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    • performative publishing
    • project
    • workshop
    • AM I EVIL ? Open Call for writers
      29 February 2024
      posted by: Kristof Van Hoorde
    • 24 March 2024
    • AM I EVIL ?

      Am I Evil?* Brussels Edition 

      by Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola with Els Moors

      Can erotic writing become a place for decolonial and feminist exploration?How could one embrace the tools of erotic writing to unveil, investigate and question power processes of colonisation, discrimination, nanoracism, marginalization, exoticization, abuse and seduction from diverse perspectives?  

      These questions are at the core of Am I Evil? process writers of all sorts are invited to embark upon.
      On this journey the group of writers embrace erotic writing as a tool to investigate their own desire, and how this relates to the Other and the Unknown.

      For the duration of the whole journey they stay in dialogue through a peer-to-peer editing methodology. Actually such a methodology is not ‘just’ editing. It is rather an intimate and radical way of dialoguing through re-writing.

      Am I Evil? starts off with a-lecture introduction by Basani and Ciresola open to everyone about the legacy of Jeanne Walschot, the first white female dealer and collector of African art we know, active in Brussels from 1920s.

      The figure of Mrs. Walschot works efficiently as a site to explore the way Western European culture desires the Other, and the Unknown. With the research of Gloria Wekker, Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Robin diAngelo in mind, this exploration might reveal for instance how whiteness is constructed (culturally, socially, historically) through the look and the touch on the Other.

      The process of text writing and re-writing will take place between the end of April and July 2024, both in collective meetings in person and individual sessions at home.

      The texts created during this collective journey will be shared with the audience through a printed publication and will have a first presentation moment during the Art Book Fair at Wiels and at nadine, in October 2024.

      The Brussels edition of Am I Evil? welcomes as special guests the writers Gabriela Wiener and Cristina Ubah Ali Farah plus other artists to be confirmed.

      More info and how to apply click here.

    • 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.

       

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

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

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

       

      practical information:

      location frame: apass 4th floor within Polyset

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

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

       

      Bio

      https://evamaes.wordpress.com/

       

      Invited by

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

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

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

      Prep for participants

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

       

      Content and accessibility

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

       

      Timetable

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

      public talk 15.05, 18.00

       

      Participants 

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

       

      Bio

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

       

      Invited by

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

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

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

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

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

       


       

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

      RSVP via contact_aujus@proton.me

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

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

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

       

       

       


       

      Bio:

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

    • postgraduate program
    • 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

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

       

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

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

       

       

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

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

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

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

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

    • workshop
    • block 2023/I
    • Contingent Weirdness workshop on horror
      08 January 2023
      posted by: Sina Seifee
    • Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović
    • 10 January 2023
    • 13 January 2023
    • Contingent Weirdness

      For the Opening Week of a.pass block 2023 I, Adrijana and Sina propose training/hanging-out/sharing/practice for artists researchers that focuses on the specific genre of horror to understand each other’s artistic commitments in a constraint and therefore generative way. Adrijana and Sina will introduce some of the historical elements of the genre, such as zombies, gore and torture of ghostly demons, vicious animals and cannibal witches, as well as medieval serial killer monsters, unnatural disasters, Frankenstein projects, and so on. Parallelly foregrounding different scales and registers of horror for reconsideration, ranging from speculative fiction, and sci-fi cinema, to medieval bestiaries, inducing “bad feelings” such as fear, uncanny, awe, mania, panic, loss, tension and anxiety.

      The workshop starts by choosing an aspect of our individual artistic practices and imagining it as a horror story. Further abstracting the values and ethics that the practice promotes, and deciding what can be turned into horror with the help of the group. Doing so, the workshop explores the parts of our practices that are fucked-up, which means to what extent what we do can become disastrous, gruesome, and torturous. Starting from where one’s practice produces damage and from the point where thinking disintegrates and disorients, we will map what lurks in the peripheral vision. We will concentrate on both, to create horrors but also a specific setting, those which are important for the genre. Not only to set up the mood but to create an ambiance of the expectation of horror. In the workshop, we will provide basic accessories and tools to create settings – an ambiance of ‘expectation’ pregnant with horror. In relation to this, we will prepare references for the reading and/or watching selected films together. For the last day, we focus on composing singular pieces (around individual proposals or in small groups) which we will share at the end of the day in the setting of a ‘scary night storytelling.’

      The workshop is interested in horror as a genre. Because looking at genre can teach us how stories gather and stage their matters of care and teach a negatively affected audience to inhabit their world. Adrijana and Sina are interested in what comes from an atmosphere of contingent weirdness, creating experimental and personalized monsters of artistic work. 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).

       

      Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović were both associate researchers at a.pass Research Center (2018-2020) when this workshop was first conceived in the crossline between Sina’s medieval bestiaries and Adrijana’s artistic anxieties.

      Using storytelling, video, and performance, Sina 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)

      Adrijana employs artistic methods to create ambiguous distinctions between practice and theory, theory and confession, documentation and production, artistic and curatorial, oral exchange and artistic form. (www.gadi.me)

    • 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

       

    • 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
       
    • 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

       

    • project
    • workshop
    • Settlements
    • Polyset 2022W4-7 a.pass, Brussels 14 January 2022
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • a.pass
    • 24 January 2022
    • 11 February 2022
    • case of: Vladimir Miller
    • Polyset 2022W4-7 a.pass, Brussels

      POLYSET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH

      SCHEDULE

       

      [disorganisation, mutable<>mutant, re-constitution, available space, usedesign, decoherence, constituent imagination, perpetual modeling, set / unset, cohab, sticky space, gel, semiset, accumulation, interim, tentative, fragile, actual, affine space, poligraphy, gathering, a walk in the dark with the flashlight pointing backwards, fugitive instituting, politecture, study, overflow, hangout]

       

      a poliset is:

      a practice of temporary research co-habitation, where the the researchers design their spaces of practice in one shared space

      an indoor research hangout with available communal materials, tools, support structures and resources

      a self-curated study, that works through an open network of invitations

      consensual over-all-planning is an exception, while relational collaborative negotiations structure the space

      Poliset was developed as a workshop at a.pass about 10 years ago when a.pass was still situated at DeSingel in Antwerp. When I was invited to teach there, I was looking for a practice which would allow the researchers to produce a study environment that was structured around a polycentric approach to community and practice. The main question in coming up with this workshop was for me: How to design a (self)educational environment which can be appropriated by others through re-design? I wanted to pass on the role of the workshop facilitator to the space itself, hoping that interactions and presentations would organically emerge from the engagement of the researchers with their work and with each other. But for this to happen our spatial arrangement had to dissolve the default model of “always gathering in a circle around a table” which would privilege me as a teacher no matter what I did and said. We all needed an opportunity to stay together but to orient ourselves away from the center and towards our tasks and questions as researchers. Not to simply fall apart into individual processes, but to disorganise in order to reorganise in multiple peer-to-peer occasions of sharing and presentation. I took the idea of a city as a spatial metaphor (or on a smaller scale: village, town), with its distributed centers of production, politics and self-organisation, as the main model for such a space. The initial proposal was therefore called “Settlement” to point to a mode of dwelling which is never one structure and desire, but a multitude of interacting formations. The word “settlement” was also pointing to the key practice of negotiation (a “settlement” marks its end in legal terms) between the social, individual, material and organisational formations which would be emergent in the space. As the practice continued to develop at a.pass and elsewhere over the past ten years, then Settlement and now Poliset went through different iterations, becoming a larger research project on the politics of commoning and the relationship between practice and its material/spatial conditions within institutions.”

      Vladimir Miller

       

      a.pass Poliset 2022W4-6 will bring together research practices, contributions and participation by:

      apass participants, mentors, curators and team (tbc):

      Aleksandra Boris, Amy Pickles, Chloë Janssens, Sarah Pletcher, Anna- Sophie Lugmeier, Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier, Vera Sofia Mota, Gosie Vervlossem, Simon Asencio, Rares Craiut, João Fiadeiro, Vijai Patchineelam, Anna Rispoli, Samah Hijawi, Jaime Llopis, Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Steven Jouwersma, Joke Liberge, Kristof Van Hoorde.

       

      with research contributions by:

       

      artists choreographers Christine de Smedt, Liza Baliasnaja and Theo Livesey:

      L'Inconnu is a collaborative research project between Liza Baliasnaja, Theo Livesey and Christine De Smedt, around the notion of Low Intensity Violence (LIV). For this work, we consider LIV to be made up of the violences we experience and produce which are not immediately evident or visible. The violence that works in disguise. The research currently takes a specific look at LIV through the lens of language, and how language operates as a medium and vehicle for violences.”

       

      Tania Garduño (CIVA) - contribution on Proxemics:

      In the Turkish Empire, the shade of a tree you planted determined the amount of land you owned. Tree shades defined villages' sprawls. You could also calculate how old was a city, not necessarily by its buildings but by looking at the height of the trees.

      Architecture can be seen as the practice situated between the built space, human beings and actions. It can become the container of politics, history and civilizations. However, no single discipline nor research technique can help us understand how we perceive and associate with space. The science of Proxemics acknowledges this impasse; it addresses basic human situations in a subconscious area of society. It studies the many sensory inputs and emotions related to culture and its environment. Through scientific research, combined with "learning-by-doing" and the starting point that we are all experts in "being", Proxemics creates a broad field of experimentation that gives us a hidden take on our relationship to the world.”

       

      Jozef Wouters 

      "I will open and share my research as part of The Unbuilt School of Architecture. Part of Decoratelier, The Unbuilt School of Architecture is a platform for research about scenography and ephemeral space. For the Poliset days, I will share my research on spaces that are made of care and words more than of space and square meters. The ways of sharing are twofold; on Mon Feb 7th from 4pm I will open for a reading group and at 6pm it will be a film or a talk."

       

      Conversation with David Vercauteren on his book “Micropolitiques des Groupes” (tbc)

       

      To be expanded by the participating researchers

      an updated agenda of presentations, sharings, workshops and screenings will be posted here as it develops

      This text is not only an announcement, but also an invitation to come and spend time in the space and to usedesign it on your own terms. please use the link below to sign up and coordinate so that we can welcome you in.

      covid safety protocols will be followed in the collective space.

       

    • 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
    • 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/

       

       
    • 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!
       
       
    • 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?

    • research center
    • workshop
    • associate researchers Cycle 2
    • Spatial sound to movement 01 July 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Davide Tidoni
    • ZSenne Art Lab
    • 14 July 2020
    • 14 July 2020
    • Spatial sound to movement

      How sound-space perception and spatial listening can be used as a tool for developing movement and creating performance works?

      What knowledge/approach/way-of-doing do spatial listening and sound-space perception afford and how that can inform movement and performance work? How sound space awareness can turn or be translated into ways of moving, performing, and choreographing?

      Can we think of specific ways to develop/approach movement and performance which are led by the ear-situated-in-space? What are the differences compared to a more eye-determined approach to movement and performance? What are the intersections and common aspects? And eventually, what are the consequences of this approach on other aspects of performance work such as set design, sound design and the positioning of the sound sources, dramaturgy, costumes, and the role/position of the audience?

      My aim is not to work in praise of sound but to understand what knowledge we can extract from a spatial approach to sound in order to treat it as a resource for live performance work.

      Tue, July 14th 

      22h-02h

      Attention! In case of rain the workshop will be postponed to Wednesday the 16th, same hour.

      THE SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THE WORKSHOP ON JULY 14th ARE CLOSED

      please subscribe for the alternate date of July 15th, 10pm-02am

    • research center
    • workshop
    • associate researchers Cycle 2
    • What do you depend on, where you are? 29 June 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Breg Horemans
    • ZSenne Art Lab
    • 15 July 2020
    • 17 July 2020
    • What do you depend on, where you are?

      How can we share the performative potential of public space to explore ‘mutual vulnerability'? We invite you to think physically during a series of 'staged encounters' in the wider environment of Zsenne Art Lab, between July 15 and 17.

      Every encounter offers a space to negotiate proximity with a stranger, addressing the possibility for an intra-active (Barad) relationship. These encounters take shape as silent walks for two people on July 15, 16 and 17 (mornings, between 9 and 10 am). The endpoint of the walk is Zsenne Art Lab.

      Through this practice of physical thinking, we aim to configure a layered understanding of the relation between self- and social identity within the urban environment. We explore how the environment plays a role in the construction of an ‘environmental identity’ (Clayton). On Friday July 17th at 14pm, a public discussion will take place for the participants of the silent walks and external guests to share thoughts on the question: ‘how do our practices contribute to the construction of an environmental identity’?

      These activities are embedded in the long term research project HALL33, by TAAT. Between May and November we continue organizing 'staged encounters' as a form of social activism in Brussels (BE), Dundee (UK), Riga (LV) and Athens (GR). How vulnerable do we want to be towards strangers in a 'socially distant' society?

      More info

      • To participate in the silent walks, send an email to breg@taat-projects.com, including your name and the area where you live. You will be carefully matched with a stranger. The walk takes maximum 45min and will take place in a 3K-perimeter around Zsenne Art Lab, followed by a feedback moment.
      • The discussion on Friday July 17 is scheduled between 2 and 4 pm.
      • TAAT is a shared transdisciplinary practice that explores open ended trajectories by an open source methodology. Contributions to our research archive are highly valued and treated with care. http://taat-projects.com/
    • research center
    • workshop
    • associate researchers Cycle 2
    • Writing subtext 29 June 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Pia Louwerens
    • ZSenne Art Lab
    • 15 July 2020
    • Writing subtext

      During this workshop Pia Louwerens will test scattered yet corroborating ideas and exercises linked to her research, grouped into two sessions. The first part of the workshop will revolve around the notion of being "embedded" and ways of becoming embedded on the one hand, and on the other hand the workshop as a superstructure, an exoskeleton, which adapts itself to its participants. Would it be possible to rewrite the workshop during the event itself, and what kind of structure could serve this soft workshop? For the second part of the workshop Louwerens will introduce new elements; attempts to evoke events which occured during her research trajectory in collaboration with several institutions in the Netherlands. We will become a loosely organized speaking-reading-writing-machine to collectively document these instances and provide them with an embedded subtext.

      To participate in this workshop, please send an email to pia.louwerens1@gmail.com

      Wed, July 15th at 14h

      SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE CLOSED FOR THIS WORKSHOP

    • research center
    • workshop
    • associate researchers Cycle 2
    • Re- 29 June 2020
      posted by: Vladimir Miller
    • Esteban Donoso
    • ZSenne Art Lab
    • 13 July 2020
    • 14 July 2020
    • Re-

      How do we become visible? Within which frames? What are the conditions of that appearance? This workshop takes as points of departure objects and documents from our own archives as performance makers / thinkers, and creates a new environment for them. Via re-visiting their time, environment and our personal connections to them, we will open up a process of constant re-structuring of our own narrations. If we were to write a film script about these re-visited environments, what form would they take? How will we come to occupy the space of a film frame? Will there be enough space? How will our collective reflections and present tense entanglements become part of our fiction? How will we manage to exist and coexist within this commensurate space?

      This workshop is facilitated by Esteban Donoso, and will involve co-writing and thinking together to co-create a film script using a version of those documents, plus versions of our reflections, questions and dialogues. Please bring a document of your performance life, the documents can go from 'harder' materials like video or photos to an anecdote or a dialogue that we remember, a smell, a description of a space, etc.

      Duration: 2 x 4 hours

      More info: re-workshop@outlook.com

       

      Session 1

      Mon, July 13th

      14h

       

      Session 2

      Tue, July 14th

      14h

       

       

    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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!

       
    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • 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?
    • 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

       
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    • 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‘.

       
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    • 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.

       
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    • 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

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    • 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.
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    • 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. 
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    • block 2018/III
    • STUDY DAYS A curatorial proposal by Adva ZAkai
      11 September 2018
      posted by: Joke Liberge
    • 10 September 2018
    • 30 November 2018
    • STUDY DAYS

      PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE

      This block is organized around a series of Study Days. Almost every Monday till the end of November, a.pass hosts artists, thinkers and researchers to contribute to the problematization of various issues that bring together love, art, school, improvisation and politics.


      ** The texts bellow are written from the perspective of the notions explored at a.pass, and not by the guests, who are invited to respond to them from within their own practices **


      September 10th
      Maybe one day, love will no longer be considered a private endeavor or a slogan of hippies, but rather a public and a political mode of being...

      Guests: Johan Grimonprez & Bleri Lleshi

      Imagine a society that bases its arrangements, institutions and democracy on love itself. Such a society will probably teach and exercise love as a force that contributes to the constitution of communities. Maybe then it will make less sense to say that love is a social construction than to say that love constructs society... What kind of practices can re-appropriate love by allowing it to shift from individual, consumerist and patriarchal inclinations into the political engagement of play and interaction of differences? How can love be romantic but not only? What if love would expend beyond the limits of the couple and the nuclear family and serve as the basis for our political projects in common?
      10h – 13h A session with Johan Grimonprez
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 15h15 presentation of work by Johan Grimonprez
      15h15 – 15h30 Break
      15h30 – 18h A session with Bleri Leshi

       

      September 17th
      To be included your love tool kit
      Or: Tender technologies: how tools shape practice and practice shapes tools

      Guest: Femke Snelting

      Femke Snelting: Can we transform our relation to everyday communication technologies? Can we take that risk? Currently, tech giants dominate all forms of digital communication, from cloud-storage to production tools and archiving systems. Infused with modernist ideas of progress, these tools are full of capitalist values and dreams of seamless scaleability. They form intricate webs of human and non-human agencies weaving themselves into and around us, intimately linking our personal and professional practices. Also institutional practice has come to rely on the use of commercial platforms, including places that are dedicated to radical transformation, political love and commoning like a.pass. So how are we being with technology when practicing a School of Love? This study-day is dedicated to experiencing technology differently, of developing a convivial relationship that foregrounds vulnerability, mutual dependency and care-taking. With the help of old and new Free, Libre and Open Source Software tools we will practice a transition from anticipating efficiency to allowing curiosity; from expecting scarcity to demanding multiplicity; from solution to possibility.
      10h – 13h A session with Femke Snelting
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 18h A session with Femke Snelting

       

      September 24th – September 29th
      Inspired by the interest in both love and school as charged with potential to generate new politics and relations in the world.

      a.pass meets SOL participates to The Swamp School at the Venice Biennale Architecture 2018

      "In exploring the imaginary of a swamp—a living organism in which borders defined by social, political and cultural factors are porous and permeable— the Swamp School will investigate an open artistic/architectural form, effective workshop and publication methodologies. The Swamp School will act as a pilot for future learning environments, informed by and informing the architecture and installations of its own space. Research questions will focus on creating public interfaces and manuals that support adaptation and learning to meet the demands of a changing environment.” Swamp Pavillion curated by Nomeda and Gedeminas Urbonas.

      Participating institutions: MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, University of Antwerp, Università Iuav di Venezia, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti - NABA Milan, The Art Institute at the Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory IAeP, Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel, University of Iceland, Vytautas Magnus University Kaunas, a.pass - advanced performance and scenography studies Brussels, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Contour Biennale 9 Mechelen, Design for the Living World Class at HFBK The University of Fine Arts Hamburg, Städelschule Architecture Class – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Frankfurt

      http://swamp.lt/#program


      October 8th
      Blame it on monogamy

      Guests: Eva Berghman, CW/the Common Wallet project, Kathrien De Graeve

      Many of us were indoctrinated to believe that they desire only one way of moving through the course of life, where pairing is the ultimate goal and the preferable mode of being. This probably has not much to do with the belief in the mental and spiritual profoundness of the unit of two, but rather being motivated by the fear of being left out by a society that socially and economically prioritises the couple. How to re-appropriate institutions that re-appropriated love itself by bounding it to laws, contracts, economy and morals? What if being polyamorous would not only mean having many lovers, but many kinds of love? We could chose to stop considering Polyamory as merely a sexual and romantic practice, and think of it as an ethic that potentially destabilizes the normative hierarchies between human relationships. Monogamy is not just a way to love romantically, it also influences our relations to money, time, jobs, passports, artistic/scientific/academic researches etc... If Polyamory would be the dominant way of relation in the political and social sphere, how would this effect the notions of owning (property, identity, ideas) and owing, of secrets and privacy? How can love subvert and de-construct power structures that use monogamy to move us away from caring collectively?

      10h – 11h30 A session with Katrien De Graeve
      11h30 – 13h A Session with Eva Berghmans
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 15h30 A session with CW / the Common Wallet project
      15h30 – 16h Break
      16h – 18h A discussion through relating the themes of the day to our own practices

       

      October 22nd
      Love makes schools make love

      Guests: Jan Masschelein, Laurence Rassel, SRG / school research group

      Maybe one day, schools will no longer be considered as merely a protective incubator that prepares one to life outside of it, but rather an engaged environment that influences the world. Think of a society that bases its schools on experiment, reflection and collectivity, independent from the market's need. Schools that produce ideologies and policies, instead of being instrumentalised by them. Schools that gather strangers and differences under the common wish to study public matters in order to challenge and improve them. If ever such a society will exist, it will probably construct its schools as flexible systems that work in acceptance of potential change and disruption, as a way to embody that which is being studied in them. Can schools embrace love as a strategy to create a place of encounter where both the institution and its part takers grow in relation to each other? How can a school base its structure on the same principals it wishes to teach?

      13h – 16h A session with Jan Masschelein
      16h– 18h A session with Laurence Rassel
      18h – 19h Dinner (provided by a.pass)
      19h – 21h Presentation of school models that were developed by a.pass participants


      October 29th
      By putting that which is between us before that which we think belongs to us.

      Guests: Caroline Godart, Elke Van Campenhout

      School is maybe more of a verb than a noun. Its a state of “attentivnes” to the world that one could chose to enter at any time and any place, in the company of others. Within this logic, wouldn't being a student similar to being an artist? Schools and students could be considered as lovers, who commit to each other, but do not wish to control what the other does with the love that they give. To school could mean to study and care for the same thing that you would also be willing to let go of. To - engage with, and - detach from, at the same time. This could be the love that dares to bound spirituality and politics together. If school becomes a verb, teachers would then teach how to school, and maybe love would not be a feeling, but a mode of studying that generates feelings.

      10h – 13h A reading session with Caroline Godart
      13h – 14h Lunch
      14h – 16h A reading session with Caroline Godart
      16h – 16h30 Break
      16h30 – 18h A reading session with Elke Van Campenhout

       

      October 31st – Nov 5th (Nov 3rd – off)
      Instead of needing to know

      A workshop by Joao Fiadeiro.
      Guests: Elke Van Campenhout, Alex Arteaga

      If in both Love and School an openness to change through encounters with others is practiced, we better develop sensitivities to deal with a change into an unknown path. Perhaps we would be better off improvising through, with and within the unknown instead of needing to know. Maybe improvisation today can be approached as a mode of resistance to tendencies for a life dedicated to an anticipated and defined future. It might seem like stating the obvious, proposing to put improvisation back in the agenda. Life itself is an improvisation, of course, we never stopped improvising. But we can dedicate a special attention to it in order to examine its relevance to nowadays realities. Not the improvisation that aims to emancipate repressed self expressions, neither the one that provides skills and masteries to manoeuvre within individual lives and careers , but an improvisation attitude that may create an actualized set of relations between us and other people, us and other things, us and anything that is not us.

      10h – 18h A workshop with Joao Fiadeiro
      19h – 21h (Nov 2nd, 4th, 5th ) Evening interventions by Joao Fiadeiro, Elke Van Campenhout, Alex Arteaga


      November 12th
      The Love workers

      Guests: An Mertens, Daniela Bershan

      Artistic processes often face the contradiction of critiquing the same protocols they have to comply with, such as deadlines, saleable products, authorship, commissions and competition. Many artists experience frustration by the fact that policy makers, programmers and curators determine the visibility of certain artists/art works instead of others. A Love Worker – could this be a synonym for an Artist? Would this emancipate some practices from having to defend their relevance through the procedures imposed by artistic scenes? Or better than that – could this expand the boundaries of what an artistic work can become?

      10h – 13h A session with An Mertens (in the forest)
      13h – 15h Lunch (+ coming back from the forest)
      15h – 18h A session with Daniela Bershan

       

      BIOGRAPHIES

      Bleri Lleshi is philosopher, writer, lecturer, youth worker and DJ. He studied political sciences and philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. At the moment he is writing a ph.d on the struggle of the excluded. Lleshi is lecturer at UCLL where he teaches various subjects on social sciences. His research focuses on topics such as inequality, neoliberalism, youth, migration, identities, and extremism. Lleshi has participated in conferences, debates and media. In 2014, he was considered as one of the most influential immigrants in Belgium

      Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of practice and theory, art and cinema, documentary and fiction, demanding a double take on the part of the viewer. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work seeks out the tension between the intimate and the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue. By suggesting new narratives through which to tell a story, his work emphasizes a multiplicity of realities. Grimonprez's curatorial projects, films and installations have been exhibited at museums worldwide. He published several books and he lectures widely.

      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she explores how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. http://constantvzw.org/

      Eva Berghmans is a journalist working for 'De Standaard'. As a journalist she has an excuse to step up to people and ask them all kind of weird and intimate questions. She never took 'because this is the way we have always done things' for an answer and tries to see through the presumptions in our everyday lives. Currently she is working on a research project on polyamory, published on http://www.standaard.be/tag/.'

      CW/the Common Wallet project is an initiative of 10 people from the art sector in Belgium who share their individual income in one collective bank account. Through this experiment they collectively explore their psychological and cultural dependencies on money and a possible alternative to the monogamous and often lonely relationship one has with the money one earns. CW part takers are : Luigi Coppola, Eliza Demarre, Anna Rispoli, Adva Zakai, Diederik Peeters, Christophe Meierhans, Luca Mattei, Agnes Quackels, Ingrid Vranken, Irena Ramanovic


      Katrien De Graeve is a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), affiliated to the Department of Languages and Cultures of Ghent University, and member of the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender. In 2012, she completed her PhD at the Department of Comparative Sciences of Culture at Ghent University with a critical analysis of intensive parenting practices in Belgian-Ethiopian adoptive families. In her current research project (2016-2019), she has shifted focus to the study of sexuality/romantic relationships and discourses of exclusivity and plurality in light of the normative two-parent nuclear family.

      Jan Masschelein is head of the Laboratory for Education and Society, and of the research group Education, Culture and Society. He studied educational sciences and philosophy at the K.U.Leuven and at the Johan Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main and is as well Fellow of the Alexander Von Humboldt-Stiftung. His research can be situated in the broad domain of the formation of educational theory, critical theory, social philosophy and governmentality studies. More concretely it concerns the public and societal role of education and schooling, the role of the university, the changing experiences of time and space in the age of the network, the educational meaning of cinema and camera, the architecture of schools and architecture of the learning environment, a pedagogy of attention, the notion of 'pedagogy', the pedagogical role of teachers and social workers. A lot of attention is directed towards experimental educational practices and towards new forms of documentary and exploratory research.

      Laurence Rassel is currently the director of art school ERG in Brussels. Educated in visual arts and pedagogy, she pursued an interdisciplinary trajectory from new media to the management of an artistic institution. From 2010 to the end of June 2015, she was director of the Fundacio Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, a foundation created to promote contemporary art and thought, and the study of Antoni Tàpies' work. Previously, from 1998, she was, among others, responsible for Constant, a non-profit organization based in Brussels. Constant connects theoretical thinking, the critical use of new technologies, artistic behavior and political issues in the network. At the same time, she was project coordinator for the Interface3 women's technology training center in Brussels, as part of the European ADA project from 2001 to 2006. 



      SRG/School Research Group is an open group of art practitioners and pedagogues who meet regularly in order to share their interest and experience within school environments in Belgium and study together. 



      Caroline Godart is a writer, professor and dramaturge based in Brussels. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Cinema Studies from Rutgers University (USA), where she studied with Elizabeth Grosz. She is now an Assistant Professor of Communication, Germanic Languages and Cultural Studies at IHECS (Institut des Hautes Études des Communications Sociales, Brussels). Her first book, The Dimensions of Difference, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. It explores the question of difference, and in particular of sexual difference, through three axes (space, time, and embodiment), which are approached both as aesthetic devices and as philosophical concepts in the works of Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson.

      Elke Van Campenhout / ELLE is a tantric practioner and artistic researcher. She developed her work partly at the a.pass research institute where she worked for five years under the umbrella of Bureau d’Espoir, a practice on the import, export and redistribution of hope. For this practice she studied political theory, contemporary philosophy and spiritual body practices. Her work is a transdisciplinary practice, linking contemporary philosophy to spiritual body practice, in the development of an ethics of coming together and rethinking our relation to the world we live in. Since 2 years Elke Van Campenhout and Stijn Smeets started up the experimental living community The Monastery, dedicating all their time and resources on the creation of a spiritual life of devotion, alternative economies, and ritual composition.

      João Fiadeiro belongs to a generation of choreographers who emerged in the late 1980’s and led to the emergence of the Nova Dança Portuguesa. In 1990, he founded the workshop RE.AL Company that supported the creation and dissemination of several choreographers and their works, which were regularly performed in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and South America. Real Time Composition is a project that he has been developing for twenty years. In parallel, he has organized several workshops in various training courses, schools and universities throughout the world. João Fiadeiro is currently completing a PhD in contemporary art at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.

      Alex Arteaga’s research integrates aesthetic and philosophical practices relating to aesthetics, the emergence of sense, meaning and knowledge, and the relationships between aurality, architecture and the environment through phenomenological and enactivist approaches. He studied composition, music theory, piano, electroacoustic music, and architecture in Berlin and Barcelona and received a PhD in philosophy from the Humboldt University for his dissertation Sensuous Framing: Fundamentals of a Strategy to Realize Conditions of Perception. From 2008 to 2012 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment at the Humboldt University and visiting professor at the MA Choreography at the Inter- University Centre for Dance Berlin. In 2012 he led the research team at the Berlin.

      An Mertens is artist, writer, and core-member of Constant, an artist run organisation for experimental art and media in Brussels. Next to a practise of literary creation using algorithms, she is also a nature guide in Forêt de Soignes and writing fiction with a particular interest for the non-human presences in woods.
http://constantvzw.org, http://www.algolit.net, http://www.paramoulipist.be/

      Daniela Bershan aka Baba Electronica is a love worker using visual arts, performance, music making and social organization around topics of collective study, care-making and practices of (non-sexual) intimacy. In her work she conceptualizes not just the characteristics of her materials but with and through them the skills and objects they can be read with: the DJ, the remixer, the researcher, the love-worker are dissecting choreographies and scores in order to make tangible how they operate; and enable to organize relations otherwise. They are committed to experiment and circulate with queering tools. Bershan co-founded and directed FATFORM (NL), and is co-organizing ELSEWHERE & OTHERWISE at Performing Arts Forum (FR). Her works, projects and performances have been presented worldwide.

       

       
    • conference
    • project
    • research center
    • seminar
    • workshop
    • Parallel Parasite
    • Parallel Parasite Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre
      03 September 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • 04 June 2018
    • 30 September 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • Parallel Parasite

      A month residency at ZSenne ArtLab : On Anarchiving > On Love > On Score -ing > On the spot > On presence
      Gatherings of parallel parasite platforms  for practice based research in the arts > If you want to know, come!


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

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

       

      The propositions start from reading groups, activating thinking/doing practices, score -ing, speculative talks, and registration/documentation formats in order to converge multiple insights that might (and not must) infuse other formats of reflecting/experiencing framed by the quasi public environment of the gallery space. 

      The Research Center in residency invites several guests which are thinking and experiencing ‘gathering’ as a form of knowledge processing bridging theoretical and experiential approaches. These gatherings don’t depart from personal concerns but aim to mine inter-subjective frame works to question artistic research as a learning together practice.

      This point of address for the a.pass RC next block, comes from two main curatorial concerns. The first is about the publicness of a Research Centre for artistic research and its visibility, accessibility and share-ability.  What are the internal and external demands and needs of such environments? The second comes from an observation on what I’m calling parallel-parasite platforms for practice based research in the arts.

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

      The three main proposals are: SOL (School of Love) proposed by Adva Zakai, The way of the Anarchive proposed by Erin Manning (SenseLAb) and ScoreScapes proposed by Lilia Mestre (a.pass). These invited quasi – institutional setups affiliated in one way or another with the academic environment are experimental formats of learning processes that are critically challenging modes of knowledge production in artistic research. All these ‘parallel-parasite platforms’ or ‘ways of doing’ are engaged in thinking-doing practices that converge theoretical and artistic research practice approaches in the arts. 

      SOL / School Of Love is an initiative of students and teachers from the Autonome Vormgeving department at KASK. SOL came to existence spontaneously as a school inside a school, in March 2016, out of a workshop that explored the notions of Love and School as modes of attention. SOL has no predetermined curriculum. It avoids defining itself and its goals in order to allow activities to emerge through the presence and interest of its participants, who come from inside KASK as well from outside of the institution. Anyone can be a part of SOL, anything can become a project in it, and it can take place anywhere, as long as it’s stimulated by the will to re-think both school and love as charged with potential for change and engagement in society. It is what we make it to be. 

      AND

      The SenseLab is a laboratory for thought in motion.

      Based in Montreal, the SenseLab is an international network of artists and academics, writers and makers, from a wide diversity of fields, working together at the crossroads of philosophy, art, and activism.

      Participants are held together by affinity rather than by any structure of membership or institutional hierarchy. The SenseLab’s event-based projects are collectively self-organizing. Their aim is to experiment with creative techniques for thought in the act. The SenseLab’s product is its process, which is meant to disseminate. The measure of success is the creative momentum that spins off into individual and group practices elsewhere, to seed new processes asserting their own autonomy. The SenseLab makes no claim to ownership, operating as much as possible on the principle of a gift economy.

      This block will follow up on the thinking the archival concerns of artistic research at a.pass. The interest crawls out of the virtual into the physical public sphere wanting to add another aspect to it. The Zsenne will be taken as a sensor environment for the working upon collective processes of archive and anarchive. For this precise question we’ll be working with Erin Manning and her knowledge on the Anarchive as part of the Immediations project in SenseLab.

      Anarchive 

      1.The anarchive is best defined for the purposes of the Immediations project as a repertory of traces of collaborative research-creation events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration.2.Thus the anarchive is not documentation of a past activity. Rather, it is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation.

      3.The anarchive needs documentation – the archive – from which to depart and through which to pass. It is an excess energy of the archive: a kind of supplement or surplus-value of the archive.

      In this movement between having to retreat from the world and then go back to the world as both places to make sense (study) of our relation with things,  various questions start to appear: What is the importance and articulation of doing/thinking practices? And what kind of positionality would this create in the semi-academic frame work?What kind of environments and practices can we envisage to share political/ aesthetic concerns? what kind of ‘library’ would we build to address these concerns?

      Each practice will have a specific way of opening to the public and more specific formats will be announced in detail as we go along. For now the basic structure is a daily private practice fora group of invited artistic researchers and an open door practice everyday from 17:30 till 20:00 where public conversations and doings welcome the interested and the passerby.

      The RC is mainly working with alumni and associated researchers linked with the a.pass Research Centre. For Parallel Parasite we are: Alex Arteaga, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Bojana Cvejic, Nikolaus Gansterer, Nicolas Galeazzi, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Nico Dockx, Steven Jouwersma, Halbe Kuipers, Pia Louwerens, Sara Manente, Marialena Merouda, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Lilia Mestre, Martino Morandi, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, Eric Thielemans, Femke Snelting, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Adva Zakai, Veridiana Zurita with Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann .

      and the post-master researchers: Elen Braga, Nasia Fourtouni, Leo Kay, Laura Pante, Geert Vaes, Maurice Meewisse, Caterina Mora, Ezther Nemethi, Hoda Siahtiri, Goda Palekaite, Katinka Van Gorkum.

      Forms of learning together is a central approach in the post-master’s program of a.pass (platform for artistic research practices) and has a background in art run organisations as models of self-organisation and collaboration.  It views art practice and artistic research as situated, critical and autonomous processes contributing for the politisation of modes of gathering and learning together. 

      ScoreScapes is a research on how to create frameworks for bringing together diverse artistic practices to ‘speak’ to each other without having a common constraint in terms of content or form. To find systems of interaction where different aesthetic experiences cohabitate, complement, disagree and motivate thirdness together with the possibility to trace it. Like a maze of potentials hovering over us participants of the score.

      A central concern in the ScoreSacpes research is the development of modes of being together with our individual backgrounds, moods, sensibles, political concerns, theories, … Through a system of questions and answers set in time, the scores propose regular encounters as a mode of intensive exchange about individual experiences that interconnect with others. In this sense the score proposes a form of sociability. To work with scores allows to follow up and evaluate these relationships constantly. The score evolutions are guidelines for the progress of the study and facilitate a chronological trajectory of the research. To make scores is also to produce documents in order to observe the paradigms that are at stake while making art. The unexpected and unforeseen event is always a surprising call to pay attention to the performative aspect of things, to the condition of all existence as experiential events. The score becomes a life art laboratory for multidisciplinary practices and pluri-focus presences. An attempt to shift from an art-to-look-at to an art to experience.

       
    • SCORESCAPES: Thinking Scores as Pedagogical Tool is an ongoing research in the context of a.pass. For this occasion the score will serve the question of  'being in an (other) place' which is not home, which is semi-public, which will constitute a composite body and which will be in the 'here' of the public space and of the a.pass Research Center. Which tender social formation will take place?  What will appear from the rubbing between institutional paradigms and the discourses that resist? The score wants to make appear narratives localized in that time/place frame work. We will work with writing and physical forms of presence and we'll go in between inside and outside, the individual and the group, in between the here and there, between being part of and being other.

      SCORESCAPES bears witness to affective relationships for understanding the self and the collective through acts of gathering and attending to varied modes of being with their respective backgrounds, moods, sensibilities, political concerns, and theories. Acting as a system that establishes questions and answers set in time and place, the scores propose regular encounters as conditions for intensive exchange. They propose a system of interaction where varied aesthetic experiences coexist, complement, challenge and inspire otherness with the potential to trace it. The Score wishes to underline the importance of the experiential aspect of things as a thinking-partner.

      The week will be separated in two practices. The first will be a closed session 'Score for entering a space' with Esther Rodriguez- Barbero Granado, Lilia Mestre and Eric Thielemans.  The second 'Fragile Community Score'  is under inscription and will last for 3 days.  Both practices will be shared in the evenings.

      Please inscribe by sending an email to lilia@apass.be

      SCORESCAPES

      • WEEK 2 (11-17)

      • Monday 11 > Eric Thielemans >  Score for entering a place (close session)> Public Discussion from 17:30 till 19:00 > Concert  Eric Thielemans at 20:30

      • Tuesday 12 > Eric Thielemans > Score  for entering a place (close session) > Public Discussion from 17:30 till 19:00

      • Wednesday 13 > ScoreScapes > Public Discussion from 17:30 till 19:00

      • Thursday 14 > ScoreScapes > Public Discussion from 17:30 till 19:00

      • Friday 15 > ScoreScapes > Public Discussion from 17:30 till 19:00

      • Saturday 16 > Monday Readings - Femke Snelting and Martino Morandi  > 11:00 till 16:00

    • research center
    • seminar
    • workshop
    • block 2018/II
    • Parallel Parasite
    • The Way of the Anarchive a residency with Erin Manning in the frame of parallel parasite
      11 May 2018
      posted by: Lilia Mestre
    • Zsenne ArtLab
    • 18 June 2018
    • 29 June 2018
    • case of: Lilia Mestre
    • The Way of the Anarchive

       

      The Way of the Anarchive

      What resists the archive?
      How does that which resists cast itself forward?
      What kinds of traces, smudges, residues does it leave, does it create?
      How can we value that which does not register, but makes a difference?

      A processual engagement with the anarchic share of experience will allow us to develop techniques for attuning to that which resists capture. In a paradoxical move, our work will be to give it the breadth and force of an appearance. This appearance, conceived as a minor gesture, will be curious about that which sparks in the interstices of experience in the making.

      With a.pass associate researchers: Sina Seiffee,  Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Sara Manente, Lilia Mestre, Nicolas Galleazzi. a.pass (ex)participants: Marialena Marouda, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Xiri Noir and Pia Louwerens Guests: Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Adva Zakai, Alex Arteaga, Miriam Hempel, Nikolaus Gansterer, Silvia Pinto Coelho, Tamir Etin, Halbe Kuipers, Nico Dockx, Veridiana Zurita, Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann,  ...

      SCHEDULE

      • WEEK 3 (18 -24 June) - The two weeks of The Way of the Anarchive are radically open: together we will work to create vacuoles of time through which the infraperceptible will begin to resonate. From 12:00-16:00 you will find us at Zsenne, in and around. But time folds, so don't be alarmed if 16:00 becomes 19:00 - you never do know what time can do! In the evenings most days there is an open conversation.

      • Monday 18 > The Way of the Anarchive

      • Tuesday 19 > The Way of the Anarchive 19:00 Encounter with Erin Manning

      • Wednesday 20 > The Way of the Anarchive

      • Thursday 21 > The Way of the Anarchive  19:00 Encounter with Nico Dockx: Every Archive Hides Another Archive

      • Friday 22 > 13:30-16:30  Miriam Hempel > The Meaning Of — an exploration of alternative perspectives

      • Saturday 23 > Visit DETM (Don't Eat The Microphone) In Psychiatrisch Ziekenhuis Dr. Guislain. GENT with Viridiana Zurita, Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann (closed session)

        WEEK 4 (25- 30 June)

      • Monday 25 > CRI’s (a.pass post-master sharing practices day+ feedback)

      • Tuesday 26 > The Way of the Anarchive  19:00  Encounter SenseLab and SOL

      • Wednesday 27 > The Way of the Anarchive  19:00  Encounter with Alex Arteaga:  “de-archiving. A framed dialog”

      • Thursday 28 > The Way of the Anarchive  19:00 Encounter with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi - Cryptoeconomy of affect

      • Friday 29 > The Way of the Anarchive

      • Saturday 30 > Nikolaus Gansterer (Translecture) CANCELLED (due to inoperative meniscus)

       

       

       

       

       

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

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

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

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



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

      www.schooloflove.info

       

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

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


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

      Weekly plan

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

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

      Wednesday June 6th
      SOL OFF

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

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

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

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

    • 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.
       
    • 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.

       

    • 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

       

    • 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.

    • 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?

       

       

       

       

       

       

    • 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

    • 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


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

      This seminar is organized in collaboration with La Bellone - Brussels

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


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

      Detailed program:

      Thursday June 22nd

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

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

       

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

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

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

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

       

      Friday June 23rd

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

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

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

       

      14:00 >17:00       Masterclass Olga de Soto

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

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

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

       

      Saturday June 24th 12:00 > 18:00

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

       

      12:30   Sofia Caesar: Introduction talk

      13:00  Femke Snelting

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

      14:00 Olga de Soto

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

       

      PAUSE

       

      15:30  Vincent Meessen

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

      16:30 Agency (Kobe Matthys)

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

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

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

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

      Dirty Room

      Edited by: Juan Domínguez and Victoria Pérez Royo

      Editorial: Continta me tienes

      Executive Production: manyone

      Madrid, May 2017

      Translations by Ana Buitrago, Simon Malone and Catherine Phelps

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

       

      About the participants

      Vincent Meessen

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

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

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

       

      Agency

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

       

      Femke Snelting (Possible Bodies)

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

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

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

       

      Olga de Soto

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

    • postgraduate program
    • 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
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    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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 

       

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • 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.

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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

    • postgraduate program
    • workshop
    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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
    • workshop
    • 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
    • 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.

    • 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.

    • research center
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • The Bridge 11 September 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Adriana La Selva / Mika Juusela
    • 05 October 2015
    • 09 October 2015
    • The Bridge

      This workshop is part of Adriana La Selva’s research on contemporary training methodologies for theatre. The beginning of the project concentrates on a deep understanding of physical practices which draw from the Theatre Anthropology vocabulary developed by Eugenio Barba, in order to question and push forward training principles devised by his group.

      During this week of physical work at the a.pass, we will be looking at the principle of repetition from many different angles, in order to understand the creative possibilities of this tool and test philosophical and neurological notions developed around the theme. The main physical work concentrates on the training for the actor used and developed by the international ensemble The Bridge of Winds, a theatre group created by Odin’s actress Iben Nagel Rasmussen.

      During its 25 years of existence, the group has developed a series of exercises to work with the actors scenic presence. These energy exercises may be simple on the outside but difficult to master. Exercises have common form, they are done in contact to the others, but at the same time the work is highly individual. It develops and demands a great amount of alertness, sensitivity and willingness to overcome ones physical comfort.

      As a way of having a common theoretical ground (and developing practice-based research methodologies), the participants will receive previously to the workshop a paper Adriana has just developed on the theme, to be questioned in the practice.

      Mika Juusela is an actor/director/pedagogue from Finland. He has been a member of the Bridge of Winds from 1999 and since then he has been teaching and performing with the group. In his own country Juusela is working in various projects (from performance and scripwriting to artistic research). He is also a founding member of Laboratorytheatre Fennica and  publishes and translates theatre literature.

       

      Practical: 05 to 09/10/15, from 10.30 to 16.00 (to be confirmed) @ a.pass, 4th floor Maximun 15 participants Bring your training clothes, a sense of discipline and a will for physical engagement.

    • research center
    • workshop
    • block 2015/III
    • OR SHALL WE USE THE STAIRS? 09 September 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Adva Zakai / Raphaële Jeune
    • 18 September 2015
    • 20 September 2015
    • OR SHALL WE USE THE STAIRS?

      Brussels-based choreographer Adva Zakai and French curator Raphaële Jeune propose 3 days of lectures and exercises to collectively explore different aspects of the relationship between humans and machines. Together with special guests and anyone interested, we aim to share thoughts on the digitalization of our world, through introduction into concepts that developed in response to it: The challenging dialogue with algorithms, the splendor and misery of Transhumanism, recent developments in Donna Haraway’s thinking (author of 1985’s Cyborg Manifesto) and the theory of Accelerationism.

       

      This working session is intended for people who consider a reflection about the relation between body and technology inspiring for their own investigations. We wish to explore links between ideas and concepts through perspectives of various (artistic) researches, rather than to look for merely ready-made knowledge.

       

      Sessions will be guided by: An Mertens, Aline Wiame, Lendl Barcelos, Raphaele Jeune and Adva Zakai.

       

      Inscription:

      In order to develop a collective process, we prefer that participation will include all three days. If not possible to be fully present, you are welcome to join partly. Please send an email to Adva (advazakai@gmail.com) before Sep 15th, to inscribe and mention dates of participation. Max 15 participants, first inscribed first served!

       

       

       

      Schedule

      Friday, 18th September

       10h - 10h45               

      Introduction by Raphaele and Adva

      11h - 17h                    

      A session with An Mertens about algorithms, including a lecture, meditation and (possibly) exercises.

      18h - 21h                    

      Technocalyps - a documentary film about Transhumanism by Frank Theys (2006)

       

      Saturday, 19th September

       12h - 14h                    

      A critical discussion about Transhumanism, guided by Raphaele and Adva

      15h - 18h                    

      A talk by Aline Wiame about developments in Donna Harraway's thinking from the Cyborg manifesto till today.

       

      Sunday, 20th September

      12h - 15h                    

      A talk by Lendl Barcelos including an introduction into CCRU  (Cyber Culture Research Unit), Accelerationism & left/right  inclinations within the exploration of technologically alienated perception  

      15h30 - 17h30           

      A discussion and work session, looking for further ways to explore the themes addressed during the three days, through artistic practices (projecting towards possible future work sessions)

       

       

    • 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. 

    • 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.

    • 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.

       

    • 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
    • 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.

       

    • 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.

    • «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.

    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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.


    • 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
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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.

       

       

       





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