relating in their sensuality and knowledge to the apparatus where they were performing.

       


       

      GIFTS:

      YAARI
      And your Eye – where does your Eye dwell?
      down onto you,
      in you
      will you believe my
      Mouth
      I speak of love
      How did we live until here?
      the body of each of us were
      your body
      It gleamed
      I open your leaves, forever
      only there did  you enter wholly the name
      that is yours
      the Listened-for reached you
      It cast an image into our eyes
      and the Dew of your thought 
      (not in the eye for the tear
      but seven nights higher
      when I attended the orchids
      when I was audible)
      it shivered 
      We 
      have drunk
      The blood and the image that was in the blood
      we drink it and we drink it
      as if I were this:
      your Whiteness,
      as if you were
      mine,
      as if without us we could be we
      The place of angels
      was written there too
      How
      did we touch
      each other - each other with
      these hands?
      we could not let go, and it came at us
      came through us at the last membrane and
      your eyes
      they dwell and dwell
      they speak
      they sing 
      an acoustic thought  
      speak 
      the Prayer:
      Come, come.
      Come a word, come,
      and something believed the eyes and the mouths
      and obeyed

       

      KEYWORDS :

      fiction; embodiment; memory; disappearance; disturbance; transparency; liminal body; tentacle; noise; threshold; come; crocky; microwave; time (now just passed); universal knowledge; fairytale; estrangement; inhabiting the ruins of the body; unidentifiable; hybrid nature; unnamed.

      REPORT : the shot gun (coming soon)

      Every person contributed a key word after seeing all the presentations. We did a collective constellation practice to relate and organize the key words. The image formed by the squared papers on floor was a shot gun. Aside of that image, there were floating  three papers with the key words: unidentifiable; hybrid nature; unnamed.

      I remember three main focus:  Memory, (fiction, embodiment, disapearence, disturbance,) System ( crocky, microwave, come = universal knowledge, fairy tale, estrangement ) and Body ( inhabiting the ruins of the body). Out of the shot gun a free floating constellation contained the keywords:  unidentifiable; hybrid nature; unnamed.

    • PARTICIPANTS:

      Sofia, Christian, Aela, Gerald, Lilia, Lili, Sana, Nicolas, Luiza, Varínia, Robin, Brendan, Mala

       

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > REPLY

      1)Varínia > Sofia > Lili

      2) Robin > Nicolas > Sana

      3) Nicolas > Sana > Luiza

      4) Lili > Lili > Varínia

      5) Luiza > Varinia > Aela

      6) Lilia > Robin >Brendan

      7) Sana > Luiza > Mala

      8) Gerald > Brendan > Lilia

      9) Christian > Mala > Sofia

      10) Brendan > Lilia > Nicolas

      11) Sofia > Christian > Gerald

      12) Aela > Aela > Christian

      13) Mala > Gerald > Robin

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1)Varínia > Sofia > Lili

      Let’s act as if this was what happened last Wednesday. Let’s take one thing for another:

      X was asked to locate and touch parts of Y's body, as if it was someone else’s. X chose the neck when The Scientist asked to act as if it was a loved one, but X also chose the neck when The Scientist asked to act as if it was X's own body being touched after sex. Easy to come to the conclusion that, after sex, X wants to be treated as if X’s loved ones. In this experiment, the method of taking one thing for another leads to elucidating conclusions. Let’s elaborate on this methodology. Maybe it works like a mathematical equation, where The Scientist substitutes Y for different values in order to discover more about the nature of X’s conducts and desires.

      What does it do: to take one thing for another?

       

      2) Robin > Nicolas > Sana

      Dear Robin

      I found the solution to your riddle. You are a snail in outer space (probably on the way towards a black hole.)

      Still my thoughts couldn’t stop speculating, and I was wondering if it would be possible to exchange some words in your poem. For example: “House” with “Freedom” and “staircase” with “happiness”, “windows” with “Self”. Or more concrete:  “my House” with “public space” and “my staircase” with “urbane planing” and “my windows” with “responsibility” etc.

      This would give sentences like:
      My freedom is circular with no beginning or end…

      or

      My happiness lead both up and down; my Self is looking both in and out…
      or Public space turns on its own axis in a state of perpetual movement..
      and As Urbain planning lead both up and down, responsibility look both in and out..

      I don’t know how to interpret such sentences, but somehow they sound more promising then looking actually out of my actual “window".

      Or how about this:
      Our conflicts are circular
      with no beginning or end, no sides, no up, no down.
      Our conflicts turn on their own axis in a state of a perpetual movement.
      Fear infiltrates both up and down suspiciousness observes both in and out.

      Your last line is:
      There is an occasional flicker, a slit, a slip, of light a path both in and out.

      What is “light” for you?

      Best, Nicolas

       

      3) Nicolas > Sana > Luiza

      Dear Nicolas

      Your script and specially the way you presented that make me think about black comedy. In black comedy there is the possibility of talking about serious issues and facts in a humorous way. The characters you created and their confusion were in contrast with the sequences you invited us to imagine as the background. I enjoyed this contradiction,

      Dear Luiza

      My question is what happens when paradoxes come together?

       

      4) Lili > Lili > Varinia


      As the question goes to my own bubble score, I am tempted again to resort to yet another performance artist - Pipilotti Rist and her video-piece, Mutaflor. Question for me to consider again is how do I assimilate influences (consciously and recognizing the unconscious absorption over time). Which artists´ hair would I keep in a little locket? How do I hold them dear, what have they passed on to me?
      But in the light of Mutaflor´s perpetual exchange of the inside and outside here is my question to you: how can performance create without excavating? Creation (of new) seems to happen in the pauses we make (for the audience, which are for the performer one of  the densest moments, being pressed against the arrow of time, progression and the eye of the audience).
      Or the other way around - imagining creation only happens by digging out bones of the bodies once existing, we re-flesh them into the zombies and then how far into the future are we following our creations?

      5) Luiza > Varinia > Aela

      in your bubble action, you turned off the lights of the room to then use a torch. With the torch in hand, you rolled on the big sheets of paper bringing to light drawings, words and symbols. Your body action, the torch and the action of bringing to the light some drawings made me imagine as if you were an explorer looking to discover some ancient hieroglyphs in a dark cave. My question doesn't concern a possible fiction but more of a technical matter. If in my view a small source of light -the torch- helped you to highlight what maybe the room light would have not, in what other ways could the body become a frame for us to look into the reality in its detail and complexity ?

       

      7) Sana > Luiza > Mala

      Dear Sana,

      and Mala,

      Here is my question, sorry for the little delay :)

      In your proposal we were seeing our surroundings with our eyes and through each other. We were seeing through our ears and through language. We were also seeing through our location throughout the stairs and the architecture of the building. That way of seeing was full of flaws, but also of possibilities of reaching things that otherwise we wouldnt be able to reach.

      But, to be honest, I felt a bit disconnect of what I was seeing (for myself), as I was immersed in this "seeing through other...", and so I wondered, what is this disconexion ? Is it an openess? Or an omission? How much do we have to disconnect from ourselves in order to connect with another (person, body, structure, time...)?

      Hope you have a great weekend!

      x

      Luiza

       

      8) Gerald > Brendan > Lilia

      Remember when we all had VCR's ?

      Remember ?

      Remember that little clock,

      the one on your VCR,

      that was always blinking twelve noon,

      because you never bothered or figured out how to get in there and change it ?

      So it’s always the same time,

      just the way it came from the factory.

      Good morning. Good night.

      Same time tomorrow. We're in record

       

      So here are the questions: Is time long or is it wide?

      And the answers? Sometimes the answers

      just come in the mail. And one day you get the letter

      you've been waiting for forever. And everything it says,

      is true. and then the last line says:

       

      ________________________________

       

      And what I really want to know is: Are things getting better,

      or are they getting worse? Can we start all over again?

      Stop. Pause. We're in record. Good morning. Goodnight.

      Now I in you without a body move.

      And in our hearts we fly. Standby.

      Good morning. Good night.

       

      9) Christian > Mala > Sofia

      dear Christian,

      i am strangely moved by the watering cans, i could watch them being discovered forever, like in a loop, as a repetitive dream, only the colour changes. and then the sound is so evocative, slightly displacing, it frames my perception of the image i see. it is the sound that makes me travel and discover the world with u, as if for the first time, and as if through the lens of "an alien" from the wild blue yonder (https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=BE&v=N5Lh5mD_JJ4). i wonder how do u make the sound, the recorded sound, how u transform it, how does the relation of the sound to the image work for u, what does it do to the image, how it shifts the image or my perception of the image? the sound keeps moving my sense of a fictional "where": it’s hypnotising, then i'm in Hitchcock, then again i'm here now... but constantly moving through different spaces while looking at the multi-coloured watering cans.

      thank u! xm

      10) Brendan > Lilia > Nicolas

      "Close your eyes and tell me which message I'm sending you."

      Projections (as in the mind), dreams, imaginations, reflections (as in a mirror), illusions, hallucinations, building the world as we go .....  what do we want to know that hides behind the surface?

      Have a nice week end,

      Lilia

       

      11) Sofia > Christian > Gerald

      Dear Sofia,

      I perceived your projected texts as being synchronized, your voice telling a story about water that sounded very allegorical, and then there was the projected text that spoke directly to us and directed our situation as listeners in a (dry) space.

      Your spoken text was a reply to, or inspired by, David Foster Wallaces text "This Is Water" that begins with two young fish meeting an old fish and the old fish says “Morning, boys, how's the water?” and one of the young fish exclaims “What the hell is water?”

      So I would like to ask you this: How can water be digital, is there any digital effects/incidents/functions that you normally would compare to water? What effects would it have if your computer was flooded by digital water, leaking in to all your folders and open online accounts like gmail, paypal and facebook?

       

      13) Gerald to Mala

      Dear Mala,

      In your recent bubble score proposal, you invited us to travel mentally through some of our very human depths. In these dimensions, space and time gain seem to gain elasticity.

      In the same movement, emotions feel different, get maybe less personal.

      Something universal is going on.

      How much are these possible bridges between dimensions, important keystones in your practice, and on broader level, in human collective practices in general?

       

       

      KEYWORDS: Moon~time~insights, as if, here and there,  

       

    • PARTICIPANTS:

      Robin, Arianna, Isabel, Juan, Ricardo, Esteban , Lilia, Yaari, Juan, Anouk, Brendan, Gerald, Varinia, Sana, Agnes, Luiza, Sofia, Aela, Christian, Lili, Nicolas, Thiago

       

       P> Q >R

      1)Varinia > Gerald> Isabel 

      2)Isabel >Yaari > Sebastian

      3)Agnes >Esteban > Christian

      4)Ricardo > Lili > Anouk

      5)Yaari > Robin > Lilia

      6)Seba > Ricardo >Nicolas

      7)Arianna > Sana > Lili

      8)Luiza > Lilia > Thiago

      9)Anouk > Sebastian > Agnes

      10)Christian > Aela > Aela

      11)Esteban > Agnes > Yaari

      12)Nicolas > Brendan > Gerald

      13)Brendan > Thiago > Juan

      14)Sofia > Luiza > Ricardo

      15)Lili > Christian >  Arianna

      16)Aela > Varinia > Robin

      17)Gerald > Juan > Varinia

      18)Robin > Sofia > Brendan

      19)Sana > Nicolas > Sana

      20)Lilia > Anouk > Esteban

      21)Juan > Arianna > Luiza

      22)Thiago > Isabel > Sofia

       

      QUESTIONS:

       

      1)Varinia > Gerald> Isabel

      Varinia, in your bubble performance of the second session, you used absurd while very simple verbal and body languages to describe casual physical phenomenons.

      If you ever had to depart from there to invent a practice, would that practice be a pretext to use humour as a collective cement or absurdity as a way to challenge our relationship.s to truth? Or a critical practice of truth via humor?

       

      2) Yaari on Isabel (reply Sebastian)
       
      The density you've put our bodies in was a moment of tension between suffering and pleasure. a cis-archaeological-corporeal-structure.
      (I liked to feel I trust you, your proposal, and the others present)
      since you defined the task as an act which will help you to articulate a question…I would be interested to know why did you feel our bodies need to attain this physical contact of tightness and compression in order to 'accept' the material you offered? what was there is the two-layers-landscape that created the best state of receiving?

       

      3) Esteban's question to Agnes (Christian replies)

      Dear Agnes
      Watching your performance, I was very amused by how it was working; the deliberate choice of objects and the design of tasks developed a ‘lets not take this seriously’ kind of atmosphere that became at the same time an expectation of what the setup could engender. My questions are:

      What do you think discovering the potentiality of absurdity can generate? What do mishaps as a tool reveal about the actions and the people that perform them?

      I also thought this article of the aesthetics of failure might be of your interest 

      http://www.bussigel.com/systemsforplay/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Cascone_Aesthetics.pdf


      4) Lili question to the performance of Ricardo (replied by Anouk)

      Remembering your „solo“ on the table yesterday, I have many questions. Two most prominent ones are as follows:
      1) were you part of the audience, so us, during the „table dance“?
       
      (I found it a nice setting you chose - a bit elevated, in the midst of us, where a strip tease could take place, but instead of luring us into the escalating excitement and anticipation of the end, you have seduced us/me into cycles that kept bringing me back to the same spot. That enabled me to see you doing as well as performing)
       
      2) through what other practical ways could you immerse yourself into the audience, while still performing something - I don´t want to say observe yourself performing, because I´d say the two are different - (a performer becoming part of the audience but still available as a performer, or performing the split I am mentioning)

       

      Anouk's reply with a performance. Here is the text written after the performance

      What stays of my performance for the Bubbles score #3

       I stand up and ask people to follow me to the space behind the mobile wall/ corner. I keep the general light shut. There is some light setting from the past, some yellow light from Pierre’s proposal and a blue light coming from the projector on the white wall. I like the coldness of the blue and the warmth of the yellow. I invite everybody to walk in the space for 30 seconds. Then, I ask us to stop and stand on place with the eyes closed. I invite peoples to experience my performance from where they are, from this random point of view. I start to move with my eyes closed and my attention on my skin. What is touching me? I say to people that they can open their eyes whenever they want. I keep my eyes closed. I move in order to give sensation to my skin. I am touched by my clothe, by the air. I am gliding into space, I am not disturbing it, I am air, I am light. Am I visible? Can I feel myself? Can I sustain the lightness, the almost non-perceivable sensation? Do I still exist? I continue moving with my attention on my skin. I open my mouse to say : “ A friend of mine told me that the skin is the most external layer of the brain and the brain the most internal layer of the skin.” Depth is surface, surface is the depth. While travelling, I encounter a body, a person. The back of this person is caressing my hand. Soon after, another person. I wonder what they feel. Do they like the caress? Now, I know that some people are standing close to each other. It is darker here. I imagine that I am close to a wall. I say another thing. Why do I want to speak? Isn’t my physical presence enough? I want to share my subjective experience. Do I want to talk about subjectivity? Is my tactile experience communicative? Can we share a tactile experience? I say: “ in Chinese medicine the skin is associated to the function of the lungs, so to the respiratory system. Lungs and skin are similarly porous.” I am interested in porosity. Sometimes I am not porous enough, sometimes it’s too much. Too much porosity can arm. Can I close my skin? Can something that does not exist be armed? I am somewhere else now. I melt down to the ground. The light is yellow behind my eyes lids. The floor touches me. I think: “ there you are again. “ It is difficult to sustain verticality when my eyes are shut. I encounter a vertical object covered with thick fabric. It is a leg. I let it touch my arm. My whole arm adapts to its form, its texture, its temperature. It let the leg anchor itself; it penetrates the first layer of my skin. Now, I am an outgrowth, a parasite, a mushroom on a tree trunk. My left leg is a bit bent and floats in the air, parallel to the arm on the tree trunk. I say ‘ lets’ see if I can maintain my attention of my skin with my eyes open”. I open my eyes. I see. I let the image touch my retina. I turn my head and see the face of someone looking at me with a really soft open face. I am happy to see that my dance is affecting her. I am glad to see that to be affected by the environment can affect it in return. Receptivity is an action. A revolution? Presence. I maintain my position and talks again:” the gazes are touching me”. I only move my head and see where I am. I say “ The light ….”, the alarm rings. END.

       5) Robin asking Questions to the performance of Yari (to be replied by Lilia)

      Sorry can't believe I'm doing one of these long questions but I am:

      Yari I found your performance kind of fascinating in that the position you took was so ambiguous. By assigning someone else to find you a lover you abdicated responsibility but at the same time were very clear about what you didn’t want - so there was a move towards community, or transindividuality but a constant reclaiming of the position of decision maker- if this was intended to illustrate the ambiguity or impossibility of the question ‘how to realise the idea of Love and life and building a community” then it was effective.

      Less clear to me was the talk of falling in love not as an outward act but more as an an internal movement of falling back into the self. I think the ‘falling’ in ‘falling in love’ is unspecified in its direction, neither in nor out or rather potentially either, but I do think it does refer to the fact of doing it with, you ‘fall in love with’ so there is an action that’s an attempt to share, which you again did in your search for a lover. But I feel by treating your search for a lover with such a pragmatic and ’throw-away’ attitude you were attempting to question the desperation and commodification of a contemporary attitude towards ‘falling in love’ but this didn’t quite come off because of the lack of investment (even a momentary one) took the desperation out of the act. For me it became too blasé and what could have been desperate (even with a coating of indifference) became Irony, and Irony, for me, only succeeds in detaching us from the question. I think we may be consuming fast and without much thought but I think we certainly are ‘desperate’ in our search, driven by the the idea of somehow becoming whole , completing ourselves through the other. For me this desperation brings up the Lacanian idea of a desire that has no object …”simply the wish to perpetuate itself ad infinitum, in the dialectical movement from one signifier to the next signifier, between things but also the movement itself, the metronymic slippage from one object to the next. The desire in the gaze of the other, the pure desirousness, the looking itself. The lost object, the thing that was once conceived as part of the self becomes the other, the ghost of the original which never was”.

      This refers back to another point you bought up which was the idea of time, the arrow of time, and whether it produces language or the other way around. I lost the connection a bit here but I thought it well illustrated in the Tinder apps arrow system, though I didn’t quite get the connection between language and ecstasy. Here I I thought of Terence McKenna’s book ‘Food of the Gods’ where he talks about language coming out of the experience of ecstasy induced by our historically symbiotic relationship to Psychedelics, and how our quest for reproducing this experience of ecstasy is the driving force behind our addictions to ‘Love’, ‘materiality’ and any substance or object of desire.

      Finally about the performance at the end when you didn’t seem to want to illustrate or answer further, a sort of refusal. I found this very intriguing and wondered whether it related to this pre-self consciousness, pre-history moment, when we didn’t have language.

      So my question for you is twofold:

      What do you think the relationship between language, love and addiction is?

      How can the refusal to speak be an act of radical change?

       

      6) Sebastian > Ricardo > Nicolás

      Through substances containing certain subjects, we witness the emptying and deformation of being. How would you fill an empty body? What will you put inside of an empty body?

       

      7) Sana Asks Arriana , Lili replies

      I should say that I really like your performance and the text. They fully work together and complete each other. 
      You text amazingly takes me back and forth in time. From memory to contingency, from nostalgia to the uncertainty of future, from childhood to maturity...
      What impressed me a lot was that in chapter three which abstractly  illustrates future in front of my eyes, you create a poetic world wrapped in fantasy. The world you are waiting for is a mysterious one in which magic is possible. Thus, you beautifully transform the fear to hope and desire by passing through consciousness. 
      I doubt if I have any question around the text but as a clue for Lili ' reply I want to discuss this: if the body can make a bridge between memory and future!

       

      8)Luiza > Lilia > Thiago

      The body is a bridge
       
      We were mingled and at the end of our individual arms each of us held a cray. Underneath the cray there was a paper, a black paper. We couldn`t see well. We functioned as a blind octopus, gesticulating our tentacles on the flat surface, engaged in discovering the possibilities of that moment. 
      What kind of imaginary that situation brought to you? And what kind of politics you think it generates?

       

      9)Anouk > Sebastian > Agnes

      Considering the depth of the ecological crisis, what does our world need more: sacralization or profanation*? Or none of both? And why?

      * According to Roman law, objects that belonged in some way to the gods were considered sacred or religious. As such, these things were removed from free use and trade among humans: they could neither be sold nor given as security, neither relinquished for the enjoyment of others nor subjected to servitude. Sacrilegious were the acts that violated or transgressed the special unavailability of these objects, which were reserved either for celestial beings (and so they were properly called "sacred") or for the beings of the netherworld (in this case, they were simply called "religious"). And if "to consecrate (sacrare) was the term that designated the exit of things from the sphere of human law, then "to profane" signified, on the contrary, restoring the thing to the free use of men. "Profane," the great jurist Trebatius was therefore able to write, "is, in the truest sense of the word, that which was sacred or religious, but was then restored to the use and property of human beings." (Giorgio Agamben, What is an apparatus?)

       

      10) Christian > Aela > Aela

      Give an exemple on how sound plays in the process of letting the subject narrates itself !!!

       

      11) Esteban > Agnes > Yaari

      dear esteban,

      one day after your proposal I read this lines which made me think of the interaction of chairs and the relation between them and the sound:

      “… in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement – that is, in a world of life – knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence. It is the way forms are held together and kept in place within what would otherwise be a formless and inchoate flux”  (Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines)

      how do relate to making and unraveling knots?

       

      12) Brendan questions the performance of Nicolas (replied by Gerald)

      Nicolas

      I liked your performance with your machines. or perhaps rather,  your machines performance with you.

      Frankensteining  " This is not what i programmed! "

      I felt like you created a back door vortex into a neo-world, somewhere between a human dimension (a reality governed by humans) and a computer dimension (one governed by machines), with both exerting their desire for expression and autonomy. This shifting of dimensions illustrated by the time sequence that slowly twists into a distortion as it counts down and out … A humorous space where languages miscommunicate and everything is caught in a loop of failure and sense/nonsence. To quote my first filmmaking professor, "The only thing you can count on with technology is that it will fail".

      This makes me question, in regards to working with technology:

      Imagine,  everything is done properly, everything should be working just fine, it has operated smoothly this same way 99 previous times, there can be no possible accounting for any possible error, but yet - the unforeseeable happens - meltdown. Can this fouling up, this failure actually be a sign of artificial life? A sign of these objects, these machines exerting a kind of free will?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvLgvychb18

      Rather than answer this deeply speculative question for me, I was hoping to ask you if you could, with all your tools, take us even deeper into this neo-world that I described and was performed for us, so that as a group we could consider its implications as we embody the in-between dimension.  Can you create the conditions for the allowance of this A.I. to surface in our laboratory ?

       

      13) Brendan > Thiago > Juan

      I liked very much the presence of the mundane in your mythical
      discourse: your god is a cleaner, not so comfortable with his
      equipment.

      But you also present us a world where the creator wants back
      everything he once gave/offered/created. The cruelty of this figure
      reminded me of Kronos and Shiva, gods of the destruction. Shiva, as
      far as I know, is also responsible for creating new worlds while
      destroying everything, through this dance called Tandava.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJnfPLAMTmw&list=PL90E1CE7180CB8874&index=2&spfreload=10

      What is the importance of destruction in your practice? What are you
      currently digesting?

       

      14) Luiza to Sofia (reply Ricardo)

       

      In your performance not only gesture but also sound was very important. When we sounded our book's names (in both cases) there was an intersection and we created something new: noise. But in the first part noise was a cumulative fragmented information - we couldn't get and weren't supposed to get each other's book's names - and in the second part it was the thing, our thing - the book.
       
      noise, in music, uses "non-musical" sounds as well as mechanisms of distortions, feedback, manipulation, duration, residues... What could you say is the role of noise in your work, and even, more specific, in the creation of a character?
       
       15)Lili > Christian >  Arianna
      While experiencing you performance this question came to mind: How is it ever possible be intimate when you constantly have to (reach the surface to) breath?
       

      16) Varinia asks Aela and Robin replies

      In an exercise of trying to think in a science fiction mode, i.e in regard to what the future has in store for us, concerning the question of subjectivity v.s objectivity: if the notion of accessing ourselves - as specific and particular human beings that are aware of an interiority - is still a possible one, how would that be after the engineering of a brain that matches sense and form in such a way in which subjectivity is completely aligned with objectivity, giving end to subjectivity ? 

      Robin Replies with the movie Transnistria

      https://youtu.be/IrqCsMiS8VE

       

       
       
       
      17) Juan about Gerald reply Varinia
      My question is an image....
       
      b895637971bb2372b63d50e00e37e429
       

       18) Sofia's question to Robin (reply Brendan)

       
      Dear Robin,

      I really appreciated the sound-experience I had with your proposition. After a while I was really affected by the task you gave us. It was as if the space and the cup had become one, making me doubt if reality had shifted... I checked and it hadn't. :) Then, the voice of my partner became focused on the back of my head, and I could hear the position of the source of the voice (the mouth) quite clearly because of the cup. Usually sound is more spread out... but this time it seemed to stay in one point. I could hear the sentence: "Soy el punto negro que anda/A las orillas de la suerte" (I am the black point that walks the shores of chance). Esteban's voice was focused in one point in space and talked about a black point... coincidence... ?... I felt like reality had shifted. I was left with an enigma: What is the black point that walks the shores of chance?

      Hugs,

      Sofia

       

      19) Sana > Nicolas > Sana

      Dear Sana

      Thank you for sending me the text again! Listening at it once was definitively not enough. It’s nothing linear. I needed to listen it in layers, line by line, dive vertically into it and open the cracks in personal labyrinth this text. Each sentence seems to sediment over the next and covers it’s meaning with a new world. There is - in fact - a confusing distance between each sentence and I’m due to find my world to bridge between them. 
       
      In your text, territories belong to a time - or timeless - dimension. Somewhere out of time and time in itself. But not only this, territories seem - by being wrapped in a time - to belong to an emotional dimension - a dimension of which I’m filled. And not only that, territories are moving elements, they march on our flesh, as if in a parallel universe our spacial consciousness would be obsolete.
      And not only that, time seems to be a multiplicity of unsynchronized parallel universes (desires). 
       
      When I am the hour 
      you play days or years
       
      When you said that I was starting to doubt, wether you ever were interested at all in bridging over the borders? It seems, that you accept the border as a game - cold as it is. You’r hours, I’m years, no need for synching. 
      Yet, there is a horizon of every territory: somewhere on the line something changes. The question of ‘touch’ is coming up: is touch ‘connection', or 'revelation of difference'? Is there something like an absolute zero point of the border’s frigidity? An absolute one way? What happens when you cross that line? And when would you know, you see the border form the other side? 
       
      I don’t know if it is possible to spatialize this question or if it remains in dimensions we don’t know.
       
      20)Lilia > Anouk > Esteban
       

      Dear Lilia, you are asking this question in your text: “If one is not ready for change can change happen?”. Then what is it for you to be ready?

       
      21) Arianna on Juan (reply Luiza)
       
      the first two words you use in your text are 
       
      Two
       
      ABYSMAL
       
      I was actually impressed by that. 
      The coexistence of two elements. But:
      is it one, repeated? is it that one is the copy of the other? were they born at the same time, from the same material, or..?
      what's the relationship between the two?
       
      2 + 0 = 2
      0 + 2 = 2
      1 + 1 = 2
      1 + 1 + 0 = 2
      1 = 1
      2 = 2 ..
       
      I read the relationship between the 2 as being the ABYSMAL.
      You wrote it like that, in capital letters.
      It sounded like a character from an epic tale - a hero, or the character from a cartoon.
       
      the ABYSMAL. I see it wearing a mask, almost like Tiger Mask.
      It is a wrestler.
       
      I imagine a wrestling match - 
      between you and the work of art;
      between a work of art and its copy (if such a thing as a copy exists at all);
      between the work of art and its other, whatever that is;
      between 1 and another 1..
       
      The abysmal, in this perspective and in my view, is also what happens between 2 facing each other,
      next to each other, close but never enough; 
      parallel, not reachable from each other's perspectives..that which escapes the cumulative.
      The abysmal is an in-between:
      that which is never reachable as a full state of being, of inhabited presence.
      It is being as the state of passage. 
      It is
      a hiatus, a longing,
      a bit like sehnsucht.
       
      What happens in this wrestling match?
       
      22) Isabel asks Thiago to be responded by Sophia:
      Thinking on irony again… on the irony that appears in the bubble that you proposed and the position of vulnerability, an “un-apparently presence” a “non-acknowledged little thing” yet so strong at the same time... A human-animal rhythmically gatecrashing through the restricting laws of “civilization”… that still speaks of a witty quality of human beings. My question to you is: What is more anima-Listic, to know or not to know?
       

       

      REPLIES:

      10) Christian > Aela > Aela

      Capture d’écran 2016-01-29 à 22.05.47

       

      Hello, Ladies, gentlemen and others...

      Tonight I am gonna give you an inter-galactic waltz lesson !!!

      Waltz was born in germany, in the late eighteens century ! It was first considered as the most sexual dance ever in opposition with group dance practice such das menuet... A dance in which one partners are allowed to touch each others and even more to enter in rotation together !!!

      Waltz is a three times tempo dance ! Giving this specific rhythm of each beat waiting for the next one...and in between : the void, the intergalactic void !!! Every beat resonates and exhausts its sound waves into that void till the next beat and so on !!! Here it is about gravity, relativity or if you prefer Attraction !

      Every beat creates a circular deformation of space-time exactly like the sun does ! This geometrical deformation of space-time is what makes the earth and other planets turning around it : our galaxy and the universe itself are a gigantic inter-galactic waltz !

      Every beat enter in vibration with your inner body, activating your deepest organs... causing your deepest orgasm...

      In every waltz there is this little breath... the beat goes down..it is disturbed by the apparition of an asteroid coming closer to the attraction field...it is called a balade, a walk... or if you prefer a little flirt... It is just a breath...soon, the rhythm starts increasing again and the movement of love goes back again to its rotation !!!

      To love is to dance waltz and to dance waltz is to be individually universal !!!

       

       11) Esteban > Agnes > Yaari

       
      I was "reading" Esteban's performance as an encounter: sound that piercing a specific changeable landscape. 
      in light of  & in response to that, through Agnes's question i did a training in my materials 
       
      *
       
      a dance
       
      when we attend the forest as an entity which is constantly coming into being, the forest becomes a poem-body. 
       
      the forest, as an entity, is a whole, that is larger then the sum of its parts. 
      through processes of growth and movement, it is Alive. every Possible of its Potential is in its practice. 
      the forest is a structure while it is an essence.  
       
      a poem, is a whole, greater then the sum of its parts, a Thing that practices Life due to its formation. 
      its nature is a function but also an Experience. 
      the poem, is a vessel, for life to dwell. 
       
      language is finite and endless at the same time.
       
      there, is a forest. it has a form. but since it practices itself as a body, it articulates as language. 
      a network of visible and invisible organs, frequencies, intervals, that manifests itself through exercising communication between its performances and the latent. 
      the forest is an oral teaching, of the movement of final towards infinity. 
      it is a place of divinity, where singularity succeeds to participate in intimacy, due to its becoming in contact.
      this, operates as a system of encounters, where every intension is already a working. every encounter is an event of knotting and unraveling. singularities penetrating each other, permeable for each other, while also, at the same time, remaining different from, and 'other' then, themselves. 
      like the poem, the forest passes through its own borders while Art-iculating. like the poem, it declare itself, on its edges. in order to be, it reads itself and recalls itself continuously. 
      it is a membrane, reacting to the events, that registered in, and making of, its flesh.  
       
      to think the forest in that sense, is to think the light piercing the thicket and meets itself on a trunk. the bush's ravel as space of cavities for the wind to transfigure. it is to think the earth absorbing dead-vegetal-bodies to feed the live ones. it is to understand the mushrooms as a speech conductor. the animals, as a touch transmuting a limit into energy.
      the forest IS. 
      in its own time.
       
      the poem-body is a coherent order of becoming. by coming into being-in-contact it accedes and resists to inner and outer data while simultaneously produces it. as an operative structure, it calls, in its own time, to itself, and speaks, maybe strAngely its events.  
       
      the forest as a poem-body is an oracle. 
       
      *
       
      15) Lili > Christian >  Arianna
       
       
      huddle IMG_6919
       
       
      1) We step inside the outline of a circle placed on the floor.
      We form a huddle.

       

      2) We can lay on each other's bodies. Try to find a comfortable position, where you can close your eyes.
      Ease down your head, your arms.. your body parts onto the ones of the others close to you.

       

      3) Feel your breath
      and try to feel the breath of the person who's closer to you.

       

      4) Now, reach with one of your hands the surface of another body.
      Keep your hand there. Try to feel the quality of the body material that your hand is touching.
      How would you take care of that material?

       

      5) With your hand - the hand that is touching another body - make one gesture to take care of that body material.

       
       
       
      18)Robin > Sofia > Brendan
       
       
       
      At the Extremes
       
      Old Spit
       
      Ooh Desolution
       
      Wow Endurance God Endurance
       
       
       
       
       
       

       
       

      KEYWORDS: exchange, protocols, stacking, Landscape, fear, sharing, blackapple, gemini, trance, Ambience, locomotion, circle, subterraneous, strict minimum, brainwashing session

       

      REPORT:

      The key words remind me of ‘ The Return’. I have watched this film several times and it is still discovering for me.

      Andrey and his younger brother meet their father after many years of his absence. They set off for a fishing trip and end up on a remote Island. The father who is essentially a stranger becomes more mysterious when he starts looking for a box buried somewhere on the Island.

      As the movie opens, the brothers are testing their fears jumping in the river from height. This is a threshold to what we see later.

      Arianna’s performance made me remember this film. Gerald was also talking about discovering the landscape and the body which is one of the main concepts in the same film. Thus, I think watching this film could be a report from my point of view.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BMve_sq-o4

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBEL SCORE SESSION # 9 11 January 2016
      posted by: Juan Duque
    • 09 March 2016
    • BUBBEL SCORE SESSION # 9

      PARTICIPANTS

      Sofia, Sana, Chris, Agnes, Mala, Aela, Varinia, Arianna, Isabel, Lili, Robin, Lilia

      PERFORMANCES > QUESTIONS > ANSWERS

      1. Sofia > Sana > Lilia
      2. Sana > Lili > Mala
      3. Chris > Aela > Isabel
      4. Agnes > Sofia > Varinia
      5. Mala > Isabel > Chris
      6. Aela > Arianna > Agnes
      7. Varinia > Lilia > Sofia
      8. Arianna > Agnes > Aela
      9. Isabel > Mala > Robin
      10. Lili > Robin > Sana
      11. Robin > Cris > Arianna
      12. Lilia > Varinia > Lili

       

      1. Sofia > Sana > Lilia

      Dear Sofia

      I read your performance as an attempt to link the urban spaces to the surrounding environment, to where ever we are, to the air we breathe in, to what we feel, to the seen and the unseen, to the heard and the unheard.

      It was a game with words to create vague images while the new perceptions require new words.

      My question was about hope in a city. You shattered the city into pieces and installed each piece somewhere around. You created a new city which could exist anywhere: In our mind, in our heart, in our voice, in our memories...

      Dear Lilia

      Is there any possibility to create a new city through memories?

       

      2) Sana > Lili > Mala

      The pure image in your video, Sana, makes me feel I should get over or beyond it quickly to „see“ more, to see what´s behind it.

      Instead I imagined being you on the other side. In one of the last week´s sessions I was moving around with a pullover over half of my face to replicate your framing in the video. As an audience I am constantly left to imagine the covered part of the image in your video, attempting to be you in my little experiment however doesn´t require from me to imagine any part of my environment except the environments´ own imaginations perhaps.

      The „framing“ element, or the veil in between is different from the two perspectives -

      which veils do you use that would be hard or impossible to remove because they are essential to your work?

      A direction of the upper question that interests me even more is  using a lack or absence of a certain veil/interface/disturbance…

       3 Chris > Aela > Isabel

      Hey Christian, Isabel,

      sorry for my late question, I completely forgot the bubble score !

      So this question will be an extract from a book I just read : Chaos-phonies, from jazz to noise, the coronation of Chaos. It is in French, so I'll try to translate it.

      “Divorce between singing and talking.

      [] the archaic cousin of Sapiens and Neanderthal, Homo Heildelbergensis (500 000 years ago...) was already physiologically able to sing (its anterior condylar canal was as large as the one of Homo-Sapiens allowing then a production and a control of the sound produced by the vocal cords. It was as sophisticated as what we do now, while talking). Some scientists developed a these from this discovery: an original musilanguage. A long way ago, we were singing-talking. According to this theory, we can see some remains of this musilanguage in tonal languages (such as Vietnamese), in which the note and the accent are as meaningful as the phoneme itself. Meaning that this divorce is posterior, it comes from separation of the singing task from the talking one. This separation would have appeared in a larger context of civilisation (to be civilised), and of controlling the body and its drives”

      Do you think art is a way to find back what civilisation took away from us, from our animal instinct ? Could art be a way of rediscovering and so connecting to a more visceral being ?

      Cheers,

      Aela

      4) Agnes > Sofia > Varinia

      Each proposal has a life time, which in our times often goes from idea to realization, to than reverberation. Some proposals do not need long periods for their realization, staying more focused in the idea and reverberation parts (one example of this are the propositions of Ono in her book grapefruit and other American conceptual artists from that period). This is a particular mode of art production, nowadays questioned for its capacity of recuperation by late capitalism. How would you describe your most common mode of production? My question is a proposal: to reverse or change radically the order in which you usually produce for the bubble score. For example, if you go from idea to realization try to go the other way around.

       

      5) Mala >Isabel > Christian

      Hello dear Mala:

      The practice that you proposed made me think of the Mapuche indigenous people, the original inhabitants of the south of Chile that have survived colonialism and now struggle transnational dictatorship. They conceive imagining and dreaming to go hand in hand. They believe that both are tools to reach the magic held in symbols and archetypes, or rather power tools in our ontological configuration that enable us to transform and transmute our 3d reality. They are also places of communication, of travelling, of reaching. The Mapuche Cosmo vision is mostly based in messages transmitted by the dead through a dream. For example: a medicine woman heals and also makes political decisions in a tribe (or community). This role is passed on through female blood lineage. If the last medicine woman alive dies leaving no descent behind, the community waits until an ancestor manifests in the dream of the matriarch. Usually a girl is pointed to be the next doctor but she needs overcoming a challenge. If she is able to eat a coin and through digestion transform it in a silver egg (that she shits), then she is the next medicine woman in her community and a celebration follows.

      I read some words by Jeremy Taylor, Doctor in sacred Theology, that I would like to share with you:

      "If I can convince you that the products of your imagination are worthless or trivial, then I can make you my slave. If I fail to persuade you that your imaginative life is substandard, and then no matter how much economic, social, or political oppression I put you under, you will never be entirely enslaved".

      My question to you is: Do you conceive dream as a tool for resistance?

      Much love to you Mala from Isabella.

      6) Aela > Arianna > Agnes

       

      hi Aela and Agnes.

       

      we were standing in a circle. we were part of something.

      Then, something anomalous starts to happen.

      heavy breathing, rooted movements coming from deep down the belly. A change in the facial expression.

      Or, better: face stops existing. The face becomes just a part of the body as any other one.

      We are not in the social anymore.

      Words are spoken but it is their sound and their origin that matters. Not the meaning.

      They are breaths and movements more than acts of communication.

       

      It is perhaps when language stops making sense, because there is no need for sense anymore.

      We assist to a phenomenon.

      Among the definitions of this word, we have:

      an extra-ordinary event

      a freak

      a wonder

       

      when I was there, I stopped being part and I started witnessing.

      It was a shift in perception as well as in position.

      I could barely look anymore..

      it made me feel as being present to a transformation..

      A monster.

       

      Then, going back to that feeling of being/becoming/witnessing the presence of a monster, my mind went to the figure of the bearded lady.

      I remembered this picture:

       

      I have always been fascinated by the social stigma on women having hairs, most notably facial hairs. To be socially accepted as being women means not to have a beard or mustache, for example.

       

      But how comes?

      ..I would really like to have a beard.

      what is it to be a monster?

       

      7) Varinia > Lilia > Sofia

       

      And, and - also also - and -what else what else -instead of the uni -only only -seems to me to be a fundamental entry into thinking and perceiving the world. It's very evident that we are loosing the capacity of engaging with the other out of fear..

      And then came the stillness that  allows us to just be there, close to what is around one's own body revealed or hidden experiences. The making of non-linear history, a history of invisibilities where the several collides. Take time!

      The being there implies the expansion of empathy or the awareness of the complexity of things. We are social beings, no worries we are not made to be only or lonely. Attention is maybe the biggest capacity we have to listen to what is there to be able to communicate with what / whom we don't know yet. And also what else? My wish is: could you design a travel we could follow to feel the space between us? A sort of contagion awareness that could just make that inherent empathy smile.



      8) Arianna > Agnes > Aela

       

      In my memory you are playing this card game called Concentration or Match Match. In your game the pair was not to be found on another card but in Varinia’s mind. The game slowly turned into a riddle. It seemed there was right answer, a goal, an expectation? I will pose my question together with a song

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9XQw9iAl_Q

      Tell us oh how do we

      Catch a ghost in the

      Dark

      ?

      11 Isabel mala robin

      Dear Isabel, dear Robin
      Thank u for yr proposition. I didn't become sun powder, but I did become stardust. Or rather: I remembered I already am stardust, we already are stardust. Made in the matter of stars. When I am, we are a matter of stars everything is different. The universe breathes much slower, so slow, that a breath measures the almost of eternity. I wonder how such a collective rite like one u propose makes us remember how to dwell in the almost forever of the stars while trading the earth in time. For a moment I sink into cosmic memory to reemerge as stardust. Is such an imprint, an experience outside of time and lasts forever?
      Thank u! Xm

       

       

       

       

      12) Lilia > Varinia > Lili

      Hi Lilia,

      i read somewhere that the main reason why western culture appears as an oppressive force in the middle east, is because the notion of time in the middle east is circular,  and that the notion of progress is not measured in terms of before and after as in the West. In the middle East progress means reinterpreting, reconsidering and being in a constant dialogue with the past. But also i read that even within Europe the meaning of time changes from country to country. For instance the south of Europe a date at 4 pm means that it is then that we start thinking to go to the meeting, while for a German that would mean that you are late. According to that article this because in the south of Europe time is measured not by the clock but by moments, so i wont think of the next moment until this one is over, so if i am having a really exiting conversation, the moment will be over when the exiting conversation is over, not before.

      So we have minutes, circular time (maybe based on the rise and sunset), moments....if they give you the possibility of setting up your own measure of time, based on what would that be?



       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #5 11 January 2016
      posted by: Sana Ghobbeh
    • 12 February 2016
    • 12 February 2016
    • PARTICIPANTS

      Isabel, Arianna, Lilia, Agnes, Sebastian, Sofia, Aela, Mala, Esteban, Robin

      QUESTIONS BY

      PERFORMANCE > QUESTION > REPLY

       

      1 Sofia > Lilia > Arianna

      2 Isabel > Arianna > Robin

      3 Arianna > Isabel > Esteban

      4 Agnes > Esteban > Isabel

      5 Aela > Agnes > Lilia

      6 Lilia > Sofia > Seba

      7 Seba > Robin > Mala

      8 Robin >  Aela > Sofia

      9 Esteban > Mala > Aela

      10 Mala > Seba > Agnes

       

      BINGO!

       

      QUESTIONS

       

      1)Sofia > Lilia > Arianna

       

      In Sofia's score the words became the real and the real became the words. It was a mise-en-abime that caught the moment of the moment. An enhancer of what is there and not perceived at first instance, or too known and ordinary that it gets lost. An invitation to pay attention and re-imagine the 'we' we are in that moment. The text, the reader, the group, the room, the other. Certain scores are tuning devices, they create reading parameters for the moment. One writes and reads simultaneously the moment. I find them fascinating, time openers. Was thinking about art strategies that bring us to the present time, to the self and the group, and what do they do terms of responsibility for both the one and the group. I would like to invite you to develop on this issue. Looking forwards to read you!

       

      2) Isabel > Arianna > Robin

       

      Dear Isabel,

      it is always a pleasant surprise for me to attend to your proposals. They bring a burst of fresh air, creating the space for both disruption and intimacy.

      It is this combination that interests me the most. A strong frontal approach on themes that we most likely wouldn't talk about otherwise in a group, and the simultaneous capacity to create a space for sharing a certain kind of intimacy.

       

      I see the approach to this intimacy that your propositions bring about as characterized by an activist and militant spirit.

      You (one) DIY, you (one) can take things into your (her/his) hands and experiment with them, without forgetting about the material they are made of, and the special care each material requires to be handled with.

      In other words: the opening of a space where intimacy is possible in a public way. Even, it is directly born in a public way, and shared, without losing its specificity.

       

      My focus is then in this possibility for activism to be intimate, and for intimacy to be absolutely disruptive, poweful and re-generative, in the sense of the possibility for it to be a tool and a performative situation where to create change not only for the one, but also for many.

       

      2 connected questions:

      How to combine activism and self-care?

      How to be a wrecker and a flower at the same time?

       

      3) Arianna > Isabel > Esteban

       

      Visibility and invisibility... presence and shadow, light and darkness, a quest of the opposites and in the middle permeable receptors: body and mind mutually observing each other, evidencing a certain spectral condition that binds them together but, that also tears them apart. Is the quality of being spectral inherent to humans and why?

       

      4)Agnes>Esteban>Isabel

       

      Dear Agnes

       

      As I look back on your text/performance I think of gaps... and grammar, my question comes again in the form of a quote:

       

      There will be a writing of the unwritten.

      Someday this will happen.

      A brief writing without grammar

      A writing made solely out of words.

      Words without a grammar to support them. Lost

      There, written. and inmediately abandoned.

       

      Marguerite Duras, C’est Tout

       

      5) Aela > Agnes > Lilia

       

      Talking upside down about erection has something beautifully desperate and hopeful at the same time. The never giving up attitude affronts the paradox and exhaustion in its quest for the impossible. My question comes along with a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjW_I-2fARA and I’m curious: what do you think about eroticism in impotency?

       

      I can just think about eating flowers. Old bouquets from valentine’s day. Today is the day! The celebration of impotency I wish it was the one of eroticism.  This though made me laugh! I’m referring to the consumerism of love. Also yesterday someone posted on Facebook an article about the origine of St. Valentine day. It says: “Those Wild And Crazy Romans From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain. The Roman romantics "were drunk. They were naked. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them. They believed this would make them fertile.” I don’t know… this is possibly both eroticism and impotency in a dance macabre.

      Eroticism is potency. Eroticism needs response I believe. Impotency is no response. And there we start.

      I would like to respond with a letter I wrote to my best friend based on a text by Jean-Luc Nancy : “Stirring stirring up, uprising.”

       

      Brussels, 4 February, 2016

       

      Dear S,

       

      I've been wanting to write this letter for some time. We are so apart. Many kilometers separate our physical bodies and though I always feel you are so close. Friendship is an opening to the outside.

       

      Thinking about my work and wanting to be in touch with you about it. In relation to life, work and love, I feel I am propelled in between motion, agitation, desire and rebellion.  Restless. A being alive that doesn't want to stay still but persists in touching and being touched by the world, that wants to alter it, not with the intension that it becomes something fixed but as a challenge my physical and moral senses. Almost as a paradox this state of mind implies a strong responsible relation to the other (being the other also the non-human other), so somehow it enters the domain of ecology. I feel weak sometimes because too driven, too hopeful engaging in the believe that movement is the only condition of all. Too much expectation I guess.

      The movement that there is, is the movement of (e)motion, the one that mobilizes one towards the other and brings along excitement and exaggeration, brings on the transgression. When I write this I feel the drama queen I can be.

       

      On the other hand I also feel that that restlessness is a state of mind, something I can't get rid off and that wants to join the movement around me. I want to touch! Be in touch! Be touched! It's like a drug, an addiction, a disease…

       

      Touching shakes up and sets in motion, I think. As soon as I move my body closer to another body (even an inert body made of wood, stone or metal), it feels like I displace it, I move it even if just a tiny little bit, and the other sets me apart, holding me up in a way, I loose myself. Touching acts and reacts at the same time !!!!!. There is no mercy.  . Touching propels and repels — impulsion and repulsion, rhythm of the outside and the inside, of ingestion and indigestion, of the clean and the unclean. It's strong! Am I going crazy? Did I fall in love?

       

      I'm thinking now in the case of a new born baby.  When K was born, after being contained inside my body,  she reached for me in a survival motion, searching my breast to suck nutrition. . It was one of the most amazing experiences I had. How could she know that I had a breast, that she could suck and that there was milk? She approximates and distances, penetrates and escapes at the same time my body with her body. You know as well as me about this. We both have children, we both bared in our wombs an alien body, feeding from our own blood for later being contained by it. Sucked and pushed away on a motion of relation. An interdependent autonomous symbiosis. An intimacy that is carnal knowledge. The beginning of it all!

       

      The small bodies of our daughters were immersed in our resonating amniotic liquid, that surrounded them inside our bellies. The sounds of our bodies, our heart and our guts, and the sounds of the outside world touched their ears, their closed eyes, their nostrils and their whole infused skin at the same time. The beginning of eroticism. Yet inside there, each possible sensation was still diluted in a dim way, they were too close, in a kind of permanent, quasi-permeable exchange between the outside and the inside.

      At birth it all changes, they separated from us, we separated from our mothers. But we still remain this potential thing, floating now not in the amniotic liquid but in the world where everything relates to everything .  Yes, everything strains towards everything and pulls away from everything — but now we are separated there is a gulf between one and another. Crisis!!!! The cruel and exciting reality that only a separated body on its own is able to touch. No contact possible without being apart. Out of reason or passion, striving to connect, to exist. This letter is a getting in touch of the reason. I miss you. Miss talking to you!

       

      Thinking about the sense of pleasure in love and sex, the rhythmic movement and overflow, of the bodies spilling against and into one another, and one setting itself off from the other only to take it up and move in again together in succeeding waves. The separation is the opening of the intercourse. Poetic intimacy. The intercourse isn’t seeking to restore a lack of distinction: it celebrates the distinction! Together, apart, in , out.  It announces a meeting, which precisely is contact. Contact doesn't cancel the separation -  it makes is apparent on the contrary. Maybe here is where it resides the capacity to receive and the capacity to be affected. In that vulnerability. And affection is first of all passion and the movement of passion, a passion whose very nature is to touch. This is all about mutual action, I think, one can't receive passively, one is an active receiving mode per se. I like this idea that receptivity is active and not passive, and that when you touch your are being touched and both parties are receivers. It's an act of generosity, vulnerability and courage. My whole being is contact. My whole being is touch/touching. This is amazing!!

       

      If I say touching is stroking; the caress is the desire and the pleasure to come as close as one can to a skin — be it human, animal, textile or mineral, and so on — and to engage this proximity to play off two skins grappling with each other. This is again a play between the inside and the outside, perhaps the only game there is. Listen, if all playing consists in taking and leaving an area, in opening breaches, filling and voiding places, boxes and schedules, the only game there is is an act of intercourse. Indeed, is there even a desire that hasn’t a desire to touch? Ah, now the world becomes an erotic entity! This is a funny thought!

       

      This means we are open to the outside, open with all our orifices — my ears, eyes, mouth and nostrils, not to mention all the channels of ingestion and digestion, like those of my moods, sweats, thoughts, gaze and much more.  As for the skin, it's the envelope around these openings, these entries­ and­ exits, which locates and specifies them while at the same time developing for itself this ability to be affected and to have a desire for that. I love the skin. Maybe the skin is the loving organ with all its permeability. It makes us be-come what we are not yet and un-come who we just were.

       

      Now you’d say but what's the relation between body, politics and touch relate?

      Well, at the end, it is always a matter of sensible reality, thus material and vibratory. When the self quivers, it really is quivering, just as one may speak of water about to boil. What we commonly call the self is in fact nothing other than the waking and welcoming — both mixed — of motion/emotion. The self is the touched body — vibrating, receptive and responsive. Its response is the sharing out of the touch, its rise towards it. The body rises up! Maybe in here there is a pre-disposition of the body to be political? Indeed, there is some insurrection (and sometimes some erection) in the motions of touching. A body rises up against its own enclosure, against being locked up within itself, and against its own entropy. It rebels against its death. Whether it is about the coming of another (him or her), or the absolute alteration of death, it is the body that opens up and extends outside. It is its pure act!!!

      When i am touched, I have nothing to expect: the touch is all act, in its mobile, vibratory and sudden action. And as for Aristotle’s god, this act is accompanied by its own excess, which is its pleasure, the climax that is the flower or spark of the act — sun or dark- ness, always an abyss.

       

      Would these thoughts make the world a better place? Would the sense of love instigate a relational care beyond personal narcissistic achievement?

       

      Hope you like the reading and looking forward to hear back your thoughts,

       

      Love,

      Lilia

       

      The song says:

      The rings of Saturn are so sexy and Jupiter's got that rad spot! Pluto and Eris are just dwarfs but they get me twice as hot Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is all over me! I'd spread my legs for Venus and I'd like to live on Mars I'd take Neptune or Uranus or any of the galaxy stars... Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is all over me! Mercury is the hottest being closest to the sun and if that gets you hot you know you are not the only one! Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is all over me! Oh planet forms! The solar system really turns me on! I'm floating through your galaxy, your milkway is ah ah AH AH!

       

      6) Lilia > Sofia > Seba

       

      Maybe a mask allows a body to become other. It's such an impressive thing, such a game changer, and it does it so fast. You put the mask on and -damn! who the fuck?-, it works every time. But at the same time that it works, it's still a mask, and not a human body. If you don't wear it and leave it hanging on a nail it is clear, it's just a mask, just the other and not a body. But if you put it on again - damn again, what the fuck?! it's a body again!-. Maybe a mask allows a body to become two: both a body and not a body. It's a splitter. It gives you a super-power, and extra-non-body... I don't know, it's for you to say: What is a mask? And what is the superpower this mask gives you that you think is most interesting for you to have?

       

      1. Seba > Robin > Mala

       

      Nitrazepam is a hypnotic drug of the benzodiazepine class, indicated for the short-term relief of severe, disabling anxiety and insomnia.[1] It also has sedative and motor-impairing properties,[2] as well as amnestic, anticonvulsant, and skeletal muscle relaxant effects.

       

      Nimetazepam (marketed under brand name Erimin) is an intermediate-acting hypnotic drug which is a benzodiazepine derivative. It was first synthesized by a team at Hoffmann-La Roche in 1962.[1] It possesses hypnotic, anxiolytic, sedative, and skeletal muscle relaxant properties. Nimetazepam is also an anticonvulsant.[2] It is sold in 5 mg tablets known as Erimin. It is generally prescribed for the short-term treatment of severe insomnia in patients who have difficulty falling asleep or maintaining sleep.

      Lithium compounds, also known as lithium salts are primarily used as a psychiatric medication. This includes in the treatment of major depressive disorder that does not improve following other antidepressants and bipolar disorder.[1] In these disorders it reduces the risk of suicide.[2] Lithium is taken by mouth.[1]

       

      Dear Seba, I have to admit to not really consciously understanding your performance but there is something so clinical or maybe neutral about the way you list these drugs, And then there is the really representational side of what you did with the drawings.  They serve somehow to set up a narrative, which allows me to tell myself a story:

       

      There was a man who was blocked from his memories by a wall

      Part of him was stuck in the past

      He recited a list of magical ingredients

      This became an incantation, the incantation of the dead head

      These were supposed to be the keys to a memory that was blocked

      The memory was blocked by a failure to be assimilated

      This failure was related to lack of sleep

      1st he used a potion in a bottle to sleep

      Half of the people in the world used this potion to forget

      Ultimately It didn't work,

      The magical ingredients in his incantation were kept in a red box

      The magical ingredients gave him temporary sleep

      But this sleep was the sleep of the dead

      They allowed him to function but he became a zombie

      His head was split in 2 and cut off from the rest of himself

      He was a basket case

       

      Please consider this story the question

       

      8) Robin >  aela > sofia

       

      Hey Robin,

      as I know you would like more feedback, I am gonna try to give as much observation as I can :)

      I liked the decalage between what I could describe as an intimate lecture dispositive and the very text which was read. A nice mix between telling a story, a tale and doing it in a formal way...meaning giving awareness of the philosophical side of the tale and challenging imagination in the same way.

       

      Same decalage I could felt by the situation of both characters: being next to each other, responding (in term of tempo) to each other but not really seeing, touching, communicating...just knowing the other is somewhere near you while in the same time, keeping a private and comfortable space.

       

      It was also about interpretation...how each character interprets the silence of the other, the void in between them two...while one thinks it is necessary and peaceful to maintain this quiet void the second wonders if something might be wrong with it...non verbal communication lets space for possibilities of interpretation. The void as the space of the possible...

       

      This issue of interpretation can be found in science...here...meteorology or science fiction...how to rationalise what is seen, observed and how those observations are related to one specific way of perceiving... the limits of perception (here human and something-else-than-human) are also the limits of scientific interpretation of events...

       

      Here comes the issue of point of view...very present in your performance...zooming in...out...at least two different interpretations of the same void, the same non-presence...two different ways of feeling, living and recognising one event (human being perception and observer perception)...plus the song in behind...like a lightly colourful wind that guides imagination of the viewer a bit at side of the lecture dispositive...I felt brought away...in between two possible realities because of that song...

       

      here is my question: Does reality depends necessarily on a common interpretation or the so called reality is never else than a very useful concept we use to hide the fear of not sharing enough, the fear of being alone (in one mind, one body, one universe) ?

       

      Extra question: do you think human being can manage to live with a multitude of different realities (generated by a multitude of different point of view) happening in the same time ?

       

      9) Esteban > Mala > Aela

      Dear Esteban,

      thank u for yr proposition. i find very interesting the relation between what is represented and what remains invisible (behind the white screen), yet in a way tangible, which affects what we see, what is being performed and what is represented. I am interested in this subtle logic of confluences btw the two (voices, bodies, or states of mind, layers of "text") and how they affect or destabilise each other. It is as if the two phantasmatic frameworks within one person clash. or perhaps it is the friction between ones own fantasy and the invisible other within ones self that always already invades, tackles, influences one's own fantasy from behind the white screen. It makes me think of Zizek in his Pervert's Guide to Cinema (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTcCjNTpecc) where he talks about voice as an "alien intruder" into one's psychic reality, which in psychoanalytic terms is always displaced, cracked open. thinking, about yr performance, i wander what is then this logic of continuous and perpetual displacement and how it generates yr "cinematic" narratives on stage.

      xmala  

       

      10)Mala > Seba > Agnes

       

      Dear Mala,

       

      I was intrigued by the way you used the technique of visualization. The experiences I had up until now were individual ones, even though they happened in a group context. Your session made us verbalize in front of the group the specificity of the impressions, thoughts and affects that were produced by the interaction between your words and our imagination. By sharing all of this with each other, we could see the many individual differences. You also asked some of us to delve a bit deeper into our imagination, in order for us to be more precise when communicating our impressions. Sometimes it also seemed as if you as the interrogator were looking for something yourself, through the imagination of someone else. I wondered what it was, and if you eventually found it!

      But this is not a question Agnes could do a lot with… So, here it is: Considering the importance of knowledge production, creativity and innovation for our contemporary economies, shouldn’t we as artists take a more critical stance in regards to the productive and transformative potential of the imagination (‘elsewhere & otherwise’), a capacity often associated with our practices? Should we redefine imagination as something which is not in opposition with continuity, tradition, situated-ness,… Or define a force which can balance its constructive-destructive agency?

       

      Seba

       

      KEYWORDS

      fish, displacement, sex, excitable, particles

       

       

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

      PARTICIPANTS:

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

       

      P > Q > R

      1) Sofia > Nicolas > Christian

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      3) Nicolas > Luiza > Juan

      4) Christian > Varinia > Sofia

      5) Sana > Lili > Lilia

      6) Arianna > Brendan > Varinia

      7) Esteban > Yaari > Aela

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

      9) Agnes > Lilia > Luiza

      10) Juan > Arianna > Lili

      11) Seba > Sana > Nicolas

      12) Anouk > Christian > Pierre

      13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

      14) Pierre > Esteban > Seba

      15) Robin > Anouk > Thiago

      16) Yaari > Thiago > Sana

      17) Aela > Sofia > Yaari

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

      19) Lilia > Seba > Esteban

      20) Varinia > Robin > Brendan

       

      QUESTIONS:

      1) Sofia > Nicolas > Christian

      Dear Sofia

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

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

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

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

      Here is my question: are we breathing ?

       

      3) Nicolas > Luiza > Juan

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

      7) Esteban > Yaari > Aela

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

       

       

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

       

       

      Dear Thiago,

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

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

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

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

      my best,

      Pierre

       


      9) Agnes > Lilia > Luiza

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

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

      The Three Oddest Words

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



      When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.



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

       

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

       

      10) Juan > Arianna > Lili

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

       

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

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

       

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

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

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

       11) Seba -Sana -Nicolas

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

       

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

      13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

      Dears 

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

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

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

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

      Key words…

      - Personification of the soul of the other

      - Appropriation of the image of the other

      - Cultural anthropophage

      IMG_0221

      14) Pierre > Esteban > Seba

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

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

      15) Robin > Anouk > Thiago

       

      Dear Robin,

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

      16) Yaari > Thiago > Sana 

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

      The Rock

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

      my questions:

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

       

      17) Aela > Sofia > Yaari

      Dear Aela,

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

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

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

      19) Lilia > Sébastien > Esteban

       

      Dear Esteban, 

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

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

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

      Sébastien

       

       

      20) Varinia>Robin>Brendan

      Dear Varinia

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

      varinia

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

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

       


       

      REPLIES:

       

      2) Brendan > Aela > Agnes

      revitalise your personal blind spot

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

      blind spot

      7) esteban > Yaahri > Aela

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

      8) Thiago > Pierre > Arianna

       

      A & B_FITNESS

       

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

       

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

       

       13) Luiza > Juan > Anouk

       

      IMG_0221

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

       

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

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

       

      20) Varinia>Robin>Brendan

       

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

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

       

      L'Origine Du Monde

       

       

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

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

      you’ll make your own desire.”

       

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

       

      (silence accompanied by time)

      (taking position in the recline)

       

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

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

       

      “you watch the painting”

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

      Illusion.

       

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

       

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

      Tout cela, à beaucoup entre vous donne les cornes”

       

      The indecent look becomes increasingly more and more bleak.

      All this gives you a lot between the horns-

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

       

       

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

      Indecency even with the death of tears.

       

      (sounding and speaking more gentle)

      “And I tried, I tried, I tried-

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

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

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

       

      “where as polite or not-

      and grey in the silk ground

      of flower bond

      b-o-n-d.

       

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

      they are confusing the whole(hole)-

      structure."

       

       

      18) Lili > Agnes > Robin

       

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

      Light-Touch

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

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

      Timo Hannay, publisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Nasa Astronomer Dr. Michelle Thaller.

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

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

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

      David Bowie/comfortably numb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      nce.com/browse/touch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      RobinAmanda 

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

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

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

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

       

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


       

       

       

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

       

       

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

       

       

    • project
    • Bubble Score
    • BUBBLE SCORE SESSION #4 11 January 2016
      posted by: Agnes Schneidewind
    • 03 February 2016
    • 03 February 2016
    • dark bubbles

       

      PARTICIPANTS

      Isabel, Agnes, Esteban, Christian, Lili, Anouk, Robin, Lilia, Arianna, Aela, Brendan, Juan, Luiza, Sana, Tinna

       

       P> Q >R

       

      1) Isabel > Aela > Juan

      2) Esteban > Sana >Tinna

      3) Arianna > Christtian > Esteban

      4) Sana > Luiza > Lilia

      5) Luiza > Anouk > Sana

      6) Christian > Brendan > Christian

      7) Anouk > Lili > Luiza

      8) Brendan > Juan > Agnes

      9) Lili > Isabel > Aela

      10) Agnes > Esteban > Arianna

      11) Juan > Tinna > Lili

      12) Aela > Lilia > Isabel

      13) Tinna > Robin > Brendan

      14) Robin > Agnes >Anouk

      15) Lilia > Arianna > Robin

       

      QUESTIONS:

       

      1) Isabel > Aela > Juan

      Isabel, in your performance, you set up a space with a candle and a pendulum while reading a text that sound very precise in a scientific way. I then wonder how do you relate science and mystic in your work...

      Here an extract of one of my former text : ‘ d’une étrange manière il me semble que la science - dans l’impossible dépassement de ses limites - finisse par regarder en. / ' in a strange way, science – ceaseless facing its inability to reach boundaries – ends up looking toward '

      This sentence is for me the metaphor of the endless research of knowledge, the endless will to know... And at some point when this anxious infinity reveals itself to the researcher, the only peaceful answer he/she can draw, takes the aesthetic of the mystic.

      Here is my question: in regard of emotional truth, is there, at the end, any difference between scientific and mystical knowledge ?

       

       2) Esteban > Sana >Tinna

      dear Esteban

      What you created as a stage for love, loss and time, is infinity.

      A circulation with no beginning and no end, a loop, an endless abyss, a lifetime process of gaining and losing, birth and death.

      You insert colors to this infinity, yellow, blue, green, purple....

      Also the words are there and the silence, the hesitation and certainty, the memory and desire,

      What covers the distances?

       3) Arianna > Christtian > Esteban

      Dear Arianna,
      part of the question you were answering was:
      “Who do you become by imitating animals and what effect does it have on society?”

      Your slide show told a story about gathering food, catching behaviour and solo endeavours of rodents and birds. These creatures are so small that they can live inside a regular human meal.
      Considering taste, texture and durability; what kind of meal would you like to live in?

      Cake House

       

      4) Sana > Luiza > Lilia

      Dear Sana,

      Your works always take me somewhere else, I always feel in an ancient something, even when you use the latest geo technology, there is something about the way you propose things, your connection to your language, memory, that triggers me into a nostalgic sadness, not really sadness, but I always fell kind of blue afterwards. During your performance I kept remembering myself of the places in Rio which have nature related names, and a few of them the same names you read us, and thought it funny that if I was to tell you about them, of course we would meet each other in the English language. And so, different streets, in very different places, meet each other within language.

      I’m not sure what I want to ask, if it is “what do you think is the story behind displacement”? Or, if it is “are we always wanting to be in two places at the same time"? But I guess that maybe these two questions can meet somewhere, so I'll let Lilia take us forward here :)

      x

      Luiza

       5) Luiza > Anouk > Sana

      Dear Luiza ,  when I saw your proposal, I immediately thought of an old french movie 'Le passe muraille'  from Marcel Aymé. My question is an extract of this movie. It's in french. I like that you don't speak the langage and can only get information from the images, body langage, expression and sounds . Enjoy, Anouk

      [embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sir3rG5AW5Q[/embed]

       

      6) Christian > Brendan > Christian

       

      Kronborg_Braun-Hogenberg

       

      It worked. Q and Captain Picard's answer to Hamlet. During the bubble feast, i asked you a bit about the ShakesTrek text that you presented and read. And you let me know that your father lives very near the castle wear Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's play was said to have lived and the great tragedy takes place. In fact you can see Kronborg Castle from your father's window, placed strategically on the extreme northeastern tip, at the narrowest sound between Denmark and Sweden. I can picture it easily, simultaneously sinking and rising in the mist and taking its forms in the changing sun and moon lights. 

       

      P992_320706

       
      The castle has been immortalized by fiction.
       
      Christoffer_Wilhelm_Eckersberg_-_View_north_of_Kronborg_Castle_-_Google_Art_Project
       
      I wonder if when you look out your father's window if you are even interested in this castle? Or if you find elements of this view, this landscape, that are richer and more interesting, and maybe hidden by its presence? 
       
       
      With your interest in landscape and sound.  I wonder what this place could sound like, given your tools for video and music. Perhaps a score. 
      I return to the geographical description of this setting for the specificity of my question: it exists "at the narrowest sound between Denmark and Sweden". What is this narrowest of sounds, that makes up the common ground between your Father, Hamlet, Sweden, Denmark, marked and protected by the castle.

       

      7) Anouk > Lili > Luiza

      Inspired by the following few lines from Nigel Thrift´s writing on affect and thinking of the filling aspect of your score - filling that head and mask with your projections through observations, perceptions, imagination:
       
      „Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions
      fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and
      closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression
      of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped.
      Something remains unactualised, inseparable from but unassimilable to
      any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is
      more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside
      of oneself, at the very point at which one is most intimately and unshareably
      in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. . . . Actually existing, structured
      things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the
      autonomy of affect.
      The escape of affect cannot but be perceived, alongside the perceptions that
      are its capture."
       
      this is my question: How do you manage affect in your work or relate to it - more straightforwardly - what is it that escapes and is unactualised within you research - purposefully so - fabricating that escape or without your direct control?
      What is the relation between how you perceive affect and how you transmit it to your audience?
       
       

      8) Brendan > Juan > Agnes

       

      The question develops as a code - contribution to Brendan’s Image by adding more images and words…

      A.Etant Donné by Marcel Duchamp

      etant-donnes-inside1

      B. A random image that Google gives when you type “Histoire de l'œil” by Georges Bataille

      story-of-the-eye

       

      1. The word Acéphale

      Departing from a fragment of the text presented by Brendan…

      “Where as polite or not

      and grey in the silk ground of flower bond

      b-o-n-d.

      for thinkers shouldn’t be so much.

      (so many) they are confusing the whole(hole)- structure”.

      I would like to ask you also with an iconic Image

      What dust means in your practice?

      imgres

      Dust Breeding, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920

       

      9) Lili > Isabel > Aela

      Dear Lili:

      Itchy sensations arouse in my theets. My tung was reading invisible stuffed letters. Yet, my voice was fenced, replaced by visceral sounds, feeling congested. How much are congestion and viscerality intertwinged in your practices?

       

      10) Agnes>Esteban>Arianna

       

      Dear Agnes,

      After your text/performance, I have a somewhat enigmatic quote and an image as questions:

      "You never look at me from the place from which I see you" J, Lacan

       anglig_10313766667

      11) Juan > Tinna > Lili

      Dear Juan. In your video you showed us  a dung beetle rolling its dung, without ever seeing a result in its work, or seeing the end to the story of that beetle with its task.   It was fascinating and hypnotizing to watch this machine at work without getting the satisfaction of seeing it succeed. To study its techniques and persistence when it was basically a status quo operation.   
      It reminded me of the fascination of kids ( and some grown ups) watching machines and people at work, at e.g. building sites, or trashmen collecting garbage etc.  Why is that a common universal fascination - is it trying to understand a procedure, or to admire individual craftmanship ?

      Question -  Why do you keep on watching ? 

      12) Aela > Lilia > Isabel

       

      Aela, on your answer to Yaari last week you stumbled up on the words: "my soul (/psyche) is forcing me to speak of bodies that changed into new forms".
      It made me think about speech capacity as an autonomous entity. With not much knowledge about speech I remembered a book by Judith Buttler titled “Excitable speech, a politics of the performative” and stumbled myself on a notion of Austin that distinguishes “illocutionary” from “perlocutionary” speech acts. I think what you did was an illocutionary speech act. You were doing what you were saying. Changing your body and the language simultaneously while seemingly acting under a force or drive that governed you, trying to embody speech. The impossible task of coherence and union. I’m thinking of embodiment as the condition of the performative and performative being exactly what escapes. I’m interested to know Isabel what do you think about this and if this is a concern you have in your practice.

       

      13) Tinna > Robin > Brendan

      Tinna, It seemed to me that you embodied the narration of a medium who was acting as a channel between the dead and their relatives and friends in a seance-type situation. What interested me most about the text was the position of 1st person that you took, first as the medium describing how the person died , then becoming the dead person and speaking their words. By embodying their voices it seemed to me that they and you shared multiple realities- The reality of the context created by the medium, the reality of the voice that was being embodied, and the reality of your narration of these voices. It seems that the boundaries of our bodies are permeable and we can be possessed by a voice or voices. But this leads me to question the solidity of everything and what is the territory of a person or thing and their boundaries and is there a common space where all these things are stored. This all reminded me of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of Morphic Resonance and the idea of a common pool of memories and knowledge. This theory sees the body and the mind not as centres (which can be possessed) but more as decoders, descrambler, receivers of information, information which is held in a common pool/cloud/sphere.

      So my question here is: What is the importance of the role of the voice in your performance?

       

      14) Robin > Agnes >Anouk

      Dear Robin, I remember the word touch, repeating and commanding a horde of distorted words to pass through the world wide web in order to do what they are talking about: not to be understood but to touch. A long-distance touch that actually not only stretched the spatial distance. Echo and technology also caused a delay, a time displacement that doubled our five minutes effectively, very impressive! What do you think could be the potential of  distortion in relation to time?

       

      15) Lilia > Arianna > Robin

       

      The way Focault describes the dynamics of the relationships of power in the excerpts quoted by Lilia made me think about weather forecast.

       

      Immagine incorporata 1    

       

      "These relations of power are then changeable, reversible and unstable.", says F.

      To me, this means that they are a matter of time - as much as the relationships of care and taking care are.

      (taking) care  \approx  (taking) time  \approx  power relations

      Time is the variable that allows us to think about power and care as entire complex multidimensional and changeable systems of forces.
      They are processes. How do they transform? How to capture, even if momentarily, their movements and changes?
      I am thinking about the weather forecast as a model to analyse them.
      What scheme/function to use in order to process them?
      How to register/record their patterns?

       

       

       


       

       

      KEYWORDS: voice, resilience, "this is strange", flower-bond, death, out of reach, seeking the limits, animal, provocation, childhood

       

      REPORT

       

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • block 2015/III
    • don't eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me  invitation research sharing
      13 October 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Veridiana Zurita
    • 24 October 2015
    • 24 October 2015
    • don't eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me 

       

      24/10/2015, 7-10pm, a.pass studio, de bottelarij

      In 2014 I started working as an artistic researcher in a.pass. Since then I developed three different projects. ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of a river community in the Amazon and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between me and my parents. Through these experimental set-ups I gathered a lot of materials of various kinds. Now I would like to share these video’s, texts, experiences and set-ups with you. I would be happy to host you during an evening-long sharing of materials from the research, and offer an idea of the contexts and imaginations that brought these ongoing projects to life.

      More information here

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Agnes Schneidewind
      Anouk Llaurens
      Arianna Marcolini
      Brendan Heshka
      Christian Hansen
      Esteban Donoso
      Hektor Mamet
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Mavi Veloso
      Sofia Gerheim Caesar
      Thiago Antunes
      Varinia Canto Vila


      Research End Presentations

      Audrey Cottin
      Danny Neyman
      Jeremiah Runnels
      Silvia Ramos Pereira
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz


      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Juan Doninguez
      Ricardo Santana

       

      Partners

      Les Bains / REcommerce
      PAF Performance Art Forum

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Elke Van Campenhout
      Juan Dominguez
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Abu Ali * Antonio Serra
      Bart Van den Eynde
      Lilia Mestre

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke Van Campenhout (a.pass Research Coordinator)

       

       

      14 / 09 - 02 / 10 / 2015


      ‘SETTLEMENT VIII - TOWARDS FRAGILITY’
      workspace by Vladimir Miller


      What can be a truly feminist architecture? One that does not create territory, does not claim, does not exclude. How much of the utopia of Occupy is due to the haphazard conditions of camping and DIY? Should we be sad that it’s gone? Or is its ability to disappear its most precious, most pioneering trait? Every social movement must find, claim and hold a space or perish, yes? – become an institution or die.
      But how to keep on dying?
      Processes of institutionalization are also processes of architectural shifts away from the fragile: from sticks and fabrics to metal and concrete, from sit-ins on the floor to tables and chairs, from open spaces to chambers with doors, from expanding circles to sitting arrangements. All of these we justify with productivity concerns. So maybe the question is: how to be productive and fragile at the same time?
      Settlement is a spatial proposal that tries to sustain its architectural fragility hoping in this way to initiate a temporary social, organisational and ideological one. Simply put, it is a collective workspace, a camp and a hangout, open to all who step by and would like to contribute to it. It is a space for practices instead of products, a place where our individual ideas and processes have not yet achieved a solid state and can flow into each other.
      Settlement starts with a haphazard collection of materials in an otherwise empty space. Settlement is a space that tries very hard not to settle. Its instability naturally works against the establishing of clear boundaries between „your space“ and „my space“, what hopefully follows from that is that it is very difficult to establish boundaries between „your work“ and “my work”. I believe that practice is bound by space, and if space gets shaky, unstable, shareable, so does the practice.
      By starting from scratch Settlement invites a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. In the course of the three weeks Settlement lets your particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the encoded behaviors of ready-made spaces such as “table”, “studio”, “meeting”, “gallery”, “venue”, “library”, etc. The politics of practice in terms of co-habitation and co-working, of claiming one’s own space, inviting or excluding the outside, communication of ideas, inviting change and influence are all there to be questioned within this setup. As a practice is (in some ways) „re-built“ during Settlement, one can come to question its very construction.

       

       

      12 - 22 / 10 / 2015


      ‘DIRTY ROOM’
      workshop by Juan Dominguez


      In these 10 days we will work together. That would be the most important. The togetherness. Working together, spending time together.
      I will ask you a lot of questions, over and over. I will question you, you will question everybody, we will experience suspiciousness I guess.
      In which conspiracy are you involved at the moment?
      We will trip for sure, all kinds of trips or maybe not all kinds but different trips.
      We will share expectations.
      We will build new fictions and devices.
      We will not go out, we will be trapped like el angel exterminador from Buñuel and we will not go, the negative of el angel exterminador. We will watch this movie again.
      We will cook for each other.
      We will sleep together.
      We will gather people, as many as we can.
      We will spend time, we will understand time and the time we want and what we want from time.
      What are we going to do together that we cannot do alone?

       


      09 - 22 / 11 / 2015


      ‘MOBILE MNSTRY’
      workshop by BUREAU D'ESPOIR / ELLE


      The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbey of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.
      During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original ‘monastic’ score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.
      The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d’Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Les Bains) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community will start to grow.
      The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged…

       

       

       

    • INTRO:

      Elle sings:

      i am free to give

      what anyway isn’t mine

      the energy i suck from the earth

      and breathe back into the other,

      i am free to embody the powers of this city

      oscillating with ideas

      that enter my bloodstream and exit my body

      amplified, ordered, and displaced,

      i am free to vibrate with the desire of the other

      that lets me discover my soul, my knowledge and my being

      i am free to let go of fear of losing

      what anyway wasn’t mine:

      the identities i share with so many others

      the security blankets of opinion, belief and good taste.

      i am free not to be bound

      by my dependence on respect, affirmation and flattery

      i am free to be what i anyway always was:

      a wave, a thought, a vessel or a tree.

       

      Elke (a.pass researcher):

      Elle, with the new project ‘Mobile MNSTRY’ you again tackle some of the issues you have been dealing with in your extended project Bureau d’Espoir already for some years: the recuperation and embrace of practices and terms that have been categorized, marginalized and recuperated by capital strategies.

      For example: you worked on the mobilization of the concept of ‘anorexia’ in the Hunger and Anorexic practices as tools for rethinking our relation to the consumption of food, and our own place in the ‘food chain’ of capitalism. You worked in ‘Battery’ on the embrace of circumstances that are considered detrimental to the ‘healthy’ development of the individual: 21 days of imprisonment, hunger and lack of private space as a spiritual-aesthetic machine for the production of hope and change.

      Now you propose the Mobile Monastery: a practice that is based on rethinking the monastic rule, the disciplining and deep experience of the everyday, introducing ‘poverty’ and social service (karma yoga) into the practice. Your proposals all seem to verge on the extreme, uncomfortable, and frankly, possibly moralistic. How do you plan to make this collective practice seem inviting to collaborators.

       

      Elle:

      Although it is often perceived as such, my practice is not one of asceticism. It is rather a practice of finding pleasure, or even liberation, in reducing the overall demand for entertainment and ‘keeping busy’ that order our daily realities. If I introduce the ‘poverty’ demand to the temporary monks in the MNSTRY, this is not so much an act of moralistic self-deprivation, as it is an invitation for an active and vitalizing rethinking of our relationship and dependence on money: on subsidies, a steady income, a minimum requirement of comforts and ‘good circumstances’ to work and produce in.

      A lot of our thinking as artists and citizens is based on a conscious or unconscious fear to fall out of the grid of organized society, to become invisible to the powers that matter. What the Mobile MNSTRY proposes is to do exactly that. To live without everything we think we need to be able to ‘live’, work, enjoy life, stay connected. By giving up on these things, we are able to install other connections to the city, the environment, our practice and other people. By taking away the markers of our social position (identity card, money, private space), we enter into another reality. A reality marked by a collective discipline, a shared purpose, an outward orientation. Together we rethink what it means to be alive: what kind of practices can keep us not only alive, but also charged, and aware of each other and the outside world.

      The Mobile MNSTRY (which you can read as Monastery, but also as Ministry, or Monster-y), is an exercise in pragmatic ritualism: it opens up a space and time to reorganize our attachments and preconceptions to capital values. To make space for other ways to mobilize time, space and artistic practice, away from the confinement of the studio, the artistic workspace. To test our knowledges on another playground of society: to see what it is we can do with what we think we believe in.

      Elke:

      You could say that you try to rethink the economies of desire that rule our everyday lives. Making use of very diverse practices borrowed from spiritual body work, inventive object design, philosophical reconceptualization and artistic practice experience. But at the same time this ‘economic liberation’ is presented as quite a disciplining practice: proposing collective day rhythms, the denial of private space, limited resources to work with. In that sense, your practices might also seem old-fashioned, frugal, and out of tune with the individual freedom of the artist/collaborator/citizen to fill in their lives in a flexible, creative and singular way.

      Your collective practice environments seem to stand in stark contrast to the contemporary ideology of flexibility, choice, individual creativity. In the arts field, in particular, any sense of pre-set rules or limitations to the practice are often labeled as ‘power games’ or even as ‘fascist’, a word that seems to fit any kind of disciplined practice these days.

      Elle:

      Yes, but this term has also been hollowed out by its frequent, uncritical use. Funnily enough, it lost its meaning exactly through the banalization of the term in so-called critical discursive environments that, by seeing fascism everywhere, actually disempowered the term completely. If fascism is everywhere, then actually it becomes life itself. If fascism is but a strategic stab in an intellectual debate to disarm the opposition, there is no serious consideration for the all-too-real context in which fascism took form as a societal transformational power. Such a ‘metaphorization’ of the term, which makes is applicable to all circumstances in which a play of hierarchical oppositions of power are at stake, is nearsighted, and cynical.

      Elke:

      Let’s say that by ‘fascism’ I mean a specific coming together of Beauty, Order and the practice of what I would call the Physical Sublime, that is often created by suffering, or disciplined bodies. Or maybe rather, the dual mechanical and massively reproduced political aesthetic organization that bases itself on Beauty and Order, and produces the violence of exclusion and exhaustion in its wake. Off course this term can not be interpreted separate from its historical contexts, and the often violent mass effects it produced. But whole generations of leftist critical thinkers have grown up in the shadow of the stormy historical heritage of the 20th Century, and their historical awareness of the traps of combined ideology, idealism and organization have made them hyper-sensitive to the telltale signs of power abuse or disbalance, but also of the uncritical embrace of Beauty as a bourgeois pacifier of unrest, revolt or social struggle.

      In the wake of the 20th century, modernisms, fascist and communist critical strategies, a lot of aesthetic strategies have become suspect. Loaded with historical weight: be it romantic escapism, political incorrectness, social exclusion, uncritical acceptance of the bourgeois order, the crash and recuperation of the ideals of the 1960’s, and what more. What has been constructed however, out of the rubble of broken ideals, is a discourse police that has made a significant part of the aesthetic vocabulary off-limits, and brandished as naïve at best, hypocritical or ‘f...t’ in the worst cases.

      My question is now if maybe it is not a time to dive back into that long-forgotten dictionary of terms and see if it is not high time to rescue some of them, reactivate their power, and make them speak out another reality, another world view, than the ones they have been associated with. It is my impression that we have gone through an every-expanding exclusion of possible terms to think our realities, a progressive retreat into the trenches of a politically correct aesthetic-political discourse that is now keeping us hostage to ideas that are no longer capable of creating worlds that we actually would wholeheartedly consider to live in. What critical discourse, or at least, the particular critical discourse I’m addressing now has come to establish (which, to be clear, was not always the case) is a state of feeling constantly under siege, beleaguered and in mortal danger of recuperation of any of our bright ideas by the corporations that be.

      Instead of this kind of Repressive Criticality, or the Discourse Police, I would like to see a new wave of criticism come to be that is mainly creative: a creativity produced through a clarity of practiced conceptualization and experienced practice, that would create realities in its wake. A criticality that would not be afraid of being labeled as naïve, old-fashioned or uncritical. Since, frankly, the Discourse Police has produced a toxic reactionary environment for practicing art and politics, that is blind for the potential of other ways of doing, speaking and creating the worlds we live in.

      Elle:

      Aho. (smiles)

      It is time to reconceptualize our concepts. Not by fleeing from them in horror, but by accepting them in all their confusing associations, radical unsuitedness, and therefore irritating potential. Beauty for me is not about Order, but about Orgasm. Beauty appears at the confluence of the experience of the interior and exterior, the experience of the self expanding into that what seems separate to it. Unlike the fearful trepidation in front of the Sublime, this beauty is nothing if not powerful, energizing, and emancipatory. To know you are connected, you are part of the whole, dissolves the fear of exclusion. Orgasmic Beauty, in that sense, is a tool to overcome alienation THROUGH alienation, a kind of homeopathic medicine. It is overcoming the doctrine of individuality that has captured and narrowed our desires to the handkerchief-size of a self-realization wellness project. I think we can do more with the energy of our desires than this empty craving for self-fulfillment.

      I was just reading this rather interesting paragraph about sexuality, which might clarify what I mean with this orgasmic quality:

      ‘Sex, for its part, likes nothing so much as mixtures. Mixtures of skins, salivas, humors, organs, words to the point of delirium, images, as well; sex makes do with anything, can put everything to use. (...) Sex is not the body. It is even the forgetting of the body. It is what makes us, in jouissance, feel desire, or sadness, excitement, fear, longing - everything about the body that is not ‘the body’, that is, flesh. When the body becomes world, landscape, moor, sand, language, collage, collapse, memory, the entire body is convoked as other than flesh. Other indeed, for it is a matter of otherness, for philosophy as well as for sex. Their history is the same, like two sides of a single coin stamped with the seal of that recognition.’

      Just like Criticality, indeed can be rethought as Creative Clarity, a courageous step into the unknown potential of concepts that are constantly redefined and tested through practice. And this goes for all terms that have been derided, labeled as unfashionable, and banned out of our life practices. ...

      There is a big confusion in my practices indeed, especially around notions of self-organization, freedom and discipline. Off course this is due to the superposition of two different practice ‘myths’: the one of artistic research and creation, and the one of transformational ‘spiritual’ body practices which i started to use as ammunition, as weapons in my struggle to overcome the inertia that was keeping a lot of artists hostage in regard to the workings of contemporary capitalism: they felt their tools, their creativity, their imaginative powers had been largely recuperated by marketing, advertising, and the overall economy of affects that produces desires through the production of ever-more empty containers for the construction of ever-more ‘individualized’ selves. The artist-individual therefore has become wary of his/her ‘individual’ power, since individuality in itself has become suspect as a commercial construction of Capital. And rightfully so.

      What I try to do in my practices is to liberate, to unveil, to come to a nude understanding again of what is the non-produced power of the self. And this can, paradoxically, only be done through the stripping away of the presumed ‘personal’, or ‘hyper-individual’ layers of comportment, habits, and convictions. Temporarily! To make other potentials visible. And as such, to rephrase freedom not as a freedom from, but a freedom FOR. FOR a collective project, for a shared dream, for a collectively supported change.

      BUT, and this is very important to understand: this change is not a collective ideology as the ones that supported the communes and collective of the 1960’s and 1970’s. We do NOT have to agree on the world-supporting myths of political affiliation, religious normativization or economic regularization. At least not in Bureau d’Espoir. We only temporarily agree on a scored practice of time and action. And on linking this practice to an outside world. In this sense the Mobile MNSTRY is not built on stable grounds of conviction. While starting out with a proposed score, throughout the project, this score is bit-by-bit transformed by the collaborators, based on their individual myths and dreams, which we then begin to share through our bodies, and ending up with a monastic score that is probably far detached from the original proposal.

      Elke:

      Do you consider Bureau d’Espoir to be an activist cell? Do you see yourselves as producing instruments, weapons to fight affect capitalization. Are you a Warrior of Desire?

      Elle:

      Why do you ask me things you already know the answer to? Why do you need me as an excuse to say what you can not accept yourself saying? Why is Elle so much alluring, sexy and attractive as figure of flight for you? Why do you distrust your own desire so much you can not allow it to carry your name?

      Elke:

      Last night I spoke my name and there was no one there. The sound echoed in the long corridors but I could feel the house was uninhabited.

      Elle:

      Don’t get mystical on me. Don’t pose fake questions. Don’t play the ignorant. Practice what you know.

      Elke:

      (silent)

      Elle

      (drunk):

      to the gathering of all people that can toast to the liberty that appears out of nowhere.

      to the liberation that doesn’t need anything

      that doesn’t need to be acquired

      but that just appears in the middle of a conversation

      a touch

      a cup of coffee.

      to the enchantment of getting lost in the situation and finding

      there is no place like this place.

      to the flight of folly that connects you to my projections

      to the me i can only be through you

      to the you that is here without expectations

      to the we that will never be formed

      to the air that keeps us from being glued together

      as one big blob sharing everyone’s smells, headaches and anxieties

      to the air that allows me to keep my distance

      to the floor that supports my position

      to the gravity that keeps me down to earth

      to the sky that still hasn’t fallen on my head

      and keeps on not doing so day after day

      to the microbes that keep on digesting my food

      to the hairs on my arms that allow me to feel the wind moving on my skin

      to the hairs everywhere on my body for reminding me i’m an animal

      a rabbit, a deer or a worm. well, maybe not a worm.

      to your unhappiness that reminds me of my own good luck

      to your ravings that tell me i should slow down

      to your madness that tells me i haven’t seen nothing yet

      to the streets that keep cars from crashing into houses, or people, or trees

      to houses that keep people from crushing into each other

      to walls for protecting our privacy

      to carpets for muffling our sounds

      to tables for keeping things from falling on the ground and messing other things up

      and creating chaos

      to clothes for giving me something to imagine

      to no clothes for giving me something to imagine

      to touch for allowing me to live in my imagination … … ...

       

      24 HOURS LATER

      Elke:

      The Mobile MNSTRY is part of a bigger social-artistic neighborhood project, called Re-Commerce, in the commune of Forest. In what way do you consider the MNSTRY to fulfill a social engagement?

       

      Elle:

      The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.

      During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original ‘monastic’ score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.

      The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d’Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Bains Connective) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community starts to grow.

      The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged, etcetera.

      We also give short-term ritual training workshops: how to develop your own rituals, how to gather material for your rituals, based on the Psychomagic methodology of Jodorowsky, or the artistic methodologies of the temporary monks. The silent café in the Cité d’Espoir offers free tea and something, and would become the starting point for all projects. The monks would sleep on the premises and be available most of the time for a talk or a ritual ‘guidance’. On Sundays there is also a kind of ‘service’, which is not religious but only aims at developing an alternative ‘common’ event for the neighbourhood in the margins of the market.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • Bureau d'Espoir
    • Mobile Mnstry
    • Mobile MNSTRY 01 August 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Bureau d'Espoir
    • Abbeye of Forest
    • 09 November 2015
    • 22 November 2015
    • Mobile MNSTRY

      The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.

      During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original 'monastic' score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.

      The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d'Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Bains Connective) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community starts to grow.

      The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged, etcetera.

      We also give short-term ritual training workshops: how to develop your own rituals, how to gather material for your rituals, based on the Psychomagic methodology of Jodorowsky, or the artistic methodologies of the temporary monks. The silent café in the Cité d’Espoir offers free tea and something, and would become the starting point for all projects. The monks would sleep on the premises and be available most of the time for a talk or a ritual ‘guidance’. On Sundays there is also a kind of ‘service’, which is not religious but only aims at developing an alternative ‘common’ event for the neighbourhood in the margins of the market.

      For more information: read the self-interview of Elke Van Campenhout with Elle (Bureau d'Espoir) here.

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      Self interview

      Blue & Black <span
      style='color:#3366FF'>March 2015

      Green & Pink July 2015

       

       

      Why art?

      I like the different ways that art can
      touch someone, it can appeal to the logic, to the body, to something
      untouchable, to that which cannot be explained rationally, it can undress things.
      It can use metaphors or very literal and logical statements and it can do both at
      the same time.

       

      Art is for me the ideal way of accessing
      and creating mythology, something I am very interested in.

      Why? I like very much Joseph <span
      class=SpellE>Campel’s
      explanation on the importance of mythology,
      mythology being that which transcends the individual to the universal, to the
      unseen, to its ultimate potential or vice versa convince him of his superiority
      over nature, of his twisted nature etc., depends on the belief system it
      supports.

      It is a very powerful tool to shape
      reality, according to the mythology people believe in, you shape society and
      vice versa of course.

      In addition to that I am interested in
      mythology because it makes the whole universe alive, the personification of the
      world is not something to be dismissed lightly, by understanding that the river
      has a spirit, a vibration, that it is alive our relationship with it changes
      and it cannot be a commodity anymore.

      It is easier to sell a pair of shoes
      than your friend in a way,

      So there, art is a way to access
      mythology, invent or awaken myths and thus challenge society.

       

      What are you currently working on?

       

      I am trying to create ceremonies. I am
      interested in mythology and particularly fertility and the way mythology is
      changing in our society with the assistance of science.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      These days I am thinking about the bees
      as the pollinators and also as the creatures that are getting affected through
      the use of pesticides, the development of gmo
      agriculture and the increase of monoculture agronomy, our current commercial
      way of dealing with fertility in farming.

       

      Well in terms of appearance, I have a
      video that I shot in Brazil, that is a form of prayer, I have a pair of new age
      paintings that I hope to continue, there is a barely started macramé piece, and
      a few performances/ rituals that took place the last few months, sliding
      between artistic documentary and ceremonial collective moments.

      In terms of thematic, fertility and
      mythology are weaving the connections.

      Fertility from the physical point of
      view, the earth’s and humans fertile ability, but also fertility in thought and
      in action.  Fertility
      as a way to celebrate life, and the interconnection of the human and the earth.

       

      What do you mean?

       

      Well, with the use of science we can
      control fertility in ways that we were never able to do so before. That I
      believe is changing the way we view life and I am interested in that change.

       

      Well, for example I find that the
      violence that vibrates at this point on earth is a very unfertile <span
      class=GramE>field,
      it stimulates pain, depression, blind anger,
      alienation, death (death not only on the physical realm but also in the
      vibrational realm, like a living dead social body). So I am interested in
      finding ways to reclaim that space and make it fertile.

       

      How?

      Well this is what I am trying to find
      out. By creating collective moments of prayer, by bringing awareness to certain
      acts, by creating a new cosmology, and by understanding what are our needs from
      science.

       

      How did it start about?

       

      Of course there is not one moment, but
      let say my first proposals had to do with Theogony,
      the birth of the Earth from the god Eros (the creative, passionate, sexual and
      sensual force of nature).  Then I
      continued my inquiring on mythology and on contemporary mythologies (<span
      class=SpellE>gmo
      , eugenics, authoritative systems on life), the questioning
      of archetypal memory. For example one of my questions was and somehow still is
      that if we forming our memory and our connection to the primal archaic
      existence through food (among other things) how is this lineage to our ancestry
      affected if our seed loose that memory (with the invention of <span
      class=SpellE>gmo seeds for example).<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  How is our own fertility affected when <span
      class=GramE>our the food that we nourish ourselves is sterile? And then
      these questions expanded to the fact that technology is used very much to
      create commodities and a social body that views life as a commodity.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  For example we are creating coral reefs
      that can withstand the climate change, gmo is
      proposed as a way to fight the famine of the planet and the overpopulation,
      eugenics as a way to create a species that is more intelligent and can conquer
      the universe, but the real issues on human greed, the distraction of the environment,
      the insanity of colonization are bypassed, because it is too hard to address
      them.

      Etc<span
      style='font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:Times;color:green;mso-bidi-font-weight:
      bold'> etc etc

       

      And now where do you find yourself?

       

      I am in place that I am wondering how
      the different elements of my work can come together, I am not so much interested
      in that which I find poisonous, (like gmo, eugenics,
      authoritative systems on life) but of what on the beautiful in the potential of
      the human being.

      I have picked up some words that I have
      found interesting,

      Like city shamanism, Joy and Desire, I
      have felt my creative castle falling on the ground, and I am trying to see how
      and what this work means for me, what are the perfomative
      aspects of this act. What is moving forward, and I feel I need a pose for a
      bit.

      I crave spending time in Greece.

       

      Why is Greece important?

       

      It is very important, it is the <span
      class=GramE>mother land
      .

      The smell of my bones.<span
      style='font-family:Times;mso-bidi-font-family:Times;color:green;mso-bidi-font-weight:
      bold'>

      My interest on the human and mythology
      that I always come back in my work comes from there, the love and the beauty of
      the human being.

      Also I think that Greece at this point
      played the role of unveiling the matrix, this of course we can talk for a
      while…

       

      And what is your trouble?

       

      Well I feel I need to make a leap and I
      am not sure in what direction. Last cycle/block/ season I was saying I do not
      have enough tools in terms of spiritual knowledge and techniques, this time I
      feel the same but in an artistic way.

       

      Why?

      I see this change of genetic control
      as a continuation of our need to control life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      And I also think that it calls for
      further authoritative power in our lives. 
      I do not want to live in such a society.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">   Maybe our need to controlled
      engineering is another blindfold, without dismissing the amazing advances that
      technology is doing, there is a world that treats life as an object, as a
      commodity and the human as the creature that holds authorship in this. If that
      does not change in its base then controlled engineering will become just a way
      to reinforce this attitude.

       

       

      That sounds very confusing

       

      Well the idea that we can choose
      the genetic traits that we desire is a way to control and create
      uniformity.  Remember the 80’s
      haircuts, great but who wants an 80’s hairdo today. It is like the tomatoes,
      there had been a law in the EU until recently that all vegetables need to look
      in a certain way, that created a market that only wanted a specific look in the
      vegetables and everything that did not meet that standard was thrown out of the
      selling basket, without necessary being worse, as a result people prefer to buy
      a tomato that is wrapped in a plastic case and looks “perfect” than a tomato
      that smells like a tomato but has a few marks on it and maybe a hole from a
      warm.

       

      The same can
      happen with gene control. 

       

      It is the way of thinking that
      this selection creates that I want to put into attention.

       

      Is it about Morals then?

       

      I hope that it is not about <span
      class=GramE>morals,
      morals create a hierarchy which is also problematic.

       

      And ceremonies?

       

      I believe shamanism is a
      powerful tool to accessing archaic ways of viewing life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      There has been a strong rejection in the
      west of the magical but I think that it is important to be re
      –introduced.

      Shamanism as a science creates a
      different balance in life, that is why I think it is a
      very important tool.

       

      I saw a show recently about the
      Lascaux paintings and there was a 3-D video that illustrated how the cave
      paintings were viewed then.  It was
      this representation were the paintings, which are huge by the way, were lit up
      with fire and the trembling of the fire made them look alive.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      It made me feel that the way the animals
      were represented made the “visitor” feel in awe towards them. <span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> The paintings, huge over the head of the
      visitors in combination with the darkness of the cave, illuminated only by
      trembling fire, created a mystical environment that glorified these creatures. <span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> I think this point of view creates a
      different balance to life.

      The same way Greek theater was
      used as a tool for democracy.  It
      was presenting the viewer with questions and moral/ethical values,
      it was creating and supporting the society. (sometimes
      in support of the state some times as a critic to it, democratic Greece had its
      flows also)

      This is the value that I am trying
      to find in art I think.

       

      So you want to pass your values
      and ethics?

       

      I do not like the way this sounds,
      but probably yes, you could say that.

      Of course the
      work is created by me
      so it is made by my way of thinking, but instead of
      me passing my values I want to think of it as me creating platforms for a
      collective experience. A place for people to discover and
      bring forth their own ethics.

       

      Why collective?

       

      Well, I find it strange that we go
      to a museum to see a painting and we do not talk to each other.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      I have had an experience many times of
      being in the museum trying to listen to what the guide is saying, and being
      told off.  I do not understand how
      we can look at art and at the same time be so separate to each other.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  This does not hold life in it for me.

       

      What is life?

       

      The highest
      vibration.
      Our
      highest potential.

      Maybe it is not a very clear
      definition but I do not have a better one at the moment.

       

      So you want people to take part in shamanic experiences?

       

      Yes or even better create them.

       

      Do you still believe this?

      Yes and no, I am starting to feel
      the need to even revisit or re-evaluate the word shamanism.

       

      You talked about city shamanism?

       

      Yes, the way I understand this
      term, it is about finding ways in the rural environment, in the industrial
      world, in the cities to connect with the elements of nature. To practice with
      them, to get information from them, to have a conversation in these ecosystems
      that have forgotten about the complexity and the mystery of life and that they
      tent to exclude nature in its wild form.

       

      The relationship to ritual and
      shamanism seems to be very attractive in art these days,
      Do you feel part of it?

       

      J<span
      style='color:green'>
      Maybe this is why I do not like the word shamanism so much.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  It is already
      appropriated by the matrix
      . 
      Like anything that could possibly shake the matrix the <span
      class=GramE>idea of shamanism has been quickly adapted by the matrix.

      There is fashion that is inspired
      by shamanism from Zara clothing to high couture tribalism, but it is not very
      interesting in the way that it affects someone’s life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  
      My interest in shamanism, magic
      and ritual is to find tools, relationships, ways of living and creating that
      can be used to connect to the vibrancy of life.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes">  Ways to make reality escape The Given
      structure and bring awareness on the distraction of nature in its raw
      form.  How many people today, how
      many kids have drunk water that comes from the mountain and how often?

      How can we respect our resources
      when we do not know where they are coming from?

      So yes,

      I am interested in bringing those
      values and practicing them within a performance or even more important bring
      those practices in our contemporary life.

       

      Don’t you
      think that this “shamanism” can be a constraint for some people?

       

      It is very possible.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      But I want my “viewer” to have to take a
      personal risk.

      There is no change happening
      otherwise.

       

      And I would also like to add, I
      find this restriction very very interesting, it is a
      point to be very present!! What is it exactly that makes us feel uncomfortable
      with shamanism, and magic?

       

      So it is about change?

       

      For sure

       

      How do you create these ceremonies then?

       

      Well this is what I am in the
      process of understanding.  I think
      the best way I have found until now is to be open to information to come to me,
      this happens either by using shamanic journeying (accessing other realities
      through the sound of the drum) or signals or random moment of inspiration and
      also by scientific research, which is very difficult to come around maybe the
      most difficult.  I hope soon to open
      that process also to others and try to find collective ways that we can create
      a ceremony.

       

      Well this is what I am in the
      process of understanding.  I have
      been trying different things and now I am at the moment of realizing how it can
      tight up.

      I am interested in leaving enough
      space I think for people to wonder in diverse worlds, I am interested in the
      elements that people can bring in and add to the work.

       

      And your paintings what is
      happening in and with them?

      I started by drawing my shamanic
      journeys, (travelling with the power of your imagination accompanied by the
      shamanic drum to access your reality and find tools to bring to your reality).
      So I would travel and then make a drawing that was somehow inspired by my
      journey.

      The last two are <span
      class=GramE>different,
      they are very much influenced by my recent trip
      to Brazil.

      The rising bird is a calling that
      I think is happening at the moment for a new generation of people that walk on
      the Earth with love and respect.

      This generation is not only our
      kids, it is our selves and our ancestors that still walk through us.

      So the bird is making the calling,
      a calling to the earth. It has elements of different mythologies, some
      conscious some unconscious.

      The second painting with the
      snakes came after, as a way to tame the unbalance or to call for balance.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      The last weeks I felt that the hunger of
      the monster has been so big that all inhibitions were dropped. <span
      class=GramE>From the Greek crisis, to the public rapes in Africa, to the
      extreme weather conditions and the destruction of the rainforest, to name a
      few.  Sacredness is becoming
      a taboo word, and this is where shamanism, magic, ritual etc
      become important again. As a way to acknowledge the sacredness of life to the
      present to art, to challenge the “rational” thinking, and to affect the emotion

       

      Sacredness?

       

      Yes! Life is sacred. I like a
      definition from Starhawk on sacredness, respecting
      something or someone for its own being.

      The Cycladic phases <span
      class=GramE>that are
      looking at the sun.

       

      So this year you went to Brazil,
      how did it work on you?

       

      Brazil was very playful and my
      time there taught me even deeper the necessity of joy.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      So in a way it liberated the place from
      which I create.  The idea of
      suffering, of being an artist martyr in order to create left me and creating is
      coming from a place of joy and pleasure. 
      It also brought me back to video art, which I haven’t touched for a
      while!!!  And somehow it’s the first
      time that I am painting just for the sake of painting.

       

       

      Why is scientific research so difficult?

       

      Because it is a very sensitive
      subject and one that is connected with a multi billion dollar industry, so on
      one hand there are business issues that tend to obstruct real information
      coming through, and on the other you have very passionate activism against,
      which also is not very accurate most of the time.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      So for example it is very hard to find
      information on gmo technology that is detached from
      the companies that are associated with it. 
      On the part of humans there is a strong sentimental part that is also
      hard to overcome, why not make sure that your kid will not will not develop a
      lethal disease and why not overcome sterility, on the other hand there is a
      strong claim that we are overpopulated and that this is causing huge imbalance
      etc.  So it is not an issue that is
      easy to tackle scientifically either.

       

       

      And the city
      life?
      How you see those values stand
      in the city life?

       

      Here I have a conflict.<span
      style="mso-spacerun:yes"> 
      There are important choices to make in
      the city from the way we shop, to the way we behave, the way we look at each
      other, our capacity to share love and joy, to keep our vibration high by the
      means that each of us finds appropriate. 
      I see the fight in the city more important or as important as anywhere
      else.  On the other hand I remember
      when I was living in New York, I had a friend that was making fun of my
      vegetarianism, he was asking how living in a city like New York could be an
      ethical choice.  Just the existence
      and sustenance of this city means the death to other life forms.

      It is complicated but urgent. A
      very difficult task

       

       

    •  

       

      This is the time to come together.

      To celebrate what we worked on.

      To transform our preconceptions

      of rituals, of magic, of transformation itself.

      A pilgrimage of the self into the common

      and back again.

       

      This is a transformational journey

      that displaces our relation to our bodies, to nature, to objects

      by recognising the recuperation and commodification

      of these relations by capitalism.

       

      We come together

      To inspire different ways for counteracting

      oppressive operative systems

      of knowledge, love, work, and metaphysics.

       

      We come together

      To create a counter-spell for colonising forces

      that suppress, limit, undermine our natural virtual powers

      to resist, to perform, to be part of the world.

      To create a shared awareness of the recuperation of magic,

      of ritual commodification, of the reduction of everyday life

      by machines of correction,

      perverting our desires,

      crushing our potential selves.

       

      The world is full of magic unaccounted for

      We need to acknowledge its power

      and share it with others to empower their lives and dreams.

      We invite you as helpers, as energetic vessels

      to play with, to discover new ways of being together

       

      The artist can be the poetic warrior

      fighting for power and courage

      awakening the sense of self

      to write his alternative myths on the surface of reality

       

      Tonight we have the opportunity to experience and experiment the no-difference

      between the I that performs, and the you that undergoes

      Not as a closure but as a beginning

      A nudge to push us over the edge

      to allow us to spill over, grow wings

      and launch into transformation.

       

      We celebrate our schizophrenic adaptations

      of foregone cultural debris

      of ritual rumours and phantasies

      into operative practices for today’s crises.

      No exotic imitation

      but inventive re-draftings

      of what it is to be:

      a hybrid magic body

      that reinvents itself and all there is

      every day anew.

       

      We are virtual bodies,

      filled to the brim with knowledge

      we can not grasp through lack of words,

      we can not operate through lack of awareness

      we can not read through lack of skill.

       

      We are virtual bodies

      that have the power to overcome

      the limits of fear, guilt and physicality.

       

      We are beings on the edge of awakening

      generous souls that want to share their transgression

      expanding it over the edges of the precious circle

      into the heart of the matter

      into the matter that matters.

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Audrey Cottin
      Danny Neyman
      Hektor Mamet
      JeremiahRunnels
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Mavi Veloso
      Philippine Hoegen
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Tinna Ottesen
      Yaari Shalem

       


      Research End Presentations

      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Stef Meul 

       

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Cecilia Molano
      Mala Kline
      Ruth S. Noyes,
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Partners

      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Ana Hoffner
      Antonia Baehr
      Daniel Blanga-Gubbay
      Elke van Campenhout
      Emma Cocker
      Eric Thielemans
      Lilia Mestre
      Mariella Greil
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Pierre Rubio

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Geert Opsomer
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

       

      ‘CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS’
      curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

      The proposal is to plunge into the conditions for the emergence of poetics. Poetics used here as acts that transform our ways of perceiving, situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

       

       

      14 / 01 -19 / 03 / 2015


      ‘PERFORM BACK SCORE’
      Weekly Practice by Lilia Mestre


      This score is a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?
      The aim is to develop systems to practice the staging of philosophy, critical exposure and the rhetorics inherent to any body, object, word, situation. It is a working score. Taking as a principle that the artwork raises questions and doesn’t give answers I would like to propose a Q&A in 9 sessions where we can just perform. The series of performances will function as replies that raise (an)other(s) question(s) or problematic (s). This score will also be a documentation practice that questions performance as a document.

       

       

      05 / 01 - 09 / 01 / 2015


      ‘REPERTOIRE’
      Workshop by Eric Thielemans


      For the last couple of years my artistic practice became more research based and reflective, and my work was touched by that evolution. The workshop deals with the notion(s) of repertoire. Of what stuff are they made? How did they come about? It will be a first time for me to adapt the questions and reflections to a wider and multidisciplinary field of expertise and practices.
      Repertoire(s) is a research and reflective workshop in which I see us all, like a bunch of passionate amateur entomologists , observe, index, taxonomize, and share the constitutive phenomenons of our life with our craft and the repertory of skills, tools, techniques, practices that we use to build that life. Furthermore we will investigate various strategies and ways to weave the sensibilities, disciplines and practices of each participant together into meaningful wholes or collective spaces and cosmologies.
      First the focus will lie on each of us individually. After that we will dive into group related observations. How do we behave as a group? What’s the repertoire of the group? Off course this separation individual-group is artificial and not always easy to keep but I think it will give us a strategy, plan, focus and ground during the work.
      At the end of the workweek, we will propose a showing of the work in which there will be place for each individual to share and propose some of his/her findings and reflections in whatever way suitable as well as there will be group propositions.

       

       

      19 / 01 - 23 / 01 / 2015


      ‘PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY / SUBJECTS / OBJECTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout


      ‘Performance / Performativity / Subject / Object’ is a b-workshop: it covers some of the basic knowledges we share on an (almost) daily basis in a.pass, and that need some in-depth attention. In this block we will read texts and discuss the problematics from the point of view of objects and subjects: how does an object perform its objectness and how does it perform us. In other words: how does the object perform our subject-ness? And how does the subject perform the object? Or: how can we replace our subjectness by objectness and what does that entail?
      In other words, although the basic performativity texts like the ones of Judith Butler and the speech act theory of Austin will certainly play a role in the backseat, in these reading sessions we will concentrate more specifically on object oriented philosophies like the ones of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, the ‘queer phenomenology’ of Sara Ahmed, go deeper into the concept of ‘compositionism’ as coined by Bruno Latour, and study the continuity between materiality and immateriality by reading some from ‘Action and Agency in Dialogue’ by François Cooren.

       

       


      02 / 02 - 06 / 02 / 2015


      ‘TOOLS FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH - BECKETT’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Ana Hoffner


      The workshop starts from the assumption that the work of Samuel Beckett can offer a variety of tools for contemporary forms of artistic research. In the workshop we will focus on absurdity, melancholy, exhaustion, sense/nonsense and emptiness as main signifiers of Beckett’s work for stage, TV and film. We will watch and analyse selected scripts, dialogues, spatial set-ups and performances in order to transform them into our own experiments, exercises and techniques using body, space, camera and text. The challenge of the workshop will be to make those categories mentioned above appear as twofold: as artistic concepts from the past but also as embodied experiences and potential tools for our own artistic research. Each day we will focus on a different category from Beckett’s work in order to transform it, translate it and develop a better understanding of the way we as artist, performers and choreographers can use them in the present.

       

       

       

      23 / 02 - 27 / 02 / 2015


      ‘CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES - DEVIATIONS FROM THE LINE’
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Emma Cocker


      How might one devise a system of notation alert to the real-time circumstances of the practicing within practice, foregrounding process, and emphasizing the durational ‘taking place’ of something happening (live)? What forms of notation could be developed for articulating that which resists articulation, for that which is pre-articulation, or a form of representation for the non-representational? How can a form of notation communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within practice, without rendering them still or static, without fixing that which is contingent as a clearly readable or literal sign?
      To explore the performative character of notation, we practice kinetic as well as graphic modes of inscription, expanded tactics beyond apparent physical limitations (of the mind, the hand, pencil, and paper), attending to the integration of time, sound, movement, and narration. We propose the concept of the choreo-graphic figure, for investigating how the embodied practice of choreographic performance (in an expanded sense) might become a tool of inscription and notation in itself. The choreo-graphic figure is conceived as a notational event, incorporating the potential of both movement and materiality, a sense of both temporality and spatiality. Our shared quest is both for a system of notation for honoring the process of figuring (as a live investigative event) and for “choreo-graphic” figures for making tangible and communicating these significant moments within the unfolding journey of collaborative practice. We seek modes of notation between the lines, interested in the interval or gap between the choreo + graphic, sign + non-sign, visual + textual, extensive + intensive, embodiment + disembodiment, movement + materiality, being + becoming.

       


      02 / 03 - 06 / 03 / 2015


      ‘CONDITIONS FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN (LATENT PERFORMANCES)’
      workshop by Daniel Blanga-Gubbay

      Instead of thinking of the possible as an empty space, we should maybe see it as a space designed with conditions. Latency names the state of something ready to happen, ready to emerge. Within this space, something will happen: can we still be responsible for creating this space, without taking care of its result?
      This workshop puts first into question what does mean an act of transformation. Well beyond the notion of performing arts, performance can perhaps simply be thought of as any act that can modify the coordinates of the given. If we imagine reality to be a surface made of endless inclinations that determine movements and trajectories within it, then the proper task of performance is perhaps that of constructing the gesture that can refigure the surface for a while, releasing unimagined lines, opening up gaps between the permitted and the possible.
      How is it possible to go beyond the idea of creating something to suddenly create a space ready for the emergence of something unspecific to happen? By merging theory and practice, working both through interventions in given and constructed space – and through the categories of space of accident, risk, love – these days investigate not only the question "what is the condition for the emergence of an action", but eventually "what does it mean to create (and abandon) a space filled with unforeseen possible actions?"

       

       

      09 / 03 - 14 / 03 / 2015


      ‘WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME’
      workshop by Antonia Baehr


      In this workshop, we will investigate how scores can function as a constitutive factor for kinship relations. We will write scores as gifts to each other, and I will share some of the “make-up productions” working methods with you.
      We will make ourselves familiar on a practical level with the use of scores for performance. We will read and execute a number of found scores: historical ones (from John Cage’s Songbooks for ex.) and contemporary ones (from the projects Laugh, and Abecedarium Bestiarium, among others), some infamous and others entirely unheard of. We will write, interpret and perform scores for each other, pass them on, turn them literally upside down while swapping roles and places.
      Between the hierarchical pyramidal structure to the collective, there is an endless plurality of forms of collaboration possible. This workshop examines the boundaries between score/interpretation, rehearsal/performance, director/performer, and audience/presentation. This workshop’s focus is an investigation through praxis.

    • old information
    • NOT_index
    • old info
    • researchers 10 December 2014
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • 01 January 2015
    • The associate researcher joins a.pass for one year, and in that time develops and ‘exemplary artistic research’: a research that challenges the notions of practice-based methodologies and knowledge to its limits, and questions the values of knowledge developed in artistic research contexts. The associate researcher is financially part-time supported for one year, and gets production  support for the development of the public phases of the research, as well as mentoring support.
      Between 2014 and 2015 Veridiana Zurita initiated three ongoing artistic research projects; ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of the river side community Santa Isabel in the Amazon (BR) and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between herself and her parents. www.veridianazurita.com

      The independent researchers are only loosely connected to the research center, and are selected on the level of the interest of their already existing research trajectory. Current independent researchers are for example visual artist Alexis Destoop and his research into ‘landscape scenographies’ in the framework of the Anthropocene, and musician Eric Thielemans and his research on the ‘ensemble’ as instrument for the development of shared cosmologies and artistic instrumentarium. These researchers are only minimally and punctually supported at the moment of the publication (live or in writing) of their research results.

      The research coordinator (Elke Van Campenhout) also develops her research within the research centre, which partly consists in analyzing, publishing, and making accessible a.pass research results and methodologies (through publications, outside workshops and lectures, conferences, etc…) and partly also consists of her own collaborative research trajectory Bureau d’Espoir, that looks into a contemporary and performative redefinition of ‘hope’ through the lenses of political philosophy, choreography and spiritual body practices.

       

      webpics_apass16

    • «I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accident. I am very clear about the rules of the game, but once it's launched, I don't intervene at all».

      Francis Alÿs

      Instead of thinking the possible as an empty space, we should maybe see it as a space designed with conditions. Latency names the state of something ready to happen, ready to emerge. Within this space, something will happen: can we still be responsible for creating this space, without taking care of its result?

      This workshop puts first into question what does it mean an act of transformation. Well beyond the notion of performing arts, performance can perhaps simply be thought of as any act that can modify the coordinates of the given. If we imagine reality to be a surface made of endless inclinations that determine movements and trajectories within it, then the proper task of performance is perhaps that of constructing the gesture that can refigure the surface for a while, releasing unimagined lines, opening up gaps between the permitted and the possible.

      How is it possible to go beyond the idea of creating something to suddenly create a space ready for the emergence of something unspecific to happen? By merging theory and practice, working both through interventions in given and constructed space – and through the categories of space of accident, risk, love – these days investigate not only the question "what are the condition for the emergence of an action", but eventually "what does it mean to create (and abandon) a space filled with unforeseen possible actions?"

       

      Biography:

      Daniel Blanga-Gubbay is a researcher in political philosophy and performance based in Brussels and Düsseldorf. After graduating in philosophy from the Venice University of Architecture with Giorgio Agamben he got a European Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, jointly run by the University of Palermo, Valencia and Freie Unversität Berlin. He currently teaches Political Philosophy for the Arts at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels, and he has a research position at the Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, on the use of the concept of possible in art and politics. He is the founder of the Brussels-based project Aleppo, creating spaces of reflection in performance and political theory (www.aleppo.eu)

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics
    • Repertoire
    • REPERTOIRE 24 November 2014
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Eric Thielemans
    • 05 January 2015
    • 09 January 2015
    • REPERTOIRE

      (this workshop is part of the opening week and compulsory for everyone!!)

       

      Hi all,

      I'm Eric Thielemans, trained and drowned in a musical practice. I'm a drummer, composer and sound artist with a broad range of interests and experience with cross, multi en interdisciplinary artistic collaborations. For the last couple of years my artistic practice became more research based and reflective, and my work was touched by that evolution. I'm proposing a workshop in apass at the beginning of the january block. The workshop deals with the notion(s) of repertoire. Of what stuff are they made? How did they come about? I did this work once before with my musical ensemble EARR. It will be a first time for me to adapt the questions and reflections to a wider and multidisciplinary field of expertise and practices. In order to use our time well during this week, I propose an introduction text and some questions that are meant to open up the reflective juices. I would kindly like to ask you to prepare the sessions based on the questions and preparative tasks you will find underneath. It will make the workshop and sharing surely richer and denser. So, here we go. Looking forward to meet you in january.

      If you have questions regarding this document and how to deal with the questions, you can reach out to me by mail: ethiel23@hotmail.com.

       

      repertoire - the entire range of skills or aptitudes or devices used in a particular field or occupation; "the repertory of the supposed feats of mesmerism"; "has a large repertory of dialects and characters" - The range or number of skills, aptitudes, or special accomplishments of a particular person or group.

      For this workshop I’m looking for the entire range of skills, patterns, aptitudes in which we come home to. I really like to connect “repertoire” with “home”. “Practice” with “life”. As in: “Something to come home to.”

       

      Repertoire(s) is a research and reflective workshop in which I see us all, like a bunch of passionate amateur entomologues (insectologues...), observe,repertorise , taxonomise, and share the constitutive phenomenons of our life with our craft and the repertory of skills, tools, techniques, practices that we use to build that life. Furthermore we will investigate various strategies and ways to weave the sensibilities, disciplines and practices of each participant together into meaningful wholes or collective spaces and cosmologies.

      First the focus will lie on each of us individually. For this I have formulated some questions and notions (see under) for you to get started and prepare the first 2 days of our week. After that we will dive into group related observations. How do we behave as a group? What’s the repertoire of the group? How do we deal with the multidisciplinary aspect of it all? Off coarse this separation individual-group is artificial and not always easy to keep but I think it will give us a strategy, plan, focus and ground during the work.

      I also want us to look for appropriate ways to propose this work in a performative situation.

      At the end of the workweek, on friday, we will propose a showing of the work in which there will be place for each individual to share and propose some of his/her findings and reflections in whatever way suitable as well as there will be group propositions.

      www.ericthielemans.com

      List of questions and notions to get you started:

      1. Memory-personal history-(personal) mythology childhood memories of practices and tendencies related to your practices and tools of today: a mental, virtual, imaginative, psycho-emotional landscape. First memories. teenage memories…
        Relation to the choice of practice? Why that practice? Why that mode of expression? One can see a technique, practice or tool as a prism that reflects the light in a specific way so it also constitutes your perception of things. A technique/practice/tool is a teacher. How do you relate to your chosen mode(s) of expression in those terms? Why did you choose it? Was that always easy?
        Is there a sort of archetypal persona that you like to use specifically or to play off when performing/working? How do you see yourself? Are you a troubadour, a researcher, a botanist, a scientist, philosopher,...
      2. postures-spatial relationship-environment-pulse-tempo-stasis-mobility-voyage immobile- dynamics.
        Which postures and dynamics do you relate to most. Is there a repertoire of postures and dynamics for you? Do you like to sit or stand in a certain way? Do you prefer to move? Along which lines related to the room do you move? Do you relate to directions (up, down, left, right), center stage or front, back stage...Posture-Mobility...Dynamics: are you loud and clear in your expression or do you prefer soft and moderate. When intimate, non-performing, which mode of expression do you use? Is there an internal clock, rhythm, frequency to which you tick or more than one? What inner tempo do you relate to when creativity flows? Is it one tempo or more than one at the same time? Mobility versus stasis: How do you relate to movement, mobility? How do you deal with stasis, a fixed position in a space or stage? Voyage Immobile....
      3. repetition Repertoire = Repetition: without repetition there is no notion of repertoire. Hence Patterns. A repertoire develops through time. We write it like a story using tools like mirroring and feedback from peers, society... Which patterns do we rely on, did we create for, through our craft? Maybe you have a repertoire of techniques that are either posture based or are related to an obscure imaginary place, nourished by life experiences? Patterns maybe in how you like to go from one part to another in your writing? How do you relate to continuity and discontinuity?
      4. Love list: Think of a list of specific techniques, things you really like doing or touching, having when dealing with your practice.
      5. “I could do this for hours”: What is it in your practice that you like so much that you litteraily can do it for hours?

      Homework/Preparative tasks:

      1. As a start of the january block with the workshop; knowing that we will be part of a quite large and pretty heterogenous group of writers, researchers, artists with a practise etc... I would like you to introduce yourself and your practices, techniques and tools.
      2. Out of your answers or reactions to these questions and notions posted above, I want you to distill a number (minimum 3) of objects of your repertoire. Those objects you will also propose individually to the group as an alternative way of introducing ourselves to each other with what we do or are here to do.
      3. Make an organigram/cosmology/score of those objects on a paper. Express the relationship between those objects and how you are positioned or travel between them. Use if possible some notions like mobility, frequency, time, tempo, up, down, left, right, imagination,...
        Make this any way you feel like. A drawing, a collage, a catalogue, a text,... Use any format you wish.

      http://www.ericthielemans.com/www.ericthielemans.com/home_news/home_news.html

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Milieus
    • 2014 BLOCK II 01 May 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2014
    • 31 July 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson
      Audrey Cottin
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Danny Neyman
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Philippine Hoegen
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Ramos Pereira
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz

       


      Research End Presentations

      Carolina Goradesky
      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Julia Clever
      Maité Liébana Vena

       


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita

       

       

      Partners

      FabLab IMAL
      KU Leuven
      PAF Performance Arts Forum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Alma Soderberg
      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Restrepo
      Christophe Maierhans
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Danny Neyman
      Elke van Campenhout
      Femke Snelting
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Hendrik Willekens
      Julien Maire
      Kristien van den Brande
      Luigi Coppola
      Michael Klien
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Philippine Hoegen
      Pierre Rubio
      Pr Jan Masschelein
      Rares Crauit
      Samah HIjawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Pereira / Omniadversus
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Veronica Cruz

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Femke Snelting
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer

       

       

       

      ‘MILIEUS’
      curated by Pierre Rubio (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

      Milieus is a collective artistic research environment for the participants, mentors and other workers of the a.pass program. In a shared workspace we develop our practices in a collaborative context, on the basis of self-organisation and self-rule. Through individual actions, Milieus generates a dynamic territory for exchange, cooperation and (tacit) negotiation. A mutual creation of the individual and the common.
      We invite different guests to enter into this environment with us, to participate, open up the proposals and issues addressed in the collective work and/or to problematize the situation, fueling the ecology of ideas and practices in Milieus.
      The whole curriculum content was curated by the researchers-participants themselves through the proposition of their ‘Collective Practices’ and the collective curating of the ‘Guest House series’.

       

       


      27 / 05 / 2014


      ‘A COLLECTIVE PRACTICE OF COLLECTIVE PRACTICE’
      collective practice by Pierre Rubio


      This practice aims at sharing/developing our knowledges and skills in workshop design.
      How is it possible to translate an individual practice into a collective practice?
      How can we support each others’ effort to imagine and invent collective practices out of our individual problematics?
      From identifying central research questions in each one’s researches to transformations of these questions into shareable practices up to appropriating collectively personal singularities and nourishing a possible ‘general intellect’.

       

       

      30 / 05 / 2014


      ‘GETTING A TASTE FOR FOOD’
      collective practice by Rares Crauit


      Food is highly charged with meaning and affect; it is performative and theatrical and, as a live art, it is fleeting and sensorial. Today, in a world where one in eight people are suffering from chronic undernourishment, cooking methods, consumption protocols and gastronomic speeches are lengthily elaborated on. So what is there left for artists? Looking carefully at food particularities we may witness the ordinary and extraordinary about food as an event, catching the interest of chefs as well as artists and social campaigners.

       

       

      02 / 06 / 2014


      ‘love and other matters’
      ritual for charging the space by Elke Van Campenhout / Tara


      Monday at 10am (sharp, since a ritual can not begin twice…) we meet for a social choreography, a scored ritual, a love event, a political redistribution of desire.
We work together to transform the space of Milieus into a tableau vivant of ritual practices, using objects, the body and the voice. The ritual re-charge will go through different stages, but all require your full state of attention, comfortable clothing, and a powerful energetic level. Please don’t eat before coming, and bring:
-one object that will mark your ritual space, and that is connected to the positive energy, the love you want to dedicate to Milieus
-one ritual uniform that marks your role in the ritual

       

       


      04 / 06 / 2014


      ‘THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE WIFE AND THE LOVER’
      collective practice by Philippine Hoegen


      The aim of the workshop is to play a homemade card game and to ameliorate its rules collectively.
      Some cards have 2 images, some 2 words, some an image and a word. Some have an image and a blank space, some a word and a blank space, one card has 2 blank spaces.
      Players are invited to create connections (of similarity, opposition or otherwise) as the cards are laid.
      Each participant at the table has a role: The Cook, The Thief, The Wife or The Lover.

       

       


      11 / 06 / 2014


      ‘NEW CONTINENT OF THOUGHT, DO YOU READ ME?’
      collective practice by Vanja Smiljanic


      Invitation to gather the concepts/fetish objects/questions/ideas/ghosts that obsess and possess the participants. Translation and materialisation of these thoughts to build up a space for their habitat.
      The proposal is to see and experience this space as a momentary virtual temple.
      Discovering the path to ones own virtual temple, building up the temple, guiding a tour through it, then leaving it.
      The journey to/through/out of the temple is conceived as a virtual pilgrimage.
      Following the structure of the pilgrimage, the virtual temple represents a liminal phase of one own’s research, a space of transgression, a threshold between previous way of structuring and understanding everybody own’s identity, time, space or community and the new way of doing so.

       

       


      17 / 06 / 2014


      ‘BAD T.V. SEMINAR’
      collective practice by Anna Sörenson and Stef Meul


      'Head of Bad TV Department' Anna Sörenson and 'Bureau of Censorship President of Operation' Stef Meul invite participants in a Bad TV classification evening. They step by step take the participants through the ground pillars of Bad TV, and invite them to a public voting to help the Bad TV Department classify the very core of Bad TV. The Bad TV Department uses a system of indexing, classification and creation of categories. To inform and improve the system it is needed to gather the public opinion annually. The public voting is an important input to understand what Bad TV is in 2014 and to keep the research team informed in the many genres of Bad TV, the research in depth and the categories. The public voting is giving the statistic input the Department needs to continue the work and prepare for the coming year.
      The feeling of watching something you like, but voting for it’s “bad-ness” is a conflicting feeling and a confusing thought. The nature of the Bad TV-video clips is quite entertaining but the group can feel confused by the voting system.

       

       

       

      26 / 06 / 2014


      ‘SENSORY / SENSORIAL TRANSLATION’
      collective practice by Veronica Cruz


      A collective practice working with the sensorial way with which we engage with the world and create our understanding of it. Subjectively translating stimulus from sensation to information and vice-versa.
      The body is always the receptacle of the interrelationships’ alchemy from which we build the capacity for understanding and apprehending individuals, as well as emotions and sensations. The body’s ability to invoke the past to produce new actions and behaviours most often improvised (without previewed plans) comes from a ‘practical intelligence’.
      How to propose a different sensorial approach to performative experiences? Which mediums of transmission are favoured in your research project? Which sensations are the triggers of your research? What feeling/perception would provoke your research in its receptors/audience/spectators? How could you translate the emotions of cognitive statements of your research core into a physical stimulus?

       

       


      27 / 06 / 2014


      ‘TAKE A GOOD LOOK BACK’
      collective practice by Peter Stamer


      Visualize the past as present. Close your eyes, take a good look at what happened during the Milieus program so far. Re-imagine the events that left a mark in you, that were decisive for you, major ones, minor ones. Reveal your observations by revisiting the spots that appear in front of your inner eye. You do what you say. You tell what you see.

       

       

      27 / 06 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : JAN MASSCHELEIN’

      one day seminar around the work of Pr. Jan Masschelein curated by Philippine Hoegen and Gosie Vervloessem


      We propose an experimental seminar on horizontal learning environments/structures.
      Can one create a school for oneself? What is the role of the school as an institute?
      What does self-education mean? How can we think of different ways of creating school?
      How to counter the production oriented machine (knowledge production, instrumentalisation of terms like research in education, in art? What could be a de-capitalised labour? How could this affect knowledge production in an artistic research environment? How to keep the ‘school’ as a place of ‘free time’.

      In relation to current education and knowledge production, Jan Masschelein talks about consumerism (students as consumers of education, the entrepreneurial student), he is critical of the demand for everything to be made productive (productive time, time as a commodity, and also knowledge production) making the ‘school’ a place of formation, he calls this the taming of the school. He describes different learning environments such as the seminar, the workshop and the lecture hall: “In this sense, the lecture hall can be described as a heterotopia; a ‘place without place’ or ‘location’ with its own order, its own technologies, rituals, ways of speaking and discipline. According to Michel Foucault, it is a space where we are exposed, that is to say ‘drawn out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs’. It is a place where we are exposed to a thing-in-common and are engaged in public thinking.”

       

       


      30 / 06 / 2014


      ‘ARCHIVE FEVER’
      reading session by Camila Restrepo


      Camila Restrepo will guide the participant into an exhaustive reading of an iconic essay by Jacques Derrida: “Archive Fever”. Some key points and notions will be discussed in order to embrace the (complex) sense of the text.

       

       

      02 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : FEMKE SNELTING’

      one day seminar by Femke Snelting around the project ‘Fathers of the Internet’ curated by Pierre Rubio


      Throughout World War I and II, Belgium internationalist, universalist and documentalist Paul Otlet imagined The Mundaneum: a city that would bring together all knowledge of the world in one flexible relational classification system. His work was largely forgotten until recently, when Otlet resurfaced as ’a founding father of the Internet’. Simultaneously, corporate titan Google adopted the remains of his archive preserved at The Mundaneum in Mons. The museum is not only located in the home town of Belgium current prime minister Elio Di Rupo, but also conveniently close to Google’s largest European datacenter in St. Ghislain. Since then, The Mundaneum proudly advertises itself as ‘Google on paper’ and ‘The great ancestor of Google’.
      ‘Fathers of the Internet’ is an ongoing exploration of a wandering archive and the entanglements of artificial intelligence, patronage and political intrigue.

       

       


      08 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : ALMA SODERBERG & HENDRIK WILLEKENS’
      one day practice around Alma Soderberg and Hendrik Willekens’s work curated by Danny Neyman


      Alma Soderberg and Hendrik Willekens are offering one day of happy experimentation with music making. We will play with the idea of starting a band and explore what this collaborative improvisatory way of working with and around sound could mean. Playing instruments together, exploring our voices and bodies as instruments of sound, singing and otherwise. We will learn how to make beats, and how to use microphones and friendly machinery to make voice and sound into a material to be moulded, sculpted, messed around with.

       

       


      09 - 11 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : JULIEN MAIRE’
      ‘FIELD OF WORK, DEPTH OF FIELD’
      workshop by Julien Maire curated by Hans Van Wambeke and Camila Aschner Restrepo


      There are many definitions and uses for the term “fuzzy” but they all involve some reference to a state of instability. The fuzzy logic, for example, is a programming method used in artificial intelligence: the program sets doubts that are not exclusive and that are constantly negotiable. While the Boolean logic is limited to the use of disjunctions, conjunctions and negations, the fuzzy logic reaches a state of sharpness gradually, but the focus is made with hesitation and by approximation.
      By analyzing the various definitions of what could be “the fuzzy,” the workshop will question the positioning of the actor, the performer and the spectator inside the “depth of field.” The purpose is to experiment with fuzzyness and sharpness under various angles: working in a space with a fixed lens, with a single point of focus; moving through a space with a variable focus (autofocus); reducing the depth of field (macro, micro photography); and overall to devise alternative principles for “focus control,” the intermediate stages that precede a sound, a gesture, a concept or an image.

       

       


      14 / 07 / 2014


      ‘SPEAKING BODIES’
      collective practice by Danny Neyman


      A collective practice about our bodies and our relation to our bodies through language.
      I want to gather together around the "poor material" of our own bodies, selves, memories, speaking mouths, and guide a series of exercises which will generate a verbalization of body-selves, exploring our bodies in fragments, looking at how our bodies are charged with meaning, stories, experience, memory, signification, seeing what can and can't be said about bodies, where words cling onto a body and how and when do they slip off.

       

       


      15-16 / 07 / 2014


      ‘MAKING HI-S-TORIES’
      collective practice by Samah HIjawi and Sara Santos


      The workshop will weave together several ideas around contesting historical narratives, and the power of images, their fetishization, and their potential of/for resistance through methodologies of collage and montage.
      In two separate groups, using texts, images, photographs and video each group will work for a couple of hours in creating two separate narratives of this underground collective and their manifesto, a timeline mapping the trajectory of their activities, and we try to imagine the flag they might have made to represent themselves and present themselves to the world with. Using materials provided, as well as materials we bring with us from our own practice we create an historical document of this precious moment in history.
      Then, the groups switch stations. Using collage and montage sensibilities, the groups reconsider each others historiography to intercept each others narratives.

       

       

      16 / 07 / 2014


      ‘THE GROOM OF THE STOOL’
      collective practice by Gosie Vervloessem


      A diary of digested and not digested practices.
      How does your practice digested by a foreign body looks like?
      The Groom of the Stool (formally styled: “Groom of the King’s Close Stool“) was the most intimate of an English sovereigns’ courtiers. The Groom of the Stool, in the very earliest times was responsible for assisting the King in the performance of the bodily functions of excretion and ablution, whilst maintaining an aura of royal decorum over the proceedings.This physical intimacy naturally led the Groom to become a man in whom much confidence was placed by his royal master and with whom many royal secrets were shared.
      Recipe for a workshop :
      A. Warm up – playing around with maizena
      B. The recipe
      Cook your work/your practice/your life and write down the recipe and present your meal
      C. Grooming
      Sharing practices by eating and digesting, devouring and digesting each others’ dishes.
      Choose and eat the meal of somebody else – the cook assists the digestion and interviews the eater (the actual grooming) – record the interview on paper/take notes.
      D. Stool
      The eater reports on the excrement, using whatever means that seem suitable. How does your practice digested/processed by a foreign body looks like, smells like, …?

       

      18 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : LUIGI COPPOLA & CHRISTOPH MAIERHANS’
      one day practice and discussion around ‘Alternative Democracy’ by Luigi Coppola and Christophe Maierhans curated by Nicolas Galeazzi


      Whenever people come together, decisions will be taken - explicit or implicit, legal or legitimate, in conflict, consensus or as a compromise, spontaneously or according to a strict protocol. The dominant ‘democratic’ protocols of taking such communal decisions, are put in question from many sides: from Rancière’s concept of equality, to Putin’s rhetorics, threatening western libertarianism.
      However, in the age of flat hierarchies and the emphasised individualism, artistic group decision taking mechanisms are - willingly or not - strongly influenced by the biases, falls promises and suspiciousness against the democratic way of live. Many projects and methods try to avoid, alter or oppose democratic structures.
      a.pass, for example, and specifically Milieus, are in many sense rooted in practising agonistic structures of negotiation and try to find alternative ways.

       


      21-22 / 07 / 2014


      ‘TRANSNATIONAL ART COMMONS’
      collaborative workshop-project by Nicolas Galeazzi


      I would like to invite you all to a collaborative practice around the Transnational Arts Commons, which we are developing in relation with the Dampfzentrale in Bern.
      The aim of the project is, to temporarily run the Dampfzentrale during the Bern Biennale as a Commons, and to use this opportunity as a case study in order to develop a sustainable artistic economies based on the idea of the commons.
      In order to create a legal and recognised status for this commons, we aim to found a european co-operative, which will run its business as a commons. The exact model for this co-op is still very controversial and has to developed through many stages and with the input and interest of many people. You are kindly invited to take part in this procedure.
      Beside this gathering, we are organising a “State of the Arts” meeting. The focus of this meeting is to bring different interests and ideas in relation to each other. We invite some people engaging in alternative currencies, some active in the basic income debate, and others interested in a european network of alliances between the arts and other fields. All these approaches have their problematic points and have things in common.

       

       

      23 / 07 / 2014


      ‘MONOPOLY OF I’s / MONOPOLY OF ID's’
      collective practice by Silvia Pereira / Omniadversus


      It is a Monopoly game, with us as participants.
      We will be the piétons (pedestrians), playing at being and buying artistic identities. Identities that we will create ourselves for ourselves to the purpose of the game. The way the game will be organized will lead the group to movement very similar to the one in dynamics of creating identities as by-products of the subjecthood in relation to the conditionings of the industries of the arts.
      During the game the subject as an art piece will pass through several passes in a spiral of ascension which represents the glorification of the subject as an attributed value constructed in a narrative, a chronology and history.
      While playing we will experience through the practice the process of subjectivation of identity while enquiring about it accordingly to the positions/roles being played in the game, subject/object/art collector.

       


      24-25 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : MICHAEL KLIEN’
      two days of practice and discussion around the project ‘Parliament’ by Michael Klien curated by Damla Ekin Tokel and Stef Meul


      Michael Klien proposes a 'closed' Parliament for participants. 4 hours long to experience the setup. After that we can discuss how to take this into the city. All day is spent tuning perception to the underlying dynamics of the individual and collective mind, sensing, and interacting with nature’s self-organising dynamics. These choreographies are rehearsals of utopia, nevertheless real social relations. Rather than just commenting on it or deconstructing it, but using that aspect that those are rehearsals for our emerging social relations.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • 2013 BLOCK I 01 January 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2013
    • 31 March 2013
    • 2013 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Carolina Goradeszky
      Chris Dupuis
      Daniel Kok
      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Ive Leemans
      Jaime Llopis
      Julia Clever
      Karl Philips
      Lucia Rainer
      Maité Liébana Vena
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais

       

      Research End Presentation

      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure

       

      Partners

      Buda Kortrijk
      PAF Performing Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Alessandra Coppola
      Ana Hoffner
      Claudia Bosse
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Juan Dominguez
      Michael Kliën
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

      21-25 / 01 / 2013


      ‘NOT QUITE, NOT RIGHT’
      (Bodies within Postcoloniality)
      a.pass Basics workshop by Ana Hoffner


      How is a body transformed into an image and how does an image of the body emerge as representation? How are images of the body constructed through differences which are emphasized or hidden? We will start the workshop by having a closer look at stereotypes and visual vocabularies for representing difference by reading basic texts on representational critique by Stuart Hall. Then we will discuss basic concepts of Postcolonial Theory such as Orientalism, Subalternity, Ambivalence, Hybridity and Mimicry by Said, Spivak and Bhabha. The aim of the workshop is to enter these notions through the visual field, therefore we will use the method of Close Reading in order to connect them with the knowledge production within the works of Isaac Julien, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Angela Melitopoulos, Tanja Ostojic and others. In the last part of the workshop we will try to relate the questions raised in the workshop to contemporary societies of global migration and our own artistic research especially the image production within it.

       

       

      26 - 27 / 01 / 2013 & 29 / 01 - 02 / 02 / 2013


      ‘UNFOLDING SENSIBILITIES’
      workshop by Juan Dominguez


      This workshop takes place in two parts, first in Buda Kortrijk to the curated performance program of Juan Dominguez : ‘Somewhere Between Fiction and Reality’ and then, the workshop ‘Unfolding Sensitivities’ at a.pass in Brussels.
      Usually we, human beings, share interests, share situations, share work, spaces, leisure, love. We do it defining our interests, our identities and our territories. We are used to be effective, to not waste time, to feel uncomfortable if we don’t get what we want, we like to be safe.
      In this lab we are going to contaminate each other, we are going to lose ourselves, we are going to find and not to seek for, we are going to laugh a lot, we are going to decide, to create our own work conditions, to auto generate our resources, to work together. Clearly, we will fail miserably. But only if you want, if you don’t want, don’t come!
      In case you need a bit more info about what we will do:
      We will work through situations and practices
      We will discuss about the need of doing what we do
      We will reflect about the concerns of each other
      We will accumulate and document experience
      We will unfold perceptions aspects of space and time
      We will in a way make a trip towards the nearest unknown

       

       

      04-08 / 02 / 2013


      ‘RE-IMAGINEERING THE MACHINE’
      workshop by Vladimir Miller and Elke Van Campenhout


      In this five day workshop we work hands-on on the creation of performance 'machines', inspired by the everyday disciplinary machines that regulate our lives. In our practice we try to re-connect to an environment that is largely manifested and mediated through technological, capitalist, moral and security apparatuses that shape our sense of belonging, of mobility, and our innermost desires. Through a series of case studies we try to reinterpret the machines we know very well, but normally try to overcome by ignoring or looking awry. In this workshop we try to do the opposite: we embrace the machine and its disciplinary rigour but try to turn around its functionality: no longer producing the self-evident affirmation of the social norm, but twisting its capability for change in perception and experience.

       

       

      11-15 / 02 / 2013


      ‘CHOREOGRAPHING AS AN AESTHETIC OF CHANGE’
      workshop by Michael Kliën


      Michael Kliën outlines a fundamentally rethought understanding of ‘choreography’ as a practice vitally relevant to current social and political processes. Choreography as an ‘Aesthetics of Change’ is concerned with the workings and governance of patterns, dynamics and ecologies: the choreography of the living. If the world is perceived choreographically, namely as a moving matrix of relations, interactions, constellations and proportionalities, the creative practice of choreography aims to engage these relations or set specific conditions for relations to emerge.
      The workshop outlines choreography as a deeply political practice, unfathomably entwined with ways in which we perceive the world. Seen through a connecting framework to other fields of human knowledge (such as philosophy, physics, formal composition, sociology, anthropology, etc) participants are encouraged to recognize and challenge epistemological assumptions inscribed in the act of creation. Discussing and demonstrating a series of methodologies, the workshop explores structures and dynamics to be found in and between humans, in and between ideas as well as within the overall fabric of contemporary reality.
      The workshop will also include with an introduction to ‘Social Dreaming’, an experimental psychoanalytical practice designed by Gordon Lawrence at the Tavistock Institute in London during the 70’s.

       


      25 / 02 - 01 / 03 / 2013


      ‘SOUND GARDENING’
      workshop curated by Alessandra Coppola


      The choices the gardener makes to shape the garden result from the knowledge of how different soils accommodate different forms of life, in which ways these species develop, grow, expand above and under the ground as well as how they interact with each other and the environment. Sounds, unlike plants, do not possess such developed taxonomy; nevertheless we expect to identify various forms of sounds' "biotopes": where, when, and how do sounds do appear in the city.
      We will propose a work of observation and analysis of the urban sonic territories in order to "draw" acoustic maps of particular locations. As we won’t be relying on scientific measurements, but rather on perception and senses, our maps will differ from the noise pollution’s maps; we will try to define various given soundscapes in terms of the atmosphere they create, rather than formal units of measurement.
      Our practices aim to observe, analyze and understand the relationships between soundscape and atmosphere in an urban contexts, and eventually propose actions to alter a given situations with a sound-designing ethos. We expect this approach to be highly informative on the action agency and function sound has in shaping atmospheres;
      It will also be a study of urban soundscape from multiple viewpoints: phenomenological, poetic, physic, architectural, social, musical…. We will try not to impose any aesthetics or practice of creation, but be open to as many perspectives as possible with the reception of soundscapes.

       


      04 / 03 - 16 / 03 / 2013


      ‘THEATER OF MEMORY - POLITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE SELF’
      workshop by Claudia Bosse


      I am interested in the structure of our memory according to spatial structures which are the conditions of daily routines of our organisation of knowledge, practice, emotions, thoughts. The grammar of the spaces we are producing are structuring our thoughts and imaginations. I would like to work on try-outs and analysis of space, and spatial production between the concepts of theatre, city and parliament, the relations between political, social and individual space and its particular organisations. The memory, is in a way the archive of consciousness of our experiences. Following Guilio Camillos concept of ‘theatre of memory’ (teatro del mundo) as a conceptual arena of thoughts and an encyclopaedic ritual for one spectator, I would like to develop try outs of this concept according to individual concepts of the participants. I would be interested to co-relate this concept of theatre of memory to the concept of the cartography of the self. Cartography of the self as a didactic machine for self construction, as a space related creation of cartographies inhabited with embodiments and speech acts. The aim would be to work on tools to transfer interests and methods into a spatial appearance, to make them understandable and possible for collective discourse. This discourse should relate a combined body - thought - space - voice practice. Thinking in spaces, unfolding thoughts in space. Embody ideas. The try outs should be transferred in different spatial contexts and simultaneous settings as well as transferred into the public space.
      Its all about the production of space. production of thought. production of practice. production of self. production of art. production of analysis. production of aesthetics, production of politics. production of relations. production of memory. production of desires, production of ethics...

       


      18 - 22 / 03 / 2013


      ‘THE ADOPTION PROJECT’
      workshop by Peter Stamer & Nicolas Galeazzi


      How do you position yourself to your art? 
How tight is the bond between you and the issues or ideas you are working with?
What if you would release this bond and lend out parts of your research temporarily to someone else?
      The Adoption Project deals with the ties and habits between you and your artistic practice. It challenges the perspectives and positions you engage with in your artistic process and separates them from your personal involvement by handing them over to a different outlook, practice, or routine for a certain period of time. A clearly defined section of your project will be packed in a 'box' and given up for adoption, while you will take a part of someone else's research temporarily under your 'protection'.
In this sense the Adoption Project aims to facilitate you with tools to put your work in a public context long before it is 'completed'. We understand this process as an effective instrument of research.


    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2010 BLOCK III 01 September 2010
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2010
    • 30 November 2010
    • 2010 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Adva Zakai
      Alessandra Coppola
      David Zagari
      Doris Stelzer
      Einat Tuchman
      Esther Francis
      Iris Bouche
      Katrin Lohmann
      Manne Granqvist
      Manon Avermaete
      Margareth Kaserer
      Michiel Reynaert
      Philip Janssens
      Philippe Severyns
      Rodolphe Coster
      Stephen Bain
      Sven Goyvaerts
      Timothy Segers

       


      Research End Presentations

      Agnese Cornelio
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia

       

       

      Partners

      Theaterfestival 2010
      Thematics (Les Bains, Brussels)
      Master in Choreography (Amsterdam)
      Campo
      RITS
      De Singel

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Anette Baldauf
      Bart Van den Eynde
      Christian Rizzo
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Epifania Amoo-Adare
      Guillermo Gómez-Peña
      Janez Janša
      Jeremy Wade
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lilia Mestre
      Sara Manente
      Sven Goyvaerts

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout


      Mentors

      Anette Baldauf
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      30 / 08 - 03 / 09 / 2010


      ‘DISCUSSION & REFLECTION’
      workshop of shared critique by a.pass in collaboration with Theaterfestival 2010


      During the Theaterfestival, a.pass-participants work together with a group of outsiders on a workshop of shared critique: we go and see a series of performances at the Theaterfestival (a yearly festival that selects performances that have been of particular importance to the development of the performance arts in Flandres/Belgium in the past year).
      Next to this we selected some texts to feed the discussion, that work out some of the themes/aesthetic principles/dramaturgical choices made in these specific performances to feed the discussion.

       


      04-09 / 09 / 2010


      ‘LaZone BRUSSELS’
      project by apass Research Center, Thematics (Bains, Brussels) and Master of Choreography (Amsterdam)


      LaZone is both the second stage in the Critical Hope research by Elke van Campenhout within a.rc (a.pass research centre) and the topic for the 2 month residency Thematics at workspace Bains Connective in Brussels. For the opening week of the projects we share our space with the students of the Master of Choreography in Amsterdam to work on defining the boundaries of LaZone: this in-between place that falls out of our understanding of the different ‘regimes of the sensible/experientiable’ (Jacques Rancière) that define our daily life. In other words: we lead our lives within different zones of understanding, speaking and behaving. What I can see and experience, what I can say and express, is dependent on the particular zone I am moving in at that particular moment (the political zone, the personal, the juridical, the virtual etc...).
      LaZone is trying to construct a space-in-between these zones: the place where behavior, speech and movement have not been negotiated yet, the place where misunderstanding is the leading principle of communication, the environment that drives our hospitality principles to their breaking point, showing us simultaneously the impotence and the potential of our cosmopolitan/transcultural hopes and desires.
      LaZone is a workshop in which three groups (Thematics artists, a.pass participants, MA Choreography) share the same space for one week. During that week LaZone will be created on different levels: the interpersonal level of hospitality and the sharing of theory and practice, and the larger level of the society at large, critically examining the boundaries of our democratic pretentions and preconceptions. Everyone can bring a ‘gift’ to LaZone: a practice, a piece of knowledge, an insight or an invitation you want to extend to the rest of the group. The workshop will create itself out of the proposals of everyone, on the basis of equality and interest, with three or four activities running at the same time, allowing every participant to develop a personal trajectory throughout the week.

       

       

      13-18 / 09 / 2010


      ‘WORKSHOPS WITH GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA AND JANESZ JANSA’
      Two parallel workshops by a.pt in collaboration with Campo and RITS


      Guillermo Gómez-Peña
      In this specific physical workshop, Guillermo Gómez-Peña will attempt to create a temporary community of rebel artists, aiming to find new modes of being and discover other ways of relating to their own body. During the workshop the following questions will prove to be crucial: which borders do we wish to cross? Why? Which borders are harder to cross, both in the workshop and in our personal lives?


      Janez Janša
      In this workshop, intellectual challenge and debate will be actively encouraged, triggering an entire series of questions: What is real? What is mediated? How do identity and politics relate to the status of an object of art?
      Each day of the Summer School will be concluded by an evening programme consisting of meetings, lectures, screenings, debates and artistic interventions. The evening guest artists have all collaborated on the research topic 'the performance as document - the document as performance' and include, among others, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Sarah Vanagt and Carina Molier.

       


      19-26 / 09 / 2010


      ‘LaZone BERLIN’
      project by apass Research Center and Thematics (Les Bains, Brussels)


      A group of artistic field researchers find themselves on unknown territory: LaZone is a place where the spatial rules of behavior have stopped to make sense. It is an environment that has no function, no meaning, no recognizable orientation points. It is a transit area, a stretch of land that falls out of our rule-giving grid of common sense, of law-giving, of understanding and of commonly accepted behavior. LaZone is the space of immigrants, of avatars and aliens, of dislocated complex identities, of lost cases and derailed causes. It is a place that has to define itself through the practice, through the use, through the re-negotiation of the rules of encounter and hospitality.
      During one week a group of immigrants from a.pt (advanced performance training) and Thematics (research project of the workspace Bains Connective in Brussels) will settle down at Fabrikationen, and try to make sense of their role and interaction with the locals. The results of their work will be presented on the 24th. Their Political Party might also infiltrate at the 25th's end party.

       


      20-24 / 09 / 2010


      ‘STORYBOARDING’
      workshop by Jeremy Wade


      In many ways performance is one big performed story board, an invisible text set of directions and nothing more. At the other hand story boarding it self is an art form. So how to use a story board to construct a performance and how to make a story board performative, how to blur the boundaries between story board and piece. Starting from a a written proposal minimum of three pages of each of the participants, story boards will be made, including an application for a grant with a budget of the project.
      During the course of this exploration/composition workshop we will strive to facilitate the great blur through the investigation of numerous storyboarding techniques. We will also research a wide array of taboos, techniques and theories that help us get closer to an essential concern of composition and aesthetics which is the age-old question of… “What is a thing”? We look at a vast index of queer scores that shed some light on the circularity of aesthetics. We can make monsters out of these stagnant aesthetics and gain perspective on how to compose, obliterate, blur and layer our lovely things for an audience. We will find modes to clarify our concepts for the pre production and production phases of creation. We will work towards structuring and deconstructing our ideas, both material and ethereal.
      Jeremy Wade is an American choreographer living and working in Berlin.

       

       


      04-10 / 10 / 2010


      ‘THE GAZE 2.0’
      workshop by Sven Goyvaerts


      Theoretical & practical workshop where the social media and our desktops create the format for communication and knowledge exchange and are being used as tools for artistic creation. Central focus in the workshop is the capture / transformation / (re)routing of the gaze through social media. Featuring crash course in and experiments with social media and other software : Ustream.tv, Snapz Pro, Flickr, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Everytrail and Chatroulette.
      The following topics will be discussed : MEDIA MIRROR (on identity), CYBER EYE CONTACT (on the look and the gaze), WELIVEINPUBLIC.COM (on narcissism), SECOND SKIN (on the avatar), THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA (on obscenity).

       


      11-15 / 10 / 2010


      ‘PERFORMATIVE SPACE’
      workshop by Laurent Liefooghe


      Being interested in the negative & constrictive aspects of architecture (obstruction, representation, order) and the idea of ‘active’ architecture (defined by what it does instead of what it shows), Laurent Liefooghe takes an analogy between architecture and contemporary art performance as a departure to try to liberate architecture from its obsession with emblematic objects. For this workshop he wants to investigate the idea of the ‘performative space’. Departing from case studies, he wants to develop possible concepts of a ‘performative space’.

       


      18-22 / 10 / 2010


      ‘BROODTHAERS & KAUFMAN’
      workshop by Sara Manente


      Starting point of this workshop by Sara Manente, former a.pass participant, are the is the investigation of the possible relation between Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Kaufman, two artists that broke rules in their fields, both provocative because acting on the limits of their roles and their positions in society, playing with meaning and expectations. A speculative game to see if a hint is to be found, as if by putting two things close to each other we can find similarities, intriguing associations that we couldn't see before. The overall question is one of sameness and otherness. The research on "similarity" from the two points of view of perception (outside) and interpretation (inside).

       

       

      25-30 / 10 / 2010


      ‘INTERFACE FICTIONS’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre & Elke Van Campenhout


      In this workshop we occupy for one week the gallery/shopping window of a new alternative performance gallery in Brussels. Working together within this space we try to develop working practices that project the gallery space on the outside world: gestures that communicate with the commuters, the neighbours, the occasional passers-by. By blurring the boundaries between living and working in the space, and by not retreating to recognizable artistic strategies, we try to break the rules of expectation, of recuperation and of communication of the arts. Every participants will try, in constant negotiation with the others, to develop practices that open up the activities from within to the viewer/participant outside. This can happen imagining the space to be what it is not: a shop, a restaurant, a library, a TV studio, a social centre, an immigrant office, etc...
      As important as the inside/outside dialogue, will be the negotiation inside of the space: the overlayering of practices and imaginations of the space, the monsterly spaces that grow out of inbreeding, etc... Not only negotiating space, but also behavior, time, attitude, convictions and necessities.

       


      01-12 / 11 / 2010


      “THE 5 SENSES”
      workshop by Bart Van den Eynde and Elke Van Campenhout


      In this workshop we develop on the basis of texts and specialist talks a mapping of the 5 senses as a starting point for artistic thinking and practices. We include artistic practices like the ones of Lygia Clarke, Enrique Vargas, Peter Verhelst, Dries Verhoeven, f0am, Charo Calvo, etcetera... Each of the senses is the topic of 2 days.

       

      15-19 / 11 : 2010


      ‘SPATIAL LITERACY’
      workshop by Anette Baldauf & Epifania Amoo-Adare


      What is space, what is the relationship between spatial conditions and power? How can we envision the transformation of space and the making of different spaces? The premise of this workshop is that a critical pedagogy on space, on the forces involved in the production and reproduction of space, is a necessary condition for any intervention in space. We propose to challenge widespread understandings of space as a structure that is given and fixed, in other words: a structure that is developed for and not a context that is developed by society. We contrast this convention with an understanding of space as both, a manifestation as well as a vehicle of the productive relations of power. Following the equation “space = (social) product” we investigate spatial relations, the making of inclusion and exclusion, centrality versus marginality, legibility, difference and conflict. Framed as an exercise in “spatial literacy”, we discuss techniques of making sense of spatial relations, of making use and appropriating them.



      22 / 11 / 2010


      “LECTURE BY CHRISTIAN RIZZO”
      presented by a.pass & De Singel


      Choreographer Christian Rizzo will be working for a year with and in the buildings of deSingel. In the next block he will also create a workshop for a.pass. This is a first meeting with the artist where he reads texts with us that have been essential in his development as an artist. This lecture is a starting point to speak about different influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work.
      Christian Rizzo has been fashion designer, rock musician, then dancer and choreographer. In 1996 he created his own company L'Association Fragile. From 2003 he became artist in residence of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Toulouse. Also in 2003 he received Le Grand Prix de la Critique.

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2010 BLOCK II 01 May 2010
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2010
    • 31 July 2010
    • 2010 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Adva Zakai
      Agnese Cornelio
      Alessandra Coppola
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      David Zagari
      Einat Tuchman
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Katrin Lohmann
      Manne Granqvist
      Manon Avermaete
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Michiel Reynaert
      Philip Janssens
      Stephen Bain
      Sven Goyvaerts

       


      Research End Presentations

      Alejandro Petrasso
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Sara Vilardo

       

       

      Partners

      Les Bains
      MicroMarché
      Sarma
      Workspace Brussels
      Nadine
      SoundImageCulture

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Agnese Cornelio
      Anette Baldauf
      Charlotte Brouckaert
      Dries Verhoeven
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Erik Devries
      Jeremy Wade
      Joao Fiadeiro
      Joël Verwimp
      Katrin Lohmann
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Laurent van Lancker
      Luk Lambrecht
      Manne Granqvist
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Sven Goyvaerts

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Anette Baldauf
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi

       

       

       

       

       

      10-14 / 05 / 2010


      ‘HP OFFICEJET 9130 ± ERRORS’
      workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi & Joël Verwimp


      Developments in technology and changes in society regularly render things obsolete; think of professions like blacksmithing, technology like oil lamps, and rules about handling horses. Copyright law might well become such an obsolete instrument. In fact, it never really worked outside the US/European borders and open source software already moves beyond copyright restrictions worldwide. This shows that making and meaning in the current cultural environment requires a response to existing institutional and organisation structures, identifying differences and engaging art as an open ongoing process. With COYOTL, we produce or try to produce a vivid impression of knowledge products: of these, software is unique, as it is said to have behaviour. More specifically, it instills behavior in computers when it is executed by them, causing tangible effects in the real world. Just like software, we believe that performative publishing is such a situation allowing a reflexive way of working by engaging with relationships.
      In the framework of the Bains Connective DIY residency lab at MicroMarché, we edited previous COYOTL material into the printed workbook The leakers which will build the basic discourse for the workshop. Together with your project material (on paper, in form of quotations, or as live or memorised events) we will create a pool of content, which will be copied, scratched, hacked, nod rearranged as a resource for each other’s project. Departing from these thoughts and the mutating discussion around copyright/copyleft/open source COYOTL will play as usual, with the copy-machine (HP Officejet 9130 is currently our main tool) in order to
      - develop models of cooperation for any kind of art and knowledge production
      - facilitate an environment for independent and NOT-NEGOTIATED exchange and development of other artist's practice
      - perform on paper, nurtured by and leading to performance in OTHER spaces/logic
      - question not only new work models, but also what kind of space and organisational structure art production needs today

       

      17-21 / 05 / 2010


      ‘REVOLUTION’
      no-workshop workshop by Katrin Lohmann & Manne Granqvist,
      with guests: Nicolas Y Galeazzi, Bavo, Dieter Lesage


      The no-workshop organizers believe that the concept of revolution is a relevant and urgent one for our times. What does a revolution imply for society, and for the individual? Is the total collapse near, is it necessary, is it desirable? What are the possible positions in relation to revolution for the artist and for the activist?
      The organizers of the REVOLUTION no-workshop do not pretend to be experts on the subject. Rather they regard the workshop as an opportunity to research a cluster of topics that they regard alarmingly pertinent, for themselves and for the present times, with others who share the same sentiment. It is the experience of the no-work-no-shop organizers that the matters at hand are of a kind that strike a natural chord with not so few people in the present times.

       

       


      19-21 / 05 / 2010

      ‘DOCUMENTARY’
      workshop by Laurent van Lancker in collaboration with SIC


      SoundImageCulture is a group of artist-anthropologists committed to artful storytelling through real human encounters that challenge documentary conventions, and opens up to sound and image installations. Informed by developments in cultural theory, social sciences, and the visual art. SIC questions the relation between artist, subject and viewer. How can you represent somebody in sound and image when you don’t know his or her background? The answer is not to eschew representation; rather, SIC proposes an ethical reflection on how ‘the other’ is presented in contemporary media, believing this to be an urgency of the multicultural society we live in.

       


      24-28 / 05 / 2010


      ‘QUEER IN THE CITY’
      workshop by Anette Baldauf


      I am not a Queer Studies expert, but I have worked, and taught, on questions of gender, sexuality and the city. I would love to connect that knowledge with theories on performativity, maybe starting off from Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, both of which we addressed during the City of Illusion workshop. I have been teaching a lot on the so-called Girl Movement - Riot Girls, Dyke Bands... - which tried to challenge concepts of femininity through pop music and performance in the mid 90s, and the following backlash of Britney Spears etc.- which was a performance of femininity as special effect. We could e.g. read, and then analyze artistic as well as popular culture strategies of the gender confusion.

       

       

      31/05 - 11/06 2010

      ‘STORYBOARDING’
      workshop by Jeremy Wade


      In many ways performance is one big performed storyboard, an invisible text set of directions and nothing more. At the other hand storyboarding itself is an art form. So how to use a storyboard to construct a performance and how to make a storyboard performative, how to blur the boundaries between storyboard and piece. Starting from a written proposal minimum of three pages of each of the participants, storyboards will be made, including an application for a grant with a budget of the project.
      As Contemporary Performers, Choreographers, Directors, and Scenographers we work toward events that have the potential to rewrite and dislocate an audience from stratified senses of meaning. During the course of this exploration/composition workshop we will strive to facilitate the great blur through the investigation of numerous storyboarding techniques. We will also research a wide array of taboos, techniques and theories that help us get closer to an essential concern of composition and aesthetics which is the age-old question of… “What is a thing”? We look at a vast index of queer scores that shed some light on the circularity of aesthetics. We can make monsters out of these stagnant aesthetics and gain perspective on how to compose, obliterate, blur and layer our lovely things for an audience. We will find modes to clarify our concepts for the pre production and production phases of creation. We will work towards structuring and deconstructing our ideas, both material and ethereal.

       

      07-11 / 06 / 2010


      ‘EXHAUSTING DANCE’
      reading sessions


      After having wrestled ourselves through the introduction of this book on contemporary dance (edited by André Lepecki), we decided to take a second look at the book in a full reading-session week.
      The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, ‘Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement’ examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US.
      Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies.
      This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.
      We will combine the reading sessions with fragments out of the work of contemporary choreographers and bring the practice to the theory.

       


      14-18 / 06 / 2010


      ‘PERSPECTIVES ON SPACE’
      reading sessions


      In this reading sessions we invite several scenographers and artists in whose work the use & organization of space is essential, to read with us texts that have been essential in their development as artists. A starting point to speak about other influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work. Erki Devries, Luk Lambrecht, Dries Verhoeven & Laurent Liefooghe are our guests.

       

      21 - 24 / 06 / 2010


      ‘PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR BEGINNERS’
      workshop by Elke Van Campenhout under mentoring of Mladen Dolar in collaboration with Sarma and Workspace Brussels


      The workshop on psychoanalysis will open up the field of thinking of Lacan and related thinkers to a group of beginners in the theory. In the arts psychoanalysis has taken up a central position in the interpretation and thinking about the arts. Although a lot of the time implicit, the frame of thinking about the Real, objet petit a, etc... is part of our cultural and esthetic heritage. In this workshop we look the first two days at Slavoj Zizek’s film 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' in which he explores the psycho-analytical subconscious of Hollywood film-making. Afterwards we read Zizek's book 'Welcome to the desert of the Real' for a contemporary and highly political performativization of what the psycho-analytical framework can still teach us today.

       


      25 / 06 / 2010


      ‘SOCIAL MEDIA & THE AVATAR’
      workshop by researcher/participant Sven Goyvaerts


      One day around the basics of the social media and the role of the avatar in our thinking about (alternative or virtual) identities.



      28 / 06 - 2 / 07 / 2010


      ‘THE GAZE’
      workshop by  researchers/participants Agnese Cornelio, Marcelo Mardones, Charlotte Brouckaert & Sven Goyvaerts


      How do we construct our identity through the look of others? How do we look at others an read them? How are we judged by others or do we feel judged by them? And how does the gaze function in the social media, how do we control the gaze of the others and how do we read others by their virtual presentation?
      Partly reading session, partly practical research using social media and the camera as a tool to catch the gaze.

       


      5-11 / 07 / 2010


      ‘FIND YOUR INNER IDIOT’
      camping group practice by a.pass


      Loosely based on the Dogma movie 'The Idiots' by Lars Von Trier, we work for one week on the principles of idiocy as a potential artistic, political or actionist strategy. During the workshop we try to define different methodologies to discover our 'inner idiots', both on a physical practice level as on a theoretical level. We combine reading and viewing sessions of material relating to 'idiocy' (out of philosophy and art history) with physical sessions, aiming at the development of a personal and a communal idiot body. Each of the participants can devise his/her own perspective on the mindset and context out of which to work, trying to discover within a small group of dedicated participants their personal 'inner idiots', and constructing a group practice out of this confrontation. We might bring the practice to public space when we feel ready for that. Only for true idiots!

       


      12 - 16 / 07 / 2010


      ‘TERROR’
      film analysis workshop by a.pass


      An exercise in concrete and detailed analysis, argumentative construction and critical discussion. In this workshop we analyze horror movies. How does the mechanism of terror functions in these movies and which are its disguises? How do we deal with our instant emotional (moral) reaction in our discussion? Where does art starts and exploitation ends? What is the place of horror in our lives? One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of film, photography, the net) horrors taking place in the real or in fantasized worlds. Images of atrocities have become, via the screens of the television and the computer, a commonplace. What is this fascination with the depiction of cruelty? Is ours perception of reality eroded by the barrage of such images or do they just make us happy that we are alive?
      This workshop is in the first place aimed at analyzing the formal principles of movie making: the creation of 'horror' through camera perspectives, montage, use of (off-)voice, etcetera. But next to that we also try to come to a deeper understanding of the parameters of horror, by reading texts (Sontag, Zizek, Cronenberg,...) to feed the discussion.

       

      17-23 / 07 / 2010


      ‘HARD WORKING IDLES’
      workshop by researcher/participant Adva Zakai with Joao Fiadeiro and guests


      Each day will be divided into two sessions: Mornings to the practice of Real Time Composition*, a method developed by Joao Fiadeiro, and afternoons to a talk with an invited guest.
      Why ‘hard working idlers’? Because I find myself confronted by this contradiction: On the one hand, being critical towards the ethics of artistic practice that are increasingly product-oriented - generating practices which are exclusive rather than inclusive, imposing a position on the artist’s plan rather than enabling an ‘emergence’ of a situation. On the other hand, appreciating a personal examination of ideas or
      forms, and intrigued by a detailed, skillful and directed proposition from the artist to the public.
      Can these two approaches complement rather than oppose each other: Where does the artist’s control over a performance stop and the event generate itself through the contributions of all its participants? How much (or rather what kind of) ‘work’ is needed in order to trigger a situation?
      The same inquiries are perhaps relevant with regards to the way one relates to one’s surroundings. Can changes in society emerge through individual or self-organized mechanisms rather than be dictated by overarching norms, ideologies and preconceptions? If we consider an experience as complete even though its in a constant state of becoming itself – would it allow more dynamic and liberation from dogmas in our day, work, life, art?

       

       

      19-23 / 07 / 2010


      ‘THE REALITY, THE GIANT SCENARIO III’
      workshop by researcher/participant Maria Lucia Correia


      The City appears as a breathing entity that contains the concept of future reflections and artistic interventions. The reality, the Giant Scenario is a workshop that approaches the city space as a living body that seeks for our attention. As working methodology we will address the city space, with a critical vision on sensorial and visual awareness. In order to map our environment we will draw and recompose the elements of the urban space, collecting lost details and objects on our city walks (derives). Moments where we will get lost into a world of colors, shapes, ornaments, sounds, rhythms… and relate to places that are damaged, abandoned, dead or ill... The workshop will then resource the urbanist and emotional mapping of the space and its graphical potentialities within a new scenario, a new life, a new narrative of forgotten details. The city will not be the set of public interventions but a living body that incorporates us, an extended form of connections, reconstructions, treatment, placement and intersections.

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

       

      -Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

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

       

       

      -Partners

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

       


      -Contributors for workshops

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

      Heather Kravas / Antonija Livingstone

      Peter Stamer / Philippe Riera

       


      -Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

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

       

       

      Program #1 in collaboration with Constant vzw

       

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

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

       

      21-15 / 01 / 2008

      ‘PERFORMATIVE RECORDINGS, BROWSING THE CITY’

      workshop by Constant vzw (Brussels)

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

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

       

       

      28-31 / 01 / 2008

      ‘MODULATING SENSORY INPUT: OBJECTS AND SPACES STRATEGIES’

      workshop by Rogerio Liro

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

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

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

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

       

       

      29-31 / 01 / 2008

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

      (SWAP MEAT AND MALE BREAST FEEDING)

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

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

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

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

       

       

      11-17 / 02 / 2008

      ‘OBJECT SCORE NOTATION’

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

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

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

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

       

       

       

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

       

      18  / 02 - 20 / 03 / 2008

      ‘DRAMA QUEENS’

      workshop by Peter Stamer and Philippe Riera

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

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

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

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

       

       

      Research laboratory

       

      28-29 / 03 / 2008

      ‘PRINCIPLES AND METHODOLOGIES OF AUTO-EDUCATION’

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

       





APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

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

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