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.
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- Oxana Timofeeva
- 19 November 2020
- yes
- a.pass
- 09 April 2024
- 09 June 2024
- application letter: this can be in writing or via an audio or video recording. We are happy to read or listen to you in Dutch, French or English (max 5 pages in writing or max 15 min of recording). We would like to know how you would take care of the fallow ground? What would be a desirable outcome for your group? What is your motivation, how you imagine working together and why you would make a good group. Who is part of the group, have you worked together before, and in what fields is each of you active? Also good to mention briefly the collective and individual need in (artistic) research and your relation to it, as well as your relation to a.pass and/or Brussels.
- your favourite period (max 5 months) in which you would like to have the residency and a more detailed planning or timeline.
- short bio’s + CV of all the people involved in the group (max 1 pages per person)
- documentation: website, video links, portfolio (limited to 3 pages per person - 10 MB )
- 09 April 2024
- a.pass, Moussem, SOTA, Lagrange Points
- The Whirling Ear - Kunstberg, 1000 Brussels
- 29 November 2023
- Amari, Carina Erdmann, Mlondiwethu Dubazane, Lore D Selys
- a.pass
- 29 September 2023
- 30 September 2023
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa
- a.pass
- 23 September 2023
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov
- a.pass
- 15 September 2023
- 16 September 2023
- Kate Briggs
- a.pass
- 05 July 2023
- 06 July 2023
- Aslı Hatipoğlu, Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrović, Nada Gambier
- a.pass 4th floor
- 02 June 2023
- 03 June 2023
- POSTER...POSTER.pdf
- a.pass
- 02 May 2023
- 19 May 2023
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- Nada Gambier & Jen Rosenblit
- a.pass
- 15 March 2023
- 16 March 2023
- case of: Nada Gambier
- Chloe Chignell
- 05 November 2020
- book
- Chloe-Chignell...-1.pdf.pdf
- Peggy Pierrot
- 27 January 2023
- 27 January 2023
- 09 January 2023
- 31 March 2023
- Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović
- 10 January 2023
- 13 January 2023
- 12 October 2022
- 17 October 2022
- online
- 22 May 2023
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- MEYBOOM artists-run spaces
- 29 September 2022
- 30 September 2022
- BUDA, Kortrijk
- 24 September 2022
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- 05 September 2022
- 30 November 2022
- 15 November 2022
- 18 November 2022
- Radical_House
- 05 September 2022
- 30 November 2022
- egy kaparós sorsjegy;
- árak 1,500 Ft-tól;
- legalább 150 szokatlan hely;
- 03 June 2022
- case of: Chloe Janssens
- Portfolio mobi...ile CJ.pdf
- ZSenne ArtLab
- 27 June 2022
- 09 July 2022
- gathering, seminar, performance
- case of: Lilia Mestre
- a.pass
- 02 May 2022
- 31 July 2022
- case of: Lilia Mestre
- ビデオスロットの数;
- ゲームのテーマ;
- カジノ競争の一種
- 07 March 2022
- 11 March 2022
fixing things with Martin
fashion hypnosis with Federico
weaving storytelling by Sarah
day lead by Inga
choreography of imagining the future by Aleks
Open Salon hosted by Nathaniel
Every day at 7pm, - online audio reading of “Oneness vs.the 1%” by Vandana Shiva” ( link send on Monday)
Screening of Myriam Van Imschoot's & The Youyou Group's film 'Le Cadeau'
- case of: Lilia Mestre
- BainsConnectiv...ne.pdf.pdf
- BainsConnectiv...IY.pdf.pdf
- BainsConnectiv...il.pdf.pdf
- BainsConnectiv...al.pdf.pdf
- BainsConnectiv...il.pdf.pdf
- BainsConnectiv...il.pdf.pdf
- BainsConnectiv...al.pdf.pdf
- revue ar 2019 ...pi.pdf.pdf
- case of: Federico Protto
- Gemeenschapscentrum De Kriekelaar
- 27 January 2022
- 29 January 2022
- re source...source.pdf
- a.pass
- 24 January 2022
- 11 February 2022
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- visie en beleid te ontwikkelen voor de organisatie, op korte en lange termijn, teneinde een degelijk kader te hebben voor de a.pass activiteiten (workshops, residenties, voorstellingen, publicaties, onthaal lesgevers, curatoren, mentoren,...)
- administratieve processen te stroomlijnen zodat de activiteiten correct en efficiënt ondersteund worden
- budgetten op te maken en te superviseren, en financiële prioriteiten te stellen
- medewerkers aan te sturen die hiertoe kunnen bijdragen: intern (productie coördinator, scenograaf, artistiek-technisch medewerkers, partners...) en extern (boekhouder, revisor, sociaal secretariaat, verzekeringsagent,...)
- een correcte en kwalitatieve personeelsadministratie te beheren
- ervoor te zorgen dat wettelijke verplichtingen vervuld worden
- de huidige werking en netwerken verder uit te bouwen, financieel maar ook in samenwerkingen
- de noden van studenten en participanten te monitoren en steun aan hen te optimaliseren
- a.pass te vertegenwoordigen binnen het nationale en internationale artistieke werkveld en opleidingsinstellingen, subsidiërende overheden en netwerken (oKo, Sociare, BKO,...)
- heb je enige ervaring in de job of in een non-profit culturele context
- werk je autonoom en flexibel
- is Nederlands je moedertaal, spreek je super vlot Engels (de opleiding gebeurt in het Engels), en Frans en andere talen
- heb je een rijbewijs B
- woon je in het Brusselse
- en heb je vooral heel veel goesting om in een internationale en jonge-experimentele artistieke context aan het werk te gaan
- een 60% contract bij aanvang, eventueel uit te breiden vanaf de lente 2022
- een salaris en extra-legale voordelen volgens het PC329
- opleiding op maat en/of extern voor de taken die bijscholing vragen
- KBK Brussels
- 16 September 2021
- 17 September 2021
- 20 September 2021
- 24 September 2021
- yes
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- 01 June 2021
- 0 euro
- Where Do You D... apass.pdf
- archive-10-6-2...al.pdf.pdf
- An alter ego that i use to carry out my artistic research. The main trait of the sick Detective is her ongoing struggle with notions of immersion, osmosis, co-penetration, infection, etc. The character of the sick Detective is based on plant-human hybrids depicted in popular culture and draws inspiration from works of Stacy Alaimo, Nicole Seymour, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Heather Houser and others.
- 03 May 2021
- 31 July 2021
- yes
- case of: Sina Seifee
- case of: Magdalena Ptasznik
- The body is disciplined to mean something, to the detriment of the dimension of presence. So... Reject psychology. Empty the inner meanings of the gestures and impulses. Refuse to know the mechanics of choice.
- Acting: a process of self-exploration according to the statement above. It’s fun, playful, madcap... Lived experience as much a product of convention as dramatic experience.
- Masks > Personalities. Masks are used to adjust oneself to the situation, to the other people involved in it and also to the camera. Deal with masks.
- Physiognomy: an interest in guessing what meaning lies behind this person’s face; an idea of revealing. Need for a social control of the inner person.
- Facingness: observe faces and gestures inside a narrative without converting them into signs to reveal the inner psychology – preserve the opacity of this person.
- Audiovisual narrative where the bodies are not a translation into images of a screenplay and/or a discourse. The production of the character is unstable and influenced by the filming process itself. More interest in the process than the product, in the strength of an instant than in the logic of an action. Create forces that burst open both narrative and representation: the relationship between an image and an object that it should illustrate.
- Not a screenplay: preserve the natural language of the performers. No learning lines.
- practice my role behind the camera when I don’t have a script or a goal regarding content. What am I seeing through the camera in this context?
- practice a close relationship between the performer and the camera, or a dynamic of intersubjectivity between the cameraman and the model.
- Silence. Don’t talk. Stay in the chair. You can look around, you are not supposed to stand still. Sometimes I want you to look at the camera, establish a relationship with it, as if it were someone else, a character.
- Staying in the chair, look for a spot in the room that catches your attention. Observe it and describe what you see.
- Silence. Don’t talk. Stay in the chair. You can look around, you are not supposed to be completely still. Sometimes I want you to look at the camera, establish a relationship with it, as if it were someone else, a character. I will not count the time, but you should stay like this for a few minutes. So, in your time, I won’t say anything, you look at the camera and say: “I’m gonna put a song” and then you get up and go left. When you return, talk to me but looking at the camera, I have questions for you. And you also must have questions for me. Do you think you are acting now?
- that they stimulate repetition
- that they depend on personal interpretation according to their own feelings and opinions
- they don’t depend on personal interpretation, opinions, or feelings; the performers do it and right after have to process what was done: they are not protected by a character context
- that they demand attention to find the cue, a right moment to do it
- that they divert attention
- that they interfere in the flow of the action, of the narration
- that they activate an otherness (“Is it me who did it or not?”)
- that they demand the knitting of stories (the self does not produce fiction, but is instead produced by fiction); personal stories are mingled with tasks that move towards fiction
- watch the whole video before reading further
- then read the instructions for the performers
- remember that each video was originally shown without revealing the instructions to the spectators
- and that the whole series of looming videos were shot without the performers ever knowing each other’s instructions
- you cannot be the first to say something.
- first sentence you should say: “I realized that when you socially don’t notice the violence, it is because you do it.”
- take notes
- what are the others hiding or showing/revealing?
- say “Stop that acting”
- always non-stop looking at the one who speaks
- always start speaking using “I”
- hit the table to get attention or interrupt someone
- repeat the sentence until it is understood or you are convinced that you were understood
- when someone says something, you stare at him/her for a while
- tell again the train story you told in the first video, repeating it throughout the shooting, each time filling the story with more details
- say to Flávio “Listen to her”
- always start each sentence saying “I...”
- tell Lilia’s story about the train as if it had happened to you
- do not move while speaking, only when you need to show an object or make a clear gesture while telling the story
- ask details about the story, always mixed with comments about the perception of Flávio in the present, his behavior, his gestures (e.g. What are you looking at? You’re warm. Your eyes are tiny. Your eyes change when you say [this word]).
- tell the story about violence that you told in the first video, making only important gestures in order to explain it. Stay clear-eyed in the scene of violence, repeat the story giving more details, creating facts, trying to communicate.
- describe the gestures and behavior of Lucia and imitate them
- ask about the other involved in Lucia’s story, imagining this role in the story
- play with a balloon
- ask Lucia many times: “Is it violent?”
- Tell Lilia’s train story as if it had happened to you
- Touch Lilia
- Repeat some of Lilia’s words
- Smile a lot
- Say to Caterina that the story didn’t happened the way she’s telling it
- Ask Caterina to choose an insult against a woman and Lilia repeats it
- Describe people who pass on the streets and their behavior
- online: https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online
- 28 January 2021
- 29 January 2021
- 13 January 2021
- 13 January 2021
- 06 January 2021
- 31 March 2021
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- Chloe Chignell / Muslin Brothers / Flávio Rodrigo / Christina Stadlbauer
- online: http://dismantle.space
- 11 November 2020
- 14 November 2020
- yes
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- case of: Christina Stadlbauer
- MuseumDefiniti...rocess.pdf
- Wheatgrain...tgrain.pdf
- S Corona March...ch2020.pdf
- Abundance Unea...Centre.pdf
- Uriel%20Orlow ...EN.pdf.pdf
- Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre, Pia Louwerens, Nicolas Galeazzi
- a.pass
- 01 September 2020
- 12 December 2020
- case of: Nicolas Galeazzi
- Vladimir Miller
- a.pass
- 14 September 2020
- 03 October 2020
- how conflations between activism and fan self-aware agency can re-shape our understanding of the audience,
- potentials for public participation, civic action,
- how new civic practices of engaged audience members are defining joyous activism and with your participation move on to opening new ones, concerning your particular practices and angles, approaches to the topic.
- a.pass
- 08 July 2020
- 10 July 2020
- yes
- case of: Vladimir Miller
- Adrijana Gvozdenović
- online: http://archivingartisticanxieties.me/
- case of: Adrijana Gvozdenović
case of: Sina Seifee
archiving artistic anxieties 02 March 2020
posted by: Pierre Rubiowww.
archivingartisticanxieties.me by Adrijana Gvozdenović in collaboration with Sina Seifee, Pia Louwerens, Kristina Gvozdenović and Goda Palekaitė, is a noisy visual archive and online publication that takes the form of an essay. This platform is a way to reflect and diffract from the different activities and events realized in the past year. The writing and editing processes are exposed and show the different steps of the collaboration and their constructive agencies.
Adrijana Gvozdenovic has been for the last two years a researcher at a.pass. She proposes activities that push the borders between research, mediation and production as well as examine new formats of publicness. Naming these activities ‘Otherwise Exhibiting’, is an attempt to shift the focus from the object to relations. During the last year, her research project “Archiving Artistic Anxieties” was supported by the Royal Academy of Antwerp, which resulted in this online publication in collaboration with a.pass Research Center.
A Rabona HU Casino egy online kaszinó, amelynek lehetősége van minden játékosnak ajánlani valamit! 19 April 2020
posted by: Cecilia MolanoA szórakozás meglehetősen széles választékával egy helyen válthat az összes kedvenc játékgépére, mindezt a Rabona HU Club online kaszinóban! Egy sor video slot és több tucat élő játék, nem lesz nehéz megtalálni a szórakozást, amely vonzó lesz a felhasználók nagy százaléka számára. A Fizetési módok sokrétűek és rugalmasak, és azonnal regisztrálhat e-mail és mobiltelefonszám segítségével. Vannak Rabona bónuszok is az összes nemrégiben regisztrált felhasználó számára. Ne pazarolja az idejét, hogy betéteket Készítsen Európa egyik legmenőbb klubjában. A Rabona HU szolgáltatás előnyei: - a nyerőgépek körülbelül 1000 darabot kínálnak; - lehetőség van, hogy teszteljék játékgépek segítségével demo; - minden új játékos kap egy bónusz ajánlatot; - legalább 65 érdekes társasjátékok egy élő kereskedő állnak rendelkezésre. Játékajánlat a Rabona hu kaszinóban Magyarul Rabona kaszinó
Club játékainak listája valószínűleg az egyik legnagyobb a játékpiacon a fülkében. A több mint 1300 nyerőgép mellett hatalmas élő kaszinót, tisztességes asztali játékokat és számos jackpot játékot is kínál. A gyártók ilyen hatalmas választékával jó keresési funkcióval kell rendelkeznie, amit a szerencsejáték-létesítmény kínál. A video slotokat kereséssel vagy a rendelkezésre álló szűrők segítségével találhatja meg, ahol lehetősége van például egy játékszolgáltatót választani, az A-Z-t, a sorok számát, az összes élő verziót és a híreseket. Az üzemeltetők a szerencsejáték termékek, hogy meg fogja találni itt több mint 50 különböző szállítók Európa-szerte. A listán a legnépszerűbbek a következők: - NetEnt, - Rivális, - Habanero, - Quickspin, - Yggdrazil, - Amatic, - Villámdoboz. A klub játékainak fő kategóriája a játékgépek. A felhasználók biztonságosan kiszűrhetik a keresett játék műfaját. Az" All Casino Games " katalógusban számos más menüt is megtekinthet, beleértve a Megaways-t, az ingyenes pörgetésekkel rendelkező játékokat és a hasznos opciókat, például a szorzókat. Vannak még jó néhány más típusú játék szórakoztató, mint a kártyajátékok, ahol megtalálható néhány frissített változata Blackjack és rulett, valamint Videopoker. Rabona HU kaszinó szolgáltatás mintegy 80 egyedi szórakoztató élő kereskedők. A szerencsejáték-szolgáltatás Blackjack, Rulett és Baccarat játékokat kínál. De további asztalokat kínálnak a pókerhez és más alternatív élő játékokhoz, mint például az Evolution Dreamcatcher. A Pragmatic Play, az Authentic Gaming és a Playtech cégek szintén olyan játéküzemeltetőknek számítanak, akik játékokat adnak a Rabona Casino élő verziójához. Ha jól képzett high roller vagy, vannak VIP asztalok is, például blackjack és rulett. A legtöbb online kaszinóban tét nélkül tesztelheti a játékok katalógusát. Ezt meg kell jegyezni, hogy ingyenes demo verziókban történik, így a képen szerzett és elveszett értékeket nem veszik figyelembe. Szerencsére ez a lehetőség a Rabona HU kaszinóban is elérhető. Ha a Rabona HU club fogadásainak korlátairól beszélünk, akkor ez egy játékforrás, amely hasznos lesz mind az újonnan érkezők, mind a bónuszvadászok számára. Mivel a videójátékok listája olyan hatalmas, sok különböző típusú fogadást is elhelyezhet. Ami a gyártók, akkor lehet, hogy a betétek 0,10 - 1000 USD per pörgés. A szerencsejáték-szolgáltatás ügyfélszolgálata bizonyos számú kommunikációs csatornát kínál: - telefonszám, - e-mail, - élő chat. Az élő csevegés a nap 24 órájában elérhető, és jó szolgáltatást nyújt Önnek. Valójában nincs várakozási idő a csevegésben. E-mail küldéséhez a portál kapcsolatfelvételi űrlapját kell használnia, hívás kezdeményezéséhez pedig el kell hagynia a számát az "ügyfélszolgálat" lapon, majd visszahívják. Az élő csevegésnek van egy színes gombja is a portál tetején, és nem nehéz megtalálni a támogatási szolgáltatást. Van egy meglehetősen jó GYIK rész is, amely nagy mennyiségű hasznos információt és válaszokat tartalmaz számos kérdésre, amelyek a portálon való játék során jelentkezhetnek.
RESEARCH FUTURES Conference
27 June 2020
posted by: Vladimir MillerAs a publicly funded educational platform, a.pass is reviewed by the ministry of education in regular five-year intervals. With the next review process underway, a.pass took the opportunity to propose a collaborative process of self-evaluation to four other educational institutions - DAI - Dutch Art Institute, NL; Jan Van Eyck Academy, NL; Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerpen, BE and Uniarts Helsinki, FI in the field of artistic research. This process is motivated by a desire to establish a platform for mutual criticality where institutions of artistic research are not pushed to compete against each other, but can meet as partners sharing many of the same stakes. This critical intra-vision is also a balancing measure to the tendencies of such evaluations to produce an equalizing standard in a respective field of cultural production. Instead we aim to understand, compare and strengthen our differences, in order to create greater specificity and add complexity to the developing field of artistic research.
The upcoming conference "Research Futures" will bring representatives from five institutions of artistic research together with professionals working in the field of education, arts, culture, artistic research, curation and activism to engage with a series of questions emerging from this comparative (self)-study. We want to understand better what is the range of educational and institutional strategies and practices operating in the field of artistic research today. Where do we see common struggles, pitfalls and current problematics with respect to our concerns with inclusivity, sustainable support structures, institutionalization of artistic research and politics of publication. And finally we would like to compare ourselves to the future: what are possible scenarios for artistic research to continue its contribution to the field of artistic production, and how can these contributions respond to the changing social realities of a challenging future?
The conference will proceed in three steps, growing from a meeting to a debate.
On day one the representatives of the contributing institutions will meet to review the process of self evaluation. Moderated by Delphine Hesters, we will look for commonalities and differences between our institutions and how they operate and address the challenges we outlined together in our shared reports. This meeting will develop areas of concern to pass on to the next round of discussions the following day.
For step two we invited ca. 20 practitioners and professionals from the field of cultural production, education and artistic research to come together with us in a working session dedicated to the topics proposed on day one. Gathered around the topics in groups, the main objective will be for each group to critically develop relationships between present conditions and implications and future scenarios. Which relevance will this particular concern have in the future, how will it change in response to the developments of its social, economical and political context, what will be possible responses, adaptations and strategies to address those changes? Each group will be accompanied by a "reporter", someone who will take notes and compile an ad hoc report for the debate the next day.
At step three we will open the content developed in the groups to a collective process. With the help of the "reporters", the groups will present their findings to all present. The subsequent discussion, will be open to questions, comments, critique and contributions from all sides. This part will also be documented in audio and writing, and, together with the reports from preceding steps, contribute to a joined workshop conference report, that will be published and made available later in the year.
List of participants (tbc):
KASK - Heike Langsdorf, Frederique Le Roy; Adva Zakai; RITS - Geert Opsomer, Klaas Tindemans, Action Plan Europe - Tere Badia; PARTS - Bojana Cveijc, Charlotte Vandevyver; ROYAL ACADEMY FINE ARTS ANTWERP - Els De Bruyn, ERG - Laurence Rassel; CAVEAT - Ronny Heiremans, Kathleen Vermeir; KAAITHEATRE - Agnes Quackles; KANAL - Centre Pompidou - Guy Gypens; BUDA Kortrijk - Mathilde Villeneuve; LA LOGE- Laura Herman; WIELS Eva Gorsse; INDEPENDANT RESEARCHERS: Philippine Hoegen , Sébastien Hendrickx, Kristien Van den Brande, Sina Seifee and the Post-Graduate and Associated Researchers of a.pass; Benchmark participating institutions: Hicham Khalidi (Jan Van Eyck Academy), Elo Mika (Uniarts Helsinki), Gabriëlle Schleijpen (DAI), Nico Docks and Els De Bruyn (Royal Academy Fine Arts Antwerp); Moderator - Delphine Hesters
Curated by Lilia Mestre and Vladimir Miller
July 10th 2020, 14h-18h, online
a.pass cordially invites you to join the workshop presentations and public debate of the conference Research Futures on the 10th of July at 14h (online )
The three day conference will take the form of a gradually expanding meeting of practitioners in the fields of art, education and artistic research. On Friday the 10th, the result of the previous day's workgroups will be presented and the conference will open up to a public Q&A and debate. The link for online attendance will be posted on the a.pass website on the 10th of July.
The link for online participation will be placed here:
https://bbb.apass.be/b/nic-
h9a-kdr Welcome!
Note:
you will be prompted if you want to use your microphone by the BBB software.
You can click yes. if you wish so.Please mute your microphone when you enter the room. (bottom of the screen)
please find the full conference announcement here
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Lili Rampre's recent developments within RC involved repurposing works of popular culture and their most prominent characteristics of an epic story to help re-narrativise group and community concerns. Lili’s long term interest in (re)imagining an audience, especially within performing arts, found a strong resonance with current examples of collective action carried out by various fan groups. In Zsenne reading session, Lili is inviting you to delve into some of the texts on citizenship through fandom as a vehicle and examples of such performances. The reading will start by addressing the proposed questions:
This should not be misunderstood as an extension of the already well developed sociology and anthropology of fandom, but rather as the critical reappraisal that emergent large popular assemblages of self-identifying communities are an under-utilized and under-recognized potentiality for “performance” proper.
Reading Session will be held online (live participation limited to a.pass participants, due to corona measures)
please sign up to receive the link on the day of the session
Thu, 16th July
14h
Settlement 16 The Unconditional Institution
01 September 2020
posted by: Vladimir MillerDuring the days of Sept 14th - Oct 3rd 2020 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called Settlement. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass Settlement and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at the a.pass main space will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process. The schedule for these three weeks will be developed on site by its participants and shared online on the a.pass website.
please let us know if you want to join this workshop by subscribing a week before you come. covid measures will be followed in the shared environment to ensure it safety.
some key ideas which have informed similar spaces before:
encountering processes
The potential of this setup is that it allows us to encounter each others processes instead of products of our artistic work. Processes are much more difficult to make visible and to see as they require a different mode of attention and participation. The attempt to witness a process requires a change in the temporal mode of being-together in the collective space.
no spectators
The space we are trying to facilitate is open, but it is not an exhibition. There is no „spectator mode“, and no institutionalised responsibility for hosting visitors. However any participant (including possible newcomers) is welcome to invite and host anybody according to the logic of their work process. Anybody is welcome to join the collective space for any timespan, respectful of the fact that Settlement is a predominately a workspace. The (growing/changing) group will try to provide enough information at the entrance, so that everyone feels welcome and knows how to join and share.
productive instability
We will collect most of the materials for the space from the a.pass storage and re-accommodate them towards our purposes. This strategy produces a space that is fragile, self-made, and constantly changing. Such a space influences the sociability within it towards similar qualities – towards a more fluid social contract. In asking for a hands-on construction and deconstruction of its makeshift set-ups, such a space allows for a quicker change of settings and a decentralised mode of (self)organisation. For this reason, the suggestion is to refrain from using usual furniture (tables and chairs) and improvise new set ups for „work-stations“ and collective moments out of what we can scavenge.
The Unconditional Institution
While this workshop is a place for all involved to develop their own and collaborative work, it is also a place where we can come together around a common concern or concerns. Settlement invites to think about research in a similar way: as a material contribution to the shared environment, a place to care for which can bring other researchers together in collaboration.. The time frame of three weeks allows to actually build these spaces and consider their material conditions, access and affordances.
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Coming out of the a.pass conference Research Futures, and as the initiator of this workspace Vladimir Miller will contribute a focus on the idea of an Unconditional Institution to the shared space. This focus is not a mandatory collective topic of discussion, but a first in hopefully a number of collaborative focal points which will develop during the process. This work on the Unconditional Institution will take the form of a collective debating and writing of a manifesto in conversation with all who want to join.
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If neo-liberalism behaves as if it was unconditional (in the sense of all-encompassing), how can public institutions hold against and within this condition? They need to be built on fundamentally different politics in order to be able to provide a real alternative.
How can we rethink institutions as care places for specific practices and topics? How can we rethink their borders and access on the basis of time and labour investment into shared concerns, and not on the basis of belonging?
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The practice of Settlement is asking the question of access on a granular level: if our practices are mini-institutions within the artificial mini society / space of the Settlement, what are their modalities of conditional and unconditional access? Learning from our own small institutions we can look towards the bigger ones and develop desires and paradigms of how they should be working.
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The idea of the Unconditional Institution is rethinking the fundamental ideas of access which institutions are built on. How can we turn the paradigm of conditional access to institutions around? Can we imagine institutions with unconditional access? How would that work within a society where conditional access is the very foundation of social and economic life? Can we create a utopian imperative for institutions to give unconditional access to their resources like space, time, materials as part of their structural organisation?
Hosting Research Center Cycle 2 Block II
22 September 2020
posted by: Nicolas Galeazzi
There, we go on…The Associate Researchers are sitting together again physically. Sometimes masked, hands well disinfected and -as usually, hosted by the institutional care of a.pass. This care might be physical as never before. After several months under the lockdown's separating conditions and a half-suspended block, live meetings seem to be a real relief! It feels like re-starting the real. Of course, this feeling is not justified. However locked away from the real-'live' and however difficult the Corona-spring was, the productivity of the online collaborations was astonishing! A new online working-site has been filled with masses of texts, notes, and plans. It might be difficult to document live working processes with the same intensity. Last block ended with a residency in Zsenne Art Lab in July, when physical meetings were possible again. Workshops were proposed by each researcher as a way to share and exchange. This residency stayed contained within a small group of people, that for the first time came together physically.
Now, the autumn block has started with a new constellation of people and new conditions - the conditions of the post-lockdown-yet-infectious-city-life. The associate researchers Pia Louwerens, Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Lili Rampre, Esteban Donoso, and block curator Nicolas Galeazzi meet again regularly. More or less every second Thursday one of us is hosting the others in their research 'field'.
When we meet, half of the meeting, we are guests in the field of the other. We think-with, take part, and relate to whatever is proposed to be practiced. The second half of the meeting is explicitly not pre-conditioned by us. We relate to what is there, to what comes up, or what is needed at the moment. The possible plays of guest and host - amongst bodies and viruses, parasites, and hosts - are multiple, and allow us to experience our relational dependencies.
There, we are again...Again and again, it is necessary to think through the relational field we are working with. Not only the forced physical distancing, the prohibited hugs, and the masked faces, but also the role of the institutional and individual responsibilities, the new urgencies for presence and absence, and a new mix of carefulness and caring, are tinted the relational questions at a.pass with the Corona crisis.
What and who are we to each other in a research group? What does the research group do for us? What does it mean to be Associate Researchers - what does it mean to be a host? What is the institutional framework - what does it allow, and what does it problematize? What kind of projections are made into the institutional, and what kind of speculations could we unleash on them?
The virus highlights these questions in a very special way. Bodily distanced, we are still physically related. It feels like a real-time training in relational ontology. Donna Haraway manifests it as “beings do not pre-exist their relating" and therefore relations do produce us, not the other way round. This way to see ontology is into our face any time we have to say hello to somebody and hesitate whether to show the elbow, to hug, or just to stay still at 1,5m apart. Anyway, or specifically now, it’s worth putting the focus more on shaping relations around us rather than to shape ourselves. If this is true, attitudes of hosting, being it places, practices, contexts, and perspectives is an approach we will explore.
"We are going"..
Derrida starts his article on Steps of Hospitality / No Hospitality with this ontological statement about being guest, always! "We are moving around: from transgression to transgression but also from digression to digression." What does that mean in the contemporary context? "This step too many." These days we are crossing lines at any moment. Unavoidably. The lines of the subject are massively shaken, enforced, penetrated, and transgressed or at least put in question by a multitude of crisis - Crisis of trust (replaced by control), a crisis of care (replaced by security), a crisis of mattering (denied by ignorance).
Derrida invites us to practice unconditional hospitality and sets out the conditions for it: to go on, step by step, to put oneself in a constant not-knowing the lines guest/host-hood.What can that mean with respect to Haraway’s relational ontology?
Probably we can explore this by speaking out invitations. Let’s challenge unconditional hospitality and ask how to shape relations as a conditioning factor to deepen our understanding of the specific relational fields we find ourselves in.
We are going on a walk..As a starting ‚seminar’ in this block, we invite ourselves for a walk in the Ardennes. We will be hosted by Elke Van Campenhout at her new residence and invite her to join our 'going on'.
Originated in the wish to give attention to all the physical and social side-processes around our research in focus, which inform our relations, trajectories, and perceptions, we want to share an experience of time besides the habitual working patterns. A hike seemed to be a simple push out of habits into a habitat where we are guests per se. Let's see how this attention infects us and our research.
New Museums Christina Stadlbauer
08 October 2020
posted by: Christina StadlbauerMy initial question for the apass research fellowship departed from the place where humans meet their non-human environment. From there it took a few turns.
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In my artistic research, I explore the relationship humankind has with its other-than human-companions and the environment we are all sharing. The research started from my long term engagement with honeybees Melliferopolis – Bees in Urban Environments - and the work done by the Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity – an artistic container to explore the ethical implications of issues related with loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity. Lately, I have also started working with bacteria in the frame of my project Kin Tsugi Transformations and reflecting on the ethics implied with microbiological lab work.
Although the precise expression of a research question, keeps slipping and escaping, I got very interested with a procedure that has been unfolding around the “new” definition of museums, launched by ICOM, the international council of museums. (see more about the MuseumDefinitionProcess.)
From my perspective, although many aspects and possible roles of museums are considered in the re-definition, a major shortcoming persists. This has to do with a form of denial of other-than-human life forms needing to be acknowledged as also having rights. Taking this serious would give them a place in our re-thinking of the order of the world, and hence their inclusion in the definition and practice of museums.
To think this further, I propose practice based experiments and explorations of how we humans relate to other species, like plants, animals, bacteria and see what forms of communication can be installed to both create a “language” towards and with them, as well as ways to express the experiences.
Behind all this, is a wish to create a “museum of the future” that maybe calls for more than a redefinition but rather a deconstruction of the museum as such. It is a container that operates decentralized, ephemeral, at times paradoxical, and it does so by collecting practices, thoughts, interventions and embodied experiences.
During the almost 2 years of Apass fellowship, some experiments manifested - partly public, partly more intimate.
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March 2019, Contribution to Festival Performatiek, at Kanal:
"Diversity is all around"- Installation and video projection.
Climate change poses a significant threat to the continuing existence of many species.
The Institute for Relocation of Biodiveristy identifies fauna and flora in danger, and creates video tutorials to assist the species in relocating to safety in a new natural habitat.In the episode Diversity Is All Around, the Institute focuses on abundance of variety created through human intervention and care as well as surrogates to alleviate the losses.
During the first block of Apass, from January to April 2019, Vladimir Miller was our curator. The settlement practice that he offers led us ultimately, to settle our entire group and work at Centre Pompidou Brussels - Kanal brut, the newly designated Citroen garage building in Brussels. He also introduced the writing practice. Simply writing. No matter what. During this block, we also were offered some workshops, of which
First thoughts about "publishing" and to make public (versus intimacy , fragility and vulnerability) were discussed, together with performativity - a term that I had to grow into, but that is today very much part of my thinking. Some of the co-curators gave important input, in these first weeks - for example Peggy Pierot, who launched us into the theme of nomadism and how and where to feel at home - a theme that touched me as it has a lot to do with my research. Also Philippe Gehmacher, Alex Artega.
A workshop with Moritz Frischkorn about logistics and the choreography of objects, made me think about my Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity in terms of linearity, flow diagrams and processes.
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Summer 2019, Troubled Garden:
For the duration of a few months, apass moved headquarters to the Zenne Garden - a community garden in Anderlecht. Nicolas Galeazzi was our curator. He proposed being outdoors, getting in contact with the soil, the plants, the rain. And he proposed a practice of adopting. Everyone adopted from someone a project. One that was stuck, that I did not want to continue, that I have forgotten, no time or energy for and that I would like to pass on to someone else.
I gave "Vegetal Speed-dating" to Laura Pante, and adopted a score from Pierre Rubio myself. A score to make an endless poem, an exercise of being present with what is and naming it. It is called "I am made of" and resulted finally in a Letter to a Wheatgrain - I am made of and became a contribution to Migrant Ecologies at Svalbard Seedvault in June 2019. Amongst other contributions, it was added to the seedvault in Norway, in a ceremonial performative act.
Converstaions and mentoring with Pierre Rubio, Kobe Matthijs, Marialena Marouda, Philip van DeDingen, Sally de Kunst - all gave extra input to my research.
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Later in 2020, this place became an important refuge when the pandemic struck Belgium. Inspired by the exhibition Learning from artemisia by Uriel Orlow, I conducted some resaerch on the plant family Artemisia. They are called wormwood in English, and are used as medicinal herbs. Its antiviral properties can cure Malaria, but are also suggested for the cure of Covid 19.
I recuperated some plantlets of Artemisia annua from Joelle Corroy, that I had found via the Artemisia house and they grew, made seeds and will be distributed and planted again next year. A distributed plantation is emerging.
Fribourg, Blue Factory - the unlearning centre - a trip to Switzerland in the heat of the summer 2019.
mini conferences (2 participants) on the topic of dispersing, dry toilets and
Collective reading moments of Bruno Latour Down to Earth and Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble. Very helpful!!
A reflection about Abundance at the Unlearning Centre, Fribourg.
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The Other Within
Foundation of a collective called the Other Other, later the Other Within (with Gosie Vervloessem, Kobe Matthijs, Marialena Marouda, Maria Lucia Cruz Correia) in the winter of 2018. with a first collective attempt to encounter the other and the other within during a sweat-lodge with Rik Verschueren in July 2019.
March 2020 – a hybrid conversation online and IRL, during the first days of the lockdown. In December, the collective is invited to Workspace Brussels for a residency to take the Others' idea further.*
March 2020 ff, S/Corona
A part of the apass fellowship happened during the time of pandemic. The in between block was officially not curated, but Lilia Mestre proposed to keep us engaged with a score. This became an online practice that we could do although we were confined and the school was closed. At times, we met with one or two other fellows, in the park. My brain was over-active, trying to understand what was going on and this practice was very useful to give my thinking shape, but also to stay in contact with others, and their thinking.
The score was repeated several times. The whole series of my questions and answers (the score) can be found here: S_Corona_March2020.A collection of videos is part of it and was publicly screened in May and June 2020, in the shop window of nadine, Brussels:
Infection is defined as the communication of a disease
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November 2020
A series of conversations about "new museums" is published as podcasts for the end presentation on the website http://dismantle.space*
Absorbing philosophical, biological, physical, institutional texts, talks, performances, exhibitions was part of the research. This was not always supportive in advancing my quest, but at times also very helpful. Some texts I had to repeatedly read, so as to find how it could connect and nourish the questions I hold. Some other texts talked so much to me that I ended up contacting the author inviting him/her to a conversation or a collaboration.
Quote by Vinciane Despret
I have sometimes thought to myself - and this is surely already the basis for a science fiction novel - that our imagination is so poor, or so egocentric, that if extraterrestrials were to visit the earth, we think it is us [humans] they would want to contact.*
A selection of references that have helped this trajectory to unfold:
Agata Siniarska: In the Beginning was a Copy, 2017
Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel: Critical Zones – exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe -23.05.2020 – Sun, 28.02.2021
Bruno Latour: Down to earth, 2017
David Abram: The Spell of the sensuous, 1996
Deborah Bird Rose: Wild Dog Dreaming, 2012
Descola Philippe: Beyond nature and culture, 2005
Donna Haraway: Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016
Federico Campagna: Technic and Magic, 2018
Jonathan Franzen: What if we stopped pretending, 2019
Karen Barad: Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies, and Entanglements That Matter, 2007
Karen Barad: On Touching, 2012
Tim Ingold: What is an animal? 1988
Ursula Leguin: The carrier bag theory of fiction, 1986
Vinciane Despret: What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, 2016
- case of: Christina Stadlbauer
Research Futures Conference Report 15 October 2020
posted by: Sina SeifeePlease note that all replies and comments in this report are not verbatim transcriptions but thematic summaries. For full statements made on the public Day 3 please see the video recordings.
Introduction
On July 8-10, 2020 a.pass has hosted the conference Research Futures. The conference took the form of a gradually expanding meeting of practitioners in the fields of art, education and artistic research. The conference was initiated by a.pass in collaboration with four other institutions of artistic research participating in a.pass' comparative benchmarking study: Dutch Art Institute, Jan Van Eyck Academy, UNIARTS Helsinki and Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. The conference brought representatives from these five institutions together with professionals working in the field of education, arts, culture, artistic research, curation and activism to expand the result of the comparative study towards a series of questions concerning the futures of artistic research in relationship to its institutions.
Background
As a publicly funded educational platform, a.pass is reviewed by the ministry of education in regular five-year intervals. With the next review process underway, a.pass took the opportunity to propose a collaborative process of self-evaluation to four other educational institutions in the field of artistic research. This process was motivated by a desire to establish a platform for mutual criticality where institutions of artistic research are not pushed to compete against each other, but can meet as partners sharing many of the same stakes. This critical intra-vision is also a balancing measure to the tendencies of such evaluations to produce an equalizing standard in a respective field of cultural production. Instead we aimed to understand, compare and strengthen our differences, in order to create greater specificity and add complexity to the developing field of artistic research.
By proposing the conference we wanted to better understand what is the range of educational and institutional strategies and practices operating in the field of artistic research today. Where do we see common struggles, pitfalls and current problematics with respect to our concerns with inclusivity, sustainable support structures, institutionalization of artistic research and politics of publication? By posing these questions we wanted to compare ourselves to the future: what are possible scenarios for artistic research to continue its contribution to the field of artistic development and production, and how can these contributions respond to the changing social realities of a challenging future?
Day 1, July 8th
On day one the representatives of the contributing institutions met to review the process of self evaluation so far. Moderated by Delphine Hesters, the independent researcher who compiled the comparative study, we looked for commonalities and differences between our institutions and how they operate and addressed the challenges we outlined together in our shared reports.
Day 2, July 9th
For Day 2 of the conference we invited ca. 20 practitioners and professionals from the field of cultural production, education and artistic research to come together with us in a working session dedicated to the four topics proposed on day one. Gathered around the topics in groups, the main objective was for each group to critically develop relationships between present conditions and implications and their future scenarios. Each group was accompanied by a Reporter, an artistic research practitioner whom we asked to develop and facilitate a specific mode of conversations among the participants of their Table, and who took on the task of compiling a report on the work of the Table for the public discussion of Day 3.
Day 3, July 10th
For this day a.pass invited all participants of the previous days and the public into the process. The link for online participation via a video conference platform was published online, and an invitation was sent out. After an introduction by Delphine Hesters, the Reporters of the Table groups presented their reports to the public. Each presentation was followed by a discussion and was open to questions, comments.
Conclusion
A much needed conversation
The three days of the conference were a multifaceted, engaged discussion on Artistic Research Institutions, an impression which was supported by many contributors and participants in the their feedback. The perspective of the institutions, installed here as a result of the benchmark process, created a much needed productive conversation around common concerns. There was a shared feeling that institutions do not exchange enough on that level: eye to eye as organizers and facilitators. Being able to discuss, self-critique, be open and constructive about the difficulties and pitfalls of organizing institutions is important to the field of artistic research and its current economical, educational and administrative context.
Comments
Please leave your comments and feedback in this collective pad
Dismantle Space 30 October 2020
posted by: Lilia MestreWith Chloe Chignell, Muslin Brothers – Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi , Flávio Rodrigo and Christina Stadlbauer
NOT at ZSenne ArtLab and NOT at Rosa Library, downtown Brussels
Website: dismantle.space
Dismantle Space gathers the research outcomes of Chloe Chignell, choreographer, editor and writer; Muslin Brothers – Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi – fashion practitioners and visual/performing artists; Flávio Rodrigo, theatre maker and teacher; and Christina Stadlbauer, visual artist and scientist.
A practice of dismantling directs the conceptual and experiential nature of all their works. More than ever it is necessary to disassemble the mechanisms that form our relationships with the worlds around us in order to rebuild perspectives on those same worlds.
Using very different tools and methods the presented research insists on making visible the cultural constructions that knit our perceptions of history, language, science and fashion to their instituting frameworks. They dismantle the structural attachments we have to those institutional machines and re-tell other possible relations to them by opening up the capacity of bodies to their collective and personal resilience.
The capability of bodies to create spaces to nurture, find out and experience muted or unseen connections, may they be social, personal, economic, environmental, racial... Through performative virtual installations, readings and conversations, these research projects unfold space to engage differently in ecosystems of relations that permit perspectives affirming something other than the status quo.
For Dismantle Space, a website has been created in collaboration between the researchers and web designer and editor Sven Dehens in order to compile the works that have been developed in the frame of the artistic research environment of a.pass. This website hosts the complicities and differences of the four researches and it will address the infrastructural concerns each of them entails.
For the End Presentations, a.pass invites three Visitors for a feedback conversation with the participants. The visitors of *Dismantle Space* are writer, editor, and dramaturge Caroline Godart, performance curator Guy Gypens and artistic research director Hicham Khalidi.
This public event is co-curated by the participants with the support of a.pass. In response to the Covid-19 imperative of not being able to gather and to accommodate the different natures of the works, the presentations will take place online. The construction of the website was a way to keep the works connected and conversing with each other.
Many thanks to ZSenne ArtLab and Rosa Library for their support, Sven Dehens for the website and Deborah Birch for text editing.
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Dismantle
Space
*The research and work of Chloe Chignell is situated between choreography and literary practice. Throughout her a.pass trajectory Chloe worked with several performative dispositifs which use scores as mediators between body and language. With much precision her work performs the intra-dependencies between them in ways that facilitate and provoke in the viewer another understanding of how the body writes and reads itself.
Dismantle
Her work Poems and Other Emergencies dismantles the preconception that language can decipher and translate the body in an absolute and unidirectional manner. The prevailing cultural supremacy of language holds back other forms of knowledge and understanding of the body as a complex entity.Space
While working at a.pass the processes Chloe created in physical space or on the space of the page triggers in the audience unforeseen attachments to cultural, social paradigms and relations between languages and mediums. For her End Presentation, the book becomes an object that expands the dimensions of the page, with the essays Language as Prosthesis and The Complete Text Would be Insufferable asking questions of the reading body, your body.*
During their trajectory at a.pass, the research project of fashion practitioners Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi -had focused on the uniform in correctional facilities. Their involvement with prisons and prisoners’ statements opened up a complex questioning of the garment-as-uniform and the process of uniformization. Using installation-performance as a research tool the artist duo created participatory situations that repositioned the role of the garment in its social, political, and economic functions. From staging the tailor’s atelier in several formats, the prayer book as a scored assembly, or audio files for confined self-appraisal they created critical environments that work to de-gender, de-class, and de-colonise clothing in contemporary society.
Dismantle
Their research dismantles the production chain and the economy behind the garment. Their work looks at fashion through the economy of belonging, establishing the strong relation between who-wears-what and the creation of harsh social segregation.Space
Their research is manifested in performative installations that delay an easy identification with the garment by softening a space in which the participants can elaborate a collective and participatory questioning about this often ignored terrain.*
Flávio Rodrigo’s research is a continual overlapping and unfolding of autobiographical writing, storytelling, and ritual. His work continues an oral tradition of recounting and holding to account that can re-tell history from the place of the minority. His research creates intersections between stories of racism and homophobia, auto-fiction, and ritual in order to claim power against normative politics in a non-normative way.
Dismantle
Flávio's research investigates the body by shedding light on the scars we all have. Working with scars as relational objects from which narratives unfold, he creates the possibility for an understanding of the self as relation between physiological trace and mythical, political, and personal time.Space
Flávio crafts rituals and participatory performances as a collective investigation into both the trauma and the many forms of healing that scars represent. These storytellings open up a space for the personal to be continuously woven into collective, political history, and affirm that the possibility of transformation is embedded in each of us, and in all of us collectively. For his End Presentation Flávio worked on a performance series The ghost scar solo that will be streamed in three episodes.
11th - 20:30 - Episode 1 - the ghost and the milk
12th - 20:30 - Episode 2 - the tent and the mirror
13th - 20:30 - Episode 3 - the body and the plate*
The research of Christina Stadlbauer addresses the relationship between humans and other-than-human companions in the environment *we* share with *them*. Her approach tackles the ethical implications of the loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity. Christina engages with multiple actors in the fields of science and art, as well as with inhabitants of urban and non-urban environments, animal, vegetable, and mineral beings. She uses interviews, video footage, and performative installations to shine a light upon muted or undervalued situations of imbalance between human and other-than-human existences.
Dismantle
The recent focus of her work has been on the Museum as a public display of knowledge. Christina questions and deconstructs the infrastructure of the museum as a colonial institution which acquires, catalogues, and communicates knowledge in a human-centered manner, neglecting other life forms. Even though at this point in history, with an attempt to reformulate the definition of the Museum, lead by ICOM – the International Council of Museums – she maintains there is a persistent neglect of other species´ knowledge.Space
Christina’s research engages in a re-imagining of the museum. A museum which explores through practice-based experiments and explorations how humans relate to other species, and dedicates itself to different forms of communication in search of a language between all parties.
For her End Presentation, Christina set a series of conversations with Agata Siniarska, choreographer, dramaturge and author; Lesley Kadish, anthropologist and specialist of disabled people in museums; and Maria Ptqk, curator and director of Museum Cabinet Sycorax. These conversations will be presented as podcasts and transcribed in text.*
BIOGRAPHIESChloe Chignell
Chloe Chignell (Australia) is a dancer and choreographer based in Brussels working across text, choreography and publishing. In 2019 she opened rile* a bookshop and project space for practices moving between publication and performance, with Sven Dehens. Her most recent work Poems and Other Emergencies premiered at Batard Festival Brussels 2020, and was supported by WorkspaceBrussels, BUDA Kortrijk, Lucy Geurin Inc and La Balsamine. She graduated from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (Brussels, 2018), She has a Bachelor in Dance from Victorian College of the Arts, (Melbourne, 2013) and studied a writing and residency program at DOCH (Stockholm, 2017). As a choreographer Chloe has been commissioned by the Keir Choreographic Award for the creation of Deep Shine (Melbourne) touring to Japan for The Awaji Art Festival. She presented a short work forever in both directions for the Venice Biennale’s Biennale of Dance (2017). As a dancer Chloe has worked for Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Ingrid Berger Myhre, Anna Gaiotti, Gry Tingskog, Atlanta Eke, Ellen Söderhult, Phoebe Berglund and James Bachelor performing in Australia and across Europe. Chloe is co-editor of This Container magazine, currently in its 8th edition based between Stockholm, Brussels and Melbourne. Her writing has been published by This Container, Koreografi, Indigo Dance Magazine (PAF) and Realtime (Australia). She has developed choreographic writing and reading formats hosted by Kottinspektionen (Stockholm), PraxisFestivalen (Oslo), PAF (France) Scene:Bluss (Norway). She is co-initiator of PO$$E a dance and reading group .
www.chloechignell.com / www.rile.space / www.thiscontainer.com*
Muslin Brothers - Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi
Muslin Brothers (Tamar Levit and Yaen Levi) acts as both a fashion brand and research studio speculating on the way personal, social, and political systems shape and are shaped through clothing. It is named after the muslin fabric widely used to make veils, men shirts, and clothing prototypes prior to production.
The duo’s work overlaps between wearables, spatial, performance, image-making, and exchange of information, using the technologies of clothes-wearing and clothing production lines for a poetic investigation into the biography of non-designer design.
They hold a B.A in fashion design, from Shenkar, college of engineering, design and art, Israel.
Their work has been shown in platforms such as the Kanal centre Pompidou Brussels, Parsons New York, Stockholm Art university, Israeli Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jerusalem design week, and London and Tel Aviv fashion weeks. They were designers in residency at Arad contemporary art center (2020) Artez Academie Arnhem (2018) and London's college CFE (2016). Winners of design award from the Israeli culture ministry (2018), and the pais grant for fashion design (2016).
www.muslinbrothers.com*
Flávio Rodrigo
Flávio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira, 37, gay, brazilian, artist, lives in Brussels. He is a performer. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Scenic Arts from State University of Campinas – UNICAMP (2004), a Specialization Degree in Psychopedagogy from FHO – UNIARARAS (2012), a Specialization Degree from UCB (2013) and a post-master degree in Performing Arts in a.pass (Advanced Performing and Scenography Studies – 2020). He is now undergoing a Master's programme in Speculative Narration and Videography at the ERG (École de Recherche et Graphisme) de l'Université Saint Luc.*
Christina Stadlbauer
Christina is an artist and researcher. She works at the cracks of arts and sciences, and develops her research around non human agencies - collective intelligence, interspecies communication and the relation between culture and nature. Christina obtained a PhD in Natural Sciences and her practice is informed and influenced by her scientific understanding. She has launched several artistic long term initiatives: like Melliferopolis, an artistic platform to engage with honeybees and their worlds, the Institute for Relocation of Biodiversity – an artistic container to explore the ethical implications of issues related with loss of habitat and the collapse of diversity, and Kin Tsugi Transformations, a work strand with bacteria that reflects on the ethics implied with microbiological lab work and our strive for control and imperfection.
A Good Workshop Conversation with Krõõt Juurak
07 December 2020
posted by: Vladimir Miller- case of: Vladimir Miller
THE ASYLUM (FOR DESIRING BODIES) Block 2021 I curated by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout/The Monastery
12 December 2020
posted by: Lilia Mestre
An asylum is a place of refuge. Of taking leave of the world for a limited period of time. It is a place out of the world. Where rules function differently. Where people without a place of belonging are temporarily ‘parked’ in order to mend their ways. It is a place for the ones that don’t fit the grid: mental patients, refugees, people suffering from ailments of all kinds. Desiring bodies, in search of papers, legitimacy, acceptance, health, reconnection to the outside world.In that sense it is also a place of hope, a world-in-a-world where difference can live and be accepted. Maybe even celebrated. Where the norms are temporarily suspended, and common sense rules no longer apply. In this gap, in this suspension, wild thoughts can go unchecked. Dubious behaviour flies under the radar.
For this block, Elle/Elke Van Campenhout/The Monastery curates a block for finding refuge from the status quo of the arts. A place to turn inwards, temporarily turning sideways from the demands of the artistic world and society. To look at what actually wants to be said, and experimented. What is the desire of the artist, of the researcher, that flows underneath the work? Which are the parts in the research that flow like ghosts through the methodologies and conceptual frameworks.? What else is there but dossier language and salonfahigkeit? What is there that can not float to the surface, but can only be seen from the back, using a hand-held mirror?
The Asylum (for Desiring Bodies) proposes to take a close look at our desires, these lines of flight that connect us to the world and the others. To look with radical honesty to our drives and attractions, and enter into the intimate zone of connection: with our work, with the others, with the body of the group. The emphasis lies on encountering each other anew, working with the stories we construct about ourselves and the work we make. And tinkering with transforming these, just for a moment, to open up the multicolored layers of sediment they are built on.
Stepping out of the framework of ‘acceptable’ or normative knowledge production into murkier zones of memory, intimacy, body knowledge, and dark rooms. A time to rest, to turn inwards, to become undone. As an artist, a worker or whatever you think you are…
No Mountains, Rivers or Trees A Conversation with Elke van Campenhout
13 January 2021
posted by: Vladimir MillerA recorded and written conversation
I feel like leaving the room End Presentations 2021 I
16 January 2021
posted by: Lilia Mestrea.pass welcomes you the:
29th January 2021 – 19:30 – TV show -Collective presentation – 2h30 hoursJoin Zoom Meeting
is finished....Check out : https://ifeellikeleavingtheroom.online/
I feel like leaving the room is the title of the postgraduate End Presentations of researchers Rui Calvo (film maker), Quinsy Gario (poet, visual and performance artist), Adriano Wilfert Jensen (choreographer), Magdalena Ptasznik, (choreographer) and Kasia Tórz (dramaturg and writer).
After attending to the extended one year program at a.pass, the five researchers finish their trajectory with an online presentation of a collective website. Covid 19 and the restrictions of the confinement have framed the space of these public presentations in an uncanny entanglement between the private and the public. I feel like leaving the room is more than anything the (liminal) desire to come together. The form of this coming together takes shape around an ad-hoc TV show that will be streamed the 29th of January from the a.pass studio as an attempt to still intertwine thoughts and experiences.
In the beginning, the space for this public moment was imagined as a living room, as a place where the borders of the informal and the formal are blurred. Not as a real physical living-room but by using the conditions implied in such well known private (though public) environment, with the aim of engaging the audience in a different way. What happens when research becomes public as a workshop, a power point presentation, a film, a dance or a walk that steers from such a hangout surrounding?
As a consequence of the pandemic that determines the conditions of coming together – the living room became the desired ‘leaving room’ – a place, as well, between the private and the public but enclosing the publicness in separated private spaces with only one window – a window to the virtual. The artists researchers addressed that liminal space in various ways in accordance with the medium they mainly work with. Inevitably, the translations that will take place, address the current situation of the confinement, while trying to reach out to the world.
Rui Calvo's research on non-linear narratives in cinema, has worked with a group of performers in closed environments, claustrophobic settings, directive instructions that constrain the performers, as much as the audience, in a enclosed space of angst. In his films, no-one knows what, where and how these characters got together and which forces bind them to the situation they find themselves in. Like in a ‘chamber piece’ a small number of characters interacting over a short period of time in a limited environment create an awkward intimacy caught by the camera, from which they (maybe) want to leave. There is always the promise of an outside world created by a window, a curtain or the staircase, a promise that is never fulfilled. Cinema (audiovisual setting) is the medium by excellence we can access during the times we live. The medium that allows us to escape from the living room. But to where?
with Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Diego Echegoyen, Federico Vladimir, Flávio Rodrigo, Lilia Mestre, Lucia Palladino, Nathaniel Moore and Sara Manente.
Quinsy Gario's research focuses on de-colonial practices by revisiting archival material, institutional protocols and historical facts questioning the politics behind who gets to speak, when and how. By re-using existing materials, his work re-calls systems of oppression and proposes strategies and tactics of epistemic disobedience and fugitivity. For his End Presentation, Quinsy thinks through the Fragile sticker, used in the transport, and the imagery of travel, migration and seeking refuge elsewhere. The proposition gives attention to the precarious status quo of mobility and the destitution of private space of diaspora and fragile groups, specially threatened in time of forced confinement.
Adriano Wilfert Jensen ’s research followed three interrelated paths: spectatorship as practice, dance as a labor of depersonalizing the self and politics of collaboration. Through collaborative processes Adriano, developed dances that sought to cultivate response -ability in spectatorial practice. For his End Presentation he will present a letter on practice based spectactorship along with commented dance scores on the webpage of the group.
Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.
Kasia Tórz's, research on the notion of dissolving boundaries (smarginatura) engages in the liminal space between the private and the public, the textual and the image, reality and imagination, the conscious and the unconscious. Smarginatura makes reference to the writer Elena Ferrante and the main character of her Neapolitan Novels, Lila Cerullo, who experiences losing her solid outlines and melting into her surroundings. Kasia experimented with expanded forms of storytelling by engaging with image, voice, body practices and performance in her writing, by blurring the lines between reality and fiction in a daily life basis. For her End Presentation she will invite the audience to a nocturnal session.
This introduction took the flavour of a weather report. As times change in unforeseen ways, as complex forces conduct the environment, as the temperature is warmer than normal, as violence is unrated, as the soul is disoriented, as politics are going ashtray, the weather, here in Brussels, is grey and symptomatic of great confusion.
Stay home for now, imagine spring is coming soon and we all feel like leaving the room.*
BIOS ad extra content
Rui Calvo is a Brazilian filmmaker who works as screenwriter, director and editor. He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a degree in Audiovisual Arts. Among his short films are “Whole Man” and “Quito”, which were screened at festivals in different countries, as Canada, England, South Africa and Argentina. “The Death of Helena”, his first feature film as a director and screenwriter, was recipient of a grant for film project development in Brazil. Now he is looking for opportunities to produce the movie in a country governed by the far-right and which has been destroying, among other things, the cultural sector.
In most of Rui's previous short-films, the discomfort regarding one’s own body and the non-belonging feeling (or the lack of identity) are part of the content. Formerly, these concerns were built in the script in a linear narrative way and then translated into images. Coming to a.pass was a way of take a distance from the cinema field and think of audiovisual narrative otherwise. Through out the program, Rui addresses his initial question, on how to film bodies and not imprison them in rational discourse by taking “real life” as much as a product of convention as acting, by giving instructions ( that do not build a character) to the performers to play with in front of the camera and by creating filming settings that don't reassure a fictional background where the performers can situate themselves. In this way, the production of fiction is unstable and influenced by the shooting process itself, in which the performers hover between being characters and themselves, creating subjectivity through filming. The alchemy of these elements produces encounters filled with tension, vulnerability and exposure to the other and also to the camera, which is left with an undergoing process of rupture, misunderstanding and indeterminacy, creating this way conditions for under-narratives to appear.*
Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten, two island that share continued Dutch colonial occupation. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario's most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012). As a member of the collective Family Connection established in 2005 by Glenda Martinus and Gala Martinus, respectively his mother and aunt, his current research is attempting to institute another way of archiving. He is a Utrecht University media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies alumnus and a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague. He is a 2017 Humanity in Action Detroit Fellow, 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, 2019/2020 APASS participant and a 2020/2021 Sandberg Institute Critical Studies Fellow. Gario received the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe 12 Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in among other places Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), TENT (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg). Gario is also currently running for Dutch parliament as a candidate for the political party BIJ1.
Quinsy entered the program studying practices of refusal as found within Caribbean performance practices and his research trajectory brought him to the Baltics thinking through postsocialism and postcolonialism. For the a.pass End Presentation Quinsy is presenting #FragileRoots which is a companion piece to #FragileRoutes, a work presented at the Bâtard Festival 2021 and part of a larger series of work and research. At the center of the proposition is the suitcase bought in Hong Kong by the Estonian artist Kristina Norman and gifted to Quinsy during his research residency at the Estonian Art Academy. The residency was to further research into the depiction and usage of the depictions of St. Maurice in the Baltic region. The Sudanese Catholic saint had been adopted as the patron saint of the Blackheads Brotherhood, a merchant guild of unwed men in at the end of the 14th Century. After the end of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic region the various countries of the Baltic became nations again and started to further develop national narratives which included or excluded the remnants of this guild. Through the series of works Quinsy is reflecting on Blackness, migration, improvisation and practices of refusal. This particular piece consists of the remnants of the aforementioned suitcase, stickers bought at the lowbudget department store Daily Style and slides that were bought at a second hand store in Estonia.The stickers are used for precious cargo and contain the word 'Fragile' and the slides depict images from the Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 missions and a vacation by an unnamed group of white individuals to Cuba in the 1960's. Together with toys depicting underwater sea life, extendable mirrors and coasters with black glitter #FragileRoots pushes for epistemic disobedience and fugitive approaches to our collective presents, pasts and futures.
*
Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public (Microclimates I and II, Zachęta National Gallery 2018-2019, Cli-Fi at BWA Gallery Wrocław 2019). Magdalena is a member of a collective of choreographers Centrum w Ruchu (Warsaw), graduate of School for New Dance Development (SNDO), and sociology at Warsaw University. Since 2015 together with Maria Stokłosa and Renata Piotrowska she has been developing in Warsaw an educational project Choreography in Motion: Experimental Choreography Course. She lives in Amsterdam and Warsaw.
“My research materializes as written texts, which experiment with the form of the score—a choreographic tool. I started this journey with the idea of creating scores for collective participatory performances. Throughout the process, and the period of confinement we found ourselves in, the research transformed into an exploration of writing. I’m looking into what kind of performance these texts can produce with a reader. I propose to look at the performativity taking place in an intimate sphere activated through reading. I understand it as an interobjective space created by a reader, a score, and an environment. Scores direct its readers’ attention towards the relations within an environment of which they are part. In particular, I explore how we take part in the materiality of the environment as well as the relations we are already engaged in and have potential to engage with. Building upon observation and somatic experience, I investigate environmental relations through navigating attention and developing fictions. The ultimate reference and a tool to think with is, for me, geology, which brings us to the earth as the basic structure of our material being. Geological time teaches us about the constant movement of any and all matter, and it gives us a more-than-human perspective to time.”
*
Adriano Wilfert Jensen works with dance and choreography to analyse and produce conditions of relations. His practice manifests in making, performing, writing about, curating, representing and dealing choreography, dancing for other artists, as well as other occupations like a series of cocktail hang outs, publications, research projects, teaching etc.
Together with Simon Asencio he is since 2014 running Galerie – an immaterial gallery for immaterial artworks. And with Emma Daniel he is dancing for the dinosaurs in Spending Time With Dinosaurs. Together with Linda Blomqvist, Anna Gaïotti and Emma Daniel he organized Indigo Dance Festival, Magazine and Tink Thanks at Performing Arts Forum. In 2017 he initiated the research project analysis of which his a.pass research was part. In 2019 he premiered the group piece feelings as part of the research analysis, and in the summer 2021 he will premiere a new group piece informed by his research at a.pass.Adriano, has been researching on what he calls practice-based spectatorship and dance as a labour dispositif for depersonalizing the self. He wrote a letter developing the notion of practice-based spectatorship as a tool to study how different dance works, which have shaped his own practice, condition spectatorship conventions. Through this letter, a contextualization of how his practice is situated by and indebted to the work of others, takes place. In addition, Adriano also developed a series of dances by analyzing and intervening in existing historical dance protocols. Working on these dances together with the research of spectatorship he questioned how to re-relate to the self beyond individualism, in dance and its spectatorship.
*
Kasia Tórz. Writer, dramaturg, researcher, is seeking for other than language-based ways of writing, i.a. working with images or body practices focused on internal movement. In that framework, she is interested in the melting points of the poetic, existential and political. Graduate from Philosophy at the University of Warsaw, participant of doctoral studies at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw. Between 2007-2011 she collaborated with Twożywo – a no longer existing Polish urban art group – at projects like: Zaciemnienie / Twilight and several wall paintings. Between 2008-2019 she has programmed a thematic section of the Malta Festival Poznań (PL) called ‘Idioms’. Since 2019 she has worked with Needcompany – a Brussels based theatre collective, as artistic & programme developer.
Smarginatura {this is a demo}
How are we touched by and through the live act – the act of seeing? What goes through the porous surface of our skin? What kinds of experiences expand our sensitivity? Who sets the scale of the image? The contour of the skyline? When do we break upon the pressure of impulses, when do we freeze, and when do we burn? What are the politics of seeing that we adapt to and how to alter them? Smarginatura {this is a demo} is a radio- broadcast, a live-like transmission of words, images and sounds. It invites the audience to explore the depth of the surface.*
I am deeply grateful to Lilia Mestre and the a.pass researchers who worked in front of my camera, being vulnerable, violent, playful, cheating, confused, confusing and much more: Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Diego Echegoyen, Federico Vladimir, Flávio Rodrigo, Lucia Palladino and Nathaniel Moore. I also thank my mentor, Sara Manente, who participated as a performer in two videos. They were all engaged in doing and thinking with me, each with a different background and contributing in a unique way. The trajectory the research has taken is also due to their collaboration.
I have a background in cinema and I came to a.pass in order to take a distance from this field. I wanted to think of the audiovisual narrative otherwise. My initial questions surrounded different ways of filming bodies while not imprisoning them in rational discourse. How to create characters that push these limits and reject the logic of belonging, of confirmation? The a.pass proposals and the reading of different texts throughout the trajectory produced new desires that led the research into an eternal conflict between theory and practice. My focus was on filming bodies, their faces, their gestures. Over the course of my research trajectory in a.pass, the constant practice of shooting people from the program who were interested in taking part in the videos, and editing the material gradually, brought new important questions to explore, but the initial one always remained there, always being transformed and gaining broader implications. I have allowed myself to make choices that may be considered naivety or failure, but they were important for discoveries and new paths. So in this portfolio I will present the proposition of each video I made in a.pass; the instructions given to the performers to work in front of the camera; the videos themselves; some notes of the discussions with curators, mentors and researchers about the practice; and quotes of books and texts I was reading – all according to my point of view in the present, while writing and most importantly, editing, as a way of thinking, filming, and rethinking the whole trajectory.
FIRST BLOCK: TROUBLED GARDENS
In the beginning of the block, I had in mind:
“Une notion comme celle d’identité, aujourd’hui entièrement policière (connotations psychologiques comprises, du ressort des redresseurs de moi en tous genres), recouvre bien un aspect de cette perte: le visage doit être identique, non au sujet, mais à sa définition. Il n’est plus la fenêtre de l’âme, mais une affiche, un slogan, une étiquette, un badge.” A notion like that of identity, today entirely policed (psychological implications included, the responsibility of all kinds of redressers of self) does contain an aspect of this loss: the face must be identical not to the subject but to its definition. It is no longer the window to the soul, but a poster, a slogan, a label, a badge. - JACQUES AUMONT
FIRST VIDEO (june 2019)
[embed]https://vimeo.com/501681981/b76441f773[/embed]
Shooting part I: frame Caterina’s body in wide shot. She is moving, dancing, rehearsing. An introduction to the next shot, creating a curiosity about her.
Shooting part II: Caterina’s face.
Instructions to Caterina:
Caterina’s feedback: “I was not super much thinking and I was just trying to be, like, calm. [...] At first I was trying to be pretty and then I was a bit bored of myself… And… It’s not that I, I was thinking into something… I was just trying to focus on being here [...] But I was trying to be calm. To not to do, so... but I think I did a lot. [...] Or try to not have an opinion of what I was doing.”
Shooting part III: Flávio’s face. It was filmed later, without Caterina and it was less improvised, since I was planning the filming according to what happened in the previous shoot.
Instructions to Flávio:
Editing: connect Caterina’s and Flávio’s close-ups as if they were shot and countershot. Since they don’t interact and don’t talk about the same subjects, observe what their faces and gestures express in that mixture.
Video's presentation feedback: Philippine Hoegen, one of the mentors of the block, sees a mixed relationship with the object, a game with it, in which there were no signifiers for Caterina. Surface x psychology. She says that the fact of framing implies a choice and immediately creates a relationship. Nicolas observes that a causality was created during editing, but not only that. A way of editing that controls and loses control, falls in love with faces. Caterina thinks I should be busy with clarifying the methodology of editing, and my role as an editor. It makes me think back to my interest in the strength of the instant over the logic of an action. How to play with this strength in the editing?
SECOND VIDEO (july 2019)
[embed]https://vimeo.com/500775699/6089a324a8[/embed]
Unlike the first video, this one is about interaction between performers, and most of the time the camera is far away from them. The general situation of the scene is not clear, but each of them has two or three instructions to follow, a score in which they hover between fiction and being themselves – a creation of subjectivity through filming. None knows the instructions of the others. A score to ensure that the performers are not subordinate to the causality of narrative, that they surpass the limits of a given role and don’t reduce themselves to a character or an identity.
Instructions to the performers:
Flávio
. all the time you must be eating a fruit or talking
. you don’t want Diego in bed
Lilia
. read a book (Strangers to Ourselves or Sexus) that you find on the bed, sometimes aloud
. attentively observe Flávio and his body
. invite Diego to bed
. “Do you wanna go back to Brazil?”
Diego
. make questions about the couple Lilia and Flávio
. say many times: “I’m ok. Don’t worry.” “Do you want me to leave?”
. don’t look at them too much and when you look, disguise that you are looking
The close-ups are shot after the improvisation, a sort of interview in which I ask them questions related to subjects they were discussing in the shooting.
The improvisation is shot three times, alway restarting from the beginning, like in a rehearsal in which a scene is improved and a dramaturgy is created. But the aim is to create a score that allows people and relationships to be constantly in construction. To go further in this goal, the répétition (rehearsal and repetition in French) will be practiced in a different way in the following a.pass blocks, recording an ongoing situation that stops only when the shooting finishes (this subject will be explored later on).
The wide shot shows the space in its entirety, a recognizable space (a bedroom) that somehow situates the fictional situation. But it’s more a backdrop for a pursuit. Placing people together in bed is charged with meaning, and I want to see how they would deal with this without having a clear fictional framing.
Since the camera doesn’t get close to the performers, it doesn’t interfere much in the way they act. In some videos further on, I will hold it closer to them, making the intrusion of filming more noticeable, and opening the possibility for the performers to experience a different embodiment via the intersection of context and camera.
In this video, I don’t see a different temporality being created, nor a puncture (something that appears in the middle, between fiction and reality) or an awkwardness. Sometimes something close to this happens, like at 17:50 in the timeline of this video: Lilia says she feels more respected now that she’s getting older, then she covers herself with a blanket and talks about disappearing, not being framed. Her words cause discomfort in Flávio and Diego. There is a moment of silence in which they don’t know how to act. It’s an important quality in the development of the research, which I will go further with in the next videos.
During the video’s presentation in a.pass, Nicolas Galeazzi, curator of the block, observes that some instructions given to the performers have different qualities compared to others. For example, “all the time you must be eating a fruit or talking” produces something different to “you don’t want Diego in bed.” This is another practise I develop in the following block.
"Learning to be awkward, to be graceful, to leap, and to fall is a training in attention and also in revisceralizing one's bodily intuition. It is a training that collapses getting hurt with making a life, but that includes the welcoming of exposure alongside of a dread of it. There can be no change in life without revisceralization. This involves all kinds of loss and transitional suspension." - LAUREN BERLANT
“Which is preferable: changing my personality and keeping my body, or changing my body and keeping my current manner of experiencing reality? A fake dilemma. Our personalities arise from this very gap between body and reality.” - PAUL PRECIADO
“Contrary to the Lacanian theory of the mirror state, according to which the child’s subjectivity is formed when it recognizes itself for the first time in its specular image, political subjectivity emerges precisely when the subject does not recognize itself in its representation. It is fundamental not to recognize oneself. Derecognition, disidentification is a condition for the emergence of the political as the possibility of transforming reality.” - PAUL PRECIADO
“Perhaps Lingin suggests, rather than transmitting clear meanings, the encounter rests on an acknowledgment of an elemental otherness that is related to our own. ‘We don't relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth with our individual sensibility and sensuality’. We communicate to one another the light your eyes know...’” - AVIVAH GOTTLIEB ZORNBERG quoted by KAREN BARAD
“Living compassionately, sharing in the suffering of the other, does not require anything like complete understanding (and might, in fact, necessitate the disruption of this very yearning).” - KAREN BARAD
“Saying 'the truth is a creation’ implies that the production of truth goes through a series of operations consisting in working a matter, a series of falsifications in the literal sense... each one is a falsifier of the other, each one understands in his own the notion proposed by the other. It is these powers of the false that will produce the true.” - GILLES DELEUZE
SECOND BLOCK: A LOOMING SCORE
One of the proposals of this block is a weekly meeting where each person presents 5 minutes of a practice, work, or something regarding their research, and about which another participant asks a question, and a third one answers on behalf of the first. Each asks and answers on the basis of his/her own research. I present videos that I shoot one day per week with performers and edit right after filming. Throughout this process, my questions from the previous block remain, but with new contours, and alongside new questions. The room where I film the videos is dark and not recognizable as a place: it’s not a living room, a bar, a rehearsal room, thus troubling the space where the performers can situate themselves (in fiction or reality). This creates the conditions for sub-narratives to arise and evolve. The instructions given to the performers have one or more of the characteristics listed below:
One new fundamental element of these videos is violence. There’s violence in the stories the performers are asked to tell, but none are told the instructions of the others, so there’s a tension of not knowing who has instructions that demand disrespect or aggression, nor what they might do with them (so they play a dynamic of glances). There is the violence of framing bodies, allowing the spectator to see what the performers see and also to watch the seeing, which the performers can’t. The cut in the editing becomes more prominent once the context (either real or fictional) is more unclear; every cut becomes an ellipse. The ellipse can be considered violent, but it can also be seen as a way of interfering in the moving image, freeing it from the surveilling eyes of the spectator.
Having to admit some aggression and to move within dissatisfaction (the inconvenience of other people), I ask them to not take the agressions too personally and to look for something in between the score and the improvisation. What kind of encounter is possible in such a context of tension, vulnerability, exposure to the other and to the camera, ongoing rupture, misunderstanding and indeterminacy? What kind of encounter is possible in a situation where the body has no stable response to an intention, because neither the filmmaker nor the performers have access to one? How much are these violent thoughts already embedded in the performers? If in the beginning of the research there was still an idea of character – though already unstable and influenced by the filming process itself – now this idea is even more troubled. What can be imagined in that scenario? What kind of alchemy is produced with those elements?
The instructions are given to the performers right before filming and, once I start shooting, I record uninterruptedly for one or two hours in the same space. So the actions, lines and stories contained in the instructions are repeated many times in an ongoing situation, creating a different temporality. The state of not knowing is prolonged. It’s a framed encounter in which improvisations are perpetually rearranged and rearticulated. The language spoken is mostly English, which none of us has as our mother tongue, and which therefore evolves as queered communication. This becomes an important element in my work within this context.
The video below is the final edit of all the videos I made throughout the looming score.
[embed]https://vimeo.com/496829852/95cb3f8106[/embed]
Instructions for the visitors:
Instructions for the performers:
first part
everyone but Lilia
Lilia
Caterina
Flávio
Lucia
second part
Lilia
Caterina
Flávio
third part
Flávio
Diego
forth part
Lucia
Flávio
Diego
fifth part
Caterina
Lilia
The camera’s potential to interfere with the improvisation of the performers is not yet as incisive in these videos as it could be. Most of the time I am holding the camera far away and getting closer only by zooming in. In later videos, the camera, as well as my presence, will be more intrusive or at least there I will make attempts towards this. Jeroen Peeters, one of my mentors, participates in a filming practice as an observer and draws my attention to the question of whether I should be more present in the shooting. I think about my voice, my gestures (hors champ or not), the camera and my thoughts as possible agents of interference.* Jeroen also remarks on the private dramaturgy that is produced in each performer. I could also play more with my interference, allowing it to facilitate or threaten what is being produced.
* For me, it seems that “interference” is a concept that was always part of the research, but it was Lilia who drew my attention to it in a conversation in my last block.
“It is repetition that which ruins and degrades us, but it is repetition that which can save us and allow us to escape from the other repetition. Kierkegaard had already opposed a fettering, degrading repetition of the past to a repetition of faith, directed towards the future, which restored everything to us in a power which was not that of Good but of the absurd. To the eternal return as reproduction of something always already-accomplished, is opposed the eternal return as resurrection, a new gift of the new, of the possible.” - GILLES DELEUZE
“Tout l’effort du développement ‘technique’ du cinéma [...] revient à naturaliser l’image cinématographique, c'est-à-dire à la domestiquer, à la familiariser [...] Adieu à l'inquiétante étrangeté, adieu à l’altérité non récupérable, adieu au réel non encore cadrable.” The whole endeavour of ‘technical’ development in cinema [...] comes back to naturalising the cinematographique image, meaning domesticating it, familiarising it [...] Goodbye to troubling strangeness, goodbye to irretrievable otherness, goodbye to the as-yet-unframeable real. - JEAN-LOUIS COMMOLI
“The lack of elements to glue things creates an openness, a possibility of never settling. We cannot block out the irrationality, the perversity, the madness we fear, in the hopes of a more orderly world. [...] Indeterminacy is not a lack, a loss, but an affirmation, a celebration of the plentitude of nothingness.” - KAREN BARAD
“Relationality always includes a scenic component, a fantasmatic staging.”
“Transforming the story of cause and effect to a spectacle of cause and side effects.” - LAUREN BELANT“...identity allows us to distance ourselves from any actual manifestation of queerness”
“...accept the inauthencity at the core of something, understand it as a social institution, while still self-consciously and undeceivedly, succumbing to it.” - DAVID HALPERINTHE IN-BETWEEN (BLOCK)
(an extra block to keep working on our research while having a lot of questions and a myriad of uncertain responses in self-confinement)
[embed]https://vimeo.com/502113573/783aa7dbda[/embed]
[embed]https://vimeo.com/499227081/7b346852c7[/embed]
[embed]https://vimeo.com/499345273/0150a29bd1[/embed]
“Lies are so hard to keep track of. It's like you're constantly being reborn every time you begin a new sentence.” - DENNIS COOPER
“L'art de vivre, c'est de tuer la psychologie, de créer avec soi-même et avec les autres des individualités, des êtres, des relations, des qualités qui soient innomés.” The art of living is to kill psychology, to create with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, beings, relations, qualities. - MICHEL FOUCAULT
“Ideia de identidade só funciona quando a subjetividade está reduzida ao sujeito”. The idea of identity only works when subjectivity is reduced to the subject. - SUELY ROLNIK
"Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and — performativity." - EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK
FOURTH BLOCK: SETTLEMENT
The aim of the Settlement workshop is “to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass Settlement and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at the a.pass main space will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process.” Trying to adapt my research to this proposal, I work on making a set for my filming practice. A nondescript space, a potential landscape that doesn’t represent a specific place but whose elements engender different connotations according to the acting of the performers and how I choose frame (dark spots, a red curtain, a corridor).
The following video is shot in that space, mixing up a private and intimate sphere with a theatrical scene. Although the performers discuss the news, tell personal stories and perform violent gestures, there is no predetermined discourse. The aim is to have no project, to preserve a way of filming that is a form of thinking in real time, to create the conditions for something to emerge, to articulate new meanings or to dislocate the subject of meaning altogether. In this shoot, the performers acknowledge the camera and the viewer’s presence more, resulting in uncomfortable physical responses to the act of being filmed and encaged, or to the feeling of being “unmasked.”
My work with the camera and the editing opens a negotiation between what I watch, what I feel about it, what I would like to produce. There are moments that flow in their whole duration (“real time”) and other ones that I cut more, creating a cumulative effect of time.
[embed]https://vimeo.com/501671946/2d2e19e6f1[/embed]
Some extracts from the interview with the performers of the video above (Andrea Zavala Folache, Caterina Mora, Lilia Mestre) about their experience and Kasia Tórz as a mediator. The transcription is faithful to the syntax of the speakers.
RC: How would you define the agency you had?
LM: ...is about interfering, possibility of interfering. Dislocating as well what’s happening. And also [...] to not do, you can stop anytime. [...] it’s not sequential instruction in a way. I think interference is the best word. Which is a generator.
[...]
I think we are on standby and then things start to happen. There’s quite some rupture [...] It doesn’t need to be violent [...] but to cut through.
KT: Andrea, do you also share this notion of interfering?
AZF: Yes, in the sense of… I thought the agency I was given or I was taken was one with autonomy, like that the agency was autonomous to... to be responsible of when to interfere or change track of things or when to enable the score or disable it. It makes me think also of interdependence, so interfering as a sort of… that this fear that creates the action where the three of us are agents, is one that is interconnected. So it’s an interdependent relationship of… I have my autonomy but it doesn’t take away the responsibility to actually, anything I do can be changing how things will resolve themselves or get lost.
CM: So for me about interference, I don’t feel it more in terms of the dramaturgy because I feel more the continuation actually, the repetition of the rule. And when I see interference is more in terms of the rhythm, so something in the rhythm of what’s happening is being cut but something that appears. But for me the agency is more related to how much can I push the rule, how much the rule resists. My agency is kind of being as obedient as possible.
RC: How much agency you have? Is it something you can play with or... are you in a trap? Does vulnerability allow boundaries to be open or the opposite?
LM: The instructions are my guidelines to interfere. [...] I do feel trapped but not badly. It also feels like “Ok, this is what you can do”, so it’s also relaxing to know that “ok, this is what you can do”. It’s not a trap in a negative way, like finding our way out of there. But I feel that the conditions are well established, I can’t... I’m well situated. Maybe the environment defines very much where you are and how you can move within that space.
[...]
In terms of vulnerability, I do feel vulnerable... There’s nothing bad. I never felt bad. Neither to feel trapped. Neither to feel vulnerable. Neither to interfere. So there’s something there supporting these actions or these qualities that you are naming. So I also feel confident that I can feel vulnerable. Sometimes I think it’s needed somehow so I’ll work for that, to try to be in that place of vulnerability. This is my own thing.
KS: Have you ever questioned the instructions or had a desire to add something or to cheat a bit?
AZF: For me, the cheating is totally inscribed in the rules somehow. I am given enough information to know I can’t know all the rules… So there's an impossibility for me to know everything, you know, to hold all the information of the rules. So then there’s gaps of interpretation that opens up a... Maybe that’s also for the agency, a sense of being able to interpret and cheat. But I think when I was performing... It’s kind of actually hard to cheat because the rules are not so many so there’s a lot of space to do many other things… so the rules imply that not everything that I would do it’s a rule or something the director has told me to, so then all those other things are they cheating? So to cheat I guess would be to not obey the rule so even that it’s impossible. I mean unless we have a long conversation about exactly how my interpretation can follow a rule, but so I feel like it’s a sort of puzzle that I enter. [...] And the fact that I’m giving the information to have enough knowledge that it is a puzzle, then I feel a lot of trust from both Lilia and Caterina, and from Rui. And then the vulnerability can actually be embraced in a way. I like to think that vulnerability doesn’t contradict confidence. That in order to be vulnerable, especially in performing, you need confidence to actually be vulnerable for something. So that trust for me is really key. You know, that you trust my interpretations, my cheating, my following the rules, all of this is part of the puzzle. And I don’t feel totally trapped in it but I understand that walls are needed somehow.
RC: The instructions allow cruel actions, but these violences are not often followed by a reaction (no punishment, no confrontation, no resolution). Do you feel surprised by some of the actions of the others and how do you deal with it?
LM: Instructions are not much given of how to react but more how to propose. (...) In relation to the one when Andrea calls me cunt, that was hard actually. I mean it was difficult to… And then it was very interesting to see how I could somehow compensate that humiliation somehow, right? How can I reunite myself again as a character? So it's a moment of being disarmed, you’re like “ok”, and then how do I build it up, how do I create some consistency that I don’t collapse. How to rebuild to be able to play, to be able to be there.
AZF: I also felt that when I called Lilia a cunt, the violence was in realizing that I would not do that in my life. So what am I saying “yes” to here?. Like am I doing it for the sake of art or a friend? So the fiction of the apparatus sort of save the violence but there’s still an ethical question in me of how far do I go for art. Because if I would be an actress following a script, people would know I’m a character. So it’s sort of excused in a way. And here because part of the script is taken out or something, it’s almost like I’m playing Andrea so I am close to reality. So people don’t know how I am playing with fiction actually, so the fictions that I play for myself are not totally visible. Then that kind of unappointed fiction or undefined fiction is what is the most violent of the work. But at the same time there’s still a part of fiction so I don’t feel extreme, not actually that it is causing any deep trouble.
CM: It often happens I’m kind of surprised in my interior. And then it’s a bit shocking because… the camera is there not far away… Depending on how this surprise is, I’m also trying to integrate it. [...] A lot of things are happening because I’m always producing in relation to how I feel, to this surprise… And how I deal with this surprise.
LM: I was thinking about our relationship outside of the camera, the situation. So I mean the level of complicity or friendship that we have already between us and... How does this play within when we are playing? Because we are all doing indeed ourselves and we are all part of this program, so we carry something with us already in the projection of who we are towards each other, so there’s another score in there also. There’s a system of relations that it’s there. If we were foreigners to each other it would be another one. Here we have a degree of knowledge of each other that comes from a.pass. We are all very much foreigners, we all come from different parts of the world with different stories. So we carry that and then we carry some common ground within the program and then we go inside that room.
CM: The most violent is the editing, when I see how it’s also then afterward manipulated.
LM: Always something can turn, the things can turn around, into another direction. In this sense there’s a bit of maybe immanent violence, there’s a sense of this quietness. It can be fun… I always feel a certain tension there where things could turn. I put some violence there. (...) Like, something can come from the back, something can come from a place that you didn’t… So maybe this is because we know that the instructions are different and then we don’t know them, so there is an alertness in a way.
RC: Each instruction has a different quality in the repetition. What does it do? It’s a skill-development instead of character-development?
LM: I think that’s very hard actually, to repeat. Spontaneous is maybe more “ok”, you just throw yourself, let’s try this. But then repeat that you have to think twice. And then I think in a way it’s there where the work starts. Like how do you say it, and then maybe sometimes you just say it halfway... This is one thing, there’s a lot of practice in there. I feel the most acting practice comes from that place actually, of how to repeat things. And then I also think It creates a certain intimacy. [...] maybe not intimacy but history. Like I’ve been there before. I have heard it before. I’ve heard you say that before. I’m not telling that story myself. There is something that builds like a common history. Like the story of the train that it’s there since the beginning, now Andrea also knows that story but she doesn’t know exactly where it started, how it was originally. This story became something that we all know collectively and we all have different relations to that thing. [...] You don’t know anymore if it was real not real, how and what happened actually, but somehow you have an idea of that story.
CM: [repetition] creates a condition that escapes, it’s escaping from the succeeds and failures, another condition of doing it. It doesn’t have to succeed because it doesn’t have to fail. [...] It creates a condition to navigate in all [...] What I like from repetition is that all the time it pushes me in the same position of doing something I don’t know if I would do it in a situation.
AZF: For me is also a concrete form of awkwardness, that I value a lot as well. It’s kind of like being “hey, how are you?”, “hey, how are you?”, “hey, how are you?”. Like if you just give yourself whatever word and then you repeat it, it becomes absurd as well. Or everytime you say, there’s no training of it, other than saying it, so the intention changes so it’s awkward to say it again without knowing what’s the difference in the intention [...] If all I have to do is say a line and I have to rehearse it, but now I can’t rehearse but I have to repeat it, so it becomes more and more awkward for myself.
LM: For example, in the laughter, it’s an interesting one. To have to laugh. Because I feel definitely awkward because there’s no reason, right. But then at the same time I have to say it was like listen to yourself, I know what a laugh can be, a real laugh. There’s also the question of the real laugh. Can I really do it for real?
CM: All the time it allows displacement, the repetition.
RC: And the role of the camera?
AZF: It’s like a level of being hyper aware, of self-awareness, alertness maybe, surveillance. I don’t think I forgot at any point that there was a camera.
KT: Did you enjoy it also?
AZF: Yeah. I guess that’s the creepiness of exposure and performance. It’s pervert. (...) I think I got at some point reminded that my agency has the right to challenge you as well and the camera. And I am so hyper aware of where it is that at any point I could just do this:
[Andrea is the one in the lower left]
LM: I think it happens more when you [Rui] are inside, in the beginning you were not inside. It was much more disarming because you don’t know at all, you just have the camera away with everything and you don’t know if it’s coming closer or further, so you are much more disarmed. Once you are there then… cause there’s also the possibility of getting away from the camera. You can also leave. You can also go. And in a way I think it becomes a character, there’s also Rui there. It’s also intrusive in a way, like “I’m looking at this, I’m interested in that”.
RC: But it’s less voyeur?
LM: Yes. I think it’s less voyeur.
Magdalena Ptasznik / Zigzagging through space to discover the intimacy of relating 18 January 2021
posted by: Magdalena Ptasznika.pass post-graduate program portfolio in the form of a self-interview
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appendix: polish website/archive of the research project (the website is in Polish, but references and content materials are in English)
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Self-interview
What brought you to the research that you have been engaged with at a.pass?
First, I want to talk about movement practice; it is my base and the operational system. The movement practice has always been experiential and collaborative. It has grown through learning from and with others, listening to words, moving, formulating instructions, exploring their potentials, or teaching. It has always been working with the space in which it was happening and the materiality of the body and those beyond it. I have been exploring this practice as a practitioner– a mover. As such, a performer is always an agent and an observer of the performative. To perform one needs to be aware of the performativity that is already happening both within and beyond them. I’m interested in making the experience of the ‘performer’ available, for the audience; that is, to become an agent on the inside. Through the audience/performer’s relation to the textual material they are invited to activate the words through their participation.
Second, I will tell you a story:
We sit together on a blanket. We are seven, but I say we are five. We are on the lawn in front of a 19th century gallery building that hosts the performance that you imagine you are taking part in. I say all five characters' names and indicate, with each, to a specific person sitting on the blanket (I don't know your real names). I say: we are at the beach, we are wearing bathing suits, one of us is topless. I say: there is a birthday cake in the middle of the blanket. I describe how it looks with appetite: it has three layers, covered with whipped cream, and decorated with a few strawberries. I say: suddenly, we hear the noise. I say: we turn towards it. I say: we see a dog, a big one, hairy. I say: it is running towards us, fast. I say: it is very close. I say: it is hitting the cake, eating it, destroying it, and making a mess. I say: pieces of cake and drops of whipped cream are landing on our bodies. I say: we are looking at each other, we see our bathing suits and skin are filthy. I say: we are leaving to take a bath in the sea, to rinse the remains of the cake. I get up and leave the place. You follow. (A performative walk in summer 2018)
What were the questions you entered a.pass with, and what was their trajectory?
My a.pass research proposal had three questions[*] which I was busy with throughout. But, from the very beginning, there was also an underlying inquiry that I’ve only recently named 'the undercover project’. I find it more important than the questions posed in the application. 'The undercover project’, though not proposed directly in my application, was the real motive to enter the a.pass research environment. I unfolded the project in the following questions: How can I engage in research questions not by building a construction (a product) based on elements that are accessible to me in the moment of posing the question, but by continually digging into the problems they evoke? Can I, through practice, dig into implicit relations and assumptions within my research? Can I at least for a while, or sometimes, suspend the connection of my practice to the product it might bring? Can I, instead, turn around to the field I want to explore and experiment within it? Not to repeat the representations but go into interactions with them? Exploring these possibilities is important for me for further functioning within the arts, for refreshing the sense of it, for negotiating with its demands. It was necessary to ask how I want to cultivate my base of the practice beyond, or better to say, under different the manifestations that it may take.
Through the research process, I realized that my initial questions were attached to a particular imagination of a product and the context in which it could circulate. I wanted to reformulate my approach to working, to look for other possible openings of my practice. At the very end of a.pass, I realized I was unconsciously repeating the logic of production; using research as a means to produce something. Whilst, I don't see it as necessarily wrong to use research outcomes for further production, in my case, the logic of production was keeping my research in a very narrow frame, thinking towards the future in terms of production was haunting me. Therefore, through a.pass I was able to build skills of resistance. The skills to make a space in which I could engage with research questions and share them in new ways. The booklet I am sharing through the end-presentations is the unperfect footprint of risking entering a different mode of questioning. It is the beginning.
What is your current research?
The research materializes as written texts, which experiment with the form of the score—a choreographic tool. These scores are to be read by a reader on their own. They are written as scores (in its broadest sense), as tools that produce a specific situation, but rather than thinking of them as instructions, I propose to think of them as a literary form. A score as an instruction assumes a particular mode of attending and a set of abilities to enact it; to focus, to imagine, to act. As an instruction a score attributes value to doing. Here, I counter that attribution of value by opening possibilities of various ways of attending and propose to look at the performativity taking place in an intimate sphere activated through reading. I understand it as an interobjective[†] space created by a reader, a score, and an environment. The participant is invited to explore different ways of engaging with and interpreting the score. The reading of a text is a way of following this proposition and observing one's attendance. I called this kind of attendance 'speculative doing'—observing, sensing, perceiving, and maybe imagining a further action, physical doing.
A score is a structure for participation. What do you propose to participate in through these scores?
The score directs its readers’ attention towards the relations within an environment of which they are part. In particular, I explore how we take part in the materiality of the environment as well as the relations we are already engaged in and have potential to engage with. Building upon observation and somatic experience, I explore environmental relations through navigating attention and developing fictions. This begins with observing our own perceptual and imaginative patterns by turning our attention towards our embodiment and our surroundings. Exploring the relationality through one's sensual nature puts subjectivity in the network of dynamic relations where human and non-human materiality cannot be sharply separated. It engages the images, beliefs, and scores of 'being a person' and asks how, as such, do we understand our participation in the environment[MOU1]. Fiction is implemented here as a speculative tool for practicing relationality, a tool to create affects—fictional spaces can, and often do, influence patterns of perception.
How do you use text to explore these modes of participation?
The way of attending I am exploring and proposing demands effort. As William James said: 'Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.'[‡] To open up towards an experience of the material environment, I am looking for ways of giving attention to the possible mergers or dependencies between the bodies of participants and different materialities. An observation is an entry point, a practice to create attention. The research plays out in the area where we observe the grounds that we stand on; to give attention, 'to excavate' relations, processes, and influences we take part in, cause, or are submitted to.
If observation is a tool, what does it serve? Is observation a mindfulness meditation or an awareness exercise? Is your practice a form of human meditation within the earthy matter?
Observation is a tool for exploring the fantasmic minds—real or, at times, fictional sets of relationships that we are part of. It is a method to get acquainted with the unstable nature of fantasmic relations; their changeability, or even the transformation of the worlds known to us. To live with this transformation is to enter into collaboration with a process of decay, overcoming and transforming our own perceptual and existential limits or habits. The observation here (as opposed to how it functions in mindfulness) is not to experience 'myself in the present' but to direct the attention beyond the borders of my body, towards the other, our relation, dynamic of it, and the self, understood as being part of a bigger mind. Observation assumes the unknown (what is yet to come, what is excluded from perception) as potential and invites it to influence the known.
As a presentation, you propose a booklet, an object to keep in hand, to read in your own space and timing. What kind of encounder do you propose?
Bridging the idea of reading with the participation implied in a score, entangles the readers body with the text in an intimate way. Attending to a conscious observation is a very personal and intimate engagement. I propose the exploration at this level to let this 'close to yourself' experience—the intimate—be influenced. To engage with observation is to explore how you, on this intimate level, are in, and develop, relations with others (human and non-human). How do you perceive and perform your participation within structures? What do you attend to? and what do you exclude yourself from? I was interested and inspired by the precarity of the proposed format and situation. Will the reader try to engage with the imagination within the text? or read across it briefly? Will they engage with the choreographic aspect and relate the text to the body?
On the other hand, I thought of it as the choreography of precarious times—'poor choreography' or 'poor people choreography'[§]. To create or participate in it, one doesn't need any production machine, theater, scenography, or performers. One doesn't need to buy tickets or even to go out. You can participate in it while being in lockdown, it is accessible wherever you need to be. These ‘poor’ conditions are interesting exactly because they activate a private space and a sense of public-ness within.
Observation and further speculation are ways to explore our position in the world's material organization; in its systems and structures of power and control. A poet, Forrest Gander, talks about the 'anti-spectacular' potential of poetry which, using just words can focus attention for long hours and cause profound influence even in the context of the “resplendent visual world which often cannot focus attention on anything at all”[**]. I am looking for this kind of anti-spectacular potential of 'written choreography' operating on perceptions, senses, and imagination.
Attention and observation happen in time. Is time a theme in the research?
With this research, I reconsider what it means for a work to be time-based. The environment and the processes happening within it confront us with the passing of time. Different matters have different temporalities, temporal scales, and different dynamic registers of action. The ultimate reference and a tool to think with is, for me, geology, which brings us to the earth as the basic structure of our material being. Geological time teaches us about the constant movement of any and all matter, and it gives us a more-than-human perspective to time.
I become troubled by thinking of the ‘nowness’ seemingly implicit in performance. 'Being here and now' is often the main category of performative practices. This ‘nowness’ is central to the somatic and improvisation practices that were formative for me and my work. Whilst I appreciate their methodologies—the ways in which they teach us how to give attention and how to be affected—they tend to give attention to an individual experience and place importance on what a subjective 'I' goes through. I have the impression that this approach to practices builds a community whose members develop a sensibility for their own experience isolated in time and space. It creates a bubble of nowness that celebrates itself, that is, celebrates the individual, and does not create an idea of community with what is not immediately accessible, here and now. I try to work with elements of the somatic within an open-ended environment, in order to revisit individual or collective memories, create and share fiction, and re-observe the environment close to the body. Can we, with somatics, think of a body as something which is not determined by an 'I' and not limited to our materiality, but as an expanding entity in time and space? Can the performative act activate an embodied experience to explore an entity’s sensorial community of different matter and temporalities?
What would be the next step for this research?
I will keep on exploring writing. I want to work on a performative space where the intimacy of silent reading can perform in a public, social and collective space. I am thinking to collaborate with a visual artist to create a performative space where fiction-speculation is co-created by text, matter, words, and participants' bodies.
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[*] The central questions of the research proposal "Immersive speculation: choreography activating potentials" are:
How can choreography be a form of speculation on environmental transformations?
How can this speculation address the actual environment in which it is happening?
How can the viewer with his/her presence be placed inside this speculation?
[†] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects; as explained in chapter Interobjectivity; University of Minnesota Press; 2013; s.81-95
[‡] William James, 'Attention'; in: F.R. David, AUTUMN 2020; uh books with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin; s.39
[§] When I talk about precarity I'd like to refer to two artists who help me think about it. First of them is Ligia Clark and her Relational Object, second Lisa Nelson with her precarious composition scores, eg. one named 'Poor people yoga'.
[**] Usłyszeć ciszę, interview with Forrest Gander; in Julia Fiedorczuk, Inne Możliwości. O poezji, ekologii i polityce. Rozmowy z amerykańskimi poetami (Other possibilities. On poetry, ecology and politics. Talks with american poets); Katedra Scientific Publisher; Gdańsk 2019; s. 113.
Selected references:
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care; University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; 2017
Julia Fiedorczuk, Inne Możliwości. O poezji, ekologii i polityce. Rozmowy z amerykańskimi poetami (Other possibilities. On poetry, ecology and politics. Talks with american poets); Katedra Scientific Publisher; Gdańsk 2019
Forrest Gander BĄDŹ BLLISKO (BE WITH), translation Julia Fiedorczuk; LOKATOR; Kraków 2020.
Peter Handke, The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling; Picador; USA; 2020
Philippine Hoegen ANOTHER VERSION ‘Thinking through performance’; Onomantopee; Brussels 20202
Toine Horvers, moving-writing; Toine Horvers and stichting Suburban; Rotterdam 2020
William James, 'Attention'; in: F.R. David, AUTUMN 2020; uh books with KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects; University of Minnesota Press; 2013
Georges Perec, PRZESTRZENIE (ESPACE), LOKATOR, Kraków 2019
Ana Vujanović, Landscape dramaturgy: “Space after perspective”; Ana Vujanović’s website (2018)
Kathryn Yusoff, "Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/121847/epochal-aesthetics-affectual-infrastructures-of-the-anthropocene/
Anne Juren, Fantasmical Anatomy research
Ligia Clark Relational objects
Ilana Halperin, Geologic Intimacy
Blocks in which I participated:
2 September-1 December 2019
BLOCK 2019/III
A LOOMING SCORE – WE SHARE YOUR POLITICS OF DAMAGE
CURATORS LILIA MESTRE AND SINA SEIFEE
16 January-27 March 2020 (block closed)
BLOCK 20/I ZONE PUBLIC
CO-CURATED BY FEMKE SNELTING / PEGGY PIERROT / PIERRE RUBIO
4 May-31 July 2020 / home (partial participation)
IN CONFINEMENT
THE IN-BETWEEN BLOCK 2020 II
14 September-3 October 2020
SETTLEMENT 16/ THE UNCONDITIONAL INSTITUTION
VLADIMIR MILLER
Thanks for...
The always generous support: Lilia Mestre
Mentoring of the end project: Myriam Van Imschoot
Mentoring throughout the research process: Kristien Van den Brande, Elke Van Campenhout, Valentina Desideri, Nicolas Galeazzi, Philipine Hoegen, Myriam Van Imschoot, Krõõt Juurak, Anne Juren, Sara Manente, Anna Nowicka, Jeroen Peeters, and Femke Snelting
Facilitating the a.pass program through curating blocks: Lilia Mestre, Vladimir Miller, Peggy Pierrot, Pierre Rubio, Sina Seifee, and Female Snelting. The companionship, support, and challenges: the a.pass researchers with whom I crossed (Deborah Birch, Rui Calvo, Ana Paula Camargo, Chloe Chignell, Diego Echegoyen, Signe Frederiksen, Quinsy Gario, Stefan Govaart, Adriano Wilfert Jensen, Mathilde Maillard, Muslin Brothers, Nathaniel Moore, Vera Sofia Mota, Flavio Rodrigo Orzari, Ferreira Lucia Palladino, Federico Protto, Piero Ramella,, Túlio Rosa Christina Stadlbauer, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc, Kasia Tórz, Katrine Turner, Amélie van Elmbt, Andrea Zavala Folache)
English proofreading and editing of my texts: Chloe Chignell
Making all this possible: the team of a.pass (Lilia Mestre Steven Jouwersma Joke Liberge Michèle Meesen)
Facilitating shifts of perspectives: Jakub Szymanik
My participation in a.pass and the realization of this research would not have been possible without the support of Grażyna Kulczyk’s Research Scholarship in the field of choreography granted by Art Stations Foundation.- case of: Magdalena Ptasznik
Not in the Mood Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee
05 April 2021
posted by: Sina Seifeea.pass Block 2021 II curated by Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, Sina Seifee -
participants: Inga Nielsen, Anantha Krishnan, Jimena Perez Salerno, Carolina Mendonça Ferreira, Gary Farrelly, Aleksandra Borys, Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens, Ana Paula Camargo, and Vera Sofia Mota.
Having completed a cycle of a.pass Research Center in 2019, the six of us proposed to co-curate the block of 2021/II as a group. We aim to collectively curate an a.pass block where we redistribute and redefine the roles of curator, mentor, guest and workshop facilitator. This implies putting our knowledges, our differences and kinships into (re)productive promiscuous interactions. Each of us thinks of a.pass as an ecology of sensitivities, sentiments, rhythms and styles of knowing, but also as apparatuses, technologies and infrastructures. We do a block curation that pays specific attention to the affective and emotional dimensions of research and knowledge production, which we call here “mood”. Not only do humans have their moods and mood swings, but more-than-human, eco-synth-tech systems, and also climates and markets have it, too. By thinking and proposing practices with and about mood, we are navigating with and within affective interactions, imperfections, subjectivities and sensations of making oneself orient in the research environment and the world.
Block Scenario
The block unfolds from the 3rd of May to the 31st of July 2021.
The fourth floor of a.pass will host two installations, Unrest and The Depository Cat, inhabiting the common space, before the block starts.
Unrest, an artwork by Sofia Caesar, is a kinetic space that can move and stretch with our interactions, triggered by the workshops and reading sessions throughout the block. The Depository Cat, by Isabel Burr Raty, is a tentacular inflatable that proposes an ongoing practice based on research-treatments sharing, oriented to harvest living testimonies of the block’s processes and moods.
During the Opening Week, Sara Manente leads the first collective practice called the Washing Machine. It is a fast-paced associative game and a way to use the filter of mood to look into our research.
In the first part of the block, Antye Guenther facilitates a hybrid workshop practice, titled Oh So Serious, around moodiness for de-professionalization.
Throughout the block, Sina Seifee takes the role of PR by interviewing the participants and publishing regularly online.
Multiple reading sessions will be conducted on Thursdays during the block.
In the first part of the block, we will read selected essays associated with or drawn from Affect Theory, namely Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, and Silvia Federici, under the working title Nail Art Affects Reading Sessions, facilitated by Sara Manente and Adrijana Gvozdenović.
In the second part of the block, Thursdays are reserved for The Labour of Laziness reading sessions, proposed by Rob Ritzen.
OPENING WEEK
During the Opening Week, Sara Manente leads the first collective practice called the Washing Machine. It is a fast-paced associative game and a way to use the filter of mood to look into our research. Every participant is asked to prepare in advance 10 heterogeneous items from their practice under the filter of “obsessions”: bring something that you cannot stop thinking about, or that keeps coming back to you. It can be an unreasonable idea or feeling, a fragment of your own or somebody else’s work. Items can be of any format: a quote, a research question, a scrapbook, a dance move, a thought, a video extract, an object, a dream, or a short practice.
ONGOING PRACTICES
THE DEPOSITORY CAT - Isabel Burr Raty
activated by a workshop at the beginning of the block on Wednesday 12th of MayThe Depository Cat is an ongoing practice throughout the block, which proposes the installation of an interactive space that invites participants to share their research in the form of self treatment/s or treatment/s for others. The idea is to open the possibility for the treatment’s giver/s and/or receiver/s to remain in a constant state of alteration, envisioning flux as one of the foundational resources in the processes of artistic research.
The “treatment” implies the sharing or design of “healing” tools that give the opportunity to translate personal artistic concepts into physical or imaginary forms. These are put into motion by being with the - self - or with the - other/Cat, to trigger inner and outer mutations that can particularize, de-particularize or meta-morph affects underlying in the creative process of research.
The Cat takes the form of a “first aid cavity” that creates a visual space composed of i.e: non-standard animisms technologies, syncretic beliefs and statements, that can be freely inhabited. This cavity is at the same time a tentacular organism, as its limits can be stretched throughout the block, populating the common a.pass room. Participants are invited to deposit the or various “remainants” of the treatment/s offered in order to imprint the memory of the “healing” that took place. The remainants can be ornamental, devotional, cathartic - human and more than human objects and/or non-objects - that can infect, disinfect, contaminate, or not the common a.pass space. The depository process is archived with photographs and shared in the form of an album at the end of the Block.
PR - Sina Seifee
ongoing interviews, public relationSina will make interviews with the participants throughout the whole block one by one on a weekly basis. The interviews are immediately edited into a short videographic piece with a collage style and animated elements from the imagination, the project, or the environment where the talk takes place. The pieces are published every week on multiple social platforms. The main host for the talks will be a subdomain of the a.pass website, which will be designed as a “collector” of the interviews for future access. The interviews in the format of video will be posted and prompted on both a.pass and non-a.pass platforms, where a wider audience has immediate exposure to it as it gets produced during the block.
The interviews are informal and playful, with a heuristic approach to getting to know the participants' work and their personalities. The interview will be a substitute for mentoring (around), questioning (at), guessing (what), inventing (off), entangling (with) and imagining (on) what they are doing, what they are up to, and which mood they are in. The aim is less about understanding, and more about engaging and guessing fabulously what their matters of care are, with a perspectival (i.e. a reaction that is particular to me) and speculative (the “what if”) force that I embody in my own practice. The talks might take a maximum of two hours of recording and the final edited piece will not be more than 30 minutes long. The publication of the content will be based on the agreement with the participants, how and to which extent each likes to be exposed on social media. The interviews might take place in a.pass or elsewhere.
WORKSHOPS / READING SESSIONS
NAIL ART AFFECTS READING SESSIONS - Sara Manente and Adrijana Gvozdenović
Thursdays, the first half of the block, before the HWD
13th, 20th, 27th MayWe propose a formalized but relaxed situation, a hybrid form between mentoring and a reading group. We will do each other's nails while reading essays on affect theory.
“In ancient Egypt and Rome, military commanders also painted their nails to match their lips before they went off to battle.” Similarly, we will take care of each other, talk about what makes us happy and why do we feel like we feel (Sara Ahmed) to prepare for the “age of anxiety” (Lauren Berlant), to learn how we can repair (Eve Sedgwick) and to “re-enchant the world” (Silvia Federici).
Doing manicure is a self-care or a professional service that can be considered a beautification process: removing the dead cuticles, massaging and moisturizing the skin, filing, polishing and decorating the nails. It is an intimate, private process and a ritual of preparation that serves the appearance in public. Could this be also a definition of what mentoring is? Can this situation create a space where different reading and discussing of the text can happen?
OH SO SERIOUS - Antye Guenther
two days practice, 31st May and 1st JuneAntye is proposing a hybrid workshop practice around seriousness - approached as a state of non-moodiness - as questionable traits of professionalism in the arts. The aim is to propose and test, in conjunction with the participants, various strategies to insert moodiness, non-seriousness and silliness (back) into artistic (research) practices as a way to de-professionalize. Where are our desires to be serious/ to be taken seriously in professional artistic contexts coming from? In what ways is this an attempt to champion objectivity and rational thinking in strong opposition to affects, moods and feelings, referring hereby as well to suspicious, idealized concepts of scientific practices in the 19th century? And what kind of strategies could help us to evoke processes of the-seriousness-ization for de-professionalization?
This two-day practice will consist of a (performative) input lecture to shed light on the complex intertwinement of academisation and professionalization in the Arts, which seem to have been fundamentally boosted by neoliberal demands of constant self-advertising and promoting. This lecture will try to trace back specific tropes of professionalism to the 19th century ideal of the scientist as an ‘objective’ data recording device. After this lecture a short reading session will be proposed, to start and stir a conversation around (problematic) seriousness and professional attitudes. This will be followed by the invitation to the participants to share and to reflect on their own seriousness in their practices, what seriousness might mean for them as artists/practitioners in the arts. At the end of the first day, the participants will be asked to think of strategies to oppose rational-objective thinking and to practice hyper-seriousness or non-seriousness as a way to ‘de-professionalize’, which we want to share and test out together the next day.
In preparation, Antye will collaborate with Sara and Isabel to invent and test specific ‘body practice’ to be added to the toolbox of de-professionalization on the 2nd day.
THE LABOUR OF LAZINESS - Rob & Steyn Bergs
reading sessions, Thursdays, the second half of the block, after the HWD and one moment in PAF
24th June, 8th and 15th JulyThe Labour of Laziness is dedicated to exploring the ambiguous, complex, and contradictory valences of laziness, and to examine its potentially subversive or invigorating political effects.
In neoliberalism, tirelessly working on and investing in the self becomes an exigency. Because of their relative economic precarity, but also because of the nature of their work, artists and art workers often find themselves at the forefront (or rather, at one forefront) of exploitation and, perhaps especially, self-exploitation. We are less interested in laziness as a mode of resistance to this neoliberal regime than we are in laziness as a lateral form of political agency. In other words, we are not necessarily after laziness as a straightforward opposition to work—as passivity, as a simple refusal of work, as ‘doing nothing.’
Instead, in discussing laziness, we want to raise questions about work and productivity in the arts. We will do so through collective reading sessions, taking place in an installation by Sofia Caesar.
Furthermore, for the duration of the block, participants will be invited to keep a ‘lazy journal’ as a means of reflecting on their own relation to work and (self-)discipline, as well as on their understanding of productivity and how it informs their practice. These journals will be used as a common ground for a final group discussion/workshop. Importantly, the journals need not take the written form; other formats—video, drawing, or other media—can of course also be explored.
PARTICIPANTS
Inga Nielsen, Anantha Krishnan, Jimena Perez Salerno, Carolina Mendonça Ferreira, Gary Farrelly, Aleksandra Borys, Amy Pickles, Chloe Janssens, Ana Paula Camargo, and Vera Sofia Mota.
CURATORS
Isabel Burr Raty, Adrijana Gvozdenović, Antye Guenther, Sara Manente, Rob Ritzen, and Sina Seifee
Isabel Burr Raty is an artist, filmmaker, teacher and sexual Kung Fu coach exploring the interstices between the biotic and the virtual. She is currently researching on the human body as a territory for sustainable agri-culture and intertwining performance, installation and film to queer labor understandings, offer SF in real-time and play with geo-synthetic magic.
www.isabel-burr-raty.comAdrijana Gvozdenović is an artist interested in artists’ motivation and ways of resisting (self)institutionalized structures. In the last three years, she has been developing methods of collecting and annotating symptomatic artistic practices that recognize their anxiety as a prerequisite state for criticality, which led to developing formats of publicness that push the borders between research, mediation, and production. These will be tested as needed during the block.
www.gadi.meAntye Guenther is a visual artist, born and raised in East Germany. Drawing from her backgrounds in medicine, photography, and in the military, her art practices orbit around themes like ((non)biological intelligence and supercomputing, computer-brain-analogies and mind control, think tank ideologies and self-optimization, neuroimagery and fictionality of science, body perception in techno-capitalist societies and science fiction. Her work comes then in hybrid forms: performances, performative ceramic objects, fictionalized video tutorials, photo-text works, speculative scripts, artist publications, and narrative installations in various collaborations.
www.aguenth.deChoreographer, dancer and researcher based in Brussels, Sara Manente, is interested in the dynamic relation between performer, work and spectator. Her projects are developed throughout hybrid research and become public in different formats. Currently, she works with aesthetics and ethics at the intersection between live arts and live cultures: namely, fermentation technology, noise, chimerization and (auto)immunity.
www.saramanente.weebly.comRob Ritzen is co-initiator of THAT MIGHT BE RIGHT, a founding member of LEVEL FIVE and coordinator of PERMANENT. My curatorial practice is focused on self-organized and collaborative formats in close association with cultural practitioners. In my research, I am concerned with social and political constellations that have a hold on everyday life. Cultural practices are a way to dislodge the hold the present has on us.
www.robritzen.infoSina Seifee is an artist based in Brussels, Tehran and Cologne. Using storytelling, video, and performance, he explores and teases with the heritage of zoology in West Asia. His work picks up on how epistemologies, jokes and knowledges get shaped in the old and new intersections of techno-media and globalism.
www.sinaseifee.com/
Welcome in De Markten, Friday, 11th of June 2021.
18-22h
Subscribe for attendance. Or join us online. Details will follow.
Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens
will read, perform, discuss:
a book as a prop for future performance, a poster that unfolds into a speculative discussion board game, a timed articulation in an archive that reiterates its own traces, a set of interviews that binds four generations of activism, a performative research method that paves the way for academic writing, and a collective online score that narrates how research interests were influenced by each others presence.
*
The researchers in Research Centre Cycle II — Breg Horemans, Davide Tidoni, Esteban Donoso, Lili M. Rampre and Pia Louwerens — are ending their one year trajectory at a.pass with the launch of a series of (performative) publications.
Publishing is rarely something that concludes a confined process of solitary thought. It is a social process that — abstractly and manifestly — involves collaboration along the way. Rather than a book or printed matter as a finite goal, the researchers took publishing as a pretext to build ongoing social gestures, a space for the continued production of meaning and reverberance.
Programme:
Pia Louwerens presents the artistic research novel I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad. I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist ‘differently’ through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens' labour as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begins to overlap and blend under the name of ‘performance.’ I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.
Pia Louwerens is a performance artist and researcher from the Netherlands, living in Brussels. Her research revolves around the becoming of the artistic subject, the I who writes, speaks and makes, in relation to the (institutional) context. From 2019 - 2020 Louwerens was working as embedded artistic researcher at a big research project, for which she was embedded in an art institution. Through this research she attempted to perform or practice the artist, and thereby the institution, differently. Her work usually takes the shape of a performance in which she speaks, switching between registers of the actual, the possible, the professional and the anxious artist.
Pop-Fi poster is a “choose your own adventure” game, developed by Lili M. Rampre in collaboration with Júlia Rúbies Subirós. The game is tracing pre-public discourse, semi-private collections of thoughts that, once shared and circulated, can shift a wider agenda on what matters to artists the most. The game aims to popularise common fictions and pop the bubble of others. Collectivising half-digested thoughts potentially means bridging between personal and structural to effectuate change. Pop-Fi poster is part of Pop-Fi; a multifaceted project, that entails a performative workshop ventriloquising popular movie icons, video installations and script-readings. Pop-Fi foregrounds concerns of an artistic community, through variety of formats that act as discourse prism. Pop-Fi poster is both a visual aid for the workshop and an autonomous object. Pop-Fi’s next step is developing strategies to funnel from anecdotal to factual and think about data and its visualisation techniques informed by direct experience, commitment to action and intersectionality.
Lili M. Rampre is researching strategies to highlight “off stage”; processes, practices and actors behind, off, under or above the stage. Her focus lies on power relationships and the dynamics of disparities in cultural capital (audience-performer, fan-star, producer-artist). Her work has often a role-reversal in its core proposal, ventriloquism of a kind, or unreliable narration. Most recently Lili is looking into fandom and fandom civic practices authorising fiction to affect political action as an artistic methodology, to re-articulate essential parts of artistic production and circulation as fictional or factual aspects.
Esteban Donoso presents Mand/inga. Mand/inga is a performance that entails a reading of a script, and a screening of a film at once. It’s an instantiation of a collaborative process with Thiago Antunes in which we re-visit our own family stories, tracing along our relation to such issues as gendering, religion, spirituality and race. The script and film register an ongoing conversation between friends, as well as a conversation with our own lived memory. This process is also an attempt to trace out a methodology for working with self-narrated queerstories and their interconnected resonances. Mand/inga is a term that takes many colloquial meanings in Latin America, in Brazil it usually refers to ‘black magic’ whereas in Ecuador it denotes the racial mixtures between black, indigenous and white backgrounds.
Esteban Donoso is a choreographer, researcher and Performance Studies fan living and working between Brussels, Quito and Toronto. Currently towards the end of a PhD in Performance Studies, he is juggling to put together a practice-based methodology, his interest in feminist cinema and the writing of a dissertation about dance narratives and cultural memory in Quito-Ecuador. He researches the medium of film as a self-narrative device and as an interface for collective writing. In as much as it enables our appearance in a virtual space, it also allows us to create a third space in which we can look at our shared entanglements.
Davide Tidoni presents Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics, a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflection, and motivational support, the publication examines the experiences, commitments and feelings that operate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces outside of art institutions; it’s a repository designed to inspire and encourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics.
Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018). Davide’s work can be accessed at: davidetidoni.name
Breg Horemans presents Siting Discourse, a dialogical diary that explores the protocols, politics and accessibility of a digital architecture-as-archive (www.taat-projects.com). Breg shares the writing process through a recorded sequence of screen captures. Siting Discourse exposes the Live Archive´s digital spatiality and the implicit gestures, attitudes and coincidences of discourse making that it aims to facilitate. The title is a reference to the Live Archive as a (web-)site for discursive documentation and it addresses the academic citing mechanism as a form of ‘structural misquoting´. Siting Discourse is a collaboration between Siebren Nachtergaele (Social Sciences HOGENT, Theatre Studies UGENT, BE) and Andrew Filmer (Theatre Studies, Aberystwyth University, WA). Their first encounter was shaped by means of a drift.
Breg Horemans is co-founder of TAAT, a liquid collective of artists working on the verge of performance, research and installation art. Since 2011, he renegotiates his relation to the architecture discipline through transdisciplinary collaborations. The desire of his research lies in shaping the spatial conditions for ‘sites of encounter’ that invite human and non-human entities to co-constitute each other. The projects initiated by TAAT generate spaces for co-activity and instigate fluid prototyping processes as ‘becoming spaces’. In the last two years, Breg is co-developing an online environment that enhance processes of open source writing, archiving and publishing.
And last but not least:
Initiated out of a desire to be a shared platform of exchange, support and publication for the a.pass Associate Researchers, this year-long initiative will continue to support and publish advanced research and investigate its trajectories within a.pass.
The Associate Researchers follow a part of their research trajectory in an environment of mutual criticality and institutional support. The Research Center welcomes radical and inventive research methodologies in order to contribute them to the larger a.pass environment. The Research Center supports and facilitates individual and collective forms of performative publishing (publications, presentations, exhibitions, gatherings, etc), experimental research set ups, workshops and collaborations.
For the period of May 2021 to April 2022 a.pass is happy to welcome following Associate Researchers to the a.pass Research Center Cycle III:
Joāo Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Gosie Vervloessem, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and Simon Asencio.
The Associate Researchers will be hosted and supported during Cycle III by Vladimir Miller.
Research practices of the Associated Researchers of Cycle 3:
Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin
CofetARia is an eating performance at the confluence of two durational practices: performance art and pastry backing, where cakes are generally more performative than other dishes, and allow better for the agencies/affordances of food to come through. Working with alimentary matter and showing/doing/behaving, CofetARia is about animating memory and confronting the problems raised by post-communist empathic nostalgia, outside of the "crimes of the past regime" approaches.
Joāo Fiadeiro
Real Time Composition is a concept-tool that studies and practices a contra-intuitive skill: the ability to look at ourselves looking at (ourselves looking at) things. This is done using the fields of improvisation and composition in contemporary dance as a privileged territory of research. “Real Time” and “Composition” are two notions that cancel each other. “Composition” suggests that one must refer to the existence of previous knowledge while actively projecting the future. “Real time” implies that whatever is happening, is happening here and now, in the present. The resulting tension (and attention) generated by the collision of those two opposing forces allows an alternative way to perceive and experience time. Real Time Composition suggests a perceptual paradigm shift: instead of reacting based on previous knowledge one should suspend knowledge. Instead of fighting the unknown (or surrendering to it) one should welcome it. As a result, the linear experience of time is interrupted, a gap in the sensation of continuity is produced and an interval “emerges”. Inside this interval, time is not linear (or even circular) but “twisted” (like the topological surface of a Mobius Strip), governed by laws that don’t follow conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside. Inside this interval, space has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Transforming fixed, rigid and closed compositions into mobile, flexible and open relations is what characterises the research within and around Real Time.
Gosie Vervloessem
If a damaged heart were photosynthetIc is an ongoing in-situ project that starts from a squatted ticket booth in the Botanical Garden in Brussels, from where I, as a sick detective*, commit a slow and silent coup on the site through a two-folded strategy: by haunting the garden, identifying and unveiling the ghosts that linger on the gardens’ grounds, ghosts of various exploitations through different times. And secondly, by pushing plant science in a radical and speculative directions. Plants have long been identified with the feminine body and have been as regularly exploited and subjected to biopolitical control. But bodies of women and plants also hold a magic that might counter the ghosts of capitalism. For making the coup on the Botanical Garden really successful I need the help of women and plants.
Vijai Maia Patchineelam
As an associated researcher at a.pass, I’m looking to focus on the preparation for the potential conclusion and the aftermath of my Ph.D. in the Arts titled The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution. With the Associated Researcher position I look to outlast a premeditated institutional conclusion of the current research project that I lead by overlapping host institutions. In doing so, further committing to the complete turnaround of my artistic practice that the current PhD position has afforded. One of the primary interest at a.pass is being for the first time, inside an institution that is not solely focused on visual art. And what that entails in how artistic practice is understood, as well as artistic research — ways of communicating the decision-making process mixed with the desire for a more engaged collective research environment. In overlapping institutions, I look at a.pass not only as a place of coaching for the defense but also as an institution that participates during the final evaluation process, by inviting a core member of a.pass to be part of the jury. Looking for a difference in perspective for the feedback from an artist organised educational and research platform.
Simon Asencio
The research investigates the position of invisibility and anonymity in text in order to reassess practices of authorship and readership. The notion of invisibility in this case, is a matter of illegibility, either chosen as a ruse for safety or forced upon to undermine the ‘inadequate’. The notion of anonymity points to the set of protocols by which a person or a group appears as non-identifiable, unreachable or untraceable; or whose identity is rendered incomplete or never 'one'. If anonymity is usually seen as a way to avoid responsibility (to hide the doer behind the deed), the research focuses on how the performance of the namelessness (the doings of anonymity) could instead invite us to engage a collective responsibility towards history, community, political action and art making. At the cross between literature and performance, the research looks at practices and precedents across spoken tongues, written tongues and sung tongues (in particular in vernacular forms, music and poetry) to define poetical, ethical and political tools to think a more inclusive practice of anonymity and invisibility.
Program - Dragonlove and What your reseach Did to me 09 June 2021
posted by: Steven JouwersmaWhat your research did to me.
the (performative) publishing launch of Associate Researchers Cycle II
Dragon Love (?)
the a.pass End presentations of postgraduate researchers
Friday the 11th and
Saturday the 12th of June
at: De Markten,
Rue du Vieux Marché aux Grains 5, Brussels
No need to subscribe or reserve
Only a live program!
We have a max capacity of 80 people in the space.
Welcome!FRIDAY 11th of June : 16h till 22h16.00 Doors open16.00 - 17:30 Dragonlove (?) preview
Andrea Zavala Folache and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
What your research did to me -Associate Researchers Cycle II
18.00 Welcome18.15 I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad. I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad + Q & A, Pia Louwerens18.40 Siting Discourse - Breg Horemans19.00 Pop-Fi Poster - Lili M. Rampre19.15 -break-19.30 Mand/inga - Esteban Donoso20.30 -break-20.45 Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics + interview, Davide Tidoni21.15 Presentation common publication / Olga / annex21.30 Q & A moderated by Vladimir Miller.22.00 ENDSaturday 12th of June: 18h till 22h17.45 Doors open18.00 Mand/inga - Esteban Donoso
19.00 Dragonlove (?) - exhibition and performancesAndrea Zavala Folache and Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc22.00 END
SITING DISCOURSE Breg Horemans
13 July 2021
posted by: Steven JouwersmaDiary excerpt from Live Archive,
by Breg Horemans
Siting Discourse is a dialogical diary that explores the protocols, politics and accessibility of a digital architecture-as-archive (www.taat-projects.com). Horemans shares the writing process through a recorded sequence of screen captures. Siting Discourse exposes the Live Archive´s digital spatiality and the implicit gestures, attitudes and coincidences of discourse making that it aims to facilitate. The title is a reference to the Live Archive as a (web-)site for discursive documentation and it addresses the academic citing mechanism as a form of “structural misquoting.” Siting Discourse is a collaboration between Siebren Nachtergaele (Social Sciences HOGENT, Theatre Studies UGENT, BE) and Andrew Filmer (Theatre Studies, Aberystwyth University, WA). Their first encounter was shaped by means of a drift.
Breg Horemans is co-founder of TAAT, a liquid collective of artists working on the verge of performance, research and installation art. Since 2011, he renegotiates his relation to the architecture discipline through transdisciplinary collaborations. The desire of his research lies in shaping the spatial conditions for ‘sites of encounter’ that invite human and non-human entities to co-constitute each other. The projects initiated by TAAT generate spaces for co-activity and instigate fluid prototyping processes as ‘becoming spaces’. In the last two years, Breg is co-developing an online environment that enhance processes of open source writing, archiving and publishing.
Research In Absence 14 September 2021
posted by: Vladimir MillerThe a.pass Research Center invites you to join its public programme Research in AbsenceSeptember 20th-24th in BrusselsTogether with the Research Center participant researchers from the a.pass postgraduate program and the public will form a group that will engage in research proposals of Associate Researchers of Cycle 3. For each of the proposals, the researcher who proposes it, will be absent for the duration of the process. The rest of the group – together with the public – will engage in the research question collaboratively, contributing their knowledge and practices to the shared process.The program invites all interested participants for an introductory dinner on Monday, September 20th. The group will work with the proposals in the afternoons and evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The program will conclude with a communal breakfast and feedback session on Friday morning, Sept. 24th.The five proposals can be joined separately or for the duration of the entire process. A detailed program will be published shortly, with information of how to book a slot and the location of the program.Please sign up for the program at the bottom of the page and indicate if you join for the whole program or a specific proposal, we recommend that you join the public dinner and introduction on Monday evening.LOCATIONCentre Tour à PlombeRue de l'Abattoir 241000 BrusselsTIMETABLEMonday, September 20th18h Introduction and DinnerTuesday, September 21st14h Proposal Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin18h Proposal Elke van CampenhoutWednesday, September 22nd14h Proposal Vijai Maia Patchineelam18h Proposal Gosie Vervloessem and Simon AsencioThursday, September 23rd14h Proposal Joāo Fiadeiro18h Proposal Benny NemerFriday, September 24th10h-13h Breakfast, Discussion and FeedbackRESEARCH PROPOSALSElke Van CampenhoutBloom Sessions
The research 'Sex Asylum' works around notions of desire, when stripped from consumerist notions like instant gratification, the pornographic gaze, and subject/object divisions. In this research moment, together we create desire lines through voice, touch, and objects. An interspecies game of deferral and detournement.
Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin
Making each other ^
This is an invitation into my current research titled “CofetARia”, specifically on the part relating to the agencies of food and the role we grant food, beyond the usual symbolic projections we have about it/assign to it. I will borrow some tools and findings so we can discover more on how to account for the performative ability of cakes and pastries, that can, and that do, modify current situations like individual BMI’s or emotional states, macro events related to the climate crisis, or political power struggles. How could we best work with cakes in artistic or other types of research? What strategies are there to either decenter the human actor (like Tuija Kokkonen’s “weak actions”) or to recentre the non-human actor that is cake (like Bruno Latour’s “specific tricks that make them talk”).Vijai Maia PatchineelamOver the course of his research "The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution" Vijai Maia Patchineelam was hosted by, employed and welcomed to a variety of institutions: from artist-run spaces to art academies and museums. One of them was Plano B, Lapa, a long since closed vinyl-shop-turned-informal-art-space in Rio de Janeiro. For the last four years Vijai and Plano B's founder Fernando Torres have collaborated in archiving hundreds of live performances that span a decade (2004-2013). In 2019 they published an annotated LP as the first outcome of this collaboration. For this proposal, the research group will be invited to engage in listening to and reading this document and to contribute to a discussion on temporary institutions and their survival strategies.Gosie Vervloessem and Simon AsencioThe World is full of Monsters
The notion of textual agency refers to the capacity displayed by texts to do things in various circumstances. In other words, text might be doing something else than simply conveying meaning. Text is equally reading you. Text performs you. Ultimately text might suggest methodologies for its own study: a study from which you might not be able to return without losing a feather. The research will look into methodologies for studying the agents of text through collective practice and examination of the performances they enable.
Joāo Fiadeiro
Real Time Composition Game
Real Time Composition "object of study" is the interval that emerges when linear time is interrupted and the sensation of continuity is suspended (by an accident, incident or “just because”). The resulted gap is where Real Time Composition research takes place. Inside this space, time has this rare quality of being simultaneously “no longer” and “not yet”. Inside this space, time is not linear (or even circular) but "twisted" (like a "Möbius strip" topological surface), governed by laws that don't respect conventional notions of before or after, inside or outside, present or absent.
Benny Nemer
Several Favorable Bodies
My contribution to Research in Absence emerges from an error I made during my artistic research into the private library of French author and photographer Hervé Guibert's library. I misunderstood information transmitted to me by Guibert’s executor, and began a path of inquiry from this misunderstanding. The recent revelation that my artistic research is now deeply anchored by this mistake — essentially a historical detail of my own invention — has presented me with many questions, some of which I hope will be processed and transformed in my absence.
For more information on Associate Researcher's work please see: https://apass.be/research-center-cycle-3/
The event is free of charge
7 WALKS (resolution) Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason
26 September 2021
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeRonny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir take us for two walks in SPA in the context of their research ‘7 WALKS (resolution)’. The context of SPA offers the unique opportunity for a series of itinerant reflections on water and art. Drawing inspiration from the intangible legacy of historical walkers — kings and czars, political refugees, artists and philosophers — and, strongly anchored in a local context, Heiremans and Vermeir propose to explore a balance between private property of and access to resources that we hold in common as a society. Can SPA inspire to unbundle the proprietary rights that have been stacked around authorship and (land) ownership, i.e. two paramount features of Western subjectivity?
7 WALKS (resolution) consists of a series of public walks in the therapeutical landscape around the city of SPA. Spa became renowned for its medicinal water as early as the 16th century. Its ferruginous springs not only attracted many visitors, it was also exported internationally. Gradually the city became the so-called 'Café de l'Europe'. Visited by kings and czars, political refugees, artists and philosophers, it was a peaceful haven where a wide range of philosophies, social questions and artistic visions could interact. The 'bobelins', as the locals used to call these international visitors, walked through the surrounding forests, along landscaped paths on their way to the springs. They came to see and be seen, for diplomacy or espionage, and even for the arts. The local painter Antoine Fontaine depicted these illustrious visitors in Le Livre d'Or (1894), a 9 metres wide group portrait spanning four centuries of visitors.
7 WALKS (resolution) draws inspiration from the intangible legacy of historical walkers and, strongly anchored in a local context, invites its participants to explore a balance between private property of and access to resources that we hold in common as a society. Spa offers the project the unique opportunity for a series of itinerant reflections on water and art.
7 WALKS (resolution) responds to current and recently intensified debates about the necessity and position of art in today's society. Like water, art can be considered a basic necessity of life, a proposal that many international resolutions have promoted. The project questions how basic human rights enter into dialogue with individual private property- and exclusive use rights. To discuss these questions Vermeir & Heiremans and Luke Mason will be joined by participants and guest walkers David Aubin, Steyn Bergs, Marie-Sophie de Clippele, Françoise Jurion, Ulrich Kriese, Anne Pirard, Scott Raby, Christoph Rausch, Marie-Christine Schils, Julie Van Elslande, Jens Van Lathem, Tobias Van Royen,...
CAPTURING WATER FROM THE ARTISTS’ SOURCE
Walk#07_Promenade des Artistes, Pouhon Delcor to Promenade Cherville to Waux-Hall
Thursday 16 September 2021, 2 to 6pm
Dedicated to the many artists active in Spa in the 19th century the Promenade d'Artistes was inaugurated in 1849. The trail follows the valley of the Picherotte, a small stream that runs down from the wooded hills. At the beginning of the trail we come across one of the many capture points of Spa Monopole, the enterprise that has been bottling and exporting the communal mineral water sources since 1921. A discussion on common property and use rights of the waters extends to one on immaterial goods and services, like the arts.
A CONSPIRACY OF EQUALS IN SPA?
Walk#08_To Promenade Deschanel and Frahinfaz, further to Balmoral, back via Promenade Arago.Friday 17 September 2021, 11 to 5pm
Mid 19th century Belgium was hospitable to many French political refugees. Among them we find Emile Deschanel, Etienne Arago, P.J.Proudhon, Victor Hugo, Jules Hetzel, Henri Rochefort, Edgar Quinet and others. They found a friend in journalist Felix Delhasse who hosted many of them in Spa. Delhasse was part of the secret society La Charbonnerie and was a disciple of its founder Filippo Buonarotti. Buonorotti’s text ‘The History of the Conspiracy of Equals’ related the failed coup of Grachus Babeuf in 1796. Babeuf rejected the notion that equality before the law itself was sufficient to define societal equality, and thus placed a strong emphasis on the abolition of private property and on equal access to food. Walking the Promenades dedicated to Arago, Deschanel and Hetzel, we end our walk in Rue Delhasse.
The videos and installations of the artist duo Vermeir & Heiremans investigate the complex relationship between art, economy and the built environment in today’s highly globalized world. The artists define their own house as an artwork. The 'house as artwork' functions as a framing device that allows the artists to zoom in on the role the arts play within the ever-growing entanglement between finance, urban development and governing. Their practice employs financial tools, historical references, technology, and cinematic language to reflect on social codes as well as on the production of value in today’s artistic and non-artistic realms.
On Coloniality Chloë Janssens, Amy Pickles and Túlio Rosa
18 October 2021
posted by: Sina SeifeeDate: 10-13th of November 2021Location: KBK Brussels, Boulevard d'Ypres 20, Sainte Catherine, Brussels‘On Coloniality’ is a proposition by a.pass participants Chloë Janssens, Amy Pickles and Túlio Rosa of a temporary context for collective study. Through different artistic and theoretical speculations we will study coloniality and its manifold dimensions.Our understanding of coloniality departs from ideas developed first by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, and later expanded by many others, such as the semiotician Walter Mignolo and feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. Coloniality is an idea that points to the modes of organisation of power in so-called colonized territories, and how this extends out into supposedly postcolonial states. It differentiates colonialism, as a historical process, from its legacies. We have been thinking about ways to describe how the colonial rationale is at the very basis of our modes of social and political organisation, how those supposed histories have collapsed into, resonate with, and form our present.There is a shared desire between the three of us to learn how to articulate coloniality through artistic practices. Our collaboration has grown out of our individual motivations to discuss and re-narrate the colonial practices of the countries where we were born - Belgium, Brazil, UK - and challenge the dominant narratives that compose these histories.We are drawing connections between different times and locations by following closely methods of appropriation and extraction of land, resources, labour and data. Through different artistic practices we want to draw parallels, observe symmetries and find correlations across colonialism as it exists across all aspects of our lives; institutionally, economically, in corporations, governance, everyday structures of living and our bodies.‘On Coloniality’ will be hosted in KBK, an alternative space near Saint Cathrine, in Brussels. It is a porous programme open to the public. An exhibition will host the programme that consists of reading and listening sessions, screenings, a performance, workshops, public conversations and discussions.The full programme can be downloaded here: https://we.tl/t-3HCh0e58FjPublic ProgrammeDay 1: Wednesday November 10th, Positioning ourselves.11-13h: Visit to the Institute of Colonial Culture15h: Presentation of the programme16h: Presentation of the publication: Who’s still doing minimal design? A conversation between Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Chloe Janssens17h-18:30h: Helena Vieira [Listening Session]18:30h: Open conversationDay 2: Thursday November 11th, Accountability, Extraction and Ownership11-13h: Elodie Mugrefya [workshop]15h: Presentation Vermeir & Heiremans15:45: Presentation Line Algoed16:30: Open conversation with Vermeir & Heiremans and Line Algoed19h-21h: Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano [workshop]Day 3: Friday November 12th, Counter Narratives and Remembering Otherwise11h-13h: Visit Art and History Museum and reading of 'Curar o Mundo', by Glicéria Tupinambá14h: Presentation Sami Hammana14:45h: Presentation Satch Hoyt15:30h: Open conversation with Sami Hammana and Satch Hoyt20 - 22:30h: Arquivo Atlântico Film screenings at Pianofabriek: Rue du Fort 35, 1060 Saint Gilles, BrusselsDay 4: Saturday November 13th, Alternative Relatings to (and through) identity, borders and knowledge redistribution11h-14h: WORKNOT! X Sarmad [workshop]15h: Presentation Daniela Ortiz15:45h: Presentation Saddie Choua16:30h: Open conversation with Daniela Ortiz and Saddie Choua20h: Satch Hoyt [Sound Performance]The programme is open to anyone who wants to learn collectively about coloniality and artistic practices, who wants to engage in a conversation around this theme. Registration is not necessary. The website of a.pass will have the latest updates on time and locations.KBK has a wide entrance directly from the main street. There are no steps to enter the building. There is one toilet at the back of the space, on the same level. The space is illuminated with strip lighting on the ceiling, and a number of screen based artworks will be in the space. Hot drinks will be available for free, and there is access to drinking water. We will host a self made seating structure on which you are welcome to sit or lie down on.If you have questions on accessibility and/or the programme, you can reach us on the following email addresses: Chloë: chloejanssens@protonmail.com, Amy: amymaypickles@gmail.com, Túlio: rosa.tulio@hotmail.com
VACATURE administratief en financieel anker 25 October 2021
posted by: Sina Seifeeadministratief en financieel anker (60%)m/v/xa.pass is een artistieke onderzoeksomgeving die onderzoek ontwikkelt en ondersteunt naar performativiteit en scenografie, in een internationale artistieke en educatieve context.
a.pass omvat twee complementaire organen die parallel en in dialoog opereren: een post-graduaat programma en een onderzoekscentrum.
a.pass verwelkomt jaarlijks een 20-tal studenten/ participanten van overal ter wereld in haar thuisbasis De Bottelarij in Molenbeek.
a.pass is structureel ondersteund door het Vlaamse departement onderwijs en ontwikkelt activiteiten met talrijke partners in het binnen- en buitenlandse kunstenveld.
Als administratief-financieel anker krijg je de verantwoordelijkheid voor het beheer en de financieel-administratieve opvolging van de organisatie. Hand-in-hand met de artistieke coördinator geef je gestalte aan a.pass, consolideer je de verworvenheden, en bouw je a.pass verder uit tot een toonaangevend internationaal artistiek onderzoeksinstituut.
Ben je gemotiveerd om:
... solliciteer dan asap en ten laatste voor 31 oktober aan de hand van je CV en motivatiemail aan job@apass.be
Idealiter:
a.pass biedt:
Voor bijkomende vragen mag je contact opnemen met Lies, interim administratie & financiën (NL) +32 494 512 676 of Lilia, artistieke coördinatie (ENG) +32 478 31 75 52
Polyset 2022W4-7 a.pass, Brussels 14 January 2022
posted by: Vladimir MillerPOLYSET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH
[disorganisation, mutable<>mutant, re-constitution, available space, usedesign, decoherence, constituent imagination, perpetual modeling, set / unset, cohab, sticky space, gel, semiset, accumulation, interim, tentative, fragile, actual, affine space, poligraphy, gathering, a walk in the dark with the flashlight pointing backwards, fugitive instituting, politecture, study, overflow, hangout]
a poliset is:
a practice of temporary research co-habitation, where the the researchers design their spaces of practice in one shared space
an indoor research hangout with available communal materials, tools, support structures and resources
a self-curated study, that works through an open network of invitations
consensual over-all-planning is an exception, while relational collaborative negotiations structure the space
“Poliset was developed as a workshop at a.pass about 10 years ago when a.pass was still situated at DeSingel in Antwerp. When I was invited to teach there, I was looking for a practice which would allow the researchers to produce a study environment that was structured around a polycentric approach to community and practice. The main question in coming up with this workshop was for me: How to design a (self)educational environment which can be appropriated by others through re-design? I wanted to pass on the role of the workshop facilitator to the space itself, hoping that interactions and presentations would organically emerge from the engagement of the researchers with their work and with each other. But for this to happen our spatial arrangement had to dissolve the default model of “always gathering in a circle around a table” which would privilege me as a teacher no matter what I did and said. We all needed an opportunity to stay together but to orient ourselves away from the center and towards our tasks and questions as researchers. Not to simply fall apart into individual processes, but to disorganise in order to reorganise in multiple peer-to-peer occasions of sharing and presentation. I took the idea of a city as a spatial metaphor (or on a smaller scale: village, town), with its distributed centers of production, politics and self-organisation, as the main model for such a space. The initial proposal was therefore called “Settlement” to point to a mode of dwelling which is never one structure and desire, but a multitude of interacting formations. The word “settlement” was also pointing to the key practice of negotiation (a “settlement” marks its end in legal terms) between the social, individual, material and organisational formations which would be emergent in the space. As the practice continued to develop at a.pass and elsewhere over the past ten years, then Settlement and now Poliset went through different iterations, becoming a larger research project on the politics of commoning and the relationship between practice and its material/spatial conditions within institutions.”
Vladimir Miller
a.pass Poliset 2022W4-6 will bring together research practices, contributions and participation by:
apass participants, mentors, curators and team (tbc):
Aleksandra Boris, Amy Pickles, Chloë Janssens, Sarah Pletcher, Anna- Sophie Lugmeier, Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier, Vera Sofia Mota, Gosie Vervlossem, Simon Asencio, Rares Craiut, João Fiadeiro, Vijai Patchineelam, Anna Rispoli, Samah Hijawi, Jaime Llopis, Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Steven Jouwersma, Joke Liberge, Kristof Van Hoorde.
with research contributions by:
artists choreographers Christine de Smedt, Liza Baliasnaja and Theo Livesey:
”L'Inconnu is a collaborative research project between Liza Baliasnaja, Theo Livesey and Christine De Smedt, around the notion of Low Intensity Violence (LIV). For this work, we consider LIV to be made up of the violences we experience and produce which are not immediately evident or visible. The violence that works in disguise. The research currently takes a specific look at LIV through the lens of language, and how language operates as a medium and vehicle for violences.”
Tania Garduño (CIVA) - contribution on Proxemics:
“In the Turkish Empire, the shade of a tree you planted determined the amount of land you owned. Tree shades defined villages' sprawls. You could also calculate how old was a city, not necessarily by its buildings but by looking at the height of the trees.
Architecture can be seen as the practice situated between the built space, human beings and actions. It can become the container of politics, history and civilizations. However, no single discipline nor research technique can help us understand how we perceive and associate with space. The science of Proxemics acknowledges this impasse; it addresses basic human situations in a subconscious area of society. It studies the many sensory inputs and emotions related to culture and its environment. Through scientific research, combined with "learning-by-doing" and the starting point that we are all experts in "being", Proxemics creates a broad field of experimentation that gives us a hidden take on our relationship to the world.”
Jozef Wouters
"I will open and share my research as part of The Unbuilt School of Architecture. Part of Decoratelier, The Unbuilt School of Architecture is a platform for research about scenography and ephemeral space. For the Poliset days, I will share my research on spaces that are made of care and words more than of space and square meters. The ways of sharing are twofold; on Mon Feb 7th from 4pm I will open for a reading group and at 6pm it will be a film or a talk."
Conversation with David Vercauteren on his book “Micropolitiques des Groupes” (tbc)
To be expanded by the participating researchers
an updated agenda of presentations, sharings, workshops and screenings will be posted here as it develops
…
This text is not only an announcement, but also an invitation to come and spend time in the space and to usedesign it on your own terms. please use the link below to sign up and coordinate so that we can welcome you in.
covid safety protocols will be followed in the collective space.
re:source End Presentations January 27,28 and 29, 2022
15 January 2022
posted by: Lilia MestreNathaniel Moore is a choreographer/dancer based in Brussels.
Inter-Materiality Mode Federico Protto
21 January 2022
posted by: Federico Protto
Various notes from my research period at a.pass from September 2020 until January 2022.
Mentors: Myriam Van Imschoot, Tom Engels, Lilia Mestre, Mika Hayashi Ebbesen, Benny Nemer, Lisa Deml, Isadora Gallas, Amanda Piña
www.federicoprotto.com
(file: 29.08.2020)Komische Pan Figur, sitzt vorne, Effektmikro, verschiedene Effekte, verschiedene Sprachen
ich konnte meine Models nie zahlen
ich wollte meine Models nie zahlen
ich habe meine Models nie bezahlt
-> Beichten in verschiedenen Sprachen,
bis sich die Sprachen vermischen in Klänge
bis sich die Klänge auflösen in einen klaren Ton
Ton verwandelt sich in (chorale?) Melodie
sound Pan fängt an
[“i have laboured for free!!!” (???) ]
Song Pan, - adoration of the nature (god) of things
Baumstämme around Halbkreis, wie Waldlichtung, oder viele Objekte, nicht nur Baumstämme aber Klötze und andere bulky objects, natürlich, semi-natürlich, unnatürlich in einer Art größerem Kreis, Zirkel (neue Funde Stonehenge1 als Vorlage) um eine Haufen Kleidung, gesammelt aus den Straßen Brüssels!
Eine Szene mit dieser Kleidung, Objekte werden beschrieben, teilweise unter hysterischem Lachen, Sound im Hintergrund, wie Motoren, Kettensägen, Ferraris2, stressig, Beschleunigung, Fabrik, Produktion.
Zwei Stühle oder sowas, mit high heels dran, oder zwei Stühle als high heels verkleidet, somehow, whatever, Figur sitzt drauf, lacht hysterisch, geht nach hinten, weisse Vorhänge, lang, Nähmaschinen, die Situation von Arbeit, etwas wird genäht und immer wieder von hysterischer Figur zerrissen, Arbeiter nähen es wieder zusammen,
durational
eine Chor situation sollte hier stattfinden (?).
-
“Und jetzt kommt ‘ne Strophe von Kunst:
‘The contemporary marketing of freedom and the transfer of revolutionary themes from the class struggle to the hedonistic entertainment industry and the creative industry of ideas has resulted in today's art rarely being articulated along the lines of revolutionary utopia and the emancipatory thinking of the future.’"3
(Monday, November 9th, 2020)I would like to start these notes on my first block at a.pass with a quote I got sent by a good friend just a while ago:
“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” 4
Donna Haraway
(File: Beginning of September 2020: Presentation of research in current state)
[updated on the 1st of January 2022]
More than ever it is clear that a sustainable way of working within the field of fashion is urgently necessary. Fashion, as an industry but also as a phenomenon, poses this problem as a systemic core issue of consumerism and a capitalist value system.Regardless of several attempts of rejecting, and boycotting the fashion system, e.g. as proposed by numerous flip-charts and out-cries by influencers on social media, the question of why to bother finding solutions seems essential. Especially facing the current events of the pandemic, dressing our bodies, transforming ourselves, and role-playing, fashion becomes key protagonists in a lock-down-every-day. But not only that, more than ever, we cover our bodies: masks start to crawl up our faces, and besides being hygienic utilities, they become a further semiotic moment of dressing, a political zone of tension.
Our lives are ruled by everyday rituals, and getting dressed is one of the main acts we are all, collectively practicing. […] So how to tackle this ecological catastrophe ‘fashion’?
[…]This research approaches ways how to bring fashion elsewhere. Where or what could that be? Could fashion be understood as a certain kind of mode? A state of at*tention and ad*dressing? If so, what is this mode’s materiality like? What are the methods of making this frictional zone of interstice permeable?
Steinzeit Now:
Kleidung et Banana, Post-Post-Patchwork‘STEINZEIT now’ is a string of my research stemming from a discourse circle which was first called ‘Kleidung & Banana’ […] initiated in 2016 in London with three fellow fashion design colleges and friends: Agnes Varnai, André Reiner Törner, and Wanda Wollinsky.
‘KLEIDUNG & Banana’ is a collective discursive attempt rooted in a moment of 2016 when all of us were interning for different high-end fashion brands in London (Hussein Chalayan, Marques’Almeida, J.W. Anderson). This moment emerged from not only feeling exploited but feeling like deliberately incarnating a system of exploitation of young creative and physical labor force, feeling like voluntarily embodying an absolute forced upon crisis, feeling like trapped in the paradox of neoliberalism. From the desire to rebel against and boycott this shared common reality, we founded a fictive fashion brand called ‘Kleidung & Banana’.
[…]
In 2020 we had a short revival of the practice via online-conferences during various lockdowns. One of our main concerns and conclusions was that fashion is dead. This bitter, but almost-pathetic statement produced the idea to understand the current state of fashion as a sort of pre-stone-aged momentum, and the discourse group we formed as a prophetic preparation for a 21st-century fashion-ice-age!
The proclaimed prophecy includes a manifesto of four pillars:
1 fun (recreate)
2 fuck the system (rebel)
3 cheap-ass (reflect)
4 free booze (re-conquer)
Despite that we all enjoy a drink or two at times, obviously, these four points can be understood as placeholders for methods of preparing for and surviving the upcoming ice age.
The idea is to be a fashion collective on the basis of being a fluid creative discourse circle, beginning from the wish to primarily exchange and communicate thoughts and ideas.
[…]
Moved by the idea of a current stone age of fashion and a possible upcoming world covered in ice, I set up to look into the predecessors of my methods and practices as a fashion designer: where does fashion come from, what are the history and genealogy of the tools and methods I use and practice? How can I unlearn ‘the future’ and ‘the new’ to re-learn ‘the present’ and ‘the now’?
Hence, one first experiment is a series of hand-stitched textile pieces titled ‘Post-Post-Patchwork’. Through investigating historical sewing needles, and hand sewing techniques from centuries BC, I tried to understand how a (larger) body is generated by uniting (smaller) bodies, and how one singular (body) is always multiple (bodies). I started to manically preserve every textile leftover I had, e.g. from scavenged and customized, cropped, or tattered garments collected from the streets, or leftover fabric scraps from designed pieces from previews fashion collections of mine, and interconnect these in a coincidental and raw manner.5The resulting patchworks partly became simple flat textile pieces within the process of editing. Some others though developed into strange miss-fitting harnesses, maybe even into miss-functional porto-garments, questioning representation: not only did this practice create a fuzzy time tunnel, but also suggests an un-learning of the human anatomy, the human body, movement, performance. It trivially produced a meditative sensation of healing, a strange act of rebellion, and ultimately a clash of perspective.
Esoterikosmos
Letter for K.6
30.09.2020Dear K.!
I am Federico, I just started 1 month ago at a.pass and ur mom told me about this work of yours with your colleges at […], I went to see your musical-holistic performance, maybe you remember me, I was the awkward stranger with glasses, hehe. Anyways, your mum told me to go and see your work bc I am a fashion designer and mentioned that you made your costumes yourself during the period you spend within the location and she also mentioned that you would perform self-written songs. The day of your performance I was in a very bad mood, I don’t even remember why, I just know that I almost didn’t go, I am glad that I went at the end. You know, I never liked saying that I am an esoteric person, I would rather say I am a spiritual, but I started to understand that ESOTERIK just means – translated from Greek – THE INNER or INSIDE – and I think that in my work there is a part which strongly wants to unfold methods and practices which help as a guide o the ‘inner world’ (maybe something like ‘ESOTERIKOSMOS’).
So from my esoteric point of view, going to your performance was very important! The day before I have been writing with a friend of mine in Berlin to maybe record a song together and she plays the Klarinette. Being in a bad mood and then arriving at that location which seemed like an exploded version of your ESOTERIKOSMOS and you playing that exact instrument I had been thinking about - I connected the dots and my mood went up, lightly. I think it is crucial to keep noticing and keep reading these small symbolic ‘signs’, at least as directional meaning (to not give them a ‘good/bad’ interpretation). You know to me they represent a path, it’s relaxing. And then passing your little group in the café the day after it again lightened my mood so I decided to write you this letter, it’s my side of reading the signs.
LONG INTRODUCTION
In my path of arriving here to Brussels and a.pass there was one event which was very relevant for this direction. It’s a trance-like meditation a woman called ANITA practiced with me. It is about finding a place of safety and love and excitement one created within oneself as a child. I think there are several of these spaces within us, for different moments of our life, your performance and the space you created seemed like one of these.
[…]
THE VOICE. The voice is something very fragile, and I feel like even using my voice for 29 years on this planet, I often still have no clue about it. It comes from within! Esp. if used as we do for singing, performing can become a shamanic practice.
It becomes a shamanic practice because the voice, spoken or sung is something coming and activated from INSIDE and it goes also inside the other things, human beings around it (and it goes through us so it can also be understood as something cleansing, cleaning out, cleaning through…) To me the voice is something which very easily becomes a magical tool (or magic itself??) and the voice used in the purest sense (whatever that may mean to each one) is – in my ESOTERIKOSMOLOGICAL understanding – the most powerful. Your voice is powerful, it is really amazing and I loved that it didn’t try to be beautiful but it just was, by being itself, raw and porous and shy.
[…] I hope one day you can hear my voice too.
I want to keep striving for the porous voices, fragility, vulnerability – not singing nice – but singing !that’s it!!!!
[…] TBC.
BXL 8/8/2021
Dear K. Now almost 1 year after writing the first part of the letter, I got the impulse to (finally) send it to you. Reading it back I discovered a lot that is very dear to me, which has been abandoned a bit in the depth of human-time-space.
So I believe that the almost-one-year-delay in sending this letter is a relevant factor to re-connect […]. On the 16th I will sing in Volksroom and it would be awesome if you came!
[…] I am excited
FOR THE FUTURE
xoxo
FedericoAudio Guide:
Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?(Email to humans, end of November 2020)7
Dear fellow Humans!
Here I share with You […] the 1st volume of an audiobook series with the work-in-progress-title
‘audio guide attempt to inter-material fashion research‘
****
You will find four approaches of my artistic research on the inter-materiality of fashion in a to me quite new format, the Hörspiel (‘listening play’). The four approaches of Volume 1 are:
1 Pan & the Dystopian Tendencies
2 Vessel of Knowledge 1
3 Excerpts from ‘Notes on the Indios Charrúas’ Translation
4 Augmented Reality
****
I thank Baptiste for his euphonium contribution and Vivian for the accompanying image.
1 Pan & The Dystopian Tendencies[…]
When I was visiting my father in South America in January 2016 I wrote a piece of text with the title ‘I come from different places’. That poem became the Leitmotiv of my fashion collection ‘2017 non-corporeal' and has since transcended into different forms and outcomes. It is also included in the following sound piece called ‘Pan’ I wrote and produced within the last year.
Plato said – I quote out of Mladen Dolar’s Book ‘The Voice and nothing more' – that ‘[…] in order to forestall a truly apocalyptic vision – the end of civilization, a return to chaos initiated by innocuous-looking changes in musical forms - one has to impose a firm regimentation of musical matters.”8One of the rules, “[…] the prime antidotes for combating the monster […]” was to “[…] ban polyharmonic instruments that permit free transitions among the modes, […] in particular the flute […]. The wind instruments have the vicious property that they emancipate themselves from the text, they act as substitutes for the voice, they isolate the voice beyond words. No wonder Dionysus chose the flute as his preferred instrument (remembers also Pan’s pipes, not to mention the mythical connections of the flute with the Gorgon, and so on), while Apollo decided on the lyre.”9
Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature, shepherds, and the wilderness is associated with fertility and the awakening of spring. This goatish God, relative of the Satyrs and Fauns, is playing his flutes and borrows his name to the word ‘panic’. It is of no surprise that he is understood as relative of Christianity’s Satan. The death of Pan, which is said to have happened around the year 0, also marks a Copernican twist in the world view: it is said that Jesus was only born because Pan – as only Greek mythological god – had died. This marked a shift within beliefs and also allowed the big entrance of theology into our history.
[…]
I welcome you on my journey.
****
We question materiality: what even is material? How do we store material and how do we identify material?
How do all these questions re-inform the work we are doing, the lives we are living right now?
And what is quality then? Where and how is quality being constructed? And who decides how many filters are just the right amount of abstraction needed to allow reality?10
Fashion Hypnosis[…]
[SOUND ON machine forest]
(maybe twice, je nachdem)
you are at the place of embarkment now.
the weather,
the temperature is the one you love most.
you are embarking now.
you focus on your favorite body part.
you focus on its contact with the outside world.
it is wrapped in the material, the fabric,
you love most.
it is warm. it is cool. slippery. protecting. maybe expensive.
you chose.
you see the color which makes you feel a specific way.
you are wearing this color at this moment.
you may have smelled the wind today.
you may have sensed it, you have heard it.
you are now wearing the wind.
all around you.
the wind embraces your skin.
embraces you.
you feel the thin layer of wind between yourself and everything outside.
you consider becoming small. very small, super small, to investigate that sphere between you and outside.
you jump right into it.
mini-you jumps right
into it.
you try this for a moment
[…]
you try to remember your mother's perfume the last time you have seen her.
you are embarking now
approach the magical object you are wearing today.
it is a ring
it is a bracelet
a necklace
it is the wind
it is a building
it is a feeling
it is a memory
it is something hiding somewhere.
you think about its meaning.
What does it mean? this magical something you are wearing today
[…]
You sense the material:
cold, hard, heavy, smooth,
-
strange
[…]
you breathe and you expand your field to a comfortable size.
U expand or become small.
What is the right size?
What is your right size?
How does this size fit?
You find the right size.You define the right fit.
You decide to carry this field along for a while.
What is inside of this field?
You fine-tune the fitting of the field
when you found a comfortable fit,
you spend time in that field.
[…]
[GONG]11
Braids
(End of March 2021)
What are ways to (en)compass all the things that emerge within me?
Abundance VS abandonment?
What emerges from this juxtaposition?[…] I wonder what string to follow, which thread to hold on to, how do I identify the freshly and finely cut end so that it can be threatened through the needle hole?
Which strings, which thread, which yarn to weave? Into a tapestry? Into a braid? Braiding.
I like braiding.Recently I started braiding my hair into two tails.
There is something very primordial about braiding. Through simple movement and repetition of the movement, complex shapes, structures and ornaments are constructed.
Braiding hair feels like an act of prehistoric time,
a way to adorn yourself without any adornment,
you need nothing but your hair
and something to tie
you can even fix it with the hair itself.Interesting that Björk used the hair-braid-artworks of the artist Shoplifter for her Medúlla album cover.12
It’s an album made entirely from human voices and sounds coming from the body.It is like choral music, polyphonic singing,
Intricate, hypnotic, trance like structures, songs, lullabies
Are made entirely from human voices and sounds coming from the body.
Just like the braid itself: sounds and in this case composed sounds, musics, created only with ‘what we got’. […]Direction is another such thing. Directions are made through the constellation of possibilities, which way to go? Which path to follow, How to move through certain spaces, how to navigate through them? The compass is a tool that tells you which direction to go. It tells you where is North. To know where is North, we also need to know where is East, West, and South.
South East and West are essential for knowing where is North,
South, East, and West are essential for the existence of North.
I want to feel less pressure to be all-encompassing, but let all these strings, all this hair, all these voices, all these directions co-exist, I want to let them breathe.[…]
Montevideo, Italy(file name: HWD TEXT)
[INSERT SCREENSHOTS]
The hunted look, the haunted grace
The empty laugh that you cultivate
You fall into that false embrace
And kiss the air about her face
Who do you think you are?The tres bon mots you almost quote
from your quiver of literary darts
A thousand or so tuneless violins
thrilling your cheap little heart
Who do you think you are?[…]
Who do you think you are?
I close with my regards
Well I’m the red-faced gentleman
Caught in this picture-postcard
Who do you think you are?Trying my best to make the best of your absence
Though the joke gets tired and sordid
And sea-shell hearts get trampled underfoot
Punchlines unrewardedBut even at this distance, it’s not easy to accept
The vision that I chase returns when I least expect it
I've fallen from your tired embrace
I kiss the air around the place that should be your face.13Dear Human, [this is an ANGRY letter]
[…]I want to show you the first source
[CONTACT MIC EXPLORATION 1]We should be listening-generators
I think what is extremely needed is that we should learn how to listen, how to bear, how to carry, how to support, how to sustain, how to care, how to be humble, how to be ashamed, how to be real, how to surrender, how to abstain, and how to learn again - to re-learn. I think what is extremely needed is that we should learn how to shut the f*ck up.
Some voices are less relevant at the moment, some voices have been too loud and are just boring now. I think some of us might have already realized that their time to speak up 'n' out is – for now – over. And no kicking and punching will help
like an angry baby whoJUST
SIMPLY
WANTS
THE
LOLLIPOP (!)
the motherfathering lollipop is not gonna come.
Upgrade yourself.
The door is locked.
The key is lost.A genealogically, heritagely, and ancestral connection between us and us interwoven in time-space: who was/is/will be the god*des of our adoration? And how can we actually really channel them fairly and freely?
But in fact, that’s boring, this is not about you or me, but about the interstice between us.State of MAXIMIZED CONNECTIVITY.
Death, the Beyond, & Ghosts, the fabric for Vanitas darling: we are not eternal…
Instead let’s deal here with the stretching we should do, the swinging back and forth. […] We have to develop a new form of ancestry cult, a new methodology to celebrate the past, and thus the present to also re-open the gate to direct our magic towards the future, the ancestors we will be for somebody or something in X years. I think if you understand and internalize this idea and realize that you are meaningless just by yourself, then we are on the same page to develop this new technology, to actually reach out. At this point I am not suggesting anything, I really don’t know what could be helpful to react from here and now on but I sense in my ‘being’ - and with this, I don’t mean a simple bodily notion, that would be too easy, neither a mental or academic one, because that’s not timeless enough, but a real SENSING, like when the bass of an immense sound system in a big fat-ass Madonna-concert arena booms literally through your body, makes the hairs on your legs and arms, all over your skin stand up and shiver, you feel it in your bones, it goes something like this:BOOM [MAKE DEEP SOUND] - that we need this ancestral-upgrade-technology!
I also feel this: I don’t know my ancestors, where are they from, what did they do in their lives, how did they die, what were their favorite places, favorite colors, foods? What were their memories, desires for the future, what did they wish for, what were their kinks, which of those could they live out, and how? What did they want for me? What do they want from me?I offer a closer look at the second source:
[CONTACT MIC EXPLORATION 2]
So, I made a family tree, on my heritage.com. I can go back to about mid-19th century, with the AI help of this webpage, and I discovered from my father’s motherly side a couple consisting of a man called [unknown] CANAPÁ and a woman called [unknown] FRAQUI. Both surnames are considerably rare to come across today, apparently, Fraqui is a surname appearing mainly in the south of Brazil and in Uruguay. Canapá could appear as a surname in Italy. But looking at the construction of the word, especially the apostrophe on the final a, it grabs my attention. This stressing of the final vowel makes it sound phonetically quite similar to a lot of southern Latin-American words and forms of speaking appropriated from indigenous languages. Even the names of the three biggest Indigenous groups found in the area of Uruguay, namely Guaraní, Charrúa, and Chaná, bear similar phonetic attributes (even if it is not really clear if those names were imposed onto them by colonial forces or not).
[…] Believe, assumption, no historical notes found. […]. But even more so I wonder who […] are our ancestors, our predecessors? […] So that we can be here, sitting in this institution in Brussel writing sophisticated texts into our crazy techno-devices (for example those macbook laptops all around). Why did a large mass of humans decided pro religions which fix a certain kind of unknown distant spirit to rely on and, contra honoring and celebrating the real heroes: the ones who made us? How do I relate to the place I was born? How are we, foreigners, expected to relate?[…]
Hello, my name is Federico, I am 29 years old, I was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Against the false belief of the commune worker of Forest in Brussels that Montevideo lies in Italy and thus the falsely noted statement of my birthplace as ‘Montevideo, Italy’ in my Belgian national registration data, I can confirm that Montevideo is pretty much embedded in Uruguay and even more that it functions as its capital city.
I lived in Uruguay for about 3,5-4 years because after that, a part of my family moved to Germany. We all have Italian passports because our ancestors seemed to largely maybe have been Italians. We all have Italian passports because our ancestors seemed to largely maybe have been Romans. We all have Italian passports because our ancestors seemed to largely have maybe been Latins. Have Maybe been Greeks, maybe been Etruscans, maybe Umbrians, maybe
maybe
maybe
maybe
maybe
maybe.…
maybe I should do a little dance at this moment, dance practices, dance pieces, and dance during performance applied by non-dancers, seems to be something very trendy at the moment, so as my background and consequently my research base on fashion, it seems that the notion of the following trend is somehow relevant, and to not contradict myself I will dance now a bit.
LUMIDEE FT SPEEDY, SIENTELO, REMIXED (max 01:30)14
[dann sich auf den teppich legen, evtl contact micro bissl den teppich abtasten, durchschnaufen]Audio Guide: À Mon Seul Désir15
(filename: google search designer name_deisre)
Martin
- Margiela’s brand was acquired by the OTB Group in 2002 and industry insiders were quoted as suggesting that Margiela may desire to leave due to creative differences, or simply, "A desire to enjoy his life outside the insistent glare of the fashion world.
Viv
In [the collection] ‘Too fast to live, too young to die’ mid-70’s there would be a lot of attitudes and a lot of what was to come. The desire to provoke would lead them to problems with justice for obscenity and indecency. Vivienne [Westwood] and McLaren counterattacked renaming the store ‘Sex‘, with a huge poster with pink plastic inflatable letters, and a collection inspired by BDSM and bondage. “Rubberwear for the office” featured latex garments, zippers, straps, thongs, garters, fishnet stockings, and exposed breasts. Punk was born.
Rick
Rick Owens’ desire to expand beyond the realms of fashion, into the worlds of interiors and furniture, has been well documented over the past decade.
Hussein
His wish: that anywhere – whether he changes continents, cities, jobs, loves – he could find his native land, the one where life is born, is reborn. Nostalgia carries the desire, less for an unchanging eternity than for always-fresh beginnings.
Gianni
There’s no question that Gianni Versace’s vision was crystalline, the desire he built around his collections dazzling and his commerciality indisputable (at the time of his death the designer had an estimated net worth of £362 million).
Donatella
These were clothes designed for desire, by a fashion figure as charismatic as Karl Lagerfeld or Jean-Paul Gaultier, both out of the immediate spotlight but instantly recognizable, Donatella used her energy and passion to keep Gianni’s dream alive. Today, she has nothing more to prove: Versace has remained a veritable weapon of mass seduction.
Various notes on the Indios CharrúasExcerpt of translation of ‘apuntes varios sobre los indios charrúas’ by the Brigadier General don ANTONIO DIAZ (1861-1869?) published in a modernized version by Jose Joaquin Figueira for ‘estado mayor del ejercito, departamento de estudios historicos ‘divison historia’ in 1977.
[…]Sheet C
[…]
I remember their stature, their colour, and other physical qualities. Their guttural and nasal way of speaking, opening the mouth very little, not even to laugh, which they never did create sounds of laughter. In times of cold, they would sit down squatting on their heels, in a row, remaining in silence or talking very slowly: generally, they would stay on horse, laying on the neck of the animal.
They lived naked, like in the state of nature, only covering their sexes with some kind of object or some ordinary cloth, the ones being very rare having a quillapí or entire cloth covering their whole body, even in the winter.
The women covered their waists in the same manner, and many, but not all of them, covered their breasts with a cloth or quillapí, tied together on its tips over the right shoulder, others made a sort of simple dress out of the same material, without sleeves, with holes for their arms; they carried their small children hanging on their backs inside a cloth with its four tips knotted in the front, forming like this a kind of bag, in which they put one or two children with heads out; the ones which had three children put the third tied in the front, and the one who had four children put the oldest of them on their haunches; other brought their smaller ones hanging on their backs and the elder ones on a horse which they themselves would carry to the right.
They would have no headgear, come along bareheaded, some of them girdling their foreheads with some rags forming a headband, some of them tied their hair with a braid.
They obeyed a chief, choosing for this position the one who received the most credit for his courage and audacity, and whose authority and no rules nor limits.
Before the Conquista, when the iron was yet unknown to them, they went to war armed with arrows, made out of flintstone, its shape resembling one of the bay leaves, but surrounded with sharp teeth in the opposite direction of the harpoon; later on, they substituted that stone with metal, which they sourced mainly from barrels, also to create spears, which they would always be armed with – same as with the bows and quiver – during peace and during wartime.
Ultimately they were very few ones keeping arrows, and most of them used spears.
Always bareback on horse, with only a simple rein, without breaks, they were extremely skilled in maneuvering the horse, same counts for their Bolas, which they would never cease to carry along on their hips.
[...]16
I AM
I am, I am, erm… I am a-, I am a…
I am clothing, I am a patchwork, I am an assembly, I am a cloth, I am fabric, I am a leftover, I am recycling, I am an up-cycling, I am a hybrid, I am a chimera, I am a monster, I am a t-shirt, I am a top, I am a shirt, I am a collage, I am M, I am S, I am XS, I am XXS, I am LARGE, I am X-TRA LARGE, I am XXL, I am XXXL, I am XXXXL, I am XXXXXL, I am6 XL,
I am XM? …. I am unique.
I am a product, I am a design, I am fashion design, I am clothing design, I am cotton, I am a packaging, I am wrapping, I am protection, I am a result, I am a solution, I am a cover,
I am actually an album, an ep, an extended play, I am a CD, I am a compact disc, a carrier of data.
I am a sleve, i am a cd sleeve, I am a database.
I am work.
I am an artwork, I am an experience.
It's 2021 and I am a non-binary object
I am a non-binary artistic object
I am a non-binary artistic body
I am a non-binary body
I am a body
*CLAP*
LIEBER GOTT IM HIMMEL,Mach bitte, dass sich alle T-Shirts verkaufen! …
—
I am a body in space. And you are a body in space, and you are a body in spaces and you and you and you are all bodies in space, and YOU
Are a body in space who needs a new T-Shirt!
Auris-ThemDear Myriam
I had a dream, or a lucid vision a week ago.
I got into my head spiraling, thinking about how
absolutely different our entire world would be
if humans would have developed without
the eyes, without the sense of the optic
and visual.
And first, I thought, ah we would all be blind,
but oh, that's not true.
From the beginning, everything would be so different,
how we perceived each other,
what would be the idea of beauty,
how we would talk and communicate,
how we would dress,
what we would move,
technology, knowledge, wisdom, gender, art!
Myriam, I truly believe the world would be a better place if ears and skin were our main senses.
There is something very bizarre about the eyes,
They create distance.
I sense a huge circle of humans,
who managed to encircle the whole world,
because it is a ritual of proximity and love,
like a huge festivity, and they all hold hands,
almost
but not really, they have their arms stretched out and
enough distance between each other fingertips to feel the next persons
warmth and scent and small sounds of movement,
and they are wearing light bright robes,
out of some material unimaginable to us
which is thin and warm and origins
from a completely different technological approach to production.
And we hummmm, and zummmm.
Like bees, a sonic ring of humming all around the world!
Like the rings of Saturn, and this ring creates a balm for the soul for all living beings. So beautiful,
not humans but Auris-Them.
****18
Playlist
(End of November 2020)
Soft Post-Apocalypse of Love?
1 dj taunus - Hello and welcome back to Soft Post Apocalypse of Love (intro)2 okay kaya - mother natures bitch
3 jessie ware - save a kiss
4 cookie kawaii - vibe (if I back it up)
5 abdu Ali - did dat
6 tami ti - single right now (ft juck)
7 thool - tepeu
8 Gwen stefnai - cool (dj taunts edit)
9 MC dricka - foi bate bate
10 deli girls - peg
11 Villa Elvin - Ettiquete Stomp
12 Pelada - Asegura
13 Madonna - Frozen (Hardtechno Bootleg)
14 Vessel - Paplu (love that moves the sun)
15 eurythmics - sweet dreams (medieval version by samusoridicus)
16 amar - tuhaimerasaman (federico luz edit)
17 Fleetwood Mac - dreams
18 nils bech - foolish heart 2019
19 J H Schein - 13 Suite No. 2 in D Minor (from Banchetto musicale, 1617) II. Gagliarda a 5
1 https://earthsky.org/human-world/discovery-massive-prehistoric-circle-trenches-near-stonehenge/
2 ???
3 Lyric from the song ‘1988 Earthbound” by Federico Luz, written on9th of August 2020 in Paris, France, cites Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, John Hunt Publishing, 2015, p.10
4 Donna Haraway, 1991, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books. Quote sent to me by my dear friend Franziska Schneeberger
5 These post-post-patchworks finally becoming the base for the special edition release of my Federico 2021 Luz EP ‘Formulas’ in November 2021.
6 name changed
7 Wed, 25 Nov 2020, 00:59
8 Dolar Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuits, 2006, p.45-46
9 ibid
10 Excerpt from press text written by Anna Lugmeier & Federico Protto for the release of music video ‘Pan’ on PW-Magazine https://www.pw-magazine.com/2021/video-premiere-federico-luz-pan/
Pan by Federico Luz, Camera: Anna Lugmeier, Bo Vloors, Viktoria Bayer, Federico Protto, Edit/Concept: Anna Lugmeier, Costumes: Federico Protto, Additional Design: W<, bichofeo, Setdesign: Artemyi Shokin & Anna Lugmeier, Performers: Diana Barbosa Gil, Stefan Cantante, Anna Lugmeier, Federico Protto, Franziska Schneeberger, sound mastering: Witch Studios ?
Thanks to RENDEZVOUS3000 (Evamaria Müller, Anna Lugmeier)
11 Gong-Sound from Amanda Lear, Follow Me,1978, released on Ariola Records
12 Björk, Medúlla, released on 30 August 2004 on One Little Independent Records. Cover image photographed by Inez + Vinoodh
13 Elvis Costello & The Brodsky Quartet, The Juliet Letters, 1993, released on Warner Bros. Words, Declan MacManus & Marina Thomas, Music written by Michael Thomas
14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5stjYUK-yg
15 This title is a reference to the series of six tapestries, today called 'The Lady and the Unicorn' created in the style of millefleurs woven in Flanders around 1500
16 ‘apuntes varios sobre los indios charrúas’ by the Brigadier General don ANTONIO DIAZ (1861-1869?) published in a modernized version by Jose Joaquin Figueira for ‘estado mayor del ejercito, departamento de estudios historicos ‘divison historia’ in 1977, p.7-8
17 Open Source Font used is called Kareu Kareu designed by Isabel Motz (Velvetyne Foundry & No Foundry) and layout for Federico Luz' EP Formulas by Chloë Janssens
18 part of an email written to my friend Myriam in June 2021Image Credits in order of appearance
Pan Single Cover, Viviane Gulacsy, 2020
Post-Post-Patchwork, Federico Protto, 2020
Arachne-Mag, Federico Protto, 2017
Video-Still Pan Music Video, Anna Lugmeier, 2019/2021
Braid Detail, Dora Denerak Galyas, 2021
Video-Still 1, Research Roulette 2021, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
Video-Still 2, Research Roulette 2021, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc
'welcome to your senses', GIF from bjork[dot]com around the year 2000
Formulas Special Edition, documentation pictures, Federico Protto, 2021
Formulas EP Logo, designed by Chloë Janssens
soft post-apokalyspe of love (MIXTAPE) Cover, Federico Protto, 2020- case of: Federico Protto
"We are all very familiar with oppressive education; with its systems of reward and punishment, the stimulus of competition, the naming of the strong and the weak, the encouragement of reproduction by repetition, the reinforcement of norms and normativity, the unquestionability of the accommodating attitude towards the status quo, and its decision-making-educators—who by refusing dialogue—do not organise the people. The very goal of oppressive education isn’t to liberate nor to be liberated but to manipulate, control and generate conformism.
However, there is another sort of education that is precisely based on dialogue; a form of education that doesn’t function as a tool to facilitate anyone’s integration into the logic of the present system. It is the practice of freedom in its most germinating terms; the facilitation of critical thinking, creativity and citizenry.
a.pass is one of such places, of permanent learning and of promotion of such form of education. I was privileged to have been a part of this program and to have developed there much of my understanding of artistic research and art.
I sincerely hope this institution is granted the opportunity to keep on existing and help shape the artistic scene I am a part of."
Luanda Casella. Schrijver en theatermaker. Artist in residence NTGent
*
“I arrived at a.pass in the crucial moment of my life and career while searching for a way to combine various interdisciplinary artistic and academic experiences and, thus, to define my research and practice. There, I found a unique environment - rigorous intellectual discourse, dedicated peers and mentors, supportive community, and freedom to work on what I needed at that time. Even though previously engaged in international scenes of visual arts, performance and social sciences, I did not know such a place could exist. Until now I do not know another institution comparable to a.pass, neither in Belgium nor internationally. A.pass was the context where I developed the professional trajectory that I now follow. After and thanks to the post-graduate program of a.pass, I started a PhD in artistic research at Hasselt University (fully funded), published two books, and created performances, films and installations in collaboration with such institutions as Whitechapel Gallery, Delfina Foundation and Arts Catalyst in London, Venice Biennial for Architecture in Venice, Kunsthal Gent, BOZAR Brussels, Konstepidem in Gothenburg, among others. In these projects I often collaborate with artists and researchers whom I encountered through the context of a.pass. I firmly believe the relevance of this institute to be invaluable for the fields of contemporary art, performance and artistic research, as well as its model as an institutional structure to be unique and experimental.”
Goda Palekaite. Artist researcher. Ph.D. candidate at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts.
*
“Een jaar op a.pass heeft me meer gegeven dan drie jaar reguliere kunstopleiding. Voordat ik naar a.pass ging dacht ik niet dat het mogelijk is: les krijgen van échte kunstenaars. In vergelijking met a.pass waren mijn jaren op theaterschool een omweg vol met vast benoemde docenten die te ver van de kunstwereld verwijderd waren. Juist doordat a.pass een uniek, steeds veranderende en hybride school is die niet onder één noemer te vatten is, slaagt de opleiding er beter in om in te spelen op de veranderende wereld. Participatie is er geen loos woord: participanten en docenten kunnen de vorm van de opleiding permanent bevragen en verscherpen. a.pass uit België halen betekent een enorme en onmiddellijke verschraling van ons kunstenveld.”
Jozef Wouters. Scenograaf en theatermaker. Winnaar Ultima Podiumkunsten 2019 met Decoratelier
*
"As Brussel's only learning environment focused on artistic research and performance, a.pass serves a unique and irreplaceable function in the city. My work has been transformed by the intensive learning experience I've had there. It's more than just an institution, it's an international community coalesced around principals of rigor, collaboration and care. It gave me the confidence to emphasize knowledge production and performativity as the core strategies in my own art teaching practice."
Gary Farrelly. Beeldend kunstenaar, performer en pedagoog bij La Cambre.
*
"As a past researcher at a.pass I would like to express my disdain and concern over the decision of the Ministry of Education to withdraw their support from the insitution. My time at a.pass has been a period of incredible growth as artist, researcher and in my apprach to pedagogy in the arts. The research I started there have since resulted in projects & research supported locally, nationally, internationally by funders as well as prestigious institutions in Belgium and abroad and continues to fuel my practice and thinking. I strongly believe that a.pass is a unique institution in Europe for the quality & rigour in their pedagogical approach and vocabulary of methodologies that represent an incalculable cultural value in its own right. Beyond this collective value a.pass is also a rich and diverse environement for individual artistic researches to flourish that not only allowed me access to an incredible breadth of thinking and practices, establish new collaborations but also continues and will continue to feed my research and practice multiplying manifold the investment of the ministry and adding values be they academic, cultural, financial, artistic, emotional to Belgian academia, the Belgian state and its people. As a resident of Brussels, as an artist, as independent researcher, as an alumni of a.pass and as a European citizen I call on the Ministry to reverse their decision."
Eszter Nemethi, artist, curator*"I was a participant in a.pass in 2014 and it was an adrenaline injection into my practice. Vague ideas transformed into solid ground for a collaborative performative practice and it was a strong and formative influence also on my work as a teacher. Besides being an invaluable place of research and education, a.pass offers it's alumni a professional community that uniquely reinforces their work and careers. In this way it is a strong, constitutive player in the whole Belgian (performance) art field."
Philippine Hoegen, artist, educator
*
“Als internationaal kunstenfestival met een sterke interesse voor artistieke pedagogie zijn we bijzonder bedroefd over het nieuws dat a.pass zijn werkingsmiddelen zal verliezen. Het ondoordacht en lichtzinnig schrappen van een artistieke onderzoeksinstelling als a.pass is een totale verarming van het kunstschoollandschap. Als we de toekomst van het Vlaamse kunstenveld willen bestendigen dan moet er blijvend geïnvesteerd worden in verschillende vormen van artistiek onderwijs. a.pass is daar voor ons een cruciaal en onvervangbaar onderdeel van.”
Dries Douibi, artistiek directeur KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS
*
“Elk hedendaags artistiek ecosysteem heeft behoefte aan infrastructuur voor artistiek onderzoek. Sinds 20 jaar heeft Vlaanderen dit stapsgewijs verankerd in de grote academische onderwijskoepels. Sinds 14 jaar bestaat er een onafhankelijk, klein instituut, a.pass, wat fungeert als een internationaal laboratorium voor individueel onderzoek in een omgeving die zelforganisatie en solidariteit cultiveert. A.pass is daarenboven een unieke reflectiekamer over de methodieken en de ethiek van onderzoek. A.pass is een voorland, een stukje van dat ecosysteem dat bewezen heeft bijzonder goed in staat te zijn om het artistiek én het academisch veld te irrigeren met onvermoede voedingsstoffen. Zonder a.pass zou het programma van een huis als Kaaitheater verschralen.”
Barbara Van Lindt, algemeen en artistiek coördinator KAAITHEATER
*
"This is striking and sad news: the Flemish government stops the support for a.pass artistic research school, and also for HISK/Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten/Higher Institute for Fine Arts. At the same time they decided to continue and increase the support for two other educational institutions: the International Opera Academy and the Orpheus Institute. Both institutions are focussed on western classical and contemporary forms of music.The political choice is clear, and is probably exemplary for the direction the Flemish arts scene is evolving to the next years: real experiment, more dissident or difficult developments of artistic practices are cancelled in favour of frictionless, bourgeois ways of relating to art. I am not calling out opera and music research, don’t misunderstand me here, my plea is to support different educational views on art and access to different ways of relating to art. This government has decided to slowly but surely cancel out a vivid and (politically) more critical part of the arts scene. Yes, we knew this already, now we see it in action."Michiel Vandevelde, artist, dancer*“Als commissie schreven we een inhoudelijk advies dat a.pass met een goed tot zeer goed rapport richting een toekomst loodst, waarbij een stopzetting van subsidiëring nooit ter sprake is gekomen en voor ons nooit op de agenda stond. In dit rapport beschrijven we op een constructieve en positieve manier hoe a.pass functioneert. Dit rapport kwam tot stand na het doornemen van hun benchmarking, analyse van de voorbije jaren, plannen voor de toekomst en inspirerende gesprekken met (ex-)studenten, mentoren, management, bestuur en collega’s uit het veld. We zijn dan ook verbaasd en teleurgesteld dat de minister dit gunstige advies naast zich neer heeft gelegd.”
An Vandermeulen & Mira Sanders (evaluatiecommissie)
*
“It is with shock and sadness that we receive the news that Minister Weyts of Education will not prolong the agreement with HISK and a.pass starting 2024. The reason given for this decision is the lack of added value to the ecosystem of educational art institutes in Flanders. As director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht I can only say that this is far from the truth and this decision will be a blow to the network of post academic institutes in Europe. HISK and a.pass are part of the postacademic ecosystem and fill in just as all the other post academic institutes the gap between educational/academic and artistic practice. This is the reason why so many international artists find their way to Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany. There are no such institutes available in the world. Northern Europe has played a significant and leading role in nurturing and sustaining institutes like these for over 150 years starting with the Rijksacademy in Amsterdam. Also, postacademies push the narrative and discourse of artistic and artistic research practice internationally. This will be a blow to both fellow institutes and artists alike. I hope sincerely that Minister Weyts will reconsider his decision and will allow HISK and a.pass play the important role that they have been doing for so many years.”
Hicham Khalidi - directeur Jan Van Eyck Academie
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"a·pass has been coming to PAF every year as part of its research curriculum. The dedication towards experimental forms of education, practices of collective organization and the politicization of artistic research, makes it an invaluable institution in the landscape of school and educational programmes.”
Simon Asencio, performing artist and pedagog. On the behalf of PAF - Performing Arts Forum - Saint-Erme, France
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"What I found in a.pass is the art school I imagined to be part of when I first thought of becoming an artist. It just took me 10 years to get there. My art education begins at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Montenegro, through exchange programs in art schools in Vienna and Metz, Master's degree in Luca School of Art Brussels, postmasters in St Lucas in Antwerp, to having a research position at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. I can say with certainty that only after a.pass I gained the tools and confidence to be the artist I want to be. This is due to the experimental structure of a.pass that makes it a special place (and that transcends the borders of Belgium) - a well thought structure that allows a nonvertical approach to teaching, an open and transparent process that encourages all the participants to devote themselves not only to develop their own work but to do so by taking part in each other's practices, while they are co-making the institution they are part of. I think that to manage this way of working and to become this kind of institution it takes years of hard work and risk-taking, where governmental support is of crucial importance.
Also, a.pass managed to create a truly transdisciplinary environment, focussing on the performativity of artistic research and the methods of sharing knowledge. This I experienced only as an aim of artistic research programs developing today in Schools of Art. Needless to say that visual art schools are far from this achievement as they are becoming more of incubators for only specific kind of artist and art production, falling under pressure and influence of art market demands. a.pass is not just a program to go though, a step in the career, but it is an artist-run educational platform that for sure wouldn't be able to develop as such if merged within bigger structures of the School of Art.
a.pass is for me not only a program I took part in, but it is also a base experience for a belief that things can be done differently and that this world can become a less hostile place through artistic means."
Adrijana Gvozdenović, artist
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"It’s very sad for me to read that the subsidy for a.pass will not continue. In January of 2012 I joined a.pass as a researcher. The time I spend at a.pass was extremely beneficial; a.pass widened my understanding of artistic research, pushed me to better explain my practice, and gave me the courage to articulate and share my research. I’m very grateful for that time and the connections made there. In a complex world we need more places like a.pass not less."
Elizabeth Ward, choreographer, performer, dancer
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"I attended a.pass in 2017 and 2018, and graduated in February 2019. Without a.pass I simply don't think I would be where I am today as an artist. I learned a lot from the teachers and peers in my program. The context of a.pass (including ongoing feedback, presentation moments, space, time, research trips, budget and one-on-one mentoring support) permitted me to try new things and test out new and experimental formats, within a supportive and critical environment. a.pass provided a crucial developing ground for me to better understand my artistic practice, research methodology and needs. a.pass encourages its participants to connect with other practitioners and institutions in Belgium, and this is a strong aspect of the learning offered. The presentation of my graduation piece was held at Hectolitre, Brussels, and was organised collaboratively with two peers from my cohort. The collaboration was an important part of what made that event so meaningful. We were supported to make an audio publication together, and conceive a coherent program for our three practices, creating something none of us could have managed alone. Held on two evenings, there was a large public present to experience our event, and the three jury members subsequent feedback was invaluable. This marked a significant moment for me. Since graduating, I have continued my artistic research and consistently been invited to present performances and publish writing in Belgium and abroad. The dedicated and ongoing feedback I received during the period of my study at a.pass was instrumental to the evolution of my artistic research. The community of a.pass students and alumni is strong and ever-growing; it is a diverse group of people whose coming together makes for a unique study program, not only in Belgium but internationally. The close and unpredictable encounters with artist researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds is rare and must be valued highly. a.pass creates a veritable surplus for the artistic, cultural and educational sphere in Belgium."
Eleanor Ivory Weber, Brussels-based artist, a.pass Post-Master graduate
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"This decision is a proof of incompetence by the Ministry when it comes to understanding the information and documentation they demand and are provided with. It is evident that those in power have horrifying little to no knowledge about their own cultural fields."
Heike Langsdorf - radical_hope - a.pass alumna, artist and pedagog in KASK
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"Minister Ben Weyts should understand the importance of a.pass for the richly networked ecology of the Belgian art field, where bigger and smaller institutions constantly nourish each other. I experienced the value of the a.pass program from close by in 2016-17. The careful pedagogy helped me to start developing my own artistic practice, next to working as a dramaturge for other artists, amongst which some a.pass alumni such as Heike Langsdorf, Luanda Casella and Jozef Wouters."
Sébastien Hendrickx, performing artist, dramaturge, art critic
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"I would like to testify to the great importance of the a.pass post-master program in the development of my artistic research and its outreach in Europe since 2016. It is now supporting other artistic researches in dance, performance and documentation through publications like "Mind the dance" a digital publication of REFLEX Europe, 3 years EU-project (2018), Body in Revolt, ICK Amsterdam Online Magazine (2017) and presented in renown European dance festivals and Arts institutions a.o: Charleroi Dance, Brussels (2021); Royal Conservatory of Antwerp-master program (2020 -2021) Independent Dance, London (2019); Kaaïstudio, Brussels (2018), ImpulzTanz, Vienna (2018; 2017; 2016); KASK school of Arts, Gent (2021-2018)."
Anouk Llaurens, dancer, artist, researcher in dance and pedagogue
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"Participating in the a.pass past-master program has been hugely important for my practice. It is one of the best environments I can imagine for an artist of maker to develop and improve their critical thinking. Especially the exchange between the different fields within the arts is very special and contributes in making anyone a better and more complete artist. At least that counts for me, since my end presentation in September 2019, I've become a curator, fund raiser and a teacher and a much more complete artist. I am slowly finding my position with the international art scene and art market and turned my practice into a much more sustainable enterprise."
Maurice Meewisse, artist, curator
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"Since 2015 a.pass offers me a unique pedagogical method and an international platform that provides the guidance of highly qualified professionals in the arts, culture, theory and sciences. Based on self organization, transdisciplinary peer exchange and multicultural community care, I find the freedom and trust to experiment with my creative, intellectual and production interests in a safe space. This has allowed me to find my research methodologies, strengthen my art practice and work, develop publishing, teaching, mentoring and curating capacities. In other words, to position my profession and be someone constructive in society."
Isabel Burr Raty, artist
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"I have been an associate researcher at a.pass in 2018/19 and this period of time had such an influence on my practice and on my desires in regards to where I want my work to go, and whereto I want to develop as an artist and as a human being. I had the feeling already that there is something very unique and something very special happening at a.pass when I partly joined one of their blocks as a visitors, a block that was topic-wise very much connected to my practice. And this vague feeling proved so to be so true. It is hard to put this in words. As a visual artist and artist researcher I seem to have a difficult, challenging etc relationship with language. I experienced a.pass a a ‚fermenting‘ place, as a very fertile ground for other kinds of thinking, making, doing to emerge, to imagine other kinds of futures so desperately needed. One major trajectory in this is collaboration and community. ‚We are not all and the same but we are in this together‘. Coming from an art education that mostly teaches very individualistic approaches to art practices, it was so revealing to experience a.pass and their collaborative teaching and learning methods in the making. Last year I had the honour to curate a block as well together with my research cycle I fellows, and I again the experiences I made, the conversations we had, the things we had done together with the people at a.pass and the participants is now very much influencing how I want to approach working, thinking, doing in my practice based PhD, which is mainly collaborative. I have quite a hard journey in front of me. Learning how to truly collaborate and work together is not easily done when one went through all the individualised art and other higher educations. But a.pass gave me the hope and the energy and the passion and the joy to really trying it, to seeing not onl the benefits but the needs to do so. Loosing a.pass as a psotmaster education institution will create such a loss and leave such a hole within the educational field of artistic knowledge making etc., and I dread to think of the consequences this will entail. Within the spirit of a.pass I still hope, however, that we will be able to change the course and continue supporting this amazing, ideosyncratic and so needed institution."
Antye Guenther, visual artist
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"I participated to the a.pass post-master program between October 2018 and January 2020. My experience in the frame of this institution has been that of an extraordinary exposure to critical thought and radical imagination. Not only in the context of a.pass I found a context to get in touch with the cutting edge of artistic research within an heterogeneous, international and rich group of peers and tutors, but I found also that the ever-changing and ever-challenging environment of the program regarded also the organization of the program itself. I have never met or heard, before or after my stay in a.pass, such a radical self-critical approach within an established art education institution: the program itself was a wider research project of which the participants were part of, getting influenced by it but also shaping it with their collective and individual presence. I believe that this specific fluid and self-critical approach points at the roots of what is at stake in the practice of artistic research and should be a precious model to think of its institutionalization in the context of art education - the presence of which constitutes undoubtedly a priceless treasure for Brussels cultural scene. The a.pass post-master program led me to re-imagine education, community and artistic practice as mismatched from what is already existing, to suspend given knowledge to foster the imagination of new possible realities, which I believe to be the very core of the role of "school" as an institution within our society."
Piero Ramella, visual artist and performer
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"Small is Beautiful.
I joined a.pass in 2014, not knowing how much it would influence my practice, and how much of a large and extended family such a small organisation would connect me to. On a personal and artistic level, and through their subtly inquisitive, and insistently open approach to pedagogy, I was able to develop the courage to explore ways of presenting my work, and this is the reason I am where I am today. What I learned from people at a.pass, I keep very close to me.
We don’t only need traditional art academies, or the big names to which art schools are attached. These places may not be open to risk, but at a.pass, every problem is an opportunity to evaluate and reconsider the pedagogical framework that enables learning in ways that are present; present in the community, in the garden, in the city, in the performance space, etc. There is a clear commitment to community and sharing, in negotiating the decisions of how to learn together, and in publishing this information for others to learn from it.
While these may not be the most sought-after terms of engagement for politicians and economists, they are the terms of everyday life in any community. a.pass gives people tools for collective working, thinking, living, and making. We need these tools to re-think our relationships to the worlds we inhabit, worlds that are under threat because of the individualistic and money-driven attitudes that dominated our lives for too long.
a.pass is not just in Belgium, it is in Spain, in Romania, in Turkey, in Sweden, in Palestine, in Germany it is in Jordan, in Iran, in Serbia, in Canada, in Brazil, in Holland, in France, in Poland, in Italy, in Mexico, in the USA, in Portugal, in Ruwanda, and Iceland—to name just a few. a.pass is what puts Belgium on the international art map. Decisions to cut it out of the picture should be in consultation with the people who thrive from it, not for the furthest person from its realities. We want a more collective approach to political decisions."
Samah Hijawi, artist and phd researcher
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"In my experience, the unique added value of a.pass is unquestionable.
Personally, a.pass has had an instrumental function in my artistic career, giving space and time to develop my artistic practice and the opportunity to make connections with colleagues and professionals in my field. The artistic developments I achieved during my time at a.pass became the pillars of my artistic practice. The works I made during a.pass allowed me to leap my practice further into unknown places. The personal connections I made in a.pass are still very important to me personally and professionally. Since being at a.pass, I started teaching at Luca School of Arts in Brussels where I am also a PhD candidate, and I participated in several exhibitions and events in the Flemish art scene.
Finally, a.pass is a pilar in its field, gathering artists from different disciplines into a truly unique institution. The artists that are formed in this institution are fresh, original, special artists, that together generate an artistic scene which is extremely valuable to the Flemish art scene as a whole.
To cut funding from a.pass is to cut out the core of a vivid and diverse art community."
Sofia Caesar, visual artist
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“As one of the invited international peers involved in the benchmarking process initiated by a.pass in 2019, I want to express my support to a.pass and protest in the situation where the Ministry of Education has decided to cut the funding of a.pass. I am shocked to hear that the Ministry of Education uses “negative advice” coming from peers as an argument. If this refers to the benchmarking process I was involved in, it is clearly a grave misinterpretation.
In my view, the operational and pedagogical foundation of a.pass that involves dynamic intertwining of self-organisation and collaboration for both the postgraduate and the research centre programs has proven highly relevant and successful. After a long phase of institutional legitimation struggles the international field of artistic research is actively looking for new forms of organisation and ways of engaging with the professional art field beyond the university system. In this situation, a.pass appears as a significant forerunner and should be seen as one of the cutting edge institutions in the field.
Cutting the a.pass funding appears to me very short-sighted. I hope the decisions concerning this can still be reconsidered.”Mika Elo, Professor of Artistic Research, Academy of Fine Arts / University of the Arts Helsinki Finland
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"It would be an immense loss to the landscape of art education if a.pass would close its doors!! For me, the time I spent at a.pass was very important, it introduced me to new perspectives on art making and artistic research. a.pass gave me constructive tools to understand and articulate my practice, in a supportive and challenging manner. I most appreciate the way we have learned with and from each other on equal terms, through our own and shared desires and concerns. I have been nourished with stirring moments, insights and questions which are still unfolding. I experienced it as a place open to experimenting, failing, falling, suffering, laughing, exploding, resting, resisting, doubting, and emancipating. places with this kind of freedom are of highest value to the art world. Don’t want to have missed my time there – especially with all the wonderful and inspiring people that I know thanks to this place – it is an essential ground to the work i’m doing now."
Agnes Schneidewind, artist
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"I was privileged to be one of a.pass's first participants, witnessing the growth and impact that a.pass has had in the artistic community over the years of its existence; an impact that has proven to have national and international reach. I have continued to be present as a mentor, curator and research associate because a.pass has become a catalyst for dedicated, open and inspiring people. For most, a year at a.pass has been a career and a personal turning point. It has given me the opportunity to carve out a personal way of doing research and producing work, a chance to bring theory and practice together that my previous master's degree, a year of research at University and a year at Fine Arts Academy did not grant me. At a.pass, I met peers with whom I continue to work and discuss, people who over the years remain intellectual and personal references, weaving a network of relationships in which Brussels functions as a focal point.
a.pass is an institution that keeps the dialogue between old and new alumni open, that is not afraid to rethink itself, that is not blind to systemic power dynamics and oppressive habits, that is made up of people who care about each other, about diversity in knowledge production, about interdisciplinary and critical thinking. If we are in a world that needs to change, we need the ability and the courage to look into it, not shut it down."
Sara Manente, artist
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"It is known that the future is a big question mark. Apart from the many crises we know, many will come that will again shake our grounds. Some authors say that in the future there will be a new class of people - the useless class - that are those that do not find a place in the work market because Artificial Intelligence will do all for us. To cope with this, the author's advice is to redirect educations' s purpose towards emotional education rather than the acquisition of specialized knowledge, so that humans learn to cope with change and find new interests and occupations.
I start this statement of support in this way because a.pass has been a place where, me, a specialised professional in contemporary dance in middle career, has been invited to explore issues that little or nothing had to do with my practice as a dancer, and from that, develop new entries to my body practice. I started a.pass when I was 39 years old, and previous to that, I studied dance in many different institutions. I started studying dance at 8 years old, and since then I never stopped. I did a dance school in Mozambique for 1 years, then a full dance school for 6 years in Santiago de Chile and I ended up in P.A.R.T.S doing 3 more years. I studied a lot because I wanted to know my theme well. I worked as a freelance dancer with many independent makers of the European dance scene and also with some very well known established choreographers. But throughout that journey, I also developed my own choreographic work, even though in a much more shy manner than with my career as a dancer. In my personal biography I am also an ex -exilied of the Pinochet dictatorship, and daughter of a committed left wing activist's parents in Chile. This political heritage accompanies my life, the reason why I studied Political Science at ULB Belgium and then I did a master in Art and Politics in Goldsmiths London . All this cv like text to explain that what allowed all those studies and personal reality to make sense, was what I could accomplish in a.pass, that without the trust that mentors and colleagues in a.pass gave me in my research project, it wouldn't have been able to happen. My research looked into the ways laws and norms choreograph the social body, and with this research I have managed to move back to Chile and develop the project further. I have taught secondary students a non-traditional dance or body class, where I have invited them to explore the way their bodies are subjected to norms. The class was given in the context of civics education class, where apart from learning how the country is organized, they have managed to integrate politics to their bodies and observe themselves through the lense of the ways power operates in their life, movements and actions. The same class was given to a labour union of cleaning ladies, where apart from being able to rest their tired bodies from the repetitive movement of cleaning by making other movements, they have explored the way their workplace is filled with domestic rules that aren't necessarily the ones they agree upon. These classes were interrupted with the Covid crisis but my plan is to do them again as I believe they create spaces of micro-emancipations where the sensorial, the mental, the private and the public, dialogue.
I started this statement of support talking about the advice an author gives to the potentially useless class that will exist in the near future. A.pass has impacted my future becomings in a way that has vitalized it by giving me tools for creativity, finding solutions and allowing me to test out possibilities. The emotional educations i have managed to learn from my experience in a.pass is based in thinking that every thought is important and useful; that any opinion is worth listening and answering; that any project is an input; that colleagues are not enemies but collaborators; that intuition and theory are equality important; that knowledge materialized in a practice still has a lot to say, and it is not necessarily bounded to an aesthetical function; that artist have a role in the creation of happiness and wellbeing of society; and that artists are here to stay!"
Varinia Canto Vila, artist, dancer, choreographer
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"Outside of the Bologna logic of BA; MA or PhD and outside of titles and diploma requirements, a.pass looks for the criticism of the doing, of the practice.
Inside of the capital of the European Union, a.pass has a fee potentially accessible to countries which currencies are not in euros. I am referring here at the fact that the Latin-American community that I have met in a.pass is numerous and grandiloquent: I met people from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador.
Inside of Brussels, a.pass is as diverse as the city which host it."
Caterina Mora, artist, dancer
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"a.pass is exemplary in forms of collective organization and through this changes the shape of artistic practices and their role in society. What I took from a.pass is that we should learn from each other and the best way to do that is to leave space for initiative, plurality, and deliberation. 'We are in this together' is a valuable lesson to learn, a.pass is a place where this is practiced and reflected upon every day, in this way artistic practices are redefined and that is what post-graduate education is about. The artists engaged in a.pass take these experiences with them, in their work and to their audiences, as a result the question 'we are in this together, now what?' becomes public and that is one of the roles art should take."
Rob Ritzen, artist, curator of That Might Be Right,
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"The artistic research program at a.pass was a turning point in my personal, political, and artistic life. The questions raised by this process are crucial to the definition of my artistic-political identity. The environment built up over all these years is one of the rare grounds for deep reflection on the practice and theory of performance. Losing a.pass means that we have entered a cultural and educational recession. It affects not only Belgium, but the entire international artistic community that finds in a.pass an asylum in these obscure times."
Flavio Rodrigo, artist
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The context of rigorous examination, practical exploration and support in the construction Of methodology for research gave the groundings for a robust practice that is now gaining interest and continues to develop in commercial and community contexts across the UK and further afield.
a.pass is a unique institution uniquely situated both geographically and in terms of the intersectional artistic/methodological/political and philosophical preoccupations that it holds as valued.
I am incredibly disturbed to hear that the institutes money has been cut and that it will not be able to continue to support artist researchers in vital, pivotal moments in their careers.
I am without doubt that a.pass enriches the European artistic and academic community and I urge who ever has the power to intervene to reconsider this shortsighted decision. I would suggest that rather than support a stripping back, hollowing out and commercialising of artistic ventures that seems the order of the day, that the Belgium governmental decision making bodies make a stand, recognise the long term value to the health of the nation and support a context that challenges, stretches, nurtures and give vital space for artist researchers from all areas of thought and expression to deepen and develop their practice.
Leo Kay, artistic director: Unfinished Business
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"A.pass profoundly reshuffled my thinking about art and its relevance in society.
It provided a fertile environment for experiment and freedom in questioning given categories."Kasia Tórz, writer & dramaturg
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"A good way to attest of the pedagogical efficiency of a certain program is to do a « before & after » comparison. Having seen, throughout the years, many colleagues I knew enrolling in a.pass, I am confident stating that its approach has powerful effects.
Artists having completed the program gain an in-depth understanding of their interest, craft precise tools to develop their work, and broaden their awareness of their perspective's relevancy to the larger context – artistic, social, and political. This often results in an increase of their credibility, visibility and recognition, and thus of their professionalization. But beyond that, it leads also many of the alumni to multiply the ways by which to reach a larger and more diversified audience. The utterly collective and experimental approach of a.pass gives indeed many tools to contribute with specificity and intelligence to the field–and society at large. It is not only anymore about creating « your » piece, but about sharing a process, discussing concerns, confronting point of views. Be it by organizing seminars, leading participatory practices, teaching workshops, intervening in the public space or publishing magazines...typically, a.pass alumni invent many ways to put their work into the world and let the world inform their work, implicating many diverse people along the way. Reaching out, questioning oneself, making proposition as to the place of art for this changing world of ours.
Of all the virtues a.pass exerts on the artistic field (and beyond it), this is certainly one of the most rare and precious: to cultivate an art-making which is not about the author's narcissism nor the audience's consumerism, but about meeting, debating, searching and inventing together – crafting novel ways towards a shared relevancy, specificity and intelligence."Julien Bruneau, artist and researcher, mentor in a.pass, co-editor of Revue COI (TJP, CDN Strasbourg Grand Est), fellow of Third (Das Research, AHK)
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Beste Minister Ben Weyts,
Met ontzetting heb ik vernomen dat u de postgraduaatsopleiding a.pass niet langer zal subsidiëren. Dit is een enorm verlies voor het Vlaamse onderwijslandschap in de kunsten. Zoals u weet zijn onze reguliere opleidingen in de kunsten heel beperkt in vergelijking met buitenlandse onderwijsinstellingen. Waar wij drie Bachelor jaren aanbieden, volgen studenten in het buitenland vaak minstens vier jaren onderwijs alvorens een Bachelor-diploma te behalen. Nadien bieden we in Vlaanderen een Master-opleiding aan in één academiejaar; in het buitenland is dit meestal een opleiding die twee academiejaren beslaat.
Gedurende dit ene jaar moeten MA studenten niet alleen een autonoom artistiek werk maken, maar ook hun portfolio en artistieke visie professionaliseren, een masterproef schrijven, netwerken in het kunstenveld, en vaak ook nog een stage volgen. Het spreekt voor zich dat dit niet evident is. Deze beperking van onze opleidingen werd tot voor kort in Vlaanderen gecompenseerd door de zeer sterke postgraduaatsmogelijkheden, waar geselecteerd wordt op kwaliteit en potentieel, ruimte is voor intense persoonlijke begeleiding, onderzoeksvaardigheden centraal staan, en een sterke peer-to-peer en netwerk-cultuur heerst. A-pass is in die zin een incubator voor kwaliteitsvolle kunst en duurzame, internationale netwerken. Jonge kunstenaars hebben dit nodig.
Het is geen toeval dat deze opleiding precies in Vlaanderen de ideale bestaansvoorwaarden gevonden heeft om te ontstaan en te bloeien. Het is een initiatief van kunstenaars zelf en spreekt over hun noden en visie. Het is net uit de rijke Vlaamse artistieke ecologie dat de energie en inzichten, de autonomie en het ondernemerschap ontsproten zijn om zich in te zetten voor de jongere generatie. Om jonge kunstenaars alle kansen te geven om te groeien en aansluiting te vinden bij het internationale artistieke veld. De subsidies waren daartoe een belangrijke ondersteuning en boden de noodzakelijke input voor een duurzame groei en kwaliteitsgarantie.
Maar niet alleen is a-pass noodzakelijk als een aanvulling op ons onderwijsveld en als incubator voor de lokale professionalisering en internationale uitwisseling. Het is ook een cruciale pijler van de internationale uitstraling van ons artistiek onderwijs. Het zet ons op de internationale kaart van onderwijsinstellingen en versterkt de reputatie van ons artistiek onderwijs wereldwijd. Door de subsidies van a-pass (en HISK) stop te zetten, maakt u Vlaanderen arm. Nederland heeft de Rijksacademie en de Jan Van Eyck Academie. Wat doet u met Vlaanderens internationale uitstraling op het vlak van postgraduaat kunstonderwijs?
Het is niet zo dat u de waarde van a-pass niet erkent, en als oplossing suggereert u een aansluiting bij een andere artistieke instelling. U begrijpt dat u hen hier een onmogelijk scenario aanbiedt. De kunstinstellingen, organisaties en centra hebben zelf moeite om hun werking te garanderen en kunstenaars faire arbeidsvoorwaarden aan te bieden. Daar is geen financiële ruimte, meer nog: daar is ook geen expertise om onderwijs aan te bieden. Bovendien zou a-pass op die manier haar autonomie en haar internationale uitstraling als onderwijsinstelling zien verwateren.
Inkantelen binnen een bestaande onderwijsinstelling is al even onrealistisch, gezien de besparingen en financiële uitdagingen waar het kunstonderwijs vandaag al mee te maken heeft. Ik sta zelf aan het hoofd van een kleine Advanced Master opleiding dat focust op onderzoek in de kunsten. Deze opleiding is enkel rendabel omdat we deze gedeeltelijk financieren met de aanvullende onderzoeksmiddelen. Binnen de basisfinanciering voor onderwijs is hiervoor geen ruimte, en het zou ook niet rechtvaardig zijn om extra financiële druk te leggen op het reguliere kunstonderwijs dat een democratische toegang tot de kunsten garandeert. Zoals u weet zijn de middelen in het onderwijs ontoereikend, ook in het kunstonderwijs, en we houden de boel enkel draaiende omdat het personeel vanuit liefde voor het kunstonderwijs en voor de jonge kunstenaars veel meer doet dan dat we redelijkerwijze van hen kunnen verwachten. Een postgraduaatsopleiding als a-pass incorporeren in het onderwijsaanbod van de kunstschool zou geen teken zijn van goed bestuur: het zou druk leggen op de middelen, op de ondersteunende diensten, en het zou bovendien de autonomie, de flexibiliteit en de internationale uitstraling van a-pass niet ten goede komen. Zoals de Rijksacademie en Jan Van Eyck in Nederland, kan A-pass net zijn wat het is omdat het opereert naast de kunstscholen, en op die manier met alle kunstscholen op een gelijkwaardige manier kan uitwisselen en samenwerken, in relatie tot van specifieke noden en opportuniteiten.
Gezien de positieve evaluatie van a-pass en de kleine financiële impact maar de grote waarde voor het Vlaamse kunstonderwijs, voor de Vlaamse uitstraling en bovenal voor de jonge kunstenaars, vraag ik u de beslissing te herzien en a-pass het vertrouwen te geven om deze kwaliteitsvolle opleiding te kunnen verderzetten en uitbouwen.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Petra Van BrabandtPetra Van Brabandt, Hoofd onderzoek en maatschappelijke dienstverlening, Sint Lucas Antwerpen, KdG
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List of publications - Lilia Mestre (2011 -2022) 03 March 2022
posted by: Lilia MestreThematics – Bains Connective
La Zone, 2011
http://www.bains.be/_beta/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/BainsConnective_Thematics_LaZone.pdf
DYI, 2011
http://www.bains.be/_beta/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/BainsConnective_Thematics_DIY.pdf
Micro Histories, approaching art & ethnography paradigms, 2012
-18/+65 Politics of the un-aged, 2012
http://www.bains.be/_beta/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/BainsConnective_Thematics_-18+65_final.pdf
Art Land, rural & urban landscapes, 2012
http://www.bains.be/_beta/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/BainsConnective_Thematics_artland_email.pdf
Come Together, 2013
Author/Authority, 2013
http://www.bains.be/_beta/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/BainsConnective_Thematics_AA_final.pdf
a.pass
Writing Scores - 2014
https://apass.be/writing-scores-the-book/
Perform Back Scores -2015
https://apass.be/perform-back-score/
Bubble Scores - 2016
https://apass.be/lilia-mestre-bubble-score-publication/
Medium Scores - 2017
Othershttps://apass.be/medium-scores-lilia-mestre/
Others:
Performing Urgency #2: Turn Turtle! Reenacting the Institute, 2016
Edited by Lila Mestre and Elke Van Campenhout
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42382783-turn-turtle
Choreographic figures deviation from the line – 2017
Published in the series “Edition Angewandte” by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston
https://www.choreo-graphic-figures.net/publications/book/
A/R N2 - 2019
https://art-recherche.be/site/assets/files/1046/revue_ar_2019_150_dpi.pdf
… Through Practices, 2021
edited by Alex Arteaga & Heike Langsdorf (eds.) Choreography as Conditioning
https://artpapereditions.org/product/book/alex-arteaga-heike-langsdorf-through-practices
Making Matters – 2022
edited by Janneke Wesseling, Florian Cramer and Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, designed by Anja Groten with the Hackers & Designers collective, published by Valiz, NL
Radical Sympathy – 2022
Edited by Brandon Labelle. Errant Bodies Press, Berlin
- case of: Lilia Mestre
CARE at a.pass A proposition of the Participants Assembly
04 March 2022
posted by: Lilia MestreCARE at a.pass
A longing for togetherness is inherent to the a.pass community. To ensure this togetherness it is necessary to have different strenghtening intra-structures within the larger institutional structure. Especially in disruptive times as we are living in right now - on a micro and a macro scale - the participants of a.pass asked themselves how also they can contribute one of those intra-structures in which we can provide and reflect on care.
CARE is an invitation to five days of five brunches and five talks. Together we want to find out what does care mean under the scope of a.pass as an institution focusing on artistic research. Where or what is care within and around artistic research? How is the act of caring resonating within participants' practices? What and who needs (more) care? Is care (somewhere) missing?
Every day the table serves brunch, and different exchanges and aspects of care. We will collect and exchange individual, collective and institutional voices and expertise.
Initiated by Márcio Kerber Canabarro in 2019, CARE took place twice in physical gatherings in Budapest, Hungary, and in Almada, Portugal. After the Pandemic started CARE transformed into an online gathering of contributions in form of a digital Zine with approximately 8 editions and contributions reflecting on the notion of care from all over the world.
As the Participant Assembly’s curatorial contribution to the 2022 I. block, CARE at a.pass experiments with another alternative format of organised gathering and provides a set of methods that form a lush base to research in togetherness. These operating methods mainly touch upon basic needs of time structure, food, space, and participation. Thus CARE shapes a space to digest and process the generated knowledge and the experience, a space to breath and rest, a space to hold together.
Schedule:
March, 7th-11th 2022
5 days/ 5 brunches/ 5 aspects of care/ 5 discussions/ 5 gatherings
Day 1 - 11am-3pm - opening to CARE + invitation
Day 2 - 11am-3pm - individual care
Day 3 - 11am-3pm - collective care
Day 4 - 11am-3pm - the caring relationship between individual and institution
Day 5 - 5pm- 9pm - closing to CARE + soft party
Extra program:
CARE at a.pass holds contributions amongst others by Sarah Pletcher, Martin Sieweke, Inga Gerner Nielsens, Nathaniel Moore, Aleksandra Borys, Federico Protto.
Sarah Pletcher is a performance-based artist that works with ceramics and fibres. She has a background in traditional and alternative weaving practices. For CARE Sarah will be preparing a loom and weaving in the space to open a conversation about care for skills of making, the people who taught us our craft, and the stories embedded and woven into the history of our and others' ways of making.
Martin Sieweke works as a material researcher in Brussels.
Deconstructing and collaging given shapes and researching on the overall ambiguity of materials contexts and use relations has been a main focus ever since.
The material’s basic features such as texture, weight or colour have a strong impact on his practice.
He is working collectively on set and costume projects in the field of performance and dance.
Inga Gerner Nielsens makes performance installations which often includes one-to-one interactions and speculative interviews as immersive dramaturgy. With her current project, The Mise-en-Scène of Care Work, she is researching the social skills required for these interactions by mirroring them with the work performed by nurses.
Her dialogues with performers and nurses had led her to recognise a need to care for the caregiver. How can we as an artistic community help care workers? How can we support each other in the kind of care we perform in our artistic work?
In the post performance care circles artists, curators, and people working within the institution of a.pass will each be viewed as a caretaker (of objects, processes, collaborators, participants, space). The starting point for a circle will be an interview about how the period right after a production manifests in your life. Inspired by the Poliset we will then build a scenography around you and offer a mode of interaction which might potentially accommodate, reduce or perhaps alter the intensity of your fall into the post-performance void.
Aleksandra Borys
Choreography for Dreaming the Future is an experimental series of audio recordings which invite the listener to dream and fantasies of the desired future. They offer guidance for imagination and for body activity. My dream was to imagine how a dance gathering can happen beyond shared space and time, connected by the intention.
Federico Protto’s artistic practice unfolds along performance, music, costume and fashion, and artistic research. Spanning a hybrid network of collaborators and materialities, his projects question conventions in order to configure new forms of shared knowledge production and decolonized kinship.
Fashion Hypnosis is a guided somatic and collective moment in which we expand but also intensify our bodies and our imagination around them to sharpen or smoothen our understanding of the world surrounding us.
Nathaniel Moore:
Open Salon is a performance format with the theme of uninhibited spectatorship. 3 performances are presented as pillars supporting the evening, around which happenings, expressions, and queer modes of connecting might occur.
In this salon I hope to trouble the ways in which we practise listening and attending performance. Consider it a gentle nudge out of one's comfortably distanced seat, and a raucous invitation to make a response in real time. A permission granted to open up the floodgates of an uninhibited spectatorship which reacts to what's happening in the space immediately, even, conversationally formulating additions, disruptions, contextualization, harmonies, utterances, angers, praises, perversities, angels, etc etc.
You are invited to witness, be touched, and return the favour.
A mantra might be, “we do not yet know what this performance(moment) needs to be,” or is, and, we will find out together. This is desired as a brave space; a space where there are no mistakes. Where the information which emerges is valued regardless of the message it carries; valued simply because it offers the possibility to learn.
Informing this evening is thought around care and provocation, listening and critique, love and healing.
More information on CARE and the 2020 online zines can be found here:
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多くの都市では、通常のカジノ ゲームが好まれています。これらには、ホウ砂、クラップス、ブラックジャック、そして当然のことながらゲームも含まれます。パチンコ。 2023 年には、日本の膨大な数のカジノでパチンコをプレイできるようになります。パチンコに対する評判は年々プレイヤーからの信頼を増しています。パチンコ玉の色は異なる場合があります。日本人は、このゲームがギャンブルエンターテイメントの未来であると主張しています。演出家の野崎幸一氏も同様の意見だ。現在、埼玉市と札幌市では、カジノ場が特別な看板を掲げてギャンブラーを誘い始めている。メインページには「Pachinko」という碑文が掲げられています。
オンラインカジノ業界では、日本はそのテクノロジーで有名です。日本のオンラインカジノは、日本の多くの地域で有名な約 46 のリソースを提供しています。全国のすべての仮想カジノに直接適用される法律があります。日本でのギャンブルは刑法第 23 条によって禁止されています。ウェブカジノはグレーゾーンにあります。オンラインカジノで利益が50万円以上になると税金を支払う必要があります。日本のオンライン カジノに関する詳細情報は、リソースのテーマ別セクションでご覧いただけます。
日本で安全なオンラインカジノを選ぶにはどうすればよいですか?カジノ専門家の野崎幸一が、www.onlinecasinoosusume.jp でこれらの質問に答えます!
日本のオンラインカジノは一時、困難な時期を経験しました。 2008 年から 2012 年にかけて、日本のギャンブル市場について知る人はほとんどいませんでした。日本のギャンブルは欧州連合では特に異例だった。 2020年から2023年にかけて、すべてが劇的に変化し、現時点ではオンラインカジノの評価があります。オンラインカジノのおすすめ評価は日本語の情報だけではありません。それどころか、完全な情報を詳細に提供します。標準パラメータに従って、サイト https://onlinecasinoosusume.jp/ で最適なゲーム ポータルを選択する機会があります。
ギャンブル サイトでプレイする際の安全を確保するための最良の選択肢は、ライセンスを取得した信頼できるオンライン カジノを見つけることです。すべての検証済みカジノは正式に登録されており、セキュリティに関して業界標準が満たされていることを確認します。
Web カジノが日本で誠実な Web カジノであるかどうかを判断するには、さまざまな指標が適用されます。彼は通常、サービスを提供する国のゲーム サービス規制当局からライセンスを取得しています。これに気づくには、信頼できるウェブカジノ サイトのメイン ページの下部にさまざまな監視会社のアイコンが表示されているかどうかを確認するだけです。これはギャンブル委員会または eCOGRA である可能性があります。これらのゲーム Web サイトには、問い合わせフォームが目立つように表示され、プレイヤーがいつでも利用できるカスタマー サービスが提供されます。
国際規制当局
マルタ賭博局は、スロット マシン、ブラックジャック、ライブ カジノ、クラップス ゲーム、ルーレット、ポーカー、宝くじ、およびウェブに直接的または間接的に関連するその他のさまざまな分野を含む、すべてのカジノ ギャンブル活動に関する規制を施行する有名な組織です。カジノ。
この構造に置かれた信頼により、ウェブカジノはこの構造にライセンスを申請するようになりました。これは、有料カジノ ベンダーでプレイしたいグローバル ウェブの訪問者に対する信頼性と信頼性を保証するものです。言い換えれば、カジノが消滅したり、賞金へのアクセスが拒否されたりすることを心配する必要はありません。
さらに、キュラソー島、イギリス、マン島のギャンブルライセンスは、ギャンブルの世界で大きな権威を持っています。
SSL 証明書
カジノ ポータルのメンバーになると、住所や携帯電話番号、銀行情報などの機密情報をゲーム ポータルに提供することになるため、個人情報のセキュリティは機密要素とみなされます。賭けをして賞金を引き出すための命令。 Web カジノ ゲーム プラットフォームが信頼できるものであることを理解するための最良の解決策は、SSL セキュリティ プロトコルを介したトランザクションが許可されているかどうかを確認することです。このプロトコルは、カジノと共有する情報に暗号キーを付加することで機能し、ギャンブラーの名前やパスワードなどのログイン情報だけでなく、送金の安全性を確保するためによく使用されます。
このメカニズムにより、使用するギャンブル クラブの認証と、カジノ プレーヤーの個人情報の匿名性と完全性が保証されます。カジノがそれを使用しているかどうかを確認するには、「https」という用語を確認してください。検索エンジンのアドレスバーに「http」の代わりに入力します。拡張検証を備えた SSL プロトコルの場合、線は緑色になります。
高配当
オンライン カジノでプレイする場合は、カジノの RTP (ペイアウト率) を調べてください。たとえば、賭け率は 96% です。これは、1 回 1 円でゲームを 100 回プレイすると、少なくとも 97 円を獲得できることを意味します。 RTP は信頼性と安全性のもう 1 つの指標であるため、RTP に関する情報をゲーム ポータルに表示する必要があります。この賭けがリストにない場合は、そのようなカジノは避けてください。
日本市場の安全なオンラインカジノでゲームを選ぶ
現在、カジノの Web リソースの多くには、スロット マシンやテーブル ゲームからオンライン ルーレットやビデオ ポーカーに至るまで、あらゆる好みに合わせた膨大な数のビデオ スロットが装備されています。日本で最も信頼できるウェブ カジノが提供しているものは次のとおりです。
ビデオ スロット
ビデオ スロットは間違いなく、日本のかなり信頼できるカジノの主力製品であると考えられています。 NetEnt の Gonzo's Quest、Big Time Gaming の Bonanza Megaways、Play'n GO の Legacy of Dead など。 –これは、日本のクラブにある充実したさまざまなベンダー全体のほんの一部にすぎません。
ブラック ジャック
ブラックジャックは世界的に有名なゲームであり、多くのギャンブル クラブで提供されています。戦略的に賭ければ、ディーラーに勝つ個人的なチャンスを増やすことができます。安定したブラックジャックのオンライン カジノには、さまざまなオプションがあります。
ビデオポーカーも非常に人気のある興味深いエンターテイメントです。ゲームにはさまざまな種類があります。
ルーレット
ルーレットは、あらゆるリソースで見つかる重要なテーブル ゲームの 1 つです。ルーレットは簡単にプレイでき、大勝ちの可能性がある大きなスリルを提供し、日本人の間で流行しています。クラシック バージョンだけでなく、プログレッシブ ジャックポットを提供するバージョンでもプレイを楽しむことができます。
ライブディーラー ゲーム
日本の有名なオンライン カジノは、ライブラリに 20 以上のオプションを備えたライブ ゲームを提供しています。
信頼できる日本のカジノで最もリクエストの多いボーナス オプション
優れたカジノ ゲームの動機の 1 つは、提供されるプロモーションやプロモーションの寛大さです。新しいギャンブル ポータルには、プレイ意欲を刺激するオファーが不足することはありません。
ギャンブル クラブへの訪問者の大部分がフリースピンに惹かれています。これらを使用すると、ドラムを回転させるだけで済みます。日本のクラブは定期的にこの種のプロモーションを日本人選手に提供しています。
ゲーム プラットフォームでは、各新規メンバーにさまざまなボーナス オプションが与えられます。そして、どれをアクティブにするかを選択できるのはあなただけです。
入金ボーナスを受け取るには、登録されたゲーム アカウントに入金する必要があります。デポジット不要のフリースピンとは異なり、これらのウェルカムボーナスは、資金がアカウントに入金されると請求できるため、有効化できます。最高のゲームウェブサイトは、魅力的な条件でユニバーサル入金ボーナスを提供しています。 2023 年の日本のギャンブル クラブで人気のボーナスの例をいくつか示します。
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カジノのトランザクション処理時間、手数料、方法のセキュリティなど、他の側面も重要です。
2023 年には、最低支払額を設定したギャンブル クラブも非常に一般的になっています。予算が限られている日本人にとって、5 円、10 円、または 20 円の入金はありがたいことです。これらのゲーム サイトでは、多くの銀行カード、電子ウォレット、デビット カードでの支払いが可能です。
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モバイル向けの日本の安定したギャンブル クラブ
推奨される仮想カジノには、外部からのギャンブラーが集まりません。ボーナスも付いています。日本のプレイヤーにとって、オンラインギャンブル施設の評価は非常に重要です。当然のことながら、多くのポータルは iOS や Android 経由でゲーム形式を提供しています。
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日本で最も信頼できるカジノポータルを評価する場合、さまざまなことを考慮することが重要です。非常に重要な基準は、ゲームの選択、提供されるボーナス (ウェルカム ボーナス、フリー スピン、リロード ボーナスなど)、ライセンス、取引オプションです。おすすめオンラインカジノ ポータルの評価のいずれかに進むには、カジノがこれらすべての分野で優れている必要があります。
中毒になった場合にどのように行動すればよいですか?
ギャンブル クラブは、ほとんどの場合、依存症に対処する方法をユーザーに提供します。もちろん、全国ギャンブル依存症家族協会 (NPO) https://gdfam.org/ という組織が役に立ちます。この情報については、ポータルでご覧いただけます。
オンラインカジノおすすめ JP の編集チームは、オンライン カジノのレビューを毎日徹底的に分析しています。その結果はここでご覧いただけます。編集長は、一般的なアイデアを把握し、いくつかのオプションを分析するために、1 つのオペレーターに限定せず、推奨されている人気のあるカジノを試してみることをお勧めします。何よりも、ゲーム サイトで楽しむことを忘れないでください!
ギャンブルをお金を稼ぐ方法としてではなく、娯楽として考えるのが合理的であることも覚えておく価値があります。オンライン カジノ ゲームの利用規約を詳しくお読みください。失う可能性のある金額を賭けないでください。また、カジノ ゲームは、ゲーム ウェブサイトで正直にプレイすると忘れられない感動を与えることにも注意する必要があります。この記事は 2023 年 7 月に書かれました。
Scoring intimacy with discursive others Block II 2022 (May - July)
14 April 2022
posted by: Lilia MestreThe Block II 2022 proposes to exercise a personal, immediate and performative relation with discourse – through autotheory, speculative history, conversation and collectivity – embodied in a weekly Score. It feeds upon the tension between one’s practice and the other, often absent other who is yet unescapable like one’s ancestor, lover, kin or friend. In other words, we are interested in how discursive beings – those that we encounter only through language – can guide us through our practices?
The Score, facilitated by Lilia Mestre, will be practised every Thursday at a.pass. There will be 9 sessions in total throughout the block and participants are recommended to engage for a minimum of 5 sessions. The Score practice is an intersubjective and collective setup that facilitates the dialogue between discourse and artistic practice by engaging in writing to each other and performing for the collective. It addresses and knits relations between the research of the participants and aims to experience and empower what “difference without separability” might be.* To start up we will read and discuss the text by Denise Ferreira da Silva as a basis for studying how co-learning and collectivity relate to us and the world we are living in.
In the beginning of the block Goda Palekaitė will propose a workshop on artistic research through intimate relations with historical characters. Roland Barthes described his associative dictionary of love and longing A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978) as “the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.”** In the case of this workshop, the loved one who does not speak is a forgotten historical character, the inaccessible discursive other whose silence both challenges and excites. How can we accompany the displaced characters in their metaleptic movement – in their mesmerising exercise of shapeshifting from one reality to another (e.g., from historical absence and denial to presence and recognition)?***
A two week residency (June 27 – July 10) will take place in ZSenne ArtLab, downtown Brussels. The focus of the residency is on autotheory and its relation to alternative writing and performative practices in artistic research. The program includes a workshop, a reading group, and a programme of performances; it is curated by Goda and Lilia. A two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library of the ground theoretical materials and methodological tools to be explored during the two weeks. It will focus on highlighting how autotheoretical narrators weave an intellectual and intimate network of relations; and consequently it will make time to read, think, and share as a collective. We invited a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice to present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen.
In response to the actual distressful situation of the war in Ukraine that hits after the pandemic and tops upon the a.pass loss of subsidies due to the practical implementation of right-wing politics in Belgium, we would like to open the ZSenne ArtLab for two days to voices that need to be heard. This is an open proposition to discuss with all a.pass participants.
*On difference without separability by Denise Ferreira da Silva - In 32nd Bienal de São Paulo - Incerteza Viva. Catalogue. Edited by Jochen Volz and Júlia Rebouças. São Paulo: Fundação de São Paulo, pp 57-65, 2016.
** Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 3.
***Metalepsis, in contemporary narratology refers to a phrase or a situation from a literary text, which is used in a new, logically distinct context from its original one; a transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels.
Autotheory Gathering at ZSenne ArtLab: Public Program In the context of Block II 2022: Scoring Intimacy of Discursive Others
30 May 2022
posted by: Lilia MestreFor two summer weeks (June 27 – July 10) a.pass is moving to ZSenne ArtLab in downtown Brussels, where it organizes a gathering around autotheory that brings together several approaches to the term and its relation to artistic research practices. The program includes several working sessions, a reading group, a programme of performances, and is curated by Lilia Mestre and Goda Palekaitė. To set a theoretical framework, a two-day workshop will be offered by Maria Gil Ulldemolins who will facilitate a selected library and methodological tools to be further explored during the two weeks. Associated researchers of a.pass Research Center – Gosie Vervloessem, Simon Asencio, Rareş Crăiuţ and Vijai Maia Patchineelam – will present their current processes. Finally, a.pass alumni who engage with autotheory in their practice will present their recent work in a series of performances and conversations open to the public: Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda with Charlie Usher, Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen, Vladimir Miller, Gary Farelly and Adrijana Gvozdenović.
SCHEDULE
28 and 29 June: Workshop Maria Gil Ulldemolins [10:00-17:00]
30 June: and 1 July: How to say my name Rareş Crăiuţ [June 30 at 11:00 & July 1 at 19:00 - duration 1h]
2 July: Performance Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen [17:00-19:00]
6 July: Online talk Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker [cancelled]
6 July: Working session Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio [14:00-18:00]
7 July: Working session Kin(s)Score a.pass program https://apass.be/kinship-score/ [14:00-19:00]
8 July: Performances and book presentation Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Charlie Usher and Vijai Maia Pachineelam [19:00-21:30]
9 July: Performances Chloe Chignell, Aubrey Birch, Eleanor Ivory Weber [18:00-21:00]
DETAILED PROGRAM
28 and 29 June [10:00-17:00]
Maria Gil Ulldemolins: The Autotheory Library
For this two day workshop, MariaI puts together a library of samples of autotheoretical (or autotheory-adjacent) texts. The group will read them and discuss them collectively, without rush, meandering wherever it is of interest for the participants’ and their practices. The aim is triple: to understand the very basics of what autotheory is understood to be up to now; to tentatively look at other hybrid works that might compliment it; and, last but not least, to make time for each participant to reflect on if and how autotheory might inform or challenge their own work. Participants will be able to permanently “borrow” from the library excerpts of the works, so they can take home a collected reader for their reference. The whole experience intends to highlight how autotheoretical narrators weave an intellectual and intimate network of relations; and consequently make time to read, think, and share as a collective, too.
*
30 June and 1 July [June 30 at 11:00 & July 1 at 19:00 - duration 1h]
Rareș Crăiuț and others: How to say my name?
For this gathering, Rareș will talk about the combination of art, research, narrative and food. First through his artistic research practice but also through 'CofetARia', a project hosted at a.pass, where he is also Associate Researcher. In his practice, Rareș works with cakes, and pastries as non-human collaborators in artistic contexts. He will address the topics of science and narrative, as well as the accessibility to research.
Cakes are generally more performative than other types of food and make it easier for humans to understand and feel the agency of food. Working with alimentary matter and live performance, CofetARia is an eating performance, at the confluence of durational practices like performance and baking.
*
2 July [17:00-19:00]
Flávio Rodrigo and Philippine Hoegen: On Versions/ NÓS
Flávio and Philippine will present a performance and conversation created collaboratively for this occasion. They take this encounter as an opportunity to relate their practices to each other('s body) in the importance they give to recognising that they exist as different selves. This performance takes the shape of a working session in which the performers and researchers borrow and lend each other’s dispositives of autotheory, putting them at each other’s disposal in a negotiated time and space.
David is a person(a) and practice of versioning, who first came into being as a version of Philippine, an exploration of who Philippine could be as a man with a beard, how they could move and be in the world and how the world would respond. David consists of different aspects and objects, one of them being a voice. In this working session David's voice seeks residence in a new body, an experience that confuses and excites him, and that recreates him in an uncertain game of determining and being determined.
Flavio, by incorporating this other voice, finds himself inhabiting his own body from a new perspective. The cohabitation leads to a different understanding and positioning of his body, with new layers of perception and performative gestures. David becomes a zone in between, where their bodies and practices cross and inhabit the same territory for a while, leading and being led, proposing and being proposed to, acting and reacting to David's mediation.
The organic devices that our bodies are, and the sound and motion they create, as well as the synthetic devices such as speakers, sound processors and projectors, and the ephemeral devices such as concepts and protocols - will enable this exchange. They will allow mirroring, resonance, vibrations and echoes that constitute the necessary elements for the research process to begin. This performance proposes to see mirrors, recordings and reproductions as ideas and gestures that function in both practices as forms of interlocution with oneself, in order to actualise or confirm the perception of the self as a multitude of selves. Such interlocution produces autotheoretical reflection and becomes a methodology for artistic research.
*
6 July [cancelled]
Alex Arteaga and Emma Cocker: Online talk about language practices in artistic research
Both Emma and Alex are part of Research Groups concerned with language practices in Artistic Research. They will speak from their perspectives and practices within several academic contexts. How do language-based artistic research practices relate to other research practices? What are the motivations, needs, desires, and aims that lead to establish these correspondences? How are the practices in mutual touch affected, modified, influenced, transformed? How do these connections, entanglements and intertwinements contribute to achieve the research goals? How do they affect the unfolding of research processes?
*
6th July [14:00-18:00]
Gosie Vervlossem and Simon Asencio:
The interrogatories:*
8 July [19:00-21:30]
Pia Louwerens, Marialena Marouda, Charlie Usher and Vijai Maia Patchineelam: On Artist as Institution
This evening brings together artists working with the practices of instituting and within institutions. It will comprise Pia’s work as ‘embedded researcher’ in institutional frameworks; Vijai’s Ph.D. research regarding the employment of the artist, as an artist, inside the art institution; and Marialena’s and Charlie’s practice of summoning, hosting and appropriating utterances with the Ocean through establishing The Oceanographies Institute.
*
9 July [18:00-21:00]
Aubrey Birch, Chloe Chignell and Eleanor Ivory Weber: On Writing Practices
The Autotheory Gathering will close with performative presentations of three writers and artists working with and on language. Reflecting upon the conventions of Western news media and the practice of reporting, Eleanor will perform a new piece of writing. Choreographically engaging with the space of ZSenne ArtLab, Chloe will present an extract of her Poems and Other Emergencies. Thinking through mineral erotics and linking our bodies with the bodies of more-than-human, Aubrey will propose a cocktail of spiritual calories.
9 July 2022Eleanor will draw our attention towards reportage, which, in the same movement, bears witness to the world and consumes it. It is also a technique for making equivalences out of what is irreconcilable. In her practice, Eleanor keeps track of the dates when important things happen as a way to remember how the past shows up today. All the while she is trying to understand how repetitions, forgetting and suspended apprehension are equally part of personal and public events, places and products.Poems and Other Emergencies*Poems and Other Emergencies by Chloe sits at the intersection of poetry and choreography. Centered on a fictional character The Girl-with-her-tongue-out, the performance questions if it is through language that we find ourselves a body, or through the body that we find language? Embodied voices and voiced bodies weave and echo throughout the space. Where does the word end and her body begin?
Aubrey's Material & Spiritual Calories is a practice that bridges the art of gathering around the table with the geological origins of what we consume. The body’s chemistry is altered both by the material calories of what we eat and the spiritual calories of how we eat, where pleasure and sociality nourish us as much as the proteins, sugars, and amino acids that we need to survive - that we need in order to wake up in the morning, to act, to hope, to protect. Between the immediacy of the meal and the endurance of our mineral origins, the body becomes a site where the ephemeral and the primordial meet in sensory experience.
* performance credits:
Performance and Choreography: Chloe Chignell
Conversation partner: Adriano Wilfert Jensen
Technical Support: Sven Dehens
Thanks: Sven Dehens, Bojana Cvejic, Stefa Goovart, Sabine Cmelinski and a.pass.Supported By: BUDA Kortrijk, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Workspacebrussels, La Balsamine Theatre, GC kriekelaar, Lucy Guerin Inc, Dancehouse Melbourne, Batard Festival Brussels, QL2 dance ACT, Kanuti Gildi Saal, Tallinn, RIMI IMIR (NO), Littérature Etc. and Rencontres Chorégraphique.
*
BIOS
Aubrey Birch is a transdisciplinary artist and academic living between Australia & Europe. Working in various mediums, shecreates immersive states that link our bodies in the here-and-now to the deep time of those bodies. Thinking through a mineral erotics and social sensuality, she brings the politics of immersion into contact with the more-than-human. She lives part-time in remote Australia, where she cultivates native and medicinal plants. In Europe, she is a member of a collective taking care of Performing Arts Forum (FR), where she also co-organises the queer feminist event Elsewhere & Otherwise. Her works and collaborations have been presented by institutions like KANAL–Centre Pompidou (BE), MaerzMusik (DE), Shedhalle (CH), rotor Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst (AT), Kunsthal Ghent (BE), Theater Neumarkt (CH).
Chloe Chignell is an artist based in Brussels working across text, choreography and publishing. Her work focuses on language within a choreographic and performative frame; she invests in writing as a body building practice, examining the ways in which language makes us up. Chloe graduated from a.pass (BE, 2020) and from the research cycle at P.A.R.T.S (BE, 2018). Since 2019 Chloe co-runs rile* a bookshop and project space for publication and performance with Sven Dehens. Her work has been presented by: Batard Festival (BE, 2019) Saal Biennale (ES 2021), Moving Words Festival (NO 2021), QL2 (AU 2022), KAAP (BE 2022), Littérature etc. (FR 2022), Dancehouse (AU 2016-8), The Kier Choreographic Award (AU 2018) Kottinspektionen (SE 2019) and Venice Biennale of Dance (IT 2017). She currently teaches at ISAC and P.A.R.T.S.
Eleanor Ivory Weber is a writer and artist based in Brussels. Her works expropriate the conventions and styles of Western news media to register and materialise a subjectivity that appears latent in the source. Recently her work has been shown at Kunstverein München (Munich), Maison Pelgrims (Brussels) and Kunsthal Gent (Ghent). In 2021 her essay ‘Australian Others: Penal Logic and the Pandemic’ was published in the literary journal Meanjin (Melbourne). Eleanor holds a Masters in Political Philosophy and Theory from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and graduated from the Post-Master program at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies). She teaches art theory and critical practice at Erg since 2018 and is co-director of Divided Publishing.
Flavio Rodrigo Orzari Ferreira, 39, gay, brazilian, artist, lives in Brussels. He is a performer and psychopedagogue. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Scenic Arts from State University of Campinas – UNICAMP (2004), a Master Specialization Degree in Psychopedagogy from FHO – UNIARARAS (2012), a Master Specialization Degree from UCB (2013) and a post-master degree in Performing Arts in A.PASS (Advenced Performing and Scenography Studies – 2020). Master's degree in speculative narration and videography at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) - Instituts Saint Luc in Brussels. His latest works as a performer and dramaturg are the solo The Ghost Scar (2019-2022), and the short film Fantasma Pédé (2022). He has worked for over 15 years as an art educator at both public and private Elementary and Secondary Schools. He currently works as a psychopedagogue coordinating a program to help students improve their learning processes at the ERG École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels.
Goda Palekaitė is an artist working in the intersection of contemporary art, performance, artistic research, literature, and anthropology. Her practice evolves around long-term projects exploring the politics of historical narratives, agency of dreams and imagination, social conditions of creativity, and intimacy with historical characters. Some of Goda’s recent projects were titled Anthropomorphic Trouble (in collaboration with Adrijana Gvozdenović), The Strongest Muscle in the Human Body is the Tongue, Architecture of Heaven, Liminal Minds, and Legal Implications of a Dream. They were presented, respectively, at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Kunsthal Gent in Ghent, Centre Tour à Plomb in Brussels, Konstepidemin in Gothenburg and RawArt Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 2020 she published her first book of fictional biographies Schismatics. Goda participated in a.pass’ postgraduate program in 2018-19 and currently is a Ph.D. candidate at Hasselt University and PXL-MAD School of Arts.
Gosie Vervloessem’s artistic research focuses on the position of the researcher in times of multiple crises. Her work faces the challenges that arise within this role, and looks for new ways of producing knowledge. Her practice is an ongoing quest on finding tools to relate to a world that is messy and chaotic. Therefore she juggles with and re-interprets the practices of cooking, digesting, co-digesting, immersion or osmosis, as tools to literally embody that relation. In scrutinizing this relationship she focuses mainly on the concept of nature and tries to unravel the ideas that underpin this concept. In doing that, she identifies herself as a Sick Detective, a character that involves the vegetal kingdom as a possible ally in her research. Her work is highly inspired by plant biology, comic books, horror movies. It is mainly presented as lecture-performance, in the form of workshops or publications.
Lilia Mestre is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working mainly in collaborative formats. She has been involved in a.pass since 2008 as Associate Program Curator and Core member (2014-17) and since 2017 as artistic coordinator. Mestre works with scores: inter-subjective set-ups and other chance-induced processes as emancipatory artistic and pedagogical tools, which have been documented in various publications. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social political reflection. She was co-founder and latest coordinator of Art Laboratory Bains Connective in Brussels (1997-2017). Mestre lives and works in Brussels.
Maria Gil Ulldemolins is a postdoc artistic researcher at Hasselt University working on personal and artistic heritage, and interiority and interior architecture. Her doctoral work was a multidisciplinary autotheory on collapsing figures, sparked by the trope of the swooning Virgin in crucifixion imagery; and constructed as a writerly Warburgian atlas. Her practice is mostly hybrid writing that combines scholarly essays with more experimental approaches. She is one of the co-founders of Project Passage, a research line and academic journal that seeks to learn more and promote precisely these autotheoretical and performative writerly practices.
Marialena Marouda works in the intersections between performance, sound art and oral poetry. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York, USA and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. In May 2018 she initiated The Oceanographies Institute (TOI), as part of her research at the Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies Program (a.pass) in Brussels. TOI focuses essentially on the relation between two bodies of water: the human body and the world ocean(s). It gives particular attention to affectual and sensual encounters between the two bodies. The Institute therefore explores the relations of hands to mud, ears to the breaking waves, feet to the feeling of sinking, rather than the ocean “in itself”, as if devoid of human presence. It collects, analyzes and reenacts people's personal stories about their encounters with the ocean. In 2019, composer Charlie Usher joined TOI, letting his practice of song-making flow into the institute‘s work.
Philippine Hoegen is a visual artist living in Brussels. In her multi-stranded, predominantly performative practice, she explores the ways in which we continuously create versions of ourselves, the apparatuses and processes we use for this and what their existence means for our understanding of 'self'. In the past 2 years she has focussed specifically on how this functions in contexts of work. Hoegen approaches performance explicitly as a research strategy: a way of thinking in which the physical is involved. Currently she is a researcher at the HKU Professorship Performative Creative Processes, and CARADT (Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology) Avans University, with a research project titled Performing Working.
Since 2012 Rareş Augustin Craiut has been caring out « practice a as research » project (Performing food). The main themes of his artistic research practice are centred around the agency of food and eating and creating conditions to collaborate with Food. He is particularly interested in devices of meaning and affect (Bain-Marie Brunch food performance re-enactment cycle, various locations, ongoing; or Anximentara, Ecole de Rechrche Graphique, Brussels, 2018), and food in artistic and convivial collaborations (Comfort food continuum 2016, Baia-Mare, Romania; or The Terni – Paradisi-Neighborhood- Cookbook, Centro per le Arti Opificio Siri, Terni, 2017). Bread or baked goods are of particular interest with several performance art pieces dedicated to bread (The Transitions, Banis Connective, Brussels, 2017, or Anatomic bread bodies Matera European Capital of culture, Italy, 2019).
Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institutions. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists—one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. This displacement of roles is part of a larger trajectory that he has followed in his Ph.D. research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and the University of Antwerp, “The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution.” Vijai is currently an associate researcher in a.pass’ Research Center.
To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen 03 June 2022
posted by: Chloe JanssensResearch Portfolio Chloë Janssens
Download here: Portfolio_mobile_CJ
Keywords: soil, underground, mediation, role play, rehearsal, semi-fiction, collectivity
I combine cravings and knowledge from climate activism and graphic design in an artistic practice that investigates the soil as a basis of place and futuremaking.
To dig my hands deep into the earth and listen
“The sandy soils of my birthplace ‘de Kempen’, Belgium form the dry landscape of my research. I observe my ancestors preparing the earth for agriculture by obsessively moving cow-shit from the stalls to the fields. I can smell the cattle’s breath, the farmer’s spit, my grandmother's sweat and the excrements in the soil. After the famine we begin to enrich our lands with chemical fertilisers and radio-active uranium ore. When I stick my fingers in the earth here and tune in I can hear metals nagging, minerals singing, and bones twisting and turning in the underground. My imagination is haunted by this vibrating mass of elements holding stories from elsewhere. What to do with this pulsing scoop of dirt in my hand? I hold it with disgust, I peak into it, twirl my fingers around. I try stamping on it to free its story.”
The research proposes that a collective reading of this scoopful of earth becomes a basis for an urgent reflection on our entanglements with the places that we inhabit. I invite the audience as a co-researcher in need of a tool for reading the soil. As a tool, I use literal and metaphorical sieves to better understand our positionality and implications in the soils condition. How do these polluted soils that we create and inhabit inform, shape and guide us?
Toolkit of the research
As a real Virgo and desperate prepper I’m looking for tools to assist me in my artistic practice. In this portfolio, I share with you the tools and skills I am discovering, developing or temporarily forgetting in my artistic research. I talk about my work through these tools to share with you my current methods and approach to research and art-making.
— Sieves
— Facilitation
— Semi-fiction
— Sensuous strategies
— Graphic Design
Sieves
I understand a sieve to be a dividing tool. A tool to temporarily separate certain bits to form meaning. The meaning can be read on the surface of the sieve as well as in the remaining mass. The sieves themselves determine what will be caught, and what is able to ‘escape’. Because the materiality of the device is in the thread as well as in the holes. Julian Barnes describes a net as “A collection of holes, tied together with string”. When I replace ‘string’ with ‘material’, this could be the definition of the sieves I have been using in this research. In that sense, the material is connecting the holes, keeping together what temporarily escapes. As a designer, I’m interested how the design of the sieve holds it’s outcome, or is it possible to design open-endedly? To not define what we want to catch or capture?
Metaphorically, as an artist and Pisces moon, I think of what is flowing through the holes. Marilia Librandi wonders if we can spy the world through the hole, and which different perspectives this will bring for us. She is a scholar who thinks the net as a territory of activist, ecological and artistic interactions in relation to Amerindian and riverside cosmogonies. About her writing she says: “The pressure of linear story writing is very strong. More than the net, it’s the hole that I want to weave.”
It’s an ongoing practice of letting the different holes in the narrative of my research exist and refuse weaving the thread combining them. Weaving the holes also means letting complexity be, and not forcing direct connections.
Interpretation, meaning-making
I got this image and urge to put my hands into the soil and filter out meaning and guidance. To let the soil guide us, as we do with the stars. To add the gesture of looking down for guidance, to the gesture of looking up. By using my own hands as sieves, it isn’t only the remnants that speak, but also the experience of touching and feeling the mass. I will elaborate on ‘touching’ in the ‘Sensuous Strategies’ item in this toolkit.
When you’d search for options on ‘how to read the soil’, different search engines will give you a multitude on tactics. There’s pH strips or, when the soil is still in place, we can observe what grows out of the surface of the ground. Rather than the current vegetation, I’m interested in the seeds the soil holds for emerging futures. These seeds I don’t only see as literal seeds for plants, but also as a metaphor for materials in the soil holding questions and responsibilities for the future, which f.e. uranium is doing. Reading the soil for me became, among others things, both a historical as an intuitive practice.
Sifting paper
In a.pass (2021-2022) I engaged in a paper making practice. Making paper is done by using a sieve. First old paper is mixed with water until the paper completely falls apart. Then, this mixture is sifted and pressed on a cloth mostly in a rectangular shape. This process of working with old paper with texts we had been reading, or material I had been working with, helped me compost different entrypoints and interests in my research. By going through the printed texts again, I selected bits of my research that were important, and other bits that could go. The latter were mixed to pulp, and made into new paper. The images or pieces of texts that I considered important were mounted on top of the new paper. Holding it as a new material to work with into a new stage of the research.
Facilitation
I’m interested in negotiating collective conditions. During my time at extinction rebellion I grew an interest in collective conditions that are ‘doable’. No ideal situations, but pragmatic ways of being together with an openness to be ‘contaminated’ by the beliefs of others. Being on the intersection of the arts, activism and design, I feel there’s a lot to discover for me about the practicalities of collective conditions during polarisation.
In these collective conditions, I’m interested in the figure of the facilitator, a position that is in constant negotiation. Facilitators try to keep openings for things to emerge, and at the same time manipulate conditions to actually produce something; a decision, a conversation, new ideas,… This friction I find exciting.
Chelsea Meijer
To deepen and further explore different perspectives, I started to work with role play. For myself, I created an alter ego called Chelsea Meier, that embodies my slightly militant and sexual fantasies. Chelsea is less of a people pleaser than I am, she dares to manipulate the conversation more and isn’t afraid to share her own thoughts, beliefs and knowledge with the group. Through Chelsea I’m curious to learn and question the role of the faciliator as a ‘neutral’ position. I’m trying to discover and play with manipulation from the ‘trusted’ figure of the facilitator. Chelsea, for me, talks to authority, control, guidance, leadership amidst emergency.
Role play
Together with me, also the audience is invited to shapeshift. I wonder if changing body, can also influence your thoughts and behaviour. During my design education at the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, I was taught the ‘form follows function’ principle which states that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose. I am interested in the opposite. Being a shapeshifter myself I wonder, could changing ‘form’ change your ‘function’, or transgress the borders of ‘identity’ and negotiate new thoughts and new ways of inhabiting your form or body? Can embodying another point of view in a semi-fictional reality soften our beliefs in our everyday reality, and create openings for contamination?
On Coloniality
4-day event, 10-13/11/2021, KBK, Brussels
An actual setting where I’ve worked with collective conditions was the event ‘On Coloniailty’ that Amy Pickles, Tulio Rosa and myself organised in the frame of a.pass. ‘On Coloniality’ was a proposition for a temporary context for collective study. Through different artistic and theoretical speculations we studied coloniality and its manifold dimensions.
Our understanding of coloniality departed from ideas developed first by Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, and later expanded by many others, such as the semiotician Walter Mignolo and feminist philosopher Maria Lugones. Coloniality is an idea that points to the modes of organisation of power in so-called colonized territories, and how this extends out into supposedly postcolonial states. It differentiates colonialism, as a historical process, from its legacies. We have been thinking about ways to describe how the colonial rationale is at the very basis of our modes of social and political organisation, how those supposed histories have collapsed into, resonate with, and form our present.
There is a shared desire between the three of us to learn how to articulate coloniality through artistic practices. Our collaboration has grown out of our individual motivations to discuss and re-narrate the colonial practices of the countries where we were born - UK, Brazil and Belgium- and challenge the dominant narratives that compose these histories. We are drawing connections between different times and locations by following closely methods of appropriation and extraction of land, resources, labour and data. Through different artistic practices we want to draw parallels, observe symmetries and find correlations across colonialism as it exists across all aspects of our lives; institutionally, economically, in corporations, governance, everyday structures of living and our bodies.
‘On Coloniality’ was hosted in KBK, an alternative space near Saint Cathrine, in Brussels. It was a porous programme open to the public. An exhibition hosted the programme that consisted of reading and listening sessions, screenings, a performance, workshops, public conversations and discussions.
For On Coloniality we learnt from and with: Jeyanthy Siva, EZLN Delegation (Gira por la Vida,) WORKNOT! X Sarmad (Alireza Abbasy, Golnar Abbasi, Arvand Pourabbasi) Daniela Ortiz, Saddie Choua, Satch Hoyt, Sami Hammana, Glicéria Tupinambá, Vermeir & Heiremans, Line Algoed, Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, Elodie Mugrefya, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Helena Vieira and the Institute of Colonial Culture (initiated by Philippe Mikobi and Maarten Vanden Eynde).
Semi-fiction
I often find reality stranger than fiction. I like to work on the verge of the almost believable. To keep a space open for a naivety that is willing not to learn. The semi-fiction interests me as a space in which many things are possible, and the actual is reconsidered. I like to look for the absurdity in every-day situations, and use that as gateways into a collective imaginary. Semi-fiction offers me a method to freely combine different times and places. Just like relativity theory in physics I try to access the complexity of everyday life by bending time and space .
Brochure Hades
In the frame of my research on the geological disposal of nuclear waste in Belgium I worked with the HADES laboratory, an underground lab where every single test refers to a Greek mythological figure. The place itself was already loaded with such mythology, that it gave me a great entry point towards a fictional reading of this space.
Chelsea researched the specific site of the HADES project and discovered another very important inhabitant of the infrastructure, a young child locked up in one of the tubes, meant for radioactive disposal. The happiness of the inhabitants of the area turns out to be directly linked to the suffering of the child. This case is strangely close to another story that was reported by writer Ursula Le Guin “The ones who walk away from Omelas”. Chelsea reported the situation in the area of the HADES project to be extremely urgent both for the child and for its overhead neighbours.
But also HADES itself understand its tricky situation. Recently they opened up a call for a ‘social project’ that wants to include ‘stakeholders’ in the decision making on how to deal with nuclear waste on the long run. Chelsea saw this as an opportunity to apply for the job to facilitate this process and has been organising councils on the geological disposal of highly radioactive waste since.
Semi-fictional surroundings
I am growing an interest in how surroundings and materials can support a semi-fictional narrative. While researching I like to’make things’. Being in touch with the materials of my research, offers me a dynamic place to interact with ‘what’s there’.
During the trajectory in a.pass, I experimented with paper making. Starting from the paper making workshops, I went to build little sculptures from the same material. I enjoy the ‘habitation’ of the research, to inhabit the materials, texts and places of the research quite literally.
Sensuous strategies
In the risky spaces which Chelsea proposes, I try to enter a semi-fiction through sensuous strategies. I’m a great fan of touching and listening. Some of my favourite materials to work with are: fonts by womxn, handmade, recycled papers, ropes and chains, sexy and furry fabrics, audioguides and soundscapes.
Proximity is important in my work. Through the senses, I like to get close to things I don’t understand.
Paper making
During my stay at a.pass I picked up a practice of paper making. I learned to make recycled paper when I was a child and had been practicing every now and then over the years. In a.pass it became a recurring practice that I revisited regularly over the span of the programme.
In the paper making process I re-use paper from the bin and combine them with breadbags that my family collected during Sunday breakfasts. I like to think of the pulp mixture as a colliding of places. The paper bags have longer fibers, and they are able to hold together the short-fibered recycled paper from the bin.
Lately, I often leave the sieves for sifting the paper out of the pulp mixture aside, and use the pulp as a material for making cardboard, a table, a shelter. All kinds of substances can be added to the pulp such as soil, spinach, blue berries, coffee grind, stones, moss and ink.
Intoxication
To shapeshift, I’m experimenting with drinking a transformation poison. I’ve been thinking about this idea of intoxication or contamination as an alternative for polarisation. Could I allow myself to willingly let myself be intoxicated or contaminated by something other than myself. This openess seems so daring and naïve that it scares me.
As a concept it’s huge, maybe touching or swallowing ‘otherness’ can make it more concrete and ‘doable’. I try and think about contamination through swallowing or touching that which is considered dirty. Dirtyness often calls for refusal, but could we also be with the dirt and let it shape us?
Audioguide Down Dwars Dela
Down Dwars Delà, Constant vzw, 2021, EbenEzer. Together with Olivia Joret and Amy Pickles. This work is an audio tour that we shared at the end of the Constant Down/Dwars/Delà worksession, close to the Eben Ezer tower in Bassegne, BE.
(Text by Constant vzw) Down Dwars Delà is a trio of words from English, Dutch and French. These aren’t translations but instead position(ing) that we see as talking back to the places and postures we took, experimented with and visited during these two sessions. We look at these words as forming a vector between the beyond, the out-of-reach and the experienceable world.
Down Dwars Delà was the name of two connected sessions that took place one after the other during the summer of 2021, in two different places. One was hosted at the Eben-Ezer tower in Bassenge, Belgium, the other at the Bidston Observatory just outside Liverpool, UK . Both settings were approached as instruments to reconsider the modes of connection, observation and story-making they foster in relation with their wider historical, geographical, social, ecological, political and economical contexts. (end citation)
Our three voices, and narratives, are characters with different materialities. Rock is one, in its multiple, porous, breathing, extracted and exploited existences. Another is the gas nitrogen, whose role is shifting as rocks story changes. The third is a matrixial perspective, that brings our attention to borders and transferences between us. The tour began on top of the tower, then moved down to the stairs leading to it, a large pile of rocks and an old mine. The audience was added to a group chat on Signal in which audio fragments of the three characters were shared throughout the walk. The tour ended with a sound meditation by Pauline Oliveros in the mine.
We did an iteration of this performance for the group exhibition ‘Unfolding Down Dwars Delà’ in the weekend of 16-18th of December 2021 in SeeU, Etterbeek. In this space we shared debris from the live moment of the tour, in the form of props, sound and our script. Stoney soaps presented here confused senses, and could be carried away by visitors.
Graphic design
Graphic design and I haven’t always been friends, although I can feel we’re growing closer again. Working as a freelance designer, I can feel how these skills inform a lot how I work with performance and scenography. When thinking about alter ego’s and role play, I often fall back on making moodbards as I would do for clients when designing their branding.
I also think a lot through images and color. Through making images and collages I get visualisations of a cosmology or imaginary in my head. Through methods of visualisation I can see more clearly affinities between different holes in the net that symbolises my research. Through visualising I find it easier to think about stories in the research too.
On Coloniality, mentoring and publication with Nontsikelelo Mutiti
How to break loose from the grid? How to find a place to design from, a place of familiarity, something I know? How to work with what’s around and ‘make’ from this specific locality? How to relate to graphic design discourse without being burdened by it? These questions informed me during the process of making the design for our event ‘On Coloniality’ that took place from November 10-13th, 2021 in Brussels, Belgium.
Design comes with the responsibility of directing people’s attention. I find that devastating. It’s a source of magic, to guide someones thoughts, and I have difficulties to negotiate that power.
In September I started teaching a Typography 1 course at Paris College of Art. An engagement that sparked my interest in typography and its political potency. Preparing classes, and meanwhile structuring my thoughts about typography, activated a renewed joy and curiosity in the subject. Seeing the mainly white, male graphic design canon made me aware of the importance to speak from a certain position. I started thinking about the position that I work and teach from.
That spacial position was the fundament for the design of the visuals for our event ‘On Coloniality’. I started to work with what was lying around. I used scraps from brochures and folders of venues that we visited in preparation for the event. The biscuits and corn crackers I ate continuously got their own place in the design. I felt the urge to process the materials from the preparations into the design.
I was inspired by Nontsikelelo Mutiti, who’m I had the honor to meet for a mentoring in the a.pass programme. Nontsikelelo (among many other things) works with hair braiding as a communication technology to talk with her black community. Her way of working reminded me of the affectivity of communication design. How our communication becomes recognizable by the way it appears to our kin and communities.
As Nontsikelelo says in our conversation: her education was a training in reproduction. Coloniality aims to make people reproduce what the knowledge-holder already knows. Students are not always trained into formulating their own thoughts. Consciously are not, my design education made me belief I had to reproduce a standard I had no understanding of. I feel this design process was a first step to untangle and get loose from those believes. To compost the thoughts I hold on what design is supposed to be, and find a more synced place to work from.
I published a zine that contains a 3 hour conversation I had with Nontsikelelo Mutiti covering different topics around coloniality in graphic design. We talk about books as objects of power, about design education, about reading and about who’s still doing minimal design?
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Our Practices / Our Extensions - Mentoring practice - Block 2022 III a proposal by Simone Basani and Heike Langsdorf / radical_house
30 July 2022
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeWith Our Practices / Our Extensions we propose a self-observative and self-critical system for mentoring that acknowledges explicitly the socio-political meaning of such an activity of mentoring and being mentored – a practice in itself: attending to processes not being our own, and vice versa, being attended by eyes and minds outside ourselves.
Inspired by several conversations with current coordinators, alumni, and participants of a.pass, the mentoring system of places at its core the following questions: What do we talk/work about when we touch upon ecological/social/urban issues? How did those issues touch us/our bodies/our hi-her-stories? From which physical/emotional/philosophical site does our research start from?
We want to welcome a.pass participants by acknowledging that we all have different experiences and therefore some undeniable hunches, ideas, inheritances we are provided with by the way/s we live our life/ves and relate to others and other matter/s. Here we share a quote relating to this:
“… inheritance doesn't come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.” ― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance
Concretely speaking, we consider our practices being extensions from ‘where we come from’ – how we relate to the journey of our lives through what we do/propose ‘in practice’. For working collectively with our inheritances (and detect if/how/where they found their place within our practices), we propose to work – practice, discuss and exchange – at radical_house: a typical but recently modernized Brussels family house, being developed into a project with the same name during the last few years by radical_hope: Heike, Simone and many other practitioners. This place will be an anchor point, an object for thinking, a site of exploration for us and the participants, to unfold questions connected to their interests and practices.
radical_house, Luikenaarsstraat 2, 1050 Brussels (bus 95, tram 81: get off Germoir), will have a physical and receptive presence during this block, and be accessible for the participants to meet, be mentored (one-on-one or in constellation), research, rest, cook, present / share their practices etc.
By reacting, reading, accepting or rejecting this place, we will try to understand it as a dynamic constellation of traces, artifacts, spaces and relationships that might trigger further reflection about the artistic/social/political practices we are currently maintaining.
Practically speaking, we invite the participants of a.pass at given moments of the week (we will choose them together during the intro-week based on everybody’s availability) into radical_house and share a set of protocols/scores for using a certain space as a site of practice-exploration. Those scores we’ll script or re-script together with the participants themselves on the basis of their interests/needs/desires (heard during the introduction week) and the geography-functioning of the sites we chose.
radical_house’ proposition resonating with the Streets and the Earth: In the context of a.pass’ block 2022 / 3, while Streets and Earth raise a series of research questions connected to ecology, sustainability of art practices and, more widely, working life in the artistic field, Our Practices / Our Extensions is proposed by Simone and Heike as: 1. a methodology for mentoring & individual + collective reflection/exploration and 2. an explorative usage of a physical place where to stay, think, shelter, rest, continue... This place, radical_house, will be a place to ‘breathe with’ (or digest) the questions coming from Streets and Earth and from the physical-relational spaces of radical_house itself.
BIOs of Simone, Heike and radical_house
Simone Basani
I spent a large part of my life in Milano and its outskirts, where my biological family still is. The last five years of my stay in Italy have been in Venice though, before migrating abroad as many members of my non-biological family have done too. In Milano, I have been trained in community drama, dramaturgy work, performance making in a theatre that was in the last phase of its dying process. In Venice I have studied the lexicon of visual arts, semiotics, curating, and finally started to apply this knowledge to my own public art projects. Once I arrived in Belgium, eight years ago, I started to apply that knowledge to projects of other practitioners as well – out of necessity and out of curiosity. Now I mostly conceive curatorial and performative formats where I invite artists to react on a specific proposition of mine. This is also a way to get to know their work better. Very often, Alice Ciresola (a member of my non-biological family) helps me to produce and communicate these formats. Some of them are: NittyGritty, Galeria Gdansk itd., What Remains of a Rembrandt.. and the most recent ones: Jeanne. Or the Western Touch that she co-curates, and Unrequested Services). I like these formats to have their own life quite soon after their conception, to get out of my control. Besides this, I have been collaborating for almost four years on a stable basis as dramaturg and creative producer with Heike Langsdorf/radical_hope, and David Weber-Krebs. Heike has invited me to edit one book of the series she created with Alex Arteaga `Choreography as Conditioning`. Currently I am working on the dramaturgy of a Post Pandemics version of her performance Mount Tackle. With Heike and other artists I take care of the life in and around radical_house. Hans Bryssinck, Heike, Miriam Rohde and I have initiated a `house of practices` inside radical_house.
Heike Langsdorf
I grew up on the German/Austrian border in the very South-East of Bavaria, and after some years in Arnhem/Amsterdam, I ended up in Brussels as my home base. With a background in dance and performance making, I am exploring the performative qualities of choreographing and conditioning within and beyond the art-institutional field. I connect to artistic making, thinking and researching through a continuous exploration of movement and choreographic principles. Since 2010 I developed (starting at a:pass) radical_hope as a working attitude supporting (my) various distinct practices. Today radical_hope identifies as framework/s for artistic research/es and co-creation/s under un/ideal circumstances. Next to realizing various and numerous projects, performances, interventions and programmes throughout the years, I have always been and remain very invested in understanding what gives rise and makes develop practices: how do practices mature, shift, transform, change direction and so on? This made that what I choreographed and co-curated became rather ‘spaces for gathering through practices’ than ‘pieces for stage’. I mention here some: Changing Tents (2011), Sitting With The Body 24/7 (2014/15), Mount Tackle (2017/2019), Un/Settled Residency (2018), …Through Practices (2019). Since 2018, informally, and since 2020 in a more formulated way, with the curatorial and productional support of Simone Basani and Alice Ciresola and in dialogue with other practitioners, I develop the long term project radical_house. Together with Alex Arteaga I co-edited the book series Choreography as Conditioning which was launched end of 2021, together with a long-term project stemming now from the written texts (find here more info and all credits >>>) . The writings of this series are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students worked together with invited guests and myself. They explore notions of choreography, understood as ways of organising subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making.
radical_house
radical_house is a long term project that stems from radical_hope's practices: it presents a physical place, a framework and a reasoning. It is also a possibility for Heike Langsdorf to connect, together with others, her pedagogical experience (which she could gain during the last ten years) back to the artistic field: - How can 'just another' house become a relational tool? What if one frees 'the house' of its usual connotations presenting "neither a property nor territory to be separated and defended against who does not belong there"? (*) It then could be considered "a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves". (**) (*/**) Roberto Esposito, Communitas - the origin and destiny of community, 1998
The renovation (2016-19) of a Brussels family house, together with architect Tania Gijsenberg, into a place for 'more than family' is a relatively new reality, with three work paths that are temporally and spatially entangeled. Here just a short overview: Luikenaarsstraat 2 is the address of the house -- its physical appearance -- where people can live, work and present together. 'Just another house' (in 'just another neigborhood'). After its renovations this house now has the possibility to host more than their two permanent inhabitants: by opening and reducing the staircase to half its former width, a dark cellar (previously packed with unused stuff) became an atelier and the groundfloor became a studio with guestroom. A big window gives view to the streets, vice versa big parts of the working spaces can be seen from outside. The second floor is now an open co-working space with kitchen. Dismantling some little unused inbetween chambers on the same floor made two outside spaces possible: a little courtyard and a terrasse. Under the roof are two rooms for the permanent inhabitants to withdraw into.
Some impressions
Bridging from School: In 2021/22 radical_house develops the framework Bridging from School: first and foremost a way of working with young people, who are still studying or have just graduated, to make their practices not yet introduced to the field: this is done not only by following their work, mentoring or coaching them, giving them feedback but very concretely by setting up projects which need the presence and knowledge acquired in their practices. Like this they are actually introducing themselves while practicing, not by presenting their ideas and philosophies via dossiers and portfolios. Currently, as part of a recently started collaboration with Demos (Arts In Society Award), Simone Basani and Heike Langsdorf are mentoring their candidates.
House of Practices is exploring permeability: how to make space in existing places? In dialogue, through their practices and those of guests, initially, Simone Basani, Hans Bryssinck, Heike Langsdorf and Miriam Rohde aimed to come closer to what the transformative power of a physical place could be: What does a place with its specific history, former and current inhabitants/users allow for? What makes it relational and permeable and for whom? How do our practices create closeness and distance to one another? What of it contributes to the making of community, and what to avoiding or even destroying it? In 2020/21 House of Practices received a research grant by the Flemish Authorities. In 2022 Simone Basani, Heike Langsdorf and Miriam Rohde continue the quest.
EARTH - a gathering workshop - BLOCK 2022 III proposed by Isabel Burr Raty
30 July 2022
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeFor the topic Earth of this block, Isabel Burr Raty invites to collectively think - Earth - by diving into polarities surrounding the fourth most abundant element in the observable universe and the 15th most common in the Earth’s crust: Carbon. Carbon, which originates in the core of stars, has the power to form life, yet to dissolve life as we know it on this Planet. Carbon is the chemical skeleton, required to shape complex molecules like DNA, needed for the development, functioning and uniqueness of humans and almost all other organisms. However, carbon-based fuels dominate global energy use and in the context of climate change, carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas released by human societies. Challenging transnational green efforts to establish post-carbon economies and cementing trans-human Directed Evolution.
During a 4 day encounter based encounter and a series of theory readings, we will be in touch with traditional and innovative practices around the carbon spectrum, as well as post-human critical perspectives on the concept - human - and -nature -. Fabulating with variant Sci-Fi myths be-coming-reality, to inspire alternative imaginaries for the role of the human within the Earth’s life cycle.
On one side of the spectrum we will encounter María Quiñelén, Mapuche medicine woman and Isabel’s close collaborator. The Mapuche is the originary nation in Chile. Self-identified as – the people of the Earth -, they live in a state of resistance fighting for their autonomy. Via a series of ceremonial practices, María will share with us how her cosmovision envisions the human body as an Earth body. A body populated by carbon entities, functioning as connective tissue to establish non-biological kinship with the micro and macro cosmic. And as such, the human is an active, entangled and trans-dependent constituent in galactical systems.
On another side of the spectrum, Isabel will open up technological and artistic perspectives about xenobiology, a scientific discipline that engineers chromosomes different from carbon based DNA, to create useful artificial sustainable biodiversity. In other words, to design new forms of life on Earth that are not hard ware, but wet ware based. Such as synthetic breathing forests that would be ready to populate post-nature landscapes. A project that began as a bio-engineering experiment financed by the European Commission and today it's supported by first world power states.
Orbiting around these spectrums, our readings will open up chapters from Geontologies, A requiem to late liberalism by Elizabeth Povinelli, The Relative Native, Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Xenofeminism by Helen Hester. Where we collectively reflect on: What makes life be in opposition to and in difference from Nonlife? Can the human embody an integrative meta-physics by welcoming multiplicity through affinity? What makes the concept of nature subservient to essentialism?, etc.
Tentative Itinerary of EARTH Tuesday 15 to Friday 18 of November 2022
From 10:00 to 18:00 hrs.
Tuesday 15
Morning: readings & fabulations
Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen
Wednesday 16
Morning: readings & fabulations
Afternoon: sharing with invitee María Quiñelen
Thursday 17
Day trip visit to the Garzweiler mine in Germany with María Quiñelen.
The Garzweiler hole is one of the biggest surface coal mine in Europe.
The mine currently has a size of 48 km² and got its name from the village of Garzweiler, which previously existed at this location. The community was relocated in the nearby surroundings, as well as other villages that followed after.
Friday 18
Morning and afternoon: About xenobiology, post carbon imaginaries & fabulations
BIOS
María Quiñelén is a Mapuche activist medicine woman born in Nueva Imperial, Chile. At the age of 7 her grandmother started training her in the arts of herbs by teaching her, amongst others, how to talk to them in her dreams. Since then, for over 40 years she has been working as a social educator, imparting the Mapuche Cosmovision knowledge and the arts of medicinal herbs through her mobile school. Maria is also expert in natural and humanized birth and a ceremonial facilitator. Actively involved in social media, she has been invited by numerous TV and radio programs and lectured in diverse Indigenous Nations knowledge Congresses in Latin America.
Isabel Burr Raty (BE/CL) is an artist, lecturer, sporadic curator and sexual Kung Fu coach. With an activist background as a filmmaker working with the Rapa Nui and the Mapuche people in Chile, her artistic research is based in ecological, queer, post-human and de-colonial perspectives, where the sources of inspiration range from Indigenous knowledge to techno-scientific ideas of matter and bodies. For the past years her experiments have focused on creating conditions for embodied Sci-Fiction, where the role of the human is de-centered in commodification processes, opening discussions about “value understandings”, such as the Beauty Kit Farm. In 2018 Amsterdam Arts Fund partnered her to Waag and Mediamatic. She is member of the EU project Staying in Touch, curatorial practices of the Future and teaches New and Post Media Art history at ERG (BE). Her works and collaborations have been shown internationally.
www.isabel-burr-raty.com
Where do we go from here - Block 2022 III a proposal by Martina Petrovic
30 July 2022
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeIs a series of dinner encounters which aims to map and introduce four collectives from the Brussels scene to a.pass participants from the September block 2022. Collectives: Common Wallet, Helectolitre, BOSCH and JUBILEE/EMPTOR, are self-organized, or which have alternative approaches on commons, organization, finances and ways of living and working as artists.
Through a format of dinner we will explore how these collectives operate, what are the politics behind the modes of being and working together, where are the difficulties and what are exciting new possibilities of working with different structures. Participants of a.pass will come to the dinners of these four collectives, after these four encounters for the final dinner a.pass will take the role of the host.
Sept 20th, 7pm: Dinner with Hectolitre
Oct 7th, 7pm: Dinner with Common Wallet
Oct 27th, 4pm: Reading Room and dinner with Jubilee/Emptor
The dinner table has its own politics, how one sets it influences the conversation around it, it can generate questions, introduce different ways of composing a menu, question the tools we use, it can unveil the social structures that make the table possible, sometimes unexpected surprising flavors appear on one’s plate and many other delicious subject can surface on it.
These encounters would allow us to collect tools, inspiration and to learn from existing experience and structures on how to collectivize. Further to question what are the challenges, where to search for help, or what is the strength of working in these alternative ways. It would be amazing if this encounter would spark connections and give opportunity to new, unexpected ways of thinking. Maybe some of these conversations encourage propositions where to begin, which steps to take, what traps to avoid, etc. Maybe they provide inspiration to come together and merge projects or initiate art communities and support systems for each other.
-----------------------------------------------------------PLANNED DINNERS
DINNER with HECTOLITRE- 20th of September - Rue de L'Hectolitre 3.
HECTOLITRE is a space dedicated to artists who wish to delve deeper into their projects, experiment with transdisciplinarity and connect their art form/research to the neighborhood. The artists living and working at HECTOLITRE are co-joining interconnected community rings, together with involved neighbors, socio-cultural activists, local and international artists/curators. It is also a place where I have been living for 8 months now, which has opened for me a door to an amazing artist community, given me the time and space for research and implemented the seed from which the idea for dinners with collectives blossomed.
HECTOLITRE is also an unusual building in the heart of the Marolles neighborhood undergoing a radical change of identity. Former swingers club, then storage for antiques, the space is filled with peculiar Art Brut interventions, resembling a kind of «memory forest».Thus, visually and symbolically complex, the surrounding is no obstacle, but rather is perceived as a living system to accept, associate, question, and experience, providing a shared atelier, hosting exhibitions, performances, musical encounters, film projections, debates and other initiatives. The complementarity among artists, curators, creatives and neighbors inhabit the place and catalyze exchange.
The project’s device is based on open, curious and benevolent exchange. Innovation, perseverance, the desire to undertake guide the approach, all in an atmosphere that is joyful, lively and harmonious. The methodology of co-creation and collective intelligence governs the organization of the life of the place and the design and implementation of projects.
http://www.hectolitre.space/project.html
Meeting of the hectolitre community would take place through a neighborly Balkan traditional activity of roasting papers for preparation of traditional autumn dish Ajvar. Ajvar is a spread made from paprika, oil and spaces which is not only delicious but always takes more than 1 person to make. It invites people to come together, make a summary of the summer experiences, and start preparations for winter. This collective activity also has its economical side, it takes care of rationing the resources,by using one grill and stove for multiple households. Which brings us also to an unavoidable discussion in these times about the advantages of cohousing, living in the collectivity, and sharing working and living spaces. Where and how to search for them and how to start commonizing? Further questioning: the organic organization of the community, what does it mean, and how does it function?
*DINNER with COMMON WALLET - 7 October, 7pm @ Rue de L'Hectolitre 3
Common Wallet is a shared bank account and an experiment of radical trust created by a small community of eight people mainly based in Brussels. The members are artists and cultural producers with different lifestyles, levels of wealth and family conditions. Every income generated by the participants is shared in one common bank account. Any member of the Common Wallet can take money from this account based on their needs and with responsibility towards the group and life’s projects. This means that all everyday and regular expenses such as rent / mortgage, food, clothing, energy, transport are paid for by this common pot of resources. The experiment started in January 2018 without fixed rules but with a shared set of values and the idea to practice a polyamorous relationship with money.
Common Wallet's polyamorous relationship with money is a provocative experiment in trust. They invite us to have a conversation around our relation to money. How does one deal with income, resources and outgoing costs - how do we tackle the taboo around these issues? When the current capitalistic structures are not very welcoming, where and how could we reach for alternative solutions? The dinner with Common Wallet will tackle these questions through an open conversation around the table and by introducing us to a game made by three common walleters, named Commonopoly. How did the idea come about? How is a common wallet structured? What are its positive sides, opportunities and pitfalls.
The dinner is curated by Amy Pickles and Martina Petrovic, in collaboration with Adva Zakai and Anna Rispoli (from Common Wallet).*
DINNER with JUBILEE/EMPTOR - 27th of October, 4-9pm @ Radical House (Luikenaarsstraat 2 Rue des Liégeois, 1050 Elsene/Ixelles)
Jubilee is an artist-run organisation that functions as a platform for artistic research. Jubilee is a polyphonic and transdisciplinary structure that supports the work and research of its founding artists, as well as the projects of associated artists within collective reflection trajectories. Jubilee initiates collaborations as a basis for long-term and reciprocal relationships.
Jubilee is concerned with sustainability of artist practices and pursues viable conditions for an ecology of artistic practices. Jubilee wants to raise awareness among artists and have a positive impact on organisations and policies. It does so both by disseminating critical perspectives on the existing precarization in the arts field through individual artistic projects and collective reflections, and by participating in educational contexts, debates, lectures and working groups on an (inter)national level. Jubilee aims to propose practice-based solutions to reconceptualize solidarity systems.
Jubilee's most comprehensive collective research trajectories are Caveat and Emptor.
Caveat and Emptor
The project title Caveat alludes to the expression caveat emptor (buyer beware) – signaling the research's ambition to raise awareness around financial transfers in the arts and around how money is constitutive for work relationships, on a socio-economic, legal and cultural-institutinial level.
Caveat's primal focus is on contracts as a tool for reconfiguring relationships in the field of visual arts. The research project Emptor focuses on property relationships. In the wake of collaborative, performative, internet-based, audiovisual, and immaterial turns in the arts, it is ever more delicate and complex to define what is the artwork, and how it can be exhibited, conserved and sold. Ownership of material objects remains crucial within the visual arts economy, regardless of the challenges that new art practices pose to materialisation and acquisition. How to dislodge the focus on property to ensure the ‘life’ of artworks within collaborative set-ups?
Emptor proceeds by alternating a series of preparatory Reading Rooms with public-facing Assemblies of Practice, for in-depth presentation and study of practices of associated researchers.
Reading Room #25, towards the Assembly of Practice ‘Whose institution?’
Working towards Emptor's third assembly of practice 'Whose institution?', Jubilee invites a.pass to Reading Room #25. We gather around texts from the Handbook that accompanies Documenta 15/Lumbung, an artist-run and collectively structured edition of Documenta which has implied a significant shift in the possibilities of institutional practice. Lumbung is the name for a storage in rural areas for surplus rice that is collectively managed.
The Reading Room will proceed with a dinner conceptualized by Martina Petrovic.
Research Center Cycle 3 Performative Publications and Annex 10 September 2022
posted by: Vladimir MillerPerformative Publications at Kunstencentrum BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium bring the individual and collaborative research trajectories of the researchers of the third Cycle of the a.pass Research Center into focus. This day-long performative event is conceived by Gosie Vervloessem, João Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Simon Asencio, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and the Research Center Curator Vladimir Miller.
FROM 13:00 to 20:30 (detailed schedule below)
Kunstencentrum BUDATowerBudatoren, KortrijkKorte Kapucijnenstraat z/n, 8500 KortrijkThe Publications are accompanied by a collaboratively written Annex. In the Annex the researchers of Cycle 3 bring together and discuss an annotated library of shared references and recommendations which have accumulated during their research year. This publication is a collective retracing of these connections, and as such a reweaving of a complex understructure of speculative relationships between the questions and concerns of this Cycle.
The Performative Publications will start at 13h and end approximately around 20h. There is a opportunity in between the presentations to enjoy food and drink.
Performative Publications
Research Center Cycle 3
Introduction to the Performative Publications and Annex Reading
Studio 4
13h
duration 1h
Simon Asencio
Ballades Infidèles
open recording session and conversation
Studio 3
14h
approx 3h, durational, free to join at any moment
Ballades Infidèles is an online and offline research group working around the Ballades en jargon – eleven poems composed by 15th century poet Françoys Villon and written in the secret tongue of the Coquillard·es, a posse of French rogues. These ballads repurpose medieval language to narrate social underworlds in code. They invite to a reflection on the possibility of otherness and estrangement within a ’same’ language. Using the ballads as a map and a method for research, the working group has gathered since February 2022 to develop different forms of study of these ballads in perspective of their re-writing. At BUDA the group will gather to activate these re-writings through the situation of an open recording session and conversation. The recording of the event will later serve for the publication of a vinyl record.
With Francoys Villon, Diana Duta, Chloe Chignell, Cee Fülleman, Loucka Fiagan, camille gerenton, Anouchka Oler, etaïnn zwer, Christophe Albertijn Simon Asencio et al.
João Fiadeiro
Intra-views
Studio 5
at 14h, 15h, 16h
Durational performance, resets at every full hour.
In 2021, during a workshop given by João Fiadeiro at a.pass the artist and a.pass researcher Jimena Pérez Salerno composed a list of questions and tensions as a feedback for João Fiadeiro's practice of Real Time Composition. Instead of “answering” these questions directly João Fiadeiro felt that in order to be properly addressed in their complexity they needed a different type of response and a different type of context alltogether. On the occasion of his research presentation at BUDA João Fiadeiro decided to come back to this list and invited Jimena Pérez Salerno to collaborate with him on a dispositive for a performance where both of them will engage in a real time composition intra-view around the questions she initially raised.
Rareş Augustin Crăiuţ
CofetARia
cake selling point
Third floor
14h, ongoing
Born in socialist Rumania, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin has for the past 10 years been working with food as a complex collaborator in his performative practice. He has been exploring methods of mixing food studies with artistic research by setting up, creating and producing food performances and food education projects.
One of the resulting projects is CofetARia: an durational performance at the intersection of performance art and pastry backing. CofetARia is a functioning pastry and cakes store, that recreates and offers for consumption the pastries that were made in Romania in the last decades of the waning socialist regime.
A live performance with alimentary matter, CofetARia is exploring the food's agency in the animation of memory while at the same time confronting post-communist nostalgia.
Gosie Vervloessem
Editorial Meeting - The Horror Garden
workshop / performance
Studio 4
15h
ca 1,5 h
Gosie Vervloessem's research is focused on the ways plants are depicted in pop culture narratives. The scope of her work encompasses an assemblage of diverse allies and engagements: The Swamp Thing comic books, the plants that grow in the city of Brussels, activists who try to eradicate so called "invasive species" in different biological landscapes, her alter ego of the Sick Detective, and so on. Over the years this sprawling research has produced performative, written and drawn publications, which have never been assembled or shown in one place. Faced with the overwhelming output of her research Gosie Vervloessem will ask her audience to form the editorial board of a forthcoming book on her research. What should be part of this book, what should be excluded, what are the topics and strands that can come together and be published in this format?
Vijai Maia Patchineelam
Descriptions Change
Book presentation for: The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution together with artists who have contributed to the Research Seminar Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description that is within the book.
Studio 4
17h
Duration 1,5h
Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on dialogue between the artist and the art institutions. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists—one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions.
For this book presentation artists Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens, Evi Olde Rikkert and Julia Dahee Hong, alongside RC Associate Researcher Vijai Maia Patchineelam will present their contribution to the book The Artist Job Description – a publication of Patchineelam’s doctoral research of same title. During the presentation the artists will engage in a conversation regarding the relationship between artists and art institutions by bringing their personal experiences where they have renegotiated other ways of coming into and developing their art practices within art institutions.
The artist’s experience of being inside art institutions, starting from the effort made to be accepted in order to develop one’s art practice, then the experience of going through them, and while in them, the many ways of having to learn how to be inside. This will in several ways inform the development of an artist’s practice, for the good or for the bad. Making this publication has been an attempt at recognizing and dealing with, rather than avoiding, the tensions that exist in the relationship between artists and art institutions at a time when most art institutions themselves are under the pressure of the looming threat of austerity-politics.
Excerpt from the book, The Artist Job Description
Gosie Vervloessem & Simon Asencio
Area X
Participatory Performance and Audio
Studio 5
19h
to join the performance, please leave your phone number on the sign up sheet on location. The audio track will be send to your number via whatsapp or telegram
Duration 1,5h (train to Brussels can be reached)
Area X refers to a mysterious zone in the Southern Reach Trilogy books – a sci-fi, eco-horror and eerie fiction written by Jeff VanderMeer. In the Southern Reach Trilogy a research unit studies a mysterious substance/agent/force/landscape that takes over and re-writes whatever and whomever engages with it. In the narrative of the trilogy the researchers sent into Area X end up blending with it and becoming the subject of their research.
In their collaboration during the Research Center Cycle 3, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio have been looking into methodologies for studying the agencies of text through collective reading practices, role play and infused hallucinations. They have based their performative readings of the Southern Reach Trilogy on the methodologies that the books itself proposes: "This text, however, has an agency all of its own: its message is not disseminated through interpretation and relay, but inhalation." This research stimulates a particular relation between reader and text: a point of contact where the desire to make sense coexists with the experience of being fundamentally changed by what one reads.
Demolition, Damage, Deviation, Desire a.pass End Presentations of Gary Farrelly, Inga Gerner Nielsen, amy pickles and Jimena Pérez Salerno
11 September 2022
posted by: Lilia MestreThe a.pass End Presentations of Gary Farrelly, Inga Gerner Nielsen, amy pickles and Jimena Pérez Salerno will take place on the 29 and 30 September 2022 at artist run space Meyboom, Boulevard Pacheco 34, downtown Brussels, from 18:00 to 22:30.
This public presentation marks the end of their trajectory at a.pass and invites the researchers to share their modes of doing, seeing and making artist research public after following the year-long postgraduate program. amy pickles (UK) is an artist and educator working on colonial infrastructures embedded within everyday technologies. She curated and organised, with Chloë Janssens and Túlio Rosa, a gathering titled On Coloniality [https://apass.be/on-coloniality/]. Gary Farrelly (IE) is a visual artist researching on infrastructure, bureaucracy and the architectures of power. A big part of his work is in collaboration with German artist Chris Dreier with the ongoing project Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. Jimena Pérez Salerno (AR) is a choreographer and dancer researching on the concept of expanded choreography as a critical modality for political awareness reflecting on linear time and productive behavior. Inga Gerner Nielsen (DK) is a performing artist with a background in sociology, researching immersive performance as an interstice of poetry and institutional critique.
With singular questions, processes and approaches, the four researches intersect and expand concerns in Demolition, Damage, Deviation, Desire by bridging intimacy and politics in very different ways. Their practices extend from the lecture performance to performative installation, drawing, crossing ritual making and never ending warmups, to research, share and exchange - together with the audience - questions that are embedded in our everyday lives.
The research of these four artists addresse architecture and administration with their conditionings and protocols; the perpetuation of colonial governance through digital infrastructures and our dependency on them; immersive institutional rational authority and the amazing potential of time to inherit, transform, conduct change and resilience.
The End-Presentations at a.pass are on themselves a study on curatorial practice, performativity and making public. By being together, these performative situations will shine attention to the context and environment they are in, their relationship with audiences, the materialities that are involved being them visible or invisible and what matters in these circumstances.
For this occasion they worked with Frédéric Van De Velde on a collective sound publication with vinyls that will be performed and spinned by Frédéric during the event.
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Gary Farrelly / It is official policy to appear unmovedGary Farrelly's research at a.pass departs from the work of deceased conservative conspiracy theorist William Milton Cooper. Coopers work, through his polemical Hour Of The Time radio show synthesised economic and political ‘research’, occult knowledge, personal grievance, and manic episodes into a paranoid tsunami deployed to undermine confidence in public institutions.
Cooper's transmissions were characterised by a highly affective voice, at once disdainful, concealed, intimate, furious and hyperbolic, inducing a hypnotic state of susceptibility and acquiescence to the content. A precursor to the corrosive ‘post truth’ ideation that contaminates our current public discourse, Farrelly takes Coopers work as a departing point towards a generative reimagining of the paranoid researcher/ coercive performer.
His trajectory at a.pass has explored various performative versions of himself, including: the bureaucrat, the crossdresser, the charlatan, the guide, the joker, the devils advocate, the instructor and the Cassandra. The core mission of Farrelly’s research is the affective deployment of body and voice as transmitters of anxiety, desire, disinformation and critical questioning in relation to invasive infrastructure and monumental architecture. Much of the content and material he has brought into play at a.pass was gathered in collaboration with Chris Dreier in the context of Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. O.J.A.I.'s ongoing mission proposes a reading of the built environment through lenses of coercive power, mind control, transcendence and magic.
BioGary is an Irish artist and educator based in Brussels. His work encompasses drawing, performance, publishing, installation and experimental radio. Exhibitions and performances have been presented by Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art (London), Marres Centre for Contemporary culture (Maastricht), Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris) and Salzburger Kunstverein. He is a lecturer at La Cambre ENSAV in Brussels and his work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. A significant part of the work takes place in collaboration with Chris Dreier, through their shared practice the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence.
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Inga Gerner Nielsen / THiS INSTiTUTEAt a.pass Inga’s artistic research came to be conjured through THiS INSTiTUTE; a structure by which to constitute the sensual mode of her thinking. The past year she has been looking intensely into ահąէ it is a spacious feeling – where an imaginary world of analysis starts appearing through the objects and textures at hand, հօա it opens as a kind of summoning and closes when she is called into presence by matters of everyday life and ահվ it feels so urgent for her to institutionalize her artistic research as affect, as symptom, as dream.
Moving to Brussels from Denmark Inga lost the sociological overview of her environment. Normally, her artistic work unfolds as sitespecifc intervention in a concrete place, in the academic field or in an institutional setting, which she has carefully sensed in order to know how to highlight its features and make the invisible visible, often through an aesthetic and ideological juxtaposition. Her performance series My Protestant Origins and Catholic Fantasies combines her background in Sociology with her artistic work by making performance installations which open up a maximalist, celestial relation to space and objects in the otherwise secular rule of minimalist Danish design. Now, in the myriad of styles and institutions that make up Brussels, she didn't know what to juxtapose and how to intervene. And after quite some confusion, this lack of clarity started to feel good. It granted her permission to just gaze at her own gaze. In many of her previous works she had been exploring with performers how the gaze affects or choreographs the body, and now, with half-closed eyes she started to practice an intense mode of subjectivation.
Inside THiS INSTiTUTE she researches how to fall into a medieval perception of space/time; a mode of being in and knowing the world, she fantasizes to be a remaining counterweight to the renaissance's linear perspective once invented by the architect. She practices a bodily felt sense of her close surroundings as an emotional imaginary landscape, where the distinction between the inner and outer world falls away. At the End Presentation Inga will try to open up THiS INSTiTUTE to her community of artistic researchers and people interested in the question of how to build portals for other modes of thinking? And why might we need the institution to uphold and preserve them?
BioInga comes from a group of performers in Scandinavia, who work with immersive performance installations. Since 2007 she co-founded collectives and focused on developing their work as an activist strategy to give structure to sensuous modes of social interaction in different spheres of society. Today she collaborates with a nursing school in Denmark to introduce performance installations as a way to look into the mise-en-scène of care work. A relation, which the project mirrors with the interaction between performer and audience in one-to-one performance art installations. Inga's art explores how new modes of subjectivity or imaginaries come into existence or are transformed through interactions and refigured institutional settings.
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amy pickles / Chantal and TimothyThese two works take their name from human inscription on other than human entities.
Timothymade with George Chinnery and many others
Timothy is a multi-authored scene comprised of assembled debris from amy's experiments in a.pass. These experiments reconsidered formats for collective learning. The topic in question, colonial infrastructures and how they perpetuate modes of extraction and exploitation in a progressive western narrative, inherent within our communication technologies. Phew. Timothy is carrying a lot. Serendipitously, Timothy's name is taken from a tortoise, so it can accommodate a lot within its shell. Timothy the tortoise was taken by the british navy from a portuguese merchant in 1854, who in turn took her from the shores of turkey. She was kept in different colonising ships till she was moved to an aristocratic home in england, where they etched the family motto into her belly; "Where have I fallen? What have I done"?[1] If you're wondering, a tortoises underside is very sensitive. Timothy, as scene, resonates with the scar tissue of Timothy the tortoise. The scene is a prompt for us to think about ourselves as an accumulation of colonial narratives - these processes involve us all in some way - and to reconsider the "uncontested notion of information technology as freedom"[2].
Chantalmade with Max Franklin, Chloë Janssens, Anna Lugmeier & Marko Gutić Mižimakov
Chantal is a digitized Super8 film, that documents 'relational hood group call', a collective exercise made for a presentation in a.pass. The participants are bound together through a group video call on Signal - an internet based communication app - that is connected to their bodies through headphones, screens, and selfie sticks. They collaborate to form an experience for a primary vessel. This primary vessel is the participant whose head is engulfed inside a hood. 'relational hood group call' was a re-imagining and re-assembling of brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s relational objects, objetos relacionais[3]. The name of the film is from the tree in which the participants move around, Chantal being inscribed upon its trunk.
References1. "Timothy (tortoise)" Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_(tortoise). Accessed 7 September 2022.
2. Aouragh, Miriyam & Chakravartty, Paula. Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies. Media, Culture & Society. 2016;38(4):559–575.
3. Butler, Cornelia H. & Pérez-Oramas, Luis. Lygia Clark, The Abandonment of Art, 1948 - 1988. The Museum of Modern Art. 2014. p281
Bioamy pickles is an artist, organiser and loosely institutionalised educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution – of knowledge, tools, finances – and collaboration are ways to refuse individual ownership. She is a member of Varia, Rotterdam NL, an organisation working on everyday technology.
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Jimena Pérez Salerno / Unproductive willHow can we create a different relation to time than the one the western worldview imposes on us? How can we produce market-wise non-productive things?
Unproductive will is a choreographic practice installation that is part of a larger research. It suggests revisiting our relationship with the hegemonic notion of linear time and productive behavior. It proposes thinking of them as collective colonial wounds and impositions that run through our practices, affective bonds, and lives, wherever we are. I am developing exploratory collective practices such as Kung Fu tuning (a counter-normative body practice using simple martial arts warm-up), Collective readings (Payada: a popular folk music genre involving poetic recitations), and Technologies of attention (peeling vegetables following a choreographic score) to name some of them. I work with the idea of a never-ending warm-up to re- think the idea of practice and to engage with everyone who participates as a collaborator. This process does not seek an end but wants to remain in the continuity of the search.
I started my trajectory in a.pass exploring the normative notion of linear-productive time and how it is embodied in our behavior because I am interested in its political dimension. I observed how much thinking in a forward direction brings associations that build a certain life perspective. For example, forward-better-future-progress or backward-worst-past-degrowth. This reinforces a system of values creating a sense supported by binary thoughts. In an attempt against this logic, I followed a contradictory path. I will step forward to the past, I said, and I started to investigate, trying to detect how bringing practices from my sentimental and cultural education in Argentina to my current research, could speak of my relationship with a twisted time. I am interested in observing the transformations the project traverses in each place it is presented. To change its language and perspective, that is to say, the thickness that its affective, geographical, and political implications take both for me and those who participate in the experience. This research challenges the definitions of audience-participant, performance-practice, and encounter-training affecting the presentation dynamic that sets all of them in motion.
BioJimena Pérez Salerno is an Argentinian artist, based in Brussels (BE). She works and researches between Brussels and Buenos Aires. She experiments in the performing arts, artistic research, and teaching fields. As a dancer and choreographer, she collaborates and engages continuously with other artists as a fundamental part of her exploration of collective work. She considers choreographic practice like an expanded relations system that enables modes of imagination, attention, and coexistence. It leans towards performative practices that contemplate the activation of an unexpected context to think together through the experience of an implicated body. + info: https://cargocollective.com/jimenaps IG: @sashimishimi
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Frédéric Van de VeldeBio
Frédéric Van de Velde's artistic practice oscillates between publishing, producing and organising exhibitions and concerts. He worked for WORM and DE PLAYER in Rotterdam and used to run a bedroom-sized music venue called Antenne. In 2019 he founded the record label Futura Resistenza, which operates somewhere on the edges of performance, music and the visual arts.
Research Center Open Reading Group 28 September 2022
posted by: Vladimir MillerNEW: Every second Monday 19-21h
NEXT MEETINGS
22.05.2023 19h
"Narrate, Speculate, Fabulate: Didier Debaise and Benedikte Zitouni in Conversation with Isabelle Doucet"
proposed by Gosie Vervloessem
05.06.2023 19h
Marie Bardet: "Making a Front With Our Backs" Translated by: Ellen Heaghney
Jara Rocha: "testing texting South: a political fiction"
proposed by caterina daniela mora jara
19.06.2023 20h
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: "Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization"
proposed by Tulio Rosa
03.07.2023 19h
Tjalie Robinson: "Vivere Pericolosamente"
proposed by Paoletta Holst
17.07.2023 19h
W.J.T. Mitch: "Art And Public life: A Conversation Theaster Gates"
proposed by Maurice Meewisse and Vladimir Miller
The Research Center Open Reading Group follows the research trajectories of the Associate Researchers with text proposals from the collective library of the current Research Center and new texts written by the researchers themselves. The reading group is public and open to join in person and online.
ZOOM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7654748465?pwd=VjhFMFVkSUxRUjlkakRuTFBSSndldz09
Meeting ID: 765 474 8465
Passcode: apassPAST MEETINGS
28.09.22 @ Radical House
caterina daniela mora jara, AR
12.10.22 @ Radical House and online
Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma, What is wrong with the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research?
https://www.onlineopen.org/what-is-wrong-with-the-vienna-declaration-on-artistic-research
26.10.22 at apass and online
A House in the Dutch East Indies by Paoletta Holst
09.11.22 online
Maurice Meewisse proposes: Mark Cousins "On Support", from: Celine Condorelli "Support Structures"
23.11.22 online
Tulio Rosa proposes: a chapter from "Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism" by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
07.12.22 online
Vladimir Miller proposes: introductory chapter from "Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization." S. Shukatis, D. Graeber & E. Biddle (Eds.),
Wednesday 4.01.23 17h online
Paoletta Holst proposes: Ann Laura Stoler, "Interior Frontiers" in: Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, And Jacques Lezra, [Ed]. Thinking with Balibar A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice. Fordham University Press: New York, 2020, pp. 99-115 (pdf)
Wednesday 18.01.23 17h online
Maurice Meewisse proposes: texts from
Manifesta Journal #8- collective curating (2009): "The crux of polyphonic language, or the thing as gathering" by Katharine Schieben and other textsWednesday 01.02.23 online
caterina daniela mora jara proposes: "inflation, debt, budget" – her own text in progress; and the chapter "Naming Material" by Jeroens Peters from "And then it got legs’"
Wednesday 22.02.23
Tulio Rosa proposes: "YWY, Searching for a Character between Future Worlds: Gender, Ecology, Science Fiction"
Edited by Pedro Neves Marques.Wednesday 01.03.23 17h at a.pass and online
Vladimir Miller proposes: Eve Tuck 'Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the irreconcilable', (2010)
Wednesday 08.03.23 17h at a.pass and online
Túlio Rosa proposes: "Self Defense: a philosophy of violence", by Elsa Dorli. Introduction and first chapter.
Wednesday 22.03.23 17h online
Maurice Meewisse proposes: Chantal Mouffe: "For an Agonistic Model of Democracy", chapter 4 from "The Democratic Paradox", Verso 2009
zoom link below
Dramaturgies of Care (and other intimacies) A salon and mentoring cycle with jaamil olawale kosoko. PA-guest, invited by Alyssa Gersony.
07 October 2022
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeWe are all in need of more care and care is an often invoked concept to cope with today’s global crises. But how do we practice care within performance? In their week at a.pass, artist, author, and curator jaamil olawale kosoko will consider dramaturgy as an act of care within contemporary performance practice. During mentoring sessions, a Friday-evening salon and a rist of other activities, participants and other cultural workers are encouraged to bring examples of care strategies they find useful in creating socially engaged performance actions that stretch textually and discursively across various genres of liveness and time based art forms. jaamil olawale Kosoko’s approach draws on research methods used in the fields of experimental dance/theater making and dance studies to see what the body can tell us about pressing social issues. From the stage, to the living room, to the nightclub, to the screen, to fantasy, to the privacy of one’s own room, we will explore how care rituals animate the physical art of living and creating in an ever changing world.
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Wednesday 12th October, 2022
7pm: a.pass mentoring dinner @ Radical House
Thursday 13th
1-5pm: a.pass mentoring slots @ a.pass
5-7.30: drinks and dinner @ a.pass 4th floor kitchen
8.30: Outwalkers @ KVS
Friday 14th
1-4pm: a.pass mentoring slots @ Radical House
7-9.30: public salon @ Radical House
Saturday 15th
10pm-6am: visit to Unlimited Strip Club, in Antwerp
Sunday 16th
3pm: reading of Black Body Amnesia @ Rile*
PA-guest during Block III 2022. Invited and organized by Alyssa Gersony. Production support by Sarah Pletcher.
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jaamil olawale kosoko (they/he) is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s practice is conceptual and process based, fluidly moving within the creative realms of live art performance, video, sculpture, and poetry. Through rooted ritual and spiritual practice, embodied poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body, kosoko conjures and crafts perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible.
Blending poetry and memoir, conversation and performance theory, their book ‘Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts’, was released Spring 2022.
More: https://www.jaamil.com
date: 21.7.2022. Thursdaytime: 11:00 - 14.00Bring a straw, you will eat lunch in drag, yes.Before we meet for our drag up/drag down I would like to ask you to consider drag not as plain crossdressing or masking, but as a way of exaggerating and translating gender.Drag is a visual medium. Drag is a practice in (unlearning) visual pleasure. Drag is an embodied practice.I see the workshop as a blabbering crash course in make-up and dragging workflow: types of makeup, layering, covering your eyebrows, drawing new eyebrows, cutting the crease (of an eyelid), contour, lips, eyelashes, taping, wigs, padding, stockings etc.Therefore this 3 preparatory hours before the score start will be in huge part concerned with makeup as finding your 'face' is a huge part of what drag is, however some people might not be keen on putting their life in danger with 5kg of full coverage makeup, I propose that if you find yourself in this group, see if you can imagine making your drag out of other materials - go wild or go mild. I also have a surprise solution, but I encourage you to find your own.The makeup thing won't be a tutorial, you needn't follow it, I will just use it to talk about certain aspects of dragginging.PLEASE CONSIDER BRINGINGwhatever drag outfit -- however big or however humble,nylon stockings if extra are lying around and I'm sure they are.
if you have spare false eyelashes or false nails, combs,
whatever spare makeup you have,
hand or portable mirrors.
every item could make or break somebody's drag!
LV Bet - Online kaszinó a modern játékosok számára 24 December 2022
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Contingent Weirdness workshop on horror
08 January 2023
posted by: Sina SeifeeFor the Opening Week of a.pass block 2023 I, Adrijana and Sina propose training/hanging-out/sharing/practice for artists researchers that focuses on the specific genre of horror to understand each other’s artistic commitments in a constraint and therefore generative way. Adrijana and Sina will introduce some of the historical elements of the genre, such as zombies, gore and torture of ghostly demons, vicious animals and cannibal witches, as well as medieval serial killer monsters, unnatural disasters, Frankenstein projects, and so on. Parallelly foregrounding different scales and registers of horror for reconsideration, ranging from speculative fiction, and sci-fi cinema, to medieval bestiaries, inducing “bad feelings” such as fear, uncanny, awe, mania, panic, loss, tension and anxiety.
The workshop starts by choosing an aspect of our individual artistic practices and imagining it as a horror story. Further abstracting the values and ethics that the practice promotes, and deciding what can be turned into horror with the help of the group. Doing so, the workshop explores the parts of our practices that are fucked-up, which means to what extent what we do can become disastrous, gruesome, and torturous. Starting from where one’s practice produces damage and from the point where thinking disintegrates and disorients, we will map what lurks in the peripheral vision. We will concentrate on both, to create horrors but also a specific setting, those which are important for the genre. Not only to set up the mood but to create an ambiance of the expectation of horror. In the workshop, we will provide basic accessories and tools to create settings – an ambiance of ‘expectation’ pregnant with horror. In relation to this, we will prepare references for the reading and/or watching selected films together. For the last day, we focus on composing singular pieces (around individual proposals or in small groups) which we will share at the end of the day in the setting of a ‘scary night storytelling.’
The workshop is interested in horror as a genre. Because looking at genre can teach us how stories gather and stage their matters of care and teach a negatively affected audience to inhabit their world. Adrijana and Sina are interested in what comes from an atmosphere of contingent weirdness, creating experimental and personalized monsters of artistic work. A particular interest of the workshop is in those scales that are not necessarily correct and of good intention. How can we train ourselves in different kinds of reasoning? We propose to exaggerate consciously how great art practices are also awful, how the things we do are also often laden with damage and death, to trace our works in the matrix of rage, lure, and desire (and not necessarily in the matrix of truth, urgency, and achievements).
Sina Seifee and Adrijana Gvozdenović were both associate researchers at a.pass Research Center (2018-2020) when this workshop was first conceived in the crossline between Sina’s medieval bestiaries and Adrijana’s artistic anxieties.
Using storytelling, video, and performance, Sina explores and teases with the heritage of zoology in West Asia. His work picks up on how epistemologies, jokes and knowledges get shaped in the old and new intersections of techno-media and globalism. (www.sinaseifee.com)
Adrijana employs artistic methods to create ambiguous distinctions between practice and theory, theory and confession, documentation and production, artistic and curatorial, oral exchange and artistic form. (www.gadi.me)
More entries wait to be written, and not always patiently* 11 January 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeHappy EndingsOn horror and/in collectionsWintertime in the Northern hemisphere, night falls early, huddled around one stove, a dog starts barking, birds flutter, an invisible presence, maybe, a figment of our imagination. The penultimate block of a.pass’ current lifecycle is dedicated to ‘horror and/in collections’, to familiar stories yet untold, or unknown tales needing to be retold.
During the workshop Contingent Weirdness (Jan 10-13), Adrijana Gvozdenovic and Sina Seifee invite us to present our research practices through the filter of horror. With the help of the genre-specific conventions of horror, they challenge us to look over our shoulders into what lurks in the shadow of our own art practices, and eventually to give form - however blurry or murky - to what might be hiding in plain sight. “A particular interest of the workshop is in those scales that are not necessarily correct and of good intention. How can we train ourselves in different kinds of reasoning? We propose to exaggerate consciously how great art practices are also awful, how the things we do are also often laden with damage and death, to trace our works in the matrix of rage, lure, and desire (and not necessarily in the matrix of truth, urgency, and achievements).”
Peggy Pierrot extends the horror-proposal with additional reflections on genre tropes and modes of attention. Under the rubric The ingredients of fear (Jan 27), she addresses questions of horror stories, anxiety, otherness, cognition and emotions. What do we look for in these genre stories? When do they press upon us as potent receptacles? What themes and situations activate and titillate our anxieties? What is staged in a good horror story? Why have these genres been the outcast recipient of unspeakable but very human sensations?
Ghosts abide particularly well in ruins and nascent decay. In the workshop disseminated escapes (Jan 31-Feb 1), Heide Hinrichs and Vijai Maia Patchineemam propose to spend time in the library and to thumb through the history of a.pass by browsing its book shelves. How did this collection come into being? What has been its modes of growth, administration, caretaking and accessibility? What stories have been lost, and which entries have been neglected all together? The impending closure of the library, haunted by a battlefield or specters - those of unattainable specificity and totality, unlimited repair and loss, illusory control and contingency, imminent enlightenment and opaqueness, interminable product and process - becomes a meeting place, if not for conquest or resolution, then at least for coexistence, deferral, and even an embrace of the anxieties of critical theory and knowledge production. The artist duo Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi (Pages) join the workshop for a conversation around publishing as a collective practice of generating an open and permeable archive.
With Anne Juren and her lessons on fantasmical anatomy (March 6-10), we turn to the body as a familiar and unfamiliar site of experience, epistemology and eventually altered potentiality. If the body is a biological product, conditioned by medico-social practices and generational transmissions that precede our experience, how can we simultaneously approach our closest friend and/or foe as ‘a body project’, i.e. as a poetic, fantastical, speculative, imaginative and even monstrous site of investigation that settles and unsettles the conceptions we might have of ourselves, the world and the relations between us? In which way are metaphors influencing the imagination of the body? How is the speculative addressing of somatic practice disfiguring concepts of anatomy? Can horror imaginaries offer a mood to investigate and release our corporeal disorder and vulnerability?
The scenography of the block is provided by Steven Jouwersma, infused by material and immaterial remnants of the past: light, smoke, shadows, reflections and other translucencies.
* From ‘A glossary of haunting’, by Eve Tuck and C.Ree (in Handbook of Autoethnography, 2013)
The ingredients of fear Day of study
11 January 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeHorror stories tell us a lot about our embodied cognition, our ways of seeing, thinking and feeling the world. Without being too functionalist, these literary, comic or cinematographic stories and kids tales are staging fundamental needs linked to our survival: to be able to anticipate danger, to remain on the lookout, to defend oneself, to find resources, to eat, to protect one's own - in short, to find adequate responses to the conditions of existence that have been ours since the dawn of humanity. At the root of anxiety and fear: is there someone following me? Is the Other a friend or a foe ? Can I trust this person? Will I recover from this unknown weird diseases? Can i trust new sciences ? Is there such thing as pure evil ? Will I be able to survive in inhuman or violent conditions? Have I chosen my home well? What is this shadow that follows me?
11am - 5pm @ a.pass
We will talk about otherness, cognition, emotions. Our dichotomous view of our bodies has made us relegate the question of fear and disgust for the unknown to unloved genres that titillate our deepest human physical side. What are we looking for in genre stories? What themes and situations activate and titillate our anxieties? What is staged in a good horror story?
Peggy Pierrot teaches media theory and narration at ERG in Brussels. At fifty years old she decided to assume what she has always been: a fan. Of literature, comics and film sub-genres (thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romcom…), strategy and role playing games, technical devices of all kinds, and music. She talks about it, writes about it and thinks about it, a lot.
The complete text would be insufferable 01 February 2023
posted by: Sina Seifee
Two-Day Shift Workshop
20 February 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeBuilding on from a previous proposal (Night Shift) Nada Gambier in collaboration with Jen Rosenblit now invite you for the Two-Day Shift.
In this working shift, we will dive into the problematics that arise from coming together, engage in improvisational games and strategies, have fun with speculation and bathe in inconvenience as a way to look anew at our practices and get to know our researches from another angle. Once again, our attention goes to what it means to be of service to each other and the works and how by attending to parasites we come to another understanding of what we are doing. The question of desire and learning from what we don’t know will also linger as a larger drive and disorganizing method for the group and researches.
Through collective mentoring strategies, conversation and experimentation we will exchange ideas, desires, thoughts, materials and reflections.
The first day will largely be built around conversation. The second day we roll up our sleeves and get into action. At the end of the first day we will have dinner together.
Practical information:
Location: apass 4th floor
Dates and times:
15.3 2023 @ 10h (check-in) - 17h30 + dinner at 18h30-20h30
16.3 2023 @ 10h (check-in) -17h
There are a few places left. In case interested please contact Nada by mail at the latest by 10th of March.
For non-apassers we ask a 30 € contribution for the 2 days. Please email Nada Gambier if you're interested to participate.
Jen Rosenblit (1983. USA) is based in Berlin after many years in New York City. She makes performances inspired by architectures, bodies, text, and ideas stemming from problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny and maintenance of care, locating ways of being together amidst (un)familiar and impossible contradictions. Rosenblit’s writing practice spans from the paper to the stage, supporting an expanse of meaning as it emerges between things and toward an unwinding or the inevitably possible collapse. Desire and sexuality have offered reoccurring points of departure without demanding a singular aesthetic or representation. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 NewYork Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque (Vevey, CH) artist in residence and has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns and Philipp Gehmacher. Rosenblit’s newest work,<ElseWhereRhapsody> is a 2023 co-production of Tanzfabrik Berlin and Tanzquartier Wien, offering distraction as a guide to speak toward the illegibility of desire and forgetfulness as a way to shift toward something else, away from the damaging repetition.
www.jenrosenblit.net
Nada Gambier (1980. Finland) roams around in what she calls a crash-disciplinary world where theater, dance, performance, video, writing, curatorial approaches and languages and social concerns merge and collide. Her work often flirts with the borders between theatricality and abstraction and she is drawn to things that she doesn't understand or cannot grasp. The non-spectacular and the absurd belong to her most known trademarks as an artist. Since 2014 she has been focusing on long-term projects in which the separation between research, creation process and public event can be confused and/or abandoned. In 2020 she began monthly collective research sessions in Brussels, further establishing herself as an advocate for experimentation and research within the (performing) arts. Nada also regularly collaborates on other artists' projects as a performer and artistic advisor. She has worked a.o. with Kate MacIntosh, Edit Kaldor, Forced Entertainment, Simone Aughterlony, Jorge Léon, Maria Jerez, Diederik Peeters, Charlotte Vanden Eynde and Phil Hayes. Nada is currently doing the postgraduate course in a.pass.
www.nadagambier.be
a.pass Polyset 2023W18-20 practice gathering
17 April 2023
posted by: Vladimir Millera.pass Polyset 2023W18-20
May 2nd-19th 2023You are cordially invited to join the a.pass Polyset space between the 2nd and 19th of May '23. Within the Polyset you will find other practitioners, artists and researchers, materials, tools, technical support as well as any number of individual and communal practices and experimental proposals. Polyset starts from an empty space and an empty timetable – both are gradually established during Polyset by its participants. Artists who spend time in the Polyset space set up their own working conditions. There are materials available to create a wide range of structures: from a simple table to a performative setting. The invitation to work with communal materials in a shared space opens up questions of authorship and collaboration towards a transient idea of ownership.
A Polyset is a recurring practice of coming together in a communal practice space that is hosted by an art/educational institution. While a Polyset can be initially proposed as simply as "a prolonged collective practice hangout", its complexity arises from negotiating ways of being together which are not predetermined by a plan or a structure, institutional or otherwise. Polyset operates through dis-organising and collectively reorganising established or habitual ways of gathering and working. Its core intent is twofold: to lower the thresholds for a practice to manifest in its material form and to initiate a set of renegotiations within the relationships between space, practice, community and institution.
Polyset is an open space that welcomes and supports practitioners from outside the institution and does not assign fixed modes of participation like "audience" or "visitor". It is not a group project, but a fluctuating arrangement of "groupings" with different aims and commonalities. Poyset operates on the principle co-habitation as dissensus, which means that all processes and agreements are necessarily partial and cannot exclude other processes in the Polyset space. Every practice is invited to find its own mode of publicness and its own balance between solitary and communal research modalities.
This text is not only an announcement, but also an invitation to come and spend time in the space and to use-design it on your own terms. If you would like join the Polyset, please keep in mind that participation in an evolving and self-structuring community takes time, therefor ideally you would have a couple of days to spend in the Polyset space. Please sign up via the green link at the bottom of the page so we can establish contact for further questions and guide you to the Polyset space on the first day that you decide to come.
Polyset in short:
Polyset is a practice of temporary research co-habitation, where the the researchers design their spaces of practice in one shared space
Polyset is a self-curated place of study that works through an open network of invitations
Polyset lasts three weeks and happens in one space. Participants agree to spend as much time as possible in the Polyset.
The Polyset space will be cleared of all furniture in the beginning of the project.
There is a communal stock of materials provided for the Polyset which are available to anyone who joins it. Materials become connected to and organised in peoples practices. To disconnect or to reorganise please be careful with the other's processes.
We do not define what "research" and "practice" are, but Polyset is a space for research and practice.
Polyset space is an open space. Anyone working in the space can invite anyone, and they in turn can pass on the invitation.
Consensual planning is an exception while relational collaborative negotiations structure the space.
Schedule of proposals is developed on a day to day basis. It is not mandatory.
a.pass Polyset 2023W18-20 will bring together research practices, contributions and participation by:
Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrovic, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier, Gosie Vervlossem, Vijai Maia Patchineelam, Vladimir Miller, Lilia Mestre, Steven Jouwersma, Kristof Van Hoorde, Paoletta Holst, caterina daniela mora jara, Tulio Rossa, Maurice Meewissse, Kristien Van den Brande, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Carina Erdmann, Amari, Lore, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Mlondi Dubazane, Hans Van Wambeke, Heide Hinrichs, Tania Garduño IsradeTo be expanded by the participating researchers
an updated agenda of presentations, sharings, workshops and screenings will be posted here as it develops
THE TIME ITEM, THE ENDLESS WANDERER, THE TOURIST GUIDE AND THE LINE THAT WAS DEAD BEFORE IT HIT THE GROUND MEET AROUND A DINNER TABLE 18 May 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeThe table is set.
What is here is there. What is not here is somewhere, someone is doing something.
Martin Sieweke, Martina Petrović, Aslı Hatipoğlu and Nada Gambier invite you on a guided tour of wandering, exploring time, invisible structures, in-betweens, tastes of intimacy, heritage, abrasion, fermentation and reparation that ripple through space to mark the end of their research trajectory at a.pass.
There will be food, performances, boredom and a spa.
DAY PROGRAM
2nd of June
9h30 welcome
10h-17h working shift 1 (with Nada Gambier)
3rd of June
12h30 welcome
13h-17h working shift 2 (with Nada Gambier)
EVENING PROGRAM (2 & 3 June: same program)
17h30 doors open
18h sign up activities: green room (Nada Gambier)
6 slots for 2 persons every 10 min
time item - publication (Martin Sieweke)
foot massage (Aslı Hatipoğlu)
1 slot for 20 persons
where: sign up on the 4th floor
19h entrée (Martina Petrović)
where: dining table 4th floor
cirrendering - performance / sound installation ( Martin Sieweke & Josephine Stamer)
where: 4th floor
20h dinner (Martina Petrović & Aslı Hatipoğlu)
where: dining table 4th floor
yeast invasion - lecture performance/ installation (Aslı Hatipoğlu)
where: 4th floor
21h dessert (Martina Petrović)
where: dining table 4th floor
sign up activities: green room (Nada Gambier)
6 slots for 2 persons every 10 min
time item publication (Martin Sieweke)
beer spa - walk-in installation (Aslı Hatipoğlu)
max. 8 persons at a time
foot massage (Aslı Hatipoğlu)
2 slots for 20 persons every 20 min
where: sign up on the 4th floor
Aslı Hatipoğlu (TH/TR)
Aslı Hatipoğlu is an interdisciplinary artist and a self-taught chef who uses food as a focal point to investigate interwoven themes of psychology, science, political ecology, ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and mental health. Her work is influenced by her background growing up with a migrant Thai mother in Turkey where her father had a tourism agency. Asli curates participatory dinners that shed light on food history as well as question how climate change, agricultural politics and current technological developments are changing our contact with food. Through lecture performances with a pinch of satire, Asli brings a critical perspective on the definition of words such as ‘locality’ as a means to re-define them in the complexity of systems. As an antidote to nationalism, she proposes fermentation practices to raise questions around cultural history, locality, tourism and the dogma of economic necessity. Asli believes in the power of psycho-somatic relation to food. She creates interactive installations that bring a layer of humor around self, perception and deception.
Through physical engagement with her work, Asli tries to find the boundaries of one’s self with the ‘other’ in a visually appealing setting where questions around disgust are raised. She is interested in how architecture and ecology play a role in her fermentation experiments and how (or if) the space for making/cultivating/brewing influences the way people experience consumption. In addition, her questions around community-building around shared bacterias and yeasts set the tone around social structures, like dining together. Where are the boundaries of the mouth as an organ that lets other living organisms from another person in? Is there a common language that speaks to a consumer in order to convince them into consumption? Taking inspiration from commercial advertising techniques, Asli pushes the audience to re-question what, how and why we eat what we eat. She likes to engage the audience in food production systems to challenge a technological advancement that erases human presence in food production.
Asli’s research presentation consists of lecture performance yeast invasion, combined with a guided installation where her bacterial and yeast collaborators will invite people into a massage parlour that mixes receiving and giving touch, with the brewing of a collective fermented drink. A beer making demonstration takes people along the history of the special Senne valley which hosts the famous “Brettanomyces bruxellensis”, in the past 20 years also known as a wine maker’s worst nightmare. A spa invites people to relax into leftovers of the beer making and think about the outer body experience while sipping the special Belgian lambic brewed by the artist in a conversational set-up.
Bio
Aslı Hatipoğlu (TR/TH, 1990) is a textile culinary artist based in Brussels and Amsterdam. Her work often relates to topics such as ecology and sustainability and the challenges it imposes on our daily lives in complex systems of consumption. She is interested in science and what it can offer as well as the dangers it imposes (such as domination over nature and genetic modifications) that bring ethical questions towards our future as species. Through investigating ancestral knowledge with a community building approach, Asli is also interested in fusing diversity of her knowledge among her experiments in different environments. She often creates interactive installations, video work or uses performative storytelling through conceptual dinners as a way to bring topics of her interest forward.
After working several years as a self-taught chef, Asli deepened her knowledge with fermentation during her residency at the Food Lab Jan van Eyck Academie 2020-2021, along participating in several festivals such as Food Art Film Festival JVE (NL), Foodculture Days Vevey (CH), Oerol Terschelling (NL), Japanese Knotweed Festival at Mediamatic (NL) and Zamus Theaterhaus Cologne (DE) . Her works were exhibited in places such as Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen, Framer Framed in Amsterdam, Fanfare Amsterdam, Perdu Amsterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht.
Special thanks to: Martina Petrović, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Martin Flugelman Olmeda, Elli Vassalou and many others for thinking, listening and advising me through this a.pass trajectory.Martin Sieweke (DE)
Martin Sieweke researches how the use of materials and objects can be prolonged, extended and reformulated in different ways. He proposes a multi-layered relationality, in which the given (the context, the conditions, already existing materials and familiar objects) influences and contributes as a dispositive.
It’s about searching for affections, altering the use context, exchanging components: to not only consume materials away but to stay and remain close to them. It’s about acknowledging the multiple while reaching for the specific. It’s about structuring a process as a relational response. To follow Erin Manning’s thought in her book The Minor Gesture (Thought in the Act), it’s about implementing the context and its very specific configuration, which influences processes not yet condensed into a form:, “(...) it begins with the in-act and embraces the force of the what-else at the heart of all speculative pragmatisms”.In the evening, Martin presents cirrendering (working title), a sound installation in collaboration with Josephine Stamer. It consists of a former vinyl player reduced to its basic operation. Amplified structures, alterations and repetitive textures will dissolve over time, as emerging traces are finding their multidirectional and conversational negotiation in a circular and sonic form.
TIME ITEM is a research publication by Martin Sieweke that gathers text, images and soft proposals around bag making, reuse and repairment.
Bio
Martin Sieweke works as an accessory maker and scenographer/costume designer between Brussels, Berlin and Stockholm. He often works with found objects and materials by detaching them from their intentional use context. He is interested in engaging with materials in a way that differs from a close link between artistic production and consumption, to structure creative processes more as a relational response.
www.martinsieweke.com
performance: Martin Sieweke, Josephine Stamer
Special thanks to: Asli Hatipoglu, Martina Petrović , Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Hannah Krebs, Mary Szydlowska, Tatsuya Inuikawa, May Abnet
Martina Petrović (SER)
Martina Petrović’s research focuses on how we, Western and Eastern European society, deal with complex socially generated emotions such as grief and love. How do we face the inevitable loss of parts of our culture and humanity, due to the crisis and disappearance of species and environments, abandonment and fast replacement of technologies and ways of living. And how do we find joy and moments in these circumstances?
Her sense of misplacement and need to have a strong connection with her culture is amplified with her residing in Belgium for the past 5.5 years. She gravitates towards connecting her artistic interests with traditions and rituals stemming from her Balkan roots. She investigates women’s sacred rituals, handwork, symbols and creativity and their legacy in modern culture and common everyday practices.
Martina proposes looking deep into our roots, finding strength in the past and support in our surroundings as a way to move forward, to create new rituals and new ways of being. They might enable us to transition from fearing the future and present, and move us towards reconnecting and exploring different ways of forming bonds and relating to each other.
In the evening Martina proposes gathering around the table, there will be food for the stomach and for the thoughts, shared energy and hopefully sparks of magic. The dinner table has its own politics, how one sets it influences the conversation around it. It can generate questions, introduce different ways of composing a menu, and explore the tools we use. It can unveil the social structures that make the table possible, sometimes unexpected flavors appear on one’s plate and many other delicious subjects can surface on it.
It will be an evening of celebration, with welcomings, conversation starters, and a format to practice openings and goodbyes. Come as a friend - excited to share our a.pass trajectory. Come as a wanderer - craving to have a taste of each of our practices. Come as a fellow researcher - curious to engage with questioning, rethinking and transforming art research. Come light, with an empty stomach, with an open heart. Come unprepared but ready to engage with different flavors that work together producing unexpected combinations. Come willing to leave some time for digesting processes.
We will gather 3 times around the table. Please join on time, celebration waits for no one, it has its own rhythm. The entrée will be served at 19h. The main course is prepared in collaboration with masterful food explorer Asli Hatipoglu and will be shared at 20h. At 21h we will meet for the final gathering before we disperse into our separate celebrative trajectories.
Bio
Martina is currently the art coordinator of art space Hectolitre, Brussels. She is a part of two active collectives, School of love (Brussels) and Garden of Delights(Gent). Her recent artistic projects are: Where do we go from here? (2023), Brussels, Gent, The Last Straw (2020-2022),Gent, Antwerp, Brussels, Belgrade, Moerdijk sculpture project (2022), Belgium, EcoSuites residency (2022), Greece, Terrestrial Odditties II, Belgrade (2021), BUZZ project on Ostavinska gallery, Belgrade (2019); Terrestrial Oddities, HBKsaar, Saarbrucken, Germany (2019).
https://cargocollective.com/TheLastStraw
Special thanks to: Asli Hatipoglu, Martin Sieweke, Nada Gambier and all the a.passers, Jana Vasiljevic, Adrijana Gvozdenovic, Irena Radmanovic, Petar Sarjanovic, Hijene, Mladen Bundalo, Lucia Palladino, Adva Zakai, Renata Turkes, Gorana Bacevac, Hectolitre community, SOL, GOD, BOSCH, Common Wallet, Emptor/Caveat, Kunsthal and many others for thinking, feeling and being with me through this a.pass trajectory.
Nada Gambier (FIN / FR)
At the heart of Nada Gambier’s current artistic research practice is the concept of gentle trespassing. For Nada this is a tool for relationality. Gentle trespassing rests on the premise that crossing separations between people, things and contexts is both a necessity and a pleasure. It stems from a belief that the walls we erect around ourselves and our work should be un-hygienically permeable, implying that trouble and mess are part of the process. Practicing gentle trespassing requires collaboration, listening, flirting with gray zones and instability, revealing confinement, enclosure and accepting disagreement and structured cacophony as grounds for progress. To frame durational proposals Nada works with the idea of working shifts.
Working shift 1
In this shift gentle trespassing is practiced between ideas, practices and questions. To begin, questions will be questioned and answered by new questions until eventually what remains cannot be attributed any longer to an “original” or ”an other”. Instead, what remains embodies the structured cacophony that coming together in (mis)understandings, assumptions, interpretations and imaginations may result in. From there we move into hands-on work, exchanging materials and engaging in a process of estrangement and reinvention.
This shift is for artists, of any discipline, with a work in progress or research they wish to bring into the room. You must be willing to hand your work over, momentarily, to another person. It does not matter how far into a process you are. What matters is your curiosity to see another person trespassing into your territory. At the end of this process we will do a round of performative presentations, sharing the outcome of the session.
The shift ends with an informal drink and some light snacks.
Please register by sending a mail to nadakatinka@gmail.com by the 26th of May latest! If you have a spot in the shift we will confirm it by email together with more details of what to bring and how to prepare.
Working shift 2
In this shift, we explore the potential of fiction in relation to gentle trespassing. Through a conversational game in which we engage as “another” version of ourselves we practice strategies of interpretation, exaggeration and collage. The aim here is to experience the simultaneous negotiation between who we are (or think we are) and who ‘we’ might be with a little interference from others.
The shift ends with an informal drink and some light snacks.
Please register by sending a mail to nadakatinka@gmail.com by the 26th of May latest!
Evening shift
In a confined space, anonymous characters live their lives in a loop. Stuck in an endless repetition of mundane events and unable to escape they busy themselves with work-like tasks and sleep, waiting for time to pass. In this work, Nada explores the confinement of spaces, identities, institutions and ideas. Surveillance camera feeds, anonymity and invisibility suits (chroma key green suits used in film when wanting to disappear the body behind an action) come together in this installation in three spaces. On the 4th floor of a.pass you can watch an ongoing video feed.
On the 3rd floor you are invited into a waiting room area followed by the green room (sign up on site).
Bio
Nada Gambier roams around in what she calls a crash-disciplinary world where performance, video, writing, curatorial approaches and languages and social concerns merge and collide. Her work often flirts with the borders between theatricality and abstraction and she is drawn to things that she doesn’t understand or cannot grasp. The non-spectacular and the absurd belong to her most known trademarks as an artist. Her work is experimental in nature and very often performative, with some form of live element in it. Since 2014 Nada has been focusing on long-term projects in which the separation between research, creation process and public event can be confused and/or abandoned. In 2020, she began monthly collective research sessions in Brussels, further establishing herself as an advocate for experimentation and research within the (performing) arts. Nada also regularly collaborates on other artists’ projects as a performer and artistic advisor. She has worked a.o. with Kate MacIntosh (NZ/DE/BE), Edit Kaldor (HU/NL), Forced Entertainment (UK), Simone Aughterlony (NZ/DE/CH), Jorge Léon (ES/BE), Maria Jerez (ES), Diederik Peeters (BE), Charlotte Vanden Eynde (BE) and Phil Hayes (UK/CH).
The evening shift is performed by Nada Gambier, Mark Etchells and Vic Grevendonck and includes writing by Nada and music by Klaus Wunderlich. The research is supported by a.pass, Nada & Co., WpZimmer, Workspacebrussels, Buda Arts Centre and the Flemish Ministry of Culture (research project subsidies).
Special thanks to: Martina Petrović, Martin Sieweke, Aslı Hatipoğlu and all the a.passers, Jen Rosenblit and many others for their input in my reflections and experimentations during the past year.
A big thank you to everyone who supported us during our a.pass time:
A.pass team: Lilia Mestre, Kristien Van den Brande, Kristof Van Hoorde, Hans Van Wambeke, Steven Jouwersma, Vladimir Miller
Block mentors: Jaime Llopis, Anna Rispoli, Samah Hijawi, Goda Palekaite, Sina Seifee, Pia Louwerens, Simone Basani, Vijai Maia Patchineelam.
Fellow researchers: Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Alyssa Gersony, Andrea Brandão, Amy Pickles, Gary Farely, Chloe Janssens, Inga Gerner Nielsen, Vera Sofia Mota, Jimena Pérez Salerno, Sarah Pletcher, Anna Lugmeier, Aleksandra Borys, Carina Erdmann, Amari, Lore, Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Mlondi Dubazane and Merle Vorwald.
LONG-ING 13 June 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeThe purpose of this workshop is to explore together (through talk, writing, scoring and movement) some key compositional questions. The particular focus is on length, experienced as sequence and duration, and how to achieve it. Long-ing: how to make things that carry on? (If only for a short while?) Once initiated, how and when to make them stop? Our work will involve looking closely at transitions: the links or breaks between the smaller parts of a composition, as well as beginnings and endings, rises and falls in energy and interest. It will draw on the processes operational in our most immediate surrounds (the different durations of the bodies, objects and forces composing our work-space) and use these as both constraints and materials. It will also involve bringing in certain powerful shapes and positions -- social as well as aesthetic shapes such as the circle, the horseshoe or the line –, thinking about the work they do, then testing how to move from the one to other (from the clearing to the path, the scene to the summary). ‘I wish it were longer,’ it is written somewhere in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, ‘for I like it truly.’ In the end, the project of long-ing might come down to this: to matters of feeling, liking or not liking, tensions producing curiosities or failing to, and we will consider these vital questions, too.
Working times: 11am- 1pm & 2-4pm
Plus: July 6, 6pm: book launch 'the long form' at rile*
a.pass is located on the 4th floor inside the Brussels Event Brewery building. The studio is wheelchair accessible via elevator.
End Communications 07 September 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeIn-between researcher and research, one finds:
overlap, interests, themes, fiction, text, reading, body, duet, partner, “doctoring”, object, performance, bodies, relationship, questions, researchers, looking, things, going, us, traces, deposits, authors, architectures, dealing, bed, laying, bleeding, seeping, noticing, noting, narrating, unveiling, something, happening, discovery, methodologies, conditions, agent, asking, producing, responses, lethargy, collapse, training, experience, moment, future, here, now, concept, life, rhythm, goals, worth, cheese, workshop, ancestry, trajectories, senses, intimacy, strength, power, assertion, insistence, compassion, idea, artistic practice, descaling, focus, layers, dislocating, destabilizing, conditions, conditioning, negotiating, ways, humanization, humans, violent category, systems, disability, concrete, reference, ableism, contemporary, dance, thinking, practices, phenomena, embodiment, dancer, vessel, object, bodies, Marley, memory, erasure, obliteration, intangible, incomprehensible, determined, social, aesthetic, queer, sexualized, opening, gendered, human body, crossing, cultures, genders, generations, narrative, storytelling, voice, transmission, conditions, vs, context, decontextualizing, evaluation, affects, pieces, autofiction, mundane, erotically, charged, space, trip, supermarket, cup, coffee, Monday, morning, laying, down, convergence, blind/low vision, rehabilitation, ‘co-habilitation’, patient-therapist, flooring, prosthetic, patient, therapist, audiences, invitations, systems, dance, disability, together, final, transmission, trespassing, somatic, work, curation, drifting, vicinity, quantum physics, OOO, socio-ecological, hopelessness, seemingly, desperate, galactic points, gayness, history, AIDS, transgenerational, speculative fiction, spoken word, theoretical, dramaturgical, methodological, suggestions, Black Holes, celestial, entities, writer, producer, sexuality, vehicle, political ideology, drafts, prosaic, nature, political, administration, structure, Brazil, urban planning, Netherlands, 2019, masters, Moving Images, Belgium, 2022, interdisciplinary, Brussels, Rīga, New York City, orientation, mobility specialist, ‘the clinic’, ‘the studio’, western, lineages, contact improvisation, medical, models, disability, therapeutics, interabled, collaborations, experimental prosthetics, development, form, theatrical performances, electronic, sound, composition, 1:1, instruction, multimedia, installation, MFA, choreography, intermedia, 2021, 2022, adjunct, faculty, department, blindness, visual impairment, living, working, Zagreb, shaping, sensory materials, intimate, social processes, digital, palpable objects, animated, choreographed, sung, non-orientable, forms, different media, processes, translation, queer science fiction, speculative technology, mutual transformation, MA, animated, film, new media, rest, caves, shape, language, performativity, self, scores, ...
If one makes a list of things, a list of all the things, if one were to try an embracive list of things that arise between being and doing, let’s say a dog and barking, and if one were to apply this question to artistic research, and aim at listing all the things that emerge between researcher and research, if one were to aim for the bottom of this list, what would emerge would be immeasurable distance, a very long line of things. At the end of the exercise, the question of what it intended, if not length, if not depth, if not stretch, perhaps could be: what is at stake between researcher and research?
For the four artist-researchers Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov, it is the conflation of research and researcher via the subject. Letting go of notions of distance in relation to their research subject, they opt for a generative entanglement between the subject of research, researching and the researcher.
Understood as a sharing practice, artistic research involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to care about other people and to suspend oneself, over and over, every day, and at times in unflattering ways. For about a year this day-in-day-out practice positioned Marian, Andrea, Alyssa, Marko, as well as their other peers, towards each other as collaborators, witnesses, peers, co-conspirators, role-players, workshop facilitators and guinea pigs. Now, at the end of a joint trajectory, it involves making public, i.e. curating an event together, setting overlaps into printed matter, and extending their research intentions and questions to others.
End Communications, invites the audience to attune to the specific intensities produced by these research entanglements as they are shared and made public.
Marian Rosa van Bodegraven
The Final Exam: this research considers how an artistic practice affects and is affected by the body of the researcher through pieces of autofiction that contemplate the mundane as an erotically charged space: a trip to the supermarket, a cup of coffee, a Monday morning spent laying down. The research will be presented through a reading of three texts: Clementine, Monday Blues (written by H.de S. and researched in the context of the Am I Evil? Workshop, by Alice Ciresola and Simone Basani), and the eponymous The Final Exam.
Alyssa Gersony
co-habilitation: at the convergence of choreography and blind/low vision rehabilitation, this research proposes ‘co-habilitation’ as a way to reconfigure the patient-therapist relationship. Dance flooring (Marley) is taken as a duet partner, as a prosthetic, as a patient and a therapist, while audiences are invited into a deconstructed studio-clinic where bodies directly implicated in the systems of dance and disability perform together.
Marko Gutić Mižimakov
Less Than the Sum of Its Parts — Final Transmission is drifting in the vicinity of quantum physics, OOO, socio-ecological hopelessness and the seemingly desperate galactic points of gayness, the history of AIDS and its transgenerational affects. Trespassing performance, somatic work and curation, comes a spoken word duet speculating on the theoretical, dramaturgical, and methodological suggestions emerging from the idea of Black Holes as celestial bodies in proximity to touch and memory.
Andrea Brandão
first continue, then start (primeiro continuar, depois começar): Andrea’s research* lies within spaces of drifting, where rest, sleep, and the in-between start to carve out an embodied language that shapes the score of a performativity of the self. Through dislocating these transitory spaces into active, participatory experiences, Andrea aims to bring about the seemingly still nature of a state of consciousness that is informed by a rhythm that productively moves us through dark and liquid subterranean strata.
** At this moment, Andrea’s research will only be presented at a private scale, with a public moment at a later stage.End Communications is co-curated by Marian Rosa van Bodegraven, Andrea Brandão, Alyssa Gersony, and Marko Gutić Mižimakov, together with artist-researcher Vijai Maia Patchineelam.
Programme
7pm, 3rd Floor The Final Exam, a reading by Marian Rosa van Bodegraven
-break- food & drinks available*, 4th Floor
8:15pm, 4th Floor co-habilitation, a performance by Alyssa Gersony
-break- drinks available, 4th Floor
9:15pm, 4th Floor Less Than the Sum Of Its Parts — Final Transmission
a performance by Marko Gutić Mižimakov in collaboration with Petar SarjanovićFriday till 11:00 pm post-performance mingle, food & drinks available*
Saturday till 1:00 am post-performance party, drinks available
*On both days, a.pass alumni and culinary artist Aslı Hatipoğlu will prepare vegetarian bibimbap and sweet bites for sale over the course of the evening (gluten free, vegan option available).
Marian Rosa van Bodegraven is a Brazilian-Dutch researcher, writer and producer. Marian’s body of research moves around sexuality as a vehicle for political ideology. Through writing and readings, she drafts on the prosaic nature of sexuality, and the seemingly en passant layers of a political administration of desire that structure it. Born and raised in Brazil, where she studied Architecture and Urban Planning at Escola da Cidade, she moved to the Netherlands in 2019, where she did her MA in Moving Images at the Sandberg Institute.
Alyssa Gersony is a Jewish-American interdisciplinary artist currently working in Brussels, Rīga and New York City. Trained as a contemporary dancer and orientation and mobility specialist, Alyssa regularly traverses ‘the clinic’ and ‘the studio.’ Across these spaces, Alyssa practices within western lineages of contact improvisation, medical models of disability therapeutics, interabled performance collaborations, and experimental prosthetics development. Her work takes the form of theatrical performances, electronic sound composition, artistic development workshops, 1:1 individual instruction, and multimedia installation. Alyssa holds an MFA in choreography and intermedia performance, is a 2021-2022 Fulbright awardee in dance research, and is currently an adjunct faculty in the City University of New York, Hunter College department of blindness and visual impairment.
Marko Gutić Mižimakov is a visual, performance and text based artist and researcher living/working between Brussels and Zagreb. He is interested in shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. In his work bodies as well as digital and palpable objects, are animated, choreographed and sung into non-orientable forms via different media and processes of translation. Often borrowing from queer science fiction he sees his work as a speculative technology of mutual transformation. He has an MA in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Paris College of Art in the department of Transdisciplinary New Media.
Andrea Brandão is a visual and undisciplinary artist living and working between Brussels and Lisbon. Working in the expanded fields of visual arts, performance, cinema, and more, Andrea’s research explores notions of sleep, rest, and drifting in relation to participatory experiences facilitated by scores and assisted at times by audio-visual elements. She is interested in interweaving writing, camera-ing, meditating, and dreaming. She was born in Portugal and started traveling at a very young age. She holds a B.A. in Industrial Design from University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Architecture (2000) and has completed the Advanced Course in Visual Arts of Ar.Co - Centro de Arte e Comunicaçāo Visual and attended Studies of body and movement at c.e.m. - Centro em movimento, in Lisbon.Collaborators:
Gabi Vanek (co-habilitation, lighting design and audio engineer) is a musician and lighting technician based in Iowa City, USA. As a technician she has worked on projects ranging from HBO to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, to touring artists including Arooj Aftab, Son Lux, and Jenny Lewis.
Petar Sarjanović (Final Transmission, performer collaborator) is a dramaturg from Zagreb, now living in Brussels, also active as writer, performer and theater maker. In 2020 Petar premiered ‘Everything I don’t know, I’ve stolen’, a solo work that deals with the processes of mis- and dis-identification and the folklorization of western canon.
Co-curator:
Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on the dialogue between the artist and the art institution. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists — one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. Vijai is a former associate researcher at the Research Center, and has since come back on different occasions as a mentor for the Post-Graduate Program at a.pass.
Research Publications + Annex Research Center Cycle IV
17 September 2023
posted by: Vladimir MillerSaturday, September 23rd 2023
18-22h
a.pass, Brussels
The a.pass Research Center* cordially invites you to an evening of research publications by Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa that will conclude the year they spent together as Associate Researchers of Cycle IV.
During the timespan of Cycle IV the artists and researchers individually and collaboratively worked on hospitality as a curatorial practice, on conflicted embodiment of dance practices, on archives of colonial architecture, on the fiction of nature and on a historic opera as a foundational myth for the State of Brazil. In a series of collective practice meetings a shared discourse began to emerge that connected these works through an engagement with the responsibilities of redesign and reenactment, the tension of fiction and history in speculative practices and the embodiment of non-solutions. These intertwined processes and questions radiated into the practices of Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa as they hosted each other in their research and developed the idea of a research center as a prolonged group conversation with materials, practices, ideas and affects.
On Saturday, September 23rd, the researchers will present their individual publications and research trajectories as well as the Annex – a shared collection of essays and interviews. For their Publications the researchers aim to provide an account of their process and to develop public formats of research-doing and research-sharing to accompany the more established format of an essay. In a scenography that will be a result of a communal atelier process the Publications of Cycle IV will engage the audience in a dialogue with texts, objects, conversations, installations and performances that can be reflected back into the research process. As Cycle IV concludes, the research itself is far from finished: Publications and Annex contextualize its collaborative, intense phase and give some insight into where it came from and where it is heading next.
The evening will start at 18h with a reading of the Annex and proceed to the individual presentations by the Associate Researchers. Publications will conclude with a cooking hangout hosted by Paoletta Holst and later on, a party.
Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site 'de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience.
The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.
a.pass Research Center
Cycle IV
Research Publications + Annex
Saturday, September 23rd 2023
18-22h
a.pass, Brussels
PUBLICATIONS
MAURICE MEEWISSE
Curating Waterwerken
Essay
Hosting the Research Center
Scenography
To prepare his contribution for the final evening with RC Cycle IV, Maurice Meewisse will move into the a.pass space where everything is about to happen. He did this before: he lived for two weeks in the collective space of a.pass Polyset in May ‘23 to explore how a habitation practice transforms his relationship to a workspace. For the final evening with RC Cycle IV, his question will be about habitation and hosting.
Meewisse has taken an interest in how his collaborators' imaginations, thoughts, writing and other practices influence and contribute to his own and how his practice can in turn host imaginations, thoughts, handwriting and other practices. He is exploring the limits of this position to the point where the question arises if he is still the practitioner, is it a practice at all, can hosting be part of his artistic practice? Maurice Meewisse takes his last moments with the researchers from the RC Cycle IV to explore that a bit further. At the same time he will try to be useful and help to prepare the scenography for the evening. Something will happen, just by being there the whole time. At the moment of writing this text it is just a bit too early to say what.
CATERINA DANIELA MORA JARA
Conflicted Embodiment. Notes from Dancing on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Essay
The Second Promise of Another Bastard-cheap Lecture-performance (and the last one in a.pass)
Lecture-Performance
“I am a migrant who has the possibility to be a legal migrant. My body produces conflicted embodiment as a device to expose the violent confrontation determined by territory, patriarchal art systems, colonial silenced trauma, and resistant feminist hope. Combining different dance traditions, I seek the contamination generated by mashing up ways of representing academic dance and “world dance”...”
caterina daniela mora jara will present her essay “Conflicted Embodiment. Notes from Dancing on Both Sides of the Atlantic” in conversation with Fabián Barba. The writing of this text departs from the experiences of dancing within her processes of migration that put different "folkloric", "popular" and "academic" dance traditions from the souths and the norths into friction with each other. caterina daniela mora jara explores the potential of translation of dances into each other and what a mother tongue could be in dancing and performing. Embracing the complexity of the untranslatable, she unfolds the idea of a conflicted embodiment as a research device to address the question of how does a body navigate migration, colonialism and dancing?
PAOLETTA HOLST
Re-designing the Colonial House
Installation, Projection and Open Kitchen
Paoletta Holst researches colonial architectures and domestic cultures of the former Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia). In her installation “Re-designing the Colonial House” she uses the klamboe, or mosquito net, as a metaphor to visualize the cultural and spatial forms of separation that the colonizers created in order to mitigate their fears and vulnerabilities of being in a foreign environment. As both content and material form, as klamboe and house, the scenography created for this presentation functions as an intermediate space and support structure to talk about how the colonial house was imagined and how the process of its re-design can articulate today's questions and struggles.
TÚLIO ROSA
H(a)unting Stories
Print
In the last year, Tùlio Rosa's research has been centered around the opera Il Guarany, composed by Carlos Gomes in the 19th century, and its influence in the Brazilian representations of its history, peoples and landscape. Set in the beginning of the 16th century and depicting a love story between an indigenous man and the daughter of a Portuguese hidalgo, Il Guarany is considered to be an attempt to fabricate a foundational myth of the Brazilian nation. Within its biased narrative, Il Guarany also describes the conflict between the indigenous groups of the Aimorés and the Guaranis, and the attempts of Spanish adventurers to take hold of their lands in order to exploit their natural resources. These intertwined narratives allow for a broader reflection on fundamental aspects of the formation of Brazil. For his presentation Túlio Rosa will share some of the materials of his research in which factual history and fiction are woven together into new readings of Brazilian history that challenge and reveal their embedded colonial imaginaries.
A second part of Tulio Rosa’s presentation will happen at Szenne Lab on the 3rd and 4th of October during two evening sessions curated in collaboration with Paoletta Holst, in which he will present “Hunting Song” – a publication that crosses historical accounts of violence with the original music scores of the opera Il Guarany.
GOSIE VERVLOESSEM
Pleasure Garden Reading Group
Reader and Bookmarks
Over the past year, Gosie Vervloessem’s research was situated in the Middelheim Museum, a sculpture park in Antwerpen that invited her into a research residency within the ‘Reading the Landscape’- project. During this year of research, under the title ‘The Pleasure Garden’ Gosie Vervloessem explored the museum as a platform for encounters between different agents inhabiting the park, such as birds, animals, plants, visitors, the institute of the Middelheim Museum and its sculptures and infrastructure.
The project took on different forms and spread its tentacles deep into the park. One of these tentacles were reading sessions. Gosie Vervloessem dived deep into thinking about the relation between words and the worlds they convey. She explored, very literally, the question of what it means to read a landscape with focus on the materiality and agency of words and language. The texts and books that Gosie Vervloessem compiled for the reading group were “reading the landscape” outside of binary thinking and classification. These reflections found a final outcome in the creation of bookmarks, that she presents alongside a facsimile edition of the reader. The bookmarks invite the audience to buy the corresponding book and visit the Middelheim Museum as a setting for a reading of the selected texts.
Gosie Vervloessem, caterina daniela mora jara, Maurice Meewisse, Paoletta Holst and Tulio Rosa; Vladimir Miller (ed.)
The Annex
Publication
The Annex to the research Publications of a.pass Research Cycle IV is a space where the researchers offer some context to their presentations and explore shared themes within their research processes in the form of essays, text collaborations and group interviews.
*About the Research Center
The a.pass Research Center is a collaborative space of practice, materialization, tryout, critique and feedback of artistic research. Although it is a program in an educational institution, it does not start from a curriculum or a curatorial agenda, but operates as a series of research practice meetings. At the Research Center, the artist researchers are invited to develop the individual threads of their research practice into a shared space of study while "mutually becoming each others' guest" (Beatrice von Bismark). The Research Center is a space where hosting others in one's research is a tool of research development.
SPACES AS CONTRACTS Block III/2014
19 September 2023
posted by: Vladimir MillerSPACES AS CONTRACTS
curated by Vladimir Miller (Associate Program Curator) and Nicolas Galeazzi (Program Coordinator)
25 / 09 - 05 / 11 / 2014
POLITICS OF CHANGEABILITY
weekly meetings by Vladimir Miller, Nicolas Galeazzi and Fotini Lazaridou
For this project we ask the researchers participants to engage individually for the duration of this block with a private or institutional space outside of a.pass. The task is: to negotiate a permanent, irreversible change in the architecture of that space and to document the negotiation process. Changing our spatial circumstances, for adapting them to our needs, is so foreign to us in daily life, that we associate those changes with violence and social upheaval, with revolutions and public resistance. And maybe this holds true and points us to how powerful architecture actually is in upholding existing social order. Architecture and the political connect and hinge on access to change. Hegemonies manifest themselves and are upheld by architectural structures. So every attempt to change invariably become a political attempt. We are framing the attempt of change as a research methodology.
Taking the steps to negotiate a permanent change in an architectural setup reveals the internal structures of power distribution and decision making for any given space. If you want to propose a change, who do you contact? who will you be referred to? which groups need to come together under which premises and structures of decision making to allow for that change? To follow up those challenges to changes is to slowly reveal a diagram of power, an architecture within architecture. In fact those two architectures are inseparable from each other and we should invent ways of speaking of them as a whole. Would we have privacy if we never had walls, what kind of togetherness would we have if availability of space was not limited? Our way of living and our way of building cannot be separated from each other.
08 - 12 / 09 / 2014
SPACE AND CONTRACT
a.pass B-workshop by Vladimir Miller
In this workshop we will look at the non physical borders of architecture: the contracts and agreements that create and maintain our built environment. If you take a quick look around you and ask yourself how the things that surround you came to be the way they are, you will notice that all of them are man-made or man-transformed. Those processes of transformation are all initiated and facilitated through negotiations and agreements. The first step to connect contracts and architecture is therefore to realize that architecture is a product of an agreement. For our purposes we can loosely define a contract as a performative agreement. During the workshop we will discuss further how architecture also embodies and ultimately maintains social agreements of that kind This workshop proposes to look at the relationship between the architectural space and the contract through a series of collective building actions. We will use a simple material to build improvised structures together in order to understand how are we negotiating collaboration, aim and space. Which rules and ideological presupposition are at work? Can we come up with contracts, scores and sets of rules which would produce other architectures? What is the relationship between our social contract and the architecture we are able to produce?
15 - 19 / 09 / 2014
‘IF YOU LIKE IT, THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT A ROOF ON IT’ (and put some chairs under)
workshop-project by Jozef Wouters & Vladimir Miller
Roofs, in the arts, are often provided. In climates like Belgium, having a roof to work under is not a bad way to start. The roof protects the work (against more things than rain). But the roof also tends to isolate it. From time to time, artists grow tired of the roof and the walls and, hoping it doesn’t rain, decide to work on a square. The work of a scenographer is often more about walls than about roofs (light designers don’t like scenographers who propose roofs). Walls are flexible. Walls can be discussed. Comparing this, it turns out to be way harder to negotiate about a roof and to design a roofed space that is a square as well. This proposal is modifying the original “lets build a house together” idea, which was already presented at a.pass. The idea is, rather than overwhelming ourselves with the house building, to have a closer look (through working) at what we identify as two key elements of structuring community and social space by the means of architecture: roofs and chairs. In a much too simple way we can say that roofs bring a community together, while chairs can be used to structure its politics of attention and visibility. By avoiding walls we also subvert a key instrument to privatization of space. The space under the roof is accessible and public by design, we don't have to distribute power/keys.
29 / 09 - 03 / 10 / 2014
OCCUPYING DEMOCRACY
workshop by Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans
Luigi Coppola and Christophe Meierhans are working in different contexts and with different means about common decision taking procedures - or let’s say, alternative democracies. While Christophe proposes, in a lecture performance series, a new democratic system based on disqualifying people in charge, rather than electing them, Luigi is developing social choreographies as democratic models and is currently involved in a communal project of reorganizing the political, agricultural and economic system of a whole village in south Italy. Together they propose a research workshop where most components of its activities will have to be decided commonly with the workshop participants. Just the very basic conditions are pre-determined: the workshop occupies a public space with only one person at the time - 24h a day. The rest of the group develops, discusses and observes the occupation from a distance and takes the relevant decisions.
13 / 10 - 17 / 10 / 2014 ‘
FORMS OF LIFE - A TRAVELING PYJAMA PARTY
workshop by Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga
During a period of 6 days, each participants are invited to host the rest of the group in their apartment for a day. We will cook together, discuss a series of texts, take turns using the shower and read bedtime stories from a book picked up from the shelf. We may find out about each other’s morning habits, favorite smoothie combination, different ways of folding the sheets. For six days and five nights, this workshop will attempt to explore different ways of living and living together, focusing on the domestic sphere, our daily habits and their spatial manifestation, as well as on the ways these forms of life may or may not slip out of the window and down to the street. During each short residency we will collectively try to come up with a proposal for a small modification of or intervention in the space we are currently in, and negotiate its terms with our host. We may or may not carry out the proposal.
24 - 25 / 10 / 2014
POST-FOUNDATIONAL ARCHITECTURES
scenography workgroup meeting by Vladimir Miller
In 2012 a.pass merged the two sections a.s (advanced scenography) and a.pt (advanced performance training) to one singular program. This move was a consequence of understanding performance and scenography more and more as inseparable parts of one and the same discourse. But the merge of discourses finally reinforced the need for a new specification of the term “scenography”. What does it really mean beyond the classical stage practice? What else than a stage - and under which conditions - can be declared as a ‘scene’ and who or what is designing it? What distinguishes a ‘performative space’ from a ‘sceno-graphed’ space? For discussing these questions Vladimir Miller gathered in the fall 2013 some space practitioners to a first ‘Scenography Workgroup Meeting’. In October 2014 he calls for a second one. It will be a public work meeting between and with artists, architects, and scenographers who engage in the production of temporary and performative architectures. They will critically explore the definition of scenography simply as ‘post-foundational architectures’.
03 - 07 / 11 / 2014
PHARMAKON
workshop by Elke van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre
This workshop explores the concept of pharmakon developed by the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler in his book ‘On pharmacology - how to live your life’. Stiegler uses the term pharmakon, which simultaneously stands for ‘poison’ and medicine’ as a symptom of an ever-spreading capitalism: an economy that does not only affect our labour, but does affect also our psychic ability and reduces our desires to simple drives. As both a medicine and a cure, Stiegler emphasizes the role of technology in our society as an ultimate pharmakon. In his ‘pharmacology’, its doubleness is investigated as a possible ‘cure’: a strategy to deal with the recovery of our desires, to go against the pressure of identification trends, brands and an ever-increasing individualization. Pharmakon stands for the technical know-how we develop the strategies we use to build a different kind of future and to create another concept of our togetherness. But this is not without risk: pharmaka are both a source of misery and abuse of power, but also a stimuli of what makes life worthwhile. The workshop is part of a ‘Thematics’ research project organized by Les Bains. Four artists are invited to explore in a three month residency set-ups of 'trans-individuation’: how do we form temporary moments of sharing, how can we come together in diversity, how can we build together an organization of work and knowledge sharing that is open-ended for producing and opening up to an outside world. A constant process of infection and transformation, through testing and adjusting the dosage of the pharmakon.
27-29 / 11 / 2014
PHARMAKON
conference by a.pass Research Center, Les Bains and Kaaitheater.
The Ancient Greek word ‘pharmakon’ means ‘poison’, ‘medicine’ and ‘scapegoat’. According to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, our society urgently needs a ‘pharmacology’ to turn the tide of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment. He says that we must urgently question our culture. With which witchcraft can we turn the poison into medicine? Pharmakon: whitch culture? is a three-day ‘performative conference’ that examines artistic and theoretical strategies to counteract this pollution of our society’s culture. This congress is part of Thematics, a residency programme for artists and theorists run by Bains Connective workplace. This started in mid-October and is still on until 15 December, and is in its turn part of the transnational Pharmakon project organised by the Institut Nomade.
Program of the conference
Day 1: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-1-on-the-notion-of-pharmakon-in-the-thinking-of-bernard-stiegler Day 2: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-2-rethinking-economies
Day 3: https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/day-3-body-technologies
BLOCK III/2014
Researchers Participants in the Postgraduate Program: Damla Ekin Tokel, Danny Neyman, Gosie Vervloessem, Hans Van Wambeke, Hektor Mamet, Jeremiah Runnels, Kleoni Manousakis, Silvia Ramos Pereira, Stef Meul, Vanja Smiljanic, Verónica Cruz, Yaari Shalem
Research End Presentations: Anna Sörenson, Camila Aschner Restrepo, Victoria Myronyuk
Research Centre Researchers: Cecilia Molano Mala Kline Veridiana Zurita
Partners: Les Bains Kaaitheater
Contributors for workshops: Christophe Meierhans, Elke van Campenhout, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Jozef Wouters, Lilia Mestre, Luigi Coppola, Nicolas Galeazzi, Vladimir Miller,
Coordinators a.pass: Elke van Campenhout, Nicolas Galeazzi
Mentors Femke Snelting, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Geert Opsomer, Lilia Mestre
- case of: Vladimir Miller
Collective Channeling Exploration through research, play and art
21 September 2023
posted by: Kristien Van den BrandeSeptember 29-30
Doors open at 5.30. Delaunoystraat 58.** There will be food and drinks.
6pm-12pm: welcome at a.pass for music, film, conversation, spoken word and a dream dungeon.
Closing party on the 30th!mlondiwethu, Carina, Amari and Lore conspire a presentation to conclude the end of a year spent together at a program for advanced performance and scenography studies. They decide to play a game and while they take a walk through the building that hosted them, they slip into character, speaking in the tongue of their research. Through this game they look at the implicit support structures and restrictions in place. They address and sound the different languages and methods they need to adapt to move on an uneven playing field, comparing their different needs, skills, and energy levels, discussing how they can share time and space, the rules they would like themselves and others to play by. This also becomes a metaphor for the spoken and unspoken rules of institutions, of group-making, of ongoing or not yet inscribed forms of collectivities.
Welcome. We'll begin with a character introduction. Who are you? Why are you here? What is your quest? Starting to my right.
mlondiwethu: Hi, my name is mauve. I am a sound. I exist as a sound. I sound as a sound. As you hear me now you hear me in my essence, sound. I communicate with sound. Only sound, just sound. Sound, sound, sound, sound. But if you look into my eyes, if you look into my sound, I'm probably telling you a truth about myself. I came here to be heard. I hope you listening. I came here to be heard. I came here for love to be loved. I came here for me. I want to burn everything to the ground, but I need everything to stay up. My motto is to sound what I believe in or what other great masters believed in. I sound. I pop off. I smile frown. I'm shy loud, big small, pretentious, lover. Big eyes no see. I'm angry-soft. I am flow. I am muddy. The name is mauve.
Carina: I am Olga Terre. It's kind of an old name. It's an anagram of Alter Ego, which is a bit lame, but somehow it got stuck, got stuck in my own webs. I often appear as a game designer, but actually I'm a spider, spinning webs to catch you, but catch you feeling carried. The threads are thin and fragile. They're spun from your own thoughts. If you get tied up, your quest is to question the rules of the game. See that your struggles are not your own. Recognize the patterns and that you will not solve them alone. My tone is playful. Sometimes a bit grave. Language is a game to me and I make games as a language to speak to these elephants that are marching through the rooms. Catch them on the web. My refrain is a slogan because I want to sell you your own body as technology, for free.
Amari: My name is Anti Hero. I blurred the line between good and bad. I created bridges between what should and what shouldn't. Now, my question is, how to learn from the shadows? How does light exist in darkness? Where is dark? Where is light? I know lawful skills and unlawful tools, I know plays and games for thoughts, I have ways to care or don't care. My attitude is true to myself. My tone is love. A love that doesn't bend. A love that is bold. I face the fears that make your body shake. That make your demons awake. Those that make your mom and dad regret they make you live in such a place. With deepest fear comes deepest desire. I'm full of paradoxes. Ghosts and prayers support me. I'm limitless.
Lore: I'm superb SP(UB). I am spongy and Kuti (cutty). Sponging to others, sponging in the supposed outside. Cut T often through speech, gaze, movement, silence, anxiety, distraction and agitation. I cut the crap by maybe creating some more crap. I move the crap. I can be bratty as refrains, mucho mantra. Well, scrubbing scrubbing with two Bs I superb use pub. She he they spoke, we spoke spaces the place as with every process, I kind of follow and cut, Follow. Follow. Follow Follow matrix. I encasement and clothes meant I like to perceive beyond certain types of presence. I touch myself and the room a lot. You will be iceberg only a few things about us. I cross subjects and spaces. I know no grammar.
Full script/game to be listened : https://collectivechanneling.cargo.site/
On September 29 and 30, mlondiwethu, Carina, Amari and Lore open the a.pass doors one last time, channeling voices, rhythms, and refrains – collapsing worlds that have been into worlds that might come.
Collective Channeling is co-curated with Simone Basani.
** Accessibility: a.pass is currently situated at the former industrial site ‘de Bottelarij’ in Molenbeek (Brussels). Activities take place mostly in two different spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors of the building. Due to ongoing repair works in the building the elevators are currently not accessible unless we make a special request. If accessibility presents a concern, please contact us beforehand so we can organize access to the different floors to the best of our abilities. Apologies for this inconvenience. The events in September will likely contain spoken text and performance-based activities. If there are accessibility requests or questions please contact production@apass.be.
A global reading of the Gaza Monologues International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
10 November 2023
posted by: Kristof Van HoordeThe 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
With us an end
by caterina daniela mora jara
(excerpt from The Annex, Research Center Cycle IV)“It is of the nature of the rule to desire the death of exception.” Jean-Luc Godard
From May 20 to July 26, 2023
Rotterdam, PAF, Brussels and StockholmDear you:
These words are written with the knowledge the a.pass program will no longer exist. The end for the research program that a.pass was running for 15 years has come, and in your hands, you hold part of this end. It is the last annex of the Research Center, even though The Annex is not the end. It may seem dramatic, but do not forget that I grew up watching telenovelas in Fiske Menuco and Villarica, in the Argentinian and Chilean Patagonia, where I come from.
This letter is a sort of farewell to the Research Center Cycle IV and to a.pass, to which I’m part of, to where I belong. Therefore, the need for a farewell. But what is a farewell? Is it a space where we say, “Oh, goodbye, you have been so critical and helpful; we will miss you”? No, that’s silly on my part. I prefer to say: “With us an end.” A farewell in this case means that some people will lose their jobs, some books will no longer have a shelf, the rooms and offices that a.pass occupied will be empty. It’s crumbling around me right now, it is collapsing around us right now. Yet, we have to give an end to the format. It is not only sad, it is very exhausting and stressful. It is not only a pity, it is hard, it is a fuck you gesture with my finger on this paper, it is a wound because we are losing a space of discussion, a place that stores things of artists, personal stuff and professional stuff, an institution where credits are not determined by how much you read and how much you have demonstrated what you have learned. We lose an educational context in which there is no validation through grades, nor pass/fail course approval.
I have worked in educational institutions for the last 14 years, and I am very aware of how difficult it is to change the curricula and challenge the environmental conditions for promoting knowledge. Therefore, I was deeply amazed by the fact that in the context of a.pass (the postgraduate and the Research Center) the curricula is proposed by the participants and/or being transformed every four months.
Do I have the impression of collapsing with a.pass because I did not expect things to end in Europe? Was a modern imaginary of linear time, progression, expansion and improvement operating somehow with European expectations? Possibly. I am from Argentina and I lived in Buenos Aires for 9 years before coming to Brussels five and a half years ago. In Argentina, I often saw institutions, venues, cultural centers and theaters close and reopen, so I thought I was used to endings. I suppose the difference is that I never expected an educational institution in Europe to lose funds.
In a.pass, I entered with a key, I knew the alarm codes, and I could set up and rearrange the space as my practice required. I moved the dance floor so many times and cleaned it that many times. Through a.pass, I have encountered a network of people that has expanded in various ways in my short life in this part of the world, providing me with a context of travel and/or visibility and/or jobs more than once.
This will end.
I remember when I started the postgraduate program I was very surprised by the fact that, as part of my education, I had to share food, even make the food together, share space, even design the space together, share material resources, and even build my material resources. I remember why I chose to participate in the Research Center: it was because I knew it was coming to an end in its current format, so it was the last opportunity for me to return to this strange and luxurious context where answers are suspended.
Don’t cry for me. (...)
I experienced a.pass as a place where we could hold questions and come back later during dinner time, a context that could embrace the fragility of (my) individual research, which is sometimes full of expectations, fears and anxieties. I do not want to romanticize. It was not all rosy. RC is demanding and confronting, and perhaps even more so given that we knew a.pass would end.Outside of the Bologna logic of BA; MA or PhD, and outside of titles and diploma requirements, a.pass looks for the criticism of the doing of the practice.
Inside the capital of the European Union, a.pass has a fee for the Postgraduate program potentially accessible to countries whose currencies are not in euros. I am referring here to the fact that the South and Central-American community that I have met in a.pass is numerous and grandiloquent: I’ve met people from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador. There is no fee for the Research Center.
Inside Brussels, a.pass is as diverse as the city which hosts it.
Inside of a bilingual city, a.pass doesn’t speak the official languages of the city nor the country which hosts it. I was so afraid of not knowing how to speak English. As a non-English speaker, imagine an institution which doesn’t care about your level of English.
In the last floor of a building in Molenbeek, a.pass assumes its role as a confronting institution, it engages with conflict and with interdependence.
a.pass for me embodies the exception.
For more suspended questions, fucking ends, ends fucking and shared spaces,
Con amor,
cate
Spring Drink & Films with a.pass and nadine
02 April 2024
posted by: Kristof Van HoordeApril 9 at 20h00
rue de Manchesterstraat 17, MolenbeekSpring comes with a fresh new wind: a.pass installs a temporary place in Manchesterstraat 17, Molenbeek, where artists and alumni can organise gatherings and presentations in the coming months. For this spring event, a.pass invited nadine to host together an inauguration drink and an evening with screening of three short films by independent makers living in Brussels.
Join us, together with our friends of nadine, for a free drink and 3 short films!
FILM PROGRAM:- Memories of a Camera Perspective by Anna Lugmeier
- Show Girl by Amari
- shemortelle by Shelbatra Jashari*** Memories of a Camera Perspective by Anna Lugmeier (29 min)
Memories of a Camera Perspective is an audio-visual poem dedicated to the process of film editing as a space of intimacy with sound and image material. It disguises as a home movie that is looking into femme strategies of appropriation of the camera by turning the phallic attributes of the lens inside out and looking into the oystershell as a vessel for a filmic Séance. The film is summoning visions of early feminist filmmakers, seeking for new frameworks of kinship and care in collaboration with the camera. In this DIY-examination of the tragic-comedy we are looking into exhausted images, the role of the female film maker and a desperate love-letter to a camera perspective, yet to come. Memories of a Camera Perspective was part of Anna Lugmeier's End Presentation at a.pass in January 2023.
*** Show Girl by Amari (14 min)A short-film documentary about Michelle, a pole performer from Paris. The film centers an event where she performs for a cabaret night. Amari is a multidisciplinary artist and founder of Unlimited Strip Club, using the symbolic fascination of strip clubs as a medium for film-making, installations and performances. Show Girl was part of Amari's End Presentation at a.pass in September 2023
*** shemortelle by Shelbatra Jashari (15 min)A sensitive vampire decides to leave eternal life behind by actively undergoing euthanasia. She is assisted through a mercy killing ritual, performed by a vampire matriarchy in Brussels. Taking on human form for just a flash of time after years of immortal existence, she talks about her death, life and choice to change. Shelbatra has been active in Brussels since a while - known for the Brûlesk dance events in the past - a project around cabaret and burlesque. She has been using her body, voice and boxing (among others) as a foundation to develop her vision on the history of representations. With shemortelle she tempted into a form where concept, performance, film and narration were put to use to make a contemporary form of a “weeping song” - referring to “pleureuses” practices such as those singing songs of grief in the tradition of Albanian songs. Her research into this practice was accompanied by a performance that has been integrated in the short film.
Open Call Open Call for collective research residency
07 April 2024
posted by: Kristof Van HoordeWhat could be lying fallow in the arts?
This a call for a 2-month paid residency for collectives (existing or newly established on the occasion of this call, ideally 5 persons). The period of 2 months can be spread over a maximum of 5 months. Read more about the practical details further below. First we would like to give you more info about the context and the framework of this call.
CONTEXT? WHAT? MISSION?
“In a world in constant motion there is an ecological imperative to embrace the value of idleness” Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo in Lying fallow: the value of idleness
For about 15 years a.pass has been hosting a co-learning environment for research-based practices, focusing on collaboration, performativity, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity. a.pass is an acronym for ‘advanced performance and scenography studies’: ‘performance’ refers to how practices act in their surroundings, ‘scenography’ is the production of space and context, ‘studies’ stands for a co-learning pedagogical approach and the prefix ‘advanced’ is a dedication to challenge the frames of existing disciplinary determinations.
In 2022 however, the Flemish Ministry of Education decided to end their financial support of a.pass by the end of 2023. a.pass managed to get a transition budget and after a period of conversations with different partners (Schools of Arts, workspaces, universities, places for artistic research), and working on a new plan in order to make a restart. Nevertheless, due to the financial inflation, the tight budgets and even budget cuts in the other institutions, the budgetary framework needed to make an adapted restart was impossible to reach without any structural support from the Ministry of Education.
To make a virtue of necessity we chose for a more radical, more riskful path towards a possible future. Both programs, the Postgraduate Program as well as the Research Center, came to an end in 2023. We chose to embrace the fallow land that lays before us and a.pass entered a period of reflection, reimagination, and ultimately reorganisation: a field when it lies fallow - seemingly 'doing nothing' but in fact engaging in a deep process of rejuvenation and enriching as Rajni Shah says, a space for attention and transformation. An integral aspect of this process involves opening it up by inviting others to participate, to think together, to be together, to imagine a sustainable way forward for artistic research practices and for a.pass as a re-generated soil for collectivity and research. Therefore, we are extending invitations to 3 collectives (existing or newly established on the occasion of this call) for a 2-month paid residency to reimagine our fallow land and its implications for collective artistic research practices, methodologies, and sustainable harvesting.
Recognising the socio-economic challenges facing collective arts, wherein artistic research is fully embedded into its soil, a.pass hopes to carefully and responsibly re-plant our fallow land in the coming years, to develop and articulate frameworks, methodologies, and possible vessels that can empower sustainable collective studio environments of the near-future.
“The research is an artistic practice, the practice is an artistic research. The research is guided by the questions arising in the artistic practice and, at the same time, the formulations of the research, its theories and methodologies, are feeding back into the practice which will return with new questions to the research.” Veridiana Zurita in In These CircumstancesIf research is intrinsic to artistic practice, what constitutes this fallow land, and how can it be filled with sustainability and radical institutional re-imagining, how can it be maintained responsibly and collectively? In other words, how can we nurture this space and ensure its sustainability? Are there methodologies, economic models and networks that can support this? Are there philosophical frameworks that can inspire this? Allowing land to lie fallow offers a transitional moment outside the circuit of capitalist value creation and destruction, as Michael Chieffalo and Julia Smachylo suggest. Recognising the profound impact of an ideology of continuous progress on urban infrastructure, social dynamics, ecological processes, and the climate at large, this open call would like to seriously consider the concept of institutional lying fallow, beyond the capitalist logic of perpetual construction and deconstruction for the sake of scaling up.
Embracing the collective, collaborative, and shared spaces, along with the exchange of research practices, is essential for sustainable artistic work. This call invites collectives whose practice is grounded in reflection and collaborative efforts to make lying fallow feasible on an institutional level. What kind of institution could embrace the value of idleness? What institutional framework is necessary for artistic research, both as a practice and a field, and how can it be facilitated in a sustainably radical way?“I do not mean to phrase this as some kind of utopian ideal, but to begin an attempt at articulating the ways in which the work of lying fallow lay in relationship to the world around it, without assuming the nature or texture of that relationship.” Rajni Shah on Lying Fallow
CONDITIONS? FRAMEWORK? WHAT IS EXPECTED?
Each collective residency period serves as a reflection on institutional frameworks within the field of artistic research, acting as an experimental pedagogical platform where collectives can propose new models, methodologies, and ways of exchanging knowledge and practices. Each group is tasked with developing an institutional reimagining grounded in their own research focus and interests, while taking into consideration the concept of lying fallow. Each collective residency will need to devise a way. The hope is that the three residency periods will create a palimpsest of possibilities for a sustainable and radical artistic research institution, and a possible future for a.pass. Each collective research residency should consider the following two questions:
How to nurture a process of searching within a (collective) artistic practice? Or, how to do artistic research?
How does the process of (collective) artistic searching inspire others? Or, how to share artistic research with others?
WHAT DO WE OFFER?
We foresee a paid residency for 2 months for ideally 5 persons (min.3 - max.10 persons). There is a salary for 5 people (in case of 10 persons: the salary as well as the working time will be divided by 10, making sure people are paid correctly for the time they invest) (in case of less than 5 persons: the salary per person remains the same). The period of 2 months can be spread over a maximum of 5 months. You can indicate which periods would be convenient for your group. There will also be 2 return moments after the residency (to be organised later).
The salary will be €5.000/month/person (all costs & VAT incl.) It is also possible to be on the payroll with an artist contract, in that case the gross salary will be €3.250 (according to the official scale of PC 329) and a.pass will pay the extra costs for social security, holiday pay and taxes.
For people coming outside of Belgium, a maximum of €1.000 per month per person for travel and accommodation will be available (refund based on receipts). We don't have accommodation to stay, we only provide collective workspace.
Production budget per group: €2.000 for the whole residency (on top of the salaries). There will also be administrative/productional/ technical support with basic technical equipment. You will have access to the library and access to the archive and the update about earlier steps made in this transition process.
Space for the residency: depending on the period the place might change, since the nomadic character of a.pass at the very moment, but it will be in/around Brussels. Also collaboration with other organisations, to create intersection with other worlds, other realities could be possible. You can also indicate what kind of place you would need for this residency in your application.
Personal needs: in case you have questions regarding specific personal needs (family, accessibility,...) please contact our general coordinator.
WHO CAN APPLY ?
The residency programme is aimed at collectives from about 5 persons (minimal 3 - maximal 10) preferably having experience with artistic research, or with reflecting on institutions, or pedagogical or anthropological experience, but all disciplines are welcome. You can either work with an already constituted collective or with a newly and for this occasion only formed collective.
We call for voices less heard until now in the context of a.pass, and invite you to make your group a multitude of voices, with different perspectives and different disciplines and different expertises gathered around the table. With a transdisciplinary approach: creating intersections with other worlds, other realities (social practices, farming or cooking, or other fields like the political, ecological, economical, juridical, urbanistic, subcultures, etc…).
We value artistic research that is without hierarchy within methodologies, where every methodology is taken seriously (e.g. a dream equals statistics as methodology).
FOR WHICH PERIOD CAN YOU APPLY?
The period for the 3 residencies runs from September 2024 until August 2025.
We start with a first call for a first group for the period September 2024-January 2025.
The period for the 2nd group will be December 2024-April 2025 (call will be out in July) and for the 3rd group it will be April-August 2025.
DEADLINE
There will be 3 different calls. The calls could possibly be adapted according to the inputs from prior chosen collectives during this period. Interaction with the other chosen collectives is encouraged.
Deadline for the application for the 1st group (period Sept '24-Jan '25) is June 9th 2024.
Deadline for the application for the 2nd group (period Dec '24-May '25) is October 9th 2024. Call will be published on July 9th.
Deadline for the application for the 3rd group (period April-August 2025) is January 9th 2025. Call will be published on November 9th.
HOW TO APPLY?
You can only apply by filling in the application form here below (emails will not be accepted as application). The application form consists of 4 parts:
SELECTION
The selection will be made by the board and the General Assembly of a.pass and 2 external jury members. Please be aware that our advisory committee always reflects a diversity of fields, gender identity, and geographical knowledge. In the selection we pay attention to the complementary expertise, the diversity/multivoicedness within the collectives and the recognition of today’s challenges.
All groups applying for the first call will receive a reply by email by mid-July. Shortlisted groups will be invited for an online conversation to elaborate on their application before a final selection is made. Upon final selection, an agreement will be signed between the group and a.pass. In case of any changes in the composition of the group members (like the withdrawal or replacement of one of its members) a.pass must be informed and has to agree before the project can continue.
QUESTIONS? AND MORE INFO?
Send an email to the general coordinator at kristof@apass.be
Every application will be offered a copy of the a.pass publication In These Circumstances: a collection of methodologies, insights, experiences, ideas, researches from 15 years of a.pass. When you would like to receive a copy of this book beforehand, in order to use it for your application, it’s possible to order it for €15 only (shipping included), just send us an email.
GOOD TO KNOW!
In case you need space to come together and to prepare your application, you can always reach out to us, we’re very happy to help and share a.pass-spaces.
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On the Soul Video recording - online talk
27 November 2020
posted by: Steven Jouwersma[video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https:///www.apass.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Oxana-Timofeeva-On-The-Soul.mp4"][/video]Oxana TimofeevaOn the SoulA 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.