The House of Spirits

block information, research

a.pass research centre The House of Spirits

10 May-24 July 2015

House of Spirits

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.

Every shaman puts the individual case traces in another context, allowing them to resonate and breed new meanings and connections. The shamans together develop the Book, which documents the changing protocols regulating the workings of the House.

The beginning of every week (Monday evenings) is marked by a shared ritual with the participants, in which the reading of the shaman/conservator is revealed and the new shaman takes possession of the House. After the ritual the group engages in the weekly reading session (the Reading Circle).

At the end of the block (just before end week), the House of Spirits opens its doors to the public. In the form of a weeklong celebration, a curated exhibition, a mini-festival, a performative conference, or whatever at that point seems to be the most relevant to the group, the House functions in that week as a kind of temporal 3D publications that offers guests an insight in the work developed throughout the block.

block information

Self-Interview & Peer-to-Peer mentoring

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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block

UNTOUCHABLE / UNACCEPTABLE / INTANGIBLE

1 May-29 August 2015

about the imaginative aesthetics of change

Yupik Shaman Nushagak

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

What is the possible relationship between art and social change? When forced into the corner of economic demands on the one hand and the need for aesthetic subversion on the other, a lot of artist workers feel the need to defend their ‘right to be’ through critical strategies and political transparency. 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.

workshop

Pierre Joachim / Geert Opsomer / Pierre Rubio ECOLOGY OF AFFECTS

25-29 May 2015 / a.pass

Studio 54, Halloween 1978, Hasse Persson

'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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workshop

Sara Manente / Marcos Simoes THIS PLACE

1-5 June 2015 / a.pass

this place, Sara Manente & Marcos Simoes - photograph Marcello Mardones

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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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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workshop

Oscar Parada TOWARDS A COLLECTIVE RITUAL

22-26 June 2015 / a.pass

circle

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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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.