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Evaluation report a.pass (Draft)

visitation report apass 2015 01 April 2015
posted by: Guido Lucassen

In 2014 a.pass was evaluated by an international visitation commission to establish the level of quality of the programs on an international level. the a.pass environment was marked as 'excellent' on all levels.

here you can read the report:

It, Thingly Variations in Space 10 March 2015
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

texts by: Elke Van Campenhout, André Lepecki, Christophe van Gerrewey, Nele Wynants; ed. by Mokum, a.pass

01 January 2011

15 Euro

case of: Lilia Mestre

This book explores the position of the object in contemporary performance.

price: OUT OF STOCK

What happens when the object is no longer dealt with as a reference point in the multi-layered language of theatre? What if the object takes centre stage, or even better, becomes the stage itself? Who is the spectator the moment you become aware of IT staring back at you?

The texts and images in this book refer to the works of performance makers Lilia Mestre, Joanna Bailie & Christoph Ragg, Laurent Liefooghe and Sanja Mitrovic. This publication contains texts by André Lepecki, Elke Van Campenhout, Christophe Van Gerrewey and Nele Wynants.

High Performance! Glossary workshop day 1
08 May 2012
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

08 May 2012

The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, but the outbreak of a constant crisis inherent to the system. Exploitation of the society and the environment through a reliance on constant growth, the possibility of infinite creation of money for some through the creation of debt for the majority, and the binding of most life-procedures to procedures of money are creating a precarious and dangerous economic climate.

Starting a glossary on Economics

Working on THE SQUARE : a delimited area in the workshop space, where we can experiment and model thoughts around interactions related with art and economy.
It is supervised by a camera which films the situation from above. It looks like a surveillance system ;) but it is not only that.

Jorgos Papadopoulos, Greek Economist, is intervening to clarify notions and concepts.
We spent time defining what means UTILITY and the notion of enjoyment linked to it.
The notion of Apparatus was introduced through a text by Lepecki.

We also mentioned different existing types of economies :
general economy
gift economy
economy of the body
blood economy
etc.
and how they work respectively.

In the arts field, can we talk about a gift economy?

a.pass Basics workshops

block 2012/II

NOT_index

Higher Performance! 07 May 2012
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

07 May 2012

18 May 2012

case of: Nicolas Galeazzi

Some workshopping in economics for artists is due!
At latest since 2008 it became clear, that the economic system we are living in and with is wacky, unjust and not sustainable. Many of its instruments are either exaggerated or exhausted. The bubbles it produces in different markets are getting out of control and deregulated fiscal constructions are dramatically failing.

Yet, business is going as usual - but besides that many crucial social pillars are being washed away. The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, but it is also the outbreak of the constant crisis inherent to the system. Since many years a precarious and dangerous economic climate has been created through the exploitation of the society and the environment in the belief in constant growth and a policy relying on the infinite creation of money for some through the creation of infinite debt for the majority.

The current cuts of public funding and the absence of interesting jobs are just some visible signs of the consequences of governmental reaction towards the 2008 crisis. Arts all over Europe are now more concretely targeted for cuts than ever in the last 40 years.

In this climate artist are forced to rethink our relationship to the economics - a situation to be cached!
We have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system, and rethink our relation to the protection through governmental funding. This can not be done by making art in a more 'economic' way.

This workshop rather launches a discussion about the repositioning of the economic field towards the arts.
We have to occupy and appropriate the "economics" and its terminology and fill it with new practices and new meaning. We have to occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a wider spectrum of life than just financial success.

For that we have to ask, what do we expect from future live? What is it what we really are 'dealing', 'trading' with? What is our currency? What is/was our real contribution to the crisis and how do we fictionalise the changes to come? What kind of traps are we constantly taping as artists? What kind of an economy could we establish out of an artistic (researching) practice which will make a real difference?

Thinking over economy! Rethinking economy, or thinking economy is over!

These questions can be attacked by analysing the different notions of 'performance' in the economy and in the arts.
The understanding of "performance" differs in general in their aims, aesthetics and actions in both fields. Performance on stage has to do with appearance, or transformation, performance on 'stock' with accomplishment, growth and power (thrust).
A mixup of this different understandings happens in a very complex way when it comes to the commodification and dissemination of knowledge - and even more when this happens through artistic practices.

We would like to propose a two-week workshop in two parts. The first week should concentrate on performing the reality of the economic crisis and the crisis of art-making in relation to financial policies. By inviting theorist and artist Georgios Papadopoulos, ("Notes towards a Critique of Money") we would undertake an extended analyse of the relation between art and currency. What is our currency? What is the premise behind this currency? But also what are we actually dealing with by dealing with currencies?

While in the second week we would like to go more into alternative economic systems. For that, we will collaborate with the behavioural economist Marieke Huysentruyt and will appropriate and translate economic ideas such as the 'Gemeinwohlökonomie' and Parecon. How are alternatives possible? How can art-making develop economic alternatives? How can the economy of art-making be reclaimed and recoined with other meanings and values?

The workshops are based on a similar lab structure. In order to compare and relate the differing understandings of 'performance' in a practical a discursive way, we will set up a lab where artistic performances and economic performances should coexist, contradict and corrupt each other.

The lab is a simple square furnished with some material and positions for artistic and economic activities. It will be constantly filmed form the sealing above. This should allow to understand the procedures on the square as scores or choreographies - the choreographies of relinking and rethinking art and economy. In other words - the workshop is a lab for the performance of the reality of art-making.

2012 BLOCK II 01 May 2012
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 May 2012

31 July 2012

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
Carlotta Scioldo
Catherine (Clé) Lé
Elise Goldstein
Elizabeth Ward
Fleur Ordoukhani
Helena Dietrich
Ive Leemans
Jaime Llopis
Luanda Casella
Lucie Eidenbenz
Oshin Albrecht
Simon Loeffler
Veridiana Zurita

Partners

PAF Performance Art Forum
Nadine
De Singel

Contributors for workshops

Anja Steglich
Ant Hampton
Caroline Daish
Elizabeth Ward
Elke Van Campenhout
Julie Pfleiderer
Nicolas Galeazzi
Paz Rojo
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

Mentors

Ana Hoffner
Nicolas Galeazzi
Peter Stamer
Pierre Rubio

07 - 11 / 05 & 14 - 18 / 05 / 2012

‘HIGHER PERFORMANCE’
workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi & Elizabeth Ward

The current economic crisis is not only a result of some major failures in speculating practices, it is the outbreak of the constant crisis inherent to the system. Since many years a precarious and dangerous economic climate has been created through the exploitation of the society and the environment in the believe in constant growth and a policy relying on the infinite creation of money for some through the creation of infinite debt for the majority.
The current cuts of public funding and the absence of interesting jobs are just some visible signs of the consequences of governmental reaction towards the 2008 crisis. Arts all over Europe are now more concretely targeted for cuts then ever in the last 40 years.
In this climate, artists are forced to rethink their relationship to economics. We have to leave our triple position as critiques, prototypes and profiteers of the system, and rethink our relation to the protection through governmental funding. This can not be done by making art in a more 'economic' way.
This workshop rather launches a discussion about the repositioning of the economic field towards the arts by “occupying” and appropriating the "economics" and its terminology and fill it with new practices and new meaning. We will occupy the vocabularies, the practices and the appearance of the economy and to open it to a wider spectrum of life than just a financial success. For that we have to ask, what do we expect from future life? What is it what we really are 'dealing', 'trading' with? What is our currency? What kind of an economy could we establish out of an artistic (researching) practice which will make a real difference?
In order to compare and relate the differing understandings of 'performance' in a practical and discursive way, we will setup a lab where artistic performances and economic performances should coexist, contradict and corrupt each other.

21-25 / 05 / 2012

‘SEEING SOUND’
two workshops by Julie Pfleiderer and Ant Hampton

‘Soundwalk’
German director Julie Pfleiderer and performance artist Caroline Daish have invited guest artists, including David Helbich, Joanna Baillie & Paul Craenen for the May Soundlab "Seeing Sound". The idea is to create 10 days around Sound and Performance in the context of Soundwalks and inviting an expansive interpretation of the form 'Soundwalk'.
‘Fantasy Intervention’
"Fantasy Intervention" is a workshop by Ant Hampton on imagination and writing for site-specific theatre and live urban interventions. With a focus on observation imagination and writing and involving walks in the city, discussion, film and photography the workshop culminates with a series of presentations.

28 / 05 - 01 / 06 / 2012

‘COLLABORATION AND COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH’
a.pass Basics workshop by Elke Van Campenhout

Every block, a.pass organizes some ‘B-workshops’: workshops that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a working environment. Every B-workshop is accompanied by a reader of texts and information that will be the starting point for discussion and a platform for (re)-thinking the a.pass working environment. In the upcoming blocks we will gather around topics like ‘collaboration’, ‘self-organization’, ‘tools, cases and other methodologies for artistic research’, ‘feedback and critique’, ‘collaborative work spaces’, ‘transdisciplinary research practices’, ‘What is political about research?’, ‘Who’s afraid of the Institute?’, etc...
This first B-workshop on ‘collaboration and collaborative learning’ opens up the field of collaborative practices as ‘open collectives’, as it grew in the artistic practices of the last 10-15 years. We try to get a grip on the social, political, economic and aesthetic context that has produced this proclivity for communal working, and look at some interesting examples of collaborative research projects.

25 - 29 / 06 / 2012

“WHATEVER MOVING LIKE THIS”
workshop by Paz Rojo

How could we experience the question "what, why, who, where, what for, how we live the tension between individuation and the necessity of collectivity?” What are the conditions that make WE a problem to sustain rather than a problem to solve? How can we address such a question assuming that the sites where the sensible, the corporeal and unspeakable are the battlefield where to challenge our existence? How could we do so without addressing pre-existent models and protocols? Could we experience (the) body as the very battlefield where the "somatic" prime on the "cognitive" where "creation" prime on the "creative" where “tacit experience” primes over “negotiation and responsibility” and where softness, empathy and dispersion prime over self-representation, self-management and self-control? What does being “democratically in contact means today" as a performative and experienciable gesture?
This workshop takes place within the framework "C O R E O G R A F X S", an investigation that departs from a series of choreographic cultures that emerged over the 70´s in NY, which sought to incorporate the collective daily life through the body. From this context "C O R E O G R A F X S” studies some of the concepts that defined these cultures and, in turn, questions what they mean in the current market democracies and in relation to the triangle brand-body-work.

02 - 06 / 07 / 2012

‘FEEDBACK AND CRITIQUE‘
a.pass Basics workshop by Vladimir Miller & Elke Van Campenhout

We want to 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.
We refer also back to some basic texts on art critique and feedback systems.

13 - 22 / 07 / 2012

‘THE WALK’
workshop on location by dr. Anja Steglich & Elke Van Campenhout

The Walk is a ten day workshop on location, focussing on two main questions:
How to turn walking into a qualitative tool for artistic research? and How to create a shared landscape through the individual investigation of connecting territories?
During the Walk we will address these questions out of the proposals of the individual researchers, that will investigate a limited domain and devise a walk that can later be picked by others. Important in this construction is the decisions made on the level of parameters: what do I consider (out of my research) to be important ‘markers’ of the walking experience: fe. sound, shapes, roads, attitude of walking, … Throughout the ten days we try to come back to the PAF ‘headquarters’ with enough information to turn our proposals and experiences into a shared map of the environment, and add the instructions, tasks and guidelines into a useable walking guide for others.
What is important here that these guidelines are both addressing the walk as a method for artistic research and the walk as an investigative tool to discover the landscape as a ‘narrative’.
The main guest on this journey is dr. Anja Steglich, who is currently working on two linked themes: the `telling landscapes´ and the ‘landscape choreography’.

2012 BLOCK I 01 January 2012
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 January 2012

13 April 2012

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
Catherine (Clé) Lé
Elise Goldstein
Elizabeth Ward
Fleur Ordoukhani
Frank Pay
Ive Leemans
Jaime Llopis
Oshin Albrecht
Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
Sara Dandois
Simon Loeffler
Vicente Arlandis

Research End Presentations

Caroline Daish
Doris Stelzer
Margareth Kaserer
Marilyne Grimmer

Partners

Thematics/Les Bains
Triennal Hasselt
PAF Performance Art Forum

Contributors for workshops

Akira Hino Sensei
Alexander Schellow
Annu Pennanen
David Bergé
Deufert & Plischke
Einat Tuchman
Eleanora Sovrani
Kobe Matthys
Lilia Mestre
Nicolas Galeazzi
Stephane Querrec
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Elke van Campenhout
Lilia Mestre

Mentors

Marie de Brugerolle
Nicolas Galeazzi
Robert Steijn
Vladimir Miller

17 - 20 / 01 / 2012

‘WHAT’S THE CASE ?’
(methodological warm-up)
workshop by Nicolas Galeazzi and Lilia Mestre

This workshop is questioning the basic gestures of your artistic research.
In the search for descriptions of their methodologies, artistic researchers are developing an infinite spectrum of phrases, idioms and other grammatical constructs, to filter out the basic gesture of their own practice.
Understanding individual research as “cases” possibly enfolding fan of possibilities, and the artistic choices taken within the case as the specific politics of your research, in these four research days, we try to get an overview of this spectrum and discuss this range of approaches to artistic research in relation to your own ‘case'.

01-04 / 02 / 2012

‘DIGITAL CRIMINAL’
workshop by David Bergé

What is an analogue experience in relation to a digital one?
In this workshop we will explore together notions as the possible, the virtual and the potential in relation to the analogue versus the digital. How to define the choice for a digital or analogue process and what are its consequences towards an outcome and audience experience?
On the table will be 'On the Superiority of the Analogue' by Brian Massumi and videoworks by Michael Snow, Derek Jarman, Holis Frampton, as well as 70’s land art projects and their documentation, such as 'seven winter midday shadows' by Hamish Fulton and the documentary of 'spiral jetty', made by Robert Smithson himself,… as well as photographic projects by Edmund Engelman, Mike Mandel, Larry sultan and Jon Rafman.
Goal of the workshop is to define our own practice through what is on the table.

23-27 / 01 / 2012

‘AKIRA HINO SENSEI’
master class

Akira Hino Sensei is a master of budo, an ancient Japanese martial art, who worked -between others- with the Forsythe Company, where he has regularly given workshops since 2005. His lessons have greatly influenced both their own work and that of the Forsythe Company. For a week Akira Hino Sensei will focus on feeling the body with the aim of connecting up to movement, both one's own and that of the other. Budo is therefore a way of exploring the body and developing physical communication skills.

28 - 31 / 01 / 2012

‘EMERGENCE ROOM’
workshop by Deufert&Plischke in Hasselt

Emergence Room is a live-workspace, where all participants (performers and spectators) join to work in silence on pre-set themes. The workspace is built temporarily into an existing environment like a museum, a festival center, an academy, a retail store. The work-process is based on a circular structure of passing on containers of material. Its procedures are proliferation and reformulation in order to create topologies and maps that are related to the underlying theme. These topologies and maps serve as a common denominator for projects that will be individually developed, not by an individuum (a singular author), but individually as a project in the co-authorship of reformulation. The theme of the Emergence Room in Hasselt will be the myth of Arachne. It focuses on the difference between art and craft, symbolism and realism, doing as if and doing in the here and now. Athene weaves carpets that show the glorious deeds of the gods, Arachne weaves the everydayness of the relationship of humans and gods and its brutality. The figure of Arachne bares and exposes lots of topics and questions still relevant and unanswered in our time. What is the responsibility of the artist? What do we risk with art? How do we judge art works? How can artists and critiques coexist and collaborate?
During the four days workshop all participants will work together on these topics and questions and formulate and proliferate material, create story boards together, that will later be exposed in the Emergence Room Hasselt in the frame of the exhibition SuperBodies (Hasselt Triennale).

06 - 28 / 02 / 2012

‘THE SETTLEMENT: ALIEN LOGIC’
working space by Vladimir Miller

The settlement is a model to engender and structure work, knowledge, events and encounters. In a shared space, the participants function as an open group where questions of territory, negotiation and hospitality in art production surface. Settlers build a station suitable for their own artistic research and, by doing so, enter in a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas and events. The settlement allows negotiating many gradations of participation and influence; it also provides different modes of engagement between inside and outside. A settler can leave, a visitor becomes a tourist, a frequent visitor can eventually settle in the space. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement praxis actively searches for a spatialized production of dis-agreement. This Settlement is the 5th in a series of Settlements, developed within or outside of the a.pass context. The guiding principle of the Settlement this time is ‘Alien Logic’.

27 / 02 - 2 / 03 / 2012

‘MICRO HISTORIES / 1 / OPENING WEEK’
workshop by Thematics/Les Bains

Curated by Lilia Mestre/Les Bains with invited artists Eleanora Sovrani (it/be), Einat Tuchman (is/be), Annu Pennanen (fi) and Stephane Querrec (fr) and Kobe Matthys (be), Micro Histories researches the processes of documentation and presentation of the ‘Micro Histories’ collected in four different Brussels areas: Vilvoorde, St Joost, Brussels Center (EEC quarter) and Forest. We aim to investigate, challenge and discuss cultural phenomena and their construction through field research. During the opening week the participants of the Thematics and the participants of a.pass meet to lay out the themes that are driving this research: what is the sense of history? what kind of methodologies do we use to register ‘what has happened’? How do we create our own histories, or make history appear where it is not considered likely to be found? What is field research and how do we set up a valid research environment on location? This workshop is the introduction to the His/Herstory workshop, during which these strategies are put to the test in individual research field trajectories.

05 - 09 / 03 / 2012

‘MICRO HISTORIES / 2 / HIS/HER STORY’
workshop by Alexander Schellow

The second week of the Micro Histories workshop offers the opportunity to all participants to develop an individual history project, choosing their own location in Brussels, working on practice based field research, together with artist Alexander Schellow. In his work, which is located between artistic and scientific research-practice, he follows different strategies to translate fictions and questions into concrete narrations – as films, interventions, installations, drawing-series or spatial performance concepts. Narrations that one literally finds on the street.
One keyword here is: practice. Not seen in the constructed and fairly imprecise dualism of practical versus theoretical, this becomes a very relevant term as well as concept. How can a practice (of observation, recording) be framed methodologically in different ways, in order to make it (and not just: combine it with) a tool of reflection? The workshop aims to trigger your own concepts and practices to react in their specific way on the above-mentioned questions/problematics. We will develop individual starting points for projects and follow them at least for a few first steps. In central group discussions those experiences and case studies will be shared and questioned with regard to methodology as well as content.

19-23 / 03 / 2012

‘THE WALK - PREPARATION’
preparation for a walking workshop by Elke Van Campenhout

In preparation of a month long walking workshop on mobile archiving/narrativizing the landscape, interested participants share for one week the development of possible walking scores, the fabrication and reconstruction of traces, and the possibilities of urban/non-urban routes. Every day we test out another walking score, and try to get further into the philosophy and reality of a walking workshop.

10 - 13 / 04 / 2012

‘SPECIAL EFFECT MANUAL’
workshop by Lynda Gaudreau

This workshop is above all a research space around scores and working themes such as, speed, accidents and precision. Lynda Gaudreau's partitions constitute environments, "maps " integrating scenography, light, sound and relevant activities. The partitions include activities totally unrealistic, impossible to accomplish but that must be resolved at very precise moments. These scores open to a multitude of strategies to execute the tasks and generate what so called "side effects”. The workshop will be divided in two parts : conceptual and practical and participants will elaborate scores in a collaborative process. Open to choreographers, composers, visual artists interested in producing "special effects" in their works.

ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #2 Magical Materialism
10 October 2011
posted by: Pierre Rubio

Pierre Rubio

10 October 2011

23 October 2011

case of: Pierre Rubio

Let’s sit in a circle to talk about magic.

And then, let’s practice alchemy…

This workshop is the continuation of a series. A “first episode” happened during last spring, a new one happens this fall. They both seek to detach our research projects from an essentialist and naturalistic approach. Their common aim is at (re)problematising for (re)capturing the strategies of construction and thus the theories of knowledge which our singular researches investigate and produce. If the Spring workshop’s keyword was ‘attachments’, the second step will be entirely contaminated by the notion of ‘magic’. We will take a trip into the wonderland of in-differentiation between cultural and natural, object and subject, figure and background, and more important, theory and practice.

At first, during three days, we will re-consider our research projects under the influence of two singular analysis of magic : respectively Gilbert Simondon’s and Isabelle Stengers’.

Far from considering magic as an obsolete historical object, Simondon’s notion of the magical is that of a world structured by a network of privileged places and privileged moments. Let’s compare this magical structure of the world to our projects, as if they were worlds in themselves.

With the help of Stengers, our ‘favourite witch’, we will track the evil spells of capitalism as well as “the thoughtlessness encouraged by the theme of progress” and any kind of prescriptive power discourses. Logically we will then question the potential of politics’ re-invention through our artistic researches, the level of “empowerment” they produce and the possibility of “reclaim” they generate.

During a second period of an entire week, we will turn a former shop (turned recently into an art gallery) into an alchemy laboratory to transmute our projects into something other. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by moving it into unexpected contexts, this allows the discovery of ‘attachments’ and “othernesses” to enrich the ‘original’ project. Taking seriously what practice means and is capable of, let’s engage in a risky path from familiar individuals to unfamiliar singularities, from experiments to experiences, from “matter of facts to matter of concerns”.

The magical world is not a fascinating ethnographic object but “a mode of existence” to which individuals, as well as collectives, (and also artistic research projects...) can come back, if they endure the ordeal of disindividuation. “Disindividuation is a lack in structure” that happens when organisations that make us see, think and act break up, making us paradoxically available to invent other ways of seeing, thinking and acting. Welcome to the post-rational shamanistic academia!

2011 BLOCK III 01 September 2011
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 September 2011

30 November 2011

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld
Carlotta Scioldo
Caroline Daish
Catherine (Clé) Lé
Doris Stelzer
Elise Goldstein
Leonie Kuipers
Margareth Kaserer
Marilyne Grimmer
Oshin Albrecht
Robin Amanda Creswell Faure
Simon Loeffler
Veridiana Zurita
Vicente Arlandis

Research End Presentations

Abhilash Ningappa
Philippe Severyns
Timothy Segers

Partners

RITS
Zsenne artlab
NU Performance Festival IV (Tallinn)

Contributors for workshops

Angelo Vermeulen
Antonio Araújo
Bart Verschaffel
Bojana Cvejic
David Bade
Elke Van Campenhout
Geert Opsomer
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Jacob Wren
Juan Dominguez
Koen Van Singhel
Nicolas Galeazzi
Ong Keng Sen
Pierre Rubio
Robert Steijn
Silke Bake-Peter Stamer
Stef Stessels
Terenja Van Dijk
Wesley Meuris

Coordinators a.pass

Elke van Campenhout
Bart Van den Eynde

Mentors

Anette Baldauf
Pierre Rubio
Vincent Dunoyer
Vladimir Miller

15 - 17 / 09 / 2011

‘DON’T KNOW!’
Conference on Artistic Research

Don’t Know! is not a gathering with the sole aim of exchanging knowledge on artistic research practices. In the course of three days we rather aim to create a frame in which research is put into practice and shared with the audience. In other words: we propose a conference which provides different working situations, allowing an in-depth experience of research formats, relations and situations, and the specific ‘knowledges’ these produce. Following the suggested attitude in our conference-title - Don’t Know! - we would like to frame these formats through four fields of questions:

Don’t Know! the politics of knowledge production
In which way the artistic understanding of knowledge differs from the one in other fields? What are the political implications of such a difference (if any at all)? How could we redistribute the power of knowledge production throughout the arts? And finally: is this at all a valid question? Should the arts avoid the political recuperation of its terrain and abstain from the tight link to knowledge production practices? Or: is it possible to maintain an alternative position for the arts in their way of dealing with knowledge (production)? Or if not, can the arts still claim their (political) capacity for change?

Don’t Know! knowing today
Within a society that has turned the commodification of knowledge into one of its main economic drives, the critical discourse on these production formats the arts create has been the basis for a lot of (historical) research practices. Therefore we would like to ask ourselves how artistic practices today can be a viable motor for thinking about our economic, technical and political realities. How can the arts reflect upon, but maybe even more, how can they influence future developments?

Don’t Know! from knowledge production to knowledge processing
We might argue that art (and artistic research) does not in the first instance produce knowledge, but that the arts keep on opening up the cracks in our systems of understanding: mislaying the knowledge, escaping the gridlocked pre-defined contexts that can be understood only according to the conventions of the discourses (be they political, aesthetical, psychological, …) that define knowledge. Would it then not seem more appropriate to talk about ‘knowledge processing’ than about the production of knowledge? Art as a game of misplacing information rather than one that tries to reinforce meaning on the world? And does this in a lot of ways not echo a contemporary understanding of research in general?

Don’t Know! the environment
Artistic research - and specific modes of dealing with knowledge (production) - is nowadays placed before the challenge that it has to operate within certain disciplinary frameworks and protocols. The actual combat in the arts now is to see where the disciplining and institutionalisation of its intrinsic researching gesture can be turned productive again.The question is: what kind of environments and institutions does art need today in order to react on the changing ontologies of knowledge and to develop different approaches of working and thinking?

19 - 23 / 09 / 2011

SUMMERSCHOOL
series of two workshops in collaboration with RITS

How to Stage Discussions about Arts and Politics?
workshop by Jacob Wren

Jacob’s workshop is based on the technique of the relay-interview, a simple game for having unexpected conversations. It involves asking and answering spontaneous questions that are loosely based around several themes chosen before the game starts. It is an attempt to have genuine, surprising exchanges within a performance situation. And to find out what we think about it and what we most want to know.

How to Artistically Intervene in the Urban Space of the City of Ghent?
workshop by Antonio Araújo

The idea of Antonio’s workshop is to experience different points of departure in working with site and urban interventions. While working in a collaborative way in the city of Ghent, we will experiment the power of mobilization that theatre provides. Through intervening in the urban space, theatre recovers its public art dimension - which has always been there, but was sometimes blurry or forgotten.

26 - 30 / 09 / 2011

‘DON’T KNOW’
Workshop / Congress on Artistic Research by Nicolas y Galeazzi

Nicolas Y Galeazzi focuses on developing and questioning social discourses through artistic research, which is materialised in concepts, installations, performances as well as printed matter. Galeazzi sets up performative research frameworks for experiments with political and social conditions and is working thereby on a concept of 'Mise-en-Discourses'.
Nicolas will work further on the principles that have been developed during the conference more thoroughly with the researchers/participants of the post-graduate program. Central are the 4 questions that have been guiding the preparation of the conference.

03 - 07 / 10 / 2011

‘DIRECTING THE GAZE’
Reading sessions on Architecture with Koen Van Singhel, Terenja Van Dijk, Wesley Meuris and Bart Verschaffel.

The development in the 16th century of the controlled space of the theatre isolated within the urban context made it possible to manipulate the gaze in an absolute way. The development of the theatre building reflects societal organization in a crystallized form where watching and being watched is organized following strict rules. In the second half of 20th century the theatre is brought back as a reference in the critical reflection on and discussion of the visual organization of the public space.
In these reading sessions we invite architects, theorists and artists who work and reflect on the gaze in architecture. Texts (or other influences) that have been essential in their development as an artist or theoretician are the starting point of a discussion on the organization of the gaze in an architectural context.

10 - 12 / 10 / 2011 & 17 -23 /10 / 2011

‘ARTIFICIAL REALITIES’
(episode 2 - Magical Materialism)
workshop by Pierre Rubio

This workshop is the last iteration of a series of two. They both seek to detach our research projects from an essentialist and naturalistic approach. Their common aim is at (re)problematising for (re)capturing the strategies of construction and thus the theories of knowledge which our singular researches investigate and produce. If the Spring workshop’s keyword was ‘attachments’, the second step will be entirely contaminated by the notion of ‘magic’. We will take a trip into the wonderland of in-differentiation between human and natural, object and subject, figure and background, and more important, theory and practice.
At first, during three days, we will re-consider our research projects under the influence of two singular analysis of magic : respectively Gilbert Simondon’s and Isabelle Stengers’.
During a second period of an entire week, we will turn a former shop (turned recently into an art gallery) into an alchemy laboratory to transmute our projects into something other. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by moving it into unexpected contexts, this allows the discovery of ‘attachments’ and “othernesses” to enrich the ‘original’ project. Taking seriously what practice means and is capable of, let’s engage in a risky path from familiar individuals to unfamiliar singularities, from experiments to experiences, from “matter of facts to matter of concerns”.

24 - 28 / 10 / 2011

‘PHOTOGRAPHY * LIGHT * SCENOGRAPHY’
workshop by Stef Stessels

Stef Stessels always has used the camera as a tool to create his personal database and archive. Recently he has begun to integrate his interest of photography directly into his scenographic work and light design. First of all he started to document the performances of de Roovers- and his sets - and the company uses his photos for its communication. More fundamentally his camera became an instrument in his research for light & set design where he integrated the photos from this research process in the actual performances. In this artistic workshop he will investigate with the participants the possible relations between photography, scenography and lightdesign integrating more technical aspects in concrete artistic exercises.

31 / 10 - 02 / 11 / 2011

‘OBJECTNESS & THINGLINESS’
reading sessions workshop by Elke Van Campenhout

Picking up on the many forms in which objects have appeared in the participant’s projects in the last months, we take a quick tour down memory lane, presenting different theories on the object in a 3-day crash course for beginners: Kant, Michael Fried, Paul Gillroy, Jane Bennett etc. We work around the ‘resisting object’ and ‘thingliness’ as political qualities of the object, around the object/subject dichotomy as driving force in (late)modernism, about objects charged by desire that turn violent, etc. This workshop mainly circles around close reading of texts.

03 - 13 / 11 / 2011

‘ON HOSPITALITY AND ESTRANGEMENT’
( The Tallin Project / The Viru Hotel )
workshop by Ong Keng Sen and Elke Van Campenhout

This workshop is part of a festival organized in a gigantic old Russian hotel in Tallinn. During ten days we will be working on two levels:
Together with curator and theatre maker Ong Keng Sen we work around ‘the stranger’: the one that doesn’t belong, the one that disturbs the ‘common space’, the one that by his presence changes the perception of the space etc. Both on a theoretical and a practical level, we will interfere in the hotel life, working around hospitality (Derrida), extimacy / intimacy (Zizek), invisible theatre, etc.
On a second level, you are invited to come with a project of your own, placed in one of the hotel rooms, and work further on these themes out of your personal interest. There is also the possibility to work in the corridors (as a scenographic concept), elevators, … Ong Keng Sen will also mentor these projects.
The festival will open its doors at certain times for visitors.

14 - 18 / 11 / 2011

‘GHOSTS AND HOSTS’
workshop by Robert Steijn

In this workshop Robert Steijn will work with the participants on principles like presence and absence, ghosts, energetic transformations, schizophrenic bodies belonging to different times and spaces at the same time.
Robert Steijn worked as a dance critic for seven years, and then also as a curator for dance and experimental theatre in Amsterdam for seven years. Now he tries to bring the magic back in life and in the theatre. In that sense he considers himself more and more a magician. His helper is a deer, who appears in a lot of his texts and dances. His belief is that everyone can become a homemade contemporary shaman. His path towards becoming such a magician has been described in his three solo’s: the first solo was his call in guiding the death of his father, the second one, his ego death in the loss of everything by the breaking of the heart and now in his third solo: the birth of a person who can cross the thin line between reality and imagination, between life and death.

21 - 25 / 11 / 2011

‘WINTERSCHOOL’
(Baroque bodies)
series of three workshops in collaboration with RITS

Can we understand our times of postmodern confusion as a genuinely baroque period? How does this idea of baroque challenge pre-conceived notions such as corporality, performance and (post-)colonial hybridization? How would a baroque body look like and what is its performative potential? Are we approaching a true baroque era of crisis as the distinctions between man and machine, between human and non-human life are slowly dissolving and man is entering a new phase in the history of colonization, conquering space?
The RITS Winter School consists of two periods. In November 2011 the Brussels-based arts centre Beursschouwburg will host three workshops for artists, activists, art students and academics. During a second period, in January 2012, you will get the opportunity to develop your own artistic response to your experience in one of the three workshops in Brussels. This individual research phase will be hosted by De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam. You will collaborate with other artists and with students from different art schools and you will be coached by different teachers from the participating art schools. The results of this workshop will be included in the program on a festival on baroque theatricality (February 1-3, De Brakke Grond)

Workshop 1: Guillermo Gómez-Peña (USA/Mexico)
This workshop aims at creating a temporary community of rebel artists from different disciplines, ages, ethnic backgrounds, gender persuasions, and nationalities, in which difference and experimentation are not only accepted but encouraged. Participants are given the opportunity to develop new modes of relationships between artists and communities, mentor and apprentice, which are neither colonial nor condescending and to discover new ways of relating to their own bodies. By decolonizing and then re-politicizing bodies, they can become sites for activism and embodied theory, for memory and reinvention, for pleasure and penance. Why do we do what we do? Which borders do we wish to cross and why? What is the relationship between performance, activism, pedagogy and our everyday lives? What about the relationship between the physical body and the social body?

Workshop 2: Angelo Vermeulen (Belgium)
In Vermeulen's workshop, entitled 'BODYREACTOR - Human monstrification in outer space', the participants will explore the notion of potential monstrification of the human body in outer space. This workshop reroutes the theme of the ‘space alien’ to man himself. How to work with an ongoing mutating and modifying body? How to physically deal with an unknown and ultimately body-transforming environment? How to relate to a space where biological evolution never took us in the first place? ‘REACTOR’ refers to the experimental, open format of the workshop, to the condition of man in outer space (living in a craft or vessel), and to the fact that the group is locked up in one single space for one week. It also refers to the concept of monstrification in a more 'Gothic' sense.

Workshop David Bade (Curaçao)
During this workshop, Bade and the participants will create a site-specific environment taking the shifting world of early modern baroque as a starting point. Instability, excess, changeability will function is key concepts. The workshop will also investigate different modes of collaboration. “More is more” seems to be the motto of David Bade.

ARTIFICIAL REALITIES #1 Displacements and Attachments
30 May 2011
posted by: Pierre Rubio

Pierre Rubio

30 May 2011

03 June 2011

case of: Pierre Rubio

Often artists and researchers still hold on to the illusory idea of their material having a ‘natural’ ‘essence’. Let us for a moment take some distance from this essentialist and naturalistic approach, let us consider our research projects as artificial constructions, which thus can be problematized and turned into stimulating and productive networks. Artificial Realities aims at a rediscovery of our projects by a momentary over-artificialization: first by re-mapping our projects and by doing so understand/capture the strategies of ‘assemblage’ and thus the theories of knowledge which they formulate; and secondly by opening up horizons of possibilities for further developments and speculations. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by ‘moving’ it in unexpected contexts or by ‘translating’ it in non familiar languages, this will allow the discovery of new components and new ‘attachments’ that will enrich and stimulate the ‘original’ project. Or in other words: developing an otherness by experiencing and exploring “as if's” to get out of the over-territorial and locked perception of “our” projects. Let's re-construct, re-imagine, re-invent “our” substrata. Let's science-fictionalize “our” “problems” and speculate ... cartoons... models for societies... newspapers... fictions... messages for eventual extraterrestrial forms of life... social practices... TV programs... religions... and more. Artificial Realities will develop through different steps: from identification of central issues in the practice, problematization, to several experiences of transfers, translations, displacements, parallax shifts, etc. The workshop includes reading sessions (Bruno Latour's On the modern cult of the factish gods and Factures/Fractures), individual work, group presentations and discussions.

2011 BLOCK II 01 April 2011
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 April 2011

31 July 2011

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Abhilash Ningappa
Carlotta Scioldo
Caroline Daish
Iris Bouche
Leonie Kuipers
Marilyne Grimmer
Philippe Severyns
Rodolphe Coster
Timothy Segers
Veridiana Zurita
Vicente Arlandis

Research End Presentations

Alessandra Coppola
David Zagari
Michiel Reynaert

Partners

Sarma
Nadine
De Singel

Contributors for workshops

Adva Zakai
Dries Verhoeven
Elke van Campenhout
Koen Tachelet
Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene
Nicolas Galeazzi
Pierre Rubio
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

01 - 30 / 04 / 2011

‘CURATING AS ENVIRONMENTALISM’

salon about curating in the performing arts curated by Adva Zakai and Elke Van Campenhout

How is the notion of curating transformed from its visual arts context into a more collaborative and performative gesture? Are there projects in the contemporary performance scene that are exemplary for a re-thinking of curating as environmentalism? From this starting point, the one month salon on curating in the performing arts was developed. On the basis of the online article “Curating as Environmentalism”, people were invited to gloss the text, highlight fragments, and add other texts, images, links and thoughts. The original text faded out day by day, until what was left were the parts readers chose to highlight and the references they attached to them. The added material then was the inspiration for the live salon in the workspace Nadine in Brussels.
Contributors to the event were Deufert & Plischke, Nicolas Galeazzi, Elke van Campenhout, Adva Zakai, Raimundas Malasaukas and Jeroen Peeters.
The event was produced by Sarma, Nadine and a.pass Research Centre.
“Curating as Environmentalism” as a paper publication is available.

09 - 13 / 05 / 2011

‘SPECULATIVE WORKSHOP’
workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi

Research always is performative; not many performances, though, are researchive. More so, seeing performance as means of research is inverting the common notion of a performance: as a tool for research it is not interested in sending, but in receiving and processing information. The Speculative Workshop is aiming to develop concrete tools and practices based on the above thought. We will look critically at the current debate about artistic research and try to develop personalised theories and practices around the performative aspect of research. The workshop provides the possibility to elaborate your performative research-attitude based on your own research practice. By that we will try to understand what kind of politics of knowledge production these attitudes stand for. The double bind between the affirmed openness of research and the underlying 'politics' of its approach is the most important twist to be taken in an artistic research project. Therefore I tend to see this workshop as an experiment in knowledge production. Its structure will have to emerge through the practices you are bringing in. But I will provide (and experiment myself with) some frameworks of reading, discussing and practicing as well as some expeditions in the 'field'. To start with I would like to experiment on two general approaches, which deal with the constant unknown territory our researches are stumbling into: Speculation as the risky investment into the unknown, and Serendipity as the finding of the un-searched. By copying and abusing scientific research methodologies and confronting them with performative and artistic means, it is my aim to throw another light on the spectrum of what happens if research and performance are thought the same. This workshop is a preparation for the a.pass research conference in September.

16 - 20 / 05 / 2011

‘DUNKELKAMMER’
workshop by Dries Verhoeven & Koen Tachelet

We live in a visual consumption society where our eyes are brutally manipulated. Producers of images force us to attach a economic value to everything visible. They want us to classify the images that haunt us according to that economic parameters. Our self-image is assigned a place in this economy of visual valuation. As we look into the mirror of the other, we judge and adjust ourselves to the image of ourselves produced by the other. The more we make ourselves dependent upon this visual-economic labeling, the more our desires and needs are subjected to the logic of marketing and pornography: both try to penetrate as deep as possible our self-image, in order to order and re-order it, along the mechanism of ‘narcissistic differentiation’: the necessity to differentiate oneself from the others, to be more, better and more competitive. And here is a paradox. People have a deep-rooted need of intimacy, which can only be realised within a non-judging mutual space. A situation of intimacy implies that my gaze is directed towards the other, that the other is not seen as the mirror of myself, as an opportunity to market myself. From the moment that being desirable becomes a goal in itself, intimacy is impossible. Dries Verhoeven & Koen tachelet are preparing the installation Dunkelkammer for the Münchner Kammerspiele. Dunkelkammer questions the world of seeing. What does it mean to see? How does seeing and being seen influence our self-observation and our connection to the other? What happens when this sense is turned off? Those questions will be dealt with in a two-month rehearsal process with 7 blind performers. Dunkelkammer is meant to be an experience for the spectators; the thoughts, feelings, questions and (bodily) sensations of the spectator will be activated and steered by the performers’ actions and words. Crucial element is the space, the varying parameters of distance and intimacy, presence and absence. In the workshop texts by Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, Houellebecq, Beckett, Oliver Sacks and others will be read and discussed. A more practical part of the workshop will deal with exploration of the corporeality of vision and blindness.

30 / 05 - 03 / 06 / 2011

‘ARTIFICIAL REALITIES’
(episode 1 – Displacements and Attachments)
workshop by Pierre Rubio

Often artists and researchers still hold on to the illusory idea of their material having a ‘natural’ ‘essence’. Let us for a moment take some distance from this essentialist and naturalistic approach, let us consider our research projects as artificial constructions, which thus can be problematized and turned into stimulating and productive networks. Artificial Realities aims at a rediscovery of our projects by an (momentary) over-artificialization: first by re-mapping our projects and by doing so understand/capture the strategies of ‘assemblage’ and thus the theories of knowledge which they formulate; and secondly by opening up horizons of possibilities for further developments and speculations. The basic idea is that if one takes distance from one’s own project by ‘moving’ it in unexpected contexts or by ‘translating’ it in non familiar languages, this allows the discovery of new components and new ‘attachments’ that will enrich and stimulate the ‘original’ project. Or in other words: developing an otherness by experiencing and exploring “as if's” to get out of the over-territorial and locked perception of “our” projects. Let's re-construct, re-imagine, re-invent “our” substrata. Let's science-fictionalize “our” “problems” and speculate ... cartoons... models for societies... newspapers... fictions... messages for eventual extraterrestrial forms of life... social practices... TV programs... religions... and more. Artificial Realities will develop through different steps: from identification of central issues in the practice, problematization, to several experiences of transfers, translations, displacements, parallax shifts, etc. The workshop includes reading sessions (Bruno Latour's On the modern cult of the factish gods and Factures/Fractures), individual work, group presentations and discussions.

06 - 17 / 06 / 2011

‘SOUND AS SPACE’
workshop by Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene

Sound as Space proposes to investigate sound as a vehicle to create spaces in spaces. Sound depending on the way it is recorded and diffused, can enable the auditor to immerse in parallel realities. Audio pieces can invite the listeners to combine the view (of the physical space they find themselves in) and sound (constructed audio space) to re-create - depending on their own personal history - a new place or a series of places. Brian Massumi calls the constant becoming or transformation of space by the projections of its users the ‘virtual space’, a place of endless potential. Performing artist Lilia Mestre sound artist Els Viaene propose to think and create alternative spaces by the use of sound compositions. In this workshop we will practice recording, editing and diffusion of audio pieces produced by the participants in collaboration with us. For Mestre and Viaene this workshop is part of their ongoing research on audio spaces that create direct relations between their different users and between these users and the environment they find themselves in.

01 - 23 / 07 / 2011

‘SETTLEMENT’
workspace by Vladimir Miller

The settlement as a proposal is asking its participants to come and practice their work in a shared environment. The method is to build everything from scratch on location that is required to work and communicate a practice to other participants. This can be anything from an improvised table to hold a laptop to an elaborate, secluded structure; from temporal impromptu arrangements to specific spaces that last for the whole work period. Settlement allows for a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. As it manifests itself in the workspace, a loop of condition and production is created in that shared space: in the course of the two weeks the settlement lets a particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the sets of rules and behaviours usually provided by ready-made spaces such as ‘table’, ‘studio’, ‘meeting’, ‘gallery’, ‘venue’, ‘library’, etc. By finding a spatial manifestation and localization for their work the settlers enter a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas, events and encounters in the shared space. As the emphasis of the work-process and the activity of the individual and of the group change from day to day, the settlement stays a dynamic structure, ready to be reformed according to the present requirements for production and presentation. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the structures inherent in the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement practice actively searches for a spatialized production of a contributive dis-agreement and gives space to a literal heterotopia of work processes.

2011 BLOCK I 01 January 2011
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 January 2011

31 March 2011

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Abhilash Ningappa
Alessandra Coppola
Caroline Daish
David Zagari
Doris Stelzer
Esther Francis
Iris Bouche
Margareth Kaserer
Marilyne Grimmer
Michiel Reynaert
Philippe Severyns
Rodolphe Coster
Stephen Bain
Timothy Segers

Research End Presentations

Einat Tuchman
Katrin Lohmann
Sven Goyvaerts

Partners

Kaaitheater
Damaged Goods
RITS
Burning Ice festival.
Pact Zollverein
De Singel
PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Contributors for workshops

Adva Zakai
Anette Baldauf
Aras Ozgun
Christian Rizzo
International Errorist
Laurent Liefooghe
Leo De Nijs
Meg Stuart
Various Artists
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

Mentors

Laurent Liefooghe
Lilia Mestre
Pierre Rubio
Vincent Dunoyer

03-13 / 01 / 2011

‘A SETTLEMENT ON ALCHEMY, ALLIANCE , ANARCHY’
workspace by Vladimir Miller

The settlement is a model to engender and structure work, knowledge, events and encounters. In a shared space, the participants function as an open group where questions of territory, negotiation and hospitality in art production surface. Settlers build a station suitable for their own artistic research and, by doing so, enter in a growing and evolving network of objects, spaces, ideas and events. The settlement allows negotiating many gradations of participation and influence; it also provides different modes of engagement between inside and outside. A settler can leave, a visitor becomes a tourist, a frequent visitor can eventually settle in the space. The political questions inherent in claiming one's own space, inviting or excluding the outside, the formation of groups and production of locality and culture, constantly question the concept of settlement itself. Between anarchy and the rule of majority the settlement praxis actively searches for a spatialized production of dis-agreement.
In the context of her two-week ‘Atelier’ in the Kaaistudios, Meg Stuart invited Vladimir Miller to localize his settlement in the dance studio. During these two weeks a.pass settlers and Atelier members will try to find moments of common ground, confronting the ideas and topics emerging in their respective territories.

17-21 / 01 / 2011

‘ERRORISTA’S’
workshop by a.pass in collaboration with Kaaitheater and RITS in the context of Burning Ice festival.

The International Errorist is an artistic and cultural movement whose nucleus is the Buenos Aires-based artist collective Etcétera… The Errorist is also the most recent iteration of Etcétera’s unique fusion of aggressive street theater, political critique, and direct-action protest, which is equally marked by the group’s formative militancy within Argentina’s human rights movement as it is the artists’ ardent fealty to surrealism. Since the group’s formation in 1997, Etcétera has produced a myriad of photo- and video-based works, poetic manifestoes, theatrical works, and interventionist performances. Few have been created specifically as artworks to be exhibited in traditional fine arts contexts or destined for the publics proper to such contexts. Rather, Etcétera…’s works most often begin as performances in the midst of political demonstrations, unannounced street actions that target unwitting passersby, or as images and texts crafted to circulate within the mass media and/or amidst publics associated with left social movements.
The International Errorist constitutes a critique of the contemporary discourse of terrorism, where this discourse is understood to be an instrument of statecraft. Etcétera…’s work explores terrorism as an ideological mediation whose function is not only political -- as it bears upon interpretations of political violence, for example-- but specifically biopolitical, as it concerns the calculus of the differential value of human lives and the state’s exercise of biopower over groups delineated according to this logic.

24-28 / 01 / 2011

‘EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY’
workshop by Anette Baldauf & Aras Ozgun

This workshop aims at discussing some of the basic notions and problematics of visual ethnography, contemporary experimental practices in this field, and the practical potentials of digital media technologies for ethnographic research purposes. Starting with a critical historical overview of visual ethnography, the workshop examines various aspects of the problem of representation in visual ethnography. Representation of non-western “others” in the colonialist representation regimes, the “realism” and the “truth-value” of visual representation in general will be a part of this discussion. Following this discussion we will focus on non-mainstream ethnographic approaches and experimental documentary film practices, including so-called fake documentaries, which reflect upon and cultivate this problem of representation itself, and seek to create alternative modes, regimes and techniques of visual representation. Finally, we aim to familiarize ourselves with some of the basic techniques of ethnographic fieldwork.

28-30 / 01 / 2011

’CURATING IN PERFORMING ARTS’
workshop by a.pass in collaboration with Pact Zollverein, Essen.

This workshop is organized over two weekends: one participating in the colloquium on curating organized by Pact Zollverein (Explorationen 11: Beyond Curating), and one discussing and proposing a new thinking about curating in the performing arts in deSingel.
The currently vibrantly beginning discussion about curating in dance and performance comes at a moment when, on the one hand, ever new courses of study in curating are being launched for visual art and, on the other hand, the shape of the curatorial profession, in its authorial intervention and its omnipresence in the art market, has everywhere become the focus of massive criticism – as it was in the 1970s.
At the same time, the entanglement of theory and practice has become ubiquitous, not least because of the transformation and revaluation of art colleges and art academies into universities. In what is currently happening in art, the art museum is testing the performative and processual exhibition, while the dance and performance house oriented toward performative arts is developing the live course or the "Musée de la danse". In the field of dance, since the end of the 1990s, artists' initiatives have been developing that introduce new artistic practices and criticize the existing organizational models (for example, from choreographs and performance artists like Xavier Le Roy, deufert + plischke, and Boris Charmatz). Substantively and structurally, organizers took up important impetuses from artists, whether in the form of a thorough interlocking of theory and practice or of the establishment of artist and co-curator teams, artistic laboratories, or residence programs.

31 / 01 - 04 / 02 / 2011

‘NEW-YORK’
workshop by Elke Van Campenhout & Bart Van den Eynde

In the context of the ‘New York festival’ organised by deSingel, a.pass organizes an intensive discussion workshop. We take a close look at the recent New York performance scene and analyze how pop esthetics, cinematographic editing principles en trans-medial dispositives influenced a specific language of theatre, dance and performance. Video material, texts and talks with the artists present in the festival will be the starting point of the conversations. possibly Natural Theatre of Oklohama will also add a more practical section to the workshop.

07 - 11 / 02 / 2011

‘BUREAU OF UNTITLED’ / EXERCISE IN COMMERCIAL ART’
workshop by Various Artists

Being a Various Artist is a series of interactive installations by Various Artists in which artists are invited to identify with one of Various Artists. The format is not so much about learning but it also produces new work of which the author is the Various Artist, at the same time remaining the property of the participating artists. The event that Nadine organizes in February is dealing with Various Artist Liam Drib.
Liam Drib, born in Liverpool 1961, well known for Mes Amis Belges, Cobalt Thoughts and his Evil Olive pub realisation, will be the centre artist of a new Being a Various Artist Workshop with an emphasis on commercial art and dazzling ideas.
To support this theme, Liam will organise a Bureau of Untitled (BoU) with the participants of the workshop.
The mission of BoU is to propose new ideas to artists that have a financial value on the art market, meaning their works can be traded. BoU is about making money with art paid by art money. The context of BoU at PAF is the arts lab Being Liam Drib.
The structure of BoU approaches the structure of a sports game, including 2 teams (one black on white and one white on black) and a referee (black and white). Initially an artist is proposed, voted and processed Ideas, fitted to the work of the chosen artist, are being generated at a continuous pace which will be stored in ascending price categories. The sealed ideas will be offered for sale to the artists on an international art fair in the near future.

07 - 12 / 02 / 2011

‘SENSITIVITY, SPACE, STAGE’
workshop by Laurent Liefooghe

Through texts and references this workshop wants to introduce some concepts and concrete examples of spaces and how these function as a ‘stage’. Simultaneously it will explore the idea of the ‘stage’ (the place of the performance) as an ideological space.
The workshop will use the work Theater-Cinema by Dan Graham as reference, a crystallization point around which we will try to examine concepts of performance spaces and the power mechanisms involved.
The ambition is not to give an exhaustive and historical overview, but rather through the reading of specific texts and trough concrete practices to explore a personal spatial sensitivity.
The Texts will touch upon diverse themes as: the ‘theatro del mondo’ (the ideas of the stage as a metaphor for the world / the world as a stage), the baroque urbanistic interventions of Pius X (the city as a theater), the black box as a monadic space,. etc.
The introduction of specific examples of spatial practices leads to concrete questions on the production of space. What does it mean to first conceive a space – to first ‘represent’ it -and then realize it? Through examples of existing practices different means and methods of representation in function of production are investigated.

14 - 19 / 02 / 2011

‘SPACE OVERLOAD’
workshop by Christian Rizzo

Christian Rizzo wants to use the projects of the a.pass participants as a basis for a research on the collective production of space. How to spatialize one’s own practice and by doing so create an environment for other practices. How to be present in silence. How can the group’s activity be the scenography for an individual practice and the other way around. How to deal with an overflow or with a lack of spatial information.

28 / 02 - 04 / 03 / 2011

“LOCATION”
workshop by Leo De Nijs

Location is a practical workshop in an enormous building with empty class rooms, a theatre space and offices that was once the location of a theatre training. As a start there will be an investigation into different ways of exploring the building and expressing the specificity of this/a location through different media. The question how to use a found space as a location will then be translated in the concrete realisation of an installation starting from the personal researches of the participants.

14 - 18 / 03 / 2011

‘THE ARCHIVE AS GENERATOR’
workshop by Adva Zakai

Which archive could generate the future rather than preserve the past?
Coming out of the experience of ‘d o m i n o k i n g d o m’ where each work lives on in the next because works are made as a reaction on previous ones, I am interested in delving more into the possibility of generating present and future out of a direct confrontation with past experiences: formats that make the past, present and future influence each other, can trigger a constant re-evaluation and challenge of our knowledge and perception.
Archiving, be it in the artistic, educational or any other field, is considered important because it ‘proves’ the (past) existence of a past events and thus enables them to continue to exist and to be (re)visited. But imagine an archive that is not trying to capture fixed ‘images’, that is not referential. An archive that is a living process that keeps modifying itself constantly, triggering new processes instead of being a mere documentation, always lost in the past.
How does an archive functions that is looking forwards instead of looking back?
This question will be explored through reading, discussion and guest lectures.

tools for research 01 January 2011
posted by: Elke van Campenhout

Elke van campenhout

01 January 2011

Thinking about tools in the research environment of a.pass is a tricky 'thing'. When we think about tools in everyday language, we think about 'things that do something'. But not whatever. Tools are things that have their function inscribed in them, that are optimized for achieving a certain goal, like the radically specified instruments IKEA offers you in its DIY packages. In an artistic research environment the question thus to ask in the first place is: what kind of tools do we need to do what we do?

In a recent conference a.pass organized under the title 'Don't Know', this question took central stage. Is a platform for artistic research supposed to 'produce knowledge', as the current politics in arts and education seem to suggest. Is artistic research actually a veiled normative restriction to the messiness of the arts practices in general? A field within the arts where the outcome is supposed to be communicable, replicable, usable in other domains? For me this question of demanded outcomes and, accordingly, of fitting tools is a complicated one. Very often the categorizations used in the arts reveal their own limitations rather than open up clearly defined fields of knowledge.

In that sense we might argue that art (and artistic research) does not in the first instance produce knowledge, but that the arts keep on opening up the cracks in our systems of understanding: mislaying the knowledge that in the gridlocked pre-defined contexts that define our society can only be understood according to the conventions of the discourses (be they political, aesthetic, psychological, ...) the knowledge 'belongs' to. When speaking about artistic research, would it then not seem more appropriate to talk about 'knowledge processing' instead of 'knowledge production'? Art as a game of misplacing informations rather than creating 'new' ones? Research as a process assembling and reassembling bits and pieces of knowledge, opening up perspectives, rather than formerly uncharted territories? And does this in a lot of ways not echo a contemporary understanding of knowledge in a wider context than the arts? If we embrace this hypothesis, this move from understanding artistic research as a field for 'knowledge production' to that of 'knowledge processing, mislaying, misunderstanding', we have to rethink our tools accordingly.

For one, I don't feel artistic research should be meddled up with any kind of naÃ¯ve laboratory metaphor borrowed from the applied sciences: artistic research is rarely full-proof, and often the results obtained are hard to transpose to any other situation without a significant loss of contextual relevance or performative power. The same goes for the tools used in the research. Rather than the surefire tools of industry or certain branches of science, artistic research mostly makes use of 'broken tools', in the quasi-Heideggerian sense of the words: tools that point to themselves as much as they fulfill a specific task. If we were to set up a manual for recognizing useful tools for artistic research, I would say that rule of thumb number one could be:

IF IT TALKS BACK IT'S PROBABLY A GOOD TOOL

A tool in artistic research is never smooth and flexible. It is an artefact, a concept, a thing that resists any kind of suave usefulness. In its being-put-into-practice it never stops talking, demanding, negotiating with the researchers and demanding to be taken into account as an equal partner in the discussion. In the past years I have used mostly 'prickly objects': tools that when put on the table, produce irritation, a slight weariness, an uncomfortable unwillingness of the research partners to engage with it. 'The Symptomatic Body' for example exasperated the psycho-analytically inclined and was a constant source of misunderstanding for the performers involved. Just as my ongoing practice-based research project around 'Critical Hope' transformed the gallery space of my Natural History Museum of Hope unexpectedely in a bureau for social and psychological first-aid. In the last case this side-effect was not foreseen nor desired, which resulted in the tool and me saying our goodbyes at the end of the project. Which brings us to rule of thumb number two:

IF THE TOOL IS YOUR PARTNER PREPARE FOR A DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATION

The tool is never yours for the use. It comes with a logic and a performativity of its own. A tool does what it does within certain circumstances, but cannot be projected upon without a loss of its functionality. I therefore advise to take tools seriously, to listen to their concerns. A particular brand of dangerously instable tools are the metaphorical ones. Using a metaphorical tool runs the risk of your relationship running amok very quickly. A metaphor comes with so many associations, with such a complete pack of previous engagements, it doesn't allow you a lot of projection or intimacy. Personally I can only relate to the MT by taking it literally, by 'doing the metaphor', and see where this brings me. Often the metaphor turns out to be inappropriate when living it, but again here the side-effects can produce unexpected, possibly valuable results.

The project tool I'm working on right now is one of these half-breeds (half-metaphor, half performative frame). 'The Walk' takes the idea of the mobile archive and the nomadic quality of research (as independent of a specific discipline) at heart, and takes the form of a one month walk with the researchers, walking a specific score in which every one of them develops their own research narrative, leaving traces on the way for others to pick up and reconstruct throughout the journey. The traces and the interpretations assemble and reassemble the surrounding landscape, adding a fictional layer to the territory, rendering at the same time familiar (through framing/narrativizing) and unfamiliar (through the sheer incompatibility of the traces left) the journey you are going through. In this case the tool is particularly resistent to any kind of different use. The physical demands of being on the road, sleeping outside, the limited budget, ask for a certain discipline and attitude that will influence the research results greatly. In other words: we deal here with an imposing and demanding partner with its own set of instruments (the walking score, the time restrictions, the financial limits, ...) that possibly will result in pointing almost solely to itself, turning the research into the tool. An accidental transfer that for example marked a lot of the new media research projects in the 1990's.

In other words, the tool is what makes things visible, and hides others. Taking this into account we could say that:

AN INTERESTING TOOL IS ALWAYS (PARTLY) APOPHATIC

In dealing with tools one of the most interesting things is the realization of what they do NOT produce or process: the information they cannot bring to the fore, the things they make invisible or impossible to achieve. In that sense working with different tools is also a powerful critique on what can be said where and when (as in RanciÃƒ ¨re's partage du sensible). In an 'advanced research project' this critique then in turn can become part of the experimental set-up. In the after-days of the conference, for example, the a.pass researchers tried to map out the results of the talks, laying out hypotheses and conclusions, and trying to devise the appropriate tools to do so. Since a bonafide research environment always aims for an enlarged visibility and partnership, we started up a wikipedia page under the title 'Don't Know' and from there on enlarged our ambition to continue with a working period constructing the (strangely enough non-existing) wikipedia page around 'Artistic Research'. Since the limitations of the wikipedia format are what they are, though, the working process is sure to unveil more and more hiatuses in its potential to deal with the archiving question. The tool is limited and shows its limits quite quickly in this case. The work for us is thus to keep on addressing this impossible task, producing on the way more and more by-products, left-overs that cannot be dealt with (we use as instruments workshops, invite guests, case-studies of individual researches, bologna rules cc artistic research, etc...). And these materials will be used to make a publication that, for us, addresses exactly what interests us in the topic: the multi-layered, the illogical bends and turns, the disagreement in terms, the non-acceptance of some practices that the negotiated process of wikipedia's peer-to-peer process excludes. We use the wikipedia-tool in other words to come to a better understanding of the particular field we move in, the field that as yet cannot be recuperated in a clearly informational format, that needs its temporary exclusivity to thrive.

A tool in this case works as a vehicle, an impossible destination, a black hole around which to gather, to speak, to think, to process. A tool is only a tool as long as it 'does' that. Its power lies in its mutuality, in its potential to create change, if allowed by its partner to do so. When falling out of grace, it loses its power to speak, it can only work when given all of our attention. When passed on its behavior is unpredictable, but then again, this instability, this demand to be heard in the specificty of the new situation, is what makes the tool a thing to reckon with.

a.pass is an artistic research environment at post-master level, open to artists and theoreticians. a.pass offers an experimental space and instruments to develop research skills in a shared and collaboratively created knowledge environment. Every researcher can translate his personal project into a tailor-made curriculum.

a.pass = a.pt + a.s + a.rc

a.pt (advanced performance training) is mainly aimed at artists and theoreticians with experience in developing work in or on the field of performance that don(t fit into a standard institutional framework.
a.s (advanced scenography) welcomes artists and theoreticians who would like to investigate the notion of scenography on and off the stage. The program offers practice-based to professionals who want to expand their thinking about scenography.
a.rc (a.pass research centre) is the place the workings of a.pass are analyzed, documented and opened up to critical debate. a.rc also functions as the platform for the development of long-term or PhD-level research within the arts.

www.apass.be

research portfolio

block 2011/I

On Some Things 01 January 2011
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Katrin Lohmann

01 January 2011

comic strip book

Katrin Lohmann

2010 BLOCK III 01 September 2010
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 September 2010

30 November 2010

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Abhilash Ningappa
Adva Zakai
Alessandra Coppola
David Zagari
Doris Stelzer
Einat Tuchman
Esther Francis
Iris Bouche
Katrin Lohmann
Manne Granqvist
Manon Avermaete
Margareth Kaserer
Michiel Reynaert
Philip Janssens
Philippe Severyns
Rodolphe Coster
Stephen Bain
Sven Goyvaerts
Timothy Segers

Research End Presentations

Agnese Cornelio
Ana Casimiro
Charlotte Bouckaert
Heike Langsdorf
Iuliana Varodi
Marcelo Mardones
Maria Lucia Correia

Partners

Theaterfestival 2010
Thematics (Les Bains, Brussels)
Master in Choreography (Amsterdam)
Campo
RITS
De Singel

Contributors for workshops

Anette Baldauf
Bart Van den Eynde
Christian Rizzo
Elke Van Campenhout
Epifania Amoo-Adare
Guillermo Gómez-Peña
Janez Janša
Jeremy Wade
Laurent Liefooghe
Lilia Mestre
Sara Manente
Sven Goyvaerts

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

Mentors

Anette Baldauf
Laurent Liefooghe
Nicolas Galeazzi
Pierre Rubio

30 / 08 - 03 / 09 / 2010

‘DISCUSSION & REFLECTION’
workshop of shared critique by a.pass in collaboration with Theaterfestival 2010

During the Theaterfestival, a.pass-participants work together with a group of outsiders on a workshop of shared critique: we go and see a series of performances at the Theaterfestival (a yearly festival that selects performances that have been of particular importance to the development of the performance arts in Flandres/Belgium in the past year).
Next to this we selected some texts to feed the discussion, that work out some of the themes/aesthetic principles/dramaturgical choices made in these specific performances to feed the discussion.

04-09 / 09 / 2010

‘LaZone BRUSSELS’
project by apass Research Center, Thematics (Bains, Brussels) and Master of Choreography (Amsterdam)

LaZone is both the second stage in the Critical Hope research by Elke van Campenhout within a.rc (a.pass research centre) and the topic for the 2 month residency Thematics at workspace Bains Connective in Brussels. For the opening week of the projects we share our space with the students of the Master of Choreography in Amsterdam to work on defining the boundaries of LaZone: this in-between place that falls out of our understanding of the different ‘regimes of the sensible/experientiable’ (Jacques Rancière) that define our daily life. In other words: we lead our lives within different zones of understanding, speaking and behaving. What I can see and experience, what I can say and express, is dependent on the particular zone I am moving in at that particular moment (the political zone, the personal, the juridical, the virtual etc...).
LaZone is trying to construct a space-in-between these zones: the place where behavior, speech and movement have not been negotiated yet, the place where misunderstanding is the leading principle of communication, the environment that drives our hospitality principles to their breaking point, showing us simultaneously the impotence and the potential of our cosmopolitan/transcultural hopes and desires.
LaZone is a workshop in which three groups (Thematics artists, a.pass participants, MA Choreography) share the same space for one week. During that week LaZone will be created on different levels: the interpersonal level of hospitality and the sharing of theory and practice, and the larger level of the society at large, critically examining the boundaries of our democratic pretentions and preconceptions. Everyone can bring a ‘gift’ to LaZone: a practice, a piece of knowledge, an insight or an invitation you want to extend to the rest of the group. The workshop will create itself out of the proposals of everyone, on the basis of equality and interest, with three or four activities running at the same time, allowing every participant to develop a personal trajectory throughout the week.

13-18 / 09 / 2010

‘WORKSHOPS WITH GUILLERMO GOMEZ-PENA AND JANESZ JANSA’
Two parallel workshops by a.pt in collaboration with Campo and RITS

Guillermo Gómez-Peña
In this specific physical workshop, Guillermo Gómez-Peña will attempt to create a temporary community of rebel artists, aiming to find new modes of being and discover other ways of relating to their own body. During the workshop the following questions will prove to be crucial: which borders do we wish to cross? Why? Which borders are harder to cross, both in the workshop and in our personal lives?

Janez Janša
In this workshop, intellectual challenge and debate will be actively encouraged, triggering an entire series of questions: What is real? What is mediated? How do identity and politics relate to the status of an object of art?
Each day of the Summer School will be concluded by an evening programme consisting of meetings, lectures, screenings, debates and artistic interventions. The evening guest artists have all collaborated on the research topic 'the performance as document - the document as performance' and include, among others, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Sarah Vanagt and Carina Molier.

19-26 / 09 / 2010

‘LaZone BERLIN’
project by apass Research Center and Thematics (Les Bains, Brussels)

A group of artistic field researchers find themselves on unknown territory: LaZone is a place where the spatial rules of behavior have stopped to make sense. It is an environment that has no function, no meaning, no recognizable orientation points. It is a transit area, a stretch of land that falls out of our rule-giving grid of common sense, of law-giving, of understanding and of commonly accepted behavior. LaZone is the space of immigrants, of avatars and aliens, of dislocated complex identities, of lost cases and derailed causes. It is a place that has to define itself through the practice, through the use, through the re-negotiation of the rules of encounter and hospitality.
During one week a group of immigrants from a.pt (advanced performance training) and Thematics (research project of the workspace Bains Connective in Brussels) will settle down at Fabrikationen, and try to make sense of their role and interaction with the locals. The results of their work will be presented on the 24th. Their Political Party might also infiltrate at the 25th's end party.

20-24 / 09 / 2010

‘STORYBOARDING’
workshop by Jeremy Wade

In many ways performance is one big performed story board, an invisible text set of directions and nothing more. At the other hand story boarding it self is an art form. So how to use a story board to construct a performance and how to make a story board performative, how to blur the boundaries between story board and piece. Starting from a a written proposal minimum of three pages of each of the participants, story boards will be made, including an application for a grant with a budget of the project.
During the course of this exploration/composition workshop we will strive to facilitate the great blur through the investigation of numerous storyboarding techniques. We will also research a wide array of taboos, techniques and theories that help us get closer to an essential concern of composition and aesthetics which is the age-old question of… “What is a thing”? We look at a vast index of queer scores that shed some light on the circularity of aesthetics. We can make monsters out of these stagnant aesthetics and gain perspective on how to compose, obliterate, blur and layer our lovely things for an audience. We will find modes to clarify our concepts for the pre production and production phases of creation. We will work towards structuring and deconstructing our ideas, both material and ethereal.
Jeremy Wade is an American choreographer living and working in Berlin.

04-10 / 10 / 2010

‘THE GAZE 2.0’
workshop by Sven Goyvaerts

Theoretical & practical workshop where the social media and our desktops create the format for communication and knowledge exchange and are being used as tools for artistic creation. Central focus in the workshop is the capture / transformation / (re)routing of the gaze through social media. Featuring crash course in and experiments with social media and other software : Ustream.tv, Snapz Pro, Flickr, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Everytrail and Chatroulette.
The following topics will be discussed : MEDIA MIRROR (on identity), CYBER EYE CONTACT (on the look and the gaze), WELIVEINPUBLIC.COM (on narcissism), SECOND SKIN (on the avatar), THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA (on obscenity).

11-15 / 10 / 2010

‘PERFORMATIVE SPACE’
workshop by Laurent Liefooghe

Being interested in the negative & constrictive aspects of architecture (obstruction, representation, order) and the idea of ‘active’ architecture (defined by what it does instead of what it shows), Laurent Liefooghe takes an analogy between architecture and contemporary art performance as a departure to try to liberate architecture from its obsession with emblematic objects. For this workshop he wants to investigate the idea of the ‘performative space’. Departing from case studies, he wants to develop possible concepts of a ‘performative space’.

18-22 / 10 / 2010

‘BROODTHAERS & KAUFMAN’
workshop by Sara Manente

Starting point of this workshop by Sara Manente, former a.pass participant, are the is the investigation of the possible relation between Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Kaufman, two artists that broke rules in their fields, both provocative because acting on the limits of their roles and their positions in society, playing with meaning and expectations. A speculative game to see if a hint is to be found, as if by putting two things close to each other we can find similarities, intriguing associations that we couldn't see before. The overall question is one of sameness and otherness. The research on "similarity" from the two points of view of perception (outside) and interpretation (inside).

25-30 / 10 / 2010

‘INTERFACE FICTIONS’
workshop by Lilia Mestre & Elke Van Campenhout

In this workshop we occupy for one week the gallery/shopping window of a new alternative performance gallery in Brussels. Working together within this space we try to develop working practices that project the gallery space on the outside world: gestures that communicate with the commuters, the neighbours, the occasional passers-by. By blurring the boundaries between living and working in the space, and by not retreating to recognizable artistic strategies, we try to break the rules of expectation, of recuperation and of communication of the arts. Every participants will try, in constant negotiation with the others, to develop practices that open up the activities from within to the viewer/participant outside. This can happen imagining the space to be what it is not: a shop, a restaurant, a library, a TV studio, a social centre, an immigrant office, etc...
As important as the inside/outside dialogue, will be the negotiation inside of the space: the overlayering of practices and imaginations of the space, the monsterly spaces that grow out of inbreeding, etc... Not only negotiating space, but also behavior, time, attitude, convictions and necessities.

01-12 / 11 / 2010

“THE 5 SENSES”
workshop by Bart Van den Eynde and Elke Van Campenhout

In this workshop we develop on the basis of texts and specialist talks a mapping of the 5 senses as a starting point for artistic thinking and practices. We include artistic practices like the ones of Lygia Clarke, Enrique Vargas, Peter Verhelst, Dries Verhoeven, f0am, Charo Calvo, etcetera... Each of the senses is the topic of 2 days.

15-19 / 11 : 2010

‘SPATIAL LITERACY’
workshop by Anette Baldauf & Epifania Amoo-Adare

What is space, what is the relationship between spatial conditions and power? How can we envision the transformation of space and the making of different spaces? The premise of this workshop is that a critical pedagogy on space, on the forces involved in the production and reproduction of space, is a necessary condition for any intervention in space. We propose to challenge widespread understandings of space as a structure that is given and fixed, in other words: a structure that is developed for and not a context that is developed by society. We contrast this convention with an understanding of space as both, a manifestation as well as a vehicle of the productive relations of power. Following the equation “space = (social) product” we investigate spatial relations, the making of inclusion and exclusion, centrality versus marginality, legibility, difference and conflict. Framed as an exercise in “spatial literacy”, we discuss techniques of making sense of spatial relations, of making use and appropriating them.

22 / 11 / 2010

“LECTURE BY CHRISTIAN RIZZO”
presented by a.pass & De Singel

Choreographer Christian Rizzo will be working for a year with and in the buildings of deSingel. In the next block he will also create a workshop for a.pass. This is a first meeting with the artist where he reads texts with us that have been essential in his development as an artist. This lecture is a starting point to speak about different influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work.
Christian Rizzo has been fashion designer, rock musician, then dancer and choreographer. In 1996 he created his own company L'Association Fragile. From 2003 he became artist in residence of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Toulouse. Also in 2003 he received Le Grand Prix de la Critique.

2010 BLOCK II 01 May 2010
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 May 2010

31 July 2010

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Adva Zakai
Agnese Cornelio
Alessandra Coppola
Ana Casimiro
Charlotte Bouckaert
David Zagari
Einat Tuchman
Heike Langsdorf
Iuliana Varodi
Katrin Lohmann
Manne Granqvist
Manon Avermaete
Marcelo Mardones
Maria Lucia Correia
Michiel Reynaert
Philip Janssens
Stephen Bain
Sven Goyvaerts

Research End Presentations

Alejandro Petrasso
Dianne Weller
Fanny Zaman
Kurt Van Overbeke
Sara Vilardo

Partners

Les Bains
MicroMarché
Sarma
Workspace Brussels
Nadine
SoundImageCulture

Contributors for workshops

Adva Zakai
Agnese Cornelio
Anette Baldauf
Charlotte Brouckaert
Dries Verhoeven
Elke Van Campenhout
Erik Devries
Jeremy Wade
Joao Fiadeiro
Joël Verwimp
Katrin Lohmann
Laurent Liefooghe
Laurent van Lancker
Luk Lambrecht
Manne Granqvist
Marcelo Mardones
Maria Lucia Correia
Nicolas Galeazzi
Sven Goyvaerts

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

Mentors

Anette Baldauf
Nicolas Y Galeazzi

10-14 / 05 / 2010

‘HP OFFICEJET 9130 ± ERRORS’
workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi & Joël Verwimp

Developments in technology and changes in society regularly render things obsolete; think of professions like blacksmithing, technology like oil lamps, and rules about handling horses. Copyright law might well become such an obsolete instrument. In fact, it never really worked outside the US/European borders and open source software already moves beyond copyright restrictions worldwide. This shows that making and meaning in the current cultural environment requires a response to existing institutional and organisation structures, identifying differences and engaging art as an open ongoing process. With COYOTL, we produce or try to produce a vivid impression of knowledge products: of these, software is unique, as it is said to have behaviour. More specifically, it instills behavior in computers when it is executed by them, causing tangible effects in the real world. Just like software, we believe that performative publishing is such a situation allowing a reflexive way of working by engaging with relationships.
In the framework of the Bains Connective DIY residency lab at MicroMarché, we edited previous COYOTL material into the printed workbook The leakers which will build the basic discourse for the workshop. Together with your project material (on paper, in form of quotations, or as live or memorised events) we will create a pool of content, which will be copied, scratched, hacked, nod rearranged as a resource for each other’s project. Departing from these thoughts and the mutating discussion around copyright/copyleft/open source COYOTL will play as usual, with the copy-machine (HP Officejet 9130 is currently our main tool) in order to
- develop models of cooperation for any kind of art and knowledge production
- facilitate an environment for independent and NOT-NEGOTIATED exchange and development of other artist's practice
- perform on paper, nurtured by and leading to performance in OTHER spaces/logic
- question not only new work models, but also what kind of space and organisational structure art production needs today

17-21 / 05 / 2010

‘REVOLUTION’
no-workshop workshop by Katrin Lohmann & Manne Granqvist,
with guests: Nicolas Y Galeazzi, Bavo, Dieter Lesage

The no-workshop organizers believe that the concept of revolution is a relevant and urgent one for our times. What does a revolution imply for society, and for the individual? Is the total collapse near, is it necessary, is it desirable? What are the possible positions in relation to revolution for the artist and for the activist?
The organizers of the REVOLUTION no-workshop do not pretend to be experts on the subject. Rather they regard the workshop as an opportunity to research a cluster of topics that they regard alarmingly pertinent, for themselves and for the present times, with others who share the same sentiment. It is the experience of the no-work-no-shop organizers that the matters at hand are of a kind that strike a natural chord with not so few people in the present times.

19-21 / 05 / 2010

‘DOCUMENTARY’
workshop by Laurent van Lancker in collaboration with SIC

SoundImageCulture is a group of artist-anthropologists committed to artful storytelling through real human encounters that challenge documentary conventions, and opens up to sound and image installations. Informed by developments in cultural theory, social sciences, and the visual art. SIC questions the relation between artist, subject and viewer. How can you represent somebody in sound and image when you don’t know his or her background? The answer is not to eschew representation; rather, SIC proposes an ethical reflection on how ‘the other’ is presented in contemporary media, believing this to be an urgency of the multicultural society we live in.

24-28 / 05 / 2010

‘QUEER IN THE CITY’
workshop by Anette Baldauf

I am not a Queer Studies expert, but I have worked, and taught, on questions of gender, sexuality and the city. I would love to connect that knowledge with theories on performativity, maybe starting off from Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, both of which we addressed during the City of Illusion workshop. I have been teaching a lot on the so-called Girl Movement - Riot Girls, Dyke Bands... - which tried to challenge concepts of femininity through pop music and performance in the mid 90s, and the following backlash of Britney Spears etc.- which was a performance of femininity as special effect. We could e.g. read, and then analyze artistic as well as popular culture strategies of the gender confusion.

31/05 - 11/06 2010

‘STORYBOARDING’
workshop by Jeremy Wade

In many ways performance is one big performed storyboard, an invisible text set of directions and nothing more. At the other hand storyboarding itself is an art form. So how to use a storyboard to construct a performance and how to make a storyboard performative, how to blur the boundaries between storyboard and piece. Starting from a written proposal minimum of three pages of each of the participants, storyboards will be made, including an application for a grant with a budget of the project.
As Contemporary Performers, Choreographers, Directors, and Scenographers we work toward events that have the potential to rewrite and dislocate an audience from stratified senses of meaning. During the course of this exploration/composition workshop we will strive to facilitate the great blur through the investigation of numerous storyboarding techniques. We will also research a wide array of taboos, techniques and theories that help us get closer to an essential concern of composition and aesthetics which is the age-old question of… “What is a thing”? We look at a vast index of queer scores that shed some light on the circularity of aesthetics. We can make monsters out of these stagnant aesthetics and gain perspective on how to compose, obliterate, blur and layer our lovely things for an audience. We will find modes to clarify our concepts for the pre production and production phases of creation. We will work towards structuring and deconstructing our ideas, both material and ethereal.

07-11 / 06 / 2010

‘EXHAUSTING DANCE’
reading sessions

After having wrestled ourselves through the introduction of this book on contemporary dance (edited by André Lepecki), we decided to take a second look at the book in a full reading-session week.
The only scholarly book in English dedicated to recent European contemporary dance, ‘Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement’ examines the work of key contemporary choreographers who have transformed the dance scene since the early 1990s in Europe and the US.
Through their vivid and explicit dialogue with performance art, visual arts and critical theory from the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenge our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their work demands to be read as performed extensions of the radical politics implied in performance art, in post-structuralist and critical theory, in post-colonial theory, and in critical race studies.
This book offers a significant and radical revision of the way we think about dance, arguing for the necessity of a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.
We will combine the reading sessions with fragments out of the work of contemporary choreographers and bring the practice to the theory.

14-18 / 06 / 2010

‘PERSPECTIVES ON SPACE’
reading sessions

In this reading sessions we invite several scenographers and artists in whose work the use & organization of space is essential, to read with us texts that have been essential in their development as artists. A starting point to speak about other influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work. Erki Devries, Luk Lambrecht, Dries Verhoeven & Laurent Liefooghe are our guests.

21 - 24 / 06 / 2010

‘PSYCHOANALYSIS FOR BEGINNERS’
workshop by Elke Van Campenhout under mentoring of Mladen Dolar in collaboration with Sarma and Workspace Brussels

The workshop on psychoanalysis will open up the field of thinking of Lacan and related thinkers to a group of beginners in the theory. In the arts psychoanalysis has taken up a central position in the interpretation and thinking about the arts. Although a lot of the time implicit, the frame of thinking about the Real, objet petit a, etc... is part of our cultural and esthetic heritage. In this workshop we look the first two days at Slavoj Zizek’s film 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' in which he explores the psycho-analytical subconscious of Hollywood film-making. Afterwards we read Zizek's book 'Welcome to the desert of the Real' for a contemporary and highly political performativization of what the psycho-analytical framework can still teach us today.

25 / 06 / 2010

‘SOCIAL MEDIA & THE AVATAR’
workshop by researcher/participant Sven Goyvaerts

One day around the basics of the social media and the role of the avatar in our thinking about (alternative or virtual) identities.

28 / 06 - 2 / 07 / 2010

‘THE GAZE’
workshop by researchers/participants Agnese Cornelio, Marcelo Mardones, Charlotte Brouckaert & Sven Goyvaerts

How do we construct our identity through the look of others? How do we look at others an read them? How are we judged by others or do we feel judged by them? And how does the gaze function in the social media, how do we control the gaze of the others and how do we read others by their virtual presentation?
Partly reading session, partly practical research using social media and the camera as a tool to catch the gaze.

5-11 / 07 / 2010

‘FIND YOUR INNER IDIOT’
camping group practice by a.pass

Loosely based on the Dogma movie 'The Idiots' by Lars Von Trier, we work for one week on the principles of idiocy as a potential artistic, political or actionist strategy. During the workshop we try to define different methodologies to discover our 'inner idiots', both on a physical practice level as on a theoretical level. We combine reading and viewing sessions of material relating to 'idiocy' (out of philosophy and art history) with physical sessions, aiming at the development of a personal and a communal idiot body. Each of the participants can devise his/her own perspective on the mindset and context out of which to work, trying to discover within a small group of dedicated participants their personal 'inner idiots', and constructing a group practice out of this confrontation. We might bring the practice to public space when we feel ready for that. Only for true idiots!

12 - 16 / 07 / 2010

‘TERROR’
film analysis workshop by a.pass

An exercise in concrete and detailed analysis, argumentative construction and critical discussion. In this workshop we analyze horror movies. How does the mechanism of terror functions in these movies and which are its disguises? How do we deal with our instant emotional (moral) reaction in our discussion? Where does art starts and exploitation ends? What is the place of horror in our lives? One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of film, photography, the net) horrors taking place in the real or in fantasized worlds. Images of atrocities have become, via the screens of the television and the computer, a commonplace. What is this fascination with the depiction of cruelty? Is ours perception of reality eroded by the barrage of such images or do they just make us happy that we are alive?
This workshop is in the first place aimed at analyzing the formal principles of movie making: the creation of 'horror' through camera perspectives, montage, use of (off-)voice, etcetera. But next to that we also try to come to a deeper understanding of the parameters of horror, by reading texts (Sontag, Zizek, Cronenberg,...) to feed the discussion.

17-23 / 07 / 2010

‘HARD WORKING IDLES’
workshop by researcher/participant Adva Zakai with Joao Fiadeiro and guests

Each day will be divided into two sessions: Mornings to the practice of Real Time Composition*, a method developed by Joao Fiadeiro, and afternoons to a talk with an invited guest.
Why ‘hard working idlers’? Because I find myself confronted by this contradiction: On the one hand, being critical towards the ethics of artistic practice that are increasingly product-oriented - generating practices which are exclusive rather than inclusive, imposing a position on the artist’s plan rather than enabling an ‘emergence’ of a situation. On the other hand, appreciating a personal examination of ideas or
forms, and intrigued by a detailed, skillful and directed proposition from the artist to the public.
Can these two approaches complement rather than oppose each other: Where does the artist’s control over a performance stop and the event generate itself through the contributions of all its participants? How much (or rather what kind of) ‘work’ is needed in order to trigger a situation?
The same inquiries are perhaps relevant with regards to the way one relates to one’s surroundings. Can changes in society emerge through individual or self-organized mechanisms rather than be dictated by overarching norms, ideologies and preconceptions? If we consider an experience as complete even though its in a constant state of becoming itself – would it allow more dynamic and liberation from dogmas in our day, work, life, art?

19-23 / 07 / 2010

‘THE REALITY, THE GIANT SCENARIO III’
workshop by researcher/participant Maria Lucia Correia

The City appears as a breathing entity that contains the concept of future reflections and artistic interventions. The reality, the Giant Scenario is a workshop that approaches the city space as a living body that seeks for our attention. As working methodology we will address the city space, with a critical vision on sensorial and visual awareness. In order to map our environment we will draw and recompose the elements of the urban space, collecting lost details and objects on our city walks (derives). Moments where we will get lost into a world of colors, shapes, ornaments, sounds, rhythms… and relate to places that are damaged, abandoned, dead or ill... The workshop will then resource the urbanist and emotional mapping of the space and its graphical potentialities within a new scenario, a new life, a new narrative of forgotten details. The city will not be the set of public interventions but a living body that incorporates us, an extended form of connections, reconstructions, treatment, placement and intersections.

workshop

a.pass Basics workshops

block 2010/I

NOT_index

CONSEQUENCES II 01 March 2010
posted by: Pierre Rubio

Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

01 March 2010

06 March 2010

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference. It allows all participants to work in silence and not to be bothered by producibility. The constant passing on of written material and the permanent reformulating, contextualizing, expanding, and reflecting of the written material serve as a basis for the creation and composition of movements, texts, sounds, or images. But within this procedure all realizations are based on temporary decisions depending from the material that is handed over from the other and not because the medium of realization is chosen beforehand. Our working procedure could best fit into the motto: ‘Give me your material and I show you what you're not doing with it’.

Sourcing the creation-act out and rendering oneself into the pendency of writing instead permits a disciplined work in silence, in which each participant and partner can raise her/his voice on the paper independently from its volume or the amount and position of knowledge. Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (Re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. The place of the individual argument, the singular voice is taken by an instance of polyphony, similar to the Cadavre Exquis, which is a game that was invented by Surrealists in 1925. It is quite similar to an old english parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Unlike the surrealists, we don't hide what has been written previously. For us it is a downright challenge to deal with the input of the others and to come into thinking with it, to expand ideas and suggestions, to combine sketches, to suggest a possible proceeding. It is only very late in the working procedure that we ask about the medium in which this material is to be realized. In this sense, the medium becomes a part in the decision-making, in the claim of form (or format). It is not set a priori and thus has to be in reference, translation, transference to the material: it has to be a decision and not a choice.  Because of this it is fundamental in this principle of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one's decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (Re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. Just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

2010 BLOCK I 01 January 2010
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 January 2010

31 March 2010

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Adva Zakai
Agnese Cornelio
Alejandro Petrasso
Ana Casimiro
Charlotte Bouckaert
Dianne Weller
Einat Tuchman
Fanny Zaman
Heike Langsdorf
Iuliana Varodi
Katrin Lohmann
Kurt Van Overbeke
Manne Granqvist
Manon Avermaete
Marcelo Mardones
Maria Lucia Correia
Philip Janssens
Sara Vilardo
Sven Goyvaerts

Research End Presentations

Fien Wauters
Jozef Wouters
Julie Pfleiderer

Partners

De Singel
University of Antwerp
PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Contributors for workshops

Alexander Baervoets
Annette Baldauf
Charo Calvo
David Moss
Elke Van Campenhout
Heike Langsdorf
Jan Maertens
Lynda Gaudreau
Marc Vanrunxt
Maria Lucia Correia
Meg Stuart
Nicolas Y Galeazzi
Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne
Timmy Delaet
Tom Plischke-Kattrin Deufert
Vincent Dunoyer
Vladimir Miller

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout
Vladimir Miller

Mentors

Nicolas Y Galeazzi
Vladimir Miller

11-24 / 01 / 2010

‘REENACTMENT / RECONSTRUCTION’

reading and viewing sessions on re-enactment/reconstruction with Timmy Delaet

Reading and viewing sessions on re-enactment/reconstruction with Timmy Delaet, PhD student at the University of Antwerp, viewing sessions of performance art work at Argos (centre for video preservation in Brussels). From 21 to 24 we join the conference on re-enactment / reconstruction organised by the Marina Abramovic Research Centre in Plymouth (England), combined with a series of performances.

25-29 / 01 / 2010

‘SPHERES AND ECONOMIES OF COLLABORATION / NON-PRODUCTIVE SPHERES’

workshop by Nicolas Y Galeazzi

Nicolas Y Galeazzi organizes a practical workshop on artistic collaboration discussing different models, methods and the effects and side effects of collaborative interaction. The workshop puts forward different metaphors on collaboration (economy, utopia, non-production, laziness, etc...) and works through their consequences.

01-05 / 02 / 2010

‘RADICAL VOICE FOR PERFORMERS AND MAKERS’

workshop by David Moss

Performer, theatre maker and singer David Moss, artistic director of the institute for the Living Voice, organizes a workshop on the use of radical voice for performers and makers. Both positions are possible in this workshop, as long as you have an interest in a different use of the voice in performance (both language and non-language based).

How do you make a voice performance? How do time, timing, intensity, attack, intimacy, eccentricity, personal history, ego, musical history, rhythm, physicality, gestures, sounds, memory, songs and senses connect you to the moment of making a voice improvisation?

07 / 02 / 2010

‘PAUL TISSIER: ARCHITECT OF ILLUSIONS’

lecture by Stéphane Boudin-Lestienne

The french architect Paul Tissier realises in 1924 the main hall of the Hôtel Ruhl in Paris now destroyed, the « fêtes d’art », a concept that mixes the originality of an artist’s party with the luxury of a society ball. Tissier creates all by himself a complete artwork. Covering the original architecture with his setting, he imagines different types of creative scenographies. From the extraordinary legacy of his fund – including more than 400 elements of decor– the workshop proposes to discover the architect’s system and problems facing that type of event. The many different aspects of the scenography (general choices for the transformation of the place, iconography and technique of the setting, lighting, costumes, show, etc…) will be discussed.

01-05 / 02 / 2010

‘AFFECT AND EMOTION’

reading sessions by Elke Van Campenhout

In the past year Elke Van Campenhout worked on the research project Sense Radio, initiated by choreographer and artist Lilia Mestre. A very important part of this research was concerned with the understanding of the emotional body as a social body, as a body in constant negotiation with other bodies and objects. In this week of Reading Sessions, we go through some of the ideas of Spinoza, Brian Massumi, Nigel Thrift, Sara Ahmed, Gilles Deleuze and others on affect/emotion as a mode of social circulation and exchange. At the same time watching performance material (Meg Stuart, Lilia Mestre, ...) that corresponds to this kind of conception of the performance and the body of the performer.

08-19 / 02 / 2010

‘CITY OF ILLUSIONS’

workshop by Vladimir Miller

Vladimir Miller conceives the City of Illusions as a space of research and knowledge built around the concept of illusion. In the course of two weeks a city is being built in the Zwarte Zaal of DeSingel. each participant is invited to build his own research site (houses and/or public spaces like speakers corners, gardens, etc...) within the city and assume the performative agency of their settlement with the other participants.

Light designer Jan Maertens, sound designer, Charo Calvo are guests and create their special illusion for the city. As well, urbanist Annette Baldauf and choreographer Meg Stuart will visit the city.

22-26 / 02 / 2010

‘HOPE 2’

workshop by Heike Langsdorf and Elke van Campenhout

Participant Heike Langsdorf and coordinator Elke van Campenhout organize a second working week on “(radical) hope”, the subject of their research project. This time, set in an urban context, we work on the spreading of the rumour of hope.

22-26 / 02 / 2010

‘THE CITY : THE GIANT SCENARIO’

workshop by Maria Lucia Correia

The City appears as a breathing engine that shells the concept of future reflections and artistic interventions. “The Giant Scenario” is a workshop that will suspend a conceptual approach of the city space as a body who seeks for attention. Gradually we will propose a metaphorical diagnosis, a scan of the functionality of its organs. It will suspend an aesthetic, emotional, sociological and physical approach of the cityspace as a human body. As working methodology we will address the city space, with a critical vision on sensorial and visual awareness.

In order to fulfill the resistance of our environment we will draw and recompose the elements of the urban space, collecting lost details and objects, on city walks/derives. Moments where we will get lost into a world of colors, shapes, ornaments, sounds, rhythms… and as well an engagement of places that are damaged, abandoned, dead and ill... The workshop is a resource of urbanist and emotional mapping of the space and its graphical potentialities within a reborn of a new scenario, a new life, a new narrative of details that are forgotten in the labyrinth space.The city will not be the setting of public interventions but a living body. An extended form of connections, reconstructions, treatment, placement and intersections.

01-10 / 03 / 2010

‘CONSEQUENCES II’

workshop by Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one‘s decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

15-21 / 03 / 2010

‘ECOLOGY & ARTISTIC PRACTICE’

reading sessions by a.pass

Introduced by the participants as an urgent research topic, the relation between ecological disaster and artistic practice is the theme of these reading sessions.The week will end with a artistic conference on ecology open to the public.

22-26 / 03 / 2010

‘DANCE THEORY’

reading Sessions

In this reading sessions we invite several choreographers to read with us texts that have been essential in their development as an artist. These reading sessions are a starting point to speak about influences and important meetings in their carrier, and to show fragments of their work.

Lynda Gaudreau, Marc Vanrunxt, Vincent Dunoyer & Alexander Baervoets are our guests.

Song Mountain Area, The Centre Direction 01 January 2010
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Fanny Zaman

01 January 2010

booklet + DVD; research publication

What is it that I have done? 01 January 2010
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Jozef Wouters

01 January 2010

book

In What is it that I have done? Jozef Wouters makes an ambiguous attempt to capture from different perspectives the story of the rise of one particular tower in a field next to the railroad of a small village somewhere between Leuven and Brussels.

2009 BLOCK III 01 September 2009
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 September 2009

30 November 2009

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Agnese Cornelio
Alejandro Petrasso
Ana Casimiro
Charlotte Bouckaert
Dianne Weller
Fanny Zaman
Fien Wauters
Heike Langsdorf
Iuliana Varodi
Jozef Wouters
Julie Pfleiderer
Kurt Van Overbeke
Marcelo Mardones
Maria Lucia Correia
Sara Vilardo

Research End Presentations

Ariane Loze
Constanze Schellow

Partners

Theaterfestival
De Singel
CIFAS
Bourla Theater
PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Contributors for workshops

Arco Renz
Benjamin Verdonck
Hans Op de Beeck
Laurent Liefooghe
Lotte van den Berg
Meg Stuart
Moritz Kuhn
Nicolas Y Galeazzi
Rabih Mrouéh
Renée Copraij
Stefan Heinric
Stijn Bussels
Timothy De Paepe

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde

Elke van Campenhout

Fall 2009

‘THEATERFESTIVAL’

‘Performance in public Space’ : reading sessions & artist talks by de Singel and a.pass

The Theaterfestival offers a perfect occasion to make the a.pass training more visible. Three participants show their researches in the context of the festival ( Ariane Loze, Michel Yang and Jozef Wauters) and the reading sessions are open to outsiders. Several artists will be invited to discuss the theme of ‘performance in public space’ with the participants (Benjamin Verdonck, Moritz Kuhn and Lotte van den Berg), combined with a close reading of theoretical texts.

Fall 2009

‘CONCEPT & DESIGN III’

workshop by Arco Renz and Stefan Heinrich

A scenography workshop with a choreographer seems a necessity for a.s. Working on a new project, Arco Renz works with the participants on the development of a - hypothetical - stage design for his choreography. Without the help of a 'performance text' the participants will enter his world and find connections with their own interests, measure up the artistic and practical limitations of the project and find a scenographic vision which inscribes itself in Arco Renz' universe.

Fall 2009

‘THE ART OF MISUNDERSTANDING’

workshop by Nicholas Y Galeazzi

Nicolas Y Galeazzi’s workshop 'The art of misunderstanding' explores the different ways in which artistic research is or can be organized. In a very practical setting, the participants will develop one (room-sized) 'paper' on artistic research, using their own attitudes and methodologies for a more thorough mapping out of the field. The workshop both challenges the imagination of the field of knowledge production, as offering a lot of theoretical texts explorations, introducing artistic examples and opening up a lot of discussions.

Fall 2009

‘VENICE BIENNALE’

journey to art biennale by a.pass

The visit of the Venice Biennale is a possibility for a focussed confrontation with the referential current visual arts context. Hybridity and the confrontation of cultures, identities and art languages are at the heart of the festival and the context of a cultural event of that proportion, exposure and 'fame' is in itself an important issue of discussion. Parallel with the Biennale there will be also other major exhibitions in Venice: the opening of Punta della Dogana Art Museum and In-Finitum in the Palazzo Fortuny. There will be no organized workshop and there will be no fixed itinerary, participants will be free to completely self organize through the four days in Venice.

Fall 2009

‘ART AS DOCUMENT / DOCUMENT AS ART - RABIH MROUÉ’

Two weeks workshop with artist Rabih Mrouéh, in the framework of the RITS research project Art as a document/The document as art. Participants will join in first instance in day-long discussions on central topics within the working field of Mrouéh: what is history, what is fiction? can you create your own history? what is latency? when does your personal history become shared? how to create documents? how do documents function? how can you be your own actor?

In a second phase, the participants will work with the material in a performative way.

Fall 2009

‘ARTIST TALK / MEG STUART’

Choreographer Meg Stuart discusses her development as an artist, the evolution of her work and how she relates to other art forms than dance. Being very aware of the artistic research context of a.pass, she will elaborated on working processes and tools for collaboration as well as the dramaturgy of her performances.

Fall 2009

‘RADICAL HOPE’

An hybrid program of reading sessions, discussions with guests and practical interpretation of the concept of Hope, ending by the preparation of a 'hope dinner' in a.pass kitchen.

'Radical Hope, Ethics in the face of Cultural Devastation', Jonathan Lear

'Hope, New Philosophies for Change', Mary Zournazi: interview with Brian Massumi and Isabelle Stengers

Guests : Renée Copraij: choreographer, dancer and curator of Huis aan de Werf, Utrecht and Laurent Liefooghe: architect, performance maker

Fall 2009

‘ARTIST TALK / HANS OP DE BEECK’

Visual artist Hans Op de Beeck discusses his development as an artist, the evolution in his work and how he relates to other arts. Using a lot of visual material from his installations and models and fragments of his videoworks, he will sketch an artistic process and an evolution through trial and error. Also elaborating on the practical circumstances of his life as an artist: economics, reception, education, the relation with critics and galleries and museums, etc..

Fall 2009

‘CONTAMINATE THE CITY’

artistic practices in public space

For this workshop we will join the workshop program of CIFAS in Brussels. ‘Contaminate the city’ is a workshop on artistic practices in public space, trying out different practices and actions, and gradually developing individual projects within the city.

Fall 2009

‘AN HISTORY OF DANCE’

reading sessions by Katie Verstockt

Starting with a minimal historical introduction from dance as a ritual to the dance history in Europe (focusing on the act of seeing and the scenographic performativity), dance theoretician Katie Verstockt will discuss mainly the important 20th century movements (Modern Dance, Ausdruckstanz, Ballet Russes, Ballets Suédois, Post Modern Dance, Butoh, Contemporary dance, ...) in their more general cultural context.

Fall 2009

‘BAROKTHEATERS’

lecture by Timothy De Paepe at Bourla Theater

Scenography researcher Timothy De Paepe will give a lecture on theatre architecture, stage machinery & scenography in the baroque era 1600-1750 based on his research and reconstruction of theatre buildings and stages out of the area of Antwerp. With an historical introduction on the evolution and social context of theatre and illustrated with an impressive visual documentation, this presentation will a perfect introduction to a visit of the Bourla Theater.

Fall 2009

‘THEATRICALITY’

lecture-workshop by art historian Stijn Bussels around the term ‘theatricality'.

Following Collins Dictionary it means ‘of or related to the theatre or dramatic performance’, but also ‘exaggerated and affected in manner or behaviour’. How the theatre is related to society? How the theatre is used as a concept that explains conduct outside the norm? However, this negative connotation is historically determined. In the Renaissance, the metaphor of theatrum mundi became a dominant model to show that society is fashioned by role play and scenario’s. This view, however, was not primarily put in a negative context. There is a clear shift in eighteenth-century thought. In this period, our contemporary use of the term ‘theatrical’ comes into being.

The lecture will focus on the early modern era. By doing so, it will try to make clear how the theatre is divergently appraised in its representational aspect. The theatre is evaluated as reprehensible deception, but also as revealing deeper truth. This evaluation can be linked with views on historical societies where artificiality is not always predominantly coupled with dishonesty, but with skill and learning.

Fall 2009

(IN) VISIBLE

workshop-research by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia and Bart Van den Eynde

"The reality: “The Giant Scenario”? Are we participants in a scenario created by humans? Is our reality a scenario built in real scale? Does the space feel that we are there? Does our existence depend on the space, or is it the space that depends on us?" Starting from the distinction between what is "visible" and what is not the participants are invited to join a research of the city in the city. Together with coordinator Bart Van den Eynde a syllabus is proposed (Simmel on ‘Metropolis’, Debord on ‘Derive’ and Marc Augé on ‘non-places’) and the creation of a context for city walks and consequent mapping and reporting.

Môwn (movies on my own) 01 September 2009
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Ariane Loze

01 September 2009

DVD and booklet; research publication

56 Ways (not) to 01 September 2009
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi

Ed. by Constanze Schellow

01 September 2009

research publication

research portfolio

Marcos-Simoes_the-laughing-body.pdf

THE LAUGHING BODY 01 May 2009
posted by: Pierre Rubio

Marcos Simoes

01 May 2009

research publication

....pdf

2009 BLOCK II 01 May 2009
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 May 2009

31 July 2009

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Alejandro Petrasso
Ariane Loze
Constanze Schellow
Dianne Weller
Fanny Zaman
Fien Wauters
Jozef Wouters
Julie Pfleiderer
Kurt Van Overbeke
Sara Vilardo
Sungmin Hong

Partners

DeSingel
KunstenFestivaldesArts
Les Bains
In Transit festival, Berlin
WP Zimmer
PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Contributors for workshops

André Lepecki
Lars Frers & Alexander Schellow
Lilia Mestre & Els Viaene
Luc Van den Dries
Niek Kortekaas
Romeo Castellucci
Thomas Crombez
Vladimir Miller
Wouter Hillaert

Coordinators a.pass

Bart Van den Eynde
Elke van Campenhout

04-08 / 05 / 2009

‘AROUND ROMEO CASTELLUCCI’

workshop by De Singel

In this week we work around the video material of the Tragedia Endogonidia-cycle of Romeo Castellucci. During the first two days we watch the eleven performance and discuss the esthetic choices, and the semiotics of the work. On wednesday we try to build up a 'wunderkammer' on the principles of Castellucci's 'ars combinatoria'. As guests we have that day academic Thomas Crombez and journalist/critic Wouter Hillaert. After that we work two days with Romeo Castellucci and some of his performers on the new trilogy 'The Divine Comedy'. On Sunday the working week results in a colloquium in de Singel with international experts and collaborators of the Rafaello Sanzio-company.

Springtime 2009

‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 02’

coaching by Niek Kortekaas

Scenographer Niek Kortekaas will coach the a.s participants in the development of a scenography based on King Lear / William Shakespeare. The idea is to take a major work from the world repertoire and develop with a dramaturgical coaching by the coordinator (Bart Van den Eynde) and the scenographic (artistic and technical) guidance of Kortekaas a scenographic design for the big stage.

05 / 2009

‘RES&REF’ (Residence and Reflection)

research project by a.pt, KunstenFestivaldesArts and Les Bains

Res&Ref (Residence and Reflection) is a research project, organized during the international Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. Three groups of artists reside together in the art center Les Bains (an old bathing house/swimming pool in Brussels): the res&ref-group itself is an international group of (non)-western artists, chosen by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts. The working group 'Art&Humour' is an international group of researchers, working on the theme of the subversitity of humour as an artistic strategy of resistance. The a.pass-group joins in the groups, preparing reading sessions on art and humour, but they can also join the discussions and toolkit sessions. In the evening all participants go and see the same performances at the festival, and after ten days the workshop ends with an informal public showing of the results.

Springtime 2009

‘ARTIST TALK / VALENTINE KEMPINCK’

Costume and set designer and visual artist Valentine Kempinck discusses her carrier, development as an artist, the evolution in her work and how she wanders from medium to medium. She discusses her onorthodox vision on theatre costumes and how she sees costume design in relation to the other performance components. Later she will go in details about her latest work: scenographic interventions in the public sphere which reproduce themselves, taking on different meanings through this process of reproduction.

Springtime 2009

‘THEORY SESSIONS / HISTORY OF THEATRE AND SCENOGRAPHY’

lecture/course by Luc Van den Dries

In this lecture course Luc Van den Dries discusses the relation between space and theatricality. First he explores historical answers to the tension between theatre and reality. He deals with four prototypical dimensions:

-theatre as an imitation of reality

-theatre as a utopian project to reality

-theatre as playful counterpart to reality

-theatre as a metaphysical dimension within reality.

After scanning (20th century) theatre history related to the questions above, he discusses space-related tendencies in contemporary performing art.

11-21 / 06 / 2009

‘IN TRANSIT - BERLIN / SESSIONS WITH ANDRE LEPECKI’

In preparation for the a.pass Berlin LAB, we read a selection of texts, proposed to us by curator André Lepecki:

-Fred Moten, The Resistance of the Object (chapter 2 of 'In the Break')

-Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood

-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks

This first week we will discuss the texts and the post-colonial themes of the festival, and will try to build up a solid base for the upcoming discussions and confrontations. Out of these discussions every one of the participants will develop a personal research project to be fulfilled during the festival.

Always a central element of ‘In Transit’ festival since its first edition in 2002, the LAB has gone through many formats throughout the years. For this edition, we decided to concentrate the LAB around the offering of a space for all who are interested in gathering, talking, meeting, exchanging, experimenting, asking, provoking, dancing, writing, showing, displaying, performing, teaching, learning, sharing. And more. The LAB’s life and its events will be determined by you.

The LAB hosts a day meeting, and all LAB participants are expected to attend this day-long gathering (closed to the general public) which specifically addresses projects presented in the festival as points of departure for further and concrete debates on art and politics, as these relate to performance and its effects on creating and thinking today.

29 / 06 – 04 / 07 & 13-27 / 07 / 2009

‘WAYS OF SEEING AND FORCED PERSPECTIVES’

workshop by Vladimir Miller

Vladimir's workshop is structured in two parts and is aimed at researching the city as a model for spectator involvement in a performance space. Connecting spectatorship and questions of teaching and learning to the city is also a model for the workshop structure itself as a space for knowledge production.

The first part is centred around of the political aspects of space design and a phenomenological understanding of the spectators experience of space.

Vladimir Miller uses three key texts (among others): ‘The practice of everyday life’ by de Certeau, Charles Curtis' essay on ‘Incomprehensible space’ and Jacques Rancière ‘The emancipated spectator’.

To establish an alternative small system of knowledge production for our workshop, the participants build a space of learning and research where everyone is able to produce on her/his own terms. The idea of the city gives a model for this kind of space, which the participants can equally enter and explore.

The research theme for the city is listening and sound. The question is how to shape space for listening, having in mind a moving listener and spectator.

A violinist is invited to create a continuing presence of sound in this city of listening. The space research concentrates around question of shaping the performative space (from a scenographic point of view) around that continuum of sound.

07 / 2009

‘SPATIAL RESEARCH & PERFORMANCE ART’

workshop by Lars Frers & Alexander Schellow

The workshop of the sociologist Lars Frers and the visual artist Alexander Schellow focuses on strategies and practices of spatial research. The starting point is that any space we can perceive and engage with is already a complex and in itself relational constellation of several aspects. It is a concrete context of a very specific materiality and an embodied spectator. Both are depending on each other. Together they both realise the conditions, that govern the way the/a world is constructed, for instance by directing attention. Or: They draw the borderlines may that be in public space with its everyday-life interactions or in the art-world frame of a theatre which guide, influence and limit our actual abilities to perceive and to act. Because of this impact on perception and action the question of analysis and intervention is always at the same time a political and aesthetic question both in field research in public space as well as in the use of any artistically framed space like a black box or a white cube.

First, we want to discuss some terms and tools of our own research- and intervention-practice in and with spaces/places. We will then question, develop and adapt these terms and tools in the context of the examination, analysis, and shaping of spaces in performance practices. How to question, understand, use and not neglect or cover up spatial structures? Together with the participants of the workshop we want to choose a concrete spatial context (a building, a street, a theatre) and then concentrate on possible frames for practical research. This research should be related to the specific interests and wishes of the participants’ own projects and from their individual practices. The main part of the workshop will focus on doing concrete spatial analyses within a frame and using formats we select together. We will prescribe as little as possible, instead relying on our own perception looking for places of surprises, for modifications of movement patterns, for boredom, excitement and anxiety. Coming together at the end, we will share the singular results and research-experiences.

Additionally and in parallel, we will offer one-to-one or one-to-two talks about specific spatial ideas and setups of projects and works, where single participants can discuss questions related to their work together with us.

07 / 2009

‘SENSE RADIO’

workshop by Lilia Mestre and Els Viaene

Sense Radio is a first step in a research project initiated by Lilia Mestre in a.pass research center on the ‘Social-Emotional Body’, (project that would result in the performance ‘Live-In Room’, shown at the WorkSpaceBrussels festival in Brussels in December 2009).

This workshop is a practical try-out for the participants to set up emotional audio-spaces in the room, using the spatialisation of sound as their main material.  Each of them is taught how to use audio recording material, how to edit sound, and how to set the sound out on the space, combine it, arrange it.

2009 BLOCK I 01 January 2009
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 January 2009

31 March 2009

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Ariane Loze
Constanze Schellow
Fien Wauters
Jozef Wouters
Julie Pfleiderer
Marcos Simoes
Michel Yang
Sungmin Hong

Partners

Buda Kortrijk
University of Ghent
PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Contributors for workshops

Dora Garcia
Elke Van Campenhout
Jan Maertens
Kris Verdonck
Marianne Van Kerckhove
Miguel Clara Vasconcelos
Peter Stamer
Stefan Heinrich
Tine Van Aerschot
Tom Plischke-Kattrin Deufert
Yosi Wanunu

Coordinator a.pass

Elke van Campenhout

The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout (a.pass coordinator)

26 / 01 – 06 / 02 / 2009

‘VIDEO STORYTELLING AND EDITING’

workshop by Miguel Clara Vasconcelos

The workshop aims at setting up a film shooting and editing process out of the personal stories of the participants. Every participant constructs a personal story (out of objects, memories and scars) and throughout the first week re-constructs this story into a workable film script. During this first week Miguel Clara Vasconcelos will also provide film excerpts and examples and will go deeper into the theoretical approach of script writing and editing.

In the second week, the participants will work on a collaborative shooting and editing of one collective script, assembled out of the different stories.

02 / 2009

‘LIGHT & DESIGN’

workshop by Jan Maertens

In his workshop on light design Jan Maertens will sketch out the light designer’s tools, reviewing the technical light equipment of a theatre. He tackles the ‘functionality’ of light design as part of the scenic environment and then focuses on light design as an independent co-actor in the artistic process. The workshop consists of three sections : a general introduction, from the principles of visual perception and light as a medium to the toolbox the theatre provides for the light designer, and a reflection on the position of the light designer as an artistic player in the multimedia performance field. Secondly, the participants have a close view on the development of a light design with all possible practicalities and artistic discussions in the concrete context of the working process for Meg Stuart’s creation 2009. Third, there will be a photo shoot of the light design for ‘Maybe Forever’ with photographer David Berger : a try-out on the documentation and archiving of light design.

02 / 2009

‘CONCEPT & DESIGN 01’

coaching by Stefan Heinrich

Scenographer Stefan Heinrich coaches the program participants in the development of a scenography based on a personal fascination, for Fien Wauters ‘Hercules 2 or the Hydra’ (a text by Heiner Muller) and for Jozef Wouters ‘Encounters at the End of the World’ (a documentary by Werner Herzog). The idea is to take this personal relation as a motor for a scenography without interference of a director's concept, dramaturgy, historical context,... For Heinrich the translation of a first fascination into a coherent story and concept and the technical development of the stage design (for a concrete theatre space) are the axes of the workshop.

16-20 / 02 / 2009

‘LOW TECH PERFORMANCE / COLLABORATION AT A DISTANCE’

workshop by Dora Garcia

The workshop proposes to research strategies and contents that need nothing but a performer to create the work. Specific attention is given to keywords such as audience, duration, visibility, infiltration, subversion and commitment.

The workshop starts out of mutual interest, discussion, and information. In the first days, Dora Garcia gives a short presentation of her work and adds some "affinities" with other artists that she feels close to. Then the group discusses the concept of the workshop, "LOW TECH performances". The title, ‘LOW TECH’ refers to a type of performance stressing the content over the appearance, disliking complicated scenographies and props, rethinking conventions such as audience, stage, backstage, duration, character-playing, and using the technology that is available to everybody.

02-06 / 03 / 2009

‘CONSEQUENCES’

workshop by Tom Plischke & Kattrin Deufert

The most important element of our working process is writing and transference. It allows all participants to work in silence and not to be bothered by producibility. The constant passing on of written material and the permanent reformulating, contextualizing, expanding, and reflecting of the written material serve as a basis for the creation and composition of movements, texts, sounds, or images. But within this procedure all realizations are based on temporary decisions depending from the material that is handed over from the other and not because the medium of realization is chosen beforehand. Our working procedure could best fit into the motto: ‘Give me your material and I show you what you're not doing with it’.

Sourcing the creation-act out and rendering oneself into the pendency of writing instead permits a disciplined work in silence, in which each participant and partner can raise her/his voice on the paper independently from its volume or the amount and position of knowledge. Participation starts with a conspiracy of partaking, and not by the self-positioning of the speaker. With (Re)formulating we describe a process that can enable a discourse in silence, in the writing with each other. The place of the individual argument, the singular voice is taken by an instance of polyphony, similar to the Cadavre Exquis, which is a game that was invented by Surrealists in 1925. It is quite similar to an old english parlor game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Unlike the surrealists, we don't hide what has been written previously. For us it is a downright challenge to deal with the input of the others and to come into thinking with it, to expand ideas and suggestions, to combine sketches, to suggest a possible proceeding. It is only very late in the working procedure that we ask about the medium in which this material is to be realized. In this sense, the medium becomes a part in the decision-making, in the claim of form (or format). It is not set a priori and thus has to be in reference, translation, transference to the material: it has to be a decision and not a choice.  Because of this it is fundamental in this principle of formal strictness to take the responsibility of one's decisions and to constantly confront the other with claims in order to develop a communication, a circulation and production in the community of strangers. (Re)formulating should enable everybody to partake in the process. Just as in knitting from a single thread (the shared theme) and a knitting pattern (the permanent passing on), a complex texture evolves that formulates a possible work.

01-30 / 04 / 2009

‘TOOLS FOR TRANSDISCIPLINARITY : DRAMATURGY IN REAL-TIME’

workshop by a.pass

This workshop is open for three different groups of participants:

-aspiring dramaturges from the Theatre Sciences department of the university of Ghent and Antwerp 

-scenographers/sound designers/light designers

 -'professional' dramaturges with the artists they regularly work with.

The mentors of the project are:

theatre maker Kris Verdonck

dramaturg Marianne Van Kerckhove

theatre maker Tine Van Aerschot

dramaturg Elke Van Campenhout

theatre maker: Yosi Wanunu (Toxic Dreams)

dramaturg: Peter Stamer

In de Buda Tacktoren, we form sub-groups of one artist/dramaturg, one scenographer/../.., and one aspiring dramaturge, each one occupying one studio of the Tacktoren.

In preparation every one of the participants will receive the initial idea, or starting point (a text, a choreographic phrase, a political issue, a question), from the prof. team. Starting from this basic material they will already come to the workshop weaponed with some initial ideas, images, related texts etcetera,... (which we can call 'mood boards), to start the discussion. During the first week, the participants will discuss and work out ideas with the artist in question, and get feedback from the prof. dramaturge in the evening. Scenographers work on scenographic proposals, but work also closely together with the aspirant dramaturges, and the other way around.  Every day they share their results with the rest of the group. At the end of the week, we will decide where every project is going to lead to: a short performance, an exhibition of drawings, ideas, concepts, a discussion... In the second week, the results will be shared with the public. a.pass will provide the necessary contextualization of the project to communicate its status to the public.

research portfolio

https://cargocollective.com/democraticforest/publication

DEMOCRATIC FOREST 01 January 2009
posted by: Pierre Rubio

Sara Manente

01 January 2009

https://cargocollective.com/democraticforest/democratic-forest-encyclopaedia

2008 BLOCK III 01 September 2008
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 September 2008

31 December 2008

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Ariane Loze
Bruno Stappaerts
Christophe Engels
Constanze Schellow
Gable Roelofsen
Hanne Jacobs
Karolien De Schepper
Kim Lien Desault
Klaas Devos
Lieselot Jansen
Lore Rabaut
Luk Sips
Marcos Simoes
Michel Yang
Sara Manente
Sungmin Hong
Vick Verachtert

Partners

LOPITAL, Antwerpen
PAF (Performance Art Forum, Reims, France)

Collaborators for workshops

Alessandra Bergmaschi (Brazil)

Sandra Noeth (Germany)

Tristan Honsinger (Germany)

Coordinator a.pass

Elke van Campenhout

The block is curated by Elke van Campenhout and the researchers participants

24-25 / 09/ 2008

‘(RE)CHANNELLING THE SINGULAR’

(The solo in contemporary dance and performance)

self-organised seminar by Kim Lien Desault and Sandra Noeth, University of Hamburg, Research Department, Performance Studies

Two days of theory following the doctoral research of Sandra Noeth about the philosophical and historical significance of the solo in dance.

Sandra Noeth and Kim Lien Desault invite the participants to ‘think’ the dance solo as an object of knowledge production.

01-08 / 10 / 2008

‘PEACE PROJECT’

self-organised project by Gable Roelofsen.

The participants take part in the Peace Conference "Utopia or Distopia', organized by the philosophy department of the “Technische Universiteit” in Berlin. While they develop their own artistic researches to open perspectives on the ‘question of peace' and ‘what peace can mean in a contemporary society today’, the projects are archived and exhibited at the gallery Arttransponder.

The PEACE Project stands for the development of personal projects and of multiple collaborations between participants.

'Mount Berlin', the 'Peace Walk’ through Berlin and the 'Sleep Inn' (a sleep-in initiative for the exchange of narrative) constitute the core of the research.

09-10 / 10 / 2008

‘AROUND ALESSANDRA BERGMASCHI’

meeting and working with Alessandra Bergmaschi

self-organised and curated by Sara Manente

Alessandra Bergmaschi, a Brazilian photographer, and artist-researcher Sara Manente develop the project "Democratic Forest”.

who uses the camera?

who do you want to bring into the picture?

in what way?

what do you communicate?

Sessions alternate between presentation of Alessandra Bergmaschi’s work, documentary films screenings and texts readings.

03-07 / 11 / 2008

‘TRANSDISCIPLINARY IMPROVISATION’

self-organised workshop by Tristan Honsinger

curated by Kim Lien Desault

A group including dancers, actors, musicians and visual artists will work together on free jazz improvisation techniques to come to a common understanding of impro-building and group balance in transdisciplinary improvisation situations.

2008 BLOCK II 01 May 2008
posted by: Pierre Rubio

01 May 2008

31 July 2008

Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program

Bruno Stappaerts
Christophe Engels
Gable Roelofsen
Hanne Jacobs
Karolien De Schepper
Kim Lien Desault
Klaas Devos
Lieselot Jansen
Lore Rabaut
Luk Sips
Marcos Simoes
Michel Yang
Sara Manente
Vick Verachtert

Partners

Les Bains
KunstenFestivaldesArts
In Transit @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin)
Conflict Room (Antwerpen)

Contributors for workshops

Andre Lepecki

Davis Freeman

Lilia Mestre

Coordinator a.pass

Elke van Campenhout

The block is curated by Lilia Mestre

08-10 / 05 / 2008

‘SOME POLITICAL DANCE’

workshop by Davis Freeman

In the framework of the project 'Some Political Art', curated by choreographer Lilia Mestre in Les Bains (Brussels), the creation of a solo performance is proposed to the participants under the direction of theater maker Davis Freeman (U.S.A.).

The participants are asked to develop a five minutes performance out of their relation with politics and/or political art and to create a video out of it. They are also asked to formulate a short text out of that position. The resulting films and texts will be used in the video installation 'Some Political Dance' by Davis Freeman.

21-31 / 05 / 2008

‘RES & REF’ (Residence and Reflection)

by Elke Van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre

KunstenFestivaldesArts each year invites a group of fifteen international artists to view the festival performances, to discuss, to bring in opinions and exchange. This year, Elke Van Campenhout will expand with two other groups the ‘res & ref’ project: the a.pt-participants will join as well the group 'some political art’ around Lilia Mestre, curator of Les Bains Connective in Brussels..

All three groups (a total of thirty artists from different disciplines) will reside for ten days in Les Bains. In addition to the discussions there will be public 'reading sessions' organized by the a.pt-participants on 'The Art of Over-Identification'.

11-16 / 06 / 2008

‘IN TRANSIT’

guidance by Andre Lepecki (U.S., curator of the festival ‘In Transit’)

In-Transit festival focuses on postcolonial related issues. The program is exceptional, to the extent that it creates, in a challenging intellectual framework, a visibility to artists who are not often seen in Europe.

Andre Lepecki will guide the a.pass participants through the festival. For this he will provide in advance a reader of texts on postcolonial theory and contemporary performance.

23 / 06 - 04 / 07 / 2008

‘INTERFACE FICTIONS’

workshop by Lilia Mestre

The showcase project "Interface Fictions" will develop in the temporary gallery space Conflict Room in Borgerhout, on the busy Turnhoutselaan in Antwerpen. The project will use the transparent, yet persistent partition of a former shop vitrine to explore relationships between private and public spaces.

The a.pass participants will reside for a week in the vitrine room and will experiment with forms of (in) visibility, intimacy and (mis)communication between them and the outside world. The recurring daily passersby will face their practices, which will simultaneously function as a reverse ring and an invitation, and at times, will also transgress outside the limits of the shop to the streets.

This experimental project researches the 'relational' mapping between art practice, everyday life and community.