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Amy Pickles /1


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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      Gary Farrelly / It is official policy to appear unmoved

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


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


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


      Bio

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


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      Inga Gerner Nielsen / THiS INSTiTUTE

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

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


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

       


      Bio

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


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      amy pickles / Chantal and Timothy 

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


      Timothy

      made with George Chinnery and many others

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


      Chantal

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

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


      References

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


      Bio

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


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      Jimena Pérez Salerno / Unproductive will

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


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


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


      Bio

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


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      Frédéric Van de Velde

      Bio

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

       

    • conference
    • On Coloniality Chloë Janssens, Amy Pickles and Túlio Rosa
      18 October 2021
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • KBK Brussels
    • On Coloniality
       
      Date: 10-13th of November 2021
      Location: KBK Brussels, Boulevard d'Ypres 20, Sainte Catherine, Brussels
       
      ‘On Coloniality’ is a proposition by a.pass participants Chloë Janssens, Amy Pickles and Túlio Rosa of a temporary context for collective study. Through different artistic and theoretical speculations we will study coloniality and its manifold dimensions.
      Our understanding of coloniality departs from ideas developed first by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, and later expanded by many others, such as the semiotician Walter Mignolo and feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. Coloniality is an idea that points to the modes of organisation of power in so-called colonized territories, and how this extends out into supposedly postcolonial states. It differentiates colonialism, as a historical process, from its legacies. We have been thinking about ways to describe how the colonial rationale is at the very basis of our modes of social and political organisation, how those supposed histories have collapsed into, resonate with, and form our present.

      There is a shared desire between the three of us to learn how to articulate coloniality through artistic practices. Our collaboration has grown out of our individual motivations to discuss and re-narrate the colonial practices of the countries where we were born -  Belgium, Brazil, UK - and challenge the dominant narratives that compose these histories.
       
      We are drawing connections between different times and locations by following closely methods of appropriation and extraction of land, resources, labour and data. Through different artistic practices we want to draw parallels, observe symmetries and find correlations across colonialism as it exists across all aspects of our lives; institutionally, economically, in corporations, governance, everyday structures of living and our bodies.
       
      ‘On Coloniality’ will be hosted in KBK, an alternative space near Saint Cathrine, in Brussels. It is a porous programme open to the public. An exhibition will host the programme that consists of reading and listening sessions, screenings, a performance, workshops, public conversations and discussions.
       
      The full programme can be downloaded here: https://we.tl/t-3HCh0e58Fj
       
       
      Public Programme
       
      Day 1: Wednesday November 10th, Positioning ourselves.
      11-13h: Visit to the Institute of Colonial Culture
      15h: Presentation of the programme
      16h: Presentation of the publication: Who’s still doing minimal design? A conversation between Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Chloe Janssens
      17h-18:30h: Helena Vieira [Listening Session]
      18:30h: Open conversation
       
      Day 2: Thursday November 11th, Accountability, Extraction and Ownership
      11-13h: Elodie Mugrefya [workshop]
      15h: Presentation Vermeir & Heiremans
      15:45: Presentation Line Algoed
      16:30: Open conversation with Vermeir & Heiremans and Line Algoed
      19h-21h: Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano [workshop]
       
      Day 3: Friday November 12th, Counter Narratives and Remembering Otherwise
      11h-13h: Visit Art and History Museum and reading of 'Curar o Mundo', by Glicéria Tupinambá
      14h: Presentation Sami Hammana
      14:45h: Presentation Satch Hoyt
      15:30h: Open conversation with Sami Hammana and Satch Hoyt
      20 - 22:30h: Arquivo Atlântico Film screenings at Pianofabriek: Rue du Fort 35, 1060 Saint Gilles, Brussels
       
      Day 4: Saturday November 13th, Alternative Relatings to (and through) identity, borders and knowledge redistribution
      11h-14h: WORKNOT! X Sarmad [workshop]
      15h: Presentation Daniela Ortiz
      15:45h: Presentation Saddie Choua
      16:30h: Open conversation with Daniela Ortiz and Saddie Choua
      20h: Satch Hoyt [Sound Performance]
       
       
      The programme is open to anyone who wants to learn collectively about coloniality and artistic practices, who wants to engage in a conversation around this theme. Registration is not necessary. The website of a.pass will have the latest updates on time and locations.
       
      KBK has a wide entrance directly from the main street. There are no steps to enter the building. There is one toilet at the back of the space, on the same level. The space is illuminated with strip lighting on the ceiling, and a number of screen based artworks will be in the space. Hot drinks will be available for free, and there is access to drinking water. We will host a self made seating structure on which you are welcome to sit or lie down on.
       
      If you have questions on accessibility and/or the programme, you can reach us on the following email addresses: Chloë: chloejanssens@protonmail.com, Amy: amymaypickles@gmail.com, Túlio: rosa.tulio@hotmail.com

       

       
    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • Cracks and Containers Gathering on coloniality
      11 May 2021
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Amy Pickles, Chloé Janssens, Túlio Rosa
    • a.pass
    • 15 May 2021
    • 15 May 2021
    • yes
    • Cracks and Containers
      Cracks and Containers is a small gathering organised by Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens and Túlio Rosa, it will take place on the 15th of May at a.pass from 12h to 18:30h. More than a place for presentations, it is thought about as a space to engage in dialogues and conversations, to allow thoughts and questions to emerge, to cross, combine, to be put in tension or to be desintegrated for a little while.

      Cracks and Containers proposes to address questions around the notion of coloniality in relation to artistic practices, trying to understand what it might mean, what are the processes it includes, what images it produces or evokes, what dynamics it sustains. The desire being to understand how artistic practices, looking both to the past and to the future, can help us to navigate the present; how can we acknowledge our present with the urgency and criticality it demands. They want to do this together, by being inspired, challenged, contradicted, embraced, transformed.

      Cracks and Containers hosts: Quinsy Gario, Saddie Choua, Sami Hammana, Sophie Deckers and Kristien Van den Brande , Amy Pickles, Choe Janssens and Túlio Rosa.

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      The word container came from a lunch box, during one of their first meetings to organise this working group. In the middle of jokes, they realised that containers – as artificially made objects that 'hold' things for a while or give support to something that moves from one moment to another – were an interesting image to the kind of intentions they had: to create temporary situations that allowed us to hold questions that trouble us. The containers imagined are ephemeral, precarious, but have the possibility to host a kind of collective inside – collective ideas, collective practices, collective conversations, collective bodies – a collective such as the one we propose to congure with you, during our day-long gathering at a.pass.

      A crack in your container is not usually advisable, but we are seeking them nonetheless. A crack can provide an unusual path in and out, cracks can also offer a view to somewhere else, they remind us of the possibility of connection with something that lies outside the 'here', something that might be on the otherside, being otherwise.

      Together, cracks and containers hold, and release, a small constellation of ideas. They can sustain and support the movement of something from one place to another, they can allow for unexpected formations, shifts and slippage.

       




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