Performance / Performativity / Objects / Subjects

postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio, Elke Van Campenhout Performance / Performativity / Objects / Subjects

19-23 January 2015

USA. Florida. Cape Kennedy. Space center. 1967.

‘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

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert CONSEQUENCES

2-6 March 2009

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference
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postgraduate program, workshop

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert CONSEQUENCES II

1-6 March 2010

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference
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postgraduate program, project, workshop

Higher Performance!

7-18 May 2012

pic

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.

postgraduate program, workshop

PIERRE RUBIO / PETER STAMER HOW ABOUT CRITIQUE, CRITICALITY, CRISIS?

24-28 June 2013

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?
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Elke van campenhout “general intellect ? – it’s not about you, stupid !”

3-7 March 2014

‘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.
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postgraduate program, project, workshop

Occupy Democracy

29 September-3 October 2014

Occupation Precaire: one-euro-cents glued in public space

Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans 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.
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postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK I

1 January-31 March 2015

2015 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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postgraduate program, workshop

Eric Thielemans REPERTOIRE

5-9 January 2015

eric thielemans

With the workshop on 'Repertoire', proposed by Eric Thielemans, will not only bring us close to the background of each our’s researches, but confront us with the question what the self-built conditions of our practices are.
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postgraduate program

Lilia Mestre BLOCK FOCUS 2015/I

5 January-30 April 2015

CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF POETICS

webpics_apass14

The proposal is to plunge into the conditions for the emergence of poetics. Poetics used here as acts that transform our ways of perceiving, situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’. If we think performance as the coming-forth of those acts, as a framed re-actualization of what is there (a part of the world) we can give focus to the relations
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postgraduate program, project

Perform Back Score

14 January-31 March 2015

how to document performance?

PBScore

WEEKLY MEETING WORKSHOP:

Proposed by Lilia Mestre for the Block 2015/I (January-March)

This score was a proposal to communicate through performance throughout the block. It focuses on performance as a tool for the transformation of thought, intuition, desire, referentiality, practice into a communication medium. How to introduce exposure, playfulness, risk, generosity, exchange, fuck fear, contamination and precision in our way of communicating? How does this communication produce desire? To whom, where and how is this desire directed? What is the intensity/quality of it? What is the political agency of it?

postgraduate program, workshop

Ana Hoffner Tools for artistic research – Beckett

2-6 February 2015

Beckett_Score

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.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Nikolaus Gansterer Choreographic figures, deviations from the line

23-27 February 2015

Bildschirmfoto 2014-11-25 um 15.08.43

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.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Daniel Blanga-Gubbay Conditions for something to happen (latent performances)

2-6 March 2015

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 - Daniel Blanga-Gubay let the participates of this workshop 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?"
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postgraduate program, workshop

Antonia Baehr “When this you see remember me.” *

9-13 March 2015

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. This workshop examines the boundaries between score/interpretation, rehearsal/performance, director/performer, and audience/presentation. This workshop’s focus is an investigation through praxis.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Joachim ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

25-29 May 2015

Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson

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. '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
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postgraduate program, workshop

Abu Ali * Toni Serra THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

8-12 June 2015

Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008

For this workshop Abu Ali offers a selection of footage from the video archive O.V.N.I (observatori de video no idenitficat) based in Barcelona, which deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections Abu Ali 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.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Elke Van Campenhout Who’s Afraid of the Subject?

18-22 January 2016 / a.pass

image

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?

postgraduate program, workshop

Elke van Campenhout / Vladimir Miller FEEDBACK

3-6 May 2016 / a.pass

WOAW_Resize_original

Since a.pass is a shared environment, we depend a lot on each other as sparring partners in our researches. As part of the Opening Week this workshop addresses very diverse feedback techniques: spoken critique, non-negotiated critique, direct feedback, indirect feedback, written, walking, one-on-one or transformative feedback.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Epifania Amoo-Adare (Un)thinking Research Practice

9-10 May 2016 / a.pass

Decolonizing Theory, Mobilizing Methodologies, and Open-Ended Becoming(s)

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.

postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller / Peter Stamer FORGED THEORY

5-7 July 2016 / a.pass

artwork by Miler Lagos

„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 discouse 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
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postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller THEORIES UNDER THE COMMONS

26-30 September 2016

Commons is_

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.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Clubs #3 & #4 Situated Knowledge

2-9 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Sina Seifee

Reading Sessions of Donna Haraway's essay 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations.
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postgraduate program, reading session

Book Club #5 Sacred Drift, a journey into political consciousness of sound

16 February 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Peggy Pierrot

George Clinton emerges from Parliament-Funkadelic's Mothership on June 4, 1977, at the Coliseum in Los Angeles

Is there something to hear between the 0 and the 1 of digitized compressed music? Is there something to de-cypher in our coded Nyabinghi drums? What is the message hidden between themes, rythms, intonations, improvisations, the samples, the drum, the bass, the cuts and the pastes? and what kind of mental space or imaginary frame allowed/constrained the emergence of a futuristic post-modern culture within the Black Atlantic ? We’ll build or we’ll destroy. We’ll learn about the Know-Ledge.
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lecture, postgraduate program

Book Club #7 Politics of Speculative fabulation

10 March 2017 / a.pass

Book Club Series / Fabrizio Terranova

Dr Marboeuf

"We need new types of narratives and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made and experienced." In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Sympoiesis - Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the Trouble” and present the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sina Seifee Little Fables of Practice Workshop

24-25 July 2017 / a.pass 4th floor

Sina Seifee - Moon index in Sa'di world refraction poetics

In this two days workshop I like to propose 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?
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postgraduate program, workshop

STUDY DAYS

10 September-30 November 2018

A curatorial proposal by Adva ZAkai

* Images – screen-shots from https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/89465667

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.

postgraduate program, workshop

the Lecture, the Performance

4-8 February 2019

workshop with philipp gehmacher

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.

postgraduate program, workshop

Krõõt Juurak AUTODOMESTICATION

27-31 October 2020 / a.pass

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.

postgraduate program, workshop

Elke van Campenhout Debunking the Myth

16-20 November 2020 / online

or The Emperor’s New Clothes Revisited

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.