index

La Bellone, Brussels

22 June 2017

24 June 2017

The Document Transformed + Book Launch Dirty Room /Juan Dominguez

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

This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone - Brussels

To inscribe to the master-classes please send an email to production@apass.be

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

Detailed program:

Thursday June 22nd

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday June 23rd

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

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

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

14:00 >17:00 Masterclass Olga de Soto

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

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

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

Saturday June 24th 12:00 > 18:00

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

12:30 Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk

13:00 Femke Snelting

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

14:00 Olga de Soto

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

PAUSE

15:30 Vincent Meessen

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

16:30 Agency (Kobe Matthys)

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

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

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

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

Dirty Room

Edited by: Juan Domínguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

Editorial: Continta me tienes

Executive Production: manyone

Madrid, May 2017

Translations by Ana Buitrago, Simon Malone and Catherine Phelps

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

About the participants

Vincent Meessen

"Transform documents into experiences and vice versa". This phrase by Aby Warburg could definitely be used to introduce Vincent Meessen's speculative realism, or as he calls it: 'documents d'expérience'. His archival investigations always lead to loose associations and appropriative gestures that are rewritten into critical narratives.

In his latest modular installations he combines films with printed matter and sculptures. Meessen produces narratives that question our ability to deal with the colonial ghosts of modernity. In his recent Vita Nova, he makes use of the filmic essay to re-read Roland Barthes in various postcolonial African situations, applying Barthes's deconstruction tools to some of his famous texts. Vincent Meessen likes to use procedures of collaboration that undermine the authority of the author and emphasize the intelligence of collectives and of conceptual characters. He is a founding member of the artist collective Potential Estate and of the platform for artistic research and production Jubilee (jubilee-art.org).

Recent shows include KIOSK (Ghent), ARS 11, Kiasma Museum (Helsinki), Stedelijk Museum Bureau (Amsterdam) and Contour Biennial for Moving Images (Mechelen). He worked together with the collective Potential Estate for the Brussels Biennial and M HKA (Antwerp). His filmworks were screened at Jeu de Paume, at Cinémathèque française (Paris), at Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), at the Swiss Institute (NY) and at international festivals such as IDFA (Amsterdam), IFFR (Rotterdam), Cinéma du Réel (Paris) and Transmediale (Berlin). His films are distributed by Argos center for art & media (Brussels) (see also section on Art Organisations). Meessen has curated several film programs and exhibitions for various institutions including Extra City (Antwerp), Argos (Brussels), C.E.A.C (Xiamen, CH), E.R.B.A (Valence, F).

Agency

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

Femke Snelting (Possible Bodies)

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

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

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

Olga de Soto

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

postgraduate program

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) ))))))

‘ 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

GONÇALO PENA - drawing askew 27 May 2015
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here
drawing askew Master Class by GONÇALO PENA SAT 30 MAY 2015 12.30 to 3.30pm organized by a.pass / @ Aleppo – Dexia Art Centre – Schildknaapstraat/Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussel Sign up for this event. !!few places left!! The Proposal The concept of the workshop is, after a careful reading of the text beneath, to devise a meaningful action focussing on the perceived gap in the flow of the current system politics and technics, which could lead to the premature extinction of life on this planet, our universe and every memory of it. This device should be thought as “meta-revolutionary”; i.e. attacking from within the revolutionary flow of the allied powers of technics and capital. This action, sabotage, construct, accusation is done as a dry run, a kind of dummy crash test. Using any tools, concentrate in a group of several A4 formats your interpretation of a “vertical” or “meta-revolutionary” investment on the techno-capitalistic maze. It could range from text into video stills, passing through drawings, schemes, maps, a score or performance instructions. Duration: 3 hours; participants max. 15 With the conscious danger of falling back into romanticist politics and trying to avoid this trap, I would like to take up this idea of an ethical or even several ethical lines to think drawing as one of the tools we have to challenge politics of smoothing and soothing the collective body into mindless consumerism. It is important to state that this collective body still has a human multitudinous and restless soul, from which annoying and frequent twitches call for permanent police vigilance. Moreover this body comes out of the box including technology and complete ecosystems. So there comes a time when the soul struggles and seems itself forced to draw painful lines of choice, discovery, and the recovery of concepts and criticism. Theoretically I searched for a possible realm of production to cope with these requirements; to fight for the survival of the soul, in a vast temple contained within the language treasures, and against fatal deterritorialization posed by blind profit and fear of death, the main drive for the technological twilight of difference. As such my hypothesis followed the non-official Marxist approach to the birth of Design. In this version, Design appears as a consequence of the opening between the capitalist/investor and the workforce in the manufacture stage of the base structure, during the eighteenth century. In the void posed by the disappearance of the workshop master and appearance of the unskilled and malnourished workforces of the modern proletariat, someone was simply needed to define the “life form” of the product. The material history proceeds to create these openings in which ethics in the shape of rational decisions, intuitions, fears or desires are invested. The first professionals were infused with the urge to contribute to optimze selling performance and industry profit but others, as William Morris and Robert Owen raised themselves above these needs and thought alternatives created by craft and socialism. Contrary to this political view, the all-pervasive and everyday dominating concept of Design, drawn heavily from art history is generally tainted with a functionalist aestheticist teleology, so that to follow the Marxist argument, focusing the ethics upon these openings briefly unchecked by the tightening grid of technocracy, requires newcritical coping concepts. We can now recall the intermingled relation between revolution and order to develop it a little further. “Order” can be thought as an investment of language, through design and technical manipulation, from within the system to regain sense and control of experience. This orderly effort of drawing a line in the “chaos” can be defined further by another new concept. The old French concept of “Revolution”, now an orphaned concept is taken over by a kind counter-revolution or better called “meta-revolution”. Meta-revolution is a meaningful action placed over the common revolutionary events, like for instance the galloping technological development. The structure of this meta-revolutionary actions can be given by a kind of absent god in language, an imperious demand comes from a higher plane revealed by poetry or a heightened clairvoyance on processes. So, Meta-revolution is a production aimed and vertically inspired by a God/summa artis, on “openings” that comes to be perceived through the revolutionary stretching of the reality fabric fed by capital and technology. Meta-revolution is aimed at a dynamic flow of seemingly unstoppable events, and not, like the classical Gramscian concept of revolution, a hegemonic consequence aimed at a decaying systemic status, like an old political regime or better, a decaying macro-economic system. Following Heidegger, these so called “openings” are the results of the disclosure brought forth by the work of art. This conservative view can be eschewed as long as we sustain a critique into the limited role or the art world in this case and herald a wider participation of the critical mind through writing, plotting, mapping, drawing from experience in the world. The orientation of the intellectual in this effort creates an example from where to draw design investment with a political purpose for common survival. Biography Gonçalo Pena was born in Lisbon, 1967. He works as an Artist in various media but mainly painting, based in Lisbon and occasionally elsewhere. Recently a book was published with is drawing work in Mousse Publishing. With an extensive teaching experience. Currently his field of research in the context of a PhD, is about Design theory and politics.
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

[a.pass] Master Class by Gonçalo Penna 27 May 2015
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Master Class by

gonçalo pena

drawing askew

Sat 30 May 2015

12.30 to 3.30pm

organized by a.pass /
@ Aleppo – Dexia Art Centre – Schildknaapstraat/Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussel

Sign up for this event.

!!few places left!!

The Proposal

The concept of the workshop is, after a careful reading of the text beneath, to devise a meaningful action focussing on the perceived gap in the flow of the current system politics and technics, which could lead to the premature extinction of life on this planet, our universe and every memory of it. This device should be thought as “meta-revolutionary”; i.e. attacking from within the revolutionary flow of the allied powers of technics and capital. This action, sabotage, construct, accusation is done as a dry run, a kind of dummy crash test.

Using any tools, concentrate in a group of several A4 formats your interpretation of a “vertical” or “meta-revolutionary” investment on the techno-capitalistic maze. It could range from text into video stills, passing through drawings, schemes, maps, a score or performance instructions.

Duration: 3 hours; participants max. 15

With the conscious danger of falling back into romanticist politics and trying to avoid this trap, I would like to take up this idea of an ethical or even several ethical lines to think drawing as one of the tools we have to challenge politics of smoothing and soothing the collective body into mindless consumerism. It is important to state that this collective body still has a human multitudinous and restless soul, from which annoying and frequent twitches call for permanent police vigilance. Moreover this body comes out of the box including technology and complete ecosystems. So there comes a time when the soul struggles and seems itself forced to draw painful lines of choice, discovery, and the recovery of concepts and criticism.

Theoretically I searched for a possible realm of production to cope with these requirements; to fight for the survival of the soul, in a vast temple contained within the language treasures, and against fatal deterritorialization posed by blind profit and fear of death, the main drive for the technological twilight of difference. As such my hypothesis followed the non-official Marxist approach to the birth of Design. In this version, Design appears as a consequence of the opening between the capitalist/investor and the workforce in the manufacture stage of the base structure, during the eighteenth century. In the void posed by the disappearance of the workshop master and appearance of the unskilled and malnourished workforces of the modern proletariat, someone was simply needed to define the “life form” of the product.

The material history proceeds to create these openings in which ethics in the shape of rational decisions, intuitions, fears or desires are invested. The first professionals were infused with the urge to contribute to optimze selling performance and industry profit but others, as William Morris and Robert Owen raised themselves above these needs and thought alternatives created by craft and socialism. Contrary to this political view, the all-pervasive and everyday dominating concept of Design, drawn heavily from art history is generally tainted with a functionalist aestheticist teleology, so that to follow the Marxist argument, focusing the ethics upon these openings briefly unchecked by the tightening grid of technocracy, requires newcritical coping concepts. We can now recall the intermingled relation between revolution and order to develop it a little further.

“Order” can be thought as an investment of language, through design and technical manipulation, from within the system to regain sense and control of experience. This orderly effort of drawing a line in the “chaos” can be defined further by another new concept. The old French concept of “Revolution”, now an orphaned concept is taken over by a kind counter-revolution or better called “meta-revolution”. Meta-revolution is a meaningful action placed over the common revolutionary events, like for instance the galloping technological development. The structure of this meta-revolutionary actions can be given by a kind of absent god in language, an imperious demand comes from a higher plane revealed by poetry or a heightened clairvoyance on processes. So, Meta-revolution is a production aimed and vertically inspired by a God/summa artis, on “openings” that comes to be perceived through the revolutionary stretching of the reality fabric fed by capital and technology. Meta-revolution is aimed at a dynamic flow of seemingly unstoppable events, and not, like the classical Gramscian concept of revolution, a hegemonic consequence aimed at a decaying systemic status, like an old political regime or better, a decaying macro-economic system. Following Heidegger, these so called “openings” are the results of the disclosure brought forth by the work of art. This conservative view can be eschewed as long as we sustain a critique into the limited role or the art world in this case and herald a wider participation of the critical mind through writing, plotting, mapping, drawing from experience in the world. The orientation of the intellectual in this effort creates an example from where to draw design investment with a political purpose for common survival.

Biography

Gonçalo Pena was born in Lisbon, 1967. He works as an Artist in various media but mainly painting, based in Lisbon and occasionally elsewhere. Recently a book was published with is drawing work in Mousse Publishing. With an extensive teaching experience. Currently his field of research in the context of a PhD, is about Design theory and politics.

a.pass: Performative Conference and Presentations - May 2015 07 May 2015
posted by: Miriam Hempel

Having trouble seeing this email? Please see the online version here
Performative Conference and Presentations 29/5 - 17.00 to 22.00h 30/5 - 12.30 to 22.00h For the full program click here Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Cecilia Molano, Sara Santos, Gosie Vervloesem & Veridiana Zurita @ Aleppo laboratory of experiments in performance and politics, in residency at Acadeémie Royale des Beaux Arts Bruxelles (ARBA-ESA) Dexia Art Centre -Schildknaapstraat/Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussel >>><<<< In the frame of Aleppo's research project ‘Back to the Order’, six artistic researchers of a.pass will discuss, perform, exhibit and share their different takes on notions of ‘order’ and its simultaneous resonances of ease and discomfort, of political rigidity and potential, of aesthetic boredom and political reconsideration. Exploring the shifting territories of an order to be reconstructed, a.pass proposes ‘volver’ as an incentive to become involved, to revolve around recurring and shared interests, to recompose history in the aftermaths of an imploded revolution. Departing from the individual projects, concepts such as the domestic, evolving identities, (the act of) display(ing) and artistic production will be approached as the shifting ground on which the idea of order and its consequences can be explored and activated. On Friday the 29th and Saturday the 30th of May, we invite you for performances, film screenings and installations, to share in the artistic research processes, participate in workshops and attend lectures and presentations by the guests of the researchers: Patricia Reed, Gonçalo Pena and Petra van Brabant. program: Samah Hijawi The Wandering Singer of Tales lecture performance This work is an exploration of the aesthetics of loss, and the images recreated - by the looser - of a place and a time that perpetuates through fragile narratives, utopic images, and nostalgic songs - tokens and emblems for preserving memory. Located in political and artistic histories around Palestine, 'The Wandering Singer of Tales' questions the temporality of images reproduced of lost places, and how these function in the present following a ruptured historical trajectory of dislocation, trauma and exile in the last century. Cecilia Molano Story Lines one-to-one performative installation Writing becomes trace. An unthinkable process of alchemy. Each word is, again, what it was before becoming a word: an image, a hesitation, a movement. Narrative melts into drawings. Life remains there, in the paper, as a footprint. The diary is an invented document: the fiction of oneself. In this work we turn back to the place of words before being articulated. This installation is an experiment in co-writing, reading and (re)creating. Philippine Hoegen Versions and Displays video installation, performative interventions Versioning - as in: regarding objects in the way they appear to us as versions of themselves - means that other versions are possible, probable. Different versions are present simultaneously and may become perceptible through a slight shift of perspective or a change in the gaze. The point of this exercise is a rearrangement of relations between things. Traits, qualities and characteristics that were assumed to be constitutive for ‘our’ of ‘their’ selves, are questioned and relativized; they may in fact simply be a consequence, an outcome, of the angle at which you are looking. This implies fluidity in the nature of relations, it destabilises presumptions and assumptions. It is a way to understand the constant flux in the order of relations between things. Undergoing (Another Version, 2015), or trying to embody (Regarding David and Dividing David, 2 performances, 2015) are ways in which I attempt to see or experience things –objects, situations, myself- from more or other sides than the given frame allows. Unraveling through history different narratives about an object constructed and deconstructed through display (The Borneo Trophy, performance, 2015) or re-ordering the display (Arena, video installation, 2015) are strategies to shift or look beyond the frame, producing different objects, or more precisely different versions: the object as a different version of itself. Sara Santos Excavate films deuses vadios (stray gods) 16mm, approx. 8', color, sound BORGES' poems (mirrors), S8, approx. 3', b&w, silent Borges' poems (heaven and hell), S8, approx. 4', b&w/color, silent Excavate (‘ekska, veit) vb excavates, excavating, excavated. 1 to remove (soil, earth etc.) by digging; dig out. 2 to make (hole or tunnel) in (solid matter) by hollowing. 3 to unearth (buried objects) methodically to discover information about the past. (C16: from L. cavãre to make hollow, from cavus hollow). The dead heroes are closer to a ruin-state than to glorious, tragic death. Putting aside the epic patina, ruin is a romantic process of decay. The hero itself is the embodiment of a zombie ideology, a living-dead, a transition. By ideology, I mean immaterial constructions (symbolic ‘texts’) that impact and condition our experience of the world, and ultimately become materialized in it. Coming back to ‘an order’ unfolds a discussion about how the common experience of a crisis (war, uprising, revolution, disaster..) becomes inscribed, or eventually, cultural. My research focusses on the left-over materials of a given crisis, on the symbolic objects of those experiences, and their trajectory towards an eventual stabilization into oblivion. How do they change into something else, or stay resilient? Resonating for decades, they appear as distortions of contexts long gone. Gosie Vervloesem Tupperware performance workshop The answer on how to cope with the chaos in our daily lives lies at the bottom of a Tupperware box. 'Recipes for Disaster / The Magazine/Tupperware Party’ cooks up crucial questions: how to argue for messy and less sterile life in times of Ebola? And, how to free ourselves from the quarantine of our own bathroom? Everybody knows Tupperware, the handy plastic boxes to store and conserve food, for eternity. 'Recipes for Disaster” uses the format of the Tupperware Party (women getting together around the kitchen table to attend demonstrations of shiny plastic boxes.) And at the same time disrupts the idea that everything can be nicely stored away. Veridiana Zurita Televizinho #1 talk For 3 months I have been working together with a riverside community in the Amazon on re-enactments of Brazilian soap operas. I spent 3 days with each family and used their house as the studio for filming. Eating what they eat, sleeping as they do, watching what we watch: soaps. Every night we looked at the soap and picked a scene to re-enact the next day. While re-enacting different logics of appropriation were inaugurated. The way soaps seem to order language and physicality were disturbed by those re-enacting it. During a talk I will share some of the footage, the working methodologies, the context and ideas around the first edition of this ongoing project. workshops & lectures >>><<<< Petra Van Brabandt Disruption is still to come table talk - Fri 7pm The disruptive movements of the last years were hardly a threat to the state of order. They might be the first signals of a disruption to come; therefore to entertain the idea of 'back to an order' is far too precocious, even pernicious to the imaginative process of unworking the order. I want to focus in this table-conversation on the order of Fort Europe, which hasn't been radically contested. Our obsessions with order and stability seem to warrant the mass grave outside our safety gates. This is the horror of order showing its face, again. Inspired by the work of Gosie Vervloessem, I want to compare Fort Europa to the dynamics of fear of the kitchen, and question its order, hygiene, productivity and purpose. >>><<<< Patricia Reed Mobile Orders lecture - Sat 4.45pm ‘Order’ in and of itself, is a structural proposition in which sets of functions, behaviours, relations and norms can play out (while making other operations impossible or extremely difficult to carry out). Within the ‘social’, order is largely cultural, meaning productively artificial, subject to infinite mutability. So to demand ‘order’ is not (necessarily) to seek to submit oneself to relations of authoritarian dominance, but to seize upon structural possibilities as a project for construction. ‘Order’, in this way, is mobilised as an affirmative project - a freedom to construct new systems of cohabitation (rather than simply a freedom from something). read more >>><<<< Gonçalo Pena Drawing Askew Master Class - Sat 12.30 to 3.30pm Within a conscious danger of falling back into romanticist politics and trying to avoid this trap, I would take this idea of an ethical or even several ethical lines to think drawing as one of the tools we have to challenge politics of smoothing and soothing the collective body onto mindless consumerism. It is important to state that this collective body has still a human multitudinous and restless soul, from which the annoying and frequent twitches call for permanent police vigilance. Moreover this body comes from the box including with it technology and complete ecosystems. So it comes the time where this soul struggles and seem itself forced to draw her painful lines of choice, discovery, recovery of concepts and criticism. read more
a.pass p/a de Bottelarij Delaunoystraat 58-60/p.o. box 17 1080 Brussels/Belgium tel: +32 (0)2 411.49.16 email: info@apass.be web: www.apass.be

conference

end presentation

performative publishing

postgraduate program

Volver

volver program 06 May 2015
posted by: Elke van Campenhout

aleppo.eu

29 May 2015

30 May 2015

FRIDAY 17.00-22.00

17.00-end: Video installations: ‘Excavate’ by Sara Santos, ‘Arena’ by Philippine Hoegen

17.30-19.00: ‘Story Lines’ one-to-one performative installation by Cecilia Molano

18.00-18.30: Welcoming

18.30-19.00: ‘Tupperware’ performance workshop by Gosie Vervloesem, food introduction

19.00-19.45: ‘Disruption is still to come’, table discussion with Petra Van Brabandt

19.45-20.00: Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods) 16mm film by Sara Santos

20.00-20.30: Break

20.30-21.30: ‘Televizinho #1’ talk by Veridiana Zurita

21.30-21.45: ‘Another Version’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

after: Bar Talks

SATURDAY 12.30-23.00

12.30-15.30: ‘Drawing Askew’ Master class/workshop by Gonçalo Pena

14.00-end: Ongoing video installations ‘Excavate’ by Sara Santos, ‘Arena’ by Philippine Hoegen. Documentation installations by Gosie Vervloessem and Cecilia Molano

16.00- 16.15: Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods) 16mm film by Sara Santos

16.15-16.45: ‘Borneo Trophy’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

16.45-17.30: ‘Mobile Orders’ lecture by Patricia Reed

17.30-18.00: Break

18.00-18.30: ‘Regarding David’ performance by Philippine Hoegen

18.30-19.30: 'The Wandering Singer of Tales’ lecture performance by Samah Hijawi

19.30-20.00: Break

20.00-20.15: Screening ‘Screening ‘deuses vadios’ (stray gods)’ 16mm film by Sara Santos

20.15-20.30: ‘Dividing David’ performance and participative installation by Philippine Hoegen, with Kristien Van Den Brande

20.45-21.45: Discussion with guests and participants

22.00 END

end presentation

performative publishing

postgraduate program

Volver

VOLVER 06 May 2015
posted by: Elke van Campenhout

Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Cecilia Molano, Sara Santos, Gosie Vervloessem and Veridiana Zurita

aleppo.eu

29 May 2015

30 May 2015

performative conference and presentations by

SAMAH HIJAWI, PHILIPPINE HOEGEN,
CECILIA MOLANO, SARA SANTOS,
GOSIE VERVLOESEM & VERIDIANA ZURITA

29 (5-10pm) - 30/5 (12.30-11pm)

(click here for detailed program)

@ Aleppo - Dexia Art Centre - Schildknaapstraat/Rue de l’Ecuyer 50, 1000 Brussel

For Volver, a.pass is a guest at Aleppo, a laboratory of experiments in performance and politics, in residency at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts Bruxelles

In the frame of Aleppo's research project ‘Back to the Order’, six artistic researchers of a.pass will discuss, perform, exhibit and share their different takes on notions of ‘order’ and its simultaneous resonances of ease and discomfort, of political rigidity and potential, of aesthetic boredom and political reconsideration. Exploring the shifting territories of an order to be reconstructed, a.pass proposes ‘volver’ as an incentive to become involved, to revolve around recurring and shared interests, to recompose history in the aftermaths of an imploded revolution.

Departing from our individual projects we will dive into our researches, and approach concepts such as the domestic, evolving identities, (the act of) display(ing) and artistic production as the shifting ground on which the idea of order and its consequences can be explored and activated.

On Friday the 29th and Saturday the 30th of May, we invite you for performances, film screenings and installations, to share in the artistic research processes, participate in workshops and attend lectures and presentations by the guests of the researchers: Patricia Reed, Gonçalo Pena and Petra van Brabant.

program:

SAMAH HIJAWI
THE WANDERING SINGER OF TALES

performance lecture

This work is an exploration of the aesthetics of loss, and the images recreated - by the looser - of a place and a time that perpetuates through fragile narratives, utopic images, and nostalgic songs - tokens and emblems for preserving memory. Located in political and artistic histories around Palestine, 'The Wandering Singer of Tales' questions the temporality of images reproduced of lost places, and how these function in the present following a ruptured historical trajectory of dislocation, trauma and exile in the last century.

>>><<<<

CECILIA MOLANO
STORY LINES

one-to-one performative installation

Writing becomes trace. An unthinkable process of alchemy. Each word is, again, what it was before becoming a word: an image, a hesitation, a movement.

Narrative melts into drawings. Life remains there, in the paper, as a footprint. The diary is an invented document: the fiction of oneself.

In this work we turn back to the place of words before being articulated.

This installation is an experiment in co-writing, reading and (re)creating.

>>><<<<

PHILIPPINE HOEGEN
VERSIONS AND DISPLAYS

Video Installation, Performative Interventions

Versioning - as in: regarding objects in the way they appear to us as versions of themselves - means that other versions are possible, probable. Different versions are present simultaneously and may become perceptible through a slight shift of perspective or a change in the gaze. The point of this exercise is a rearrangement of relations between things. Traits, qualities and characteristics that were assumed to be constitutive for ‘our’ of ‘their’ selves, are questioned and relativized; they may in fact simply be a consequence, an outcome, of the angle at which you are looking. This implies fluidity in the nature of relations, it destabilises presumptions and assumptions. It is a way to understand the constant flux in the order of relations between things.

Undergoing (Another Version, 2015), or trying to embody (Regarding David and Dividing David, 2 performances, 2015) are ways in which I attempt to see or experience things –objects, situations, myself- from more or other sides than the given frame allows. Unraveling through history different narratives about an object constructed and deconstructed through display (The Borneo Trophy, performance, 2015) or re-ordering the display (Arena, video installation, 2015) are strategies to shift or look beyond the frame, producing different objects, or more precisely different versions: the object as a different version of itself.

>>><<<<

SARA SANTOS
EXCAVATE

films

Excavate (‘ekska, veit) vb excavates, excavating, excavated. 1 to remove (soil, earth etc.) by digging; dig out. 2 to make (hole or tunnel) in (solid matter) by hollowing. 3 to unearth (buried objects) methodically to discover information about the past. (C16: from L. cavãre to make hollow, from cavus hollow).

The dead heroes are closer to a ruin-state than to glorious, tragic death. Putting aside the epic patina, ruin is a romantic process of decay. The hero itself is the embodiment of a zombie ideology, a living-dead, a transition. By ideology, I mean immaterial constructions (symbolic ‘texts’) that impact and condition our experience of the world, and ultimately become materialized in it.

Coming back to ‘an order’ unfolds a discussion about how the common experience of a crisis (war, uprising, revolution, disaster..) becomes inscribed, or eventually, cultural. My research focusses on the left-over materials of a given crisis, on the symbolic objects of those experiences, and their trajectory towards an eventual stabilization into oblivion.

How do they change into something else, or stay resilient? Resonating for decades, they appear as distortions of contexts long gone.

>>><<<<

GOSIE VERVLOESEM
TUPPERWARE

performance workshop

The answer on how to cope with the chaos in our daily lives lies at the bottom of a Tupperware box. 'Recipes for Disaster / The Magazine/Tupperware Party’ cooks up crucial questions: how to argue for messy and less sterile life in times of Ebola? And, how to free ourselves from the quarantine of our own bathroom?

Everybody knows Tupperware, the handy plastic boxes to store and conserve food, for eternity. 'Recipes for Disaster” uses the format of the Tupperware Party (women getting together around the kitchen table to attend demonstrations of shiny plastic boxes.) And at the same time disrupts the idea that everything can be nicely stored away.

>>><<<<

VERIDIANA ZURITA
TELEVIZINHO #1

Talk

For 3 months I have been working together with a riverside community in the Amazon on re-enactments of Brazilian soap operas. I spent 3 days with each family and used their house as the studio for filming. Eating what they eat, sleeping as they do, watching what we watch: soaps. Every night we looked at the soap and picked a scene to re-enact the next day. While re-enacting different logics of appropriation were inaugurated. The way soaps seem to order language and physicality were disturbed by those re-enacting it.

During a talk I will share some of the footage, the working methodologies, the context and ideas around the first edition of this ongoing project.

workshops & lectures

>>><<<<

PATRICIA REED
MOBILE ORDERS

lecture - Sat 4.45pm

‘Order’ in and of itself, is a structural proposition in which sets of functions, behaviours, relations and norms can play out (while making other operations impossible or extremely difficult to carry out). Within the ‘social’, order is largely cultural, meaning productively artificial, subject to infinite mutability. So to demand ‘order’ is not (necessarily) to seek to submit oneself to relations of authoritarian dominance, but to seize upon structural possibilities as a project for construction. ‘Order’, in this way, is mobilised as an affirmative project - a freedom to construct new systems of cohabitation (rather than simply a freedom from something). read more

>>><<<<

GONÇALO PENA
DRAWING ASKEW

Master Class - Sat 12.30 to 3.30pm

Within a conscious danger of falling back into romanticist politics and trying to avoid this trap, I would take this idea of an ethical or even several ethical lines to think drawing as one of the tools we have to challenge politics of smoothing and soothing the collective body onto mindless consumerism. It is important to state that this collective body has still a human multitudinous and restless soul, from which the annoying and frequent twitches call for permanent police vigilance. Moreover this body comes from the box including with it technology and complete ecosystems. So it comes the time where this soul struggles and seem itself forced to draw her painful lines of choice, discovery, recovery of concepts and criticism. read more

>>><<<<

PETRA VAN BRABANDT
DISRUPTION IS STILL TO COME.

table talk - Fri 7pm

The disruptive movements of the last years were hardly a threat to the state of order. They might be the first signals of a disruption to come; therefore to entertain the idea of 'back to an order' is far too precocious, even pernicious to the imaginative process of unworking the order. I want to focus in this table-conversation on the order of Fort Europe, which hasn't been radically contested. Our obsessions with order and stability seem to warrant the mass grave outside our safety gates. This is the horror of order showing its face, again. Inspired by the work of Gosie Vervloessem, I want to compare Fort Europa to the dynamics of fear of the kitchen, and question its order, hygiene, productivity and purpose

postgraduate program

research center

a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.

2012 BLOCK I 01 January 2012
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 January 2012

13 April 2012

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
Catherine (Clé) Lé
Elise Goldstein
Elizabeth Ward
Fleur Ordoukhani
Frank Pay
Ive Leemans
Jaime Llopis
Oshin Albrecht
Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
Sara Dandois
Simon Loeffler
Vicente Arlandis

Research End Presentations

Caroline Daish
Doris Stelzer
Margareth Kaserer
Marilyne Grimmer

Partners

Thematics/Les Bains
Triennal Hasselt
PAF Performance Art Forum

Contributors for workshops

Akira Hino Sensei
Alexander Schellow
Annu Pennanen
David Bergé
Deufert & Plischke
Einat Tuchman
Eleanora Sovrani
Kobe Matthys
Lilia Mestre
Nicolas Galeazzi
Stephane Querrec
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Elke van Campenhout
Lilia Mestre

Mentors

Marie de Brugerolle
Nicolas Galeazzi
Robert Steijn
Vladimir Miller

17 - 20 / 01 / 2012

‘WHAT’S THE CASE ?’
(methodological warm-up)
workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Lilia Mestre

This workshop is questioning the basic gestures of your artistic research.
In the search for descriptions of their methodologies, artistic researchers are developing an infinite spectrum of phrases, idioms and other grammatical constructs, to filter out the basic gesture of their own practice.
Understanding individual research as “cases” possibly enfolding fan of possibilities, and the artistic choices taken within the case as the specific politics of your research, in these four research days, we try to get an overview of this spectrum and discuss this range of approaches to artistic research in relation to your own ‘case'.

01-04 / 02 / 2012

‘DIGITAL CRIMINAL’
workshop by David Bergé

What is an analogue experience in relation to a digital one?
In this workshop we will explore together notions as the possible, the virtual and the potential in relation to the analogue versus the digital. How to define the choice for a digital or analogue process and what are its consequences towards an outcome and audience experience?
On the table will be 'On the Superiority of the Analogue' by Brian Massumi and videoworks by Michael Snow, Derek Jarman, Holis Frampton, as well as 70’s land art projects and their documentation, such as 'seven winter midday shadows' by Hamish Fulton and the documentary of 'spiral jetty', made by Robert Smithson himself,… as well as photographic projects by Edmund Engelman, Mike Mandel, Larry sultan and Jon Rafman.
Goal of the workshop is to define our own practice through what is on the table.

23-27 / 01 / 2012

‘AKIRA HINO SENSEI’
master class

Akira Hino Sensei is a master of budo, an ancient Japanese martial art, who worked -between others- with the Forsythe Company, where he has regularly given workshops since 2005. His lessons have greatly influenced both their own work and that of the Forsythe Company. For a week Akira Hino Sensei will focus on feeling the body with the aim of connecting up to movement, both one's own and that of the other. Budo is therefore a way of exploring the body and developing physical communication skills.

28 - 31 / 01 / 2012

‘EMERGENCE ROOM’
workshop by Deufert&Plischke in Hasselt

Emergence Room is a live-workspace, where all participants (performers and spectators) join to work in silence on pre-set themes. The workspace is built temporarily into an existing environment like a museum, a festival center, an academy, a retail store. The work-process is based on a circular structure of passing on containers of material. Its procedures are proliferation and reformulation in order to create topologies and maps that are related to the underlying theme. These topologies and maps serve as a common denominator for projects that will be individually developed, not by an individuum (a singular author), but individually as a project in the co-authorship of reformulation. The theme of the Emergence Room in Hasselt will be the myth of Arachne. It focuses on the difference between art and craft, symbolism and realism, doing as if and doing in the here and now. Athene weaves carpets that show the glorious deeds of the gods, Arachne weaves the everydayness of the relationship of humans and gods and its brutality. The figure of Arachne bares and exposes lots of topics and questions still relevant and unanswered in our time. What is the responsibility of the artist? What do we risk with art? How do we judge art works? How can artists and critiques coexist and collaborate?
During the four days workshop all participants will work together on these topics and questions and formulate and proliferate material, create story boards together, that will later be exposed in the Emergence Room Hasselt in the frame of the exhibition SuperBodies (Hasselt Triennale).

06 - 28 / 02 / 2012

‘THE SETTLEMENT: ALIEN LOGIC’
working space by Vladimir Miller

The settlement is a model to engender and structure work, knowledge, events and encounters. In a shared space, the participants function as an open group where questions of territory, negotiation and hospitality in art production surface. Settlers build a station suitable for their own artistic research and, by doing so, enter in a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas and events. The settlement allows negotiating many gradations of participation and influence; it also provides different modes of engagement between inside and outside. A settler can leave, a visitor becomes a tourist, a frequent visitor can eventually settle in the space. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement praxis actively searches for a spatialized production of dis-agreement. This Settlement is the 5th in a series of Settlements, developed within or outside of the a.pass context. The guiding principle of the Settlement this time is ‘Alien Logic’.

27 / 02 - 2 / 03 / 2012

‘MICRO HISTORIES / 1 / OPENING WEEK’
workshop by Thematics/Les Bains

Curated by Lilia Mestre/Les Bains with invited artists Eleanora Sovrani (it/be), Einat Tuchman (is/be), Annu Pennanen (fi) and Stephane Querrec (fr) and Kobe Matthys (be), Micro Histories researches the processes of documentation and presentation of the ‘Micro Histories’ collected in four different Brussels areas: Vilvoorde, St Joost, Brussels Center (EEC quarter) and Forest. We aim to investigate, challenge and discuss cultural phenomena and their construction through field research. During the opening week the participants of the Thematics and the participants of a.pass meet to lay out the themes that are driving this research: what is the sense of history? what kind of methodologies do we use to register ‘what has happened’? How do we create our own histories, or make history appear where it is not considered likely to be found? What is field research and how do we set up a valid research environment on location? This workshop is the introduction to the His/Herstory workshop, during which these strategies are put to the test in individual research field trajectories.

05 - 09 / 03 / 2012

‘MICRO HISTORIES / 2 / HIS/HER STORY’
workshop by Alexander Schellow

The second week of the Micro Histories workshop offers the opportunity to all participants to develop an individual history project, choosing their own location in Brussels, working on practice based field research, together with artist Alexander Schellow. In his work, which is located between artistic and scientific research-practice, he follows different strategies to translate fictions and questions into concrete narrations – as films, interventions, installations, drawing-series or spatial performance concepts. Narrations that one literally finds on the street.
One keyword here is: practice. Not seen in the constructed and fairly imprecise dualism of practical versus theoretical, this becomes a very relevant term as well as concept. How can a practice (of observation, recording) be framed methodologically in different ways, in order to make it (and not just: combine it with) a tool of reflection? The workshop aims to trigger your own concepts and practices to react in their specific way on the above-mentioned questions/problematics. We will develop individual starting points for projects and follow them at least for a few first steps. In central group discussions those experiences and case studies will be shared and questioned with regard to methodology as well as content.

19-23 / 03 / 2012

‘THE WALK - PREPARATION’
preparation for a walking workshop by Elke Van Campenhout

In preparation of a month long walking workshop on mobile archiving/narrativizing the landscape, interested participants share for one week the development of possible walking scores, the fabrication and reconstruction of traces, and the possibilities of urban/non-urban routes. Every day we test out another walking score, and try to get further into the philosophy and reality of a walking workshop.

10 - 13 / 04 / 2012

‘SPECIAL EFFECT MANUAL’
workshop by Lynda Gaudreau

This workshop is above all a research space around scores and working themes such as, speed, accidents and precision. Lynda Gaudreau's partitions constitute environments, "maps " integrating scenography, light, sound and relevant activities. The partitions include activities totally unrealistic, impossible to accomplish but that must be resolved at very precise moments. These scores open to a multitude of strategies to execute the tasks and generate what so called "side effects”. The workshop will be divided in two parts : conceptual and practical and participants will elaborate scores in a collaborative process. Open to choreographers, composers, visual artists interested in producing "special effects" in their works.

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Open Call