Hello readers,

In the essay "Conflict Embodiment. Notes from dancing on both sides of Atlantic" you are holding in your hands, I delve into the research project I am busy with, which departs from the dancing experience in processes of migration.

Frictioning different dance traditions understood as "folkloric", "popular" and "academic" from the souths and norths, these lines inquire about the potential of translation in dances and what mother tongues could be in dancing/performing. By trying to embrace the complexity of the untranslatable, I aim to unfold Conflicted Embodiment as a research device from the question: How does a body navigate migration, colonialism and dancing?

You are warmly welcome to move desacatadamente with me.

cate

In these circumstances: On collaboration, performativity, self-organisation and transdisciplinarity in research-based practices assembles curatorial, artistic and pedagogical practices inspired by a.pass: an inter- national artistic and educational research environment focusing on performativity and scenography.

This book discloses a history of the methods of artistic research in the context of the academisation of art education, and an abrasion of the once unbridled scene of artist-run organisations in Northern Europe. There are 35 contributions, many of them collaborative, ranging from concrete projects to inter- rogative speculations about artistic research. It aims to demonstrate how artistic research operates institutionally through a complex intertwinement of practices and how a.pass, over the past 14 years, has carved out a space for artistic research to imbricate in fields of both art and education, and stir the sediments of disciplinary enclosures.

“The artist’s experience of being inside art institutions, starting from the effort made to be accepted in order to develop one’s art practice, then the experience of going through them, and while in them, the many ways of having to learn how to be inside. This will in several ways inform the development of an artist’s practice, for the good or for the bad. Making this publication has been an attempt at recognizing and dealing with, rather than avoiding, the tensions that exist in the relationship between artists and art institutions at a time when most art institutions themselves are under the pressure of austerity-politics.”

The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institutionconstitutes the result of Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s PhD research in the arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, University of Antwerp and a.pass, advance performance and scenography studies, Brussels.

Authors for the research seminar ‘Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description: ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ, EVI OLDE RIKKERT, FELIX RAPP, JOEP VOSSEBELD, JULIA DAHEE HONG AND PIA LOUWERENS 

Copy-editor for ‘The Artist Job Description, For the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution’: HEMANT SAREEN 
Co-Editor for thickets: FABIEN SILVESTRE SUZOR
Proof-reader: SARAH PREDDY
Graphic design: NINA BAČUN AND ROBERTA BRATOVIĆ (OAZA, ZAGREB)
Printer: SVEUČILIŠNA TISKARA, ZAGREB

Edition: 400

In this Player’s Handbook you’ll find the rules of a Fantasy Role Playing Game: Draconis Lacrimae. It can be played by a group of 3 to 6 players.

First, you will create the Characters, then you will create the World and, lastly, you will Role-Play to escape from the inside of The Dragon. The characters come from different background universes and they all meet in The Dragon’s guts after being swallowed/injected/tele-transported/etc. by their own dragons. In Draconis Lacrimæ there are no dungeons and dragons, the dungeon is the Dragon. The adventurers must join forces in order to “escape” from it, whatever escape might mean. 

This game is an invitation for the readers to play themselves otherwise and encounter otherness as an accomplice. In addressing certain construction paradigms of the self, the book invites the reader/player to welcome the alterity we have in us, in order to revisit fundamental archetypes of fiction. It aims at creating interstices that can open up to another view of the self and its social configurations.

Autobiography is used as a ground from which to start playing, as the material that one has at hand to transform, craft, dissolve, rebuild, paint, glitch, etc. Auto-fiction serves here as a tool to resist predefined categorizations of identity, as a technique of transformation and orientation in a world saturated with categories.

Hopefully, along the way, our fictional and real selves will start bleeding onto each other, the infinite threads of our possible selves hanging around us connected to our play partners, known and unknown.

“The Dragon is the figure that extends the couple, that expands the kin, that narrates the community. The Dragon is the shared collective fiction that appears within the mosh.”

The publication consists of two parts:

"Draconis Lacrimae. The Player’s Handbook” (A5, 160 pages), divided in three chapters: Character Building, World Building and Role-Playing.

“Draconis Lacrimae. After action report” (A5, 8 pages). A booklet that accompanies the book. An after action report contains the stories created during a game. This booklet is a draft of the fiction and characters created while playing Draconis Lacrimae.

CLEAN ROOM is the name of a performance project created by Juan Domínguez and several collaborators that was developed as a three-season series with six episodes in each season. Its name refers to a spotless space, with low levels of external pollutants and controlled environmental parameters that guarantee minimum interferences in the developments of experiments.

DIRTY ROOM is CLEAN ROOM against the light, the negative of CLEAN ROOM, a collection of outlines, notes, ideas, reflections, photographic materials, maps, manifestos, fragments from diaries, transcriptions of conversations, interviews, email exchanges, memoirs, memories and scripts, among other documents from the working and research process that led to CLEAN ROOM. Through this book we invite you to enter the labyrinth of this long and multifaceted process, which had followed simultaneously different directions, moved by different concerns. 

Juan Domínguez, a maker and organizer within the fields of choreography and performing arts; and Victoria Pérez-Royo, performing arts researcher.

Where Do You Draw The Line Between Art and Politics? consists of a series of interviews with individuals who have been active in various capacities at the intersection of art and politics. Between historical documentation, political memory, dialogic reflections and motivational support, the publication focuses on the experiences, commitments, and feelings that animate and inform aesthetic priorities in social spaces both within and outside of art institutions; a repository designed to inspire and enourage the politicization of aesthetics, as opposed to the aestheticization of politics. 

Davide Tidoni is an artist and researcher working with sound and listening. With a particular focus on direct experience, observation, and action, he creates works of different formats that include live performance, intervention, walk, video, audio recording, and text scores. He is interested in the use of sound and music in counter-culture and political struggles and has published a sound based field research on the northern italian ultras group Brescia 1911 (The Sound of Normalisation, 2018).

Published 2021.

Lilith, Losing, Lavender: A love letter to love, is a publication based on stretching the subjectivities in love from the formulation I love You, as a way of seeing what is under the gaze of western romantic ideas and heteropatriarchal structures that may reveal problems in language about love.

It gathers a collection of texts written throughout the artistic research trajectory of Andrea Zavala Folache. With different narrative styles as diary, love letters, score instructions, this collection imbricates ideas of love, art and life as an essay about conditions of attachment.

In the interstice of several practices as dance, writing and drawing and different spaces as the dance studio, the atelier, the classroom, the theatre and the white cube, Andrea’s research focuses on non chronological dramaturgies for the emergence of surprise or unexpectedness.

Published 2021. 

'To discover a fossil on your tibia: scories and other mutations of scores' is a collection of texts exploring the score as a choreographic tool for writing.

Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.

Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

FORMS OF LIFE OF FORMS brings artistic research into form – not merely as an aesthetic question but as a social and political one. Indeed, there are no politics without form! With Forms of Life, Rob Ritzen curated several “Moments” that assembled works, collective readings, and other references into a single installation. This publication reshuffles documentation of these “Moments” as a visual reflection of the trajectory of this research.

Rob Ritzen works as a curator with a background in philosophy. His curatorial practice is focusing on self-organized and cooperative formats. Consciously positioned at the margins of established institutions and outside of market-oriented spaces, his practice is placed in close association with communities of cultural practitioners. His initiatives are attempts to reconfigure the politics of making art and alternative forms of production and presentation.

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

ZOOLOGICAL VANDALISM by Sina Seifee in collaboration with editor Renan Lauran and designer Foad Farahani, is immersion in the compiling and composing of Seifee’s notes on medieval bestiaries, and placing them in sequential order. It is the first chapter of a series that creates context and opens small descriptive steps towards (what Latour might call) “knowing interestingly” about bestiaries. It is a speculative adventure in bio-techno tales and old styles of knowing. As an “ecology of obligation” with Iranian sensuality and its ardent materiality, somewhere in the menagerie of found and feral animal videos on Whatsapp and Telegram, is Seifee’s undisciplined grounding in visual crafts.

Sina Seifee researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance, and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his MA in Media Arts in KHM Cologne. In 2017 he finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.

The book Writing Scores is the result of 3 months of written dialogues produced within the group of artistic researchers of a.pass during the Block I /2014 curated by Lilia Mestre. Questions on art, dreams, politics, violence, research, life, practice, bureaucracy, resistance, etcetera, … are addressed and later on re-addressed, revisited and assembled into a book with (at least) three faces… 

BUBBLE SCORE – The Relation between Performance and Writing is the third book of the ScoreScapes publications series. The book contains texts by a.pass researchers, collages as well as Scores for the Reader inserted at the back of the book. 

The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.

the project - a project about love and intimacy. 'It is a method that touches on (or rather, crashes into) some (artistic) ‘taboo’s’, surrounding the ways in which the autobiographical, one’s intimate life and those who partake in that, can and ought to be dealt with within one’s artistic work. She ‘gets away with it’ and I think the reason for that is that she doesn’t try to spare herself or seek a safety zone, nor does she shun her artistic, author’s responsibility: she is constantly both in the middle of the sticky hot soup in which she is cooking her research and she doing the stirring, the spicing and the serving.' - Philippine Hoegen