More entries wait to be written, and not always patiently*

postgraduate program

9 January-31 March 2023

photo_2023-01-11 10.22.26

~~Happy Endings~~ On horror and/in collections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

workshop

Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović Contingent Weirdness

10-13 January 2023

workshop on horror

Cover of Flesh-Colored Horror manga, written and illustrated by Junji Ito, published by Asahi Sonorama, 1997.

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.

postgraduate program

Peggy Pierrot The ingredients of fear

27-27 January 2023

Day of study

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

11am – 5pm @ a.pass

workshop

Heide Hinrichs and Vijai Maia Patchineelam disseminated escapes

31 January-1 February 2023

Workshop in the library

workshop-image-heide-vijai

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.

postgraduate program, seminar

Jubilee/Emptor Whose collection?

3 March 2023

Assembly of Practice

image

In the next Assembly of Practice, Emptor proposes the a.pass participants to examine collections as potential places of shared interest, zooming in on questions that come to the surface with the complexity of collecting contemporary art practices, which are increasingly immaterial, performative, situated, ongoing and collaborative in nature. The integration of such contemporary art practices in collections by means of documentation, reactivation protocols and complex contractual relationships may satisfy desires of collection(er)s but don’t seem to create change in terms of care attributed to the needs of a practice, its ecology and sustainability. Conservation and reactivation often stay disconnected from the driving forces, methodologies and contexts of the collected material elements, thus allowing the pieces nothing more than exposure in a curated frame.

postgraduate program, workshop

Anne Juren Fantasmical Anatomy lesson

6-10 March 2023

Workshop

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?

Open Call