Notes on The School For Temporary Liveness

A collection of brief descriptions of Toine's movement performances- and installations since 1979. The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which Toine's ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into a writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.

Each of the 120 selected works has been translated in the most concise way into words and sentences.

Because of the possible role that the book could play in the discussion about conserving and documenting volatile works of art, Toine included related texts by other writers who directly or indirectly responded  to my writing: Marcus Bergner  Hannes Böhringer  Florian Cramer  Jan Van Den  Dobbelsteen  Nell Donkers  Tim Etchells  Ger Groot  Geert Koevoets Thomas Körtvelyessy  Dom H. van der Laan  Dick Raaijmakers  Jan Laurens Siesling  Sandra Smets  Hans Stevens  ieke Trinks  Samuel Vriezen  Ciel Werts - Emilie Gallier
Editing and text advice   Kathrin Wolkowicz  Dick van Teylingen

translations:  Simon Benson  Maaike Trimbach  Samuel Vriezen  Helen Adkins  Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

English version

graphic design: Koos Siep
Edition: 2 x 250 copies

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

Since the late 1970s Matt Mullican has developed a practice of performing under hypnosis that extends from his investigations into representation and subjective projection, and from his efforts to “enter the image” and embody a fictional character, a body of work that offers an exceptional perspective on repetition and renewal in performance practice.

This book is the outcome of an extensive research project into Mullican’s hypnosis performances, undertaken within the frame of If I Can’t Dance’s Performance in Residence programme with invited researcher Vanessa Desclaux, and a two-day Class of Masters with Mullican on character construction. Desclaux takes up the question of personification in light of her analysis of Mullican’s hypnosis performances. A selection of Mullican’s photographs and works on paper are reproduced in this book.

Produced on the occasion of the event Unbidden Tongues #6: Cutting Out Reading the New York Times, Saturday, April 9 from 4-6pm. The event unfolded over a newly conceived spoken-word version of Lorraine O’Grady’s collage series Cutting Out the New York Times. The initial work consists of 26 “cut-out” or “found” newspaper poems that O’Grady made on consecutive Sundays from June to November in 1977.

It is the sixth title from Unbidden Tongues, a series edited by Isabelle Sully that focuses on previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civility and civic life—particularly so in relation to language.

Contributions by: Julien de Smet, Ronny Heiremans, Heike Langsdorf, Vanessa Müller, Filip Van Dingenen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Clémentine Vaultier, Katleen Vermeir.

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera answers the question posed in the second book by transforming life into voices and presenting possible mindsets through co-authoring a factual fiction. As such, it constitutes a mental space in which ficti­tious characters find an almost disturbing expansion of their thoughts. Accordingly, the book can be considered as an alle­gory of human thoughts as (possible) actions: what could happen becomes what does happen. For better and worse.

October 2019