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Bureau d'Espoir SELF-INTERVIEW Elke – Elle

1 September-31 December 2015 / Abbeye de Forest

MNSTRY

INTRO:

Elle sings:

i am free to give

what anyway isn’t mine

the energy i suck from the earth

and breathe back into the other,

i am free to embody the powers of this city

oscillating with ideas

that enter my bloodstream and exit my body

amplified, ordered, and displaced,

i am free to vibrate with the desire of the other

that lets me discover my soul, my knowledge and my being

i am free to let go of fear of losing

what anyway wasn’t mine:

the identities i share with so many others

the security blankets of opinion, belief and good taste.

i am free not to be bound

by my dependence on respect, affirmation and flattery

i am free to be what i anyway always was:

a wave, a thought, a vessel or a tree.

 

Elke (a.pass researcher):

Elle, with the new project ‘Mobile MNSTRY’ you again tackle some of the issues you have been dealing with in your extended project Bureau d’Espoir already for some years: the recuperation and embrace of practices and terms that have been categorized, marginalized and recuperated by capital strategies.

For example: you worked on the mobilization of the concept of ‘anorexia’ in the Hunger and Anorexic practices as tools for rethinking our relation to the consumption of food, and our own place in the ‘food chain’ of capitalism. You worked in ‘Battery’ on the embrace of circumstances that are considered detrimental to the ‘healthy’ development of the individual: 21 days of imprisonment, hunger and lack of private space as a spiritual-aesthetic machine for the production of hope and change.

Now you propose the Mobile Monastery: a practice that is based on rethinking the monastic rule, the disciplining and deep experience of the everyday, introducing ‘poverty’ and social service (karma yoga) into the practice. Your proposals all seem to verge on the extreme, uncomfortable, and frankly, possibly moralistic. How do you plan to make this collective practice seem inviting to collaborators.

 

Elle:

Although it is often perceived as such, my practice is not one of asceticism. It is rather a practice of finding pleasure, or even liberation, in reducing the overall demand for entertainment and ‘keeping busy’ that order our daily realities. If I introduce the ‘poverty’ demand to the temporary monks in the MNSTRY, this is not so much an act of moralistic self-deprivation, as it is an invitation for an active and vitalizing rethinking of our relationship and dependence on money: on subsidies, a steady income, a minimum requirement of comforts and ‘good circumstances’ to work and produce in.

A lot of our thinking as artists and citizens is based on a conscious or unconscious fear to fall out of the grid of organized society, to become invisible to the powers that matter. What the Mobile MNSTRY proposes is to do exactly that. To live without everything we think we need to be able to ‘live’, work, enjoy life, stay connected. By giving up on these things, we are able to install other connections to the city, the environment, our practice and other people. By taking away the markers of our social position (identity card, money, private space), we enter into another reality. A reality marked by a collective discipline, a shared purpose, an outward orientation. Together we rethink what it means to be alive: what kind of practices can keep us not only alive, but also charged, and aware of each other and the outside world.

The Mobile MNSTRY (which you can read as Monastery, but also as Ministry, or Monster-y), is an exercise in pragmatic ritualism: it opens up a space and time to reorganize our attachments and preconceptions to capital values. To make space for other ways to mobilize time, space and artistic practice, away from the confinement of the studio, the artistic workspace. To test our knowledges on another playground of society: to see what it is we can do with what we think we believe in.

Elke:

You could say that you try to rethink the economies of desire that rule our everyday lives. Making use of very diverse practices borrowed from spiritual body work, inventive object design, philosophical reconceptualization and artistic practice experience. But at the same time this ‘economic liberation’ is presented as quite a disciplining practice: proposing collective day rhythms, the denial of private space, limited resources to work with. In that sense, your practices might also seem old-fashioned, frugal, and out of tune with the individual freedom of the artist/collaborator/citizen to fill in their lives in a flexible, creative and singular way.

Your collective practice environments seem to stand in stark contrast to the contemporary ideology of flexibility, choice, individual creativity. In the arts field, in particular, any sense of pre-set rules or limitations to the practice are often labeled as ‘power games’ or even as ‘fascist’, a word that seems to fit any kind of disciplined practice these days.

Elle:

Yes, but this term has also been hollowed out by its frequent, uncritical use. Funnily enough, it lost its meaning exactly through the banalization of the term in so-called critical discursive environments that, by seeing fascism everywhere, actually disempowered the term completely. If fascism is everywhere, then actually it becomes life itself. If fascism is but a strategic stab in an intellectual debate to disarm the opposition, there is no serious consideration for the all-too-real context in which fascism took form as a societal transformational power. Such a ‘metaphorization’ of the term, which makes is applicable to all circumstances in which a play of hierarchical oppositions of power are at stake, is nearsighted, and cynical.

Elke:

Let’s say that by ‘fascism’ I mean a specific coming together of Beauty, Order and the practice of what I would call the Physical Sublime, that is often created by suffering, or disciplined bodies. Or maybe rather, the dual mechanical and massively reproduced political aesthetic organization that bases itself on Beauty and Order, and produces the violence of exclusion and exhaustion in its wake. Off course this term can not be interpreted separate from its historical contexts, and the often violent mass effects it produced. But whole generations of leftist critical thinkers have grown up in the shadow of the stormy historical heritage of the 20th Century, and their historical awareness of the traps of combined ideology, idealism and organization have made them hyper-sensitive to the telltale signs of power abuse or disbalance, but also of the uncritical embrace of Beauty as a bourgeois pacifier of unrest, revolt or social struggle.

In the wake of the 20th century, modernisms, fascist and communist critical strategies, a lot of aesthetic strategies have become suspect. Loaded with historical weight: be it romantic escapism, political incorrectness, social exclusion, uncritical acceptance of the bourgeois order, the crash and recuperation of the ideals of the 1960’s, and what more. What has been constructed however, out of the rubble of broken ideals, is a discourse police that has made a significant part of the aesthetic vocabulary off-limits, and brandished as naïve at best, hypocritical or ‘f…t’ in the worst cases.

My question is now if maybe it is not a time to dive back into that long-forgotten dictionary of terms and see if it is not high time to rescue some of them, reactivate their power, and make them speak out another reality, another world view, than the ones they have been associated with. It is my impression that we have gone through an every-expanding exclusion of possible terms to think our realities, a progressive retreat into the trenches of a politically correct aesthetic-political discourse that is now keeping us hostage to ideas that are no longer capable of creating worlds that we actually would wholeheartedly consider to live in. What critical discourse, or at least, the particular critical discourse I’m addressing now has come to establish (which, to be clear, was not always the case) is a state of feeling constantly under siege, beleaguered and in mortal danger of recuperation of any of our bright ideas by the corporations that be.

Instead of this kind of Repressive Criticality, or the Discourse Police, I would like to see a new wave of criticism come to be that is mainly creative: a creativity produced through a clarity of practiced conceptualization and experienced practice, that would create realities in its wake. A criticality that would not be afraid of being labeled as naïve, old-fashioned or uncritical. Since, frankly, the Discourse Police has produced a toxic reactionary environment for practicing art and politics, that is blind for the potential of other ways of doing, speaking and creating the worlds we live in.

Elle:

Aho. (smiles)

It is time to reconceptualize our concepts. Not by fleeing from them in horror, but by accepting them in all their confusing associations, radical unsuitedness, and therefore irritating potential. Beauty for me is not about Order, but about Orgasm. Beauty appears at the confluence of the experience of the interior and exterior, the experience of the self expanding into that what seems separate to it. Unlike the fearful trepidation in front of the Sublime, this beauty is nothing if not powerful, energizing, and emancipatory. To know you are connected, you are part of the whole, dissolves the fear of exclusion. Orgasmic Beauty, in that sense, is a tool to overcome alienation THROUGH alienation, a kind of homeopathic medicine. It is overcoming the doctrine of individuality that has captured and narrowed our desires to the handkerchief-size of a self-realization wellness project. I think we can do more with the energy of our desires than this empty craving for self-fulfillment.

I was just reading this rather interesting paragraph about sexuality, which might clarify what I mean with this orgasmic quality:

‘Sex, for its part, likes nothing so much as mixtures. Mixtures of skins, salivas, humors, organs, words to the point of delirium, images, as well; sex makes do with anything, can put everything to use. (…) Sex is not the body. It is even the forgetting of the body. It is what makes us, in jouissance, feel desire, or sadness, excitement, fear, longing – everything about the body that is not ‘the body’, that is, flesh. When the body becomes world, landscape, moor, sand, language, collage, collapse, memory, the entire body is convoked as other than flesh. Other indeed, for it is a matter of otherness, for philosophy as well as for sex. Their history is the same, like two sides of a single coin stamped with the seal of that recognition.’

Just like Criticality, indeed can be rethought as Creative Clarity, a courageous step into the unknown potential of concepts that are constantly redefined and tested through practice. And this goes for all terms that have been derided, labeled as unfashionable, and banned out of our life practices. …

There is a big confusion in my practices indeed, especially around notions of self-organization, freedom and discipline. Off course this is due to the superposition of two different practice ‘myths’: the one of artistic research and creation, and the one of transformational ‘spiritual’ body practices which i started to use as ammunition, as weapons in my struggle to overcome the inertia that was keeping a lot of artists hostage in regard to the workings of contemporary capitalism: they felt their tools, their creativity, their imaginative powers had been largely recuperated by marketing, advertising, and the overall economy of affects that produces desires through the production of ever-more empty containers for the construction of ever-more ‘individualized’ selves. The artist-individual therefore has become wary of his/her ‘individual’ power, since individuality in itself has become suspect as a commercial construction of Capital. And rightfully so.

What I try to do in my practices is to liberate, to unveil, to come to a nude understanding again of what is the non-produced power of the self. And this can, paradoxically, only be done through the stripping away of the presumed ‘personal’, or ‘hyper-individual’ layers of comportment, habits, and convictions. Temporarily! To make other potentials visible. And as such, to rephrase freedom not as a freedom from, but a freedom FOR. FOR a collective project, for a shared dream, for a collectively supported change.

BUT, and this is very important to understand: this change is not a collective ideology as the ones that supported the communes and collective of the 1960’s and 1970’s. We do NOT have to agree on the world-supporting myths of political affiliation, religious normativization or economic regularization. At least not in Bureau d’Espoir. We only temporarily agree on a scored practice of time and action. And on linking this practice to an outside world. In this sense the Mobile MNSTRY is not built on stable grounds of conviction. While starting out with a proposed score, throughout the project, this score is bit-by-bit transformed by the collaborators, based on their individual myths and dreams, which we then begin to share through our bodies, and ending up with a monastic score that is probably far detached from the original proposal.

Elke:

Do you consider Bureau d’Espoir to be an activist cell? Do you see yourselves as producing instruments, weapons to fight affect capitalization. Are you a Warrior of Desire?

Elle:

Why do you ask me things you already know the answer to? Why do you need me as an excuse to say what you can not accept yourself saying? Why is Elle so much alluring, sexy and attractive as figure of flight for you? Why do you distrust your own desire so much you can not allow it to carry your name?

Elke:

Last night I spoke my name and there was no one there. The sound echoed in the long corridors but I could feel the house was uninhabited.

Elle:

Don’t get mystical on me. Don’t pose fake questions. Don’t play the ignorant. Practice what you know.

Elke:

(silent)

Elle

(drunk):

to the gathering of all people that can toast to the liberty that appears out of nowhere.

to the liberation that doesn’t need anything

that doesn’t need to be acquired

but that just appears in the middle of a conversation

a touch

a cup of coffee.

to the enchantment of getting lost in the situation and finding

there is no place like this place.

to the flight of folly that connects you to my projections

to the me i can only be through you

to the you that is here without expectations

to the we that will never be formed

to the air that keeps us from being glued together

as one big blob sharing everyone’s smells, headaches and anxieties

to the air that allows me to keep my distance

to the floor that supports my position

to the gravity that keeps me down to earth

to the sky that still hasn’t fallen on my head

and keeps on not doing so day after day

to the microbes that keep on digesting my food

to the hairs on my arms that allow me to feel the wind moving on my skin

to the hairs everywhere on my body for reminding me i’m an animal

a rabbit, a deer or a worm. well, maybe not a worm.

to your unhappiness that reminds me of my own good luck

to your ravings that tell me i should slow down

to your madness that tells me i haven’t seen nothing yet

to the streets that keep cars from crashing into houses, or people, or trees

to houses that keep people from crushing into each other

to walls for protecting our privacy

to carpets for muffling our sounds

to tables for keeping things from falling on the ground and messing other things up

and creating chaos

to clothes for giving me something to imagine

to no clothes for giving me something to imagine

to touch for allowing me to live in my imagination … … …

 

24 HOURS LATER

Elke:

The Mobile MNSTRY is part of a bigger social-artistic neighborhood project, called Re-Commerce, in the commune of Forest. In what way do you consider the MNSTRY to fulfill a social engagement?

 

Elle:

The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop.

During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original ‘monastic’ score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.

The workshop is part of the larger project Cité d’Espoir (part of the REcommerce social-artistic initiative, organised by Bains Connective) which develops a constant practice for about six weeks (starting half October) with intense public moments during the weekends. The Mobile MNSTRY starts out with one member and through a call on the internet, the development of the workshop but also through local advertising the community starts to grow.

The ‘cité’ of the Abbaye will be renamed ‘Cité d’Espoir’ and will house the artists and their guests, supporting their ‘monastic’ practices. Cité d’Espoir will develop into a social meeting place, with a silent space to hang out, daily soup dinners, a library and regular ritual and other activities. The temporary monks start to develop their practices on the basis of poverty, social service and artistic transformation. Neighbours and interested people can pass by to have a personal ritual made for them, but we also want to involve groups and youngsters to develop group public rituals with us, based on their needs and visions. For example, we develop mourning rituals for pets or family members, light rituals for those who can not stand the cold anymore, love rituals for the lonely, political change rituals for the disengaged, etcetera.

We also give short-term ritual training workshops: how to develop your own rituals, how to gather material for your rituals, based on the Psychomagic methodology of Jodorowsky, or the artistic methodologies of the temporary monks. The silent café in the Cité d’Espoir offers free tea and something, and would become the starting point for all projects. The monks would sleep on the premises and be available most of the time for a talk or a ritual ‘guidance’. On Sundays there is also a kind of ‘service’, which is not religious but only aims at developing an alternative ‘common’ event for the neighbourhood in the margins of the market.





performative publishing, research center

Elke Van Campenhout Tarot of Hope

25 euro - tarot cards and book

1 December 2013

tarot0
If you wanted to come up with a language that could be understood by anyone, and that allows for different ways to adapt to the situation, but that still speaks about what concerns us all, the Tarot is the way to go. The Tarot is an ancient method to gain insight into your current situation. It is a way to bring different aspects of your life together, and relate them to an outside world that sometimes appears hostile or unconcerned by your sorrows or doubts. With the Tarot of Hope, Bureau d’Espoir tries to get a grip on our current situation.
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Order this publication.

performative publishing, research center

BUREAU d’ESPOIR

15 December 2014

BdE_stamp_square

Bureau d’Espoir is a long-term research project on hope, initiated by Elke Van Campenhout. Bureau d’Espoir researches the possibility for a new engagement with the concept of hope, both on a political, social, physical and spiritual level.

Bureau d’Espoir is a research practice that starts out from the question: why do something rather than nothing? The last ten years the artistic sector seems to be burdened by a nagging form of debilitating self-critique that blocks artists (and other artistic workers) from assuming an affirmative position on the scene. Not only does it feel like any kind of performative gesture has become over-identified by decennia of critical theory, but an all-encompassing economic system has rendered any kind of emancipatory or critical gesture close to impossible.

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postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK II

1 May-31 July 2015

2015 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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information, postgraduate program

Self-Interview & Peer-to-Peer mentoring

1 May-31 July 2015

self interview
SELF / Throughout the block we develop a self-interviewing practice. PEER / On top of the dedicated mentoring and the self-interview practice you will also mentor - and be mentored by -a peer researcher.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Nicolas Galeazzi BRICOLAGE

4-8 May 2015 / a.pass

a tool for opening the block

Bildschirmfoto 2015-04-03 um 21.49.02
Diving into this concept, described in Claude Levi-Strauss' 'The Savage Mind', we develop a practice to present, discuss and discover the momentary objectives of our researches. With the help of found and constructed objects, objects of personal importance and desire, daily objects and precious ones, or objects of thought and discourse, we will try to define the actual quality of each one's research model and methodology.
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postgraduate program, research center

a.pass research centre The House of Spirits

10 May-24 July 2015

The House of Spirits is a common space for the (re)collection, digestion and transformation of the traces of the individual researches and workshops. The House opens up a space for the shamans/conservators of the Research Centre, as well as some of the participants. Every week another shaman practices in the House of Spirits, working with the case objects of the participants or with left-overs of the workshop, developing a shared ritual for the a.pass group. The strategies of the shaman include reordering, cataloguing, magical transformations, ritual alchemy, displacement and fictionalisation.

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postgraduate program, reading session, research center

Reading Circle

11 May-29 August 2015 / a.pass

Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu

As a red thread throughout the block the participants engage in a weekly communal reading practice of the book ‘Realist Magic – Object, Ontology, Causality’ by Timothy Morton.

Reading and discussing in-depth this one central text allows for the development of a common ground of reference and connection that functions as a backdrop to the workshops and practices that shape the block. The Reading Circle happens on Monday evenings from 6pm to 10pm.


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Vanja

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Yari

12 May 2015

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Mavi

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Kleoni

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Isabel

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Veronica

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Pierre / Super power

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Thiago / Fool dice totem

12-12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Elke

12 May 2015

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performative publishing

Nicolas

12 May 2015

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Ricardo

12 May 2015

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reading session

Culture: The Universal Animal – Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

13 May 2015

Contribution for the discussion about totemism, animism, and naturalism. Lecture by Viveiros de Castro. "Animism could be defined as an ontology which postulates the social character of relations between humans and non-humans: the space between nature and society is itself social. Naturalism is founded on the inverted axiom: relations between society and nature are themselves natural. Indeed, if in the animic mode the distinction "nature/culture" is internal to the social world, humans and animals being immersed in the same socio-cosmic medium (and in this sense, "nature" is a part of an encompassing sociality), then in naturalist ontology, the distinction "nature/culture" is internal to nature (and in this sense, human society is one natural phenomenon amongst others). Animism has "society" as the unmarked pole, naturalism has "nature": these poles function, respectively and contrastingly, as the universal dimension of each mode. Thus animism and naturalism are hierarchical and metonymical structures."
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postgraduate program, workshop

Pierre Rubio / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Joachim ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

25-29 May 2015

Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson
Every block, a.pass organizes ‘b-workshops’ that focus on the basic principles of a.pass as a collaborative artistic research environment. This b-workshop ‘Ecology of Affects’ wants to address critically the production of subjectivity. 'A revolution is as much a reorientation of our affective relations as it is of social relations and cannot be one without the other.' Jason Read, ‘Economies of Affect / Affective Economies’, 2013
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postgraduate program, workshop

Sara Manente / Marcos Simoes THIS PLACE

1-5 June 2015 / a.pass

The workshop unfold a series of extra sensorial practices as tools for collaboration in groups, couples or with objects. The dispositives used, for example the telepathic approach, offer the possibility to create a third existence which is “a self”, “an entity” other than us, with own quality and ability to perform. Like an “experimental magic”: there will be magic without magicians. Can we create the magic by creating the situation for the magic to happen? We create the rules therefore we create the magic. Is it possible to empower an object, a person, a situation through speculation? With the stubbornness of “the idiot”, we will practice and question again and again opening up the creative process to the immaterial and the immaterial.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Abu Ali * Toni Serra THE UNSEEN WORKSHOP

8-12 June 2015

Filmstill, Exodus OVNI 2008
For this workshop Abu Ali offers a selection of footage from the video archive O.V.N.I (observatori de video no idenitficat) based in Barcelona, which deals with the ‘Unseen’. Based on these projections Abu Ali will experiment with us on practices of not seeing. Challenging the relation between the gaze and action, vision and perception, the imaginary and the experienced, we will cruise through a network of text, video, and physical practices that open the vision for the unseen and the un-seeing.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Oscar Parada TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

22-26 June 2015 / a.pass

oscar
The objective of re-knowing and re-producing the sacred in connection with a performative ritual space is to operate a transformation and that is what we can call medicine. Medicine is everything that transforms us. The workshop proposes techniques and practices to open the body not only as an artistic tool but also as a medicinal tool. We will question and challenge the limits of what ‘self’, ‘presence’ and ‘relation’ mean. Hence, the workshop will also a research into creating individual and collective rituals in different ways.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Peter Stamer / Luanda Casella SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

29 June-3 July 2015

Bildschirmfoto 2015-03-28 um 13.59.09

In 1969, the American psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a study to explore if two randomly selected individuals, strangers to each other coming from different American states, are nevertheless connected by acquaintances in between. Starting the test in Kansas/Nebraska, linking people to one individual in Massachusetts, the experiment suggested that an individual knows of any target person only by six degrees of connecting steps: Mr X from Kansas knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows Mrs Z, living in Massachusetts.

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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Magic Night / Crystal Seeds

15-15 July 2015

kleoni
5 crystals where used as seeds, to hold our intentions, our prayers to berry around the world in an effort to influence those events that seam to be so big, and beyond our personal capacities.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program, research center

MAGIC NIGHT

24 July 2015

_MG_3266
This is the time to come together. To celebrate what we worked on. To transform our preconceptions of rituals, of magic, of transformation itself. A pilgrimage of the self into the common and back again.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Self Interview Draft Kleoni Black / Kleoni Pink and Green

31 July 2015

On the other hand I remember when I was living in New York, I had a friend that was making fun of my vegetarianism, he was asking how living in a city like New York could be an ethical choice.  Just the existence and sustenance of this city means the death to other life forms. It is complicated but urgent. A very difficult task
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Self Interview draft Thiago written / Thiago transcribed

31 July 2015

Thiago’s Self-interview I write in Italic. I make the questions. Sometimes I explain things for you, the one who reads. I am a bit smarter than the others, but I don’t have a color. I am… I am a recorded voice transcripted. I am another voice, written.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Self Interview Draft Pierre/Pierre

31 July 2015

alchemic self interview
On the black and icy waters of the Styx, in the infernal meanders of his arms, Charon's boat progresses about the kingdom of Hades. Aboard the vessel, you, me and a bunch of thinkers and activists, necessarily part of this globalised miserable journey. Of the nature of the swamps, of the depths of the mud in which we sink, of the once renowned magical properties of the river, we have lost track and memory. Sondes throwers more than prophets, advancing in the midst of experiments, we clumsily try to offer a tentative guidance...
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postgraduate program

UNTOUCHABLE/UNACCEPTABLE/INTANGIBLE

CURATED BY ELKE VAN CAMPENHOUT & NICOLAS GALEAZZI & PIERRE RUBIO

1 August 2015

about the imaginative aesthetics of change

In defence of the power of aesthetics this block tries to pry open the difficult paradox between criticality and imagination, between the power of the subject and the passive resistance of the object, between political critique and artistic re-imagineering strategies. Animating objects to animate our agencies. Fictionalising the real as a critique to produce alternatives to ideology. Speculating on the impossible to construct a possible. Considering imagination not as escapism but as an operative vehicle for change. The unacceptable reveals the limitations of the acceptable. The untouchable foreshadows the adventurous discovery of difference. The intangible offers a speculative sense towards the radically other.
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postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK III

1 September-30 November 2015

2015 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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information, postgraduate program

MENTORING STRATEGIES block 2015/III

1 September 2015

the new structure for dedicated mentorings and the interview sessions
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postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller Settlement VIII

14 September-2 October 2015 / a.pass studio

TOWARDS FRAGILITY

settlement
Settlement is a space that tries very hard not to settle. Its instability naturally works against the establishing of clear boundaries between „your space“ and „my space“, what hopefully follows from that is that it is very difficult to establish boundaries between „your work“ and "my work". I believe that practice is bound by space, and if space gets shaky, unstable, shareable, so does the practice.
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research center, workshop

Adva Zakai / Raphaële Jeune OR SHALL WE USE THE STAIRS?

18-20 September 2015

Or shall we use the stairs?/Helena Dietrich

Brussels-based choreographer Adva Zakai and French curator Raphaële Jeune propose 3 days of lectures and exercises to collectively explore different aspects of the relationship between humans and machines. Together with special guests and anyone interested, we aim to share thoughts on the digitalization of our world, through introduction into concepts that developed in response to it: The challenging dialogue with algorithms, the splendor and misery of Transhumanism, recent developments in Donna Haraway’s thinking (author of 1985’s Cyborg Manifesto) and the theory of Accelerationism.

 

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research center, workshop

Adriana La Selva / Mika Juusela The Bridge

5-9 October 2015

the bridge
This workshop is part of Adriana La Selva’s research on contemporary training methodologies for theatre. The beginning of the project concentrates on a deep understanding of physical practices which draw from the Theatre Anthropology vocabulary developed by Eugenio Barba, in order to question and push forward training principles devised by his group.
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postgraduate program, workshop

Juan Dominguez dirty room

12-22 October 2015 / a.pass studio

EL ANGEL EXTERMINADOR Luis Bunuel 1962.preview
I will ask you a lot of questions, over and over. From the begining till the end. I will question you, you will question everybody, we will experience suspiciousness I guess. In which conspiracy are you involved at the moment? Angles, all the time different ones. We will trip for sure, all kind of trips or maybe not all kinds but different trips. Follow me through the rabbit hole and lets visit Wonderland.
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performative publishing, project, research center, seminar

PHARMAKON

15 October-15 December 2015

Pharmakon : whitch culture ?

 

‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’, is a Thematics artistic research residency project, taking place in Brussels from the 15th of October until the 15th of December 2014. This residency is one of the stages in the development of the broader, transnational ‘Pharmakon’ research project undertaken by Institut Nomade. The ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference will last three days and will explore the theoretical and artistic approaches to dealing with an increasingly toxic economic, ethical and cultural environment, in search of other techniques by which to connect, share and imagine the fabric of our togetherness. As a ‘performative conference’, this meeting involves artists as well as theorists, dissolves the boundaries between ‘specialists’ and ‘public’, and between ‘performers’ and ‘theorists’, and opens up a space for desire and reflection.

Thematics is organized by Bains Connective, in collaboration with Institut Nomade, the a.pass research center and Kaaitheater.

 

Pharmakon: whitch culture?

This Thematics project builds on the notion of ‘pharmakon’ as coined by the contemporary philosopher Bernard Stiegler. In ancient Greece, ‘pharmakon’ was understood both as ‘poison’ and ‘medicine’, and in some cases also as ‘scapegoat’. The word might mean either the one or the other depending on the context, which implies a certain knowledge, or ‘knowledge-ability’. A skill of dosage and use, witchcraft involving insight and imaginative contextualization.

At the ‘Pharmakon: whitch culture?’ conference, a group of artists and theorists will investigate the notion of ‘pharmakon’ in our society. As Stiegler suggests in his analysis of the need for a ‘pharmacology’ to counter the poisonous fumes of economic, ethical and cultural impoverishment, it is clear that the fabrication of our culture(s) has urgently to be (re)questioned. What are the categories we use to produce and develop the culture in which we ‘individuate’ ourselves? What is the change in ‘technics’ that is needed to re-imagine our desires, stepping out of ourselves, as ex-isting in the public sphere? What sort of witchcraft is demanded from us, as artists, citizens and thinkers, to come up with the right spells and potions, and to dose our practices to transform poison into medicine.

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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Thiago Antunes / Darling, what would you do for being integrated in a new country until the end of the week otherwise you I dont know what but something very bad would happen?

16 October 2015

Colonization, gamification, scores, characters, diagrams, schedules, plans. But, Luanda, how to live from art in Belgium? Should I prepare myself for being a Chef de cuisine at least to earn more mony from restaurants? Yes, of course, if you like it don’t lose your time. I regret not having done the same few years ago. It is hard to be an artist here, very hard, darling.
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lecture, performative publishing, research center

Veridiana Zurita don’t eat the microphone / televizinho / mommy, daddy, me 

24-24 October 2015

invitation research sharing

Los Angeles, Kinderreiche Familie

 

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

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

More information here


end presentation, performative publishing, postgraduate program

FIRE SALE TOUR

3-8 November 2015

firesale5_for webx


postgraduate program, workshop

Bureau d'Espoir Mobile MNSTRY

9-22 November 2015 / Abbeye of Forest

MNSTRY
The Mobile MNSTRY (Monastery, Ministery, Monster-y) is a collective location project, organised in and around the previous Abbeye of Forest. The MNSTRY will install a temporary (monastic) community that lives and works within a limited area, following a shared time score and accepting the rule of poverty for the duration of the workshop. During this time all activities of the MNSTRY will be organised within the public contexts of Forest, and developed as an open invitation to the neighbourhood and passers-by. During the workshop the time score of the MNSTRY will bit by bit start to change: the original 'monastic' score will be taken over by the members of the community, who will start to decide on what there is to be done, what we will spend our shared time on, and what is it that is needed today, here, and for whom.
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performative publishing

Audrey

29 April 2021

image


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

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