Super Sweet Tea Party takes place in the smoking room as part of 5614660 contemplations around the politics of hosting and the wider frame of Diwan. It's a space between the poetic and the rhetorical, inviting you to lick your lips twice and melt the sugar crystals holding the lips together to open them in ease.
"Diwan refers to a reception or council chamber in traditional Arabic architecture. It serves as a multi-functional space where gatherings, meetings, discussions, and parties take place. Within the context of Arab culture, it is the ultimate hosting space, existing in open courtyard private houses in the Levant and public spaces like the Alhambra."
"(Dīwān) - Collection or Anthology**: A " ديوان " (dīwān) is a collection or anthology of poems by a single poet. Interestingly, the term originally referred to a register or account book, which implies a sense of order and organization. Just as rooms in a house serve different purposes, the poems in a dīwān may cover a range of themes, emotions, and styles. The dīwān as a whole can be thought of as a space where each poem occupies a room, contributing to the overall aesthetic and thematic composition."
During the Abolish-the-Family Week, we propose a session focused on hacking the institution of marriage as a means to secure Belgian nationality. This session will draw on insights from legal advisors and individuals with relevant experiences. The presentation will outline the necessary steps, potential risks, and strategies for mitigating these risks. Collectively we want to explore how to transform this approach into a collective endeavour and create a community-based process where knowledge and experiences are shared and leveraged.
Caroline Honorien et Rosanna Puyol Boralevi présentent leur travail de traduction collective et de recherche pour le magazine The Funambulist. Au fil des articles, elles développent des outils et apparaissent certaines similitudes. Au cœur des textes il y a souvent la question de l’apprentissage : plus qu’une relation située au sujet de l’article, les auteurices racontent souvent comment iels ont accès à un savoir précis, qu’il s’agisse de rapports familiaux, militants, affectifs… Cette approche de la transmission informe particulièrement notre travail : d’abord traduire pour comprendre.
Oh to be skull at all! To be that miserable hunchbacked vertebrae sacrum who sells its fibulae in the evening. But to really possess the full extent of the radius, to be the master of the radius, in short: to think!
- excerpt from Eighteen Seconds by Kari Artaud Heimskog.
In this session we will be sharing a method of script processing that derives from kinaesthetic imagination and experimental anatomical charts. Starting from the idea of a theatre play that is both based on- as well as staged within specific bodies, a selection of shorter manuscripts will be transformed into meta-portraits of ourselves and further lay the ground for expanded choreographic scores.
5 Broken Pianos is a collection of 5 pieces that were written or prepared for 5 different(ly) broken pianos that are situated in PAF, with their unique sound quality in mind. The sounds that have a "unconventional" timbre thanks to the broken state of a part of these pianos form the heart of the pieces, looking with acceptance and love towards these broken states and showing the beauty that can be found within them!
In this workshop we will explore our voices as tools for discovering our ‘vocalic-body’, the surrounding environment, listening and relating to the other. Approaching the voice from a choreographic lens, it proposes to enter a playful space informed by Melissa K. Nelson’s ‘Getting Dirty; The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, asking: how can the voice and its physical mechanisms (diaphragm, lungs, breath, tongue) be engaged to come closer to a (natural) environment through vibration and pleasure? What becomes when engaging in an intimacy with an unknown/wild/non-human environment, through the voice? And how can this inform our sense of presence and interconnectedness in the time and space we inhabit together?
Each session will start with warm up and basic vocal embodiment exercises, then various scores will be proposed. No vocal knowledge or singing experience necessary, just a willingness to explore your voice and move your body :)
This workshop proposes semi-fictional, anonymous and score-based collective writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns and desires across different positionalities, in the realms of relationships, intimacy and (a)sexuality.
Engaging tools from live role play and dance improvisation we will prepare scores for writing, editing and printing together.
There will be several moments collectively and individually for each participant to adjust their level of anonymity and to decide whether they want their material to make its way into printed matter.
The booklet will be distributed at PAF SU on a pay-what-you-want basis. Once the material costs are covered all proceeds will go to save up for repairs and upgrades of the Paf risograph workshop.
On the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and the notion of iconoclasm, working from Mikel Dufrenne, Herbert Marcuse, and the Situationists.
A scientific experiment to explore the big and small, odd and easy, scammy, sneaky and radical ways family abolition* could show up in one’s life.This project emerges from our experience in the Berlin-based Family Abolition Reading and Action Group, as well as the Hologram, a peer-to-peer care protocol for viral autonomous support. We will first discuss the core arguments of family abolition, addressing the isolation of the couple, adult supremacy, gendered domestic labor, etc. Then we will recruit conspirators for the Bravery Club to conduct on-person research with us. We will meet daily for four days to debrief, support, and egg each other on. The Club is both a boot camp (getting us out of our comfort zones) and a research group, taking its own medicine.
*For reference, see Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation
Explore the rich meeting of projected and reflected light and integrate digital colorscapes into our shared environment. In a collaborative workshop we will familiarize ourselves with standard visuals software (Resolume Arena) and draw from our collective backgrounds and vantage points to create site-specific installations.
It's a good idea to have Resolume Arena software downloaded ahead of this session. The demo version is available here.
In working with this piece, the performer creates a space of encounters where learning takes precedence. She aims to learn how to build her own analogue synthesiser. She works with doubles and doubling, with intensities and on edges. She finds herself lost in a sea of possibilities; Water, water everywhere, not any drop to drink. She gets from A to B to bee to be to being to come into being, to be two people at once, to forget what happened that night, to be here and there at the same time. She asks herself: What do I already know and what else do I need to know to proceed?
We propose a workshop that comes from our experience in grassroots politics - mainly occupations of different kinds. We have been involved in forest occupations – to fight against the displacement of villages in order for a coal mine to expand – as well as urban squatting for homeless people and people on the move. Within those spaces, we have discovered and lived a multitude of future building practices in which people came together to reimagine how society in relation to space and nature can look like. Spaces of resistance and solidarity - occupations, community centres and private houses that open up their doors for those in need, squats, political actions, protest camps - all of them create alternative knowledges. We are interested in stories of those everyday forms of resistance, and propose countermapping as a way of telling and sharing them.
I feel watched by the surveillance industry and now i want to watch them. A session of learning together and teaching each other in the art of investigation and suspicion. Looking for ways to do and use research with the ambition of unmasking, plotting and evoking change. Sharpening our artistic skills used for research to understand the crime scene that is our society today. We will be very concretely investigating the surveillance industry and using artistic tools to do so. Who’s watching who, why and how and will you accept our freshly baked cookies?
Oh to be skull at all! To be that miserable hunchbacked vertebrae sacrum who sells its fibulae in the evening. But to really possess the full extent of the radius, to be the master of the radius, in short: to think!
- excerpt from Eighteen Seconds by Kari Artaud Heimskog.
In this session we will be sharing a method of script processing that derives from kinaesthetic imagination and experimental anatomical charts. Starting from the idea of a theatre play that is both based on- as well as staged within specific bodies, a selection of shorter manuscripts will be transformed into meta-portraits of ourselves and further lay the ground for expanded choreographic scores.
In this workshop we will explore our voices as tools for discovering our ‘vocalic-body’, the surrounding environment, listening and relating to the other. Approaching the voice from a choreographic lens, it proposes to enter a playful space informed by Melissa K. Nelson’s ‘Getting Dirty; The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, asking: how can the voice and its physical mechanisms (diaphragm, lungs, breath, tongue) be engaged to come closer to a (natural) environment through vibration and pleasure? What becomes when engaging in an intimacy with an unknown/wild/non-human environment, through the voice? And how can this inform our sense of presence and interconnectedness in the time and space we inhabit together?
Each session will start with warm up and basic vocal embodiment exercises, then various scores will be proposed. No vocal knowledge or singing experience necessary, just a willingness to explore your voice and move your body :)
This workshop proposes semi-fictional, anonymous and score-based collective writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns and desires across different positionalities, in the realms of relationships, intimacy and (a)sexuality.
Engaging tools from live role play and dance improvisation we will prepare scores for writing, editing and printing together.
There will be several moments collectively and individually for each participant to adjust their level of anonymity and to decide whether they want their material to make its way into printed matter.
The booklet will be distributed at PAF SU on a pay-what-you-want basis. Once the material costs are covered all proceeds will go to save up for repairs and upgrades of the Paf risograph workshop.
NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.
–Diane di Prima
You are a feminist watching Poor Things, a transsexual beguiled by TERFS, yelling “Boycott Carrefour” to find yourself at its checkout “one last time”, and leave your lover for the revolution that doesn’t take place. No one way works? A constant absence inherent in any presence? Excessive nonbegetting? Detached zealotry? Consequential complicity? What’s left/Left? There’s a simultaneity: a constancy and unreliability in consistency. So to “rebuild the idea of a global left”, borrowing from documenta 14, we bet on negative inhabitation, circumlocution, the group. Materials may include (tbs) Claire Fontaine’s Human Strike (2017), Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism (2023), Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), Rebecca Comay’s work on “resistance”, Rizvana Bradley's “recursive deconstruction”. Using “diagram” and “performance”, we hope to swiftly produce scripts/scores.
Explore the rich meeting of projected and reflected light and integrate digital colorscapes into our shared environment. In a collaborative workshop we will familiarize ourselves with standard visuals software (Resolume Arena) and draw from our collective backgrounds and vantage points to create site-specific installations.
It's a good idea to have Resolume Arena software downloaded ahead of this session. The demo version is available here.
We propose a workshop that comes from our experience in grassroots politics - mainly occupations of different kinds. We have been involved in forest occupations – to fight against the displacement of villages in order for a coal mine to expand – as well as urban squatting for homeless people and people on the move. Within those spaces, we have discovered and lived a multitude of future building practices in which people came together to reimagine how society in relation to space and nature can look like. Spaces of resistance and solidarity - occupations, community centres and private houses that open up their doors for those in need, squats, political actions, protest camps - all of them create alternative knowledges. We are interested in stories of those everyday forms of resistance, and propose countermapping as a way of telling and sharing them.
A performance glued piece by piece from texts, video, movement and self-massage instructions. The fragments come together in four different acts to tell a story about you or me or all of us together living now and here.
Abolishing the constructed and often violent social border between adults and children implies recognizing that we reproduce the seeds of hierarchy in our daily relationships, both as parents and non-parents. Our world is caught up in cycles of abuse and at their root lies our dehumanisation of children. Every hierarchy appeals through analogy to the rules of adults over children. Of all systems of oppression, that of children is the least questioned.For collective liberation to gain strength, we must help build youth autonomy, starting by questioning our our social positions of authority as adults. This is essential to counteract the spiral of violence in all systems of domination. Inspired by activists from youth liberation and family abolition movements, we will use the potential of the Hologram Protocol as a social practice to identify harmful patterns and build solidarity, curiosity and trust across generations.
a workshop based on material from a research on the relationship between the obscure, the body and the productions of the unconscious. By Obscure I mean / the night / the occult / the devil / violence / death / In other words, the place of our intimate madness, that unsightly part of ourselves that we can't get rid of and which is sometimes unpleasant to look at. Taking the flip side from the image of the nymph, I explore the figure of the monster - the embodiment of the subterranean powers of the psyche. I'm interested in female characters, mythical, like the Erynies, the Black Madonna, the goddess Kali, or real, like the painter Artemisia Gentileschi or the poet and activist Colette Peignot. Characters who embody the need to acknowledge the existence of violence and who underline that there is something disturbing for the established order in looking at the other side of reason.
Che Vuoi is the synth song theater solo project of the Brussels based performer and musician, gladys. Mostly inspired by literature, her music sits at the crossroads of different genres: spoken word, noise, electronic pop. Her performances, infused with theater, aim to experiment, explore and enter in a dialogue with the audience.
Co-writing of music for all the broken pianos in PAF, aiming to share our fresh compositions through an evening of ambulant piano listening. No prior experience with music theory or technique required!
In this workshop we will explore our voices as tools for discovering our ‘vocalic-body’, the surrounding environment, listening and relating to the other. Approaching the voice from a choreographic lens, it proposes to enter a playful space informed by Melissa K. Nelson’s ‘Getting Dirty; The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literatures’, asking: how can the voice and its physical mechanisms (diaphragm, lungs, breath, tongue) be engaged to come closer to a (natural) environment through vibration and pleasure? What becomes when engaging in an intimacy with an unknown/wild/non-human environment, through the voice? And how can this inform our sense of presence and interconnectedness in the time and space we inhabit together?
Each session will start with warm up and basic vocal embodiment exercises, then various scores will be proposed. No vocal knowledge or singing experience necessary, just a willingness to explore your voice and move your body :)
This workshop proposes semi-fictional, anonymous and score-based collective writing as a tool for articulating shared concerns and desires across different positionalities, in the realms of relationships, intimacy and (a)sexuality.
Engaging tools from live role play and dance improvisation we will prepare scores for writing, editing and printing together.
There will be several moments collectively and individually for each participant to adjust their level of anonymity and to decide whether they want their material to make its way into printed matter.
The booklet will be distributed at PAF SU on a pay-what-you-want basis. Once the material costs are covered all proceeds will go to save up for repairs and upgrades of the Paf risograph workshop.
NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.
–Diane di Prima
You are a feminist watching Poor Things, a transsexual beguiled by TERFS, yelling “Boycott Carrefour” to find yourself at its checkout “one last time”, and leave your lover for the revolution that doesn’t take place. No one way works? A constant absence inherent in any presence? Excessive nonbegetting? Detached zealotry? Consequential complicity? What’s left/Left? There’s a simultaneity: a constancy and unreliability in consistency. So to “rebuild the idea of a global left”, borrowing from documenta 14, we bet on negative inhabitation, circumlocution, the group. Materials may include (tbs) Claire Fontaine’s Human Strike (2017), Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism (2023), Naeem Mohaiemen’s Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), Rebecca Comay’s work on “resistance”, Rizvana Bradley's “recursive deconstruction”. Using “diagram” and “performance”, we hope to swiftly produce scripts/scores.
Preforming the Triolectic Archives takes on ad-hoc problematisationings of the relationship between various pseudo-political specificities inherent to (con)temporary notions on the concept of history in regards to the material-productive means of Hommersåk/Hestånå Architecture & Taxonomic Triennale (HATT)’s recent activity as time-witnessing practice and the notion of a "soon-to-be-gone" archival dissection, through various emblematic display modes on time, i.e dissecting the not-to-come assemblage of trialectics
Disgusting movements engage with aggressiveness, vulnerability, masculinity and femininity, disgust, trauma, pleasure, care and innocence all at the same time. Moving through patterns such as drooling, nose picking and humping, we’re questioning how we relate to hierarchy in our bodies. Can we hold the loathsome and repulsive with care?
*this work-in-progress contains pop cultural sediments of our rehearsals to spotify hits such as; Disgust for the poor; Disgustingly sad fall indie folk song; Disgustingly Horny hozier; Not jealous just disgusted; Rick ross features are disgusting; Disgustingly in love; Nasty boy; Nasty girl; Nasty freestyle; - all seemingly bound up with sexuality and love. x
a movement-guided hyperlocal excursion. We'll move through different spaces, locations and rooms in PAF, being aware of and inspired by the bodies that accompany us in our surroundings. Based on somatic practices and sound release, I will guide us through specific gestures we repeat rhythmically over and over again - together producing a kind of shared continuum of failure and sweat.
This 3-day workshop provides tools for accessing our innate ability to perform, and source our power from a personal, vulnerable, safe and genuine place. Participants of all levels are invited to challenge their perspectives and personal barriers around lyrical/vocal performance.
Day 1 -
To open the space and introduce myself, I will perform from my latest work, which combines spoken word, vocalisation, movement, live music and audience engagement. Then I’ll lead a workshop on performance fundamentals, and a discussion around the alchemic and transformative nature of performance.
Small Altars is an autoethnographic exploration of family, grief, rituals, and faith. Through the assembly of religious ephemera, family photos, and found letters, the artist reconstructs her grandmother's prayer book, examining simultaneously traditional, religious, contemporary, and secular modalities of devotion.
Day 1: On The Semiotics of Devotion.
The inaugural session will map out the historical and cultural underpinnings of shrines & altars across diverse religious and cultural contexts, dissecting the lexicon of sacred spaces. The talk will explore the myriad modalities through which devotion is articulated and understood, and present conventions of contemporary internet culture as secular devotional practices.
a workshop based on material from a research on the relationship between the obscure, the body and the productions of the unconscious. By Obscure I mean / the night / the occult / the devil / violence / death / In other words, the place of our intimate madness, that unsightly part of ourselves that we can't get rid of and which is sometimes unpleasant to look at. Taking the flip side from the image of the nymph, I explore the figure of the monster - the embodiment of the subterranean powers of the psyche. I'm interested in female characters, mythical, like the Erynies, the Black Madonna, the goddess Kali, or real, like the painter Artemisia Gentileschi or the poet and activist Colette Peignot. Characters who embody the need to acknowledge the existence of violence and who underline that there is something disturbing for the established order in looking at the other side of reason.
This workshop will be led by Toestand vzw, an organization that promotes the temporary use of vacant urban spaces to develop inclusive social and cultural dynamics based on meeting, action, and creation. For this workshop, the book "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded," will be used as a starting point to question the role of state funding in the organization of (our) struggles. While subsidies allow us to welcome a wide range of people into our spaces, enabling them to organize and create mental and physical space, they open the question of certain form of dependency and state control (formal or informal). This workshop aims to explore the relationship with state funding by creating a collective map of the dangers associated with institutional funding and how subsidies can be redirected to support our struggles. We will collectively search for the grey zones between grassroots and more institutionalized organizations, using the book as a foundation for our discussions and reflections.
This session is for all identities and ages, prioritising the voices of Black/POC darkskin trans, queer individuals. We'll start with a one-hour discussion about online spaces and digital notions of ‘community’ in the context of fascism and surveillance. Following that will be a one-hour music jam.
I have an armchair interest in psychoanalysis and experience facilitating peer support groups, sharing a talking and listening method with those coping with the failing public health system in the UK. The Peer Analysis Group at SU will build on this, testing a non-hierarchical method for group analysis. Meeting daily for 2 hours from 15 Aug, for up to 5 days.
What = A day-long drop-in film-making workshop + An evening screening of the film the next day
Where = a big airy room, ideally the one on the 3rd floor + We'd like the screening to happen in the screening room.
During the workshop: Participants are welcome to attend for 10 minutes or the whole day. We'll be there all day. They will be directed to "audition" (although it will actually be a first-come-first-serve dynamic) for a part in the film, acting out a scene from a list of scenes we have compiled. We will film both the auditions and the "real" scenes and use both in the final film. We will use the PAF closet/wardrobe to source costumes. We will use objects / furniture etc from PAF as set-dressing
During the screening: We will play the film in its entirety, loosely edited together + There will be popcorn and potentially a red carpet
Preforming the Triolectic Archives takes on ad-hoc problematisationings of the relationship between various pseudo-political specificities inherent to (con)temporary notions on the concept of history in regards to the material-productive means of Hommersåk/Hestånå Architecture & Taxonomic Triennale (HATT)’s recent activity as time-witnessing practice and the notion of a "soon-to-be-gone" archival dissection, through various emblematic display modes on time, i.e dissecting the not-to-come assemblage of trialectics
After looking at some quotes to think with concepts like abolition, refusal, communism, etc we'll play with astrology to generate a vision and a ritual. There will be three sessions, with some study, conversations, and writing.
Disgusting movements engage with aggressiveness, vulnerability, masculinity and femininity, disgust, trauma, pleasure, care and innocence all at the same time. Moving through patterns such as drooling, nose picking and humping, we’re questioning how we relate to hierarchy in our bodies. Can we hold the loathsome and repulsive with care?
*this work-in-progress contains pop cultural sediments of our rehearsals to spotify hits such as; Disgust for the poor; Disgustingly sad fall indie folk song; Disgustingly Horny hozier; Not jealous just disgusted; Rick ross features are disgusting; Disgustingly in love; Nasty boy; Nasty girl; Nasty freestyle; - all seemingly bound up with sexuality and love. x
This 3-day workshop provides tools for accessing our innate ability to perform, and source our power from a personal, vulnerable, safe and genuine place. Participants of all levels are invited to challenge their perspectives and personal barriers around lyrical/vocal performance.
Day 2 -
We will explore the spirit’s pull and how to access the intuitive parts of oneself in performance. We will discuss our barriers collectively and solutions to overcome them. I will facilitate performance exercises, free writing and spoken word prompts, with opportunities for participants to perform and ask for direction and feedback. Participants will prepare a piece of writing or performance for the last session held outdoors.
Small Altars is an autoethnographic exploration of family, grief, rituals, and faith. Through the assembly of religious ephemera, family photos, and found letters, the artist reconstructs her grandmother's prayer book, examining simultaneously traditional, religious, contemporary, and secular modalities of devotion. Each page serves as a tangible homage to the artist's relationship with her grandmother, and offers a glimpse into the sacred spaces of familial reverence and spiritual inheritance.
Day 2: Crafting Personal Mythologies & Exploring the Art of Devotional Expression.
In this practical workshop, participants will engage in a hands-on exploration of devotional practices, undertaking the creation of pocket altars informed by their personal mythologies.
Abolishing the constructed and often violent social border between adults and children implies recognizing that we reproduce the seeds of hierarchy in our daily relationships, both as parents and non-parents. Our world is caught up in cycles of abuse and at their root lies our dehumanisation of children. Every hierarchy appeals through analogy to the rules of adults over children. Of all systems of oppression, that of children is the least questioned.For collective liberation to gain strength, we must help build youth autonomy, starting by questioning our our social positions of authority as adults. This is essential to counteract the spiral of violence in all systems of domination. Inspired by activists from youth liberation and family abolition movements, we will use the potential of the Hologram Protocol as a social practice to identify harmful patterns and build solidarity, curiosity and trust across generations.
This is the second installation of the concert series “I LOVE MUSIC” where I'm trying to make something that means something for someone! Thank you for coming! Sending luv!
This workshop will be led by Toestand vzw, an organization that promotes the temporary use of vacant urban spaces to develop inclusive social and cultural dynamics based on meeting, action, and creation. For this workshop, the book "The Revolution Will Not Be Funded," will be used as a starting point to question the role of state funding in the organization of (our) struggles. While subsidies allow us to welcome a wide range of people into our spaces, enabling them to organize and create mental and physical space, they open the question of certain form of dependency and state control (formal or informal). This workshop aims to explore the relationship with state funding by creating a collective map of the dangers associated with institutional funding and how subsidies can be redirected to support our struggles. We will collectively search for the grey zones between grassroots and more institutionalized organizations, using the book as a foundation for our discussions and reflections.
We invite you to discover and discuss PAF’s Lichens. What derives from this collective symbiosis, what can we learn about interdependence, coexistence, and collaboration? In three sessions over two days, we reimagine the potential of ecological relations and transformations.
Day 1, Part A: Becoming Lichen - Collective Reading. A collective reading session and exchange of ideas opens a doorway to critical thinking of lichen as organism, relation and metaphor. Should we look to lichens as a heuristic model for human-nonhuman coexistence, or instead attempt to understand them on their own terms?
Day 1, Part B: Exploration and Mapping of Lichens at PAFWe journey through the lichen habitats of PAF: mapping, collecting and documenting various kinds of lichen, reflecting on their role and resilience in our ecosystems. What emerges from attending to these beings?
This session is for all Gender Queer Racialized individuals* and other Queer folk. Wura will perform an audiovisual work (poetry and movement) focused on Trans identity and the inner conflict externalised by white supremacist hegemonic society. What is daily living like when your existence is a political talking point? When every beat of your heart requires a yes or a no from others to survive? Do you live in inertia with parts of yourself—parts that you can’t access—and allow those with more vertical power, agency over your desires/truths? The session will also include a discussion.
Sonance: The quality of a voiced sound which is musical in character.
Sonanced Bodies: Refers to the embodied experience of musical qualities in voiced sound, intertwining physical sensations with harmonious characteristics, to create a sensory connection between multiple bodies, forming a collective engagement with musical expression.
This immersive journey seamlessly intertwines theory with practice, fostering an environment for musical and performative encounters. Delving into the realms of sonic and somatic expression, the gathering encourages a collaborative effort, emphasising shared creativity and the expressive potential inherent in communal making. Participants will work in groups to devise sound installations or performances, culminating in a collective celebration of creativity and experimentation.
What does it mean to be a good neighbour as a resident, a member of an artists' studio, a cultural worker in an institution?How do we untangle the complexities of our complicity in the displacement of marginalised communities?Through a group role playing game (RPG) and over two sessions, we will grapple with our individual and collective identities focusing on the infinite possibilities of practicing solidarity with communities fighting gentrification in our cities. The scenarios used in the game are based on stories encountered during Anti-Gentrification School, a Rotterdam based initiative.
A workshop split over two days. Consisting of talks, mediated discussion, and live performance. We are two, working on similar problems. Historically, we have worked in some degree of collaboration. We intend to suspend this collaboration in preparation for this workshop, which will therefore represent a (re)encounter produced in the wake of a temporary bifurcation.
For one, we are interested in the relation between death and the metabolism of surplus internal to the social. How do social relations of property and value intervene in processes of decay? For another, how can we be redeemed without dying? Death seems to always be the end of the story, and thus is always the condition of value. Narrative generates value, but death is the ground of both: these terms are perhaps thinkable only through their reciprocal mediation.
Children and dogs welcome. Bring earplugs.
I have an armchair interest in psychoanalysis and experience facilitating peer support groups, sharing a talking and listening method with those coping with the failing public health system in the UK. The Peer Analysis Group at SU will build on this, testing a non-hierarchical method for group analysis. Meeting daily for 2 hours from 15 Aug, for up to 5 days.
I propose a series of workshops on Shadows as Invisible. The first workshop uses the practice of recalling – telling one’s life story to another person in an intimate setting. How this act of recalling mingles with choice, and what choice tells us about context and identity. Having already addressed the space of fictionality that is present in telling our life stories from memory, we’ll then expand the potential space of bringing fictionality in our narratives as well as opening the possibilities to disrupt traditional chronology of events. The third part deals with the presence of violence in our stories. In part four, we explore how to include all the previous into a more dramaturgical and narrative context. How to tell a story on stage while (a) using memory as a tool of generating fiction, (b) expanding our understanding of time, and (c) including the hidden layers of violence?
A Future Letter To Consent is a performative reading of some of my messy notes on consent in dance. It is in collaboration with Elsa B. Mason, an illustrator who visually practices the deconstruction of white patriarchy and the need to address feminist failure. The text is based on the activist and discursive work that I have been doing with Engagement Arts (BE), an artist-led movement that was formed in the wake of #MeToo. I will also present my current research on 1) the heterosexual duet and 2) the performer's right to their own image.
After looking at some quotes to think with concepts like abolition, refusal, communism, etc we'll play with astrology to generate a vision and a ritual. There will be three sessions, with some study, conversations, and writing.
Cosmograms are objects that represent cosmologies or worldviews. They exist in iconographic, narrative, performative and architectural forms, and are produced within scientific, spiritual and and artistic contexts. They have been around for millennia. Think, for instance, of city plans of the Mayans, which reflected their idea of the cosmos, the spatial arrangement of the afterlife in Dante's Divine Comedy or the contemporary speculative cartographies of Alexandra Arènes.
Over two sessions lasting two and a half hours each we will make cosmogram drawings on circular pieces of paper, inspired by diagramming techniques and other infographics. Artists and non-artists from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome! You don’t need to be able to draw.
This 3-day workshop provides tools for accessing our innate ability to perform, and source our power from a personal, vulnerable, safe and genuine place. Participants of all levels are invited to challenge their perspectives and personal barriers around lyrical/vocal performance.
Day 3 -
Participants will perform pieces they curated themselves, either solo or together. We will finish with a live improvised jam session, encouraging experimentation and using the skills we’ve learned.
Abolishing the constructed and often violent social border between adults and children implies recognizing that we reproduce the seeds of hierarchy in our daily relationships, both as parents and non-parents. Our world is caught up in cycles of abuse and at their root lies our dehumanisation of children. Every hierarchy appeals through analogy to the rules of adults over children. Of all systems of oppression, that of children is the least questioned.For collective liberation to gain strength, we must help build youth autonomy, starting by questioning our our social positions of authority as adults. This is essential to counteract the spiral of violence in all systems of domination. Inspired by activists from youth liberation and family abolition movements, we will use the potential of the Hologram Protocol as a social practice to identify harmful patterns and build solidarity, curiosity and trust across generations.
P0SSE dance and reading, established in 2016, is a gathering for people wanting to spend time dancing and reading together. Each session is hosted by one or several practitioners that propose the materials: a text to read, a way to read the text and a way to move – generating discourse through doing.
For P0SSE @ Summer University, three practitioners from different disciplines will convene across three sessions, exploring topics such as social resonance, embodied voice, tuning and the nature of chorus.
Texts for sessions will be brief and will also be circulated in advance. You don't need to prepare in order to partake - come as you are. The duration of a session is 3 hours.
We invite you to discover and discuss PAF’s Lichens. What derives from this collective symbiosis, what can we learn about interdependence, coexistence, and collaboration? In three sessions over two days, we reimagine the potential of ecological relations and transformations.
Day 2: Transforming Lichens What is provoked from our newfound understanding? In this phase, we collaboratively engage in lichen expressions—whether drawing lichen found, brewing lichen tea, or embodying lichen in performative acts: together we may produce a collective text work, transforming our insights and documentation into shared experiences.
This session is for everyone, centering Black/POC queer individuals. It will include visually coded interactive images/video and poetry, considering: Creation without intention. The decline in art* by its definition of reflecting contradictions in reality. Coachella, consumerism and political identities. What pulls us to action? Power in understanding how reality is shaped by algorithms and visual propaganda. The session will include a meditation and a discussion.
Sonance: The quality of a voiced sound which is musical in character.
Sonanced Bodies: Refers to the embodied experience of musical qualities in voiced sound, intertwining physical sensations with harmonious characteristics, to create a sensory connection between multiple bodies, forming a collective engagement with musical expression.
This immersive journey seamlessly intertwines theory with practice, fostering an environment for musical and performative encounters. Delving into the realms of sonic and somatic expression, the gathering encourages a collaborative effort, emphasising shared creativity and the expressive potential inherent in communal making. Participants will work in groups to devise sound installations or performances, culminating in a collective celebration of creativity and experimentation.
What does it mean to be a good neighbour as a resident, a member of an artists' studio, a cultural worker in an institution?How do we untangle the complexities of our complicity in the displacement of marginalised communities?Through a group role playing game (RPG) and over two sessions, we will grapple with our individual and collective identities focusing on the infinite possibilities of practicing solidarity with communities fighting gentrification in our cities. The scenarios used in the game are based on stories encountered during Anti-Gentrification School, a Rotterdam based initiative.
A three day facilitation of a walk in the forest choreographed by the scansion of the Lacanian cut that ends an analytic session, but arranged also in relation to the specific use PAF makes of its adjacent forest, with its animals, wild and domesticated, its edible and non edible plants, its little and big puddles and stones, its creaking canopies, its means and ends, 'is that corn growing in that field??'
A workshop split over two days. Consisting of talks, mediated discussion, and live performance. We are two, working on similar problems. Historically, we have worked in some degree of collaboration. We intend to suspend this collaboration in preparation for this workshop, which will therefore represent a (re)encounter produced in the wake of a temporary bifurcation.
For one, we are interested in the relation between death and the metabolism of surplus internal to the social. How do social relations of property and value intervene in processes of decay? For another, how can we be redeemed without dying? Death seems to always be the end of the story, and thus is always the condition of value. Narrative generates value, but death is the ground of both: these terms are perhaps thinkable only through their reciprocal mediation.
Children and dogs welcome. Bring earplugs.
I have an armchair interest in psychoanalysis and experience facilitating peer support groups, sharing a talking and listening method with those coping with the failing public health system in the UK. The Peer Analysis Group at SU will build on this, testing a non-hierarchical method for group analysis. Meeting daily for 2 hours from 15 Aug, for up to 5 days.
A research performance that takes place in multiple places and forms, sharing our experience and excerpts of our ongoing dialogue, each time nurtured and branched out by the conversation with the audience. The performance is rooted in our search for alternatives to the capitalist alienation that penetrates and shapes all levels of everyday life. We will start with our childhood memories growing up in the ruins of Soviet Union, followed by Oscar's works in China and the US, Dimitri’s time at the anarchist homeless shelter in New York and his work in a squat for Palestinian asylum seekers in Brussels. The session will be a mix of video footage, excerpts of our diaries, literature readings and songs, concluding with snacks and drinks and questions towards the audience to share their take on the themes. How do alternatives arise? How do they fail? & Is there still hope and where to look for it?
I propose a series of workshops on Shadows as Invisible. The first workshop uses the practice of recalling – telling one’s life story to another person in an intimate setting. How this act of recalling mingles with choice, and what choice tells us about context and identity. Having already addressed the space of fictionality that is present in telling our life stories from memory, we’ll then expand the potential space of bringing fictionality in our narratives as well as opening the possibilities to disrupt traditional chronology of events. The third part deals with the presence of violence in our stories. In part four, we explore how to include all the previous into a more dramaturgical and narrative context. How to tell a story on stage while (a) using memory as a tool of generating fiction, (b) expanding our understanding of time, and (c) including the hidden layers of violence?
A Future Letter To Consent is a performative reading of some of my messy notes on consent in dance. It is in collaboration with Elsa B. Mason, an illustrator who visually practices the deconstruction of white patriarchy and the need to address feminist failure. The text is based on the activist and discursive work that I have been doing with Engagement Arts (BE), an artist-led movement that was formed in the wake of #MeToo. I will also present my current research on 1) the heterosexual duet and 2) the performer's right to their own image.
Cosmograms are objects that represent cosmologies or worldviews. They exist in iconographic, narrative, performative and architectural forms, and are produced within scientific, spiritual and and artistic contexts. They have been around for millennia. Think, for instance, of city plans of the Mayans, which reflected their idea of the cosmos, the spatial arrangement of the afterlife in Dante's Divine Comedy or the contemporary speculative cartographies of Alexandra Arènes.
Over two sessions lasting two and a half hours each, we will make cosmogram drawings on circular pieces of paper, inspired by diagramming techniques and other infographics. Artists and non-artists from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome! You don’t need to be able to draw.
This intervention gathers academic & non-academic thinking about the imagination, refusal and practices of art-making to produce an experimental methodology for confronting relations of unfreedom.
Think of how a circle, rounded lines from a fixed point, seems to keep going and going. That could be key to our method.
Using presentation, discussion & collective reading and writing, participants will reflect on the uses of the imagination in resistant and revolutionary cultural production. Collectively, we will explore the necessity of affective engagement with the objects of history. This session will present the imagination as a scalable tool for thinking and making against logics of capital and confinement.
This workshop will explore the arts of navigation. Taking the transmissions of languages, technologies and civilisations across the Silk Road as a starting point, we will explore how people and things have marked, mapped, metabolised, and moved their way across the cartographies of Eurasia. Drawing on these stories, we consider ancient and contemporary navigational techniques as an investigative, embodied relationship to light, space, time, sky, atmosphere, cosmos, exploring the evolution of navigational tools as entangled practices of technical, social and philosophical world-building.
In second part of the workshop, we will take an exploratory approach to practically designing navigational instruments and methods. Participants will be taught some hands-on digital processes (GIS, 3D, game engine, archiving, or other digital tools - laptops are highly recommended) and (conditions permitting), use the spaces, skies and landmarks around PAF to guide their work.
NB. Recommended but not essential: if you want to participate in this workshop you could also bring anything you think might be relevant: tools, images, sounds, books, sensors, maps, etc?
With dark humor, puns, tenderness, and a dose of remonstrance, we invite you to a space featuring readings, live scenography, music, poetic reflections, and open questions.
A three day facilitation of a walk in the forest choreographed by the scansion of the Lacanian cut that ends an analytic session, but arranged also in relation to the specific use PAF makes of its adjacent forest, with its animals, wild and domesticated, its edible and non edible plants, its little and big puddles and stones, its creaking canopies, its means and ends, 'is that corn growing in that field??'
How do artists, theorists and activists intervene in capitalist structures, such as cities, urban and spatial developments, institutes and infrastructures, and reinterpret and reclaim spaces and spatial relationships? How do they define their ground and forge spaces while evading being co-opted by the systems they aim to overcome?
This session, inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s pivotal concept of "the plot,” will discuss the historical, material, and metaphorical dimensions of plotting as a form of decolonial and counter-hegemonic resistance and reclamation of spaces.During a lecture, a study session and a collaborative workshop we explore how spatial praxis can reshape capitalist enclosures such as urban spaces, institutions, and social infrastructures. Participants are encouraged to critically engage with various interpretations and applications of "the plot," considering how this concept can be a critical tool in fostering new geographies.
We will examine the potential sustainability, value and beauty of leading a mediocre life through conversations and dance scores in a meditative, grey, groovy mush of pure bodily enjoyment and low ambitions. The workshop is based on materials from the dance piece The Basics, and stems from an urgent need for shifting focus from a linear, capitalist aim for success through constant productivity and consumption, to a composting web between creatures in the low caps body text of the soupy everyday. Together we will challenge our standards of success and failure, as well as our ideas of effort, laziness, skill, quality and value through an attempt at perfecting the bare minimum.
Act 2: E-Clown esquire [or] clowntown sads
Must laughter must collide with existential angst(?). Here, words become a cipher for navigating chaos. internalised. As truths dissolve into paradox, identity is an ever-shifting shadow. a flickering. a fickle jester dancing against light.
think big laughs but mixed-in with rlly deep feelings? words are like a secret code in this chaos. truths melt into confusion. identity feels like a shadow that keeps changing, a silly clown dancing against bad front-cam flash lighting.
Starting from a reflection on the structural analysis of myths as fiction about fiction - myth of mythology - the aim of this talk is to share my research in my doctoral work on the ontological status of fiction, based on a reconstructed dialogue between the work of Lévi-Strauss, and that of Deleuze and Guattari. The aim is to read and analyze myths, tales and legends, to ask what constitutes them and what characterizes them as such, and to use this material as a basis for reconsidering changes in the way we think about and express the boundary between fiction and reality. If "the cracking of the unified ontology in which the West has lived since the end of the Renaissance (Descola 2005) is the context in which the question of fiction is posed today", how can questioning the bipartition between fiction and reality, or rather exposing its situated character, not risk making all thought impossible?
In the first session we will give an overview of how the movement got to where it is today and key lessons learned along the way in order to build a sustainable, effective and diverse direct action movement. We will speak about our approach to targets with specific reference to Elbit Systems as our primary target and then a discussion on secondary and tertiary targeting. We will also elaborate on Palestine Actions model of direction action to include our 5 steps to success, why we advocate a full diversity of tactics within our direct action framework.
In the second session we propose to do a (hypothetical) training session for an action.
P0SSE dance and reading, established in 2016, is a gathering for people wanting to spend time dancing and reading together. Each session is hosted by one or several practitioners that propose the materials: a text to read, a way to read the text and a way to move – generating discourse through doing.
For P0SSE @ Summer University, three practitioners from different disciplines will convene across three sessions, exploring topics such as social resonance, embodied voice, tuning and chorality.
Texts for sessions will be brief and will also be circulated in advance. You don't need to prepare in order to partake - come as you are. The duration of a session is 3 hours.
it might be a little lecture on queer lighting and organizing space, or a score for cleaning the windows, or a lecture on the concept of pay-what-you-wish… x
- echolocation, the bat - te amo te amo, she said to me - ableton live 11 - 2010 heartbreak - the birth of opera - imploded home studio - 1608 (Italy) - Ach ich fühl’s - echolocation, the nymph -
Wading through the sound waves of laments (aka love songs) stemming out of mouths from 1608 to 2024 – a voice before meaning broadcasts them into the theatre space. They seem oh so familiar. They touch you but also feel distant. Like the foreign tongue of a loved one. The mouth estranges them, warps their time, body and space together. It is a process of dislocating the laments that have been put into our hands.
a series of small maintenance workshops exploring and discussing the laborious and performative aspects of the Maintenance Wing at PAF.
How do artists, theorists and activists intervene in capitalist structures, such as cities, urban and spatial developments, institutes and infrastructures, and reinterpret and reclaim spaces and spatial relationships? How do they define their ground and forge spaces while evading being co-opted by the systems they aim to overcome? This session, inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s pivotal concept of "the plot,” will discuss the historical, material, and metaphorical dimensions of plotting as a form of decolonial and counter-hegemonic resistance and reclamation of spaces.
During a lecture, a study session and a collaborative workshop we explore how spatial praxis can reshape capitalist enclosures such as urban spaces, institutions, and social infrastructures. Participants are encouraged to critically engage with various interpretations and applications of "the plot," considering how this concept can be a critical tool in fostering new geographies.
we invite you into a shared practice, something that emerges as a continuation of our work flowing into each other. We will use text as a vehicle together with the body to explore space constantly changing perspective. Hacking space, understanding it, negotiating, playing, resemantizing, etc the feeling of being very tactile, physical, spatial. Retrieving some words, images, and inhabiting them in the body, bringing them into space. For example... selecting three words, for each word imagining a gesture, placing that gesture in space.
We will examine the potential sustainability, value and beauty of leading a mediocre life through conversations and dance scores in a meditative, grey, groovy mush of pure bodily enjoyment and low ambitions. The workshop is based on materials from the dance piece The Basics, and stems from an urgent need for shifting focus from a linear, capitalist aim for success through constant productivity and consumption, to a composting web between creatures in the low caps body text of the soupy everyday. Together we will challenge our standards of success and failure, as well as our ideas of effort, laziness, skill, quality and value through an attempt at perfecting the bare minimum.
Since the financial crisis of 2008-9, the renewed interest in Marxist feminism has seen a number of feminists reiterate ‘the most infamous proposal’ of the 1970s movement: the abolition of the family.
Though agreeing on the category of abolition as the general point of orientation for their projects, family abolitionist feminists have suggested a range of differing and sometimes contradictory visions of what a post-family future would look like. We propose meeting over 3 days, from 20th-22nd August, to critically analyse these visions together, with a view to coming to a clearer understanding of their possibilities and limitations. This will include interrogation of the various critiques of family abolitionism, which have been numerous within feminist theory since the 1970s.
On this point, we specifically propose critical discussion of two tendencies within the recent family abolitionist literature: one, the emphasis on the automation of reproductive labour as the key to dismantling the privatisation of care that the family represents (e.g. in Lewis 2019,Hester 2018); and two, proposals for autonomous, ‘women-led’ alternative paradigms of reproductive labour (e.g. in Federici, 2012).
In the first session we will give an overview of how the movement got to where it is today and key lessons learned along the way in order to build a sustainable, effective and diverse direct action movement. We will speak about our approach to targets with specific reference to Elbit Systems as our primary target and then a discussion on secondary and tertiary targeting. We will also elaborate on Palestine Actions model of direction action to include our 5 steps to success, why we advocate a full diversity of tactics within our direct action framework.
In the second session we propose to do a (hypothetical) training session for an action.
Sienna & Valencia 2 infinity is a study of young girls situated in a BFF-constellation - - Two girls explore ways to achieve femininity and their place in the world, whilst nurturing a seemingly infinite duo that inhabits violence, jealousy, desire, newfound agency, wishes, feelings and actions without consequences - - The material is sourced from the zeitgeist of the early 2010s, and first hand experience with educational environments during the spring 2024. Originally performed with Hannah Krebs, with music by Emil Lennstrand.
Bring your favourite karaoke song. And we will slow it down on one day and drag it through a dance and many bodies and spaces on an other. By applying a persisting echo that slowly differs, in conversation with a digital audio workstation, we are busy with operations of echolocation through emotions and time - exploring the potentials of echolocation, the nymph, to revive the old anew differently.
Memory Terminal is evolving practical technology. It is a mobile archive of archives housed in a Pelican case which travels with Sammie Veeler. A custom hardware device stewarded by a cyborg wetware girl. The device is designed to install virtual worlds in physical spaces in a way that is accessible, immersive, and interactive. Memory Terminal serves as a traveling offline archive of virtual worlds in New Art City’s Memory Card collection, which includes 30 exhibitions featuring 205 artists. It also hosts an archive of Veeler's personal collection of virtual worlds, which forms a multimedia diary spanning her entire artistic career and gender transition. The piece draws the human agents of computing and collective memory into focus, through activations which blur the boundary between reality and performance. Sammie plays the human NPC, alternating between docent, lecturer, archivist, and hardware engineer.
a series of small maintenance workshops exploring and discussing the laborious and performative aspects of the Maintenance Wing at PAF.
I propose to share some of my research on comparative trade unionism in the US and the UK. One interesting avenue might be to focus on debates regarding the conceptualisation of trade unions throughout the nineteenth century—as voluntary associations, trusts, or corporations—in relation to other working class societies. The session would look at comparative debates on the rights of associations of individuals and the transition from the association to the corporation or trust towards the end of the 19th century, and how they shaped welfare politics in the early 20th century.
A polyphonic gathering emerges from the unknown…
A world building and larp session exploring situated folklore and mythology. Join this collective dive into collaboratively imagining and embodying a pantheon of magical and musical characters inspired by each of us own mythological references, personal interest, curiosity, questions, worries, practices.
Drawing from hybrid role play of mythologies developed for the making of an upcoming audiovisual project, we will construct these chimeric characters as allegories of the landscape around and within us, belonging to the world of the invisible and carrying memories of the land(s). What tales of resilience and resistance can we learn from them and from each other? How can we overcome and overwrite (his)stories of violence? Singing, moving, making props, growling, rolling in the grass, screaming may or may not happen.
A two day workshop exploring the notion of contact and its consequence through readings, discussions, and embodied/material research. Participants will be invited to read, write, and discuss, stretching and exploring definitions of "touch" and "contact" within realms of the somatic, the social, the political, and the ecological, and perhaps even immaterial notions of encounter. Participants will discuss, share tools, and embody experiments which explore protocols, conditions, or best practices for tending to right relation while negotiating the complexity of reciprocity.
Since the financial crisis of 2008-9, the renewed interest in Marxist feminism has seen a number of feminists reiterate ‘the most infamous proposal’ of the 1970s movement: the abolition of the family.
Though agreeing on the category of abolition as the general point of orientation for their projects, family abolitionist feminists have suggested a range of differing and sometimes contradictory visions of what a post-family future would look like. We propose meeting over 3 days, from 20th-22nd August, to critically analyse these visions together, with a view to coming to a clearer understanding of their possibilities and limitations. This will include interrogation of the various critiques of family abolitionism, which have been numerous within feminist theory since the 1970s.
On this point, we specifically propose critical discussion of two tendencies within the recent family abolitionist literature: one, the emphasis on the automation of reproductive labour as the key to dismantling the privatisation of care that the family represents (e.g. in Lewis 2019,Hester 2018); and two, proposals for autonomous, ‘women-led’ alternative paradigms of reproductive labour (e.g. in Federici, 2012).
A work session based on a crate. The crate contains sculptures made of concrete, textiles pieces that are at once packaging, accessories and images, and texts in French. The set of elements can be activated individually or in groups, with or without an audience. The texts are montages of literary extracts that evoke construction, gesture and material. They bring us into contact with concrete rubble, geological strata, exoskeletons, comfortable pillows, rolled mattresses, extraterrestrial ruins, marine minerals and composite materials... Combining readings, manipulations and reflections on the evocative power of the elements brought together, we will experiment with gestures, voices, compositions, but above all, the construction of a version x of this piece by several people. The group will decide whether or not to present.
Material sharing from the dance piece Sienna & Valencia 2 infinity. We'll try out different performative states and scores accumulated in the process of making S&V2I. All relating to how young girls relate to each other and their umwelt(s).
A 2-days workshop for dancers and interested earthlings (10 years and older), where we together do social dance à la 'selskapsdans' with the ABC-dance-method - the same simple method to put together dance steps that was utilized for the dance making of the infamous Printing Performance(s) of Dog Days Discourse during last year's Summer University '23. This time around we'll experiment further with formulas for collective dance making and practicing.
Bring your favourite karaoke song. And we will slow it down on one day and drag it through a dance and many bodies and spaces on an other. By applying a persisting echo that slowly differs, in conversation with a digital audio workstation, we are busy with operations of echolocation through emotions and time - exploring the potentials of echolocation, the nymph, to revive the old anew differently.
Screening and conversation about the work-in-progress and eco-documentary.
A mini film festival in the hangar with both (experimental) documentaries and fiction films portraying struggles against expropriations, displacement, and homelessness in and outside of cities. We will watch films with different aesthetic approaches and (fictional) methodologies that together shed light on a multiplicity of spatial resistance tactics - such as community organizing, squatting/occupations, protesting, civil disobedience, schooling, rent strikes, riots. These films will hopefully spark a conversation about the relationships between different land struggles and strategies, how these are perhaps not separated but always overlapping and feeding into each other, and how we can capture and imagine movements that are messy, trying, failing, caring and above all very human.
(if films come to mind – please find me to discuss if we can fit them into the festival program!)
A trainspotting / planespotting / canal gongoozling informed workshop that invites questions about the implications of representing the world via numbers, and whether such representations correspond with our visceral experience of the world.
The bean-counting approach of taking note of the immediate surroundings at/within PAF offers some nice prospects in terms of appraising things which might ordinarily be banal but can be used to tell a story, perhaps unwittingly. Through this, we begin thinking through digital representations of reality that are primarily but not exclusively suited to both technological creative practitioners and non-technological creative practitioners.
We give these 'objective' numerical data importance by ascribing attention, value and meaning to them. Roundly questioning the fatal assumption that number are objective at all. Thus, the dual interrogations at play here: a smaller one of domestic (sort of) space and a principal one of our relationships to numbers, have political implications too.
Louis Armstrong is often quoted as having said that "all music is folk music; I ain't never heard a horse sing a song". But what if he had? In his 1930 études book, The Novelty Cornettist, trumpeter Louis Panico gives detailed instructions on how to produce a "horse neigh" on trumpet, as well as other effects such as "the laugh", "the baby cry", and "the Chinese effect"—tricks that had become popular at the height of the jazz age. Though not quite a singing horse, such mimeticism raises broad questions about how music has mediated the borders between humans, animals, and machines. Reading the history of brass instruments in jazz through the work of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey, I show how trumpets and trombones have played a surprising role in disarticulating racialised conceptions of the human.
In the evening there will be a trumpet performance in advance of the talk the next day.
A non-verbal larp (live action role play) centred around the process of zoonotic spillover, disease-carrying pathogens transferring from wild animals to humans. We play out the story which creates the conditions for a pandemic through colonial extractivism, deforestation and habitat degradation, through a dual embodiment of bat and human characters. Using movement, sound, touch and environment interaction as ways of communicating, Spillover plays with the context to the present-day fragility of ecological life support systems.
The Restshops are spaces of collective studies, ateliers of collective practices, imagined around, through and next to Alix’s library. This collection of exercises has been travelling through various contexts of visibility, such as art festivals, schools, research projects, and programs -although mostly if not only within the cultural scene of European cities. It has also tredged and stretched in spaces of conviviality such as private homes-after-parties, whatsapp life-long extended conversations (recently moved to signal); across lovers & feelings, and mostly (mossly?) in the undergrowths of inherited practices that are dedicated to re-practicing existing forces. Restshop #6 the library of Institute of Rest(s) meets Simon Asencio is a series of exercises in which books slide, literally, under our skins; a space to exercise our rests in the arms of words and sentences and poems, a space in which to (dis)articulate thoughts by re-practising forces that already exist. Together.
‘Thoroughfare' explores the temporalities of water, from rivulets to global cycles. It centers on the maritory—a colonial thoroughfare, sanctuary for indigenous wisdom, and libertarian utopian escape. Rooted in research into the history of sovereignty and maritime law, it explores the politics of belonging, mysticism, and the formation of zones. Formed as an intermedia duo lecture and narrative song cycle between dramaturg and writer Klara Kofen and artist and composer Cameron Graham, ‘Thoroughfare’ is an early experiment in straddling the spaces between text and sound, lecture and audiovisual performance, sensory percussion drums and speaking voice.
A polyphonic gathering emerges from the unknown…
A world building and larp session exploring situated folklore and mythology. Join this collective dive into collaboratively imagining and embodying a pantheon of magical and musical characters inspired by each of us own mythological references, personal interest, curiosity, questions, worries, practices.
Drawing from hybrid role play of mythologies developed for the making of an upcoming audiovisual project, we will construct these chimeric characters as allegories of the landscape around and within us, belonging to the world of the invisible and carrying memories of the land(s). What tales of resilience and resistance can we learn from them and from each other? How can we overcome and overwrite (his)stories of violence? Singing, moving, making props, growling, rolling in the grass, screaming may or may not happen.
A two day workshop exploring the notion of contact and its consequence through readings, discussions, and embodied/material research. Participants will be invited to read, write, and discuss, stretching and exploring definitions of "touch" and "contact" within realms of the somatic, the social, the political, and the ecological, and perhaps even immaterial notions of encounter. Participants will discuss, share tools, and embody experiments which explore protocols, conditions, or best practices for tending to right relation while negotiating the complexity of reciprocity.
A work session based on a crate. The crate contains sculptures made of concrete, textiles pieces that are at once packaging, accessories and images, and texts in French. The set of elements can be activated individually or in groups, with or without an audience. The texts are montages of literary extracts that evoke construction, gesture and material. They bring us into contact with concrete rubble, geological strata, exoskeletons, comfortable pillows, rolled mattresses, extraterrestrial ruins, marine minerals and composite materials... Combining readings, manipulations and reflections on the evocative power of the elements brought together, we will experiment with gestures, voices, compositions, but above all, the construction of a version x of this piece by several people. The group will decide whether or not to present.
This workshop wants to focus on the hidden face of speculation : trembling vulnerability. Pierrot Seban has proudly published a treaty on Zeno's paradoxes, Time, Infinity and the (im)-possibility of achieving an infinite task. These questions, the author argues, get to the heart of philosophical activity and what it means to think. But if publishing and lecturing are exercises of conquest, skilful demonstration of speculative force and occultation of uncertainty, along the speculative process each locus of publishable stability is gained out of an indeterminate movement of doubt and perceived nonsense. The ruthless process of argumentative critique must be accompanied by a loving care for burgeoning ideas. In these anti-lectures, and subsequent workshopping sessions, speculative gain on the reality of Infinity, the meaning of Time, and the trinity of Nature, Thought, and Mathematics, will be presented through the perspective of uncertainty : what does not work here, what feels the most fragile, where could we go from there, and does any of it mean anything?
When thinking about life, not many people are seen standing around, wondering, „is this a non-materialist, non-reductionist Idealism or a naturalist non-idealist Dualism?“ However, these abstract categorization are used when describing arguments in theory. If you don’t understand what’s going on, these categories, when used in texts or spoken language, can often feel alienating or make you feel stupid. But, they can empower you too, once you get the hang of it. Broadly described as „cognitive mapping“, these categories can help you understand your own position and those of others.
In this workshop, we will learn how to make mental models. We want to learn how to define core beliefs in arguments, share resources in the craft of definition making and apply them to lines of thought. This workshop is a workshop in intellectual self-defense. It aims at helping you to navigate in a metaphorical spatial environment just like all the other bright bulbs around you.
Through examples of anti-abortion activism, pro-life supporters and abortion critics we are focusing on the notion, concept and idea of »life« in anti-abortion debates. Secondly, the debate about what life is and where life begins is sometimes sidelined by progressive political debates due to it being imbibed by the possible religious, nationalist and conservative connotation of this term. We want to find out whether it could be useful to take a stance on „what life is“. We will look at some contemporary Marxist approaches to this question of „life“.
Since before the Russian revolution, Muslims have worked together with Marxists, influenced each other and fought together. Together we'll explore and discuss texts related to Marxist explorations of the Quran and Islamic interpretations of communism, along with their sociopolitical contexts in revolutions and uprisings in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and beyond.
In what ways the stories we tell affect our attitudes and behaviours? What is the trans-generational transference that is embodied in how we move, how we relate to ourselves and to other bodies? What are the factors that enable a choreography for togetherness? A choreography of bodies figuring out new forms of relation. Relations that overlap in theory, in reading, in clubs, in the street, in the studio. Bodies that reverberate, bodies that relay a series of movements, codes and signifiers. Bodies allied in a pedagogy of togetherness.
Traversing known forms and dances that escape recognition, Repertoire is a dance forgery with no inventory.
A mini film festival in the hangar with both (experimental) documentaries and fiction films portraying struggles against expropriations, displacement, and homelessness in and outside of cities. We will watch films with different aesthetic approaches and (fictional) methodologies that together shed light on a multiplicity of spatial resistance tactics - such as community organizing, squatting/occupations, protesting, civil disobedience, schooling, rent strikes, riots. These films will hopefully spark a conversation about the relationships between different land struggles and strategies, how these are perhaps not separated but always overlapping and feeding into each other, and how we can capture and imagine movements that are messy, trying, failing, caring and above all very human.
(if films come to mind – please find me to discuss if we can fit them into the festival program!)
How: A trainspotting / planespotting / canal gongoozling informed workshop that invites questions about the implications of representing the world via numbers, and whether such representations correspond with our visceral experience of the world.
The bean-counting approach of taking note of the immediate surroundings at/within PAF offers some nice prospects in terms of appraising things which might ordinarily be banal but can be used to tell a story, perhaps unwittingly. Through this, we begin thinking through digital representations of reality that are primarily but not exclusively suited to both technological creative practitioners and non-technological creative practitioners.
We give these 'objective' numerical data importance by ascribing attention, value and meaning to them. Roundly questioning the fatal assumption that number are objective at all. Thus, the dual interrogations at play here: a smaller one of domestic (sort of) space and a principal one of our relationships to numbers, have political implications too.
Louis Armstrong is often quoted as having said that "all music is folk music; I ain't never heard a horse sing a song". But what if he had? In his 1930 études book, The Novelty Cornettist, trumpeter Louis Panico gives detailed instructions on how to produce a "horse neigh" on trumpet, as well as other effects such as "the laugh", "the baby cry", and "the Chinese effect"—tricks that had become popular at the height of the jazz age. Though not quite a singing horse, such mimeticism raises broad questions about how music has mediated the borders between humans, animals, and machines. Reading the history of brass instruments in jazz through the work of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey, I show how trumpets and trombones have played a surprising role in disarticulating racialised conceptions of the human.
The Restshops are spaces of collective studies, ateliers of collective practices, imagined around, through and next to Alix’s library. This collection of exercises has been travelling through various contexts of visibility, such as art festivals, schools, research projects, and programs -although mostly if not only within the cultural scene of European cities. It has also tredged and stretched in spaces of conviviality such as private homes-after-parties, whatsapp life-long extended conversations (recently moved to signal); across lovers & feelings, and mostly (mossly?) in the undergrowths of inherited practices that are dedicated to re-practicing existing forces.
Restshop #6 the library of Institute of Rest(s) meets Simon Asencio in a series of exercises in which books slide, literally, under our skins; a space to exercise our rests in the arms of words and sentences and poems, a space in which to (dis)articulate thoughts by re-practising forces that already exist. Together.
This workshop focuses on world building and the evolution of digital landscapes. From tangible, physical objects, we sculpt models that transition into the digital through 3D scanning. Within this transformation translation errors happen and architectural, surreal or futuristic environments are materialized, blurring the boundaries between physical and virtual spheres.
Part I - COLLECT
Joint treasure hunt across the area to uncover and collect hidden gems (stones, trash, plants, broken toys, etc.).
Part II - BUILD
Sculptures made of salt dough are shaped and baked. These will be molded into landscapes using both the materials brought by participants and the found objects. Teams can also be formed during this part.
Part III - SCAN
These developed landscapes will now be captured using photogrammetry or 3D scanning techniques and translated into 3D objects. The translated objects will then be viewed together.
This workshop wants to focus on the hidden face of speculation : trembling vulnerability. Pierrot Seban has proudly published a treaty on Zeno's paradoxes, Time, Infinity and the (im)-possibility of achieving an infinite task. These questions, the author argues, get to the heart of philosophical activity and what it means to think. But if publishing and lecturing are exercises of conquest, skilful demonstration of speculative force and occultation of uncertainty, along the speculative process each locus of publishable stability is gained out of an indeterminate movement of doubt and perceived nonsense. The ruthless process of argumentative critique must be accompanied by a loving care for burgeoning ideas. In these anti-lectures, and subsequent workshopping sessions, speculative gain on the reality of Infinity, the meaning of Time, and the trinity of Nature, Thought, and Mathematics, will be presented through the perspective of uncertainty : what does not work here, what feels the most fragile, where could we go from there, and does any of it mean anything?
Through engagements with the works of Hegel and Gillian Rose, this workshop will explore the significance of the beginning, the middle, and the end—as well as what comes after—with reference to questions of creative practice, love, Palestine, and the climate crisis. We might also cover topics including the temporality of deadlines, the value of planning, the meaning of method, experimentation, vanguardism, illness, and the afterlife. The workshop will take the form of a digressive paper, followed by a discussion on some pre-circulated texts.
A 2-days workshop for dancers and interested earthlings (10 years and older), where we together do social dance à la 'selskapsdans' with the ABC-dance-method - the same simple method to put together dance steps that was utilized for the dance making of the infamous Printing Performance(s) of Dog Days Discourse during last year's Summer University '23. This time around we'll experiment further with formulas for collective dance making and practicing.
Since before the Russian revolution, Muslims have worked together with Marxists, influenced each other and fought together. Together we'll explore and discuss texts related to Marxist explorations of the Quran and Islamic interpretations of communism, along with their sociopolitical contexts in revolutions and uprisings in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine and beyond.
In what ways the stories we tell affect our attitudes and behaviours? What is the trans-generational transference that is embodied in how we move, how we relate to ourselves and to other bodies? What are the factors that enable a choreography for togetherness? A choreography of bodies figuring out new forms of relation. Relations that overlap in theory, in reading, in clubs, in the street, in the studio. Bodies that reverberate, bodies that relay a series of movements, codes and signifiers. Bodies allied in a pedagogy of togetherness.
Dance Lessons is a series of workshops that invite participants to explore partner dance. Partner dances traditionally happens on social dance floors in groups of bodies enacting dense forms of somatic communication, outside the gaze of a stationary audience. Dance Lessons invites participants to practice movement at a beginner level of partnered dance. The questions that drive Dance Lessons concern the sensate body, delight, intimacy, communication and the networks of meaning alive in interpersonal touch.
Dance Lessons consists of three partner dance workshops and one penultimate social dance. Our workshops emerge from forms and floors including blues-fusion, salsa, tango, and flamenco. Participation in all three workshops is encouraged, but singular attendance is also welcome.
Workshop 1: Handholding, weight shifting, presence.
Workshop 2: Fluidity, freezing switching, joking.
Workshop 3: Momentum, layering, lowering.
Workshop 4: Not a workshop, a social dance! (this will not be on the program)
The intention is to explore the possibility of discussing philosophical musings in an encounter, without reference to tradition or appeal to entrenched intuitions. Come prepared to leave your books and articles at the door: there will be no name-dropping, no footnoting, no special featuring nor assumptions about shared knowledge. It might be doomed to fail, but we will have fun.
In order to try to speak otherwise about philosophy, we will set up a variety of methodological constraints. The starting point will be the idea of the score—as explored, for instance, by the art movement, Fluxus. The opening line of the score is “no referencing”: we will start a discussion by thinking about what this means, and whether this is possible or simply ridiculous. The rest of the score will follow, as we will decide upon it together, based on our discussions, utilizing examples that will be presented on the day of the event. The score will thus guide us: we will start from uncommon knowledge, and then proceed step by step, gesture to gesture, to a collective experience of thought.
The Restshops are spaces of collective studies, ateliers of collective practices, imagined around, through and next to Alix’s library. This collection of exercises has been travelling through various contexts of visibility, such as art festivals, schools, research projects, and programs -although mostly if not only within the cultural scene of European cities. It has also tredged and stretched in spaces of conviviality such as private homes-after-parties, whatsapp life-long extended conversations (recently moved to signal); across lovers & feelings, and mostly (mossly?) in the undergrowths of inherited practices that are dedicated to re-practicing existing forces.
Restshop #6 the library of Institute of Rest(s) meets Simon Asencio in a series of exercises in which books slide, literally, under our skins; a space to exercise our rests in the arms of words and sentences and poems, a space in which to (dis)articulate thoughts by re-practising forces that already exist. Together.
In this workshop we’ll look at the pedagogy and strategy of the US civil rights movement in on the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Freedom Summer—in which 7,000 black and white students mobilized a grassroots movement for democracy in rural Mississippi—extending the civil rights movement from the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery into the countryside, and bringing it to new heights in federal politics. We will focus on both the Freedom Schools program launched by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the campaign of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey and thereby replace Southern Democrats. We will pay special attention to the role of socialists and the organized left and within this mass, cross-class, multiracial movement.
We will discuss figures including Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, Kwame Ture, and Ella Baker and the work of scholars including Adolph Reed and Frances Fox Piven, read from creative works by James Baldwin, Kathleen Collins, and the students of the Freedom Schools; and look at, perhaps enact, the socio-drama exercises adopted by pacifist militants to prepare to non-violently resist to attacks from racial fascists.
How might we live differently in an animist world, if we accepted that there are more-than-human persons brimming with agency all around us? What responsibilities would this generate, and how might we think-with beings so physically and cognitively different from ourselves? Can we find—or rediscover a lost—shared language?
This workshop will tend to the many beings, sentiences and temporalities around us, above and below the surface. We will discuss, share experiences and try to put some of this thinking into practice, taking inspiration from systems of knowledge based in yarning, story-telling, deep listening, pattern-thinking and symbol-making.
I will briefly share my practice-based PhD research on resuscitating/reinterpreting “forgotten” animist traditions in Southern Norwegian folk culture. Feel free to share your own animist knowledge like songs, stories or imagery.
References and inspiration: Pauline Oliveros, Tyson Yunkaporta, Starhawk, David Abram, Marcia Bjornerud, Dylan Robinson, Voluspá, Joesphine McCarthy, LARP.
The smell of when the ocean meets the desert
dry earth water
glitters floating through the curtains
the overtones of the little room when the wind from the high passageways plays with its corners
when the ocean sings, would you listen?
In the brilliance of the searing light,
when the sirens call, would you sing their song back to them?
– from the Atlantic shore of the Maghreb
Bring 1 (or more!) essential oils or scented material, and we’ll mix a scent of a spatiotemporal locality that is meaningful for you.
Then we will explore the connection between scent and the body. Using call-and-response practices – making movement or sound – resonating, reflecting and amplifying the personal within the common. As we lean into this sense-led body poetry practice, we might just unfold how relationalities between our respective affective places come together, apply friction and tenderness.
A romantic harmonic metal screamo choir in yoga positions. A phone call argument, whispered. This workshop is an exploration of how individuals performing contrasting movement and sound can create a new theatrical dimension when meeting the collective.
Material sharing of Coquita - a dance project in development that departs from a desire to connect with Latin American references such as reggaeton and perreo. It is inspired by thoughts and practices such as 'Yoggaton' by Maque Pereyra, 'deculonization' / to decolonize the butt by Pedra Costa and "La conciencia de la mestiza" by Gloria Anzaldúa.
Mean Time is a solo performance that propagates 'the word' toward both its emancipatory potential and its abuses of power. Through speech and song, the work's protagonist, a female oracle, spins a chaotic web of prophecies while grappling for a grammatical tense in crisis. Oscillating between prophetic predictions and frenzied, riddle-filled discourse, Mean Time is a reflection of itself and its dual meaning: a time that is filled and separated from the future and a mean, miserable and nasty time.
When facts are absent and you have only assumptions and legends at your disposal, imagination comes into play - - Playwriting sessions where we conspire with historic female characters. We'll look at how their silenced voices of the past can return and address issues of today. In the first session I'll present my approach to script writing, followed by a second writing session, and afterwards we can try to give voice to female heroes.
Dance Lessons is a series of workshops that invite participants to explore partner dance. Partner dances traditionally happens on social dance floors in groups of bodies enacting dense forms of somatic communication, outside the gaze of a stationary audience. Dance Lessons invites participants to practice movement at a beginner level of partnered dance. The questions that drive Dance Lessons concern the sensate body, delight, intimacy, communication and the networks of meaning alive in interpersonal touch.
Dance Lessons consists of three partner dance workshops and one penultimate social dance. Our workshops emerge from forms and floors including blues-fusion, salsa, tango, and flamenco. Participation in all three workshops is encouraged, but singular attendance is also welcome.
Workshop 1: Handholding, weight shifting, presence.
Workshop 2: Fluidity, freezing switching, joking.
Workshop 3: Momentum, layering, lowering.
Workshop 4: Not a workshop, a social dance! (this will not be on the program)
My research is a cultural analysis of rituals of service, departing from the contemporary hospitality industry, and some of my own experiences as a waiter and bartender. Most centrally, I am interested in labour relations generated when ‘labour becomes a performance of itself’. Drawing mostly from Agamben, who in turn draws heavily on Foucault, I approach the biopolitical question: what goes into the ‘making of’ this kind of labour, what are its unexpected implications, and how could service relationships be unmoored from the confines of both wage-labour and performance. For this workshop, I propose a collective reading of a few texts, and a collective unpacking of the socio-economic identities and the psychosocial architectures that we move into and out of, whether as tablewaiters, receptionists, bartenders, but also sexworkers, careworkers, performers and similar roles, and also as the guests that those roles are ‘at the service of’.
The intention is to explore the possibility of discussing philosophical musings in an encounter, without reference to tradition or appeal to entrenched intuitions. Come prepared to leave your books and articles at the door: there will be no name-dropping, no footnoting, no special featuring nor assumptions about shared knowledge. It might be doomed to fail, but we will have fun.
In order to try to speak otherwise about philosophy, we will set up a variety of methodological constraints. The starting point will be the idea of the score—as explored, for instance, by the art movement, Fluxus. The opening line of the score is “no referencing”: we will start a discussion by thinking about what this means, and whether this is possible or simply ridiculous. The rest of the score will follow, as we will decide upon it together, based on our discussions, utilizing examples that will be presented on the day of the event. The score will thus guide us: we will start from uncommon knowledge, and then proceed step by step, gesture to gesture, to a collective experience of thought.
Fascisms of the 20th century industrialized tyranny. They staged political responses to the challenges of industrialization, an excess of power concentrated in the hands of a single person. What some call contemporary 'fascisms' respond to the challenges of digitalization and machine learning in particular - they digitalize tyranny. In three sessions, we will try to understand what that looks like. We will put special emphasis on the intensified commodification of 21st century life, focusing on libidinal relationships, political terminology and "gender ideology" as the tissue that connects a scattered landscape of right wing actors. Finally, I will suggest anti-capitalistic hospitality as an antidote to the commodification of life and its disenfranchising transformation of power. Parts of the course will be based on my upcoming book and might involve unpublished manuscripts.
Reactivating the tradition of the active intellect from Aristotle to Alexander of Aphrodisias, Al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, and many more. Two sessions to chart possible ways forward for a philosophy of the act and its modal attributes, and plan for a study group around this.
Diagonale was a film production company established by Paul Vecchiali in 1976. One of what Jacques Rivette termed the ‘microsystems’ of French cinema, Diagonale was, in the words of the critic Serge Daney, a ‘dream mini major studio’ that ‘never stopped experimenting’. Free from the exigencies of the mainstream, Diagonale filmmakers like Jean-Claude Biette, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Vecchiali himself developed a cinema quite unlike any other, mining the working class melodramas of the 30s, the Technicolor grandeur of 50s Hollywood and the formal inventiveness of the Nouvelle Vague, all with something akin to the spirit of the contemporaneous punk movement. We will introduce Diagonale's body of work and discuss what made this particularly fertile episode in the history of French cinema possible, what distinguished its productions, and what we can learn from it today.
I am currently working on an intellectual biography of African American anthropologist Ellen Irene Diggs, one of the first scholars to write on African-descendant culture in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a close collaborator of the African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and a student of the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Diggs was an active contributor to the global exchange of ideas on issues of race and the history of Africa and the African diaspora. Having visited over 80 countries throughout her life, she was dedicated to the cause of Black internationalist solidarity. My project, entitled Ellen Irene Diggs and the Chronotope of Africa – Travel, Racial Justice and Black Liberation from the 1940s-1980s, aims to trace her intellectual exchanges which propelled a transatlantic circulation of ideas on issues of race in the African diaspora.
tba
Deep dive into the Riso printing and the Kitchen 3 Press. Inspired by 'my zine library' we'll look into people's connections to rise, zines and print. We'll spend time understanding the riso machine; get into the world of preparing files (scanning, spectrolite, free programs? ++ ); and explore what's possible with 1 A3 (tutorials on different programs to prepare files, types of booklets you can get out of one A3, a single print poster, ++).
We have come to understand that "the national question" has not been abolished, as some might have believed, by the installation of a liberal world order at the turn of the century: supremacist nationalisms are no longer simply "on the rise" but have very much become the order of the day, and with them, and a framework of national liberation also has returned in different struggles worldwide. How to approach these questions beyond the merely 'abstract stance' of anti-nationalism?
We want to articulate an understanding of the raging neo-imperialist/colonialist wars outside any liberal framework. The comparisons being made between the war on Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine seem most often to be ridiculous, yet it seems worthwhile to formulate our own positive position on the connections and causes behind these wars and to find a common path of solidarity.
When facts are absent and you have only assumptions and legends at your disposal, imagination comes into play - - Playwriting sessions where we conspire with historic female characters. We'll look at how their silenced voices of the past can return and address issues of today. In the first session I'll present my approach to script writing, followed by a second writing session, and afterwards we can try to give voice to female heroes.
My research is a cultural analysis of rituals of service, departing from the contemporary hospitality industry, and some of my own experiences as a waiter and bartender. Most centrally, I am interested in labour relations generated when ‘labour becomes a performance of itself’. Drawing mostly from Agamben, who in turn draws heavily on Foucault, I approach the biopolitical question: what goes into the ‘making of’ this kind of labour, what are its unexpected implications, and how could service relationships be unmoored from the confines of both wage-labour and performance. For this workshop, I propose a collective reading of a few texts, and a collective unpacking of the socio-economic identities and the psychosocial architectures that we move into and out of, whether as tablewaiters, receptionists, bartenders, but also sexworkers, careworkers, performers and similar roles, and also as the guests that those roles are ‘at the service of’.
Screening of two films: Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us by Kajsa Dahlberg and Why? (Place Your Ear to the Ground and Tell Me What You Hear) by Gabo Camnitzer.
The films will act as an introduction to the Highly Sensitive Aesthetics workshop that will take place over the next two days.
The workshop will discuss social alienation with an emphasis on counter-aesthetics, (counter critique?) or other forms of sensing oneself and others — be it through erotic or other forms of self-reflection, refusals, or withdrawals. The focus on race, sexuality, gender, and fascism is increasingly relevant to this focus as history unfolds. For me, fascism and how to deal with it perfectly has to do with the suprasensual, the highly sensitive, the erotic, etc.
Fascisms of the 20th century industrialized tyranny. They staged political responses to the challenges of industrialization, an excess of power concentrated in the hands of a single person. What some call contemporary 'fascisms' respond to the challenges of digitalization and machine learning in particular - they digitalize tyranny. In three sessions, we will try to understand what that looks like. We will put special emphasis on the intensified commodification of 21st century life, focusing on libidinal relationships, political terminology and "gender ideology" as the tissue that connects a scattered landscape of right wing actors. Finally, I will suggest anti-capitalistic hospitality as an antidote to the commodification of life and its disenfranchising transformation of power. Parts of the course will be based on my upcoming book and might involve unpublished manuscripts.
In the film Uccellacci e uccellini (Pasolini, 1966), the dance scene Scuola di Ballo al Sole features young people learning a choreography in front of a countryside bar. They dance and improvise, taking turns as authors and performers.
"Found in the streets of the world"It is through this formula, present in the credits with the appearance of a sung fable, that Pasolini mentions the performers of the scene. While this statement highlights his casting methods, it also indirectly places these young actors in anonymity.
Any news of what's-his-name ? is an invitation to consider the question of recognition through credit, as much in contemporary art, performing arts, or other disciplines. Taking the Scuola di Ballo al Sole scene as a starting point, we will present different examples to reflect on ethical and performative practices of credit.
Workshop in relation to creation project on resistance and struggle against the monopolies of violence.
Reactivating the tradition of the active intellect from Aristotle to Alexander of Aphrodisias, Al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd, and many more. Two sessions to chart possible ways forward for a philosophy of the act and its modal attributes, and plan for a study group around this.
Diagonale was a film production company established by Paul Vecchiali in 1976. One of what Jacques Rivette termed the ‘microsystems’ of French cinema, Diagonale was, in the words of the critic Serge Daney, a ‘dream mini major studio’ that ‘never stopped experimenting’. Free from the exigencies of the mainstream, Diagonale filmmakers like Jean-Claude Biette, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Vecchiali himself developed a cinema quite unlike any other, mining the working class melodramas of the 30s, the Technicolor grandeur of 50s Hollywood and the formal inventiveness of the Nouvelle Vague, all with something akin to the spirit of the contemporaneous punk movement. We will introduce Diagonale's body of work and discuss what made this particularly fertile episode in the history of French cinema possible, what distinguished its productions, and what we can learn from it today.
Deep dive into the Riso printing and the Kitchen 3 Press. Inspired by 'my zine library' we'll look into people's connections to rise, zines and print. We'll spend time understanding the riso machine; get into the world of preparing files (scanning, spectrolite, free programs? ++ ); and explore what's possible with 1 A3 (tutorials on different programs to prepare files, types of booklets you can get out of one A3, a single print poster, ++).
We have come to understand that "the national question" has not been abolished, as some might have believed, by the installation of a liberal world order at the turn of the century: supremacist nationalisms are no longer simply "on the rise" but have very much become the order of the day, and with them, and a framework of national liberation also has returned in different struggles worldwide. How to approach these questions beyond the merely 'abstract stance' of anti-nationalism?
We want to articulate an understanding of the raging neo-imperialist/colonialist wars outside any liberal framework. The comparisons being made between the war on Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine seem most often to be ridiculous, yet it seems worthwhile to formulate our own positive position on the connections and causes behind these wars and to find a common path of solidarity.
Dance Lessons is a series of workshops that invite participants to explore partner dance. Partner dances traditionally happens on social dance floors in groups of bodies enacting dense forms of somatic communication, outside the gaze of a stationary audience. Dance Lessons invites participants to practice movement at a beginner level of partnered dance. The questions that drive Dance Lessons concern the sensate body, delight, intimacy, communication and the networks of meaning alive in interpersonal touch.
Dance Lessons consists of three partner dance workshops and one penultimate social dance. Our workshops emerge from forms and floors including blues-fusion, salsa, tango, and flamenco. Participation in all three workshops is encouraged, but singular attendance is also welcome.
Workshop 1: Handholding, weight shifting, presence.
Workshop 2: Fluidity, freezing switching, joking.
Workshop 3: Momentum, layering, lowering.
Workshop 4: Not a workshop, a social dance! (this will not be on the program)
Fascisms of the 20th century industrialized tyranny. They staged political responses to the challenges of industrialization, an excess of power concentrated in the hands of a single person. What some call contemporary 'fascisms' respond to the challenges of digitalization and machine learning in particular - they digitalize tyranny. In three sessions, we will try to understand what that looks like. We will put special emphasis on the intensified commodification of 21st century life, focusing on libidinal relationships, political terminology and "gender ideology" as the tissue that connects a scattered landscape of right wing actors. Finally, I will suggest anti-capitalistic hospitality as an antidote to the commodification of life and its disenfranchising transformation of power. Parts of the course will be based on my upcoming book and might involve unpublished manuscripts.
Our workshop is organised around the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. What is “psychoanalysis” from the point of view of the psychoanalytic experience? And why engage with such a “singular” work when global political events call for more collective effort and put pressure on the renewal of the old institutional processes?
For the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic formation is a process which dissolves normative institutional processes for training clinicians, as well as brings analysands and analysts together under the formal framework of the psychoanalytic school. The process is never the same, but neither is it without a shared theoretical orientation in psychoanalysis. The stake is jouissance, which cannot be addressed merely theoretically or psychologically, and which distorts universal categories and norms, confuses bodily experiences, does not settle under any identity or binary; and always calls for “sinthomatic” solutions — be they constructed in analysis or outside of it.
This two-part discussion will interrogate Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter's proposal for a "re-enchanted humanism" made from the "demonic ground" of Caribbean life. We will study how her model--which proposed the original thesis of bourgeois Man's over-representation of the human in general within European humanism--was made by systematizing Césairean and Fanonian insights. Like his countryman Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire stands out as an advocate of what is often called “new humanism,” a politico-philosophical tendency that emerged in the context of anticolonial struggles in the mid-twentieth century. The first session will consider Wynter's links to Césaire's "science of the word" from his 1944 essay, "Poetry and Knowledge." The second session will examine Wynter's deployment of Fanonian sociogeny from his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks. These inheritances will be analysed as materials for the theorization of Wynter's "human being as praxis," an anticolonial humanism that explores the autopoetic capacity of the human species to consciously transform itself. Not only the form but the content of this transformation will be the object of our collective discussions.
Theory in the field of arts and architectural education is facing a deep and multifaceted crisis. In a post-critical ecosystem, theory has developed resilience to remain relevant, reducing itself to expressing uncertainties and anxieties or building conceptual toolkits. Meanwhile, machine- learning and generative AI also challenge the perceived robustness of theory and highlight its fragility.
Against this predicament, we propose to experiment with the concept of anti-fragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) as a mode for thinking about theory's properties in the computational globally warming 21st century. While the resilient and the robust resist various shocks, risks, and uncertainty to bounce back and remain the same, the anti-fragile improves amidst them. We will examine the material and political contexts that have made theory fragile, explore the dilemmas and concerns faced by those engaging with theory in arts and architecture and consider how we can approach theory from an anti-fragile perspective.
Diagonale was a film production company established by Paul Vecchiali in 1976. One of what Jacques Rivette termed the ‘microsystems’ of French cinema, Diagonale was, in the words of the critic Serge Daney, a ‘dream mini major studio’ that ‘never stopped experimenting’. Free from the exigencies of the mainstream, Diagonale filmmakers like Jean-Claude Biette, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Vecchiali himself developed a cinema quite unlike any other, mining the working class melodramas of the 30s, the Technicolor grandeur of 50s Hollywood and the formal inventiveness of the Nouvelle Vague, all with something akin to the spirit of the contemporaneous punk movement. We will introduce Diagonale's body of work and discuss what made this particularly fertile episode in the history of French cinema possible, what distinguished its productions, and what we can learn from it today.
This workshop will discuss social alienation with an emphasis on counter-aesthetics, (counter critique?) or other forms of sensing oneself and others — be it through erotic or other forms of self-reflection, refusals, or withdrawals. The focus on race, sexuality, gender, and fascism is increasingly relevant to this focus as history unfolds. For me, fascism and how to deal with it perfectly has to do with the suprasensual, the highly sensitive, the erotic, etc.
The workshop will start follow on from the screening (aug 27) of film works by Gabo Camnitzer and Kajsa Dahlberg, and develop in a discussion and a writing practice.
Deep dive into the Riso printing and the Kitchen 3 Press. Inspired by 'my zine library' we'll look into people's connections to rise, zines and print. We'll spend time understanding the riso machine; get into the world of preparing files (scanning, spectrolite, free programs? ++ ); and explore what's possible with 1 A3 (tutorials on different programs to prepare files, types of booklets you can get out of one A3, a single print poster, ++).
This workshop session is designed to increase critical thinking in mass media consumption. It analyzes representations of gender based violence and child sexual abuse in black radical film. Although incest is traditionally associated with kinship, marriage, and family in white scholarship, the historical standpoint of the enslaved problematizes these assumptions. The poetry, film, and theater of black Americans reveals the oppositional gaze of racial, sexual and political minorities. Participants will discuss the experience of visual pleasure and abjection in representations of incest. The goal is to disrupt colonial ways of looking at the bodies of incestuous subjects.
Vellum explores intimacy and ecstasy inspired by devotional practices of touching books from medieval Christianity. These practices included group exercises with books, as in an oath-taking ceremony, or private contemplative habits like fondling book illustrations - often rendering the original image unrecognizable from the repeated touching. The page, made of prepared skin called vellum or parchment, then became both a vessel for the illuminator’s ink, as well as a site of encounter for the devout to fondle and kiss.
We will use simple exercises in attention, sensation and role-playing to become illuminators, ink, vellum and devouts for one-another. We will be both the book and the hands incessantly touching it! The workshop involves touch but no mandatory skin-on-skin contact with others. At large, we hope to arrive at an ‘ecstatic literacy’ in which human and nonhuman bodies are always in/voluntarily inscribing, holding, handling, fondling, melting, disappearing in one-another.
It’s time to push the kill-switch on the fictional killer robot. Visions of anthropomorphic murder machines fire rampant in our futures. In the United States, we are over inundated with stories of sentient robots gone rogue, spawned from the excesses of an overactive, militarized imagination. These figures are perhaps easy to overlook as mundane, sci-fi pastiche or as overdone shorthand for a dismal tomorrow. However, as the use of lethal force by nation states at home and abroad is increasingly automated, the anthropomorphic weapons of our fantasies have come to override what’s real.
This seminar will examine the ongoing history of the automation of lethal force and the cultural imaginaries that occlude them. We will also explore the liberal fantasy that assumes more “efficient” defense technologies inherently lead to more humane forms of killing.
Our workshop is organised around the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. What is “psychoanalysis” from the point of view of the psychoanalytic experience? And why engage with such a “singular” work when global political events call for more collective effort and put pressure on the renewal of the old institutional processes?
For the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic formation is a process which dissolves normative institutional processes for training clinicians, as well as brings analysands and analysts together under the formal framework of the psychoanalytic school. The process is never the same, but neither is it without a shared theoretical orientation in psychoanalysis. The stake is jouissance, which cannot be addressed merely theoretically or psychologically, and which distorts universal categories and norms, confuses bodily experiences, does not settle under any identity or binary; and always calls for “sinthomatic” solutions — be they constructed in analysis or outside of it.
This two-part discussion will interrogate Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter's proposal for a "re-enchanted humanism" made from the "demonic ground" of Caribbean life. We will study how her model--which proposed the original thesis of bourgeois Man's over-representation of the human in general within European humanism--was made by systematizing Césairean and Fanonian insights. Like his countryman Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire stands out as an advocate of what is often called “new humanism,” a politico-philosophical tendency that emerged in the context of anticolonial struggles in the mid-twentieth century. The first session will consider Wynter's links to Césaire's "science of the word" from his 1944 essay, "Poetry and Knowledge." The second session will examine Wynter's deployment of Fanonian sociogeny from his 1952 book, Black Skin, White Masks. These inheritances will be analysed as materials for the theorization of Wynter's "human being as praxis," an anticolonial humanism that explores the autopoetic capacity of the human species to consciously transform itself. Not only the form but the content of this transformation will be the object of our collective discussions.
Theory in the field of arts and architectural education is facing a deep and multifaceted crisis. In a post-critical ecosystem, theory has developed resilience to remain relevant, reducing itself to expressing uncertainties and anxieties or building conceptual toolkits. Meanwhile, machine- learning and generative AI also challenge the perceived robustness of theory and highlight its fragility.
Against this predicament, we propose to experiment with the concept of anti-fragility (Nassim Nicholas Taleb) as a mode for thinking about theory's properties in the computational globally warming 21st century. While the resilient and the robust resist various shocks, risks, and uncertainty to bounce back and remain the same, the anti-fragile improves amidst them. We will examine the material and political contexts that have made theory fragile, explore the dilemmas and concerns faced by those engaging with theory in arts and architecture and consider how we can approach theory from an anti-fragile perspective.
A seminar/reading workshop on contemporary queer and trans near-future scifi novels. I will present my own work as a novelist, and bring excerpts from other great queer authors. In these novels, useless transboys fall forward through hectic cityscapes like modern-day Buster Keatons. Friends fall out because fascism creeps into their brains like ear-wormy pop songs. People are sick and their friends are unable or unwilling to help because of decrees from powerful businessmen fathers. How do all these characters feel? What are the conditions for their ability to feel, if they feel their feelings and bodies at all? Are trans people seismographicly attuned to the dissociative forces of the world? Will bdsm save us? Is your phone destroying your life? Stay tuned.
The workshop will have two parts, split over three days:
1: A seminar on the novel I’m currently working on, titled Extra.
2: A day of reading and conversation.
Impossible screenic/cinematic body is the topic of an ongoing research about the filmed body on the screen. My interest for these kinds of bodies is both theoretical and practical and also influenced by my choreographic background. Questions relating to this topic vary from: what is the body on the screen? can we even call it a body? what makes that body impossible? -> to: what kind of games and compositions can appear when we add bodies in real space to the equation? what kind of relationships can real bodies and screen bodies have? how can we make that meeting place have a performative value?
Workshop in relation to creation project on resistance and struggle against the monopolies of violence.
A live recording of a radio show (both recorded and for a live audience at PAF) mixing thoughts, music, voices. Exploding concretized structures in society, maintaining revolutionary structures, pioneering musique concrète and lifting the concrete ceiling for collective liberation.
This workshop will discuss social alienation with an emphasis on counter-aesthetics, (counter critique?) or other forms of sensing oneself and others — be it through erotic or other forms of self-reflection, refusals, or withdrawals. The focus on race, sexuality, gender, and fascism is increasingly relevant to this focus as history unfolds. For me, fascism and how to deal with it perfectly has to do with the suprasensual, the highly sensitive, the erotic, etc.
The workshop will start follow on from the screening (aug 27) of film works by Gabo Camnitzer and Kajsa Dahlberg, and develop in a discussion and a writing practice.
Internal Singing is a multidimensional, unbalanced-balancing act between inhale-exhale, between two points of touch on the body, between two vocal sounds in constant evolution, between the imagination of a voice and the letting go of a voice. My sensitised vocalbody is played as an instrument, through exploration of sounding on both the inhale and exhale, vocal imaginaries and self-administered touch. As it builds up slowly through acute attention to breath, impulse, pleasure and circulation, Internal Singing attempts to prise open a space to gather, improvise and examine what unknown vocality might emerge when acute sensitivity is valued as a resource.
This workshop session is designed to increase critical thinking in mass media consumption. It analyzes representations of gender based violence and child sexual abuse in black radical film. Although incest is traditionally associated with kinship, marriage, and family in white scholarship, the historical standpoint of the enslaved problematizes these assumptions. The poetry, film, and theater of black Americans reveals the oppositional gaze of racial, sexual and political minorities. Participants will discuss the experience of visual pleasure and abjection in representations of incest. The goal is to disrupt colonial ways of looking at the bodies of incestuous subjects.
In a snowy paf in January ‘24 a cassette tape was discovered in the music room. The cover said it was Louis Amstrong, but the music was not. What followed was a moment of discovery of this found tape which was listened to on repeat by the residents. It sparked a new band which grew by members each night as they played covers of Maria’s tape, trying to learn and bring back to life this anonymised tape. We propose a workshop based on the tape as we embark on a sound-hunt together to look for more fun sounds and sonic goodies in PAFs corners in search for things to record and instruments to play in our ‘band of the day’. The workshops will include a listening of the tape, a group improvisation working with found sounds and materials from around paf, collaging our finds to culminate in a sharing in the evening.
Vellum explores intimacy and ecstasy inspired by devotional practices of touching books from medieval Christianity. These practices included group exercises with books, as in an oath-taking ceremony, or private contemplative habits like fondling book illustrations - often rendering the original image unrecognizable from the repeated touching. The page, made of prepared skin called vellum or parchment, then became both a vessel for the illuminator’s ink, as well as a site of encounter for the devout to fondle and kiss.
We will use simple exercises in attention, sensation and role-playing to become illuminators, ink, vellum and devouts for one-another. We will be both the book and the hands incessantly touching it! The workshop involves touch but no mandatory skin-on-skin contact with others. At large, we hope to arrive at an ‘ecstatic literacy’ in which human and nonhuman bodies are always in/voluntarily inscribing, holding, handling, fondling, melting, disappearing in one-another.
Our workshop is organised around the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. What is “psychoanalysis” from the point of view of the psychoanalytic experience? And why engage with such a “singular” work when global political events call for more collective effort and put pressure on the renewal of the old institutional processes?
For the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic formation is a process which dissolves normative institutional processes for training clinicians, as well as brings analysands and analysts together under the formal framework of the psychoanalytic school. The process is never the same, but neither is it without a shared theoretical orientation in psychoanalysis. The stake is jouissance, which cannot be addressed merely theoretically or psychologically, and which distorts universal categories and norms, confuses bodily experiences, does not settle under any identity or binary; and always calls for “sinthomatic” solutions — be they constructed in analysis or outside of it.
A seminar/reading workshop on contemporary queer and trans near-future scifi novels. I will present my own work as a novelist, and bring excerpts from other great queer authors. In these novels, useless transboys fall forward through hectic cityscapes like modern-day Buster Keatons. Friends fall out because fascism creeps into their brains like ear-wormy pop songs. People are sick and their friends are unable or unwilling to help because of decrees from powerful businessmen fathers. How do all these characters feel? What are the conditions for their ability to feel, if they feel their feelings and bodies at all? Are trans people seismographicly attuned to the dissociative forces of the world? Will bdsm save us? Is your phone destroying your life? Stay tuned.
The workshop will have two parts, split over three days:
1: A seminar on the novel I’m currently working on, titled Extra.
2: A day of reading and conversation.
Statistical physics offers insights into phase transitions in complex systems, where critical points cause various system characteristics to become infinite. A simple example is the freezing of a liquid, where around the freezing point, the correlation between different points becomes infinite as the system transitions globally. During these transitions, many properties of the system are mostly independent of local interactions between individual particles and are instead defined by global features like total energy, symmetries, and geometry. This suggests that metaphysical types or holistic characteristics determine such systems more than their constituent particles. These types are emergent and relate to the system similarly to how components of the ship of Theseus relate to the whole. This perspective implies that reality consists of infinite smooth transitions or metaphysical scaling between types, depending on the angle and scale of observation.
Impossible screenic/cinematic body is the topic of an ongoing research about the filmed body on the screen. My interest for these kinds of bodies is both theoretical and practical and also influenced by my choreographic background. Questions relating to this topic vary from: what is the body on the screen? can we even call it a body? what makes that body impossible? -> to: what kind of games and compositions can appear when we add bodies in real space to the equation? what kind of relationships can real bodies and screen bodies have? how can we make that meeting place have a performative value?
an abstract solipsistic ongoing research on live body censorship and dancing body’s political borders. Informed by the notion of choreopolitics and choreopolice, the piece consists of undefined dancing put in the coercive circumstances of a form-dominant field. What is located between the cases of violence? The sudden strikes of pauses in the seemingly careless, formless dance tend to reveal hidden internalized body regimes, masked body police seems to always show up to a dance party. What if there is a spot, the Zone, which the body is denied access to? Spurred by the spacial pain, territorialized fear and music for rhythmic jumping, dancing as a mode of body existence starts to culturally flicker on the verge of being either a consequence or the source, slowly begins to manifest itself both as the quest for escape and a means of resistance.
A live recording of a radio show (both recorded and for a live audience at PAF) mixing thoughts, music, voices. Exploding concretized structures in society, maintaining revolutionary structures, pioneering musique concrète and lifting the concrete ceiling for collective liberation.
Using a combination of coded soundscapes, reiki and guided gentle movement & touch - refreshing&nice take us to the hypnagogic realm to release, connect, remember, forget; and carry us to the space of integration: sleep.
Holding sacred the realm of the unconscious and the power of connection and collectivity - refreshing&nice offer a space that blurs the line(s) between the (meta)physical, calling into question the 'real'.
refreshing&nice, (@)tending wave ceremonies, is the dirty child of Sym Stellium & melissandre varin. Offering urban rituals at the intersection of live coding and performance arts.
A three hour workshop/reading session that will lead us through various states of listening, brushing and vocalising. I will begin by reading you a story told from a twilight zone made real through a series of blows to the head. A disoriented world of over amplified tiny shifts, minute erotic turns, brain fog, doubling vocalbodies and bending time. Following this, I will propose a few exercises in tune with this twilight zone that work through inhale sounding, improvisation, listening and voluntary vocalisation. Please note there will always be an option to actively partake as a listener rather than a sounder.
As a complement to the boundless escapades of our thoughts, we practice massage therapy to release blockages in our "vehicles" of flesh and bone. From my many years of practicing deep tissue massage and more recently thai-yoga massage, I wish to share skills and confidence in physiotherapeutic touch. Taking off in anatomical mapping, we practice some basic principles on how to make the soft tissue of each other’s bodies even softer. With minimal effort and maximum mutual benefit. We first tune into grips, trechniques, and communication of needs and desires before treating each other in duos. We work without oil, so soft and covering clothing is preferable.
There're things we hear. "Sonic ( )reading" taps into the tremors & murmurs nestled in Reza Negarestani's "( )hole complex"——a whole-hole meshwork——and Charles Bernstein's "wreading"——methods of creative reading. This workshop slips into the spaces where sound curls into text, where words pulse with vibratory imaginaries left unheard. We'll tease apart the ways writers stitch sound into sentences, how they capture the rustle & roar within the folds of text. Participants will sift through sonic writing, opening up a sense of how narratives echo with auditory life. Through a few games, we'll coax sound from the crevices of language, blending the act of hearing with the act of reading. "Sonic ( )reading" invites you to experience how words can resonate, making the silent vibrate and the noisy narrate. If you have found pieces of writing prior to the workshop that describe, articulate, &or use sound, please bring them.
In a snowy paf in January ‘24 a cassette tape was discovered in the music room. The cover said it was Louis Amstrong, but the music was not. What followed was a moment of discovery of this found tape which was listened to on repeat by the residents. It sparked a new band which grew by members each night as they played covers of Maria’s tape, trying to learn and bring back to life this anonymised tape. We propose a workshop based on the tape as we embark on a sound-hunt together to look for more fun sounds and sonic goodies in PAFs corners in search for things to record and instruments to play in our ‘band of the day’. The workshops will include a listening of the tape, a group improvisation working with found sounds and materials from around paf, collaging our finds to culminate in a sharing in the evening.
Vellum explores intimacy and ecstasy inspired by devotional practices of touching books from medieval Christianity. These practices included group exercises with books, as in an oath-taking ceremony, or private contemplative habits like fondling book illustrations - often rendering the original image unrecognizable from the repeated touching. The page, made of prepared skin called vellum or parchment, then became both a vessel for the illuminator’s ink, as well as a site of encounter for the devout to fondle and kiss.
We will use simple exercises in attention, sensation and role-playing to become illuminators, ink, vellum and devouts for one-another. We will be both the book and the hands incessantly touching it! The workshop involves touch but no mandatory skin-on-skin contact with others. At large, we hope to arrive at an ‘ecstatic literacy’ in which human and nonhuman bodies are always in/voluntarily inscribing, holding, handling, fondling, melting, disappearing in one-another.
A seminar/reading workshop on contemporary queer and trans near-future scifi novels. I will present my own work as a novelist, and bring excerpts from other great queer authors. In these novels, useless transboys fall forward through hectic cityscapes like modern-day Buster Keatons. Friends fall out because fascism creeps into their brains like ear-wormy pop songs. People are sick and their friends are unable or unwilling to help because of decrees from powerful businessmen fathers. How do all these characters feel? What are the conditions for their ability to feel, if they feel their feelings and bodies at all? Are trans people seismographicly attuned to the dissociative forces of the world? Will bdsm save us? Is your phone destroying your life? Stay tuned.
The workshop will have two parts, split over three days:
1: A seminar on the novel I’m currently working on, titled Extra.
2: A day of reading and conversation.
tbc
A live recording of a radio show (both recorded and for a live audience at PAF) mixing thoughts, music, voices. Exploding concretized structures in society, maintaining revolutionary structures, pioneering musique concrète and lifting the concrete ceiling for collective liberation.
Using a combination of coded soundscapes, reiki and guided gentle movement & touch - refreshing&nice take us to the hypnagogic realm to release, connect, remember, forget; and carry us to the space of integration: sleep.
Holding sacred the realm of the unconscious and the power of connection and collectivity - refreshing&nice offer a space that blurs the line(s) between the (meta)physical, calling into question the 'real'.
refreshing&nice, (@)tending wave ceremonies, is the dirty child of Sym Stellium & melissandre varin. Offering urban rituals at the intersection of live coding and performance arts.
As a complement to the boundless escapades of our thoughts, we practice massage therapy to release blockages in our "vehicles" of flesh and bone. From my many years of practicing deep tissue massage and more recently thai-yoga massage, I wish to share skills and confidence in physiotherapeutic touch. Taking off in anatomical mapping, we practice some basic principles on how to make the soft tissue of each other’s bodies even softer. With minimal effort and maximum mutual benefit. We first tune into grips, trechniques, and communication of needs and desires before treating each other in duos. We work without oil, so soft and covering clothing is preferable.
There're things we hear. "Sonic ( )reading" taps into the tremors & murmurs nestled in Reza Negarestani's "( )hole complex"——a whole-hole meshwork——and Charles Bernstein's "wreading"——methods of creative reading. This workshop slips into the spaces where sound curls into text, where words pulse with vibratory imaginaries left unheard. We'll tease apart the ways writers stitch sound into sentences, how they capture the rustle & roar within the folds of text. Participants will sift through sonic writing, opening up a sense of how narratives echo with auditory life. Through a few games, we'll coax sound from the crevices of language, blending the act of hearing with the act of reading. "Sonic ( )reading" invites you to experience how words can resonate, making the silent vibrate and the noisy narrate. If you have found pieces of writing prior to the workshop that describe, articulate, &or use sound, please bring them.
