Settlement 14

postgraduate program, workshop

Settlement 14

7-26 January 2019 / a.pass

settlement

During the days of Jan 7th-26th 2019 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called SETTLEMENT. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass SETTLEMENT and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at the a.pass main space will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process. The schedule for these three weeks will be developed on site by its participants and shared online on the a.pass website.

Here are some key ideas which have informed similar spaces before:

encountering processes

The potential of this setup is that it allows us to encounter each others processes instead of products of our artistic work. Processes are much more difficult to make visible and to see as they require a different mode of attention and participation. The attempt to witness a process requires a change in the temporal mode and in the mode of being-together in the collective space.

no spectators

The space we are trying to facilitate is open, but it is not an exhibition. There is no „spectator mode“, and no institutionalised responsibility for hosting. However any participant (including possible newcomers) is welcome to invite and host anybody according to the logic of her/his work process. Anybody is welcome to joint the collective space for any 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 apass storage and re-accommodate them towards our purposes. This strategy produces a space that is fragile, self-made, and constantly changing. We believe that such a space influences the sociability within it towards similar qualities – towards a more fluid social contract. In asking for a hands-on construction and deconstruction of its makeshift set-ups, such a space allows for a quicker change of settings and a decentralised mode of (self)organisation. For this reason, we suggest to refrain from using usual furniture (tables and chairs) and improvise new set ups for „work-stations“ and collective moments out of what we can scavenge from around the academy.

Settlement

Settlement is spatial proposal that tries to sustain its architectural fragility hoping in this way to initiate a temporary social, organizational and ideological one. Simply put it is a collective workspace, a camp and a hangout, open to all who stop by and would like to contribute to it. Like many other such meetings it is a place of informal exchange and presentation. It is a space for practices instead of products, a place where our individual ideas and processes have not yet achieved a solid state and can flow into each other.

Settlement starts with a haphazard collection of materials in an otherwise empty space. Everything one might need for one’s work has be be built and (re)invented there. There are no tables, no chairs, and the materials and objects resist easy categorization and usability. They have to be mis-used, adapted, they have a will on their own. The built environment has to be negotiated -with on the level of the object. There is potential in a thing being one thing one day, and a totally different thing the day after. There is also potential in that thing changing hands. (You will be surprised how quickly ownership is established from communal beginnings: one just has to pick up a thing and put it somewhere.)

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

By starting from scratch Settlement invites a re-negotiation of the specific conditions of each practice. In the course of the three weeks Settlement lets a particular method of production and sharing find its own intrinsic spatial conditions, free from the encoded behaviors of ready-made spaces such as “table”, “studio”, “meeting”, “gallery”, “venue”, “library”, etc.

The politics of practice in terms of co-habitation and co-working, of claiming one’s own space, inviting or excluding the outside, communication of ideas, inviting change and influence are all there to be questioned within this setup. As a practice is (in some ways) „re-built“ during Settlement, one can come to question its very construction.

Settlement is a collective project which was facilitated over several years on different occasions. The project takes the form of a workshop and creates and inhabits a space full of fragile and precarious structures. Since Settlement starts from a space devoid of habitual work setups, with all materials present considered a common resource, all the structures are built from the necessities of the individual and collective practices of its participants. A kind of a re-start on the physical level and an attempted re-start on the level of the habitual and institutional structures governing our spaces of production. The title is used as a provocation, as Settlement is a space which, over the course of several weeks, tries very hard not to settle.

Settlement puts a spatial perspective on practice, identifying modes of institutionalisation and habit which keep the spaces of artistic production and education from becoming spaces of commoning. These modes of ‘settling’ are embedded in many things: they are there in the ways the spaces are designed and organised towards stability (supporting habit and the given hierarchy of organisation), they are there in the institutionalised processes of access and exclusion, and they are there in our social habits (which structure the most empty and open space imaginable). Looking at how the spaces of our practice prioritise the habitual, Settlement introduces architectural fragility as a mode of destabilizing practice and the social agreements between the participants. The spaces created within Settlement are make-shift and precarious and therefore never suited to support a certain social constellation or a process indefinitely. That introduces another timing into the space, rendering all structures inherently temporary and unreliable. The habit of regarding products of work as property becomes destabilized, as all structures in the space are short-lived and can become ‘material’ again very quickly. These and other changes occur through fragility of the built environment and work effectively against the habitual ‘settling down’. The transition of a structure back to the common resource through collapse or re-appropriation is always a possibility, producing the common as a constant perspective onto the emerging territories, constellations and rules in the Settlement space.

postgraduate program

Block 2020 III

2020 has so far been a turbulent year: of course, the global background we are all aware of, but also for a.pass and all involved, as a community, as a group of colleagues and as a place of politics and organisation. We need time to meet despite all difficulties, and we need time to think together. We think of this block primarily as a meeting of ideas and practices of the researchers and the block contributors, in order to make space for an emergent support structure shared between all involved. Our desire is to ground the support structure of a.pass in a close relationship with the necessities and practices of the researchers. Curating here refers again more to care, than to an overarching trajectory. The core of what we do, practice artistic research, is what needs input and support. Starting from the question of what we need and how to organise it we want to create transitory and sustainable modes of organising and sharing research. The block practice, starting with the Settlement gathering, is focused on organisational and structural awareness and feedback: which spatial and temporal structures do we propose, how is it working with us and our research, and is it something we should keep for the future?

postgraduate program, research center

2013 BLOCK III

1 September-30 November 2013

2013 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
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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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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.
Read more..

postgraduate program, workshop

Settlement 11 Collective Schedule

22 May-3 June 2017 / a.pass

Day 4

11:00 Play-ground Eszter Nemethi 13:00 Planning a.pass block III/2017 Vladimir Miller 15:00 Dialoge with Alex Arteaga 17:00 Feminist Benjamin Reading Group Caroline Godart and Marialena Marouda
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Maurice Meewisse Documentation Third Block – Settlement 14

1 January-31 March 2019

Curated by Vladimir Miller

mobilier1

postgraduate program

BLOCK 2019/I UNSETTLED STUDY

7 January-31 March 2019

curated by Vladimir Miller

unsettled study

Continuing the line of inquiry from Uninvited Research, Block 19/I will again come together around the questions of mobility, logistics and gestures of moving, settling and unsettling. All who research, work and support at apass including the Research Center, the administration, the curators and production support are invited to join the process.

information, postgraduate program

Settlement 14 schedule

7-26 January 2019

MON 7th

14:00 meeting

17:00 cleaning, emptying the collective space

19:00 dinner

TUE 8th

10:00 Materials and Tools

postgraduate program, workshop

the Lecture, the Performance

4-8 February 2019

workshop with philipp gehmacher

This week’s focus lies on the idea and genre of the lecture performance in the performing and visual arts. Speaking out will be looked at as a performative act of sharing thoughts and concerns about ones own research and work. The questions often arising are: Why speak out about things at all? Why not let the work speak for itself, the research be mapped out and available? Is the speaking an extra layer of added information, at times rendering the ‚shown’ and presented more informal, even personal? Whilst in fact pointing at its surrounding, as much as the institution, is there a self-referentiality involved in speaking that we cannot escape whether we speak about ourselves, our concerns or just matters seemingly ‚worldly‘ and not personal? Speaking is however also about utterance and the speech act, performative as such, in the now, whether scripted or not. Speaking points out, maps out, accompanies actions and discursifes often all at once.

postgraduate program, workshop

Moritz Frischkorn The Choreography of Objects: Logistics vs. Entanglement

25-28 February 2019

c_robinhinsch

In recent years, theoreticians both from political sciences and cultural studies have become more and more interested in the business field of logistics. Besides finance (and new logics of extraction, some authors claim), logistics seems to be one of the key notions to understand global capitalism today.

Today logistics considers itself the totalized management and governance of all flows of capital, labour and commodities. And more than ever, logistics is administered and steered by algorithms – auto-managed and automated, implementing a computational governance that subjects labour as much as all material resources of the globe to its regime. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’, thus write: ‘The rise of logistics is rapid. Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also in business studies, in management research, logistics is everywhere.

performative publishing, postgraduate program

UNSETTLED STUDY AT PERFORMATIK ’19

22-23 March 2019 / KANAL

performative research environment

kanal centre pompidou

Unsettled Study will invite the audience to witness and join the multitude of research processes currently hosted by the a.pass platform for artistic research.

For several years a.pass platform fo artistic research has periodically engaged with a research environment called Settlement proposed and facilitated by Vladimir Miller. This project continues to ask on which spatial, performative and institutional conditions is it possible to step into and share an artist’s research process as it is happening.

postgraduate program, workshop

Vladimir Miller Settlement 16

14 September-3 October 2020 / a.pass

The Unconditional Institution

Settlement 16

During the days of Sept 14th – Oct 3rd 2020 a.pass will come together and host an open workspace called Settlement. In the course of these three weeks we will share our current work processes within an open collaborative workspace. We aim to create a poly-central gathering that is self-structured, self-organized and open to contributions from anyone. You are cordially invited to join this process by establishing your own space in the a.pass Settlement and sharing some of your ideas, practices or works with others. The materials and structures available at the a.pass main space will be a common resource for all who join to create whatever is needed to facilitate this process. The schedule for these three weeks will be developed on site by its participants and shared online on the a.pass website.

please let us know if you want to join this workshop by subscribing a week before you come. covid measures will be followed in the shared environment to ensure it safety.

postgraduate program, workshop

Krõõt Juurak AUTODOMESTICATION

27-31 October 2020 / a.pass

Autodomestication

As a performer you provide your audience with something that cannot be measured in material terms. As regards the activity that produces the cultural content of the commodity, your labour involves a series of activities that are not normally recognised as work – activities involved in defining and determining cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and, on a strategic level, public opinion. As a performer you are primarily a producer of subjectivity. Typically, an artist’s value does not lie in what they “do” but in what they “are”. Now, remember, for example, how Richard Florida described the processes of gentrification caused by the migration of artists and creative workers – the artists may or may not be aware of the value of their mere presence but on a larger scale they produce “results” simply by existing. Survival in the (performing) arts requires creativity that goes beyond the artworks one creates. In fact, a typical performing artist spends about 99 percent of their time off stage – as an audience member, a critic, an administrator, a networker, friend, mentor, student, teacher and so on. Inventing and re-inventing oneself on and offstage, adjusting to various situations, restrictions, moving from project to project, one residency to the next, brimming with creative energy, training and forever educating oneself is the way forward.

postgraduate program, workshop

Elke van Campenhout Debunking the Myth

16-20 November 2020 / online

or The Emperor’s New Clothes Revisited

NEW DATES!

16.-20. Nov 2020

To be a contemporary artist comes with a lot of prerequisites these days: unspoken discourse rules, critical norms, and a general salonfähig consensus about values like fluidity, horizontality, collaboration, etcetera… Often these values are taken for granted while a strong discourse is ruling the artist’s world, zooming in on any hint of postcolonial insensitivity, patriarchal blindness, gender observations, and faintly non-consensual power use. This attitude stems from the bountiful history of feminist and queer studies, cultural studies insights, and a general growing awareness of her-stories and the damage done by biased educations and cultural misgivings. But at the same time there are also a lot of other untouched territories underlying these value markers: 19th century romanticism, liberalism, humanism, … Each one carrying within it a very specific view of what it means to be a human being in this world, how we are connected and what we are able to convey.

project, workshop

Polyset 2022W4-7 a.pass, Brussels

24 January-11 February 2022 / a.pass

Image copyright: Robbie Shone

POLYSET HAS BEEN PROLONGED BY A WEEK, TO END ON FRI FEB 18TH

SCHEDULE

[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

Open Call