Block 2019/III curators Lilia Mestre and Sina Seiffee

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

Some workshops remain a fiction – yet a fiction can be embodied. For several reasons, the proposition of Marialena Marouda couldn’t take place at the intended ‘workshop’ – the Buratinas boat of Nadine, laboratory for contemporary art. However, her proposal to encounter water as a companion and to spend for that min. 24h on that boat let us float into the imagination of how to fundamentally shift our relation to that essential element of life. Read more..

Research center 18/II curated by Lilia Mestre

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. Read more

Where do we practice our research, and how does changing that affect what can be talked about and experimented with? How to give a practice a new context? What can we do, think, read and try together when being on the move? We will take this opportunity to re-examine mobility of research practices in the context of de-colonial and feminist discourse on space and its social production. How do notions of power and privilege figure into this academic exploration of the presupposed „outside“ of the institution? With our colonial histories, what does it mean today to go on an excursion, to go looking „elsewhere“ for knowledge? Which gestures of power and othering are we replicating by using these methods of (ad)venture in our research? This block will be guided by an attempt to apply de-colonial thinking to the very idea of research itself, to unlearn its innocence and to insist that coloniality and its critique apply as soon as we open our doors and step outside, and as soon as we think towards „other“ places and discourses. Read more

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. Read more..

Nicolas Galeazzi

This cluster of posts tells the stories of a bunch of research adoptees that are shared amongst a group of apass researchers during the Block 2019/II. Read more