SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST



search


category /17


    • information
    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • project
    • reading session
    • A global reading of the Gaza Monologues International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
      10 November 2023
      posted by: Kristof Van Hoorde
    • a.pass, Moussem, SOTA, Lagrange Points
    • The Whirling Ear - Kunstberg, 1000 Brussels
    • 29 November 2023
    • A global reading of the Gaza Monologues

      The ASHTAR Theatre in Ramallah is calling on theatres and artistic organisations around the world to perform the Gaza Monologues on Wednesday 29 November and share images of the performances on social media. The play, produced by the Palestinian theatre company in 2010, consists of 31 testimonies from children and young people who lived through the war in Gaza in 2008 and 2009. In short monologues they recount what happened to them during those weeks. As the violence in Gaza has viciously erupted again, the text is as relevant today as it was 13 years ago.
       
      The United Nations General Assembly has declared November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. That is why ASHTAR Theatre is calling for the text to be performed again on that day.
       
      Several cultural houses and many artists in Flanders and Brussels are responding to this call, as well as organisations in 40 other countries. Together with SOTA, Moussem and Lagrange points, a.pass will organise a reading of these monologues in different langues in the public space: at the statue of Godfrey of Bouillon in the heart of Brussels.
       
      In exchange for the use of the text, a financial contribution will be made to ASHTAR Theatre’s fund, which is dedicated to the psychosocial well-being of Palestinian children and trauma therapy.
       
      By reading these monologues, we want to express our solidartity with the Palestian people. Reading can give a voice to those unheard, provide a platform to the voices that are currently being silenced. We have read, heard and seen many testimonies of the victims of the brutal terrorist attack on 7.10.2023. We got to see their faces in the newspapers; on television, we heard their stories and got to know their families. And that is undoubtedly how it should be.
       
      When it comes to Palestinians, however, we only hear numbers: 5.000 killed, 10.000 killed, 15.000 killed. Reading these 31 monologues is a call for putting a face and a voice to the thousands and thousands people, children, who lost their lives. Those that simply can’t remain unheard and unseen.
       
      Wednesday November 29
      15h-17h at The Whirling Ear Fountain
      between Koningsplein/place Royale & Kunstberg/Mont des Arts 1000 Brussels

    • lecture
    • workshop
    • Participants Assembly
    • Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies 03 May 2023
      posted by: Kristien Van den Brande
    • Áron Birtalan
    • a.pass 4th floor
    • 15 May 2023
    • 16 May 2023
    • Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies
      Inspired by devotional practices from the Late Middle Ages, this workshop explores mystical languages as somatic and performative technologies. Focusing on spoken language and tactile ways of engaging with text and images, we will create affective relationships between bodies and matter. Contaminating the lines between a within and a without, mystical languages become an interface for intimate bonds with the unknowable and unreliable. Topics include: image as induction, reading as annihilation, text as embodiment and touch as giving birth. We will familiarize ourselves with the historical contexts and theologies of the body in Christian mysticism of the Late Middle Ages, using it a lens through which we can re-encounter the now. 
       

       
      Our activities include reading, writing, discussing, engaging in simple exercises that challenge perception and sensation. At large, the workshop invites us to be with language and touch as a place of possibility for encounters, relationships and becomings between active-passive and living-dead bodies. We will draw attention to how these possibilities can influence our own practices, showings, publications - and their embodied afterlife as a post-mortem artwork.
       

      Prep for participants

      • Please bring 2-3 pieces of printed texts or images you can imagine playing with in the workshop based on what you read in the description. This can be something you yourself made, but also from someone or somewhere else. As formats, you can choose to bring a printed publication (book, zine, brochure, sign, etc) or loose pieces of paper. We will use these as playful starting points, so don't think too much about what you bring!
      • For the first day, please bring a modern computing device that connects to the internet: smartphone, tablet or laptop. Please contact me with any questions about this.
      • Clothes you feel nice and comfortable in.

       

      Content and accessibility

      Activities are made to accomodate for different kinds of bodies and needs. Every activity will be introduced in advance and you are encouraged to take a step back if something is not working for you. In its themes, the workshop touches upon religion, mysticism, sex, ideas about the afterlife, grief, death and wounds.

       

      Timetable

      workshop sessions: 15 & 16.05, 10-16.00 each day including a break for lunch

      public talk 15.05, 18.00

       

      Participants 

      max ~16 participants for workshop. Please contact Hans if you're interested to participate in the workshop.

       

      Bio

      Áron Birtalan is an artist, musician and a student of theology, whose work explores languages of pleasure and anguish between angel, creature and computer. Working together with participants and their imagination as an artistic medium, Áron creates guided games, mystical practices, musical releases, unruly thoughts and publications. They are interested in a practice that acts as an interface through which intimate relationships with the unknowable may unfold. They received their education at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, the DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam and are currently a PhD candidate in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts with their research project 'Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come'.

       

      Invited by

      Áron Birtalan and 'Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies' are invited by Carina Erdmann (Participant Assembly curation).

    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • block 2020/III
    • Participants Assembly
    • On the Soul Video recording - online talk
      27 November 2020
      posted by: Steven Jouwersma
    • Oxana Timofeeva
    • 19 November 2020
    • yes
    • [video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Oxana-Timofeeva-On-The-Soul.mp4"][/video]
       
      Oxana Timofeeva
      On the Soul
       
      A talk and a conversation on the soul. This talk took place on November 19th.
      The talk was proposed by Adriano Wilfert Jensen and supported by the a.pass participants assembly as part of a new modality of participants curated content at a.pass. 
       

       
      The talk addresses to some episodes in the history of philosophy from antiquity to the present, where the soul is considered, fist, in its corporeal aspects, i.e. in its immediate or mediated connection to the body, and second, in the context of the question of the passages between the human and the nonhuman, as well as between individual and collective experiences.
       

      Oxana Timofeeva is a Professor at “Stasis” Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, member of the artistic collective "Chto Delat?" ("What is to be done?"), deputy editor of the journal "Stasis", and the author of books History of Animals(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012; trans. into Russian, Turkish, Slovenian, and Persian), Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009), How to Love a Homeland (Cairo: Kayfa ta, 2020; trans. into Arabic), and other writings.

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • Zones of disobedience Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma
      29 January 2020
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Close Encounters series
    • ISELP & a.pass
    • 06 February 2020
    • 06 February 2020
    • Zones of disobedience

       

       

      a.pass Close Encounters

      Zones of disobedience

      Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma

      06/02/2020 - 15h00  at  ISELP / 18h00  at  a.pass

       

      Close Encounters are light and irregular events to take time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in an artistic -research- trajectory. The events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by their protagonists, but the format is always a dialog with one or more guests; all are invited to expand on their research or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. The Close Encounters series holds a double intention of getting a closer look at things and of approaching somebody closely and tries to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research and its current nature, function and conditions of possibility: What to study? What to research? What to practice? 

       

      For Zone Public, the current seminar of the postgraduate program in a.pass, the Close Encounters series invites guests that have relevant practices with regards to (infrastructures of) publishing and/or making-public and/or art and research publicness.

       

      On Thursday 6th, for this special edition, a new monumental work Elen Ou Hubris by Elen Braga will be on display for the first time at ISELP from 15h00 to 17h00 This will be followed by Zones of Disobedience, a three hour long discussion with Elen Braga, Eve Kalyva and Steven Jouwersma that will unfold from 18h00 onwards at a.pass.

       
       

      Thursday February 6, 15h00-17h00

       

      Elen Ou Hubris

       
      Elen Braga
       
      a monumental tapestry on display for the first time
       
      @ ISELP, Boulevard de Waterloo 31, 1000 Bruxelles
       
       
       
      Thursday February 6, 18h00
       
      Close Encounters Series @ Zone Public
       
      Zones of disobedience
       
      Elen Braga / Eve Kalyva / Steven Jouwersma
       
      a three hours public presentation and discussion hosted by Pierre Rubio 
       

      @ a.pass, 60 Delaunoystraat, 1080 Brussels

       

       
       
       
      When institutions have come to embody their own institutional critique, when participatory art becomes the new weapon of the established normalising order, and when attempts to further develop forms of artistic resistance are almost instantly liquefied in the commodifying reason of the market, a series of questions arise: Is it still possible to disobey? What could the forms of disobedient work be today? What new strategies should be invented in this context? How can one give the public the incentive to transgress its fears, inhibitions and limitations?
       
       
      Having these questions as a starting point, “Zones of Disobedience” opens up a space for discussion, reflection and debate. It presents examples from the past and the present and from across the spheres of the artistic and the political in order to problematise sets of relationships, conceptual frameworks and behaviours. These have to do with ideas about monuments, myths and experiences of the city as space but also as a site of memory, of belonging and of envisioning a future.
       
       
      The protagonists of “Zones of Disobedience” are equally interested in the relationships across the public, the artist, one’s environment and discourse, with particular attention on self-imaging in public spaces. Public self-imaging –and the different techniques of the self– are understood here in relation to a place and its image as this is perceived from different perspectives and for different audiences. Likewise, public self-imaging refers to the stories one tells about oneself and about the “other” (the artist, the audience, the immigrant, the policymaker, the army, the police), as well as to the mirroring of power, its ideologies and hierarchies. With this in mind, the performative conception of the self-image and its associated “hubris” enable to conceptualise strategies one can deploy in order to expose and destabilise the tenure of authority.
      If this can be achieved –for example in the works of Elen Braga and Steven Jouwersma through absurd, futile, uncomfortable or humorous encounters– how can such moments of critique be sustained or resurface in new forms? Which other public spaces can they generate? As such, “Zones of Disobedience” offers an evening of contestation, blurred limits, shifts and negotiations.
       
       
       

      Elen Braga

      Elen Braga is a Brazilian artist based in Brussels. Her practice involves self-imposed tasks that border on the absurd. She investigates how one creates narratives of the self, and is particularly interested in how myths function in relation to an individual’s strength, ambition, futility and resilience.
      Elen's new project, Elen Ou Hubris, is an entirely hand-tufted 120 square metres carpet/tapestry reproducing the image of a 24-metre tall woman standing on a pedestal. Created in the form of a giant idealised self-portrait of the artist, this monumental object will be installed in front of the triumphal arch of King Leopold II in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels in 2020. By its size and location, Elen Ou Hubris addresses the notion of hubris, exposes an entangled multiplicity of self-images, seeks to open a debate on monumentality, pride and determined futures –and boldly claims the central place to question the very place of women in t-his-her-stor-y-ies.
      In 2014 Elen was selected in “Situações Brasília” Contemporary Art Award of DF –National Museum of the Republic, in Brazil. In 2016 she participated in AIR ANTWERPEN residency where she worked on the performance series named 'Os 12 trabalhos' (the twelve labors), inspired by the Greek myth of Odysseus.  In 2017 she was selected for the residency at Central Saint Martins in London in partnership with SESC São Paulo. In 2018 she completed a postgraduate in advanced performance in a.pass, Brussels.
      Elen is currently in residence at ISELP – Institut supérieur pour l’étude du langage plastique (Brussels) and has exhibited and developed projects at SOKL (Antwerp, 2019) Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo, 2015), 17th Bienal of Cerveira  (Portugal, 2013), MUVIM – Valencian Museum of Enlightenment and Modernity  (Valencia, 2015), Samples - MULF – Museo Universitario Leopoldo Flores ( Mexico, 2015), SESC Belenzinho (Sao Paulo, 2017) amongst others.
       
       
       
       

      Eve Kalyva

      Eve Kalyva works on the relationships between images and texts in cultural production and visual culture. Her recent monograph, Image and Text in Conceptual Art: Critical Operations in Context (Palgrave/ Macmillan 2016), offers interdisciplinary perspectives on art from Europe, North and South America, and evaluates the different ways in which artworks advance their institutional and socio-political critique. Eve also works on the relation between art and politics, visual activism and social semiotics. She has developed the idea of “rhetoric of disobedience” to refer to the different ways in which art engages the associations one makes beyond what one sees, and is particularly interested in meaning making and communication as social and shared processes.
      Prior to moving to Amsterdam, Eve taught at universities in the UK and Argentina, and collaborated with international art institutions such as the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds) and the Museum of Modern Art Chiloé (Chile) as curator and artist in residence. Her creative practice explores the intersections of the real with the fantastic through texts, images, objects and bodily experiences; and her interdisciplinary research spans art, exhibition design, pedagogies of play, intermediality, discourse analysis and visual culture. Eve also develops museum workshops and cultural games. She is co-coordinator of the research group Global Trajectories of Thought and Memory: Art from the Global South at the University of Amsterdam, and will co-chair the panel ‘Radical women: the construction of Latin American women artists through exhibitions’ at the forthcoming 2020 annual conference of the College Art Association.
       
       
       
       
       

      Steven Jouwersma

      Steven Jouwersma is a Dutch artist. His work develops always in relation to contexts and combines performance with film making and installations.  
      Within specific contexts where socio-political tensions intersect, Steven Jouwersma invents performative situations that enable critical relations between him-as-artist and the expectations of the public. Steven (self) induces “crises” in the apparent status quo and engages in performing the inherent contradictions present within, often highly, unsettled spaces of cultural difference. Art in public space and in countries that are foreign to the artist always assert political dimensions. By defining antagonistic elements that provoke debates, Steven functions as a catalyst for these political dimensions to be exposed. Without being “classically” political, Steven’s works aim to challenge his own political and social position as well as his audience’s by acting “like an icebreaker in a congealed situation”. These singular forms of interaction in public spaces have unexpected outcomes. In some cases, in place of the predicted problems that might have occurred, the project is accepted and achieved. On the other hand, occasionally, the artist’s contribution is considered too controversial, straying too far away from conventions, and leads to its cancellation. Steven works with these missed expectations and miscommunications and sees them as potentials from which he operates, continually adjusting his own expectations.
      Steven studied at the Frank Mohr Institute and has a Master in Interactive Media and Environments. His most recent residencies and public events of the last three years are: dinA (Brussels), IBB (Curacao, Mondriaan Fonds), Buratinas (Nadine, Brussels) Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Mondriaan Fonds), Het Resort E03S01 (Het Resort, group show –with Alban Karsten and Feiko Beckers, Groningen), Common sweat sauna #2 and #3 (Zsenne Artlab, Brussel) Spectacle of the Sweet…  (Nodine, Brussel), Wandering Arts Biennale (Nadine, Brussel), Power and Ancestors (WM Gallery, Amsterdam), Casa Moderna (Willemstad), Grand Marcha (Carnaval parade, Willemstad)
       
    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Boundaries do not sit still
    • Close Encounters
    • Conditions for the work Sofia Caesar / Femke Snelting
      23 April 2018
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Close Encounters series
    • a.pass, 4th floor
    • 05 May 2018
    • 05 May 2018
    • Conditions for the work

      Image: detail of Spaghetti plot, vinyl on wall, Sofia Caesar, 2018. Photo: Gilles Ribero

      Saturday May 5 2018, 15h-18h @ a.pass , 4th floor

       

      For this episode of Close encounters, Sofia Caesar and Femke Snelting have invited each other for an afternoon of conversation about contracts as propositions and elements as conditions. Both are involved in related but very different practices that they will present and bring into discussion with each other and the public.
       
      Sofia shares two recent works, Worker leaves the factory (Conditions for the work) a permanent installation at PAV, Turin (IT), and the video Excess Lines to talk about her artistic methods that involve re-enacting found footage produced by car manufacturer FIAT in the last 100 years, appropriating techniques of motion analysis, and creating open structures for the re-writing of contracts.
       
      Femke discusses her work with the Codes of conduct in the context of Free/Libre and Open Source software communities. Codes of Conduct address on- and off-line behaviour of community members, acknowledge the possibility of harassment explicitly or euphemistically and provide guidelines in case something happens. These self-regulating practice function in an environment that is particularly sensitive to the ways words can be made flesh, both as code and as law.
       

      Close Encounters is a series of presentations and public conversations organized by the a.pass Research Centre. They take place whenever (associated) researchers feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. These informal events are designed to take the time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. Even if free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, the format is a dialog that expands the presented research. The Close Encounters get a closer look at things while trying to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research: What to study? What to research? What to practice?
       
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and is currently curator of the Research Centre at a.pass.
       
      Sofia Caesar is an artist and choreographer. Her works rearrange the power relations present in structures that act on the body, such as architecture, language, surveillance, or the camera. Her propositions, performances, installations, videos, and sculptures take us to the surreal, impossible, and complex layers of our relation to the language that surround us. Her oeuvre is developed in search of moments in which the body exceeds the forces that attempt to control it. Caesar's poetic and political strength lies in how she reveals that structures can be both controlling and generative, on the one hand tools of violence and power, and on the other the very means for the creation of new structures for the body. Caesar has participated in exhibitions and residencies in institutions such as A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam (NL), Parco d'Arte Vivente, Turin (IT); La Maudite, Paris (FR); SFMOMA, San Francisco (USA); Casamata, Parque Lage, Capacete, Oi Futuro RJ, Galeria A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro (BR); CCBNB-BR, Fortaleza (BR); Tomie Othake, São Paulo (BR), and others. She holds an MFA from the School of Missing Studies, Sandberg Instituut, in Amsterdam (NL).
       
    • Close Encounters is the name of a series of presentations and public conversations produced by the a.pass Research Centre during this block, which takes place when researchers are invited, or feel the need to communicate publicly about their research. These light and irregular events are designed to take the time to meet, listen and evaluate an idea, a project, a research, or a specific point in a research trajectory. Even if the events are free-formed and singularly appropriated by its protagonists, one rule remains for all: the format must be in dialog with a guest who is invited to expand on the presented research, the topic discussed or the problem posed through the lens of their expertise, experience or concern. The Close Encounters series holds a double intention of getting a closer look at things and of approaching somebody closely and try to respond to three key questions in relation to artistic research and its current nature, function and conditions of possibility: What to study? What to research? What to practice?

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • Semiotics of the Uncanny Dr. Dalila Honorato / Isabel Burr Raty
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • Close Encounters series
    • a.pass 4th floor studio
    • 21 October 2017
    • Semiotics of the Uncanny

       

       

      a.pass Research Center and Isabel Burr Raty invite special guest Dr. Dalila Honorato.

      The talk will be followed by a discussion.

      Saturday October 21st 2017, 16h-19h @ a.pass , 4th floor

       

       

      'Semiotics of the Uncanny'

       

      'Semiotics of the Uncanny' will approach alternative bodies in art, sexuality and pop culture, that conjugate body alteration, medical fetish, disability aesthetics and creative ritualistic behavior, touching on subjects such as: phobia, paraphilia, teratology, prosthetics and acrotomophilia.

      If the body is defined as the sum of all physical parts then individuality is composed by the uniqueness of this structure and the qualities of its elements. In a time when plastic surgery is considered a commodity within the cosmetic industry and the hype for symmetry has reached post-standardized levels, the borders between mass production and eccentricity, in what beauty is concerned, become more obvious. But it is when health issues occur that the equation changes. How can a body be defined if a physical part is missing or if it is supernumerary in the sum? Unlike some types of lizards, starfish, sea cucumbers, earthworms and salamanders, humans have a very limited capacity of self-healing. What happens to a physical part that is removed from a body separated either due to an accident or due to its dysfunction? And how does one cope with this separation as an individual and as a social being?

       

      After Dalila’s talk, Isabel Burr Raty, performance artist, independent filmmaker and associated researcher in a.pass Research Center, will offer some tea and will support a co-learning conversation.

       

      At first, the focus of the conversation will be on the Hybrid Art contemporary positioning, a phenomenon that mixes multiple art forms crossing borders between art, science and technology, contributing to hybrid narratives in performing arts and creating new alternative technological materials and objects aimed to serve as empowering tools for resisting the high-tech capitalist imperialism. Then, Isabel and the public will prolong the discussion with Dalila to bring her approach to a broader artistic research context.

       

      Dr. Dalila Honorato’s research focuses on embodiment at the intersection of performing arts and new media and, as a curator, she is interested in exploring the outlines of art and biology. Dalila is currently Assistant Professor in Aesthetics and Visual Semiotics at the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. She is one of the founding members of the Interactive Arts Lab where she coordinates the Art & Science Research Group. She is the head of the organizing committee of the conference "Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science" and conceptor-developer of the Corfu Summer School in Hybrid Arts. She is a guest faculty at the PhD studies program of the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Alma Mater Europaea, Slovenia, and a guest member of the Center of Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

      ionio.academia.edu/DalilaHonorato

       

      Isabel Burr Raty explores the ontological crack between the engineered and the native, between the official facts and the unlicensed knowledge of the resettled, the relocated; in order to think about the memory of the future and dig out chapters left out of scientific and history books. Her artistic research  is design based and semiotic, interweaving live/body art, participatory performance, biology and DIY technologies, and is based on the question of how to write in situ Sci-Fi narratives that remain alive, alive as they rely on the participative audience’s faculty to propose dispositives of liberation from a commodified life/body.

      www.isabel-burr-raty.com

       

      When: Saturday October 21st  from 16:00 h to 19:00 h

      Where: a.pass fourth floor studio.

      Free entrance

      Directions: https:///www.apass.be/contact/

      Please confirm your participation by sending an email to <isabelburr.raty@sacrofilms.com> !

       
    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • A dialogue on Active Archives Nicolas Malevé / Femke Snelting
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Close Encounters series
    • Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080
    • 27 January 2018
    • A dialogue on Active Archives

       

       

      Close Encounters @ a.pass End-Communications

      This month, two Close Encounters take place during the a.pass End-Communication event, an event dedicated to a.pass researchers presenting their research at the end of the post-masters program.

       

       

      Saturday January 27th, 15:00-18:00 @ Manchesterstraat, 17 - 1080 Brussels

       

      A DIALOGUE ON ACTIVE ARCHIVES WITH NICOLAS MALEVE AND FEMKE SNELTING

       

       

      “Within Active Archives, we aim to set up multi-directional communication channels, and are interested in making information circulate back and forth. We would like to give material away and receive it transformed: enriched by different connections, contexts and contradictions.”

      (Manifesto for an Active Archive, 2006)

       

      As a young institute for artistic research, a.pass currently reflects on modes of documenting, archiving, publishing and sharing. These modes should mirror its criticality, singular modes of operation, agonistic environment and ongoing reformulation of tools, practices and research. Moreover, the institute is concerned with a complex equation: how to develop an attitude towards archiving and dissemination that combine a critique of the usual institutional ‘archival reason’, while producing and sharing readable (structured) 'forms of knowledge'? Or, how to avoid and/or assume commodification, reification and authority while documenting and archiving polymorph artistic research practices and discourses? Ultimately a.pass wants to engage with documenting, archiving and disseminating -independent and experimental artistic research practices- to produce an ecology of text critique and to find inventive modes of co-operation and fair technological practices interlacing politically in non-innocent and least toxic ways. In the context of these current reflections and within the series Close Encounters, Nicolas Malevé and Femke Snelting both invited by a.pass researcher Pierre Rubio will discuss the long history of Active Archive, as a case study and exemplary project/practice.

      Active Archives started in 2006 as a Constant project, out of concern with the digital archiving and publishing practices within, and between cultural institutions. The project functions as a context for the development of tools and practices that provide a real possibility for sharing. It creates environments where ‘letting go’ is acknowledged as a necessary and desirable gesture. Active Archives has evolved through different projects/forms, and is currently activated by Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé in the context of the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism .

      What can the different iterations of Active Archives tell us about the condition of engaged artists-researchers-archivists? What were the historical conditions that stimulated its genesis? And after all these years -punctuated by profound technological, cultural and institutional changes- how is its evolution, topicality and relevance today?

       

       

       

      Nicolas Malevé
      Visual artist, computer programmer and data activist, who lives and works between Brussels and London. Nicolas Malevé is currently working on a Phd thesis on the algorithms of vision at the London South Bank University. He is a member of Constant and the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism. In the Active Archives project, with Michael Murtaugh, he is experimenting with techniques to engage with large collections of visual materials and explore different ways to navigate and question them. Nicolas studies the mutation of the archive in a digital context. How the evolution of machine learning influences computer vision when these techniques are applied on large collections of images. And in this context, how it affects the relationship between training data and the design of algorithms. Nicolas researches how these elements question the supremacy of the human eye in the visual field and how the redefinition of the archive implies to take into account a larger amount of agents, human and non-human for the circulation of visual content. These last five years, Nicolas contributed to exhibitions (documenta12, Kassel; Kiasma, Helsinki), research events (“Archive in Motion”, University of Oslo; Document, Fiction et Droit, Fine Arts Academy, Brussels), and has published in publications by MIT Press and Presses Universitaires de Provence.

       

      Femke Snelting
      Femke Snelting works as artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. In various constellations she has been exploring how digital tools and practices might co-construct each other. She is member of Constant, a non-profit, artist-run association for art and media based in Brussels. Since 1997, Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts. With Jara Rocha she activates Possible Bodies, a collective research project that interrogates the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. She co-initiated the design/research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and formed De Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) with Renée Turner and Riek Sijbring. Femke teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute (experimental publishing, Rotterdam) and is currently curator of the Research Centre at a.pass.

       

       

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Close Encounters
    • A conversation-on-exhibition Marcelo Rezende / Adrijana Gvozdenović
      13 October 2017
      posted by: Femke Snelting
    • Close Encounters series
    • Manchesterstraat 17 - 1080
    • 25 January 2018
    • A conversation-on-exhibition

       

       

      Close Encounters @ a.pass End-Communications

      This month, two Close Encounters take place during the a.pass End-Communication event, an event dedicated to a.pass researchers presenting their research at the end of the post-masters program.

       

       

      Thursday January 25th, 15:00-18:00 @ Manchesterstraat, 17 - 1080

       

      A CONVERSATION-ON-EXHIBITION WITH MARCELO REZENDE AND ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ

       

      In this episode of Close encounters your host is the artist Adrijana Gvozdenović, who has invited the exhibition-maker with great experience Marcelo Rezende for a late afternoon conversation about the practice of exhibition making. From the different positions they occupy, within the art system mainly powered through the conventions of exhibition making, they will share their stories and experiences, while inviting a live audience to interact generously. The talk is programmed to place an emphasis on the controversial and sensationalistic questions: How can you produce meaning and experience that matters? Why do we still believe in reality?

       

      Marcelo Rezende

      Marcelo Rezende (Brazil, 1968) is a researcher, critic and exhibition-maker. He was director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia (2012-2015), artistic director of the 3rd Bahia Biennial (2014) and was part of the curatorial group of the 28th São Paulo Biennial (2008), amongst other projects and occupations. He is the author of the novel “Arno Schmidt” (2005), associate curator of the Museu do Mato (Scrubland Museum) in Bahia, and he prepared for the Johann Jacobs Museum (Zurich) the exhibition “Utopischer Beigeschmack” (summer, 2017). He is currently the director of the Archiv der Avantgarden (ADA) in Dresden, Germany.

       

      Adrijana Gvozdenović

      Adrijana Gvozdenović is an artist living and working in Brussels, and is currently a researcher in a.pass – advanced performance and scenography studies and a member of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Montenegro. She is interested in the anecdotal and peripheral in art, in the performative aspects in the conventions of exhibition making, as well as artists’ motivations and their responsibility in the general context of art and art related politics. Her focus is on writing and collecting that often result in artist publications. She performed and presented her publication in Alexander Rodchenko's "Worker’s Club" in 2015. She holds a Master of Free Arts (Luca-University College for Sciences & Arts, Brussels, 2014) and a Master of Research in Art and Design (St-Lucas Antwerp, 2015)

       

    •  

       

      Book Club #6   “A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY”

      with Laurence Rassel

      Thursday March 9th / 10am-1.30pm

       

       

      “The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge. "Splitting" in this context should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. This geometry pertains within and among subjects. Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.”

      Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges

       

       

      Upcoming Book Club welcomes “what if” expert-consultant Laurence Rassel. Long ago she diagnosed the vacuity of artistic practices when its formats of knowledge-production are not ‘situated’ in an ecology of art that encompasses social and psychological factors. Paradoxically she considers fiction, science-fiction, narratives and role plays as paramount tools to achieve that goal.

      Laurence Rassel will address the notion of ‘Radical Hospitality’ by revisiting Stitch and Split, and some of the curatorial operating principles and practices she developed in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona: ‘re.act.feminism’, ‘Retrospective’ by Xavier Le Roy, ‘FAQ: Zone of frequently asked questions’, ‘Allan Kaprow. Other Ways’.

       

      At Tàpies Foundation she engaged the staff-members in a continuous play of becoming aliens of their own activity, all the while practising different modes of welcoming and establishing actual rules for how to use the ‘house’. How can rules be read, understood and negotiated if we take the model of children who change the rules of the game as they play: “Now, what if? And if? Now You, Now I.”

      The science and fiction approach in Stitch and Split is an early exemplarity of her hybrid curatorial practice that steers towards a politics of imagination-as-critique and alternative forms of life and work ‘invented’ in common. Stitch and Split explored the joints, the interstices, and the reciprocal contaminations between two registers which might be considered opposed, science and fiction. Science fiction as a zone of tension that amalgamates imaginary and real, utopia and dystopia, flesh and machine; the use of intrusion, incongruity and discrepancy as a system of resistance and a tool for questioning the present. Science fiction is not considered here as an oracle that can predict the future more or less exactly, but as a critical, inventive, cross-genre/gender and cross-disciplinary discourse on the body, identity and contemporary territories.

      http://www.stitch-and-split.org/site/images/poster.pdf

       

      Laurence Rassel is a Brussels based cultural worker who acts as curator, teacher, organizer. She is currently the director of ERG (École de recherche Graphique). From 2008 to 2015 she was the Director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, an institution created in 1984 by the artist Antoni Tàpies to promote the study and knowledge of modern and contemporary art. From 1997 to 2008, Rassel was member of Constant, a Brussels based non-profit association and interdisciplinary arts-lab that advocates free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism.

       

       

      Trouble on Radio Triton”, the dispositive of the current block in a.pass, revolves around a series of questions (de)forming alternatively its centre and its periphery: As artists, do our researches contribute to changes in contemporary culture? And if yes, which alternative worlds do our researches/practices contain and produce immanently? What do we see with/through artistic-research? How do we relate to the future via artistic-research? Through a series of strategic ‘if’s’, ‘what if’s’, ‘as if’s’ we imagine alternatives and exercise criticality along diverse speculative collective practices.

       

       

       

      Book Club #6 “A STITCHED AND SPLIT HOSPITALITY”

      Thursday March 9th / 10am-1.30pm

      participation to the costs : 5 euros

       

      @ a.pass / 4th floor

      https://www.google.be/maps/place/Rue+Delaunoy+60,+1080+Molenbeek-Saint-Jean/@50.8530792,4.3300367,17z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c3c3f46c54e4c7:0x4e61e376c2f6b53a

       

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • postgraduate program
    • Book Club
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • Book club #7bis An Animal Escape Case Book club series special event / Sina Seifee
      28 February 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 10 March 2017
    • case of: Sina Seifee
    • Book club #7bis  An Animal Escape Case

       

       

      Book Club #7  'Special event'  by Sina Seifee

      An animal escape case

      March 10th – 2.30am-3.30pm

       

       

      This essay/performance investigates the fragile intersections of friendship between digital avatars and trans-animals in the social media in Tehran’s landscape. Through personal animal-findings and fairy-tale associations the An Animal Escape Case interprets the epistemological openings and closings in cross-species sociality in Tehran domestic landscape exemplified in the everyday use of mobile phones where images of pets circulates and different species meet in mediated formats. The essay/performance analyzes all that anthropomorphism performs and withholds on and with animality in the situated conditions of contemporary Tehran domestic life and addresses the relationships between people, animals and place in a socio-technological milieu as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, public/private cross- boundaries, its wilderness, and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape. By going through the politics of friendship in a political and historical milieu the essay explores different modes of friendship in the literary texts such as: the 8th century Kalile va Demne’s indo-Iranian essence of friendship, the quotidian of middle ages registered in the works of Saadi, an Iranian modality of everyday happening of greeting in Taarof, children animation films, and ‘Telegram’ social networks in my own family. The An Animal Escape Case as an artistic concern with “foreign-policy” remains committed to the finite essence of friendship while investigating the origins of reciprocity, identification, and greeting in quotidian technologized performances. By problematizing the notion of Democracy as an institutionalizations of a Graeco-Roman model of friendship, the essay/performance asks for other forms of friendship that has stakes in multi-species contingencies in a “difficult” landscapes such as Tehran, operations of disproportion and disidentification empowered by middle ages Indo-Persian cosmologies, and the possibilities of empathic non-understanding in everyday life.

       

      Sina Seifee is an interdisciplinary artist working in the field of computer art, writing, drawing and performance. He is involved in research and work on technology, narrative, globalism, and intercultural mythologies.

      http://www.sinaseifee.com

       

       

      Book Club #7  'Special event'  / Sina Seifee

      March 10th – 2.30am-3.30pm

      Entrance free

    •  

       

      Book Club #7 with Fabrizio Terranova

      Politics of Speculative Fabulation

      March 10th - 10am-1.30pm

       

      In this talk/reading session, Fabrizio Terranova will revisit a recent text by Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking” and talk about the different projects he is involved in where activism, speculative fiction and pedagogy merge.

       

      "We need new types of narrative", once wrote Haraway (1). We follow in her tracks. Indeed we need new types of narrative and techniques. Stories that reclaim the earth and the commons that capitalism has stolen from us. Stories that invite us to take up and create trans-species sensitivities, trans-matters vitalities and trans-cerebral unrests. And it’s not enough imagining them, these stories have to be made. And even making them does not suffice, it is necessary to learn how to fabulate what concerns us, what we are confronted with, that is to say, to venture into narrations and cosmologies that can welcome these sensibilities, vitalities and crossing unrests. Fabulating is indeed a new kind of construction, at least for those who seek knowledge and in our opinion, fabulations are those narratives that dig interstices in our world, queering and manipulating it in a more than imaginary take off’s until sparking new attachments and forcing the investigation to be reopened, so that we may once again explore this forsaken territory, which did not seem to deserve even a bit of our attention. Fabulating is an act of repopulating which will no longer be trapped by the limited question of True and False. Stuttering the real, launching the orderly sabotage of the categories of thought, enlarging the spectre, bringing out connected and baffling new worlds, deploying them by triggering desires for the possible and shifting a too well described overwhelming World. Finding tricks, playing, tirelessly returning to our practices, affirming the necessity of new ways of telling and experiencing these worlds, is what we must learn to do.

      Fabrizio Terranova

      (1) D. Haraway, “Primatology is Politics by Other Means”, 1986



      Fabrizio Terranova, who lives and works in Brussels, is a film-maker, activist, dramaturge, and teacher at erg (École de recherche graphique) in Brussels, where he launched and runs the master’s programme in Récits et expérimentation/Narration spéculative (Narrations and experimentation/ Speculative narration). Terranova is the author of Josée Andrei, An Insane Portrait, an experimental documentary that was turned into a book published by Les Editions du souffle. He is also a founding member of DingDingDong – an institute to jointly improve knowledge about Huntington’s disease. He has recently published the article “Les Enfants du compost” in the a publication edited by isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise : Gestes spéculatifs (Les Presses du réel, 2015). Fabrizio Terranova directed a documentary/film on/with Donna Haraway - 'Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival'. The film will be presented at the end of March 2017 in Brussels within a series of conferences with and around Donna Haraway.

       

      https://vimeo.com/188121629

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFGXTQnJETg)

       

       

      Fabrizio Terranova’s cinematic choice, a pseudo-realist but discretely fictional one, corresponds very precisely to the mode of presence that makes this portrait a model of integrity. Neither taking over nor offering a neutral opinion, it is a device that constrains Haraway no more than it constrained Josée Andréi, the subject of his first, admirable film, but leaves them to use their own mode of being honest and entrusts in the work of the image the responsibility of turning this recorded document into a co-created documentary work. I am profoundly grateful to this director for knowing how to use his talent, his intelligence and his sensitivity to serve what will be a real transmission of intelligence and emotion. I would also like to emphasise the exceptional confidence that he was able to inspire in Haraway, whose recorded lectures are so far all we know about her, allowing her to give free rein to a “thought” live.

      Isabelle Stengers

       

       

      Book Club #7 with Fabrizio Terranova

      March 10th - 10am-1.30pm

      Participation to the costs : 5 euros

       

      at 2.30pm, an essay-performance will follow Fabrizio Terranova's presentation.

      "An animal escape case" by Sina Seifee

      https:///www.apass.be/book-club-series-7-an-animal-escape-case/

       

       

       

    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • Trouble on Radio Triton
    • LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY screening and presentation by Dr EDWARD GEORGE
      23 February 2017
      posted by: Pierre Rubio
    • a.pass
    • 08 March 2017
    • LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY

       

       

      “LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY”

       

      a screening and presentation by Dr EDWARD GEORGE

      (Black Audio Film Collective, London)

       

      The Last Angel of History is one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels and exhibitions. Black Audio Film Collective's exploration of the chromatic possibilities of digital video is embedded within a mythology of the future that creates connections between black unpopular culture, outer space and the limits of the human condition. The influential Black Audio Film Collective crafted this experimental blend of sci-fi parable and essay film, which also serves as an essential primer on the aesthetics and dynamics of contemporary Afrofuturism. Interviews with esteemed musicians, writers, and cultural critics are interwoven with the fictional story of the “data thief,” who must travel through time and space in search of the code that holds the key to his future.

      Edward George, the writer, researcher, presenter of this ground breaking science fiction documentary, will present and discuss the film and its themes of music, Diaspora, science fiction, and its engagement with Afro futurism.

       

      Dr. Edward George is a founder of Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), the multimedia duo Flow Motion (1996-present), and the electronic music group Hallucinator (1998-present).

       

       

      March 8th, 2017 _ 7pm-10pm

       

      @ a.pass

      Delaunoystraat 58

      1080 Brussels

       

      ​entrance free​!

       

      Screening at 7pm

      Presentation at 8pm

      Discussion at 9pm

       

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYe_nj7xfQM

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Angel_of_History

       

       

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • block 2015/III
    • don't eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me  invitation research sharing
      13 October 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Veridiana Zurita
    • 24 October 2015
    • 24 October 2015
    • don't eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me 

       

      24/10/2015, 7-10pm, a.pass studio, de bottelarij

      In 2014 I started working as an artistic researcher in a.pass. Since then I developed three different projects. ‘Don’t Eat the Microphone’: a weekly session developed together with the residents of the psychiatric hospital Dr. Guislain in Ghent, ‘Televizinho’: a series of re-enactments of Brazilian soap-operas with no-actors of a river community in the Amazon and ‘Mommy, Daddy, Me’: a letter trialogue about love relationships between me and my parents. Through these experimental set-ups I gathered a lot of materials of various kinds. Now I would like to share these video’s, texts, experiences and set-ups with you. I would be happy to host you during an evening-long sharing of materials from the research, and offer an idea of the contexts and imaginations that brought these ongoing projects to life.

      More information here

    • lecture
    • postgraduate program
    • Volver
    • mobile orders 06 May 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Patricia Reed
    • aleppo
    • 30 May 2015
    • 30 May 2015
    • ‘Order’ in and of itself, is a structural proposition in which sets of functions, behaviours, relations and norms can play out (while making other operations impossible or extremely difficult to carry out). Within the ‘social’, order is largely cultural, meaning productively artificial, subject to infinite mutability. So to demand ‘order’ is not (necessarily) to seek to submit oneself to relations of authoritarian dominance, but to seize upon structural possibilities as a project for construction. ‘Order’, in this way, is mobilised as an affirmative project - a freedom to construct new systems of cohabitation (rather than simply a freedom from something).

      Such a project for the constructability of new orders is ultimately, and simultaneously, epistemic, technological, representational as well as ethical - but cannot be spurned on merely through modes of moralization or symbolic personifications. How are we to rigorously confront the question of "order" today in the face of global complexity, a complexity that defies (unaided) human intellection, simplified localisation (we can't perceive this complexity, but only experience fragments of its residual traces), and vastly asymmetric operations of time (from nanoseconds to the geological)? How can we better grasp these functions, so as to seek strategic points of restructuring (oriented towards the service of the many), without reverting to a 'naturalist' position (a fixing or essentializing of the human) that negates the potentially productive forces of abstraction capable of permitting the construction of new horizons for (co-)existence? To begin to unpack these conceptual and practical problems, a "synthetic" approach will be introduced as a certain methodology affording creative world-making (with non-absolute, universalist ambitions); without reverting to top-down blueprint models of utopian schematics. Synthesis, as outlined by the philosopher/mathematician Fernando Zalamea, is characterized by its emphasis on mobility, a diagrammatic mobility proficient in examining the back and forth movements between 'polar opposites' (local/global; one/many; ideal/real); it does not deny these distinctions but is invested in the transits between, offering a useful cognitive scaffold that can potentially aid in navigating and re-orienting our current reality.


       

      Biography:

      Patricia Reed is an artist and writer. Exhibitions have included those at the Witte de With (NL); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE); Württembergische Kunstverein (DE); Audain Gallery (CA); and 0047 (NO), amongst others. As a writer she has contributed to several books and periodicals including: Dea Ex Machina; Mould Magazine; #ACCELERATE - The Accelerationist Reader; The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Vol. II; Who Told You So?!; Intangible Economies; Cognitive Architecture; and Fillip. Lectures have included those at Gertrude Contemporary (AU); The Institute of Modern Art (AU); The Future Summit (CA); Tate Britain (UK, Speculative Tate); University of Westminster (UK); Artists Space (US); MIT (US); abc Berlin (DE); Archive Kabinett (DE); and The Winter School Middle East (KW). She sits on the board (and teaches) at the New Centre for Research & Practice, and is part of the Laboria Cuboniks working group.

    • lecture
    • performative publishing
    • research center
    • Tender Institute
    • the tender institute 12 January 2015
      posted by: Elke van Campenhout
    • Elke van campenhout
    • 12 January 2013
    • the tender institute

      "In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute's extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution."

      Who's afraid of the Institute?

      In the whirlwind of changing subsidy policies, and political crisis, the Institute has become a partner to be mistrusted. Paraphrasing Dorothy Parker you could say that the Institute in most contemporary engaged art practices is 'not one to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.' What has become clear from all the waves of institutional critique that have fueled the visual arts production in the last decennia, is the Institute's extreme flexibility to reinvent itself, to recuperate and produce the ruling discourses, in a constant craving for the new. The Institute in this understanding has become synonymous with capital power struggles, with normative regulation of the arts scene, and with an unsavory attachment to a global economy that creates and sustains inequality, poor labor conditions and a sanctimonious elitist attitude towards knowledge and its distribution.

      In the last ten years however, more and more artist initiatives have been re-thinking the Institute's mandate. Taking the term up on its potential, rather than its historical accomplishments, the Institute once again has become a point of address: a specific place where people share their concerns and interests, where you can find topical information and engage with it, where knowledge is archived and opened up to public interest and scrutiny. Although it is a bit of a stretch to compare all these particular initiatives, I will venture to formulate some comments on these practices that place them within a larger field of enquiry in today's art field.

      Compared with the more established Institute's the arts' initiatives seem less embedded in a universal idea of knowledge conservation than in a dynamic reformulation of knowledge processed in situ. In that sense we could use the term 'environmental' for these newly constructed spaces for encounter. The environment here is constructed by the relations and the interests of the people participating in the particular context (of the Bureau, the performance, the work table, etc..). In other words: the institute (without capital I) has lost its clear horizon of social valorization and functionality. It is not transparently embedded in a supra-structure of similar houses of power. Instead it has a nomadic feature that is permeable, a qualitative openness that connects it directly to a context of particular participants, diverse spaces and a larger politico-social context.

      Another important feature of this institute is that it allows for a differential approach of interests. Although the institute clearly functions as a point of address of a certain problematics, as an environmental space, the processing of this information can be shared by anyone participating. Turning the monolithic space of recognition and representation into a heterotopic openness to different interests. What we see here is a constantly shifting maze of connections and reconnections, allowing for a constant and simultaneous shrinking and aggrandizing of the issues addressed. Connecting now only with a group of 4 participants, and at the same time addressing a global or political question that overrides by far the mandate of the artistic initiative at hand.

      The institute's boundaries in that sense are highly flexible, but not in the way they’d adapt to whatever kind of interpretation. Like in any other institute - and especially in the Tender Institute - the practices and the encounters are prescribed. There is an etiquette ruling the space that makes it possible to engage. There is an invitation that opens up the potential of the encounter. But at the same time the level and focus of engagement stays open for interpretation. For the mutual recognition of a common interest. Based on the smallest of details, or on the largest of analytical frameworks. The institute in that way questions our 'sense of belonging', of being part of the event unfolding: do I engage in the practice as an artist, a citizen, a woman, an agnostic or a believer? What does this engagement then produce in the event? How do I relate to the information that is swirling around? How do I add (or not) to the particular context unfolding?

      Infolding the Institute

      The institute (I make the distinction between the Institute as the power house and the institute as the environmental settlement) is a particular space, situated not outside of the logics of classification and order, but standing at its limits, 'at the edge of the void that lies beyond every order of recognition or normalization' (professor Peter Hallward on Foucault's use of the specific). It is this de-normalization process that is of interest to the artist community rethinking its own complicities. All too often the engagement with 'what lies outside' of the arts is taken up on the level of the reinstallment of an oppositional logic of understanding. In the embrace of a politics of trying to understand the other (the precarious worker, the poor, the immigrant, …) the artistic practices process and produce again and again this dichotomic sense of 'normalcy' in contrast to the 'exotic' feature of the have-nots, not taking into account the complicity in the construction of exactly these knowledge divisions, these 'states of exceptions' that sustain an unequal access to the declaration of 'what is important', today as well as in history or in the near future.

      What the institute can do is exactly to redefine the grid that limits our entitlements of knowing and taking action. Turning the strictness of the dividing horizontals and verticals in an interesting plane of 'wholes and holes', for every individual to navigate through. What the institute archives in these circumstances, is then not a universal, nor even a particular kind of knowledge. Rather it archives the processes that keep these different knowledge field connecting and communicating. The institute expresses a desire to address, to weave a grounding but fragmentary mythology for the becoming of the social fabric. No longer a clear road map to navigate our relations in past, present and future, the institute infolds the very diverse ways to deal with the 'situation', with what we think is at stake in this slice of time and space.

      Methods and tools

      If we said earlier on that it is a precarious endeavor to put all recent artistic institute's projects on the same line of interpretation, that is largely because all these initiatives claim a particular and concrete point of departure and an other methodological logic. In all their quirky singularity they break the demand for seamless reproduction that governs still a big part of the arts scene. The development of work here is drawn out of its mold of quantifiable recognition (through number of performances, partners, spectators and critiques) and into a much murkier field of the development of 'qualities' of working and sharing a space for exchange. As we know every method of work is somehow reproductive of a certain world view, of a particular way of relating to your collaborators, of a certain way to understand what 'work' today can still mean. Aesthetics are in that sense always prescriptive, or even – in some cases – normative, in the explicit demand that the situation should be recognized, and the division of roles that this implies. The art work here could be seen as an interface of social relations to unfold in the encounter. A relationality that can reach far beyond the limits of the arts factory.

      If we understand the institute as a possible tool to deal with these relations, this is not a tool that is to be judged by its efficiency, by the results that it provides. Rather, the tools used by the institute are at the same time highly specialized and highly dysfunctional. You might say that a good tool in this context is not a tool that hides itself behind its own surefire functionality, but rather one that talks back. A tool as an obstacle, as something that has to be reckoned with. Undermining as much as opening up the process of relating and dealing with the situation. As Isabelle Stengers mentions in her 'Ecology of Practices': “This is how I produced what I would call my first step towards an ecology of practice, the demand that no practice would be defined "like any other", just as no living species is like any other. Approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is feeling its borders, experimenting the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, not insulting ones leading them to mobilize and transform the border into a defence against their outside.”

      In that context the tool functions rather as a 'symptom' of the way we perceive our being together. Of the ways we consider an object, a situation, a relation, as a piece of knowledge to be dealt with. Every environment constructs its own value system. Not on the basis of a mutual agreement, but on the practical basis of 'what works' or 'what doesn't work'. In other words: what creates a situation is a change in the status quo, a performance. Opening up the method to the participants (both the 'users' of the institute as the creators) makes it possible for anyone to rethink its metabolism, its inner working, its outer organizing affect. Instead of the ideological reinforcement of the hierarchic status quo proposed by the Institute, the institute reappraises the circulating mythologies that cross the space, the specificity of the current proposal, the value of what is to be kept alive for the future (performances). The institute is what turns a 'state of exception' into a 'state of attention' for everyone to appraise.

    • postgraduate program
    • seminar
    • block 2018/I
    • Making / Conditions
    • Performing knowledge. Lecture-performances in perspective
      26 February 2018
      posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
    • Pieter Vermeulen
    • ARIA - Antwerp
    • 09 March 2018
    • 09 February 2018
    • Performing knowledge.

      Lecture-performances have gained increasing attention in recent years, in the wake of the ‘academic turn’, which frames artistic praxis as a form of research. Its genealogy can arguably be traced back to the emergence of performance art in the 1960s, with canonical examples such as Robert Morris, Dan Graham, Andrea Fraser and Joseph Beuys. Contemporary artists like Sharon Hayes, William Kentridge, Rabih Mroué, Hito Steyerl, Amalia Ulman, Walid Raad, Bruce High Quality Foundation and many others are now continuing this historical legacy. Sharpening the relation between art and knowledge, their work can be situated at the intersection of visual art, lecture and performance.

      How to analyse these different forms of knowledge transmission? What kind of knowledge are we dealing with and how is it being performed? What is the role of the performer's body, and is it possible to move beyond the divide between subject and object? Or, for that matter, between the spectator and performer, or between the academic and artistic realm? Would teaching qualify as a form of art and/or research? The objective of this research seminar is not to canonise the lecture-performance as a ‘medium’, but to examine its multiplicity at the intersection between the arts and academia.

      Performing Knowledge. Lecture-Performances in Perspective consists of a seminar program at ARIA (by registration only) and a public program at Extra City Kunsthal.

       

      Contributions by:

      Venue daytime (seminar): ARIA, Lange Sint-Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerp (room S.S208)
      Venue evening (public) at Kunsthal Extra City, Eikelstraat 25-31, 2600 Antwerpen-Berchem

      Co-curator: Michiel Vandevelde

       

      Programme

      ARIA, Lange Sint-Annastraat 7, 2000 Antwerp (room S.S208)

      9:30 - 10:30  Welcome and introduction by Pieter Vermeulen

      10:30 - 12:00  Doing Knowledge: Exploring the Tresholds of Lecturing and Performing, Dr. Lucia Rainer

      12:00 - 13:00  Lunch break

      13:00 - 14:00  Some Comments Concerning my Statisticon Neon, Dr. Warren Neidich

      14:00 - 15:00  The Case of the Ridiculous Curator, or How Transfigurative Recontextualisations May Reveal Authentic Truths, Lecture-performance by Toon Leën

      15:00 - 15:45  Round table discussion

      15:45 - 16:30  Performance by Pia Louwerens

      16:30 - 17:00  Concluding remarks by Pieter Vermeulen

       

      PUBLIC PROGRAM, Kunsthal Extra City, Eikelstraat 25-31, 2600 Antwerpen-Berchem

      19:00 - 20:00  Warren Neidich: The Brain Without Organs in Cognitive Capitalism (lecture)

      20:00 - 20:30  Bryana Fritz: Indispensible blue (lecture-performance)

      (Photo: Warren Neidich, Some Comments concerning my Statisticon Neon, Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, 2015)

       

      Register HERE!!

       

      The Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, (aria@uantwerpen.be) is collecting these personal details for the organization of the ARIA research seminar 'Performing knowledge - Lecture-performances in perspective'. Under no circumstances will these details be given to third parties. If you want to change your personal details or have them removed from our database, please inform us using the address above. More information about our privacy policy: www.uantwerpen.be/disclaimer.

       

       





APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

Unfortunately we no longer have applications. Both programs: the Postgraduate as well as Research Center have come to an end due to the decision of the ministry of education to stop financing a.pass. At the moment we look into new plans for the future. More news soon on our website.

Alternativly you can upload your Research proposal, Portfolio, CV and other documents here.

Maximum file size: 50 MB, maximum 5 files.

X  

add file..


SIGN UP TO EVENT
selected :
yes
no
ex-participant


ORDER