Annex III is a collaboratively written book by researchers of Cycle 3. It discusses an annotated library of shared references and recommendations which have accumulated during their research year. This publication is a collective retracing of these connections, and as such a reweaving of a complex understructure of speculative relationships between the questions and concerns of this Cycle.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
"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." Curator Vladimir Miller
The Settlement was prolonged and resulted in Unettled Study, as a part of Performatik19, the Brussels performance biennial in Kanal Centre Pompidou.
In the context of the Settlement I started a proces where I would explore themes like ownership, value and territory.
Step I - Sitting
The Settlement started as an empty space, and I needed to sit, but if you make only one stool, there will always be somebody on it, so I made a lot more.
Step II - Helping
I offered my skills to the group, if somebody wanted something, I would make it for them!
Step III - Branding
On the last day of the first week I branded everything I made with green and orange, in total 27 objects, after this I left the Settlement for two weeks.
Step IV - Follow-up
I told the settlers that all my efforts were for the benefit of the collective and that they should feel free to do whatever they want with the stuff I made. But after two weeks I came back to follow up on my work, and about half 'my' things were used in people individual projects - which was perfectly fine, but where I could find traces of my branding, I rebranded and spread my motif further.
Step V - Outsourcing
Again I was away for some time, but I needed to stay involved, so what better way then hire people to make me the things I desired? The assignments varied from things I actually needed, up to stuff I was curious about how my colleagues would react. "I need a flag and I pay € 10,- for it" - "I want something pretty for € 8,- " - "Could somebody make me a 10% oversized chair for € 10,-?" - "I pay € 10,- for something to organize all these jobs" ect. In total 13 objects have been made based on those minimal guidelines, but there was always one hard demand, it needed to be branded! The resulting objects varied enormous, there were provocations, there were simple executions, useful ones and even a virtual one!
Step VI - Selling
The Settlement moved to Kanal Centre Pompiduo and transformed into 'Unsettled Study' as a part of Performatik19. In the middle of the group I erected a small shop, Meewisse Mobilier et Divers, where I engaged into negotiations to determine the value of the outsourced objects. The visitors had then the option to buy the object for that price. In that negotiation I was completely open about the procedure that led to these object and tried to sketch an as complete as possible image of the object. Factors like material, who made it, what is it for, what did I pay for it, is it art, is it something else, ect..?
With special thanks to Katinka, Diego, Adrijana, Steven, Elen, Vlavio, Antye and Pierre for making objects!
This September marks the beginning of the first one-year-cycle of the a.pass Research Center. After being initiated as a platform for the individual research trajectories of the a.pass Associate Researchers, starting this year the Research Center is shifting to welcoming a group of advanced researchers for a shared one-year period.
The a.pass Research Center is dedicated to supporting advanced research and to collecting and making public methodologies of artistic research developed at a.pass.
For the period of September ‘18 to August ‘19 we are happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center:
Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist who notes, talks, writes, and collects. She is interested in anecdotal and peripheral art, the conventions of exhibition making, artists’ motivations, and responsibility in the general context of art and art-related politics.
Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.
Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy, museum studies, art and architectural history. His curatorial practice is focused on self-organised and co-operative formats in close association with cultural practitioners — consciously positioned on the margin of established institutions and outside of market oriented spaces, but in the middle of communities of cultural practitioners. Most recently he co-initiated That Might Be Right, an attempt to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.
Isabel Burr Raty is a performance artist based in Brussels interested in the ontological crack between the organic and the artificially engineered, between the unlicensed knowledge of minority groups and the official facts. Her research interweaves new media, body art, lectures, installations and participatory performance to propose hybrid narratives and bio-autonomy practices that play with synthetic magic and compose in situ Sci-Fi.
Sara Manente lives in Brussels and works as a choreographer and performance artist.
Her projects start from an understanding of dance as a performative language and exist at the limit of the choreographic: texts, dance pieces, films, workshops, experimental performances, artistic researches and collaborations.
At the a.pass Research Center she is gathering knowledge on fermentation techniques in order to consider her research from a perspective of bacterial/interspecies ethics and aesthetics.
Antye Guenther, born in former East Germany, has a theory based visual art practice dealing with epistemological questions within the realms of technology, post-humanism, science fiction and fictionality of science. Since her fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-2016, Guenther, who has a background in medicine, is investigating neuroscientific research and imaging, particularly in its entanglement with neoliberal corporate structures and ideologies.
For the current block the Associate Researchers will be supported by Vladimir Miller as the Research Center curator and further on by Alex Arteaga for block I/19 and Pierre Rubio for Block II/19.
Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, scenographer and dramaturge. His practice aims at re-negotiating habitual modes of spatial production within ad-hoc groups and institutional environments by using fragility as a building principle.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
SPACES AS CONTRACTS
curated by Vladimir Miller (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)
25 / 09 - 05 / 11 / 2014
POLITICS OF CHANGEABILITY
weekly meetings by Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi and Fotini Lazaridou
For this project we ask the researchers participants to engage individually for the duration of this block with a private or institutional space outside of a.pass. The task is: to negotiate a permanent, irreversible change in the architecture of that space and to document the negotiation process. Changing our spatial circumstances, for adapting them to our needs, is so foreign to us in daily life, that we associate those changes with violence and social upheaval, with revolutions and public resistance. And maybe this holds true and points us to how powerful architecture actually is in upholding existing social order. Architecture and the political connect and hinge on access to change. Hegemonies manifest themselves and are upheld by architectural structures. So every attempt to change invariably become a political attempt. We are framing the attempt of change as a research methodology.
Taking the steps to negotiate a permanent change in an architectural setup reveals the internal structures of power distribution and decision making for any given space. If you want to propose a change, who do you contact? who will you be referred to? which groups need to come together under which premises and structures of decision making to allow for that change? To follow up those challenges to changes is to slowly reveal a diagram of power, an architecture within architecture. In fact those two architectures are inseparable from each other and we should invent ways of speaking of them as a whole. Would we have privacy if we never had walls, what kind of togetherness would we have if availability of space was not limited? Our way of living and our way of building cannot be separated from each other.
08 - 12 / 09 / 2014
SPACE AND CONTRACT
a.pass B-workshop by Vladimir Miller
In this workshop we will look at the non physical borders of architecture: the contracts and agreements that create and maintain our built environment. If you take a quick look around you and ask yourself how the things that surround you came to be the way they are, you will notice that all of them are man-made or man-transformed. Those processes of transformation are all initiated and facilitated through negotiations and agreements. The first step to connect contracts and architecture is therefore to realize that architecture is a product of an agreement. For our purposes we can loosely define a contract as a performative agreement. During the workshop we will discuss further how architecture also embodies and ultimately maintains social agreements of that kind This workshop proposes to look at the relationship between the architectural space and the contract through a series of collective building actions. We will use a simple material to build improvised structures together in order to understand how are we negotiating collaboration, aim and space. Which rules and ideological presupposition are at work? Can we come up with contracts, scores and sets of rules which would produce other architectures? What is the relationship between our social contract and the architecture we are able to produce?
15 - 19 / 09 / 2014
‘IF YOU LIKE IT, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT A ROOF ON IT’ (and put some chairs under)
workshop-project by Jozef Wouters & Vladimir Miller
Roofs, in the arts, are often provided. In climates like Belgium, having a roof to work under is not a bad way to start. The roof protects the work (against more things than rain). But the roof also tends to isolate it. From time to time, artists grow tired of the roof and the walls and, hoping it doesn’t rain, decide to work on a square. The work of a scenographer is often more about walls than about roofs (light designers don’t like scenographers who propose roofs). Walls are flexible. Walls can be discussed. Comparing this, it turns out to be way harder to negotiate about a roof and to design a roofed space that is a square as well. This proposal is modifying the original “lets build a house together” idea, which was already presented at a.pass. The idea is, rather than overwhelming ourselves with the house building, to have a closer look (through working) at what we identify as two key elements of structuring community and social space by the means of architecture: roofs and chairs. In a much too simple way we can say that roofs bring a community together, while chairs can be used to structure its politics of attention and visibility. By avoiding walls we also subvert a key instrument to privatization of space. The space under the roof is accessible and public by design, we don't have to distribute power/keys.
29 / 09 - 03 / 10 / 2014
OCCUPYING DEMOCRACY
workshop 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 pre-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.
13 / 10 - 17 / 10 / 2014 ‘
FORMS OF LIFE - A TRAVELING PYJAMA PARTY
workshop by Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga
During a period of 6 days, each participants are invited to host the rest of the group in their apartment for a day. We will cook together, discuss a series of texts, take turns using the shower and read bedtime stories from a book picked up from the shelf. We may find out about each other’s morning habits, favorite smoothie combination, different ways of folding the sheets. For six days and five nights, this workshop will attempt to explore different ways of living and living together, focusing on the domestic sphere, our daily habits and their spatial manifestation, as well as on the ways these forms of life may or may not slip out of the window and down to the street. During each short residency we will collectively try to come up with a proposal for a small modification of or intervention in the space we are currently in, and negotiate its terms with our host. We may or may not carry out the proposal.
24 - 25 / 10 / 2014
POST-FOUNDATIONAL ARCHITECTURES
scenography workgroup meeting by Vladimir Miller
In 2012 a.pass merged the two sections a.s (advanced scenography) and a.pt (advanced performance training) to one singular program. This move was a consequence of understanding performance and scenography more and more as inseparable parts of one and the same discourse. But the merge of discourses finally reinforced the need for a new specification of the term “scenography”. What does it really mean beyond the classical stage practice? What else than a stage - and under which conditions - can be declared as a ‘scene’ and who or what is designing it? What distinguishes a ‘performative space’ from a ‘sceno-graphed’ space? For discussing these questions Vladimir Miller gathered in the fall 2013 some space practitioners to a first ‘Scenography Workgroup Meeting’. In October 2014 he calls for a second one. It will be a public work meeting between and with artists, architects, and scenographers who engage in the production of temporary and performative architectures. They will critically explore the definition of scenography simply as ‘post-foundational architectures’.
03 - 07 / 11 / 2014
PHARMAKON
workshop by Elke van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre
This workshop explores the concept of pharmakon developed by the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in his book ‘On pharmacology - how to live your life’. Stiegler uses the term pharmakon, which simultaneously stands for ‘poison’ and medicine’ as a symptom of an ever-spreading capitalism: an economy that does not only affect our labour, but does affect also our psychic ability and reduces our desires to simple drives. As both a medicine and a cure, Stiegler emphasizes the role of technology in our society as an ultimate pharmakon. In his ‘pharmacology’, its doubleness is investigated as a possible ‘cure’: a strategy to deal with the recovery of our desires, to go against the pressure of identification trends, brands and an ever-increasing individualization. Pharmakon stands for the technical know-how we develop the strategies we use to build a different kind of future and to create another concept of our togetherness. But this is not without risk: pharmaka are both a source of misery and abuse of power, but also a stimuli of what makes life worthwhile. The workshop is part of a ‘Thematics’ research project organized by Les Bains. Four artists are invited to explore in a three month residency set-ups of 'trans-individuation’: how do we form temporary moments of sharing, how can we come together in diversity, how can we build together an organization of work and knowledge sharing that is open-ended for producing and opening up to an outside world. A constant process of infection and transformation, through testing and adjusting the dosage of the pharmakon.
27-29 / 11 / 2014
PHARMAKON
conference by a.pass Research Center, Les Bains and Kaaitheater.
The Ancient Greek word ‘pharmakon’ means ‘poison’, ‘medicine’ and ‘scapegoat’. According to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, our society urgently needs a ‘pharmacology’ to turn the tide of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment. He says that we must urgently question our culture. With which witchcraft can we turn the poison into medicine? Pharmakon: whitch culture? is a three-day ‘performative conference’ that examines artistic and theoretical strategies to counteract this pollution of our society’s culture. This congress is part of Thematics, a residency programme for artists and theorists run by Bains Connective workplace. This started in mid-October and is still on until 15 December, and is in its turn part of the transnational Pharmakon project organised by the Institut Nomade.
Program of the conference
Day 1: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-1-on-the-notion-of-pharmakon-in-the-thinking-of-bernard-stiegler Day 2: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-2-rethinking-economies
Day 3: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-3-body-technologies
BLOCK III/2014
Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program: Damla Ekin Tokel, Danny Neyman, Gosie Vervloessem, Hans Van Wambeke, Hektor Mamet, Jeremiah Runnels, Kleoni Manousakis, Silvia Ramos Pereira, Stef Meul, Vanja Smiljanic, Verónica Cruz, Yaari Shalem
Research End Presentations: Anna Sörenson, Camila Aschner Restrepo, Victoria Myronyuk
Research Centre Researchers: Cecilia Molano Mala Kline Veridiana Zurita
Partners: Les Bains Kaaitheater
Contributors for workshops: Christophe Meierhans, Elke van Campenhout, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Jozef Wouters, Lilia Mestre, Luigi Coppola, Nicolas Galeazzi, Vladimir Miller,
Coordinators a.pass: Elke van Campenhout, Nicolas Galeazzi
Mentors Femke Snelting, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Geert Opsomer, Lilia Mestre
Saturday, September 23rd 2023
18-22h
a.pass, Brussels
The a.pass Research Center* cordially invites you to an evening of research publications by Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa that will conclude the year they spent together as Associate Researchers of Cycle IV.
During the timespan of Cycle IV the artists and researchers individually and collaboratively worked on hospitality as a curatorial practice, on conflicted embodiment of dance practices, on archives of colonial architecture, on the fiction of nature and on a historic opera as a foundational myth for the State of Brazil. In a series of collective practice meetings a shared discourse began to emerge that connected these works through an engagement with the responsibilities of redesign and reenactment, the tension of fiction and history in speculative practices and the embodiment of non-solutions. These intertwined processes and questions radiated into the practices of Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa as they hosted each other in their research and developed the idea of a research center as a prolonged group conversation with materials, practices, ideas and affects.
On Saturday, September 23rd, the researchers will present their individual publications and research trajectories as well as the Annex – a shared collection of essays and interviews. For their Publications the researchers aim to provide an account of their process and to develop public formats of research-doing and research-sharing to accompany the more established format of an essay. In a scenography that will be a result of a communal atelier process the Publications of Cycle IV will engage the audience in a dialogue with texts, objects, conversations, installations and performances that can be reflected back into the research process. As Cycle IV concludes, the research itself is far from finished: Publications and Annex contextualize its collaborative, intense phase and give some insight into where it came from and where it is heading next.
The evening will start at 18h with a reading of the Annex and proceed to the individual presentations by the Associate Researchers. Publications will conclude with a cooking hangout hosted by Paoletta Holst and later on, a party.
Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site 'de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience.
The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.
a.pass Research Center
Cycle IV
Research Publications + Annex
Saturday, September 23rd 2023
18-22h
a.pass, Brussels
PUBLICATIONS
MAURICE MEEWISSE
Curating Waterwerken
Essay
Hosting the Research Center
Scenography
To prepare his contribution for the final evening with RC Cycle IV, Maurice Meewisse will move into the a.pass space where everything is about to happen. He did this before: he lived for two weeks in the collective space of a.pass Polyset in May ‘23 to explore how a habitation practice transforms his relationship to a workspace. For the final evening with RC Cycle IV, his question will be about habitation and hosting.
Meewisse has taken an interest in how his collaborators' imaginations, thoughts, writing and other practices influence and contribute to his own and how his practice can in turn host imaginations, thoughts, handwriting and other practices. He is exploring the limits of this position to the point where the question arises if he is still the practitioner, is it a practice at all, can hosting be part of his artistic practice? Maurice Meewisse takes his last moments with the researchers from the RC Cycle IV to explore that a bit further. At the same time he will try to be useful and help to prepare the scenography for the evening. Something will happen, just by being there the whole time. At the moment of writing this text it is just a bit too early to say what.
CATERINA DANIELA MORA JARA
Conflicted Embodiment. Notes from Dancing on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Essay
The Second Promise of Another Bastard-cheap Lecture-performance (and the last one in a.pass)
Lecture-Performance
“I am a migrant who has the possibility to be a legal migrant. My body produces conflicted embodiment as a device to expose the violent confrontation determined by territory, patriarchal art systems, colonial silenced trauma, and resistant feminist hope. Combining different dance traditions, I seek the contamination generated by mashing up ways of representing academic dance and “world dance”...”
caterina daniela mora jara will present her essay “Conflicted Embodiment. Notes from Dancing on Both Sides of the Atlantic” in conversation with Fabián Barba. The writing of this text departs from the experiences of dancing within her processes of migration that put different "folkloric", "popular" and "academic" dance traditions from the souths and the norths into friction with each other. caterina daniela mora jara explores the potential of translation of dances into each other and what a mother tongue could be in dancing and performing. Embracing the complexity of the untranslatable, she unfolds the idea of a conflicted embodiment as a research device to address the question of how does a body navigate migration, colonialism and dancing?
PAOLETTA HOLST
Re-designing the Colonial House
Installation, Projection and Open Kitchen
Paoletta Holst researches colonial architectures and domestic cultures of the former Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia). In her installation “Re-designing the Colonial House” she uses the klamboe, or mosquito net, as a metaphor to visualize the cultural and spatial forms of separation that the colonizers created in order to mitigate their fears and vulnerabilities of being in a foreign environment. As both content and material form, as klamboe and house, the scenography created for this presentation functions as an intermediate space and support structure to talk about how the colonial house was imagined and how the process of its re-design can articulate today's questions and struggles.
TÚLIO ROSA
H(a)unting Stories
In the last year, Tùlio Rosa's research has been centered around the opera Il Guarany, composed by Carlos Gomes in the 19th century, and its influence in the Brazilian representations of its history, peoples and landscape. Set in the beginning of the 16th century and depicting a love story between an indigenous man and the daughter of a Portuguese hidalgo, Il Guarany is considered to be an attempt to fabricate a foundational myth of the Brazilian nation. Within its biased narrative, Il Guarany also describes the conflict between the indigenous groups of the Aimorés and the Guaranis, and the attempts of Spanish adventurers to take hold of their lands in order to exploit their natural resources. These intertwined narratives allow for a broader reflection on fundamental aspects of the formation of Brazil. For his presentation Túlio Rosa will share some of the materials of his research in which factual history and fiction are woven together into new readings of Brazilian history that challenge and reveal their embedded colonial imaginaries.
A second part of Tulio Rosa’s presentation will happen at Szenne Lab on the 3rd and 4th of October during two evening sessions curated in collaboration with Paoletta Holst, in which he will present “Hunting Song” – a publication that crosses historical accounts of violence with the original music scores of the opera Il Guarany.
GOSIE VERVLOESSEM
Pleasure Garden Reading Group
Reader and Bookmarks
Over the past year, Gosie Vervloessem’s research was situated in the Middelheim Museum, a sculpture park in Antwerpen that invited her into a research residency within the ‘Reading the Landscape’- project. During this year of research, under the title ‘The Pleasure Garden’ Gosie Vervloessem explored the museum as a platform for encounters between different agents inhabiting the park, such as birds, animals, plants, visitors, the institute of the Middelheim Museum and its sculptures and infrastructure.
The project took on different forms and spread its tentacles deep into the park. One of these tentacles were reading sessions. Gosie Vervloessem dived deep into thinking about the relation between words and the worlds they convey. She explored, very literally, the question of what it means to read a landscape with focus on the materiality and agency of words and language. The texts and books that Gosie Vervloessem compiled for the reading group were “reading the landscape” outside of binary thinking and classification. These reflections found a final outcome in the creation of bookmarks, that she presents alongside a facsimile edition of the reader. The bookmarks invite the audience to buy the corresponding book and visit the Middelheim Museum as a setting for a reading of the selected texts.
Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa; Vladimir Miller (ed.)
The Annex
Publication
The Annex to the research Publications of a.pass Research Cycle IV is a space where the researchers offer some context to their presentations and explore shared themes within their research processes in the form of essays, text collaborations and group interviews.
*About the Research Center
The a.pass Research Center is a collaborative space of practice, materialization, tryout, critique and feedback of artistic research. Although it is a program in an educational institution, it does not start from a curriculum or a curatorial agenda, but operates as a series of research practice meetings. At the Research Center, the artist researchers are invited to develop the individual threads of their research practice into a shared space of study while "mutually becoming each others' guest" (Beatrice von Bismark). The Research Center is a space where hosting others in one's research is a tool of research development.
a.pass Polyset 2023W18-20
May 2nd-19th 2023
You are cordially invited to join the a.pass Polyset space between the 2nd and 19th of May '23. Within the Polyset you will find other practitioners, artists and researchers, materials, tools, technical support as well as any number of individual and communal practices and experimental proposals. Polyset starts from an empty space and an empty timetable – both are gradually established during Polyset by its participants. Artists who spend time in the Polyset space set up their own working conditions. There are materials available to create a wide range of structures: from a simple table to a performative setting. The invitation to work with communal materials in a shared space opens up questions of authorship and collaboration towards a transient idea of ownership.
A Polyset is a recurring practice of coming together in a communal practice space that is hosted by an art/educational institution. While a Polyset can be initially proposed as simply as "a prolonged collective practice hangout", its complexity arises from negotiating ways of being together which are not predetermined by a plan or a structure, institutional or otherwise. Polyset operates through dis-organising and collectively reorganising established or habitual ways of gathering and working. Its core intent is twofold: to lower the thresholds for a practice to manifest in its material form and to initiate a set of renegotiations within the relationships between space, practice, community and institution.
Polyset is an open space that welcomes and supports practitioners from outside the institution and does not assign fixed modes of participation like "audience" or "visitor". It is not a group project, but a fluctuating arrangement of "groupings" with different aims and commonalities. Poyset operates on the principle co-habitation as dissensus, which means that all processes and agreements are necessarily partial and cannot exclude other processes in the Polyset space. Every practice is invited to find its own mode of publicness and its own balance between solitary and communal research modalities.
This text is not only an announcement, but also an invitation to come and spend time in the space and to use-design it on your own terms. If you would like join the Polyset, please keep in mind that participation in an evolving and self-structuring community takes time, therefor ideally you would have a couple of days to spend in the Polyset space. Please sign up via the green link at the bottom of the page so we can establish contact for further questions and guide you to the Polyset space on the first day that you decide to come.
Polyset in short:
Polyset is a practice of temporary research co-habitation, where the the researchers design their spaces of practice in one shared space
Polyset is a self-curated place of study that works through an open network of invitations
Polyset lasts three weeks and happens in one space. Participants agree to spend as much time as possible in the Polyset.
The Polyset space will be cleared of all furniture in the beginning of the project.
There is a communal stock of materials provided for the Polyset which are available to anyone who joins it. Materials become connected to and organised in peoples practices. To disconnect or to reorganise please be careful with the other's processes.
We do not define what "research" and "practice" are, but Polyset is a space for research and practice.
Polyset space is an open space. Anyone working in the space can invite anyone, and they in turn can pass on the invitation.
Consensual planning is an exception while relational collaborative negotiations structure the space.
Schedule of proposals is developed on a day to day basis. It is not mandatory.
a.pass Polyset 2023W18-20 will bring together research practices, contributions and participation by:
Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier, Gosie Vervlossem, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Steven Jouwersma, Kristof Van Hoorde, Paoletta Holst, caterina daniela mora jara, Tulio Rossa, Maurice Meewissse, Kristien Van den Brande, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Carina Erdmann, Amari, Lore, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Mlondi Dubazane, Hans Van Wambeke, Heide Hinrichs, Tania Garduño Israde
To be expanded by the participating researchers
an updated agenda of presentations, sharings, workshops and screenings will be posted here as it develops
NEW: Every second Monday 19-21h
NEXT MEETINGS
22.05.2023 19h
"Narrate, Speculate, Fabulate: Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni in Conversation with Isabelle Doucet"
proposed by Gosie Vervloessem
05.06.2023 19h
Marie Bardet: "Making a Front With Our Backs" Translated by: Ellen Heaghney
Jara Rocha: "testing texting South: a political fiction"
proposed by caterina daniela mora jara
19.06.2023 20h
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization"
proposed by Tulio Rosa
03.07.2023 19h
Tjalie Robinson: "Vivere Pericolosamente"
proposed by Paoletta Holst
17.07.2023 19h
W.J.T. Mitch: "Art And Public life: A Conversation Theaster Gates"
proposed by Maurice Meewisse and Vladimir Miller
The Research Center Open Reading Group follows the research trajectories of the Associate Researchers with text proposals from the collective library of the current Research Center and new texts written by the researchers themselves. The reading group is public and open to join in person and online.
ZOOM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7654748465?pwd=VjhFMFVkSUxRUjlkakRuTFBSSndldz09
Meeting ID: 765 474 8465
Passcode: apass
PAST MEETINGS
28.09.22 @ Radical House
caterina daniela mora jara, AR
12.10.22 @ Radical House and online
Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma, What is wrong with the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research?
https://www.onlineopen.org/what-is-wrong-with-the-vienna-declaration-on-artistic-research
26.10.22 at apass and online
A House in the Dutch East Indies by Paoletta Holst
09.11.22 online
Maurice Meewisse proposes: Mark Cousins "On Support", from: Celine Condorelli "Support Structures"
23.11.22 online
Tulio Rosa proposes: a chapter from "Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism" by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
07.12.22 online
Vladimir Miller proposes: introductory chapter from "Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization." S. Shukatis, D. Graeber & E. Biddle (Eds.),
Wednesday 4.01.23 17h online
Paoletta Holst proposes: Ann Laura Stoler, "Interior Frontiers" in: Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, And Jacques Lezra, [Ed]. Thinking with Balibar A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice. Fordham University Press: New York, 2020, pp. 99-115 (pdf)
Wednesday 18.01.23 17h online
Maurice Meewisse proposes: texts from
Manifesta Journal #8- collective curating (2009): "The crux of polyphonic language, or the thing as gathering" by Katharine Schieben and other texts
Wednesday 01.02.23 online
caterina daniela mora jara proposes: "inflation, debt, budget" – her own text in progress; and the chapter "Naming Material" by Jeroens Peters from "And then it got legs’"
Wednesday 22.02.23
Tulio Rosa proposes: "YWY, Searching for a Character between Future Worlds: Gender, Ecology, Science Fiction"
Edited by Pedro Neves Marques.
Wednesday 01.03.23 17h at a.pass and online
Vladimir Miller proposes: Eve Tuck 'Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable', (2010)
Wednesday 08.03.23 17h at a.pass and online
Túlio Rosa proposes: "Self Defense: a philosophy of violence", by Elsa Dorli. Introduction and first chapter.
Wednesday 22.03.23 17h online
Maurice Meewisse proposes: Chantal Mouffe: "For an Agonistic Model of Democracy", chapter 4 from "The Democratic Paradox", Verso 2009
zoom link below
Performative Publications at Kunstencentrum BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium bring the individual and collaborative research trajectories of the researchers of the third Cycle of the a.pass Research Center into focus. This day-long performative event is conceived by Gosie Vervloessem, João Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Simon Asencio, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and the Research Center Curator Vladimir Miller.
FROM 13:00 to 20:30 (detailed schedule below)
The Publications are accompanied by a collaboratively written Annex. In the Annex the researchers of Cycle 3 bring together and discuss an annotated library of shared references and recommendations which have accumulated during their research year. This publication is a collective retracing of these connections, and as such a reweaving of a complex understructure of speculative relationships between the questions and concerns of this Cycle.
The Performative Publications will start at 13h and end approximately around 20h. There is a opportunity in between the presentations to enjoy food and drink.
Performative Publications
Research Center Cycle 3
Introduction to the Performative Publications and Annex Reading
Studio 4
13h
duration 1h
Simon Asencio
Ballades Infidèles
open recording session and conversation
Studio 3
14h
approx 3h, durational, free to join at any moment
Ballades Infidèles is an online and offline research group working around the Ballades en jargon – eleven poems composed by 15th century poet Françoys Villon and written in the secret tongue of the Coquillard·es, a posse of French rogues. These ballads repurpose medieval language to narrate social underworlds in code. They invite to a reflection on the possibility of otherness and estrangement within a ’same’ language. Using the ballads as a map and a method for research, the working group has gathered since February 2022 to develop different forms of study of these ballads in perspective of their re-writing. At BUDA the group will gather to activate these re-writings through the situation of an open recording session and conversation. The recording of the event will later serve for the publication of a vinyl record.
With Francoys Villon, Diana Duta, Chloe Chignell, Cee Fülleman, Loucka Fiagan, camille gerenton, Anouchka Oler, etaïnn zwer, Christophe Albertijn Simon Asencio et al.
João Fiadeiro
Intra-views
Studio 5
at 14h, 15h, 16h
Durational performance, resets at every full hour.
In 2021, during a workshop given by João Fiadeiro at a.pass the artist and a.pass researcher Jimena Pérez Salerno composed a list of questions and tensions as a feedback for João Fiadeiro's practice of Real Time Composition. Instead of “answering” these questions directly João Fiadeiro felt that in order to be properly addressed in their complexity they needed a different type of response and a different type of context alltogether. On the occasion of his research presentation at BUDA João Fiadeiro decided to come back to this list and invited Jimena Pérez Salerno to collaborate with him on a dispositive for a performance where both of them will engage in a real time composition intra-view around the questions she initially raised.
Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ
CofetARia
cake selling point
Third floor
14h, ongoing
Born in socialist Rumania, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin has for the past 10 years been working with food as a complex collaborator in his performative practice. He has been exploring methods of mixing food studies with artistic research by setting up, creating and producing food performances and food education projects.
One of the resulting projects is CofetARia: an durational performance at the intersection of performance art and pastry backing. CofetARia is a functioning pastry and cakes store, that recreates and offers for consumption the pastries that were made in Romania in the last decades of the waning socialist regime.
A live performance with alimentary matter, CofetARia is exploring the food's agency in the animation of memory while at the same time confronting post-communist nostalgia.
Gosie Vervloessem
Editorial Meeting - The Horror Garden
workshop / performance
Studio 4
15h
ca 1,5 h
Gosie Vervloessem's research is focused on the ways plants are depicted in pop culture narratives. The scope of her work encompasses an assemblage of diverse allies and engagements: The Swamp Thing comic books, the plants that grow in the city of Brussels, activists who try to eradicate so called "invasive species" in different biological landscapes, her alter ego of the Sick Detective, and so on. Over the years this sprawling research has produced performative, written and drawn publications, which have never been assembled or shown in one place. Faced with the overwhelming output of her research Gosie Vervloessem will ask her audience to form the editorial board of a forthcoming book on her research. What should be part of this book, what should be excluded, what are the topics and strands that can come together and be published in this format?
Vijai Maia Patchineelam
Descriptions Change
Book presentation for: The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution together with artists who have contributed to the Research Seminar Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description that is within the book.
Studio 4
17h
Duration 1,5h
Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on 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.
For this book presentation artists Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens, Evi Olde Rikkert and Julia Dahee Hong, alongside RC Associate Researcher Vijai Maia Patchineelam will present their contribution to the book The Artist Job Description – a publication of Patchineelam’s doctoral research of same title. During the presentation the artists will engage in a conversation regarding the relationship between artists and art institutions by bringing their personal experiences where they have renegotiated other ways of coming into and developing their art practices within art institutions.
The artist’s experience of being inside art institutions, starting from the effort made to be accepted in order to develop one’s art practice, then the experience of going through them, and while in them, the many ways of having to learn how to be inside. This will in several ways inform the development of an artist’s practice, for the good or for the bad. Making this publication has been an attempt at recognizing and dealing with, rather than avoiding, the tensions that exist in the relationship between artists and art institutions at a time when most art institutions themselves are under the pressure of the looming threat of austerity-politics.
Excerpt from the book, The Artist Job Description
Gosie Vervloessem & Simon Asencio
Area X
Participatory Performance and Audio
Studio 5
19h
to join the performance, please leave your phone number on the sign up sheet on location. The audio track will be send to your number via whatsapp or telegram
Duration 1,5h (train to Brussels can be reached)
Area X refers to a mysterious zone in the Southern Reach Trilogy books – a sci-fi, eco-horror and eerie fiction written by Jeff VanderMeer. In the Southern Reach Trilogy a research unit studies a mysterious substance/agent/force/landscape that takes over and re-writes whatever and whomever engages with it. In the narrative of the trilogy the researchers sent into Area X end up blending with it and becoming the subject of their research.
In their collaboration during the Research Center Cycle 3, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio have been looking into methodologies for studying the agencies of text through collective reading practices, role play and infused hallucinations. They have based their performative readings of the Southern Reach Trilogy on the methodologies that the books itself proposes: "This text, however, has an agency all of its own: its message is not disseminated through interpretation and relay, but inhalation." This research stimulates a particular relation between reader and text: a point of contact where the desire to make sense coexists with the experience of being fundamentally changed by what one reads.
This Schedule will be updated on a daily basis as Poliset 2022W4-7 and the proposals within it develop.
POLISET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH
Monday Jan. 24th
14-19h Poliset Introduction by Vladimir Miller
Moving into the space, introduction to the available materials, the technicals space aspects (with Steven Jouwersma), the common budget and schedule. Vladimir will facilitate a process of connecting over shared and unshared topics and ideas of everyone's research. We will try to finish the day with setting up a place to have a dinner together. Food can not be as easily shared as we like, due to covid safety, but we can try to have a shared dinner and welcome drink.
Tue Jan 25th
Steven Jouwerstma technical assistance day
10h Poliset talk: Politecture.
Vladimir
13h Scheduling / Check in
15h Research Mapping
Wed, Jan 26th
10-13h Steven Jouwerstma technical assistance
13h Scheduling / Check in
14h Low Intensity Violence Research Group
Research Introduction
Thu, Jan 27th
11h Wet Floor Cleaning
13h Scheduling / Check in
15h Abrasive Strategies introduction Martin
Fri, Jan 28th
10h Poliset Talk
Christine de Smedt (LIV)+Vladimir
we will pick two space related terms from our research and introduce and discuss them together
13h Scheduling / Check in
13h-15h one on one Interviews on plant care as part of Ingas research practice
Mon, Jan 31st
17h Film Screening "Cyborg Europe" by Anna Lugmeier
Tue Feb 1st
Steven Jouwerstma technical assistance day
10h Brushing Teeth, Martin Sieweke
11h Walking Practice, Vera Sofia Mota
Wed, Feb 2nd
11h Open Conversation on "Organising Randomness" with Nada Gambier and Vladimir Miller (also happening on zoom)
Thu, Feb 3rd
10h LIV Group + Vladimir Miller, open conversation on notions from their practice.
14h What can be a contemporary scenography curriculum? Public writing session (etherpad) in the poliset. Vladimir
14h Building a space of reading, and reading Chantal Mouffe on agonism (Lisa)
16h-18h Toast to the Future, gathering in front of the Flemish Parliament in support of a.pass
17h Film Screening: "La Rabbia" (Gastone Ferranti, Giovannino Guareschi, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
19h Drinks
Mon Feb 7th
Jozef Wouters at poliset
"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; from 4pm I will open for a reading group and at 6pm it will be a film or a talk."
16h Reading group with Jozef Wouters
18h Jozef Wouters' public presentation
Tue Feb 8th
16h Five Minute Festival
Wed Feb 9th
Tania Garduño (CIVA) day at poliset
10:30 Open Conversation: “Periphery”, Nada Gambier
Thu, Feb 10th
14h Conversation on how we research. Focus away from “what” and “why” towards “how” with specific attention to art practice as a tool for research.
Fri, Feb 11th
12:00 Reading Group, “What”s the Use” bySara Ahmed, with Martin Sieweke
Wed, Feb 16th
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.”
18h Presentation and Talk
Fri, Feb 18th
10h Cleaning and Sorting
13h check in
13:30 In-process presentations for the HWD participants
POLYSET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH
[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.
Bloom Sessions
The research 'Sex Asylum' works around notions of desire, when stripped from consumerist notions like instant gratification, the pornographic gaze, and subject/object divisions. In this research moment, together we create desire lines through voice, touch, and objects. An interspecies game of deferral and detournement.
Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin
Making each other ^
The World is full of Monsters
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 than 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. The research will look into methodologies for studying the agents of text through collective practice and examination of the performances they enable.
Joāo Fiadeiro
Real Time Composition Game
Real Time Composition "object of study" is the interval that emerges when linear time is interrupted and the sensation of continuity is suspended (by an accident, incident or “just because”). The resulted gap is where Real Time Composition research takes place. Inside this space, time has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Inside this space, time is not linear (or even circular) but "twisted" (like a "Möbius strip" topological surface), governed by laws that don't respect conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside, present or absent.
Benny Nemer
Several Favorable Bodies
My contribution to Research in Absence emerges from an error I made during my artistic research into the private library of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert's library. I misunderstood information transmitted to me by Guibert’s executor, and began a path of inquiry from this misunderstanding. The recent revelation that my artistic research is now deeply anchored by this mistake — essentially a historical detail of my own invention — has presented me with many questions, some of which I hope will be processed and transformed in my absence.
For more information on Associate Researcher's work please see: https://apass.be/research-center-cycle-3/
The event is free of charge
As Associated Researcher at the a.pass Research Center, João Fiadeiro will open his research process to the a.pass community in order to exchange, clarify and discuss the premisses and principles of Real Time Composition, a tool that practices radical decentering in order to attend to what exceeds human experience. This process can be accessed in a series of meetings/slots between July 19 and 21.
In Portuguese, the word "reparar" can be understood both as “noticing, attending”, and as “restoring, repairing”. It also means “stopping twice” (re-parar). Real Time Composition works in the entanglement of these three meanings because they invite all at once to come to a halt and to observe as a commitment to the present and a willingness to restore what has been wounded.
Real Time Composition "object of study" is the space-time interval that emerges when the experience we all have with linear time is interrupted and suspended by an accident/incident. This generates a “rift” in the “arrow of time" opening a gap in the sensation of continuity. Inside this space, time is not linear (or circular) but "twisted" (like a "Möbius strip" topological surface), governed by laws that don't respect conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside, up or down, left or right. Inside this space, time has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”.
Real Time Composition is a contra-intuitive tool because it practices an ability to look at ourselves looking at (ourselves looking at) things. It does that by "practicing", by default, the famous Bartleby’s approach to (re)action: “I would prefer not to…”. An attribute that keeps “possibility suspended between occurrence and non-occurrence, between the capacity to be and the capacity not to be.” (Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby, or On Contingency in Potentialities: SUP, California,1999).
For more information and to enroll in the session(s) please visit the following site:
On João Fiadeiro
As an artist João Fiadeiro positions himself in the crossroads between performance, dance, visual arts and theater. As a researcher he positions himself in the intersections between practice and theory; art and science; life and art. His work – both as an artist and as a researcher – relies on the premiss that composition should be understood and experienced as com-position (the preposition “com” means “with” in Portuguese). That is to say, not as an act of “positioning oneself against”, but as an act of “positioning oneself with”.
João Fiadeiro (1965) is a Portuguese performer, choreographer, researcher, teacher and curator. He belongs to the generation of artists who emerged in the late eighties in Portugal and gave rise to the New Portuguese Dance movement. He was the artistic director of ATELIER RE.AL a structure that played a major role in the development of contemporary dance and trans-disciplinary initiatives in Portugal. João Fiadeiro has toured extensively throughout Europe, North and South America with his solo and group works. In the 90’ João Fiadeiro studied and practiced intensively Contact-Improvisation which led him to pursue and systematize his own research on improvisation under the designation of Real Time Composition. This research has led him to coordinate workshops in Masters and PhDs programs in several schools and universities throughout the world.
Currently he his a PhD student at Colégio das Artes, Coimbra University and Associated Researcher at a.pass, Brussels, with a scholarship from Calouste Gulbenkian Fundation in Lisbon
Initiated out of a desire to be a shared platform of exchange, support and publication for the a.pass Associate Researchers, this year-long initiative will continue to support and publish advanced research and investigate its trajectories within a.pass.
The Associate Researchers follow a part of their research trajectory in an environment of mutual criticality and institutional support. The Research Center welcomes radical and inventive research methodologies in order to contribute them to the larger a.pass environment. The Research Center supports and facilitates individual and collective forms of performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions, gatherings, etc), experimental research set ups, workshops and collaborations.
For the period of September 2022 to August 2023 a.pass is happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center Cycle IV:
Caterina Mora, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst, Samah Higawi, Túlio Rosa, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio.
The Associate Researchers will be hosted and supported during Cycle IV by Vladimir Miller.
Initiated out of a desire to be a shared platform of exchange, support and publication for the a.pass Associate Researchers, this year-long initiative will continue to support and publish advanced research and investigate its trajectories within a.pass.
The Associate Researchers follow a part of their research trajectory in an environment of mutual criticality and institutional support. The Research Center welcomes radical and inventive research methodologies in order to contribute them to the larger a.pass environment. The Research Center supports and facilitates individual and collective forms of performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions, gatherings, etc), experimental research set ups, workshops and collaborations.
For the period of May 2021 to April 2022 a.pass is happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center Cycle III:
Joāo Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Gosie Vervloessem, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Simon Asencio.
The Associate Researchers will be hosted and supported during Cycle III by Vladimir Miller.
Research practices of the Associated Researchers of Cycle 3:
Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin
CofetARia is an eating performance at the confluence of two durational practices: performance art and pastry backing, where cakes are generally more performative than other dishes, and allow better for the agencies/affordances of food to come through. Working with alimentary matter and showing/doing/behaving, CofetARia is about animating memory and confronting the problems raised by post-communist empathic nostalgia, outside of the "crimes of the past regime" approaches.
Joāo Fiadeiro
Real Time Composition is a concept-tool that studies and practices a contra-intuitive skill: the ability to look at ourselves looking at (ourselves looking at) things. This is done using the fields of improvisation and composition in contemporary dance as a privileged territory of research. “Real Time” and “Composition” are two notions that cancel each other. “Composition” suggests that one must refer to the existence of previous knowledge while actively projecting the future. “Real time” implies that whatever is happening, is happening here and now, in the present. The resulting tension (and attention) generated by the collision of those two opposing forces allows an alternative way to perceive and experience time. Real Time Composition suggests a perceptual paradigm shift: instead of reacting based on previous knowledge one should suspend knowledge. Instead of fighting the unknown (or surrendering to it) one should welcome it. As a result, the linear experience of time is interrupted, a gap in the sensation of continuity is produced and an interval “emerges”. Inside this interval, time is not linear (or even circular) but “twisted” (like the topological surface of a Mobius Strip), governed by laws that don’t follow conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside. Inside this interval, space has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Transforming fixed, rigid and closed compositions into mobile, flexible and open relations is what characterises the research within and around Real Time.
Gosie Vervloessem
If a damaged heart were photosynthetIc is an ongoing in-situ project that starts from a squatted ticket booth in the Botanical Garden in Brussels, from where I, as a sick detective*, commit a slow and silent coup on the site through a two-folded strategy: by haunting the garden, identifying and unveiling the ghosts that linger on the gardens’ grounds, ghosts of various exploitations through different times. And secondly, by pushing plant science in a radical and speculative directions. Plants have long been identified with the feminine body and have been as regularly exploited and subjected to biopolitical control. But bodies of women and plants also hold a magic that might counter the ghosts of capitalism. For making the coup on the Botanical Garden really successful I need the help of women and plants.
Vijai Maia Patchineelam
As an associated researcher at a.pass, I’m looking to focus on the preparation for the potential conclusion and the aftermath of my Ph.D. in the Arts titled The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution. With the Associated Researcher position I look to outlast a premeditated institutional conclusion of the current research project that I lead by overlapping host institutions. In doing so, further committing to the complete turnaround of my artistic practice that the current PhD position has afforded. One of the primary interest at a.pass is being for the first time, inside an institution that is not solely focused on visual art. And what that entails in how artistic practice is understood, as well as artistic research — ways of communicating the decision-making process mixed with the desire for a more engaged collective research environment. In overlapping institutions, I look at a.pass not only as a place of coaching for the defense but also as an institution that participates during the final evaluation process, by inviting a core member of a.pass to be part of the jury. Looking for a difference in perspective for the feedback from an artist organised educational and research platform.
Simon Asencio
The research investigates the position of invisibility and anonymity in text in order to reassess practices of authorship and readership. The notion of invisibility in this case, is a matter of illegibility, either chosen as a ruse for safety or forced upon to undermine the ‘inadequate’. The notion of anonymity points to the set of protocols by which a person or a group appears as non-identifiable, unreachable or untraceable; or whose identity is rendered incomplete or never 'one'. If anonymity is usually seen as a way to avoid responsibility (to hide the doer behind the deed), the research focuses on how the performance of the namelessness (the doings of anonymity) could instead invite us to engage a collective responsibility towards history, community, political action and art making. At the cross between literature and performance, the research looks at practices and precedents across spoken tongues, written tongues and sung tongues (in particular in vernacular forms, music and poetry) to define poetical, ethical and political tools to think a more inclusive practice of anonymity and invisibility.
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
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.
2020 has so far been a turbulent year: of course, the global background we are all aware of, but also for a.pass and all involved, as a community, as a group of colleagues and as a place of politics and organisation. We need time to meet despite all difficulties, and we need time to think together. We think of this block primarily as a meeting of ideas and practices of the researchers and the block contributors, in order to make space for an emergent support structure shared between all involved. Our desire is to ground the support structure of a.pass in a close relationship with the necessities and practices of the researchers. Curating here refers again more to care, than to an overarching trajectory. The core of what we do, practice artistic research, is what needs input and support. Starting from the question of what we need and how to organise it we want to create transitory and sustainable modes of organising and sharing research. The block practice, starting with the Settlement gathering, is focused on organisational and structural awareness and feedback: which spatial and temporal structures do we propose, how is it working with us and our research, and is it something we should keep for the future?
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
aaa
Lili Rampre's recent developments within RC involved repurposing works of popular culture and their most prominent characteristics of an epic story to help re-narrativise group and community concerns. Lili’s long term interest in (re)imagining an audience, especially within performing arts, found a strong resonance with current examples of collective action carried out by various fan groups. In Zsenne reading session, Lili is inviting you to delve into some of the texts on citizenship through fandom as a vehicle and examples of such performances. The reading will start by addressing the proposed questions:
This should not be misunderstood as an extension of the already well developed sociology and anthropology of fandom, but rather as the critical reappraisal that emergent large popular assemblages of self-identifying communities are an under-utilized and under-recognized potentiality for “performance” proper.
Reading Session will be held online (live participation limited to a.pass participants, due to corona measures)
please sign up to receive the link on the day of the session
Thu, 16th July
14h
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
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
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
July 10th 2020, 14h-18h, online
a.pass cordially invites you to join the workshop presentations and public debate of the conference Research Futures on the 10th of July at 14h (online )
The three day conference will take the form of a gradually expanding meeting of practitioners in the fields of art, education and artistic research. On Friday the 10th, the result of the previous day's workgroups will be presented and the conference will open up to a public Q&A and debate. The link for online attendance will be posted on the a.pass website on the 10th of July.
The link for online participation will be placed here:
https://bbb.apass.be/b/nic-
Welcome!
Note:
you will be prompted if you want to use your microphone by the BBB software.
You can click yes. if you wish so.
Please mute your microphone when you enter the room. (bottom of the screen)
please find the full conference announcement here
As a publicly funded educational platform, a.pass is reviewed by the ministry of education in regular five-year intervals. With the next review process underway, a.pass took the opportunity to propose a collaborative process of self-evaluation to four other educational institutions - DAI - Dutch Art Institute, NL; Jan Van Eyck Academy, NL; Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerpen, BE and Uniarts Helsinki, FI in the field of artistic research. This process is motivated by a desire to establish a platform for mutual criticality where institutions of artistic research are not pushed to compete against each other, but can meet as partners sharing many of the same stakes. This critical intra-vision is also a balancing measure to the tendencies of such evaluations to produce an equalizing standard in a respective field of cultural production. Instead we aim to understand, compare and strengthen our differences, in order to create greater specificity and add complexity to the developing field of artistic research.
The upcoming conference "Research Futures" will bring representatives from five institutions of artistic research together with professionals working in the field of education, arts, culture, artistic research, curation and activism to engage with a series of questions emerging from this comparative (self)-study. We want to understand better what is the range of educational and institutional strategies and practices operating in the field of artistic research today. Where do we see common struggles, pitfalls and current problematics with respect to our concerns with inclusivity, sustainable support structures, institutionalization of artistic research and politics of publication. And finally we would like to compare ourselves to the future: what are possible scenarios for artistic research to continue its contribution to the field of artistic production, and how can these contributions respond to the changing social realities of a challenging future?
The conference will proceed in three steps, growing from a meeting to a debate.
On day one the representatives of the contributing institutions will meet to review the process of self evaluation. Moderated by Delphine Hesters, we will look for commonalities and differences between our institutions and how they operate and address the challenges we outlined together in our shared reports. This meeting will develop areas of concern to pass on to the next round of discussions the following day.
For step two we invited ca. 20 practitioners and professionals from the field of cultural production, education and artistic research to come together with us in a working session dedicated to the topics proposed on day one. Gathered around the topics in groups, the main objective will be for each group to critically develop relationships between present conditions and implications and future scenarios. Which relevance will this particular concern have in the future, how will it change in response to the developments of its social, economical and political context, what will be possible responses, adaptations and strategies to address those changes? Each group will be accompanied by a "reporter", someone who will take notes and compile an ad hoc report for the debate the next day.
At step three we will open the content developed in the groups to a collective process. With the help of the "reporters", the groups will present their findings to all present. The subsequent discussion, will be open to questions, comments, critique and contributions from all sides. This part will also be documented in audio and writing, and, together with the reports from preceding steps, contribute to a joined workshop conference report, that will be published and made available later in the year.
List of participants (tbc):
KASK - Heike Langsdorf, Frederique Le Roy; Adva Zakai; RITS - Geert Opsomer, Klaas Tindemans, Action Plan Europe - Tere Badia; PARTS - Bojana Cveijc, Charlotte Vandevyver; ROYAL ACADEMY FINE ARTS ANTWERP - Els De Bruyn, ERG - Laurence Rassel; CAVEAT - Ronny Heiremans, Kathleen Vermeir; KAAITHEATRE - Agnes Quackles; KANAL - Centre Pompidou - Guy Gypens; BUDA Kortrijk - Mathilde Villeneuve; LA LOGE- Laura Herman; WIELS Eva Gorsse; INDEPENDANT RESEARCHERS: Philippine Hoegen , Sébastien Hendrickx, Kristien Van den Brande, Sina Seifee and the Post-Graduate and Associated Researchers of a.pass; Benchmark participating institutions: Hicham Khalidi (Jan Van Eyck Academy), Elo Mika (Uniarts Helsinki), Gabriëlle Schleijpen (DAI), Nico Docks and Els De Bruyn (Royal Academy Fine Arts Antwerp); Moderator - Delphine Hesters
Curated by Lilia Mestre and Vladimir Miller
MON 7th
14:00 meeting
17:00 cleaning, emptying the collective space
19:00 dinner
TUE 8th
10:00 Materials and Tools
WED 9th
10:30 Scheduling
11:00 Katinka van Grokum, a.pass opening week presentation: SketchUp as an Interior
12:00 Caterina Mora: Translating Ballet to Regaton
13:00 Living Together: organising cooking cleaning up
14:00 Research and Space (conversation with new a.pass researchers and LM and VM)
16:00 Ezster Nemethi TBC
THU 10th
9:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
10:30 Scheduling
11:00 Deborah Birch, a.pass opening week presentation: Caves II. Re-entry
14:00 Katinka van Grokum: Trash Talk, recycling in Belgium
16:00 Chloe Chignell, a.pass opening week presentation: Choreographic Strategies for Writing
17:00 Christina Stadlbauer, a.pass opening week presentation: Sharpening the Narrative
FRI 11th
12:00 Signe Frederiksen, a.pass opening week presentation
Cooking: Amelie van Elmst
15:30 Maurice Meewisse, a.pass opening week presentation
17:00 Meri Ekola, Light Observations
18:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton) with a guest dancer
SAT 12th
SUN 13th
MON 14th
9:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
11:30 Diego Echegoyen, a.pass opening week presentation
12:30 Goda Palekaitė, a.pass opening week presentation: Legal Implications of a Dream
"Legal Implications of a Dream" is the title of Goda's research and her solo exhibition which just opened in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Let us think of settlement as an occupied space which materializes as a consequence of a collective dream.
14:00 Scaffolding Introduction (how to and safety instructions)
16:00 Human Condition Reading Club part I
TUE 15th
10:00 Scheduling
10:30 Outside Walk (Mathilde Maillard) 1h
12:00 Alex Arteaga, Input: Architecture of Embodiment and destabilizing an architectural object
Disclosing an Architectural Object is an artistic research framework that allows an approach to a twofold object of inquiry: the architectural organization of material and the cognitive agency of aesthetic media, practices and artifacts.
14:00 Meeting with Michele Meesen and Joke Liberge: organisational, budget, etc for first block researchers (end 16:00)
16:00 Laura Pante, apass opening week presentation: On Metaphorology
18:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
WED 16th
10:00 Mathilde Maillard: a.pass opening week presentation: Work Club / Club Travail
11:00 Peggy Pierrot, Do You Belong ?
Artistic activities are shaped by continuous trips, international workshops and residencies abroad. In this context, each work session operates like a colonization of some people space, means and life by the artistic presence and vision. The artist settles in different environments, whether his work aim to relate directly or not at all to the different creation contexts. In this international scene of seesaw motion, how can one’s cultivate his sense of belonging, of beeing from, of being rooted, without a nationalist content, but without being a post modern nomad of emptiness? How do YOU, settler, react to this constraints (langage, food, bodies, papers...). What do you take or leave ? What do you gain from this artistic nomadism ? Do you belong somewhere ? We’ll question these assumptions through an insight on the work of the artist Pierre Creton.
14:00 Flavio Rodrigo, a.pass opening week presentation: Sensations, Paths and Rituals of Work with the Creative Imagination (establishing the initial relations of my research). Please bring you mobile phone and headphones, you will need them during the presentation.
18:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
THU 17th
9:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
11:00 Elen Braga: The World to Come
If we have a history-line, what are the most important events of the last 30 years of human life that come to our mind? Is there a connection between those events and the context of our artistic research? What are the symptoms of those events and how to prophesize the world to come? We will start the exercise using the allegory of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. And by creating symbolic images, we will try to transform those events into an allegory of apocalypse. "And in the days of these people shall we set up a world, which will never be destroyed?"
12:00 Nassia Fourtouni, a.pass opening week presentation: Neither Distance nor Empathy
FRI 18th
9:30 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
13:00 Philipp Gehmacher, mentor's presentation (skype)
14:00 Amelie van Elmbt, a.pass opening week presentation: Dreaming Walls
15:00 Scheduling next week
15:05 Space and Scenography review and preview w. Vladimir
SAT 19th
SUN 20th
MON 21st
13:00 Experimental Film Scratching Workshop
14:30 Muslin Brothers, a.pass opening week presentatio
16:00 Human Condition Reading Club part II
TUE 22nd
9:00 Caterina Mora: Training, Translation (Ballet and/or/vs Regaton)
12:00 Engaging the Spectacle: Aspects of Contemporary Ideology, a Brazilian Case Study.
Roberto Winter shares his thoughts and artistic practice - with an introduction and lunch prepared by Adrijana Gvozdenovic.
"Our time is critical, we seem to be finishing the transition to a new era (and maybe we already have), call it the "New Dark Ages", "Hypernormal", "Semiocapitalist", or "Capitalist realist", under the empire of total spectacle, we are ruled by images. [...] Art’s potential role in untangling the situation is privileged and fragile: if it can resort to fiction, it must also deal with fake news; if it can resort to a long tradition of making and understanding images, it must also deal with the emptiness of memes and social networks; if it can resort to aesthetics, it must understand the new role of images and the obligation to (self-)design. The question remains: how to engage in the production of things that could make the current state of affairs graspable, explicit, unbearable and, eventually, help lead to their overcoming?"
14:30 Mathilde Maillard and Flavio Rodrigo, Lets Talk about Brasil
WED 23rd
10:00 We meet at KANAL Centre Pompidou to have a look at the space for the upcoming Unsettled Study. Afterwards we will talk about the space and the process of the block
14:00 Bauhaus and School, Input from Moritz Frischkorn + Heike Bröckerhoff
Based on their own research for an artistic project, Heike and Moritz will give a short introduction about the Bauhaus as an art-academy. It seems as if the very idea of an art-school as a "total work of art", based on principles of performance, inter-disciplinarity and process-orientation, where one invests oneself fully, combines technology and art, and thus manufactures a new subject for a democratic society was invented at the Bauhaus. We would like to discuss how to relate to those ideas and concepts from a contemporary point of view.
THU 24th
10:00 Lilia Mestre: On Scoring, To Forge Temporary Communities
11:30 Alex Arteaga: On my Intervention in/with the Settlemen
20:00 Cine Club: Time Indefinite
FRI 25th
11:00 Settlement review and block organisation (whats next?) w. Vladimir
Within the frame of Performatik19, the Brussels biennial of performance art
Unsettled Study Open Studio
Wednesday 20th – Saturday 23rd of March during opening hours at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels
tickets are available as a special 10-day pass for Kanal Centre Pompidou
Unsettled Study Performative Research Environment
Friday 22nd of March 16h
Saturday 23rd of March 18h
at Kanal Centre Pompidou Brussels
duration ca 3h
tickets are available as a special 10-day pass for Kanal Centre Pompidou
Produced and performed by a.pass researchers, curators and facilitators: Alex Arteaga, Deborah Birch, Elen Braga, Isabel Burr Raty, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Amélie van Elmbt, Nassia Fourtouni, Katinka van Gorkum, Antye Guenther,Steven Jouwersma, Leo Kay, Joke Liberge, Mathilde Maillard, Sara Manente, Michele Meesen, Maurice Meewisse, Lilia Mestre, Caterina Mora, Muslin Brothers (Yaen Levi & Tamar Levit), Eszter Némethi, Goda Palekaite, Laura Pante, Peggy Pierrot, Rob Ritzen, Flavio Rodrigo, RRadio Triton, Femke Snelting, Christina Stadlbauer,
Lecture performance mentoring: Philipp Gehmacher
Process curator: Vladimir Miller
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.
more on the lecture performance series Walk+Talk:
Critical voicing, reading, enactment of Alien (1979). Process of audio-visual documentation. Generation of a subtext to the script.
Meeting at Rue Manchester at 10h. Finishing at 15-16h.
The city of Brussels is holding a part of my past. I will take you to one of the most historical places of Brussels. Please bring headphones if you have. It would be nice to have a piece of paper and pen. thanks.
meeting point: apass
time: 14h
duration: 3-4h
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.
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.
"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.
“…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?
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
