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

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



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


       

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

      Collective Channeling is co-curated with Simone Basani.

       


       

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






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

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

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

    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • End Communications 07 September 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov
    • a.pass
    • 15 September 2023
    • 16 September 2023
    • End Communications

      In-between researcher and research, one finds:

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       


       

       

      Marian Rosa van Bodegraven

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

       

      Alyssa Gersony

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

       

      Marko Gutić Mižimakov

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

       

      Andrea Brandão

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

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

       

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

       


       

      Programme

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      -break- drinks available, 4th Floor

       

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

       

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

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

       

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

       


       

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

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

       

      Collaborators:

       

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

       

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

       

      Co-curator:

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

       

      → DATES&TIMES

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

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

      →HOW TO JOIN

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

       

      ANNA NOWICKA ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

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

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

       

       

      ABOUT ANNA NOWICKA

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

      more: https://annanowicka.com/


      ABOUT THE CONTEXT/INVITATION 

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

       

      ACESSIBILITY

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

       

    • The table is set. 

      What is here is there. What is not here is somewhere, someone is doing something. 

       

      Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrović, Aslı Hatipoğlu and Nada Gambier invite you on a guided tour of wandering, exploring time, invisible structures, in-betweens, tastes of intimacy, heritage, abrasion, fermentation and reparation that ripple through space to mark the end of their research trajectory at a.pass. 

       

      There will be food, performances, boredom and a spa. 


      DAY PROGRAM

      2nd of June

      9h30 welcome

      10h-17h working shift 1 (with Nada Gambier)

       

      3rd of June

      12h30 welcome

      13h-17h working shift 2 (with Nada Gambier)

       

      EVENING PROGRAM (2 & 3 June: same program)

      17h30  doors open

       

      18h  sign up activities: green room (Nada Gambier) 

                                          6 slots for 2 persons every 10 min

       

                                          time item - publication (Martin Sieweke)    

                                         

                                          foot massage (Aslı Hatipoğlu)

                                          1 slot for 20 persons

       

                                          where: sign up on the 4th floor                                    

       

      19h  entrée (Martina Petrović)

              where: dining table 4th floor

              

              cirrendering - performance / sound installation ( Martin Sieweke & Josephine Stamer)

              where: 4th floor

       

      20h  dinner (Martina Petrović & Aslı Hatipoğlu)

              where: dining table 4th floor

       

             yeast invasion - lecture performance/ installation (Aslı Hatipoğlu) 

             where: 4th floor

       

      21h  dessert (Martina Petrović)

             where: dining table 4th floor

       

             sign up activities: green room (Nada Gambier) 

                                          6 slots for 2 persons every 10 min

       

                                          time item publication (Martin Sieweke)    

                                         

                                          beer spa - walk-in installation (Aslı Hatipoğlu)

                                          max. 8 persons at a time

                                         

                                          foot massage (Aslı Hatipoğlu)

                                          2 slots for 20 persons every 20 min

       

                                          where: sign up on the 4th floor 

       

       


       

      Aslı Hatipoğlu (TH/TR) 

      Aslı Hatipoğlu is an interdisciplinary artist and a self-taught chef who uses food as a focal point to investigate interwoven themes of psychology, science, political ecology, ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and mental health. Her work is influenced by her background growing up with a migrant Thai mother in Turkey where her father had a tourism agency. Asli curates participatory dinners that shed light on food history as well as question how climate change, agricultural politics and current technological developments are changing our contact with food. Through lecture performances with a pinch of satire, Asli brings a critical perspective on the definition of words such as ‘locality’ as a means to re-define them in the complexity of systems. As an antidote to nationalism, she proposes fermentation practices to raise questions around cultural history, locality, tourism and the dogma of economic necessity. Asli believes in the power of psycho-somatic relation to food. She creates interactive installations that bring a layer of humor around self, perception and deception. 

      Through physical engagement with her work, Asli tries to find the boundaries of one’s self with the ‘other’ in a visually appealing setting where questions around disgust are raised. She is interested in how architecture and ecology play a role in her fermentation experiments and how (or if) the space for making/cultivating/brewing influences the way people experience consumption. In addition, her questions around community-building around shared bacterias and yeasts set the tone around social structures, like dining together. Where are the boundaries of the mouth as an organ that lets other living organisms from another person in? Is there a common language that speaks to a consumer in order to convince them into consumption? Taking inspiration from commercial advertising techniques,  Asli pushes the audience to re-question what, how and why we eat what we eat. She likes to engage the audience in food production systems to challenge a technological advancement that erases human presence in food production. 

      Asli’s research presentation consists of lecture performance yeast invasion, combined with a guided installation where her bacterial and yeast collaborators will invite people into a massage parlour that mixes receiving and giving touch, with the brewing of a collective fermented drink. A beer making demonstration takes people along the history of the special Senne valley which hosts the famous “Brettanomyces bruxellensis”, in the past 20 years also known as a wine maker’s worst nightmare. A spa invites people to relax into leftovers of the beer making and think about the outer body experience while sipping the special Belgian lambic brewed by the artist in a conversational set-up.

       

      Bio

      Aslı Hatipoğlu (TR/TH, 1990) is a textile culinary artist based in Brussels and Amsterdam. Her work often relates to topics such as ecology and sustainability and the challenges it imposes on our daily lives in complex systems of consumption. She is interested in science and what it can offer as well as the dangers it imposes (such as domination over nature and genetic modifications) that bring ethical questions towards our future as species. Through investigating ancestral knowledge with a community building approach, Asli is also interested in fusing diversity of her knowledge among her experiments in different environments. She often creates interactive installations, video work or uses performative storytelling through conceptual dinners as a way to bring topics of her interest forward.

      After working several years as a self-taught chef, Asli deepened her knowledge with fermentation during her residency at the Food Lab Jan van Eyck Academie 2020-2021, along participating in several festivals such as Food Art Film Festival JVE (NL), Foodculture Days Vevey (CH), Oerol Terschelling (NL), Japanese Knotweed Festival at Mediamatic (NL) and Zamus Theaterhaus Cologne (DE) . Her works were exhibited in places such as Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen, Framer Framed in Amsterdam, Fanfare Amsterdam, Perdu Amsterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht.

       


      Special thanks to: Martina Petrović, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Martin Flugelman Olmeda, Elli Vassalou and many others for thinking, listening and advising me through this a.pass trajectory.

       


       

      Martin Sieweke (DE) 

      Martin Sieweke researches how the use of materials and objects can be prolonged, extended and reformulated in different ways. He proposes a multi-layered relationality, in which the given (the context, the conditions, already existing materials and familiar objects) influences and contributes as a dispositive.


      It’s about searching for affections, altering the use context, exchanging components: to not only consume materials away but to stay and remain close to them. It’s about acknowledging the multiple while reaching for the specific. It’s about structuring a process as a relational response. To follow Erin Manning’s thought in her book The Minor Gesture (Thought in the Act), it’s about implementing the context and its very specific configuration, which influences processes not yet condensed into a form:, “(...) it begins with the in-act and embraces the force of the what-else at the heart of all speculative pragmatisms”.

       

      In the evening, Martin presents cirrendering (working title), a sound installation in collaboration with Josephine Stamer. It consists of a former vinyl player reduced to its basic operation. Amplified structures, alterations and repetitive textures will dissolve over time, as emerging traces are finding their multidirectional and conversational negotiation in a circular and sonic form.

      TIME ITEM is a research publication by Martin Sieweke that gathers text, images and soft proposals around bag making, reuse and repairment. 

       

      Bio

      Martin Sieweke works as an accessory maker and scenographer/costume designer between Brussels, Berlin and Stockholm. He often works with found objects and materials by detaching them from their intentional use context. He is interested in engaging with materials in a way that differs from a close link between artistic production and consumption, to structure creative processes more as a relational response.

      www.martinsieweke.com

       

      performance: Martin Sieweke, Josephine Stamer

      Special thanks to: Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrović , Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Hannah Krebs, Mary Szydlowska, Tatsuya Inuikawa, May Abnet




       

      Martina Petrović (SER)

      Martina Petrović’s research focuses on how we, Western and Eastern European society, deal with complex socially generated emotions such as grief and love. How do we face the inevitable loss of parts of our culture and humanity, due to the crisis and disappearance of species and environments, abandonment and fast replacement of technologies and ways of living. And how do we find joy and moments in these circumstances?

      Her sense of misplacement and need to have a strong connection with her culture is amplified with her residing in Belgium for the past 5.5 years. She gravitates towards connecting her artistic interests with traditions and rituals stemming from her Balkan roots. She investigates women’s sacred rituals, handwork, symbols and creativity and their legacy in modern culture and common everyday practices.

      Martina proposes looking deep into our roots, finding strength in the past and support in our surroundings as a way to move forward, to create new rituals and new ways of being. They might enable us to transition from fearing the future and present, and move us towards reconnecting and exploring different ways of forming bonds and relating to each other.

      In the evening Martina proposes gathering around the table, there will be food for the stomach and for the thoughts, shared energy and hopefully sparks of magic. The dinner table has its own politics, how one sets it influences the conversation around it. It can generate questions, introduce different ways of composing a menu, and explore the tools we use. It can unveil the social structures that make the table possible, sometimes unexpected flavors appear on one’s plate and many other delicious subjects can surface on it.

      It will be an evening of celebration, with welcomings, conversation starters, and a format to practice openings and goodbyes. Come as a friend - excited to share our a.pass trajectory. Come as a wanderer - craving to have a taste of each of our practices. Come as a fellow researcher - curious to engage with questioning, rethinking and transforming art research. Come light, with an empty stomach, with an open heart. Come unprepared but ready to engage with different flavors that work together producing unexpected combinations. Come willing to leave some time for digesting processes. 

      We will gather 3 times around the table. Please join on time, celebration waits for no one, it has its own rhythm. The entrée will be served at 19h. The main course is prepared in collaboration with masterful food explorer Asli Hatipoglu and will be shared at 20h. At 21h we will meet for the final gathering before we disperse into our separate celebrative trajectories.

       

      Bio 

      Martina is currently the art coordinator of art space Hectolitre, Brussels. She is a part of two active collectives, School of love (Brussels) and Garden of Delights(Gent). Her recent artistic projects are: Where do we go from here? (2023), Brussels, Gent, The Last Straw (2020-2022),Gent, Antwerp, Brussels, Belgrade, Moerdijk sculpture project (2022), Belgium, EcoSuites residency (2022), Greece, Terrestrial Odditties II, Belgrade (2021), BUZZ project on Ostavinska gallery, Belgrade (2019); Terrestrial Oddities, HBKsaar, Saarbrucken, Germany (2019).

      https://cargocollective.com/TheLastStraw

       

      Special thanks to: Asli Hatipoglu, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Jana Vasiljevic, Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Irena Radmanovic, Petar Sarjanovic, Hijene, Mladen Bundalo, Lucia Palladino, Adva Zakai, Renata Turkes, Gorana Bacevac, Hectolitre community, SOL, GOD, BOSCH, Common Wallet, Emptor/Caveat, Kunsthal and many others for thinking, feeling and being with me through this a.pass trajectory.

       


       

       

      Nada Gambier (FIN / FR)

      At the heart of Nada Gambier’s current artistic research practice is the concept of gentle trespassing. For Nada this is a tool for relationality. Gentle trespassing rests on the premise that crossing separations between people, things and contexts is both a necessity and a pleasure. It stems from a belief that the walls we erect around ourselves and our work should be un-hygienically permeable, implying that trouble and mess are part of the process. Practicing gentle trespassing requires collaboration, listening, flirting with gray zones and instability, revealing confinement, enclosure and accepting disagreement and structured cacophony as grounds for progress. To frame durational proposals Nada works with the idea of working shifts. 

       

      Working shift 1

      In this shift gentle trespassing is practiced between ideas, practices and questions. To begin, questions will be questioned and answered by new questions until eventually what remains cannot be attributed any longer to an “original” or ”an other”. Instead, what remains embodies the structured cacophony that coming together in (mis)understandings, assumptions, interpretations and imaginations may result in. From there we move into hands-on work, exchanging materials and engaging in a process of estrangement and reinvention.

      This shift is for artists, of any discipline, with a work in progress or research they wish to bring into the room. You must be willing to hand your work over, momentarily, to another person. It does not matter how far into a process you are. What matters is your curiosity to see another person trespassing into your territory. At the end of this process we will do a round of performative presentations, sharing the outcome of the session.

       The shift ends with an informal drink and some light snacks.

       Please register by sending a mail to nadakatinka@gmail.com by the 26th of May latest! If you have a spot in the shift we will confirm it by email together with more details of what to bring and how to prepare.

       

      Working shift 2

      In this shift, we explore the potential of fiction in relation to gentle trespassing. Through a conversational game in which we engage as “another” version of ourselves we practice strategies of interpretation, exaggeration and collage. The aim here is to experience the simultaneous negotiation between who we are (or think we are) and who ‘we’ might be with a little interference from others.  

      The shift ends with an informal drink and some light snacks.

       Please register by sending a mail to nadakatinka@gmail.com by the 26th of May latest! 

       

      Evening shift

      In a confined space, anonymous characters live their lives in a loop. Stuck in an endless repetition of mundane events and unable to escape they busy themselves with work-like tasks and sleep, waiting for time to pass. In this work, Nada explores the confinement of spaces, identities, institutions and ideas. Surveillance camera feeds, anonymity and invisibility suits (chroma key green suits used in film when wanting to disappear the body behind an action) come together in this installation in three spaces. On the 4th floor of a.pass you can watch an ongoing video feed.

      On the 3rd floor you are invited into a waiting room area followed by the green room (sign up on site). 

        

      Bio

      Nada Gambier roams around in what she calls a crash-disciplinary world where performance, video, writing, curatorial approaches and languages and social concerns merge and collide. Her work often flirts with the borders between theatricality and abstraction and she is drawn to things that she doesn’t understand or cannot grasp. The non-spectacular and the absurd belong to her most known trademarks as an artist. Her work is experimental in nature and very often performative, with some form of live element in it. Since 2014 Nada has been focusing on long-term projects in which the separation between research, creation process and public event can be confused and/or abandoned. In 2020, she began monthly collective research sessions in Brussels, further establishing herself as an advocate for experimentation and research within the (performing) arts. Nada also regularly collaborates on other artists’ projects as a performer and artistic advisor. She has worked a.o. with Kate MacIntosh (NZ/DE/BE), Edit Kaldor (HU/NL), Forced Entertainment (UK), Simone Aughterlony (NZ/DE/CH), Jorge Léon (ES/BE), Maria Jerez (ES), Diederik Peeters (BE), Charlotte Vanden Eynde (BE) and Phil Hayes (UK/CH).

      www.nadagambier.be

       

      The evening shift is performed by Nada Gambier, Mark Etchells and Vic Grevendonck and includes writing by Nada and music by Klaus Wunderlich. The research is supported by a.pass, Nada & Co., WpZimmer, Workspacebrussels, Buda Arts Centre and the Flemish Ministry of Culture (research project subsidies). 

      Special thanks to: Martina Petrović, Martin Sieweke, Aslı Hatipoğlu and all the a.passers, Jen Rosenblit and many others for their input in my reflections and experimentations during the past year. 

       


       

       

      A big thank you to everyone who supported us during our a.pass time:

      A.pass team: Lilia Mestre, Kristien Van den Brande, Kristof Van Hoorde, Hans Van Wambeke, Steven Jouwersma, Vladimir Miller

      Block mentors: Jaime Llopis, Anna Rispoli, Samah Hijawi, Goda Palekaite, Sina Seifee, Pia Louwerens, Simone Basani, Vijai Maia Patchineelam.

      Fellow researchers: Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Amy Pickles, Gary Farely, Chloe Janssens, Inga Gerner Nielsen, Vera Sofia Mota, Jimena Pérez Salerno, Sarah Pletcher, Anna Lugmeier, Aleksandra Borys, Carina Erdmann, Amari, Lore, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Mlondi Dubazane and Merle Vorwald.

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      Practical information:

      Location: apass 4th floor 

      Dates and times: 

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

      www.jenrosenblit.net

      Nada Gambier (1980. Finland) roams around in what she calls a crash-disciplinary world where theater, dance, performance, video, writing, curatorial approaches and languages and social concerns merge and collide. Her work often flirts with the borders between theatricality and abstraction and she is drawn to things that she doesn't understand or cannot grasp. The non-spectacular and the absurd belong to her most known trademarks as an artist. Since 2014 she has been focusing on long-term projects in which the separation between research, creation process and public event can be confused and/or abandoned. In 2020 she began monthly collective research sessions in Brussels, further establishing herself as an advocate for experimentation and research within the (performing) arts. Nada also regularly collaborates on other artists' projects as a performer and artistic advisor. She has worked a.o. with Kate MacIntosh, Edit Kaldor, Forced Entertainment, Simone Aughterlony, Jorge Léon, Maria Jerez, Diederik Peeters, Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Phil Hayes. Nada is currently doing the postgraduate course in a.pass. 

      www.nadagambier.be 

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

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

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

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


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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       


       

      BOOK LAUNCH, 9th of March @ rile*

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

      More about the performance.

      More about the book

       

       


       

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

      More about Studies on Fantasmical Anatomy

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

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

      -vessels🥚🦪

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

       

      further information

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

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

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

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

       

      Anna Lugmeier (she/her)

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

       

      Sarah Pletcher (they/them)

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

       

       

       

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

      11am - 5pm @ a.pass

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

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

    • Happy Endings On horror and/in collections

       

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

       

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2022/III
    • * Home - Street - Earth * BLOCK 2022 III curatorial assemblage Radical_House, Martina Petrovic, Isabel Burr Raty
      07 November 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 05 September 2022
    • 30 November 2022
    • * Home - Street - Earth * BLOCK 2022 III

       

      Block III of 2022 has a cascading structure. The backbone of the block is a mentoring proposition by Radical_House, who invite us to displace mentoring from a.pass’ communal 4th floor to a residential house that has been renovated to accommodate affinities and relations beyond the family that resides in it. In one-to-one or collective mentorings they propose to take this environment as a setting to look at the inheritances our practices stem from, and vice versa, at how we bring ecological/social/urban issues into our homes. 

      SEE: https://apass.be/our-practices-our-extensions/

      From the private we spiral out to the public. In this block ‘Street’ stands for collective life. How do we organize ourselves in structures made by ‘elective affinity’? The mode of study is a visit to Documenta, and a collective reading practice adjacent to a series of dinners organized by a.pass-participant Martina Petrovic with Brussels based collectives.

      SEE: https://apass.be/where-do-we-go-from-here/

      In November, Isabel Burr Raty holds a weeklong workshop ‘EARTH’ focusing on the substance that constitutes and threatens (non)human life: carbon. Together with her guests she will introduce us to very different cosmovisions that make the carbon-spectrum: from deep identification to post-carbon scientific imaginaries.

      SEE: https://apass.be/earth/

       

      People involved in block 2022 III

      Postgraduate Participants: Amari, Marian R. van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão,  Mlondi Dubazane, Carina Erdman, Alyssa Gersony,  Stephen Graves, Anna Lugmeier, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Sarah Pletcher, Lore de Selys, Merle Vorwald.

      Block skippers (will rejoin in January 2023): Nada Gambier, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Asli Hatipoglu

      Dedicated mentors: Every block has three dedicated mentors that support the participants research, the presentations and feedback moments. For block 2022 III the dedicated mentors are Vladimir Miller (Research Center Curator), Heike Langsdorf (a.pass alumna, choreographer and researcher - Radical_House) and Simone Basani (artist, curator dramaturge- Radical _House). 

       

      Curatorial assemblage: Lilia Mestre, Isabel Burr Raty, Radical_House, Martina Petrovic

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

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

       

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

      2am: night walk around the block

      5.30-6.30am: breakfast and conclusion of nightshift

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

      +

       

      Wednesday 12th October, 2022

      7pm: a.pass mentoring dinner @ Radical House

       

      Thursday 13th

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

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

      8.30: Outwalkers @ KVS

       

      Friday 14th

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

      7-9.30: public salon @ Radical House

       

      Saturday 15th

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

       

      Sunday 16th

      3pm: reading of Black Body Amnesia @ Rile*

       

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

       

      +

       

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

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

    • 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. 


      *


      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.


      *


      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.


      *


      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.


      *


      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


      *


      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.

       

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

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

       

      Sept 20th, 7pm: Dinner with Hectolitre

      Oct 7th, 7pm: Dinner with Common Wallet

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

       

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

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

       

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

       

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

       

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

      https://vimeo.com/295537042

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

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

       

      *

       

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

       

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

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

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

       

      Caveat and Emptor

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

      From 10:00 to 18:00 hrs.

      Tuesday 15

      Morning: readings & fabulations

      Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen

      Wednesday 16

      Morning: readings & fabulations

      Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen

      Thursday 17

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

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

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

      Friday 18

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

       

      BIOS

       

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

       

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

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

       

       

      BIOs of Simone, Heike and radical_house

      Simone Basani

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

      Heike Langsdorf

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

      radical_house

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

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

      Some impressions

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

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

       

    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • seminar
    • workshop
    • Autotheory Gathering at ZSenne ArtLab: Public Program In the context of Block II 2022: Scoring Intimacy of Discursive Others
      30 May 2022
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • ZSenne ArtLab
    • 27 June 2022
    • 09 July 2022
    • gathering, seminar, performance
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Autotheory Gathering at ZSenne ArtLab: Public Program

      For two summer weeks (June 27 – July 10) a.pass is moving to ZSenne ArtLab in downtown Brussels, where it organizes a gathering around autotheory that brings together several approaches to the term and its relation to artistic research practices. The program includes several working sessions, a reading group, a programme of performances, and is curated by Lilia Mestre and Goda Palekaitė. To set a theoretical framework, a two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library and methodological tools to be further explored during the two weeks. Associated researchers of a.pass Research Center – Gosie Vervloessem, Simon Asencio, Rareş Crăiuţ and Vijai Maia Patchineelam – will present their current processes. Finally, a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice will present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda with Charlie Usher, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen, Vladimir Miller, Gary Farelly and Adrijana Gvozdenović. 

      SCHEDULE

      28 and 29 June: Workshop Maria Gil Ulldemolins [10:00-17:00]

      30 June: and 1 July: How to say my name Rareş Crăiuţ [June 30 at 11:00 & July 1 at 19:00 - duration 1h]

      2 July: Performance Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen [17:00-19:00]

      6 July:  Online talk Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker [cancelled]

      6 July: Working session  Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio [14:00-18:00]

      7 July: Working session Kin(s)Score a.pass program https://apass.be/kinship-score/ [14:00-19:00]

      8 July: Performances and book presentation Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Charlie Usher and  Vijai Maia Pachineelam [19:00-21:30]

      9 July: Performances Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber [18:00-21:00]

       

      DETAILED PROGRAM

      28 and 29 June [10:00-17:00]

      Maria Gil Ulldemolins: The Autotheory Library

      For this two day workshop, MariaI puts together a library of samples of autotheoretical (or autotheory-adjacent) texts. The group will read them and discuss them collectively, without rush, meandering wherever it is of interest for the participants’ and their practices. The aim is triple: to understand the very basics of what autotheory is understood to be up to now; to tentatively look at other hybrid works that might compliment it; and, last but not least, to make time for each participant to reflect on if and how autotheory might inform or challenge their own work. Participants will be able to permanently “borrow” from the library excerpts of the works, so they can take home a collected reader for their reference. The whole experience intends to highlight how autotheoretical narrators weave an intellectual and intimate network of relations; and consequently make time to read, think, and share as a collective, too.

      *

      30 June and 1 July [June 30 at 11:00 & July 1 at 19:00 - duration 1h]

      Rareș Crăiuț and others: How to say my name?

      For this gathering, Rareș will talk about the combination of art, research, narrative and food. First through his artistic research practice but also through 'CofetARia', a  project hosted at a.pass, where he is also Associate Researcher. In his practice, Rareș works with cakes, and pastries as non-human collaborators in artistic contexts. He will address the topics of science and narrative, as well as the accessibility to research.

      Cakes are generally more performative than other types of food and make it easier for humans to understand and feel the agency of food. Working with alimentary matter and live performance, CofetARia is an eating performance, at the confluence of durational practices like performance and baking.  

      2 July [17:00-19:00]

      Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen: On Versions/ NÓS 

      Flávio and Philippine will present a performance and conversation created collaboratively for this occasion. They take this encounter as an opportunity to relate their practices to each other('s body) in the importance they give to recognising that they exist as different selves. This performance takes the shape of a working session in which the performers and researchers borrow and lend each other’s dispositives of autotheory, putting them at each other’s disposal in a negotiated time and space.

      David is a person(a) and practice of versioning, who first came into being as a version of Philippine, an exploration of who Philippine could be as a man with a beard, how they could move and be in the world and how the world would respond. David consists of different aspects and objects, one of them being a voice. In this working session David's voice seeks residence in a new body, an experience that confuses and excites him, and that recreates him in an uncertain game of determining and being determined.

      Flavio, by incorporating this other voice, finds himself inhabiting his own body from a new perspective. The cohabitation leads to a different understanding and positioning of his body, with new layers of perception and performative gestures. David becomes a zone in between, where their bodies and practices cross and inhabit the same territory for a while, leading and being led, proposing and being proposed to, acting and reacting to David's mediation. 

      The organic devices that our bodies are, and the sound and motion they create, as well as the synthetic devices such as speakers, sound processors and projectors, and the ephemeral devices such as concepts and protocols - will enable this exchange. They will allow mirroring, resonance, vibrations and echoes that constitute the necessary elements for the research process to begin. This performance proposes to see mirrors, recordings and reproductions as ideas and gestures that function in both practices as forms of interlocution with oneself, in order to actualise or confirm the perception of the self as a multitude of selves. Such interlocution produces autotheoretical reflection and becomes a methodology for artistic research.

      *

      6  July [cancelled]

      Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker: Online talk about language practices in artistic research

      Both Emma and Alex are part of Research Groups concerned with language practices in Artistic Research.  They will speak from their perspectives and practices within several academic contexts. How do language-based artistic research practices relate to other research practices? What are the motivations, needs, desires, and aims that lead to establish these correspondences? How are the practices in mutual touch affected, modified, influenced, transformed? How do these connections, entanglements and intertwinements contribute to achieve the research goals? How do they affect the unfolding of research processes?

      *

      6th July [14:00-18:00]

      Gosie Vervlossem and Simon Asencio: Autheority

      The notion of textual agency refers to the capacity displayed by texts to do things in various circumstances. In other words, text might be doing something else then simply conveying meaning. Text is equally reading you. Text performs you. Ultimately text might suggest methodologies for its own study: a study from which you might not be able to return without losing a feather.
       
      As part of the Research Center Cycle 3, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio, have been looking into methodologies for studying the agents of text through collective reading practice, role play and infused hallucination to examine the performances they enable. They have based their research on the Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandemeer, a sci-fi, eco-horror and eerie fiction and engaged in a process of reading the book by the means it proposes. Southern Reach Trilogy plots the story of a research unit studying a mysterious substance/agent/force/landscape that takes over and re-writes whatever and whoever engages with it: the researchers of Area X end up becoming the subject of their research. There is no objectivity whatsoever left.
       
      Authority is the title of the second book in the Area X trilogy. The book takes place in the research unit Southern Reach, exploring aspects of institutional paranoia, infrastructural and architectural labyrinths, secrecy and bureaucratic anxiety. Authority follows the main protagonist Control, the new director of Southern Reach while he leads interrogations of staff and former expeditions researchers. Conspiracy and paranoia are rampant. To access Authority they will use the method of lecture par arpentage* and the format of the interrogatory. Chapters will interrogate each other on the plots and holes of the book. The interrogatories will take place during four hours on June 6 during a public event situation. The interrogatories will be transcribed live by a transcriber.
       
      The interrogatories:
      Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Adrijana Gvozdenović as Incantations (Chapter 1)
      Simon Asencio, Gosie Vervloessem and Gary Farrelly as Rites (Chapter 2) 
      Pia Louwerens as Hauntings (Chapter 3)
      Vladimir Miller as Afterlife (Chapter 4)
       
      * Lecture par arpentage is a method in which participants read one part of a book each and gather to report and reconstruct the book together.
       

      *

      8 July [19:00-21:30]

      Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Charlie Usher and Vijai Maia Patchineelam: On Artist as Institution  

      This evening brings together artists working with the practices of instituting and within institutions. It will comprise Pia’s work as ‘embedded researcher’ in institutional frameworks; Vijai’s Ph.D. research regarding the employment of the artist, as an artist, inside the art institution; and Marialena’s and Charlie’s practice of summoning, hosting and appropriating utterances with the Ocean through establishing The Oceanographies Institute.

      The Oceanographies Institute (TOI) studies human-ocean kinships. It gives particular attention to affectual and sensual encounters between those two bodies of water. The Institute therefore explores the relations of hands to mud, ears to the breaking waves, feet to the feeling of sinking, rather than the ocean 'in itself', as if devoid of human presence. It collects, analyzes and reenacts people's personal stories about their encounters with the ocean. TOI is interested in the relations to the ocean of the institutions that it is invited into -and of the people that are part of those institutions. In the case of a.pass and the people that make it up, they have been formative in TOI's coming to be. In their presentation, Marialena and Charlie will revisit some of those early Ocean Conversations and through them trace the parcours of the institute so far. TOI presentations often function as rituals of summoning: the ocean and fellow a.pass researchers and mentors will become characters coming to life in TOI's stories and songs.

      For this gathering, Pia will tell a story about a piece that she wrote to be published in a journal on autotheory, but never survived the editing process. She will alternate this with readings from her self-published book I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad: an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. The blurb reads: "Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist 'differently' through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the insitution's curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Pia dresses her protagonist in the different professional guises of artistic labour. Her experiences as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begin to overlap and blend under the name of 'performance'.  The result is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability."

      For his presentation, Vijai will present the book, The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institutiopublished recently by Track Report, Antwerp, in collaboration with OAZA, Zagreb, and a.pass, Brussels. During the presentation, Vijai will read passages from the book in which artist colleagues are referenced as key influences that have helped shape and direct the practice-led research, The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution. 

      *

      9 July [18:00-21:00]

      Aubrey Birch, Chloe Chignell and Eleanor Ivory Weber: On Writing Practices 

      The Autotheory Gathering will close with performative presentations of three writers and artists working with and on language. Reflecting upon the conventions of Western news media and the practice of reporting, Eleanor will perform a new piece of writing. Choreographically engaging with the space of ZSenne ArtLab, Chloe will present an extract of her Poems and Other Emergencies. Thinking through mineral erotics and linking our bodies with the bodies of more-than-human, Aubrey will propose a cocktail of spiritual calories.

      9 July 2022
      Eleanor will draw our attention towards reportage, which, in the same movement, bears witness to the world and consumes it. It is also a technique for making equivalences out of what is irreconcilable. In her practice, Eleanor keeps track of the dates when important things happen as a way to remember how the past shows up today. All the while she is trying to understand how repetitions, forgetting and suspended apprehension are equally part of personal and public events, places and products.
       
      Poems and Other Emergencies*

      Poems and Other Emergencies by Chloe sits at the intersection of poetry and choreography. Centered on a fictional character The Girl-with-her-tongue-out, the performance questions if it is through language that we find ourselves a body, or through the body that we find language? Embodied voices and voiced bodies weave and echo throughout the space. Where does the word end and her body begin?

      Aubrey's Material & Spiritual Calories is a practice that bridges the art of gathering around the table with the geological origins of what we consume. The body’s chemistry is altered both by the material calories of what we eat and the spiritual calories of how we eat, where pleasure and sociality nourish us as much as the proteins, sugars, and amino acids that we need to survive - that we need in order to wake up in the morning, to act, to hope, to protect. Between the immediacy of the meal and the endurance of our mineral origins, the body becomes a site where the ephemeral and the primordial meet in sensory experience.

      * performance credits:

      Performance and Choreography: Chloe Chignell
      Conversation partner: Adriano Wilfert Jensen
      Technical Support: Sven Dehens
      Thanks: Sven Dehens, Bojana Cvejic, Stefa Goovart, Sabine Cmelinski and a.pass. 

      Supported By: BUDA Kortrijk, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Workspacebrussels, La Balsamine Theatre, GC kriekelaar, Lucy Guerin Inc, Dancehouse Melbourne, Batard Festival Brussels, QL2 dance ACT, Kanuti Gildi Saal, Tallinn, RIMI IMIR (NO), Littérature Etc. and Rencontres Chorégraphique.

      *

       

      BIOS

      Aubrey Birch is a transdisciplinary artist and academic living between Australia & Europe. Working in various mediums, shecreates immersive states that link our bodies in the here-and-now to the deep time of those bodies. Thinking through a mineral erotics and social sensuality, she brings the politics of immersion into contact with the more-than-human. She lives part-time in remote Australia, where she cultivates native and medicinal plants. In Europe, she is a member of a collective taking care of Performing Arts Forum (FR), where she also co-organises the queer feminist event Elsewhere & Otherwise. Her works and collaborations have been presented by institutions like KANAL–Centre Pompidou (BE), MaerzMusik (DE), Shedhalle (CH), rotor Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst (AT), Kunsthal Ghent (BE), Theater Neumarkt (CH).

      Chloe Chignell is an artist based in Brussels working across text, choreography and publishing. Her work focuses on language within a choreographic and performative frame; she invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up. Chloe graduated from a.pass (BE, 2020) and from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2018). Since 2019 Chloe co-runs rile* a bookshop and project space for publication and performance with Sven Dehens. Her work has been presented by: Batard Festival (BE, 2019) Saal Biennale (ES 2021), Moving Words Festival (NO 2021), QL2 (AU 2022), KAAP (BE 2022), Littérature etc. (FR 2022), Dancehouse (AU 2016-8), The Kier Choreographic Award (AU 2018) Kottinspektionen (SE 2019) and Venice Biennale of Dance (IT 2017). She currently teaches at ISAC and P.A.R.T.S. 

      Eleanor Ivory Weber is a writer and artist based in Brussels. Her works expropriate the conventions and styles of Western news media to register and materialise a subjectivity that appears latent in the source. Recently her work has been shown at Kunstverein München (Munich), Maison Pelgrims (Brussels) and Kunsthal Gent (Ghent). In 2021 her essay ‘Australian Others: Penal Logic and the Pandemic’ was published in the literary journal Meanjin (Melbourne). Eleanor holds a Masters in Political Philosophy and Theory from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and graduated from the Post-Master program at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). She teaches art theory and critical practice at Erg since 2018 and is co-director of Divided Publishing.

      Flavio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira, 39, gay, brazilian, artist, lives in Brussels. He is a performer and psychopedagogue. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Scenic Arts from State University of Campinas – UNICAMP (2004), a Master Specialization Degree in Psychopedagogy from FHO – UNIARARAS (2012), a Master Specialization Degree from UCB (2013) and a post-master degree in Performing Arts in A.PASS (Advenced Performing and Scenography Studies – 2020). Master's degree in speculative narration and videography at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) - Instituts Saint Luc in Brussels. His latest works as a performer and dramaturg are the solo The Ghost Scar (2019-2022), and the short film Fantasma Pédé (2022). He has worked for over 15 years as an art educator at both public and private Elementary and Secondary Schools. He currently works as a psychopedagogue coordinating a program to help students improve their learning processes at the ERG École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels.

      Goda Palekaitė is an artist working in the intersection of contemporary art, performance, artistic research, literature, and anthropology. Her practice evolves around long-term projects exploring the politics of historical narratives, agency of dreams and imagination, social conditions of creativity, and intimacy with historical characters. Some of Goda’s recent projects were titled Anthropomorphic Trouble (in collaboration with Adrijana Gvozdenović), The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue, Architecture of Heaven, Liminal Minds, and Legal Implications of a Dream. They were presented, respectively, at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunsthal Gent in Ghent, Centre Tour à Plomb in Brussels, Konstepidemin in Gothenburg and RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 2020 she published her first book of fictional biographies Schismatics. Goda participated in a.pass’ postgraduate program in 2018-19 and currently is a Ph.D. candidate at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts.

      Gosie Vervloessems artistic research focuses on the position of the researcher in times of multiple crises. Her work faces the challenges that arise within this role, and looks for new ways of producing knowledge. Her practice is an ongoing quest on finding  tools to relate to a world that is messy and chaotic. Therefore she juggles with and re-interprets the practices of cooking, digesting, co-digesting, immersion or osmosis, as tools to literally embody that relation. In scrutinizing this relationship she focuses mainly on the concept of nature and tries to unravel the ideas that underpin this concept. In doing that, she identifies herself as a Sick Detective, a character that involves the vegetal kingdom as a possible ally in her research. Her work is highly inspired by plant biology, comic books, horror movies. It is mainly presented as lecture-performance, in the form of workshops or publications.

      Lilia Mestre is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working mainly in collaborative formats. She has been involved in a.pass since 2008 as Associate Program Curator and Core member (2014-17) and since 2017 as artistic coordinator. Mestre works with scores: inter-subjective set-ups and other chance-induced processes as emancipatory artistic and pedagogical tools, which have been documented in various publications. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social political reflection. She was co-founder and latest coordinator of Art Laboratory Bains Connective in Brussels (1997-2017). Mestre lives and works in Brussels.

      Maria Gil Ulldemolins is a postdoc artistic researcher at Hasselt University working on personal and artistic heritage, and interiority and interior architecture. Her doctoral work was a multidisciplinary autotheory on collapsing figures, sparked by the trope of the swooning Virgin in crucifixion imagery; and constructed as a writerly Warburgian atlas. Her practice is mostly hybrid writing that combines scholarly essays with more experimental approaches. She is one of the co-founders of Project Passage, a research line and academic journal that seeks to learn more and promote precisely these autotheoretical and performative writerly practices.

      Marialena Marouda works in the intersections between performance, sound art and oral poetry. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York, USA and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. In May 2018 she initiated The Oceanographies Institute (TOI), as part of her research at the Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies Program (a.pass) in Brussels. TOI focuses essentially on the relation between two bodies of water: the human body and the world ocean(s). It gives particular attention to affectual and sensual encounters between the two bodies. The Institute therefore explores the relations of hands to mud, ears to the breaking waves, feet to the feeling of sinking, rather than the ocean “in itself”, as if devoid of human presence. It collects, analyzes and reenacts people's personal stories about their encounters with the ocean. In 2019, composer Charlie Usher  joined TOI, letting his practice of song-making flow into the institute‘s work.

      Philippine Hoegen is a visual artist living in Brussels. In her multi-stranded, predominantly performative practice, she explores the ways in which we continuously create versions of ourselves, the apparatuses and processes we use for this and what their existence means for our understanding of 'self'. In the past 2 years she has focussed specifically on how this functions in contexts of work. Hoegen approaches performance explicitly as a research strategy: a way of thinking in which the physical is involved. Currently she is a researcher at the HKU Professorship Performative Creative Processes, and CARADT (Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology) Avans University, with a research project titled Performing Working.

      Pia Louwerens is an artistic researcher, artist and writer exploring the performance of artistic production. Through  performances and performative texts Louwerens researches how art institutions and the artistic subject — the I who writes, speaks and makes — co-constitute each other. The speculation on what an institutional script would look like, and who are co-authoring, serves as a tool to materialize the mutual reading and writing that occurs. For her performances, Louwerens appropriates performative (para-)artistic frames such as the guided tour, the artist talk, the novel and the workshop. Her practice constitutes a rich intertextual netwerk of anecdotes, events, jokes, theories and citations, which summon and frame each other. Pia has completed a post-master and fellowship programme at a.pass. Next to her artistic practice Louwerens has written texts for De Witte Raaf, Metropolis M, Tubelight and Het Parool. Pia Louwerens lives and works in Brussels.

      Since 2012 Rareş Augustin Craiut has been caring out « practice a as research » project (Performing food). The main themes of his artistic research practice are centred around the agency of food and eating and creating conditions to collaborate with Food. He is particularly interested in devices of meaning and affect (Bain-Marie Brunch food performance re-enactment cycle, various locations, ongoing; or Anximentara, Ecole de Rechrche Graphique, Brussels, 2018), and food in artistic and convivial collaborations (Comfort food continuum 2016, Baia-Mare, Romania; or The Terni – Paradisi-Neighborhood- Cookbook, Centro per le Arti Opificio Siri, Terni, 2017). Bread or baked goods are of particular interest with several performance art pieces dedicated to bread (The Transitions, Banis Connective, Brussels, 2017, or Anatomic bread bodies Matera European Capital of culture, Italy, 2019). 

      Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institutions. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists—one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. This displacement of roles is part of a larger trajectory that he has followed in his Ph.D. research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the University of Antwerp, “The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution.” Vijai is currently an associate researcher in a.pass’ Research Center.

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2022/II
    • kinship score
    • kin(s)score Scoring intimacy with discursive others
      11 May 2022
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • a.pass
    • 12 May 2022
    • 21 July 2022
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • kin(s)score
      Kinsscore will be practiced every Thursday of  block 2022 II titled "Scoring intimacy with discursive others" (see block post)
       

      The proposal for this score follows on previous iterations of Scorescapes as a tool to practice intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing in collective settings.

      If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of one's knowledge in relation with others', then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen  relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself? 

      The specificity of Kin(s)score is on the fact that we will participate in the score with our research kinships. We will speak with them, through them and us about the questions that our research make apparent. We will discuss and practice what are the political implications of authorship, collectivity and the other.

      INSTRUCTIONS

      -We meet every week on Thursdays from 16:00 till 19:00 on a.pass 4th floor studio.

      -We bring food and drinks to share.

      -We work with the people present. It’s not possible to participate remotely.

      -There is no audience. If one doesn’t have something to present, one can skip a session.

      -Participants of the score attend to minimum 5 sessions.

      The score is simple. It works as follows:

      To start:

      The first meeting each of us presents a 5 minutes sample of our research question. The sample is communicated as performance, text, object, dissertation,…It manifest the content of the research and the medium through which the research is taking place.

      The questions

      After assisting to each others presentations we assign by chance procedure who is offering questions to whom.

      There are two days to formulate a question to one of the researchers that has presented their work. Questions are sent by email maximum by Saturday midnight.

      The questions are a dialectic tool to engage in the discursiveness of artistic practice and research. They aim to argument what is at stake, its implications and further relations in the artistic research environment and in the world. They are the indicators of the dialogical potential of each research project. They are the motor of a process of sharing, contaminating, contradicting, thinking / making together apart. Questions are an intrinsic and important component of the score. Think them, contextualize them, offer them.

      The responses

      After receiving your questions you have 5 days to develop an answer with the medium you’ve chosen. You present your response the next Thursday you will attend within a 5 minutes timeframe .

      Conversation

      While we assist to the presentations we will write keywords. At the end of each sessions we will collect them and chose one to have a conversation about. The notes of the conversation will be documented through out the sessions.

       

      Documentation

      All the questions will be stored at the pads here bellow. The documentation of the presentations will an individual process.

       
       
      days 1
       
      days 2
       
      days 3
       
      days 4
       
      days 5
       
      days 6
       
      days 7
       
      days 8
       
      days 9
       
      days 10
       
    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Burrow Chloë Janssens and Vera Sofia Mota
      09 May 2022
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Level 5
    • 11 June 2022
    • 12 June 2022
    • Burrow

      This public presentation of Vera Sofia Mota and Chloë Janssens marks the end of the researchers’ trajectory at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). After following the year-long postgraduate program they will share their modes of doing, seeing and making artistic research public.

       
      Location:
      Level 5
      Rue van Meyel 49, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
       
       
      Saturday 11th of June:
       
      Vera Sofia Mota
      16-22h 1 on 1  presentations. We kindly ask you to sign up on site.
       
      Chloë Janssens
      16h installation on view + individual bike rides
      18h presentation in English
      19h installation on view + individual bike rides
      20h presentation in English
       
      18h general welcome, drinks and food
       
       
       
      Sunday 12th of June:
       
      Vera Sofia Mota
      16-22h 1 on 1  presentations. We kindly ask you to sign up on site.
       
      Chloë Janssens
      16h installation on view + individual bike rides
      18h presentation in Dutch
      19h installation on view + individual bike rides
      20h presentation in English
       

      18h general welcome, drinks and food

       

       

      Vera Sofia Mota (PT)

      Vera Sofia Mota is a visual, performance and dance artist. In her research, she explores how artists and artworks are constituted today in relation to the archive. Her initial practice unfolds as a series of conversations with dead and living artists. She assembles these conversations into a spatial and performative archive that explores the relationship between her own movement practice and canonised works of art. This archive is the space where the heterogeneous objects, relationships and practices intertwine around one of the many questions of authorship: how does an artist engage with the art of others? In its craftsmanship of reinterpretation and reproduction, her research awakens the ghosts of originality, ownership, status, and value. 

      Imprints

      Imprints is an installation-performance which gives access to references which populate my art practice. It comprises materials from my own archives and the archives of Nan Hoover (New York, 1931 – Berlin, 2008) and Lourdes de Castro (Funchal, 1930 – Funchal, 2022). Departing from the idea that performance practice is a process of re-appropriation of movement language of many others, this work is constructed as a transmission, reproduction and contamination of these influences. This collective archive of past and living artists is presented as a mobilised assemblage of texts, materials and body languages. The installation is built from documents which are digitally available to the public. Does this predispose them to transformation and alteration?

      We have today unprecedented access to information on and documentation of artworks, and yet many of them come to us, just as Walter Benjamin has described, as reproductions void of context. By decoupling my archive from a genealogical approach, I try to re-enter the ecology of practices, positions, materials and texts which bring my performance practice about. The work of copying and alteration frames the performance as a complex weaving of its influence. Foregrounding the ecology of the artworks’ gestation while it is being performed demystifies the ghosts of originality and authorship. Can we look at performance differently if we situated it in a world of altered copies?

       

      Chloë Janssens Janssens (BE)

      Chloë Janssens  combines cravings and knowledge from climate activism and graphic design in an artistic practice that investigates the soil as a site of place- and future making.

      To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen 

      “The sandy soils of my birthplace ‘de Kempen’, Belgium form the dry landscape of my research. I observe my ancestors preparing the earth for agriculture by obsessively moving cow-shit from the stalls to the fields. I can smell the cattle’s breath, the farmer’s spit, my grandmother's sweat and the excrements in the soil. After the famine we begin to enrich our lands with chemical fertilisers and radio-active uranium ore. When I stick my fingers in the earth here and tune in I can hear metals nagging, minerals singing, and bones twisting and turning in the underground. My imagination is haunted by this vibrating mass of elements holding stories from elsewhere. What to do with this pulsing scoop of dirt in my hand? I hold it with disgust, I peak into it, twirl my fingers around. I try stamping on it to free its story.”

      Chloe Janssens research proposes that a collective reading of this scoopful of earth becomes a basis for an urgent reflection on our entanglements with the places that we inhabit. She invites the audience as a co-researcher in need of a tool for reading the soil. Chloe Janssens offers literal and metaphorical sieves to better understand our positionality and implications in the soil’s condition. How do these polluted soils that we create and inhabit inform, shape and guide us?

      For this presentation Chloe (and her alter ego Chelsea) proposes to experiment with roleplay as a tool for collective decision making on geological disposal of highly radioactive waste. She will organise a fictional council and a series of tandem bike rides for the public of her presentation. Can roleplaying in a semi-fictional reality challenge our belief systems and create openings for epistemological contamination?

    • 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

       

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

       

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

      2022 I - BLOCK PLANNING + Opening week detailed program

      6 -14 January Opening Week (obligatory)

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

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

      → 6 January

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

      → 7 January

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

      → 10, 11, 12 January

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

      13 January

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

      → 14 January

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

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

      Study framework facilitated by Vladimir Miller

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

      17 - 25 February Half Way Days (obligatory)

      Participants research presentations (HOW) focus on methodology.

      (Preparation days 17 and 18)

      7 - 11 March CARE practices

      Curatorial input proposed by the participants Assembly

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

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

       

      People involved in block 2022 I

       

      Postgraduate Participants

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

      Associate Researchers

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

      Dedicated mentors

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

      Study facilitator and guests

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

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

      Other guests will be hosted during Poliset in collaboration with all involved.
    • postgraduate program
    • bleed is inevitable
    • block 2021/III
    • 7 WALKS (resolution) Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason
      26 September 2021
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • 16 September 2021
    • 17 September 2021
    • 7 WALKS (resolution)

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

       


       

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

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

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

       


       

      CAPTURING WATER FROM THE ARTISTS’ SOURCE

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

      Thursday 16 September 2021, 2 to 6pm

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

       

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

      Friday 17 September 2021, 11 to 5pm

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

       

      More about the other walks.

       


       

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

       

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

      7pm @ a.pass!

       


       

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

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

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

      Guests:

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

      Sebastien Hendickxs (dramaturg)

      Luk Vervaet (pedagogue in prisons)

      Dries Martin (television director at 100.000Volts)

       

      More about Agency.

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

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

      More about the LARP.

       


       

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

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

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


       



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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

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

      September 16-17

       


       

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

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

      September 27 - October 8

       


       

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

      Guests are announced shortly.

      November 10-13

       
    • postgraduate program
    • Not in the Mood
    • A talk with Gary Farrelly 14 June 2021
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Sina Seifee
    • Gary Farrelly
    • interview
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykp04eGXoIM[/embed]

      This video is part of a series of conversations by Sina Seifee with the current artists in a.pass postgraduate program Summer of 2021. The series takes a tangential and heuristic approach to getting to know the participants of the program. The interviews are mutilated as a substitute for questioning, getting, guessing, and imagining what we are doing and in which mood.

    • 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.

       

       
    • 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.

      *

      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.

       
    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • workshop
    • associate researchers Cycle 1
    • Not in the Mood
    • Not in the Mood Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee
      05 April 2021
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • 03 May 2021
    • 31 July 2021
    • yes
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • Not in the Mood

      a.pass Block 2021 II curated by Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee -

      participants: Inga Nielsen, Anantha Krishnan, Jimena Perez Salerno, Carolina Mendonça Ferreira, Gary Farrelly, Aleksandra Borys, Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens, Ana Paula Camargo, and Vera Sofia Mota.

      Having completed a cycle of a.pass Research Center in 2019, the six of us proposed to co-curate the block of 2021/II as a group. We aim to collectively curate an a.pass block where we redistribute and redefine the roles of curator, mentor, guest and workshop facilitator. This implies putting our knowledges, our differences and kinships into (re)productive promiscuous interactions. Each of us thinks of a.pass as an ecology of sensitivities, sentiments, rhythms and styles of knowing, but also as apparatuses, technologies and infrastructures. We do a block curation that pays specific attention to the affective and emotional dimensions of research and knowledge production, which we call here “mood”. Not only do humans have their moods and mood swings, but more-than-human, eco-synth-tech systems, and also climates and markets have it, too. By thinking and proposing practices with and about mood, we are navigating with and within affective interactions, imperfections, subjectivities and sensations of making oneself orient in the research environment and the world.

       

      Block Scenario

      The block unfolds from the 3rd of May to the 31st of July 2021. 

      The fourth floor of a.pass will host two installations, Unrest and The Depository Cat, inhabiting the common space, before the block starts. 

      Unrest, an artwork by Sofia Caesar, is a kinetic space that can move and stretch with our interactions, triggered by the workshops and reading sessions throughout the block. The Depository Cat, by Isabel Burr Raty, is a tentacular inflatable that proposes an ongoing practice based on research-treatments sharing, oriented to harvest living testimonies of the block’s processes and moods.

      During the Opening Week, Sara Manente leads the first collective practice called the Washing Machine. It is a fast-paced associative game and a way to use the filter of mood to look into our research. 

      In the first part of the block, Antye Guenther facilitates a hybrid workshop practice, titled Oh So Serious, around moodiness for de-professionalization.

      Throughout the block, Sina Seifee takes the role of PR by interviewing the participants and publishing regularly online.

      Multiple reading sessions will be conducted on Thursdays during the block.

      In the first part of the block, we will read selected essays associated with or drawn from Affect Theory, namely Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Silvia Federici, under the working title Nail Art Affects Reading Sessions, facilitated by Sara Manente and Adrijana Gvozdenović.

      In the second part of the block, Thursdays are reserved for The Labour of Laziness reading sessions, proposed by Rob Ritzen.

       

      OPENING WEEK

       

      During the Opening Week, Sara Manente leads the first collective practice called the Washing Machine. It is a fast-paced associative game and a way to use the filter of mood to look into our research. Every participant is asked to prepare in advance 10 heterogeneous items from their practice under the filter of “obsessions”: bring something that you cannot stop thinking about, or that keeps coming back to you. It can be an unreasonable idea or feeling, a fragment of your own or somebody else’s work. Items can be of any format: a quote, a research question, a scrapbook, a dance move, a thought, a video extract, an object, a dream, or a short practice.

       

       

      ONGOING PRACTICES

       

      THE DEPOSITORY CAT - Isabel Burr Raty
      activated by a workshop at the beginning of the block on Wednesday 12th of May

      The Depository Cat is an ongoing practice throughout the block, which proposes the installation of an interactive space that invites participants to share their research in the form of self treatment/s or treatment/s for others. The idea is to open the possibility for the treatment’s giver/s and/or receiver/s to remain in a constant state of alteration, envisioning flux as one of the foundational resources in the processes of artistic research.

      The “treatment” implies the sharing or design of “healing” tools that give the opportunity to translate personal artistic concepts into physical or imaginary forms. These are put into motion by being with the - self - or with the - other/Cat, to trigger inner and outer mutations that can particularize, de-particularize or meta-morph affects underlying in the creative process of research. 

      The Cat takes the form of a “first aid cavity” that creates a visual space composed of i.e: non-standard animisms technologies, syncretic beliefs and statements, that can be freely inhabited. This cavity is at the same time a tentacular organism, as its limits can be stretched throughout the block, populating the common a.pass room. Participants are invited to deposit the or various “remainants” of the treatment/s offered in order to imprint the memory of the “healing” that took place. The remainants can be ornamental, devotional, cathartic - human and more than human objects and/or non-objects - that can infect, disinfect, contaminate, or not the common a.pass space. The depository process is archived with photographs and shared in the form of an album at the end of the Block.

       

      PR - Sina Seifee
      ongoing interviews, public relation

      Sina will make interviews with the participants throughout the whole block one by one on a weekly basis. The interviews are immediately edited into a short videographic piece with a collage style and animated elements from the imagination, the project, or the environment where the talk takes place. The pieces are published every week on multiple social platforms. The main host for the talks will be a subdomain of the a.pass website, which will be designed as a “collector” of the interviews for future access. The interviews in the format of video will be posted and prompted on both a.pass and non-a.pass platforms, where a wider audience has immediate exposure to it as it gets produced during the block.

      The interviews are informal and playful, with a heuristic approach to getting to know the participants' work and their personalities. The interview will be a substitute for mentoring (around), questioning (at), guessing (what), inventing (off), entangling (with) and imagining (on) what they are doing, what they are up to, and which mood they are in. The aim is less about understanding, and more about engaging and guessing fabulously what their matters of care are, with a perspectival (i.e. a reaction that is particular to me) and speculative (the “what if”) force that I embody in my own practice. The talks might take a maximum of two hours of recording and the final edited piece will not be more than 30 minutes long. The publication of the content will be based on the agreement with the participants, how and to which extent each likes to be exposed on social media. The interviews might take place in a.pass or elsewhere.

       

       

      WORKSHOPS / READING SESSIONS

       

      NAIL ART AFFECTS READING SESSIONS - Sara Manente and Adrijana Gvozdenović
      Thursdays, the first half of the block, before the HWD
      13th, 20th, 27th May

      We propose a formalized but relaxed situation, a hybrid form between mentoring and a reading group. We will do each other's nails while reading essays on affect theory. 

      “In ancient Egypt and Rome, military commanders also painted their nails to match their lips before they went off to battle.” Similarly, we will take care of each other, talk about what makes us happy and why do we feel like we feel (Sara Ahmed) to prepare for the “age of anxiety” (Lauren Berlant), to learn how we can repair (Eve Sedgwick) and to “re-enchant the world” (Silvia Federici).

      Doing manicure is a self-care or a professional service that can be considered a beautification process: removing the dead cuticles, massaging and moisturizing the skin, filing, polishing and decorating the nails. It is an intimate, private process and a ritual of preparation that serves the appearance in public. Could this be also a definition of what mentoring is? Can this situation create a space where different reading and discussing of the text can happen? 

       

      OH SO SERIOUS - Antye Guenther
      two days practice, 31st May and 1st June

      Antye is proposing a hybrid workshop practice around seriousness - approached as a state of non-moodiness - as questionable traits of professionalism in the arts. The aim is to propose and test, in conjunction with the participants, various strategies to insert moodiness,  non-seriousness and silliness (back) into artistic (research) practices as a way to de-professionalize. Where are our desires to be serious/ to be taken seriously in professional artistic contexts coming from? In what ways is this an attempt to champion objectivity and rational thinking in strong opposition to affects, moods and feelings, referring hereby as well to suspicious, idealized concepts of scientific practices in the 19th century? And what kind of strategies could help us to evoke processes of the-seriousness-ization for de-professionalization?

      This two-day practice will consist of a (performative) input lecture to shed light on the complex intertwinement of academisation and professionalization in the Arts, which seem to have been fundamentally boosted by neoliberal demands of constant self-advertising and promoting. This lecture will try to trace back specific tropes of professionalism to the 19th century ideal of the scientist as an ‘objective’ data recording device. After this lecture a short reading session will be proposed, to start and stir a conversation around (problematic) seriousness and professional attitudes. This will be followed by the invitation to the participants to share and to reflect on their own seriousness in their practices, what seriousness might mean for them as artists/practitioners in the arts. At the end of the first day, the participants will be asked to think of strategies to oppose rational-objective thinking and to practice hyper-seriousness or non-seriousness as a way to ‘de-professionalize’, which we want to share and test out together the next day.

      In preparation, Antye will collaborate with Sara and Isabel to invent and test specific ‘body practice’ to be added to the toolbox of de-professionalization on the 2nd day.

       

      THE LABOUR OF LAZINESS - Rob & Steyn Bergs
      reading sessions, Thursdays, the second half of the block, after the HWD and one moment in PAF
      24th June, 8th and 15th July

      The Labour of Laziness is dedicated to exploring the ambiguous, complex, and contradictory valences of laziness, and to examine its potentially subversive or invigorating political effects.

      In neoliberalism, tirelessly working on and investing in the self becomes an exigency. Because of their relative economic precarity, but also because of the nature of their work, artists and art workers often find themselves at the forefront (or rather, at one forefront) of exploitation and, perhaps especially, self-exploitation. We are less interested in laziness as a mode of resistance to this neoliberal regime than we are in laziness as a lateral form of political agency. In other words, we are not necessarily after laziness as a straightforward opposition to work—as passivity, as a simple refusal of work, as ‘doing nothing.’

      Instead, in discussing laziness, we want to raise questions about work and productivity in the arts. We will do so through collective reading sessions, taking place in an installation by Sofia Caesar.

      Furthermore, for the duration of the block, participants will be invited to keep a ‘lazy journal’ as a means of reflecting on their own relation to work and (self-)discipline, as well as on their understanding of productivity and how it informs their practice. These journals will be used as a common ground for a final group discussion/workshop. Importantly, the journals need not take the written form; other formats—video, drawing, or other media—can of course also be explored.

       

       

      PARTICIPANTS

      Inga Nielsen, Anantha Krishnan, Jimena Perez Salerno, Carolina Mendonça Ferreira, Gary Farrelly, Aleksandra Borys, Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens, Ana Paula Camargo, and Vera Sofia Mota.

       

      CURATORS

      Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, and Sina Seifee

       

      Isabel Burr Raty is an artist, filmmaker, teacher and sexual Kung Fu coach exploring the interstices between the biotic and the virtual. She is currently researching on the human body as a territory for sustainable agri-culture and intertwining performance, installation and film to queer labor understandings, offer SF in real-time and play with geo-synthetic magic.
      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist interested in artists’ motivation and ways of resisting (self)institutionalized structures. In the last three years, she has been developing methods of collecting and annotating symptomatic artistic practices that recognize their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality, which led to developing formats of publicness that push the borders between research, mediation, and production. These will be tested as needed during the block.
      www.gadi.me

      Antye Guenther is a visual artist, born and raised in East Germany. Drawing from her backgrounds in medicine, photography, and in the military, her art practices orbit around themes like ((non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, computer-brain-analogies and mind control, think tank ideologies and self-optimization, neuroimagery and fictionality of science, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and science fiction. Her work comes then in hybrid forms: performances, performative ceramic objects, fictionalized video tutorials, photo-text works, speculative scripts, artist publications, and narrative installations in various collaborations.
      www.aguenth.de

      Choreographer, dancer and researcher based in Brussels, Sara Manente, is interested in the dynamic relation between performer, work and spectator. Her projects are developed throughout hybrid research and become public in different formats. Currently, she works with aesthetics and ethics at the intersection between live arts and live cultures: namely, fermentation technology, noise, chimerization and (auto)immunity.
      www.saramanente.weebly.com

      Rob Ritzen is co-initiator of THAT MIGHT BE RIGHT, a founding member of LEVEL FIVE and coordinator of PERMANENT. My curatorial practice is focused on self-organized and collaborative formats in close association with cultural practitioners. In my research, I am concerned with social and political constellations that have a hold on everyday life. Cultural practices are a way to dislodge the hold the present has on us.
      www.robritzen.info

      Sina Seifee is an artist based in Brussels, Tehran and Cologne. Using storytelling, video, and performance, he explores and teases with the heritage of zoology in West Asia. His work picks up on how epistemologies, jokes and knowledges get shaped in the old and new intersections of techno-media and globalism.
      www.sinaseifee.com/

       

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2021/I
    • I feel like leaving the room End Presentations 2021 I
      16 January 2021
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • online: https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online
    • 28 January 2021
    • 29 January 2021
    • I feel like leaving the room

      a.pass welcomes you the:
      29th January 2021 – 19:30 – TV show -Collective presentation – 2h30 hours

      Join Zoom Meeting
      is finished.... 

      Check out :  https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online/

      I feel like leaving the room  is the title of the postgraduate End Presentations of researchers Rui Calvo (film maker), Quinsy Gario (poet, visual and performance artist), Adriano Wilfert Jensen (choreographer), Magdalena Ptasznik, (choreographer) and Kasia Tórz (dramaturg and writer).

      After attending to the extended one year program at a.pass, the five researchers finish their trajectory with an online presentation of a collective website. Covid 19 and the restrictions of the confinement have framed the space of these public presentations in an uncanny entanglement between the private and the public. I feel like leaving the room  is more than anything the (liminal) desire to come together. The form of this coming together takes shape around an ad-hoc TV show that will be streamed the 29th of January from the a.pass studio as an attempt to still intertwine thoughts and experiences.

      In the beginning, the space for this public moment was imagined as a living room, as a place where the borders of the informal and the formal are blurred.  Not as a real physical living-room but by using the conditions implied in such well known private (though public) environment, with the aim of engaging the audience in a different way. What happens when research becomes public as a workshop, a power point presentation, a film, a dance or a walk that steers from such a hangout surrounding?

      As a consequence of the pandemic that determines the conditions of coming together – the living room became the desired ‘leaving room’ – a place, as well, between the private and the public but enclosing the publicness in separated private spaces with only one window – a window to the virtual. The artists researchers addressed that liminal space in various ways in accordance with the medium they mainly work with. Inevitably, the translations that will take place, address the current situation of the confinement, while trying to reach out to the world.

      Rui Calvo's research on non-linear narratives in cinema, has worked  with a group of performers in closed environments, claustrophobic settings, directive instructions that constrain the performers, as much as the audience, in a enclosed space of angst. In his films, no-one knows what, where and how these characters got together and which forces bind them to the situation they find themselves in. Like in a ‘chamber piece’ a small number of characters interacting over a short period of time in a limited environment create an awkward intimacy caught by the camera, from which they (maybe) want to leave. There is always the promise of an outside world created by a window, a curtain or the staircase, a promise that is never fulfilled. Cinema (audiovisual setting) is the medium by excellence we can access during the times we live. The medium that allows us to escape from the living room. But to where?

      with Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Diego Echegoyen, Federico Vladimir, Flávio Rodrigo, Lilia Mestre, Lucia Palladino, Nathaniel Moore and Sara Manente.

      Quinsy Gario's research focuses on de-colonial practices by revisiting archival material, institutional protocols and historical facts questioning the politics behind who gets to speak, when and how. By re-using existing materials, his work re-calls systems of oppression and proposes strategies and tactics of epistemic disobedience and fugitivity. For his End Presentation, Quinsy thinks through the Fragile sticker, used in the transport, and the imagery of travel, migration and seeking refuge elsewhere. The proposition gives attention to the precarious status quo of mobility and the destitution of private space of diaspora and fragile groups, specially threatened in time of forced confinement.

      Adriano Wilfert Jensen ’s research followed three interrelated paths:  spectatorship as practice, dance as a labor of depersonalizing the self and politics of collaboration. Through collaborative processes Adriano, developed dances that sought to cultivate response -ability in spectatorial practice. For his End Presentation he will present a letter on practice based spectactorship along with commented dance scores on the webpage of the group.

      Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.

      Kasia Tórz's, research on the notion of dissolving boundaries (smarginatura) engages in the liminal space between the private and the public, the textual and the image, reality and imagination, the conscious and the unconscious. Smarginatura makes reference to the writer Elena Ferrante and the main character of her Neapolitan Novels, Lila Cerullo, who experiences losing her solid outlines and melting into her surroundings. Kasia experimented with expanded forms of storytelling by engaging with image, voice, body practices and performance in her writing, by blurring the lines between reality and fiction in a daily life basis. For her End Presentation she will invite the audience to a nocturnal session.

      This introduction took the flavour of a weather report. As times change in unforeseen ways, as complex forces conduct the environment, as the temperature is warmer than normal, as violence is unrated, as the soul is disoriented, as politics are going ashtray, the weather, here in Brussels, is grey and symptomatic of great confusion.
      Stay home for now, imagine spring is coming soon and we all feel like leaving the room. 

       

      *

       

      BIOS ad extra content

      Rui Calvo is a Brazilian filmmaker who works as screenwriter, director and editor. He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a degree in Audiovisual Arts. Among his short films are “Whole Man” and “Quito”, which were screened at festivals in different countries, as Canada, England, South Africa and Argentina. “The Death of Helena”, his first feature film as a director and screenwriter, was recipient of a grant for film project development in Brazil. Now he is looking for opportunities to produce the movie in a country governed by the far-right and which has been destroying, among other things, the cultural sector.


      In most of Rui's previous short-films, the discomfort regarding one’s own body and the non-belonging feeling (or the lack of identity) are part of the content. Formerly, these concerns were built in the script in a linear narrative way and then translated into images. Coming to a.pass was a way of take a distance from the cinema field and think of audiovisual narrative otherwise. Through out the program, Rui addresses his initial question, on how to film bodies and not imprison them in rational discourse by taking “real life” as much as a product of convention as acting, by giving instructions ( that do not build a character) to the performers to play with in front of the camera and by creating filming settings that don't reassure a fictional background where the performers can situate themselves. In this way, the production of fiction is unstable and influenced by the shooting process itself, in which the performers hover between being characters and themselves, creating subjectivity through filming. The alchemy of these elements produces encounters filled with tension, vulnerability and exposure to the other and also to the camera, which is left with an undergoing process of rupture, misunderstanding and indeterminacy, creating this way conditions for under-narratives to appear.

      *

      Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten, two island that share continued Dutch colonial occupation. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario's most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012). As a member of the collective Family Connection established in 2005 by Glenda Martinus and Gala Martinus, respectively his mother and aunt, his current research is attempting to institute another way of archiving. He is a Utrecht University media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies alumnus and a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague. He is a 2017 Humanity in Action Detroit Fellow, 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, 2019/2020 APASS participant and a 2020/2021 Sandberg Institute Critical Studies Fellow. Gario received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in among other places Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), TENT (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg). Gario is also currently running for Dutch parliament as a candidate for the political party BIJ1.

      Quinsy entered the program studying practices of refusal as found within Caribbean performance practices and his research trajectory brought him to the Baltics thinking through postsocialism and postcolonialism. For the a.pass End Presentation Quinsy is presenting #FragileRoots which is a companion piece to #FragileRoutes, a work presented at the Bâtard Festival 2021 and part of a larger series of work and research. At the center of the proposition is the suitcase bought in Hong Kong by the Estonian artist Kristina Norman and gifted to Quinsy during his research residency at the Estonian Art Academy. The residency was to further research into the depiction and usage of the depictions of St. Maurice in the Baltic region. The Sudanese Catholic saint had been adopted as the patron saint of the Blackheads Brotherhood, a merchant guild of unwed men in at the end of the 14th Century. After the end of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic region the various countries of the Baltic became nations again and started to further develop national narratives which included or excluded the remnants of this guild. Through the series of works Quinsy is reflecting on Blackness, migration, improvisation and practices of refusal. This particular piece consists of the remnants of the aforementioned suitcase, stickers bought at the lowbudget department store Daily Style and slides that were bought at a second hand store in Estonia.The stickers are used for precious cargo and contain the word 'Fragile' and the slides depict images from the Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 missions and a vacation by an unnamed group of white individuals to Cuba in the 1960's. Together with toys depicting underwater sea life, extendable mirrors and coasters with black glitter #FragileRoots pushes for epistemic disobedience and fugitive approaches to our collective presents, pasts and futures.

      *

      Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public (Microclimates I and II, Zachęta National Gallery 2018-2019, Cli-Fi at BWA Gallery Wrocław 2019). Magdalena is a member of a collective of choreographers Centrum w Ruchu (Warsaw), graduate of School for New Dance Development (SNDO), and sociology at Warsaw University. Since 2015 together with Maria Stokłosa and Renata Piotrowska she has been developing in Warsaw an educational project Choreography in Motion: Experimental Choreography Course. She lives in Amsterdam and Warsaw.

      “My research materializes as written texts, which experiment with the form of the score—a choreographic tool. I started this journey with the idea of creating scores for collective participatory performances. Throughout the process, and the period of confinement we found ourselves in, the research transformed into an exploration of writing. I’m looking into what kind of performance these texts can produce with a reader. I propose to look at the performativity taking place in an intimate sphere activated through reading. I understand it as an interobjective space created by a reader, a score, and an environment.  Scores direct its readers’ attention towards the relations within an environment of which they are part. In particular, I explore how we take part in the materiality of the environment as well as the relations we are already engaged in and have potential to engage with. Building upon observation and somatic experience, I investigate environmental relations through navigating attention and developing fictions. The ultimate reference and a tool to think with is, for me, geology, which brings us to the earth as the basic structure of our material being. Geological time teaches us about the constant movement of any and all matter, and it gives us a more-than-human perspective to time.”

      *

      Adriano Wilfert Jensen works with dance and choreography to analyse and produce conditions of relations. His practice manifests in making, performing, writing about, curating, representing and dealing choreography, dancing for other artists, as well as other occupations like a series of cocktail hang outs, publications, research projects, teaching etc.

      Together with Simon Asencio he is since 2014 running Galerie – an immaterial gallery for immaterial artworks. And with Emma Daniel he is dancing for the dinosaurs in Spending Time With Dinosaurs. Together with Linda Blomqvist, Anna Gaïotti and Emma Daniel he organized Indigo Dance Festival, Magazine and Tink Thanks at Performing Arts Forum. In 2017 he initiated the research project analysis of which his a.pass research was part. In 2019 he premiered the group piece feelings as part of the research analysis, and in the summer 2021 he will premiere a new group piece informed by his research at a.pass.

      Adriano, has been researching on what he calls practice-based spectatorship and dance as a labour dispositif for depersonalizing the self. He wrote a letter developing the notion of practice-based spectatorship as a tool to study how different dance works, which have shaped his own practice, condition spectatorship conventions. Through this letter, a contextualization of how his practice is situated by and indebted to the work of others, takes place. In addition, Adriano also developed a series of dances by analyzing and intervening in existing historical dance protocols. Working on these dances together with the research of spectatorship he questioned how to re-relate to the self beyond individualism, in dance and its spectatorship.

       

      *

      Kasia Tórz. Writer, dramaturg, researcher, is seeking for other than language-based ways of writing, i.a. working with images or body practices focused on internal movement. In that framework, she is interested in the melting points of the poetic, existential and political. Graduate from Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, participant of doctoral studies at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. Between 2007-2011 she collaborated with Twożywo – a no longer existing Polish urban art group – at projects like: Zaciemnienie / Twilight and several wall paintings. Between 2008-2019 she has programmed a thematic section of the Malta Festival Poznań (PL) called ‘Idioms’. Since 2019 she has worked with Needcompany – a Brussels based theatre collective, as artistic & programme developer.

      Smarginatura {this is a demo}
      How are we touched by and through the live act – the act of seeing? What goes through the porous surface of our skin? What kinds of experiences expand our sensitivity? Who sets the scale of the image? The contour of the skyline? When do we break upon the pressure of impulses, when do we freeze, and when do we burn? What are the politics of seeing that we adapt to and how to alter them? Smarginatura {this is a demo} is a radio- broadcast, a live-like transmission of words, images and sounds. It invites the audience to explore the depth of the surface.

       

      *

       

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2021/I
    • The Asylum
    • THE ASYLUM (FOR DESIRING BODIES) Block 2021 I curated by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout/The Monastery
      12 December 2020
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 06 January 2021
    • 31 March 2021
    • THE ASYLUM (FOR DESIRING BODIES)


      An asylum is a place of refuge. Of taking leave of the world for a limited period of time. It is a place out of the world. Where rules function differently. Where people without a place of belonging are temporarily ‘parked’ in order to mend their ways. It is a place for the ones that don’t fit the grid: mental patients, refugees, people suffering from ailments of all kinds. Desiring bodies, in search of papers, legitimacy, acceptance, health, reconnection to the outside world.

      In that sense it is also a place of hope, a world-in-a-world where difference can live and be accepted. Maybe even celebrated. Where the norms are temporarily suspended, and common sense rules no longer apply. In this gap, in this suspension, wild thoughts can go unchecked. Dubious behaviour flies under the radar.

      For this block, Elle/Elke Van Campenhout/The Monastery curates a block for finding refuge from the status quo of the arts. A place to turn inwards, temporarily turning sideways from the demands of the artistic world and society. To look at what actually wants to be said, and experimented. What is the desire of the artist, of the researcher, that flows underneath the work? Which are the parts in the research that flow like ghosts through the methodologies and conceptual frameworks.? What else is there but dossier language and salonfahigkeit? What is there that can not float to the surface, but can only be seen from the back, using a hand-held mirror?

      The Asylum (for Desiring Bodies) proposes to take a close look at our desires, these lines of flight that connect us to the world and the others. To look with radical honesty to our drives and attractions, and enter into the intimate zone of connection: with our work, with the others, with the body of the group. The emphasis lies on encountering each other anew, working with the stories we construct about ourselves and the work we make. And tinkering with transforming these, just for a moment, to open up the multicolored layers of sediment they are built on.

      Stepping out of the framework of ‘acceptable’ or normative knowledge production into murkier zones of memory, intimacy, body knowledge, and dark rooms. A time to rest, to turn inwards, to become undone. As an artist, a worker or whatever you think you are…

       
    • 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.

    • end presentation
    • postgraduate program
    • Dismantle Space 30 October 2020
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Chloe Chignell / Muslin Brothers / Flávio Rodrigo / Christina Stadlbauer
    • online: http://dismantle.space
    • 11 November 2020
    • 14 November 2020
    • Dismantle Space

      With Chloe Chignell, Muslin Brothers – Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi , Flávio Rodrigo and Christina Stadlbauer

      NOT at ZSenne ArtLab and NOT at Rosa Library, downtown Brussels


       

      Website: dismantle.space

       


       

      Dismantle Space gathers the research outcomes of Chloe Chignell, choreographer, editor and writer; Muslin Brothers – Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi – fashion practitioners and visual/performing artists; Flávio Rodrigo, theatre maker and teacher; and Christina Stadlbauer, visual artist and scientist.

      A practice of dismantling directs the conceptual and experiential nature of all their works. More than ever it is necessary to disassemble the mechanisms that form our relationships with the worlds around us in order to rebuild perspectives on those same worlds.

      Using very different tools and methods the presented research insists on making visible the cultural constructions that knit our perceptions of history, language, science and fashion to their instituting frameworks. They dismantle the structural attachments we have to those institutional machines and re-tell other possible relations to them by opening up the capacity of bodies to their collective and personal resilience.

       

      The capability of bodies to create spaces to nurture, find out and experience muted or unseen connections, may they be social, personal, economic, environmental, racial... Through performative virtual installations, readings and conversations, these research projects unfold space to engage differently in ecosystems of relations that permit perspectives affirming something other than the status quo.

       

      For Dismantle Space, a website has been created in collaboration between the researchers and web designer and editor Sven Dehens in order to compile the works that have been developed in the frame of the artistic research environment of a.pass. This website hosts the complicities and differences of the four researches and it will address the infrastructural concerns each of them entails.

       

      For the End Presentations, a.pass invites three Visitors for a feedback conversation with the participants. The visitors of *Dismantle Space* are writer, editor, and dramaturge Caroline Godart, performance curator Guy Gypens and artistic research director Hicham Khalidi.

       

      This public event is co-curated by the participants with the support of a.pass. In response to the Covid-19 imperative of not being able to gather and to accommodate the different natures of the works, the presentations will take place online. The construction of the website was a way to keep the works connected and conversing with each other.

       

      Many thanks to ZSenne ArtLab and Rosa Library for their support, Sven Dehens for the website and Deborah Birch for text editing.

       

      *

      Dismantle

      Space


      *

       

      The research and work of Chloe Chignell is situated between choreography and literary practice. Throughout her a.pass trajectory Chloe worked with several performative dispositifs which use scores as mediators between body and language. With much precision her work performs the intra-dependencies between them in ways that facilitate and provoke in the viewer another understanding of how the body writes and reads itself.

      Dismantle
      Her work Poems and Other Emergencies dismantles the preconception that language can decipher and translate the body in an absolute and unidirectional manner. The prevailing cultural supremacy of language holds back other forms of knowledge and understanding of the body as a complex entity.

      Space
      While working at a.pass the processes Chloe created in physical space or on the space of the page triggers in the audience unforeseen attachments to cultural, social paradigms and relations between languages and mediums. For her End Presentation, the book becomes an object that expands the dimensions of the page, with the essays Language as Prosthesis and The Complete Text Would be Insufferable asking questions of the reading body, your body.

       

      *

       

      During their trajectory at a.pass, the research project of fashion practitioners Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi -had focused on the uniform in correctional facilities. Their involvement with prisons and prisoners’ statements opened up a complex questioning of the garment-as-uniform and the process of uniformization. Using installation-performance as a research tool the artist duo created participatory situations that repositioned the role of the garment in its social, political, and economic functions. From staging the tailor’s atelier in several formats, the prayer book as a scored assembly, or audio files for confined self-appraisal they created critical environments that work to de-gender, de-class, and de-colonise clothing in contemporary society.

      Dismantle
      Their research dismantles the production chain and the economy behind the garment. Their work looks at fashion through the economy of belonging, establishing the strong relation between who-wears-what and the creation of harsh social segregation.

      Space
      Their research is manifested in performative installations that delay an easy identification with the garment by softening a space in which the participants can elaborate a collective and participatory questioning about this often ignored terrain.

       

      *

       

      Flávio Rodrigo’s research is a continual overlapping and unfolding of autobiographical writing, storytelling, and ritual. His work continues an oral tradition of recounting and holding to account that can re-tell history from the place of the minority. His research creates intersections between stories of racism and homophobia, auto-fiction, and ritual in order to claim power against normative politics in a non-normative way.

      Dismantle
      Flávio's research investigates the body by shedding light on the scars we all have. Working with scars as relational objects from which narratives unfold, he creates the possibility for an understanding of the self as relation between physiological trace and mythical, political, and personal time.

      Space
      Flávio crafts rituals and participatory performances as a collective investigation into both the trauma and the many forms of healing that scars represent. These storytellings open up a space for the personal to be continuously woven into collective, political history, and affirm that the possibility of transformation is embedded in each of us, and in all of us collectively. For his End Presentation Flávio worked on a performance series The ghost scar solo that will be streamed in three episodes.
      11th - 20:30 - Episode 1 - the ghost and the milk
      12th - 20:30 - Episode 2 - the tent and the mirror
      13th - 20:30 - Episode 3 - the body and the plate

       

      *

       

      The research of Christina Stadlbauer addresses the relationship between humans and other-than-human companions in the environment *we* share with *them*. Her approach tackles the ethical implications of the loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity. Christina engages with multiple actors in the fields of science and art, as well as with inhabitants of urban and non-urban environments, animal, vegetable, and mineral beings. She uses interviews, video footage, and performative installations to shine a light upon muted or undervalued situations of imbalance between human and other-than-human existences.

      Dismantle
      The recent focus of her work has been on the Museum as a public display of knowledge. Christina questions and deconstructs the infrastructure of the museum as a colonial institution which acquires, catalogues, and communicates knowledge in a human-centered manner, neglecting other life forms. Even though at this point in history, with an attempt to reformulate the definition of the Museum, lead by ICOM – the International Council of Museums – she maintains there is a persistent neglect of other species´ knowledge.

      Space
      Christina’s research engages in a re-imagining of the museum. A museum which explores through practice-based experiments and explorations how humans relate to other species, and dedicates itself to different forms of communication in search of a language between all parties.
      For her End Presentation, Christina set a series of conversations with Agata Siniarska, choreographer, dramaturge and author; Lesley Kadish, anthropologist and specialist of disabled people in museums; and Maria Ptqk, curator and director of Museum Cabinet Sycorax. These conversations will be presented as podcasts and transcribed in text.

       

      *


      BIOGRAPHIES

      Chloe Chignell
      Chloe Chignell (Australia) is a dancer and choreographer based in Brussels working across text, choreography and publishing. In 2019 she opened rile* a bookshop and project space for practices moving between publication and performance, with Sven Dehens. Her most recent work Poems and Other Emergencies premiered at Batard Festival Brussels 2020, and was supported by WorkspaceBrussels, BUDA Kortrijk, Lucy Geurin Inc and La Balsamine. She graduated from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (Brussels, 2018),  She has a Bachelor in Dance from Victorian College of the Arts, (Melbourne, 2013) and studied a writing and residency program at DOCH (Stockholm, 2017). As a choreographer Chloe has been commissioned by the Keir Choreographic Award for the creation of Deep Shine (Melbourne) touring to Japan for The Awaji Art Festival. She presented a short work forever in both directions for the Venice Biennale’s Biennale of Dance (2017). As a dancer Chloe has worked for Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Ingrid Berger Myhre, Anna Gaiotti, Gry Tingskog, Atlanta Eke, Ellen Söderhult, Phoebe Berglund and James Bachelor performing in Australia and across Europe. Chloe is co-editor of This Container magazine, currently in its 8th edition based between Stockholm, Brussels and Melbourne. Her writing has been published by This Container, Koreografi, Indigo Dance Magazine (PAF) and Realtime (Australia). She has developed choreographic writing and reading formats hosted by Kottinspektionen (Stockholm), PraxisFestivalen (Oslo), PAF (France) Scene:Bluss (Norway). She is co-initiator of PO$$E a dance and reading group .
      www.chloechignell.com / www.rile.space / www.thiscontainer.com

      *

      Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi
      Muslin Brothers (Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi) acts as both a fashion brand and research studio speculating on the way personal, social, and political systems shape and are shaped through clothing. It is named after the muslin fabric widely used to make veils, men shirts, and clothing prototypes prior to production.
      The duo’s work overlaps between wearables, spatial, performance, image-making, and exchange of information, using the technologies of clothes-wearing and clothing production lines for a poetic investigation into the biography of non-designer design.
      They hold a B.A in fashion design, from Shenkar, college of engineering, design and art, Israel.
      Their work has been shown in platforms such as the Kanal centre Pompidou Brussels, Parsons New York, Stockholm Art university, Israeli Museum,  the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jerusalem design week, and London and Tel Aviv fashion weeks. They were designers in residency at Arad contemporary art center (2020) Artez Academie Arnhem (2018) and London's college CFE (2016). Winners of design award from the Israeli culture ministry (2018), and the pais grant for fashion design (2016).
      www.muslinbrothers.com

      *
      Flávio Rodrigo
      Flávio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira, 37, gay, brazilian, artist, lives in Brussels. He is a performer. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Scenic Arts from State University of Campinas – UNICAMP (2004), a Specialization Degree in Psychopedagogy from FHO – UNIARARAS (2012), a Specialization Degree from UCB (2013) and a post-master degree in Performing Arts in a.pass (Advanced Performing and Scenography Studies – 2020). He is now undergoing a Master's programme in Speculative Narration and Videography at the ERG (École de Recherche et Graphisme) de l'Université Saint Luc.

      *

      Christina Stadlbauer
      Christina is an artist and researcher. She works at the cracks of arts and sciences, and develops her research around non human agencies - collective intelligence, interspecies communication and the relation between culture and nature. Christina obtained a PhD in Natural Sciences and her practice is informed and influenced by her scientific understanding. She has launched several artistic long term initiatives: like Melliferopolis, an artistic platform to engage with honeybees and their worlds, the Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity – an artistic container to explore the ethical implications of issues related with loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity, and Kin Tsugi Transformations, a work strand with bacteria that reflects on the ethics implied with microbiological lab work and our strive for control and imperfection.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2020/III
    • Settlements
    • Debunking the Myth or The Emperor’s New Clothes Revisited
      01 September 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Elke van Campenhout
    • online
    • 16 November 2020
    • 20 November 2020
    • yes
    • NEW DATES!

      16.-20. Nov 2020

       

      To be a contemporary artist comes with a lot of prerequisites these days: unspoken discourse rules, critical norms, and a general salonfähig consensus about values like fluidity, horizontality, collaboration, etcetera… Often these values are taken for granted while a strong discourse is ruling the artist's world, zooming in on any hint of postcolonial insensitivity, patriarchal blindness, gender observations, and faintly non-consensual power use. This attitude stems from the bountiful history of feminist and queer studies, cultural studies insights, and a general growing awareness of her-stories and the damage done by biased educations and cultural misgivings. But at the same time there are also a lot of other untouched territories underlying these value markers: 19th century romanticism, liberalism, humanism, … Each one carrying within it a very specific view of what it means to be a human being in this world, how we are connected and what we are able to convey.

      In the current climate it seems to me a lot of these values are not questioned thoroughly on how they influence our capacity to open up to the choices in the work that want to manifest. Often the research is blocked by the embodied discourse, warning against any infractions on the presupposed shared value system. Which often seems to stop the experimentation at the point where it dips into uncertainty, risk and the danger of losing the stamp of approval of the community. In this workshop I would like to look into these presuppositions, both on a discursive and body level: to see what are the desires that are being thwarted by the powers-that-are-being-accepted, and how we can reclaim the ones that aren’t and activate them in a thinking and body practice out of a normative context, but within the expansive limits of an experimental research practice.

       

      Deadline to sign up is Thursday, 12.11.2020

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2020/III
    • Settlements
    • AUTODOMESTICATION 01 September 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Krõõt Juurak
    • a.pass
    • 27 October 2020
    • 31 October 2020
    • yes
    • AUTODOMESTICATION

      As a performer you provide your audience with something that cannot be measured in material terms. As regards the activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity, your labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as work – activities involved in defining and determining cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and, on a strategic level, public opinion. As a performer you are primarily a producer of subjectivity. Typically, an artist’s value does not lie in what they “do” but in what they “are”. Now, remember, for example, how Richard Florida described the processes of gentrification caused by the migration of artists and creative workers – the artists may or may not be aware of the value of their mere presence but on a larger scale they produce “results” simply by existing. Survival in the (performing) arts requires creativity that goes beyond the artworks one creates. In fact, a typical performing artist spends about 99 percent of their time off stage – as an audience member, a critic, an administrator, a networker, friend, mentor, student, teacher and so on. Inventing and re-inventing oneself on and offstage, adjusting to various situations, restrictions, moving from project to project, one residency to the next, brimming with creative energy, training and forever educating oneself is the way forward.

      Autodomestication is a workshop about becoming what one already is. Autodomestication asks the participants to colonise themselves to the furthest edges of their souls, extend in all directions and go nowhere. This is the first level of a multi-layered performance which will extend beyond workshop hours and breaks. Infinite moods in which one is not fully aware of what type of decision will be asked to be made next, time-based ways of being, spaces of attention, autobiography as a tool of speculation, insurrection of experience and emotions, and non-causal reasoning.
       
       
      You can find a conversation between Krõõt Juurak and Vladimir Miller here:
       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2020/III
    • Settlements
    • Settlement 16 The Unconditional Institution
      01 September 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass
    • 14 September 2020
    • 03 October 2020
    • Settlement 16

      During the days of Sept 14th - Oct 3rd 2020 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called Settlement. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim 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. The schedule for these three weeks will be developed on site by its participants and shared online on the a.pass website.

      please let us know if you want to join this workshop by subscribing a week before you come. covid measures will be followed in the shared environment to ensure it safety. 

      some key ideas which have informed similar spaces before:

      encountering processes

      The potential of this setup is that it allows us to encounter each others processes instead of products of our artistic work. Processes are much more difficult to make visible and to see as they require a different mode of attention and participation. The attempt to witness a process requires a change in the temporal mode of being-together in the collective space.

      no spectators

      The space we are trying to facilitate is open, but it is not an exhibition. There is no „spectator mode“, and no institutionalised responsibility for hosting visitors. However any participant (including possible newcomers) is welcome to invite and host anybody according to the logic of their work process. Anybody is welcome to join the collective space for any timespan, respectful of the fact that Settlement is a predominately a workspace. The (growing/changing) group will try to provide enough information at the entrance, so that everyone feels welcome and knows how to join and share.

      productive instability

      We will collect most of the materials for the space from the a.pass storage and re-accommodate them towards our purposes. This strategy produces a space that is fragile, self-made, and constantly changing. Such a space influences the sociability within it towards similar qualities – towards a more fluid social contract. In asking for a hands-on construction and deconstruction of its makeshift set-ups, such a space allows for a quicker change of settings and a decentralised mode of (self)organisation. For this reason, the suggestion is to refrain from using usual furniture (tables and chairs) and improvise new set ups for „work-stations“ and collective moments out of what we can scavenge.

       

      The Unconditional Institution

      While this workshop is a place for all involved to develop their own and collaborative work, it is also a place where we can come together around a common concern or concerns. Settlement invites to think about research in a similar way: as a material contribution to the shared environment, a place to care for which can bring other researchers together in collaboration.. The time frame of three weeks allows to actually build these spaces and consider their material conditions, access and affordances.

      /

      Coming out of the a.pass conference Research Futures, and as the initiator of this workspace Vladimir Miller will contribute a focus on the idea of an Unconditional Institution to the shared space. This focus is not a mandatory collective topic of discussion, but a first in hopefully a number of collaborative focal points which will develop during the process. This work on the Unconditional Institution will take the form of a collective debating and writing of a manifesto in conversation with all who want to join.

      /

      If neo-liberalism behaves as if it was unconditional (in the sense of all-encompassing), how can public institutions hold against and within this condition? They need to be built on fundamentally different politics in order to be able to provide a real alternative.

      How can we rethink institutions as care places for specific practices and topics? How can we rethink their borders and access on the basis of time and labour investment into shared concerns, and not on the basis of belonging?

      /

      The practice of Settlement is asking the question of access on a granular level: if our practices are mini-institutions within the artificial mini society / space of the Settlement, what are their modalities of conditional and unconditional access? Learning from our own small institutions we can look towards the bigger ones and develop desires and paradigms of how they should be working.

      /

      The idea of the Unconditional Institution is rethinking the fundamental ideas of access which institutions are built on. How can we turn the paradigm of conditional access to institutions around? Can we imagine institutions with unconditional access? How would that work within a society where conditional access is the very foundation of social and economic life? Can we create a utopian imperative for institutions to give unconditional access to their resources like space, time, materials as part of their structural organisation?

    • 2020 has so far been a turbulent year: of course, the global background we are all aware of, but also for a.pass and all involved, as a community, as a group of colleagues and as a place of politics and organisation. We need time to meet despite all difficulties, and we need time to think together. We think of this block primarily as a meeting of ideas and practices of the researchers and the block contributors, in order to make space for an emergent support structure shared between all involved. Our desire is to ground the support structure of a.pass in a close relationship with the necessities and practices of the researchers. Curating here refers again more to care, than to an overarching trajectory. The core of what we do, practice artistic research, is what needs input and support. Starting from the question of what we need and how to organise it we want to create transitory and sustainable modes of organising and sharing research. The block practice, starting with the Settlement gathering, is focused on organisational and structural awareness and feedback: which spatial and temporal structures do we propose, how is it working with us and our research, and is it something we should keep for the future?

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/II
    • Block 2020/II: The In-Between Block in confinement
      19 May 2020
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • home
    • 04 May 2020
    • 31 July 2020
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Block 2020/II: The In-Between Block

       

       

      The current In-Between Block is a simple infrastructure of extended mentoring that supports the a.pass researchers in the development of their work during the Coronavirus measures.

       

      a.pass supports the researchers in using the current situation to reflect on the resonance of their practices within the contemporary social, ecological, artistic, political and economical discourses. A series of scores are being developed and practiced to keep the contact and the exchange going between the researchers . This shared practice over distance allows us to reflect on the crisis and support each other through it.

       

      The mentors for the In-Between Block are Elke Van Campenhout, Philippine Hoegen, Krõõt Juurak and Sara Manente.

       

      We are looking forward to the moment when we can come together again!

    • 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.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/I
    • Zone Public
    • BLOCK 2020/I 20 December 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Brussels
    • 06 January 2020
    • 30 April 2020
    • BLOCK 2020/I

       

       

       

       

      a.pass post-graduate program for winter-spring 2020 follows the habitual form of three collective gatherings: at the beginning: the ‘Opening Week’, in the middle: the ‘Half Way Days’ and at the end: the ‘End Week’. These are collective workdays where, at large, all the artists and researchers both present their work and feedback on everybody’s research. The three distinct gatherings propose different protocols of presentations and modes of feedback. All protocols are discussed during the block. 

      The block includes as well Zone Public, a curated seminar-like series of working sessions dedicated specifically to this block and happening mainly on Thursdays and Fridays. This ensemble of proposals is designed by Femke Snelting, Peggy Pierrot and Pierre Rubio.


      January
      6-14 : Opening Week Days
      16-17 : Zone Public sessions #1
      23-24 : Zone Public sessions #2
      30-31 : Zone Public sessions #3

      February
      6-7 : Zone Public sessions #4
      13-14 : Zone Public sessions #5
      17-21 : Halfway Days
      27-28 :  Zone Public sessions #6

      March
      5-6 Zone Public sessions #7
      12-13 Zone Public sessions #8
      14-15 Zone Public sessions #9
      22-23 Zone Public sessions #10
      30-April 5 End Week at Perfomance Arts Forum (France)

       


      The artists and researchers participating in this block with their projects are:

      Chloe Chignell
      Signe Frederiksen
      Quinsy Gario
      Stefan Govaart
      Adriano Wilfert Jensen
      Mathilde Maillard
      Muslin Brothers
      Flavio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira
      Magda Ptasznik
      Christina Stadlbauer
      Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
      Kasia Tórz
      Katrine Turner
      Andrea Zavala Folache

       

       

       

       

       


      The dedicated mentors, curators, and artistic coordinator are:

       

                 Dedicated Mentoring

      Kristien Van Den Brande
      Kristien Van den Brande is a Brussels-based writer, editor, dramaturge and researcher. An ongoing interest in the (im)materiality, image and performativity of writing has characterized her work, which engages with a range of disciplines including literature, performance, expanded publishing, urbanism and sexuality. Inspired by ‘minor literatures’, she does ongoing research about 'Support de Fortune’, a notion that refers to forms of writing that take place in the margin of print or on throw-away paper. She is a living book and co-editor in Mette Edvardsen’s project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. Together with Myriam Van Imschoot she set up oralsite.be, an online platform for expanded publishing. Lately, she is gaining interest in role-play as dramaturgic, artistic, therapeutic, sexual tool "to undo the creature in us”. That latter was Anne Carson speaking.

       

      Vladimir Miller
      Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturge. His practice aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of spatial production by using fragility as a building principle. He uses collective construction- and building processes to investigate ideologies of labour and territory within ad-hoc groups and institutional environments. In his latest projects he works with the materiality of fluids to challenge ideas of stability embedded within the design of spaces of cultural production. Vladimir Miller has been a frequent collaborator with the choreographers Philipp Gehmacher and Meg Stuart. As scenographer, co-author, dramaturge and performer he took part or co-created a number of performances and video installations with the two artists. In 2018-19 he is dramaturge in residence at Decoratelier/Jozef Wouters. Vladimir Miller is co-curator of the postgraduate artistic research institute a.pass, Brussels and a PhD in Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 2013 Miller was Fellow at Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin and in 2015 Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Vladimir Miller has been guest lecturer at the University of Hamburg and at KASK, Gent.

       

      Femke Snelting
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminisms and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring 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. With Jara Rocha she currently activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of "bodies" in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Apart from mentoring at a.pass, Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

       


                Zone Public Co-curating

      Peggy Pierrot
      Peggy Pierrot lives and works in Brussels. She works mainly with different associations and educational or research structures. Her most favourite tools are human sciences and free softwares. Since there are "profound links between gesture and speech, between expressible thought and the creative activity of the hand ", she is currently working at the Ecole of Recherche Graphique (ERG) both as a technical and logistical assistant and as a teacher in Media and Communication Theory. She is also involved in the master's program Récits et expérimentation - Narration spéculative. (Storytelling and experimentation - Speculative Fabulation) She gives lectures and workshops on Afro-Atlantic cultures and literatures, science fiction, media and technology and has an active practice in radio.

       

      Pierre Rubio
      Pierre Rubio works as artist, independent researcher and dramaturge. At large and through different forms, his work questions modes of individuation to explore contemporary production of subjectivity in/through the arts. What is real for an artist? is his main research question. Pierre was a dancer and choreographer for a long time, holds a master's degree in the arts combining theatre & communication at the campus of Aix-Marseille University (France) and dance & choreography at the campus of Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers (France). Pierre is currently a core member, co-curator and mentor in a.pass - a platform for artistic research practices.

       

      Femke Snelting
      (see above)

       


                Artistic coordination

      Lilia Mestre
      Lilia Mestre (Lisboa 1968) is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels. She interested in art practice as a medial tool between several domains of semiotical existence. Mestre works with assemblages, scores and inter-subjective setups as an artist, curator, dramaturge and teacher. She’s currently co-curator and artistic coordinator of a.pass where she develops a research on scores - Scorescapes - as a possible radical pedagogical tool. In 2019 - 2021 she’s collaborating with Prof. Jill Halstead and Prof. Brandon LaBelle in Social Acoustic - a research project supported by the University of Bergen, Norway. And with Nikolaus Gansterer and Alex Arteaga in Contingent Agencies - a research project supported by PEEK -Vienna, AU. 

       

       

      More information about Zone Public here

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/I
    • Zone Public 20 December 2019
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • curated by Femke Snelting & Peggy Pierrot & Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass Brussels
    • 16 January 2020
    • 27 March 2020
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • Zone Public

       

       

      Zone Public contributes to an ongoing conversation on the dynamics of publishing generated by technologies of artistic research. From January 2020 onwards, within the a.pass platform for artistic research practices -where its agents continuously re-examine and re-imagine this special form of knowledge production, specifying over and over again its generative nature and deploying its potential-  a three month series of readings, mediations and compilations is oriented by the postgraduate program and its participants to (re)consider the forms and conditions for disseminating artistic research.

       

      In the context of a.pass, the field of artistic research is one to be embodied but also to be explored, discussed and ultimately transversally invented. Instead of a discipline, a.pass considers artistic research as an inclusive library of heterogeneous, impermanent, precarious yet rigorous constructions and affirms that only as a non-discipline, un-discipline or de-discipline can artistic research create the conditions for multiple sites of intersection between society, academia and art. Methodological conflicts, critical discursive inventiveness and continuous experimentation with tentative sub-categories, all are generatively interconnected through hybrid artistic and research practices. Thus, Zone Public wants to closely observe and document the sources, contexts, dynamics, compositions and especially the modes of publicness of the multiple and diverse art and research projects conducted in the post graduate program. The different participatory dispositifs initiated by Zone Public are situated in this specific context, where artistic research is modulated as a topological object to articulate the ways in which artistic practice, theory, history and other disciplines intersect and combine in unique ways in each artistic research projects and trajects. 

       

      Nevertheless, to consider these diverse artistic researches as singular assemblages, as effects but also as proposals for new combinations implies navigating a space where the separation between what is discrete and continuous is reduced. Thinking/doing, writing/publishing, researching/performing, speculating/archiving, containing/executing, exploring/presenting, disagreeing/collaborating, emancipating/determining… Zone Public wants to question these polarities and tries to articulate a relational material that supports, binds and maintains both the discrete and the continuous scales of a non-uniform zone of artistic research in tension with its publicness.

       

      Especially, Zone Public invites to (re)consider the conditions for dissemination of the specific forms of knowledge that artistic research does produce/process/practice. It activates the interrelation between research-as-process versus the crystallisation that publishing requires, and wants to open up the exhibitionary regimes which seem to articulate current artistic research practices and the infrastructures of knowledge production that its agents are both using and possibly used by.

       

      What happens to research when it is made public? How to deal with the apparent dichotomy between research and publicness? What are the ways to manage the (im)possible task of (re)presenting something as hybrid and liquid as a research process? How to produce legible forms out of unformed research matters? How to understand publishing beyond legitimisation and validation? What relations emerge from the determining norms of institutional or academic forms of publication? What to expect from the transfer of research to audiences and what would be, for both agents, useful to know? What could be the definitions and practices of spectatorship for artistic research? What could a public for artistic research be?

       

      Tuned through an ensemble of co-curated proposals designed and coordinated by Femke Snelting, Peggy Pierrot and Pierre Rubio in discussion with the a.pass actors, Zone Public is set up as a collective situation to reflect upon the conditions for making research public, as a space, and time, for together reconsidering academic and/or artistic (internalised) standards of communication and to get to terms with their implications. Therefore, Zone Public is also an occasion to share, invent and consider experimental, performative and/or speculative forms of publishing and exhibiting.

       

      Zone Public is co-curated by three cultural workers. Each of them arrive with distinct but related practices and approaches to the problems of publishing and they assume each of the participants will arrive with theirs. Pierre is interested in modes of knowing, forms of culture and processes of collective individuation specific to artistic research; Femke brings tools from new-materialist feminisms to the tensions between publicness and ongoingness; Peggy questions how publishing can be defined in other ways than by utilitarianism or fetishisation of the legitimacy ideology and dominant modes of (re)presentation and recognition.

       

       

      Zone Public is organised around four dispositifs. Each of them allows another entry into 'the problems of publishing' and is proposed as an invitation to be appropriated and developed.

       

      1. Multipolar Book Club (Researching / Reading / Discussing)
      Every Thursday morning, a time to read and discuss together. The texts to work with are reflecting upon questions of concretisation and individuation, around intersectional relations between cybernetic control systems and structures of knowledge oppression, on the problems of the public, on entanglements and how to cut, and on usefulness and anti-utilitarianism. 
      When: Thursdays 10h00-14h00

       

      2. A Becoming Library (Researching / Contributing / Compiling)
      On Friday afternoon, time to work on concrete experiments of research-publishing. On the program: making on-line publications, editing photocopied fanzines, reprinting materials and programing small radio-capsules. What knowledge would be really useful to publish, and for whom? This collection of publishing experiments will form a growing 'library' of content and forms that matter. The group will contextualise and reflect upon this 'becoming library' through the practice of 'compilation'. Compiling is a term borrowed from collective software-development and it is used to describe a practice of iteratively and temporarily bringing together of resources and references to form a running program. Rather than formatting itself according to preformatted templates of art-publishing, artist books, or academic publishing, can one think the infrastructure of referencing and distribution in ways that work performatively with and not against the intricacies of artistic research? 
      When: Fridays 14h00-18h00

       

      3. The Bermuda Radio Show (Researching / Questioning / Positioning)
      The Bermuda Radio Show is a series of triangular audio recorded conversations. They are occasions to reflect on the issues with ‘making-public’ in relation to artistic research projects conducted at the moment in a.pass. Each project producing possibly its specific form of and matter for interviews.
      When: flexible between Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings or at other possible times.

       

      4. Close Encounters (Researching / Curating / Hosting)
      On some Thursday evenings, a series of presentations and public conversations that was proposed in the context of the a.pass research center in 2018. (See: https:///www.apass.be/close-encounters/ ). Close Encounters are light and irregular events to take time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. The events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, but the format is always a dialog with one or more guests; all are invited to expand on their research or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. For Zone Public, the Close Encounters series will invite guests that have relevant practices with regards to (infrastructures of) publishing and/or making-public and/or art and research publicness. 
      When: most of the time on Thursdays 18h00-21h00

       

       

      here more information about the block of which "Zone Public" is a part

       


      Femke Snelting - Zone Public co-curator
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminisms and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring 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. With Jara Rocha she currently activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of "bodies" in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Apart from mentoring at a.pass, Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam).

       

       

      Peggy Pierrot - Zone Public co-curator
      Peggy Pierrot lives and works in Brussels. She works mainly with different associations and educational or research structures. Her most favourite tools are human sciences and free softwares. Since there are "profound links between gesture and speech, between expressible thought and the creative activity of the hand ", she is currently working at the Ecole of Recherche Graphique (ERG) both as a technical and logistical assistant and as a teacher in Media and Communication Theory. She is also involved in the master's program Récits et expérimentation - Narration spéculative. (Storytelling and experimentation - Speculative Fabulation) She gives lectures and workshops on Afro-Atlantic cultures and literatures, science fiction, media and technology and has an active practice in radio.

       

       

      Pierre Rubio - Zone Public co-curator
      Pierre Rubio works as artist, independent researcher and dramaturge. At large and through different forms, his work questions modes of individuation to explore contemporary production of subjectivity in/through the arts. What is real for an artist? is his main research question. Pierre was a dancer and choreographer for a long time, holds a master degree in the arts combining theatre & communication at the campus of Aix-Marseille University (France) and dance & choreography at the campus of Centre National de Danse Contemporaine in Angers (France). Pierre is currently a core member, co-curator and mentor in a.pass - a platform for artistic research practices.

    • "Milieus, associations, sieves and other matters."

      "Ensemble of problematisations composing a processual environment. A metastable milieu in crisis, which evolves by shifting to new dimensions out of a series of confrontations with and temporary resolutions of problems. The basic grid is one of a series of self organised interactive events intersecting with a series of theoretical study days and a series of advanced forms of feedback." (May-August 2018, curated by Pierre Rubio)

      During my first block I spend most time trying to understand in what kind of environment I ended up and to learn the lingo. Besides that, it was urgent to reformulate my research question that come out of my practise.

      C.R.I. I

       

      The block was activated by C.R.I.'s (critical research interfaces) which raised questions about what does your research open up or makes you see and how does it function as a dispositif (from Foucault). For the first C.R.I. I stacked all the materials, from coffee cups and wall segments to research objects from other participants on one big pile in the middle of the room. I invited all my colleague to come the next day with a very simple task, walk around the pile with me sitting on top. Every time somebody completed a full circle I would read up one 'act' that composed the pile, and if somebody activated the horn, I would start over again from the beginning. After more 90 minutes they managed to walk all the 123 circles around me without stepping on the horn.

      C.R.I. II - A 40kg likable object to carry around

      During a day at ZSenne artlab we were invited to make a small scale C.R.I. for which I introduced my likable object that was filled with 40kg of sand. My request for the group and visitors was simple, please carry the thing and don't put it down!

       

    • "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.

       

    • "During the days of Jan 7th-26th 2019 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called SETTLEMENT. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim 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." Curator Vladimir Miller

      The Settlement was prolonged and resulted in Unettled Study, as a part of Performatik19, the Brussels performance biennial in Kanal Centre Pompidou.

      In the context of the  Settlement I started a proces where I would explore themes like ownership, value and territory.

      Step I - Sitting

      The Settlement started as an empty space, and I needed to sit, but if you make only one stool, there will always be somebody on it, so I made a lot more.

      Step II - Helping

      I offered my skills to the group, if somebody wanted something, I would make it for them!

      Step III - Branding

      On the last day of the first week I branded everything I made with green and orange, in total 27 objects, after this I left the Settlement for two weeks.

      Step IV - Follow-up

        

      I told the settlers that all my efforts were for the benefit of the collective and that they should feel free to do whatever they want with the stuff I made. But after two weeks I came back to follow up on my work, and about half  'my' things were used in people individual projects - which was perfectly fine, but where I could find traces of my branding, I rebranded and spread my motif further.

      Step V - Outsourcing

      Again I was away for some time, but I needed to stay involved, so what better way then hire people to make me the things I desired? The assignments varied from things I actually needed, up to stuff I was curious about how my colleagues would react. "I need a flag and I pay € 10,- for it" - "I want something pretty for € 8,- " - "Could somebody make me a 10% oversized chair for € 10,-?" - "I pay € 10,- for something to organize all these jobs" ect.  In total 13 objects have been made based on those minimal guidelines, but there was always one hard demand, it needed to be branded! The resulting objects varied enormous, there were provocations, there were simple executions, useful ones and even a virtual one!

      Step VI - Selling

      The Settlement moved to Kanal Centre Pompiduo and transformed into 'Unsettled Study' as a part of Performatik19. In the middle of the group I erected a small shop, Meewisse Mobilier et Divers, where I engaged into negotiations to determine the value of the outsourced objects. The visitors had then the option to buy the object for that price. In that negotiation I was completely open about the procedure that led to these object and tried to sketch an as complete as possible image of the object. Factors like material, who made it, what is it for, what did I pay for it, is it art, is it something else, ect..?

      With special thanks to Katinka, Diego, Adrijana, Steven, Elen, Vlavio, Antye and Pierre for making objects!

       

    • In this block we were invited to imagine our research as an ecosystem. This was actually relatively easy, because since some I imagined my practice along these lines, although I prefer to use the term oikos.

      My attitude and relationship to the a.pass curatorial program has been different every block. Because the end is approaching I decided to use this block as an experimental playground and to start preparing my end-communication. It resulted in a series of small interventions and explorations in which the curatorial program was secondary. My focus was pointed at how to relate to specific perceptions of reality, and what became apparent during my period at a.pass, explore and question my own perception of reality. This block I explored the agency of smaller gestures then I used before.

      The concept of making kin from Donna Harroway was the bases of the adoption project that I found most interesting in this block. We were asked to give up for adoption a part of our research. I brought in a flag that was partly deconstructed and primarily based on naval signal flags to explore the ambiguity of those things. But since I gave this up for adoption, it doesn't play a role in the current narrative.

      Laura Pante gave me a lot of material for adoption, she gave nature, fascism, Jane Fonda, the pink, and other items and concepts. The big amount of the materials that I received forced me to select and edit, sometimes follow an idea, and sometimes store it for later. I was looking for connections and meaning through working with them, I presented those as rehearsal for a small exhibition. (I was asked to do something on the doorstep of NL=US, a gallery in Rotterdam, I used my adoption findings as the exhibition that was inside)

      During the halfway days we swapped adoptees, I recieved my new one from from Nicolas Y Galeazzi

      Who received 'Yggdrasil' from from Flavio Rodrigo. He gave me the number 1425, as a reference to a date imagined by Donna Harroway. Accidentally he talked about a 1000 years. I decided to not physically bring the number with me, even though I found out later that the proffered wood for an axe handle is actually ash. My explorations resulted into a presentation in 'Valhalla'.

      During dinner I spoke about the steps from tree and wood to lumber and timber, I made a huge 'buddha-bowl' which was mixed up to become pig-food, I showed a timber sample box with over 50 samples of wood from all over the world, of which some are now endangered, I did an experiment with some generated sound and I gave my adoptee to Nicolas is the form of a facses, and ancient ambigoues object.

      Some small gestures during

      I made and served jam made from Japanese Knotweed

      I weaponized the children that lived on the wasteland where part of the block was happening

      And when we asked to leave a trace at the unlearing centre we visited in Switserland, I cut of some centimeter from a chair so it would wobble.

      (some photo's of my intervention at NL=US)

      the cloths are adapted by the Muslin Brothers

       

    • 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.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Looming Score
    • Sounding Situations 03 September 2019
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Milena Kipfmüller & Klaus Janek
    • a.pass
    • 09 October 2019
    • 07 November 2019
    • Sounding Situations
       
      The duo [SNDNG STTNS] Milena Kipfmüller & Klaus Janek, seeks for the reciprocity of the auditive and its staging. Semantics, appearing sounds and music elements form musical gestures and meaning, the composition is in tight correspondence with its staging.  Challenging the line between discourse and aesthetics, the focus on conflicting situations animates interpretation and questions in a subtil and humble way.

      The territories of interests of sounding situation are prospected from worldwide sociopolitical dynamics and the romantic utopia of truth. Attributes are side-specific-ness, perception in motion, Radio waves, reformulated beauty -  formats are concert, installation, music theater. [SNDNG STTNS] was formed in 2014. Since then works were commissioned by Goethe Institut Montreal, Salvador, Sao Paulo, Haus der Kulturen der Welt-Berlin, various German Radio Stations, Musrara Mix Festival, Jerusalem and more. The duo was invited to Vila Sul earning a scholarship with Robert Bosch Stiftung and won the 2018 Music Theatre Now competition. sounding-situations.com
       
      During oct 2019 [SNDNG STTNS] are resindents at Q0-2 and will further-exam aspects of staging sound and its force and properties. A further concern will circulate around the stochastics of sound-appearance and its inclusion in the claim of the Werkbegriff. The two open the research up to side aspects and field and invite co-researchers to exchange and be involved. 
       
      Dates:

      October: 9 / 10 / 11 / 24 / 25 / 30 / 31
      November: 1 / 6 / 7

    • postgraduate program
    • project
    • Looming Score
    • A looming score - we share your politics of damage Block 2019/III curators Lilia Mestre and Sina Seiffee
      27 August 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 02 September 2019
    • 01 December 2019
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
      case of: Sina Seifee
    • A looming score - we share your politics of damage
       
      Why loom? We were thinking about the loom’s invocation of the closeness of the textile sense, fabrics that bind our desires and bodies. The loom means also the threatening feeling of an inevitable terrible thing as it approaches. And the possibility of b-looming, from the rest, waste, residue, remainders of the storm. Furthermore, loom echoes a gendered practice of writing textile; in the making of fabric like Arachné, that talented mortal weaver who challenged the god of wisdom, as well as Penelope, who weaved and weaved (a mournful making and unmaking fabrics) to postpone her arranged marriage. The loom is a metaphor that invites us to think of reality as something deeply embedded within context, like “the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves” (Veena Das). That means, modes of knowing constitute the objects of knowing in a manner that profoundly affects how one comes to inhabit a new reality.
       
      That is just the conceptual backdrop for us. In this block we want to focus on a support structure that will help each other research and continue what has been initiated in the past block, ‘Troubled Gardens.’ We transport what has been found out there and elsewhere into looming (transposed into weaving + feeling the darkness of it). That is to sustain being immersed in the subjects of ecology, feminism and their possible political agency in this unpredictable and precarious world we are living in. In the coming block, we’ll take these lines thought while going back “home” (we will land somewhere in a.pass studios hosting three scenographies from Laura, Maurice and Caterina for their End-Communication). We would take the movement of going inside as the one to prepare for winter: gather, digest, tell stories, imagine futures. As a curatorial approach we are not interested in obsessing on these concepts per se, but working in and through the particular challenges of our researches.

      We are structuring the block around three ‘scores’ (i.e. structures for enabling the plural): “what do you eat? what do you think? what do you do?” The score here is seen like the loom (a trope of text and textile): thinking made in the context of its weaving in the criss-crossing of one another's desires. Like patterns of giving and receiving affect, concepts, panics, worries, concerns, literacies, curiosities, play, know-ofs, as-ifs, why-nots, sometimes obvious sometimes cryptic sites that you and your colleagues are caught in long enough. By ‘playing’ one integrates, takes care of things that one might not be interested in, engages in an ongoing pattern of feeding and being fed. This joins the power of the transformative by paying attention to things that one does not notice alone. ‘One is alone together.’ What kind of monsters are we?!
       

       

       

      The score is structured on a weekly basis. We will gather one morning and one afternoon only once a week, as follows:
       
      Mondays from 10:00 till 15:00
      what do you eat? is about bringing your food--we feast, making lunch, not cooking, eating together, extended breakfast, with reading practices. Bring something you want to share: text, problem, theme, practice, concern, old question, new question, film, … in case you have nothing, Sina and Lilia have a bag of goodies. 
      what do you think? has to do with the harvesting fields of interest, readings, questions you have in your work and what has been provoked in the last block. Asking what was the sort of knowledge about the ecological thought that you inhabited in ‘Trouble Gardens’?

       

      Tuesdays from 14:00 till 18:00
      what do you do? has to do with what are the residues of the kinds of knowledge, imagination, relations that you are bringing into your current work. There is a list of existing scores in the a.pass website, if you want to know more go here. Performing Back Score, Medium Score, Bubble or Writing, Fragile Community Score, each with its own different nuances of attention, writing and composing. We will present them during the opening week and work with one score throughout the block.
       
      Participants
      Muslin Brothers, Amélie van Elmbt, Rui Calvo, Ana Paula Camargo, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Deborah Birch, Lucia Palladino, Piero Ramella, Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Quinsy Gario, Kasia Torz, Magda Ptasznik ,
       
      Dedicated mentors
      Sara Manente, works with digestion and fermentation processes and feminist theory. Choreographer and performance artist working on ethics and aesthetics of fermentation in relation to artistic research.
      Jeroen Peeters, writer, dramaturg and performer, part of the artistic team of Sarma, a laboratory for discursive practices and expanded publication. The topics of his work includes: performing arts as a site for social experiments, embodied knowledge, languages of making, visual regimes, and ecologies of attention.
      Nicolas Galeazzi, in the cross over through media, methodologies, materials and theories, he works as an actor, teacher, theater director, concept artist, and performance artist. Galeazzi works with Mise-en-Discourse - performative research frameworks where public can experiment with political and social conditions.

       

      Guests
      Milena Kipfmüller and Klaus Janek, artist duo resident at Q-O2, working on development of theatrical, radio and soundwork that deals with aspects of staging sound in specific situations, the processing of musical material, field recordings and language based sound. They will give a workshop in a format of a practical research about how sound acts by itself in a context of performative dramaturgies. Their contribution to the block coincides with the a.pass engagement in defining its own notion of making public, performative devices and working with sound.

       

      Curators
      Lilia Mestre, is a performing artist and researcher based in Brussels. She is interested in art practices as a medial tool between several domains of semiotic existences. Coming from a choreography and dance background, Mestre now researches on Scorescapes, a research she started in a.pass questioning support structures and artificial friendships in artistic research environments.
      Sina Seifee, artist-researcher-storyteller works on the poetics of animal description, the ecological cosmologies of nonhumans-with-history. His artworks illustrate research trajectories that traverse the questions of technology, storytelling, globalism and intercultural mythologies, with an eye on the premodern techno-culture in the Middle East.

       

       

       

       

       

    •  

      I like to think that objects decide the place where they want to be or with who they want to be. 

      That they could move until they find the good place or the good person to leave close by. 

      As an adoptee, I gave a yellow hamac that I get in Brazil last October. There were two main reasons for me to borrow this hamac to someone else : * I tried to find a place for it at home but (also because I don’t have any outside place) I never took the use of it. Was it because this place represents the laziness ? the place where I could rest and read ? (In relation to that, I share the link of this article called A woman's greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself » in the Guardian) 

      This laziness to me is connected to my research with club travail but also to the fantasy of the research which make me come to a.pass (a place where I could dream, read, think, share and…  have time) . And because the block would happen outside I thought it would be nice to have it there in the garden. * the second reason is that I had this hamac in Brazil and that this travel there was really important to me and open a field of questions about the places I (feel) am privileged or not. So I thought in this international context of a.pass it would be a nice object to give in term of many subjects. I gave my adoptee with only one demand : that the object will come back to me at the end in one piece. 

      And then the hamac moved to Rui’s place. 

      But I don’t think he hang once the hamac at his place. He used the hamac in a presentation where he would film Tamar Lilia and Maurice as a group inside the garden, with Tamar trying to hang it somewhere. He told me that he wanted to hang the hamac because we wouldn't have any place to be confortable in the garden. But Rui explained me that the main thing for him was to think about this laziness. In the other movie that Rui did with Caterina in a.pass building, the first indications were about create empty space in an empty space, so in a way laziness related to the non-indications/ improvisations / non-rules that Rui. 

      Together with Cate and Rui, we talked about how laziness is connected to a bad behavior. And how from a country to another it doesn’t contain the same kind of guiltiness.  To the clishé of the South American people who are very lazy  rest a lot : clishé/ Disney character who is Brazilian is very slow and lazy  (ze carioca) 

      Like we are  «  Lost in time » (expression in Brazilian) 

      And then the hamac became a vidéo 

      That Rui send to Caterina.  The video of the improvisation in the garden. 

      (cf Pictures of Rui movie)  Caterina said :  « I was the only one looking at this movie ». 

      Actually Caterina received two videos:

      * the one she was inside (in a.pass building) 

      * the one of the hamac with Tamar 

      Caterina explained us that hamac as an object didn’t catch her so much / it was a bit abandoned 

      More the editing process / how the edition build focus, narrative, story-telling

      How much is this value of the edition by contrast with the laziness of the action

      You don’t do so much but you get a lot because of the framing

      I did a video for the presentation

      I was a bit guilty of not taking attention at the hamac

      I looked at the history of the hamac / images of the slavers using the hamac / symbol of power / it has a political symbol : who has the privileged to be carry in the hamac /// 

      There is hamac inside in our body ! the organes of the stomach are protected by thousand of little hamacs inside our body who car pour body / the transversal abdominal 

      To support the organs, the peritoneal folds that surround the viscera form not only a hammock, but a multitude of small hammocks, so that each organ is solidly attached to its neighbors and to the different walls. The transverse mesocolon envelops the subdiaphragmatic organs. This “hammock structure” supports the static of the viscera while allowing variations in volume, weight and displacement. This is how this “viscera” system adapts to significant variations in volume during pregnancy. This type of anatomical organization is possible thanks to the tissue continuity of the peritoneum.The peritoneum confers to the organs surrounding deformability qualities while maintaining its shape thanks to the collagen fibers it contains.The role of the mesos can be compared to that of a belt , which, while holding the organ, provides a range of measured movements around its reference position.

      Our conversation about the symbolic of the hamac : 

      Hamac not just as a lazy place but also used by poor people in Brazil 

      J’ai acheté ce hamac 50 euros / 50 hamac / 15 dollars / 18 euros 

      70 % de la population de la campagne dort en hamac, 30 % en ville. 

      Quand il y a un hamac et un lit dans la maison, dans 9 cas sur 10, à la saison chaude c'est uniquement l'homme qui l'utilise pour y dormir la nuit ; le hamac procure un couchage plus frais qu'un matelas.

      Les Européens découvrent le hamac au xve siècle grâce aux voyages de Christophe Colomb.

      Quelques dessins expliquent la manière de se coucher dans un hamac ; Raymond Breton, un missionnaire français aux carabes, un dans un dictionnaire caraïbe-français rapporte : « Keyeyecoua tiem larangon callinago, tichati balanagle », ce qui signifie « Le sauvage se couche en rond et en travers, le Français étendu et en longueur ». Là est la principale raison pour laquelle le hamac fut modifié en occident avec l'ajout de barres en bois à chaque extrémité.Les Latinos américains n'utilisent jamais de barres en bois sur leur hamacs.

      And the hamac came back to my place and I found a place for me. 

      Now I would like to invite Rui and Cate to my place and we continue this discussion about laziness, emptiness and what does it mean to make places for things. May be the next movie of Rui can happen in the hamac. 

       

       

      Mathilde > Rui > Caterina

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

      Readings  : 

      Jonathan Crary  24/7 

      The radical plan to save the planet by working less, Robert Pollin, Vice 

      Le droit à la paresse, Lafargue 

      Une apologie des oisifs, Robert Louis Stevenson 

    • postgraduate program
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    • Troubled Gardens
    • Writing into becoming water an instant conversation
      16 July 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Marialena Marouda, Christina Stadlbauer and Nicolas Geleazzi
    • Writing into becoming water

      Imagining a two-day boat trip on the Dilje-Leuven Canal:

      M.M.: A brief introduction into my practice: I see performance as a practice of inhabiting a specific ecosystem. Currently, I am focusing on the oceanic ecosystem, one that can only in part be inhabited by human beings.
      Concerning the ocean, the question that interests me most is: What is my relation to the ocean, and how can this relation be described? What are the affects or elements that make it up? And how can those affects be performed and thus communicated? My focus lies on creating affective (an)archives. i.e. archives that communicate relational experiences and knowledges of the ocean.

      NG: What makes the ocean for you to the ideal ecosystem to be performatively inhabited?

      M.M.: Well, I feel very attracted to it physically and mentally. And it also proposes a different way of thinking and being than land proposes. So I want to explore those. But it is not an "ideal" ecosystem because it is actually quite difficult to inhabit it physically. Very little is known of the ocean compared to ecosystems on land.

      C.S.: For me, it is less the ocean than the water that triggers the idea of inhabiting it in a performative sense. Water is everywhere, in us, around us, we are made up of water - and the element is so common that we don't think about it much, as we live our lives. To give it a moment of special attention and to engage with it as a practice is like a process of becoming aware of something that we deal with every day, and that is so at the basis of our existence.
      The ocean was extremely attractive to me when I was a child. I used to spend my entire summer holidays at the Mediterranean Sea, and I spent most of these months inside of the water. It was the experience of being submersed, totally enveloped by the salty moving body that intrigued me. The smell, the temperature, the consistency (compared with the bathtub water or the swimming pool water) of the Mediterranean became like a place where I would feel at home for me.
      Today, much older, I don't have this urge anymore to submerse in the sea. I'm much more respectful of the gigantic body of water and enjoy more contemplating it by staying at its side, and not going in.

      N.G.: Probably, I could see the ocean in any water. Looking deep into the glass before I take a sip of delicious spring water - e.g. at Schwarzsee in the Alps - I see the sea, I see into the history of these molecules and can follow them through my body into my pee, into the ground into the flower, into the sunray into the rain into the river into the stream into the whole flow that cyclically generates life. Of course, on these waves, we perform our lives and are performed by them. In the case of water, the conditions it creates, the landscape it carves, I'm not sure if I inhabit and perform within or if it's not the other way, the water inhabits me and performs through me.

      M.M.: I think different bodies of water work differently, affect the human body in a different way. So for me, the ocean as I recently encountered it Portugal, for example, the force that it has, is very different from my own experience of the sea in the Mediterranean in Greece.

      C.S.: Can you tell more about the performative aspect that intrigues you with water or the ocean?

      M.M.: Performance is for me the way we choose to enter into relation with the body of water that we encounter. So for example, if you say that you want to be engulfed by the sea, the salty and continuously moving water, I am interested to know more about this sensation that you have and how it could be performed now, for example, in the conditions in this room.

      C.S.: The most intriguing part that comes to mind at once is the aspect of being carried. And of course, we have this much more on the earth. The earth is solid and carries us all the time - something that we also take for granted, and forget about it, as we sit on this chair.
      In the water, especially the salty - thick - water, the buoyancy is a fantastic characteristic that gives me a sense of trust inside this ever-moving deep sea.

      M.M.: Yes, I recognize this feeling! What I would propose now on the trip is to explore how this sensation could be reconstructed through performance or how this sensation could influence what you are researching artistically.

      C.S.: First association is STAGE DIVING!! But that is not very serious, of course!

      M.M.: What is stage diving?

      N.G.: The tricky thing might be, that the sensation is part of the ecosystem which should be performed. But probably that's exactly the chance. To perform WITHIN something not ON something (like a stage). If we take performance as a 'doing' not as a 'representing' it becomes very interesting, I think. Performance in an economic sense is an act of domination. To 'perform' witing a system, in respons-able relation to it, is something very different. The notion of being performed while performing is there very applicable.

      C.S.: Stage diving is to let yourself be carried by the masses of listeners /audience standing in front of the stage when you dive onto their uplifted hands. It is a big test of trust!

      M.M.: Aaaaahh yes, the rockstar thing. We could try it.

      CS: Now, I have to think of VariousArtists - whose performance often has to do with experimenting with what he eats, drinks, how much he sleeps, or exercises. So a 40-day water fast could be a very embodied experience of what water does. And very cleansing, as well. Another important aspect of water, of course - the CLEANING!
      In that sense, Trudo makes his body the ecosystem and the stage at the same time.

      M.M.: We can make a list of those aspects here, during this conversation? I was planning to do this also on the boat trip. Now we can imagine the ocean and that we are travelling on it. What sensation does it give us?

      1. Being engulfed/ buoyancy
      2. Sense of cleansing
      3. ...

      C.S.: There is something that happens to the sinuses, also. And to the sense of smell that I find very interesting. In the ocean, of course, you smell the salt and the "sea" - like algae and dead fish and live fish and all the rest of it. But there is also something happening to the nose, in my case. It gets full of water and clogged, and at the same time, it cleans itself.
      What aspect of sensation is that?!

      M.M.: How would you name it? If you had to use one word? Smell? Or salt-smell?

      N.G.: For this, it would have been perfect to be on the boat. I'm sure we would find another answer than here!

      C.S.: There is something that is inside and outside at the same time. It is as if the ocean gets INSIDE of my body through the nose. It is the one opening that lets the water in. So, it is not the smell, I think - it is more the permeability of my body to the body of water.
      Of course, also the skin gets wrinkled and like a prune, that it keeps the water out. On the contrary, it may even lose a bit of my body water instead of letting the ocean in, because I always get very thirsty when I spend a long time in the water.

      M.M.: Permeability is a wonderful word for it! There is this concept of the Hypersea, that was put forth by two biologists, Mark and Dianna McMenamin. They understand all living organisms on land as "lakes" that communicate with each other by on the one hand keeping the water in and on the other being permeable and passing water from one organism to the other. It's as if all organisms on land form a deterritorialized sea that they carry in their bodies.

      N.G.: The inside/outside is actually rather a human perspective. Nothing wrong with this, but from the water perspective we are simply a tunnel! A place of passage, and probably of transformation. Perhaps that's the most real performance we do. Being a catalyst for waters. WE ARE THE CANAL!!

      C.S.: Now, I have to think of homoeopathic medicine, somehow. The transformation of the water inside our body tunnel.
      A tangent.

      N.G.: btw. What do you think is the boat a stage ? or rather an ecosystem within an ecosystem?

      C.S.: the boat is a very artificial object for me that allows us to traverse the body of water, to be on it without getting wet, to not engage with the water but only with the surface of the water, and there is an aspect of dominance in boats also. You are always (unless you are going under) on top of the water and you don't get wet. It is an object that divides you from the water. You feel it but indirectly only. The most stringent aspect of water - that it is WET - is lost. You don't get wet.

      M.M.: You can get very wet on a boat! Have you ever been on a boat when there are strong wind and big waves? You get soaked.
      For me, the boat is a machine that allows us to enter into relation with the vastness of the sea, that otherwise, we would not be able to approach. But yes, it also has an aspect of domination. Without boats, no "discoveries", no colonization, but also no communication, no fishing, no trade. It's a complex place to be, the boat. It also makes for a very specific surface on which to move and urges a particular behaviour regarding the human bodies that inhabit it.

      N.G.: We have this image of the sailors, that try to master the waters with their boat, fighting against the waves and storms, overcoming the overwhelming forces of nature. Like Ishmael fighting Moby-Dick the wale.

      C.S.: I have an aunt who cannot swim. She would go on a boat, though. But she would not go directly into the water. Only where it is very shallow.
      And Jonas who found himself inside the whale. How did he end up there again? That was an ecosystem inside of the water, and then he was inside the belly, and that was a bit like land again. Like a membrane that allowed him to be inside the water for a long time, but without touching the water. Was it so?

      M.M: So you would prefer a whale belly to a boat?

      C.S.: that is difficult to answer. I don't have a clear image of a whale belly...

      N.G.: Of course! Even in this nutshell, I dream of the big monsters.

      M.M.: So we add 3. permeability, 4. whale-belly...

      N.G.: Or let's say permea-belly.

      C.S.: And now, the ice. What about ice. Is this ocean? But solid, you can walk on it. And it totally changes the experience of being in/on the water.
      Or under it...?

      M.M.: Yes definitely, ice is also ocean. Just in a different form. With a whole different set of conditions. I talked to a glaciologist recently, and he said there is the category of sea ice and the ice shelf, that are both ice formations on the sea, which differ from the big glaciers that are usually land formations.

      N.G.: For an ice bear it might be something different than for a penguin, or for the wind. For the ice bear it is (more and more ) a boat!

      C.S.: With ice I find it confusing. Do I remember right that for a long time it was not known if the North Pole is solid or if the South Pole is solid - land or sea. Ice confuses things a bit, I find...

      M.M.: Then lets end in this confusion? I think its quite appropriate.

      NG: True!

       
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    • Troubled Gardens
    • Exercises in Becoming Water Score for a boat trip
      16 July 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Marialena Marouda
    • Exercises in Becoming Water

      Introduction:

      This is a score for a multiple day boat trip for two or more people. It should last a minimum of two days. It can take place on any body of water large enough to sail on for a number of days: a lake, a canal, a river, a sea or an ocean. The boat you use, its size and form, can differ accordingly. This score invites you to spend time on this body of water and to see how it affects/ can affect your body, your thoughts, and your work. It proposes some tasks that you can try while sailing. It also suggests different texts that you can read during the trip. Each task can take as long as you need it to take, from a few minutes to several days. Take your time.

      1. Preparations

      Start by making sure you know the basics regarding how to sail the boat or that you sail with someone who is a captain. Let them show you the knots that you will need to navigate and to dock the boat. Read the book of rules of conduct on water and inform yourself about the conditions of insurance. If there is a VHF on the boat, make sure you know the basics of how to communicate through it. Sign all the necessary papers and register, if necessary, with the marine authorities, before you start your trip.

      2. Inhabiting your Boat

      Get to know the boat you are on and its history. How old is it, by whom was it made? What material is it made out of? Who owns it? Is it a shared boat, or does it belong to an individual? How come you are on it then?

      3. Inhabiting the Body of Water

      Get to know the body water you are sailing on, its set of conditions and its history. Is it an ocean or a sea? Which one, how much salt does it have? Are there tides or currents? Or, otherwise, how is this body of water connected to the ocean? Is it natural or artificial? If natural, how did it come about, and what is its age? If its a river, in which direction is it flowing? If artificial, when was it made and for what reason?

      How will you navigate through it?

      4. Noting Elements/ Affects:

      While you sail, try to take note of different elements/ particular that appear to you during the trip.

      What elements of the specific body of water and its conditions are most intriguing for you? What things interest you, touch you, connect you to this specific water body affectively, physically? How do you experience those things? Can you name them and list them? How do they affect you, what are the ways in which they communicate themselves to you?

      5. Doing work:

      Option a.

      Choose one affect that you noted before and demonstrate to each other how you experience it, how it affects you. You can use your body, voice, objects on the boat and anything else you need, as tools for this demonstration.

      Option b.

      Choose one affect that you noted before and try to present your work/research to each other through this element. How has this element affected your thoughts and work?

      or

      How is this element already present in your body or practice, or how has it affected it/ them?

      6. Logbook/ Documentation:

      A logbook is a book for narrating events that took place on the boat. There should be one logbook in your boat as well; you usually find it where all the maps for navigation are kept.

      Document your trip and the affects that you have experienced and performed in the logbook of the boat you are sailing on. You can choose how you want to do this. What traces of your journey would you like to leave in the book, for others to read? You can use parts or all of your notes and research from the preparation process.

       

       

       

       

      Some Reading to Accompany the Score:

      McMenamin, Mark and Dianna: Hypersea (New York: Columbia UP, 1994)

      Neimanis, Astreida: Bodies of Water:

      https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/bodies-of-water-posthuman-feminist- phenomenology/

      Water: a Queer Archive of Feelings” in: Tidalectics; Imagining an oceanic worldview through art and Science (Cambridge: MIT UP, 2018)

      Protevi, John: “Water” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/protevi.html#_edn8

       
    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • workshop
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Traveling through square liberateurs – Molenbeek 15 May 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Einat Tuchman
    • Square des Libérateurs, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean
    • 12 July 2019
    • 12 July 2019
    • I'm inviting you into my neighborhood, to discover the "Quartier Liberateurs "- a specific urban sphere that I'm investigating for three years now. Let us enter some of its local structures with their human and political complexity; small institutes, shops, and churches; artifacts, publicness, and attitudes; architecture, infrastructure, and topographies. We will explore how those elements create a natural habitat that exposes layers of exchange between needs and capacities. 
       
      Taking a distinctive look at the divergent attitudes towards the environment and the social struggles in these different locations, we will learn about the prototypical difficulties and potentials of such culturally dense urban areas. 
       
      Through a reading of Felix Guattari's The Three Ecologies, we will reflect on the three layers of its daily life circumstances. The mental state of its multicultural inhabitants, the social relations in the public sphere and the ecology it proposes. By assembling the necessities and the resources of the "Quartier Libérateurs", we will each develop on our language to interact with such spheres: Probably best we start with writing a letter, a note or a phrase that tries to connect our gazes and impressions with the reality we encounter.
       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Bruocsella a resilient movement for room to secondary river valleies
      07 May 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Ecole Mondiale
    • Start at Zenne Garden
    • 22 May 2019
    • 22 May 2019
    • Bruocsella
       
       
      ECOLE MONDIALE experiments and experiences walking in and with the Zenne Valley while researching an alternative political model for the Brussels region, - capital of Europe, as a metropolitan landscape. Its ambitions is to transform the dominant 19th-century political model of the Brussels-Capital Region into a 21st-century vision / version based on its specific hydrographic structure. The secondary river valleys of the Zenne can provide these metropolitan landscape specific characteristic features. How can we create a mentality and culture together with the landscape of these secondary valleys, to radically transform the old model? How can we confront us with energy transition, relating humans and non-humans, and provide common places for thinking in multi-species spheres? This future model is based on the special hydrographic structure of Brussels, in particular the 8 secondary river valleys, tributaries of the Zenne which make up 80% of the total green space.
       
      Landscape architect Bas Smets studied the changing significance of the landscape and the open space in the 21st century metropolitan Brussels region. He mapped the importance of these secondary valleys (Molenbeek, Neerpedebeek, Vogelzanbeek, Geleytsbeek, Maelbeek, Linkebeek, Woluwe, Laarbeek, Zuunbeek) and proposed to design a network. These secondary valleys can be strengthened to become linear park landscapes that enable greater water catchment and thereby
      reduce the risk of flooding.
       
      Taking this study as a starting point and the positive appreciation for the Zenne river basin, we want recognize and acknowledge room to the river and to investigate agency of the basin becoming a legal entity.
       

      How making kin with the secondary river valleys?

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Waterways 07 May 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Marialena Marouda
    • 01 July 2019
    • 02 July 2019
    • Waterways
       
       
      As an additional tool of investigation for the troubled gardens, I propose to float on water. By exchanging the usual surface of this block - soil - for water, I would like to explore how this element and it’s set of conditions can leak into artistic researche(r)s - or even flood them? What does it mean to understand water as a workshop? How can this experience influence our practice in the workshops of this block?
       
       
      Asking these questions, we will spend at least 48h at the water and walk along the idea of 'canal'. Will we accompany the water or is the water our companion? How does the current of the rivers enter the streams of our communication? How do we approach this hyper-object that finally floats in the ocean?
    • postgraduate program
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Horror Garden 07 May 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Gosie Vervloessem
    • Zenne Garden
    • 20 May 2019
    • 20 May 2019
    • Horror Garden

      One way to connect to other then humans is the horror genre. By thinking the unthinkable, we explore the limits of our ability to understand the world. But does the world lends itself to a meaningful relationship? Does increased access lead to decreased strangeness? In thinking about our relationship to the "other than humans", what is the status of the notion of obscurity and darkness? What lingers at the edges of our experience? The Horror Garden is a tool that explores the idea of our profound dark relation to the World through our relationship with plants.

      Gosie is teaching us the alchemy of making jam from horror, helps us to discover methodologies of radical weeding and will surprise us with poisonous techniques. Please be well prepared, and take your intellectual antidote. 

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Body Virtual Institution 30 April 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Nassia Fourtouni / Goda Palekaitė / Katinka Van Gorkum
    • Hacktiris (6th floor) - Rue Paul Devauxstraat 3, 1000 Brussel
    • 31 May 2019
    • 01 June 2019
    • Body Virtual Institution


       

      @ Hacktiris (6th floor) - Rue Paul Devauxstraat 3, 1000 Brussel

      Doors open at 18:00

      19:00 GODA PALEKAITĖ - How to Infuriate a Historian
      21:00 NASSIA FOURTOUNI - Waiting Room Meditation
      22:00 KATINKA VAN GORKUM - Distance Learning in Close Proximity


      Virtual Body Institution
      is the coming together of the 3 concepts that intertwine in the End-Presentations of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė.

      Their practices are very distinct from each other, in form as in content though they all engage with forms of sociability that enhance, propose and reveal the relation of the individual with the societal. Tackling this position from discursive, technological or body practices they invite the visitor to engage in thinking and embody modes of construction of the self.

      Through their current practices of research and exposure - that use the personification of historical characters in a public discussion, the entrance into virtual space as a extension of the ‘real’ and the body as a perception machine - we encounter some of the contexts and mechanisms we inhabit in current western society.

      Their proposals are not complementary but do co-habit through this event beyond agreement or disagreement by creating an area (spatial and experiential) of a temporary common.

      The work of Katinka Van Gorkum, Nassia Fourtouni and Goda Palekaitė enacts research modes of activating and empowering the self as active part of larger technological concepts. One becomes aware through their piercing practices of the narratives that surround the institutional, the body and the virtual. They softly enable criticality in the moment of exposure by engineering transdisciplinary processes that fundamentally question what  we are made of and how do we relate to it.

      All researchers work with performance and with the performativity of the event as a field of exploration that deconstructs the world as a given. The making public of these concerns in a transdisciplinary manner, mainly want to politicise the individual as being an actant in the public sphere enacted by the event itself. The participatory is here seen as the moment of inquiry, experiencing and sharing that crosses through the individual to the communal and vice-versa in enabling the non expertise as potential for critical presence.

      Are questions related to the self, isolated from the other? Is the self alienated from the communal, the historical, the technological, from the body?  How do we practice the spilling of our personal concerns into societal concerns? Where and how do we politicise our practices? Where do we meet? Are we here yet?

       

      Short description of the researches and links to the respective portfolios:

      Nassia Fourtouni

      is a dramaturg and dance researcher. She came to a.pass with a research upon dramaturgical practice with a focus on the initial phase of a creative process, namely the phase where things are not yet shaped, the phase of nothing.

      Having in mind the dialogical relationship in which most dramaturgical practices take place, the first scores she developed were about dialogue and conversation. Gradually, the scores and methodologies developed borrowed the form of a somatic lesson.

      In her work she brings together text and experiential anatomy, shaping an expanded dramaturgical practice that can vary in form and content depending on the given context. The aim is to facilitate the appearance of embodied aesthetic experience by addressing the inner sense.

      The practice manifests in installations, scores and somatic lessons.  Also, it functions as a critical commentary on authorship and the seductive power of language, mainly in relation to the use of instructions.

      For the a.pass end-communications, she is developing an in situ audio installation based on a score about the past, the present and the future of the building, using excerpts from texts by Virginia Woolf, Robert Walser and Ivan Illich.

      https:///www.apass.be/profile/practicing-interstices/

       

      Goda Palekaitė

      is an artist and researcher whose work can be described as a combination of artistic, literary and anthropological practices. Her long-term projects explore the construction mechanisms of historical narratives, political agency of dreams and imagination, and social conditions of creativity. Their outcomes usually manifest as performances, installations, scenographies, and texts.

      In the context of a.pass Goda continued her investigations on the construction of historical and political ideologies, and the agency of imagination in processes of legitimization and instituting. Her interest lies in narratives, stories and characters of diverse identities, which operated outside the official discourses, and were seen as troublemakers. These people did not see themselves as artists, neither have they had a place in art history; yet Goda sees their modes of operation as comparable to those of some contemporary artists working today.

      For the End Communications event at a.pass she is writing a script and directing a performance-conference where three of such characters meet. The debate will take place between a 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the ancient Greek female poet Sappho and a controversial Jewish-Muslim writer and journalist Essad Bay. This semi-scripted debate will manifest as a live discussion between three contemporary artists and researchers whom Goda encountered within the context of a.pass: Nicolas Galeazzi, Marialena Marouda, and Sina Seifee. They will embody the characters, yet contributing with their own practice.

      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=103

       

      Katinka Van Gorkum

      is a visual artist interested in the (domestic) interior as a figure for interiority. Previous work includes video, performance and installations, all with a strong physical component. She arrived at a.pass with a desire to explore further the concept of home and how it's being shaped by ideas, ideologies, theory and philosophy. Besides that, she felt the need to dematerialize her art practice, experiencing difficulties with the inflexibility, heaviness (literally) and the origin of the materials she used. She also had questions about her work as a single-use artwork and art as an ecological act.

      She started working with the 3D design program SketchUp which is used by architects and designers. In this virtual environment she tries to exteriorize the interior. Working in virtual space further problematized the question of exteriorizing the interior and brought up questions concerning (dis)orientation, scale, groundlessness, perspective, entering and sharing an interior.

      Throughout the a.pass trajectory she has attempted multiple points and modes of entry to the spaces of the research. For the End Communications she intends to open the virtual research environments through a (lecture) performance and screen recordings of the SketchUp spaces, exploring the program as a tool for distance learning in close proximity.

      https:///www.apass.be/profile/dear-visitor-a-portfolio-by-katinka-van-gorkum/

       

       

    • Not far from the Zenne Garden a wasteland area expands along the canal. It is one of those areas looking empty, lost and not taken care of. BXL WILD LIFE and BUITEN/DEHORS is a collective of research and experimentation which proposes to consider the urban as the natural environment of man. Since 2012 the collective focuses on the relationships between maintenance, property, and inhabitation of areas. This year BUITEN / DEHORS decided to start on a piece of land located between Digue du Canal and rue des Goujons in Anderlecht, the establishment of what is called an adventure playground*.
      This project is part of a broader research questioning the place of children in the city, the practice of an anti-authoritarian education, the citizen's auto-construction of the city, radical ecology as a reconsideration of the relation between man and his environment. As so it can be seen as an outcome as well as the beginning of something unexpected.
The adventure field is as much about the physical structure that we try to put in place as its context.
The land, located in an area of current "urban renewal" belongs to a private developer, Atenor, lurking for the right moment for exploitation. Officially considered as a wasteland, it is one of those areas looking empty, lost and not taken care for. Its current inhabitants are most invisible, the soil polluted and the (non-)maintenance very diverse. BUITEN/DEHORS is occupying it with no authorization.
The structure is made of second-hand wood, thrown by people in the street, collected daily in the surrounding neighborhood, Cure-ghem. Like our knowledge of the site, it is gradually built up according to our weekly onsite visits. It is built and destroyed, with no preconceived plans, by us and the children passing by. An ongoing process, to be continued in many different ways.


      *The first junk playgrounds were based on the ideas of Carl Theodor Sørensen, a Danish landscape architect, who noticed that children preferred to play everywhere but in the playgrounds that he designed. In 1931, inspired by the sight of children playing in a construction site, he imagined "A junk playground in which children could create and shape, dream and imagine a reality". He aimed to provide children living in cities the same opportunities for play that were enjoyed by children living in rural areas. The first adventure playground was set up by a Workers Cooperative Housing Association in Emdrup, Denmark, during the German occupation of the 1940s. The playground at Emdrup grew out of the spirit of resistance to Nazi occupation and parents' fears that "their children's play might be mistaken for acts of sabotage by soldiers". Source wikipedia -adventure playground, 12/04/2019

       
    • This is an elaborate permaculture garden with many small experiments from water cleaning plants to interspecies labour. Kobe, who will also be one of the dedicated mentors - is working in this garden for 12 years together with a collective of various artists and activists. It is quite a sensitive ecosystem. Not only these human relationships and diverse projects but also the wild animals and insects that are populating the area have to be taken care for while entering this garden. What does this mean for us how can we become their companions?
      We will engage and relate to this 'refuge' situated somehow hidden behind industries along the neglected Zenne river throughout the whole block. It will be our primary place of gathering, and therefore we will also physically support the collective in gardening and construction work

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Workshop 3 :: Unlearning Center / Terrestrial Building crafting
      29 April 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Martin Schick / construct lab
    • Fribourg (CH)
    • 24 June 2019
    • 29 April 2019
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Workshop 3 :: Unlearning Center / Terrestrial Building

       

      To meet this Workshop, I propose a trip. For the cultural program of the blueFactory in Fribourg Martin Schick is developing a concept for an Unlearning Center - an open sphere for re-practice learning in times of climate change. The blueFactory is a new economic zone for circular and environmental business. It expands in the former industrial site that is now used for green entrepreneurship, engineering research companies, communal gardening, amongst others. The Unlearning Center aims to give space for a fundamental rethinking of the knowledge needed to face different and difficult visions of building for the future with all its personal, economic, political, technical and aesthetic implications.
      Together with the ConstructLab - a network of architects, that constructed the unlearning furniture - we will engage in this „Terrestrial Building Site“ by a parallel reading of Bruno Latour’s manifesto ‚Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime‘.

       
    •  

      The workshops of this block will be 'gardens' - and therefore for once of spacial nature. I propose to ask these gardens to be our teachers, to learn from them, to let them put us at work, to ask them to suggest a practice to us, to make them structure our time and our collective research attempts etc. The gardens are the 'education' framework and the 'atelier.'

       

      For this, we need interpreters and people who have tools, figures or behaviours to engage, read and work within the workshops. These interpreters - probably we will call them ‚companions' - will build a network, a web of knowledge, together with us and amongst themselves. I would like to invite quite some of them to accompany us - sometimes alone sometimes in couples or groups.

       

      For further details watch out for following posts.

       

       
    •  

      To engage in gardens and use them kind of as our ‚atelier‘ needs a certain regularity.  Therefore, I propose to meet more or less three days per week. To all of these days one or more companion shall be invited. These days may resound the three ecologies proposed by Felix Guattari:

      One day we will focus on gardening (the environmental ecology), helping with planting, weeding, constructing etc. whatever is needed to do.

      One other day we will engage in weaving the social tissue by exchanging and discussing ideas, experiment with practices, and sharing the work on the adoptions.

      On the third day, we want to give space to the development of the individual research ecologies, for a shared reading relevant texts (which might reflect the mental ecologies). Our ‚companions’ will join us on these days, connect to our practices or propose a specific approach from their side.

      Of course, these days are not apportionable in ecological categories, and the practices will strongly interrelate. We will have to find out together how these foci can influence the practices and how we develop rituals and methods that help guiding us through the various experience of ecologies and ecosystems.

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • The Adoption Project
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Making Kin the adoption project
      24 April 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Zenne Garden et al.
    • 06 May 2019
    • 28 July 2019
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Making Kin

      The primary soil of questions for our investigations in the a.pass block 2019/II is to experience us as an ecosystem in ecosystems. We take this fertile ground as an incentive to generate ideas for a 'we' that relates differently to the planes, stays differently in trouble with the damages we induce, and rather becomes-with then cares-for the life on it. Donna Haraway proposes for the generate this other "we" by makeing kin with multiple things, species and other ‚companions‘. In her book „Staying With The Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene“, an essential (tentacular) body of references for this block, she offers a meshwork of indicators what 'making kin' could mean.

      "Think we must. We must think"
      (Stengers, Despret, refering to Harraway).

       

      To put it into practice is at stake. My intuitive response to this is a practice that I started developing some years before I read her text: mutual adoption of specific aspects of each other’s research seems to be a good motor to train the response-ability Donna Haraway claims as one of the needs for making kin. To ‚adopt‘ objects, practices, behaviours or ways of thinking etc. of someone else’s research means taking care of it as it would be your own! In an ecosystem, all aspects are at the same time ‚other' - and part of one and the ‚same‘ space of resonance. The complex relational web of this 'same-other', can be explored by mutual and temporal adoption of aspects of each other' research and make it part of kin.

      I propose a joint exercise, whereby every one of us

      1.) prepares to put aspects up for adoption, then

      2.) to leave them as ejects of our research aside, to

      3.) be found by others and

      4.) to adopt ourselves ejected aspect from someone else into our own practice.

      - On a regular base, we will need to swap and continue the cycle.

       

      Btw. did you know that works are acting in swarms, and take common decisions by communicating through touch?

       

      During the opening week, we will develop our adopt-ability and will exchange our 'baskets' and get ready for the impact an adopted aspect on our researches.
      The first cycle of adoption starts in the opening week, will continues with a swap in the HWD’s and will end by handing it back in the end week.

       
    • postgraduate program
    • Troubled Gardens
    • Block 2019/II Troubled Gardens ecologies of artistic research
      23 April 2019
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 29 April 2019
    • 28 July 2019
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Block 2019/II  Troubled Gardens

      The earth faces troubles of kind humanity never experienced before: climatic changes induced by humankind are dramatically destructive and - meanwhile unavoidable. Therefore we can register a shift in the environmental movement from an understanding of trying to prevent the planet from a catastrophe to mere dealing with life within the consequences of climate changes. This perspective fundamentally shifts our culturally abstracted understanding of nature - and therefore it poses big questions to the arts as a source of cultural knowledge for that great deal of life. The catastrophe might mirror the impossibility of hierarchical understandings of the relation between nature and culture, but it also forces us to the obvious insight that all vital cycles - whether social, ecological, technological, cultural, mental, emotional, economic etc.- are inseparably connected ecosystems.

      Knowing about their sensitivity and complexity, I’m asking myself, how does my artistic practice and research act within the disturbedness of these ecosystems? How can I understand myself and my research as transformative part of their troubles - knowing, that I’m a troubled and troubling ecosystem myself?

      After having curated two blocks at a.pass with regards to the conditions which, and in which we create - the block 2017/II about the commons, as an alternative economy, and the block 2018/I about the making of conditions and Institutional Critique - I see the need to look beyond our cultural boundaries and understand the meshwork of diverse conditions we are living in together with other species, elements and time zones.

      The aim of this block is to challenge our individual research aims as living creatures and companions in and as ecosystems. Hyper related, affecting, and never singular, our researches are - however - in resonance with their surrounding. We can not ignore the influence of these aspects, but we are also hardly aware of the performance of these influences on our practice.

      Taking this ‚ecosystem-perspective‘ as the main tool for our investigations, this block shall give you the possibility to reflect your research as a relational field within a ‚terrestrial‘ landscape. On the other side, it will unavoidably put our researches in relation to the ecological crisis and catastrophes surrounding us and will help us to develop tools and understanding for a post-anthropocentric, post-atopocenic, probably post-artropocentric relational practice with your research.

      Therefore, this block IN-vites you OUT. Where to investigate and experience a behaviour as ecosystem better then in the outside - an outside, that immediately takes us in, makes us being a part of it! ‚Outdoor‘ - at places with-out-doors - might be the right term. Where weather and biosphere meet industrial (side-)performance, migrant activities, walls, traffic, sun - and state power, written and unwritten laws etc. interact with each other.
      This block takes you out into the systemically ‚wild‘. What allows structure? I don’t know - at the moment, before having taken up theses c/glasses any curated structure feels violent towards the tenderness of the ecosystems. Handling the idea ‚ecosystem as research as ecosystem‘ with care is as crucial as to care with the greatest sensitivity for the ecosystems we are about to enter by stepping out of the door.

      This in mind, I throw out my tentacles to propose a path to step into our ‚worlding‘ experience and to trace the stories we will tell on that way.

       
    •  

      MON 7th

      14:00 meeting

      17:00 cleaning, emptying the collective space

      19:00 dinner

       

      TUE 8th

      10:00 Materials and Tools

      WED 9th

      10:30 Scheduling

      11:00 Katinka van Grokum, a.pass opening week presentation: SketchUp as an Interior

      12:00 Caterina Mora: Translating Ballet to Regaton

      13:00 Living Together: organising cooking cleaning up

      14:00 Research and Space (conversation with new a.pass researchers and LM and VM)

      16:00 Ezster Nemethi TBC

       

      THU 10th

      9:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      10:30 Scheduling

      11:00 Deborah Birch, a.pass opening week presentation: Caves II. Re-entry

      14:00 Katinka van Grokum: Trash Talk, recycling in Belgium 

      16:00 Chloe Chignell, a.pass opening week presentation: Choreographic Strategies for Writing

      17:00 Christina Stadlbauer, a.pass opening week presentation: Sharpening the Narrative

       

      FRI 11th

      12:00 Signe Frederiksen,  a.pass opening week presentation

      Cooking: Amelie van Elmst

      15:30 Maurice Meewisse, a.pass opening week presentation

      17:00 Meri Ekola, Light Observations

      18:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton) with  a guest dancer

       

      SAT 12th

      SUN 13th

       

      MON 14th

      9:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      11:30 Diego Echegoyen, a.pass opening week presentation

      12:30 Goda Palekaitė,  a.pass opening week presentation: Legal Implications of a Dream

       "Legal Implications of a Dream" is the title of Goda's research and her solo exhibition which just opened in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Let us think of settlement as an occupied space which materializes as a consequence of a collective dream.

      14:00 Scaffolding Introduction (how to and safety instructions)

      16:00 Human Condition Reading Club part I

       

      TUE 15th

      10:00 Scheduling

      10:30 Outside Walk (Mathilde Maillard) 1h

      12:00 Alex Arteaga, Input: Architecture of Embodiment and destabilizing an architectural object

      Disclosing an Architectural Object is an artistic research framework that allows an approach to a twofold object of inquiry: the architectural organization of material and the cognitive agency of aesthetic media, practices and artifacts.

      14:00 Meeting with Michele Meesen and Joke Liberge: organisational, budget, etc for first block researchers (end 16:00)

      16:00 Laura Pante, apass opening week presentation: On Metaphorology

      18:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

       

      WED 16th

      10:00 Mathilde Maillard:  a.pass opening week presentation: Work Club / Club Travail

      11:00 Peggy Pierrot, Do You Belong ?

      Artistic activities are shaped by continuous trips, international workshops and residencies abroad. In this context, each work session operates like a colonization of some people space, means and life by the artistic presence and vision. The artist settles in different environments, whether his work aim to relate directly or not at all to the different creation contexts. In this international scene of seesaw motion, how can one’s cultivate his sense of belonging, of beeing from, of being rooted, without a nationalist content, but without being a post modern nomad of emptiness?  How do YOU, settler, react to this constraints (langage, food, bodies, papers...).  What do you take or leave ? What do you gain from this artistic nomadism ? Do you belong somewhere ? We’ll question these assumptions through an insight on the work of  the artist Pierre Creton.

      14:00 Flavio Rodrigo, a.pass opening week presentation: Sensations, Paths and Rituals of Work with the Creative Imagination (establishing the initial relations of my research). Please bring you mobile phone and headphones, you will need them during the presentation.

      18:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

       

      THU 17th

      9:00  Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      11:00 Elen Braga: The World to Come

      If we have a history-line, what are the most important events of the last 30 years of human life that come to our mind? Is there a connection between those events and the context of our artistic research? What are the symptoms of those events and how to prophesize the world to come? We will start the exercise using the allegory of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. And by creating symbolic images, we will try to transform those events into an allegory of apocalypse. "And in the days of these people shall we set up a world, which will never be destroyed?"

      12:00 Nassia Fourtouni, a.pass opening week presentation: Neither Distance nor Empathy

       

      FRI 18th

      9:30 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      13:00 Philipp Gehmacher, mentor's presentation (skype) 

      14:00 Amelie van Elmbt, a.pass opening week presentation: Dreaming Walls

      15:00 Scheduling next week

      15:05 Space and Scenography review and preview w. Vladimir

       

      SAT 19th

      SUN 20th

       

      MON 21st

      13:00 Experimental Film Scratching Workshop

      14:30 Muslin Brothers, a.pass opening week presentatio

      16:00 Human Condition Reading Club part II

       

      TUE 22nd

      9:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)

      12:00 Engaging the Spectacle: Aspects of Contemporary Ideology, a Brazilian Case Study.

      Roberto Winter shares his thoughts and artistic practice - with an introduction and lunch prepared by Adrijana Gvozdenovic.

      "Our time is critical, we seem to be finishing the transition to a new era (and maybe we already have), call it the "New Dark Ages", "Hypernormal", "Semiocapitalist", or "Capitalist realist", under the empire of total spectacle, we are ruled by images. [...]  Art’s potential role in untangling the situation is privileged and fragile: if it can resort to fiction, it must also deal with fake news; if it can resort to a long tradition of making and understanding images, it must also deal with the emptiness of memes and social networks; if it can resort to aesthetics, it must understand the new role of images and the obligation to (self-)design. The question remains: how to engage in the production of things that could make the current state of affairs graspable, explicit, unbearable and, eventually, help lead to their overcoming?"

       

      14:30 Mathilde Maillard and Flavio Rodrigo, Lets Talk about Brasil

       

      WED 23rd

      10:00 We meet at KANAL Centre Pompidou to have a look at the space for the upcoming Unsettled Study. Afterwards we will talk about the space and the process of the block

      14:00 Bauhaus and School, Input from Moritz Frischkorn + Heike Bröckerhoff

      Based on their own research for an artistic project, Heike and Moritz will give a short introduction about the Bauhaus as an art-academy. It seems as if the very idea of an art-school as a "total work of art", based on principles of performance, inter-disciplinarity and process-orientation, where one invests oneself fully, combines technology and art, and thus manufactures a new subject for a democratic society was invented at the Bauhaus. We would like to discuss how to relate to those ideas and concepts from a contemporary point of view. 

       

      THU 24th

      10:00 Lilia Mestre: On Scoring, To Forge Temporary Communities

      11:30 Alex Arteaga: On my Intervention in/with the Settlemen

      20:00 Cine Club: Time Indefinite

       

      FRI 25th

      11:00 Settlement review and block organisation (whats next?) w. Vladimir

       

       

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Subtracted Seduction 07 January 2019
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Adrijana Gvozdenović / Pia Louwerens / Eleanor Ivory Weber
    • Hectolitre
    • 01 February 2019
    • 02 February 2019
    • Subtracted Seduction

      On Friday 1 and Saturday 2 February 2019, from 18:00 to 22:00 Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens and Eleanor Ivory Weber present their artistic researches at the former swingers club, La Porte des Senses, today an art space called Hectolitre, to mark the end of their participation in the a.pass program.

      With Subtracted Seduction, their individual researches are framed through shared concepts such as anxiety, non-consensual collaboration, authorship and institutional critique. In each of the three approaches, narratives created through these symptoms of the contemporary artist are investigated. The romantic artist is negated and the multi-faceted artist materialises as both instigator and instigated, made up of multiple voices. The three researchers engage with the complexity of being both unnameable and contained in the knowledge-network immanent to the institution. There appears Subtracted Seduction.

      Gvozdenović, Louwerens and Weber all work with writing and performance. They use notions of script and publication as tools to reveal contexts as partners to the doing and thinking of artistic practice. The institutional is key to their approaches, both as a way to understand what predetermines the performativity of the artwork and in how it relates to issues of authorship. The question is often, "who is voicing?"

      Pia Louwerens works with spoken-word performances in which she performs an unreliable subject intra-acting with its institutional framework.
      Eleanor Ivory Weber uses conceptual writing techniques to arrive at multi-vocal recompositions of existing text-sources, combining formal structures with the spontaneity of the body.
      Adrijana Gvozdenović collects and annotates symptomatic artistic practices that recognise their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality. This results in publications of sorts or “exhibiting otherwise”.

      The concept of the anarchive as a way to reactivate meaning through revisiting traces is a common process to the three researches. Through either activating authored texts, institutional conditions and/or artistic practice paraphernalia, new iterations appear that re-actualise and re-situate the event. Each variation is always already allied with new subjectivities.

      To access the Research Portfolios follow the links:

      Adrijana Gvozdenović
      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=97

      Pia Louwerens
      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=99

      Eleanor Ivory Weber
      https:///www.apass.be/blockboard/my-case/?user=98

       

      Schedule of the event:

      18:00 food & drinks (€)

      18:30 Subtracted Seduction
      19:00 Subverses I: Play
      (break)
      20:00 7 anxieties and the world
      20:30 Subverses II: Glossolalien missive
      (break)
      21:15 Subverses III
      21:30 The big gesture is many small gestures dispersed

      Performances by:
      Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens, Eleanor Ivory Weber

      With contributions by:
      *Subtracted Seduction: sound editing and mixing Teresa Cos
      *Subverses I & III: performers Lydia McGlinchey, Marcus Bergner
      *7 anxieties and the world: sound mixing Marko Radišić

      Thanks:
      Henry Andersen, Simon Asencio, Marcus Bergner, Deborah Birch, Elen Braga, Kate Briggs, Mladen Bundalo, Teresa Cos, Sven Dehens, Nico Dockx, Diego Echegoyen, Paolo Favero, Luisa Fillitz, Nassia Fourtouni, Anastasia Freygang, Nicolas Galeazzi, Camille Gérenton, Caroline Godart, Katinka van Gorkum, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Philippine Hoegen, Eunkyung Jeong, Steven Jouwersma, Ekaterina Kaplunova, Leo Kay, Shervin Kianersi Haghighi, Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, Heike Langsdorf, Joke Liberge, Bart Lescreve, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Lydia McGlinchey, Michèle Meesen, Maurice Meewisse, Zoumana Méïté, Lilia Mestre, Wesley Meuris, Vladimir Miller, Caterina Mora, Eszter Némethi, Elizabeth Newman, Anouchka Oler, Goda Palekaitė, Lucia Palladino, Laura Pante, Vijai Patchineelam, Peggy Pierrot, Piero Ramella, Marcelo Rezende, Kate Rich, Esther Rodríguez Barbero, Pierre Rubio, Margaux Schwarz, Hoda Siahtiri, Vanja Smiljanić, Femke Snelting, Geert Vaes, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Camilla Wills, Roberto Winter, Aurore Zachayus, Adva Zakai.

       

       

       

       
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • UNSETTLED STUDY AT PERFORMATIK '19 performative research environment
      03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • KANAL
    • 22 March 2019
    • 23 March 2019
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • UNSETTLED STUDY AT PERFORMATIK '19
       
      Unsettled Study will invite the audience to witness and join the multitude of research processes currently hosted by the a.pass platform for artistic research.  
       
      For several years a.pass platform fo artistic research has periodically engaged with a research environment called Settlement proposed and facilitated by Vladimir Miller. This project continues to ask on which spatial, performative and institutional conditions is it possible to step into and share an artist's research process as it is happening.  

      During Performatik 2019 "Unsettled Study" will attempt to develop the idea of the Settlement into a performative installation at KANAL which will invite the audience into the multitude of research and work processes currently hosted by a.pass. Starting from the Settlement project in January at a.pass, the researchers, curators and facilitators will embark on a process of developing architectural structures to support, represent and host their research processes. Through a series of workshops and inputs from invited guest artists the researchers will develop short performance lectures in relation to their practice. As a culmination of this three months long process this emergent collective space of study will move from apass to KANAL and open its research environment in an evening of overlapping performances and installations.

       

       

      Within the frame of Performatik19, the Brussels biennial of performance art

       

      Unsettled Study Open Studio

      Wednesday 20th – Saturday 23rd of March during opening hours at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels

      tickets are available as a special 10-day pass for Kanal Centre Pompidou

       

      Unsettled Study Performative Research Environment

      Friday 22nd of March 16h

      Saturday 23rd of March 18h 

      at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels

      duration ca 3h

      tickets are available as a special 10-day pass for Kanal Centre Pompidou

       

      Produced and performed by a.pass researchers, curators and facilitators: Alex Arteaga, Deborah Birch, Elen Braga, Isabel Burr Raty, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Amélie van Elmbt, Nassia Fourtouni, Katinka van Gorkum, Antye Guenther,Steven Jouwersma, Leo Kay, Joke Liberge, Mathilde Maillard, Sara Manente, Michele Meesen, Maurice Meewisse, Lilia Mestre, Caterina Mora, Muslin Brothers (Yaen Levi & Tamar Levit), Eszter Némethi, Goda Palekaite, Laura Pante, Peggy Pierrot, Rob Ritzen, Flavio Rodrigo, RRadio Triton, Femke Snelting, Christina Stadlbauer,   
      Lecture performance mentoring: Philipp Gehmacher
      Process curator: Vladimir Miller

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • the Lecture, the Performance workshop with philipp gehmacher
      03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • 04 February 2019
    • 08 February 2019
    • the Lecture, the Performance

       

      This week’s focus lies on the idea and genre of the lecture performance in the performing and visual arts. Speaking out will be looked at as a performative act of sharing thoughts and concerns about ones own research and work. The questions often arising are: Why speak out about things at all? Why not let the work speak for itself, the research be mapped out and available? Is the speaking an extra layer of added information, at times rendering the ‚shown’ and presented more informal, even personal? Whilst in fact pointing at its surrounding, as much as the institution, is there a self-referentiality involved in speaking that we cannot escape whether we speak about ourselves, our concerns or just matters seemingly ‚worldly‘ and not personal? Speaking is however also about utterance and the speech act, performative as such, in the now, whether scripted or not. Speaking points out, maps out, accompanies actions and discursifes often all at once.

      All in all the lecture performance combines notions of speaking with notions of showing, doing, and demonstrating, side by side or all at once. It seems to be a format where something needs to be told, literally. All of the above however in relationship to physical actions or the presentations of any kind of materials. As much as at the lecture, the doing, mapping out, constructing and building with materials or any medial visualizations will also be looked at. What does the performance allow as a time based procedure to present and make available besides verbal utterance? The performative seems to lie as much in the words as in the objects and thoughts. We’ll find out.

       

       

      Philipp Gehmacher
      Choreographer, dancer and visual artist, lives and works in Vienna. Gehmacher’s artistic works implement the body and language as forms of expression, erected and institutional space, as well as object and sculpture. Philipp Gehmacher has presented these works between black box and white cube internationally at theatre festivals and in exhibition spaces. Recently, among others at Museum der Moderne Salzburg, steirischer herbst (Graz), the Biennale of Sydney, Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival (Helsinki), Leopold Museum and mumok in Vienna, and Griffith University Art Museum in Brisbane and Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. Philipp Gehmacher is a mentor and teacher at P.A.R.T.S and ISAC in Brussels, HZT in Berlin, DOCH in Stockholm, Impulstanz Vienna and the University of Salzburg.

       

      philippgehmacher.net

      more on the lecture performance series Walk+Talk:

      http://sarma.be/pages/Anthology_walk+talk

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • Settlement 14 03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass
    • 07 January 2019
    • 26 January 2019
    • Settlement 14
      During the days of Jan 7th-26th 2019 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called SETTLEMENT. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim 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. The schedule for these three weeks will be developed on site by its participants and shared online on the a.pass website.
       

       
      Here are some key ideas which have informed similar spaces before:
       
      encountering processes
      The potential of this setup is that it allows us to encounter each others processes instead of products of our artistic work. Processes are much more difficult to make visible and to see as they require a different mode of attention and participation. The attempt to witness a process requires a change in the temporal mode and in the mode of being-together in the collective space.
       
      no spectators
      The space we are trying to facilitate is open, but it is not an exhibition. There is no „spectator mode“, and no institutionalised responsibility for hosting. However any participant (including possible newcomers) is welcome to invite and host anybody according to the logic of her/his work process. Anybody is welcome to joint the collective space for any timespan, respectful of the fact that Settlement is a predominately a workspace. The (growing/changing) group will try to provide enough information at the entrance, so that everyone feels welcome and knows how to join and share. 
       
      productive instability
      We will collect most of the materials for the space from the apass storage and re-accommodate them towards our purposes. This strategy produces a space that is fragile, self-made, and constantly changing. We believe that such a space influences the sociability within it towards similar qualities – towards a more fluid social contract. In asking for a hands-on construction and deconstruction of its makeshift set-ups, such a space allows for a quicker change of settings and a decentralised mode of (self)organisation. For this reason, we suggest to refrain from using usual furniture (tables and chairs) and improvise new set ups for „work-stations“ and collective moments out of what we can scavenge from around the academy.
       
       
      Settlement
      Settlement is spatial proposal that tries to sustain its architectural fragility hoping in this way to initiate a temporary social, organizational and ideological one.  Simply put it is a collective workspace, a camp and a hangout, open to all who stop by and would like to contribute to it. Like many other such meetings it is a place of informal exchange and presentation. 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. Everything one might need for one’s work has be be built and (re)invented there. There are no tables, no chairs, and the materials and objects resist easy categorization and usability. They have to be mis-used, adapted, they have a will on their own. The built environment has to be negotiated -with on the level of the object. There is potential in a thing being one thing one day, and a totally different thing the day after. There is also potential in that thing changing hands. (You will be surprised how quickly ownership is established from communal beginnings: one just has to pick up a thing and put it somewhere.)
       
      Settlement is a space that tries very hard not to settle. Its instability 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“.  It asserts 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 a 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.
       
      Settlement is a collective project which was facilitated over several years on different occasions. The project takes the form of a workshop and creates and inhabits a space full of fragile and precarious structures. Since Settlement starts from a space devoid of habitual work setups, with all materials present considered a common resource, all the structures are built from the necessities of the individual and collective practices of its participants. A kind of a re-start on the physical level and an attempted re-start on the level of the habitual and institutional structures governing our spaces of production. The title is used as a provocation, as Settlement is a space which, over the course of several weeks, tries very hard not to settle.
      Settlement puts a spatial perspective on practice, identifying modes of institutionalisation and habit which keep the spaces of artistic production and education from becoming spaces of commoning. These modes of ‘settling’ are embedded in many things: they are there in the ways the spaces are designed and organised towards stability (supporting habit and the given hierarchy of organisation), they are there in the institutionalised processes of access and exclusion, and they are there in our social habits (which structure the most empty and open space imaginable). Looking at how the spaces of our practice prioritise the habitual, Settlement introduces architectural fragility as a mode of destabilizing practice and the social agreements between the participants. The spaces created within Settlement are make-shift and precarious and therefore never suited to support a certain social constellation or a process indefinitely. That introduces another timing into the space, rendering all structures inherently temporary and unreliable. The habit of regarding products of work as property becomes destabilized, as all structures in the space are short-lived and can become ‘material’ again very quickly. These and other changes occur through fragility of the built environment and work effectively against the habitual ‘settling down’. The transition of a structure back to the common resource through collapse or re-appropriation is always a possibility, producing the common as a constant perspective onto the emerging territories, constellations and rules in the Settlement space.
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Settlements
    • Unsettled Study
    • The Choreography of Objects: Logistics vs. Entanglement 03 January 2019
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Moritz Frischkorn
    • 25 February 2019
    • 28 February 2019
    • The Choreography of Objects: Logistics vs. Entanglement
       
      In recent years, theoreticians both from political sciences and cultural studies have become more and more interested in the business field of logistics. Besides finance (and new logics of extraction, some authors claim), logistics seems to be one of the key notions to understand global capitalism today.
       
      Today logistics considers itself the totalized management and governance of all flows of capital, labour and commodities. And more than ever, logistics is administered and steered by algorithms – auto-managed and automated, implementing a computational governance that subjects labour as much as all material resources of the globe to its regime. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in their essay 'Fantasy in the Hold', thus write: 'The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere.

      Logistics as choreography describes the faculty of being able to transport 'mountains of goods' (Maersk) just in time. The use of 'choreography' as marketing metaphor is then mirrored also in expert papers speaking about Supply Chain Choreographies as ways to interface diverse informational systems.
       

       

      Reading about the confluence and interrelation of logistics and choreography together, we will try to unfold some of the historic as much as contemporary political problematics related to this totalizing choreography of power operating by extraction, abduction and containerization. At the same time, we can discuss in how far this 'other' choreography of objects, based on efficiency and seamless interfaces, reflects back on recent discourses about an 'expanded choreography' in the field of contemporary performing arts and Performance Studies. How can an understanding of the history and contemporary over-practice of logistics inform our own choices when moving stuff? What are the political dimensions that are at play here – especially if we do not concede to maximizing claims for efficiency, but to an ethics of 'following the materials' or of attending and attuning to manifold entanglements?
       
      In a second step, we will try to play around with logistical concepts in order to re-formulate our own artistic practices. We will draw maps of the diverse material and semiotic resources that go into our work: From where do they enter, and at what point do our practices interface with these resources? Could we imagine ways of working with material or information, where 'value is added at each step'? What would be more efficient ways of thinking about our own 'supply chains', both in terms of research and artistic production? When, on the other hand, are the moments in which we are overwhelmed by materials, where we can only try to follow their itinerant logics of entanglement and proliferation? Presenting these 'total cost analysis' and 'supply chain diagram' to each other, we may find out how our own and others practices rely on a fine balance between logistical efficiency and itinerant, entangled hyper-chaos.
       
      On another, more physical level, we can assess our own work-spaces from a logistical point of view. In Amazon distribution centers, for example, goods are shelved chaotically, according to algorithmic procedures. In the same way, we can think of workspaces as processual logistical choreographies based on the in- and out-flux of materials and information. What if we thought of our workspaces thus as a form of archive of the logistics that made it come to be in its current shape? Does that give us valuable information about our practices? On the horizon, then, we come to articulate an even bigger question: Can we formulate an ethics of how to work with materials, whatever form, coherence, shape or agility they may have?
       
       
      Moritz Frischkorn is a choreographer and researcher working within contemporary performing arts. He is based in Hamburg, where, since 2015, he is part of the artistic-theoretic graduate school 'Performing Citizenship' at HafenCity University. His artistic research deals with ethical and social questions related to choreographies of objects. In his artistic work, he looks for bodily practices of attuning to non-human movement and researches ways of moving beyond self-expression and intentionality. 
       
      In the last years, he is interested, mainly, in the relation of choreography and logistics, a topic that he will deal with in detail within a new performance project entitled 'The Great Report'. His artistic work is regularly presented at Kampnagel, Hamburg. Furthermore, he often collaborates with, among others, Manon Santkin (Brussels, Stockholm), his Hamburg colleagues Heike Bröckerhoff and Jonas Woltemate, and performance collective geheimagentur. Sporadically, he writes for 'Plateau - Performing Arts in Hamburg' and works for Sarma/Oral Site web-journal. 
    • 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.
       
    • 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.

       

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • PIECE ME BACK TOGETHER (AGAIN) 03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Leo Kay / Elen Braga / Eszter Némethi / Geert Vaes / Hoda Siahtiri
    • 14 September 2018
    • 16 September 2018
    • PIECE ME BACK TOGETHER (AGAIN)

      On September 14­, 15 and 16 Leo Kay, Elen Braga, Eszter Némethi, Geert Vaes and Hoda Siahtiri come together in concepts of identity, narratives of possible futures, liquidity and participation. The five artist researchers take over Elizabeth Park for the weekend presenting an undercover carnival of experiences. All of which welcome audience into tangible relationship with the material.

      The presentations include: Eszter Némethi’s Border Stories a conference-­machine weaving together magic, the uncertainty of definitions and war; Hoda Siahtiri’s intimate expanded film experience concerning pain and healing; Elen Braga’s site­ responsive, interactive exhibition exploring identity, gender roles and image construction through multi­-threaded visual and sonic narratives; Geert Vaes's Live Talk Show: an awareness experiment at the crossroads of Therapy Street and Tourism Avenue where the public wear hyper real masks & explore the possibility of nurturing empathy for others; & Leo Kay’s Bakery Of Slow Ideas exploring sourdough and vegetable fermentation as an action; a ritual & a space for dialogue, critiquing the collateral damage caused by the continual drive towards hyper productivity and self presentation.

      a.pass -advanced performance and scenography studies - is an artistic research environment that develops research on performativity and the creation of space, in an international artistic and educational context. The environment encourages diverse understandings of artistic research, the development of (post-­disciplinary or undisciplined) perspectives and experimentation with methodologies and strategies. a.pass is concerned with reflections on the role and responsibility of the artist researcher within the vital and precarious economic, political and global context of the here and now.

      Opening hours:
      From 12am to ­11pm. With formal presentation from 16:00

      12:00 > 21:00 Bakery of Slow Ideas process- Leo Kay
      14:00 > 21:00 Vroom - Elen Braga
      16:00 + 18:00 Border Stories - Eszter Némethi
      20:00 > Singing the Silences - Hoda Siahtiri
      21:00 > Bakery of Slow Ideas Breaking Bread Presentation- Leo Kay
      18:30 + 22:00 > The Who Are You Talking To Talk Show- Geert Vaes
      (Sunday at 17:00 + 19:00)


      Address:
      Elizabeth park / De Platoo
      1081 Koekelberg Brussels, Belgium

    • 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.

       
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • This is 1000 liter fuel. So - & Tectonic Friendship book launch 21 May 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Luisa Fillitz / Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado / Eunkyung Jeong / Marialena Marouda / Ekaterina Kaplunova / Shervin Kiarnesi / Lilia Mestre
    • 24 May 2018
    • 26 May 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • This is 1000 liter fuel. So - & Tectonic Friendship book launch

       

       

      This is 1000 liter fuel. So-

      For this End-Presentations, six researchers 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 Kianersi Haghighi addresses the undocumented performance of everyday life as an invisible event produced within the confines of Art.

       

      SCORESCAPES BOOK LAUNCH

      Medium Score -Tectonic Friendship & End Presentations  Writing Score

      a.pass book launch @ Brew with a dialogue facilitated by Philippine Hoegen and chocolate cocktails by Shervin Kianersi Haghighi!

      We will engage in a collective discussion with Philippine Hoegen and will perform parts of the publication.

      This publication serves the SCORESCAPES research - scores as pedagogical tool by Lilia Mestre and the End-Communications of six a.pass researchers. Medium Score builds on the previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue and intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research.

      Before finishing the a.pass program in May 2018, the six researchers Luisa Fillitz, Esther Rodriguez-Barbero Granado, Eunkyung Jeong, Marialena Marouda, Ekaterina Kaplunova and Shervin Kiarnesi Haghighi worked for a month and a half in an adapted Writing Score to produce this publication.

      Design: Miriam Hempel www.daretoknow.co.uk

       

       

      END-PRESENTATIONS @ DecorAtelier 24 and 25 May from 17:30 till 22:30

      Rue de Liverpool 24, 1080 Molenbeek-Saint-Jean

      BOOK LAUNCH Medium Score -Tectonic Friendship & End Communications  Writing Score

      @ Brew 26 May from 17:30 till 19:30

      1 Rue du Pene, 1000 Brussels

       

    •  

       

      Milieus, Associations, Sieves and other matters

      some orientation guidelines

       

      Today, to the question ‘what is technoscience?’ the answer is: it is the medium of knowledge. Just as technology is not the instrument of science but its epistemological framework, so it is not the instrument of our communication, but our medium of meaning. Everyone seems to admit today that we are inhabited by our habitat, built by our niche, processed by our technical environment, which is neither external nor peripheral, but inherent to our being and to all meaning. Now it seems obvious that it is one and the same milieu that surrounds and separates us, and that which crosses and connects us, but this environment has become technical. The co-birth of humans and technology means that the latter is both our medium (the midpoint through which individuals maintain each other) and our environment (our space-time). The technical environment perfectly illustrates the idea that our environment or what surrounds us is actually in our midst (au milieu de nous). That technology is both our exteriority and our interiority, our cage and what takes us away from it. How, in an artistic research environment, do these ontological, ethical and political contemporary concerns resonate?

       


      Proposal


      Composing a processual environment, the block consisted in a sequential ensemble of collective dispositives that were proposed to be appropriated, interpreted, developed and problematised by the artists and researchers. A metastable milieu in ‘crisis’ which evolved by shifting to new dimensions out of a series of analyses and temporary resolutions of problematics linked with the artists and researchers’ projects considered as technologies.

      The basic structure was an arrangement of 1-self organised interactive events intersecting with 2-a series of three theoretical study days and 3-a series of advanced forms of feedback.

       

       

      Organisation / Trajectory

       

      1. Twenty two self-organised interactive events of different dimensions : the C.R.I.’s
      (from May 31st to July 19th)

      The acronym C.R.I. stands for Collective Research Interface. The researchers were invited to compose and propose participatory events that one could identify as shareable practices out of/around/through their individual researches. Instead of qualifying -and reducing- simply the object by ‘collective practice’ or ‘workshop’, the name ‘Collective Research Interface’ produced momentary shared interstitial spaces between different scales (private, public, cultural, social, personal, artistic, aesthetic, political and so on…) and enabled and supported a certain mode of attention, the one of technical mentality. Experiencing with this mentality was possible as the mode of production of the C.R.I.’s followed a principle of compositionality. The performativity and meaning of the C.R.I’s, as complex technical ensembles, were determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the modes of relating/assembling used to combine them. A structuring loop was formulated : invent, invite, do, participate, share, document, discuss, reflect, problematisatise… and back again. The researches were not only presented but organised into shareable dispositives, that then were described, analysed, filtered driving the attention to their resonances in term of constructions and modes of assemblages. Their technological qualities.

       


      2. Three theoretical study days

              a/ The diagram and the residual (June 12th)
      The program visited the artist residency project ‘Villa Blanche’ within the Solvay Parc in Brussels with Martino Morendi (philosopher-hacker-activist) and Pietro Fortuna (philosopher-artist). The day was articulated around the tension between two conceptual outlines, two proposals that sketched complementary or opposite modes of understanding reality. The diagram, as the systematic representation of a set of relations between elements, where logics, organicism and industrial engineering converge in the effort to govern and organize these relations and the residual, as the irreducible part that remains beyond one's hunger to explain and describe, that recedes and escapes any attempt of organization and rationalization.
      United if only by their distance from the subject-object mode of disclosure, Martino Morandi and Pietro Fortuna oriented us through a series of ‘objects’ like an elegy by Rilke, passages from von Uexküll and Agamben, a bourgeois villa, a tree, a giant Olmec head made of stone, the Solvay ammonia-soda process ... and a series of readings of objects related to every researcher’s art and research.


              b/ on Participation (June 17th)
      The program visited the project ‘Precarious Pavillon #1 - Don’t eat the microphone’ -an artistic project initiated by Veridiana Zurita and Petra Van Dyck, curated by Michael Vandevelde and co-produced by Vooruit- happening in the garden of the Psychiatric Hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent.
      The study day was dedicated to the critique of participatory art and ideas of participation. Don’t Eat the Microphone represented for us a grey zone where we could think but also be challenged in our certainties about the nature and function of participation. Currently focused on the development of the Collective Research Interfaces and exploring the value of several modes of participation, we wanted to problematise the issue(s) in a problematic environment.             
      What is participatory art? What does it mean to participate?
      What are the relations between participatory art and utopia?
      Which kind of public space and social fabric participatory practices do (and do not) produce? What are the relations between participatory art and communicative capitalism?
      What is participation-as-injunction the diagram of? Is it still possible not to participate? Is it still possible even to imagine non-participation? How to foster (non) participatory arts and (un) communicative thus militantly collective aesthetic educations of possibilities? After a phase of various reservations expressed about the optimistic rhetoric accompanying collaboration and participation, could we now be entering a new phase of a practical re-invention of participation?
      This tentative list of problems and questions guided our study day displaced in the frame of Don’t Eat the Microphone. We read some Hal Foster , Chat Rooms / some Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells / some Yves Citton, Ecology of Attention / some Derek R. Ford and Tyson E. Lewis, On the freedom to be opaque monsters, and discuss in various ways our doubts on participative art with the curators of ‘Don’t eat the microphone’ project and the patients of the psychiatric hospital.


              c/ Poieien (July 14th)
      Invited by the summer program to structure a day around concerns traversing researchers and artists when thinking about methodologies and their politics, Bojana Cvejic, then-curator of the research program at p.a.r.t.s., guided the group of researchers and artists through a critical reflection that she currently conducts on methodologies, opposing practice and action to poiesis. During the encounter with the researchers of a.pass, she proposed two points of entry: how poetry pierces through other mediums than text and poiein, as in how to make, compose, form... more than do and act... a kind of thought that arises from within, or close to, artistic practice that in turn becomes an instrument of looking past art. She accounts for it by “poetics”, using the term to emphasise the productive power of thought as opposed to the genre of interpretation that classifies specimens of kinds. Bojana Cvejic shared that poetics entails engagement with art in imaginary and speculative senses that ‘theory’, tout court – in the way that it has become the superstructural element of art production in capitalism – no longer enables.
      The participants did map out their imaginary around their matters of concern, read some texts and discussed with Bojana.

       

       

      3. Three 'Sieves' proposed by three human 'analogous algorithms'

      The aim of these three advanced modes of feedback named ‘Sieves’ -performed by three ex-a.pass researchers identified as 'analogous algorithms'- were to create conditions that could define practices of creative feedback experimentations on artistic researches envisaged as technical dispositives to investigate how each rhetoric of presentation and its digestive techniques could be expressed in terms of data model (Sina Seifee in May), in terms of recipes and cook books (Gosie Vervloessem in June) and in terms of idiotic practice (Vanja Smilianic in July)

       

              a/ Sina Seifee / Filters
      The basic question of 'Filter'  was : what happens when linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants? The work started with working on/with the feedback material produced during the block’s opening week and processing this material in diagrams. The proposal centred on the notion (and practice) of topological analysis to investigate questions of connectivity and boundaries, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. This did direct us to construct ‘transversal objects’ actualising what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects in the culture of each participant researches.

      some documentation of the process here

       

              b/ Gosie Vervloessem / Vision and Digestion
      The protocol was to bring one’s research and start to think about the taste of it, the way it could move through one’s intestines and try to visualise the tools and methods one would use to transform one’s questions into a dish. How to boil down questions, how to crystallise the background dramaturgy of researches? As a way of documenting the symposium, Gosie proposed to write  the recipes of the ‘dishes’ and to edit the cookbook out of the ‘digested’ researches.

       

              c/ Vanja Smilianic / Idiotic Mandala attacked by a parasitic octopus
      The Idiotic Mandala  -indicating a weird circular configuration with a centre that radiates outward into compartmentalised areas deranged by the unvited presence of a creeping octopus-  asked to switch off one's rational thinking and opened it up to wandering and wondering. The practitioners were invited to introspectively transform the Vicious Circle ( sad passions at work disguised as set of tools and technologies that became behaviour patterns in one's research) into the Virtuous Circle (creating a universe in which idiots are able to act)

       

       

       

      Milieus, Associations, Sieves and other matters

      some justifications

       

              Thematics, Research questions, approaches, potentials, methodologies, relevance

      In response to a proposed frame given by a.pass coordinator and research center curator Lilia Mestre to structure the block in relation to the Senselab concepts and practices, postmaster program curator Pierre Rubio choose to design entry points to different set of practices and theoretical notions accessing a central theme for Senselab and him, the one of technical mentality. A few years ago SenseLab published a special issue of Inflexions ‘Simondon : Milieux, Techniques, Aesthetics’ and Brian Massumi’s lenghtly interview ‘Technical mentality revisited’ was published in Parrhesia. Rubio, since 2010, regularly revisits Simondon’s texts in relation to his practice as artist/dramaturge and observes the growing interest for the french philosopher's ideas in the academic and artistic fields. He curated an a.pass block in 2014 -'Milieu(s)'- that problematised some aspects of technical mentality within a collectively constructed ephemeral public school dispositive.  The possibility of considering artistic researches trajects and projects as technical objects and experimenting with technical mentality seemed to be relevant for this block especially in the vicinity of Senselab's residence invited by a.pass Research Centre within the 'Parallel/Parasite' project.

       

      -A poly semantic space to activate problematisations and progressive resolutions through concretisation

      -The individual CRI’s as case studies of non-autonomous technological open objects

      -Constructivism, technical mentality and artistic research

      -Simondon and artistic research : a promising diffractive equation

      .

      ... to be continued...

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • crypting currency, etc. 09 March 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Alberto Cossu
    • a.pass 4th floor / 10:00 to 17:00
    • 16 March 2018
    • 16 March 2018
    • crypting currency, etc.
      Next to the event Reclaiming Economy - it's art, Alberto Cossu provides a workshop for us during the day of the 16th March. He will give us a closer insight into his practical experience with the common coin crypto-currency he helped to developed at MACAO and his profound research into the self-governance of that place. 

       
      Macao is an independent center for art, culture and research. Avoiding the creative industry paradigm, and trying to innovate the old idea of cultural institutions, we started to consider art production as a viable process for rethinking social change, elaborating independent political critique, and as a space for innovative governance and production models. Our research concerns the labour conditions in the creative industry and cultural sector, the right to the city and new forms of organization and technological solutions for cultural production. Macao is currently based in a former slaughterhouse in the middle of a huge abandoned area not so far from the center of the city; it has a cross-sectorial program hosting performing arts, cinema, visualarts, design, photography, literature, newmedia, hacking and the meetings of citizens committees. It is coordinated by an open assembly of artists and activists.
       
      Alberto is since the beginning active in this place  and has developed as a sociologist specific research methodologies tin relation with the arts to understand and improve their economic and self-governing mechanisms.
       
    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Reclaiming economy - it's art anyway an evening on the self-governing of fairness
      08 March 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Alberto Cossu / Ronny Heiremans / Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass / starting at 19:00
    • 16 March 2018
    • 16 March 2018
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Reclaiming economy - it's art anyway

      In the last couple of months a.pass was investigating the impact of economic and institutional conditions onto artistic research practices and the possibilities to impact those conditions through the very same artistic practices. Institutional critique and alternative economic concepts are strongly related when it comes to the creation of differing conditions.

      SOTA, state of the arts, is engaging since several years in influencing cultural policy in Belgium. Now SOTA proposes a yearly summer camp as a gathering of all workers in the cultural sector to discuss the notion of fair practice and the creation of an Almanac as an evolving political instrument. 

      For the evening of March 16 a.pass has invited together with SOTA Alberto Cossu to meet with Ronny Heiremans, who both engage with their practices in different ways of discussing and changing the conditions for artistic practices.
      In the Project CAVEAT Ronny Herremans and Katleen Vermeir take contracts used in the Belgium art context as a starting point for a reconfiguration of the position of the artist in society. In their investigation they look into the legal, social and artistic consequences of the structuring framework a contract provides and use it as a lens to look at questions of authorship, labour situation, price politics or political solidarity.

      As sociologist and activist, Alberto Cossu in contrast, is situated in the conditions of an occupied space in Italy – the MACAO in Milano that he joined since its inception in 2012. MACAO is an independent center for art, culture and research. Rejecting the creative industry paradigm, and innovating the idea of cultural institutions, MACAO considers art production as a viable process for changing social, political and economic conditions. MACAO developed its own crypto-currency, provides a context for the research on innovative governance and discusses the labour conditions in the cultural sector.

      Ronny Heiremans and Alberto Cossu are meeting each other this evening the first time to discuss principles of self-organisation and the creation of condition under which artistic practice can unfold a reclaimed economy that serves the common livelihood.

    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Performing knowledge. Lecture-performances in perspective
      26 February 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Pieter Vermeulen
    • ARIA - Antwerp
    • 09 March 2018
    • 09 February 2018
    • Performing knowledge.

      Lecture-performances have gained increasing attention in recent years, in the wake of the ‘academic turn’, which frames artistic praxis as a form of research. Its genealogy can arguably be traced back to the emergence of performance art in the 1960s, with canonical examples such as Robert Morris, Dan Graham, Andrea Fraser and Joseph Beuys. Contemporary artists like Sharon Hayes, William Kentridge, Rabih Mroué, Hito Steyerl, Amalia Ulman, Walid Raad, Bruce High Quality Foundation and many others are now continuing this historical legacy. Sharpening the relation between art and knowledge, their work can be situated at the intersection of visual art, lecture and performance.

      How to analyse these different forms of knowledge transmission? What kind of knowledge are we dealing with and how is it being performed? What is the role of the performer's body, and is it possible to move beyond the divide between subject and object? Or, for that matter, between the spectator and performer, or between the academic and artistic realm? Would teaching qualify as a form of art and/or research? The objective of this research seminar is not to canonise the lecture-performance as a ‘medium’, but to examine its multiplicity at the intersection between the arts and academia.

      Performing Knowledge. Lecture-Performances in Perspective consists of a seminar program at ARIA (by registration only) and a public program at Extra City Kunsthal.

       

      Contributions by:

      Venue daytime (seminar): ARIA, Lange Sint-Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerp (room S.S208)
      Venue evening (public) at Kunsthal Extra City, Eikelstraat 25-31, 2600 Antwerpen-Berchem

      Co-curator: Michiel Vandevelde

       

      Programme

      ARIA, Lange Sint-Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerp (room S.S208)

      9:30 - 10:30  Welcome and introduction by Pieter Vermeulen

      10:30 - 12:00  Doing Knowledge: Exploring the Tresholds of Lecturing and Performing, Dr. Lucia Rainer

      12:00 - 13:00  Lunch break

      13:00 - 14:00  Some Comments Concerning my Statisticon Neon, Dr. Warren Neidich

      14:00 - 15:00  The Case of the Ridiculous Curator, or How Transfigurative Recontextualisations May Reveal Authentic Truths, Lecture-performance by Toon Leën

      15:00 - 15:45  Round table discussion

      15:45 - 16:30  Performance by Pia Louwerens

      16:30 - 17:00  Concluding remarks by Pieter Vermeulen

       

      PUBLIC PROGRAM, Kunsthal Extra City, Eikelstraat 25-31, 2600 Antwerpen-Berchem

      19:00 - 20:00  Warren Neidich: The Brain Without Organs in Cognitive Capitalism (lecture)

      20:00 - 20:30  Bryana Fritz: Indispensible blue (lecture-performance)

      (Photo: Warren Neidich, Some Comments concerning my Statisticon Neon, Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, 2015)

       

      Register HERE!!

       

      The Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, (aria@uantwerpen.be) is collecting these personal details for the organization of the ARIA research seminar 'Performing knowledge - Lecture-performances in perspective'. Under no circumstances will these details be given to third parties. If you want to change your personal details or have them removed from our database, please inform us using the address above. More information about our privacy policy: www.uantwerpen.be/disclaimer.

       

       

    • 1. Entrepreneur & Creative Economy

      art and economy

      Hans Abbing (2010). Why are artists poor? The exceptional economy of the arts. Amsterdam University Press.

       

      Tatiana Bazzichelli (2013) Networked disruption. Aarhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Center, 73.

      PhD thesis

      creative economy

      Richard Florida (2002) The economic geography of talent. Annals of the Association of American geographers, 92(4), pp.743-755.

      creative economy flag-raiser

      Richard Florida (2005) Cities and the creative class. Routledge.

      Bridgstock Entrepreneurship Education in the Arts

      quadruple bottom line theory, career self-management

      Hartley et al Key Concepts in Creative Industries

      entrepreneurship and innovation

      creative economy critique

      Banks, M. and O’Connor, J. (2017) Inside the whale (and how to get out of there): Moving on from two decades of creative industries research. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(6), pp.637-654.

      Timely self-critique from apologetic creative economy former enthusiasts. Creative cities, cluster theory, Landry, Florida etc.

      Paul Chatterton (2000). Will the real Creative City please stand up?. City, 4(3), pp.390-397. [online]

      http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/713657028

       

      Banks, M., 2010. Craft labour and creative industries. International journal of cultural policy, 16(3), pp.305-321.

      Richard Sennett and craft.

      Anthony Davies (2007) Take me I’m yours: neoliberalising the cultural institution. In Mute Vol 2 No 5 It’s not easy being green [online]

      http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/take-me-im-yours-neoliberalising-cultural-institution

      A principle contradiction: the content of the institution’s discourse can be utterly inverted in the institutional form.

      Jones, C. and Murtola, A.M. (2012) Entrepreneurship and expropriation. Organization, 19(5), pp.635-655.

      Entrepreneurship as individual activity which rests on appropriation of production in common.

      Angela McRobbie 2016. Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. John Wiley & Sons.

      Book. Forensic examination of the UK cultural economy.

      2. Diverse Economies

      Performativity

      ..& research

      Butler, J., 1993. Critically queer. GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(1), pp.17-32.

      Performativity as a research strategy.

      Queer theory.

      Law, J. and Urry, J. (2004) Enacting the social. Economy and society, 33(3), pp.390-410.

      Sedgwick, E.K., (1997) Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, You're so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you. [online]

      https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10224/3628/2001-1233.pdf?sequence=1

      .. & art

      Brook, Donald. Experimental Art [online]

      http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/niea-experimentalartsconference/files/2011/08/DONALD-BROOK-Experimental-Art.pdf

      Art as ‘mimetic innovation’

      Wright, S. (2013). 1:1 Scale, Toward a lexicon of usership. Van Abbemuseum. [online]

      Art on a 1:1 scale

      .. & economy

      Çalışkan, K. and Callon, M., 2009. Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization. Economy and Society, 38(3), pp.369-398.

      Performing the economy / economy as performance.

      Çalışkan, K. and Callon, M., 2009. Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization. Economy and Society, 38(3), pp.369-398.

      Callon, M., 2006. What does it mean to say that economics is performative? [online]

      https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00091596/document

      Diverse economies

      JK Gibson-Graham and Ethan Miller (2015) ‘Economy as ecological livelihood’. Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, pp.7-16.

      Rethinking economic action as a space for ethical negotiation. In economic geography, JK Gibson-Graham challenges the idea of “the economy” as a unified, capitalist domain, to instead reframe it as diverse practices and interrelationships of sustenance and livelihood. This “diverse economies” approach is grounded in methodologies from feminist theory, which emphasise the need to recognise, theorise and engage with diversity. It constructs a different vision of "economy" where a host of informal, underground, non-market, collective and co-operative behaviours and activities are considered not only prevalent, but also primary and consequential.

      JK Gibson-Graham. (2008) 'Diverse economies: performative practices for other worlds'. Progress in Human Geography, 32(5), pp.613-632.

      Gibson-Graham, J.K., 1999. Queer(y)ing Capitalism in and out of the Classroom [1]. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 23(1), pp.80-85.

      Zanoni, P., Contu, A., Healy, S. and Mir, R.,(2017) Post-capitalistic politics in the making: The imaginary and praxis of alternative economies. In Organization, Vol. 24(5) Sage Publications pp 575-588

      Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2014. Rethinking the economy with thick description and weak theory. Current Anthropology, 55(S9), pp.S147-S153.

      3. Radmin

      Art and admin

       

      Andrea Phillips (2015) Invest in What

      howtoworktogether.org [online]

      Arts organisations' structures shape their policies. A history of artistic work proposing radical forms of cooperation

      vs potlitcally endorsed models of entrepreneurship.

      Caroline Woolard (2017) Ourgoods, BAMBAPHD [online]

      Art-based critique of art economies. Objects and contexts: together, objects

      and contexts create space for reflection, circulation, and social transformation.

      Angela McRobbie (2010) Rethinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise. Variant Magazine

      [online]

      How does teaching students critical understanding tally with also encouraging self-reliance and entrepreneurship?

      Proposes a renewal of radical social enterprise and co-operatives as self-organised collectives, to provide working structures for diverse occupations, including artists.

      Business studies

      Martin Parker Art as Work

      Critical management studies perspective on Art. Being an artist is supposed to expose the constraints of rules by bending / breaking conventions .. but art is work and involves rules, and work is creative and produces difference.

      Matthew Manos (2012) Business as a Medium in Hertz, Garnet. Critical Making. 1st ed. [United States]: Telharmonium p.27-32. [online]

      Business as a medium for critical enquiry and meaning-making, to change perceptions.

      A means of designing a future the entrepreneur would like to inhabit.

      Business as a non end-dated project; an ultra accessible medium; a platform for experiments.

      Martin Parker et al (2013) ‘Horizons of possibility’. In: Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V. and Land, C. eds., The Routledge companion to alternative organization. Routledge.

      Assimilation and recuperation (Boltanski & Chiapello) vs operating in the cracks.

      Essential laboratories for post/non/modified capitalist practices, ‘less-governed’ (Foucault).

      Critique is a limited strategy if the real goal is social transformation. (A positive critique which brings new things into the world).

      Does the scale of resistance have to match the scale of the problem?

      Calls for a radical insurgent entrepreneurship as form of social creativity. Changes in daily practice, invents futures.

      Entrepreneurship as a set of unstable, untested, potentially transformational practices of collective invention and reorientation.

      Craig Deegan (2016)

      Twenty five years of social and environmental accounting research within Critical Perspectives of Accounting: Hits, misses and ways forward. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 43, pp.65-87.

      Critical accounting.

      The transformational potential of accounting, vs producing incontravertible facts.

      Accounting as a means of identifying which action one must defend.

      Systems thinking

      Gregory Bateson (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind

      Form is the primary mode of communication, understood analogically. Significant meta-level change requires a change of context as well as content.

      Bruno Latour (2011) What’s the story? Organizing as a mode of existence. In: Passoth, JH., Peuker, B. and Schillmeier, M., Agency without Actors.

      Organisation staves off disorder. Being-in-action, organisations as scripts. Organisations as a flock of sparrows.

      Legal

      Janelle Orsi

      Bronwen Morgan

      Morgan, B. and Kush, D. (2015) 'Radical transactionalism: legal consciousness, diverse economies and the sharing economy'. Journal of Law and Society 556-587

      Bronwen Mogan and Declan Kuch Radical Transactionalism

      An expansive concept of enterprise as ‘any productive activity that might bring us sustenance’.

      The legal, financial and organisational structures of our current economy do not sit comfortable with small-scale sustainable economy initiatives.

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • If a question could lie 25 January 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • SVEN DEHENS & ZOUMANA MEÏTÉ
    • Manchesterstraat 17
    • 25 January 2018
    • 27 January 2018
    • If a question could lie

      a.pass end-communications is a public event for the sharing of the one year trajectories of the a.pass researchers. It’s a moment to bring to a larger public the questions and methods that their practice of artistic research at a.pass entailed. The event focuses on the sharing of their processes and on the invitation to reflect on the emerging topics and concerns of their research question(s) in the context of artist practice today.

      'If a question could lie' brings forth or wants to insist on the agency of the question. It aims to raise the issue of the appearance of criticality and its location. It's as much claiming the right to pose a question as opening its ability to gather around a multitude, a poly. It could be read as a dating strategy. Saying, I wouldn't be here if I weren't interested. The I being the issue and the subject, at the same time. The set up for this End-Communications addresses the agencies of ‘performing’, ‘publishing’, ‘curating’ and ‘soft architecture’ as strategies for artistic research. It focuses and exposes text, performance, installation, technological apparatus as chapters, editorial parameters, contexts for the reader-audience. It wants to bring together a ‘collection’ or ‘assemblage’ of performative materials that are autonomous on themselves but brought together in relation to one another in a permeable physical space. These materials are the indicators of processes of thinking and doing which are not conclusive on themselves but that are on the edge of making emerge or unfold questions, meanings, feelings.

      Over two days Zoumana Meïté and Sven Dehens invite you to come, see, listen and share. They will present their means for changed ways of reading, pointing and publishing.

      Zoumana Meïté 
      Practiced Dramatic Arts in different context (street, contest, Studies, social, laboratory, company, outside look, postmaster...). He is working as staging dramaturgist in Brussel.

      Sven Dehens (°1990, BE) www.svendehens.org

      These evenings on 25th and 27th January start at 19h till about 22h
      We recommend you come for the full evening.

      ++

      In addition to the end-communications two episodes of the Close Encounters series will take place in the afternoons on the same location. 

      25 January – Marcelo Rezende in conversation with Adrijana Gvozdenović – – 15h to 18h  – public talk – more info

      27 January – Femke Snelting, Nicolas Malevé & Pierre Rubio – Close Encounters – 15h to 18h  – public talk -  more info

       

    • 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?

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Critical Administration Shaking down the entrepreneur
      30 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Kate Rich
    • a.pass 4th floor
    • 30 January 2018
    • 03 February 2018
    • Critical Administration

      This workshop takes place in the devastated landscape of the Creative Economy. Dipping cautiously into realms of business and economics (in which artists are generally and probably wilfully unschooled), we will take a pigeon’s-eye view (scrappy, opportunistic, only occasionally vicious) of worn-out tropes such as entrepreneurialism, human capital and cultural enterprise.

      Weaving through dense territory from queer theory to open source organisation, radical shopkeeping and the role of economics in performing the economy, we will transit between theory and application to experiment on ourselves with new and wild shapes for enterprise and organisation, both at the level of the individual and at that of the collective. In the process we will also assess the case for administration as an art form; and business as a medium for artistic enquiry and meaning-making.

       

      Biography

      Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia and living in Bristol UK. She is co-founder of the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Since 2003 she has run Feral Trade, a long-range economic experiment and underground freight network, utilising the spare carrying capacity of the art world for the transportation of other goods, specifically groceries. Kate is senior lecturer in DIY and activist media at the University of the West of England; volunteer finance manager at Bristol's artist-run Cube Microplex; system administrator for the Irational.org art-server collective; and a founding member of the European Sail Cargo Alliance. Her ongoing preoccupation is to move deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy in the cultural realm. To this end she is currently establishing a Feral MBA for artists, positioned somewhere between the academy and the wild.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • How do we do the things that we do? #2 a rewrite of twelve design principles
      29 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Florian Feigl
    • 26 February 2018
    • 02 March 2018
    • How do we do the things that we do? #2

      In this second period of my visit in the a.pass block „making/conditions“ I want to propose a sequence of practical, object based approaches that allow to broaden perspectives on the individual research projects as well as oon the over arching theme of this block.

      How do the objects, thus the different elements and entities of an individual research perform. How do they interact with us, human agents, and with other elements, what suppoprt do they need, how would this potentially articulate the individual research processes as processes of radical imagination (Katja Rothe).

      Each participants is asked to bring three objects (not more then five if you cannot decide). The practical sessions will be slow approaches towards the objects starting with drawing, associating, moving, writing. These first approaches will be followed by a series of exercises focusing on spatial constellations based on improvisation and movement introducing strategies of composition and sequencing. In a concluding session we elaborate based on these previous experiencies micro sequences of possible performances: performances of the objects, performances for and with the objects.

      The sessions are based on individual and group exercises. Practical exercises will be followed by group evaluation.

      To accompagny this practice based research we will read in depth a text by Katja Rothe „Permaculture Design Praxis“ and discuss basic terms, ideas and visualizations from permaculture design practice (Mollision, Holmgren). Experiences and results from both the practical and more discursive approaches will be related to your ongoing research and developments in the formulation and desgin of patterns and their articulations in the spatial situation in the common studio and work schedules.

      Schedule.

      We will work from Monday to Friday, 10.00 to 17.00. Depending on the days each day will be divided rouhgly into two blocks of three hours with a one hour lunch break. Or three blocks of two hours with a lunch break.

      Day 1:

      Katja Rothe „Permaculture Design Praxis“ – reading and exchanging – part 1

      Introduction of object based, practical work, exchange and clarifications regarding objects

      You don‘t need to have your objects fixed and prepared already – you are welcome though. However, a rough idea would be good. Because on day 2 you will need to have them with you.

      Day 2:

      Katja Rothe „Permaculture Design Praxis“ – reading and exchanging – part 2

      Practical session: First exercises with the objects. Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      Day 3:

      permacultural design practice part 1: the zone model, edge effect – introduction, exchange, discussion

      Practical session: exercises with the objects – spatial constelllation – part 1.

      Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      Day 4:

      permacultural design practice part 2: twelve design principles – introduction, exchange, discussion

      Practical session: exercises with the objects – spatial constelllation – part 2.

      Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      Day 5:

      Practical session: object work – sequencing and micro performances

      Exchange and evaluation of practical session.

      revisiting patterns

      revisiting ideas of performance

      revisiting conditions

      Requirements:

      As the days, the discursive inputs and practical exercises build up from day to day full-time commitment is required from the whole group of participants. Individual necessities can be discussed in advance but can be accomodated only as exceptions. Please contact me latest until Wednesday, February 21st und mail@florianfeigl.com

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • How do we do the things that we do? a rewrite of twelve design principles
      29 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Florian Feigl
    • 18 January 2018
    • 19 January 2018
    • How do we do the things that we do?

      Florian Feigl is a practitioner and scholar, maker and facilitator in the broader field of time-based art and more specifically of performance as art. Artistic research, artistic process, making as production of knowledge occupy focal areas of his doing and thinking.

      The proposal for the two work periods in January and February is to analyse, discuss and introduce strategies and methodological approaches as articulated in permaculture desgin practice (Mollison, Holmgren) in relation to the Pattern Theory (Alexander) towards an environ-mental & corpo-real understanding of artistic process and artistic research.

      Florian comes as a visiting researcher. The idea is to support the current research within the „Making / Conditions“ block at a.pass, to engage with the processes under way, to collaborate in designing situations and spaces of making and understand the diverse conditions.

      What he bring:
      - Some basic ideas and principles of permacultural design practice,
      - some related texts and theoretical bodies,
      - practical experimental tools and approaches from the realm of object based performance art & composition.

       

      Some general remarks:

      As practitioner and scholar, maker and facilitator in the broader field of time-based art and more specifically of performance as art terms such as „artistic research“, „artistic process“, „making as production fo knowledge“ occupy focal areas of my doing and thinking. And I couldn‘t miss noticing that these terms gain weight & visibility in the field of contemporary art making, art discourse and also art education. At the same time the very terms – without the prefixed „artistic“ – are used and at times seemingly valued when it comes to descriptions in the fields of science, politics and economics (to name some out of many) and increasingly in the world of contemporary entrepreneurship.

      Now these are developments that are already around for a while: Boltanski/Chiapello‘s „New Spirit of Capitalism“ (1999), Jon McKenzie‘s „Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance“ (2001) could be mentioned as landmarks that articulated, described, and critically reviewed the development beyond the closer field of art a while ago.

      However, there are still some blank spots left. Maybe most importantly: There are still no systematic descriptions or broader agreements on what it actually should be this „artistic process“, „artistic research“. What makes it different from other all kinds of processes and researches? To avoid misunderstandings: I would not propose to aim for a general definition to nail the issue for good. (Most probably the value of the terms lies to a certain extent in the flexible quality.) But my suspicion is that on the one hand the „je ne sais quoi“ and highly individual qualities assigned to individual „artistic processes and researches“ are based on still prevailing 19th century ideas and role models when it comes to art making. And on the other hand makes the terms so highly susceptible to be occupied and taken over by ever hungry economic ideologies, the dictate of economic surplus value and individual improvement. (We all still remember how „the artist“ became a model for „the new worker“– and suffer from the results.) Making artist into better entreprenuers has to stop.

      Instead: let‘s adress and describe how we do the things that we do to make better art and produce new and better environments for a truely contemporary art making,

      My proposal is to apply and further analyse strategies and methodological approaches – as articulated in permaculture desgin practice (Mollison, Holmgren) – to develop a contemporary environ-mental & corpo-real understanding of artistic process and artistic research. Is it possible to develop and describe artistic practice as complexe environment? What if we focus on details and design patterns which include and relate to agents beyond the artist, his/her intuition, imagery and narrations, scarce funding situations and imagined focus groups? Will this allow to understand and design more precise work situations? Will this allow to create a different understanding, describe and apply a relational, environ-mental and corpo-real understanding of choice & decision, image & process?

       

      Further reading:

      ecologies_of_making_florian_feigl

       

    • information
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Block overview plenum & forum
      20 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 08 January 2018
    • 01 April 2018
    • Block overview

      This post gives a short overview of the organisation and agenda of the block.


      PLENUM
      Plenums are gatherings of a.pass as a whole. All participants of the block program take part in each of the 3 plenums to share the state and development of their researches, as do the mentors, the research centre, the daily team and the core members as far as possible.
      Plenums are gatherings to exchange about individual researches and practices, and are used to discuss how we, as a group of researchers, and the structure of a.pass can best support them.

      The plenum doesn't start until everyone announced is present.

       

      FORUM
      Forums are timeframes to discuss and work on the topics of MAKING/CONDITIONS, to develop and exchange knowledge or to practice the making of research. 
      A forum can be a physical gathering from 1 hour to 5 days. Forums can be internal a.pass work gatherings, held publicly in presence of invited guests, or even take place in collaboration with other institutions.
      Forums start at the announced time, wether the participants are present or not.

       

      AGENDA

      Plenum I

      8. - 17. January: Displaying Conditions (opening week)

       

      10.-11. January: participation in U-Ghent seminar 'What are we training for?'
      by Adriana la Selva

      Forum I

      18.-19. January: 'How do we do the things that we do?'
      with Florian Feigl

      Forum II

      26. January; 2., 9., 17. February; 1., 8., 16., March: Pattern Language 
      with Nicolas Galeazzi

      Forum III

      30. January - 3. February: Critical Administration; or Shaking down the  Enterpreneur
      with Kate Rich

      Plenum II

      19. February - 23. February:  Making Conditions (HWD's) 

      Forum IV

      26. February - 2. March: 'How do we do the things that we do?' with Florian Feigl

      Forum V

      9. March: Performing Knowledge
      with Pieter Vermeulen (Antwerpen)

      Forum VI

      16. March: Alternatives to Economy (the Macao Model)
      with Alberto Cossu

      Forum VII

      19. - 23. March: Pattern Testing
      with Nicolas Galeazzi

      Plenum III

      26. March - 1. April: Reflecting Conditions (end week)

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • pattern language for conditioning practices weekly meetings
      19 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 19 January 2018
    • 23 March 2018
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • pattern language for conditioning practices

      PATTERNS
      The block MAKING/CONDITIONS is made of patterns. Here is the first pattern of an unfolding language of patterns that shall be created during the next three months.  In a weekly meeting we will look at the emergence of common patterns in or between our investigations of possible conditions for our researches.

      A pattern is a description of a specific practice, thought or approach that can help to develop a shared understanding of a certain field of knowledge. In this case the field of institutional critique and performance as an economic, sozial and artistic category. It discusses the relationship between an artistic research practice and its supporting conditional structures – the institutional in its broadest sense.

      Inspired by the Pattern Theory of Christopher Alexander we will develop a language that shall emerge from practicing our individual researches be shareable with a larger audience.

      According to Alexander, patterns are building blocks for transformation and follow an evolutionary structure: a pattern is repeatable, connective to other patterns and changes according to the needs of a situation.

      Patterns can take shape in any material or immaterial form, but should, if possible, be accompanied by a descriptive. The patterns will be gathered in a library and should be presented in a way that anyone can interpret and appropriate them in a actual situation.

       

      LANGUAGE
      Building a pattern language means to create a common context of a specific set of patterns. The singular patterns can be composed to syntax-like structures. Like in a spoken language, design patterns follow certain grammatical structures and can be combined in different orders  – but most likely not in any orders. The Language we create will evolve out of the context of our artistic research practices and will have to comply to it in its very specific way.


      LIBRARY
      The patterns shall be assembled and discussed in a library. This library shall be hosted in a shelter that shall be build in the big space of a.pass during Plenum I. It shall act as a center of the pattern language practice. The library of patterns shall be a living archive of practical thought, methods, acts, performances, approaches etc.
      Users of the library can experiment with the growing variety of patterns, can patch them together to sentences that make sense to their situation, can alter and amend patterns and add new ones. This is how the language fill find its form.

       

      CONDITIONING
      Every artistic practice is contained in a context and relates at the same time to a multitude of contexts. Yet, it is an intrinsic character of artistic practice to act beyond boundaries and in the grey-zones between contexts. For that the arts often needs to think and go beyond their conditions and rather start creating and intervening their own. This however might be difficult in situations where the overall structure is too big to leave. This might or might not be the case if we think of todays capitalist economy.

      However it seems that institutional critique enters a new phase where systems are changed not only from within, but by experimentally exploiting their structures. Authors like Gerhard Raunig talk in this context of new instituting practices. Through the construction of a pattern language we explore these practices and try to understand what they could mean in relation to our own researches.

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Block 18/I: making / conditions curated by Nicolas Galeazzi
      19 December 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 08 January 2018
    • 01 April 2018
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Block 18/I: making / conditions

       ''Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and economy have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production.''
      Chantal Mouffe 

       

      What is the position of the arts in a completely economized society? What kind of answers do we find towards the increasing entrepreneurial demands? How to keep a discourse about values apart from finances? How to create conditions and institutions that allow us to continue asking these questions with view to a greater societal picture?

      This block combines institutional critique with a fundamental unravling of Performance in its various interpretations in economy, administration, performing art, and sociology. To put performance as a term into the centre between art and economy, is pointing at the fundamental misunderstandings and simultaneous interdependence between these two fields.

      Performance stands for productivity and efficiency as much as for doing, being present, representation, and the transformative power of speech. In between the different interpretations one question appeares very clearly: What are we doing? Beyond the Leninist version of this proverb (What is to be done?), this question not only points to a future productivity (What are we creating?) or a struggle against/for the institution (Under what conditions are we doing and making?). It points to the creation of the framework in which this question can be posed with regard to the basic values of life (How do we live?). In this way all the different understandings of performance aim at transformation or even change.

      In the last decades economy became more and more the overarching concept that incorporates all aspects of life and channels all living efforts. The Arts contributed to this development in multiple ways and acted - consciously or not - as a role model in the process of this economization in many ways.

      For a big majority of the population the economization and finanzialisation of their life means to loose access to common resources and with that the control over the self-creation of their living conditions. At the same time the neoliberal doctrine turned the full responsibility for these conditions onto the individual and diminishes solidarity and democratic processes.

      Being critical and self-critical of this development, the arts must take the performative power inherent in its role model serious and needs to devise new instruments for concrete change and new institutional formats to respond to this development in order to keep the creation of societally viable living and working conditions in their hands.

      Searching for the relationship between the artistic research practice and the creation of its own legal, economic, administrative condition, we try to detect common working patterns that enable us to create our own conditions. Using the concept of Pattern Language developed by Christopher Alexander in late 1970’s we try to come up with practical building blocks to think a radical artistic research practice within, and in response to, the contemporary economic and political constraints.

       

       
    • The excursion is a first encounter with the Flemish Marine Institute and its work. It includes a tour of the Marine Station and the Research Vessel Simon Stervin in the port of Ostend. Our guide will be André Cattrijsee, who is the "research infrastructure manager" of the FMI.

      During this excursion, I propose for us to focus our attention on how the ocean is studied in a scientific context. What kind of language is used to describe it? And what kinds of instruments are used to measure it? What are the categories that result from those measurements? And what kind of ocean is produced as a result? As a score for this excursion, I therefore propose to shift slightly the way we listen and experience this tour of a marine research institution. Instead of simply following the content of what is said, could we also discern the knowledge dispositive within which this tour takes place? And how does this dispositive affect, finally, the "object" of its study?

      In the framework of my research project "Oceanographies" I am interested in finding ways to summon the ocean by means of storytelling and performance. The project in inspired by a personal fascination with this liquid space and its properties. Its materiality, the traces it leaves on the body, its infinite blue transparency, the way it reflects the light, the physical –and temporal– limits it imposes are some of the ways the ocean can “speak” to me. In my research I study this “language” of the ocean by collecting stories from different people’s encounters with it. The focus of the research is therefore not about the ocean “in itself”, devoid of the human presence. Rather it is the relation of the hands to the mud, the ears to the breaking of the waves, the feet to the feeling of sinking, that the work focuses on. The research project weaves the complexity that arises from those interactions into the tellings of stories and their demonstrations.

      I perceive the excursion to the flemish marine institute as a first step towards a longer term collaboration with this institution. I intent to also introduce the researchers of the institute to my oceanic research and hope that I can enter into conversations with them about their experiences of the ocean and the storytelling of those experiences.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • War-/-Lace and Vertigo 20 October 2017
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Eszter Némethi
    • 03 November 2017
    • War-/-Lace and Vertigo

      An excursion is a military term to describe a short entry to enemy territory without formal announcement of war. This excursion is an invitation to explore the ways in which spaces and materials can become instructions and how this relates to participation in complex systems. What is the the agency of things, participants and also the host. Can we listen to things in order to decipher their fictions? And can we remain complicated to each other? You will visit the Kantcentrum in Brugge and the NATO Headquarters in Evere . I will do my best to host you. You will be largely following instructions, reading, making, observing, walking and looking for gaps. You will then return to a playground for discussion at a.pass. I will make you dinner.

      Part 1: Koninklijke Sinte-Maria Straat 106 + time to be confirmed (waiting for a confirmation!)
      Part 2: 7 - 8.30pm @ a.pass

      Duration: 5 hours + 1.5 hours (with a break in between)

    • Coming together in a place. Where and how do our perceptions, according to the surrounding/the place and the situation where we are, manifest themselves? Where and how can we locate them in our body? How is our intuitive reaction? Linked together in groups, we would then — following a score-proposal — try out how everybody`s own intuitional desire of where and how he/she wants to move is affecting the movement of the others in the group as well as their movement is affecting each one. Afterwards everybody is invited to create a zine in any form – according to ones wish – trying to remember the different impressions and the thoughts, feelings, that they provoked.

      2pm: Cité administrative de l'État – Bruxelles, close to botanique. (TBC)
      Duration: approximately 2,5h

       

    • How can we think together? How can we make Space for deep reflection on complex issues? How can we come close enough without intruding? How can we engage in group dialogue and take the time that is needed to think before producing more, contributing more to the system we are locked within?
      A day of observing, listening, walking, kneading, thinking, talking and baking, as we navigate a critical socio/political issue that effects us all and will continue to affect us in the forceable future.

      14h to 18h (approximately) Meeting place: 14h apass 4th floor

      Bring Warm clothes, a smartphone with WhatsApp, Headphones
      [if you do not have a smartphone/whatsApp/headphones please inform me prior to the day of the excursion and I will supply an alternative]

    • "- You shine through my atmosphere. And when you show up, my mountains move like bushes in the wind, and the rocks are scattered on all sides. I hear you. I hear an amazing bang like a storm to come. I hear the noise of thunder, the voice of demons, the winds, the monsters. The whole earth rises, dilating like the waves of the sea and my surface breaks down. My own ground seems to subside and... we need to find another ground to walk by: the unpromised land and the magics balls... "

      14h - starting point: Microfactory (Quai Fernand Demets 55, 1070 Anderlecht) - Duration: 2 or 3 hours - obs: wear comfortable shoes

    • Imagine natural daylight, the best kind of light to see things clearly. Then imagine the light getting brighter and brighter, until it becomes so blindingly white that you are filled with anxiety. The information overload that we experience in our everyday lives is similar to that blinding light. Its origins date to the early 90s, when computer networks attained critical speeds and scales. Today, each of us yearns to be informed 24/7. The dictatorship of information creates in us a desire for round-the-clock information. We have become the organic components of an integrated global data and information system. Yet this yearning we feel is about our search for the Real, which a never-ending stream of information, that informs us only of the reality of facts, can neither satisfy nor fulfil. Because information is always directed at you. Information informs but is no guarantee of getting any closer to the truth. In fact, information sometimes operates as an obstacle to the truth. Instead, what if we started to filter out what we could of the information, in order to better understand the truth? What if we ignored information about the given facts and instead tried learn about something or someone for ourselves? 
      meeting time and point

      Starting at 14:00 - Greenway Veggie Resto Leuven (Parijsstraat 12) 

      4 hours

    • '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 all these notions in place? How will I go from here to using masks again? And how will I finally get out of Flanders?

      Meeting point a.pass 4th floor at 16:30.

      Two cars leave at 18:00 to drive to Tejater De Orchidee in Tielen.

      At 20:00 starts the rehearsal, following that an interview. Then ride back to Brussels.

      Back in Brussel latest by 23:30.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • From I to we Excavating reality together, at home
      20 October 2017
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Pia Louwerens
    • 24 October 2017
    • From I to we

      "From I to we" serves as an introduction into my practice inside its subjective core: my own home. After a performance the audience is invited to rewrite the script, rewarded with a warm meal cooked by the artist herself.

      The structure of the excursion will consist of two parts; first a performance and introduction to my practice, followed by a participatory performance/workshop. Right now at a.pass my biggest challenge is to “break open” my own research practice, to make it open and shareable. In general you could say that my work attempts to go inside, towards some kind of “essence” or fundamental understanding of reality and/or the self. First I try to deconstruct a context, digging towards some kind of subjective center or essence (a true center which is, even in this subjective form, never to be found). Then I try to reattach these findings back to the context, communicating them, telling stories about them, making them real. In my performance I will introduce myself and some of these lines of thought.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • The World Today All In The Mind 20 October 2017
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Eleanor Ivory Weber
    • 23 October 2017
    • The World Today All In The Mind

      “…a 100% probability of nothing happening, and that’s often when it’s more interesting…”
      – Peter Ryan, ABC Senior Business Correspondent, 2 October 2017

      On Monday 23 October 2017, several todays, today. An instruction-based, public yet solo, listening & reading exercise, derived from radiowaves. Thinking about the public mind and testing what is produced from chance and structure. How language functions on different registers, at once, in time, and beyond us.

       

      //// Please bring ID for library registration, a smartphone/laptop (with charger) and head/earphones.

       

      meeting:

      Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België / Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique (kbr.be), Kunstberg / Mont des Arts, 1000 Brussels (Central Station). Meet Eleanor in the lobby, please advise the time you will come, between 11h and 12h. Piece lasts approximately 5 hours (including regular breaks).

       

    • In the course of the upcoming two weeks the a.pass researchers of this block will each propose an excursion coming out of their current research focus. You are cordially invited to join. Please sign up on the a.pass main page on the detail page for each of the proposals. 

       

      26. Okt

      Eleanor Ivory Weber

      The World Today / All In The Mind

      "“…a 100% probability of nothing happening, and that’s often when it’s more interesting…”
      – Peter Ryan, ABC Senior Business Correspondent, 2 October 2017
      On Monday 23 October 2017, several todays, today. An instruction-based, public yet solo, listening & reading exercise, derived from radiowaves. Thinking about the public mind and testing what is produced from chance and structure. How language functions on different registers, at once, in time, and beyond us.
      //// Please bring ID for library registration, a smartphone/laptop (with charger) and head/earphones. "

       

      24. Okt

      Pia Louwerens

      From I to we - Excavating reality together, at home

      From I to we serves as an introduction into my practice inside its subjective core: my own home at Rue Blaes 244. After a performance the audience is invited to rewrite the script, rewarded with a warm meal cooked by the artist herself.

      25. Okt 

      Hoda Siahtiri

      If the past is really passed?! An introduction to co-experincing the others' trauma.

      The city of Brussels is holding a part of my past, I take you to one of the most traumatic places of Brussels for me.

       

      26.Okt 

      Geert Vaes

      La Flandre Profonde/Into The Heart Of Flanders

      Visiting and interrogating theatre amateurs rehearsing 'Het Gezin Van Paemel', a flemish classic and theatrical mask for a flemish identity. The 'interrogation' consists of a group constellation + witnessing the rehearsal + an interview.

       

      27. Okt

      Sven Dehens

      Untitled Excursion 

      Critical voicing, reading, enactment of Alien (1979). Process of audio-visual documentation. Generation of a subtext to the script.

       

      30. Okt

      Shervin Kianersi

      For to Know Nothing Is Nothing

      Imagine natural daylight, the best kind of light to see things clearly. Then imagine the light getting brighter and brighter, until it becomes so blindingly white that you are filled with anxiety. The information overload that we experience in our everyday lives is similar to that blinding light. Its origins date to the early 90s, when computer networks attained critical speeds and scales. Today, each of us yearns to be informed 24/7. The dictatorship of information creates in us a desire for round-the-clock information. We have become the organic components of an integrated global data and information system. Yet this yearning we feel is about our search for the Real, which a never-ending stream of information, that informs us only of the reality of facts, can neither satisfy nor fulfil. Because information is always directed at you. Information informs but is no guarantee of getting any closer to the truth. In fact, information sometimes operates as an obstacle to the truth. Instead, what if we started to filter out what we could of the information, in order to better understand the truth? What if we ignored information about the given facts and instead tried learn about something or someone for ourselves? 

       

      31.Okt

      Elen Braga

      The masters meeting: A Journey to the unpromised land and the magic balls

      You shine through my atmosphere. And when you show up, my mountains move like bushes in the wind, and the rocks are scattered on all sides. I hear you. I hear amazing bang like a storm to come. I hear the noise of thunder, the voice of demons, the winds, the monsters. The whole earth rises, dilating like the waves of the sea and my surface breaks down. My own ground seems to be subside, and... Take your hand car and come with me. We need to find another ground to walk by: the unpromised land and the magics balls...

       

      1.Nov 

      Leo Kay

      The time it takes to think

      How can we think together? How can we make Space for deep reflection on complex issues? How can we come close enough without intruding? How can we engage in group dialogue and take the time that is needed to think before producing more, contributing more to the system we are locked within?

      A day of observing, listening, walking, kneading, thinking, talking and baking, as we navigate a critical socio/political issue that effects us all and will continue to affect us in the forceable future. 

       

      2. Nov

      Luisa Filiitz

      A collection of Impressions

      Coming together in a place. Where and how do our perceptions, according to the surrounding/the place and the situation where we are, manifest themselves? Where and how can we locate them in our body? How is our intuitive reaction? Linked together in groups, we would then — following a score-proposal — try out how everybody`s own intuitional desire of where and how he/she wants to move is affecting the movement of the others in the group as well as their movement is affecting each one. Afterwards everybody is invited to create a zine in any form – according to ones wish – trying to remember the different impressions and the thoughts, feelings, that they provoked.

       

      3.Nov

      Eszter Némethi

      War-/-Lace and Vertigo

      An excursion is a military term to describe a short entry to enemy territory without formal announcement of war. This excursion is an invitation to explore the ways in which spaces and materials can become instructions and how this relates to participation in complex systems. What is the the agency of things, participants and also the host. Can we listen to things in order to decipher their fictions? And can we remain complicated to each other? You will visit the Kantcentrum in Brugge and the NATO Headquarters in Evere . I will do my best to host you. You will be largely following instructions, reading, making, observing, walking and looking for gaps. You will then return to a playground for discussion at a.pass. I will make you dinner.

       

      17. Nov

      Marialena Marouda

      Flemish Marine Institue: Marine Station Ostend (MSO)

      A tour of the Marine Station Ostend and its research vessel Simon Stervin by marine biologist Dr. Andre Cattrijsee. My interest is to get a glimpse of the tools that the research institute uses in order to study the ocean. What language is used and what are the measurement instruments in the laboratories? What kind of ocean is produced through them?

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • block 2017/III
    • 2017 BLOCK III 01 September 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2017
    • 30 November 2017
    • 2017 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Adrijana Gvozdenović
      Eleanor Ivory Weber
      Elen Braga
      Eszter Némethi
      Eunkyung Jeong
      Geert Vaas
      Hoda Siahtiri
      Leo Kay
      Luisa Fillitz
      Pia Louwerens
      Shervin Kianersi
      Sven Dehens

       

      Research End Presentations

      Esta Matkovic
      Lili Mihajlovic Rampre
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      Sina Seifee
      Xiri Noir

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana

       

      Partners

      ARIA
      Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten
      Middelheim Museum
      Kunsthal Extra City
      Kunstcel
      Departement Cultuur, Jeugd, Media
      Kunstenpunt

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Dalila Honorato
      Eleanor Ivory Weber
      Elen Braga
      Eszter Némethi
      Geert Vaas
      Hoda Siahtiri
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Leo Kay
      Luisa Fillitz
      Marialena Marouda
      Nico Dockx
      O.S.P. (Gijs de Heij, Ludi Loiseau, Sara Magnan)
      Pascal Gielen
      Pia Louwerens
      Pierre Rubio
      Shervin Kianersi
      Sven Dehens
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Lilia Mestre
      Pierre Rubio
      Vladimir Miller


      Mentors

      Caroline Godart
      Heike Langsdorf
      Pierre Rubio
      Peggy Pierrot

       

    • In this two days workshop Sina Seifee proposes the notion of keyword seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices. We will (re)animate our keywords as fables, which are operational metaphors that shape subjects and objects of knowledge. How can we participate in (re)shaping our objects of knowledge in terms of little fables?


      Committed to staying with linguistic differences in each of our stories we open a praxiography, a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language that we are using to describe what we do. The participants are asked to bring their "found-objects" (objects, categories, metaphors, concepts, words, terms, and figures that one cannot stop following) and put them under telling: stories about the lives of your found-objects in a practice of writing. In telling-practices we engage in a contingent (re)materializing of our empirical objects and we question the essential stories that hold each of our practices together. With the aim of keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation, through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) ecology of key concepts we will learn a relational empiricism that helps decomposing one's solid objects of knowledge.


      Where? a.pass 4th floor from 14:00 till 18:00

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2017/II
    • The Problem of the Score
    • Dance Workshop 07 June 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Jennifer Lacey
    • 10 July 2017
    • 14 June 2017
    • Dance Workshop

      It seems obvious  that the conditions for making something (anything) will influence the thing made . Other "I " words are maybe more specific than influence: infuse, impregnate, infiltrate, interrupt, incinerate, incarcerate, inveigle, imbue, illuminate. The larger axis of conditions, as I see them, are largely related to money, time, health and the political situation of the land and/or institution surrounding the workplace. The more intimate and malleable aspects are ideas and process. The qualities and hazards of the large-axis conditions in relation to the ones deemed "creative" produce what we could call a form.

      The base line of dance is perhaps understood as the body but mostly it is bodies ( minds implied) together someplace, deciding to work in a certain way . The how of the work, the process, is something that is always to be reinvented and renegotiated. Each dispositif of dance making already contains a nascent content, one that will inevitably be more influential than any idea or concept in the production of the form. So, in imagining how to design the making of a dance, the translation of the concept or content into a thing-which-can-be-done is a crucial, poetic and political task.

      In this workshop we will practice dancing and make the making of dances, or otherwise said, processes.
      Within the workplace/studio our first and most important gesture is to decide how shall we spend our time and how we shall be with each other and then be alert to the dances that are produced and what they might need to continue. My primary proposition is to cultivate processes derived from your own work, translating their conditions and content into practices that produce some dances (we will simply call all that we produce "dance"). There is no necessity to have had any experience dancing.

       As an artist who has worked under a myriad of different large-axis conditions, I have found the greatest necessity and source for me is to render transparent these larger conditions and mix them into the content or desires that preoccupy me, to consciously make a process that can only exist within this specific alchemy. This is my way but there are many varied conventions of contemporary choreographic practice that hold with in them poetic, social and political forces that become be the dominant aspect of the work, even if by accident. We will play with a few of these to observe their forces in action but most of our energy will be devoted to your own work,devising ways to share their doing that retain the integrity of your vision and perhaps reveal the influences of the specific conditions of your work. Or more truthfully, we will start to do this, as 5 days is rather short for such an ambition!  I like to refer to working processes as punctual social contracts. Ones that might be extreme in certain ways but that are agreed upon and that we know will end and so we can commit without anxiety.

      INSCRIPTIONS ; production@apass.be LIMITED CAPACITY  (price 50 euro)

      Everyday from 10:00 till 17:00 a.pass 4th floor

    • 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

    • The Schedule will be updated daily

      for more information visit https:///www.apass.be/settlement-11/

       

      MON 22.05

      14:00 Introduction and Clearing out the Space

      18:00 Improvised Dinner

       

      TUE 23.05

      10:00 Warm Up Practice

                 Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

      14:00 Peer Critique Leo

                  Leo Kay

      15:00 Spaces of Commoning

                 Zeljko Blace, Time Lab (Ghent), Vladimir Miiller

      17:00 1 Minute Festival

       

      WED 24.05

      10:00 Warm Up Practice

                 Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

      14:00 Peer Critique Eszer

                 Leo Kay

      13:30 Collaboration Interview

                 Eszter and Esther

      14:00 Marie Van Leeuwen (ArtEZ) 

                 Conversation with Lilia Mestre

      15:00 Session #1 Planning nothing

                 Where we collectively work out the rules surrounding session #2

                 Leo Kay

       

       

      THU 25.05

      09:30 Sensation as Score (Movement Practice)

                 Anouk Llaurens

      11:00 Reading Group

                 Lilia Mestre and Score participants

      13:00 2 Minute Festival

      17:00 Medium Score 2

           |     Lilia Mestre

       21:00

       

      FR 26.05

      10:00 Warm Up Practice

                 Esther Rodriguez-Barbero

      10:30 Cleaning

      11:30 Peer Critique slot

                 Leo Kay

      13:00 Making Space For

                 Collective practice of framing and naming spaces

                  Esther Rodriguez-Barbero and Leo Kay

      14:30 Session #2 Doing Nothing

                 We gather, head out to a chosen spot and using the ground rules from session #1, do nothing.

                 Leo Kay

      15:30 Session #3 Planning Something

                  We spend half an hour as a group planning what we will do the following week.

                 We aim to be prescriptive and impose structures that allow us to fulfil our aims.

                 Leo Kay

       

      SAT 27.05

       

      MO 29.05

      11:00 Architecture and Movement 

                 Creating and experimenting with space by moving simple forms /structures.
                 Duration 45min

                 Luisa Fillitz

      15:00 Playground

                 Eszter Némethi

       

      TUE 30.05

      11:00 Play-ground
         During a short and playful workshop, we will explore the materials and existing geographies of the Settlement to create instructions and scores; while also exploring how dynamics, forms and narratives are conjured through this process. 
                 Eszter Nemethi

      13:00 Planning a.pass block III/2017

                Vladimir Miller

      15:00 Dialogue with Alex Arteaga 

      What does it mean to think? What does research mean? What can be the cognitive function of aesthetic practices? How should be these practices organized and performed in order to “do research”? And on this basis, what can be the contribution of artistic research to the epistemic field? These, an other related, are the questions that will be addressed in an open dialogue framed by Alex Arteaga.
      17:00  Feminist Benjamin 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.

      Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda

       

      WED 31.05

      11:30 Session #4 Doing Something

                We gather to do whatever we, as a group, decided that we wanted to do in the previous session.

                We will have decided all the parameters of the experience (or lack of them) in the 3rd session. In this last session we just do them.

                Leo Kay

       

      THU 01.06

      9:30 Sensation as Score (Movement Practice)

               Anouk Llaurens

      11:00 Reading Group

                 Lilia Mestre and Score participants

      17:00 Medium Score 2

           |     Lilia Mestre

       21:00

       

      FR 02.06

       

      SAT 03.06

      12:00 Settlement Review

      14:00 Build Down

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Landings 18 May 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Varinia Canto Vila; Sofia Gerheim Caesar; Christian Hansen; Brendan Heshka; Anouk Llaurens; Arianna Marcolini; Agnes Schneidewind
    • 20 January 2017
    • 22 January 2017
    • book
    • Landings

      Landing is an act of returning to the ground or another surface after a flight. This is an invitation to the readers/visitors to temporarily observe and intentionally touch that ground we continuously step on.

       

       

      price: 8 euro

       

      More information here.

    •  

      There has been a shift in humanities scholarship:

      (feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether

      --> redistribution of agencies

      political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

      (the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)

      • descriptive practices of poetics and natural history

       

      situated perspective ==> storytelling

      my interest in your work is to become skillful at reading with you our situated perspectives --> Zoumana’s, Hoda’s, Sina’s, ajayeb’s, apass’, etc.

       

      http://ajayeb.net/bibli

      • women in my life: Avital, Haraway, Ahmed, Scher, Barad, Despret, teaching me science and art, attentive modes of differential reading and writing, practices of noninnocent care and concern
      • men in my life: Serres, Sennet, Delanda, Levinas, Anand, teaching me a non-guilt-driven knowledge of history and past, a different mode of remembrance which provokes a different mode of response and responsibility

      #i am learning from Kohn that the survival is complicated, from Haraway that world works by excess and therefore filled with hope, with Sennett and Delanda a better account of socio-material history, from Ahmed a different understanding of psychoanalysis, from Barad poetry and argumentation, from Scher the effort needed to become interested, from Kenney that there is no need for a “standard language” to describe your interventions or to produce a body of knowledge about your matters of concern,

       

      http://ajayeb.net/?q=hypertext

       

      stories that collect stories [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]

      (kinda mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > made found object by Sina)

       

      stories that collect other stories:

      1- archive ~--> sortability

      2- translation ~--> linearity

      3- dictionary ~-->

      ==> universality (that both these stories claim)

      (my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storing/storying. i wasn’t interested in this some time ago: a shift in my interest)

       

      http://ajayeb.net/?q=excess

       

      excess : there is always more that we don't know, what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--X--> accelerationist manifesto, apocalyptic narratives, technophobic narcissistic stories, etc.)

      (i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic.)

       

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12j9COM_uN9zlWhs9FQiFVdAoc_jMo0AMesYGCFfUPNY/edit?usp=drive_web

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QYJHc3uoDwucLAMp4oPBe19CETNk2Pa27ZhK51bAngk/edit?usp=drive_web

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_sl0QNWI-Iedg48Ao7-aXxW9wnnife0xUTpnCzgrfQU/edit?usp=drive_web

       

      (as you have already noticed, my:)

      Routines:

      • interrupting stories with stories
      • partial connection (and its performance)
      • moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
      • mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
      • mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al-makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات, Sa'di, Attar, Sadra, Sohrevardi, etc.
      • remembering what one knows (=/= owes) (and organizing, performing, reworking it, sustaining a state of generative transformation = my ajayeb.net)
      • having stakes in rationality (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
      •  
      •  

       

      Practices:

       

      Trajectory:

      • Bibliography
      • Wonder
      • Ongoingness
      • Ontology
      •  

       

      Productions:

      • study as artwork
      • reading as artwork
      • bottom-top approach to writing
      •  

       

      Findings:

      • every research practice:
        • must include "the image of body"
        • must employ ontological attention to differential productions
        • must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors
        • must give extensive equipment list
        • must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices
        •  

       

      citation apparatus

      to begin writing about ajayeb with the citational ‘avardeand ke...’ (...آورده‌اند که)

       

      citation, an important characteristic of fables, is about relational histories

       

      absence of definitive source (in my old childhood favorite radio show, by bring an endless list of fantastic source and bodies of lures) allows monsters to flourish and me the full range of my passionate crafts. ajaybe's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).

       

      اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...

       

      • Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...) (--> wonderful to relate… / Virgil’s citation making) (=/= sad to say…, unfortunately...)

       

      (with Despret's talking parrots)

      parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation

      (parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language

      [?am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also a profound interest in misunderstanding (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control? (Despret asks)

       

      exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continuous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning” ==> understanding itself is compromised

       

      “we”: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well

       

      ***

      (one thing i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community

      [asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling?

      (the question i asked Sven: to tell others 'which language one is using.')

       

      in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about:

      • histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions
      • the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural potential memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}

      -artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)

      -(out of) control standards

      -there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext http://ajayeb.net/bibli

      -international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?

       

      (it is about) organizing my memory

      (it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to mind(s) (of the people around me, and before me)

      (it is about) the things I am told

      __(these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,)

      __in our shared space where we let each other in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training

       

      also in apass i want to catch you in your acts

      it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)

       

      asking:

      1- what do I know?

      2- what am I told?

       

      1. the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is an always compound relation between matters, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology, semiotics, ajayeb theory, Sadrian imaginal ontology, etc.)
      2. the response to the second question is also not clear, i can never be sure of what i am told, i don't remember or even hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know

       

      (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity, panicking into a meaning i don't actually want to mean, or plotting an answer, plotting relevances)

       

      is all about loving to tell you about what i am reading

       

      to become a skilled listener : listening ~= response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend

      -these have nothing to do with “common understanding,” “make something work,”

       

      cooperation is about getting deeper into something

       

      (i am more interested in) conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)

       

      (digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?

       

      #on hypertext note:

       

      i am becoming skilled at looking at my own notes:

       

      {(1) what are the skills necessary [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface”--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...

      skills --> to become literate in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)

      --> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?

       

      (Sennett’s) varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

       

      ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:

      1. --> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
      2. --> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
      3. --> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?

       

      as you can see almost all my crafts and tropes are related to social order, communities of concern and research, practices of response, interactions in collective life, etc. the meanings of community and knowledge

       

      because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming sort of a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)

      a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particular niche of space and time, even when accessed in my hypertext (--> wht Sven’s music sounds different when he plays it in the group?)

       

      (committed to the imperative of the Rig,) things not to do in the pop-up book:

      • use as ironic: incongruity (عدم تجانس) in expectations of what is meant and what it will mean in advance
      • use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with transference and sujet supposé savoir
      • use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
      • use of palindromic model --> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherent in the pop-up book Blickmaschin

       

      *a non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic work

       

       

      my Rigs diagrams are swarms? -a multitude of different creative agents

      ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”

      • am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how? To equip a being with “ego”.

       

      topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing

      topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)

      -in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?

       

      • in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget;
        how did i come to use “?q=”: rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
        • selection pressure of ?q= : a (abstract) probe head:  explores a space of possible forms (of writing), is blind or shortsighted, nevertheless effective in certain circumstances ==> double articulation http://ajayeb.net/?q=double%2Barticulation
          • producing highlights: embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others
        • ?q= is an abstract machine that differentiates the process of sedimentary-sentence formation from the process that yields textual species
      • google webmasters tools is my first readership, it communicates its reading with me; (did i have a desire to make the hypertext for a machine?)
      • url passed in facebook post, results into a link to فلزیاب ، مطالب علمی و آموزشی / مدار فلزیاب و دستگاه فلزیاب تضمینی, a series of websites for selling treasure finders, finding metal under the ground, ganj, and so on...

       

      the English (since World War II) --> (1) international lingua franca of high technology, (2) the language of computers

      -in ajayeb.net the enforcement of standard spelling and grammar is weak or nonexistent

      -the amount of linguistic replicators that circulate through my ajayeb hypertext are bound to a colloquial English, they are nevertheless “English”. but this English is being changed and adapted by my foreign use in multiple ways. Is this language really “English”?

      -(towards) a flourishing of a neo-English + Farsi miniaturization of Eng

       

       

      ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i want to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.

      aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour,Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs

      **aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**

       

      novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories --> these genres of composition gather together and stage their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.

       

       

      bottom-up writing

       

      my ajayeb hypertext, what is there the specific law of putting together letters ([and atoms?] to produce a text)? That means the question of Greekness and syntax technology, and my reworking articulated

      • alphabetical proto cloud (Serres) --?--> without law, random
      • what are the laws of good combination that i am reworking or resisting or acquiring or answering to, in my ajayeb hypertext? (how composition is reproduced?)

      --> (the law enunciates [تلفظ کردن ,مژده دادن] the federated,) the law repeats the fact =/= the things of ajayeb are (still) in the process of being formed (--> the morality of reading that i am working on)

      (in the facts of the law there is no space between things and language, is reduced to zero)

      -language and things are born together with the very same process (Serres - Hermes.) --> stable gathering of elements

      • ajayeb's version of the network of primordial elements in communication with each other

       

      my interest in the devil is in the details of my makings (and others)

       

      *please take in mind that these names are my guess at my own rabbit chasings, (they are not “wants” or purposefully organized tracings or mobilized intentions)

       

      (do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation

      --> transformational grammar

      --> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level

      -->

      in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language (that computers could understand)?

       

      common language ~= standard language

      (we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)

       

      (my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of atomic-level data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)

        • is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set

       

      • a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency

       

       

      #in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with an idea of “Iranian scientist” (?)

       

      authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very “natural” at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy

       

      questions for my ajayeb's Rigs and pop-up book:

      my rigs and pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation

      • pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
      • Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning

      --> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)

      exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive

      objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundary articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)

      • my Rigs and books are basically about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena

       

      reading: “text” is the interface between the materialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb

      (“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)

       

      ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

       

      عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality

       

      ajayeb's stories of historically nonhuman people

       

      in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world (= phenomena)

      (with Barad)

       

      we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus ends, and this poses serious questions about the ontology of our practices

       

      • (but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embedded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, my sayings, etc.)
      • (resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries (of my objectives)?
      • (if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics?

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • HEARSAY 09 May 2017
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Luiza Crosman, Juan Duque, Sana Ghobbeh, Sébastien Hendrickx, Aela Royer
    • Greylight Projects
    • 23 May 2017
    • 25 May 2017
    • HEARSAY

      At the end of a one year research cycle at a.pass, Luiza Crosman (BR), Juan Duque (CO), Sana Ghobbeh (IR), Sébastien Hendrickx (BE) and Aela Royer (FR) open their thoughts and practices to a larger audience through (lecture-)performances, installations and performative scores. You are welcome to explore a tentacular collection of interests and concerns, relating to site-specificity, alternative eroticisms, complex narrativities, urban protest and diagrammatic speculation.

       


       

      ____HEARSAY____

       a.pass end-communications by

      Luiza Crosman, Juan Duque, Sana Ghobbeh, Sébastien Hendrickx and Aela Royer

       

      MAY 23-24-25 GREYLIGHT PROJECTS 5-10pm

      Rue Brialmont 11

      1210 Sint-Joost-ten-Node/ Brussels

       

      ____HEARSAY____ is a three day event hosted by GreyLight Projects. Five artist-researchers from the Brussels based post-master program a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) make a public presentation of their respective researches.

       

      The end, self-evidently, isn’t the end. ____HEARSAY____ offers space for reflection and informal dialogue, in order to co-imagine possible research futures. In between scheduled performances, a comfortable bar/terrace/library is open to spend some time, share your experiences and questions with the artist-researchers, and get in touch with the research backgrounds through a communal publication and a selection of books and documents. Or simply enjoy a drink, food and listen to some music of your choice.

      Limited capacity: reservation for the (lecture-)performances is recommended. Guarantee your place by subscribing via the doodles.

      – Sana Ghobbeh: max 30: DOODLE 1
      – Sébastien Hendrickx: max 30: DOODLE 2
      – Aela Royer: max 50: DOODLE 3

       


       

      PROGRAMME

       

      MAY 23-24-25 @ Greylight Projects

       

      5-6pm: performance

      This wall grows at its root. Performance by Sana Ghobbeh. Audience capacity 30; subscribe here.

       

      6-7pm: installations + bar/food/terrace/library

      UNFOLD, site-specific installation by Juan Duque

      Notes on Institutional Fictions and a hypothesis to be developed by practice; INDEX 3/3 – ALIBI: “Dummies; The Prophecy of the Ceiling made of Glass; A Space into a Diagram, installation by Luiza Crosman.

       

      7-8pm: lecture performance

      Research presentation, by Sébastien Hendrickx. Audience capacity 30; subscribe here.

       

      8-9pm: installations + bar/food/terrace/library

       

      9-10pm: performative lecture

      Eros the Joyful, by Aela Royer. Audience capacity 50; Subscribe here.

       

       

      Thanks to: Greylight Projects &  Bains Connective:

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2017/II
    • Medium Score
    • The Problem of the Score
    • The Medium Score Thinking making together apart
      07 May 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Lilia Mestre
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The Medium Score

      The proposal for this block follows on previous iterations of scores as tools to practice dialogue or intersubjective formats for exchange in artistic research. ScoreScapes is an investigation of how scores can facilitate the relation between artistic research, documentation and knowledge processing.

      If artistic research is an active and methodological search for ways to keep the viability of our relation with the world, then how can this search be mediated by scores? If artistic research engages in processes of awaking unseen phenomenological relations with what surrounds us, then how do we compose materials and thoughts? What is the performativity at stake on the sharing of those? What’s the relation between subjectivity and collectivity? What does that do to our individual practices and to the collective itself?

      This time the practice of The Medium Score will focus on how different formats of communication intertwine in the making and the analyses of each others researches. Each time every participant will contribute with a 5 minutes template of his/her research as a module of knowledge processing within the common environment of a.pass post master.

      The score brings about the importance of art practice and research as a discursive tool. The score pushes for an assemblage of layers - philosophical, emotional, aesthetic, economic, critical, social-  that form a reflection of the world and the role of art within it. Every art work has a relation with multiple layers and constructs itself upon that basis. The context of each artistic research is variable and is therefor a contribution for a plural approach of relations.

      GENERAL FRAME : MMM - Medium, Methodology, Model

      Medium

      Use the medium you wish. Answer the questions that will be addressed to you always with the same medium. Be aware you can change medium just once and when you do so you’ll have to explain why.

      Methodology

      Through the practice of the score the methodological approach of the singular researches will emerge by the way participants will compose their replies. The score allows for the cognition of the individual methodological approaches.

      Model

      By the end of the score practice each of us will make a model of each of our researches. A model is a visualisation of the connections that the researches propose and the links they have with modes of production, the societal environment, the philosophical, architectural, political, etc, fields that the singular researches entail.


      INSTRUCTIONS

      -We meet every week on Thursdays from 17:00 till 21:00 on a.pass 4th floor studio.
      -We bring food to share.
      -We work with the people present. It’s not possible to participate remotely by email or other telematic means.
      -There is no audience.If you don’t have work to present you skip a session.

      The score is simple. It works as follows:

      Proposition > (X 8 question > reply ) > model

      To start:

      The first meeting each of us presents a 5 minutes sample of our research question. The sample is communicated as performance, text, object, dissertation,…It manifest the content of the research and the medium through which the research is taking place.

      The questions

      After we assist to each others presentations we assign by chance procedure who is asking questions to whom.

      Each of us has two days to formulate a question to one of the researchers that has presented her/his work. Questions are sent by email.

      The questions are a dialectic tool to engage in the discursiveness of artistic practice and research. They aim to argument what is at stake, its implications and further relations in the artistic research environment. They are the indicators of the dialogical potential of each research project. They are the motor of a process of sharing, contaminating, contradicting, thinking / making together apart. Questions are an intrinsic and important component of the score. Think them, contextualize them, offer them.

      The replies

      After receiving your questions you have 5 days to develop an answer with the medium you’ve chosen. You present your reply the week after in a 5 minutes template. And so forth till the end of the block.

      Change

      If you want to change medium during the score practice it is possible to do it once. You have to argument your choice when you decide to do so.


      PUBLICATION

      We think together how we will publish the practice of the score. How do we make public our processes? The question of documentation and archive is a collective process. The result will be decided by all of us and the materials we generate. A publication will be issued after the block finishes.


    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2017/II
    • The Problem of the Score
    • SETTLEMENT (11) artistic research environment
      07 May 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass 4th floor
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • SETTLEMENT (11)


      During the days of May 22nd - June 4th 2017 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called SETTLEMENT. In the course of these 14 days we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim 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 a.pass will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process. The schedule for these two week will be developed on site by its participants and shared online here:

      Settlement 11 Collective Schedule

       

      Here are some key ideas which have informed similar spaces before:


      encountering processes
      The potential of this setup is that it allows us to encounter each others processes instead of products of our artistic work. Processes are much more difficult to make visible and to see as they require a different mode of attention and participation. The attempt to witness a process requires a change in the temporal mode and in the mode of being-together in the collective space.

      no spectators
      The space we are trying to facilitate is open, but it is not an exhibition. There is no „spectator mode“, and no institutionalized responsibility for hosting. However any participant (including possible newcomers) is welcome to invite and host anybody according to the logic of her/his work process. Anybody is welcome to joint the collective space for any time span, respectful of the fact that Settlement is a predominately a workspace. The (growing/changing) group will try to provide enough information at the entrance, so that everyone feels welcome and knows how to join and share. Although the time frame is short, we hope to create a space that would be engaging to the students, faculty and visitors of the Academy.

      gifts
      Everyone is welcome to visit or join the space. If someone wants to stay and work (this includes us) s/he should bring a "gift" to the space in terms of sharing a work process, presenting a work, or facilitating a discussion or any other imaginable contribution to the shared space.

      productive instability
      We will collect most of the materials for the space from the academy’s storage and re-accommodate them towards our purposes. This strategy produces a space that is fragile, self-made, and constantly changing. We believe that such a space influences the sociability within it towards similar qualities – towards a more fluid social contract. In asking for a hands-on construction and deconstruction of its makeshift set-ups, such a space allows for a quicker change of settings and a decentralized mode of (self)organization. For this reason, we suggest to refrain from using usual furniture (tables and chairs) and improvise new set ups for „work-stations“ and collective moments out of what we can scavenge from around the academy.

      SETTLEMENT


      Settlement is spatial proposal that tries to sustain its architectural fragility hoping in this way to initiate a temporary social, organizational and ideological one.  Simply put it is a collective workspace, a camp and a hangout, open to all who stop by and would like to contribute to it. Like many other such meetings it is a place of informal exchange and presentation. 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 Everything one might need for one’s work has be be built and (re)invented there. There are no tables, no chairs, and the materials and objects resist easy categorization and usability. They have to be mis-used, adapted, they have a will on their own. The built environment has to be negotiated (with) on the level of the object. There is potential in a thing being one thing one day, and a totally different thing the day after. There is also potential in that thing changing hands. (You will be surprised how quickly ownership is established from communal beginnings: you just have to take one thing and put is somewhere.)

      Settlement is a space that tries very hard not to settle. Its instability 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". Miller believes 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.

      Settlement is a collective project Vladimir Miller facilitated over several years on different occasions. The project takes the form of a workshop and creates and inhabits a space full of fragile and precarious structures. Since Settlement starts from a space devoid of habitual work setups, with all materials present considered a common resource,all the structures are built from the necessities of the individual and collective practices of its participants. A kind of a re-start on the physical level and an attempted re-start on the level of the habitual and institutional structures governing our spaces of production. The title is used as a provocation, as Settlement is a space which, over the course of several weeks, tries very hard not to settle.
      Settlement puts a spatial perspective on practice, identifying modes of institutionalization and habit which keep the spaces of artistic production and education from becoming spaces of commoning. These modes of ‘settling’ are embedded in many things: they are there in the ways the spaces are designed and organized towards stability (supporting habit and the given hierarchy of organization), they are there in the institutionalized processes of access and exclusion, and they are there in our social habits (which structure the most empty and open space imaginable). Looking at how the spaces of our practice prioritize the habitual, Settlement introduces architectural fragility as a mode of destabilizing practice and the social agreements between the participants. The spaces created within Settlement are make-shift and precarious and therefore never suited to support a certain social constellation or a process indefinitely. That introduces another timing into the space, rendering all structures inherently temporary and unreliable. The habit of regarding products of work as property becomes destabilized, as all structures in the space are short-lived and can become ‘material’ again very quickly. These and other changes occur through fragility of the built environment and work effectively against the habitual ‘settling down’. The transition of a structure back to the common resource through collapse or re-appropriation is always a possibility, producing the common as a constant perspective onto the emerging territories, constellations and rules in the Settlement space.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • block 2017/II
    • 2017 BLOCK II 01 May 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2017
    • 31 July 2017
    • 2017 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program


      Ekaterina Kaplunova
      Elen Souza Braga
      Esta Matkovic
      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero
      Eszter Némethi
      Hoda Siahtiri
      Leo Kay
      Luisa-Marie Fillitz
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      Marialena Marouda
      Shervin Kianersi
      Sina Seifee
      Sven Dehens
      Xiri Noir
      Zoumana Meïté

       

      Research End Presentations

      Juan Duque
      Luiza Crosman
      Sana Ghobbeh
      Sébastien Hendrickx

      Aela Royer

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Esteban Donoso
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana

       

      Partners

      La Bellone
      PAF performance Arts Forum

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Lilia Mestre
      Jennifer Lacey
      Caroline Godart
      Marialena Marouda
      Vladimir Miller
      Anouk Llaurens
      Sofia Caesar
      Femke Snelting
      Olga de Soto
      Vincent Meessen
      Agency (Kobe Matthys)

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Kristien Van den Brande
      Lilia Mestre

       

      Mentors

      Kobe Mathys
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Tine Van Aerschot
      Veridiana Zurita

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2017/II
    • Medium Score
    • The Problem of the Score
    • The problem of the score Block curated by Lilia Mestre / May > July 2017
      21 April 2017
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The problem of the score


      From May till July 2017 the a.pass post-master program questions how structures pre-determine singular outcomes, and to what extent they imply relationality. Every system is a network of connections and the way the system is set to operate defines forms of relation which reveal ideological standpoints. In other words modes of interaction are formatting forces that construct worlds. If we think that way, what kind of problems do our research structures entail?  And if we can think a polyphonic world , constituted by multiple models, how do we consider our own structure as a relational one? What kind of technologies are we putting into place? What kind of invitation are we making? And to whom?

      The notions of ‘apparatus’ and ‘tentacular thinking’ will be key to understanding and experiencing the problem of score in contextual ecologies. Apparatuses, as coined by Foucault and Agamben, are systems of governance that enable relationships between beings and structures through which the subject is constructed. During former block Donna Haraway  introduced us to tentacular thinking as a place from which one can build relations to economical, biological, philosophical, productional, institutional, etc orders. Together with the a.pass researchers, workshop givers and guests we reflect on them, challenge our practices and relate to other authors and art makers.

      Every Thursday we meet at a.pass 4th floor for movement practice with Anouk Llaurens, followed by a reading and reflexion group that tackles emergent issues and in the evening we play ‘The medium Score’. Through the score we concentrate on Medium, Method and Model in our researches as points of analysis and tools to craft relations. The MMM attempts to understand the implications of our works in our environmental context. The crazier the better!

      The Medium Score is a next iteration of Block Curator Lilia Mestre’s research on scores as collaborative tools for production, pedagogy and discourse. A variation of Writing Score https:///www.apass.be/writing-scores-the-book/ but this time each score participant will focus on his/her own medium. Scores are seen as dispositives of collaboration, of conversation and practice that tie together a plurality of concerns of a.pass researchers. More information about the previous scores at the ABCDAIRE > entry = Scores

      In what concerns workshops, Vladimir Miller and his project Settlement is in for a 2 week investigation on how spatial setups embody and facilitate certain ideologies of togetherness. Jennifer Lacey gives a week workshop on choreography and dance. Her approach consists in the development of processes specific to each project and its resources of production. Through her methods we produce aesthetic rules, body vocabulary and behaviour related to us as a group in context.

      In collaboration with former a.pass researchers Sofia Caeser we organise a seminar at La Bellone with focus on the status of document and display as structures that reveal power relations and equally structures that can be transformed and modify those same power relations. The full programme is under construction but we can already announce that artists Vincent Meessen, Olga de Soto, Kobe Matthys and Femke Snelting are invited to give public talks and masterclasses. Former a.pass associate researcher Juan Dominguez launches the book that results from his research on conspiracy.

      During The Problem of the Score the concrete models under consideration are the methodologies of researchers, the devices proposed by workshop givers, the structure of a seminar and the score as learning through practice tool.

      More information about the block soon!

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


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

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



      More information about the block soon!

    • 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
    • reading session
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book Club #9 Language as Magic and the Language of Things Book Club Series / Caroline Godart & Marialena Marouda
      03 March 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 17 March 2017
    • Book Club #9 Language as Magic and the Language of Things

       

       

       

      Bookclub #9

      Close Reading Session with Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda

      Language as Magic and the Language of Things

      Walter Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”

       

       

       

       

      “To whom does the lamp communicate itself? The mountain? The fox?”

       

      In the essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” Benjamin proposes a language metaphysics that extends to every thing. Every thing has a language: objects, animals, human beings but also immaterial things, like the Arts or Technology. For Benjamin language is therefore a medium going very much beyond human language and the communication through words. One could say language is the way in which some thing – indeed every thing – communicates itself to the world.

      During this morning session we will read Benjamin’s text on the metaphysics of language by using the method of the feminist close reading. By encountering the text in such a way we will try to unfold concepts such as the magic in language and the language of things.

       

       

       

      Caroline Godart holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Cinema Studies from Rutgers University (USA), where she studied under the direction of 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) and a Scientific Collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). 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.

      http://www.rowmaninternational.com/books/the-dimensions-of-difference

       

      Marialena Marouda works in the fields of performance art and choreography. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York, USA (B.A., 2004) and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany (M.A., 2011).  Marialena Marouda’s work is focused primarily on the development of performance exercises, self-invented practices for relating to and for inhabiting spaces. The experimentation with walking, listening and storytelling as relational spatial practices forms the basis of her work.

       

       

      Friday 17th from 10am to 2pm

      @ a.pass 4th floor

      participation to the costs : 5 euros

      Map

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 3/4 (Revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
      03 March 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 06 March 2017
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 3/4

       

       

      Program for Monday 06/03
      Screening starts at 19h30
       
       
       
       
      Testament
      John Akomfrah
      1988 / Ghana / 88 min
       
      Preceeding the visit of Dr. Edward George, member of Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), we present Testament, the first narrative feature film of the collective. Link to the event / on Facebook
       
      In Testament, the condition of the postcolony is embodied in the figure of activist turned television reporter Abena who returns to contemporary Ghana, for the first time since the 1966 coup that ended President Kwame Nkrumah’s experiment in African socialism. Adrift in a ‘war zone of memories’ in the words of the film’s subtitle, Abena is caught in the tension between public history and private memory Testament is characterised by a depopulated frame and the deliberately cold look that evoke an emotional landscape of postcolonial trauma.
       
       
       
      The Unity of All Things
      Alexander Craver & Daniel Schmidt
      2013 / USA, Switzerland, China/ 97 min
       
      The Unity of All Things is a work of experimental science fiction about the construction of a particle accelerator beneath the U.S./Mexico border. It is grappling with questions of self and other by employing particle physics as a metaphor for the morphing nature of human identity. The film engages the utopian impulses of the genre, not through the imagining of another world, but through the rendering of this world as Other. All subjects are treated as alien, or as radical others, who search for, or advance different ideological, psychological, or sexual ideals of belonging. Subjects oscillate between the contemplation of past societal traumas and idealizations of futurity that refuse to synthesize or resolve, but instead reveal a troubling satire of the present.
       
       
       
       
       
      Program for Monday 06/03
      Screening starts at 19h30
      Entrance free
      location a.pass 4th floor
      https://www.google.be/maps/place/Rue+Delaunoy+60,+1080+Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/@50.8530792,4.3300367,17z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c3c3f46c54e4c7:0x4e61e376c2f6b53a

       

    •  

       

      Book Club #6   “A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY”

      with Laurence Rassel

      Thursday March 9th / 10am-1.30pm

       

       

      “The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge. "Splitting" in this context should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. This geometry pertains within and among subjects. Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.”

      Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges

       

       

      Upcoming Book Club welcomes “what if” expert-consultant Laurence Rassel. Long ago she diagnosed the vacuity of artistic practices when its formats of knowledge-production are not ‘situated’ in an ecology of art that encompasses social and psychological factors. Paradoxically she considers fiction, science-fiction, narratives and role plays as paramount tools to achieve that goal.

      Laurence Rassel will address the notion of ‘Radical Hospitality’ by revisiting Stitch and Split, and some of the curatorial operating principles and practices she developed in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona: ‘re.act.feminism’, ‘Retrospective’ by Xavier Le Roy, ‘FAQ: Zone of frequently asked questions’, ‘Allan Kaprow. Other Ways’.

       

      At Tàpies Foundation she engaged the staff-members in a continuous play of becoming aliens of their own activity, all the while practising different modes of welcoming and establishing actual rules for how to use the ‘house’. How can rules be read, understood and negotiated if we take the model of children who change the rules of the game as they play: “Now, what if? And if? Now You, Now I.”

      The science and fiction approach in Stitch and Split is an early exemplarity of her hybrid curatorial practice that steers towards a politics of imagination-as-critique and alternative forms of life and work ‘invented’ in common. Stitch and Split explored the joints, the interstices, and the reciprocal contaminations between two registers which might be considered opposed, science and fiction. Science fiction as a zone of tension that amalgamates imaginary and real, utopia and dystopia, flesh and machine; the use of intrusion, incongruity and discrepancy as a system of resistance and a tool for questioning the present. Science fiction is not considered here as an oracle that can predict the future more or less exactly, but as a critical, inventive, cross-genre/gender and cross-disciplinary discourse on the body, identity and contemporary territories.

      http://www.stitch-and-split.org/site/images/poster.pdf

       

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

       

       

      Trouble on Radio Triton”, the dispositive of the current block in a.pass, revolves around a series of questions (de)forming alternatively its centre and its periphery: As artists, do our researches contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if yes, which alternative worlds do our researches/practices contain and produce immanently? What do we see with/through artistic-research? How do we relate to the future via artistic-research? Through a series of strategic ‘if’s’, ‘what if’s’, ‘as if’s’ we imagine alternatives and exercise criticality along diverse speculative collective practices.

       

       

       

      Book Club #6 “A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY”

      Thursday March 9th / 10am-1.30pm

      participation to the costs : 5 euros

       

      @ a.pass / 4th floor

      https://www.google.be/maps/place/Rue+Delaunoy+60,+1080+Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/@50.8530792,4.3300367,17z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c3c3f46c54e4c7:0x4e61e376c2f6b53a

       

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book club #7bis An Animal Escape Case Book club series special event / Sina Seifee
      28 February 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 10 March 2017
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • Book club #7bis  An Animal Escape Case

       

       

      Book Club #7  'Special event'  by Sina Seifee

      An animal escape case

      March 10th – 2.30am-3.30pm

       

       

      This essay/performance investigates the fragile intersections of friendship between digital avatars and trans-animals in the social media in Tehran’s landscape. Through personal animal-findings and fairy-tale associations the An Animal Escape Case interprets the epistemological openings and closings in cross-species sociality in Tehran domestic landscape exemplified in the everyday use of mobile phones where images of pets circulates and different species meet in mediated formats. The essay/performance analyzes all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality in the situated conditions of contemporary Tehran domestic life and addresses the relationships between people, animals and place in a socio-technological milieu as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, public/private cross- boundaries, its wilderness, and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape. By going through the politics of friendship in a political and historical milieu the essay explores different modes of friendship in the literary texts such as: the 8th century Kalile va Demne’s indo-Iranian essence of friendship, the quotidian of middle ages registered in the works of Saadi, an Iranian modality of everyday happening of greeting in Taarof, children animation films, and ‘Telegram’ social networks in my own family. The An Animal Escape Case as an artistic concern with “foreign-policy” remains committed to the finite essence of friendship while investigating the origins of reciprocity, identification, and greeting in quotidian technologized performances. By problematizing the notion of Democracy as an institutionalizations of a Graeco-Roman model of friendship, the essay/performance asks for other forms of friendship that has stakes in multi-species contingencies in a “difficult” landscapes such as Tehran, operations of disproportion and disidentification empowered by middle ages Indo-Persian cosmologies, and the possibilities of empathic non-understanding in everyday life.

       

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

      http://www.sinaseifee.com

       

       

      Book Club #7  'Special event'  / Sina Seifee

      March 10th – 2.30am-3.30pm

      Entrance free

    •  

       

      Book Club #7 with Fabrizio Terranova

      Politics of Speculative Fabulation

      March 10th - 10am-1.30pm

       

      In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking” and talk about the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.

       

      "We need new types of narrative", once wrote Haraway (1). We follow in her tracks. Indeed we need new types of narrative and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made. And even making them does not suffice, it is necessary to learn how to fabulate what concerns us, what we are confronted with, that is to say, to venture into narrations and cosmologies that can welcome these sensibilities, vitalities and crossing unrests. Fabulating is indeed a new kind of construction, at least for those who seek knowledge and in our opinion, fabulations are those narratives that dig interstices in our world, queering and manipulating it in a more than imaginary take off’s until sparking new attachments and forcing the investigation to be reopened, so that we may once again explore this forsaken territory, which did not seem to deserve even a bit of our attention. Fabulating is an act of repopulating which will no longer be trapped by the limited question of True and False. Stuttering the real, launching the orderly sabotage of the categories of thought, enlarging the spectre, bringing out connected and baffling new worlds, deploying them by triggering desires for the possible and shifting a too well described overwhelming World. Finding tricks, playing, tirelessly returning to our practices, affirming the necessity of new ways of telling and experiencing these worlds, is what we must learn to do.

      Fabrizio Terranova

      (1) D. Haraway, “Primatology is Politics by Other Means”, 1986



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

       

      https://vimeo.com/188121629

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFGXTQnJETg)

       

       

      Fabrizio Terranova’s cinematic choice, a pseudo-realist but discretely fictional one, corresponds very precisely to the mode of presence that makes this portrait a model of integrity. Neither taking over nor offering a neutral opinion, it is a device that constrains Haraway no more than it constrained Josée Andréi, the subject of his first, admirable film, but leaves them to use their own mode of being honest and entrusts in the work of the image the responsibility of turning this recorded document into a co-created documentary work. I am profoundly grateful to this director for knowing how to use his talent, his intelligence and his sensitivity to serve what will be a real transmission of intelligence and emotion. I would also like to emphasise the exceptional confidence that he was able to inspire in Haraway, whose recorded lectures are so far all we know about her, allowing her to give free rein to a “thought” live.

      Isabelle Stengers

       

       

      Book Club #7 with Fabrizio Terranova

      March 10th - 10am-1.30pm

      Participation to the costs : 5 euros

       

      at 2.30pm, an essay-performance will follow Fabrizio Terranova's presentation.

      "An animal escape case" by Sina Seifee

      https:///www.apass.be/book-club-series-7-an-animal-escape-case/

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • BOOK CLUB #8 ACCELERA.PASS Book Club Series / Michiel Vandevelde & Wouter De Raeve curated by Sébastien Hendrickx
      24 February 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 16 March 2017
    • BOOK CLUB #8 ACCELERA.PASS

       

       

       

      Book Club #8 with Michiel Vandevelde and Wouter De Raeve

       

       

      Accelera.pass

      A seminar-presentation by Michiel Vandevelde and Wouter De Raeve curated by Sébastien Hendrickx

       

      How to render our future habitable again, without resorting to the false paradise of disembodied utopias? The societal challenges of the 21st century urge to re-think tactics, methodologies and productions of knowledge how to challenge the prevailing hegemony. In 2013 the Accelerationist Manifesto by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams emerged, aiming to do exactly that. It questions the traditional Left and demarcates a renewed relation with capitalism, while its provocative aura generated a whirlwind of pros and cons.

       

      During this seminar we will not merely read excerpts of the manifesto. By means of a genealogy of the concept, we'll try to frame this tendency within the larger philosophical evolutions of the past decennia and nuance its “accelerating” characteristic.

       

      Michiel Vandevelde (Belgium, 1990) began his dance career at an early age with the Leuven-based company fABULEUS. Since graduating from P.A.R.T.S. in 2012 he has been building up his own practice as a choreographer, curator and writer. A political and artistic activism is the common thread running through his work. He is a member of the Bâtard festival’s artistic team and of Etcetera’s editorial team. Michiel has previously appeared at Kaaitheater with Antithesis. The future of the image (2015).

      From 2013 to 2017 Michiel Vandevelde will be artist in residence at Kaaitheater.

       

      Wouter De Raeve (BE, 1982) studied landscape architecture and is currently pursuing a master degree in visual arts at KASK (Ghent, Belgium). An interest in the interaction between the spatial realm and how society is thought is the leitmotif running through his projects. He recently co-initiated the platform Perhaps it is high time for a xeno-architecture (of knowing) to match, a Brussels-based curatorial and research platform that seeks to examine the possibilities for re-radicalizing spatial practice.

       


      March 16th, 10am-1.30pm

      @ a.pass 4th floor

      Participation to the costs : 5 euros

      Map

    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY screening and presentation by Dr EDWARD GEORGE
      23 February 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 08 March 2017
    • LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

       

       

      “LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY”

       

      a screening and presentation by Dr EDWARD GEORGE

      (Black Audio Film Collective, London)

       

      The Last Angel of History is one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels and exhibitions. Black Audio Film Collective's exploration of the chromatic possibilities of digital video is embedded within a mythology of the future that creates connections between black unpopular culture, outer space and the limits of the human condition. The influential Black Audio Film Collective crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. Interviews with esteemed musicians, writers, and cultural critics are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief,” who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future.

      Edward George, the writer, researcher, presenter of this ground breaking science fiction documentary, will present and discuss the film and its themes of music, Diaspora, science fiction, and its engagement with Afro futurism.

       

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

       

       

      March 8th, 2017 _ 7pm-10pm

       

      @ a.pass

      Delaunoystraat 58

      1080 Brussels

       

      ​entrance free​!

       

      Screening at 7pm

      Presentation at 8pm

      Discussion at 9pm

       

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYe_nj7xfQM

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

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 2/4 (Revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
      10 February 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 16 February 2017
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 2/4

       

       

      Program for Thursday 16/02, 19h30
       

      The stuff of stars has come alive
       
      A Visit To The Underground Cities Of Mars
      UNARIUS
      1977/ USA/ 58"

      We'll go visit the underground cities of Mars, as imaginated and documented by an actual psychic experience. It shows for a more embodied approach to the SF imagination and reconsiders the trope of the guest, the visitor, the witness as experience. We will be guided by Uriel and her students of the UNARIUS academy of science, an UFO-religion still active today. 


      The Co-Star Tapes
      Compiled by Miranda July
      1998-2002/ USA/ Var.
       
      Then we head to scroll through The Co-Star Tapes, a series of videos compiled and distributed by Miranda July in the 90s. Let's look at the co-stars of the sky. It's a feminist, queer sky; a betaville for the future.

      The selection includes:

      How The Miracle of Masturbation Saved Me From Becoming a Teenage Space Alien - Dulcie Clarkson
      A coming-of-age story you've never seen before.

      The Amateurist - Miranda July 
      A “professional” woman monitors an “amateur” woman (both played by July) via video surveillance, as she has for the last four and a half years. She has never had direct contact with the amateur, but creates a sense of communion through numbers, knobs and careful language.

      Transeltown - Myra Paci 
      Dante transported to Times Square.




      NOTE: The event is open for limited public. Feel free to invite some friends. 
      Before the screening at 7.30pm, around 6pm we will cook some vegetarian pasta and eat together. 
       
      WELCOME!
       
       
       
    •  

       

      Now if six turned out to be nine,
      I don't mind, I don't mind (…)
      Alright, 'cause I got my own world to look through,
      And I ain't gonna copy you.

      - J.Hendrix

       

      Stimulating the audio nerve directly
      You wanna come flex with me?

      - The Spaceape

       

       

      In this Book Club, we drown together in an ocean of sound and words.

      We listen to echoes of submarine writings. We vibrate to the whale’s praise chants. We embrace syncretic marginal cults. We embark on a slave/space/ship for a time travel into modern cultures.

      1492. Knowledge Freedom/Culture Born Wisdom.

      We build or we destroy.

      We find our way through popular cultures and music. Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digtised compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rhythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes?

      We learn about the Know-Ledge.

      What kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic?

      To mediate our comprehension of the unsubtitled tracks, we'll intensively use texts by Kodo Eshun, David Toop, Peter Lamborn Wilson, S. H. Fernando Jr. and others, hoping we’ll finally kiss the sky.

      We draw an intensive rear view mirror tour in theory, music, politics, visual arts and mysticism.

      Positive – Energy – Always – Creates – Elevation. (PEACE)

       

      We end the session with Zoé Whitley on the “ afrofuturistic transnational geographies”, a framework of thoughts and aspirations called Afro Futurism, today, in 2017.

      Partly reading together, this session will also be a time for listening and thinking together.

       

       

      Peggy Pierrot lives in Brussels and is involved in projects linking information, media, activism, radio art and technology.

      A sociologist by training, she holds a postgraduate degree in multimedia engineering. Peggy worked as a journalist (Transfert.net, Le Monde diplomatique, Minorités.org) and as editorial/technical webmaster in media and non-profit projects. She lectures on African-American and Caribbean literature and culture, science-fiction, information society or related topics. She collaborates with erg (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels), and she is a tutor in les Ateliers des Horizons in Grenoble (France), a new multidisciplinary professional training located at the boundaries of the art(s) and societ(y)ies.

       

       

      Date

      Thursday February 16th

      from 9.30am to 1.30pm

      (as the session will be quite (con)densed, please be on time!)

       

      Location 

      a pass / Studio 4th floor

      rue Delaunoystraat, 58-60

      1080 Brussels

       

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge Book Club Series / Sina Seifee
      29 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 02 February 2017
    • 09 February 2017
    • Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

       

      Which version of "realism" are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a 'point of view' is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading sessions we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'.

      This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations.

      We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.

      From 9.30am to 1pm both days.

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 1/4 (Revisiting SF Cinema) curated by Dehens & Kaplunova
      29 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 30 January 2017
    • YOU CALL THIS PROGRESS?! 1/4

       

       

      Program for Monday 30/01/17:
       
      Screening begins at 20:00
       
      Crimes of the future
      David Cronenberg
      1970 / USA / 70 min
       
      Crimes of the Future details the wanderings of Tripod, sometime director of a dermatological clinic called the House of Skin, who is searching for his mentor, the mad dermatologist Antoine Rouge. Rouge has disappeared following a catastrophic plague resulting from cosmetic products, which has killed the entire population of sexually mature women. A bio-political Science Fiction informed by the anti-psychiatry movement mixed with a bit of Ballard and Burroughs and a lot of early Cronenberg imagination. It is curious in many ways - one of which being the fact that no sound was taken on location and the experimental use of foley that resulted from this.
       
      Per Aspera Ad Astra (Through The Thorns To The Stars)
      1st part
      Richard Viktorov
      1981 / USSR / 75 min
       
      Neeya is a striking-looking anthropoid found barely alive in an abandoned space craft... Brought to earth by the Russian space crew, she is nursed back to health and memory of her planet Dessa and its ecological collapse. When Neeya's benefactor Sergey joins the crew of an environmental rescue mission, she sneaks on board and convinces Sergey to change course. Once they have landed on the planet of Dessa, they begin improving the atmosphere and water while simultaneously struggling against the supporters of an evil dwarf Turan and a creepy biomass that has escaped the laboratory…
       
       
       
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • - HEARSAY 19 January 2017
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • Luiza Crosman, Juan Duque, Sana Ghobbeh and Aela Royer
    • - HEARSAY

      Luiza Crosman (BR), Juan Duque (CO), Sana Ghobbeh (IR), Sébastien Hendrickx (BE) and Aela Royer (FR) reflect in their stories, statements and scores on their one year research cycle at a.pass in this publication. 

      price: 2 euro


      This publication was part of the end communication HEARSAY at grelight projects 23/24/25 may 2017 at GREYLIGHT projects. . 

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • LANDINGS 12 January 2017
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • SOFIA CAESAR VARINIA CANTO VILA CHRISTIAN HANSEN BRENDAN MICHAL HESHKA ANOUK LLAURENS ARIANNA MARCOLINI AGNES SCHNEIDEWIND
    • Morpho, Rue Gallaitstraat 80, 1030 Schaarbeek, Brussel
    • 20 January 2017
    • 21 January 2017
    • LANDINGS

       

       

      Landings (definition by the M-Webster dictionary): an act of returning to the ground or another surface after a flight. This is an invitation to us visitors to temporarily observe and intentionally touch that ground we continuously step on. Landings brings together 7 a.pass researchers that started and finished their Post Master program at the same time.

      Their research engaged in varied practices and tackled different concerns that are inherent to the relationship between the rules of a given habitat and the experiencing of being in it. The 7 trajectories were explored individually and collectively within the a.pass environment for the past year and crossed paths on several occasions. They all share the sense of place as a meeting point where their research questions are practiced through singular interactions with the viewers. The affinities that these encounters propose can be seen as points of reflection for this end presentations and can be the guidelines for you, dear visitor, to join in.

       

       
       
      Performances and Installations:
       
      Fri 20/1 - 18:00 to 22.00h
      Sat 21/1 - 13.00 to 17.00h + 18:00 to 22.00h
      + landings party
      door opening one hour before start
       
       
       
      Breathing archive practice with Anouk LLaurens:
       
      Fri 20/1 - 11:00 to 13:00 + 14:30 to 16:30
      Sat 21/1 - 10:30 to 12:30 + 14:30 to 16:30
       
       
       

       

       
       

       

      DSC_0020 (1)_small

      "THE BREATHING ARCHIVE"
      ANOUK LLAURENS

      The breathing archive sends us back to the basic life’s movement that is an oscillation between concentration and expansion, like the movement of cells breathing and heart beating. The practice invites visitors to edit collectively a poetic and ephemeral document.  

       

      A Room from his Conceptual House - The Cabinet of Psychosculpture

      "A ROOM FROM HIS CONCEPTUAL HOUSE: THE CABINET OF PSYCHOSCULPTURE"
      BRENDAN MICHAL HESHKA

      A quick artist-guided tour through a single room from The House of the Wandering Joyce.

       

      newsletter pic

      "CARTOGRAPHERS"
      VARINIA CANTO VILA

      In seeing laws and norms as a matrix that creates divisions and borders –physical and existential – this work attempts to map a territory through choreography. In this legal territory, gesture and movement become the cartographers, making visible how the legal and the normative are preset frames for our paths.

       

      MonkeyMan,take13

      "CORRIDORS"
      CHRISTIAN HANSEN

      Possible Landscapes -
      What happens in them and what happens when they’re not there
      Earthquake glue and tectonic contrasts - Wildlife

       
       

      wring gesture_ari_small

      "REGULAR CLEANING"
      ARIANNA MARCOLINI

      is a performative setting to play with the intersection between care-taking gestures and the outcome of a Radical Cleaning session. Radical Cleaning is a practice that addresses the circulation of affects involved in the relations we establish with spaces, things, and other people. This time the outcome of the session takes the form of texts. They are performed in the Regular Cleaning, triggering the experience of the affective layer of an environment.

       

      web bed A 1_small

       "LONG WE AHEAD & WORLD HAS GONE KOOKOO"
      AGNES SCHNEIDEWIND


      A performative erasing practice investigates the rest: the resting body that lies down horizontally, and also the rest that we leave behind as a trace.
       
       

      Screen Shot 2017-01-02 at 21.42.16 (2)

      "I AM WELTON SANTOS, 2016"
      SOFIA CAESAR

      Visitors enter the backstage of an interview set. In between cameras, sound equipment, and lights, they find books. These contain texts based on transcripts and descriptions of an interview with geo-bio-architect Welton Santos.

      By collectively reading the books, the visitors are invited to a generative reconstruction of the interview, a space for rewriting the operation of documentary and narrativity and its tools, tropes, and methods.

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • TELESCOPING THE INTERVIEW three day intensive
      12 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Myriam Van Imschoot
    • 07 February 2017
    • 10 February 2017
    • TELESCOPING THE INTERVIEW

       

      'Telescoping the interview' follows in three days the route from interview-based art to vocal performance and bruitism. That was anyway the passage once taken by sound and performance artist Myriam Van Imschoot when she discovered within her interest in the interview several doors that led over time to appreciating speech for what it offers beyond meaning: significant aberrations, iterations, flux and rupture, modulation, and not in the least, different alterations of subjectivity away from the knowledge-centered ego to idiotic, pluriphonic and even nonhuman alternatives. It became the backbone of a body of works that persistently investigates the various agencies and colours of voicing.

      The three day workshop wants to act as an insert into Trouble on Radio Triton by interacting with the radiophonic and speculative concerns of this block.

      Rather than developing a full-on extensive practice-based workshop, this is a three day intensive that will combine artist talk, screenings, voice improvisations, score explorations, and other tele-scopic incursions into artistic practice and research.

      Have a look at the schedule below.

       

      Myriam Van Imschoot (1969) is a Brussels-based sound and performance artist who works in different media - with the voice as the recurrent motive -, often engaging large groups of performers/practitioners that bring their own sonic cultures, techniques and histories, on the edge of folklore and popular practice with extended uses. Her latest performance pieces, What Nature Says (2015) and HELfel (2016), evoke sensations of landscape in trouble, with the call as an emergent act of insistence and resistance. She is the founder of various initiatives, like Sarma, Voicelabs, Oral Site, and recently the sound poetic series Volume SP. In 2017 her new film Yodel Portrait Phil Minton will come out in Stuttgart, Akademie Schloss Solitude, followed by the première of the theater production IN KOOR! (with Willem Dewolf) at Campo.

      http://oralsite.be/pages/Myriam_Van_Imschoot_Digital_Portfolio

      http://oralsite.be/pages/WNS

      www.oralsite.be

      http://oralsite.be/pages/VolumeSP

       

       

      Schedule of the workshop

      Tuesday 7th from 3pm to 10pm

      Wednesday 8th from 10am to 5pm

      Friday 10th from 10am to 5pm

       

      Location of the workshop

      a pass / Studio 4th floor

      rue Delaunoystraat, 58-60

      1080 Brussels

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • reading session
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book Club #1 COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT BOOK CLUB SERIES / Sol Archer
      06 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 19 January 2017
    • Book Club #1 COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT

       

      a.pass welcomes Sol Archer on Thursday January 19th from 9.30 to 13h00 as part of the Book Club Series.

       

      “SF’s specific modality of existence is a feedback oscillation that moves now from the author's and implied reader’s norm of reality to the normatively actualised novum… and now back from these novelties to the author's reality, in order to see it afresh from the new perspective gained.”

      Darko Suvin

       

      Science Fiction has enjoyed a massive surge in popularity over the past few years, Utopian, Dystopian, and futuristic worlds abound in the cinema, on TV, in books, and cartoons.  I want to look at what drives this surge, and how imagining difference may be a reflection on the political reduction of possibility, following 2008?

      Starting with Darko Suvin's ideas of Cognitive Estrangement, we will look at some of the mechanisms and functions of science fiction, and consider how the imagining of alternative realities operates is a critical gesture with which to view consensus reality -Suvin's “Zero World”.

      We will read into Ursula LeGuin's “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, consider some classic examples of critical Sci-Fi, and talk briefly about the position of theatre within Science Fiction.

       

      Sol Archer is an artist, primarily working with the moving image to research the layering of narratives within location. Sol’s work has been exhibited internationally, at, among other places, the Sydney Biennial, the MuKHA Antwerp, Action Field Kodra, and the University of California. Currently he is an artistic researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie where he is developing a film workshop, based on an improvisational game of science fiction and alternative futures.

      http://www.solarcher.co.uk

      https://youtu.be/vd4pM5-d3yU

       

       

       on Thursday January 19th from 9.30 to 13h00 !! @ https://goo.gl/maps/n1xo77pA9es

    • SELF / Throughout the block each participant develops a self-interviewing practice. The self-interview develops through the individual 'journeys of practices and researches'. During opening week we will introduce possible strategies for self-interviewing and start up the process. During the End Week we will share our results or work in progress. (for inspiration (and fun)... https://youtu.be/o51RdZBsv0w)

      PEER / On top of the dedicated mentoring and the self-interview practice you will also mentor - and be mentored by -a peer participant who will follow you throughout the whole block. You meet with each mentor (at least) twice throughout the block.

      This list shows the chains of  mebtorings: A mentors B, mentors C ...

       Mentored byMentoring
      Isabel Burr RatyThiagoVanja
      Thiago AntunesKleoniIsabel
      Ricardo Santana (PhD)VeronicaEsteban
      Esteban DonosoRicardoKleoni
      Tinna OttesenHektorMavi
      Mavi VelosoTinnaYaari
      Yaari ShalemMaviHektor
      Hektor MametYaariTinna
      Audrey CottinVanjaAdriana
      Kleoni ManousakisEstebanTiago
      Vanja SmiljanicIsabelAudrey
      Marta Verónica Cruz CamposAdrianaRicardo
      Adriana La SelvaAudreyVeronica

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • 2017 BLOCK I 01 January 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2017
    • 31 March 2017
    • 2017 BLOCK I

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aela Royer
      Ekaterina Kaplunova
      Esta Matkovic
      Esther Rodriguez-Barbero
      Eunkyung Jeong
      Juan Duque
      Lili Mihajlovic Rampre
      Luiza Crosman
      Marialena Marouda
      Sana Ghobbeh
      Sina Seifee
      Sven Dehens
      Sébastien Hendrickx
      Zoumana Meïté


      Research End Presentations

      Agnes Schneidewind
      Anouk Llaurens
      Arianna Marcolini
      Brendan Heshka
      Christian Hansen
      Sofia Caesar
      Varinia Canto Vila


      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Esteban Donoso
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana


      Partners

      ERG (Ecole de Recherche Graphique)
      PAF Performance Arts Forum
      Nadine

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Alice Chauchat
      Caroline Godart
      Christian Hansen
      Edward George
      Ekaterina Kaplunova
      Fabrizio Terranova
      Helena Dietrich
      Laurence Rassel
      Marialena Marouda
      Michiel Vandevelde
      Myriam Van Imschoot
      Peggy Pierrot
      Pierre Rubio
      Sina Seifee
      Sol Archer
      Sven Dehens
      Sébastien Hendrickx
      Wouter De Raeve


      Coordinators a.pass

      Kristien Van den Brande
      Lilia Mestre
      Pierre Rubio


      Mentors

      Caroline Godart
      Peggy Pierrot
      Veridiana Zurita

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • F.Y.R. Foley Your Research
      28 December 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Christian Hansen
    • a.pass
    • 23 January 2017
    • 06 February 2017
    • F.Y.R.

      Foley Your Research is a series of sound research ateliers throughout a.pass next block. The workshops are based both on the history of the evolution of methods used to reproduce sound effects for radio and film and a research around the question “how does/could my research sound like?”.

      Does your research have a direct auditory quality and content or would you like/need to create a fictional soundscape to give it a sound?   

      In our atelier I will introduce basic recording methods and various microphones and audio editing tools. Digital and analog use of sound effects will be a natural part of our exploration of physical objects in front of a microphone. How does an object/material producing a given sound release to the mental image you want to produce? And vice versa?

      When using microphones as extended ears it will be an important exercise to reposition ourselves as listeners and take the opportunity to tingle with space. Every recording session will offer us choices of changing time and space completely as we will work free of any visual references. In coordination with the ‘Sci-Fi terraforming mode of attention’- the ‘regard’ of the current block, we will explore tools and methods that will enable us to create critical and fictional soundscapes by layering and panning recordings into mono, stereo or surround sound fields.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • The Tea Party in search for an elastic alien self
      27 December 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Helena Dietrich
    • a.pass
    • 14 March 2017
    • 15 March 2017
    • The Tea Party

       

      The Tea Party

      a workshop by Helena Dietrich

      14th & 15th of March 2017

      from 10.00am to 6pm both days.

      @ a.pass 4th floor

      Map

       

       

       

      “A detailed and exact description of an object, including representations of its spirit language in conversational form and its daily round of activities, demonstrates to it (really to the spirit) that the performer of the ikar {chant} has intimate knowledge of it and can control it. (...) The subsequent narration of actions and events, addressed to the spirit world, causes their simultaneous occurrence in the mirror image physical world.”

      Joel Sherzer, Verbal Art in San Blas: Kuna Culture Through Its Discourse

       

      In this workshop I propose practices to create sensitivity towards the relations we build with images and aesthetics. As a development/othering of my former project Becoming Lili I invite the group to encounter alternative forms of being-with-oneself through creating an auto-(science?)-fiction story through self-image-modifications. The practices are based on improvised physical explorations of physiognomic aspects of the body-image collected in several years of experimentation.

      We will use surfaces, materials, clothes and props as entrances into parallel realities within ourselves. The clothes and accessories will become our vessels to travel into unknown (and unconscious?) parallel forms of being. Trying to establish a perspective from outer-space, the future or a parallel universe we will revisit common aesthetics with an outside eye. This approach can be understood as a ritualistic act of re-configuration of known aesthetics revealing another relation to them. We will use clothing like a pharmakon: what pollutes us can also clean us! By triggering the optical unconscious we can transform sensuously a commoditised visual world into a psychological cleansing process from cultural inherited aesthetics. Acknowledging the ability of three-dimensional images and materials as determinations of our perception of self is already an attempt to empower ourselves at changing our/the reality. Not only in words but also in materialising this reality into visible and tangible new object-beings.

       

      In two days we will approach the ‘image’ from two divergent points of departure: the image’s impact from outside to inside and the creation of an image from inside to outside.

      Looking for alternative beings, bodies and genders we will draw inspiration first from an inward inspection, giving a space for inner perceptions and phantasies and then imagine how they could be actualised into material presences -as bodies. By turning the inside out, we will ‘design’ a wardrobe for a speculative body and search for an embodied aesthetic. An invitation to explore the elasticity of the image and as in a process of channeling, body and image/form will interpenetrate.

      For the first time this practice will not be experienced in one-on-one setting only but collectively in a group. At the end of the days we will all together have a ‘tea-party’ gathering our newly discovered alien-fiction-beings. Their voices will be enhanced through microphones, loop-machines, effect-paddles and speakers and recorded as a divergent radio-show. Supported by the sonic experience and other than filming or taking pictures the focus will be on the ‘invisible matter’ the modifications bring out. Which kind of voices and words will the other image-beings create?

       

      Helena Dietrich

      The German designer and performance artist Helena Dietrich is since four years working and living in Brussels. After her Master in European Media at the University of Portsmouth, she conducted a research project at a.pass in Brussels, a postgraduate program for performance arts and scenography. Both in her artistic and in her design approach she is interested in the analyzation of the impact of visual information on identity and therefore culture. In her artistic work she lays out the significance of the symbolism that is embedded in esthetics (and by extension our identity). Her work has been exhibited amongst others at Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Beursschouwburg Brussels, and Cinema Galeries Brussels.

      http://helenadietrich.com

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • worlding from this world this is not wishful thinking, it is speculating utopia from what is already there
      27 December 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Alice Chauchat
    • a.pass
    • 27 February 2017
    • 03 March 2017
    • worlding from this world

       

       

      When inviting me to host this workshop, Pierre Rubio spoke about my piece Togethering, a group solo as a case of worlding: building a present-tense, experiential fiction from gathered (past) moments of collaboration, uprooting situated moments to turn them into speculative propositions for a common future.

       

      Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines speculate (transitive verb) as "to take to be true on the basis of insufficient evidence”. But what constitutes (in)sufficient evidence?

      (Social, political or sensational) reality jumbles together structural and punctual catastrophes, studded with gems: local endeavours, micro-events allowing glimpses of "something better”. Rather than lamenting the scarcity of agreeable situations in our present, we will wilfully engage in expanding through the force of our imagination these maybe fragile, uncertain, easily disposable snippets of communal life which are also part of the world as we know it. Taking these as sufficient evidence for the existence of a world we want to inhabit, we will turn the logic of exception into a logic of rule, and run the risk of building monstrous worlds. At least these might be differently interesting monstrosities.

       

      Our work will be one of observation, sifting and narration. Unravelling the consequences of chosen proofs, we will abstract principles from these concrete events in order to build systems; fleshing out structure, structuring affects and learning from each other - riffing off misunderstood proposals in order to speculate alternative worlds. Affirming the circumstantial as a law, generalising circumstances, pushing naivety to a point of boldness, our main responsibility rests in our choice of evidence.

       

      Language is a powerful tool, and your own practices are so many other tools which we will put to use.

       

      To start the days I will introduce some speculative dance practices in which imagination and collectivity reconfigure standard anatomical knowledge, and where paranormal or subterranean relationships between individuals and communal selves are embodied. The rest of the day is ours and we will fabricate worlds from the small stuff we find at the bottom of our pockets.

       

      Dance knowledge is always an advantage (always!) but none of what I will propose here depends on it.

       

       

      Alice Chauchat

      Alice Chauchat lives in Berlin and works as a choreographer, performer, teacher, editor and other activities related to choreography. She created performances in collaboration with a.o. Louise Trueheart, Anne Juren, Frédéric Gies, Alix Eynaudi and performed/collaborated in projects by a.o. Jennifer Lacey, Xavier le Roy, Marten Spangberg and Juan Dominguez. She has been working extensively in collaborative set-ups, developing numerous choreographic projects and platforms for knowledge production and exchange in the performing arts (everybodystoolbox.net, teachback vienna, praticable etc.). In 2010-2012 she was in the artistic direction for Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, a centre for artistic research in the Parisian suburbs. After completing a master degree in choreography in the Amsterdam Theaterschool with a “group solo” and a publication of dance scores and poems, she is currently preparing a PhD on the practice of relational subjectivities in dance.

      http://www.alicechauchat.net

       

      Dates : February Monday 27th , Tuesday 28th and March Wednesday 1st and Friday 3rd

      Schedule : 11am-6pm everyday

      Address : https://www.google.be/maps/place/Rue+Delaunoy+60,+1080+Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/@50.8530792,4.3300367,20z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c3c3f46c54e4c7:0x4e61e376c2f6b53a

       

    • 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

       

       

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/III
    • UNDER )o( MINING 27 September 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Isabel Burr Raty; Thiago Antunes; Esteban Donoso
    • Zsenne Artlab
    • 27 September 2016
    • 30 September 2016
    • UNDER )o( MINING

      "BEAUTY KIT FOCUS GROUP"

      ISABEL BURR RATY

      Isabel will be presenting bio-products that she fabricates
      from a variety of substances collected from her womb

      "WELCOME and please do NOT turn the page"
      THIAGO ANTUNES 

      A reading game performance around authority, obedience and participation,
      inspired by civic integration programs.

      "TABLE MOVIE"
      ESTEBAN DONOSO

      Esteban hosts a moment of collective fiction; to create an imaginary film
      using our senses as recording devices.


       

      DOOR OPENING AT 18.30 : 20 PEOPLE PER NIGHT - INSCRIBE BELOW !!!

       
      Due to the intimate nature of our performance event, we will be hosting up to 20 people per night, so it is first come first served, or alternatively  we kindly ask you to sign up and reserve a place using the doodle link above (highly recommended!!)   

      We have designed an experience that offers you finger food with interactive installations at 18h30 and then we will be guiding you through a series of participatory performances.

       


        

      pics_emailer_isabel

      Isabel burr raty
      Bio Autonomy practice

      “I conceive of the Planet as a womb. I make the sacred plastic to reveal its nature. I bring my insides out, performing bloody rituals with machines mimicking the dichotomy of life as it becomes transgenic, engineered in the temple of science. I’m a sculptural thought. Before the womb microarchitecture ends up being a metal box, I become a pharmaceutical sculpture animating a dimension that queries the place of spirits and souls. I’m anatomy. I body dig cyclically. I'm a medical container and I use my uterus to prove it. I excavate the inner geology of this persona to practice my fabrications. I deconstruct to construct bringing the discharged abject to our every day. I re-acknowledge bio-autonomy. I build a bridge. I use the system, the metaphor of industry and its mind gap game apparatus hoping to free us from the mechanical and systematic customized gesture”. 

      "BEAUTY KIT FOCUS GROUP"
      Participatory performance. 

      pics_emailer_thiago

      Thiago antunes
      Civic intimacy games

      My plan was to create a political role playing game that could address migration and integration. After realizing the limits of playable games to disrupt hegemonic discourses, I started to investigate manners of encouraging the players to play against the game itself. A game that never starts, or never ends, and peculiar rules that lead to paradoxical achievements became possibilities for concretely investigating the contradictory hospitality of Europe.

      In my decolonizing fantasy, I imagine Amerindian shamans running an immigration office in Europe, imposing their fleshly notion of integration under the drapery of the bureaucratic civic integration courses. These games demand resourcefulness from the players in coping with physical proximity, smelling and touching the other, sharing drinks and food, enhancing intimacy, as basic requirements for acquiring citizenship. The colonised eventually teaches the coloniser “what a body can do”.

      "WELCOME and PLEASE DO NOT turn the page"
      participatory performance

      pics_emailer_esteban

      esteban donoso
      Scenes of naration

      “During this period I have created distpositifs that alter/displace self-narration and narratives; opening up the gap that lies in-between the thinking and the speaking, the speaking and the doing. This in-between space unfolds slowly and simultaneously to our conscious speaking / doing and allows for a thinner, more fluid membrane between reality, fiction and memory. There is also the in-betweenness of the speaker and the listener, of the speaker and the spoken about, of the person speaking and the others that speak through him/her. A scene of narrating that welcomes the fragmentary, the phantasmatic and the poetic”.

      "TABLE MOVIE"
      participatory performance


       

      UNDER )O( MINING

      “… the playful dystopia of the domestic raw. The displaced archive woven through a membrane that digs fictional technologies…”

      “….is to playfully dig into archives, fabricating technologies that challenge dystopian perspectives through the displacement of domestic membranes, weaving new fictions for ourselves…”

      “… through raw technologies, weaving membranes of fictions, digging in the playfulness of a dystopian archive, creating domestic displacements of ourselves…”


      Home

      Rue Anneessens 2, 1000 Bruxelles

      http://www.zsenne.be/ 

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • Ten New Practices of the Great Transition 18 September 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Michael Bauwens / KaaiTheater
    • a.pass / KaaiTheater
    • 14 November 2016
    • 14 November 2016
    • Ten New Practices of the Great Transition

      Kaaitheater kindly invites us to participate in a one day Workshop with of the most experienced activist, philosopher and commons advisor in Belgium. Michale Bauwens is working on many levels for practicable solutions for structuring societies as commons. He is working as much with gras root  movements as he advises e.g. Ecuador in reorganizing parts of their state structure as a commons. 

      Which new social structure are we evolving towards? Michel Bauwens tries to work this out by looking at contemporary practices that address the challenges of the future in the most direct way. He identifies an exponential growth of civil initiatives that experiment both locally and globally with new models and solutions. Behind the scenes, an entirely new set of values is being built up, with discoveries such as new types of contributory accounting to manage common property, open logistics systems for the circular economy, and so on. Michel Bauwens and the network of researchers into the emerging commons-based economy  present a summary of 10 years of research.

      For more information see KaaiTheater.


       

      Biography

      • Michel Bauwens is a Belgian cyber philosopher and founder of the P2P Foundation, which carries out research into peer-to-peer-networks and practices. In 2013, together with Jean Lievens, he published the book De Wereld Redden, met peer-to-peer naar een post-kapitalistische samenleving (‘Saving the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer to peer’).

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • BLOCK 2016/III: COMMONS 12 September 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 05 September 2016
    • 04 December 2016
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • BLOCK 2016/III: COMMONS

      This block investigates commons economies in the context of the arts.

      We work together, every now and then, some more than others.  Even if the neoliberal ideology continues to run political and economic structures according to the principle of competition and privatization, there exists a wider acknowledgement that cooperation promises more success than competition. But what surplus - other than the sum of the parts - is created while working together? What is the promise of cooperation actually about? What is the philosophy and politics behind it? How does it position the individual towards the social, and what is the concept of ‘success’ that we would cooperate for? Finally, how does radical cooperation affect the idea of ourselves and of the social bodies we are part of?

      The structure of the commons gives a perfect framework to experiment and reflect upon the basic notions of individuality, sustainability and forms of social organization.

      Commons are cultural or natural resources, that are held in common responsibility, not in privatized  ownership. The commons stays in contrast to the market economy.  The market distributes and privatizes goods onto different stakeholders who then come into trade with each other. The commons understands goods not as owned by someone but cares for them in shared responsibility. Commons structures can be found in all societies and are applied in many debates over forests and waters, knowledge, or outer space. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis(es) the commons is widely discussed again as a possible economic and political alternative to the capitalist system.

      But interpretations of the commons are many, and bellow the surface of the debate, we discover the diverging ideas of what Marx described as the ‚social animal’.

      The block is an experimental setup to expand the notion of economy in general and the commons in specific, and appropriate it as an artistic practice. We will model our own specific commons economy based on a shared responsibility for our individual researches.

      Declaring artistic practices as common goods and searching for a form of organizing artistic processes, is questioning the position of the individual, of resources and of the social. We will investigate the common pool of our researches and see how this reflects back on our individual trajectories.

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • "WITH I/II": Communal Dreaming 07 September 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Mala Kline
    • a.pass
    • 19 September 2016
    • 17 November 2016
    • In these two complementary workshops we explore the practical and theoretical implications of working with the concept of the “With” (Nancy) with-in the affective relational space between singularities. In the process of co-articulation of singularities to be “with” is to be exposed, at the limit of oneself, entangled with another singularity and distinguished from it. We examine this concept as a tool in relation to related concepts like “singular plural” (Nancy), “exteriority of singularities” (Agamben) and “composing common world(s)” (Latour). Taking the “with” as a pivotal notion of “community to come”, we play with “relation” as a common, through which the potential "(in-)operative communities" may take place (Nancy).

       

       “WITH I”: 

      19 - 22 September 2016

      These relational concepts are explored through practical use and application of tools for communal dreaming. Improvisation and real-time composition procedures that engage body and imagination in the practice of dreaming serve as tools for “temporalizing of affective and relational singularities” (Manning). The aim is to provide the participants with a common toolbox for improvisation and composition, which they can apply within the “common pool” in the process of composing “common world(s)”, as singular events that occur in the passing between fields of immanence and actualization.

       

      “WITH II”:

      15-17 November 2016

      Reading excerpts from theoretical texts that give insight into these concepts enable us to look back at the used tools for “being together”. The aim is to look back and reflect upon these relational commons and the common tools used in a “common pool” over the months, to rethink and further articulate the common strategy with which this temporary collective can contribute to the conference on the Commons.

       


       

      Biography

      Mala Kline is a performer, choreographer and writer. She holds MA in theater (DasArts, Amsterdam) and PhD in philosophy (UL, Ljubljana). Her PhD on the problem of ethics in contemporary performing arts was written in affiliation with a.pass research centre. Currently she is a post-doctoral researcher at Faculty of Arts and Philosophy (UG) and member of S:PAM research center in Ghent. She is a certified practitioner and teacher of Saphire™ practice (SOI, NYC). All her artistic and theoretical work is embedded in the practice of dreaming. In her author-based choreographic works she uses Saphire™ to facilitate individual and communal dreaming in order to create unique singular worlds weaved from and generated through the language of our dreaming. She has a private practice in Brussels and teaches Saphire™ internationally, in diverse educational, research and production contexts and settings.

      www.malakline.com

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • 2016 BLOCK III 01 September 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2016
    • 30 November 2016
    • 2016 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aela Royer
      Agnes Schneidewind
      Anouk Llaurens
      Arianna Marcolini
      Brendan Heshka
      Christian Hansen
      Eunkyung Jeong
      Lili Mihajlovic Rampre
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      Sofia Caesar
      Varinia Canto Vila
      Xiri Noir
      Zoumana Meïté

       

      Research End Presentations

      Esteban Donoso
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Thiago Antunes

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana

       

      Partners

      Kaaitheater
      Zsenne ArtLab
      Vaarkapoen
      PAF Performance Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Kate Rich
      Michael Bouwens
      Einat Tuchman
      Kobe Matthys
      Mala Kline
      Vladimir Miller


      Contributors for the conference

      Aela Royer
      Agnes Schneidewind
      Anouk Llaurens
      Arianna Marcolini
      Bojana Cvejić
      Cecilia Molano
      Christian Hansen
      Daniel Blanga-Gubbay
      Einat Tuchman
      Eunkyung Jeong
      Femke Snelting
      Guy Gypens
      Ingrid Vranken / SPIN
      Juan Dominguez
      Kate Rich
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Lili Mihajlovic Rampre
      Lilia Mestre
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      Magda Tyzlik-Carver
      Miriam Hempel
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Philippine Hoegen
      Pierre Rubio
      Rudi Laermans
      Steven Jouwersma
      Varinia Canto Vila
      Vladimir Miller
      Xiri Noir
      Zoumana Meïté


      Coordinators a.pass

      Kristien Van den Brande
      Nicolas Galeazzi


      Mentors

      Femke Snelting
      Geert Opsomer
      Kate Rich
      Philippine Hoegen

    • conference
    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting (self) Education of new subjectivities
      30 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass, KaaiTheater
    • KaaiStudios - Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Vaakstraat 81 // 1000 Brussel.
    • 25 November 2016
    • 26 November 2016
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
      case of: Vladimir Miller
      case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The Artist Commoner : Public Meeting

      When we talk about commoning in the arts, or of artistic production as a site of commoning, or the arts as a common good, we evoke economies of material and immaterial labour within the field of art. But we seldom consider the changing understanding of what an artist is, and how this historic subjectivity possibly undergoes a dramatic shift in response to the resurgence of the commons debate in the last few years. Not only do we need to ask ourselves how to be an artist and a commoner today, and how to produce art within commoning processes, but also what kind of a new artist subjectivity is summoned by the commons. Long gone is the conception of the artist as a craftswoman, long gone the conception of a solitary genius, yet the market still welcomes the individualistic producer, enamoured with the beautified reflection the neo-liberal consumer finds in the persona of the free-to-do-anything, singular novum-art-maker. At the same time the contemporary art market (at least its attention, if not its monetary economy) has embraced commoning as a method for artistic production and encourages the artist to engage with the surrounding world. But is it really the same type of artist that emerges in the (economic) contexts traversed by the artist commoner? She travels from commoning to capitalism, to gift economy, and back. How are those subjectivities negotiated with the citizen of capitalism who she inadvertently also is?

      Does commoning, as a means of artistic practice, require a radically different self-conception of the artist? And if we see the emergence of a different artist subjectivity, what role does (self-)education in the arts play in fostering and welcoming this subjectivity? What kind of (educational) institutions can the artist-commoner take root in? How can these institutions engage not only in educating the artist about the commons but in developing radical methodologies of commoning education?

      During a two day event, a.pass welcomes a gathering of researchers, artists, a.pass program participants and public to engage with the struggle of being an artist commoner today, and the role of (educational) institutions in bringing this subject about.

      Two days of presentations, exchanges and commoning practices. Two days of ateliers, books launches, performances, workshops and discussions.

      free admission -  except the performance of Juan Dominguez - tickets

       


       

       

      PROGRAM

       

      Friday November 25

      10:00-16:00: Open space / habitat, with: a.pass participants. (@dance studio)

      11:00-15:30: office-work,
      with Femke Snelting, Kate Rich, Magda Tyzlik-Carver.(@concert studio)

      15:30-17.30: Regime Change, presentation after office-work,
      with: Femke Snelting, Kate Rich, Magda Tyzlik-Carver. (@concert studio)

      18:00-23:00: Common Sweat sauna,
      with Steven Jouwersma.

      18:00-19.30: Turn, Turtle! panel,
      with: Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay. Followed by The Missing Chapter, by Guy Gypens & SPIN.

      Food: catering at Kaaistudio-bar

      20:30-21:30: SITUATMENTS,
      with: Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio, Kristien Van den Brande & Cecilia Molano, Steven Jouwersma, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman (@concert studio).

      21.30-02:00: PRACTICES. Mobile Interviews + City of Commons + Reading out loud & von unten + Common Sweat Sauna + ArtsCommons rehashed

       

       

      Saturday November 26

      12:00-15:00: Open space / habitat, with: a.pass participants. (@dance studio)

      15:30-16:30: Figures of commoning,
      introduction by Rudi Laermans

      16:30-18:00: Launch Bubble Score publication,
      with: Lilia Mestre, Philippine Hoegen, Miriam Hempel 

      17:00-21:00: Common Sweat sauna,
      with Steven Jouwersma.

      18:00-19:30 : Presentation of the ThK Journal #23, Commons / Undercommons in art, education, work…’,
      with: Bojana Cvejić interviewed by Pierre Rubio.

      Food : catering by Kaaistudio-bar

      20:30-22:30: Between what is no longer and what is not yet,
      performance by Juan Dominguez - ticket requiered

      22:30-02:00: introduction Dino Sound System + DJs: party!

       



      OPEN SPACE / A COMMON HABITAT FOR ARTISTIC RESEARCH
      with Nicolas Galeazzi and a.pass-participants

      Friday 25 November: 10:00-16:00

      Saturday 26th November: 12:00 - 15:00

      Every Friday of the last three month a.pass participants met for a concentrated commoning experiment.

      With this practical inquiry into artistic research as a commons we try to establish an Open Space practice, that allows pursuing the individual researches while observing at the same time the general picture that these activities generate together. Every artistic element within that space is considered as a common good. Training the simultaneity and interdependence of individual and common interests not only puts our commons economy at work, but also lets us investigate the personal and collective effects of this structural shift.

      For the ‘The Artist Commoner‘ meeting we move the Open Space Practice to the KaaiStudios and continue our work under the new spatial conditions, inviting you as a potential Open Space commoner into these investigations. You are welcome to explore, expand, dismantle and recharge this space with whatever you consider as your current work. Please bring at least a vegetable for the common cooking.

      10:00 to 11:00 warm up; 11:00 to 13:00 practice; 13:00 common soup and discussion; 14:30 to 15:30 logging.

       

       

      REGIME CHANGE
      with Kate Rich, Femke Snelting and Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver

      Friday 25 November, office hours: 11:00-15:30

      Presentation: 15:30-17:30

      A day long session, aimed at aligning the a.pass computing infrastructure with the ambitions and aspirations summoned by the commons. Tech giants currently dominate all forms of digital communication, from cloud-storage to production tools and archiving systems. For cultural institutions like a.pass and many kindred spirit organisations, there is potential for resistance. Kate, Magda and Femke will use the common power of their intersecting practices in art, technology and theory, to break the spell of this paralysing digital regime. With the aid of Free, Libre and Open Source software, the transposition agents will begin to transform the relation of a.pass to its computing technology. Throughout the day the trio will conduct fieldwork, draw up solemn oaths & commit the institution to a rite of passage: from efficiency to curiosity; from scarcity to multiplicity and from solution to possibility. Champagne served all day.

       

       

      
TURN, TURTLE! PANEL
      with Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi, Daniel Blanga-Gubbay, Guy Gypens, SPIN.

      Friday 25 November, 18.00-19.30

      We would like to draw your attention to the publication of the book ‘Turn Turtle, Turn!’, a creative and intellectual analysis of the new turn in the perception and workings of institutes in the performing arts.

      What has become apparent in the last ten years or so is a move towards an engaged re-appropriation of of arts institutions in artistic (performance) practices, and a more in-depth collaboration between institutes and artists in rethinking the functioning, position, and decision-taking structures of these organisations. We asked several artists, programmers and thinkers to contribute to this publication from the viewpoint of their practice and experience within the institutional framework. Turn, Turtle! Re-enacting the Institute is the second part of the publication series Performing Urgency, commissioned by European theatre network House on Fire which will continue half-yearly.

      For this edition launch in Brussels, the artists Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galleazzi and Daniel Blanga-Gubbay will debate on these questions. The panel is followed by The Missing Chapter, a discussion between SPIN and Guy Gypens.

       

       

      
SITUATMENTS
      with Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Kristien Van den Brande, Steven Jouwersma, Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman.

      Friday 25 November, 20:30-21:30

      Collective scheduling and set-up. The first evening of The Artist-Commoner meeting is structured as an overlap of practices, talks and mini-workshops. We would like to provide a space and time for the audience to engage in the politics, pragmatics and poetics of collective scheduling and setting up, believing that commoning begins where stakes and engagement are developed within a framework that is open to change by its outsiders. On Friday evening we come together to introduce and situate our main concerns and give space to a self-organization of the evening. Guided by open space principles, the audience is invited to take active part in existing proposals and schedule other circles and meetings around possible emergent topics. All proposals will be organized and communicated on a central wall paper. This sprawling exploration of the conference themes will be injected into the discussions and presentation of the second day.

       

       

      PRACTICES
      with Vladimir Miller, Kristien Van den Brande & Cecilia Molano, Steven Jouwersma, Pierre Rubio, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman.

      Friday 25 November, at 21.30pm-02:00

      Mobile interviews - Pierre Rubio

      Pierre Rubio will conduct several nomadic interviews with the participants and with the audience throughout the two-day event. They will revolve around preconceptions about and definitions of the very terms of the a.pass event. What does ‘commoning’ mean? Who is the ‘subject’ producing and operating the commons? What is a ‘commoning practice’? What can ‘commoning’ do? What is the relation between the production of subjectivity and the production of a commoning theatre of operations?

      City of Commons - Vladimir Miller

      In 2015 Stefan Gruber and Vladimir Miller began working on a series of speculative vignettes imagining and discussing a city (or rather a multitude of cities) where certain key institutions are based on practices of commoning. These fragmented utopian visions do not necessarily function or come together as one proposal, but are tools to explore critical positions towards the commons. The texts approach commoning not from the present state of things but speculate from within an imaginary state of commoning as a status quo, thus shifting critique towards a position of inner logics. Rather than discussing commoning practices by comparing or contrasting them with present day structures we jump to a discussion of commoning from within its own possibilities and contradictions, on its own terms. Vladimir Miller will facilitate a work session where together we will develop and discuss visions of institutions as radical spaces of commoning.

      Reading out loud & von unten - Cecilia Molano & Kristien Van den Brande

      Out of the clear, critical light of day, where black night is falling, let's do something as simple as reading a novel to each other. From beginning to end, von unten and out loud, with no particular perspective in mind. Vocalizing writing in order to actualize it, like visualizing it, is not without danger, says Lyotard. Let’s see. If on your bookshelf you have a copy of anti-bildungsroman Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser please bring it. Books-with-scribbles-in very much appreciated. Starting at 9.30 pm, until the last page is turned.

      Common sweat sauna - Steven Jouwersma
      extra session on saturday 17:00-21:00

      The Common Sweat Sauna is a real working sauna made only from recuperated materials. It was built in the public space of Brussels and immediately opened up to the public. The project intends to create a free nomadic urban sauna space that diverts from the logic of commercial and individualized wellness and that de-colonizes the public space. The sauna moves from place to place in Brussels and gathers a growing crowd that takes care of the sauna.

      please bring your sauna gear.

      ArtsCommons - rehashed & common zapping (Philippine Hoegen & Einat Tuchman & Nicolas Galeazzi)

      Based on their experience with an attempt to create a commons for the arts, Einat Tuchman, Philippine Hoegen, Nicolas Galeazzi will discuss the difficulties in practicing the commons as an artistic form. Their discussion is ongoing, temporarily settled at a table next to the bar, open for everyone and will be supported by a common zapping through YouTube clips.

       

       

      Figures of Commoning 

      with Rudi Laermans

      Saturday 26 November, 15:30-16:30

      Commoning, or the collective production of a common (a commonality, a common good), is the essential practice through which the social instantiates the political, be it on the macro or the micro level. Evidently, there exist various modes of commoning - of being with and for, social giving and taking, sharing and co-creating. The presentation focusses on some of these practices, ranging from discussing to complicit action to doing nothing.

       


      LAUNCH: BUBBLE SCORE 

      with Lilia Mestre, Philippine Hoegen, Miriam Hempel, and a.pass-participants

      Saturday 26 November, 16:30-18:00

      As a program curator of a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies), Lilia Mestre has since 2014 developed ScoreScapes, a research on scores as pedagogical tools. Her theoretical interest focuses on performativity as a discursive practice leading to a method based on dialogical and intersubjective formats that function as enablers of exchange within artistic research. Working with this method led to various ways of reflecting on the participants’ work, such as the question of authorship within a scored situation and the bearing of individual creativity within a collective. Bubble Score is the third score created for this context; on the occasion of ‘The Artist Commoner’ a publication will be launched to share and open up the discussion ‘of’ methodologies of commoning education.

       

       

      ‘COMMONS / UNDERCOMMONS IN ART, EDUCATION, WORK...’

      with Bojana Cvejić (ThK - Walking Theory), Pierre Rubio (a.pass)

      Saturday 26th , 18.00-19.30

      a.pass welcomes Bojana Cvejić to discuss the last issue of the journal TkH/Walking Theory : ‘Commons / Undercommons in art, education, work…’ (2016).

      In an interview by Pierre Rubio, co-curator of the apass program, Bojana Cvejić, co-editor of the journal, will address a few problems and questions following from 'The Public Commons and the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labour’ conference (Frankfurtlab 2014).

      Taking a cue from Jason Read’s contribution to the conference and journal: ‘Individuating the Commons’, Cvejić will account for the approaches and arguments around the Common, its practices and plea for new subjectivation. Her own stance recasts collectivity through the questions of the preindividual and transindividual (in Gilbert Simondon, Paolo Virno, and Jason Read). Cvejić recently gave a lecture using these very concepts ( ‘Radicalising a condition into a practice : Transindividuality’ London, Sept. 2016) to critically problematise art as “a site of intensive expression of individualism”.

      Why do concepts like ‘individuation’ or ‘transindividuality’ seem operative today for Bojana Cvejić to expand the narrow individual interest to a broader horizon of collective transindividual solidarity?

       

      BETWEEN WHAT IS NO LONGER AND WHAT IS NOT YET
      
with Juan Dominguez

      Saturday 26 November; 20:30-22:30

      Juan Dominguez suspends events and creates an interval of time in which he tries to integrate his past into his future. He translates his visions and his desire to encounter the unknown through language. For the first time in 14 years Dominguez is working alone, giving rise to a self-portrait that cites himself and some of his friends.

      tickets on Kaaitheatre website

       

       

      Dance with the DINO SOUND SYSTEM
      
with Christophe Meierhans and Ant Hampton

      Saturday 26 November, 22:30-02:00

      To round up this public meeting, we will party. The sound will be produced by a sound system that is considered a common good – the ominously famous "Dino Sound System". Driven by the need to dance - a group of artists, djs and friends around Christophe Meierhans and Ant Hampton joined forces to construct an extraordinary loudspeaker system that can be used by any of the contributing ‘Dinos' for whatever event they’re planning. For our party, the system will experience its second test phase and official inauguration, with music played by a many-armed, collective DJ. Bring your ears for a listening event at 22.30 and you’ll not be able to hold your legs back!

       

       

      ONGOING

      A.pass books on display / for sale

      The stock of books, artist-publications, posters, leaflets produced by a.pass-curators, researchers and participants will be on display and for sale during the Artist Commoner public meeting.

      publications of a.pass

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • THEORIES UNDER THE COMMONS 24 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Vladimir Miller
    • 26 September 2016
    • 30 September 2016
    • THEORIES UNDER THE COMMONS

      In the past several years, we have witnessed are resurgence  of artistic and academic discourse around the notions and practices of commoning. The commons is the central theme of the current apass block, and, over the years, it has arguably been one of the central models for many forms of collectivity practiced at apass. This workshop will be an attempt to „come to terms“, to create shared reference points within the commons discourse among the workshop participants. We will read discuss and map a selection of texts which lay the groundwork for understanding the commons debate today and we will make ourselves familiar with a reader, which can be a further reference for discussions and in depth reading throughout the block.

      To ground our discussions we will look at apass itself as a space of commoning with the help an a project Annette Krauss During the last two years she has worked with CASCO on processes of commoning within the institution. The results of their collective discussions and work take the form of posters, each proposing an exercise in unlearning. Annette Krauss proposes to use the posters as tools for unlearning the practices that uncommon us. 

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • ECONOMY, AN INTRODUCTION 23 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Kate Rich
    • 13 September 2016
    • 13 September 2016
    • ECONOMY, AN INTRODUCTION

      A one-day sortie into the darker macro arts of Economics, a field in which artists are regularly and perhaps wilfully unschooled. This session will draw on a wild expanse of economic theory, from mainstream to outlier, to sketch out the some of the larger context of the contemporary Economy, against which the resistent coordinates of the Commons (as collective endeavour) and the Artist (as either conscript or deserter) might be revealed. This exploration makes no pretense of discovering reality, but instead to draw out some of the fundamental truths which economists hold to be self evident.


       

       

      Biography:

      Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia and living in Bristol UK. She is co-founder of the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products. Since 2003 she has run Feral Trade, a long-range economic experiment and underground freight network, utilising the spare carrying capacity of the art world for the transportation of other goods, specifically groceries. Her work has been represented in the Whitney Biennial, Tate Modern, New York MoMA, Whitechapel Gallery and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Kate is senior lecturer in DIY and activist media at the University of Western England, volunteer finance manager at Bristol's artist-run Cube Microplex, system administrator for the Irational.org art-server collective, and a founding member of the European Sail Cargo Alliance. Her ongoing preoccupation is to move deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy in the cultural realm.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • Friday Open Space 23 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass
    • 16 September 2016
    • 25 November 2016
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Friday Open Space

      Every Friday of this block – from 16th September till the Common Conference – we will come together for a concentrated commoning session. In order to concretely practice and practically inquire the general question of the block – what is created in common? – we try to establish an open space practice that allows pursuing the individual research interests while focussing at the same time on interrelations amongst these researches and the common interests. Training the simultaneity and interdependency of individual and common interests not only puts our commons economy at work but also let’s us investigate the personal and collective effects of structural shifts.

      We will work with the elements provided and commonized during the opening week workshop.

      What is created while working together? With this basic question in mind, we will establish our own specific common working economy. The critical practice of this economy will be our contribution to the Common Conference at the end of the block.

       
      The Fridays Open Space follow a strict protocol: preparing, diving, reflecting, adjusting.

      At 10am we gather for a preparatory hour including a body warm-up, check up of the material and the situation, and a short recap of the previous Friday’s session. Contributions for this preparation can be proposed by everyone taking part.

      At 11am we dive into the open. Everything is in common responsibility and has to be taken care of to be activated, nourished, cultivated, played with, questioned, put in context, etc.

      Throughout these sessions, the attention lies – similar to improvisation – on the contextual relationality of the individual trajectories towards the commons.

      At 1pm we eat soup and reflect upon our experience in the open session. Based on this reflection we commonly decide on adjustments as a starting point for the next Friday Open Space.

      The sessions will end around 3pm.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • ASSEMBLY WITH THINGS Thing 001390, and Thing 001652
      23 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Agency
    • a.pass
    • 10 October 2016
    • 13 October 2016
    • ASSEMBLY WITH THINGS

      Agency constitutes a growing “list of things” that resist the radical split between the classifications of nature and culture. This list of things is mostly derived from juridical cases and controversies involving intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trade marks, etc.) in various territories around the world. The concept of intellectual property relies upon the fundamental assumption of the split between culture and nature and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and tradition, individuals and collectives, mind and body, etc.. Each “thing” or controversy, included on the list, witnesses a hesitation in terms of these divisions. Agency calls these “things” forth from its list via varying “assemblies” inside exhibitions, performances, publications, and other forms. Each assembly speculates around possible inclusions of excluded agencies. These fabulations explore in a topological way the operative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of art practices and their modes of existence.

      In terms of intellectual property law the commons are often determined by the vague demarcation like between what is "common" and what is "original". The controversies that Kobe Matthys of Agency will invoke during the workshop bring about the absurdities of this division in artistic, philosophical and other terms. In this workshop we will also put some existing legal precedents in relation to our own practices and speculate around other potential scenarios, other lines of thoughts than the juridical argumentation of copyright law, possible diverging situations and beyond.

      For this workshop Agency proposes an work amongst others with two Things that are directly connocted to questions of the commons Commons. Discussing and unfolding the problematics of these cases we try to localize the gray zones in our own researches, our relationship to objects and the reality that create ‚us and them’.

      Thing 001390 (Ten dollar bank note)

      According to Aboriginal tradition the Morning Star Pole is imbued with the power to take the spirits of the dead to the Morning Star, which will return them to their ancestral home. While a pole is part of the communal ceremony, it is made in secret in accordance with (common) religious rules.

      In 1985, the artist Terry Yumbulul, himself member of the Galpu people, made morning star poles and sold one of them to the Australian Museum in Sidney.

      In 1988, the Reserve Bank of Australia released a special $10 bank note to commemorate the first

      European settlement in Australia incorporating elements of a reproduction of that specific Morning Star Pole. After Yumbulul was criticized by his community for permitting the reproduction of the pole on the banknote, he initiated an action against the Bank for infringement of his copyright.The court defended the copyright of the Bank.

      Thing 001652 (Monkey’s Selfies)

      In 2011 an individual of the so called crested macaques ape manipulated the camera of the wild life photographer David Slater and shot coincidentally an image of itself. The image became famous as the Monkey’s Selfie. It was published in an online version of Daily Mail and on Wikipedia - in Daily Mail the copyright notice read: „Copyright Casters News Service“; Wikipedia considered the picture as public domain. In consequence Mr. Slater himself, Copyright Offices and animal right groups started to fight with different arguments for and against a possible copyright of this picture.


       

       

      Biography

      "Agency" is an international initiative that was founded in 1992 by Kobe Matthys and has office in Brussels. Agency constitutes a growing “list of things” that resist the radical split between the classifications of nature and culture. This list of things is mostly derived from juridical cases and controversies involving intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trade marks, etc...) in various territories around the world. The concept of intellectual property relies upon the fundamental assumption of the split between culture and nature and consequently between expressions and ideas, creations and facts, subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, originality and tradition, individuals and collectives, mind and body, etc.... Each “thing” or controversy, included on the list, witnesses a hesitation in terms of these divisions. Agency calls these “things” forth from its list via varying “assemblies” inside exhibitions, performances, publications, etc... Each assembly speculates around possible inclusions. As a whole the assemblies explore in a topological way the operative consequences of the apparatus of intellectual property for an ecology of diverse art practices and their modes of existence.

      On Days Like These We Must Surf from Jake Kovnat on Vimeo.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • Opening week 2016/III workshop: Gathering things 23 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass
    • 05 September 2016
    • 14 September 2016
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Opening week 2016/III workshop: Gathering things

      This commoning workshop radicalizes the usual focus of the opening week: we share our researches! Sharing this time, is not only a means to update each other about the actual state of our projects, but literally aims to make them a common issue.

      Our individual researches are the basic material to set to work during a block. 'Working’ is a specific economy of related energies, knowledge, motivation, intend, emotions, of objects and humans, documents and processes.

      The opening workshop forms the basis of a block-specific economy that will be developed further in the Fridays Open Session.

      You are invited to carefully select parts of your individual research that will then be declared as common good for the duration of the block. The collection of these parts is the base of our commons. The collection will be under constant transformation and observation, and shall be our indicator of how our researches develop under the influence of the care by ‘everyone‘.

      We will present our individual researches synthesized through three specific filters :

      •     One element from your research that you define as a resource for yourself and others.
            Resources are things that transform when we use them!
      •     One element that you declare as a tool.
            Tools are things that we use in order to transform other things.
      •     One element that describes a ‘gap’ in your research.
            Gaps are not-things: Gaps are consciously or unconsciously ignored or desired elements within our researches.


      Beside the opening week workshop, we will take time to discuss the concept and the practicalities of a.pass in general.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/III
    • Commons
    • COMMUNAL GARDENS 18 August 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Einat Tuchman & VK
    • VK (Vaarkapoen, Molenbeek)
    • 31 October 2016
    • 03 November 2016
    • COMMUNAL GARDENS

      Vaarkapoen is a community center in the heart of Molenbeek, quite near a.pass. It’s an institution engaged in the community and community building of this problematic commune. Since November 2015 Molenbeek is recurrently in the world news as a nest for ’islamic’ terrorists. The commune has been blamed for neglecting integration policy and for not taking serious the existing social and economic problems. The political community as well as the population are therefore alert and know they – we – have to do something. In this situation, many claims are coming towards the arts, towards education and social work. The team of VK is one of those actors who are assigned to address this social situation in the commune and to bring artists in relation to the community.

      One of their projects is to develop a communal garden as open space for a general public to use. Connected to it they want to build an artistic residency place for projects that deal with the community.  The situation is structurally complex. To create this garden a currently squatted building has to be destroyed. For the rather poor population the renovation cost are fairly high. The questions of who will decide about the dedication of the garden, about activities and use, is still open.

      During the workshop we will examine the existing garden and the future one, departing from our personal artistic researches. How can we as artists with our researches take position in, or towards this project? What would we do with this space, in this situation, at this location? How would our research react to, or in it? In what kind of garden would you place your project? What would you need in this garden to be able to realize your ideas and how could your research reach others through this garden?

      These are questions addressed together with Einat Tuchman. Through her artistic practice Tuchman addresses since several years the question how art can engage in community building without compromising itself. Together with Tuchman we will relate our researches to this garden/residency project and will develop positions and actions towards it.

    •  
      The Excursion-workshop Visiting the (un)safe is an individual travel through some specific spaces of Brussels. The excursion will ask of its participants to question how our identity(ies) are constantly formed and transformed by our physical surroundings and environment.
       

      Safe space is a term used for an area or forum where either a marginalized group are not supposed to face standard mainstream stereotypes and marginalization, or in which a shared political or social viewpoint is required to participate in the space. For example, a feminist safe space would not allow free expression of anti-feminist viewpoints. Physical safe spaces are often reserved only for members of the oppressed group.

      This excursion wants to question what places in the city can be considered as safe- and un-safe-spaces, and if our interpretation of our own identity(ies) affect this definition. Does age, race, gender, national origin, religion, physical or mental ability, sexual orientation, class etc apply to our connotation of a safe-space. Do we sometimes reconstruct our own identity(ies) in different spaces in order to be safe, or in order to keep the space safe for others. What makes a space safe for some while un-safe for others. Do we unconscious search or attract these safe spaces and avoid the un-safe spaces. What uninvited situations would occur if we consciously turned this around for a day.

       

      Practical information: The excursion is an individual travel through some specific spaces of Brussels and can be done anytime, if you contact Xiri.

      Participation and time schedule:  Participants outside of the A.pass program is very welcome to join this excursion, but as its an individual route (you can not walk with other people), you will have to subscribe individually on this email: xiritaranoir@gmail.com

      To subscribe for the excursion please write to the above mentioned email with the time and day you wish to make the excursion (around 1-2 hours any day between 9-18).

      When you subscribe for the excursion you will receive your own individual time scheduleIf you have a specific wish for the time schedule please mention it in your subscription and it will be taken into account.

      All participants will receive a personal letter by email containing the map of your route and some personal instructions during the route.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Place yourself to receive 05 July 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Esta Matkovic
    • apass
    • 11 July 2016
    • 11 July 2016
    • Place yourself to receive

      My suggestion for excursion is to try perceive particular space, as still-non-defined-space. We will go to this kind of space, which has potential to stimulate different directions in conversation. We will stand in a waiting line with other participants and  “receive” what this space gives to us. How do we perceive and measure this? What we are perceiving and how does this influence our behavior. Body position, relation, potential to become statement.  

      The way we are going to observe this space will give us information, which will be starting point to get involve into conversation with others. Which gesture that space suggests? We will chose and be able to change position in the space, making relations. Question is how conversation grows and how do we mediate that space, and space between us. Conversation (speech and body language) will be main tool of being influenced. We are part of the context and are becoming its content. We will let political to appear.

      In conversation, we will try to avoid introducing or presenting ourselves. Focus should stay with starting point and affect of the space. We are creating behavior that could be content supported by space as its context.

      Everything is going to be recorded and transmitted by skype, as silent observer. There is notion of heterotopia, which pertains into space we are in. How all this influences our behavior?

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Hoarding and Hiding 05 July 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Christian Hansen
    • Station Haren Zuid
    • 16 July 2016
    • 17 July 2016
    • Hoarding and Hiding

      Together we will walk from Station Haren Zuid towards Brussels along the railways.
      Underway we will exaggerate and share our urge to pick up and play with any things that trigger our curiosity and find temporary homes possible new belongings. After the walk we will set up a studio camp in a field between Gare de Schaerbeek and Gare du Nord where we can work with our findings and get some sleep.

    • postgraduate program
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    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • EXCURSION TO CEN 30 June 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Sina Seifee
    • apass
    • 12 July 2016
    • 12 July 2016
    • EXCURSION TO CEN
      (in the direction of my research; hastily opening the ontological envelope that saves a heart full of "list of specifications"...)
      the visit will be to the 'European Committee for Standardization' (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalisation), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of 'data', 'systematic knowledge', and 'specifications'. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of APASS and the representatives of CEN; and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their epistemological formations meet and intersect.
       
      KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence, specification, future, knowledge, irrationality, permanence and substance; technological acts (of naming); suspicious partnership of "advanced democracies" and "high technology" (what allows their mutuality?); standard-testing (which sectors of existence it traverses?); the very little difference between specification and "the real thing"; the origin of the demand for rigorous specification; migration of questions in or out of the areas of instrumental fitnessa path of becoming (on the grid of technological dominion); 
    • postgraduate program
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    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • UNRAVELING INSTITUTIONAL DYNAMICS 30 June 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Luiza Crosman
    • apass
    • 13 July 2016
    • 13 July 2016
    • UNRAVELING INSTITUTIONAL DYNAMICS

      A one day practice-based and experimental excursion-workshop that will focus on reflecting on Art Institutions - how they present themselves and how we, as artists,art workers or general public, would act upon them, given the power to make decisions. During the excursion-workshop we will visit an Art Institution and, through a staff’s guided tour, we will learn about the “non visible” work that maintains and moves it’s dynamics, making it possible for its structure to be ready to receive art shows, projects, presentations, etc. During this encounter we will address issues such as:

      - what kind of decisions are underneath the proposed experiences? - which operational dynamics could be different, and which are to be preserved? - where does that which is visible and not visible intersect?

      Afterwards, the group of participants will work expressing thoughts, desires, and ideas, by re- imagining the problematics through diagram drawing; in order to propose the operations, systems, and movements we would like to put in place if we were to create an Art Institution.

      This workshop invites the participants to step out of a passive critical position and engage in an active role in the making of an Art Institution. Subjective ideas and points of view will be able to inform an institutional and collective structure:

      - if I was to do it, how would I do it? - for me, what should be a priority within an Art Institution? - is there anything I would like to know about an Art Institution before experiencing its Art? - for who is this Institution for and what does it do?

      By making use of visual language to express the group’s vision of possibilities, the workshop aims to dislocate the common use of discursive language used to address institutional issues and re-imagine it’s possible structuring. Drawings made during the workshop will be collected and made into a poster to be distributed both to the participants and to the receiving Art Institution as a collective feedback tool.

    • Wondering around the community of Molenbeek we will enter four different social cultural centres. In each one we will get to know their activities , their aims and their relation to the political economical conditions of a community like Molenbeek. 

       

      prelimnary Schedule

      at 10:00 we meet at a.pass (gate)

      at 10:30 Raquel will receive us in the new space of maison des cultures 

      at 11:30 we  be hosted in GC de Vaartkapoen 
      at 12:30 we can eat in a kind of social restaurant in Centre  maritime 
      at 13:30 we will get a tour and explanation about Centre  maritime 
      at 14:30 we will go the maison de Quartier Liberateur 

       

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/II
    • Generously forceful / The doubtful wild THREE VIVARIUMS /  a.pass research presentation 
      21 May 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • TINNA OTTESEN 
    • in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds
    • 26 May 2016
    • 28 May 2016
    • Generously forceful / The doubtful wild

      Program 

      vernissage 26/5 at 18.00 – 20.00
       
      vivariums open 26/5 – 28/5  11.00 – 20.00h
       
      artist talk 27/5 at 18.00 

       
      in the cellars of the Tour&Taxis sheds

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

       


       
      vi·var·i·ums or vi·var·i·a: 

      A place, such as an enclosure or facility, used for keeping live animals for observation or research.

       


       

      latex_test

      make animated gifs like this at MakeaGif

      >

       

      THREE VIVARIUMS: ENTER, SURRENDER, PLAY 

      I invite you to contemplate on a reality without you being the central perspective.

      When entering a.pass, my initial question was, how to combine site specific and portable scenography.  How to make spaces, that correspond to a particular site, but can also move between locations and respond to the next site with equal value, using the same materials. 

      This research has led me to the scenography of a manmade space. My contemplation is not only its interaction with its surroundings and context but furthermore, how the human body interacts directly with space – how is he influenced and transformed by it? 

      If a place has a memory, will it sense your absence? How do we respond to materials, and to the sensations, the memories they evoke? And how can inorganic, industrial materials like latex & nylon, respond to elementary things in us? What are the transformative effects of space and beauty? Is it possible that spatial experience can change ones perspective and interaction with the world?

      Each vivarium explores a material, spatial positioning and proportions. I’m exploring the generous violence of beauty by creating small cells that evoke the sensations of wide landscapes.   

      Get close, find the playfulness through engagement and intimacy, and use your senses as a compass!

       


       

       

      fallhlif_test

      make animated gifs like this at MakeaGif

       

      LETS TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER.

      Artist talk with light snacks and heavier drinks. 

      Friday 27/5 at 18:00 

      Chatting about weather is not only Iceland’s most indulged past time behaviour. The pleasure of sharing perceptions of this ever changing landscape connects us to the basics of this world, and shapes our relation to matter. 

      Tinna Ottesen’s vivariums position the border between matter and us into a moving climate. She is subtly reconsidering the environment as a partner in crime – a responsive field, that ‘talks’ back to us. 

      We would like to invite you to talk about these ‘talking’ qualities of material in relation to the spaces and landscapes we are living in. Based on a text by Tim Ingold, “The eye of the storm: visual perception and the weather” Tinna Ottesen will be interviewed by Nicolas Galeazzi about her perception of space, the performance of the weather, touch and other feelings. 

       


       
      Tinna Ottesen has been working with space and scenography for stage, for sites & for screens over the last 10 years exploring the suggestions of behaviour space provides and the affects the medium is capable of.

      She is a prominent presence in the Icelandic art scene and has a trail of projects spanning from site specific performances, production design for Films, TV & documentaries, theatre scenography, art direction for festivals, and immersive installations like the underwater concert series and food event installations.  

       


       

      How to find the vivariums: 

      Avenue du Port 86C, 1000 Bruxelles

      Tinna map-Seite001

       

    • postgraduate program
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    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • PROTEST! 19 May 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Maarten Van Den Bussche
    • apass
    • 24 May 2016
    • 24 May 2016
    • PROTEST!

      Next Tuesday, the 24th of may, the three biggest labour unions of Belgium are calling for a collective demonstration through Brussels. They march against austerity measurements that weigh heavy on the general public but refuse to demand a similar effort of the top percent. They march against a deregulation of the working hours that would push burn-out and stress statistics to all time highs. 

      As an artist and researcher at a.pass, I want to explore how I as an artist can be there. Do I protest, or stage a performance? Can a group of artists take part in this manifestation, as a block, a community, with their own sincere slogans? The dockers, the metal workers, the office clerks, the artists, as different perspectives and simultaneous retellings of the same discontent and j'accuse.

      This is an open invitation to participate in this experience/experiment. Everyone who wants to join our artist block is welcome the 24th of may, at 10:00, in the a.pass studio, rue Delaunoy 58, 1080 Sint-Jans Molenbeek, Brussels. There we will shortly discuss our participation, slogans, and movement as an artist block within the manifestation, to then from there walk to the North Station and join the manifestation.

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Esta Matkovic
      Esteban Donoso
      Juan Duque
      Luiza Crosman
      Maarten Van den Bussche
      Sana Ghobbeh
      Sina Seifee
      Sébastien Hendrickx
      Thiago Antunes De Oliveira Santos
      Xiri Noir

       

      Research End Presentations

      Tinna Ottesen

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Mala Kline

       

      Partners

      PAF Performance Arts Forum
      Constant vzw
      Wiels
      Thermae Grimbergen
      Tour&Taxis
      GC de Vaartkapoen 
      Centre  maritime
      Maison de Quartier Liberateur
      Bains du Centre
      CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation)

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Christian Hansen
      Einat Tuchman
      Elke van Campenhout
      Epifania Amoo-Adare
      Esta Matkovic
      Esteban Donoso
      Femke Snelting
      Gerald Kurdian
      Juan Duque
      Luiza Crosman
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peggy Pierrot
      Peter Stamer
      Sana Ghobbeh
      Sina Seifee
      Sébastien Hendrickx
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Mentors

      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

    • postgraduate program
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    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Hot bodies of the future <3 22 April 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Gerald Kurdian
    • Barlok, 9pm
    • 08 July 2016
    • 09 July 2016
    • Hot bodies of the future <3

      Hot bodies of the future <3 is a scored investigation of body states in parties and clubs contexts. Experienced one night through and under coloured lights, it consists in a very sensuous and playful exploration, with scores, of some or our physiologic, erotic and imaginative relationships to sounds, body movements and space while club dancing. It is also an attempt to understand and/or feel, the conditions of sexual arousal and the factors that trigger it. It results in a compilation of short written science-fictional texts recounting the different shifts, drives and metamorphoses that occurred during the participants’ experiences.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Mr. Ecuador 22 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Esteban Donoso
    • meeting at a.pass
    • 29 June 2016
    • Mr. Ecuador

      The trip I propose has two parts, the first day we will visit the swimming pool at Jeu de Bal in Brussels. While swimming we will record sounds from the site, our conversations, and sounds sprout from talking practices I have been working on. When we are back in the apass studio, we will perform our swiming pool sound documentary. We will perform it live, in swiming gear, some sounds will be broadcasted, some will be produced at the moment, some texts read live. Along with our performing, there will be a video footage of an abandoned swimming pool in Quito-Ecuador, a former military post from the XIXth century, turned into a sports complex, then abandoned from the 1970s on, this swimming pool was the site for the first Mr Ecuador contest.

    • postgraduate program
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    • block 2016/II
    • Excursions
    • Uninvited Research
    • Excursion 22 April 2016
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Sana Ghobbeh / Juan Duque
    • meeting at a.pass
    • 10 June 2016
    • We are interested in narratives, narratives that are not exclusively expressed as text or writing material but above all narratives that we can construct and develop as artistic practice.
      We propose to go to Sunday market at Gare du Midi.
      The market is set up on a location that operates in every day life as urban infrastructure for different functions, side walks, city streets, viaducts, rail way tracks; every Sunday those concrete and asphalted surfaces become the platform and support for the market.
      We propose as an activity to gather at Gare du Midi market on Sunday and each of us, after finding a place, remain still in the same spot for about 45 minutes (or as much as the high activities of the context allow) before the finishing activity and dismantling of the market.
      A main question we want to explore: For how long can we remain? In which ways can our bodies be affected when we decide to take a position that is opposite to the majority of people surrounding us in such a busy place?

    • I propose a visit to Grimbergen Thermae, a spa in the village of Grimbergen, next to Brussels. I want to invite the participants to imagine this SPA as an official civic integration machinery. A fictional government would oblige newcomers to undergo a program of integration that consists in sharing saunas, swimming pools, and scrubbing sessions with locals, in a silent and relaxing environment. As to increase a familiar taste for most of the migrants, there are different thematic saunas – such as the “African Lodge”, the “Mediterranean sauna”, and the “Turkish bath” – incorporating visual and sensorial elements of different cultures.

      Departing from this fictional frame, the participants will receive scores to be performed/experimented in this spa. These scores will challenge the ordinary way that we deal with physical proximity, politeness, and nudity.

      What kind of choreography appears from that situation? And how does it interact with our beliefs around private and public?

      Time schedule:

      11:00 am - gathering at Ribaucourt bus stop (direction cathedral) close to metro station Ribauccourt.

      11:25 am - departure by bus DeLijn 231

      12:06 pm - arrival at Grimbergen. Talk with snacks. Walking around the village. Maybe a warm up in the Church.

      13:48 pm - Entry in the spa.

      16: 07 pm - Return to Brussels. (yes, you can leave before if you pay the fine ;-)

       

      Please bring:

      - towel(s) - otherwise you must rent them for 5 euros

      - snacks

      - (fancy) slippers - optional

      - (fancy) swimming suit(s) - optional

    • In order to simulate our ideas for specific and challenging trips we would like to gather some Brussels ‘cracks’ - people who know Brussels form one or the other perspective by heart, know the hidden places and weird stories of this city - and invite them for a dinner at a.pass.

      This dinner will take place on Monday 9th May in  our Opening Week, will start at 19:00 and takes place in our space on the 4th floor of the Bottelarij, Delaunoystraat 58-60 b17, 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek (Brussel)

       

      We would like to create an informal situation with food and chats to let people engage in each other’s practices and brainstorm about Brussels as a place for an excursion. The a.pass researchers will have a lot of questions about this but a lot of things to tell about their research practice.  We will ask Brussels experts to be there with their knowledge and to be open to talking about spatial settings in relation to the research practices of the a.pass participants.

    • postgraduate program
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    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • FORGED THEORY 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Vladimir Miller / Peter Stamer
    • a.pass
    • 05 July 2016
    • 07 July 2016
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • FORGED THEORY
      „I remember this workshop where we were asked to write theory in support of our research. Not to go and read and quote existing work but to make it up, to quote from a fictional pile of books. What would be such a fictional body of writing to situate our work in? What kind of fanstasy discourse does our work exist in? To be honest: Is our work not already producing a potential yet unwritten discourse? We keep looking until we find that ghost in someone else’s writing, calling it research, no? Its divination, ghost hunting, séances.  Can we go one step further and conjure up those voices we are looking for?
      In that workshop we looked at the many fragmented ways those voices appear in a piece of writing: blurbs on the back page, quotes from form other literary works, footnotes, citations, bibliography lists and lists for further reading. All the ways a supporting structure of precedents is woven into and around an academic text. Mere fragments in themselves, they point to whole architectures of thought. Their distinct style, their no-nonsense-brevity speak volumes. How does an archeologist distinguish between a shard and a piece of pottery made to look like one? He cant help but imagine the vase.“
       Richard Crane, Territorial Discourses Michigan University Press, 1998
       
      "Contemporary art has two major problems. One is that it’s absolute meaningless when it comes to a larger scale. Whatever is being produced, performed, presented has no potency to leave the bubble of those who are in one way or the other involved in the respective field. The artistic practice is absolutely irrelevant and will have nothing to contribute in the forthcoming years to the challenges globalism already presents to our societies. The other huge problem even has a dramatic touch. There is not one single theoretical concept, not one philosophical idea that has been articulated or even thought within the contemporary arts that would have an impact on the ‚world out there’. Nothing that would provoke social discourses to rethink the accepted horizon of knowledge, nothing to at least create confusion in scientific environments. Instead, contemporary art theory is as stale as the beers the visual artists drink after they have opened their futile exhibitions, as silly as the babble theatre makers come up with in their meaningless funding applications, as impotent as the pieces dancers fabricate in their unattended off-off garages. Theory which has developed into the well-fed heir of contemporary artistic practice is in fact a motherless, dead-born child, and I couldn’t think of anything that would reanimate that poor and hopeless creature. What ‚theory’ is rather in dire need of is to be turned around in order to be taken from behind…” 
      Gianluca di Fratelli, "Standing on one leg while holding one’s breath. The Apocalypse of the Now". Riders in the Storm. The Act of Nothing. Ed. by Meyers P. and Bozac S., Rome/Warsaw 1997. p. 233-234.
    • postgraduate program
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    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • Modifying the universal 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Peggy Pierrot / Femke Snelting
    • a.pass
    • 30 June 2016
    • 30 June 2016
    • case of: Femke Snelting
    • Modifying the universal

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

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

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

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

       



      Biographies

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

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

    • postgraduate program
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    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • ON MOVEMENT 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga
    • a.pass
    • 24 May 2016
    • 24 May 2016
    • ON MOVEMENT

      Cities are dynamic places defined by the incessant flows of people, capital, information and ideas that traverse them. Day and night we find ourselves caught up in these rhythms, which are to a large degree completely internalized by now. Both the city and our functioning within it seem to depend on how well-synchronized all these flows are, but at the same time this repetition ends up reproducing the existing power relations and structural inequalities.

      This workshop will work through a series of selected texts and ideas to collectively look for places, times and modes of being that allow for a wider margin of manoeuvrability—points where things start falling out of synch and trajectories are diverging.

      Given the multiple understandings of the word 'movement' both as a change of physical location over time and in the sense of social or political movements, we will discuss the affective paths that such movement follows within the spaces of the city and the new cartographies that might be drawn in this way. Looking at the nomad as a sustainable modern subjectivity which is always in flux (via Rosi Braidotti's nomadic thought), we will explore that space of becoming and the various thresholds one might traverse and/or occupy while on the move.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • (Un)thinking Research Practice Decolonizing Theory, Mobilizing Methodologies, and Open-Ended Becoming(s)
      20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Epifania Amoo-Adare
    • a.pass
    • 09 May 2016
    • 10 May 2016
    • (Un)thinking Research Practice

      The premise of this workshop is that a critical pedagogy on the space of research knowledge production, and its related forces of (re)production, is a necessary condition for any intervention in (and of) that space. Consequently, we propose to challenge widespread understandings of research space and knowledge production as a binary researcher-researched structure that is given and fixed, in other words: a structure that is developed for and not a context that is developed by the various actors in the research process. We contrast this convention with an understanding of research space as both, a manifestation as well as a vehicle of the productive relations of power-knowledge.

      More specifically we will look at the significance of the multiply-identified and mobile “research bodies,” as agents, interacting in various networks of relationships (and things) within, and beyond, a given society. We will utilize conceptual frameworks, derived from critical social theory, de-colonial thinking and being, feminisms, and geography to discuss questions such as: How does a spatially-oriented critical reading of the world inform our social construction of knowledge(s) on it? What is the relationship between spatiality, knowledge and power? How does (hegemonic) knowledge production arise as a consequence of struggles over (academic) place? How is the researcher implicated in appropriating, re-constructing and/or dismantling existing knowledge structures?

      Here, we highlight the importance of positionality, threshold theories, and the open-ended becoming of researchers for better contestation of power-knowledge regimes that reify and universalize context-specific ontologies, cosmologies, ecologies, epistemologies, philosophies on existence, etcetera. Additionally, we will discuss critical perspectives, with a focus on border consciousness, positionality, the mobility paradigm, and decoloniality; all of which work to enhance our development of a more critically conscious research praxis. This will also include brief discussions on research method, as relates to questions of mobilizing and decolonizing methodologies, plus other modes for enabling the development of threshold theories as part of a process of (un)thinking hegemonic research practice and moving towards open-ended becoming(s), beyond the binaries of the researcher and the researched.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2016/II
    • Uninvited Research
    • FEEDBACK 20 April 2016
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Elke van Campenhout / Vladimir Miller 
    • a.pass
    • 03 May 2016
    • 06 May 2016
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • FEEDBACK

      As part of the Opening Week this workshop we address the topic of feedback. Since a.pass is a shared environment, we depend a lot on each other as sparring partners in our researches. Often the work is presented within a group and the quality of the feedback is lacking in precision, understanding or communicative strength. What is important in giving or receiving feedback is that both positions are clarified: what position do I speak out of? What kind of feedback would be useful for my research?

      In this workshop we try to construct very diverse feedback techniques: spoken critique, non-negotiated critique, direct feedback, indirect feedback, written, walking, one-on-one or transformative feedback.

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

      Vladimir Miller BLOCK PROPOSAL

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

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

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

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

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

       

       

       

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

       

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

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

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • 2016 BLOCK I 01 January 2016
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2016
    • 31 March 2016
    • 2016 BLOCK I

       

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aela Royer
      Agnes Schneidewind
      Anouk Llaurens
      Arianna Marcolini
      Brendan Heshka
      Christian Hansen
      Gerald Kurdian
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Juan Duque Restrepo
      Lili Mihajlovic Rampre
      Luiza Crosman
      Sana Ghobbeh
      Sofia Caesar
      Sébastien Hendrickx
      Tinna Ottesen
      Varinia Canto Vila


      Research End Presentations

      Hektor Mamet
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Yaari Shalem
      Mavi Veloso


      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Juan Dominguez
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana

       

      Partners

      PAF Performance Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Anne Juren
      Bruno de Wachter
      Elke van Campenhout
      Jack Hauser & Sabina Holzer
      Lilia Mestre
      Myriam van Imschoot


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre
      Nicolas Galeazzi


      Mentors

      Femke Snelting
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio
      Vladimir Miller

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Who's Afraid of the Subject? 07 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Elke Van Campenhout
    • a.pass
    • 18 January 2016
    • 22 January 2016
    • case of: Elke van Campenhout
    • Who's Afraid of the Subject?

      In this theoretical and discussion workshop, we reconsider the notion of the subject today:

      why, after all the turn-arounds of becomings, vibrant objects and a decentralisation of the human perspective, do we need to reconsider the subject as an important player in our discourses and practice?

      well, to start with, because there is no personal agency or ethics without it. and also because there is a need for a consciousness of what it is that subjects us, what it is that turns us into speaking, experiencing and affecting human beings. but even more so, when and why these powers are denied to us, and why? if we consider the subject as being constructed by what it is subjected to, it is important to see 'reality' for what it is. in the sense of: what it is doing to us. if we consider, on the other hand, the subject as the basis position out of which an action-on-the world, or with-the-world, takes off, it is the basic premisse to be able to (re)think the public as a place of togetherness, the construction of a 'we', and the starting point for our commonal ethics.

      we talk our way through these thoughts, focussing more specifically on the artist subject, and diving into foucault's 'care of the self', developing through the week into the theories of agamben and judith butler.

    • information
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/II
    • NOT_index
    • Opening week Block II/2016 04 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass
    • 02 May 2016
    • 11 May 2016
    • The basic idea of this week is to share and ‘update’ each other about our researches in order to allow the collaborations in the block. This means that you will be asked to share the concept, some material and thoughts of your personal research with all of us. We will send you a more detailed plan about this very soon.
      This is it for now, if you have more specific questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

      Looking forward to seeing you all!

    • The dedicated mentors for this block are Femke Snelting, Kate Rich, Geert Opsomer and Philippine Hoegen.

      According to your needs, you can choose for either 2 or 3 mentors.

      In order to challenge you with a specific context and language of mentoring we would like to suggest for this block, that the team of mentors proposes one of those 2 or 3 mentors to you. We would like to experiment with this possibly confronting, contrasting, or specific support to your research.  With each of the 2 or 3 mentors you will have 4 hours of mentoring throughout the block.

      Since the dedicated mentors will present themselves in the opening week and will attend all your presentations you will be able to decide on your mentors at the end of the first week.

      To subscribe read more:

      Please check the time availabilities of the mentors below and subscribe to your mentors here.

       

      Timing of possible mentoring:

       Schedule will follow soon.
       
      Femke Snelting:
      Best days for the 1st mentoring are: 22, 23, 26, 29, 30 September;
      Best days for the 2nd mentoring are:  14, 24, 28 November.
      Otherwise there's always space around things so we'll make individual appointments and find slots.
       
      Kate Rich:
      Available in Brussels for the 1st mentoring are: 14 - 17 September
      Available in Brussels for the 1st mentoring are:  26 - 29 October
       
      Philippine Hoegen:
      on individual appointment
       
      Geert Opsomer:
      from 15th September on individual appointment.
       
       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Bubble Score for performance and writing 02 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Lilia Mestre
    • a.pass
    • 11 January 2016
    • 25 March 2016
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Bubble Score for performance and writing

      General rules:

      • The score happens weekly throughout the block between January and March 2016. The day and hours will be agreed with the group.
      • The practices of the score alternate between performance and writing as modes of the performative. Performance doesn’t mean a concrete discipline but a materiality coming to presence. (Of course writing can be part of it. The question would be then the relation between several ways of writing). Participants can chose to start with writing or performance, after that each alternating consequently between the two practices the following sessions.
      • No remote presence is allowed. Meaning there can’t be works sent by email. If someone can’t be present during a session, the sequence will be picked up next time the person joins back.
      • All people attending the score meetings has to share work. There is no audience.
      • We'll discuss together about issues of documentation for this process containing different mediatizations. A publication will be issued out of the material produced.
      • The score will take place in the evening. We'll bring food and drinks to share.

       

      Playing rules:

      To start:

      1. Present max 5 minutes performance or write a text of maximum two pages. This first presentation is a gift to the group and the beginning of a process.
      2. After assisting to all presentations, each of us will select one  one performance or text to ask a question to and assigns who should answer that question.
      3. General discussion.
      4. We have 2 days maximum to address the questions. The next session will happen one week after.

      The week after.

      1. Present max 5 minutes performance or write a text of maximum two pages as a response for the question that as been assigned to you in relation to what you've witness and your interests in that. No interest is also a good motivation.
      2. After assisting to all responses, each of us will select one performance or text to ask a question to and assigns who should answer that question.
      3. General discussion.
      4. After assisting to all presentations, each of us will select one  one performance or text to ask a question to and assigns who should answer that question.
      5. We have 2 days maximum to address the questions. The next session will happen one week after.

      And so forth...

      A first meeting will happen during the opening week to define further rules and to precise ways of documenting the process taking in consideration the publication. Miriam Hempel the graphic designer will be also present in this meeting.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • Denuding 02 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Anne Juren
    • 14 March 2016
    • 18 March 2016
    • Denuding

      The workshop will explore different topics present in my research. Dealing with different writings and languages, I developed choreographic sessions to look upon the relation between body function, written words, spoken texts, sexuality and choreography. The workshop is a continuation of the research in engaging the body in different states of physical, sensorial, kinaesthesic and mental experiences. It inspects the thin line between private and public, and attempts to balance inner desires and outer realities by entering the limbic system of the body. It triggers the idea that no one is a coherent, self-sustaining element; we are all internally divided and made up of many dissimilar characteristics.

      Following the notion of the division and the multiplicity of the subject, the workshops will deal with different choreographic strategies and body practices related to text present in the method Feldenkrais and will experiment within the relation between poetry and writing in examining the text of authors from the Ecriture Féminine.
      The workshop is an experimental and process-related event. The participants will be able to bring their own questions and practices and find a way to engage the body in different states of physical, sensorial and written expressions.
       
      Anne Juren born in Grenoble/ France is a choreographer, dancer and performer based in Vienna. In 2003, she co-founded together with the visual artist Roland Rauschmeier the association Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung in Vienna. Her choreographic works and artistic researches have been extensively presented in international theatres, festivals, and different art spaces and venues. In her work, Juren tries to expand  the term choreography in engaging the body in different states of physical, sensorial, kinaesthesic and mental experiences, questioning the boundaries between private and public spheres. Since 2013, Anne Juren is a Feldenkrais® practitioner and aslo graduated of the JFK Approach to child development and Special Needs Children. She is currently part of the artistic committee for the Master in Choreography at DOCH and doing a PhD at UNIARTS Stockholm University of the Arts. www.wtkb.org

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • VOCAL CIRCUITS (working title for a workshop at Apass)
      02 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Myriam Van Imschoot
    • a.pass
    • 07 March 2016
    • 11 March 2016
    • VOCAL CIRCUITS

      In this one-week workshop we will use various forms of voicing and singing to co-write thoughts, ideas and presence in the multiple spaces of social interaction, communication and their architectural and acoustic envelopes. The week follows two tracks that at first seem different yet might intertwine as we go along: we explore sensorial awareness and possibilities of vocal sound production within moving constellations (distance, proximity, humming, vibrating, micro-sound
      and deep listening); and we engage in impromptu singing as a way to convey thoughts and ideas about ourselves and the world (Silly Singing)). No musical background is required: we don't aspire to be musicians, yet, like to unsettle, mobilize the rules that govern discourse, and our mindsets.

      The week encompasses warm-ups, improvisation, scores, listening sessions or screenings of support material. Participants are encouraged to develop their own compositional proposals and strike a note.


       

       

      Biography

      Myriam Van Imschoot is a performer and sound artist who explores the potential of speech, address and utterance. Her installations, videos and performance work often integrate interviews, spoken words, shouting or gestures that bridge large distances in time or space. Often she works with
      'found vocal techniques', open for reorganization as she looks for new charges and significances, cf. her work with yodeling, Arabic cries, or nature calls. Her last group piece, What Nature Says, investigated the phenomenon of audio-mimesis, with sliding lines between culture and nature, human and other entities.

      Link: http:// oralsite/pages/Myriam_Van_Imschoot_Digital_Portfolio/

      (to be consulted with firefox)

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2016/I
    • Sub -(e)ject
    • VAN 01 December 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Jack Hauser & Sabina Holzer
    • a.pass
    • 15 February 2016
    • 19 February 2016
    • VAN

      If we have a room for instance with just tables and chairs. What else is necessary to liven up a place? Noises, movements, pictures, words probably, presences and absences. Some awareness and listening. Scores to fold action and fictions. Scores to discover what is going on. Scores to support memory and construct frames for translations. We develop them. Together. The participants, are invited to engage with their artistic and daily practices, occupations and desires.

      VAN is a spacetime machine in which all medias and materials become speakers to question common dichotomies: subject / object, observers / observed, nature / culture, male / female, materiality / discourse, matter / meaning, past / future, space / time, something / nothing.

      VAN invites us to a collaborative work. Jack Hauser & Sabina Holzer propose a situation as a sculpture in time for stories to emerge, dances pop up and sentences as we know from Philosophers and trashy novels catapult us into what we are seeing with our own eyes but cannot quite grasp. Do our codes stay hidden? Or do we override some patterns of dominance to process this specific ecriture?


       

      Biographies

      Jack Hauser, was born in 1958 in horn/lower Austria. From 1983 to 1986 studied electro-acoustic music. 1994 foundation member of lux flux. 
      In recent years artistic projects with Daniel Aschwanden, David Bergé, David Ender, Karlheinz Essl, Philipp Gehmacher, Lisa Hinterreithner, Anne Juren, Krõõt Juurak, Barbara Kraus, Elke Krystufek, machfeld, Markus Schinwald, Oleg Soulimenko, Myriam van Imschoot, Simon Wachsmuth, and others. 
      Since 2003 co-operating with Milli Bitterli, and since 2005 numerous joint projects with Sabina Holzer. 
      Member of the editorial staff of www.corpusweb.net. Designs performative pictorial interventions and experimental works with various media which since 1999 have been run and attended to as "Wohnung Miryam van Doren" ("Apartment Miryam van Doren"). During the triennale 1.0 at Lentos Art Museum Linz in 2010 the dwelling's mobile version was exhibited in co-operation with M1+1, as well as a series of pictures from the Apartment under the title  "Carte de tendre".

      Sabina Holzer, is a dance and performance artist and a writer based in Vienna. She worked in projects with Robert Steijn (NL), Fabian Chyle (D), Bilderwerfer (AT), Toxic Dreams (AT), Vera Mantero (PT), Philipp Gehmacher (AT), Lux Flux (AT), Machfeld (AT), Milli Bitterli (AT) and Jeroen Peeters (B) and others. She organizes and is invited for transmedial-settings and collaborative research projects at the intersection of theory and practice internationally. She teaches in various institutions such as Tanzquartier Wien (A), School for New Dance Development (NL), Konservatorium Wien (A), Trois C-L (LB), ImPulsTanz (A) and publishes texts on performances since 2007. Since 2011 she is associated artist of the independent artist platform Im_flieger. In 2005 she started cooperating closely with the fine artist Jack Hauser. Together they create performances, interventions in public space and galleries as well as in theaters and museums, such as the Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz; WUK; Essl Museum; Hidden Museum; Documenta 13, University of visual Arts Vienna and Tanzquartier Wien. www.cattravelsnotalone.at

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

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


       

       

      Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

      OVERVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

    • image

      How to desintegrate as quick as possible?

      I think it is better to put it this way.
      Skype mentoring with Luanda. The two of us sleepy, having coffe at a distance.
      Colonization, gamification, scores, characters, diagrams, schedules, plans. But, Luanda, how to live from art in Belgium? Should I prepare myself for being a Chef de cuisine at least to earn more mony from restaurants? Yes, of course, if you like it don’t lose your time. I regret not having done the same few years ago. It is hard to be an artist here, very hard, darling.

      How to clean the house and prepare lunch for husband and one guest as quickly as possible? With the hands I would say. But using all your body. Dividing attention between the right hand cleaning the toilet and the right foot smashing some onions. She is vegan. A vegan sex worker from Mexico. I have to improve my Spanish. Maybe in one hour I will be probably a native speaker, I just have to begin using my mouth too. Quinoa and beans, some bread. Very frugal. Exactly on time. After “Hola, que tal?” I gave up the Spanish. Everybody happy.

      How to desintegrate my belly fat in the GYM as quick as possible? Training in circuits, almost no pauses. Nobody will notice that I have never done it before, that I don’t even know how to use these objects properly, or which weight I should choose to begin. This paper with the circuit thing was on the floor of my appartment for some months, and I found it under the sofa probably. It was time to use it somehow. Looking to the mirror with confidence. Nobody noticed that I was an impostor. That I was not from there exactly, despite the confidence in my steps, in the certitude going from one spot to the other, completely determined.

      How to get money in a pleasant way? I should work in this Ethiopian café. It as really nice the flavour of that espresso. While I waited for Esteban one guy behind me was trying to integrate with everybody, speaking loud about Saint-Exupéry. Such a good writer. He was preaching, let’s put it this way. But everybody there pretended he was not there, and tried to maintain a civilised attitude. What is the ceremony of the Ethiopian café, madam? It is a bit hard for me to explain it in French, do you speak English, she said? I said I think I speak English, and it is a little better than my French. We smiled relieved. She explained the ceremony, but I couldn’t understand it really. But I was completely convinced that it would be a good idea to have it on my birthday. Unfortunately they don’t do it on Sundays.

      Let’s go to another coffee, Esteban. Maybe it is not the best place for a tarot reading. Or we can ask for the guy behind us to join, he is up for integration. Let’s go to a Belgian café, darling, he said. Or not exactly this way. I am not sure about the darling. And instantly we were in this Belgian café, ordering coffee and beer for our tarot reading. Long pause. How to doo tha?

      I should work as a tarot reader. In Belgian cafés, like Jodorowsky in French coffees.
      We were very integrated there. I wondered if I could work in that Belgian café. Maybe I could be a blond waitress too, and I could learn hoe to be sympathetic in Flemish and French. Even make some jokes, which certainly would result in more tips and loyal costumers.
      I was on time during the whole daym for every event. I could meditate, train Dutch, exercise my Brain with Lumosity, to have mentoring, to clean the house and receive guests, to go to the gym, to read tarot to a friend and to work. And all the time I was working on my research. Not so sure about the utility of my documentation for the workshop.

    •  

       

       

      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…

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • UNTOUCHABLE/UNACCEPTABLE/INTANGIBLE about the imaginative aesthetics of change
      01 August 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 01 August 2015
    • CURATED BY ELKE VAN CAMPENHOUT & NICOLAS GALEAZZI & PIERRE RUBIO
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • UNTOUCHABLE/UNACCEPTABLE/INTANGIBLE

       

       

      What is the possible relationship between art and social change? When forced into the corner of economic demands on the one hand and the need for aesthetic subversion on the other, a lot of artist workers feel the need to defend their ‘right to be’ through critical strategies and political transparency. In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies.

      In a famous essay, Isabelle Stengers borrows from Dostoevski, through Deleuze, a conceptual character : the Idiot. Stubbornly believing that “there is always something more important”, the Idiot slows everybody down and consequently opens ‘interstices in the soil of good reasons’. During this block, we will use this Idiot figure as a conceptual totem, ‘in the presence of which’ we might challenge our aesthetic certainties and ethical values.

      Over the past decade a renewed interest occurred in the arts in practices that have been labelled as ‘neo-animism’, ‘neo-shamanism’, ‘object oriented performance art’, ‘speculative’, etc.... These movements seem inseparable from the general crisis of modernist avant-garde forms of art that, one way or another, based their authority on the exclusive reference to progress, universality, authoritarian formalism, self-referentiality, critical conceptualism and so on and so on.... In that sense they announce a large and deep unfolding crisis, because one does not get rid so easily of the Modernist agenda of aesthetic and political concerns that has served as a compass for the Euro-American art scene since its unfolding at the beginning of the 20th century. Nevertheless, a necessary crisis, because the aesthetic mind frames of the current arts scene are blind to the actual novelty of the current era, marked by a reevaluation, through practice, of the models of production of aesthetics and subjectivity.  New models that pose a threat to the accepted contemporary artist identity and its well-defined role within society. "New Age fabulation!, Idiotic!, Superficial!, Overly therapeutical!, Dangerously spiritual!, Fuzzy dreams!, Pseudo-Metaphysical!, Not serious enough!…", a whole bunch of despising critiques erupt regularly. Mocking what produces discomfort and what demands a redefinition of the ways one reads art and ultimately of who one is.

      Here in a.pass, when we practice and discuss the outcomes of aesthetic speculations, of magical practices and of spiritual performativity, it is because these practices/modes of thought are too often defined as purely utopian, ineffable, abstract or just disconnected imaginations unable to get a grip on reality. In response, we want to consider them as forms of agency, concerns, as localized potentialities. The sense we can make out of such unacceptable, untouchable, intangible proposals are linked to their consequences, to the modifications in the understanding of the present they perform.

      Animating objects to animate our agencies.
      Fictionalising  the real as a critique to produce alternatives to ideology.
      Speculating on the impossible to construct a possible.
      Considering imagination not as escapism but as an operative vehicle for change.

      The unacceptable reveals the limitations of the acceptable.
      The untouchable foreshadows the adventurous discovery of difference.
      The intangible offers a speculative sense towards the radically other.

       

      Pierre Rubio, March 2015

    • 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.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • dirty room 01 August 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Juan Dominguez
    • a.pass studio
    • 12 October 2015
    • 22 October 2015
    • dirty room

      In these 10 days we will work together. That would be the most important. The togetherness. Working together, spending time together. 

      Agenda???  What is that, maybe something to discover???

      I will ask you a lot of questions, over and over. From the begining till the end.

      I will question you, you will question everybody, we will experience suspiciousness I guess. 

      In which conspiracy are you involved at the moment?

      Angles, all the time different ones.

      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 devises.

      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 have to beat the Guinness record.

      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?

      we will build tension, all kind and we will have to hold it. how? together.

      we will work in continuity. what is that?

      also in friendship.

      in simultaneity.

      where the fuck are you?

      Is there any infiltrant among us?

      What are you doing here?

      Follow me through the rabbit hole and lets visit Wonderland.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • Settlements
    • Settlement VIII TOWARDS FRAGILITY
      01 August 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass studio
    • 14 September 2015
    • 02 October 2015
    • Settlement VIII

       (fragile: unstable, disintegrating, malleable, temporary, sketchy, self-sabotage, needs care, gone when not needed, anti-territorial, only there as long as invested in, can’t hold)

       

      I have some questions:

      What can be a truly feminist architecture? One that does not create territory, does not claim, does not exclude. (Will society be different if it builds in another way, or is it the other way around, or are they actually inseparable form one another?). 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. Like many other such meetings it is a place of informal exchange and presentation. 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 Everything one might need for one’s work has to be built and (re)invented there. There are no tables, no chairs, and the materials and objects resist easy categorization and usability. They have to be mis-used, adapted, they have a will of their own. The built environment has to be negotiated (with) on the level of the object. There is a potential in a thing being one thing one day, and a totally different thing the day after. There is also a potential in a thing changing hands. (You will be surprised how quickly ownership is established from communal beginnings: you just have to take pick up something and move it somewhere else.)

      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. 

    •  

      (excerpts July 31st 2015)

      -good morning

      -good morning

      -this morning you wrote :

      “On the black and icy waters of the Styx, in the infernal meanders of his arms, Charon's boat progresses about the kingdom of Hades. Aboard the vessel, you, me and a bunch of thinkers and activists, necessarily part of this globalised miserable journey. Of the nature of the swamps, of the depths of the mud in which we sink, of the once renowned magical properties of the river, we have lost track and memory. Sondes throwers more than prophets, advancing in the midst of experiments, we clumsily try to offer a tentative guidance...”

      very nice introduction text, very promising…

      you seem to work well in the morning, are you a “morning person”?

      -yes, I always understand better, even difficult texts if I read them, study them, in the early morning.

      I wake up, drink a coffee or two and immediately open a book and read and… understand it most of the time. And it’s the same concerning writing… words come more clearly… sentences, ideas, articulations… yes I am definitivly a morning person…

      -why do you think it is like this?

      -I am less afraid and stuck by the blank page in the morning because I feel like a blank page myself.

      -like a virgin…

      -yes like a virgin… touched for the very first time… you made me feel shiny and new...

      It’s a precious feeling and the very appropriate moment for me to work before the world imprints itself on me.

      -”imprinted”, what do you mean?

      -I am very quickly and deeply affected by things, things that appear in front of me, things that happen, objects, events, news, conversations, all problematics that the people I work with are busy with… all sort of things that want to enter into dialogue with me, populate me, occupy me and affect me so much…

      -why?

      -because they cry to be taken seriously, they insist for being articulated... sometimes they hate each other and ask me to become the referee, sometimes I have to get them around a negotiation table and perform the role of a diplomat, they… it’s like I catch any kind of information and try to make sense with everything...

      I am everyday in a titanic effort to articulate all kind of singular heterogeneities…

      -you speak about things like you would speak about persons…

      -yes, the all-kind-of-things are part of a fabric, a stuff that is in the making all along my day. This stuff is kind of alive, like a coral colony formed by organisms forming a hyper organism.

      -do the things talk to you? do you hear voices?

      -oh yeh… a lot of voices… they occupy me… I feel occupied by several entities

      -do you consider yourself as schizophrenic?

      -oh yeh… very much… sometimes I don’t feel possessed anymore, I AM possessed

      -is it a good thing?

      -oh yeh… I do believe that’s one of the best way to make sense!

      -you often use the that expression “make sense” or “making sense”, why and what do you really mean by that?

      … … … … … … ...

      what do you want to begin with, then?

      polishing lenses?

      objects as machines to be mapped out, deconstructed and rebuilt?

      objects as machines whose gravitational organisations should be read and then changed to free movement?

      objects as machines to be assembled differently to create new ecologies?

      are you a machine?

      why our magic should spellbind people?

      critical dark moments?

      which concrete outcomes after these “magic” months?

      was it all about magic?

      how to queer but avoiding 'system building', 'moral injunctions' and 'political correctness'?

      is magic putting an end to any discussion or criticism?

      what do you mean by beautiful?

      what do you mean by magic?

      what do you mean by affect?

      what do you mean by desire,

      what do you mean by care?

      what do you mean by being changed?

      what do you mean by risks taken?

      what do you mean by magic powers?

      what do you mean by powers of magic?

      what do you really want?

      do you do what you want?

      do you want what you do?

      you seem quite focussed on the Bermuda triangle Spinoza,Deleuze,Guattari, why them again? why them now? 

      putting into practice the concepts of “Sadness decomposing relations” and “Joy composing more relations”?

      is it really necessary to feel this fear to learn how to defeat capitalism and its obscene trade with death?

      evil spell? curse? aren’t you performing the anti-capitalist drama queen?

      remove the fingers out of our nose to smell the real shit?

      do you think that, like at the end of the sixties, we have to “set fire on reality itself”? is it still possible?, imaginable?

      what do they mean by “reconnecting desire and reality”?

      considering seriously our works as medicines?

      what do you mean by “the only thing to do is to construct apparatuses that will stimulate self-healing”?

      why is it necessary to affirm again that 'another world is possible'?

      what do you mean by “new affects” and “new joys”?

      doing whatever but methodically?

      why do we need to produce new joys?

      producing new lives, really?

      today, it seems not possible anymore NOT to see the coexistence of a plurality of worlds, how to practically deal with that idea?

    • Thiago’s Self-interview I write in Italic. I make the questions. Sometimes I explain things for you, the one who reads. I am a bit smarter than the others, but I don’t have a color. I am… I am a recorded voice transcripted. I am another voice, written. I have this yellow light behind me, as you can see. So, what is your research about? My project is about a creation of a game that discuss and is inspired by… the bureaucracies that migrants have to undergo when they try to live regularly in Europe. I am not certain if it is a research about something. Or instead a research through something. The fact is that this research is interested both in the performative language of games and in the migration policies that sometimes look like games. The games are not only a mean to address something, they are also object of the research. When you say game, do you mean video-game? No it’s a game that happens in a space. In the real space with people. And, it could be like a role playing game (RPG). Actually it is a RPG, because each player has a specific role in the game. And… It’s a game based on acting. It’s strategic and also theatrical. So, people have to choose to what places they go, and how they perform in each one of these places, and then afterwards they conquer or they lose… the possibilities to get the document. No, it’s a live game, and it is a role playing game. It’s both strategical and performative. Each player has to choose, in each round, which actions they will perform in order to get the documents to stay in the game as much as they they can. Is it a game to train people in how to get documents? Initially it was a game… I had the idea to have this game… I planned to build it on the very exact… Initially, yes. But now, I think it would be interesting to create a game that somehow. It has no end. Or it demolishes itself, or it collapses. I think there is a way to use games to train people, based on the thinking that games are an effective way to teach. My opinion is that games can also be a platform for people to think by themselves, specially if the game offers the possibilities to see a situation from different points of view. For me it is more interesting to create a game like that than only use this language to train people. A poetic game, or a game that comments itself could be an interesting way to provoke the players to find solutions by themselves, to complexify their points of view about a situation that is believed to be completely understood. Or to create interest about a situation that some people would find only boring or distant from their realities. Why do you want to build a game that collapses? Because with this I’d like to… to… to reinforce the non-sense of the system. Otherwise it would be… I think it would be considered like a training for getting documents, and I don’t think it is. Yes, it is useful somehow, it’s still a way to believe that game… That the system is a game that you have to learn how to play. But for me it’s also important to say that the game itself must be criticized. A think we are “gamified” enough. We are educated to follow paths that most of the times are designed to maintain capitalism working, with the promise of self-realisation. This mismatch between the promise and the means to obtain it are how games are structured. The seduction created by a fictionalised reality in order to maintain the functioning of a machine. The political importance of exposing the “game-like” structure of certain political issues can be useful to open spaces between us the and games in which we are involved. So, in this sense, I am more interested in create a game that disempowers the game. An anti-game, or a “game that collapses”. Are you inspired conspiration theories? I don’t understand why are you asking that. But maybe you are trying to insinuate that I see a discrepancy between discourse and practice in the political level, which is obvious, and also that I have some interest by Sci-Fi, which is true. But I don’t identify migration policies with conspiration. I don’t know why I asked that. Ok, no problem. So, what benefit migrants will have in playing your game? I don’t think this game is for making migrants happier or wiser, but to create other possibilities of integration between migrants and non-migrants. Which in a deeper level would take to a discussion about what is nationalism, nationality, what is… what is race. Because underneath this discussion there is a very conservative discussion which defends the autonomy of the countries and the legitimacy of nationals to have access to basic services and to. No, more precisely, there is an instinct of defense of many of the states that avoid integration. This game is against this belief. So it relativizes the… the needs or… the expression… or the assumptions that migrants have to be integrated. Not a shared integration program. I think I am repeating myself. In which way you think a game is the best platform for this project instead of a theatre play? Well, I think a theatre play reinforces… Well, I think there is in my project a desire to create a theatre play a bit more porous. A theatre play that could be played by non-actors. A theatre play that could involve more the audience inside itself. And not just an interactive play but something that people could engage even more, like in a game. And… I have. I have this experiences in playing games with groups that are non-actors, I I could understand with them how things operate in order to train them in very theatrical skills. Even though no one of them were actors or performers. These games were creating a common language for this group of friends. It was important for the creation of specific kind of spirit of community. I think this game could create more integration than a theatre play. But why aren’t ping-pong or football as much or more effective for integration than this game you have in mind? (two weeks later) Maybe yes. But there is something empowering in jocking about a situation that is frustrating or annoying for you. Maybe this hypothetic game could help to create a new understanding about what integration is, or at least, what is not integration. If this game can be hypothetically empowering for migrants, what would be the interest for natives or people who have no initial interest about the discussion about migration? I hope the game can be fun and an opportunity to gather also people interested in theatre, in games, and in arts. But I am prepared to understand that some people can be completely not interested. Which are your beliefs around the migrant? I have read something about that. Octavio Paz was the first, I studied one of his texts during the School, about his experience as an ambassador. It was a course on anthropology and the techer related Octavio Paz and this situation of the migrant with this movie Lost in Translation. I think it was this. It was 1996. More recently I studied Beckett and learned how important was for him to shift his writing from English to French, and to move himself from Ireland to France. Without that he wouldn’t have produced his masterpieces. It was capital for him to express in a foreigner language and to be himself a foreigner. It is deeply present in his texts this condition. All his characters are displaced, they do not belong to the place where they are. And for this reason, they are completely part of the landscape, although, this landscape is completely strange for him. Being human is being foreigner. What is the importance of being funny for you? Isn’t it tragic? Is it ethical to laugh on a subject that is related with death, violence, and exploitation? Would it be more ethical to not talk about it at all?

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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.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Volver
    • drawing askew 06 May 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • gonçalo pena
    • 30 May 2015
    • 30 May 2015
    • Workshop - Sat 12.30 to 15.30pm

      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.

    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • Volver
    • mobile orders 06 May 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Patricia Reed
    • aleppo
    • 30 May 2015
    • 30 May 2015
    • ‘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).

      Such a project for the constructability of new orders is ultimately, and simultaneously, epistemic, technological, representational as well as ethical - but cannot be spurned on merely through modes of moralization or symbolic personifications. How are we to rigorously confront the question of "order" today in the face of global complexity, a complexity that defies (unaided) human intellection, simplified localisation (we can't perceive this complexity, but only experience fragments of its residual traces), and vastly asymmetric operations of time (from nanoseconds to the geological)? How can we better grasp these functions, so as to seek strategic points of restructuring (oriented towards the service of the many), without reverting to a 'naturalist' position (a fixing or essentializing of the human) that negates the potentially productive forces of abstraction capable of permitting the construction of new horizons for (co-)existence? To begin to unpack these conceptual and practical problems, a "synthetic" approach will be introduced as a certain methodology affording creative world-making (with non-absolute, universalist ambitions); without reverting to top-down blueprint models of utopian schematics. Synthesis, as outlined by the philosopher/mathematician Fernando Zalamea, is characterized by its emphasis on mobility, a diagrammatic mobility proficient in examining the back and forth movements between 'polar opposites' (local/global; one/many; ideal/real); it does not deny these distinctions but is invested in the transits between, offering a useful cognitive scaffold that can potentially aid in navigating and re-orienting our current reality.


       

      Biography:

      Patricia Reed is an artist and writer. Exhibitions have included those at the Witte de With (NL); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE); Württembergische Kunstverein (DE); Audain Gallery (CA); and 0047 (NO), amongst others. As a writer she has contributed to several books and periodicals including: Dea Ex Machina; Mould Magazine; #ACCELERATE - The Accelerationist Reader; The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Who Told You So?!; Intangible Economies; Cognitive Architecture; and Fillip. Lectures have included those at Gertrude Contemporary (AU); The Institute of Modern Art (AU); The Future Summit (CA); Tate Britain (UK, Speculative Tate); University of Westminster (UK); Artists Space (US); MIT (US); abc Berlin (DE); Archive Kabinett (DE); and The Winter School Middle East (KW). She sits on the board (and teaches) at the New Centre for Research & Practice, and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group.

    • 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
    • VOLVER

      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

    •  

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Audrey Cottin
      Esteban Donoso
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Jeremiah Runnels
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Mavi Veloso
      Thiago Antunes
      Tinna Ottesen
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz
      Yaari Shalem


      Research End Presentations

      Gosie Vervlosem
      Philippine Hoegen
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos


      Research Centre Researchers

      Adriana La Selva
      Cecilia Molano
      Juan Dominguez
      Mala Kline
      Ricardo Santana
      Ruth S. Noyes

       


      Partner

      PAF Performance Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Abu Ali * Toni Serra
      Adriana La Selva
      Adva Zakai
      Elke van Campenhout
      Esteban Donoso
      Geert Opsomer
      Isabel Burr Raty
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Luanda Casella
      Marcos Simoes
      Medicine Man Oscar Parada
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Joachim
      Pierre Rubio
      Sara Manente
      Thiago Antunes
      Veridiana Zurita

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

      Nicolas Galeazzi

      Pierre Rubio

       

      Mentors

      Adva Zakai
      Femke Snelting

       

       

       


      'UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE'
      about the imaginative aesthetics of change

      Curated by Elke Van Campenhout (Research Coordinator), Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator), and Pierre Rubio (Associate Program Curator)


      In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies.

      The unacceptable reveals the limitations of the acceptable.
      The untouchable foreshadows the adventurous discovery of difference.
      The intangible offers a speculative sense towards the radically other.

       


      01/05 - 31/07 / 2015

      Ongoing workshops

       

      House of Spirits
      Throughout the whole period, the House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the ‘shamans/conservators’ of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another ‘shaman’ practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the ‘shaman’ include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.
      Every shaman puts the individual case traces in another context, allowing them to resonate and breed new meanings and connections. The shamans together develop the Book, which documents the changing protocols regulating the workings of the House.
      At the end, the House of Spirits opens its doors to the public. In the form of a weeklong celebration, a curated exhibition, a mini-festival, a performative conference, or whatever at that point seems to be the most relevant to the group, the House functions in that week as a kind of temporal 3D publications that offers guests an insight in the works developed throughout the block.

       

      Reading Circle
      As a red thread throughout the block the participants engage in a weekly communal reading practice of the book ‘Realist Magic - Object, Ontology, Causality’ by Timothy Morton.
      Reading and discussing in-depth this one central text allows for the development of a common ground of reference and connection that functions as a backdrop to the workshops and practices that shape the block.

       

      Self-interviews
      Throughout the block each participant can develop a self-interviewing practice, which is supported by one or more mentors. The self-interview develops through the case practices, and is embedded in the mentoring process. During opening week we will introduce possible strategies for self-interviewing and start up the process.

       

      04 / 05 - 06 / 05 / 2015

      ‘BRICOLAGE’
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi


      Diving into the concept of bricolage, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects - objects of personal importance and desire, objects of daily or precious use, objects of thought and discourse - we will try to get a hold on the actual qualities of each one's research model and methodology. The bricolage technique may be very close to many of our practices. The artist researchers are commonly acknowledged as the bricoleur-scientists. They craft the object of knowledge.
      In the course of this week we will present the current state of our research case from various perspectives. ‘Bricolaging’ the 'objects' of your research, turning them upside down, looking at them through the other's eyes and assembling the elements in play, we want to understand the complex horizon of your research target.

       

       


      25 / 05 - 29 / 05 / 2015


      ‘ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Joachim, Geert Opsomer and Pierre Rubio

      Can we associate sadness with the outcomes of our capitalist world? Are we affected so much by capitalism that we can only sadly survive in what seems to have become its ‘nature’? Can we still affect the world? What could a joyful passion mean today? Is a joyful passion subversive? How can we create the conditions for joy to be possible? Is it by re-allocating desire that new joys can emerge? Can artistic researches produce a change Can agency be generated with aesthetic means? Could we critically re-combine ethics and aesthetics to reclaim the transformative power of our researches? What could be the nature of an ecology of affects with the potential to produce a change?
      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘a.pass Basics workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment.
      This B-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ will put into discussion Spinoza’s concepts of Desire, Joy, Sadness and Affect in the ‘Ethics’ and Guattari’s concepts of Mental Ecology and Collective Assemblages of Enunciation by reading closely a series of texts from the 17th up to the 21st century. With the help of two guests, Pierre Joachim and Geert Opsomer, we will study these philosophical key notions but also discover how Pierre and Geert put them into practice and consequently how we can do so as well.

       

       

      01 / 06 - 05 / 06 / 2015


      ‘PLACE THIS’
      Workshop by Sara Manente and Marcos Simoes


      The workshop unfolds a series of extra-sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The tools, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is ‘a self’, an entity other than us, with its own qualities and ability to perform in an attempt to include chance and other contingencies in the work, to destabilize power relations based on linear logics and to questions the effect of belief and make-belief in a performative environment. Can we create magic by creating the rules for magic to happen? Like an ‘experimental magic’ without magicians? Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation and prediction?
      The workshop will start with a daily practice of writing questions for a tarot reader. Then, we will offer three different performative tools to be explored and then appropriated into your own project. The workshop “Place this” wants to discover the transformational powers of this knowledge in different constellations: individually, with objects, in couples, trios, groups. With the stubbornness of ‘the idiot’, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the material and the immaterial.

       

       

      08 / 06 - 12 / 06 / 2015


      ‘UNSEEN WORKSHOP’
      Workshop by Abu Ali * Toni Serra


      Abu Ali * Toni Serra is a researcher through video. He hosts and programs the Observatori de Video No Identificat based in Barcelona - an observatory archive, that is structured around particular themes, which does encourage a critique of contemporary culture and society,
      His videos explore different visions between the essay and the poetry, with an evocation of trance and the realities of dream. His videos immerse into the relationship with the visionary, into the inner experience, the no man’s land between real and unreal, dream and awakeness, poetry and prophecy... as ways to deepen the criticism of reality.
      Normally we associate image with vision. But in a society of the spectacle images have become a form of blindness - an increasing veil, that prevents us from viewing. Our vision remains a prisoner of the images constructed by the entertainment, media and network apparatus, which not only tries to shape our vision but to colonize our dreams.
      For the workshop, he offers a selection of footage, which directly deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections he will experiment with us on practicing the not-seen. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.

       

       


      22 / 06 - 26 / 06 / 2015


      ‘TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL’
      Workshop by Medicine Man Oscar Parada


      What is a ritual and how can we use our bodies as tools to access a ritualistic space? Could rituals be keys to enter the invisible world and render it perceptible to us? Are ritualistic practices ways to open a specific space inside us but connecting us as well with the outside? How to navigate the body for it to become an instrument that can reveal those spaces? What is the epistemology supporting the ritualistic practices? What are the tools and symbols at work to create a healing ceremony? How to realise that a mere procedure can escape the mechanical, become a ritual and perform power? What is a sacred space, and what can it do?
      In this workshop Medicine Man Oscar Parada proposes hologenic breathing techniques, re-birthing, sound evocation, Zen Buddhism and ritualistic elements from the Amerindian cosmogony as ways to explore the sacred.
      This workshop has as objective to engage and reproduce the sacred in connection with a performative ritual space. Which is: to operate a transformation. And that is what we can call medicine. Medicine is everything that transforms us.
      Firstly, the workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal tool. Secondly the workshop is also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways.
      We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean.
      We will open different space dimensions to find in ourselves ways to discover, recreate and relearn our personal ritualistic spaces connected to our memory. The different sessions will produce a possible catharsis for the participants to create a collective healing ceremony.

       

       


      29 / 06 - 03 / 07 / 2015


      ‘SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION’
      Workshop by Peter Stamer and Luanda Casella


      We are dealing with what is known as „The Small World Problem“, a popular research method, especially in times of immaterial communication or social networks like Facebook, trying to merge mathematical parameters of statistics with marketing tools to improve accessibility to one’s consumer behaviour. And yet, the thought is fascinating: that everyone of us is connected with anyone on this planet of now 7.5 billion inhabitants, regardless of race, cultural background, continent, religion, age. Next to the political implication of such a thought this idea provides us with a resourceful generator for stories, narratives, fictions about human beings and their lives.
      Six Degrees of Separation is based upon the desire to create contemporary storytelling formats in which we explore fiction in shared narrative practices - narratives without a centre plot, but composed of biographical fragments, travel experiences, random encounters, figments of imagination - and maybe very little resolution. We believe that the world is full of stories, told ones and concealed ones, voiced ones and mute ones. Stories that we fantasize are not less true; digging them out and rendering them audible creates a multiplicity of narratives which form a large tapestry of events, a patchwork of textures, interwoven in such a fashion that they somehow may exist on the verge of being. Using a mixed media apparatus (Google Earth; Skype; Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, etc), we will go through different storytelling exercises focusing on the construction of evasive, critical, imaginative narratives in order to create a common imaginary in the end. So what is it that holds the world(s) together?

    • information
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2016/II
    • HALF-WAY-DAYS 31 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass
    • 17 October 2016
    • 21 October 2016
    • The half-way-days - half way through the block - are the second common gatherings in each block. It is the moment where the exchange of practices include the direct involvement of the others into our own practices. We use the others as ‘guinea pigs’, collaborators or interlocutor for our research and play those roles ourselves for the others. This exchange is a practical research moment and a chance to test and develop our methodologies.

      Beside that, the half-way-days are also an occasion to think about and influence the making of the following blocks to come. The APC’s are sharing their first thoughts and approaches to construct the next block’s program and ask for your involvement, your ideas and needs.

       

    • the new structure for dedicated mentorings (3x2 or 2x3)

      The dedicated mentors for this block are Abu Ali * Toni Serra, Bart Van den Eynde, Lilia Mestre and Elke Van Campenhout. Since some participants preferred to have a more in-depth contact with their mentors, we changed the set-up of the sessions as follows: out of the four mentors each participant chooses

      -3 mentors and has 2 sessions with each of them (regular)

      OR

      -2 mentors and has 3 sessions with each of them (intense)

      Since the dedicated mentors each are responsible for one day during the first Workshop on Artistic Research, we will be able to decide on who, what and how at the end of the first week.

       

      On top of these mentors you will also be mentored a peer participant of your choice who will follow you throughout the whole block, and with whom you meet also at least twice. For this block we would like you to experiment with the mentoring format, and to contribute to our Toolkit for Mentoring, by adding alternative formats for mentoring through practice, movement, double self-interviews, through intermediary pets, objects or cooking sessions, ... Whatever you think might get the juices flowing. 

       

      the INTERVIEW SESSIONS

      Throughout the block each participant also develops an interview practice, in 3 sessions, based on questions that appeared in their own cases. The three stages of the interview throughout the block can take on different forms: through language, audio or image, addressing one person at the the time, or conducting (small) group interviews. Written or spoken or walked. In the end the three stages of the interview will serve as a starting point for the sessions during End Week in PAF. 

       

    • The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.

      Every shaman puts the individual case traces in another context, allowing them to resonate and breed new meanings and connections. The shamans together develop the Book, which documents the changing protocols regulating the workings of the House.

      The beginning of every week (Monday evenings) is marked by a shared ritual with the participants, in which the reading of the shaman/conservator is revealed and the new shaman takes possession of the House. After the ritual the group engages in the weekly reading session (the Reading Circle).

      At the end of the block (just before end week), the House of Spirits opens its doors to the public. In the form of a weeklong celebration, a curated exhibition, a mini-festival, a performative conference, or whatever at that point seems to be the most relevant to the group, the House functions in that week as a kind of temporal 3D publications that offers guests an insight in the work developed throughout the block.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL 29 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Oscar Parada
    • a.pass
    • 22 June 2015
    • 26 June 2015
    • TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

      In this workshop Medicine Man Oscar Parada proposes hologenic breathing techniques, re-birthing, sound evocation, Zen Buddhism and ritualistic elements from the Amerindian cosmogony as ways to explore the sacred. The workshop has as objective to engage and reproduce the sacred in connection to the performative ritual space. Which means: to perform a transformation. It is this transformation we can call 'medicine'.  Medicine is understood here as everything that transforms us.  

      In the first place this workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal one. Secondly, the workshop is also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways. We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean. We will open different space dimensions to find in ourselves ways to discover, recreate and relearn our personal ritualistic spaces connected to our memory. The different sessions will produce a possible catharsis for the participants to create a collective healing ceremony.

      The last day of the workshop will be directed at questioning and clarifying the individual and collective experiences. We will take time to hear Oscar Parada talking about his concerns, the way his practices make sense to him and how he perceives their possible consequences.

      Some questions that will be addressed throughout the workshop:

      What is a ritual and how can we use our bodies as tools to access a ritualistic space? Could rituals be keys to enter the invisible world and render it perceptible to us? Are ritualistic practices ways to open a specific space inside us but connecting us as well with the outside? How to navigate the body for it to become an instrument that can reveal those spaces?

      What is the epistemology supporting the ritualistic practices? What are the tools and symbols at work to create a healing ceremony? How to realise that a mere procedure can escape the mechanical, become a ritual and perform power?

      What is a sacred space? What could be a pre-religious sacred space? Why would we need rituals, ceremonies and sacred spaces? What can they do?

       

      Subscription for this workshop is unfortunately no longer possible. All available places are taken. 

       

       


      Biography

      Medicine Man Oscar Parada

      Master in Traditional Chinese Medicine

      Healer master in Reiki, Acupressure, Jin Shin Do, Shiatsu and Do In


      Taoist Yoga instructor: Chi Kung, Dao jin and Ba Dua Jing

      Received his ordination as a Bodhisattva Monk in Zen Buddhism more than 20 years ago, receiving the name of Do Sei.


      Zen- Za-Zen meditation instructor

      Martial artist: Aikido, Wing Chun, Tai sword and Katana

      Music therapist

      Professional Rebirther and healer in the art of the breath



      Coordinates a self-healing school in Bogota, Colombia: El Centro de la Respiración Conciente


      Director of the Tierra Humana Foundation.



       

      He has been training actors for more than 15 years, from a perspective that defines the actor as a social healer and the origins of theater as collective cathartic rituals.

      Medical anthropologist and researcher of different healing systems from different cultures, he has specialized in the Tibetan Buddhist system, the Greek catharsis techniques and the Sotai from Japan.


      In order to integrate his knowledge as a Medicine Man he has embraced the ways of the Native American Wisdom and works and learns with other medicine men of North and South America.
 He has been walking and learning with traditional indian medicine for more than 15 years.
 At the moment he prays and prepares the medicine with the master Don Segundo Navia Mutbajoy of the Inga tribe of the Putumayo jungle. He also works and learns with Hilario Chiriap, Shaman of the Shuar tribe of the Ecuador Amazon, participating in the cutting, preparation and praying for the ancestral ceremony of the initiation of the NateMamo. In the year 2000 he began his formation as a Spiritual Leader and Medicine Man in the Native American Tradition of the Sacred Fire of Itzachilatlan. He received the blessing as Fire Man, the water blessing of the Temascal and the Sun Dance Drum blessing, 13 days Vision Searcher, Carrier of the Channupa (sacred pipe), Carrier of the Moon Prayer. He has guided for the last 4 years vision quest processes in Colombia and since last year in Greece.


      Walker of the Medicine Circle of the Hicuri grandfather, he is initiated in this way with Emerson Jackson, medicine man and spiritual leader of the Navajo People. For several years he accompanies Uncle Fred Vasquez, Medicine Man of the Teocalli Tlanezi branch of Mexico, of whom he receives the instruction of the ceremony of the the 4 tobaccos. He presently collaborates and learns with Tomas Adriano Perez, carrier of the Medicine of the Huichol tradition of North Mexico, with whom he opened the ceremony of the 4 Inipis to support the Sun Dance prayer in Colombia.

    • Abu Ali * Toni Serra is researcher through video. He hosts and programs the Observatori de Video No Identificat based in Barcelona - an Observatory Archive, that is structured around particular themes, which encourage a critique of contemporary culture and society,

      Using strategies of video art, independent documentary, and mass media archaeology embedded in this archive as source and tool to engaging with some of the dreams and nightmares of our times, he organizes frameworks for practicing and discussing perspectives beyond the visible.

      For the workshop at a.pass he offers a selection of footage, which directly deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections he will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.

      Normally we associate image with vision. But in a society of the spectacle images have become a form of blindness - an increasing veil, that prevents us from viewing. Our visions remains a prisoners of the images constructed by the entertainment, media and network apparatus, which not only tries to shape our vision but to colonized our dreams.

      We need to experiment and to experience the Unseen as a way to live the plenty of a reality, that finally can not be appropriate, represented or de-fined by any means. The Unseen is the source of the limitless ‘all’, and can not be confined in a narrow horizon.

      Here, closing your eyes means open them to another dimension, and not only disrupt the hypnotic flow of objective images, but "stops the world" around it to see. It is in this reality where a non return trip starts, beyond or before dualism: interior - exterior, to compose a world without borders between wakefulness and dreams, real and unreal, life and death.

      Find more information and content on this blog: 

       


       

      Biography

      Toni Serra * Abu Ali Barcelona 1960

      www.al-barzaj.com

      Lives in between Duar Msuar (Morocco) and Barcelona (Spain). videos, mass-media archaeology,texts and other submedia

      Member of OVNI Archives, he is also working in the research  projects: Ru'a [visions] , disReality, The Colonial Dream, and Babylon Archives,..

      His videos explore different visions between the essay and the poetry, with an evocation of trance and the realities of dream. His first works in New York and Tangiers were questioning the beauty and mystery of the ephemeral and marginal. In 1998 he finishes the TV Codes series: a critical immersion into the mass media mechanisms of alienation, a deconstruction and its hypnotical creation of social and identitary models. His last videos immerse into the relationship with the visionary, into the inner experience, the no man’s land between real and unreal, dream and awakeness, poetry and prophecy.,..as a way to deepen the criticism of reality.

      As a founding member of OVNI Archives - Observatorio de Video No Identificado (www.desorg.org), he was doing research and programming around Exodus, The Margins of the Empire - Colonial Dream and Autononous Zones,  Resistances, Rhizomes, disReality, Oblivion etc.

      He is also founder of the research project Ru'a [visions] www.ru-a.org: An intersection between western criticism and the islamic rhizome. To deconstruct the media monotype imposed on islamic realities. A reflection on the image in its relationship with the dream and visionary and on the images ability to project reality.

       

    • conference
    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • NOT_index
    • Volver
    • Back to the order 29 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Gosie Vervloessem, Sarah Santos, Silvia Pereira, and Cecilia Molano
    • Aleppo
    • 29 May 2015
    • 30 May 2015
    • Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Gosie Vervloessem, Sarah Santos, Silvia Pereira, and Cecilia Molano will share their practices and perspectives of their research in form or a symposium and bring them in relation to those of guests and collaborators. A symposium that consists of performances, lectures, film screenings and workshops.

      This event is a collaboration with, and will take place at Aleppo.

      Relating to Aleppos current thematic program which is termed ‘Back to the Order’, we understand order and revolution as integral parts of each other, the interdependent counterweights of the device that drives, and is driven by, contemporary society.

      Departing from the different preoccupations of our separate researches we will make inroads towards shared perceptions. We will approach concepts such as the domestic, identity, display and artistic production as complex territories through which the nature of order and its potential counterparts can be analysed and activated.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS 28 March 2015
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Joachim
    • 25 May 2015
    • 29 May 2015
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

       

       

      “The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.”
      Spinoza, ‘Tractatus Theologicopoliticus’, 1670

       

      “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds”
      Gregory Bateson, ‘Steps to an ecology of mind’, 1972

       

      “There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.”
      Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, ‘Anti-Oedipus’, 1972

       

      “The question of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotiv. It’s not a natural given any more than air or water. How do we produce it, capture it, enrich it, and permanently reinvent it in a way that renders it compatible with universes of mutant value? How do we work for its liberation that is for its resingularization?
      Felix Guattari, ‘Chaosmosis’, 1992

       

      “A revolution is as much a reorientation of our affective relations as it is of social relations and cannot be one without the other.“
      Jason Read, ‘Economies of Affect / Affective Economies’, 2013

       

       

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment.

      This B-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ wants to address critically the production of subjectivity. We will put into discussion Spinoza’s theory of Affect in the ‘Ethics’ and Guattari’s critique of Capitalism's exploitation of Desire by reading closely a series of texts from the 17th up to the 21st century. With the help of two guests, Pierre Joachim and Geert Opsomer, we will study these philosophical and critical key notions but also discover how Pierre and Geert put them into practice and consequently how we can do so as well.

      Can we associate sadness with the outcomes of our capitalist world?
      Are we affected so much by capitalism that we can only sadly survive in what seems to have become its ‘nature’?
      Can we still affect the world?
      What could a joyful passion mean today?
      Is a joyful passion subversive?
      How can we create the conditions for joy to be possible?
      Is it by re-allocating desire that new joys can emerge?
      Can artistic researches produce a change?
      How can agency be created with aesthetic means?
      Could we critically re-combine ethics and aesthetics to reclaim the transformative power of our researches?
      What could be the nature of an ecology of affects that has the potential to produce a change?

      The workshop will make use of an elaborate reader that will be shared with the participants well in time for the workshop.

       

      The workshop is curated by Pierre Rubio

       

       

      Biographies

      Geert Opsomer

      Geert Opsomer is a German philologist, theatre scientist and dramaturg, teacher at the director’s department of the RITS and artistic collaborator of the arts centre CAMPO. Between 2001 and 2007 he was the artistic director of Nieuwpoorttheater in Ghent, which in 2008 fused with the theatre company Victoria to become CAMPO. Within CAMPO Geert Opsomer organizes the Plateau/Platform for Artistic Nomads, which is the artistic research department of CAMPO.

      An extension of this research platform turned into the celebrated CAMPO production ‘A l’attente du Livre d’Or’, selected for the Dutch Theaterfestival in 2010. Together with Johan Dehollander and a strong Belgian-Congolese cast, Opsomer made a joyful-anarchistic assemblage piece about Congolese comedy and Western tragedy. The jury praised the piece as a pioneer in the construction of connections between local and international practices, allowing them to strengthen one another.

       

      Pierre Joachim

      Pierre Joachim studied architecture (la Cambre, Belgium) and philosophy (ULB, Belgium). He has been exploring interactions between ‘theory’ and various practices, from architecture to pedagogy, social work, or dramaturgy. Rather driven by collaborations born from joyful encounters than any specific field of expertise, his main recent activities are writing and research collaborations with psychoanalyst Kathleen Rochlenko, performance and installation creation with Alexandre Le Petit (Verso Natura) and architectural conception. He is actually working on a blog and inquiry project. Spinoza’s Ethics have often offered him a precious tool for thought and collaboration.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION 23 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Peter Stamer / Luanda Casella
    • 29 June 2015
    • 03 July 2015
    • SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

      In 1969, the American psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a study to explore if two randomly selected individuals, strangers to each other coming from different American states, are nevertheless connected by acquaintances in between. Starting the test in Kansas/Nebraska, linking people to one individual in Massachusetts, the experiment suggested that an individual knows of any target person only by six degrees of connecting steps: Mr X from Kansas knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Mrs Z, living in Massachusetts. Even though this experiment showed some flaws in its methodological design, it seemed to prove a fascinating idea which the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy had already carried out in his fictional essay ‘Chains’ in 1929. In this text the writer even suggested that the population of the whole planet, not just from a region in the United States, was closer together than it had ever been before: “We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth - anyone, anywhere at all - and, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, one could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances.”

      What Karinthy and Milgram were dealing with is now known as „The Small World Problem“, a popular research method, especially in times of immaterial communication or social networks like facebook, trying to merge mathematical parameters of statistics with marketing tools to improve accessibility to one’s consumer behaviour. And yet, the thought is fascinating: that everyone of us is connected with anyone on this planet of now 7.5 billion inhabitants, regardless of race, cultural background, continent, religion, age. Next to the political implication of such a thought this idea provides us with a resourceful generator for stories, narratives, fictions about human beings and their lives.

      Six Degrees of Separation is based upon the desire to create contemporary storytelling formats in which we explore fiction in shared narrative practices - narratives without a centre plot, but composed of biographical fragments, travel experiences, random encounters, figments of imagination - and maybe very little resolution. We believe that the world is full of stories, told ones and concealed ones, voiced ones and mute ones. Stories that we fantasize are not less true; digging them out and rendering them audible creates a multiplicity of narratives which form a large tapestry of events, a patchwork of textures, interwoven in such a fashion that they somehow may exist on the verge of being. Using a mixed media apparatus (Google Earth; Skype; Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, etc), we will go through different storytelling exercises focusing on the construction of evasive, critical, imaginative narratives in order to create a common imaginary in the end. So what is it that holds the world(s) together?

      References/Literature: Sophie Calle: Exquisite Pain and other writings; George Perec: “Life – A User’s Manual”; “Species of Spaces and other pieces”, Alfred Hitchcock: “Rear Window”; ‘The Phantom of Liberty’, film by Luis Bunuel, 1974; ‘Street Scene’ by Bertolt Brecht; ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ by Augusto Boal; ‘Phone Booth’ (film) by Joel Schumacher.

       

       

      Biographies:

       

      Peter Stamer works as director, dramaturg, mentor and curator in the field of contemporary theatre and performance. In his projects he is mainly interested in the potency of bodies and their potential for language. His performance and theatre projects, realized all over Europe, also led him to China, Egypt, USA, or Israel. His recent works include a.o. The Path Of Money, a documentary/theatre/installation on a travelling banknote through China; the performance For Your Eyes Only on story telling and blindness; or The Big Event 1 – 3, a documentary theatre play on the assassination of John F. Kennedy (with toxic dreams). Lately he has been working on the international building-performance-project A Future Archeology within which spatial structures in Berlin, Vienna, and Cairo were to be built during five months in 2013. He just finished the New York phase of the project 26 Letters to Deleuze on the Abcédaire of Gilles Deleuze for EMPAC in Troy/New York.

      (www.peterstamer.com)

       

      Luanda Casella is a Brazilian writer and storyteller, living and working in Belgium since 2006. Her research focuses on the ways individuals relate to narratives in order to create a sense of identity, to form their opinion of the world, and ultimately to protect themselves. As a writer she's interested in magic realism and in all forms of prose where fictional elements are incorporated in the narratives with the same relevance as real facts — strongly believing that fantastic attributes given to characters and settings give us the freedom we need to address the often phantasmagoric social realities of our history. In her performance work she's concerned with finding techniques to produce hypertext fiction on stage. In other words, to expose the audience to an experience of co-authorship, where viewers are engaged in making intellectual and emotional associations to the completion of the story. In the context of the storytelling format "live-book" — an interaction of spoken word and live jazz music — she connects the experiences of 'reading' to that of 'watching a jazz concert' and builds (with prose) a space for free interpretation. Extremely influenced by plastic theatre, her stage narratives are enhanced by the use of paratextual material — in the form of video projections of written content, maps, objects, costumes and props — suggesting purely poetic truths.

      (www.luandacasella.com)

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • THIS PLACE 23 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Sara Manente / Marcos Simoes
    • a.pass
    • 01 June 2015
    • 05 June 2015
    • THIS PLACE

       The workshop unfolds a series of extra-sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The dispositives, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is ‘a self’, an entity other than us, with its own qualities and ability to perform in an attempt to include chance and other contingencies in the work, to destabilize power relations based on linear logics and to questions the effect of belief and make-belief in a performative environment. Can we create magic by creating the rules for magic to happen? Like an ‘experimental magic’ without magicians? Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation and prediction?

      The workshop will start with a daily practice of writing questions for a tarot reader. What would you like to ask the cards? What do you need to know? How will the formulation of doubts affect you? We will offer three different performative tools to be explored and then appropriated into your own project. These practices were the starting point for the one year project called “This place”, during which we collaborated with 8 artistic couples to make and present 8 performances inspired by ‘paranormal’ experiences between people who know each other in an extra-ordinary way.

      For the workshop “Place this”, we want to discover the transformational powers of this knowledge in different constellations: individually, with objects, in couples, trios, groups. With the stubbornness of ‘the idiot’, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the material and the immaterial.

       

      this place, Sara Manente, Marcos Simoes : photograph Marcello Mardones


       

       

      Biographies

      Sara Manente

      °1978, lives and works in Brussels.

      Born close to Venice in 1978, she began practising ballet at an early age. In 2003, she completed a degree in Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna with a graduate thesis on Semiotics and Dance before moving to Belgium with a research scholarship at the Univer- sity of Antwerp. In 2007 she attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp (In Situ department) for a year. In 2008 she completed the post-master’s programme of a.pass at deSingel (advanced performance and scenography studies, previously A.P.T).

      Sara Manente works as a choreographer and performer.

      Since 2004 she has made performances, videos and research projects of her own and in collaboration, namely with Marcos Simoes, Ondine Cloez, Michiel Reynaert, Alessandra Bergamaschi, Constanze Schellow, Hwang Kim and the members of Cabra. Some of her works: Democratic forest (research project and workshops, 2008-2009), To park (per- formance installation, 2008-2010), Some performances (video, 2008), Lawaai means Hawaai (trio after two previous projects on noise and dance, 2009), Grand Tourists (experimental in-situ project, 2010), Not not a lecture (lecture performance and publication, 2011), Faire un four (quartet on the making of 4 similar and 4 different, 2011), x: I liked B better/ y: I am 29 too (telepathic experiment between North and South Korea, 2013), This place (a series of performances based on ESP and tarot reading made in two weeks with seven differ- ent artistic couples, 2012-2014) and Rita (video and performance of a joint Cabra project, 2014). As a performer, since 2009 she has been working for Juan Dominguez, Kate McIntosh, Aitana Cordero Vico, Marcos Simoes, Jaime Llopis, Nada Gambier and Gaëtan Bulourde.

      Sara is one of the founding members of the association CABRA vzw facilitating the work of seven artists: Sara Manente, Marcos Simoes, Norberto Llopis, Jaime Llopis, Santiago Ribelles Zorita, Kyung Ae Ro and Varinia Canto Vila

      www.cabra.weebly.com

       

      Marcos Simoes

      °1975, Portugal, lives and works in Brussels.

      Marcos studied civil engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. He attended the intensive course of SNDO and the contemporary dance programme at the University Miguel Hernandez in Altea (Spain) where he started to create his own work. He created and performed

      three pieces in collaboration with Sara Manente: Palyndrome, Eye in the Sky and Instructions. He completed the post-master a.p.t/A. pass in Performing Arts in Antwerp where he presented several works around his concept: The LaughingBody. In 2010 he presents ‘Eskimo’ a piece for 6 performers in Monty and Working Title Platform. In 2011/2012 together with Hwang Kim and Sara Manente they presented ‘‘x: I liked B better / y: I’m 29 too ” at the Festival Bom in Seoul (Korea), and together with the Portuguese choreographic art- ist Lilia Mestre they present ‘Ai! a choreographic project’.

      In 2013/14 he works in different collaboration projects, ‘Proces- sionism’ with the visual artist Marcelo Mardones; ‘This Place’ with Sara Manente and invited guests; and a 2 weeks collaboration Project between CABRA VZW and ETT in Seoul (South Korea).

      As a performer he has worked for Sara Manente, Kyung Ae Ro, Nada Gambier and others. Currently he is working as a performer for Nada Gambier and in a collaboration Project with Artur Castro Freire.

      He’s one of the founding members of the association CABRA vzw fa- cilitating the work of seven artists: Sara Manente, MarcosSimoes, Norberto Llopis, Jaime Llopis, Santiago Ribelles Zorita, Kyung Ae Ro and Varinia Canto Vila.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • project
    • Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics
    • Perform Back Score
    • Perform Back Score how to document performance?
      17 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 14 January 2015
    • 31 March 2015
    • case of: Mavi Veloso
      case of: Sara Santos
      case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Perform Back Score

      WEEKLY MEETING WORKSHOP: 

      Proposed by Lilia Mestre for the Block 2015/I (January-March)

      This score was 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 was 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.

      The performances can take any kind of medium, strategy. Just it would be good if you are a writer to work at least two times in another medium and if you are not a writer to reply at least two times with text.

      The invitation is to meet once a week for 3 hours and work together. These meetings will have to happen after 17:00 and can take place in different environments.

       

      Set up

      14 January in the afternoon. (last day of opening week)

      In this meeting we’ll set up the frame that will accompany the score for the 9 sessions.

      We’ll assign to whom we are addressing the first performances.

      First session

      *Every participant will display a 5 minutes performance as a gift.

      *After performance the participant will assign a participant that will reply the week after.

      *Discussion about the problematics that emerged.

      *We’ll choose for a space and time for the next session.

      Sessions 2 till 9

      *Every participant will display her /his response in a 5 minutes performance.

      *After all presentations we’ll assign together the next repliers.

      *Discussion about the problematics that emerged.

      *We’ll choose for a space and time for the next session.

      Documentation

      All performances will be filmed in the same format. Julia Clever (ex-a.pass working on documentary) will be working with us. All next repliers can take a video home to work on their responses.

      We’ll think and work together on the notion of archive and of performance as documentation.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • Untouchable/Unacceptable/Intangible
    • BRICOLAGE a tool for opening the block
      17 March 2015
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Nicolas Galeazzi
    • a.pass
    • 04 May 2015
    • 08 May 2015
    • case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • BRICOLAGE

      To open this block we start with bricolage. The bricoleur never starts - he is continuously working on 'whatever is at hand'.

      Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology.   

      The bricolage technique may be very close to many of our practices. The artist researcher is commonly acknowledge, as the bricoleur-scientist. He crafts the object of knowledge. Levi-Strauss describes the the bricoleur in opposition to the engineer: the bricoleur’s tools and materials are heterogeneous but - working only with what is there - his/her universe of instruments is finite. The understanding of the world is assembled and constructed on the go. The material "is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions."

      The engineer instead, tries - in the most rational manner - to overcome the constraints of his current reality and works under the basic assumption of infinite possibilities. The engineer as much as the scientist creates events (changing the world) by means of structures and the 'bricoleur' creating structures by means of events.

      Living and acting as an artist researcher in-between these two methodologies is a choice of political dimension, which we want to discuss at the beginning of the block.

      In the course of this week we will present the current state of our research case from various perspectives. ‘Bricolaging’ the 'objects' of your research, turning them upside down, looking at them through the other's eyes and assembling the elements in play, we want to understand the complex horizon of your research target.

      For this we will use a variety of objects (and their relations, materials and relations to those materials, tools and relation to them.) Fixing and recycling will be as much part of the practice of understanding as destroying, dismantling and dissecting.

      As a preparation to this opening workshop we would like you to search for three objects with different characteristics:

      • one precious object, relevant to your research in a personal, ev. emotional sense,
      • one broken object, to be fixed, even if in this case fixing might be hopeless,
      • and finally one object with an open structure - something not yet finished, in the middle of its becoming.

      All of these objects should have a more or less tight connection to the research discourse or field you’re working on.

       

    •  

       

       

      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.

    • 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 ‚ “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.

      Performing, directing, writing and interpreting scores ‚ - how to collaborate? How can we work together? 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.

      * Gertrude Stein 

       

      Biography:

      Antonia Baehr is a choreographer. What characterizes her is a non-disciplinary work and a method of collaboration with different people, using a game-structure with switching roles: each person is alternately director / author / host and performer / guest for the other one.

      1994 she co-founded the Berlin-based performance group "ex machinis". She graduated in Film- and Media Arts at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin with Valie Export (1996) and obtained a DAAD-grant and a Merit Scholarship for the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. There she completed her Master in Performance with Lin Hixson of the performance group Goat Island and began collaborating with William Wheeler. Since 2000 she is based in Berlin. She was co-organizing "Labor Sonor", experimental music and performance series, at KuLe from 2001 to 2003, and co-hosted the festival "Radioriff" that took place in December 2003 at Ausland, Berlin. From 2006 until 2008 she was associated artist in residence at "Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers" in France. In 2008 she published her book and her vinyl "Rire / Laugh / Lachen". From March to May 2013, the Beursschouwburg in Brussels curated a three-month program that included performances, films and an exhibition: "make up - at Antonia Baehr and Werner Hirsch's table". This focus program featured works by artists who have been collaborating with Hirsch and Baehr in various and switching roles for many years, as well as a wide selection of works by Baehr and Hirsch themselves. Her book "Abecedarium Bestiarium - Portraits of affinities in animal metaphors" came out in January 2014.

      Antonia Baehr's productions include: "Holding Hands" (2001), "Un après-midi" (2003), "Cat Calendar" together with Antonija Livingstone (2004), "Larry Peacock" co-produced by Sabine Ercklentz and Andrea Neumann (2005), "Merci" (2006), "Rire / Laugh / Lachen" (2008), "For Faces" (2010), "My Dog is My Piano" (2012), "Abecedarium Bestiarium" (2013), "The Wildes" together with Ida Wilde (Keren Ida Nathan) (2014).

      Antonia Baehr is the producer of the horse whisperer and dancer Werner Hirsch, the musician and choreographer Henri Fleur, and the composer Henry Wilt.

    • Collective moments (opening week, half-way-days, and end week) are compulsory for everybody

      Beside the collective moments you should engage in alt least 2 workshops proposed in thes block, of which one should be  b-workshop. B-workshops are this block Vladimir's 'Theory Under The Commons' workshop and Mala's 'With I+II' workshop.

      In order to participate in the Common Conference at the end of the block, you should at least take part in half of the Friday open space sessions.

      In order to keep the a.pass archive alive, we have to feed it! Therefore, we would like to introduce the concept of the Caretaker: all a.pass event - workshops and common moments - should be hosted and documented by participants.

      You will have one coordinator's mentoring with Kristien to orientate yourself within a.pass and your own research.

      During the block you normally have two meetings with either 2 or 3 mentors of your choice. Please read the specific mentoring strategies for this block. 

    • «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)

    • Choreo-graphic Figures - Deviations from the Line is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving artist Nikolaus Gansterer, choreographer Mariella Greil and writer-artist Emma Cocker. The project unfolds through two interconnected aims: we are interested in the nature of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ operative within artistic practice, and seek to develop systems of notation for sharing and reflecting on this often hidden or undisclosed aspect of the creative process. Herein, lies the challenge

      • 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 honouring 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.

       

      Proposal for a.pass

       

      For a.pass, our intent is to share and put pressure on our recent explorations around both the ‘notion of notation’ and the ‘notation of notion’, through live investigations, presentation and discussion with students and wider publics. Specifically, we wish to investigate notation (and its related technologies) through two concepts: figure and figuring.

      • The Notion/Notation of Figuring: We use the term ‘figuring’ to describe a state of emergence or experiential shift, the barely perceptible movements and transitions at the cusp of awareness within the process of “sense-making”. What different systems of notation can be developed for cultivating awareness of and for marking and identifying the moments of “figuring” within live investigative action?
      • The Notion/Notation of Figure: We use the term ‘figure’ to describe the point at which figuring coalesces into a recognizable + repeatable form. How then might the performed ‘figure’ be a system of notation in and of itself?
    • 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.

       

      Biography:

      Ana Hoffner is an artist and theoretician working  in the fields of queer and postcolonial/migratory politics. Her interest lies in creating conditions for recognizability of non-normative forms of life through a performative practice consisting of reenactment and lecture performance. Ana Hoffner researches currently as a candidate of the PhD in Practice program and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

      Artistic research projects: Reenacting Intervention – Intervening in Reenactment/PhD in Practice; Queer Perspectives in and on Europe/Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen.

      Last publication: “Was ist Kunst - a Product of Circumstances?” in: Private Investigations, Ed.: Andrei Siclodi, Büchs’n’Books, Volume 3, Innsbruck.

      Upcoming performance: „Wissensdramatisierung – Sprechstück“, Critical Voices, Platform3/Munich, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

    •  

       

      ‘Performance / Performativity / Objects / Subjects’ is an a.pass basics-workshop covering some of the basic knowledges we share on an (almost) daily basis in a.pass, and that need some in-depth attention.

      In this workshop 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 Ontologies like the ones of Timothy Morton, the extended concept of ‘the democracy of objects’, go deeper into the concept of ‘compositionism’ as coined by Bruno Latour, revisiting phenomenology with Sara Ahmed through her (queer) concept of 'orientation' and mobilizing metaphorically the notion of 'ventriloquism' by reading some pages of François Cooren's ‘Action and Agency in dialogue’ . 

      What if human interactants were not the only ones to be considered, paraphrasing Austin, as “doing things with words”? That is, what if other “things” could also be granted the status of agents in dialogical situations?

    • 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

    • A workshop took time and place 24/7 as a singular occupation of a public space with hourly rotations. A group was working in parallel daily 10am - 1pm.

      This workshop was designed and organized by Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans

      Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans are working in different contexts and with different means about common decision taking procedures - or let’s say, alternative democracies.

      While Christophe proposes in a lecture performance series a new democratic system based on disqualifying people in charge, rather than electing them, Luigi is developing social choreographies as democratic models and is currently involved in a communal project of reorganizing the political, agricultural and economic system of a whole village in south Italy.

      Together they propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are determined: The workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day.  The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.

      The discussions and decision taking procedures already started last block and created some new questions and tendencies. But an entrance into the process is possible at anytime.

    • postgraduate program
    • Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics
    • BLOCK FOCUS 2015/I CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS
      16 September 2014
      posted by: Guido Lucassen
    • Lilia Mestre
    • 05 January 2015
    • 30 April 2015
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • BLOCK FOCUS 2015/I

      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’.

      If we think performance as the coming-forth of those acts, as a framed re-actualization of what is there (a part of the world) we can give focus to the relations and tensions between what is offered and what can be received in a reciprocal act of exchange, between performance and audience. Performance becomes then the enhancement zone for shared inquire, an area through which, attention is created, a place of inter-subjective research.

      The performativity or agency of such acts is of course embedded in the invitation they propose through the organization of the elements that take part in the acts themselves (time, space, objects, words,...) and that form an environment that starts to speak.

      I would say that the margins of the ‘event’ (emergence) is then situated in-between that environment, the perceptive bodies and the communal regime of perception proposing a field of action, a re-consideration of forms of living, a political approach.

      Scores are tools to understand and analyze those conditions and to bring to the fore the core of each proposal. This block we’ll investigate some formats coming from different practices (music, choreography, theater, drawing, philosophy) through the workshops and we will process the information through a score called ‘Perform back score’. (see ‘Performing back score in workshops). This score focuses on the performativity of any act of framed communication.

      A study of the conditions for the emergence of poetics in different art practices will enable the possibility to question the methods and strategies they propose and to observe the impact they produce as forms of communication (shared environments). By crossing different practices we get re-informed about our own ways of doing, one’s own methodology, one’s own critical approach, one’s own aesthetics.

      * Wikipedia : Poïesis (Ancient Greek: ποίησις) is etymologically derived from the ancient term ποιέω, which means "to make". This word, the root of our modern "poetry", was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and person with the world.

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • THRESHOLDS 15 September 2014
      posted by: Miriam Hempel
    • ANNA SÖRENSON, VICTORIA MYRONYUK AND CAMILA ASCHNER RESTREPO
    • online
    • 15 September 2014
    • THRESHOLDS

      These three researchers all linger in their own way on the thresholds between the hyper-real and everyday fictions, inviting the visitor to step into their research through the experience of its procedures.

      price: 2 euro

      Read the full publication here

    • As a consequence of the the act to translate 650€ at the National Bank in to 1€-Cent pieces by one participant of the Occupy Democracy workshop, a financial justification of a receipt had to be handed out to the revisor of the a.pass accounting and finally to the ministry of education of the Flaamse Gemeenschapt Commissie:

      nationale bank exchange-receipt

      This is a receipt that doesn't document the purchase of a commodity or a service, but the transformation of one form of money, in to an other - one form of money, which generally enables purchase into an other form, where exactly this basic function of money is impeded.

      This receipt deserves a special explanation.

      In the course of a workshop called Occupying Democracy / Occupation Précaire one participant translated 650€ reserved for material expenses of the Workshop into 1 €Cent coins - an amount of copper which weights about 350kg. The monetary value is kept - just its applicable value is abrogated!

      While this act points to the overarching problematic in the relation between the performance of art and the performance of money, it was of high educational and research value in the course this workshop, and in consequence it caused a social intervention in public sphere. The combination of this clearly lifts this act into the state of an a

      rt work in itself with conceptual and genuine artistic value.

      Through the simple act of translating the materiality of money in to an other consistency without chaining its monetary value but to discard with this it’s functional usability, the sum of 650€ becomes an artifact - a sculpture in it self. The provided receipt is in so far the proof not only of an act of ‘buying’ the essential artifact of this act, but is part of it’s social plastic. Money is used here to create art in the most possible direct way.

      History

      In the frame of the a.pass trimestrial Block 2014/III reflecting on the relation between ‘Space and Contract’ Co-curated by the Associate Program Curator Vladimir Miller and the Program Coordinator Nicolas Galeazzi, we asked Christoph Meierhans and Luigi Coppola to come up with a workshop proposal based on their individual artistic practice on democratic forms.

      This is what they proposed:

      Original Workshop proposal

      OCCUPYING DEMOCRACY / Occupation Precaire
      WORKSHOP; 29th September - 3rd October
      (10am - 5pm group work; 24/7 singular occupation of the space with hourly rotations)
      Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans

      Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans are working in different contexts and with different means about common decision taking procedures - or let’s say, alternative democracies.

      While Christophe proposes in a lecture performance series a new democratic system based on disqualifying people in charge, rather than electing them, Luigi is developing social choreographies as democratic models and is currently involved in a communal project of reorganizing the political, agricultural and economic system of a whole village in south Italy.

      Together they propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are determined: The workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day. Starting with one square meter of occupation, the territory of artistic occupations should be expanded for minimum one square meter with every occupant. The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.
      The discussions and decision taking procedures already started last block and created some new questions and tendencies. But an entrance into the process is possible at anytime.

       

      Process of the Workshop

      Eight a.pass participants engaged in the workshop and managed the

      1m2-24h/7-occupation-1-at-the-time

      concept together in shifts of 2h per person. The occupation was held on Place Saint-Jeans in Brussels.

      A Budget of 800€ was on spot and available to the current occupant in order to increase the tension between the decisions of the individual towards the decisions of the Workshop collective.

      Beside the occupation, the group held daily plenum gatherings at an other place in town, discussing the development of the occupation and its ethical, artistic and political implications.

      The fact that one person is in charge for the budget of a group for only 2h at the time reviles obvious conflicts of interests between the ‘society’ of this workshop and the individual occupant and was therefore the most concrete challenge of the idea of rethinking democratic systems through this workshop.

      At the beginning this challenge wasn’t faced much. The occupants only moderately bought things for their own use and bigger sums were only spent on objects that had a value for the whole group.

      The group fully accepted, that someone buys a beer for his midnight shift, or a morning juice, some chips, or batteries for his/her camera etc. Someone bought a Kalimba as the lullaby music instrument of the whole group. Someone else Gloomy Sticks - a scenographic element, which structured the space the whole week after.
      Occupants contributed even more private material and made this way the available money partially obsolete. This surely very interesting attitude suspended therefore, we might say paradoxically, the challenging discourse of the workshop. The tension embedded in the experimental concept of the workshop wasn’t fully embraced and experienced.

      The sum of those small expenses didn’t exceed 125€ and didn’t contribute much to the curtail discussions. The receipts for this sum are available and can be justified.

       

      Turning the coin

      One occupant interpreted the responsibility of the budget available in the explained transformative way. He went with the at the point remaining 650€ to the National Bank and was allowed to translate the bills into coins without any concern. The restriction related to these cases is, that one can change an infinite sum into smaller coins, but one is only allowed to bring 1€-cent coins back to the bank in portions of 5kg a week! In our case, this would take us almost one and a have year of weekly engagement to walk coins back to the bank.

      This conceptual act changed the situation in the workshop drastically. The collective was confronted with a radical individual move, which challenged everyones responsibility.

      The unpracticality of the available money in this form occurred when other occupants wanted to buy just a little chewing gum at a night shop in their shift - none was willing to take these coins. No night shop, no café, even giving them away for free was impossible.

      The only ones who saw the value of this conns being transferred in something real, practical and useful were a bunch of homeless people. Their time and economy allows to spend hours for picking up the coins, carrying them to around, negotiating with potential takers only to get the sum for example of a weekend ticket to the Ardennes together. A holiday dream some of them were waiting for since ages!

      With this aspect, the precariousness of this occupation entered other dimensions.
      It sets our abstract discussion on a slippery yet concrete and practical experience.
      The Workshop givers and the program coordinator who are finally responsible the workshop were suddenly under totally different the pressure of justification.
      The reviled presence and unavoidable openness of the money - we hardly could hide the 350kg coins in the public space - was constantly under thread of being stolen.
      It opened a communication to the most precarious living participants of this society.

      The group had to find new and concrete solutions for the technical and ethnical handling of the money and was confronted with an urgent decision finding process and it’s mechanisms.

       

      Continuation

      At the end of the week long occupation we left the space with about the half of the transferred 1 €-cent coins - ca. 170kg - in a suitcase together with a protocol for further operations.

      An Open Call shall be launched for competitive proposals to perform the coins.

      The selection procedure will follow principles that were discussed and tested in the workshop.

      The proposals will all be read on one evening to the public. 

      Only after the reading one member of the audience will randomly be chosen to act as a one-man-jury select a winning proposal.

      Another person has to be chosen randomly for as a performer of the proposal.

      The social plastic has to go on!

      Responsible for this report:

       

      Nicolas Galeazzi
      a.pass Program Coordinator

      Brussels 10/02/2015

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Spaces as Contracts
    • 2014 BLOCK III 01 September 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2014
    • 30 November 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Danny Neyman
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Hektor Mamet
      Jeremiah Runnels
      Kleoni Manousakis
      Silvia Ramos Pereira
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz
      Yaari Shalem


      Research End Presentations

      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Victoria Myronyuk


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita   

       

      Partners

      Les Bains
      Kaaitheater


      Contributors for workshops

      Christophe Meierhans
      Elke van Campenhout
      Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga
      Jozef Wouters
      Lilia Mestre
      Luigi Coppola
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Femke Snelting
      Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga
      Geert Opsomer
      Lilia Mestre

       

       

       

       

       

      ‘SPACES AS CONTRACTS’
      curated by Vladimir Miller (Associate Program Curator and Nicolas Galeazzi ( Program Coordinator)

       

       


      25 / 09 - 05 / 11 / 2014


      ‘POLITICS OF CHANGEABILITY’
      weekly meetings by Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi and Fotini Lazaridou


      For this project we ask the researchers participants to engage individually for the duration of this block with a private or institutional space outside of a.pass. The task is: to negotiate a permanent, irreversible change in the architecture of that space and to document the negotiation process.
      Changing our spatial circumstances, for adapting them to our needs, is so foreign to us in daily life, that we associate those changes with violence and social upheaval, with revolutions and public resistance. And maybe this holds true and points us to how powerful architecture actually is in upholding existing social order. Architecture and the political connect and hinge on access to change. Hegemonies manifest themselves and are upheld by architectural structures. So every attempt to change invariably become a political attempt.
      We are framing the attempt of change as a research methodology
      Taking the steps to negotiate a permanent change in an architectural setup reveals the internal structures of power distribution and decision making for any given space. If you want to propose a change, who do you contact? who will you be referred to? which groups need to come together under which premises and structures of decision making to allow for that change? To follow up those challenges to changes is to slowly reveal a diagram of power, an architecture within architecture. In fact those two architectures are inseparable from each other and we should invent ways of speaking of them as a whole. Would we have privacy if we never had walls, what kind of togetherness would we have if availability of space was not limited? Our way of living and our way of building cannot be separated from each other.

       

       

      08 - 12 / 09 / 2014


      ‘SPACE AND CONTRACT’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Vladimir Miller


      In this workshop we will look at the non physical borders of architecture: the contracts and agreements that create and maintain our built environment.
      If you take a quick look around you and ask yourself how the things that surround you came to be the way they are, you will notice that all of them are man-made or man-transformed. Those processes of transformation are all initiated and facilitated through negotiations and agreements. The first step to connect contracts and architecture is therefore to realize that architecture is a product of an agreement. For our purposes we can loosely define a contract as a performative agreement.
      During the workshop we will discuss further how architecture also embodies and ultimately maintains social agreements of that kind
      This workshop proposes to look at the relationship between the architectural space and the contract through a series of collective building actions. We will use a simple material to build improvised structures together in order to understand how are we negotiating collaboration, aim and space. Which rules and ideological presupposition are at work? Can we come up with contracts, scores and sets of rules which would produce other architectures? What is the relationship between our social contract and the architecture we are able to produce?

       

       

      15 - 19 / 09 / 2014


      ‘IF YOU LIKE IT, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT A ROOF ON IT’
      (and put some chairs under)
      workshop-project by Jozef Wouters & Vladimir Miller


      Roofs, in the arts, are often provided. In climates like Belgium, having a roof to work under is not a bad way to start. The roof protects the work (against more things than rain). But the roof also tends to isolate it. From time to time, artists grow tired of the roof and the walls and, hoping it doesn’t rain, decide to work on a square.
      The work of a scenographer is often more about walls than about roofs (light designers don’t like scenographers who propose roofs). Walls are flexible. Walls can be discussed. Comparing this, it turns out to be way harder to negotiate about a roof and to design a roofed space that is a square as well.
      This proposal is modifying the original “lets build a house together” idea, which was already presented at a.pass. The idea is, rather than overwhelming ourselves with the house building, to have a closer look (through working) at what we identify as two key elements of structuring community and social space by the means of architecture: roofs and chairs. In a much too simple way we can say that roofs bring a community together, while chairs can be used to structure its politics of attention and visibility. By avoiding walls we also subvert a key instrument to privatization of space. The space under the roof is accessible and public by design, we don't have to distribute power/keys.

       


      29 / 09 - 03 / 10 / 2014


      ‘OCCUPYING DEMOCRACY’
      workshop by Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans


      Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans are working in different contexts and with different means about common decision taking procedures - or let’s say, alternative democracies. While Christophe proposes, in a lecture performance series, a new democratic system based on disqualifying people in charge, rather than electing them, Luigi is developing social choreographies as democratic models and is currently involved in a communal project of reorganizing the political, agricultural and economic system of a whole village in south Italy.
      Together they propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are pre-determined: the workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day. The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.

       

       

      13 / 10 - 17 / 10 / 2014


      ‘FORMS OF LIFE - A TRAVELING PYJAMA PARTY’
      workshop by Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga


      During a period of 6 days, each participants are invited to host the rest of the group in their apartment for a day. We will cook together, discuss a series of texts, take turns using the shower and read bedtime stories from a book picked up from the shelf. We may find out about each other’s morning habits, favorite smoothie combination, different ways of folding the sheets.
      For six days and five nights, this workshop will attempt to explore different ways of living and living together, focusing on the domestic sphere, our daily habits and their spatial manifestation, as well as on the ways these forms of life may or may not slip out of the window and down to the street. During each short residency we will collectively try to come up with a proposal for a small modification of or intervention in the space we are currently in, and negotiate its terms with our host. We may or may not carry out the proposal.

       

       

      24 - 25 / 10 / 2014


      ‘POST-FOUNDATIONAL ARCHITECTURES’
      scenography workgroup meeting by Vladimir Miller


      In 2012 a.pass merged the two sections a.s (advanced scenography) and a.pt (advanced performance training) to one singular program. This move was a consequence of understanding performance and scenography more and more as inseparable parts of one and the same discourse. But the merge of discourses finally reinforced the need for a new specification of the term “scenography”. What does it really mean beyond the classical stage practice? What else than a stage - and under which conditions - can be declared as a ‘scene’ and who or what is designing it? What distinguishes a ‘performative space’ from a ‘sceno-graphed’ space?
      For discussing these questions Vladimir Miller gathered in the fall 2013 some space practitioners to a first ‘Scenography Workgroup Meeting’. In October 2014 he calls for a second one. It will be a public work meeting between and with artists, architects, and scenographers who engage in the production of temporary and performative architectures. They will critically explore the definition of scenography simply as ‘post-foundational architectures’.

       

       

      03 - 07 / 11 / 2014


      ‘PHARMAKON’
      workshop by Elke van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre


      This workshop explores the concept of pharmakon developed by the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in his book ‘On pharmacology - how to live your life’. Stiegler uses the term pharmakon, which simultaneously stands for ‘poison’ and medicine’ as a symptom of an ever-spreading capitalism: an economy that does not only affect our labour, but does affect also our psychic ability and reduces our desires to simple drives. As both a medicine and a cure, Stiegler emphasizes the role of technology in our society as an ultimate pharmakon.
      In his ‘pharmacology’, its doubleness is investigated as a possible ‘cure’: a strategy to deal with the recovery of our desires, to go against the pressure of identification trends, brands and an ever-increasing individualization. Pharmakon stands for the technical know-how we develop the strategies we use to build a different kind of future and to create another concept of our togetherness. But this is not without risk: pharmaka are both a source of misery and abuse of power, but also a stimuli of what makes life worthwhile.
      The workshop is part of a ‘Thematics’ research project organized by Les Bains. Four artists are invited to explore in a three month residency set-ups of 'trans-individuation’: how do we form temporary moments of sharing, how can we come together in diversity, how can we build together an organization of work and knowledge sharing that is open-ended for producing and opening up to an outside world. A constant process of infection and transformation, through testing and adjusting the dosage of the pharmakon.

       


      27-29 / 11 / 2014


      ‘PHARMAKON’
      conference by a.pass Research Center, Les Bains and Kaaitheater.


      The Ancient Greek word ‘pharmakon’ means ‘poison’, ‘medicine’ and ‘scapegoat’. According to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, our society urgently needs a ‘pharmacology’ to turn the tide of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment. He says that we must urgently question our culture. With which witchcraft can we turn the poison into medicine?
      Pharmakon: whitch culture? is a three-day ‘performative conference’ that examines artistic and theoretical strategies to counteract this pollution of our society’s culture. This congress is part of Thematics, a residency programme for artists and theorists run by Bains Connective workplace. This started in mid-October and is still on until 15 December, and is in its turn part of the transnational Pharmakon project organised by the Institut Nomade.

      Program of the conference

      Day 1: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-1-on-the-notion-of-pharmakon-in-the-thinking-of-bernard-stiegler

      Day 2: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-2-rethinking-economies

      Day 3: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-3-body-technologies

    • end presentation
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • it's not me, is it? 23 May 2014
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Maite Liébana Vena, Julia Clever, Daniel Kok, Gaja Karolczak, Carolina Goradesky
    • 23 May 2014
    • case of: Miriam Hempel
    • it's not me, is it?

      What is the relation between the researcher and his research, between the artist and the world, between the body and the body of work? Today’s ideology of contemporary arts condemns the narcissism of the artist-genius as as an old-fashioned marketing strategy that affirms rather than critiques the status quo.

      price: 2 euro

      But nobody probably doubts that the quality of an artistic research is largely dependent on the individual desire of the researcher, on the spark of necessity that turn mere research data into a work of genuine reflection. In an invitation that has the power to instigate interest and a dialogue that extends beyond the safe limits of the research environment.

      In this booklet we look into the work of five artist researchers: Daniel Kok, Gaja Karolczak, Julia Clever, Carolina Goradesky and Maité Liébana Vena. In their (very diverse) cases, each of them explores a possible strategy to deal with the ‘I’ of the researcher: as a ‘problem’ to address the needs of the European community and rethink the public as a simultaneous singular and plural body (Daniel Kok). As a constantly shape-shifting ground for the experience of the phantom body (Gaja Karolczak). As a foreigner in search for spatial re-cognition (Carolina Goradesky). As a performer healing the self through dialoguing with a plant, inviting the spectator to share in the experience (Maité Liébana Vena). Or as a discrete witness to the playing out of History in WWII reenactments (Julia Clever).

      All of them put their bodies and self-constructions at risk, expose themselves as historically, geographically, racially or otherwise bent relational territories on which the larger narratives of aesthetics and politics cross and intertwine. Their stories in all their small-scale intensity are mirroring fragments of larger forces that can not so easily be grasped or experienced: the violent manipulations of commerce, migration, politics and global economics. But especially also the artificial - because always mediated, manipulated and accidental - coming-into-being of the self. 

      This booklet contains artistic statements of all of the artists, as well as individual interviews on their relation to the topic

    • postgraduate program
    • block 2014/II
    • Milieus
    • NOT_index
    • MILIEUS 01 May 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • BLOCK 14/II
    • 01 May 2014
    • 31 July 2014
    • CURATED BY PIERRE RUBIO
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • MILIEUS

       

       

      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.

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Milieus
    • 2014 BLOCK II 01 May 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2014
    • 31 July 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson
      Audrey Cottin
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Danny Neyman
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Philippine Hoegen
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Ramos Pereira
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Verónica Cruz

       


      Research End Presentations

      Carolina Goradesky
      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Julia Clever
      Maité Liébana Vena

       


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita

       

       

      Partners

      FabLab IMAL
      KU Leuven
      PAF Performance Arts Forum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Alma Soderberg
      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Restrepo
      Christophe Maierhans
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Danny Neyman
      Elke van Campenhout
      Femke Snelting
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Hendrik Willekens
      Julien Maire
      Kristien van den Brande
      Luigi Coppola
      Michael Klien
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Philippine Hoegen
      Pierre Rubio
      Pr Jan Masschelein
      Rares Crauit
      Samah HIjawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Pereira / Omniadversus
      Stef Meul
      Vanja Smiljanic
      Veronica Cruz

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Femke Snelting
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer

       

       

       

      ‘MILIEUS’
      curated by Pierre Rubio (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

      Milieus is a collective artistic research environment for the participants, mentors and other workers of the a.pass program. In a shared workspace we develop our practices in a collaborative context, on the basis of self-organisation and self-rule. Through individual actions, Milieus generates a dynamic territory for exchange, cooperation and (tacit) negotiation. A mutual creation of the individual and the common.
      We invite different guests to enter into this environment with us, to participate, open up the proposals and issues addressed in the collective work and/or to problematize the situation, fueling the ecology of ideas and practices in Milieus.
      The whole curriculum content was curated by the researchers-participants themselves through the proposition of their ‘Collective Practices’ and the collective curating of the ‘Guest House series’.

       

       


      27 / 05 / 2014


      ‘A COLLECTIVE PRACTICE OF COLLECTIVE PRACTICE’
      collective practice by Pierre Rubio


      This practice aims at sharing/developing our knowledges and skills in workshop design.
      How is it possible to translate an individual practice into a collective practice?
      How can we support each others’ effort to imagine and invent collective practices out of our individual problematics?
      From identifying central research questions in each one’s researches to transformations of these questions into shareable practices up to appropriating collectively personal singularities and nourishing a possible ‘general intellect’.

       

       

      30 / 05 / 2014


      ‘GETTING A TASTE FOR FOOD’
      collective practice by Rares Crauit


      Food is highly charged with meaning and affect; it is performative and theatrical and, as a live art, it is fleeting and sensorial. Today, in a world where one in eight people are suffering from chronic undernourishment, cooking methods, consumption protocols and gastronomic speeches are lengthily elaborated on. So what is there left for artists? Looking carefully at food particularities we may witness the ordinary and extraordinary about food as an event, catching the interest of chefs as well as artists and social campaigners.

       

       

      02 / 06 / 2014


      ‘love and other matters’
      ritual for charging the space by Elke Van Campenhout / Tara


      Monday at 10am (sharp, since a ritual can not begin twice…) we meet for a social choreography, a scored ritual, a love event, a political redistribution of desire.
We work together to transform the space of Milieus into a tableau vivant of ritual practices, using objects, the body and the voice. The ritual re-charge will go through different stages, but all require your full state of attention, comfortable clothing, and a powerful energetic level. Please don’t eat before coming, and bring:
-one object that will mark your ritual space, and that is connected to the positive energy, the love you want to dedicate to Milieus
-one ritual uniform that marks your role in the ritual

       

       


      04 / 06 / 2014


      ‘THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE WIFE AND THE LOVER’
      collective practice by Philippine Hoegen


      The aim of the workshop is to play a homemade card game and to ameliorate its rules collectively.
      Some cards have 2 images, some 2 words, some an image and a word. Some have an image and a blank space, some a word and a blank space, one card has 2 blank spaces.
      Players are invited to create connections (of similarity, opposition or otherwise) as the cards are laid.
      Each participant at the table has a role: The Cook, The Thief, The Wife or The Lover.

       

       


      11 / 06 / 2014


      ‘NEW CONTINENT OF THOUGHT, DO YOU READ ME?’
      collective practice by Vanja Smiljanic


      Invitation to gather the concepts/fetish objects/questions/ideas/ghosts that obsess and possess the participants. Translation and materialisation of these thoughts to build up a space for their habitat.
      The proposal is to see and experience this space as a momentary virtual temple.
      Discovering the path to ones own virtual temple, building up the temple, guiding a tour through it, then leaving it.
      The journey to/through/out of the temple is conceived as a virtual pilgrimage.
      Following the structure of the pilgrimage, the virtual temple represents a liminal phase of one own’s research, a space of transgression, a threshold between previous way of structuring and understanding everybody own’s identity, time, space or community and the new way of doing so.

       

       


      17 / 06 / 2014


      ‘BAD T.V. SEMINAR’
      collective practice by Anna Sörenson and Stef Meul


      'Head of Bad TV Department' Anna Sörenson and 'Bureau of Censorship President of Operation' Stef Meul invite participants in a Bad TV classification evening. They step by step take the participants through the ground pillars of Bad TV, and invite them to a public voting to help the Bad TV Department classify the very core of Bad TV. The Bad TV Department uses a system of indexing, classification and creation of categories. To inform and improve the system it is needed to gather the public opinion annually. The public voting is an important input to understand what Bad TV is in 2014 and to keep the research team informed in the many genres of Bad TV, the research in depth and the categories. The public voting is giving the statistic input the Department needs to continue the work and prepare for the coming year.
      The feeling of watching something you like, but voting for it’s “bad-ness” is a conflicting feeling and a confusing thought. The nature of the Bad TV-video clips is quite entertaining but the group can feel confused by the voting system.

       

       

       

      26 / 06 / 2014


      ‘SENSORY / SENSORIAL TRANSLATION’
      collective practice by Veronica Cruz


      A collective practice working with the sensorial way with which we engage with the world and create our understanding of it. Subjectively translating stimulus from sensation to information and vice-versa.
      The body is always the receptacle of the interrelationships’ alchemy from which we build the capacity for understanding and apprehending individuals, as well as emotions and sensations. The body’s ability to invoke the past to produce new actions and behaviours most often improvised (without previewed plans) comes from a ‘practical intelligence’.
      How to propose a different sensorial approach to performative experiences? Which mediums of transmission are favoured in your research project? Which sensations are the triggers of your research? What feeling/perception would provoke your research in its receptors/audience/spectators? How could you translate the emotions of cognitive statements of your research core into a physical stimulus?

       

       


      27 / 06 / 2014


      ‘TAKE A GOOD LOOK BACK’
      collective practice by Peter Stamer


      Visualize the past as present. Close your eyes, take a good look at what happened during the Milieus program so far. Re-imagine the events that left a mark in you, that were decisive for you, major ones, minor ones. Reveal your observations by revisiting the spots that appear in front of your inner eye. You do what you say. You tell what you see.

       

       

      27 / 06 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : JAN MASSCHELEIN’

      one day seminar around the work of Pr. Jan Masschelein curated by Philippine Hoegen and Gosie Vervloessem


      We propose an experimental seminar on horizontal learning environments/structures.
      Can one create a school for oneself? What is the role of the school as an institute?
      What does self-education mean? How can we think of different ways of creating school?
      How to counter the production oriented machine (knowledge production, instrumentalisation of terms like research in education, in art? What could be a de-capitalised labour? How could this affect knowledge production in an artistic research environment? How to keep the ‘school’ as a place of ‘free time’.

      In relation to current education and knowledge production, Jan Masschelein talks about consumerism (students as consumers of education, the entrepreneurial student), he is critical of the demand for everything to be made productive (productive time, time as a commodity, and also knowledge production) making the ‘school’ a place of formation, he calls this the taming of the school. He describes different learning environments such as the seminar, the workshop and the lecture hall: “In this sense, the lecture hall can be described as a heterotopia; a ‘place without place’ or ‘location’ with its own order, its own technologies, rituals, ways of speaking and discipline. According to Michel Foucault, it is a space where we are exposed, that is to say ‘drawn out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs’. It is a place where we are exposed to a thing-in-common and are engaged in public thinking.”

       

       


      30 / 06 / 2014


      ‘ARCHIVE FEVER’
      reading session by Camila Restrepo


      Camila Restrepo will guide the participant into an exhaustive reading of an iconic essay by Jacques Derrida: “Archive Fever”. Some key points and notions will be discussed in order to embrace the (complex) sense of the text.

       

       

      02 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : FEMKE SNELTING’

      one day seminar by Femke Snelting around the project ‘Fathers of the Internet’ curated by Pierre Rubio


      Throughout World War I and II, Belgium internationalist, universalist and documentalist Paul Otlet imagined The Mundaneum: a city that would bring together all knowledge of the world in one flexible relational classification system. His work was largely forgotten until recently, when Otlet resurfaced as ’a founding father of the Internet’. Simultaneously, corporate titan Google adopted the remains of his archive preserved at The Mundaneum in Mons. The museum is not only located in the home town of Belgium current prime minister Elio Di Rupo, but also conveniently close to Google’s largest European datacenter in St. Ghislain. Since then, The Mundaneum proudly advertises itself as ‘Google on paper’ and ‘The great ancestor of Google’.
      ‘Fathers of the Internet’ is an ongoing exploration of a wandering archive and the entanglements of artificial intelligence, patronage and political intrigue.

       

       


      08 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : ALMA SODERBERG & HENDRIK WILLEKENS’
      one day practice around Alma Soderberg and Hendrik Willekens’s work curated by Danny Neyman


      Alma Soderberg and Hendrik Willekens are offering one day of happy experimentation with music making. We will play with the idea of starting a band and explore what this collaborative improvisatory way of working with and around sound could mean. Playing instruments together, exploring our voices and bodies as instruments of sound, singing and otherwise. We will learn how to make beats, and how to use microphones and friendly machinery to make voice and sound into a material to be moulded, sculpted, messed around with.

       

       


      09 - 11 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : JULIEN MAIRE’
      ‘FIELD OF WORK, DEPTH OF FIELD’
      workshop by Julien Maire curated by Hans Van Wambeke and Camila Aschner Restrepo


      There are many definitions and uses for the term “fuzzy” but they all involve some reference to a state of instability. The fuzzy logic, for example, is a programming method used in artificial intelligence: the program sets doubts that are not exclusive and that are constantly negotiable. While the Boolean logic is limited to the use of disjunctions, conjunctions and negations, the fuzzy logic reaches a state of sharpness gradually, but the focus is made with hesitation and by approximation.
      By analyzing the various definitions of what could be “the fuzzy,” the workshop will question the positioning of the actor, the performer and the spectator inside the “depth of field.” The purpose is to experiment with fuzzyness and sharpness under various angles: working in a space with a fixed lens, with a single point of focus; moving through a space with a variable focus (autofocus); reducing the depth of field (macro, micro photography); and overall to devise alternative principles for “focus control,” the intermediate stages that precede a sound, a gesture, a concept or an image.

       

       


      14 / 07 / 2014


      ‘SPEAKING BODIES’
      collective practice by Danny Neyman


      A collective practice about our bodies and our relation to our bodies through language.
      I want to gather together around the "poor material" of our own bodies, selves, memories, speaking mouths, and guide a series of exercises which will generate a verbalization of body-selves, exploring our bodies in fragments, looking at how our bodies are charged with meaning, stories, experience, memory, signification, seeing what can and can't be said about bodies, where words cling onto a body and how and when do they slip off.

       

       


      15-16 / 07 / 2014


      ‘MAKING HI-S-TORIES’
      collective practice by Samah HIjawi and Sara Santos


      The workshop will weave together several ideas around contesting historical narratives, and the power of images, their fetishization, and their potential of/for resistance through methodologies of collage and montage.
      In two separate groups, using texts, images, photographs and video each group will work for a couple of hours in creating two separate narratives of this underground collective and their manifesto, a timeline mapping the trajectory of their activities, and we try to imagine the flag they might have made to represent themselves and present themselves to the world with. Using materials provided, as well as materials we bring with us from our own practice we create an historical document of this precious moment in history.
      Then, the groups switch stations. Using collage and montage sensibilities, the groups reconsider each others historiography to intercept each others narratives.

       

       

      16 / 07 / 2014


      ‘THE GROOM OF THE STOOL’
      collective practice by Gosie Vervloessem


      A diary of digested and not digested practices.
      How does your practice digested by a foreign body looks like?
      The Groom of the Stool (formally styled: “Groom of the King’s Close Stool“) was the most intimate of an English sovereigns’ courtiers. The Groom of the Stool, in the very earliest times was responsible for assisting the King in the performance of the bodily functions of excretion and ablution, whilst maintaining an aura of royal decorum over the proceedings.This physical intimacy naturally led the Groom to become a man in whom much confidence was placed by his royal master and with whom many royal secrets were shared.
      Recipe for a workshop :
      A. Warm up – playing around with maizena
      B. The recipe
      Cook your work/your practice/your life and write down the recipe and present your meal
      C. Grooming
      Sharing practices by eating and digesting, devouring and digesting each others’ dishes.
      Choose and eat the meal of somebody else – the cook assists the digestion and interviews the eater (the actual grooming) – record the interview on paper/take notes.
      D. Stool
      The eater reports on the excrement, using whatever means that seem suitable. How does your practice digested/processed by a foreign body looks like, smells like, …?

       

      18 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : LUIGI COPPOLA & CHRISTOPH MAIERHANS’
      one day practice and discussion around ‘Alternative Democracy’ by Luigi Coppola and Christophe Maierhans curated by Nicolas Galeazzi


      Whenever people come together, decisions will be taken - explicit or implicit, legal or legitimate, in conflict, consensus or as a compromise, spontaneously or according to a strict protocol. The dominant ‘democratic’ protocols of taking such communal decisions, are put in question from many sides: from Rancière’s concept of equality, to Putin’s rhetorics, threatening western libertarianism.
      However, in the age of flat hierarchies and the emphasised individualism, artistic group decision taking mechanisms are - willingly or not - strongly influenced by the biases, falls promises and suspiciousness against the democratic way of live. Many projects and methods try to avoid, alter or oppose democratic structures.
      a.pass, for example, and specifically Milieus, are in many sense rooted in practising agonistic structures of negotiation and try to find alternative ways.

       


      21-22 / 07 / 2014


      ‘TRANSNATIONAL ART COMMONS’
      collaborative workshop-project by Nicolas Galeazzi


      I would like to invite you all to a collaborative practice around the Transnational Arts Commons, which we are developing in relation with the Dampfzentrale in Bern.
      The aim of the project is, to temporarily run the Dampfzentrale during the Bern Biennale as a Commons, and to use this opportunity as a case study in order to develop a sustainable artistic economies based on the idea of the commons.
      In order to create a legal and recognised status for this commons, we aim to found a european co-operative, which will run its business as a commons. The exact model for this co-op is still very controversial and has to developed through many stages and with the input and interest of many people. You are kindly invited to take part in this procedure.
      Beside this gathering, we are organising a “State of the Arts” meeting. The focus of this meeting is to bring different interests and ideas in relation to each other. We invite some people engaging in alternative currencies, some active in the basic income debate, and others interested in a european network of alliances between the arts and other fields. All these approaches have their problematic points and have things in common.

       

       

      23 / 07 / 2014


      ‘MONOPOLY OF I’s / MONOPOLY OF ID's’
      collective practice by Silvia Pereira / Omniadversus


      It is a Monopoly game, with us as participants.
      We will be the piétons (pedestrians), playing at being and buying artistic identities. Identities that we will create ourselves for ourselves to the purpose of the game. The way the game will be organized will lead the group to movement very similar to the one in dynamics of creating identities as by-products of the subjecthood in relation to the conditionings of the industries of the arts.
      During the game the subject as an art piece will pass through several passes in a spiral of ascension which represents the glorification of the subject as an attributed value constructed in a narrative, a chronology and history.
      While playing we will experience through the practice the process of subjectivation of identity while enquiring about it accordingly to the positions/roles being played in the game, subject/object/art collector.

       


      24-25 / 07 / 2014


      ‘GUEST HOUSE SERIES : MICHAEL KLIEN’
      two days of practice and discussion around the project ‘Parliament’ by Michael Klien curated by Damla Ekin Tokel and Stef Meul


      Michael Klien proposes a 'closed' Parliament for participants. 4 hours long to experience the setup. After that we can discuss how to take this into the city. All day is spent tuning perception to the underlying dynamics of the individual and collective mind, sensing, and interacting with nature’s self-organising dynamics. These choreographies are rehearsals of utopia, nevertheless real social relations. Rather than just commenting on it or deconstructing it, but using that aspect that those are rehearsals for our emerging social relations.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • NOT_index
    • Scores
    • "general intellect ? - it's not about you, stupid !" 03 March 2014
      posted by: Guido Lucassen
    • Pierre Rubio / Elke van campenhout
    • 03 March 2014
    • 07 March 2014
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ‘General Intellect? - it's not about you, stupid !’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the apass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective. What is this relation, how does it function? Is it the individual that creates the collective? Or is the collective the base structure on which individuals can work and organize themselves? Specifically within an artistic research environment where the institution is constantly reformulating itself out of a multitude of individual inputs and where the individuals, in a state of crisis, are constantly self-constructing, confronted and challenged by a collective project.

      Can there be a mutual constitutive relation? A relational machine we can call ‘General Intellect’ or ‘Transindividual Space’ operating between and through the individuals, creating an 'ensemble' through their practice?

      From reading sessions to diverse practice formats, we will come up possibly with refreshed perspectives on what collective working and thinking can do.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Scores
    • 2014 BLOCK I 01 January 2014
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2014
    • 31 March 2014
    • 2014 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Carolina Goradesky
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Gosie Vervloessem
      Hans Van Wambeke
      Julia Clever
      Philippine Charlotte Hoegen
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Samah Hijawi
      Sara Santos
      Silvia Ramos Pereira

       


      Research End Presentations

      Chris Dupuis
      Karl Philips

       


      Research Centre Researchers

      Cecilia Molano
      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Partners

      Les Bains
      PAF Performance Arts Forum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Elke van Campenhout
      Lilia Mestre
      Lisa Nelson
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Pierre Rubio
      Veridiana Zurita

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Kristien Van den Brande
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      ‘SCORES’
      curated by Lilia Mestre (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

       


      13-17 / 01 / 2014


      ‘SCORES GENERATOR’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre


      In this workshop, I’ll introduce a writing score, which was tested already in the research residency Thematics: Author/Authority that I curated in Les Bains last year. This score is based on question&answer dialogues between the participants and will be continued in a regular basis, after this one week workshop, in open weekly meetings during the block. With this writing score, we’ll produce a documentation booklet at the end of the block. As an example, you can find here the booklet that was made for Author / Authority.
      The aim is to discuss and write as a regular practice and to use encounter, dialogue, each others knowledge in the elaboration of the discourse about one’s own researches.
      I will introduce two performance scores I worked with: one on sounding objects /affective spaces from performance ‘ Moving You’; and another: from gesture to utterance to language that comes from my latest performance with Marcos Simões: ‘Ai! a choreographic project’.

       

       


      27 / 01 - 07 / 02 / 2014


      ‘LABORATORY: TUNING SCORES’
      (composition, communication, and the sense of imagination)
      workshop by Lisa Nelson


      The Tuning Score -a performance research format- asks what do we see when we're looking at dance. How does composition arise in the body and its environment? The research focuses on the physical base of the imagination. By altering the way we use our senses while moving and watching movement, we can begin to tease apart the genetic and acquired patterns our senses use to construct our experience. We will look at ways these patterns influence how and why we move, shape our interaction with our inner and outer environments, and inform both our desire for action and what we "see" when we are attending to anything.
      Two aspects of practice are described by the name Tuning Scores: a solo warm up, and interpersonal composition games. The solo practices are a kind of pre-technique––a physical-attentional warm up to one's inner composition, and provide an inner score for the ensemble games. Focusing on vision, touch, and hearing, the scores provoke spontaneous compositions that make evident our opinions about who/where we are, how each of us senses and makes sense of movement, initiating a dialogue between inner and outer organization, about space, time, movement, and the desire to compose (a satisfying) experience.
      The Tuning Score is an improvisational composition practice that is a performance in itself. It offers tools and a framework for communication and model of collaboration that is constructed by the players in the act of doing. As a practice of real-time editing and instant replay, Tuning is an aesthetic game and a self-balancing system that uncovers its intention each time anew.

       

       

       

      17 - 21 / 02 / 2014


      ‘ARTISTIC RESEARCH’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi, Lilia Mestre, Veridiana Zurita, Elke van Campenhout


      It comes in waves, sometimes it’s a fever, sometimes a dispute and sometimes energy boost: the discussion around artistic research is a core issue at a.pass. Its notions go in various directions, follow diverse protocols and curl around manifold practices. In order to keep this controversy discussion alive we would like to design a workshop with four different approaches and definitions of artistic research provided by four people in the a.pass surrounding : Elke Van Campenhout, Veridiana Zurita, Lilia Mestre and Nicolas Galeazzi. Following a score, all four try to communicate their thought lines of artistic research practices. The score not only asks for their proper view, but also for supportive foreign material and for its antonyms.

       

       


      3 - 7 / 03 / 2014


      ‘GENERAL INTELLECT ?’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Elke van Campenhout


      ‘General Intellect?’ will explore and question a basic parameter of the a.pass environment : the relation between the individual and the collective. What is this relation, how does it function? Is it the individual that creates the collective? Or is the collective the base structure on which individuals can work and organize themselves? Specifically within an artistic research environment where the institution is constantly reformulating itself out of a multitude of individual inputs and where the individuals, in a state of ‘crisis’, are constantly self-constructing, confronted and challenged by a collective project.
      Can there be a mutual constitutive relation? A relational machine we can call ‘General Intellect’ or ‘Transindividual Space’ operating between and through the individuals, creating an 'ensemble' through their practice?
      From reading sessions to diverse practice formats, we will come up with refreshed perspectives on what collective working and thinking can do.

       

       


      10 - 14 / 03 / 2014


      ‘NOTATIONS BETWEEN THOUGHT AND MATTER”
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer


      Scores are translations. They transform one thought into another. They are also invitations to understand and interpret one reality through another. In a five day workshop led by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer, we will collaboratively explore the complex relationship between drawing, writing and movement.
      What is exactly happening when a thought and/or movement becomes a score? What
      kind of translation process is taking place between thought and matter? And again what is happening when a notation is being read, interpreted and performed by others? What kind of movements, transcriptions and acts of inscribing take place when we project a cartography of the body? What kind of tool set can we develop to map this intertextual language? What else can become a score?
      Within the workshop, drawing scores is to be extended along the categories of time, space and movement. So to speak a line of thought becomes a line on the paper, can turn into a line in space, a line verbalized, a line drawn with the whole body.
      The workshop will interrogate these interstitial processes, practices and knowledges produced by scores, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • Settlements
    • 2013 BLOCK III 01 September 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2013
    • 30 November 2013
    • 2013 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Anna Sörenson,
      Camila Aschner Restrepo
      Carolina Goradeszky
      Chris Dupuis
      Damla Ekin Tokel
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Julia Clever
      Karl Philips
      Maité Liébana Vena
      Maja Hammaren
      Rareş Crăiuţ
      Stef Meul
      Victoria Myronyuk


      Research End Presentations

      Helena Dietrich
      Luanda Casella
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais

       

      Research Centre Researchers

      Lucia Rainer
      Mala Kline

       

      Partners

      Uferstudios (Berlin)
      PAF Performance Arts Forum
      Bâtard festival
      RITS
      P.A.R.T.S.


      Contributors for workshops

      Claudia Bosse
      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Geert Opsomer
      Lilia Mestre
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

      ‘SETTLEMENTS’
      curated by Vladimir Miller (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

       

      09 - 13 / 09 / 2013


      ‘(PRE)CONDITIONS OF ACTS’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Claudia Bosse in the form of a city space action laboratory

      The main focus is to analyse and understand the contextual and spatial dependency of space and of each artistic practice, to invent translations, spatialisations and sharable constellations for each one’s specific research. What is given in a space, and how this information is manifested. What is inscribed in a space as its function, economy of transfer, context of its users, politics of its realisations and time?
      Scenarios of the personal research will be developed, used, transferred, implanted and tested in different spatial conditions of urban zones and zones of social contracts. This means, that we will try to put the consistency of our different research approaches in dialogue with urban and social spheres. How will they be infected, destabilised or clarified?
      The communication and observation will have to focus on following two aspects of scenography: the organization of space as a basic condition of artistic production and the (re)presentation of space in dialogue with the different understandings of the surrounding contexts. No space is inculpable, but at the same time the concrete condition for each artistic formulation and appearance .
      By interacting and criticising via concrete propositions, we try to create a practice that reacts on the proposed practice of the other workshop participants and the city and its users and inscribed different contexts. Everyone is writing a journal of documentation which will be publish on a blog with reflections about the space, the propositions and the influence towards your own research.

       

       

      16 - 20 / 09 / 2013


      ‘FEEDBACK’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Elke van Campenhout


      In this second feedback workshop, we take the end presentations of the previous week as a starting point. On the basis of what the participants that finished their trajectory showed to the public, and on the basis of what they choose to share on the level of their research methodologies to the group, we confront the relation between research and its relation to an ‘outside’ (the public, the research fellows, the internet, …). Since in a.pass we use feedback as a basic tool for the construction of a common ground, and of a collaborative working environment, we try to develop different methodologies to construct a critical culture of mutual support. But: since a good feedback needs a precise point of entry, a clear presentation, or a generous invitation, the feedback workshop works at the same time also on the requirements of a research presentation, and the different attitudes of feedbacking this makes possible.

       


      30 / 09 - 20 / 10 / 2013


      “SETTLEMENT’
      workspace proposed by Vladimir Miller


      In the last years a.pass already organized seven Settlements in the program. Some were organized in our studio, some on location. Vladimir Miller proposed the Settlement as an open and collaborative research space that takes on different forms in different locations. This time he invites us for a slightly transformed Settlement at the Uferstudios in Berlin.
      A Settlement is a workspace that explores the relations between space, (artistic) practice, and the politics of the commons.
      The basic practice of this collective set-up is to occupy together one large space and build everything required in that space from a common stock of materials to enable the individual practices. Next to providing the practitioner with the possibility to re-negotiate the spatial manifestations of his or her individual practice over the three weeks, the Settlement explores the potential of unstable architectures, the emergence and disappearance of property and territory in collective practice, and the agency of objects in establishing communal structure.
      Following the idea that the material choices determine the set of possibilities of any given practice, for this episode we would like to work with materials that are not chosen by us or Vladimir but are randomly gathered from already existing workspaces in Berlin. This choice is also informed by a raised awareness towards questions of sustainability within research environments. The material will thus be largely provided by artist and architects studio’s that will contribute objects and left-overs of previous practices, which will be used as a starting point of a material collection for this project.

       


      11 - 23 / 11 / 2013 & 02 - 07 / 12 / 2013


      ‘CONCERNS IN MOTION’
      laboratory, workshop and performative conference
      in collaboration with Bâtard festival, RITS, and P.A.R.T.S.


      This year the Bâtard festival was calling for projects reacting to the evidently generic question “What are your concerns?”. All addressed concerns - of selected and non selected propositions - were mapped out and shall be the starting point for setting up a performative congress related to the festival concerning the activation of concerns. The question of “what to do?” - if you are clear about your concerns - not only triggers the classical grassroot-questions concerning our capacity of inducing change, but is also confronting us with a lot of political, ethical and aesthetic paradoxes of political and artistic activism.
      The strategies we have at hand or in mind are often very controversial, just because of the always inherent potential of being recuperated by the opposed issues and powers. We see it as an artistic duty to constantly re-discuss and re-negotiate the relations of politics, art and activism, the relation of the artistic sphere and the surrounding society, and we have to search for consequent and radical solutions for approaching our concerns.
      The Bâtard festival invited the three educational institutions: a.pass, P.A.R.T.S., and RITS to be engaged in the setup of this congress and we react to this invitation by inviting our students and/or participants to collectively develop material in a two week long workshop and to perform the congress together.
      The whole congress should be built on our reactions to the Map of Concerns and the proposed strategies of activism of the guests invited to the workshop.

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.pass Basics workshops
    • block 2013/II
    • NOT_index
    • HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS? 24 June 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • PIERRE RUBIO / PETER STAMER
    • 24 June 2013
    • 28 June 2013
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?

       

      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. ‘How about Critique, Criticality, Crisis?’ ties in on a field already explored by ‘Feedback and Critique’ in July 2012. Whereas the previous workshop focused on several feedback techniques to clarify the nature(s) and function(s) of feedback within a collaborative and self-organized artistic research environment, this one will focus on the challenging issue of ‘critique’.

      What does critique aim at, and how does it epistemologically operate? How can we deal with its problematic relation to judgment and truth? What’s the relevance of critique within a system of criticality to overcome the vicious circle of belief and denunciation? What’s the role of discourse and theory in one’s research and practice in order to go beyond backing up one’s work but rather challenging it, eroding it, posing problems to it? Is discourse solving the crisis of practice or should it rather impose a crisis on practice?

      From critical readings of several texts on critique and criticality to film and performance analysis, from case studies to role-playing, we will come up with refreshed definitions of critique and renewed objectives of uncompromising aesthetic.

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • 2013 BLOCK II 01 May 2013
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2013
    • 31 July 2013
    • 2013 BLOCK II

       

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Daniel Kok
      Gabriela Karolczak
      Helena Dietrich
      Luanda Casella
      Lucia Rainer
      Maité Liébana Vena
      Maja Hammaren
      Mala Kline
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais
      Victoria Myronyuk


      Research End Presentations

      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Ive J.K. Leemans
      Jaime Llopis

       

      Partners

      PAF Performing Arts Forum


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Anette Baldauf
      Anna Rispoli
      Chantal Mouffe
      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Nikolaus Gansterer
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio
      Various Artists


      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Nicolas Galeazzi

       

      Mentors

      Claudia Bosse
      Geert Opsomer
      Peter Stamer
      Robert Stijn

       

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout (Research Coordinator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)

       

      20 - 24 / 05 / 2013


      ‘PERFORMING RESISTANCE IN POLITICS’
      workshop around/with Chantal Mouffe by Anette Baldauf and Elke van Campenhout


      This Workshop looks into Chantal Mouffe's ideas on the political concepts of hegemony and antagonism as well as their relationship to the arts. Anette Baldauf and Elke van Campenhout will put Mouffe's political theory under the microscope, by reading an anthology of her texts and discussing their relevancy for artistic research practices today. Finally, on the last day, Chantal Mouffe will offer her input, discuss with us the central trajectories of her work and elaborate on her special interest in the arts.
      day 1. Introduction on Post-Marxism
      day 2: Politics Today
      day 3: Politics and Public Space
      day 4: Art
      day 5: discussion with Chantal Mouffe

       


      27 - 31 / 05 / 2013


      ‘THE END OF PERSONALITY’
      workshop by \/arious Artists


      ‘The end of personality’ is a series of actions, interventions and artistic research methods developed and guided by Various Artists. During five days, a program will be presented to the participants that deals with themes like authorship, default identity, straitjacket-creation.
      Different Various Artists will guide the participants through research and interactive activities on several locations. The workshop is site-specific, the local context, and a few restrictions will be defining the content.
      Various Artists is a collective of 24 'imaginary' artists who for the last four years opened themselves up to be embodied by different physical persons. The artistic content that each artist creates belongs to the Various Artist, but the physical work can differ from owner. The complex and fragmented nature of Various Artists’ work deals with identity, artistic practice, and Gesamtkunst.
      The workshop aims to question in different ways artistic identity.
      Working methods, group sessions, and co-artistic concepts are examples of activities where personality, identity, and methodology will be tackled.

       


      03 - 07 / 06 / 2013


      ‘BETWEEN TOOL AND MATTER - THE ART OF INTERVIEW’
      workshop by Anna Rispoli and Adva Zakai


      The practice of interview is living a golden age in visual arts and live art contexts. Often a series of interviews supports the creation of video-documentaries as a research tool, frame site-specific performances, or create the first bonding for community-based projects. At the same time it is not rare to experience works of art that take interviews as their conceptual object of artistic reflection. The difference between those two approaches often appears blurry. More so, it produces challenging ethical and aesthetic questions concerning the power relation between the interviewer as an author and the interviewee as an authority - or inverse.
      Methodologies and perspectives from various fields will be reflected upon in relation to each other during the workshop: Artists who make use of the interview in their artistic trajectory will discuss their works with each other and the participants. Sociologists and phd researchers will introduce interview protocols and share their exploration of ethical implications linked to the relationship interviewee/interviewer. Specifically, we will exercise sensitive listening, watch and analyze case studies of interviews, and focus on the creation of subjective tales within the urban experience. Along the workshop days, participants will share and feedback the content produced during the workshop from the perspective of their own practice.

       


      10 - 14 / 06 / 2013


      ‘CHINESE WHISPERS & ORIGINAL COPIES’
      workshop by Nikolaus Gansterer


      Nikolaus Gansterer works on a series of projects studying strategies of translation and forms of reproduction and appropriation. Here his attention is directed towards differences, misinterpretations and errors committed in the process of communication circles. What happens when an image, an object or movement is read, used, interpreted, understood without knowing its initial personal and/or cultural context? By regarding these gaps with their potential shifts of meaning as a vital source of artistic inspiration, Nikolaus proposes for the workshop setting up several circuits of interpretations exploring multiple and shared authorships to reflect on diverse cultural practices, identities and authenticities.

       


      24-28 / 06 / 2013


      ‘HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Pierre Rubio and Peter Stamer


      Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. ‘How about Critique, Criticality, Crisis?’ ties in on a field already explored by ‘Feedback and Critique’ in July 2012. Whereas the previous workshop focused on several feedback techniques to clarify the nature(s) and function(s) of feedback within a collaborative and self-organized artistic research environment, this one will focus on the challenging issue of ‘critique’. What does critique aim at, and how does it epistemologically operate? How can we deal with its problematic relation to judgment and truth? What’s the relevance of critique within a system of criticality to overcome the vicious circle of belief and denunciation? What’s the role of discourse and theory in one’s research and practice in order to go beyond backing up one’s work but rather challenging it, eroding it, posing problems to it? Is discourse solving the crisis of practice or should it rather impose a crisis on practice?
      From critical readings of several texts on critique and criticality to film and performance analysis, from case studies to role-playing, we will come up with refreshed definitions of critique and renewed objectives of uncompromising aesthetic.

       


      15-19 / 07 / 2013


      ‘SCENOGRAPHIC FUNDAMENT’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Elke van Campenhout


      Let's stress the 's' in a.pass and study its 'scenography' aspects. In this B-workshop we want to discover the base of what scenography stands for in our acronym. This will not be a work to understand scenography in general, rather, we want to detect, where each of us sets her/his focus in the artistically formed relationship between performance and space.
      Starting point for this enquiry will be 'the public' - the public, for which a spatial condition is provided - incidentally, accidentally, explicitly or as an emerging construct. The public is taken here as sphere, where the social body meets it's self-created structures. In this sense a scenography is a form of an organization of the performance of this social body - an aesthetic organization, which unavoidably presents and reveals it's own politics.
      Whether the scenography happens in the inside space of a theatre or a gallery, a flat, a foyer, or a dance floor, or if it happens in the outside space of a park, a parliament or the pavement, the crucial question is, to whom does this 'scenario' communicates itself and who is designing it for what? Then, what is the difference between a performative space and a scenography? Where do we break the fine line between them? And how to dance on it, without falling into the featureless?

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • block 2013/I
    • NOT_index
    • The Adoption Project
    • The Adoption Project 16 March 2013
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Peter Stamer / Nicolas Galeazzi
    • 16 March 2013
    • 20 March 2013
    • 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 adopt out parts of your research temporally to someone else?

       

      The Adoption Project takes on the bonds and habits between you and your artistic practice. It challenges the perspectives and positions you engage with in your artistic process and takes them away from your personal involvement by handing them over to a different look, practice, or routine for a certain period of time. A clear defined section of  your project shall be packed in a 'box' and given up for adoption, while you will take a section of someone else's research temporally under your 'protection'.


      In this sense the Adoption Project aims to facilitate you with tools to put your proper work in a public sphere long before it is 'completed'. We understand this process as an effective instrument of research.



       

      How does it work?


      1. 'give it away' First, you are going to enclose and extract a section from the complex of your research case. This may be a part you don't know how to deal with, a part you would like to be infected by with foreign qualities, or a section you already gave up. 
Then you condense this section to a 'package' - readable for an 'anybody' - and release it from your personal care. You put it on disposal to be adopted by someone else – maybe by means of a lottery. Everyone who is involved will give away part of his research and receive parts of others – adoption is based on mutuality.
      2. 

'care about' In the following adoption phase you will hence be in charge for a package yourself. You will feel responsible for the assignment delivered to your hands. You will have to take up a stance for it,  to care for it and to charge it with the best of your intentions and qualities. You will approach it through your own eyes and tools and, as you adopt it, you will treat it as if it would be yours and use if it was for your own purposes.


      3. 'give it back' Changed, charged and re-bundled you will give the adopted package back from the foster-artist to the mother-artist. The third phase will happen in PA-F, where you will hand it over to the mother-artist in the context of his/her research presentation.




       

      Timeframes:

      Introduction to the project during the opening week in January. First working phase during the Half-way-days, February 18th and 19th. Second phase Workshop, March 18th to 22nd. Third phase in Pa-f, March 30th to April 5th.


    • 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
    • Tender Institute
    • 2012 BLOCK III 01 September 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2012
    • 30 November 2012
    • 2012 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Chris Dupuis
      Helena Dietrich
      Karl Philips
      Lisa Charlotte Baudouin
      Luanda Casella
      Nibia Pastrana Santiago
      Raquel Santana de Morais
      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure

       


      Research End Presentations

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Elise Goldstein
      Oshin Albrecht
      Simon Loeffler
      Veridiana Zurita
      Vicente Arlandis

       

       

      Partners

      RITS
      Campo
      Les Bains / Thematics
      Playground Festival
      M-Museum

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Brandon LaBelle
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Einat Tuchman
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Geert Opsomer
      Heike Langsdorf
      Johan Dehollander
      Jovial Mbenga
      Jozef Wouters
      Lynda Gaudreau

      Lilia Mestre

      Peter Pal Pelbart
      Robert Steijn
      Stefanie Claes
      Toto Kisaku
      Vera Mantero

       

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Lynda Gaudreau
      Pierre Rubio
      Robert Steijn

       

       

       

      07 - 08 / 09 / 2012


      ‘TENDER INSTITUTE’
      international conference by a.pass


      After finishing the artistic research post-graduate program at a.pass, 8 participants open up their researches in a performative and multi-layered setting.
      Sharing their insights into questions that are on the table for contemporary artists every day: what is the notion of work? How to deal with intuition today? What is the performative power of the object? How can the city be the witness of time?
      8 cases open up as many different strategies, diverse invitations to engage and experience artistic research from 8 wholly different perspectives.
      During a residency period of 3 weeks, a space is constructed that invites you into all these different cases, constructing crossing points and welcoming the visitors into the research trajectories.
      At the same time, a.pass organizes the conference 'The Tender Institute': an active meeting around the notion of the 'institute' in artistic practices today.
      In the last ten years, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the institute once again as a point of address: a place where people share their concerns and interests, where you can find topical information and engage with it, where knowledge is archived and opened up to public interest and scrutiny. Compared to the more established Institutes these initiatives seem less concerned with classical knowledge conservation than with a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. Opening up the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic space of engaged interest.
      In these two days, a.pass invites speakers, artists, and administrators to construct new imaginations of what the institute today might look like: how to think of an institute with flexible walls, how to administer an organic institute that grows out of the interests of the people working in it? What is the place of this kind of institute in today's society? In other words: how can an institute still stay an institute when it is embracing its 'tenderness': when it recognizes its dependency on the interest of its users? The risk to become obsolete in the whirlwind of heterotopic interests? The challenge to re-invent its administration to shift from a politics of categorization to one of attention and engagement?

       

       

      Fall 2012

      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES’
      series of workshops organised by a.pass in collaboration with Bains Connective (Thematics ‘Come Together (Lilia Mestre) /Schizophrenic Bodies’), RITS, and Campo / Summer School


      Schizophrenic Bodies test the limits of the economy of our belonging and coming together. Interpreting a Schizophrenic Body as a body that simultaneously belongs to different time and space zones, different fields of experience or history, or a body in a synaesthetic space, we'll explore during two months very different schizophrenic models. Our desire is to be working with the input of the BwO of Deleuze, with Peter Pal Pelbart the 'ghostly' bodies as put into perspective in the practice of Robert Steijn, the postcolonial monsters of Vera Mantero, the ways to rethink the hybridity of our history with the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance and the 'orally disoriented body' of Brandon LaBelle. In each of the stadia we try to come to an overlapping and exchange between practice and theory, placing both participants and mentors into an unknown field of references that produce unexpected exchange and reasoning.

       

      17-21 / 09 / 2012


      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES / 1’
      Peter Pal Pelbart & Robert Steijn


      This first workshop around the theme of Schizophrenic Bodies, will explore the notion of the ‘Body without Organs’, both from a theoretical and a physical perspective. In the morning the sessions with Peter Pal Pelbart are organized around texts from his book ‘The Cartography of Exhaustion’ and in the afternoons/evenings Robert Stijn works on creating these bodies through various physical practices that question, stretch or undermine an immediate i-dentification with our body and mind. The practices induce a certain kind of alienation, working out of unmediated desires, splitting up the I into different entities, in dialogue with totem animals, ghosts, out-of-body experiences. All on an experimental scale of rediscovery.

       

       

      01 - 05 / 10 / 2012


      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES / 2’

      VERA MANTERO / The thinking body
      Vera Mantero is one of the leading Portuguese dancers and choreographers. She started in the Ballet Gulbenkian, studied contemporary dance technique and started creating her own choreographies in 1987. Since then, her work has been shown in theatres and festivals in Europe, Brazil, USA, Canada and Singapore.
      One of her shorter pieces was based on the hybrid post-colonial body of Josephine Baker, a ‘not-too-black’ American dancer making a career in colonialist France by manipulating the French stereotypes about blackness: blacks as wild animals coming straight from the jungle.
      Relaxation, the use of voice, writing, breathing and free association are some means to be used in her workshop entitled ‘The thinking body’. In this way, we will explore the movements and actions going on inside us, some of them separately first in order to incorporate them later in longer and more complex improvisational processes. The idea of getting inside a particular state of consciousness will be very important. Awareness and use of space, and the exploration of objects and materials will not be forgotten. Irony and empty hands will take us further. The workshop is not only open for trained dancers.

      PAN / The Belgo-Congolese Third Space
      (Toto Kisaku / Johan Dehollander / Jovial Mbenga / Stefanie Claes / Geert Opsomer)
      The workshop develops a research context around a contemporary Congolese performance subculture calling itself SAPE (La Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes or, in English: the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance). They consider themselves members of a sort of science and religion which “escalates into real fashion contests and potlatches in which youngsters would display their European fashion designer clothes, in an attempt to outdo each other”.
      The workshop aims at creating a temporary community of artistic nomads focusing on new ways to relate to the hybridity of our history, our imagination, our collective consciousness, our multiple media, our fashion and above all our of potential of resistance.

       


      08 - 12 / 10 / 2012


      ‘PERMEABLE CITY / 1’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Carlotta Scioldo & Bart Van den Eynde with Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman and Jozef Wouters.


      The urban context has become the working field for many artists over the last decades. This movement outside the established art spaces can be seen as means to make a direct connection with and to have a direct impact on a larger (urban) audience and/or to (re)connect with the social, economical and political realities of the city.
      What are the economies involved in this ‘fieldwork’ and what are the possibilities and difficulties of the artist’s position in this relation? How do these artistic interventions relate to the very different temporalities of the urbanist and architectural timelines involved in the continuous making of the city?
      The concrete case of Brussels and the very different practices in the city of three ex a.pass participants, Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman and Jozef Wouters, are the starting point of a first workshop where their work will be presented and contextualized. Together with the artists we will explore the neighbourhood and places they work in and the theoretical framework they have built.

       

       

      15-19 / 10 / 2012


      ‘OUT OF FRAME’
      workshop by Lynda Gaudreau


      For the next Playground Festival Lynda Gaudreau has been invited to adapt her choreographical exhibition ‘Out of Grace’ for the permanent collection of the M-Museum in Leuven. Elementary devices such as sound, lighting and the presence of the body will draw the visitor in and activate modes of display and perception, addressed here according to a performative and compositional logic. What is entailed by these modes when a collection coexist with the body, the light and the sound? André Malraux’ essay, ‘The Imaginary Museum’, (1947) will serve as a starting point to reflect on history, contemporaneity and the idea of reproduction with copies, photocopies, photos and drawings. This hybrid and experimental project, at the borders of choreography and exhibition questions the nature and relationship of these practices.

       


      25 - 29 / 10 / 2012


      ‘SCHIZOPHRENIC BODIES / 3’
      Brandon LaBelle


      The workshop will explore notions of masquerade, impersonation, clowning and multiple personalities. Through a series of exercises and experiments with voice, masks, and puppets, participants will construct their own double. The double will function as a second body, or an echo of oneself. By using various static materials, the workshop will support a "distribution of agency" away from the human subject and toward an interaction with static materials, audio recordings, and space. How might objects and things come to life, as animate forms? And what consequences might this have for methods of performance and choreography?

       

       

      12-16 / 11 / 2012


      “PERFORMANCE / PERFORMATIVITY’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      In this workshop we attack texts and practices that deal with the notion of performance and performativity. We dive into the historical context of the birth of performance as an emancipatory and authenticating gesture, put critical questions towards its aura of ‘authenticity’ and ‘unrepeatability’ (Peggy Phelan), its documentary status, etc... We also go into the philosophical meaning of ‘performativity’ as developed by Austin and Butler. And take in some of the technological and economic uses of the word ‘performance’ to see if this can enlighten a contemporary notion of ‘performance’ today: how this could reflect a changed reality, and societal organization. Is there anything to be emancipated from? And are performative strategies the tools we need to wriggle ourselves out of the restrictions and limitations of an artistic, economic, and institutional field?

       


      19 - 24 / 11 / 2012


      ‘PERMEABLE CITY / 2’
      workshop and conference by Carlotta Scioldo & Bart Van den Eynde with Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman, Jozef Wouters & guests


      Second practical part of the workshop ‘Permeable City’ on artistic interventions in the urban context where the participants of the workshop are invited to explore their own artistic practice in relation to the city and the working spaces created by Heike Langsdorf, Einat Tuchman & Jozef Wouters.
      This second workshop week will be rounded up in a conference, a public presentation and discussion forum, with participants and guests where the two weeks experience of ‘The Permeable City’ will be shared with a larger audience.

    • The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, but the outbreak of a constant crisis inherent to the system. Exploitation of the society and the environment through a reliance on constant growth, the possibility of infinite creation of money for some through the creation of debt for the majority, and the binding of most life-procedures to procedures of money are creating a precarious and dangerous economic climate.

      Starting a glossary on Economics

      Working on THE SQUARE : a delimited area in the workshop space, where we can experiment and model thoughts around interactions related with art and economy.
      It is supervised by a camera which films the situation from above. It looks like a surveillance system ;) but it is not only that.

      Jorgos Papadopoulos, Greek Economist, is intervening to clarify notions and concepts.
      We spent time defining what means UTILITY and the notion of enjoyment linked to it.
      The notion of Apparatus was introduced through a text by Lepecki.

      We also mentioned different existing types of economies :
      general economy
      gift economy
      economy of the body
      blood economy
      etc.
      and how they work respectively.

      In the arts field, can we talk about a gift economy?

    • Some workshopping in economics for artists is due!
      At latest since 2008 it became clear, that the economic system we are living in and with is wacky, unjust and not sustainable. Many of its instruments are either exaggerated or exhausted. The bubbles it produces in different markets are getting out of control and deregulated fiscal constructions are dramatically failing.

      Yet, business is going as usual - but besides that many crucial social pillars are being washed away. The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, but it is also the outbreak of the constant crisis inherent to the system. Since many years a precarious and dangerous economic climate has been created through the exploitation of the society and the environment in the belief in constant growth and a policy relying on the infinite creation of money for some through the creation of infinite debt for the majority.

      The current cuts of public funding and the absence of interesting jobs are just some visible signs of the consequences of governmental reaction towards the 2008 crisis. Arts all over Europe are now more concretely targeted for cuts than ever in the last 40 years.

      In this climate artist are forced to rethink our relationship to the economics - a situation to be cached!
      We have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system, and rethink our relation to the protection through governmental funding. This can not be done by making art in a more 'economic' way.

      This workshop rather launches a discussion about the repositioning of the economic field towards the arts.
      We have to occupy and appropriate the "economics" and its terminology and fill it with new practices and new meaning. We have to occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a wider spectrum of life than just financial success.  

      For that we have to ask, what do we expect from future live? What is it what we really are 'dealing', 'trading' with? What is our currency? What is/was our real contribution to the crisis and how do we fictionalise the changes to come? What kind of traps are we constantly taping as artists? What kind of an economy could we establish out of an artistic (researching) practice which will make a real difference?

      Thinking over economy! Rethinking economy, or thinking economy is over!

      These questions can be attacked by analysing the different notions of 'performance' in the economy and in the arts. 
      The understanding of "performance" differs in general in their aims, aesthetics and actions in both fields. Performance on stage has to do with appearance, or transformation, performance on 'stock' with accomplishment, growth and power (thrust).  
      A mixup of this different understandings happens in a very complex way when it comes to the commodification and dissemination of knowledge - and even more when this happens through artistic practices. 

      We would like to propose a two-week workshop in two parts. The first week should concentrate on performing the reality of the economic crisis and the crisis of art-making in relation to financial policies. By inviting theorist and artist Georgios Papadopoulos, ("Notes towards a Critique of Money") we would undertake an extended analyse of the relation between art and currency. What is our currency? What is the premise behind this currency? But also what are we actually dealing with by dealing with currencies? 

      While in the second week we would like to go more into alternative economic systems. For that, we will collaborate with the behavioural economist Marieke Huysentruyt and will appropriate and translate economic ideas such as the 'Gemeinwohlökonomie' and Parecon. How are alternatives possible? How can art-making develop economic alternatives? How can the economy of art-making be reclaimed and recoined with other meanings and values?

      The workshops are based on a similar lab structure. In order to compare and relate the differing understandings of 'performance' in a practical a discursive way, we will set up a lab where artistic performances and economic performances should coexist, contradict and corrupt each other.

      The lab is a simple square furnished with some material and positions for artistic and economic activities. It will be constantly filmed form the sealing above. This should allow to understand the procedures on the square as scores or choreographies - the choreographies of relinking and rethinking art and economy. In other words - the workshop is a lab for the performance of the reality of art-making. 

       
    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2012 BLOCK II 01 May 2012
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2012
    • 31 July 2012
    • 2012 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Elise Goldstein
      Elizabeth Ward
      Fleur Ordoukhani
      Helena Dietrich
      Ive Leemans
      Jaime Llopis
      Luanda Casella
      Lucie Eidenbenz
      Oshin Albrecht
      Simon Loeffler
      Veridiana Zurita

       

      Partners

      PAF Performance Art Forum
      Nadine
      De Singel

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Anja Steglich
      Ant Hampton
      Caroline Daish
      Elizabeth Ward
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Paz Rojo
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Ana Hoffner
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Peter Stamer
      Pierre Rubio

       

       

       

       

       

      07 - 11 / 05 & 14 - 18 / 05 / 2012


      ‘HIGHER PERFORMANCE’
      workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi & Elizabeth Ward


      The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, it is the outbreak of the constant crisis inherent to the system. Since many years a precarious and dangerous economic climate has been created through the exploitation of the society and the environment in the believe in constant growth and a policy relying on the infinite creation of money for some through the creation of infinite debt for the majority.
      The current cuts of public funding and the absence of interesting jobs are just some visible signs of the consequences of governmental reaction towards the 2008 crisis. Arts all over Europe are now more concretely targeted for cuts then ever in the last 40 years.
      In this climate, artists are forced to rethink their relationship to economics. We have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system, and rethink our relation to the protection through governmental funding. This can not be done by making art in a more 'economic' way.
      This workshop rather launches a discussion about the repositioning of the economic field towards the arts by “occupying” and appropriating the "economics" and its terminology and fill it with new practices and new meaning. We will occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a wider spectrum of life than just a financial success. For that we have to ask, what do we expect from future life? What is it what we really are 'dealing', 'trading' with? What is our currency? What kind of an economy could we establish out of an artistic (researching) practice which will make a real difference?
      In order to compare and relate the differing understandings of 'performance' in a practical and discursive way, we will setup a lab where artistic performances and economic performances should coexist, contradict and corrupt each other.

       


      21-25 / 05 / 2012


      ‘SEEING SOUND’
      two workshops by Julie Pfleiderer and Ant Hampton


      ‘Soundwalk’
      German director Julie Pfleiderer and performance artist Caroline Daish have invited guest artists, including David Helbich, Joanna Baillie & Paul Craenen for the May Soundlab "Seeing Sound". The idea is to create 10 days around Sound and Performance in the context of Soundwalks and inviting an expansive interpretation of the form 'Soundwalk'.
      ‘Fantasy Intervention’
      "Fantasy Intervention" is a workshop by Ant Hampton on imagination and writing for site-specific theatre and live urban interventions. With a focus on observation imagination and writing and involving walks in the city, discussion, film and photography the workshop culminates with a series of presentations.

       


      28 / 05 - 01 / 06 / 2012


      ‘COLLABORATION AND COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH’
      a.pass Basics workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      Every block, a.pass organizes some ‘B-workshops’: workshops that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. Every B-workshop is accompanied by a reader of texts and information that will be the starting point for discussion and a platform for (re)-thinking the a.pass working environment. In the upcoming blocks we will gather around topics like ‘collaboration’, ‘self-organization’, ‘tools, cases and other methodologies for artistic research’, ‘feedback and critique’, ‘collaborative work spaces’, ‘transdisciplinary research practices’, ‘What is political about research?’, ‘Who’s afraid of the Institute?’, etc...
      This first B-workshop on ‘collaboration and collaborative learning’ opens up the field of collaborative practices as ‘open collectives’, as it grew in the artistic practices of the last 10-15 years. We try to get a grip on the social, political, economic and aesthetic context that has produced this proclivity for communal working, and look at some interesting examples of collaborative research projects.

       

       

      25 - 29 / 06 / 2012


      “WHATEVER MOVING LIKE THIS”
      workshop by Paz Rojo


      How could we experience the question "what, why, who, where, what for, how we live the tension between individuation and the necessity of collectivity?” What are the conditions that make WE a problem to sustain rather than a problem to solve? How can we address such a question assuming that the sites where the sensible, the corporeal and unspeakable are the battlefield where to challenge our existence? How could we do so without addressing pre-existent models and protocols? Could we experience (the) body as the very battlefield where the "somatic" prime on the "cognitive" where "creation" prime on the "creative" where “tacit experience” primes over “negotiation and responsibility” and where softness, empathy and dispersion prime over self-representation, self-management and self-control? What does being “democratically in contact means today" as a performative and experienciable gesture?
      This workshop takes place within the framework "C O R E O G R A F X S", an investigation that departs from a series of choreographic cultures that emerged over the 70´s in NY, which sought to incorporate the collective daily life through the body. From this context "C O R E O G R A F X S” studies some of the concepts that defined these cultures and, in turn, questions what they mean in the current market democracies and in relation to the triangle brand-body-work.

       


      02 - 06 / 07 / 2012


      ‘FEEDBACK AND CRITIQUE‘
      a.pass Basics workshop by Vladimir Miller & Elke Van Campenhout


      We want to address the topic of feedback. Since a.pass is a shared environment, we depend a lot on each other as sparring partners in our researches. Often the work is presented within a group and the quality of the feedback is lacking in precision, understanding or communicative strength. What is important in giving or receiving feedback is that both positions are clarified: what position do I speak out of? what kind of feedback would be useful for my research?
      In this workshop we try to construct very diverse feedback techniques: spoken critique, non-negotiated critique, direct feedback, indirect feedback, written, walking, one-on-one or transformative feedback.
      We refer also back to some basic texts on art critique and feedback systems.

       

       

      13 - 22 / 07 / 2012


      ‘THE WALK’
      workshop on location by dr. Anja Steglich & Elke Van Campenhout


      The Walk is a ten day workshop on location, focussing on two main questions:
      How to turn walking into a qualitative tool for artistic research? and How to create a shared landscape through the individual investigation of connecting territories?
      During the Walk we will address these questions out of the proposals of the individual researchers, that will investigate a limited domain and devise a walk that can later be picked by others. Important in this construction is the decisions made on the level of parameters: what do I consider (out of my research) to be important ‘markers’ of the walking experience: fe. sound, shapes, roads, attitude of walking, … Throughout the ten days we try to come back to the PAF ‘headquarters’ with enough information to turn our proposals and experiences into a shared map of the environment, and add the instructions, tasks and guidelines into a useable walking guide for others.
      What is important here that these guidelines are both addressing the walk as a method for artistic research and the walk as an investigative tool to discover the landscape as a ‘narrative’.
      The main guest on this journey is dr. Anja Steglich, who is currently working on two linked themes: the `telling landscapes´ and the ‘landscape choreography’.

    • 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
    • 2012 BLOCK I

       

       

      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.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • NOT_index
    • ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #2 Magical Materialism
      10 October 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Pierre Rubio
    • 10 October 2011
    • 23 October 2011
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #2

       

       

      Let’s sit in a circle to talk about magic.

      And then, let’s practice alchemy…

      This workshop is the continuation of a series. A “first episode” happened during last spring, a new one happens this fall. They both seek to detach our research projects from an essentialist and naturalistic approach. Their common aim is at (re)problematising for (re)capturing the strategies of construction and thus the theories of knowledge which our singular researches investigate and produce. If the Spring workshop’s keyword was ‘attachments’, the second step will be entirely contaminated by the notion of ‘magic’. We will take a trip into the wonderland of in-differentiation between cultural and natural, object and subject, figure and background, and more important, theory and practice.

      At first, during three days, we will re-consider our research projects under the influence of two singular analysis of magic : respectively Gilbert Simondon’s and Isabelle Stengers’.

      Far from considering magic as an obsolete historical object, Simondon’s notion of the magical is that of a world structured by a network of privileged places and privileged moments. Let’s compare this magical structure of the world to our projects, as if they were worlds in themselves.

      With the help of Stengers, our ‘favourite witch’, we will track the evil spells of capitalism as well as “the thoughtlessness encouraged by the theme of progress” and any kind of prescriptive power discourses. Logically we will then question the potential of politics’ re-invention through our artistic researches, the level of “empowerment” they produce and the possibility of “reclaim” they generate.

      During a second period of an entire week, we will turn a former shop (turned recently into an art gallery) into an alchemy laboratory to transmute our projects into something other. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by moving it into unexpected contexts, this allows the discovery of ‘attachments’ and “othernesses” to enrich the ‘original’ project. Taking seriously what practice means and is capable of, let’s engage in a risky path from familiar individuals to unfamiliar singularities, from experiments to experiences, from “matter of facts to matter of concerns”.

      The magical world is not a fascinating ethnographic object but “a mode of existence” to which individuals, as well as collectives, (and also artistic research projects...) can come back, if they endure the ordeal of disindividuation. “Disindividuation is a lack in structure” that happens when organisations that make us see, think and act break up, making us paradoxically available to invent other ways of seeing, thinking and acting. Welcome to the post-rational shamanistic academia!

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2011 BLOCK III 01 September 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2011
    • 30 November 2011
    • 2011 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Caroline Daish
      Catherine (Clé) Lé
      Doris Stelzer
      Elise Goldstein
      Leonie Kuipers
      Margareth Kaserer
      Marilyne Grimmer
      Oshin Albrecht
      Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
      Simon Loeffler
      Veridiana Zurita
      Vicente Arlandis

       


      Research End Presentations

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Philippe Severyns
      Timothy Segers

       


      Partners

      RITS
      Zsenne artlab
      NU Performance Festival IV (Tallinn)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Angelo Vermeulen
      Antonio Araújo
      Bart Verschaffel
      Bojana Cvejic
      David Bade
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Geert Opsomer
      Guillermo Gómez-Peña
      Jacob Wren
      Juan Dominguez
      Koen Van Singhel
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Ong Keng Sen
      Pierre Rubio
      Robert Steijn
      Silke Bake-Peter Stamer
      Stef Stessels
      Terenja Van Dijk
      Wesley Meuris

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout
      Bart Van den Eynde


      Mentors

      Anette Baldauf
      Pierre Rubio
      Vincent Dunoyer
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

       

      15 - 17 / 09 / 2011


      ‘DON’T KNOW!’
      Conference on Artistic Research

      Don’t Know! is not a gathering with the sole aim of exchanging knowledge on artistic research practices. In the course of three days we rather aim to create a frame in which research is put into practice and shared with the audience. In other words: we propose a conference which provides different working situations, allowing an in-depth experience of research formats, relations and situations, and the specific ‘knowledges’ these produce. Following the suggested attitude in our conference-title - Don’t Know! - we would like to frame these formats through four fields of questions:

      Don’t Know! the politics of knowledge production
      In which way the artistic understanding of knowledge differs from the one in other fields? What are the political implications of such a difference (if any at all)? How could we redistribute the power of knowledge production throughout the arts? And finally: is this at all a valid question? Should the arts avoid the political recuperation of its terrain and abstain from the tight link to knowledge production practices? Or: is it possible to maintain an alternative position for the arts in their way of dealing with knowledge (production)? Or if not, can the arts still claim their (political) capacity for change?

      Don’t Know! knowing today
      Within a society that has turned the commodification of knowledge into one of its main economic drives, the critical discourse on these production formats the arts create has been the basis for a lot of (historical) research practices. Therefore we would like to ask ourselves how artistic practices today can be a viable motor for thinking about our economic, technical and political realities. How can the arts reflect upon, but maybe even more, how can they influence future developments?

      Don’t Know! from knowledge production to knowledge processing
      We might argue that art (and artistic research) does not in the first instance produce knowledge, but that the arts keep on opening up the cracks in our systems of understanding: mislaying the knowledge, escaping the gridlocked pre-defined contexts that can be understood only according to the conventions of the discourses (be they political, aesthetical, psychological, …) that define knowledge. Would it then not seem more appropriate to talk about ‘knowledge processing’ than about the production of knowledge? Art as a game of misplacing information rather than one that tries to reinforce meaning on the world? And does this in a lot of ways not echo a contemporary understanding of research in general?

      Don’t Know! the environment
      Artistic research - and specific modes of dealing with knowledge (production) - is nowadays placed before the challenge that it has to operate within certain disciplinary frameworks and protocols. The actual combat in the arts now is to see where the disciplining and institutionalisation of its intrinsic researching gesture can be turned productive again.The question is: what kind of environments and institutions does art need today in order to react on the changing ontologies of knowledge and to develop different approaches of working and thinking?

       


      19 - 23 / 09 / 2011


      SUMMERSCHOOL
      series of two workshops in collaboration with RITS

       

      How to Stage Discussions about Arts and Politics?
      workshop by Jacob Wren


      Jacob’s workshop is based on the technique of the relay-interview, a simple game for having unexpected conversations. It involves asking and answering spontaneous questions that are loosely based around several themes chosen before the game starts. It is an attempt to have genuine, surprising exchanges within a performance situation. And to find out what we think about it and what we most want to know.

       

      How to Artistically Intervene in the Urban Space of the City of Ghent?
      workshop by Antonio Araújo


      The idea of Antonio’s workshop is to experience different points of departure in working with site and urban interventions. While working in a collaborative way in the city of Ghent, we will experiment the power of mobilization that theatre provides. Through intervening in the urban space, theatre recovers its public art dimension - which has always been there, but was sometimes blurry or forgotten.

       


      26 - 30 / 09 / 2011


      ‘DON’T KNOW’
      Workshop / Congress on Artistic Research by Nicolas y Galeazzi


      Nicolas Y Galeazzi focuses on developing and questioning social discourses through artistic research, which is materialised in concepts, installations, performances as well as printed matter. Galeazzi sets up performative research frameworks for experiments with political and social conditions and is working thereby on a concept of 'Mise-en-Discourses'.
      Nicolas will work further on the principles that have been developed during the conference more thoroughly with the researchers/participants of the post-graduate program. Central are the 4 questions that have been guiding the preparation of the conference.

       


      03 - 07 / 10 / 2011


      ‘DIRECTING THE GAZE’
      Reading sessions on Architecture with Koen Van Singhel, Terenja Van Dijk, Wesley Meuris and Bart Verschaffel.


      The development in the 16th century of the controlled space of the theatre isolated within the urban context made it possible to manipulate the gaze in an absolute way. The development of the theatre building reflects societal organization in a crystallized form where watching and being watched is organized following strict rules. In the second half of 20th century the theatre is brought back as a reference in the critical reflection on and discussion of the visual organization of the public space.
      In these reading sessions we invite architects, theorists and artists who work and reflect on the gaze in architecture. Texts (or other influences) that have been essential in their development as an artist or theoretician are the starting point of a discussion on the organization of the gaze in an architectural context.

       


      10 - 12 / 10 / 2011 & 17 -23 /10 / 2011


      ‘ARTIFICIAL REALITIES’
      (episode 2 - Magical Materialism)
      workshop by Pierre Rubio


      This workshop is the last iteration of a series of two. They both seek to detach our research projects from an essentialist and naturalistic approach. Their common aim is at (re)problematising for (re)capturing the strategies of construction and thus the theories of knowledge which our singular researches investigate and produce. If the Spring workshop’s keyword was ‘attachments’, the second step will be entirely contaminated by the notion of ‘magic’. We will take a trip into the wonderland of in-differentiation between human and natural, object and subject, figure and background, and more important, theory and practice.
      At first, during three days, we will re-consider our research projects under the influence of two singular analysis of magic : respectively Gilbert Simondon’s and Isabelle Stengers’.
      During a second period of an entire week, we will turn a former shop (turned recently into an art gallery) into an alchemy laboratory to transmute our projects into something other. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by moving it into unexpected contexts, this allows the discovery of ‘attachments’ and “othernesses” to enrich the ‘original’ project. Taking seriously what practice means and is capable of, let’s engage in a risky path from familiar individuals to unfamiliar singularities, from experiments to experiences, from “matter of facts to matter of concerns”.

       

       

      24 - 28 / 10 / 2011


      ‘PHOTOGRAPHY * LIGHT * SCENOGRAPHY’
      workshop by Stef Stessels


      Stef Stessels always has used the camera as a tool to create his personal database and archive. Recently he has begun to integrate his interest of photography directly into his scenographic work and light design. First of all he started to document the performances of de Roovers- and his sets - and the company uses his photos for its communication. More fundamentally his camera became an instrument in his research for light & set design where he integrated the photos from this research process in the actual performances. In this artistic workshop he will investigate with the participants the possible relations between photography, scenography and lightdesign integrating more technical aspects in concrete artistic exercises.

       


      31 / 10 - 02 / 11 / 2011


      ‘OBJECTNESS & THINGLINESS’
      reading sessions workshop by Elke Van Campenhout


      Picking up on the many forms in which objects have appeared in the participant’s projects in the last months, we take a quick tour down memory lane, presenting different theories on the object in a 3-day crash course for beginners: Kant, Michael Fried, Paul Gillroy, Jane Bennett etc. We work around the ‘resisting object’ and ‘thingliness’ as political qualities of the object, around the object/subject dichotomy as driving force in (late)modernism, about objects charged by desire that turn violent, etc. This workshop mainly circles around close reading of texts.

       


      03 - 13 / 11 / 2011


      ‘ON HOSPITALITY AND ESTRANGEMENT’
      ( The Tallin Project / The Viru Hotel )
      workshop by Ong Keng Sen and Elke Van Campenhout


      This workshop is part of a festival organized in a gigantic old Russian hotel in Tallinn. During ten days we will be working on two levels:
      Together with curator and theatre maker Ong Keng Sen we work around ‘the stranger’: the one that doesn’t belong, the one that disturbs the ‘common space’, the one that by his presence changes the perception of the space etc. Both on a theoretical and a practical level, we will interfere in the hotel life, working around hospitality (Derrida), extimacy / intimacy (Zizek), invisible theatre, etc.
      On a second level, you are invited to come with a project of your own, placed in one of the hotel rooms, and work further on these themes out of your personal interest. There is also the possibility to work in the corridors (as a scenographic concept), elevators, … Ong Keng Sen will also mentor these projects.
      The festival will open its doors at certain times for visitors.

       


      14 - 18 / 11 / 2011


      ‘GHOSTS AND HOSTS’
      workshop by Robert Steijn


      In this workshop Robert Steijn will work with the participants on principles like presence and absence, ghosts, energetic transformations, schizophrenic bodies belonging to different times and spaces at the same time.
      Robert Steijn worked as a dance critic for seven years, and then also as a curator for dance and experimental theatre in Amsterdam for seven years. Now he tries to bring the magic back in life and in the theatre. In that sense he considers himself more and more a magician. His helper is a deer, who appears in a lot of his texts and dances. His belief is that everyone can become a homemade contemporary shaman. His path towards becoming such a magician has been described in his three solo’s: the first solo was his call in guiding the death of his father, the second one, his ego death in the loss of everything by the breaking of the heart and now in his third solo: the birth of a person who can cross the thin line between reality and imagination, between life and death.

       


      21 - 25 / 11 / 2011


      ‘WINTERSCHOOL’
      (Baroque bodies)
      series of three workshops in collaboration with RITS


      Can we understand our times of postmodern confusion as a genuinely baroque period? How does this idea of baroque challenge pre-conceived notions such as corporality, performance and (post-)colonial hybridization? How would a baroque body look like and what is its performative potential? Are we approaching a true baroque era of crisis as the distinctions between man and machine, between human and non-human life are slowly dissolving and man is entering a new phase in the history of colonization, conquering space?
      The RITS Winter School consists of two periods. In November 2011 the Brussels-based arts centre Beursschouwburg will host three workshops for artists, activists, art students and academics. During a second period, in January 2012, you will get the opportunity to develop your own artistic response to your experience in one of the three workshops in Brussels. This individual research phase will be hosted by De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. You will collaborate with other artists and with students from different art schools and you will be coached by different teachers from the participating art schools. The results of this workshop will be included in the program on a festival on baroque theatricality (February 1-3, De Brakke Grond)

      Workshop 1: Guillermo Gómez-Peña (USA/Mexico)
      This workshop aims at creating a temporary community of rebel artists from different disciplines, ages, ethnic backgrounds, gender persuasions, and nationalities, in which difference and experimentation are not only accepted but encouraged. Participants are given the opportunity to develop new modes of relationships between artists and communities, mentor and apprentice, which are neither colonial nor condescending and to discover new ways of relating to their own bodies. By decolonizing and then re-politicizing bodies, they can become sites for activism and embodied theory, for memory and reinvention, for pleasure and penance. Why do we do what we do? Which borders do we wish to cross and why? What is the relationship between performance, activism, pedagogy and our everyday lives? What about the relationship between the physical body and the social body?

      Workshop 2: Angelo Vermeulen (Belgium)
      In Vermeulen's workshop, entitled 'BODYREACTOR - Human monstrification in outer space', the participants will explore the notion of potential monstrification of the human body in outer space. This workshop reroutes the theme of the ‘space alien’ to man himself. How to work with an ongoing mutating and modifying body? How to physically deal with an unknown and ultimately body-transforming environment? How to relate to a space where biological evolution never took us in the first place? ‘REACTOR’ refers to the experimental, open format of the workshop, to the condition of man in outer space (living in a craft or vessel), and to the fact that the group is locked up in one single space for one week. It also refers to the concept of monstrification in a more 'Gothic' sense.

      Workshop David Bade (Curaçao)
      During this workshop, Bade and the participants will create a site-specific environment taking the shifting world of early modern baroque as a starting point. Instability, excess, changeability will function is key concepts. The workshop will also investigate different modes of collaboration. “More is more” seems to be the motto of David Bade.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • NOT_index
    • ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #1 Displacements and Attachments
      30 May 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Pierre Rubio
    • 30 May 2011
    • 03 June 2011
    • case of: Pierre Rubio
    • ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #1

       

      Often artists and researchers still hold on to the illusory idea of their material having a ‘natural’ ‘essence’. Let us for a moment take some distance from this essentialist and naturalistic approach, let us consider our research projects as artificial constructions, which thus can be problematized and turned into stimulating and productive networks. Artificial Realities aims at a rediscovery of our projects by a momentary over-artificialization: first by re-mapping our projects and by doing so understand/capture the strategies of ‘assemblage’ and thus the theories of knowledge which they formulate; and secondly by opening up horizons of possibilities for further developments and speculations. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by ‘moving’ it in unexpected contexts or by ‘translating’ it in non familiar languages, this will allow the discovery of new components and new ‘attachments’ that will enrich and stimulate the ‘original’ project. Or in other words: developing an otherness by experiencing and exploring “as if's” to get out of the over-territorial and locked perception of “our” projects. Let's re-construct, re-imagine, re-invent “our” substrata. Let's science-fictionalize “our” “problems” and speculate ... cartoons... models for societies... newspapers... fictions... messages for eventual extraterrestrial forms of life... social practices... TV programs... religions... and more. Artificial Realities will develop through different steps: from identification of central issues in the practice, problematization, to several experiences of transfers, translations, displacements, parallax shifts, etc. The workshop includes reading sessions (Bruno Latour's On the modern cult of the factish gods and Factures/Fractures), individual work, group presentations and discussions.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2011 BLOCK II 01 April 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 April 2011
    • 31 July 2011
    • 2011 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Carlotta Scioldo
      Caroline Daish
      Iris Bouche
      Leonie Kuipers
      Marilyne Grimmer
      Philippe Severyns
      Rodolphe Coster
      Timothy Segers
      Veridiana Zurita
      Vicente Arlandis

       

      Research End Presentations

      Alessandra Coppola
      David Zagari
      Michiel Reynaert

       

      Partners

      Sarma
      Nadine
      De Singel


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Dries Verhoeven
      Elke van Campenhout
      Koen Tachelet
      Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene
      Nicolas Galeazzi
      Pierre Rubio
      Vladimir Miller


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

      01 - 30 / 04 / 2011


      ‘CURATING AS ENVIRONMENTALISM’

      salon about curating in the performing arts curated by Adva Zakai and Elke Van Campenhout


      How is the notion of curating transformed from its visual arts context into a more collaborative and performative gesture? Are there projects in the contemporary performance scene that are exemplary for a re-thinking of curating as environmentalism? From this starting point, the one month salon on curating in the performing arts was developed. On the basis of the online article “Curating as Environmentalism”, people were invited to gloss the text, highlight fragments, and add other texts, images, links and thoughts. The original text faded out day by day, until what was left were the parts readers chose to highlight and the references they attached to them. The added material then was the inspiration for the live salon in the workspace Nadine in Brussels.
      Contributors to the event were Deufert & Plischke, Nicolas Galeazzi, Elke van Campenhout, Adva Zakai, Raimundas Malasaukas and Jeroen Peeters.
      The event was produced by Sarma, Nadine and a.pass Research Centre.
      “Curating as Environmentalism” as a paper publication is available.

       

       

      09 - 13 / 05 / 2011


      ‘SPECULATIVE WORKSHOP’
      workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi


      Research always is performative; not many performances, though, are researchive. More so, seeing performance as means of research is inverting the common notion of a performance: as a tool for research it is not interested in sending, but in receiving and processing information. The Speculative Workshop is aiming to develop concrete tools and practices based on the above thought. We will look critically at the current debate about artistic research and try to develop personalised theories and practices around the performative aspect of research. The workshop provides the possibility to elaborate your performative research-attitude based on your own research practice. By that we will try to understand what kind of politics of knowledge production these attitudes stand for. The double bind between the affirmed openness of research and the underlying 'politics' of its approach is the most important twist to be taken in an artistic research project. Therefore I tend to see this workshop as an experiment in knowledge production. Its structure will have to emerge through the practices you are bringing in. But I will provide (and experiment myself with) some frameworks of reading, discussing and practicing as well as some expeditions in the 'field'. To start with I would like to experiment on two general approaches, which deal with the constant unknown territory our researches are stumbling into: Speculation as the risky investment into the unknown, and Serendipity as the finding of the un-searched. By copying and abusing scientific research methodologies and confronting them with performative and artistic means, it is my aim to throw another light on the spectrum of what happens if research and performance are thought the same. This workshop is a preparation for the a.pass research conference in September.

       

       

      16 - 20 / 05 / 2011


      ‘DUNKELKAMMER’
      workshop by Dries Verhoeven & Koen Tachelet


      We live in a visual consumption society where our eyes are brutally manipulated. Producers of images force us to attach a economic value to everything visible. They want us to classify the images that haunt us according to that economic parameters. Our self-image is assigned a place in this economy of visual valuation. As we look into the mirror of the other, we judge and adjust ourselves to the image of ourselves produced by the other. The more we make ourselves dependent upon this visual-economic labeling, the more our desires and needs are subjected to the logic of marketing and pornography: both try to penetrate as deep as possible our self-image, in order to order and re-order it, along the mechanism of ‘narcissistic differentiation’: the necessity to differentiate oneself from the others, to be more, better and more competitive. And here is a paradox. People have a deep-rooted need of intimacy, which can only be realised within a non-judging mutual space. A situation of intimacy implies that my gaze is directed towards the other, that the other is not seen as the mirror of myself, as an opportunity to market myself. From the moment that being desirable becomes a goal in itself, intimacy is impossible. Dries Verhoeven & Koen tachelet are preparing the installation Dunkelkammer for the Münchner Kammerspiele. Dunkelkammer questions the world of seeing. What does it mean to see? How does seeing and being seen influence our self-observation and our connection to the other? What happens when this sense is turned off? Those questions will be dealt with in a two-month rehearsal process with 7 blind performers. Dunkelkammer is meant to be an experience for the spectators; the thoughts, feelings, questions and (bodily) sensations of the spectator will be activated and steered by the performers’ actions and words. Crucial element is the space, the varying parameters of distance and intimacy, presence and absence. In the workshop texts by Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, Houellebecq, Beckett, Oliver Sacks and others will be read and discussed. A more practical part of the workshop will deal with exploration of the corporeality of vision and blindness.

       


      30 / 05 - 03 / 06 / 2011


      ‘ARTIFICIAL REALITIES’
      (episode 1 – Displacements and Attachments)
      workshop by Pierre Rubio


      Often artists and researchers still hold on to the illusory idea of their material having a ‘natural’ ‘essence’. Let us for a moment take some distance from this essentialist and naturalistic approach, let us consider our research projects as artificial constructions, which thus can be problematized and turned into stimulating and productive networks. Artificial Realities aims at a rediscovery of our projects by an (momentary) over-artificialization: first by re-mapping our projects and by doing so understand/capture the strategies of ‘assemblage’ and thus the theories of knowledge which they formulate; and secondly by opening up horizons of possibilities for further developments and speculations. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by ‘moving’ it in unexpected contexts or by ‘translating’ it in non familiar languages, this allows the discovery of new components and new ‘attachments’ that will enrich and stimulate the ‘original’ project. Or in other words: developing an otherness by experiencing and exploring “as if's” to get out of the over-territorial and locked perception of “our” projects. Let's re-construct, re-imagine, re-invent “our” substrata. Let's science-fictionalize “our” “problems” and speculate ... cartoons... models for societies... newspapers... fictions... messages for eventual extraterrestrial forms of life... social practices... TV programs... religions... and more. Artificial Realities will develop through different steps: from identification of central issues in the practice, problematization, to several experiences of transfers, translations, displacements, parallax shifts, etc. The workshop includes reading sessions (Bruno Latour's On the modern cult of the factish gods and Factures/Fractures), individual work, group presentations and discussions.

       


      06 - 17 / 06 / 2011


      ‘SOUND AS SPACE’
      workshop by Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene


      Sound as Space proposes to investigate sound as a vehicle to create spaces in spaces. Sound depending on the way it is recorded and diffused, can enable the auditor to immerse in parallel realities. Audio pieces can invite the listeners to combine the view (of the physical space they find themselves in) and sound (constructed audio space) to re-create - depending on their own personal history - a new place or a series of places. Brian Massumi calls the constant becoming or transformation of space by the projections of its users the ‘virtual space’, a place of endless potential. Performing artist Lilia Mestre sound artist Els Viaene propose to think and create alternative spaces by the use of sound compositions. In this workshop we will practice recording, editing and diffusion of audio pieces produced by the participants in collaboration with us. For Mestre and Viaene this workshop is part of their ongoing research on audio spaces that create direct relations between their different users and between these users and the environment they find themselves in.

       


      01 - 23 / 07 / 2011


      ‘SETTLEMENT’
      workspace by Vladimir Miller


      The settlement as a proposal is asking its participants to come and practice their work in a shared environment. The method is to build everything from scratch on location that is required to work and communicate a practice to other participants. This can be anything from an improvised table to hold a laptop to an elaborate, secluded structure; from temporal impromptu arrangements to specific spaces that last for the whole work period. Settlement allows for a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. As it manifests itself in the workspace, a loop of condition and production is created in that shared space: in the course of the two weeks the settlement lets a particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the sets of rules and behaviours usually provided by ready-made spaces such as ‘table’, ‘studio’, ‘meeting’, ‘gallery’, ‘venue’, ‘library’, etc. By finding a spatial manifestation and localization for their work the settlers enter a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas, events and encounters in the shared space. As the emphasis of the work-process and the activity of the individual and of the group change from day to day, the settlement stays a dynamic structure, ready to be reformed according to the present requirements for production and presentation. 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 structures inherent in the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement practice actively searches for a spatialized production of a contributive dis-agreement and gives space to a literal heterotopia of work processes.

       

       

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2011 BLOCK I 01 January 2011
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2011
    • 31 March 2011
    • 2011 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Abhilash Ningappa
      Alessandra Coppola
      Caroline Daish
      David Zagari
      Doris Stelzer
      Esther Francis
      Iris Bouche
      Margareth Kaserer
      Marilyne Grimmer
      Michiel Reynaert
      Philippe Severyns
      Rodolphe Coster
      Stephen Bain
      Timothy Segers

       


      Research End Presentations

      Einat Tuchman
      Katrin Lohmann
      Sven Goyvaerts

       


      Partners

      Kaaitheater
      Damaged Goods
      RITS
      Burning Ice festival.
      Pact Zollverein
      De Singel
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       


      Contributors for workshops

      Adva Zakai
      Anette Baldauf
      Aras Ozgun
      Christian Rizzo
      International Errorist
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Leo De Nijs
      Meg Stuart
      Various Artists
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

      Mentors

      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lilia Mestre
      Pierre Rubio
      Vincent Dunoyer

       

       

      03-13 / 01 / 2011


      ‘A SETTLEMENT ON ALCHEMY, ALLIANCE , ANARCHY’
      workspace 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.
      In the context of her two-week ‘Atelier’ in the Kaaistudios, Meg Stuart invited Vladimir Miller to localize his settlement in the dance studio. During these two weeks a.pass settlers and Atelier members will try to find moments of common ground, confronting the ideas and topics emerging in their respective territories.

       


      17-21 / 01 / 2011


      ‘ERRORISTA’S’
      workshop by a.pass in collaboration with Kaaitheater and RITS in the context of Burning Ice festival.


      The International Errorist is an artistic and cultural movement whose nucleus is the Buenos Aires-based artist collective Etcétera… The Errorist is also the most recent iteration of Etcétera’s unique fusion of aggressive street theater, political critique, and direct-action protest, which is equally marked by the group’s formative militancy within Argentina’s human rights movement as it is the artists’ ardent fealty to surrealism. Since the group’s formation in 1997, Etcétera has produced a myriad of photo- and video-based works, poetic manifestoes, theatrical works, and interventionist performances. Few have been created specifically as artworks to be exhibited in traditional fine arts contexts or destined for the publics proper to such contexts. Rather, Etcétera…’s works most often begin as performances in the midst of political demonstrations, unannounced street actions that target unwitting passersby, or as images and texts crafted to circulate within the mass media and/or amidst publics associated with left social movements.
      The International Errorist constitutes a critique of the contemporary discourse of terrorism, where this discourse is understood to be an instrument of statecraft. Etcétera…’s work explores terrorism as an ideological mediation whose function is not only political -- as it bears upon interpretations of political violence, for example-- but specifically biopolitical, as it concerns the calculus of the differential value of human lives and the state’s exercise of biopower over groups delineated according to this logic.

       


      24-28 / 01 / 2011


      ‘EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY’
      workshop by Anette Baldauf & Aras Ozgun


      This workshop aims at discussing some of the basic notions and problematics of visual ethnography, contemporary experimental practices in this field, and the practical potentials of digital media technologies for ethnographic research purposes. Starting with a critical historical overview of visual ethnography, the workshop examines various aspects of the problem of representation in visual ethnography. Representation of non-western “others” in the colonialist representation regimes, the “realism” and the “truth-value” of visual representation in general will be a part of this discussion. Following this discussion we will focus on non-mainstream ethnographic approaches and experimental documentary film practices, including so-called fake documentaries, which reflect upon and cultivate this problem of representation itself, and seek to create alternative modes, regimes and techniques of visual representation. Finally, we aim to familiarize ourselves with some of the basic techniques of ethnographic fieldwork.

       

       

      28-30 / 01 / 2011


      ’CURATING IN PERFORMING ARTS’
      workshop by a.pass in collaboration with Pact Zollverein, Essen.


      This workshop is organized over two weekends: one participating in the colloquium on curating organized by Pact Zollverein (Explorationen 11: Beyond Curating), and one discussing and proposing a new thinking about curating in the performing arts in deSingel.
      The currently vibrantly beginning discussion about curating in dance and performance comes at a moment when, on the one hand, ever new courses of study in curating are being launched for visual art and, on the other hand, the shape of the curatorial profession, in its authorial intervention and its omnipresence in the art market, has everywhere become the focus of massive criticism – as it was in the 1970s.
      At the same time, the entanglement of theory and practice has become ubiquitous, not least because of the transformation and revaluation of art colleges and art academies into universities. In what is currently happening in art, the art museum is testing the performative and processual exhibition, while the dance and performance house oriented toward performative arts is developing the live course or the "Musée de la danse". In the field of dance, since the end of the 1990s, artists' initiatives have been developing that introduce new artistic practices and criticize the existing organizational models (for example, from choreographs and performance artists like Xavier Le Roy, deufert + plischke, and Boris Charmatz). Substantively and structurally, organizers took up important impetuses from artists, whether in the form of a thorough interlocking of theory and practice or of the establishment of artist and co-curator teams, artistic laboratories, or residence programs.

       

      31 / 01 - 04 / 02 / 2011


      ‘NEW-YORK’
      workshop by Elke Van Campenhout & Bart Van den Eynde


      In the context of the ‘New York festival’ organised by deSingel, a.pass organizes an intensive discussion workshop. We take a close look at the recent New York performance scene and analyze how pop esthetics, cinematographic editing principles en trans-medial dispositives influenced a specific language of theatre, dance and performance. Video material, texts and talks with the artists present in the festival will be the starting point of the conversations. possibly Natural Theatre of Oklohama will also add a more practical section to the workshop.

       

      07 - 11 / 02 / 2011


      ‘BUREAU OF UNTITLED’ / EXERCISE IN COMMERCIAL ART’
      workshop by Various Artists


      Being a Various Artist is a series of interactive installations by Various Artists in which artists are invited to identify with one of Various Artists. The format is not so much about learning but it also produces new work of which the author is the Various Artist, at the same time remaining the property of the participating artists. The event that Nadine organizes in February is dealing with Various Artist Liam Drib.
      Liam Drib, born in Liverpool 1961, well known for Mes Amis Belges, Cobalt Thoughts and his Evil Olive pub realisation, will be the centre artist of a new Being a Various Artist Workshop with an emphasis on commercial art and dazzling ideas.
      To support this theme, Liam will organise a Bureau of Untitled (BoU) with the participants of the workshop.
      The mission of BoU is to propose new ideas to artists that have a financial value on the art market, meaning their works can be traded. BoU is about making money with art paid by art money. The context of BoU at PAF is the arts lab Being Liam Drib.
      The structure of BoU approaches the structure of a sports game, including 2 teams (one black on white and one white on black) and a referee (black and white). Initially an artist is proposed, voted and processed Ideas, fitted to the work of the chosen artist, are being generated at a continuous pace which will be stored in ascending price categories. The sealed ideas will be offered for sale to the artists on an international art fair in the near future.

       

      07 - 12 / 02 / 2011


      ‘SENSITIVITY, SPACE, STAGE’
      workshop by Laurent Liefooghe


      Through texts and references this workshop wants to introduce some concepts and concrete examples of spaces and how these function as a ‘stage’. Simultaneously it will explore the idea of the ‘stage’ (the place of the performance) as an ideological space.
      The workshop will use the work Theater-Cinema by Dan Graham as reference, a crystallization point around which we will try to examine concepts of performance spaces and the power mechanisms involved.
      The ambition is not to give an exhaustive and historical overview, but rather through the reading of specific texts and trough concrete practices to explore a personal spatial sensitivity.
      The Texts will touch upon diverse themes as: the ‘theatro del mondo’ (the ideas of the stage as a metaphor for the world / the world as a stage), the baroque urbanistic interventions of Pius X (the city as a theater), the black box as a monadic space,. etc.
      The introduction of specific examples of spatial practices leads to concrete questions on the production of space. What does it mean to first conceive a space – to first ‘represent’ it -and then realize it? Through examples of existing practices different means and methods of representation in function of production are investigated.



      14 - 19 / 02 / 2011


      ‘SPACE OVERLOAD’
      workshop by Christian Rizzo


      Christian Rizzo wants to use the projects of the a.pass participants as a basis for a research on the collective production of space. How to spatialize one’s own practice and by doing so create an environment for other practices. How to be present in silence. How can the group’s activity be the scenography for an individual practice and the other way around. How to deal with an overflow or with a lack of spatial information.

       


      28 / 02 - 04 / 03 / 2011


      “LOCATION”
      workshop by Leo De Nijs


      Location is a practical workshop in an enormous building with empty class rooms, a theatre space and offices that was once the location of a theatre training. As a start there will be an investigation into different ways of exploring the building and expressing the specificity of this/a location through different media. The question how to use a found space as a location will then be translated in the concrete realisation of an installation starting from the personal researches of the participants.

       

      14 - 18 / 03 / 2011


      ‘THE ARCHIVE AS GENERATOR’
      workshop by Adva Zakai


      Which archive could generate the future rather than preserve the past?
      Coming out of the experience of ‘d o m i n o k i n g d o m’ where each work lives on in the next because works are made as a reaction on previous ones, I am interested in delving more into the possibility of generating present and future out of a direct confrontation with past experiences: formats that make the past, present and future influence each other, can trigger a constant re-evaluation and challenge of our knowledge and perception.
      Archiving, be it in the artistic, educational or any other field, is considered important because it ‘proves’ the (past) existence of a past events and thus enables them to continue to exist and to be (re)visited. But imagine an archive that is not trying to capture fixed ‘images’, that is not referential. An archive that is a living process that keeps modifying itself constantly, triggering new processes instead of being a mere documentation, always lost in the past.
      How does an archive functions that is looking forwards instead of looking back?
      This question will be explored through reading, discussion and guest lectures.

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

       

       

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

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

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2010 BLOCK I 01 January 2010
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 January 2010
    • 31 March 2010
    • 2010 BLOCK I

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Adva Zakai
      Agnese Cornelio
      Alejandro Petrasso
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      Dianne Weller
      Einat Tuchman
      Fanny Zaman
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Katrin Lohmann
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Manne Granqvist
      Manon Avermaete
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Philip Janssens
      Sara Vilardo
      Sven Goyvaerts

       

       

      Research End Presentations

      Fien Wauters
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer

       

       


      Partners

      De Singel
      University of Antwerp
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Alexander Baervoets
      Annette Baldauf
      Charo Calvo
      David Moss
      Elke Van Campenhout
      Heike Langsdorf
      Jan Maertens
      Lynda Gaudreau
      Marc Vanrunxt
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Meg Stuart
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi
      Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne
      Timmy Delaet
      Tom Plischke-Kattrin Deufert
      Vincent Dunoyer
      Vladimir Miller

       

      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout
      Vladimir Miller


      Mentors

      Nicolas Y Galeazzi
      Vladimir Miller

       

       

       

       

      11-24 / 01 / 2010

      ‘REENACTMENT / RECONSTRUCTION’

      reading and viewing sessions on re-enactment/reconstruction with Timmy Delaet

      Reading and viewing sessions on re-enactment/reconstruction with Timmy Delaet, PhD student at the University of Antwerp, viewing sessions of performance art work at Argos (centre for video preservation in Brussels). From 21 to 24 we join the conference on re-enactment / reconstruction organised by the Marina Abramovic Research Centre in Plymouth (England), combined with a series of performances.

       

      25-29 / 01 / 2010

      ‘SPHERES AND ECONOMIES OF COLLABORATION / NON-PRODUCTIVE SPHERES’

      workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi

      Nicolas Y Galeazzi organizes a practical workshop on artistic collaboration discussing different models, methods and the effects and side effects of collaborative interaction. The workshop puts forward different metaphors on collaboration (economy, utopia, non-production, laziness, etc...) and works through their consequences. 

       

       

      01-05 / 02 / 2010

      ‘RADICAL VOICE FOR PERFORMERS AND MAKERS’

      workshop by David Moss

      Performer, theatre maker and singer David Moss, artistic director of the institute for the Living Voice, organizes a workshop on the use of radical voice for performers and makers. Both positions are possible in this workshop, as long as you have an interest in a different use of the voice in performance (both language and non-language based).

      How do you make a voice performance? How do time, timing, intensity, attack, intimacy, eccentricity, personal history, ego, musical history, rhythm, physicality, gestures, sounds, memory, songs and senses connect you to the moment of making a voice improvisation?

       

       

       

       

      07 / 02 / 2010

      ‘PAUL TISSIER: ARCHITECT OF ILLUSIONS’

      lecture by Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne

      The french architect Paul Tissier realises in 1924 the main hall of the Hôtel Ruhl in Paris now destroyed, the « fêtes d’art », a concept that mixes the originality of an artist’s party with the luxury of a society ball. Tissier creates all by himself a complete artwork. Covering the original architecture with his setting, he imagines different types of creative scenographies. From the extraordinary legacy of his fund – including more than 400 elements of decor– the workshop proposes to discover the architect’s system and problems facing that type of event. The many different aspects of the scenography (general choices for the transformation of the place, iconography and technique of the setting, lighting, costumes, show, etc…) will be discussed.

       

       

      01-05 / 02 / 2010

      ‘AFFECT AND EMOTION’

      reading sessions by Elke Van Campenhout

      In the past year Elke Van Campenhout worked on the research project Sense Radio, initiated by choreographer and artist Lilia Mestre. A very important part of this research was concerned with the understanding of the emotional body as a social body, as a body in constant negotiation with other bodies and objects. In this week of Reading Sessions, we go through some of the ideas of Spinoza, Brian Massumi, Nigel Thrift, Sara Ahmed, Gilles Deleuze and others on affect/emotion as a mode of social circulation and  exchange. At the same time watching performance material (Meg Stuart, Lilia Mestre, ...) that corresponds to this kind of conception of the performance and the body of the performer. 

       

       

      08-19 / 02 / 2010

      ‘CITY OF ILLUSIONS’

      workshop by Vladimir Miller

      Vladimir Miller conceives the City of Illusions as a space of research and knowledge built around the concept of illusion. In the course of two weeks a city is being built in the Zwarte Zaal of DeSingel. each participant is invited to build his own research site (houses and/or public spaces like speakers corners, gardens, etc...) within the city and assume the performative agency of their settlement with the other participants.

      Light designer Jan Maertens, sound designer, Charo Calvo are guests and create their special illusion for the city. As well, urbanist Annette Baldauf and choreographer Meg Stuart will visit the city.

       

       

      22-26 / 02 / 2010

      ‘HOPE 2’

      workshop by Heike Langsdorf and Elke van Campenhout 

      Participant Heike Langsdorf and coordinator Elke van Campenhout organize a second working week on “(radical) hope”, the subject of their research project. This time, set in an urban context, we work on the spreading of the rumour of hope.

       

       

      22-26 / 02 / 2010

      ‘THE CITY : THE GIANT SCENARIO’

      workshop by Maria Lucia Correia

      The City appears as a breathing engine that shells the concept of future reflections and artistic interventions. “The Giant Scenario” is a workshop that will  suspend a conceptual approach of the city space as a  body who seeks for attention. Gradually we will propose a metaphorical diagnosis, a scan of the functionality of its organs. It will suspend  an aesthetic, emotional, sociological and physical approach of the  cityspace as a human body. As working methodology we will address the city space, with a critical vision on sensorial and visual awareness. 

      In order to fulfill the resistance of our environment we will draw and recompose the elements of the urban space, collecting lost details and objects, on city walks/derives.  Moments where we will get lost into a world of colors, shapes, ornaments, sounds, rhythms… and as well an engagement of places that are damaged, abandoned, dead and ill... The workshop is a  resource of urbanist and emotional mapping of the space and its graphical potentialities within a reborn of a new scenario, a new life, a new narrative of  details that are forgotten in the labyrinth space.The city will not  be the setting of public interventions but a living body. An extended form of connections, reconstructions, treatment, placement and intersections.

       

       

      01-10 / 03 / 2010

      ‘CONSEQUENCES II’

      workshop by Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

      Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one‘s decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

       

       

      15-21 / 03 / 2010

      ‘ECOLOGY & ARTISTIC PRACTICE’

      reading sessions by a.pass

      Introduced by the participants as an urgent research topic, the relation between ecological disaster and artistic practice is the theme of these reading sessions.The week will end with a artistic conference on ecology open to the public. 

       

       

      22-26 / 03 / 2010

      ‘DANCE THEORY’

      reading Sessions

      In this reading sessions we invite several choreographers to read with us texts that have been essential in their development as an artist. These reading sessions are a starting point to speak about influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work.

      Lynda Gaudreau, Marc Vanrunxt, Vincent Dunoyer & Alexander Baervoets are our guests.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK III 01 September 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2009
    • 30 November 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Agnese Cornelio
      Alejandro Petrasso
      Ana Casimiro
      Charlotte Bouckaert
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Fien Wauters
      Heike Langsdorf
      Iuliana Varodi
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Marcelo Mardones
      Maria Lucia Correia
      Sara Vilardo
       

       


      Research End Presentations

      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow

       


      Partners

      Theaterfestival
      De Singel
      CIFAS
      Bourla Theater
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Arco Renz
      Benjamin Verdonck
      Hans Op de Beeck
      Laurent Liefooghe
      Lotte van den Berg
      Meg Stuart
      Moritz Kuhn
      Nicolas Y Galeazzi
      Rabih Mrouéh
      Renée Copraij
      Stefan Heinric
      Stijn Bussels
      Timothy De Paepe

       


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde   

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THEATERFESTIVAL’

      ‘Performance in public Space’ : reading sessions & artist talks by de Singel and a.pass

      The Theaterfestival offers a perfect occasion to make the a.pass training more visible. Three participants show their researches in the context of the festival ( Ariane Loze, Michel Yang and Jozef Wauters) and the reading sessions are open to outsiders. Several artists will be invited to discuss the theme of ‘performance in public space’ with the participants (Benjamin Verdonck, Moritz Kuhn and Lotte van den Berg), combined with a close reading of theoretical texts.  

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN III’

      workshop by Arco Renz  and Stefan Heinrich

      A scenography workshop with a choreographer seems a necessity for a.s. Working on a new project, Arco Renz works with the participants on the development of a - hypothetical - stage design for his choreography. Without the help of a 'performance text' the participants will enter his world and find connections with their own interests, measure up the artistic and practical limitations of the project and find a scenographic vision which inscribes itself in Arco Renz' universe.  

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THE ART OF MISUNDERSTANDING’

      workshop by Nicholas Y Galeazzi

      Nicolas Y Galeazzi’s workshop 'The art of misunderstanding' explores the different ways in which artistic research is or can be organized. In a very practical setting, the participants will develop one (room-sized) 'paper' on artistic research, using their own attitudes and methodologies for a more thorough mapping out of the field. The workshop both challenges the imagination of the field of knowledge production, as offering a lot of theoretical texts explorations, introducing artistic examples and opening up a lot of discussions.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘VENICE BIENNALE’

      journey to art biennale by a.pass 

      The visit of the Venice Biennale is a possibility for a focussed confrontation with the referential current visual arts context. Hybridity and the confrontation of cultures, identities and art languages are at the heart of the festival and the context of a cultural event of that proportion, exposure and 'fame' is in itself an important issue of discussion. Parallel with the Biennale there will be also other major exhibitions in Venice: the opening of  Punta della Dogana Art Museum and In-Finitum in the Palazzo Fortuny. There will be no organized workshop and there will be no fixed itinerary, participants will be free to completely self organize through the four days in Venice.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ART AS DOCUMENT / DOCUMENT AS ART - RABIH MROUÉ’

      Two weeks workshop with artist Rabih Mrouéh, in the framework of the RITS research project Art as a document/The document as art. Participants will join in first instance in day-long discussions on central topics within the working field of Mrouéh: what is history, what is fiction? can you create your own history? what is latency? when does your personal history become shared? how to create documents? how do documents function? how can you be your own actor?

      In a second phase, the participants will work with the material in a performative way.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / MEG STUART’

      Choreographer Meg Stuart discusses her development as an artist, the evolution of her work and how she relates to other art forms than dance. Being very aware of the artistic research context of a.pass, she will elaborated on working processes and tools for collaboration as well as the dramaturgy of her performances. 

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘RADICAL HOPE’

      An hybrid program of reading sessions, discussions with guests and practical interpretation of the concept of Hope, ending by the preparation of a 'hope dinner' in a.pass kitchen.

      'Radical Hope, Ethics in the face of Cultural Devastation', Jonathan Lear

      'Hope, New Philosophies for Change', Mary Zournazi: interview with Brian Massumi and Isabelle Stengers

      Guests : Renée Copraij: choreographer, dancer and curator of Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht and Laurent Liefooghe: architect, performance maker

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / HANS OP DE BEECK’

      Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck discusses his development as an artist, the evolution in his work and how he relates to other arts. Using a lot of visual material from his installations and models and fragments of his videoworks, he will sketch an artistic process and an evolution through trial and error. Also elaborating on the practical circumstances of his life as an artist: economics, reception, education, the relation with critics and galleries and museums, etc..

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘CONTAMINATE THE CITY’

      artistic practices in public space

      For this workshop we will join the workshop program of CIFAS in Brussels. ‘Contaminate the city’ is a workshop on artistic practices in public space, trying out different practices and actions, and gradually developing individual projects within the city.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘AN HISTORY OF DANCE’

      reading sessions by Katie Verstockt

      Starting with a minimal historical introduction from dance as a ritual to the dance history in Europe (focusing on the act of seeing and the scenographic performativity), dance theoretician Katie Verstockt will discuss mainly the important 20th century movements (Modern Dance, Ausdruckstanz, Ballet Russes, Ballets Suédois, Post Modern Dance, Butoh, Contemporary dance, ...) in their more general cultural context. 

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘BAROKTHEATERS’

      lecture by Timothy De Paepe at Bourla Theater

      Scenography researcher Timothy De Paepe will give a lecture on theatre architecture, stage machinery & scenography in the baroque era 1600-1750 based on his research and reconstruction of theatre buildings and stages out of the area of Antwerp. With an historical introduction on the evolution and social context of theatre and illustrated with an impressive visual documentation, this presentation will a perfect introduction to a visit of the Bourla Theater.

       

      Fall 2009

      ‘THEATRICALITY’

      lecture-workshop by art historian Stijn Bussels around the term ‘theatricality'. 

      Following Collins Dictionary it means ‘of or related to the theatre or dramatic performance’, but also ‘exaggerated and affected in manner or behaviour’. How the theatre is related to society? How the theatre is used as a concept that explains conduct outside the norm? However, this negative connotation is historically determined. In the Renaissance, the metaphor of theatrum mundi became a dominant model to show that society is fashioned by role play and scenario’s. This view, however, was not primarily put in a negative context. There is a clear shift in eighteenth-century thought. In this period, our contemporary use of the term ‘theatrical’ comes into being.

      The lecture will focus on the early modern era. By doing so, it will try to make clear how the theatre is divergently appraised in its representational aspect. The theatre is evaluated as reprehensible deception, but also as revealing deeper truth. This evaluation can be linked with views on historical societies where artificiality is not always predominantly coupled with dishonesty, but with skill and learning. 

       

      Fall 2009

      (IN) VISIBLE 

      workshop-research by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and Bart Van den Eynde

      "The reality: “The Giant Scenario”? Are we participants in a scenario created by humans? Is our reality a scenario built in real scale? Does the space feel that we are there? Does our existence depend on the space, or is it the space that depends on us?" Starting from the distinction between what is "visible" and what is not the participants are invited to join a research of the city in the city. Together with coordinator Bart Van den Eynde a syllabus is proposed (Simmel on ‘Metropolis’, Debord on ‘Derive’ and Marc Augé on ‘non-places’) and the creation of a context for city walks and consequent mapping and reporting. 

       

       

       

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2009 BLOCK II 01 May 2009
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2009
    • 31 July 2009
    • 2009 BLOCK II

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Alejandro Petrasso
      Ariane Loze
      Constanze Schellow
      Dianne Weller
      Fanny Zaman
      Fien Wauters
      Jozef Wouters
      Julie Pfleiderer
      Kurt Van Overbeke
      Sara Vilardo
      Sungmin Hong                


      Partners

      DeSingel                 
      KunstenFestivaldesArts
      Les Bains
      In Transit festival, Berlin
      WP Zimmer
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)


                        
      Contributors for workshops

      André Lepecki
      Lars Frers & Alexander Schellow
      Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene
      Luc Van den Dries
      Niek Kortekaas
      Romeo Castellucci
      Thomas Crombez
      Vladimir Miller
      Wouter Hillaert


      Coordinators a.pass

      Bart Van den Eynde
      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

      04-08 / 05 / 2009

      ‘AROUND ROMEO CASTELLUCCI’

      workshop by De Singel

      In this week we work around the video material of the Tragedia Endogonidia-cycle of Romeo Castellucci. During the first two days we watch the eleven performance and discuss the esthetic choices, and the semiotics of the work. On wednesday we try to build up a 'wunderkammer' on the principles of Castellucci's 'ars combinatoria'. As guests we have that day academic Thomas Crombez and journalist/critic Wouter Hillaert. After that we work two days with Romeo Castellucci and some of his performers on the new trilogy 'The Divine Comedy'. On Sunday the working week results in a colloquium in de Singel with international experts and collaborators of the Rafaello Sanzio-company. 

       

       

      Springtime 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 02’

      coaching by Niek Kortekaas

      Scenographer Niek Kortekaas will coach the a.s participants in the development of a scenography based on King Lear / William Shakespeare. The idea is to take a major work from the world repertoire and develop with a dramaturgical coaching by the coordinator (Bart Van den Eynde) and the scenographic (artistic and technical) guidance of Kortekaas a scenographic design for the big stage.

       

       

      05 / 2009

      ‘RES&REF’ (Residence and Reflection)

      research project by a.pt, KunstenFestivaldesArts and Les Bains

      Res&Ref (Residence and Reflection) is a research project, organized during the international Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. Three groups of artists reside together in the art center Les Bains (an old bathing house/swimming pool in Brussels): the res&ref-group itself is an international group of (non)-western artists, chosen by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. The working group 'Art&Humour' is an international group of researchers, working on the theme of the subversitity of humour as an artistic strategy of resistance. The a.pass-group joins in the groups, preparing reading sessions on art and humour, but they can also join the discussions and toolkit sessions. In the evening all participants go and see the same performances at the festival, and after ten days the workshop ends with an informal public showing of the results.

       

       

      Springtime 2009

      ‘ARTIST TALK / VALENTINE KEMPINCK’

      Costume and set designer and visual artist Valentine Kempinck discusses her carrier, development as an artist, the evolution in her work and how she wanders from medium to medium. She discusses her onorthodox vision on theatre costumes and how she sees costume design in relation to the other performance components. Later she will go in details about her latest work: scenographic interventions in the public sphere which reproduce themselves, taking on different meanings through this process of reproduction.

       

       

       

      Springtime 2009

      ‘THEORY SESSIONS / HISTORY OF THEATRE AND SCENOGRAPHY’

      lecture/course by Luc Van den Dries

      In this lecture course Luc Van den Dries discusses the relation between space and theatricality. First he explores historical answers to the tension between theatre and reality. He deals with four prototypical dimensions:

      -theatre as an imitation of reality

      -theatre as a utopian project to reality

      -theatre as playful counterpart to reality

      -theatre as a metaphysical dimension within reality. 

      After scanning (20th century) theatre history related to the questions above, he discusses space-related tendencies in contemporary performing art.  

       

       

      11-21 / 06 / 2009

      ‘IN TRANSIT - BERLIN / SESSIONS WITH ANDRE LEPECKI’

      In preparation for the a.pass Berlin LAB, we read a selection of texts, proposed to us by curator André Lepecki:

      -Fred Moten, The Resistance of the Object (chapter 2 of 'In the Break')

      -Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood

      -Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

      This first week we will discuss the texts and the post-colonial themes of the festival, and will try to build up a solid base for the upcoming discussions and confrontations. Out of these discussions every one of the participants will develop a personal research project to be fulfilled during the festival.

      Always a central element of ‘In Transit’ festival since its first edition in 2002, the LAB has gone through many formats throughout the years. For this edition, we decided to concentrate the LAB around the offering of a space for all who are interested in gathering, talking, meeting, exchanging, experimenting, asking, provoking, dancing, writing, showing, displaying, performing, teaching, learning, sharing. And more. The LAB’s life and its events will be determined by you.

      The LAB hosts a day meeting, and all LAB participants are expected to attend this day-long gathering (closed to the general public) which specifically addresses projects presented in the festival as points of departure for further and concrete debates on art and politics, as these relate to performance and its effects on creating and thinking today. 

       

       

      29 / 06 – 04 / 07 & 13-27 / 07 / 2009

      ‘WAYS OF SEEING AND FORCED PERSPECTIVES’

      workshop by Vladimir Miller

      Vladimir's workshop is structured in two parts and is aimed at researching the city as a model for spectator involvement in a performance space. Connecting spectatorship and questions of teaching and learning to the city is also a model for the workshop structure itself as a space for knowledge production.

      The first part is centred around of the political aspects of space design and a phenomenological understanding of the spectators experience of space.

      Vladimir Miller uses three key texts (among others): ‘The practice of everyday life’ by de Certeau, Charles Curtis' essay on ‘Incomprehensible space’ and Jacques Rancière ‘The emancipated spectator’.

      To establish an alternative small system of knowledge production for our workshop, the participants build a space of learning and research where everyone is able to produce on her/his own terms. The idea of the city gives a model for this kind of space, which the participants can equally enter and explore.

      The research theme for the city is listening and sound. The question is how to shape space for listening, having in mind a moving listener and spectator. 

      A violinist is invited to create a continuing presence of sound in this city of listening. The space research concentrates around question of shaping the performative space (from a scenographic point of view) around that continuum of sound.

       

       

      07 / 2009 

      ‘SPATIAL RESEARCH & PERFORMANCE ART’

      workshop by Lars Frers & Alexander Schellow

      The workshop of the sociologist Lars Frers and the visual artist Alexander Schellow focuses on strategies and practices of spatial research. The starting point is that any space we can perceive and engage with is already a complex and in itself relational constellation of several aspects. It is a concrete context of a very specific materiality and an embodied spectator. Both are depending on each other. Together they both realise the conditions, that govern the way the/a world is constructed, for instance by directing attention. Or: They draw the borderlines may that be in public space with its everyday-life interactions or in the art-world frame of a theatre which guide, influence and limit our actual abilities to perceive and to act. Because of this impact  on perception and action the question of analysis and intervention is always at the same time a political and aesthetic question both in field research in public space as well as in the use of any artistically framed space like a black box or a white cube. 

       First, we want to discuss some terms and tools of our own research- and intervention-practice in and with spaces/places. We will then question, develop and adapt these terms and tools in the context of the examination, analysis, and shaping of spaces in performance practices. How to question, understand, use and not neglect or cover up spatial structures? Together with the participants of the workshop we want to choose a concrete spatial context (a building, a street, a theatre) and then concentrate on possible frames for practical research. This research should be related to the specific interests and wishes of the participants’ own projects and from their individual practices. The main part of the workshop will focus on doing concrete spatial analyses within a frame and using formats we select together. We will prescribe as little as possible, instead relying on our own perception looking for places of surprises, for modifications of movement patterns, for boredom, excitement and anxiety. Coming together at the end, we will share the singular results and research-experiences.

      Additionally and in parallel, we will offer one-to-one or one-to-two talks about specific spatial ideas and setups of projects and works, where single participants can discuss questions related to their work together with us.

       

       

      07 / 2009 

      ‘SENSE RADIO’

      workshop by Lilia Mestre and Els Viaene

      Sense Radio is a first step in a research project initiated by Lilia Mestre in a.pass research center on the ‘Social-Emotional Body’, (project that would result in the performance ‘Live-In Room’, shown at the WorkSpaceBrussels festival in Brussels in December 2009).

      This workshop is a practical try-out for the participants to set up emotional audio-spaces in the room, using the spatialisation of sound as their main material. 
Each of them is taught how to use audio recording material, how to edit sound, and how to set the sound out on the space, combine it, arrange it.

       

       

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

       

       

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


      Partners

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


                        
      Contributors for workshops

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

       


      Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

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

      26 / 01 – 06 / 02  / 2009

      ‘VIDEO STORYTELLING AND EDITING’

      workshop by Miguel Clara Vasconcelos

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

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

       

       

      02  / 2009

      ‘LIGHT & DESIGN’

      workshop by Jan Maertens

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

       

       

      02  / 2009

      ‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 01’

      coaching by Stefan Heinrich

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

       

       

       

      16-20 / 02 / 2009  

      ‘LOW TECH PERFORMANCE / COLLABORATION AT A DISTANCE’

      workshop by Dora Garcia

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

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

       

       

      02-06 / 03 / 2009

      ‘CONSEQUENCES’

      workshop by Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

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

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

       

       

      01-30 / 04 / 2009

      ‘TOOLS FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARITY : DRAMATURGY IN REAL-TIME’

      workshop by a.pass

      This workshop is open for three different groups of participants:

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


      -scenographers/sound designers/light designers

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

       

      The mentors of the project are:

      theatre maker Kris Verdonck

      dramaturg Marianne Van Kerckhove

      theatre maker Tine Van Aerschot

      dramaturg Elke Van Campenhout

      theatre maker: Yosi Wanunu (Toxic Dreams)

      dramaturg: Peter Stamer

       

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

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

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2008 BLOCK III 01 September 2008
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 September 2008
    • 31 December 2008
    • 2008 BLOCK III

       

       

       

      Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

      Ariane Loze
      Bruno Stappaerts
      Christophe Engels
      Constanze Schellow
      Gable Roelofsen
      Hanne Jacobs
      Karolien De Schepper
      Kim Lien Desault
      Klaas Devos
      Lieselot Jansen
      Lore Rabaut
      Luk Sips
      Marcos Simoes
      Michel Yang
      Sara Manente
      Sungmin Hong
      Vick Verachtert

       

      Partners

      LOPITAL, Antwerpen
      PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

       

      Collaborators for workshops

      Alessandra Bergmaschi (Brazil)

      Sandra Noeth (Germany)

      Tristan Honsinger (Germany)

       

      Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout and the researchers participants

       

      24-25 / 09/ 2008

      ‘(RE)CHANNELLING THE SINGULAR’

      (The solo in contemporary dance and performance)

      self-organised seminar by Kim Lien Desault and Sandra Noeth, University of Hamburg, Research Department, Performance Studies

      Two days of theory following the doctoral research of Sandra Noeth about the philosophical and historical significance of the solo in dance.

      Sandra Noeth and Kim Lien Desault invite the participants to ‘think’ the dance solo as an object of knowledge production.

       

       

      01-08 / 10 / 2008

      ‘PEACE PROJECT’

      self-organised project by Gable Roelofsen.

      The participants take part in the Peace Conference "Utopia or Distopia', organized by the philosophy department of the “Technische Universiteit” in Berlin. While they develop their own artistic researches to open  perspectives on the ‘question of peace' and ‘what peace can mean in a contemporary society today’, the projects are archived and exhibited at the gallery Arttransponder.

      The PEACE Project stands for the development of personal projects and of multiple collaborations between participants.

      'Mount Berlin', the 'Peace Walk’ through Berlin and the 'Sleep Inn' (a sleep-in initiative for the exchange of narrative) constitute the core of the research.

       

       

       

      09-10 / 10 / 2008

      ‘AROUND ALESSANDRA BERGMASCHI’

      meeting and working with Alessandra Bergmaschi

      self-organised and curated by Sara Manente

      Alessandra Bergmaschi, a Brazilian photographer, and artist-researcher Sara Manente develop the project "Democratic Forest”.

      who uses the camera?

      who do you want to bring into the picture?

      in what way?

      what do you communicate?

      Sessions alternate between presentation of Alessandra Bergmaschi’s work, documentary films screenings and texts readings.

       

       

       

      03-07 / 11 / 2008

      ‘TRANSDISCIPLINARY IMPROVISATION’

      self-organised workshop by Tristan Honsinger

      curated by Kim Lien Desault

      A group including dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists will work together on free jazz improvisation techniques to come to a common understanding of impro-building and group balance in transdisciplinary improvisation situations.

    • postgraduate program
    • research center
    • a.p.t.-a.s.-a.r.c.
    • 2008 BLOCK II 01 May 2008
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • 01 May 2008
    • 31 July 2008
    • 2008 BLOCK II

       

       

      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
      Marcos Simoes
      Michel Yang
      Sara Manente
      Vick Verachtert

        
      Partners

      Les Bains          
      KunstenFestivaldesArts
      In Transit @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin)
      Conflict Room (Antwerpen)

       

      Contributors for workshops

      Andre Lepecki

      Davis Freeman

      Lilia Mestre

       

      Coordinator a.pass

      Elke van Campenhout   

       

       

       

      The block is curated by Lilia Mestre

       

       

      08-10 / 05 / 2008

      ‘SOME POLITICAL DANCE’

      workshop by Davis Freeman

      In the framework of the project 'Some Political Art', curated by choreographer Lilia Mestre in Les Bains (Brussels), the creation of a solo performance is proposed to the participants under the direction of theater maker Davis Freeman (U.S.A.).

      The participants are asked to develop a five minutes performance out of their relation with politics and/or political art and to create a video out of it. They are also asked to formulate a short text out of that position. The resulting films and texts will be used in the video installation 'Some Political Dance' by Davis Freeman.

       

       

       

      21-31 / 05 / 2008

      ‘RES & REF’ (Residence and Reflection)

      by Elke Van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre

      KunstenFestivaldesArts each year invites a group of fifteen international artists to view the festival performances, to discuss, to bring in opinions and exchange. This year, Elke Van Campenhout will expand with two other groups the ‘res & ref’ project: the a.pt-participants will join as well the group 'some political art’ around Lilia Mestre, curator of Les Bains Connective in Brussels..

      All three groups (a total of thirty artists from different disciplines) will reside for ten days in Les Bains. In addition to the discussions there will be public 'reading sessions' organized by the a.pt-participants on 'The Art of Over-Identification'.

       

       

       

       

      11-16 / 06 / 2008

      ‘IN TRANSIT’

      guidance by Andre Lepecki (U.S., curator of the festival ‘In Transit’)

      In-Transit festival focuses on postcolonial related issues. The program is exceptional, to the extent that it creates, in a challenging intellectual framework, a visibility to artists who are not often seen in Europe.

      Andre Lepecki will guide the a.pass participants through the festival. For this he will provide in advance a reader of texts on postcolonial theory and contemporary performance.

       

       

       

       

      23 / 06 - 04 / 07 / 2008

      ‘INTERFACE FICTIONS’

      workshop by Lilia Mestre

      The showcase project "Interface Fictions" will develop in the temporary gallery space Conflict Room in Borgerhout, on the busy Turnhoutselaan in Antwerpen. The project will use the transparent, yet persistent partition of a former shop vitrine to explore relationships between private and public spaces.

      The a.pass participants will reside for a week in the vitrine room and will experiment with forms of (in) visibility, intimacy and (mis)communication between them and the outside world. The recurring daily passersby will face their practices, which will simultaneously function as a reverse ring and an invitation, and at times, will also transgress outside the limits of the shop to the streets.

      This experimental project researches the 'relational' mapping between art practice, everyday life and community.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • 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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