Mobile MNSTRY

workshop

Bureau d'Espoir / Elle Mobile MNSTRY

9-22 November 2015 / Abbeye of Forest

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.

block information

MENTORING STRATEGIES Cycle III/2015

the new structure for dedicated mentorings (3×2 or 2×3)

The dedicated mentors for this block are Abu Ali (Toni Serra), Bart Van den Eynde, Lilia Mestre and Elke Van Campenhout. Since some participants preferred to have a more in-depth contact with their mentors, we changed the set-up of the sessions as follows: out of the four mentors each participant chooses

-3 mentors and has 2 sessions with each of them (regular)

-2 mentors and has 3 sessions with each of them (intense)

Since the dedicated mentors each are responsible for one day during the first Workshop on Artistic Research, we will be able to decide on who, what and how at the end of the first week.

On top of these mentors you will also be mentored a peer participant of your choice who will follow you throughout the whole block, and with whom you meet also at least twice. For this block we would like you to experiment with the mentoring format, and to contribute to our Toolkit for Mentoring, by adding alternative formats for mentoring through practice, movement, double self-interviews, through intermediary pets, objects or cooking sessions, … Whatever you think might get the juices flowing.

the INTERVIEW SESSIONS

Throughout the block each participant also develops an interview practice, in 3 sessions, based on questions that appeared in their own cases. The three stages of the interview throughout the block can take on different forms: through language, audio or image, addressing one person at the the time, or conducting (small) group interviews. Written or spoken or walked. In the end the three stages of the interview will serve as a starting point for the sessions during End Week in PAF.

article, project, workshop

Bureau d'Espoir - Elle SELF-INTERVIEW Elke – Elle

1 September-31 December 2015 / Abbeye de Forest

MNSTRY

Elke (a.pass researcher): Elle, with the new project ‘Mobile MNSTRY’ you again tackle some of the issues you have been dealing with in your extended project Bureau d’Espoir already for some years: the recuperation and embrace of practices and terms that have been categorized, marginalized and recuperated by capital strategies. For example: you worked on the mobilization of the concept of ‘anorexia’ in the Hunger and Anorexic practices as tools for rethinking our relation to the consumption of food, and our own place in the ‘food chain’ of capitalism. You worked in ‘Battery’ on the embrace of circumstances that are considered detrimental to the ‘healthy’ development of the individual: 21 days of imprisonment, hunger and lack of private space as a spiritual-aesthetic machine for the production of hope and change. Now you propose the Mobile Monastery: a practice that is based on rethinking the monastic rule, the disciplining and deep experience of the everyday, introducing ‘poverty’ and social service (karma yoga) into the practice. Your proposals all seem to verge on the extreme, uncomfortable, and frankly, possibly moralistic. How do you plan to make this collective practice seem inviting to collaborators.
Read more..

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settlement

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EL ANGEL EXTERMINADOR Luis Bunuel 1962.preview

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