SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST



postgraduate program

UNTOUCHABLE/UNACCEPTABLE/INTANGIBLE

CURATED BY ELKE VAN CAMPENHOUT & NICOLAS GALEAZZI & PIERRE RUBIO

1 August 2015

about the imaginative aesthetics of change

 

 

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.

In a famous essay, Isabelle Stengers borrows from Dostoevski, through Deleuze, a conceptual character : the Idiot. Stubbornly believing that “there is always something more important”, the Idiot slows everybody down and consequently opens ‘interstices in the soil of good reasons’. During this block, we will use this Idiot figure as a conceptual totem, ‘in the presence of which’ we might challenge our aesthetic certainties and ethical values.

Over the past decade a renewed interest occurred in the arts in practices that have been labelled as ‘neo-animism’, ‘neo-shamanism’, ‘object oriented performance art’, ‘speculative’, etc…. These movements seem inseparable from the general crisis of modernist avant-garde forms of art that, one way or another, based their authority on the exclusive reference to progress, universality, authoritarian formalism, self-referentiality, critical conceptualism and so on and so on…. In that sense they announce a large and deep unfolding crisis, because one does not get rid so easily of the Modernist agenda of aesthetic and political concerns that has served as a compass for the Euro-American art scene since its unfolding at the beginning of the 20th century. Nevertheless, a necessary crisis, because the aesthetic mind frames of the current arts scene are blind to the actual novelty of the current era, marked by a reevaluation, through practice, of the models of production of aesthetics and subjectivity.  New models that pose a threat to the accepted contemporary artist identity and its well-defined role within society. “New Age fabulation!, Idiotic!, Superficial!, Overly therapeutical!, Dangerously spiritual!, Fuzzy dreams!, Pseudo-Metaphysical!, Not serious enough!…”, a whole bunch of despising critiques erupt regularly. Mocking what produces discomfort and what demands a redefinition of the ways one reads art and ultimately of who one is.

Here in a.pass, when we practice and discuss the outcomes of aesthetic speculations, of magical practices and of spiritual performativity, it is because these practices/modes of thought are too often defined as purely utopian, ineffable, abstract or just disconnected imaginations unable to get a grip on reality. In response, we want to consider them as forms of agency, concerns, as localized potentialities. The sense we can make out of such unacceptable, untouchable, intangible proposals are linked to their consequences, to the modifications in the understanding of the present they perform.

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.

 

Pierre Rubio, March 2015





postgraduate program, research center

2015 BLOCK II

1 May-31 July 2015

2015 POST-GRADUATE PROGRAM AND RESEARCH PROJECTS SUMMARY
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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.

Read more..

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.


performative publishing

Yari

12 May 2015

image

 

 


performative publishing

Ricardo

12 May 2015

image

performative publishing

Nicolas

12 May 2015

image

performative publishing

Elke

12 May 2015

image

image


performative publishing

Vanja

12 May 2015

image

imageimage


performative publishing

Mavi

12 May 2015

image

imageimage


performative publishing

Kleoni

12 May 2015

image

performative publishing

Veronica

12 May 2015

image

performative publishing

Pierre / Super power

12 May 2015

image

performative publishing

Thiago / Fool dice totem

12-12 May 2015

image

imageimage


performative publishing

Isabel

12 May 2015

image

imageimage


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."
Read more..

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
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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.

Read more..

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.
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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
Read more..

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.
Read more..

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...
Read more..

performative publishing, research center

Bureau d'Espoir SELF-INTERVIEW Elke – Elle

1 September-31 December 2015 / Abbeye de Forest

MNSTRY
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.
Read more..

performative publishing

Audrey

29 April 2021

image


APPLY TO THE A.PASS PROGRAMMES

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

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

Maximum file size: 50 MB, maximum 5 files.

X  

add file..


SIGN UP TO EVENT
selected :
yes
no
ex-participant


ORDER