At a.pass researchers seek to develop public formats of research-doing and -sharing while the process is ongoing. Finding a good way to share research is itself a tool in the research process. These Publications often fall outside of academic formats of what it is to “publish research” and are very specific to the artistic methods of the researcher. The Performative Publications at arts centre BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium bring the individual and collaborative research trajectories of the researchers of the third Cycle of the a.pass Research Center into sharper focus. These Publications are processes of artistic creation, and at the same time they are experimental proposals within the larger research trajectories of the researchers – they are not conclusive, but a further step. They attempt to contextualise the research process and open up its questions in relation to the occasion of this event, its context, and its audience. They address the audience as collaborators, witnesses and critics.

This day-long performative event is conceived by Gosie Vervloessem, João Fiadeiro, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin, Simon Asencio, Vijai Maia Patchineelam and the Research Center Curator Vladimir Miller. This event is part of BUDA’s Learning Together program.

The Performative Publications will be accompanied by the Annex. In the Annex the researchers bring together and discuss a collective library of shared references and recommendations which has accumulated during the research year of Cycle 3. This publication is a retracing of these many moments, and as such a reweaving of a complex understructure of speculative relationships between the questions and concerns of this Cycle.

Program

Introduction to the Performative Publications and Annex Reading

Studio 4 | 13h | duration 1h

Simon Asencio: Ballades Infidèles

open recording session and conversation

Studio 3 | 14h | approx 3h, durational, free to join at any moment

Ballades Infidèles is an online (hyperlink: https://t.me/+1PBmW1sHDAI2NWE0) and offline research group working around the Ballades en jargon – eleven poems composed by 15th century poet Françoys Villon and written in the secret tongue of the Coquillard·es, a posse of French rogues. These ballads repurpose medieval language to narrate social underworlds in code. They invite to a reflection on the possibility of otherness and estrangement within a ’same’ language. Using the ballads as a map and a method for research, the working group has gathered since February 2022 to develop different forms of study of these ballads in perspective of their re-writing. At BUDA the group will gather to activate these re-writings through the situation of an open recording session and conversation. The recording of the event will later serve for the publication of a vinyl record.

With Francoys Villon, Diana Duta, Chloe Chignell, Cee Fülleman, Loucka Fiagan, camille gerenton, Anouchka Oler, etaïnn zwer, Christophe Albertijn Simon Asencio et al.

João Fiadeiro: Real Time Composition Intra-views: questions on the game / the game of questions.

Studio 5 | 14h, 15h, 16h | Durational performance, resets at every full hour.

In 2021, during a workshop given by João Fiadeiro at a.pass the artist and a.pass researcher Jimena Pérez Salerno composed a list of questions and tensions as a feedback for João Fiadeiro’s practice of Real Time Composition. Instead of “answering” these questions directly João Fiadeiro felt that in order to be properly addressed in their complexity they needed a different type of response and a different type of context altogether. On the occasion of his research presentation at BUDA João Fiadeiro decided to come back to this list and invited Jimena Pérez Salerno to collaborate with him on a dispositive for a performance where both of them will engage in a real time composition intra-view around the questions she initially raised.

This performance will be accompanied by a video installation, documenting further conversations on Real Time Composition – from the perspective of the practitioner – between João Fiadeiro’s performers/students Alina Belfort, Jean Lesca, Piero Ramella, Nirvan Navarin and the researchers of the RC Cycle 3, recorded on the occasion of a collaborative residency of the RC Cycle 3 at the Performing Arts Forum (PAF) in St. Erme, France in March 2022.

Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin: CofetARia

cake selling point | Third floor |14h, ongoing

Born in socialist Romania, Crăiuţ Rareş Augustin has for the past 10 years been working with food as a complex collaborator in his performative practice. He has been exploring methods of mixing food studies with artistic research by setting up, creating and producing food performances and food education projects.

One of the resulting projects is CofetARia: a durational performance at the intersection of performance art and pastry backing. CofetARia is a functioning pastry and cakes store that recreates and offers for consumption the pastries that were made in Romania in the last decades of the waning socialist regime.

A live performance with alimentary matter, CofetARia is exploring the food’s agency in the animation of memory while at the same time confronting post-communist nostalgia.

Gosie Vervloessem: Editorial Meeting – The Horror Garden

workshop / performance | Studio 4 | 15h | ca 1,5 h

Gosie Vervloessem’s research is focused on the ways plants are depicted in pop culture narratives. The scope of her work encompasses an assemblage of diverse allies and engagements: The Swamp Thing comic books, the plants that grow in the city of Brussels, activists who try to eradicate so-called “invasive species” in different biological landscapes, her alter ego of the Sick Detective, and so on. Over the years this sprawling research has produced performative, written and drawn publications, which have never been assembled or shown in one place. Faced with the overwhelming output of her research Gosie Vervloessem will ask her audience to form the editorial board of a speculative forthcoming book on her research. What should be part of this book, what should be excluded, what are the topics and strands that can come together and be published in this format?

Vijai Maia Patchineelam: Descriptions Change

Book presentation for: The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution together with artists who have contributed to the Research Seminar Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description that is within the book.

Studio 4 | 17h | Duration 1,5h

Book presentation for: The Artist Job Description, for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution together with artists who have contributed to the Research Seminar Descriptions Change, The Artist Job Description that is within the book.

Vijai Maia Patchineelam’s artistic practice focuses on dialogue between the artist and the art institutions. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists—one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions.

For this book presentation artists Adrijana Gvozdenović, Pia Louwerens, Evi Olde Rikkert and Julia Dahee Hong, alongside RC Associate Researcher Vijai Maia Patchineelam will present their contribution to the book The Artist Job Description – a publication of Patchineelam’s doctoral research of same title. During the presentation the artists will engage in a conversation regarding the relationship between artists and art institutions by bringing their personal experiences where they have renegotiated other ways of coming into and developing their art practices within art institutions.

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

Excerpt from the book, The Artist Job Description

Gosie Vervloessem & Simon Asencio: Area X

Participatory Performance and Audio

Studio 5 | 19h | to join the performance, please leave your phone number on the sign up sheet on location. The audio track will be send to your number via whatsapp or telegram | Duration 1,5h (train to Brussels can be reached)

Area X refers to a mysterious zone in the Southern Reach Trilogy books – a sci-fi, eco-horror and eerie fiction written by Jeff VanderMeer. In the Southern Reach Trilogy a research unit studies a mysterious substance/agent/force/landscape that takes over and re-writes whatever and whomever engages with it. In the narrative of the trilogy the researchers sent into Area X end up blending with it and becoming the subject of their research.

In their collaboration during the Research Center Cycle 3, Gosie Vervloessem and Simon Asencio have been looking into methodologies for studying the agencies of text through collective reading practices, role play and infused hallucinations. They have based their performative readings of the Southern Reach Trilogy on the methodologies that the book itself proposes: “This text, however, has an agency all of its own: its message is not disseminated through interpretation and relay, but inhalation.” This research stimulates a particular relation between reader and text: a point of contact where the desire to make sense coexists with the experience of being fundamentally changed by what one reads.

At BUDA Gosie Vervloessem & Simon Asencio will revisit Area X by proposing two “expeditions”: a collective performative reading and a sharing of their research notebook.